"Registered?"
"Within three weeks. It's the law, look you."
That was the first thing that frightened me. I had filled up truthfully
enough the card which the Rector had sent me, because I knew that the
register of my Church must be as sacred as its confessional.
But a public declaration of my baby's birth and parentage seemed to be
quite another matter--charged with all the dangers to me, to Martin, and
above all to my child, which had overshadowed my life before she was
born.
More than once I felt tempted to lie, to make a false declaration, to
say that Martin had been my husband and Isabel was my legitimate child.
But at length I resolved to speak the truth, the plain truth, telling
myself that God's law was above man's law, and I had no right to be
ashamed.
In this mood I set off for the Registry Office. It was a long way from
where I lived, and carrying baby in my arms I was tired when I got
there.
I found it to be a kind of private house, with an open vestibule and a
black-and-white enamelled plate on the door-post, saying "Registry of
Births and Deaths."
In the front parlour (which reminded me of Mr. Curphy's office in
Holmtown) there was a counter by the door and a large table covered with
papers in the space within.
Two men sat at this table, an old one and a young one, and I remember
that I thought the old one must have been reading aloud from a newspaper
which he held open in his hand, for as I entered the young one was
saying:
"Extraordinary! Perfectly extraordinary! And everybody thought they were
lost, too!"
In the space between the door and the counter two women were waiting.
Both were poor and obviously agitated. One had a baby in her arms, and
when it whimpered for its food she unbuttoned her dress and fed it
openly. The other woman, whose eyes were red as if she had been crying,
wore a coloured straw hat over which, in a pitiful effort to assume
black, she had stretched a pennyworth of cheap crêpe.
In his own good time the young man got up to attend to them. He was a
very ordinary young clerk in a check suit, looking frankly bored by the
dull routine of his daily labour, and palpably unconscious of the fact
that every day and hour of his life he was standing on the verge of the
stormiest places of the soul.
Opening one of two registers which lay on the counter (the Register of
Births) he turned first to the woman with the child. Her baby, a boy,
was illegitimate, and in her nervousness she stumbled and stammered, and
he corrected her sharply.
Then opening the other register (the Register of Deaths) he attended to
the woman in the crêpe. She had lost her little girl, two years old, and
produced a doctor's certificate. While she gave the particulars she held
a soiled handkerchief to her mouth as if to suppress a sob, but the
young clerk's composure remained undisturbed.
I do not know if it was the agitation of the two poor women that made me
nervous, but when they were gone and my turn had come, I was hot and
trembling.
The young clerk, however, who was now looking at me for the first time,
had suddenly become respectful. With a bow and a smile he asked me if I
wished to register my child, and when I answered yes he asked me to be
good enough to step up to the counter.
"And what is your baby's name, please?" he asked.
I told him. He dipped his pen in his metal ink-pot, shook some drops
back, made various imaginary flourishes over his book and wrote:
"Mary Isabel."
"And now," he said, with another smile, "the full name, profession, and
place of residence of the father."
I hesitated for a moment, and then, making a call on my resolution, I
said:
"Martin Conrad, seaman, deceased."
The young clerk looked up quickly.
"Did you say Martin Conrad, ma'am?" he asked, and as well as I could for
a click in my throat I answered:
"Yes."
He paused as if thinking; then with the same flourish as before he wrote
that name also, and after he had done so, he twisted his face about to
the old man, who was sitting behind him, and said, in a voice that was
not meant to reach me:
"Extraordinary coincidence, isn't it?"
"Extraordinary!" said the old man, who had lowered his newspaper and was
looking across at me over the rims of his spectacles.
"And now," said the young clerk, "your own name and your maiden name if
you please."
"Mary O'Neill."
The young clerk looked up at me again. I was holding baby on my left arm
and I could see that his eye caught my wedding ring.
"Mary Conrad, maiden name O'Neill, I presume?" he said.
I hesitated once more. The old temptation was surging back upon me. But
making a great pull on my determination to tell the truth (or what I
believed to be the truth) I answered:
"No, Mary O'Neill simply."
"Ah!" said the young clerk, and I thought his manner changed instantly.
There was silence for some minutes while the young clerk filled up his
form and made the copy I was to carry away.
I heard the scratching of the young clerk's pen, the crinkling of the
old man's newspaper, the hollow ticking of a round clock on the wall,
the dull hum of the traffic in the streets, and the thud-thud-thudding
in my own bosom.
Then the entry was read out to me and I was asked to sign it.
"Sign here, please," said the young clerk in quite a different tone,
pointing to a vacant line at the bottom of the hook, and I signed with a
trembling hand and a feeling of only partial consciousness.
I hardly know what happened after that until I was standing in the open
vestibule, settling baby on my arm afresh for my return journey, and
telling myself that I had laid a stigma upon my child which would remain
with her as long as she lived.
It was a long, long way back, I remember, and when I reached home
(having looked neither to the right nor left, nor at anything or
anybody, though I felt as if everybody had been looking at me) I had a
sense of dimness of sight and of aching in the eyeballs.
I did not sing very much that day, and I thought baby was rather
restless.
Towards nightfall I had a startling experience.
I was preparing Isabel for bed, when I saw a red flush, like a rash,
down the left side of her face.
At first I thought it would pass away, but when it did not I called my
Welsh landlady upstairs to look at it.
"Do you see something like a stain on baby's face?" I asked, and then
waited breathlessly for her answer.
"No . . . Yes . . . Well," she said, "now that thee'st saying so . . .
perhaps it's a birthmark."
"A birthmark?"
"Did'st strike thy face against anything when baby was coming?"
I made some kind of reply, I hardly know what, but the truth, or what I
thought to be the truth, flashed on me in a moment.
Remembering my last night at Castle Raa, and the violent scene which had
occurred there, I told myself that the flush on baby's face was the mark
of my husband's hand which, making no impression upon me, had been
passed on to my child, and would remain with her to the end of her life,
as the brand of her mother's shame and the sign of what had been called
her bastardy.
How I suffered at the sight of it! How time after time that night I
leaned over my sleeping child to see if the mark had passed away! How
again and again I knelt by her side to pray that if sin of mine had to
be punished the punishment might fall on me and not on my innocent babe!
At last I remembered baby's baptism and told myself that if it meant
anything it meant that the sin in which my child had been born, the sin
of those who had gone before her (if sin it was), had been cast out of
her soul with the evil spirits which had inspired them.
"_This sign of the Holy Cross + which we make upon her forehead do
thou, accursed devil, never dare to violate_."
God's law had washed my darling white! What could man's law--his proud
but puny morality--do to injure her? It could do nothing!
That comforted me. When I looked at baby again the flush had gone and I
went to bed quite happy.