The Eyes of the World | Page 2

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