I closed the nursery door with an air of great calmness and determination, but outside I lingered like a complete coward. The girls were glowering darkly from the end of the hall, and we needed only candlelight to look like three bloodthirsty conspirators. For two or three minutes there was a soothing and deceptive silence, so that I turned to smile with an air of superior wisdom on the maids. Then without warning baby uplifted her voice and wailed.
There was something most disconcertingly explosive about the cry, as if Thomasine had been holding her breath until she were black in the face, and only let it escape one second short of actual suffocation. I jumped as if a mouse had sprung into my face, and the two girls swooped down upon me in a whirl of triumphant indignation.
"Well," I said defensively; "I expected her to cry some."
"She wants to be walked with, poor little thing," Rosa said incautiously.
I was rejoiced to have a chance to turn the tables, and I sprang upon her tacit admission at once.
"Rosa," I said severely, "have you been walking Thomasine to sleep? I told you never to do it."
Rosa, self-convicted, could only murmur that she had just taken her up and down two or three times to make her sleepy; she hadn't really walked her to sleep.
"What if she had?" Hannah demanded boldly, her place entirely forgotten in the excitement of the moment. "If babies like to be walked to sleep, it stands to reason that's nature."
I began to feel as if all authority were fast slipping away from me, and that I should at this rate soon become a very secondary person in my own house. I tried to recover myself by assuming the most severe air of which I was capable.
"You must not talk outside the nursery door," I told them. "If Thomasine hears voices, of course she'll keep on crying. Go downstairs, both of you. I'll see to baby."
They had not yet arrived at open mutiny, and so with manifest unwillingness they departed, grumbling to each other as they went. Baby seemed to have some superhuman intelligence that her firmest allies were being routed, for she set up a series of nerve-splitting shrieks which made every fibre of my body quiver. As soon as the girls were out of sight I flopped down on my knees outside of the door, and put my hands over my ears. I was afraid of myself, and only the need I felt of holding out for Tomine's own sake gave me strength to keep from rushing into the nursery in abject surrender.