It was a dark autumn night. It was the time of night that everyone should have been asleep, but there was one house, which showed no signs of being so. It was fully awake and full of fear and pain.
The doctor had been called for in the previous afternoon, but by midnight he hadn't managed to do anything to make the mistress of the house feel any better.
"It's a very difficult childbed," had the doctor said some time ago, maybe it was minutes, maybe hours: the master of the house couldn't tell. He felt as if he had been listening his wife screaming for days, even weeks.
"I can not promise that your wife will live to see the dawn," that's what the doctor had said. And when he had asked about the baby, the doctor had only shaken his head and said that it didn't look too good for the baby either.
Some time later the doctor had appeared to the library, where the master was waiting, and told that the baby could be saved, but not the mother. After that he hadn't heard anything from the doctor, only screeches of pain from his wife's chamber.
When the dawn came closer, the master thought sarcastically: "I do believe you were wrong, my dear doctor, it is not long before the sun will rise, but my wife is still alive."
But it was he, who was wrong. Only ten minutes or so later the entire house fell silent, screaming faded away, and the doctor came to announce what the master already knew: that his wife was gone and also, which he hadn't been so sure about, that he had a baby girl.
Now it only remained for him to climb upstairs, wake up the daughter he already had, and to tell her that she didn't have a mother anymore.
The master sighed, hid his face behind his hands and, when the doctor was gone, began to sob.