‘Oh, my dear,’ said grandmamma, ‘try to be softened and not hardened by this great trouble.’
These were things that Johnnie heard partially. Sometimes a few words would get lost as the corner of the table-cover fell down between him and the other parlour, like a curtain in a theatre, which was what happened from time to time: and there would be long pauses in which nothing at all was said, but only a little sob from grandmamma, or the tchick, tchick of inarticulate comment which the old man made, or the mother or Susie moving across the room. There is nothing more terrible than those long pauses in which those who have come to console the sufferers can find nothing to say, when words are impossible, and the silence of the little company, which cannot be broken save on one subject, becomes more intolerable than if no consolation had been attempted at all.
Then they had a sort of dreary dinner, to prepare for which Johnnie and his bricks had to be removed into a corner. They all sat down round the table, grandpapa still giving a tchick, tchick from time to time and grandmamma stopping in the midst of a mouthful to dry her eyes. Johnnie himself was hungry, but it was difficult to eat when everybody looked so miserable, and when he asked for a little more they all looked at him as if he had said something wrong.
‘Poor child, he had always a good appetite, bless him,’ grandmamma said, laying down her knife and fork with a little sob. ‘What a good thing it is that nothing matters very much at his age.’
Johnnie did not say that it mattered very much indeed—he had no words to use; but his little heart throbbed up into his throat, and he could not eat a morsel of his second help. Oh, if anyone had known how forlorn that little heart was, groping among the mysteries with which he was surrounded, which he could not understand! All he could do was to gaze at the grown-up people who were so hard upon him, who did not understand him any more than he understood them. Grandpapa, though he went on with his tchick, tchick at intervals, made a tolerable meal, and thought he could taste a bit of cheese after all the rest had done.
‘Meat has no savour to people in trouble,’ he said, ‘but sometimes you can taste a bit of cheese when you can take nothing else.’
All the same, however, he made a very good meal.
Some time after this it was suddenly intimated to Johnnie that he was going ‘back’ with the old people.
‘Grandpapa and grandmamma are going to take you with them,’ Susie said, seeking him out in the back parlour where he had relinquished the bricks and taken to Robinson Crusoe, and began again to wonder whether, in spite of the placid policeman, the savages, after all, might not have something to do with the disappearance of papa.
‘Oh, what a lucky boy you are, Jack! You are going to drive back between them in the shandry, and stay there for a change—for mamma thinks you are not looking very well. Oh, you lucky little boy!’