"GOD PITY ME! GOD PITY ME!"
Edward was sitting thus lost in the contemplation of the circumstances
surrounding him, when by that subtle sense as yet not analyzed he felt
the presence of another person in the room, and looked over his
shoulder. Gerald was advancing toward him smiling mysteriously. Edward
noticed his burning eyes and saw intense mental excitement gleaming
beyond. The man's mood was different from any he had before revealed.
"So you have been out among the friends of your family," he said, with
his queer smile. "How did you like them?" Edward was distinctly offended
by the supercilious manner and impertinent question, but he remembered
his ward's condition and resentment passed from him.
"Pleasant people, Gerald, but I am not gifted with the faculty of making
friends easily. How come on your experiments?"
The visitor's expression changed. He looked about him guardedly. "They
advance," he replied, in a whisper; "they advance!"
Whatever his motive for entering that room--a room unfamiliar to him,
for his restless eyes had searched it over and over in the few minutes
he had been in it--was forgotten in the enthusiasm of the scientist. "I
have mapped out a course and am working toward it," he said; and then
presently: "You remember that pictures can now be transmitted by
electricity across great stretches of space and flashed upon a disc? So
goes the scene from the convex surface of the eye along a thread-like
nerve, so flashed the picture in the brain. But somewhere there it
remains. How to prove it, to prove it, that is the question! Oh, for a
brain, a brain to dissect!" He glared at Edward, who shuddered under the
wildness of the eyes bent upon him. "But time enough for that; I must
first ascertain if a picture can be imprinted upon any living substance
by light, and remain. This I can do in another way."
"How?" Edward was fascinated.
"It is a great idea. The fish's eye will not do; it is itself a camera
and the protecting film is impression-proof. It lacks the gelatine
surface, but over some fish is spread the real gelatine--in fact, the
very stuff that sensitive plates rely upon. In our lake is a great bass,
that swims deep. I have caught them weighing ten and twelve pounds. They
are pale, greenish white until exposed to the light, when they darken.
If the combined action of the light and air did not actually destroy
this gelatine, they would turn black. The back, which daily receives the
downward ray direct, is as are the backs of most fishes, dark; it is a
spoiled plate. But not so the sides. It is upon this fish I am preparing
to make pictures."
"But how?" Gerald smiled and shook his head.
"Wait. It is too important to talk about in advance."
Edward regarded him long and thoughtfully and felt rising within him a
greater sympathy. It was pitiful that such a mind should die in the
embrace of a mere drug, dragged down to destruction by a habit. "Beyond
the scope of any single university," but not beyond the slavery of a
weed.
"I have been thinking, Gerald," he said, finally, fixing a steady gaze
upon the restless eyes of his visitor, "that the day is near at hand
when you must bring to your rescue the power of a great will."
Gerald listened, grew pale and remained silent. Presently he turned to
the speaker.
"You know, then. Tell me what to do."
"You must cease the use of morphine and opium."
Gerald drew a deep breath and smiled good-naturedly.
"Oh, that is it," he said; "some one has told you that I am a victim of
morphine and opium. Well, what would you think if I should tell you he
is simply mistaken?"
His face was frank and unclouded. Edward gazed upon him, incredulous.
After a moment's pause, during which Gerald enjoyed his astonishment, he
continued:
"I was once a victim; there is no doubt of that; but now I am cured. It
was a frightful struggle. A man who has not experienced it or witnessed
it can form no conception of what it means to break away from habitual
use of opium. Some day you may need it and my experience will help you.
I began by cutting my customary allowance for a day in half, and day
after day, week after week, I kept cutting it in half until the time
came when I could not divide it with a razor. Would you believe it, the
habit was as strong in the end as the beginning? I lay awake and thought
of that little speck by the hours; I tossed and cried myself to sleep
over it! I slept and wept myself awake. The only remedy for this and all
habits is a mental victory. I made the fight--I won!
"I can never forget that day," and he smiled as he said it; "the day I
found it impossible to divide the speck of opium; a breath would have
blown it away, but I would have murdered the man who breathed upon it. I
swallowed it; the touch of that atom is yet upon my tongue; I swallowed
it and slept like a child; and then came the waking! For days I was a
maniac--but it passed.
"I grew into a new life--a beautiful, peaceful world. It had been around
me all the time but I had forgotten how it looked; a blissful world! I
was cured.
"Years have passed since that day, and no taste of the hateful drug has
ever been upon my tongue. Not for all the gold in the universe, not for
any secrets of science, not for a look back into the face of my mother,"
he cried, hoarsely, rising to his feet; "not for a smile from heaven
would I lay hands upon that fiend again!"
He closed abruptly, his hand trembling, the perspiration beading his
brow. His eyes fell and the woman Rita stood before them, a look of
ineffable sadness and tenderness upon her face.
"Will you retire now, Master Gerald?" she said, gently. Without a word
he turned and left the room. She was about to follow when Edward,
excited and touched by the scene he had witnessed and full of
discoveries, stopped her with an imperious gesture.
For a moment he paced the room. Rita was motionless, awaiting with
evident nervousness his pleasure. He came and stood before her, and,
looking her steadily in the face, said, abruptly:
"Woman, what is the name of that young man, and what is mine?"
She drew back quickly and her lips parted in a gasp.
"My God!" he heard her whisper.
"I demand an answer! You carry the secret of one of us--probably both.
Which is the son of Marion Evans?"
She sank upon her knees and hid her face in her apron.
It was all true, then. Edward felt as though he himself would sink down
beside her if the silence continued.
"Say it," he said, hoarsely; "say it!"
"As God is my judge," she answered, faintly, "I do not know."
"One is?"
"One is."
"And the other--who is he?"
"Mine." The answer was like a whisper from the pines wafted in through
the open window. It was loud enough. Edward caught the chair for
support. The world reeled about him. He suffocated.
Rita still knelt with covered head, but her trembling form betrayed the
presence of the long-restrained emotions. He walked unsteadily to the
mantel, and, drawing the cover from the little picture, went to the
mirror and placed it again by his face. At length he said in despair:
"God pity me! God pity me!"
The woman arose then and took the picture and gazed long and earnestly
upon it. A sob burst from her lips. Lifting it again to the level of the
man's face, she looked from one to the other.
"Enough!" he said, reading it aright.
Despair had settled over his own face. She handed back the little
likeness, and, clasping her hands, stood in simple dignity awaiting his
will. He noticed then, as he studied her countenance closely, the lines
of suffering there; the infallible record that some faces carry, which,
whether it stands for remorse, for patience, for pure, unbroken sorrow,
is always a consecration.
"Master, it must have come some time," she said, at length, "but I have
hoped it would not be through me." Her voice was just audible.
"Be seated," said Morgan. "If your story is true, and it may be so, you
should not stand." He turned away from her and walked to the window; she
was seeking for an opening to begin her story. He began for her:
"You crouched in a church door to avoid the storm; a woman seeking
shelter there appeared just outside. She was attacked by a man and fell
to the ground unconscious; you carried her off in your arms; her child
was born soon after, and what then?"
Amazed she stared at him a moment in silence.
"And mine was born! The fright, the horror, the sickness! It was a
terrible dream; a terrible dream! But a month afterward, I was here
alone with two babies at my breast and the mother was gone. God help me,
and help her! But in that time Master John says I lost the memory of my
child! Master Gerald I claimed, but his face was the face of Miss
Marion, and he was white and delicate like her. And you, sir, were dark.
And then I had never been a slave; John Morgan's father gave me my
liberty when I was born. I lived with him until my marriage, then after
my husband's death, which was just before this storm, they brought me
here and I waited. She never came back. Master Gerald was sickly always
and we kept him, but they sent you away. Master John thought it was
best. And the years have passed quickly."
"And General Evan--did he never know?"
"No, sir; I would not let them take Master Gerald, because I believed he
was my child; and Master John, I suppose, would not believe in you. The
families are proud; we let things rest as they were, thinking Miss
Marion would come back some day. But she will not come now; she will not
come!"
The miserable secret was out. After a long silence Edward lifted his
head and said with deep emotion: "Then, in your opinion, I am your son?"
She looked at him sadly and nodded.
"And in the opinion of John Morgan, Gerald is the son of Marion Evans?"
She bowed.
"We have let it stand that way. But you should never have known! I do
not think you were ever to have known." The painful silence that
followed was broken by his question:
"Gerald's real name?"
"I do not know! I do not know! All that I do know I have told you!"
"And the child's coffin?" She pressed her hand to her forehead.
"It was a dream; I do not know!"
He gazed upon her with profound emotion and pity.
"You must be tired," he said, gently. "Think no more of these troubles
to-night."
She turned and went away. He followed to the head of the stairs and
waited until he heard her step in the hall below.
"Good-night," he had said, gravely. And from the shadowy depths below
came back a faint, mournful echo of the word.
When Edward returned to the room he sat by the window and buried his
face upon his arm. Hour after hour passed; the outer world slept. Had he
been of the south, reared there and a sharer in its traditions, the
secret would have died with him that night and its passing would have
been signaled by a single pistol shot. But he was not of the south, in
experience, association or education.
It was in the hush of midnight that he rose from his seat, took the
picture and descended the steps. The wing-room was never locked; he
entered. Through the drawn curtains of the glass-room he saw the form of
Gerald lying in the moonlight upon his narrow bed. Placing the picture
beside the still, white face of the sleeper, he was shocked by the
likeness. One glance was enough. He went back to his window again.
One, two, three, four o'clock from the distant church steeple.
How the solemn numbers have tolled above the sorrow-folds of the human
heart and echoed in the dewless valleys of the mind, the depths to which
we sink when hope is gone!
But with the dawn what shadows flee!
So came the dawn at last; the pale, tremulous glimmer on the eastern
hills, the white light, the rosy flush and then in the splendor of
fading mists the giant sun rolled up the sky.
A man stood pale and weary before the open window at Ilexhurst. "The
odds are against me," he said, grimly, "but I feel a power within me
stronger than evidence. I will match it against the word of this woman,
though every circumstance strengthened that word. The voice of the
Caucasian, not the voice of Ethiopia, speaks within me! The woman does
not believe herself; the mother's instinct has been baffled, but not
destroyed!"
And yet again, the patrician bearing, the aristocrat! Such was Gerald.
"We shall see," he said, between his teeth. "Wait until Virdow comes!"
Nevertheless, when, not having slept, he arose late in the day, he was
almost overwhelmed with the memory of the revelation made to him, and
the effect it must have upon his future.
At that moment there came into his mind the face of Mary.