This child came, he hoped, freighted with healing and comfort, came like the glad spring-time itself, like Adonis or Persephone, with his arms full of flowers.
He wrote to his cousin, in tenderest congratulation, a letter breathing a generous affection, without one selfish thought lurking between the lines.
Her answer came after nearly a month’s delay, but, although tardy, it was most delightful to him. Juanita asked him to be godfather to her boy; and he could easily imagine that this was the highest honour she could offer him.
“In London half the young men I used to meet took a pride in avowing their unbelief,” she wrote, “but I know that you are not ashamed to acknowledge your faith in Christ and His Church. I shall feel secure that what you promise for my child will be fulfilled, so far as it is in your power to bring about its fulfilment. I know that if you stand beside the font and take those vows in His name you will not remember that ceremony as an empty form, a mere concession to usage and respectability. Those promises will appeal to you for my fatherless child in the days to come. They will make you his friend and protector.”
He accepted the trust with greater gladness than he had felt about anything that had happened to him for a long time; and on a balmy morning in the last week of May he found himself standing by the font of the old Saxon church at Milbrook where he had heard the solemn words of the Burial Service read above Sir Godfrey Carmichael’s coffin less than a year before. He took upon himself the custody of the infant’s conscience in all good faith, and he felt that this trust which his cousin had given to him made a new link between them.
The Grenvilles had come down from town to be present at the ceremony, though neither husband nor wife was officially concerned in it. Mrs. Grenville had seized the opportunity to bring Johnnie and Godolphin to Dorsetshire for change of air. She had an idea that the Purbeck air had a particularly revivifying effect upon them—like unto no other air.
“I suppose that is because it is my native air,” she explained.
Mr. Grenville submitted to his nephew’s existence as a mysterious dispensation of Providence, which it became him to endure with gentleman-like fortitude, but he did not cease to regard a posthumous infant as a solecism in nature and society.
“Your sister-in-law actually seems pleased with her baby,” he told his wife, grumblingly, as he put on a frock coat in honour of the approaching ceremony; “but it appears to me that a woman of refined feeling would be impressed with a sense of incongruity—of indelicacy even—in the idea of a child born such ages after the father’s death—a sort of no-man’s-baby. And upon my word it is uncommonly hard upon Thomas. With such a family as ours—five and the possibilities of the future—it would have been a grand thing to have one well provided for. As things stand now they must all be paupers.”