‘Don’t cry, grandmamma!’ but Susie knew all about the trouble, whatever it was. She was not like her little brother, only unhappy and perplexed to see the grown-up people cry.
‘Run away, dear, and play,’ his mother said; and the poor little boy obeyed, very forlorn and miserable to be always sent away. But he only went to the back parlour, where his box of bricks was standing on the floor, and where he began to build a house, oh, so seriously, as if it were a matter of life and death. The folding-doors were half open, and he still could see grandmamma crying and the wrinkles on grandpapa’s face, and hear the murmur of the talk, very serious, and broken now and then with a sob. They were in great trouble—that Johnnie could easily make out: and by this time he was as sure, as if some one had told him all about it, that their trouble had something to do with his father—his merry laughing father, who spoilt him so—who was never now to be seen even in the middle of the night through half shut eyes. The conversation that went on was not much. Grandpapa for his part only sat and stared before him, and occasionally shook his head, and drew his brows together, as if it was somebody’s fault; while grandmamma cried and sometimes exclaimed,
‘Oh, how could he do it? Had he no thought of you or the children, or how dreadfully you would feel it?’
‘If he did not think of himself, mother, how should he think of me,’ said Johnnie’s mother, with a sort of stern smile. ‘He knew better than anyone what the penalty was.’
‘He was a fool, always a fool,’ said grandpapa, hastily.
‘Oh,’ said grandmamma, ‘when he was young, he was very dear! There never was anyone nicer than he was—instead of thinking harm of his mother-in-law, as so many foolish fellows do——’
‘Hush, mother! don’t speak so that the child can understand. I don’t want him to know.’
‘How can you keep it from him? It isn’t possible. Why, everybody knows, even the people at the turnpike. They looked at your father and me so pitifully as we came through.’
‘That for their pity!’ said grandpapa, with an angry snap of his fingers, and the colour mounted up to the very edge of his white hair. Johnnie, peeping timidly out between the legs of the table, thought his mother, too, was very angry with grandmamma. She was standing in the middle of the room, looking very tall and grand, enough to strike terror into any little shrinking breast, whether it belonged to a child of seven or to a man of seventy.
She said: ‘Mother! Pity is what I cannot bear. Let them crush us if they like. Let them think us as bad as—but pity, never! That I cannot bear.’