Chapter I

His Inheritance

It was winter—­cold and snow and ice and naked trees and leaden clouds and stinging wind.

The house was an ancient mansion on an old street in that city of culture which has given to the history of our nation—­to education, to religion, to the sciences, and to the arts—­so many illustrious names.

In the changing years, before the beginning of my story, the woman’s immediate friends and associates had moved from the neighborhood to the newer and more fashionable districts of a younger generation.  In that city of her father’s 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.