And so the old fellow went on, telling me about that wonderful pic-nic; how he had gathered flowers for the baby, and made little bouquets, which the baby received with a critical air, as if he had spent his life in a florist’s shop, and being a connoisseur in flowers, couldn’t afford to become enthusiastic over pied daisies; how a gray squirrel scampering down a near tree had startled him out of his wits, while the baby, seated still nearer the disturbance than he, remained a marvel of stolidity and presence of mind; how the baby was finally coaxed out of his wise reserve by a group of yellow butterflies pulsating in the golden sunshine, and by the flashing of the silvery brook that ran beneath them; how all the birds in the county seemed to have entered into a conspiracy to upset that baby’s dignity; and how they would assail him with pert bursts of song and rapid curvetings about his head, while Bob sat off at a distance, “and let ’em fight it out, not helping one side or t’other,” always to see the chatterers retire in good-humored defeat before the serene impassibility of the youngster; how the only drawback to the pic-nic was that there was not a thing to eat, and besides its being in violation of all pic-nic precedent, there was danger of the little one getting very hungry; and how, in the evening—what would have been after dinner if they’d had any dinner—the baby, who was sitting opposite Bob on the grass, suddenly assumed an air of deeper solemnity, even than he had worn before, and gazed at Bob with a dense and inscrutable gaze, until he was actually embarrassed by the searching and fixed character of this look; and how the round, grave head suddenly keeled to one side as if it were so heavy with ideas that it could not be held upright any longer; and how then, suddenly, and without a sign or hint of warning, this self-possessed baby tumbled over in the grass, shot his little toes upward, and, before Bob could reach him, was dead asleep! And Bob told me then, with the glittering tears gathering in his eyes and rolling down his old cheeks, how he had picked the baby up and cuddled him close to his old bosom, and listened to his soft breathing, and stroked his chubby face, and almost guessed the wise dreams that were flitting through his round fuzzy head,—hugged him so close, and pressed him to his bosom with such hungry, tender love, that he felt as if he had him “layin’ agin’ my naked heart, and warmin’ it up, and stirrin’ all its strings with his little fingers!”
It was late that night when I went home—after one o’clock; a fearful night, too. The rain was pouring in torrents and the wind howled like mad. Taking a near cut home, I passed by the hut where Bob’s wife lived. Through the drifting rain, I saw a dark figure against the side of the house. Stepping closer, I saw that it was Bob, mounted on a barrel, flattened out against the planks, his old felt hat down about his ears, and the rain pouring from it in streams—his face glued to the window.
Poor old follow! there he was! oblivious to the storm, to hunger and everything else—clinging like some homeless night-bird, drifting and helpless, to the outside of his own home; gazing in stealthily at the bed where the little one slept, and warming his old heart up with the memory of that wondrous pic-nic—of the solemn contest with the impertinent jay-bird, and the grave rapture over the butterflies that swung lazily about in their rift of sunshine.
One morning, many months after the pic-nic, Bob came to me sideways. His right arm hung limp and inert by his side, and his right leg dragged helplessly after the left. The yielding muscles of the neck had stiffened and drawn his head awry. He stumbled clumsily to where I was standing, and received my look of surprise shamefacedly.
“I’ve had a stroke,” he said. “Paralysis? It’s most used me up. I reckon I’ll never be able to do anything for him! It came on me sudden,” he said, as if to say that if it had given him any sort of notice, he could have dodged it.
After that Bob went on from worse to worse. His face, all save that fixed in the rigid grasp of the paralysis, became tremulous, pitiful and uncertain. He had lost all the chirrupy good-humor of the other days, and became shy and silent. There was a wistfulness and yearning in his face that would have made your heart ache; a hungry passion had struggled from the depth of his soul, and peered out of his blue eyes, and tugged at the corners of his mouth. There was, too, a pitiful, scary look about him. He had the air of one who is pursued. At the slightest sigh he would pluck at his lame leg sharply, and shamble off, turning full around at intervals to see if he was followed. I learned that his wife had become even harder on him since his trouble, and that he was even more than ever afraid of her.
He had never had another “pic-nic.” He had snatched a furtive interview with the baby, under protection of the occasional nurse, from each of which he came to me with a new idea of the “deepness” of that infant. “He’s too much for me, that baby is!” he would say. “If I just had his sense!” He was rapidly getting shabbier, and thinner and more woe-begone. He became a slink. He hid about in the day-time, avoiding everybody, and seeming to carry off his love and his passion, as a dog with a bone, seeking an alley. At night he would be seen hanging like a guilty thief about the hut in which his treasure was hid.
“I’ve a mind,” he said one morning, “to go home. I don’t think she” (he had quit calling her “Ann” now) “could drive me out now. All I’d want would be to just sit in a corner o’ the house and be with him. That’s all.”
“Bob,” I said to him one morning, “you rascal, you are starving!”
He couldn’t deny it. He tried to put it off, but he couldn’t. His face told on him.