“I want the child,” Jean Jacques insisted abruptly. “I’ll wait till she wakes, and then I’ll wrap her up and take her away.”
“Didn’t you hear me say she was to be brought up English?” asked Norah, with a slowness which clothed her fiercest impulses.
“Name of God, do you think I’ll let you have her!” returned Jean Jacques with asperity and decision. “You say you are alone, you and your M’sieu’ Nolan. Well, I am alone—all alone in the world, and I need her—Mother of God, I need her more than I ever needed anything in my life! You have each other, but I have only myself, and it is not good company. Besides, the child is mine, a Barbille of Barbilles, une legitime—a rightful child of marriage. But if it was a love-child only it would still be mine, being my daughter’s child. Look you, it is no such thing. It is of those who can claim inheritance back to Louis XI. She will be to me the gift of God in return for the robbery of death.”
He leaned over the cradle, and his look was like that of one who had found a treasure in the earth.
Now she struck hard. Yet very subtly too did she attack him. “You—you are thinking of yourself, m’sieu’, only of yourself. Aren’t you going to think of the child at all? It isn’t yourself that counts so much. You’ve had your day, or the part of it that matters most. But her time is not yet even begun. It’s all—all—before her. You say you’ll take her away—well, to what? To what will you take her? What have you got to give her? What—”
“I have the three hundred and twenty acres out there”—he pointed westward—“and I will make a home and begin again with her.”
“Three hundred and twenty acres—‘out there’!” she exclaimed in scorn. “Any one can have a farm here for the askin’. What is that? Is it a home? What have you got to start a home with? Do you deny you are no better than a tramp? Have you got a hundred dollars in the world? Have you got a roof over your head? Have you got a trade? You’ll take her where—to what? Even if you had a home, what then? You would have to get someone to look after her—some old crone, a wench maybe, who’d be as fit to bring up a child as I would be to—” she paused and looked round in helpless quest for a simile, when, in despair, she caught sight of Jean Jacques’ watch-chain—“as I would be to make a watch!” she added.
Instinctively Jean Jacques drew out the ancient timepiece he had worn on the Grand Tour; which had gone down with the Antoine and come up with himself. It gave him courage to make the fight for his own.
“The good God would see that—” he began.
“The good God doesn’t interfere in bringing up babies,” she retorted. “That’s the work for the fathers and mothers, or godfathers and godmothers.”