“I go when I see babee,” came the feeble response to his racket.
“Let her in, Hennessy,” came the voice of Sheila from up-stairs.
Hennessy unbarred the door, and a shaken, pathetic little figure crept in. All the coy prettiness was gone for the moment; the swollen eyes had circles about them, the cheeks were sallow and free of powder as the lips were free of carmine. The mouth quivered like a grief-stricken child’s. “Please—please—I see babee?” came the wail again.
“Yes. Come up softly,” Sheila called from the head of the stairs.
The little figure crept up eagerly. Sheila put out an arm and led her into a room where a single candle burned beside the bed. There lay the atom, rosy and dimpling in his sleep.
It is to be doubted if the señora had ever dreamed of such a possession after the appalling reality of the original Francisco Enrique Manuel Machado y Rodriguez. In her ignorance and youth she had accepted ugliness, sickness, and peevish crying as the normal attributes of babyhood, and because of this she had loathed it. Therefore to be suddenly confronted with her awful mistake, to find that she had thrown away something that was beautiful and enchanting, to know she had forfeited what might have been hers, to feel in a small degree the first longing of motherhood and be denied it—all this was born into the slowly awakening consciousness of the señora. It almost transformed her face into homely holiness as she made her one supreme prayer and sacrifice. “You give me my babee—now—you give heem and not keep—and I give you all these. See?” She held out her hands that had been clasped under the heavy mantilla that covered her head and shoulders. Opening them, she thrust them close, that Sheila might look. They were filled with jewels—the jewels she adored, that had contributed a large part to the joy of her existence. Pins, rings, necklaces, bracelets—the señora had not kept back a single ornament. “You—you and the blessed Maria will give heem back to me?”
“Get down and pray to the Maria,” commanded Sheila. “Promise her that if she will give your baby back to you you will take care of him for ever and ever. Never neglect him, never shake nor slap him, never give him bad milk to make him sick. Promise you’ll always love him and keep him laughing and pretty. And remember—break your promise, let anything happen to Pancho again, and Maria will not give him back to you another time.”
The sanitarium never learned in detail how Señor Machado became reconciled to a live son, not being present when the news was conveyed to him. They saw him arrive, however, looking very much shaken with his bereavement, and they saw him depart with his son perched high upon his shoulder, wearing the expression of one who has come unexpectedly into a great possession, while the señora clung to them both. The sanitarium waved them off with gladness and satisfaction—all but four unsmiling outsiders. So great a hole can a departing atom sometimes leave behind that those four who had given him temporary care and guardianship went about for days with sorrow written plainly upon them. Hennessy fed the swans in bitter silence; Peter moped, with a laugh for no one; Doctor Fuller groaned whenever South America was mentioned; while all three knew they could not even fathom the deepness or the bigness of that hole for Sheila.
Peter took her for a twilight ride in his car the first empty night. “Go on and cry it out—I sha’n’t mind,” he urged as he speeded the car along a country road.
Sheila smiled faintly. “Thank you—can’t. Just feel bruised and banged all over—feel as if I needed a plunge in that old pool of Bethesda.”