When, trembling and bedraggled, I came again to the room where my mother’s body lay, my sister was kneeling by the bed, and my father was in converse with a stranger, who was not like the men of our coast. “Not necessarily mortal,” this man was saying. “An operation—just a simple operation—easily performed with what you have at hand—would have saved the woman.”
“Saved her, Doctor?” said my father passionately. “Is you sayin’ that?”
“I have said so. It would have saved her. Had we been wrecked five days ago she would have been alive.”
A torrent of rain beat on the house.
“Alive?” my father muttered, staring at the floor. “She would have been alive!”
The stranger looked upon my father in pity. “I’m sorry for you, my man,” he said.
“’Tis strange,” my father muttered, still staring at the floor. “’Tis strange—how things—comes about. Five days—just five....”
He muttered on.
“Yes,” the stranger broke in, stirring nervously. “Had I come but five days ago.”
A sudden rising of the gale—the breaking of its fury—filled the room with a dreadful confusion.