Presently, held warm against that aching breast, Mag's baby slept again; and Jacqueline looked from one to the other of those about her with the first dawning of her old, wide, radiant smile.
Soon her own eyes drooped. The three tiptoed toward the door; but quiet as they were the faint voice from the bed followed them: "Phil, Phil! where are you?"
"I can't leave her," he whispered apologetically. "You see how it is!" (Kate was glad indeed to see how it was.) "Will you go into the next room, and say good-by to—our son?"
CHAPTER LII
Kate stood gazing down at the grandchild she had so longed for, Jacqueline's baby; an old, wrinkled, strangely wise little face, as befitted one who had solved with his first breath both the mysteries of Life and of Death. His tiny fists were clenched, his brow puckered, as if that momentary glimpse of knowledge had not been a happy one.
No woman who has not gazed so into the face of her own dead child can understand the hopelessness, the sense of bafflement, of the futility of all human endeavor, which surged through Kate Kildare at that moment. The waste of it! The utter, insensate waste of so much passion and hope and tenderness, of such desperate agony, of such courage to bear...! There is no spendthrift so prodigal as Nature. For one perfected product that pleases her, hundreds of preciously guarded lives, such as this, thrown aside like so many pot-shards, useless, done for—and all to what purpose?... For the moment Kate visualised Nature as some incredible, insatiable goddess, a female Moloch, who must be propitiated always with mother's tears....
Then she had a thought of her husband; of his tenderness with their little suffering Katherine, his remorse-stricken grief over the child's death. Was that the purpose? For the moment, she forgot the other Basil whom she knew better, the one who had put aside his own flesh and blood as ruthlessly as Nature herself had put aside this little son of Jacqueline.
"Basil would be sorry for this," she whispered, half aloud. "Poor Basil!"
She did not know that she was weeping, or that she was not alone, till Jemima touched her hand; the girl's nearest approach to a caress.