"What is that?" I asked, with my throat so dry that it ached.
I think now that we must both have spoken like puppets talking by machinery. I hardly seemed to myself to be alive and real, but this proposition awoke me like a blow. I could at first only gasp, too much overcome to bring out a word.
"But its mother?" I managed to stammer at last.
"If I'm to marry her for the sake of the child," he answered in a voice I hardly recognized, "it would be perfect tomfoolery to leave it to grow up with the Brownrigs. If that's to be the plan, I'll save myself. Jule doesn't mind not being married. You don't know what a tribe the Brownrigs are. It's an insult for me to be talking to you about them, only it can't be helped. Is it a boy or a girl?"
"And you think a girl ought to be left to follow the noble example of the mother!"
"Oh no, no!" I cried out. "Anything is better than that."
"That is what must happen unless you take the poor thing," he said in a voice which, though it was hard, seemed somehow to have a quiver in it.
"But would she give the baby up?" I asked. "She's its mother."
"Jule? She'll be only too glad to get rid of it. Anyway she'd do what I told her to."
I tried to think clearly and quickly. To have the baby left to follow in the steps of its mother was a thing too terrible to be endured, and yet I shrank selfishly from taking upon my shoulders the responsibility of training the child. Whatever Tom decided about the marriage, however, I felt that he should not have to resolve under pressure. If he were doing it for the sake of the baby's future, I could clear his way of that complication. I could not bear the thought of having Tom marry Julia. This would be a bond on his whole life; and yet I could not feel that he had a right to shirk it now. If I agreed to take the child, that would leave him free to decide without being pushed on by fear about the baby. My mind seemed to me wonderfully clear. I see now it was all in a whirl, and that the only thing I was sure of was that if it would help him for me to take the baby there was nothing else for me to do.
"Tom," I said, "I do not, and I will not, decide for you; and I will not have anything to do with conditions. If she will give me the baby, I will take it, and you may decide the rest without any reference to that at all."