"He may not live," the nurse said; "the doctor thought his father would like to see him. I must go back to the room, Mrs. Farquharson is so dreadfully nervous and hysterical; we are both quite worn out. Just hark at her now! Would you kindly take the baby down, Mrs. Brand."
The gods have an unlimited belief in one's powers of endurance. Slowly, with breaking heart, her eyes drowned partly for self-pity, partly for fear lest the flickering little life she held might breathe its last before the end of her journey, she went downstairs and entered the sitting-room where Farquharson stood waiting. She saw his face as he greeted her, its pallor, its anxiety transfigured suddenly by the light which comes but once in a lifetime to a man, and that only when he looks upon his firstborn son. Without a word he held out his arms; without a word Evelyn handed him her dear burden. Then the room rocked, she put out her hands blindly, swaying. So bitter, so cruel, so overwhelming was the moment's agony, that it was as though a chord had snapped in her heart, and left her struggling for breath. But Farquharson neither saw nor heard. She closed the door gently--how she did not know--and left him alone with his son.
"The cord breaks at the last by the weakest pull."--Old Spanish Proverb.
At one point in pain, all sense of value dies. Nothing is left but the overwhelming realization that, throb by throb, it will increase until it reaches the climax, when a woman bites her pillow to stifle her shrieks, and a man in all probability blows out his brains--the shortest way of escape. To the woman there succeeds what may be called reaction, a temporary lull, in which body, mind and soul are alike so bruised and stricken that, possibly from sheer weariness, sleep may come for a brief hour. But next day the pain begins again and concentrates again, and so on and on from day to day and week to week, the only change being that soul and mind and body become daily a little more bruised, a little more stricken.
This is worse than a mere period of spiritual dryness; it is an active wrestling with the powers of hell. It is in such moments that religion fails, and the faith to which one was born seems to spell restriction. One would prefer to fling it away altogether, to deny its truth, to escape to a world where the light of the heart might give out its full radiance, even if the soul shrank in gloom.