"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."
Miller walked away, speechless with astonishment, but he had found his tongue by the time he got back. He went into the private office, hat in hand, and waited patiently until Mr. Forbes looked up.
"Well?"