The House by Henry Bordeaux

FINE weather had come. Three months still lay between us and the long vacation. Father, agreeing with the timid little colleague whom he had again called in to support his own opinion, declared that I was not to return to school until the end of the vacation next October.

"The child needs out-of-door air. The first thing is to build up his health."

I was pained by this decision, which wounded my pride. If I were not in school during the last quarter, I could not hope for a wreath at the distribution of prizes. For I was full of emulation, and loved to take the first place, though this brought down upon me grandfather's ridicule.

"Those classifications mean nothing. First or last it's all one."

Father laid out for me a very simple plan of life. A country walk morning and evening, far from the microbes of the town, where you can breath fresh air uncontaminated by human beings. Thus I should recover strength and appetite. But who would walk with me and be my guide? Who would undertake a peripatetic preceptorship of this sort? Father, already behind in his duties because of my long illness, belonged to his absorbing profession; mother, whose presence was certainly required by the whole family, especially the little ones, could hardly ever leave the house except to go to church. Aunt Deen had no out-of-door legs, a deficiency which did not prevent her going up and down stairs, from kitchen to tower, a hundred times a day. There remained grandfather. He always took a walk morning and evening on his own account; what would it cost him to take me along? This would suit all round; the plan was evidently the best possible.

I perceived, however, that it met a serious resistance, for I overheard my parents discussing it in the calm and confident tone which they always used when regulating, in perfect accord, all questions concerning us.

"I would not have him turn him against the house," said my father.

"Oh! " she exclaimed, as if it were wrong to admit such a thought, "he wouldn't do that! You don't think that of your own father, surely! Of course he has his whims, and his ideas are not always ours. What he needs is God. But he is good hearted; he will be grateful to you for your confidence. And we could not ask such a thing of a stranger."

"I am not quite satisfied with the plan," said father.

A little later he resumed the subject. "I will speak to him; there seems to be no other way."

When this proposition concerning me was broached to him, grandfather acceded to it without either enthusiasm or hostility, with an indifference that wounded me.

"I'd just as soon. It's the same to me whether I take my walk alone or with some one. " (Naturally! ) "Children ought to live out of doors. Study does no good. No more do medicines."

Father no doubt had an interview with him at which I was not present, and the affair was decided. How would he act toward his new companion? He always treated my brothers and sisters and me, even the two youngest, like reasonable persons, though a little more interesting than others, lending to our remarks as much attention as to those of grown persons; but we had an impression that he couldn't always tell us apart, and that he would cheerfully have dispensed with us all, which seemed to us an affront.

Why had father told mother that he was not quite satisfied? On the morning of my first walk with grandfather he was waiting for us at the door on our return. He inspected me, looking me over from head to foot, then, as if resolved, he took my hand and placed it in grandfather's with a certain solemnity -- as a reigning king might do, I thought.

"Here is my son," he said; "I entrust him to you; he holds the future of our house."

Grandfather received the precious trust indifferently, replying in a slightly sarcastic tone, thus at once putting the incident upon an every-day footing:

"Don't worry, Michel; no one is going to rob you of him."

I smiled, standing between the two. How could grandfather rob my father of me?

The smallest details of that walk are present with me now. And rightly, so great was its importance in my life. But everything is important when one is little. After a rain the drenched fields seem to draw nearer to one another, and the plants reflect the sunlight from all their pendant drops. My eyes, purged by illness, must have thus shone.

"Where are we going, grandfather?"