Harriet had succeeded where Miss Abbott and Philip had failed. It was the baby.
She would not let him talk. The baby, she repeated, was asleep, and she put up an umbrella to shield it and her from the rain. He should hear all later, so he had to conjecture the course of the wonderful interview—an interview between the South pole and the North. It was quite easy to conjecture: Gino crumpling up suddenly before the intense conviction of Harriet; being told, perhaps, to his face that he was a villain; yielding his only son perhaps for money, perhaps for nothing. “Poor Gino,” he thought. “He’s no greater than I am, after all.”
Then he thought of Miss Abbott, whose carriage must be descending the darkness some mile or two below them, and his easy self-accusation failed. She, too, had conviction; he had felt its force; he would feel it again when she knew this day’s sombre and unexpected close.
“You have been pretty secret,” he said; “you might tell me a little now. What do we pay for him? All we’ve got?”
“Hush!” answered Harriet, and dandled the bundle laboriously, like some bony prophetess—Judith, or Deborah, or Jael. He had last seen the baby sprawling on the knees of Miss Abbott, shining and naked, with twenty miles of view behind him, and his father kneeling by his feet. And that remembrance, together with Harriet, and the darkness, and the poor idiot, and the silent rain, filled him with sorrow and with the expectation of sorrow to come.
Monteriano had long disappeared, and he could see nothing but the occasional wet stem of an olive, which their lamp illumined as they passed it. They travelled quickly, for this driver did not care how fast he went to the station, and would dash down each incline and scuttle perilously round the curves.
“Look here, Harriet,” he said at last, “I feel bad; I want to see the baby.”
“Hush!”
“I don’t mind if I do wake him up. I want to see him. I’ve as much right in him as you.”
Harriet gave in. But it was too dark for him to see the child’s face. “Wait a minute,” he whispered, and before she could stop him he had lit a match under the shelter of her umbrella. “But he’s awake!” he exclaimed. The match went out.