I
Their baby was born the following August.
The day of its arrival, Nathan paced the cool, impersonal corridors of the maternity hospital like an animal crazed, obsessed with the necessity of getting relief by tearing something.
He had often smiled over the acclaimed nervousness and general distress of certain young fathers, awaiting the arrival of their first-born. He was not smiling now. Suppose the child should cost Madelaine her life? What youngster could ever compensate for the Woman Beautiful who from the first had made matrimony almost an idealist’s dream? If he lost Madelaine, he could understand how fathers could hate their offspring.
But there was to be no occasion for any such unnatural attitude. At twenty minutes past three o’clock, a nurse came down the elevator and accosted him with a cheery, knowing smile.
“Congratulations first, Mr. Forge,” she cried. “You have an eight-pound son. Everything’s perfectly normal and your wife’s doing lovely.”
A son!
A hot knife went straight through Nathan’s heart and into his soul.
“Come back about six o’clock,” the nurse advised him, though Nathan scarcely heard. “You’ll find your wife in Room Eighty-eight.”
A few minutes later Nathan left the hospital. He sped blindly for a florist’s to buy flowers, flowers—millions of flowers. He was boyishly obsessed to buy flowers.
Madelaine was dozing when Nathan entered her room at six o’clock. She turned her head toward him, lifting eyes that were still hollow and slightly glazed with suffering. But when she recognized him, a coy smile showed about her delicate mouth.
“Well, Mr. Man?” she demanded. “And now what have you to say? We—have—a—son!”
Nathan, down beside the bed, buried his face in her soft mother-throat.
“If there was only something big I could do to show how much I love you, dear,” he cried thickly, “—oh, God, if I only knew what to do——”
“Do? I thought we settled that—the night on the steam-ship—coming back from Japan? A similar ‘do’ will be quite sufficient for the present also.”
She held up her lips. He did.
It was not until the following morning, however, that Nat saw his son. The nurse entered with a heavy roll of flannel and laid the baby in his arms. Gently Nat pulled aside the blanketing and a tiny hand came up. It was groping in its new-born blindness,—groping, groping, groping.
But it did not grope fruitlessly. That exquisite, shell-like little palm found a great talon claw,—the life-twisted hand of its father. And it gripped that calloused Thing tightly. It could always grip that calloused Thing tightly.
Nathan’s only comment came in a whisper. To his boy he spoke a promise:
“There shall be no Fog for you, little son. As you grow along—your dad—will understand!”