The Eyes of the World | Page 2

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