The Mystics | Page 2

of flesh. His glassy eyes were still fixed and immovable save
for an occasional twitching of the eyelids; his pallid lips were drawn

back from his strong, prominent teeth; and the skin about his temples
looked shrivelled and sallow. The doctor's parting words came sharply
to the younger man's mind.
"Sit still and watch him--you can do no more."
He reiterated this injunction many times mentally as he stood
contemplating the man who for seven interminable years had ruled,
repressed, and worked him as he might have worked a well-constructed,
manageable machine; and a sudden rush of joy, of freedom and
recompense flooded his heart and set his pulses throbbing. He
momentarily lost sight of the grim shadow hovering over the house.
The sense of emancipation rose tumultuously, over-ruling even the
immense solemnity of approaching Death.
John Henderson had known little of the easy, pleasant paths of life,
carpeted by wealth and sheltered by influence. His most childish and
distant recollections carried him back to days of anxious poverty. His
father, the elder son of a wealthy Scottish landowner, had quarrelled
with his father, and at the age of twenty left his home, disinherited in
favor of his younger brother. Possessed of a peculiar
temperament--passionate, headstrong, dogged in his resolves, he had
shaken the dust of Scotland from his feet; sworn never to be beholden
to either father or brother for the fraction of a penny, and had gone out
into the world to seek his fortune. But the fortune had been far to seek.
For years he had followed the sea; for years he had toiled on land; but
in every undertaking failure stalked him. Finally, at the age of fifty, he
touched success for the first time. He fell in love and found his love
returned. But here again the irony of fate was constant in its pursuit.
The object of his choice was the daughter of an artist, a man as needy,
as entirely unfortunate as he himself.
But love at fifty is sometimes as blind as love at twenty-five. With an
improvidence that belied his nationality, Alick Henderson married after
a courtship as brief as it was happy. For a year he shared the hap-hazard
life of his wife and father-in-law; then Nature saw fit to alter the small
ménage. The artist died, and almost at the same time little John was
born.

With the coming of the child, Henderson conceived a new impetus and
also a new sense of bitterness and self-reproach. A homeless failure
may tramp the face of the earth and feel no shame; but the unsuccessful
man who is a husband and a father moves upon a different plane. He
has ties--responsibilities--something for which he must answer to
himself.
There is pathos in the picture of a man setting forth at fifty-one to
conquer the world anew; and its grim futility is not good to look upon.
Henderson had failed for himself, and he failed equally for others. The
years that followed his marriage were but the unwinding of a pitifully
old story. Before his boy was ten years old he had run the gamut of
humiliation; he had done everything that the pinch of poverty could
demand, except apply for aid to his brother Andrew. This even the
faithful, patient wife who had stood stanch in all his trials never dared
to suggest.
In this atmosphere John learned to look upon life. A naturally
high-spirited and courageous child, he gradually fell under that spell of
premature understanding that is the portion of a mind forced too soon
to realize the significance of ways and means. Day by day his serious
eyes grew to comprehend the lines that marked his mother's beloved
face; to know the cost at which his own education, his own wants, were
supplied by the tired, silent father, who, despite his shabby clothes and
prematurely broken air, seemed perpetually to move in the glamour of a
past romance; and gradually, steadily, passionately, as these things
came home to him, there grew up in his youthful mind a desire to
compensate by his own future for the struggle he daily witnessed.
Many were the nights when--his lessons for the next day finished, and
his father away at one of the many precarious tasks that kept the
household together--he would draw close to his mother, as she sat
industriously sewing, and beg her for the hundredth time to recount the
story of the grim Scotch home where his father had lost his birthright;
of the stern old grandfather who had died inexorably unforgiving; of
the unknown uncle of whom rumor told many eccentric stories. And,
roused by the recital, his boyish face would flush, his boyish mind leap

forward towards the future.
"'Twill all come back, mother!" he would cry. "'Twill all come