“Anna, dear, there are moments when I almost think you are vain,” said Miss Penny smiling. “But listen to me, child. Reuben stayed at the parsonage for weeks after his father passed away, and Mrs. Langley would never see him even once. And he was the sweetest little fellow! Mr. Langley would have liked to keep him, but of course he couldn’t under the circumstances. And so—you know how it all came about that he came here, don’t you, Anna?”
“I have heard it many a time. It’s one of pa’s favourite yarn. But it’s a good story and worth repeating just the same,” Anna returned.
The girl’s last waking thought was of standing by the invalid’s couch bathing her aching brow with cologne-water. But in the course of the following week she learned that Mrs. Langley had acquired the reputation of being extremely formidable. Big Bell, as Bell Adams, the tall, large-boned, hard-featured but good-natured housekeeper was called, cherished considerable affection for her mistress but gave Anna no encouragement whatever. When she hinted that it might be well for her to see someone, Bell was horrified and aghast. It was as much as ever, she declared, that Mrs. Langley would see her own husband for two minutes a day.
Admitting that visiting Mrs. Langley would be no cinch, the girl was nevertheless undaunted. It wasn’t natural for her to live in that way. If she weren’t lonely, she ought to be; if she were not wretched, it was because there were no extremes in her life—only one dead level of headache and neuralagy. And constantly Anna came back to the realisation that there was something to appeal to in a woman who had thought of having the three days old lamb carved and who had cherished the picture of it all these years.
Finally she decided to see the image itself and receive, it might be, some inspiration or suggestion for making a beginning. She learned the location of the minister’s lot and set off secretly early Saturday afternoon.
The cemetery, which overlooked the whole valley of the river, was a retired, lonely place, hedged in by evergreen, yet not without beauty. Anna had been vaguely perplexed and anxious, but the serenity of the place soothed her, and she made straight for the minister’s lot with a subdued eagerness of expectation that was almost adventurous.
Suddenly she saw it from a distance, the tiny baby lamb with its feet folded neatly beneath it. So little and quaint and homely it was, that the girl stilled a cry, a little motherly murmur of pity, as if the tiny creature were alive and had been left here lonely through all the long years. And running, she dropped down on her knees beside it to fondle it.
Then she shrank back and caught her breath sharply, almost in a sob. It was as if, believing it to be alive, she had found it dead. One side of the marble was sadly discoloured. It was so blackened indeed as to be quite defaced and ugly, to have lost all its symbolism and significance and to have become an hideous caricature. Suddenly the other Miller girl, who seldom shed tears, covered her face and wept.
CHAPTER III
MR. LANGLEY was nearer fifty than forty, though only by a little. He was, in a way, ‘settled’ in his habits. He liked and affected, on all days save the Sabbath, old clothes and old shoes, though both were always scrupulously neat, and his shabbiness was never otherwise than picturesque and attractive. Though he went about constantly among his people, he led a lonely, pensive life in the big, empty, shabby parsonage, almost as little aware, it would seem, of the existence of his invalid wife as were his parishioners who practically thought of him as a bachelor. And truly, since his wife had taken to her room upwards of twenty years ago, and shut herself out from everyone, he had been almost as literally widowed as if she, too, lay in the enclosure marked by the little marble lamb in the cemetery on the hillside.