Page:Possession (1926).pdf/505

 From a window above their heads, the sound of a cracked shrill voice shot at them.

"Is the child born? What is it?" . . . And then with irritation. "For Heaven's sake!"

It was Gramp. Lily answered him, and the bony head was withdrawn again, the light extinguished and the room left to silence.

They must all see the child. They must come to the very door of the pavilion where Hattie, holding them at bay like a royal nurse exhibiting the heir to the populace, thrust toward them a lusty, tomato-colored child which appeared to cry, "Ala-as! Ala-as! Ala-as!" over and over again, monotonously. She allowed no one to touch it, not even old Thérèse who, kept at bay by the threatening manner of the royal nurse, bent over it murmuring, "The darling! Isn't he beautiful? The precious darling! Qu'il est mignon! And he looks for all the world like Richard, the precious darling."

"You can't tell what he looks like," said Hattie with a savage indignation. "That's nonsense! You can't tell for a long time!"

Callendar, thrust aside by this regiment of women, regarded his son with a faint light in his gray eyes. He said nothing. He waited. Perhaps for an instant he wished that he might see Ellen, as a father, a husband should have done. But he was given no chance, for Hattie said, "She wants to see Lily. The doctor says she may see no one else."

Ensconced in the pavilion Hattie became a despot, a tyrant. The child at the moment it entered the world became a part of her family, swallowed up by it remorselessly.

Inside the pavilion, a pale, handsome Ellen looked up at Lily and murmured, smiling a little, "You must call Sabine. Tell her that she was right. Just tell I am a good gambler. I have been successful. Old Thérèse is satisfied."

One by one they drifted away until only Callendar was left sitting in the darkness, smoking and thinking. A little way off