“You are neither,” exclaimed Jean Jacques. “You have no rights at all.”
“I have no rights—eh? I have no rights! Look at the child. Look at the way she’s clothed. Look at the cradle in which it lies. It cost fifteen dollars; and the clothes—what they cost would keep a family half a year. I have no rights, is it?—I who stepped in and took the child without question, without bein’ asked, and made it my own, and treated it as if it was me own. No, by the love of God, I treated it far, far better than if it had been me own. Because a child was denied me, the hunger of the years made me love the child as a mother would on a desert island with one child at her knees.”
“You can get another-one not your own, as this isn’t,” argued Jean Jacques fiercely.
She was not to be forced to answer his arguments directly. She chose her own course to convince. “Nolan loves this child as if it was his,” she declared, her eyes all afire, “but he mightn’t love another—men are queer creatures. Then where would I be? and what would the home be but what it was before—as cold, as cold and bitter! It was the hand of God brought the child to the door of two people who had no child and who prayed for one. Do you deny it was the hand of God that brought your daughter here away, that put the child in my arms? Not its mother, am I not? But I love her better than twenty mothers could. It’s the hunger—the hunger—the hunger in me. She’s made a woman of me. She has a home where everything is hers—everything. To see Nolan play with her, tossin’ her up and down in his arms as if he’d done it all his life—as natural as natural! To take her away from that—all the comfort here where she can have anything she wants! With my old mother to care for her, if so be I was away to market or whereabouts—one that brought up six children, a millionaire among them, praise be to God as my mother did—to take this delicate little thing away from here, what a sin and crime ‘twould be! She herself ‘d never forgive you for it, if ever she grew up—though that’s not likely, things bein’ as they are with you, and you bein’ what you are. Ah, there—there she is awake and smilin’, and kickin’ up her pretty toes this minute! There she is, the lovely little Zoe, with eyes like black pearls.... See now—see now which she’ll come to—to you or me, m’sieu’. There, put out your arms to her, and I’ll put out mine, and see which she’ll take. I’ll stand by that—I’ll stand by that. Let the child decide. Hold out your arms, and so will I.”
With an impassioned word Jean Jacques reached down his arms to the child, which lay laughing up at them and kicking its pink toes into the air, and Norah Doyle did the same, murmuring an Irish love-name for a child. Jean Jacques was silent, but in his face was the longing of a soul sick for home, of one who desires the end of a toilsome road.
The laughing child crooned and spluttered and shook its head, as though it was playing some happy game. It looked first at Norah, then at Jean Jacques, then at Norah again, and then, with a little gurgle of pleasure, stretched out its arms to her and half-raised itself from the pillow. With a glad cry Norah gathered it to her bosom, and triumph shone in her face.
“Ah, there, you see!” she said, as she lifted her face from the blossom at her breast.
“There it is,” said Jean Jacques with shaking voice.
“You have nothing to give her—I have everything,” she urged. “My rights are that I would die for the child—oh, fifty times!... What are you going to do, m’sieu’?”
Jean Jacques slowly turned and picked up his hat. He moved with the dignity of a hero who marches towards a wall to meet the bullets of a firing-squad.