He paused, still keeping his gaze fixed intently on the fire. And I?
At the first words a faint sickness came upon me. Was I to hear this again?--here, remote from the environment from which I had so recently fled? Could it be possible that I was to hear again that account of my mother's death? I struggled for control. They must not know, they should not see that struggle. Intent on keeping every feature passive, hoping that in the firelight whatever my face might have shown would pass unnoticed, I waited for the Doctor's next word.
"It seems unprofessional, perhaps, to enter into any detail, but we are far away from that environment now--and in time, too, for it was over a quarter of a century ago. She was very young, nineteen perhaps, and about to become a mother. I remained with her till morning. I knew she would never come through her trial alive. I went again in the evening and stayed with her till her child was born and--to the end which came an hour afterwards. During all those twenty-four hours she spoke but twice. She gave me no name, although I asked her; no name of friends even--God knows if she had any, or why was she there?
"Now, here is my dilemma: in the morning, I signed the death certificate and then went out of the city on a case that kept me forty-eight hours. On my return, the woman, who had rescued this poor girl,--a woman who took in washing and ironing in that basement--told me a man had appeared at the house to claim the body he said was his wife's. She gave me the man's name, but the name of this man was not the name of the husband according to a marriage certificate which I found in an envelope the young woman entrusted to me for her child. At any rate, he had claimed the body and taken it away.
"Now, ordinarily the living waves of existence close very soon over such an episode--all too common; and, so far as I am concerned, in such and other similar cases I forget; it is well that I can. But I 've never been permitted to forget this!"
He made this announcement emphatically, looking up suddenly from the fire, and glancing at each of us in turn.
"And, moreover, I don't believe I am ever going to be permitted to forget. Some one intends I shall remember!