XLI

Deborah had not yet stopped work. Again and again she put it off. For in her busy office so many demands both old and new kept pressing in upon her, such unexpected questions and vexing little problems kept cropping up as Deborah tried to arrange her work for the colleague who was to take her place in the spring, that day after day she lingered there⁠—until one afternoon in March her husband went to her office, gave her an hour to finish up, and then brought her home with him. She had a fit of the blues that night. Allan was called out on a case, and a little while later Roger found his daughter alone in the living room, a book unopened in her lap, her gray eyes glistening with tears. She smiled when she caught sight of him.

“It’s so silly!” she muttered unsteadily. “Just my condition, I suppose. I feel as though I had done with school for the remainder of my days!⁠ ⁠… Better leave me now, dearie,” she added. “I’m not very proud of myself tonight⁠—but I’ll be all right in the morning.”

The next day she was herself again, and went quietly on with her preparations for the coming of her child. But still the ceaseless interests of those hordes of other children followed her into the house. Not only her successor but principals and teachers came for counsel or assistance. And later, when reluctantly she refused to see such visitors, still the telephone kept ringing and letters poured in by every mail. For in her larger family there were weddings, births and deaths, and the endless savage struggle for life; and there were many climaxes of dreams and aspirations, of loves and bitter jealousies. And out of all this straining and this fever of humanity, came messages to Deborah: last appeals for aid and advice, and gifts for the child who was to be born; tiny garments quaintly made by women and girls from Italy, from Russia and from Poland; baby blankets, wraps and toys and curious charms and amulets. There were so many of these gifts.

“There’s enough for forty babies,” Deborah told her father. “What on earth am I to do, to avoid hurting anyone’s feelings? And isn’t it rather awful, the way these inequalities will crop up in spite of you? I know of eight tenement babies born down there in this one week. How much fuss and feathers is made over them, and their coming into the world, poor mites?” Roger smiled at his daughter.

“You remind me of Jekyll and Hyde,” he said.

“Father! What a horrible thought! What have Jekyll and Hyde to do with me?”

“Nothing, my dear,” he answered. “Only it’s queer and a little uncanny, something I’ve never seen before, this double mother life of yours.”

It was only a few days later when coming home one evening he found that Deborah’s doctor had put her to bed and installed a nurse. There followed a week of keen suspense when Roger stayed home from the office. She liked to have him with her, and sitting at her bedside he saw how changed his daughter was, how far in these few hours she had drawn into herself. He had suspected for some time that all was not well with Deborah, and Allan confirmed his suspicions. There was to be grave danger both for the mother and the child. It would come out all right, of course, he strove to reassure himself. Nothing else could happen now, with her life so splendidly settled at last. That Fate could be so pitiless⁠—no, it was unthinkable!

“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 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.”