A FADED PICTURE
Elena's tears had shaken the Colonel's confidence in his position as
nothing else could possibly have done. Since she had finished her
course in college two years before, and he had come in daily contact
with her strong personality, a most intimate and perfect sympathy had
grown between them. He had never before known her intuitive judgment
to be wrong. Her impressions of character especially he had found
singularly accurate, her sense of right and her good taste nearly
perfect.
He retired to his room at night with a deep sense of uneasiness. His
anger had cooled, and in its stead a feeling of depression slowly
settled. From every nook and corner came memories of the boy he had
driven from his door. His pictures hung on the walls and stared at him
from every piece of furniture on which a frame could be placed. He had
learned photography as a pastime years before the kodak was invented,
and most of the pictures he had taken himself.
One photograph in particular, which stood by the clock on the mantel,
set in a heavy frame of hammered gold, which he had made himself from
the product of his first mine, riveted and held his attention. His
first impulse was to tear these pictures all down and throw them in
the fire. He had picked this one up first, to carry out his furious
impulse, but something held his hand and he placed it back in its old
place with the grim exclamation:
"No! It's the act of a coward. I've got to live with my memories--or
surrender at once."
Again and again his eye came back to this picture. He had taken it
twenty-three years ago in a little bedroom in a dirty hotel of a
desolate, God-forsaken mining town in Nevada. How well he remembered
it! He was poor then, and had just begun the first big fight of his
life for wealth and power. The boy was four weeks old, and he had
insisted on taking the picture of the mother with the baby in her
arms. He had carefully posed her, standing by the window looking down
into the child's upturned face. It had turned out a remarkable
likeness of both--the young mother's face wreathed in smiles, tender
and frail and happy, with the great joy of the dawn of motherhood
shining in her eyes.
He looked at it long and tenderly. And, as a thousand memories of
life crowded his soul, he suddenly exclaimed:
"God in heaven! What does she say to-day if she knows what I've done?"
His eyes blinked, and the tears blinded them.
He kissed the picture and buried his face in his hands as a sob of
anguish shook his frame.
"The girl's right. My boy's my boy after all. I'm wrong!"