"Her baby--Cecily's--"
"_Then you're a grandmother_?"
It seemed to Cissy that the whole restaurant rang with the emphasis of
the words. Yet he had not spoken loudly; not a head was turned in their
direction; even the waiter stood unmoved.
When she came to herself Landry was laughing softly. "When are you going
to let me see--the baby--?"
"Never--"
"Why not?"
Cissy went on to her doom. "Because you'll want to put me on the shelf
like all the rest of them. You'll want to see me with--my
hair--parted--and spectacles. And my eyes are perfectly good--and my
hair is my own--"
She stopped. Landry was surveying her with hard eyes.
"Don't you love--the baby--?"
Cissy shrugged. "Perhaps. I don't know yet. Some day I may when I
haven't anything to do but sit in a chimney-corner."
Thus spoke Cissy Beale, making of herself a heartless creature, flinging
back into the face of Valentine Landry his most cherished ideals.
But what did it matter? She had known from the moment of her confession
that he would be repelled. What man could stand up in the face of the
world and marry a grandmother!--the idea was preposterous.
She finished dinner with her head in the air; she was hypocritically
lively during the drive home; she said "Good-night" and "Good-bye"
without feeling, and went up-stairs with her heart like lead to find the
nurse weeping wildly on the first landing.
The baby, it appeared, was very ill. And the baby's father and mother,
having left the little cherub sleeping peacefully, were motoring
somewhere in the wide spaces of the world. The family doctor was out.
She had called up another doctor, and he would come as soon as he could.
But in the meantime the baby was dying--
"Nonsense, Kate," said Cissy Beale, and pulling off her gloves as she
ran, she made for the pale-gray room.
Now, as it happened, Valentine Landry, driving away in a priggish state
of mind, was suddenly overwhelmed by miserable remorse. Reviewing the
evening, he seemed to see, for the first time, the unhappiness in the
eyes of the little woman who had borne herself so bravely. In a sudden
moment of illumination he realized all that she must have been feeling.
Perhaps it had not been heartlessness; perhaps it had been--heart
hunger.
Leaning forward, he spoke to his chauffeur. They stopped at the first
drug-store, and Landry called up Cissy. Her voice from the other end
answered, sharply, then broke as he gave his name.
"I thought it was the doctor," she said. "Can you come back, please? The
baby, oh, the baby is very ill!"
Five minutes later the nurse let him into the house. He followed her up
the stairs and into the nursery. Cissy sat with the baby in her arms.
The baby was in a blanket and Cissy was in her gray wrapper. She had
donned it while the nurse held the baby in the hot bath which saved its
life. Cissy's hair was out of curl and the color was out of her cheeks.
But to Valentine Landry she was beautiful.
"It was a convulsion," she told him, simply. "I am afraid she will have
another. We haven't been able to get a doctor--will you get one for us?"
Out he went on his mission for the lady of his heart, and the lady of
his heart, sitting wet and worried in the pale-gray bedroom, was saying
to herself, monotonously, "It's all over now--no man could see me like
this and love me--"
Cecily and her husband and the doctor and Landry came in out of the
darkness together. They went up-stairs together, then stopped on the
threshold as Cissy held up a warning hand.
She continued to croon softly the lullaby which had belonged to her own
babies: "Hushaby, sweet, my own--"
It was Cecily and the doctor who went in to her, and Landry, standing
back in the shadows, waited. He spoke to Cissy as she came out.
"I am going so early in the morning," he said, "will you give me just
one little minute now?"
In that minute he told her that he loved her.
And Cissy, standing in the library in all the disorder of uncurled locks
and gray kimono, demanded, after a rapturous pause, "But why didn't you
tell me before?"
He found it hard to explain. "I didn't quite realize it--until I saw you
there so tender and sweet, with the baby in your arms--"
"A Madonna-creature," murmured Cissy Beale.
But he did not understand. "It isn't because I want you to sit in a
chimney-corner--it wasn't fair of you to say that--"
Then in just one short speech Cissy Beale showed him her heart. She told
of the years of devotion, always unrewarded by the affection she craved.
"And here was the baby," she finished, "to grow up--and find somebody
else, and forget me--"
As he gathered her into his protecting embrace, his big laugh comforted
her.
"I'm yours till the end of the world, little grandmother," he whispered.
"I shall never find any one else--and I shall never forget."