Boy of My Heart. Marie Connor Leighton

successful he became paralysed in the lower limbs, and thenceforward could only go about in a bathchair.

      This is only one instance out of the scores that present themselves to us on every hand. Compensation is a very real and very pitiless Force. Knowing this, I was afraid; terribly afraid: and as I saw the beauty grow in Little Yeogh Wough's baby body and in his mind, which always, even from the beginning, seemed to know things which he had never been taught, I began to pray night after night:

      "Don't take him away from me, oh God! Don't take him away!"

      And now he is in khaki, a lieutenant and adjutant at just twenty years old—and is coming home from the Front on his second leave.

      When I first realised that he would soon be coming home, I went out into the loft over the old stables and took his baby clothes out of an old trunk and looked at them. And, as I looked, it seemed to me such a little while since he had worn them.

      How patient I had been with him in those days—I, who am not patient by nature! How I had walked up and down with him, sat up at night with him, sung for him strange songs about butcher boys and tom cats, and interrupted my work a score of times every hour for him! But I never yielded to him, not even in those babyhood days, for I wanted him to grow up to be a fine sample of manhood, and I knew that if he was to do that he must know that his mother was not weak.

      A little cream silk coat and a pair of cream woollen gaiters reminded me of his first tryings to speak. His little stumbling words had always had a thought behind them. How he had taken us aback one morning when he had presented himself before us with a pen behind his ear, saying with an owl-like wiseness: "Fishman doos that." This referred to the fishmonger whom he visited every morning with his old nurse for the giving of orders. And then, another time, when I was annoyed with my brother and said to him that something he had done was: "Just the sort of thing that eccentric males always do," the room door had opened suddenly to admit a little figure in the cream silk pelisse and woollen gaiters, and a baby voice had cried reproachfully:

      "Not 'centric males. No!"

      "He's beginning pretty early to stand up for his own sex," my brother said with a laugh that drove away the cloud of annoyance between us.

      And yet the boy had in him that touch of the feminine which the best men have and which makes them irresistible. Already in his little way he had a knightly reverence for womanhood. Already his few pence of pocket money were spent on flowers for me.

      I remember that what struck me most when he came into the room at this time was his brave little walk. He always had such brave, gay feet! I thought of this again last week when in answer to my question in a letter as to how his battalion had got all the way down from near Ypres to somewhere east of Abbeville, he said:

      "We got a train for a bit of the way, but mostly we came on our feet."

      Oh, the dear, dear feet, so plucky and untiring! And how I loved the "we" and the "our"! He always has identified himself with his men, so that they know that he cares for them, and they would follow him, as his colonel put it, "anywhere and into anything."

      And that day in his small childhood the little feet had a charm that for an instant brought quick hot tears into my eyes.

      He was very shy, though sometimes he could be very bold—as when one day, coming into the dining-room and finding a certain important person sitting there, he fetched on his own account a box of Vafiadis and, thrusting them under the visitor's eyes, said coolly:

      "'Ave a cigawette?"

      At other times nothing could induce him to go into a room where there was someone who was a stranger to him.

      His first experience of serious punishment came of this sensitiveness and shyness. A very well-known but decidedly ugly man was in the drawing-room, and the child, under pressure, went in to be seen of him. But when he caught sight of the visitor, his feelings overcame him.

      "Shunny man! Ugly man!" he cried; and he turned and bolted.

      And so sweet was that ugly man that he not only forgave him, but declared afterwards that it was the wretched little insulter's charm and beauty which had led him to think of marriage in the hope of having children of his own. But, as for me—I left the visitor to my husband's care, and, following the three-year-old sinner out of the room and upstairs to the nursery, whither he had fled, I administered personal chastisement.

      I soon found, however, that to punish him for social misbehaviour would not always be possible, because most of his naughtiness in this respect was due to nerves. It seemed to be a penalty attaching to his really unusual beauty that I should be unable to show it off. Many and many a time I took him to literary and artistic gatherings only to find myself obliged to send him home with his nurse before any exhibiting of him had been possible. The least excitement would throw him into such a fit of nerves as made even his grandmothers learn new wisdom about childhood.

      He was never gleeful. He had the sweetest, gladdest smile in the world, but there was always an underlying sadness in him that worried the many good people who imagine that if a child is happy it must needs be jumping about and laughing more or less noisily. And a great grief came to him at this time when his first nurse left to be married.

      Fond though he was of me, he was yet so unhappy over this that he was very nearly ill. How different children's characters are! His sister, The Bystander, then three months old, never cared who nursed her. Nurses might come and nurses might go, but as long as she was fed and bathed and looked after, she cared not a tinker's curse.

      And then there came two very important new-comers to the household—a black puppy, and the elderly woman who from then till now has been known as the Old Nurse.

      Oh, that Old Nurse! what would she say now if she were watching and waiting here with us for her Master Roland to come home on leave, instead of lying in her grave as she has been for eighteen months, where the alarms of war reach her not!

CHAPTER III THE FIRST STEPS OF THE LITTLE FEET

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      There is nothing like smells, or clothes, for bringing back the past. The scent of the American currant will always bring my childhood back to me when even music could not do it. The hardest-hearted criminal can be softened sometimes to yielding and to tears by some smell that brings back an old home life long since forgotten. In the same way the sight of clothes worn in other days sends the memory darting back across the years. So it was with me when I was rummaging among my Little Yeogh Wough's things and found a pink linen coat and knee breeches and a little white-frilled shirt that had been worn with them.

      That little pink linen suit lit up the past for me just as a lamp lights up a dark place into which it is suddenly carried.

      I had a vision of yellow curls under a sailor hat and sunning out over a white embroidery collar. I saw little brown hands always finding something to do and doing it masterfully, reckless of consequences. I saw happy Christmases and birthdays made stupendously joyous by the coming of luxurious toys, which may have been wastefully extravagant, but which helped, anyhow, to build a foundation of happiness for the child and his sister and brother to look back to in after years. I saw battles in the nursery in which the Old Nurse and the under nurse were sometimes worsted and even received personal injuries. But, above all, I saw two scenes which had a bearing on the future of my Yeogh Wough, who was one day to go to the trenches in France and Flanders and fight for his country.

      The first was the occasion of the christening of his newly arrived small brother. The scene was a London church, and after the christening ceremony the clergyman looked at Yeogh Wough and then spoke to me.

      "This elder boy was only baptised privately, at home, I believe?"

      "Yes."

      "Then he ought to be received properly into the Church. I will do it now."

      And he put out his hand and drew Yeogh