He addressed the last sentence of this speech to Harrington. Muriel had gone into the other room, and was leaning over Mrs. Roux, speaking in a low, soothing voice, with her hands on the sick woman’s head. The children were prattling with each other, and Tugmutton was standing apart, with his short arms akimbo, the hands spread on his hips, and an expression of ineffable scorn on his fat, grey face, which was turned toward Roux.
“Now, father,” said the squab, taking advantage of the pause, “ain’t you ashamed? My gosh! I’m goin’ to blush at ye, father.”
“What’s the matter, Tugmutton,” asked Roux, with comical deprecation.
“What’s the matter? That’s a pretty question!” was the reproachful reply. “There you stand, and never ask Mr. Harrington to take a chair. That’s the matter. Do you call that doin’ the honors of the establishment?”
Roux looked abashed, while Tugmutton, with his face puffed out, and his eye sternly fixed upon the offending party, brought forward a chair, dumped it down under Harrington’s coat-tails, and retreating a couple of paces, put his arms akimbo again, still sternly regarding Roux.
The whole proceeding was so ineffably droll, that Harrington, sinking into the chair, with a hand on each knee, laughed heartily, though quietly, with his eyes fixed on the fat pigmy. Roux, who was very fond of Tugmutton, and submitted meekly to all his odd humors, regarding him, indeed, with an absurd mixture of puzzled curiosity and reverential awe, such as the good-natured Welsh giant might have bestowed upon Jack the Giant-killer, stood now, with the baby on his arm, uneasily eyeing his chunky mentor, and smiling confusedly. Nothing could be more amusing than the relation Tugmutton occupied toward him, and the rest of the family. They were all under the domination of this small, fat chunk. Tugmutton’s grand assumption of importance, and his authoritative airs, conjoined with his genuine affection for them all, which took the form of perpetual wardenship, had prevailed over the age and experience of both Roux and his wife. He was so old-fashioned, so queer, so mysterious and inconceivable a creature to them, that they looked upon him almost as a superior being, and petted and humored him in all possible ways.
“Just look at you, now,” continued the irate fat boy. “Do you call that the way to hold a baby? With his head hangin’ down, and every drop of blood in his body runnin’ into it! My gosh! that child’ll never have one speck of hair, father, an’ water on the brain, beside.”
Without feeling any apprehension of the capillary and hydrocephalous catastrophe thus ominously predicted as the inevitable consequence of his way of holding the baby, Roux glanced at the little one, whose head was drooping back over his arm, and whose fat, yellow fists were contentedly inserted in its mouth, and then gently shifted the position of the child, so as to rest its head on his shoulder.
“Just you give me that baby, father,” blurted out the fat boy, starting forward, and receiving in his short arms the infant which Roux readily abandoned to his charge. “There’s nobody knows how to take care of this poor child but me,” he indignantly continued, bearing off his burden, and sitting down with it in a short chair near the wall. “Lord a mercy! If it wasn’t for me, I don’t know what’d become of this family! Chick-a-dee-dee—chick-a-dee-dee—honey—honey—pretty Brudder Baby,” he chirruped, showing all his ivories in a jovial grin to the infant, and dancing it up and down in his short arms.
“Tugmutton’s great on takin’ care of the chil’ren,” remarked Roux to the smiling Harrington. “There aint no better boy than Tug nowhere, Mr. Harrington. He helps Clarindy a mighty deal, an’ he’s a reel comfort, I tell you.”