"He won't want the likes of that," the nurse had said. Nanna was very stupid; as if the baby had ever wanted anything in his life so much as that yellow ball! Conscience pricked cruelly. She had been selfish and horrid to the poor baby. She fell a-crying. Very likely they didn't have yellow balls in heaven, and wouldn't know how much the baby loved them, and he mightn't like to ask; besides, the poor baby talked such a queer language, strangers never understood him. A sudden inspiration. It was rather confusing about the real baby in heaven, and the real baby in the "best" room. Wouldn't it be better to be on the safe side? Anyhow, there was that business about Gabriel and the Last Trump and the Resurrection. They had talked about that in church, and Nanna and mother had said it was true. The dead would surely rise; the baby in the "best" room there would one day come alive. It looked as if there'd be two real babies in the end; but never mind. She flew up-stairs, rummaged the cupboard in the nursery, and came flying down with something wrapped in her apron. The doctor was in the lower hall talking to her father; she peeped at them through the balusters, then softly on to the "best" room.
She shut the door this time, though more frightened than the day before. She stopped short in the middle of the room. Too late! the baby had gone. But there was something she'd never seen before. She went close. How pretty and shiny it was; it smelt like the piano. Why, this was what the strange man had brought up-stairs behind Matilda last night. It was bigger than the musical-box—much bigger. What was in this beautiful, shiny, new thing? She dragged a chair to the table, climbed on it, and looked down into the coffin.
She stood some time motionless; then, hearing a noise in the hall, hurriedly lifted a corner of the baby's frock and pushed a yellow ball down against the padded white satin side.
In spite of the continued "riling" presence of a grandmother in the house, Val made up her mind to be very good now the baby was gone, and be a comfort to her mother. No more fights with Nanna, even over the hair-combing; no defiant refusals to say her prayers. Standing by the cot in her nightgown the evening of the funeral, "I shall say three prayers," she announced, sternly; "and you mustn't interrupt, Nanna."
"Three!" said the nurse, suspicious of such overwhelming piety.
"Yes; I shall say, 'Our Father,' and 'Nower Lamy,' and then one of my own—one I can understand as well as God. Now! Sh!" She knelt down and recited the two accustomed petitions, and then, still kneeling there, poured forth some stringent directions to the Lord which horrified the good Christian woman not a little.
After that, Val insisted on going to church, rain or shine. She read her Bible with vigor and astonishment, belaboring Nanna with difficult questions. Nanna was so ill-inspired as sometimes to appeal in her perplexity to the elder Mrs. Gano. But this lady found to her cost that the course so successfully pursued with little Ethan was doomed to failure here. When she thought to curb the excessive Gano concern about Biblical interpretation by saying, "It is not a book for children," she was met with:
"My Bible says, 'Suffer little children,' and people 'mustn't despise the little ones.'"
Her father began to laugh; she felt encouraged to proceed: