Larrie generally minded the baby on Thursday mornings. It was Thursday morning [p 27] ]now. Peggie was doing her routine work for that time, scrubbing the bare pine floors of the bedrooms. Larrie and Dot both hated carpets.
Larrie was smoking his third postprandial pipe, and was pacing up and down one side of the verandah; he would have liked to have gone the whole distance, but then there was the baby.
It was lying in a hammock in a nest of pillows, and looking with calm, large gaze out into all the world that appeared through a gap in the rose creeper. There was the pink flush of recent sleep on its little soft cheeks, and its hair, the softest, warmest gold in the world, was all tumbled and curly with washing. It had a wonderful amount of hair for so young a child, and Dot’s pride in it was forgivable, for nearly all the babies of her acquaintance were bald.
Have you ever kissed a baby’s neck? Was ever anything so warm and white and velvety? The neck of Dot’s baby was absolutely beyond description. Its mouth was [p 28] ]red, bowshaped. Sometimes it gave wide wet touches on Dot’s cheeks, and she would whisper excitedly to Larrie that it was kissing her.
Such wonderful, wondering eyes it had, intensely blue, intensely earnest. There had been moments when Larrie felt he would give his soul to know just what his baby was thinking of.
Did you show it a beautiful flower or a low hanging silver moon, a picture, something bright with colour? it seemed to be looking away far beyond them and smiling in a faint sweet way, because it saw fairer things than ever you dreamed of.
Its hands—well, perhaps they were like most babies’ hands, but neither Dot, nor Larrie, nor Peggie, nor the little mother would have allowed it for a moment. They were like the inside of a flushed, curled, rose-leaf, and when they closed round your finger, you felt how strangely sweet, and soft and warm they were. From the long open window came the sound of Dot’s voice, singing. The [p 29] ]baby was listening as it lay in the hammock. Larrie was listening as he smoked, though in a half reluctant way.
When little souls are born, just before they come to us from the wonderful place of souls, they have to do with a lottery. To a thousand little blind struggling souls, there are half-a-dozen great good gifts. Nine hundred and ninety-four draw blanks, but the band of six come down to us blessed, rejoicing. Dot had been of the six. She had drawn a voice. Generally Larrie rejoiced because of it.
Not this morning, however. He had been brooding lately over Dot’s deficiencies
, and he almost wished she had been of the nine hundred and ninety-four. For one thing, he could have walked all the four sides of the verandah if she had been. The thought rankled.