Pitiful little Mary Isabel, pale wraith of my sturdy comrade! When she lifted her beseeching eyes to me and faintly, fleetingly smiled—unable to even whisper my name, I, forbidden to speak, could only touch her cheek with my lips and leave her alone with her devoted nurse—for, so weak was she that a breath might have blown her away, back into the endless shadow and silence of the grave.
At that moment I asked myself, "What right have men and women to bring exquisite souls like this into a world of disease and death? Why maintain the race? What purpose is subserved by keeping the endless chain of human misery lengthening on?"
In times like these I was weaker than my wife. I grant her marvelous fortitude, sustained by something which I did not possess and could not acquire. She met every crisis. I leaned upon her serenity, her courage, her faith in the future which was in no sense a religious creed. It was only a womanly inheritance, something which came down the long line of her maternal Anglo-Saxon ancestors.
At last the day came when the nurse permitted me to take my daughter again in my arms and carry her out to the easy chair before the fire. The moment was perfect. The veil of snow falling without, the leaping firelight on the hearth, and the presence of my wife and father, united to fill me with happiness. I became the fond optimist again—the world was not so black—our year was worthy of Thanksgiving after all.
Nevertheless I was aware that a bitter ineradicable dusk had gathered in the corners and crannies of the old house. Something depressing, repellent, was in the air. My sense of joy, my feeling of comfort in its seclusion were gone.
"Never again will this be a restful home for you or for me," I declared to my daughter. "Its shadow is now an enemy, its isolation a menace." To my wife I said, "Let us go back to the city where the highest type of medical science is at the end of the telephone wire."
She consented, and taking the child in my arms, I left the village with no intention of ever returning to it. The fire on my family altar seemed dead, never again to be rekindled.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO