“Oh, Roger, singin’, with grandpa dead,” Frank exclaimed; and then Roger remembered the white, stiffened form upstairs, and thought himself a hardened wretch that he could for a moment have so forgotten his loss as to sing a negro melody.
“I did not mean any disrespect to father,” he said softly to Frank, and without going back to the parlor, he stole up to his own room, and kneeling by his bedside, said the familiar prayer commencing with “Our Father,” and then cried himself to sleep with thinking of the dead father, who could never speak to him again.
CHAPTER IV.
THE MORNING OF THE FUNERAL.
If Frank Irving had been poor, instead of the grandson of a wealthy man, he would have made a splendid carpenter; for all his tastes, which were not given to horses, ran in the channel of a mechanic, and numerous were the frames and boxes and stools which he had fashioned at Millbank with the set of tools his grandfather had bought him. The tools had been kept at Millbank, for Mrs. Walter Scott would not have her house on Lexington Avenue “lumbered up;” and with the first dawn of the morning after Roger’s return, Frank was busy in devising what he intended as a cradle for the baby. He had thought of it the night before, when he saw it on the settee; and, now, with the aid of a long, narrow candle-box and a pair of rockers which he took from an old chair, he succeeded in fashioning as uncouth a looking thing as ever a baby was rocked in.
“It’s because the sides are so rough,” he said, surveying his work with a rueful face. “I mean to paper it, and maybe the darned thing will look better.”
He knew where there were some bits of wall paper, and selecting the very gaudiest piece, with the largest pattern, he fitted it to the cradle, and then letting Ruey into his secret, coaxed her to make some paste and help him put it on. The cradle had this in its favor, that it would rock as well as a better one; and tolerably satisfied with his work, Frank took it to the kitchen, where it was received with smothered bursts of laughter from the servants, who nevertheless commended the boy’s ingenuity; and when the baby, nicely dressed in a cotton slip which Roger used to wear, was brought from Hester’s room and lifted into her new place, she seemed, with her bright, flashing eyes, and restless, graceful motions, to cast a kind of halo around the candle-box and make it beautiful just because she was in it. Roger was delighted, and in his generous heart he thought how many things he would do for Frank in return for his kindness to the little child, crowing, and spattering its hands in its dish of milk, and laughing aloud as the white drops fell on Frank’s face and hair. Baby evidently felt at home, and fresh and neat in her clean dress, she looked even prettier than on the previous night, and made a very pleasing picture in her papered cradle, with the two boys on their knees paying her homage, and feeling no jealousy of each other because of the attentions the coquettish little creature lavished equally upon them.
Our story leads us now away from the candle-box to the dining-room, where the breakfast was served, and where Mrs. Walter Scott presided in handsome morning-gown, with a becoming little breakfast cap, which concealed the curl papers not to be taken out till later in the day, for fear of damage to the glossy curls from the still damp, rainy weather. The lady was very gracious to Roger, and remembering the penchant he had manifested for raspberry jam, she asked for the jar and gave him a larger dish of it than she did to Frank, and told him he was looking quite rested, and then proceeded to speak of the arrangements for the funeral, and asked if they met his approbation. Roger would acquiesce in whatever she thought proper, he said; and he swallowed his coffee and jam hastily to force down the lumps which rose in his throat every time he remembered what was to be that afternoon. The undertakers came in to see that all was right while he was at breakfast, and after they were gone Roger went to the darkened chamber for a first look at his dead father.
Hester was with him. She was very nervous this morning, and hardly seemed capable of anything except keeping close to Roger. She knew she would not be in the way, even in the presence of the dead; and so she followed him, and uncovered the white face, and cried herself a little when she saw how passionately Roger wept, and tried to soothe him, and told him how much his father had talked of him the last few weeks, and how he had died in the very act of writing to him.
“The pen was in his hand, right over the words, ‘My dear Roger,’ Aleck said, for he found him, you know; and on the table lay another letter,—a soiled, worn letter, which had been wet with—with—sea-water—”