Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v109.djvu/447

Rh by them, he turned himself about and—once having turned—fairly scrambled back into the upper world of life and of health again. He would live—and not only live, but grow to be a man, a strong man in God's great sunshiny world. That was the verdict that was given one morning just as the wonderful Swiss day was breaking over the mountains.

Madame's dainty breakfast—coffee and rolls and honey—was daintily spread that morning, as usual, by the open window of her sitting-room. She could see the mists that festooned the mountains and hung low over the quivering lake turning from snowy white to opal; but she could not eat, for very joy. The tears were streaming down her face.

She rose and stood by the window. "This must be a new world," she thought within herself, marvelling, a world that she had never seen—it must have been made in the night—a world in which there was no room for littleness and all uncharitableness, but only room for love, and service of things smaller and weaker and more helpless than one's self—the love and service of a child.

When Monsieur le Bébé was no longer even convalescent, but had grown as rosy and rugged as one of the little peasants on the hills, when the scales of the spectacled German apothecary in the village told fairy-tales of his increasing weight, madame announced her intention of re- turning to her ancestral home in America and of taking the child and his nurse with her. The bond between the three had grown too strong ever to be broken. Moreover, the little fellow was fatherless and motherless—friendless, too, save for the old nurse. Madame was childless and rich and alone.

Desolation amounting to consternation fell upon the old ladies who were to be left behind. But madame was firm. If she was to answer, as his foster-mother, for Monsieur le Bébé's soul, here and hereafter, the soul of a man, the enervating, irresponsible ease of foreign living was not for her. She must go back and put herself in touch with the life of her native land.

When the day and the hour came for her to go, Monsieur Planche escorted her and her retinue to the railway station himself, a duty he was generally only too glad to leave to his porters. He was very foggy and misty about his kind old eyes as he bade them good-by.

After they had gone, he stood upon the empty platform watching the billows of smoke roll back from the engine of the receding train. He realized for an instant that he had done a very foolish thing from a worldly standpoint. Only for an instant. As he took his way homeward through the market-place with its quaint pillared market-house, and through the narrow, clean, cobbled streets of the little town, he could have yodelled, fairly yodelled, in memory of his youth, he was so happy; for now his Sunday mornings in the cathedral would bring him peace—lasting, genial peace. His conscience was at ease.

