Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/442

404 with nervous, impotent rage. They even spoke of migrating in a body to a pension a little farther back upon the hill, as a covey of partridges rises with a clack and a whir and settles down somewhere else. Each one knew in her heart of hearts that not for worlds would she, to use a homely old proverb, "bite off her own nose to spite her face" in such reckless fashion. Nevertheless, it did her a world of good to threaten.

It goes without the saying that Monsieur le Bébé and his nurse, descending upon such a state of feeling, were boycotted from the first.

Nobody can boycott like respectable women. It was not to be expected, of course, that they should receive into their social bosom a North-country serving-woman; but they might at least have asked how her little charge had passed the night, and whether the air was agreeing with him. It was really not decently Christian of them not to.

A month of the boycotting went past and Monsieur le Bébé disappointed all expectations concerning him. He never turned night into day for his hostile neighbors. Madame, kept awake as she had been in the matter of the roosters, by her anticipation of what he would do, was forced to admit that he did nothing. If possible, he was quieter even than his predecessor the clergyman. His quiet, in fact, was unnatural, and would have been suggestively pitiful save that every heart was hardened against him.

Then one day, in the midst of the boycotting, an idea transferred itself straight from the father of all evil into one of the old ladies' brains. The transfer was effected while she was mending her stockings. She was not, be it said in passing, mending them because of a hole in them, or of a thin place even; merely because of a place that she feared might in time, if left to itself, become thin. If only old ladies' brains could shut down while they are mending prospective holes in their stockings, as factories shut down in dull seasons, so much mischief would be saved in the world!

"Of course, of course!" this particular old lady exclaimed excitedly to herself. Why had she never thought of it before? No wonder that child was superhumanly good! It was drugged, without a doubt, by its nurse, to keep it quiet and to save herself trouble. How had she—that is, the old lady—been so blind as not to see it before? How had they all been so blind?

If she had suddenly had it revealed to her over her mending that the earth was an octagon, rather than a sphere, she could not have felt a greater impatience to divulge the secret.

It was an unwritten law of the pension that morning calls from room to room were not to be expected before eleven. That gave time for any really arduous and unhandsome duties—such as clear-starching of neck-pieces and pressing of handkerchiefs. One's heavy work it was always best to get out of the way while one was fresh. Rather than to burst, however, it was better to break any number of laws.

Within an hour the new and terrible suspicion against the child's nurse had found its way into every room in the pension. Indignation ran high. What was not said against the poor creature, over afternoon coffee that day, really was not worth the saying. In crusading against her they almost forgot to crusade against the baby. The only way to make women of a certain order of mind stop hating any one person is to make them hate some one else enough more, to make up the sum total of the venom at their disposal.

"Paregoric! Paregoric!" was the word that was tossed from mouth to mouth, over the coffee-cups, interspersed with such interjections as "The hard-hearted hussy! the jade! the Jezebel!" The old ladies were hardly reasonable, or stopped to look up the meaning of the language they used.

Madame, dredging about in her memory for parallel instances, called to mind a woman whom she had known who had been a paregoric drunkard. She drank a pint a day. From every fold of her garments, meantime, there exuded a mild, all-pervading, half-tangible odor of the drug. The old ladies had not noticed this odor about the child, as yet, but it would not be their fault, now, if they did not. From that time on, fired by the detective instinct that is so strong in all of us, instead of passing by on the other side when they met him with his nurse, they passed as near to them as they could, and lingered—and sniffed for paregoric.