“Yes. I do! It’s his, and he ought to keep it!”
“But you are its mother!”
“I won’t be its mother!” exploded Becky, flinging the ill-kept and wretched infant about on her knees with a vicious grip. “I’ll leave it on a doorstep first!”
The child put up a piteous lip and uttered those cries by which bruised infancy protests against tormentors whom it feels but does not know.
America stared at the girl; her alabaster face was suddenly drained of horror at the wrong done a woman, and filled with passionate contempt.
“Then I’ll be its mother! Give it to me.”
She gathered it off Becky’s lap and laid its heat-blotched face against her shoulder. The tiny creature discharged a mouthful of its wretchedness there. America stanched the spot, and made a softer rest for its cheek with her rose-scented handkerchief. Her unconscious sweep of figure in taking the child and standing up publicly with it, thrilled beholders like piercing music or the sight of great works of art. The mother-spirit, which has brooded for centuries over this world—the passion to foster and protect and train—shone white and large in her face. She was that fair impersonation men call the Goddess of Liberty, holding the outcast to her breast. She was Mother Mary, with a reminder of the Heavenly Infant in her arms.
No one remonstrated or spoke a word to her as she moved from the room.
Becky Inchbald, pulling her shaker over her face, went out and mounted her horse.
America was at the top of the stairs when she heard Ross Carr speak hoarsely at the foot. She stood looking at him over the balustrade. The baby was quiet.