Who was the human father of this child-to-be? And what share had he himself in it? The helpless grandfather of a helpless grandchild! Why would Immy not tell the father’s name? Perhaps she did not know! This thought was too loathsome to endure. Yet how could one unthink a thought that has drifted into his mind like a snowflake from nowhere?
Why should the father of the child not even be aware of its birth, when the howling mother must be squeezed as if she were run through a clothes-wringer?
Two thousand children were born dead every year in New York—such a strange long procession to the cemeteries! They were washed up on the shores of life, like the poor little victims of the Children’s Crusade who set out for Christ’s tomb and drowned in armies.
If Immy’s baby could only be born dead what a solution of all problems! But it would splutter and kick, mewl and puke, and make itself a nuisance to every sense.
And if the child died, where would it go? To hell if it were not baptized first. That was sure, if anything were sure. Yet if it were not of the elect it would go there anyway, in spite of any baptism, any saintliness of its life.
If it lived, it would join the throng of illegitimate children. Of these there were a thousand a year born in New York alone. What a plague of vermin!
And what would its future be? It might become a thief, a murderer. It might be sentenced to death for crime.
If RoBards continued his career as a judge, he would have many death sentences to pass. His own grandchild might come before him some day.
What if he should sentence it to death now? In the good old times of the patria potestas a father could destroy an unworthy child without punishment. Judge RoBards’ jurisdiction as a grandfather was doubly authentic. By one curt act he could protect his daughter from endless misery and frustration, and protect the world from this anonymous intruder and protect this poor little waif from the monstrous cruelty of the world.
This snowflake ought to go back to the invisible. Its existence was God’s crime against his child. Yet he could be a god himself and by the mere tightening of his fingers about that little wax-doll throat, fling it back at God, rejected, broken—a toy that he refused to play with.