"If our child lives there is hope that my wife will live?"
"A strong hope; I speak with confidence."
"And if our child dies?"
"The mother will die."
No voice was speaking in the chamber of death, but Aaron heard again these words which had passed between the doctor and himself. If the child lived the mother would live; if the child died the mother would die.
A black darkness fell upon his soul. His mind, his soul, every principle of his being, was engulfed in the one despairing thought that Rachel was doomed, that although she was sleeping peacefully before his eyes, death would be her portion when she awoke to the fact that her babe had been taken from her.
"If when she wakes all is well with the child all will be well with her."
The spiritual echo of the doctor's words, uttered but a few hours ago. He heard them as clearly as he had heard the others.
How to avert the threatened doom? How to save his Rachel's life? Prayer would not avail, or he would have flown to it instinctively. It was not that he asked himself the question, or that in his agony he doubted or believed in the efficacy of prayer. It may be, indeed, that he evaded it, for already a strange and terrible temptation was invading the fortress of his soul. To save the life of his beloved was he ready to commit a sin? What was the true interpretation of sin? A perpetrated act which would benefit one human being to the injury of another. Then if an act were perpetrated which would insure the happiness and well-doing not of one human creature but of three, and would inflict injury upon no living soul, that act was not a sin. Unmistakably not a sin. But if this were really so, wherefore the necessity for impressing it upon himself? The conviction that he was acting justly in this hour of woe--that the contemplated act was not open to doubt in a moral or religious sense--was in itself sufficient. Wherefore, then, the iteration that it was not a sin?
He could not think the matter out in the presence of Rachel and of his dead child. He stole down to his room, and gave himself up to reflection. He turned down the gas almost to vanishing point, and stood in the dark, now thinking in silence, now uttering his thoughts aloud.