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.
"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?"