The Eyes of the World
By Harold Bell Wright
Author of "That Printer of Udells," "The Shepherd of the Hills,"
"The Calling of Dan Matthews," "The Winning of Barbara Worth,"
"Their Yesterdays," Etc.
To Benjamin H. Pearson
Student, Artist, Gentleman
in appreciation of the friendship that began on the "Pipe-Line Trail," at
the camp in the sycamores back of the old orchard, and among the higher
peaks of the San Bernardinos; and because this story will always mean more
to him than to any one else,--this book, with all good wishes, is
Dedicated.
H. B. W.
"Tecolote Rancho,"
April 13, 1914.
"I have learned
To look on Nature not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The sad, still music of humanity,
Not harsh or grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt,
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is in the lights of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
A motion and a spirit that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thoughts,
And rolls through all things.
Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods
And mountains.........
....... And this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her. 'Tis her privilege
Through all the years of this one life, to lead
From joy to joy; for she can so inform
The mind that is within us--so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts--that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shalt e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith."
William Wordsworth.
Contents
I. His Inheritance
II. The Woman With the Disfigured Face
III. The Famous Conrad Lagrange
IV. At the House on Fairlands Heights
V. The Mystery of the Rose Garden
VI. An Unknown Friend
VII. Mrs. Taine in Quaker Gray
VIII. The Portrait That Was Not a Portrait
IX. Conrad Lagrange's Adventure
X. A Cry in the Night
XI. Go Look in Your Mirror, You Fool
XII. First Fruits of His Shame
XIII. Myra Willard's Challenge
XIV. In the Mountains
XV. The Forest Ranger's Story
XVI. When the Canyon Gates Are Shut
XVII. Confessions in the Spring Glade
XVIII. Sibyl Andrés and the Butterflies
XIX. The Three Gifts and their Meanings
XX. Myra's Prayer and the Ranger's Warning
XXI. The Last Climb
XXII. Shadows of Coming Events
XXIII. Outside the Canyon Gates Again
XXIV. James Rutlidge Makes a Mistake
XXV. On the Pipe-Line Trail
XXVI. I Want You Just as You Are
XXVII. The Answer
XXVIII. You're Ruined, My Boy
XXIX. The Hand Writing On The Wall
XXX. In the Same Hour
XXXI. As the World Sees
XXXII. The Mysterious Disappearance
XXXIII. Beginning the Search
XXXIV. The Tracks on Granite Peak
XXXV. A Hard Way
XXXVI. What Should He Do
XXXVII. The Man Was Insane
XXXVIII. An Inevitable Conflict
XXXIX. The Better Way
XL. Facing the Truth
XLI. Marks of the Beast
XLII. Aaron King's Success
Illustrations from Oil Paintings
By
F. Graham Cootes
Sibyl
A curious expression of baffling, quizzing, half pathetic, and wholly
cynical, interrogation
"Well, what do you want? What are you doing here?"
Still she did not speak
The Eyes of the World
Chapter I
His Inheritance
It was winter--cold and snow and ice and naked trees and leaden clouds and
stinging wind.
The house was an ancient mansion on an old street in that city of culture
which has given to the history of our nation--to education, to religion,
to the sciences, and to the arts--so many illustrious names.
In the changing years, before the beginning of my story, the woman's
immediate friends and associates had moved from the neighborhood to the
newer and more fashionable districts of a younger generation. In that city
of her father's there were few of her old companions left. There were
fewer who remembered. The distinguished leaders in the world of art and
letters, whose voices had been so often heard within the walls of her
home, had, one by one, passed on; leaving their works and their names to
their children. The children, in the greedy rush of these younger times,
had too readily forgotten the woman who, to the culture and genius of a
passing day, had been hostess and friend.
The apartment was pitifully bare and empty. Ruthlessly it had been
stripped of its treasures of art and its proud luxuries. But, even in its
naked necessities the room managed, still, to evidence the rare
intelligence and the exquisite refinement of its dying tenant.
The face upon the pillow, so wasted by sickness, was marked by the
death-gray. The eyes, deep in their hollows between the fleshless forehead
and the prominent cheek-bones, were closed; the lips were livid; the nose
was sharp and pinched; the colorless cheeks were sunken; but the outlines
were still delicately drawn and the proportions nobly fashioned. It was,
still, the face of a gentlewoman. In the ashen lips, only, was there a
sign of life; and they trembled and fluttered in their effort to utter the
words that an indomitable spirit gave them to speak.
"To-day--to-day--he will--come." The voice was a thin, broken whisper; but
colored, still, with pride and gladness.
A young woman in the uniform of a trained nurse turned quickly from the
window. With soft, professional step, she crossed the room to bend over
the bed. Her trained fingers sought the skeleton wrist; she spoke slowly,
distinctly, with careful clearness; and, under the cool professionalism of
her words, there was a tone of marked respect. "What is it, madam?"
The sunken eyes opened. As a burst of sunlight through the suddenly opened
doors of a sepulchre, the death-gray face was illumed. In those eyes,
clear and burning, the nurse saw all that remained of a powerful
personality. In their shadowy depths, she saw the last glowing embers of
the vital fire gathered; carefully nursed and tended; kept alive by a will
that was clinging, with almost superhuman tenacity, to a definite purpose.
Dying, this woman _would_ not die--_could_ not die--until the end for
which she willed to live should be accomplished. In the very grasp of
Death, she was forcing Death to stay his hand--without life, she was
holding Death at bay.
It was magnificent, and the gentle face under the nurse's cap shone with
appreciation and admiration as she smiled her sympathy and understanding.
"My son--my son--will come--to-day." The voice was stronger, and, with the
eyes, expressed a conviction--a certainty--with the faintest shadow of a
question.
The nurse looked at her watch. "The boat was due in New York, early this
morning, madam."
A step sounded in the hall outside. The nurse started, and turned quickly
toward the door. But the woman said, "The doctor." And, again, the fire
that burned in those sunken eyes was hidden wearily under their dark lids.
The white-haired physician and the nurse, at the farther end of the room,
spoke together in low tones. Said the physician,--incredulous,--"You say
there is no change?"
"None that I can detect," breathed the nurse. "It is wonderful!"
"Her mind is clear?"
"As though she were in perfect health."
The doctor took the nurse's chart. For a moment, he studied it in silence.
He gave it back with a gesture of amazement. "God! nurse," he whispered,
"she should be in her grave by now! It's a miracle! But she has always
been like that--" he continued, half to himself, looking with troubled
admiration toward the bed at the other end of the room--"always."
He went slowly forward to the chair that the nurse placed for him. Seating
himself quietly beside his patient, and bending forward with intense
interest, his fine old head bowed, he regarded with more than professional
care the wasted face upon the pillow.
The doctor remembered, too well, when those finely moulded features--now,
so worn by sorrow, so marked by sickness, so ghastly in the hue of
death--were rounded with young-woman health and tinted with rare
loveliness. He recalled that day when he saw her a bride. He remembered
the sweet, proud dignity of her young wifehood. He saw her, again, when
her face shone with the glad triumph and the holy joy of motherhood.
The old physician turned from his patient, to look with sorrowful eyes
about the room that was to witness the end.
Why was such a woman dying like this? Why was a life of such rich mental
and spiritual endowments--of such wealth of true culture--coming to its
close in such material poverty?
The doctor was one of the few who knew. He was one of the few who
understood that, to the woman herself, it was necessary.
There were those who--without understanding, for the sake of the years
that were gone--would have surrounded her with the material comforts to
which, in her younger days, she had been accustomed. The doctor knew that
there was one--a friend of her childhood, famous, now, in the world of
books--who would have come from the ends of the earth to care for her. All
that a human being could do for her, in those days of her life's tragedy,
that one had done. Then--because he understood--he had gone away. Her own
son did not know--could not, in his young manhood, have understood, if he
had known--would not understand when he came. Perhaps, some day, he would
understand--perhaps.
When the physician turned again toward the bed, to touch with gentle
fingers the wrist of his patient, his eyes were wet.
At his touch, her eyes opened to regard him with affectionate trust and
gratitude.
"Well Mary," he said almost bruskly.
The lips fashioned the ghost of a smile; into her eyes came the gleam of
that old time challenging spirit. "Well--Doctor George," she answered.
Then,--"I--told you--I would not--go--until he came. I must--have my
way--still--you see. He will--come--to-day He must come."
"Yes, Mary," returned the doctor,--his fingers still on the thin wrist,
and his eyes studying her face with professional keenness,--"yes, of
course."
"And George--you will not forget--your promise? You will--give me a few
minutes--of strength--when he comes--so that I can tell him? I--I--must
tell him myself--George. You--will do--this last thing--for me?"
"Yes, Mary, of course," he answered again. "Everything shall be as you
wish--as I promised."
"Thank you--George. Thank you--my dear--dear--old friend."
The nurse--who had been standing at the window--stepped quickly to the
table that held a few bottles, glasses, and instruments. The doctor looked
at her sharply. She nodded a silent answer, as she opened a small, flat,
leather case. With his fingers still on his patient's wrist, the physician
spoke a word of instruction; and, in a moment, the nurse placed a
hypodermic needle in his hand.
As the doctor gave the instrument, again, to his assistant, a quick step
sounded in the hall outside.
The patient turned her head. Her eager eyes were fixed upon the door; her
voice--stronger, now, with the strength of the powerful stimulant--rang
out; "My boy--my boy--he is here! George, nurse, my boy is here!"
The door opened. A young man of perhaps twenty-two years stood on the
threshold.
The most casual observer would have seen that he was a son of the dying
woman. In the full flush of his young manhood's vigor, there was the same
modeling of the mouth, the same nose with finely turned nostrils, the same
dark eyes under a breadth of forehead; while the determined chin and the
well-squared jaw, together with a rather remarkable fineness of line,
told of an inherited mental and spiritual strength and grace as charming
as it is, in these days, rare. His dress was that of a gentleman of
culture and social position. His very bearing evidenced that he had never
been without means to gratify the legitimate tastes of a cultivated and
refined intelligence.
As he paused an instant in the open door to glance about that poverty
stricken room, a look of bewildering amazement swept over his handsome
face. He started to draw back--as if he had unintentionally entered the
wrong apartment. Looking at the doctor, his lips parted as if to apologize
for his intrusion. But before he could speak, his eyes met the eyes of the
woman on the bed.
With a cry of horror, he sprang forward;--"Mother! Mother!"
As he knelt there by the bed, when the first moments of their meeting were
past, he turned his face toward the doctor. From the physician his gaze
went to the nurse, then back again to his mother's old friend. His eyes
were burning with shame and sorrow--with pain and doubt and accusation.
His low voice was tense with emotion, as he demanded, "What does this
mean? Why is my mother here like--like this?"--his eyes swept the bare
room again.
The dying woman answered. "I will explain, my boy. It is to tell you, that
I have waited."
At a look from the doctor, the nurse quietly followed the physician from
the room.
It was not long. When she had finished, the false strength that had kept
the woman alive until she had accomplished that which she conceived to be
her last duty, failed quickly.
"You will--promise--you will?"
"Yes, mother, yes."
"Your education--your training--your blood--they--are--all--that--I
can--give you, my son."
"O mother, mother! why did you not tell me before? Why did I not know!"
The cry was a protest--an expression of bitterest shame and sorrow.
She smiled. "It--was--all that I could do--for you--my son--the only
way--I could--help. I do not--regret the cost. You will--not forget?"
"Never, mother, never."
"You promise--to--to regain that--which--your father--"
Solemnly the answer came,--in an agony of devotion and love,--"I
promise--yes, mother, I promise."
* * * * *
A month later, the young man was traveling, as fast as modern steam and
steel could carry him, toward the western edge of the continent.
He was flying from the city of his birth, as from a place accursed. He had
set his face toward a new land--determined to work out, there, his
promise--the promise that he did not, at the first, understand.
How he misunderstood,--how he attempted to use his inheritance to carry
out what he first thought was his mother's wish,--and how he came at last
to understand, is the story that I have to tell.