His Family - Ernest Poole [121]
Two long quiet weeks of this happiness, and then in a twinkling it was gone. The child fell sick, within a few hours its small existence hung by a thread--and to Roger's startled eyes a new Deborah was revealed! Tense and silent on her bed, her sensitive lips compressed with pain, her birthmark showing a jagged line of fiery red upon her brow as her ears kept straining to catch every sound from the nursery adjoining, through hours of stern anguish she became the kind of mother that she had once so dreaded--shutting out everything else in the world: people, schools, all other children, rich or poor, well, sick or dying! Here was the crisis of Deborah's life!
One night as she lay listening, with her hand gripping Roger's tight, frowning abruptly she said to him, in a harsh, unnatural voice:
"They don't care any longer, none of them care! _I'm_ safe and they've stopped worrying, for they know they'll soon have me back at work! The work," she added fiercely, "that made my body what it is, not fit to bear a baby!" She threw a quick and tortured look toward the door of the other room. "My work for those others, all those years, will be to blame if this one dies! And if it doesn't live I'm through! I won't go on! I couldn't! I'd be too bitter after this--toward all of them--those children!"
These last two words were whispers so bitter they made Roger cold.
"But this child is going to live," he responded hoarsely. Its mother stared up with a quivering frown. The next moment her limbs contracted as from an electric shock. There had come a faint wail from the other room.
And this went on for three days and nights. Again Roger lived as in a dream. He saw haggard faces from time to time of doctors, nurses, servants. He saw Allan now and then, his tall ungainly figure stooped, his features gaunt, his strong wide jaw set like a vise, but his eyes kind and steady still, his low voice reassuring. And Roger noticed John at times hobbling quickly down a hall and stopping on his crutches before a closed door, listening. Then these figures would recede, and it was as though he were alone in the dark.
At last the nightmare ended. One afternoon as he sat in his study, Allan came in slowly and dropped exhausted into a chair. He turned to Roger with a smile.
"Safe now, I think," he said quietly.
Roger went to Deborah and found her asleep, her face at peace. He went to his room and fell himself into a long dreamless slumber.
In the days which followed, again he sat at her bedside and together they watched the child in her arms. So feeble still the small creature appeared that they both spoke in whispers. But as little by little its strength returned, Deborah too became herself. And though still jealously watchful of its every movement, she had time for other thinking. She had talks with her husband, not only about their baby but about his work and hers. Slowly her old interest in all they had had in common returned, and to the messages from outside she gave again a kindlier ear.
"Allan tells me," she said one day, when she was alone with her father, "that I can have no more children. And I'm glad of that. But at least I have one," she added, "and he has already made me feel like a different woman than before. I feel sometimes as though I'd come a million miles along in life. And yet again it feels so close, all that I left back there in school. Because I'm so much closer now--to every mother and every child. At last I'm one of the family."
CHAPTER XLII
Of that greater family, one member had been in the house all through the month which had just gone by. But he had been so quiet, so carefully unobtrusive, that he had been scarcely noticed. Very early each morning, day after day, John had gone outside for his breakfast and thence to the office where he himself had handled the business as well as he could, only coming to Roger at night now and then with some matter he could not settle alone, but always stoutly declaring that he needed