“No; no, she won’t.” The bitterness of the mother’s heart expressed itself in the dry, light utterance. It was a comfort to express bitterness, for once, to somebody.
“She is a harmless little thing,” Frances offered after a moment.
“Harmless?” Mrs. Bradley turned it over drily and lightly. “I can’t feel her that. I feel her blameless if you like. And it will be easy to keep her contented. That is really the best that one can say of poor Dollie. And then there will be the child. I am pinning all my hopes to the child, Frances.”
Frances understood that.
Dollie, as the winter wore on, kept remarkably well. She had felt it the proper thing to allude to Jack and his danger; and so, now, she more and more frequently felt it the proper thing to allude, humorously if with a touch of melancholy, to “baby.” Her main interest in baby, Mrs. Bradley felt, was an alarmed one. She was a good deal frightened, poor little soul, and in need of constant reassurances; and it was when one need only pet and pity Dollie that she was easier to deal with. Mrs. Bradley tried to interest her in plans for the baby; what it should be named, and how its hair should be done if it were a little girl,—for only on this assumption could Dollie’s interest be at all vividly roused; and Mrs. Bradley more than ever hoped for a boy when she found Dollie’s idle yet stubborn thoughts fixed on the name of Gloria.
She was able to evade discussion of this point, and when the baby came, fortunately and robustly, into the world on a fine March morning, she could feel it as a minor but very real cause for thanksgiving that Dollie need now never know what she thought of Gloria as a name. The baby was a boy, and now that he was here Dollie seemed as well pleased that he should be a commonplace Jack, and that there should be no question of tying his hair with cockades of ribbon over each ear. Smiling and rosy and languid, she lay in her charming room, not at all more maternal—though she showed a bland satisfaction in her child and noted that his eyes were just like Jack’s—yet subtly more wifely. Baby, she no doubt felt, with the dim instinct that did duty for thought with her, placed and rooted her and gave her final rights. She referred now to Jack with the pensive but open affection of their shared complacency, and made her mother-in-law think, as she lay there, of a soft and sleepy and tenacious creeper, fixing tentacle after tentacle in the walls of Jack’s house of life.
If only one could feel that she had furnished it with a treasure! Gravely, with a sad fondness, the grandmother studied the little face, so unfamiliar, for signs of Jack. She was a helplessly clear-sighted woman, and remembrance was poignantly vivid in her of Jack’s face at a week old. Already she loved the baby since its eyes, indubitably, were his; but she could find no other trace of him. It was not a Bradley baby; and in the dreamy, foreboding flickers of individuality that pass uncannily across an infant’s features, her melancholy and steady discernment could see only the Watson ancestry.
She was to do all she could for the baby; to save him, so far as might be, from his Watson ancestry and to keep him, so far as might be, Jack’s and hers. That was to be her task. But with all the moulding that could, mercifully, be applied from the very beginning, she could not bring herself to believe that this was ever to be a very significant human being.
She sent Jack his wire: “A son. Dollie doing splendidly.” And she had his answer: “Best thanks. Love to Dollie.” It was curious, indeed, this strange new fact they had now, always, to deal with; this light little “Dollie” that must be passed between them. The baby might have made Jack happy, but it had not solved the problem of his future.