Kate gazed at Polly in dumb amazement. She was speechless for a
time, then to break the strain she said: "My soul! Did you
really, Polly? I guess there is more Bates in you than I had
thought!"
"Oh, there's SOME Bates in me," said Polly. "There's enough to
make me live until I sign that paper, and make Henry Peters sign
it, and send Mr. Thomlins to you with it and the baby. I can do
that, because I'm going to!"
Ten days later she did exactly what she had said she would. Then
she turned her face to the wall and went into a convulsion out of
which she never came. While the Peters family refused Kate's plea
to lay Polly beside her grandmother, and laid her in their family
lot, Kate, moaning dumbly, sat clasping a tiny red girl in her
arms. Adam drove to Hartley to deposit one more paper, the most
precious of all, in the safety deposit box.
Kate and Adam mourned too deeply to talk about it. They went
about their daily rounds silently, each busy with regrets and self
investigations. They watched each other carefully, were kinder
than they ever had been to everyone they came in contact with; the
baby they frankly adored. Kate had reared her own children with
small misgivings, quite casually, in fact; but her heart was torn
to the depths about this baby. Life never would be even what it
had been before Polly left them, for into her going there entered
an element of self-reproach and continual self-condemnation. Adam
felt that if he had been less occupied with Milly York and had
taken proper care of his sister, he would not have lost her. Kate
had less time for recrimination, because she had the baby.
"Look for a good man to help you this summer, Adam," she said.
"The baby is full of poison which can be eliminated only slowly.
If I don't get it out before teething, I'll lose her, and then we
never shall hear the last from the Peters family." Adam consigned
the Peters family to a location he thought suitable for them on
the instant. He spoke with unusual bitterness, because he had
heard that the Peters family were telling that Polly had grieved
herself to death, while his mother had engineered a scheme whereby
she had stolen the baby. Occasionally a word drifted to Kate here
and there, until she realized much of what they were saying. At
first she grieved too deeply to pay any attention, but as the
summer went on and the baby flourished and grew fine and strong,
and she had time in the garden, she began to feel better; grief
began to wear away, as it always does.
By midsummer the baby was in short clothes, sitting in a high
chair, which if Miss Baby only had known it, was a throne before
which knelt her two adoring subjects. Polly had said the baby
would be like Kate. Its hair and colouring were like hers, but it
had the brown eyes of its father, and enough of his facial lines
to tone down the too generous Bates features. When the baby was
five months old it was too pretty for adequate description. One
baby has no business with perfect features, a mop of curly, yellow
silk hair, and big brown eyes. One of the questions Kate and Adam
discussed most frequently was where they would send her to
college, while one they did not discuss was how sick her stomach
teeth would make her. They merely lived in mortal dread of that.
"Convulsion," was a word that held a terror for Kate above any
other in the medical books.