Irvin Cobb - Sundry Accounts

"Judge Priest, perhaps you will not understand me, but the mother instinct is a curious thing. Through these last few years of my life I have felt as though there were two women inside of me. One of these women grieved because her child had denied her. The other of these women was reconciled because she could see reflected in the actions of that child the traits of a breed of strangers. And yet both these women can still find it in them to forgive her for all that she has done and all that she may ever do. That's motherhood, I suppose."

"Yes, ma'am," he said slowly, "I reckin you're right – that's motherhood." He tugged at his tab of white chin whisker, and his puckered old eyes behind their glasses were shadowed with a deep compassion. Then with a jerk he sat erect.

"I take it that you adopted the child legally?" he said, seeking to make his tone casual.

"We took her just as I told you," she answered. "We always treated her as though she had been ours. She never knew any difference."

"Yes, ma'am, quite so. You've made that clear enough. But by law, before you left Maryland, you gave her your name, I suppose? You went through the legal form of law of adoptin' her, didn't you?"

"No, sir, we didn't do that. It didn't seem necessary – it never occurred to us to do it. Her mother was dead and her father was gone nobody knew where. He had abandoned her, had shown he didn't care what might become of her. And her mother on her deathbed had given her to me. Wasn't that sufficient?"

Apparently he had not heard her question. Instead of answering it he put one of his own:

"Do you reckin now, ma'am, by any chance that there are any people still livin' back there in that town of Calais – old neighbors of yours, or kinfolks maybe – who'd remember the circumstances in reguard to your havin' took this baby in the manner which you have described?"

"Yes, sir; two at least that I know of are still living. One is my half sister. I haven't seen her in twenty-odd years, but I hear from her regularly. And another is a man who boarded with us at the time. He was young then and very poor, but he has become well-to-do since. He lives in Baltimore now; is prominent there in politics. Occasionally I see his name in the paper. He has been to Congress and he ran for senator once. And there may be still others if I could think of them."

"Never mind the others; the two you've named will be sufficient. Whut did you say their names were, ma'am?"

She told him. He repeated them after her as though striving to fix them in his memory.

"Ah-hah," he said. "Ma'am, have you got some writin' material handy? Any blank paper will do – and a pen and ink?"

From a little stand in a corner she brought him what he required, and wonderingly but in silence watched him as he put down perhaps a dozen close-written lines. She bided until he had concluded his task and read through the script, making a change here and there. Then all at once some confused sense of realization of his new purpose came to her. She stood up and took a step forward and laid one apprehensive hand upon the paper as though to stay him.

"Judge Priest," she said, "what have you written down here? And what do you mean to do with what you have written?"

"Whut I have written here is a short statement – a memorandum, really, of whut you have been tellin' me, ma'am," he explained. "I'll have it written out more fully in the form of an affidavit, and then to-morrow I want you to sign it either here or at my office in the presence of witnesses."

"But is it necessary?" she demurred. "I'm ignorant of the law, and you spoke just now of my failure to adopt Ellie by law. But if at this late date I must do it, can't it be done privately, in secret, so that neither Ellie nor anyone else will ever know?"

"Ellie will have to know, I reckin," he stated grimly, "and other folks will know too. But this here paper has nothin' to do with any sech proceedin' ez you imagine. It's too late now fur you legally to adopt Mrs. Dallam Wybrant, even though any person should suggest sech a thing, and I, fur my part, don't see how any right-thinkin' person could or would do so. She's a free agent, of full age, and she's a married woman. No, ma'am, she has no legal claim on you and to my way of thinkin' she has no moral claim on you neither. She's not your child, a fact which I'm shore kin mighty easy be proved ef anyone should feel inclined to doubt your word. She ain't your legal heir. She ain't got a leg – excuse me, ma'am – she ain't got a prop to stand on. I thought Ellie had us licked. Instid it would seem that we've got Ellie licked."

He broke off, checked in his exultant flight by the look upon her face. Her fingers turned inward, the blunted nails scratching at the sheet of paper as though she would tear it from him.

"No, no, no!" she cried. "I won't do that! I can't do that! You mustn't ask me to do that, judge!"

"But, ma'am, don't you git my meanin' yit? Don't you realize that not a penny of this eight thousand dollars belongs to Mrs. Dallam Wybrant? That she has no claim upon any part of it? That it's all yours and that you're goin' to have it all for yourself – every last red cent of it – jest ez soon ez the proof kin be filed and the order made by me in court?"

"I'm not thinking of that," she declared. "It's Ellie I think of. Her happiness means more to me than a million dollars would. What I have told you was in confidence, and, judge, you must treat it so. I beg you, I demand it of you. You must promise me not to go any further in this. You must promise me not to tell a living soul what I have told you to-night. I won't sign any affidavit. I won't sign anything. I won't do anything to humiliate her. Don't you see, Judge Priest – oh, don't you see? She feels shame already because she thinks she was humbly born. She would be more deeply ashamed than ever if she knew how humbly she really was born – knew that her father was a scoundrel and her mother died a pauper and was buried in a potter's field; that the name she has borne is not her own name; that she has eaten the bread of charity through the most of her life. No, Judge Priest, I tell you no, a thousand times no. She doesn't know. Through me she shall never know. I would die to spare her suffering – die to spare her humiliation or disgrace. Before God's eyes I am her mother, and it is her mother who tells you no, not that, not that!"

He got upon his feet too. He crumpled the paper into a ball and thrust it out of sight as though it had been a thing abominable and unclean. He took no note that in wadding the sheet he had overturned the inkwell and a stream from it was trickling down his trouser legs, marking them with long black zebra streaks. He looked at her, she standing there, a stooped and meager shape in her scant, ill-fitting gown of sleazy black, yet seeming to him an embodiment of all the beatitudes and all the beauties of this mortal world.

"Ma'am," he said, "your wishes shall be respected. It shall be ez you say. My lawyer's sense tells me that you are wrong – foolishly, blindly wrong. But my memory of my own mother tells me that you are right, and that no mother's son has got the right to question you or try to persuade you to do anything different. Ma'am, I'd count it an honor to be able to call myself your friend."

Already, within the hour, Judge Priest had broken two constant rules of his daily conduct. Now, involuntarily, without forethought on his part, he was about to break another. This would seem to have been a night for the smashing of habits by our circuit judge. For she put out to him her hand – a most unlovely hand, all wrinkled at the back where dimples might once have been and corded with big blue veins and stained and shriveled and needle scarred. And he took her hand in his fat, pudgy, awkward one, and then he did this thing which never before in all his days he had done, this thing which never before he had dreamed of doing. Really, there is no accounting for it at all unless we figure that somewhere far back in Judge Priest's ancestry there were Celtic gallants, versed in the small sweet tricks of gallantry. He bent his head and he kissed her hand with a grace for which a Tom Moore or a Raleigh might have envied him.