Just for an instant I wondered if she would rise and take me by the hand and lead me from the room; but, instead of that, she held out her hand to me and drew me close, and motioned to me to kneel by the bed. I did kneel. I heard the quick breathing, and noticed the cadaverous, worn face, the dark lashes lying on the cheeks, the hair tossed back from the lofty and magnificent brow. Something seemed to clutch at my heart; then my step-mother’s voice sounded in my ears:
“You and I will watch by him together.”
After that I felt that nothing really mattered; and I knew also that the barrier between my step-mother’s heart and mine had vanished. I looked at her; my eyes were full; I took her hand and, stooping, kissed it several times. Then she too dropped on her knees, and we remained motionless together.
All night long we knelt by the Professor’s side, and all night long he slept. It was about five in the morning when he opened his eyes. Dr Robinson was standing by the other side of the bed; he was holding his hand and feeling his pulse.
“Come,” said the doctor in a cheerful tone, “you have had a famous sleep. You are better; and now you must take this;” and he put a strong restorative between my father’s white lips.
“Take me away—mother!” I said.
I could not contain myself. She led me as far as the door. I do not think she said a word; but she herself returned to the room. I rushed up to my own room, and there I flung myself on my bed and cried as though my very heart would break.
Oh, shadow, shadow of my own mother, were you really angry with me then? Or did you, in the light of God’s Presence, understand too well what love really meant ever to be angry any more? For everything that was not love, that was not gratitude towards the new mother who had come into my life, had vanished for ever and ever while I knelt that night by my father’s bedside.
By-and-by, in the course of that day, I kissed her and told her something of what I felt. She understood, as I think she always did understand even my thoughts before they were uttered.
And so I turned over a new page in life, and my father was spared to us after all.