Hobart Eddy obediently kissed the baby’s thumb.
“Man and brother,” he greeted him solemnly; “Lord, to think I’ll take it to luncheon sometime and hear it know more about the town than I do.”
“At all events,” Madame Sally Chartres begged gravely, “don’t ask him to lunch until he’s been christened. In Society you have to have a name.”
“But,” Enid settled it with pretty peremptoriness, “you must be godfather even if he never lunches. Hobart—you will?”
“Its godfather?” said Hobart Eddy. “I? But yes, with all pleasure. What do I have to do? Is there more than one figure?”
When at length the arrival of the bishop followed close on the departure of Pelleas, regretful but absurdly firm, we were in a merry clamour of instruction. The situation had caught our fancy and this was no great marvel. For assuredly Hobart Eddy was not the typical godfather.
“On my honour,” he said, “I never was even ‘among those’ at a christening, in my life, and I would go a great distance to be godfather. It’s about the only ambition I’ve never had and lost.”
The service of the christening holds for me a poignant solemnity. And because this was Enid’s baby and because I remembered that hour in which he had seemed to be Pelleas’ dream and mine come back, my heart was overflowingly full. But I missed Pelleas absurdly, for this was one of the hours in which we listen best together; and to have learned to listen with some one brings, in that other’s absence, a silence. But it was a happy hour, for the sun streamed gayly across the window-boxes, there were the dear faces of our friends, the mer-mother and her young husband were near to joyful tears and the bishop’s voice was like an organ chord in finer, fluttering melody. Through the saying of prayer and collects I stood with uplifting heart; and then Enid’s husband gave the baby’s name with a boyish tremble in his voice; and after the baptism and its formalities the bishop read the words that were the heart of the whole matter; and the heart of a matter does not always beat in the moment’s uplift.
“‘And thou, Child,’ the bishop read, ‘shalt be called the prophet of the Highest; for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare His ways.
“‘Through the tender mercy of our Lord, whereby the day spring from on high hath visited us.