Too confounded for speech, he took it down, handled and put it back. Then he went out without a word.
He decided to say nothing to Anna until next day. But the next day brought wild excitement to the house in the form of an invitation for Anna to bring little Joe to the parsonage on Saturday, and he forgot the lesser in the greater.
The excitement was great, too, at Miss Penny’s, and Joe, Junior, acquired a new importance. Anna consulted Mrs. Lorraine and Miss Penny, and even Mrs. Miller showed an interest in the baby’s toilette for the occasion. But no one guessed how painfully the girl made her preparations, for she expected to return without the child. She sang as she flew about, and laughed at the boys who were working hard in all their spare time to teach the baby to talk before he should visit the parsonage. Freddy began with cat and rat, those being the words he first learned to read. Frank, the older and wiser, experimented with bow-wow, moo-moo and other onomatopoetic syllables, but with equal unsuccess. The baby wouldn’t even say O.
On Saturday afternoon, Seth Miller himself drove them over to the parsonage, Miss Penny having loaned her pony. Mr. Langley came to the gate and proudly and rather spectacularly bore the baby into the house as if it were a royal infant. He removed his little bonnet and cloak with surprising deftness, admiring the swan’s down border of the hood as if it were ermine. Big Bell stood at the end of the passage with a wistful expression on her homely face and Anna tiptoed past Mrs. Langley’s door to let her see the baby first.
But the emotion displayed by the giantess gave the girl pause. On the threshold of Mrs. Langley’s room she was seized with sudden apprehension. Suppose it should be too much for the invalid! Her reiterated phrase as to its breaking her heart to see the baby acquired a warning significance. On a sudden Anna wished with all her heart that she hadn’t insisted. Suppose the shock were too much for Mrs. Langley!
“We’re here,” she said faintly, ready to back out across the threshold at a word.
“Come up near,” Mrs. Langley bade her more hoarsely than usual and not at all reassuringly. She obeyed tremblingly.
Taking the customary chair, she settled the baby comfortably and fixed her eyes upon his wisp of hair. If she hadn’t heard her heart beating wildly she wouldn’t have believed that she breathed at all.
For a few moments Mrs. Langley peered at the child in silence. He was beautifully dressed, but he wasn’t at all what she had expected from Anna’s and her husband’s accounts. He wasn’t even what a baby would naturally have been expected to be apart from pardonable exaggeration. He wasn’t round nor rosy nor pretty; he looked like nothing so much as a very ugly rubber doll dressed in fine raiment. Moreover, Ella Langley had so dreaded the ordeal that cold sweat stood upon her forehead in beads.
None the less, as she gazed, her heart warmed. There was, somehow, something appealing in his big, mournful eyes and plaintive little white, pinched face and perhaps even in the very want of baby charms. The woman hadn’t seen a child for years upon years and suddenly her heart yearned towards this one overwhelmingly.