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Balder's attack at length yielded, and a drowsy consciousness returned, memory and reason being still partly in abeyance. His heavy, half-closed eyes rested on darkness. A crooning sound was in his ear, a nursery lullaby, wordless but soothing. Where was he? Had he been ill? Was he in his cradle at home? Was Salome sitting by to watch him and give him his medicine?
Between them Delphy's son-in-law, Moses, was helping Bernard mend a broken hare trap, while Delphy, herself, was crooning a lullaby to one of her grandchildren as she carded the wool which she had taken from a quilt of faded patchwork.
I tell yer he's er-comin'. Here, Susan Jane, take th' cloth. There, gra'mammy; there's jest es sweet er little gal es ye'd find in er dog's age." And the old lady at once cuddled the little one in her arms, swinging back and forth in her home-made rocker, and crooning an old-time baby song.
All the pent-up love of the men for their own little ones from whom they had been parted for so long they lavished on the tiny stranger, but all his affection and his whole heart belonged to the rough miner soldier who had brought him in. As the shadows fell one saw the man walking up and down the ward with the child in his arms, crooning the "Marseillaise" until the tired little eyes closed.
Besides, if he lasted that long, he might fill his nostrils once more with the smell of Africa, see the little fires of the safari flickering against the green cane brakes, hear the songs of the march and the crooning of the camp and the voices of the jungle under the crowded stars.
The streets were deserted, and lights gleamed only in upper windows of apartments, where sick sufferers tossed, or tender mothers sang soft lullabys to restless babies crooning in their cribs.
Even Mimmy has his two or three themes: the weird one already described; the little one in triple measure imitating the tap of his hammer, and fiercely mocked in the savage laugh of Alberic at his death; and finally the crooning tune in which he details all his motherly kindnesses to the little foundling Siegfried.
The village, for it amounted to that, was almost deserted at that hour; only a few crooning old women on the sunny side of a wall, and a few half-grown girls, and a quantity of little children, depending for all the care they got upon one or the other of these. "Haven't all these little babies got mothers!" I asked. "For sure, Miss Daisy dey's got modders."
To listen to it with open heart is to know all things are for good and that a peace from mystic spaces far above the woodland is descending upon it. Heard through this song the tone of the brook's voice changes and instead of swift-syllabled gossip I seem to hear it softly crooning a hymn. "The Fourth of July is past; the summer is gone," says a New England proverb.
His voice broke with emotion, and his innumerable wrinkles quivered and writhed, but the student observed in the lamplight that his shining eyes were still as dry and tearless as two beads of steel. For some minutes he lay, with a twitching face, crooning and moaning over the beautiful head.
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