His Family by Ernest Poole (popular ebook readers txt) 📕

“This is what comes of your modern woman!” Roger exclaimed to Allan one night. “This is the price she’s paying for those nerve-racking years of work!”

The crisis came toward the end of the week. And while for one entire night and through the day that followed and far into the next night the doctors and nurses fought for life in the room upstairs, Roger waited, left to himself, sitting in his study or restlessly moving through the house. And still that thought was with him⁠—the price! It was kept in his mind by the anxious demands which her big family made for news. The telephone kept ringing. Women in motors from uptown and humbler visitors young and old kept coming to make inquiries. More gifts were brought and flowers. And Roger saw these people, and as he answered their questions he fairly scowled in their faces⁠—unconsciously, for his mind was not clear. Reporters came. Barely an hour passed without bringing a man or a woman from some one of the papers. He gave them only brief replies. Why couldn’t they leave his house alone? He saw her name in headlines: “Deborah Gale at Point of Death.” And he turned angrily away. Vividly, on the second night, there came to him a picture of Deborah’s birth so long ago in this same house. How safe it had been, how different, how secluded and shut in. No world had clamored then for news. And so vivid did this picture grow, that when at last there came to his ears the shrill clear cry of a new life, it was some time before he could be sure whether this were not still his dream of that other night so long ago.

But now a nurse had led him upstairs, and he stood by a cradle looking down at a small wrinkled face almost wholly concealed by a soft woolly blanket. And presently Allan behind him said,

“It’s a boy, and he’s to be named after you.” Roger looked up.

“How’s the mother?” he asked.

“Almost out of danger,” was the reply. Then Roger glanced at Allan’s face and saw how drawn and gray it was. He drew a long breath and turned back to the child. Allan had gone and so had the nurse, and he was alone by the cradle. Relief and peace and happiness stole into his spirit. He felt the deep remoteness of this strange new little creature from all the clamoring world without⁠—which he himself was soon to leave. The thought grew clearer, clearer, as with a curious steady smile Roger stood there looking down.

“Well, little brother, you’re here, thank God. And nobody knows how close we’ll be⁠—for a little while,” he thought. “For we’re almost out of the world, you and I.”

Days passed, Deborah’s strength increased, and soon they let Roger come into the room. She, too, was remote from the world for a time. That great family outside was anxious no longer, it left her alone. But soon it would demand her. Never again, he told himself, would she be so close, so intimate, as here in her bed with this child of hers to whom she had given her father’s name. “These hours are my real goodbyes.”

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