“You’d best,” Nichola said to me over her shoulder, “go downstairs and see after that—babby.”
Nichola dislikes a great many things, but the greatest of these dislikes is babies. When she passes one in its perambulator I have seen her take the extreme edge of the walk.
“They ain’t a bone in ’em,” she once explained; “when you go to pick ’em up, they slimpse.”
I deplored this failing of Nichola’s as I hurried downstairs to Pelleas, but I was chiefly concerned to know how he had got on in my absence—Pelleas, who will not even hold my Angora.
No sound came from the drawing-room. I entered fearfully, for even a man of genius is sometimes helpless. I have never known my own alarm more swiftly rebuked.
He had managed to turn on the lights and furthermore he had contrived to take off the baby’s cloak and bonnet and veil, though usually he could as easily embroider a thing as to untie it, save after a very long time. And there sat Pelleas on the sofa with the baby in one arm, and he was gravely holding a lighted match a foot from its face.
As I looked he threw the burned match in the grate, soberly lighted another and repeated the performance. Evidently he construed some movement of the baby’s face to be an answering smile, for he looked vastly pleased and encouraged and instantly said clearly:—
“Well, tol, tol, tol, tolly tol! Yes!” And then added in a tone of the simplest conviction, “Of course.”
I hurried forward, laughing at him in spite of the sudden lump in my throat. It is sad for Pelleas to be nobody’s grandfather when he looks so precisely like a grandfather on the stage.
“What are the matches for, Pelleas?” I cried.