His eyes, unsteady now no longer, never left her face as he moved with a strange dexterity nearer and nearer to them both. The woman glanced one moment into the lurking depths, all aflame with the awful light that tenderness and madness combine to give, saw the outstretched hand, felt the fumes outbreathing from the parted lips—and with a low gurgling cry she sprang like a wounded deer towards the door. But he was too quick for her, flinging himself headlong against it. Aroused and inflamed by the fall, he was on his feet in an instant, clutching at her skirt as he arose.
"Give me that young 'un," he said hoarsely; "we'll see whose child this is."
The woman's lips surged with the low moaning that never ceased as the unequal struggle raged a moment, the helpless babe contributing its note of sorrow. Suddenly the man got his hands firmly on the little arms; and the mother, her instinct quick and sensitive, half relaxed her hold as she felt the dreadful wrenching of the maddened hands. With a gasp he tore the baby from her, reeling backward as the strain was suddenly relaxed. Struggling desperately, he strove to recover himself. But the strain had been too much for the ruined nerves. The child fell from his hands, the man's arms going high into the air; an instant later he slipped and tottered heavily to the floor, the woman springing towards them as his outclutching hands seized her and bore her heavily down, the man now between the two, the silent infant beneath the struggling pair.
She was on her feet in the twinkling of an eye, tearing him aside with superhuman strength. But the baby lay in the long last stillness; its brief troubled pilgrimage was at an end. And the little dreamers up-stairs still slept on in uncaring slumber—nor knew that their long rough journey was at hand. And the kettle on the stove still murmured its unconscious song.
* * * * * *
The evil spirit had departed from the man.
It had gone forth with the destroying angel, both with their dread work well performed. And the man knew—with preternatural acuteness he interpreted his handiwork in an instant.
And they knelt together—that is the wonder of it—together, above the baby form. Both noted the dimpled hand, and the rosebud mouth—both touched the flaxen hair. No word of chiding fell—from the mother's lips nothing but an inarticulate broken flow, sometimes altogether still, like the gurgling of an ice-choked brook.
But he was the first to declare that the child was dead, maintaining it fiercely, his eye aglow now with anguished pity, so different from the weird lustre that it had displaced. And she would not believe it, dropping one tiny hand that she might chafe the other, lest death might get advantage in the chase.
She was still thus engaged when he arose and looked about the room for his hat. It was lying where he had flung it when he came in an eternity ago.