“It was only a mock adoption, and you promised if she ever wanted him back she should have him,” Father O’Friel reminded her.
“She’s his mother, after all,” Peter put in, lamely.
At that Sheila exploded. “You men make me tired! ‘She’s his mother, after all.’ After all what? Cruelty, neglect, heartlessness, hoping he would die—glad to be rid of him! That’s about all the sense of justice you have. Let a woman weep and call for her baby, and every man within earshot would hand him over without considering for a moment what kind of care she would give him. Oh, you—make—me—sick!” Sheila buried her face in the nape of Pancho’s neck.
Doctor Fuller, who had always known her, who had stood by her in her disgrace when she had been sent away from the sanitarium three years before and had believed in her implicitly in spite of all damning evidence, who had fought for her a dozen times when she had called down upon her head the wrath of the business office, looked now upon her silent, shaking figure with open-mouthed astonishment. In all those years he had never seen Leerie cry, and he couldn’t quite stand it.
“There, there, child! We understand—we’re not quite the duffers you make us out. Of course, by all rights, human and moral, the little shaver belongs to you, but you can’t keep him, just the same.”
“Know it! Needn’t rub it in! Wasn’t going to!” Sheila raised a wet face, with red-rimmed eyes and lips that trembled outrageously. She couldn’t steady them to save her, and so she let them tremble while she stuttered forth her last protest. “Didn’t think for a moment I wouldn’t give him back, d-d-did you? That was my plan—my way. I wanted Father O’Friel to let me try—t-t-t-thought all along he’d grow into such an ad-d-d-dorable mite his m-m-m-mother’d be wanting him back. What I didn’t count on was my wanting to k-k-keep him.” Sheila swallowed hard. She wanted to get rid of that everlasting choke in her throat. When she spoke again her voice was steadier. “But I tell you one thing. She doesn’t get him without fighting for him. She’s going to fight for him as I fought that night in the sanitarium, and you’re going to help me keep her fighting. Understand? Then perhaps when she gets him she’ll have some faint notion of how precious a baby can be.” With a more grim expression than any of the three had ever seen on her usually luminous face, Sheila O’Leary shouldered the atom and disappeared within the house.
The three men stood by her while Hennessy guarded the house. For the rest of the day the señora, backed by the business office and a procession of interested sympathizers, stormed the parish house and demanded to see the paper that she had signed. They stormed Doctor Fuller’s office and demanded his co-operation, or at least what information he had to give. They consulted the one lawyer in the town and three others within car distance, but their advice availed little, inasmuch as Father O’Friel had refused to give up the paper until the baby’s father arrived, and they could get no intelligent idea from the señora of how legal the adoption had been made. By keeping perfectly dumb the three were able to hold the crowd in abeyance, and the señora, looking anything but a bird of paradise, came back to them again and again to weep, to plead, to bribe.
The excitement held until midnight, an unprecedented occurrence for the sanitarium. It was still dark the next morning when Hennessy was roused from the haircloth sofa in the hall, where he was still keeping guard, by the fumbling of a hand on the door-knob. “Who’s there?” roared Hennessy.
“Please—eet ees me—the Señora Machado y Rodriguez.”
“Go ’way! Shoo-oo!” Hennessy banged the door with his fist as he always banged the bread-platter to scatter the swans.