“You ain’t going to take him away! From me! No, you wouldn’t do that, would you? Not for—not for always! You wouldn’t do that—you wouldn’t—”
Judge Wheeling waved her away. But the woman dropped to her knees.
“Judge, give me a chance! I’ll stop drinking. Only don’t take him away from me! Don’t, judge, don’t! He’s all I’ve got in the world. Give me a chance. Three months! Six months! A year!”
“Get up!” ordered judge Wheeling, gruffly, “and stop that! It won’t do you a bit of good.”
And then a wonderful thing happened. The woman rose to her feet. A new and strange dignity had come into her battered face. The lines of suffering and vice were erased as by magic, and she seemed to grow taller, younger, almost beautiful. When she spoke again it was slowly and distinctly, her words quite free from the blur of the barroom and street vernacular.
“I tell you you must give me a chance. You cannot take a child from a mother in this way. I tell you, if you will only help me I can crawl back up the road that I’ve traveled. I was not always like this. There was another life, before—before—Oh, since then there have been years of blackness, and hunger, and cold and—worse! But I never dragged the boy into it. Look at him!”
Our eyes traveled from the woman’s transfigured face to that of the boy. We could trace a wonderful likeness where before we had seen none. But the woman went on in her steady, even tone.
“I can’t talk as I should, because my brain isn’t clear. It’s the drink. When you drink, you forget. But you must help me. I can’t do it alone. I can remember how to live straight, just as I can remember how to talk straight. Let me show you that I’m not all bad. Give me a chance. Take the boy and then give him back to me when you are satisfied. I’ll try—God only knows how I’ll try. Only don’t take him away forever, Judge! Don’t do that!”
Judge Wheeling ran an uncomfortable finger around his collar’s edge.
“Any friends living here?”