“Yes, as Keith says, my dear, it was a kind impulse on your part, but it certainly was a very singular action on that of your friend. She was probably too ill, poor thing, at the time to realize just what she was asking. I have no doubt you were quite excusable for giving her some sort of a conditional promise, considering all the circumstances. But you need have no sense of responsibility in the matter; infants left like that never live. It will only be a question of a few weeks’ care for any one.”
Anna turned her eyes from her mother-in-law back to her husband in mute amazement and appeal. They could not mean to deny her this sacred right! It was impossible. And yet a sudden sense of the incongruity of poor Mally’s baby in that house smote sharply upon her for the first time.
“If it had been God’s will that we should have had children of our own, Anna,” said Keith, in answer to her look, “we should have learned to fit ourselves to the many cares and responsibilities involved, I do not doubt, as others do; but it is very different to go out of our way to assume such cares, not ours in any legitimate sense. I think the question is more serious than you realize in the very natural and proper emotion which you are passing through in the death of your friend. We certainly could not ask mother to take this strange child, and all that would be involved in such a relation, into her house; and we are, I am sure, as little prepared to leave mother and break up our natural order of life,” and Keith smiled with kind conviction into Anna’s face. She rose slowly and stood with eyes fixed before her, and a strange light was in them, which her husband had never seen before.
“That is all perfectly true, Keith,” said Madam Burgess, as if to finish up the case against poor Anna; “and even if all this were not so, there would remain one insuperable obstacle to adopting this infant—an absolutely insuperable obstacle.”
“What is it?” asked Anna, very low.
“Blood, my dear. I believe in blood, and never, with his mother’s consent or approval, could my son give his name, and all that that means, to a child of alien stock. Never.” And Madam Burgess closed her lips firmly and folded her hands peacefully upon her grey silk gown with the consciousness of occupying a perfectly unassailable position.
Anna moved toward the door, a curious effect in her step and bearing as of one physically wounded, her head drooped slightly as if in submission, her eyes downcast.
When she reached the door, however, a swift change passed over her; a sudden energy and power awoke in her, and she turned, and, looking back at mother and son, her eyes flashing light, and a smile they had never seen before upon her lips, said quietly, but with slow emphasis:—
“You have decided this matter. You have each other; you are satisfied. I shall submit, as you know. Once more you have taken my life—its most sacred promise and its highest purpose—out of my hands. This time another life, too, is involved. One thing only you must let me say, I wonder how you dare!”
Facing them for an instant in silence, she turned, and went alone to her room.