"But Norma perhaps has told you——?" Chris said, in a different tone. "Told you of the—the remarkable talk we had yesterday—with my poor mother-in-law——"
Kate Sheridan nodded gravely.
"Yes," she answered, almost reluctantly, "Norma is Theodore Melrose's child. I have letters—all their letters. I knew her mother, that was Louison Courtot, well. It was a mixed-up business—but you've got the whole truth at last. I've lost more than one night's sleep over my share of it, Mr. Liggett, thinking who this child was, and whether I had the right to hold my tongue.
"I was a widow when I went to Germany with Mrs. Melrose. She begged and begged me to, for she was sick with worry about Miss Annie. Miss Annie had been over there about eight months, and something she'd written had made her mother feel that she was ill, or in trouble. Well, I didn't want to leave my own children, but she coaxed me so hard that I went. We sailed without cabling, and went straight to Leipsic, and to the dreadful, dreary pension that Miss Annie was in—a dismal, lonely place. She came downstairs to see her mother, and I'll never forget the scream she gave, for she'd had no warning, poor child, and Müller had taken all her money, and she was—well, we could see how she was. She began laughing and crying, and her mother did, too, but Mrs. Melrose stopped after a few minutes, and we couldn't stop Miss Annie at all. She shrieked and sobbed and strangled until we saw she was ill, and her mother gave me one look, and bundled her right out to the carriage, and off to a better place, and we got a doctor and a nurse. But all that night she was in danger of her life. I went in to her room that evening, to put things in order, and she was lying on the bed like a dead thing—white, sick, and with her eyes never moving off her mother's face. I could hear her murmuring the whole story, the shame and the bitter cruelty of it, crying sometimes—and her mother crying, too.
"'And, Mama,' she said—the innocence of her! 'Mama, did the doctor tell you that there might have been a baby?—I didn't know it myself until a few weeks ago! And that's why they're so frightened about me now. But,' she said, beginning to cry again, 'I should have hated it—I've always hated it, and I'd rather have it all over—I don't want to have to face anything more!'
"Well, it looked then as if she couldn't possibly live through the night, and all her mother could think of was to comfort her. She told her that they would go away and forget it all, and Miss Annie clung to her through the whole terrible thing. We none of us got any sleep that night, and I think it was at about three o'clock the next morning that I crept to the door, and the doctor—Doctor Leslie—an old English doctor who was very kind, came to the door and gave me the poor little pitiful baby in a blanket. I almost screamed when I took it, for the poor little soul was alive, working her little mouth! I took her to my room, and indeed I baptized her myself—I named her Mary for my mother, and Leslie for the doctor, but I never thought she'd need a name—then. She was under four pounds, and with a little claw like a monkey's paw, and so thin we didn't dare dress her—we thought she was three months too soon, then, and I just sat watching her, waiting for her to die, and thinking of my own——!
"Miss Annie was given up the next day, she'd gone into a brain fever, but my poor little soul was wailing a good healthy wail—I remember I cried bitterly when the doctor told me not to hope for her! But she lived—and on the fourth day Mrs. Melrose sent us away, and we went and stayed in the country for two months after that.
"Then I had a letter from the Riviera, the first that'd come. Miss Annie was getting well, her hair was coming out curly, and she hardly remembered anything about what had happened at all. She wasn't nineteen then, poor child! She had cried once, her mother wrote, and had said she thanked God the baby had died and that was all she ever said of it.
"I brought the baby home, and for nearly three years she lived with my own, and of course Mrs. Melrose paid me for it. And then one day Louison Courtot came to see me—I'd known her, of course—Mr. Theodore's wife, that had been Miss Annie's maid. She had a letter from Mrs. Melrose, and she took Leslie away, and gave her to her grandmother—just according to plan. Well, I didn't like it—though it gave the child her rights, but it didn't seem honest. I had no call to interfere, and a few months later Mrs. Melrose gave me the double house in Brooklyn, that you'll well remember, Norma—and your own father made out the deed of gift, Mr. Chris——!
"And then, perhaps a year later, Louison came to call on me again, and with her was a little girl—four years old, and I looked at her, and looked at Louison, and I said, 'My God—that's a Melrose!' She said, yes, it was Theodore's child."