Chapter III

The music poured up the well of the staircase; softened by distance, the shrill childish sopranos and the throaty basses of the medical staff merged into a rising and falling harmony of exquisite beauty.

Liz sat on the top step of the stairs, with her baby in her arms; and, as the song went on, Liz's eyes fell to her child and stayed there.

At three o'clock the elevator-man brought Rosie Davis along the hall--Rosie, whose costume betrayed haste, and whose figure, under a gaudy motor-coat, gave more than a suggestion of being unsupported and wrapper-clad. She carried a clinking silver chatelaine, however, and at the door she opened it and took out a quarter, extending it with a regal gesture to the elevator-man.

"Here, old sport," she said, "go and blow yourself to a drink. It's Easter."

Such munificence appalled the ward.

Rosie was not alone. Behind her, uncomfortable and sullen, was Al. The ward, turning from the episode of the quarter, fixed on him curious and hostile eyes; and Al, glancing around the ward from the doorway, felt their hostility, and plucked Rosie's arm.

"Gee, Rose, I'm not going in there," he said. But Rosie pulled him in and presented him to the Nurse.

Behind the screen, Claribel, shut off from her view of the open window, had taken to staring at the ceiling again.

When the singing came up the staircase from the chapel, she had moaned and put her fingers in her ears.

"Well, I found him," said Rosie cheerfully. "Had the deuce of a time locating him." And the Nurse, apprising in one glance his stocky figure and heavy shoulders, his ill-at-ease arrogance, his weak, and just now sullen but not bad-tempered face, smiled at him.

"We have a little girl here who will be glad to see you," she said, and took him to the screen. "Just five minutes, and you must do the talking."

Al hesitated between the visible antagonism of the ward and the mystery of the white screen. A vision of Claribel as he had seen her last, swollen with grief and despair, distorted of figure and accusing of voice, held him back. A faint titter of derision went through the room. He turned on Rosie's comfortable back a look of black hate and fury. Then the Nurse gave him a gentle shove, and he was looking at Claribel--a white, Madonna-faced Claribel, lying now with closed eyes, her long lashes sweeping her cheek.

The girl did not open her eyes at his entrance. He put his hat awkwardly on the foot of the bed, and, tiptoeing around, sat on the edge of the stiff chair.

"Well, how are you, kid?" he asked, with affected ease.

She opened her eyes and stared at him. Then she made a little clutch at her throat, as if she were smothering.

"How did you--how did you know I was here?"

"Saw it in the paper, in the society column." She winced at that, and some fleeting sense of what was fitting came to his aid. "How are you?" he asked more gently. He had expected a flood of reproaches, and he was magnanimous in his relief.

"I've been pretty bad; I'm better."

"Oh, you'll be around soon, and going to dances again. The Maginnis Social Club's having a dance Saturday night in Mason's Hall."

The girl did not reply. She was wrestling with a problem that is as old as the ages, although she did not know it--why this tragedy of hers should not be his. She lay with her hands crossed quietly on her breast and one of the loosened yellow braids was near his hand. He picked it up and ran it through his fingers.

"Hasn't hurt your looks any," he said awkwardly. "You're looking pretty good."

With a jerk of her head she pulled the braid out of his fingers.

"Don't," she said and fell to staring at the ceiling, where she had written her problem.

"How's the--how's the kid?"--after a moment.

"I don't know--or care."

There was nothing strange to Al in this frame of mind. Neither did he know or care.

"What are you goin' to do with it?"

"Kill it!"

Al considered this a moment. Things were bad enough now, without Claribel murdering the child and making things worse.

"I wouldn't do that," he said soothingly. "You can put it somewhere, can't you? Maybe Rosie'll know."

"I don't want it to live."

For the first time he realised her despair. She turned on him her tormented eyes, and he quailed.

"I'll find a place for it, kid," he said. "It's mine, too. I guess I'm it, all right."

"Yours!" She half rose on her elbow, weak as she was. "Yours! Didn't you throw me over when you found I was going to have it? Yours! Did you go through hell for twenty-four hours to bring it into the world? I tell you, it's mine--mine! And I'll do what I want with it. I'll kill it, and myself too!"

"You don't know what you're saying!"

She had dropped back, white and exhausted.

"Don't I?" she said, and fell silent.

Al felt defrauded, ill-treated. He had done the right thing; he had come to see the girl, which wasn't customary in those circles where Al lived and worked and had his being; he had acknowledged his responsibility, and even--why, hang it all----

"Say the word and I'll marry you," he said magnanimously.

"I don't want to marry you."

He drew a breath of relief. Nothing could have been fairer than his offer, and she had refused it. He wished Rosie had been there to hear.

And just then Rosie came. She carried the baby, still faintly odorous of violets, held tight in unaccustomed arms. She looked awkward and conscious, but her amused smile at herself was half tender.

"Hello, Claribel," she said. "How are you? Just look here, Al! What do you think of this?"

Al got up sheepishly and looked at the child.

"Boy or girl?" he asked politely.

"Girl; but it's the living image of you," said Rose--for Rose and the Nurse were alike in the wiles of the serpent.

"Looks like me!" Al observed caustically. "Looks like an over-ripe tomato!"

But he drew himself up a trifle. Somewhere in his young and hardened soul the germs of parental pride, astutely sowed, had taken quick root.

"Feel how heavy she is," Rose commanded. And Al held out two arms unaccustomed to such tender offices.

"Heavy! She's about as big as a peanut."

"Mind her back," said Rose, remembering instructions.

After her first glance Claribel had not looked at the child. But now, in its father's arms, it began to whimper. The mother stirred uneasily, and frowned.

"Take it away!" she ordered. "I told them not to bring it here."

The child cried louder. Its tiny red face, under the powder, turned purple. It beat the air with its fists. Al, still holding it in his outstretched arms, began vague motions to comfort it, swinging it up and down and across. But it cried on, drawing up its tiny knees in spasms of distress. Claribel put her fingers in her ears.

"You'll have to feed it!" Rose shouted over the din.

The girl comprehended without hearing, and shook her head in sullen obstinacy.

"What do you think of that for noise?" said Al, not without pride. "She's like me, all right. When I'm hungry, there's hell to pay if I'm not fed quick. Here,"--he bent down over Claribel,--"you might as well have dinner now, and stop the row."

Not ungently, he placed the squirming mass in the baptismal dress beside the girl on the bed. With the instinct of ages, the baby stopped wailing and opened her mouth.

"The little cuss!" cried Al, delighted. "Ain't that me all over? Little angel-face the minute I get to the table!"

Unresisting now, Claribel let Rose uncover her firm white breast. The mother's arm, passively extended by Rose to receive the small body, contracted around it unconsciously.

She turned and looked long at the nuzzling, eager mouth, at the red hand lying trustfully open on her breast, at the wrinkled face, the indeterminate nose, the throbbing fontanelle where the little life was already beating so hard.

"A girl, Rose!" she said. "My God, what am I going to do with her?"

Rose was not listening. The Junior Medical's turn had come at last. Downstairs in the chapel, he was standing by the organ, his head thrown back, his heavy brown hair (which would never stay parted without the persuasion of brilliantine) bristling with earnestness.

"_O'er all the way, green palms and blossoms gay_,"

he sang, and his clear tenor came welling up the staircase to Liz, and past her to the ward, and to the group behind the screen.

"_Are strewn this day in festal preparation,
Where Jesus comes to wipe our tears away--
E'en now the throng to welcome Him prepare._"

On the throne-chair by the record-table, the Nurse sat and listened. And because it was Easter and she was very happy and because of the thrill in the tenor voice that came up the stairs to her, and because of the page in the order-book about bran baths and the rest of it, she cried a little, surreptitiously, and let the tears drop down on a yellow hospital record.

The song was almost done. Liz, on the stairs, had fed her baby twenty minutes too soon, and now it lay, sleeping and sated, in her lap. Liz sat there, brooding over it, and the last line of the song came up the staircase.

"_Blessed is He who comes bringing sal-va-a-a-ation!_"

the Junior Medical sang.

The services were over. Downstairs the small crowd dispersed slowly. The minister shook hands with the nurses at the door, and the Junior Medical rolled up his song and wondered how soon he could make rounds upstairs again.

Liz got up, with her baby in her arms, and padded in to the throne-chair by the record-table.

"He can sing some, can't he!" she said.

"He has a beautiful voice." The Nurse's eyes were shining.

Liz moved off. Then she turned and came back.

"I--I know you'll tell me I'm a fool," she said; "but I've decided to keep the kid, this time. I guess I'll make out, somehow."

Behind the screen, Rosie had lighted a cigarette and was smoking, sublimely unconscious of the blue smoke swirl that rose in telltale clouds high above her head. The baby had dropped asleep, and Claribel lay still. But her eyes were not on the ceiling; they were on the child.

Al leaned forward and put his lips to the arm that circled the baby.

"I'm sorry, kid," he said. "I guess it was the limit, all right. Do you hate me?"

She looked at him, and the hardness and defiance died out of her eyes. She shook her head.

"No."

"Do you--still--like me a little?"

"Yes," in a whisper.

"Then what's the matter with you and me and the little mutt getting married and starting all over--eh?"

He leaned over and buried his face with a caressing movement in the hollow of her neck.

Rose extinguished her cigarette on the foot of the bed, and, careful of appearances, put the butt in her chatelaine.

"I guess you two don't need me any more," she said yawning. "I'm going back home to bed."

"ARE WE DOWNHEARTED? NO!"