"Your sister," Doctor Morrison wrote, "has suffered a complete nervous breakdown. Long rest with complete relief from financial care is imperative."
This letter stirred John to immediate action. He rushed to the long-distance telephone. The telegraph was not quick enough.
"Please reassure my sister immediately," John telephoned to Doctor Morrison. "Every provision will be made for her care and that of the children." Not satisfied with this, John sent a telegram to his sister direct and to the same effect.
These messages were dispatched as the first and most natural impulses of the brother's heart, without pause to consider the responsibilities involved; and then, having no appetite for breakfast, John returned to his room to write to Rose.
Poor Rose! And poor old Charles! Such an end for him. No great pictures painted; no roseate successes gathered; just to follow his vision on and on until in absent-minded admiration of a sunset glow he stepped off the brow of El Capitan in Yosemite and fell hundreds of feet to death. Yet John's grief was strangely tempered by the thought that somehow this death was fitting. It was like the man's life. In art he had tried to walk the heights with no solid ground of ability beneath, and he had fallen into the bottomless abyss of failure.
For a moment John pitied Charles greatly; yet when he thought of Rose, prostrated, as he was sure, not by grief, but by long anxieties, his feeling turned to one of reproach. When he thought of the children left fatherless, with no provision for their future or that of Rose, the reproach turned to bitterness. He found himself judging Charles very sternly, and a verse from scripture came into his mind,—something about the man who provides not for his own being worse than a murderer.
But in the midst of this condemnation, Hampstead's jaw dropped, and he sat staring at the pen with which he was preparing to write. The expression on the man's face had changed from concern to one of agony. When the pain passed, his features were gray and tenantless, almost the look of the dead; for John Hampstead had suddenly perceived that his stage career was ended!
Rose, Dick and Tayna were now "his own." To give Rose the best of care, upon which his heart had instantly determined, he must have what were to him large sums of money weekly and monthly; money for nurses, money for doctors, for sanitariums possibly; and perhaps Dick and Tayna must be sent to boarding-school or some place like that for the present, while their higher education must also be considered and provided for.
John knew he could never do these things and follow the stage. He could succeed upon the stage; he had proven that, to his own satisfaction at least; but he could not make money there yet, not for years and years. Marien was right. If he persisted, rewards would come and affluence. But they would come at the other end of life. He must have them now.
Perhaps hardest of all to John was the hurt to his pride, to his self-confidence, the reflection that, having set his eye upon a shining goal, he must abandon the march toward it unbeaten, with his strength untested, or with the tests so far made distinctly in his favor. It was hard to think himself a "quitter." And yet he could feel the stir of a noble satisfaction in being a "quitter" for duty's sake. He remembered with a certain sad pleasure how almost prophetically he had told Mr. Mitchell that it would only be something that would happen to Dick and Tayna that could keep him from going on with his ambition. Now exactly that had come to pass; yet to make immediate surrender of the ambition to which he had devoted himself with such enthusiasm seemed impossible. He knew what he should do—what he intended to do—but he lacked the resolution for the moment.