The Innocents Read Free

held the baby so firmly and protectively on his knee.—When I say baby, remember that Antoinette was three. Yet she still seemed just a baby—possibly because she wouldn’t say a word. She was perfectly well-grown, even sturdy. Her face was rather plain—a Dutch little face, I thought, round and unanimated, with a small mouth and her father’s small grey eyes. There was nothing of Cecilia about her except her extreme fairness—but whereas Cecilia had locks the colour of honey, Antoinette’s were just the colour of straw, and her eyebrows and lashes practically invisible. Probably most people would have considered Antoinette plain, except those who like myself have a fondness for the lint-headed, serious little creatures one sees in old Dutch paintings. I could easily picture that solemn small countenance intent above a bowl of eggs, or basket of oranges, responsible for their safe conveyance across a scrupulously clean red-tiled floor!
    There were no such tiles underfoot at the moment. My sitting-room carpet is a rather nice old Aubusson, off which, before her father scooped her up, Antoinette had been trying to pick the roses. Now she wriggled down again, and towards myself; I held out a hand, and she instantly bit it—not to hurt, but as it were experimentally, as if to test (she a young rabbit) whether I were some kind of lettuce. Cecilia naturally scolded and apologized—but what are baby-teeth to the thumb of a hardened gardener?—and I felt Antoinette not at all unreasonable in objecting to apologize herself.
    â€œSay sorry, darling!” bade Cecilia. “Tony, say sorry at once!”
    But quite evidently Tony wasn’t going to. Her small pink mouth remained obstinately shut.
    â€œYou mean you’re going to let Mummy say it for you?” reproached Cecilia.
    Which seemed perfectly acceptable to Antoinette, who after a second tentative nibble appeared to recognize something tougher than green-stuff, yet not inimical, and philosophically squatted down on my shoes.
    â€œShe’s so shy, if there’s a stranger she simply won’t utter,” explained Cecilia. “But you’re certainly favoured!”
    â€”I shall never forget how lovely she looked at that moment, bending forward from where she sat, her eyes on her little daughter, one hand stretched out, as if in an arrested caress, toward the smooth, lint-coloured head. In the six years since she left us Cecilia had grown even slenderer, but without the least angularity. There was a wonderful grace about her even more attractive than her beauties of hair and skin and feature—though these too seemed to me enhanced, as if by special cherishing. I could easily imagine her becoming a leader of fashion and a pride to her husband in New York! But even while Antoinette was still trying to undo my shoelaces (she didn’t succeed), Cecilia’s expression of maternal affection altered to an equally maternal expression of irritation—though directed rather towards her husband.
    â€œWhen we left, she was quite rosy!” harked back Cecilia. “Now she’s white as an egg! Didn’t I tell you, darling, we should have left her with Miss Swanson?—Swedish,” she added, in a hasty parenthesis to myself, “with absolutely every qualification!”
    â€œMaybe I was wrong,” said Rab quietly.
    â€œYou certainly were!” snapped Cecilia. “And there’s still Paris and Rome and Salzburg ahead!”
    It is always embarrassing to witness a tiff between husband and wife; I so to speak absented myself by lifting Antoinette up and letting her bite my thumb more conveniently from my lap. I only hoped Cecilia might not feel jealous, at such trust in as she said a stranger; but not at all. On the contrary—
    â€œActually I’ve suddenly had the most brilliant idea!” declared Cecilia, turning from her husband to myself with a lightened brow. “If we