His Family - Ernest Poole [107]
"Father! Please! Is this fair? Is this kind?" She asked in a harsh frightened tone. Her eyes were wet with angry tears.
"This isn't a time to be kind, my dear." His voice was quivering like her own. "I'm bungling it--I'm bungling it--but you must let me stumble along and try to show you what I mean. You will have your work, your crowded schools, to which you'll be able to give your life. But I look ahead, I who know you--and I don't see you happy, I don't even see you whole. For you there will be no family. None of the intimate sorrows and joys that have been in this house will come to you. I look back and I see them all--for a man who has come so near the end gets a larger vision." He shut his eyes, his jaw set tight. "I look into my family back and back, and I see how it has been made of many generations. Certain figures stand out in my mind--they cover over a hundred years. And I see how much they've meant to me. I see that I've been one of them--a link in a long chain of lives--all inter-bound and reaching on. In my life they have all been here--as I shall be in lives to come.
"And this is what I want for you." He held her close a moment. The tears were rolling down her cheeks. "Until now you have been one of us, too. You have never once been free. You have been the one in this house to step in and take hold and try to decide what's best to be done. I'm not putting you up on a pedestal, I don't say you've made no mistakes--but I say you're the kind of a woman who craves what's in a family. You're the one of my daughters who has loved this house the most!"
"Yes," she said, "I've loved this house--"
"But now for you all this will stop--quite suddenly," he told her. "This house of ours will soon be sold. And within a few months I shall be dead, and your family will have dropped out of your life."
"Stop! Can't you? Stop! It's brutal! It isn't true about you!" she cried. "I won't believe it!" Her voice broke.
"Go and see my physician," he said.
"How long have you known it? Why didn't you tell me?"
"Because we had troubles enough as it was, other things to think of. But there's only one thing now, this freedom you are facing."
"Please! Please!" she cried imploringly. "I don't want to talk of myself but of you! This physician--"
"No," he answered with stern pain, "you'll have to hear me out, my child. We're talking of you--of you alone when I am gone. How will it be? Are you quite sure? You will have your work, that vision of yours, and I know how close it has been to you, vivid and warm, almost like a friend. But so was my business once like that, when I was as young as you. And the business grew and it got cold--impersonal, a mere machine. Thank God I had a family. Isn't your work growing too? Are you sure it won't become a machine? And won't you lose touch with the children then, unless you have a child of your own? Friends won't be enough, you'll find, they're not bound up into yourself. The world may reach a stage at last where we shall live on in the lives of all--we may all be one big family. But that time is still far off--we hold to our own flesh and blood. And so I'm sure it will be with you. You see you have been young, my dear, and your spirit has been fresh and new. But how are you going to keep it so, without the ties you've always had?" He felt the violent clutch of her hand.
"_You won't die_!" she whispered. But he went on relentlessly:
"And what will you do without Allan Baird? For you see you have not even worked alone. You have had this man who has loved you there. I've seen how much he has helped you--how you have grown and he has grown since you two got together. And if you throw him over now, it seems to me you are not only losing what has done