The christening of Enid’s baby, delayed until David’s return from
Washington, was to be at our house because Enid and her little son had
already come to us, but we, being past seventy, could not so easily go
up in Connecticut to Enid. At all events that was what they told us,
though Pelleas and I smiled somewhat sadly as we permitted our age to
bear the burden of our indolence. Besides, I would always be hostess
rather than guest, for the hostess seems essentially creative and the
guest pathetically the commodity.
Therefore on a day in May we rose early and found our shabby
drawing-room a kind of temple of hyacinths, and every one in the
room--by whom I mean its permanent inhabitants--rejoicing. The marble
Ariadne, on a pedestal in a dark corner, guided her panther on a field
of jonquils which they two must have preferred to asphodel; the Lady
Hamilton who lived over the low shelves folded her hands above a very
home of Spring; and once, having for a moment turned away, I could have
been certain that the blindfold Hope above the mantel smote her harp
softly, just loud enough, say, for a daffodil to hear.
“Ah, Pelleas,” I cried, “one would almost say that this is _The
Day_--you know, the day that one is expecting all one’s life and that
never comes precisely as one planned.”
“Only,” Pelleas supplemented positively, “this is much nicer than that
day.”
“Much,” I agreed, and we both laughed like children waiting to be
christened ourselves.
Pelleas was to be godfather--I said by virtue of his age, but Enid,
whose words said backward I prefer to those of many others in their
proper order, insisted that it was by office of his virtue. There were
to be present only the Chartres’ and the Cleatams, Miss Lillieblade and
Lisa and Hobart Eddy and a handful besides--all our nearest and dearest
and no one else; although, “Ah, me,” cried Madame Sally Chartres while
we waited, “haven’t you invited every one who has lately invited _you_
to a christening?” And on, so to speak, our positive negative, she
added: “Really, I would have said that in these social days no one
is even asked to a funeral who has not very recently had a sumptuous
funeral of her own.”
“Who was _my_ godfather?” Pelleas asked morosely. “I don’t think I ever
had a godfather. I don’t know that I ever was christened. Have I any
proof that I was named what I was named? I only know it by hearsay.
And how glaringly unscientific.”
“You are only wanting,” cried Madame Polly Cleatam, shaking her curls,
“to be fashionably doubtful!”
“Religions have been thrown away by persons who had no more authentic
doubts,” Pelleas gravely maintained.
“I dare say,” Miss Lillieblade piped. “In these days if a man has an
old coat he puts on a new doubt, and society is satisfied.”
Thereafter the baby arrived, a mere collection of hand embroidery
and lace, with an angel in the midst of these soft billows. The baby
looked quite like a photograph made by the new school, with the high
lights on long sweeping skirts and away up at the top of the picture
a vague, delicious face. Our grandniece Enid is an adorable little
mother, looking no less like a mermaid than does Lisa, but with a light
in her eyes as if still more of the mystery of the sea were come upon
her. And, as a mer-mother should, she had conversation not exclusively
confined to the mer-child. I heard her on the subject of prints with
the bishop’s lady, and the mer-child was not three months old.
The christening was to have been at eleven o’clock, and at twelve
Pelleas had an appointment which it was impossible to delay, or so he
thought, having a most masculine regard for hours, facts, and the
like. Therefore when, at fifteen after eleven, the bishop had not yet
arrived, Pelleas began uneasily suggesting taking leave. Enid looked
at him with a kind of deep-sea-cave reproach before which every one
else would have been helpless; but Pelleas, whose nature is built on
straight lines, patted her and kissed the baby at large upon the chest
and, benign, was still inexorable.
“But who will be godfather?” Enid cried disconsolately, and,
young-wife-like, looked reproachfully at her young husband.
At that moment the hall door, as if it had been an attentive listener
as long as it could and must now give the true answer, opened and
admitted Hobart Eddy, come late to the christening and arrived with
that vague air of asking why he was where he was which lent to him all
the charm of _ennui_ without its bad taste.
“Hobart,” Enid cried ecstatically, “_you_ shall be godfather!”
Hobart Eddy continued to bend to kiss my hand and then sought the hand
of Madame Sally and next the hand of Madame Polly Cleatam. Finally he
bowed before Enid and fixed his monocle on the baby.
“It opens and shuts its eyes,” he earnestly observed; “how these baby
people imitate the doll factories. It’s disgraceful.”
“Kiss him!” the mer-mother commanded, as if she were the prompter.
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._
“_‘To give light to them that sit in darkness and in the shadow of
death, to guide our feet into the way of peace.’_”
As he read a hush fell upon us. It seemed suddenly as if our
conventional impulse to see Enid’s baby christened was an affair of
more radiant import than we had meant. From the words of exhortation
that followed I was roused by a touching of garments, and I looked up
to see a trim, embroidered maid holding the baby toward Hobart Eddy.
The moment for his service as godfather was come. As he held out his
arms he questioned Enid briefly with his eyes, and then earnestly
gave himself to establishing the little man and brother in a curve of
elbow. It was after all, I suppose him to have been reflecting, as
sternly required of a man that he be an efficient godfather as that
he perfectly fill all the other offices of a man of the world. I even
suspected him of a downward glance to be assured that the soft skirts
were gracefully in place, quite as if he were arranging _tableaux
vivants_. Thereafter he stood erect, with his complaisant passivity of
look, as perfectly the social automaton as if the baby were a cup of
tea. Really, to accept dear Hobart Eddy as godfather was rather like
filling a champagne glass with cream.
“What shall be the name of this child?” once more demanded the bishop.
“Philip Wentworth,” prompted the young father a second time, presenting
a serious, young-father profile to the world.
The bishop waited.
“Philip Wentworth,” obediently repeated Hobart Eddy with, I dare be
sworn, the little deferential stooping of the shoulders with which I
had seen him return many and many a fan.
The bishop, his face filled with that shining which even in gravity
seemed sweeter than the smile of another, fixed his deep eyes upon the
godfather, and when he spoke it was as if he were saying the words for
the first time, to the guardian of the first child:--
“‘Dost thou, in the name of this Child, renounce ... the vain pomp and
glory of this world, with all covetous desires of the same, and the
sinful desires of the flesh, so that thou wilt not follow nor be led by
them?’”
Hobart, his eyes fixed on the open prayer-book which he held, read the
response quickly and clearly:
“‘I renounce them all, and by God’s help I will endeavour not to follow
or be led by them.’”
“‘Wilt thou, then,’” pursued the bishop benignly, “‘obediently keep
God’s holy will and commandments and walk in the same all the days of
thy life?’”
“‘I will,’” said Hobart Eddy, “‘by God’s help.’”
There was no slightest hesitation, no thought, or so it seemed to me;
only the old urbane readiness to say what was required of him. What had
he said, what had he done, this young lion of the social moment, beau,
gallant, _dilettante_, and was it possible that he did not understand
what he had promised? Or was I a stupid and exacting old woman
taking with convulsive literalness that which all the world perhaps
recognizes as a form of promise for the mere civilized upbringing of
a child? I tried to remember other godfathers and I could remember
only those who, like Pelleas, had indeed served, as Enid had said in
jest, by office of their virtue. And yet Hobart Eddy--after all I told
myself he was a fine, upright young fellow who paid his debts, kept his
engagements, whose name was untouched by a breath of scandal, who lived
clear of gossip; so I went through the world’s dreary catalogue of the
primal virtues. But what had these to do with that solemn “I renounce
them all”?
By the time that the service was well over I could have found it in
my heart to proclaim to our guests that, as the world construed it, a
christening seemed to me hardly more vital than the breakfast which
would follow.
This however I forbore; and at the end every one pressed forward
in quite the conventional way and besieged the baby and Hobart and
showered congratulations upon them both and kissed Enid and was as
merry as possible. And as for Hobart, he stood in their midst, bowing a
little this way and that, giving his graceful flatteries as another man
gives the commonplaces, complaisant, urbane, heavy-lidded....