Entirely subject to my daughter, who regarded me as a wonder-working giant, I paid tribute to her in song, in story, and in frankincense and myrrh. Led by her trusting little hand I re-discovered the haunts of fairies and explored once more the land beneath the rainbow.
For the most part this was true. For several summers our daughter lived and throve at her birthplace, free of pain and in idyllic security—and then suddenly, one September day, like the chill shadow from an Autumn stormcloud, misfortune fell upon us. Our daughter became sick, how sick I did not realize until on the eighth day as I took her in my arms I discovered in her a horrifying weakness. Her little body, thinned with fever, hung so laxly, so lightly on my knee that my blood chilled with sudden terror.
With a conviction that I dared not even admit to myself, I put her back into her mother's keeping and hurried to the telephone. In ten minutes I had called to her aid the best medical men of the region. Especially did I appeal to Doctor Evans, who had helped to bring her into the world. "You must come," I said to him. "It is life or death."
He came, swiftly, but in a few moments after his arrival he gravely announced the dreadful truth. "Your child is in the last stages of diphtheria. I will do what I can for her but she should have had the antitoxin five days ago."
For forty-eight hours our baby's life was despaired of, yet fought for by a heroic nurse who refused to leave her for a single hour.
Oh, the suspense, the agony of those days and nights, when her mother and I, helpless to serve, were shut away from her, not even permitted to look at her. We could do nothing—nothing but wait through the interminable hours, tortured by the thought that she might be calling for us. During one entire dreadful night we writhed under one doctor's sentence, "The child can not live," and in these hours I discovered that it is the sweetest love that casts the blackest shadow. My joy in my daughter was an agony of fear and remorse—why had I not acted sooner?
As I imagined my world without that radiant face, that bird-like voice, I fell into black despair. My only hope was in the nurse, who refused to give her up. I could not talk or write or think of any other thing. The child's sufferings filled my mind with an intolerable ache of apprehension. I had possessed her only a few years and yet she was already woven into the innermost fibers of my heart.
That night, which I dare not dwell upon, put my youth definitely behind me. When the blessed word came that she would live, and I was permitted to look upon her small wasted face, I was a care-worn middle-aged man—willing to give up any part of my life to win that tiny sufferer back to health and happiness.