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Page 65
"I want to have a little talk with her. She has seemed so miserable and
unhappy, since all this happened. The poor child has nearly made herself
ill worrying about it."
Across the hall Eugenia had thrown herself down on her bed, and was
staring out of the windows. She saw nothing of the summer skies outside,
or any of all that outdoor brightness. Her gaze was turned inward on
herself.
"I wish I could begin at the beginning and do it all over,--all my
life!" she thought. "Somehow I've always thought it rather smart to say
and do exactly as I pleased; to be the ringleader in all the mischief
and make the teachers dread me, and have the girls afraid of me. But
Betty makes you look at things so differently. I'd give anything I've
got to have people remember me as they will her. What must papa think of
me? I'm all he's got, and he is so good to me! Oh, it would have been
better if I had never been born! Every day I've lived I've left a whole
road full of stones for somebody to jolt over. Poor old Eliot can't
think of me as anything else than an imp of selfishness, for I'm always
making it hard for her, and she's a stranger in a strange land,' and I
ought to have remembered that she has feelings as well as I have, even
if she is a servant. And now Betty's eyes--"
She turned over on the bed, face downward, and began to cry. It was just
then that Mrs. Sherman tapped at the door. For almost an hour Lloyd
could hear the low murmur of voices going on inside the room, and knew
that Eugenia was hearing now what she had always most sorely needed, a
sympathetic, motherly talk. If she could have had that loving advice,
those straightforward words of warning, long ago, how much they might
have done for the motherless child. As it was, that hour opened
Eugenia's eyes to many things, and awakened a desire to grow more like
the gentle woman beside her, sweet and sincere, unselfish and helpful.
Great was Mr. Forbes's surprise one day, when he opened a letter from
Eugenia in the dining-room at the Waldorf, to find that it covered eight
pages, and was blistered in several places, as if she had dropped a tear
or two as she wrote. Usually she had a favour to ask when she wrote, and
scrawled only a page or two; but this told the story of Betty's
blindness, her own part in the affair, and all that she had learned
about the Road of the Loving Heart. The newspaper clipping that Betty
had treasured was enclosed, that he might read for himself the story of
Tusitala that had left such an impression on her.
The letter touched him as nothing had done for years, and he read it a
second time while he was going up to his office on the elevated. Then at
lunch-time, while he waited in his club-room, for lunch to be served, he
took it out and read it again. All that busy day between the demands
that business made on him, and once even in the midst of dictating to
his typewriter, his thoughts kept turning to that far-away island in the
Southern seas, where Tusitala's road gleams white under the tropic sun.
He had met Robert Louis Stevenson once, the tale-teller of Eugenia's
story, and he well understood the influence of that noble life over the
old chiefs who called him "brother."
The words that Eugenia had quoted in her letter rang in his ears all
day, every way he turned: "_Fame dies and honours perish, but
loving-kindness is immortal._" He seemed to hear them when a poor woman
came into his office, asking for a position for her son. They stopped
the curt refusal on his lips, and caused him to take half an hour of his
precious time to help her.
He heard them again when a case was reported to him of a man living in
one of his tenement-houses, who could not pay his rent because he was
too ill to work, and could not hope to recover in his present
surroundings. The stifling heat of the crowded tenement was killing him.
In his weakened condition he was slowly sinking under his burden of debt
and worry, and the thought that his helpless family was almost starving
and would be left uncared for when he died.
Mr. Forbes turned away with an impatient frown from his collector's
report, but that voice from far Samoa seemed to speak again. It was
Tusitala's, and again he saw the road dug to last for ever, in the white
light of the tropic skies. He sat with his head on his hand a moment,
and then, slowly reaching for his check-book filled out a blank, signed
it, and sealed it in an envelope.
Pushing it toward his astonished collector, he said: "Here, Miller, take
that down to Wiggins, and tell him I said to pick up himself and family,
and go down to the seashore for a couple of weeks. It will put them all
on their feet again to get out of that place into the salt air, and,
wait a minute, Miller,"--as the collector moved off,--"take him a
receipt for two months' rent."
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