“It will. When my feelings about anything run all to the good this way, I’d bank anything on them. Now please hurry.”
So it came about that instead of a burial service that night Father O’Friel conducted an original and unprecedented adoption ceremony. Without even a witness the señora signed a paper which she showed no inclination to read and which she would hardly have understood had she attempted it. It was enough for her that she could give away Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez to a foolish nurse who was plainly anxious to be bothered with him. Death had seemed the only release from an obligation that exhausted and frightened her, and from which neither pleasure nor personal pride could be obtained. But this was another way mercifully held out to her, and she accepted it with gratitude and absolute belief. Eagerly she agreed to the conditions Sheila laid down; the father was to be notified and forced to make a life settlement on the atom; in the mean time she was to remain at the sanitarium, pay all expenses, and interfere in no way with the nurse or the baby. So desirous was she to display her gratitude that she heaped the atom’s wardrobe—lace, ribbons, and embroidery—upon Sheila, and kissed the hem of Father O’Friel’s cassock.
“Qué gracioso—qué magnifico!” Then she yawned behind her tinted nails. “I have ver’ much the sleep. I find anothaire room and make what you call—la cama.” At the door she turned and cast a farewell look upon the blanketed bundle. “Eet look ver’ ugly—all the same I theenk eet die.”
It took barely ten minutes for word of the adoption to reach Doctor Fuller, and it brought him running. “Good Lord! Leerie, are you crazy? Did you think I pulled you out of bed to-night to start an orphan-asylum? What do you mean, girl?”
Sheila looked down at her newly acquired possession, and for the first time that night the strange, luminous look that was all her own, that had won for her her nickname of Leerie, crept into her eyes; they fairly dazzled the old doctor with their shining. “Honestly, don’t know myself. Still testing out my feelings in my think laboratory.”
“You can’t raise that baby and keep on with your nursing. Too much responsibility, anyway, for a young person. What’s more, the mother shouldn’t be allowed to dodge it. She can be made fit.”
“How are you going to do it? Train her with harness and braces? Or moral suasion—or the courts?”
“And I thought you hated it, couldn’t bear to touch it,” growled the baby specialist.
“Did. But that’s past tense. Since I fought for it, it’s suddenly become remarkably precious. And that’s the precise feeling I’m testing up in the lab.”
“In the name of common sense what do you mean, Leerie?”