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THE IDOL OF THE BLIND




BOOKS BY T. GALLON.

Each, 12mo, cloth, $1.00; paper, 50 cents.


The Idol of the Blind.

"No person well posted in current fiction lets a story by Mr. Gallon
pass unnoticed."--_Buffalo Commercial._


The Kingdom of Hate.

"The whole story is told with an appearance of honest, straightforward
sincerity that is very clever and well sustained, and the suspicion of
satire will only dawn on the reader when the story is well advanced,
and he is thoroughly interested in the tumultuous swing."--_Chicago
Chronicle._


Dicky Monteith. A Love Story.

"A good story, told in an engaging style."--_Philadelphia Press._

"A refreshing example of everything that a love story ought to
be."--_San Francisco Call._


A Prince of Mischance.

"The story is a powerful one, and holds the reader from the
start."--_Boston Budget._

"An admirable story."--_London Telegraph._


Tatterly.

"A charming love story runs through the book, which is written in a
bright and lively style.... The book is worth reading."--_New York Sun._

"We believe in 'Tatterly' through thick and thin. We could not
recommend a better story."--_London Academy._


D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, NEW YORK.




                                THE IDOL
                              OF THE BLIND

                               _A NOVEL_

                                  BY

                               TOM GALLON

                               AUTHOR OF
                    TATTERLY, A PRINCE OF MISCHANCE,
                          DICKY MONTEITH, ETC.

                  "When pious frauds and holy shifts
                  Are dispensations and gifts."
                                            HUDIBRAS

                               NEW YORK
                        D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
                                 1899

                           COPYRIGHT, 1899,
                      BY D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.
                        _All rights reserved._




CONTENTS.


    CHAPTER                                               PAGE

    I.--COMETHUP ENTERS LIFE DISASTROUSLY                    1

    II.--AND MAKES DISCOVERIES                              10

    III.--THE GHOST OF A LITTLE CHILD                       20

    IV.--THE CAPTAIN PLAYS THE KNIGHT-ERRANT                40

    V.--TELLS OF AN ERRING WOMAN                            55

    VI.--THE CAPTAIN IN STRANGE COMPANY                     62

    VII.--IN WHICH SEPARATIONS ARE SUGGESTED                79

    VIII.--COMETHUP SUFFERS A LOSS                          88

    IX.--THE COMING OF AUNT CHARLOTTE                      100

    X.--COMETHUP LEAVES THE OLD LIFE                       115

    XI.--AND BECOMES A PERSONAGE                           131

    XII.--THE CAPTAIN SPEAKS HIS MIND                      141

    XIII.--A RETROSPECT--AND A FLUTTERING OF HEARTS        158

    XIV.--AN INCUBUS, AND THE DEMON OF JEALOUSY            175

    XV.--COMETHUP PRACTISES DECEPTION                      183

    XVI.--COMETHUP IS SHADOWED                             199

    XVII.--THE BEGINNINGS OF A GENIUS                      214

    XVIII.--AUNT CHARLOTTE IS SYMPATHETIC                  231

    XIX.--GENIUS ASSERTS ITSELF                            247

    XX.--THE DESERTION OF A PARENT                         262

    XXI.--GENIUS AND THE DOMESTIC VIRTUES                  276

    XXII.--A SECOND DESERTION                              286

    XXIII.--COMETHUP DRIVES A BARGAIN                      301

    XXIV.--UNCLE ROBERT HAS AN INSPIRATION                 311

    XXV.--THE FALL OF PRINCE CHARMING                      327

    XXVI.--BRIAN PAYS HIS DEBTS                            332

    XXVII.--THE PLEADING OF THE CAPTAIN                    351

    XXVIII.--MEDMER MELTS A SILVER SPOON                   361

    XXIX.--COMETHUP LEARNS THE TRUTH                       369

    XXX.--AUNT CHARLOTTE ATTENDS A CELEBRATION             374




THE IDOL OF THE BLIND.




CHAPTER I.

COMETHUP ENTERS LIFE DISASTROUSLY.


"My dear" had looked her last upon a troublesome world. She had taken
life sighingly, in little frightened gasps, as it were, with the fear
upon her, even from childhood, that unknown horrors lurked for her
in each day to which she was awakened. It can scarcely be said that
she had clung to life with any tenacity--rather with the instinct of
living; and she had fluttered out of it resignedly enough, a little
sorry, perhaps, that she had left any one behind to grieve for her. And
yet, with the inconsistency which had marked her life, she had died at
the very moment when life had actually begun to be worth living for her.

"My dear" was one of those who wait long for the happiness, if any,
that is to come to them, and find it a little tasteless when it is
at last given to them. She had been the younger child of a stern and
unbending man, who bent or broke to his code of rules those who were
weak enough to be bent or broken, and thrust sternly aside those whose
strength opposed itself to his. He had found in his little daughter
one who smilingly and timidly obeyed in everything, and worshipped him
without question--up to a certain point. That point was determined by
the arrival of David Willis.

It was an old and a very ordinary story; such stories are played out
to their bitter end day after day around us. David Willis was poor,
and had absolutely no expectations; so far as old Robert Carlaw was
concerned he simply did not exist--except as many other people existed,
as a part of the world with which he had nothing to do. David, for
his part, was as patient and long-suffering as the girl who loved
him; and so they solemnly and pitifully plighted their troth, and
agreed to wait. Boldness or resource of action was not in either of
them; the girl, despite her love for the man, and the sort of humble,
patient faithfulness with which she was endowed, would not have risked
her father's anger on any account. So, in a poor, half-ridiculous,
half-heroic fashion, they parted and waited.

They waited, strange as it may seem, for nearly twenty years; until
the man had entered the forties and the woman was nearing them. She
was still a pretty woman, soft-eyed and gentle of voice, with a great
mine of tenderness hidden away in her which no one had been able to
discover. When, on her father's death, she married David Willis, there
seemed a prospect that the mine would be discovered, but the time had
gone past; life had been so long a flat and stale and unprofitable
thing that the old fierce heart-beats at the thought of her lover, the
old hunger of love for him, had died away into a mere tremulous wonder
as to whether he would be good to her, or whether he might have moments
of harshness and sternness, like her father. She had hung too long
expectant on hope to believe that the world was going to be very good
to her now; she was only a little glad, for her lover's sake, that his
time of waiting was ended.

David Willis was a musician and a dreamer; not a very great musician,
and certainly a dreamer whose dreams brought him no profit. He had
filled the place of organist in one or two minor churches, living
simply and contentedly. By the very irony of things, when the woman
he loved was able to come to him and put her hands in his, and tell
him that there was no further bar to their happiness, he was out of
an engagement, and had scarcely a penny in the world. But, with a
childlike faith which, even at their years, came near to the sublime,
they married first and tried to be worldly afterward. Fortunately
for them, her brother was a man of property in a small, old-fashioned
town near the coast of Kent; and, having considerable influence in the
place, he offered, through the clergyman of the parish, the vacant post
of organist in the parish church to David Willis, after first roundly
abusing his sister for having married a pauper.

It was a quaint old town, a place of red roofs and winding streets and
strange old buildings; a very paradise to the dreamer and the woman who
had waited so long for him. Her brother's house stood at the far end
of the town, in the newer part of it; but they saw little of him, and
had, indeed, no particular desire to do so. They had their own quiet
dwelling-place, a little house nestling under the frowning shadows of
the church wherein he worked; a strange old place, with low ceilings
and black beams, with a garden of roses stretching right along under
the gray old church wall. Her life, for a few months at least, was a
sweet and shadowed thing; people said afterward--people who had never
known her--that they had seen her sitting often in the old church,
with her mild eyes looking upward at a great rose window over the
porch, while her husband practised for the services on the wheezy old
organ; had seen her wandering in her garden among the roses, singing to
herself in a subdued voice--the voice of one who has long been forced
to be silent, or to subdue any natural mirth that might be in her.

The summer went by, while David Willis played on his organ, and his
wife sang among her roses; and with the autumn came a new light in the
eyes of the woman--a light as of one who waits and hopes for something.
Poor, trembling, wistful creature, what dreams were hers then! What
dreams when she sat by her husband's side in the twilight, looking out
over the town where the lights were beginning to twinkle one by one
like sleepy eyes! What dreams of a little life that was to recompense
her for all she had missed, and all she never could find in any other
way! Childish hands were to draw all that mine of tenderness out of
her, as no other hands could have done; childish words were to wake
echoing words in her dull heart, and stir it to life again. She dreamed
tremblingly of all she would do; of all she would teach the child; saw
it walking by her side among the roses; fluttered into church proudly,
braving the eyes of younger women with the mite beside her.

Those were dreams which never came true. She had waited, through dull
and spiritless years, for her chance of life; it was written, in that
book which no man shall read, that her life in that fuller sense was
to be but a short one. She gave birth to her child--a boy--and knew
her fate even before they told her. She sank slowly, drifting out of
life with as little effort to retain it as she had shown throughout her
days. Almost the last thing she did was to take her husband's hand, as
he sat speechless with grief beside her, and put it to her lips, and
draw it up against her cheek.

"We waited--a long time--Davie," she whispered. "I wish--I
might--have--stayed." She did not speak again; she held his hand in
that position until the last breath fluttered out of her lips.

David Willis was utterly incapable of appreciating anything except
the magnitude of his loss. He wandered desolately from room to room,
picking up things that had belonged to her and putting his lips to
them, and weeping, in a hopeless, despairing fashion, like a child.
Fortunately for that other child who had been the direct cause of the
disaster, there were kindly people about the place who cared for it,
and found a nurse for it--a young and healthy woman who had but just
lost a child of her own, and who was installed in the house of David
Willis at once. From that big house in the newer part of the town came
Mr. Robert Carlaw, the brother of the dead woman, hushing his loud and
blustering voice a little as he crossed the threshold of the place of
mourning.

He had an air with him, this Robert Carlaw; a sense of saying, when he
entered a room, that it was something poorer and meaner than before he
came; a magnificent air of proprietorship in every one he honoured by
a nod or a handshake; the very town through which he walked became,
not a sweet and beautiful old place which seemed to have been dropped
clean out of the middle ages, but an awkward, badly built little place
in which Robert Carlaw was good enough to live. The swing of him was so
fine that the skirts of his coat brushed the houses as he went down the
street; other passengers humbly took the roadway.

He was very kind and sympathetic with David Willis, with the kindness
and sympathy of a patron to a dependent who has suffered a loss; he had
scarcely seen his sister since she was a child, and knew absolutely
nothing of her. He seated himself in an armchair--the chair which had
been hers--opposite to where David Willis sat with his head bowed in
his hands; he coughed, with a little shade of annoyance in the cough,
as of one who is not receiving proper attention. David Willis looked up
without speaking.

"Bad business, this," said Mr. Carlaw, with a jerk of the head which
was meant to convey that he referred to what was lying upstairs. "A man
feels these things; I know _I_ did. Cut me up dreadfully."

"Yes," said David, in a low voice.

"She was never strong, you know," went on the brother; "not like the
others, I mean. And then she married late, which tries a woman, I'm
told."

"Yes," replied the other again in the same tone.

"She was just the sort that would give in without making what I call a
kick for it. Hadn't half enough of the devil in her. Not a bit like her
brother in that respect. Why, I assure you, they've positively _tried_
to kill me, half a dozen times; given me over for dead. But they didn't
know Bob Carlaw; he's always proved one too many for 'em. There's a lot
of life in Bob."

David Willis got up slowly. "Would you like to see her?" he asked.

"No, no; I don't think so. It wouldn't--wouldn't do any good, and the
sight of any one dead always upsets me. No, I don't think I'll see
her; I only--only called in case I could do anything. A man needs
sympathy at such a time." He got up and took his hat, and swung toward
the door. Turning there, he said abruptly, "What about the kid?"

"The----" said David, looking at him blankly.

"The child; is it alive?"

"Yes," replied David; "doing well, they tell me."

"Ah--that's bad--for you, I mean." He paused a moment, coughed
uncomfortably, and stuck his hat sideways on his head; then remembered
himself, and took it off and frowned at it. Finally he got out of the
door awkwardly, and swung himself out through the garden of the roses
and went up the street, trying hard not to whistle.

It was on the day of the funeral that David Willis first seemed to
grasp the idea of his responsibility in regard to his infant son. He
had had no thought of that before; had listened to the sympathizing
remarks of the few friends he had with indifference, and had scarcely
appeared to realize that there was a new element in his life at all. He
grasped things slowly at all times, and required time to digest them;
he had room for nothing else in his mind then but the thought of his
loss. The day that saw her committed to the earth in the old churchyard
within sight of the garden where she had walked was a day which passed
for him like a troubled dream; he had a vague remembrance that people
were very kind to him, and helped him, and told him what to do and
where to stand. It was while he stood beside the grave that some words
from the burial service broke upon his ears as though nothing had been
said before; he saw in them something new and fresh and hopeful.

"Man that is born of a woman hath but a short time to live, and is full
of misery. He cometh up and----"

He lost all that followed; with those final words came a new thought
into his mind. The woman he had loved, for whom he had waited and
hungered so patiently, was to sleep her last sleep in that quiet place,
to sleep as calmly and as gently as she had lived. But there was
something more than this, something to comfort him. God had, after all,
been very merciful; so, in his simple mind, he told himself. The poor,
frail woman was gone; in her place had come a little child. The words
were true; he applied them at once to the baby. "He cometh up--like a
flower." Surely that was true; his eyes brightened as he thought of it;
the bitterness fell away from his heart; he almost longed to leave her
sleeping there and to get back to the child. He scarcely seemed to have
seen the child yet--to know what it was like.

As he crossed the churchyard to his house the thing was forced more
clearly and strongly upon him; he saw, with the fine instinct of love,
that this was what she would have wished, that the child must grow up
to think well of her, and to take her place. A man of rare singleness
of life and purpose, he had been capable only of single emotions; and
those emotions must, of necessity, be great. His dogged patience in
waiting for one woman through all the best years of his life had had in
it much of heroism; that was ended, and he turned now to something else
to fill his days. The child should do it; the child had been sent for
that very purpose. Over and over again the words came back to him, "He
cometh up--like a flower." That was very beautiful; it seemed strange
that he had not thought of that before. He dreamed a dream, even as the
woman had done, of all that the child was to be to him.

He went into the room where the scrap of humanity lay sleeping against
the strange woman's breast; the woman glanced up at him almost
resentfully as he bent over the child; just such another child had lain
warm against her, and this one filled the void in her heart a little.
She was a humble creature, of no subtle emotions whatever; her sense of
motherhood, so recently awakened, was the strongest feeling in her.

The man touched the baby's cheek with a hesitating forefinger, and
then turned away and walked out of the room. He saw quite clearly how
the child would grow up, knowing only him, desiring no one else to
fill its world. Before another hour had passed, the solitary man had
mapped out the seat the child should take in the house and in church;
had wandered in fancy over the fields through which the child should
accompany him. There was no disloyalty to the dead woman in all this;
the child had sprung out of the woman, in every sense, and took her
place quite naturally in the deep heart of the man.

That evening David Willis received an unexpected visitor. The visitor
came slowly and timidly, and yet with a certain forced air of defiance
upon him, up the garden path, and knocked at the door of the little
house. The one servant the house boasted, and who did not sleep there,
had gone to her own home at the other end of the town; David Willis
opened the door, and stared out into the twilight at the visitor.

The caller was a little man--very alert and very upright, with a
tightly buttoned frock coat, and an old-fashioned silk hat with a
curly brim. He carried something in one hand behind him. David Willis
remembered to have seen him once or twice in the streets, walking very
erect, and swinging a cane with a tassel attached to it; and always in
church on Sundays, where he occupied a little odd pew in one corner,
and gave the responses in a very loud and sonorous voice not at all
fitting to his stature. David held the door in one hand, and looked out
wonderingly at the little man.

"My name is Garraway-Kyle--Captain Garraway-Kyle--late of her Majesty's
service. You are in trouble, sir, your wife"--he stopped abruptly and
coughed and frowned, and tugged at one end of his white mustache with
his disengaged hand--"your wife, sir, was good enough to admire my
flowers; used to stop sometimes to look at them. I thought perhaps----"
His sunburned face took on a deeper tinge, and he brought his hand from
behind him and showed a carefully arranged bunch of flowers.

David Willis came out into the little path, and closed the door behind
him; his voice was rather unsteady when he spoke. "Thank you, sir," he
said. "Would you like me to go with you and point out the--the grave?"

"I know it. I was there this afternoon," replied the captain, shortly.
"But I should like you to come with me." So the two men went in silence
out of the garden, and by the little gate into the churchyard, David
Willis having no hat, and the captain carrying his in his hand.

At the grave the captain knelt stiffly, as though it were an effort
for him to do so, and put the flowers at the head of the new mound. He
remained for nearly half a minute kneeling, and then drew himself up
and faced the other. "She was a sweet and gentle woman, sir; I have
seen her often; I have ventured to peep over the wall when she was in
her own garden. She was very fond of flowers."

"Yes," replied David, "very."

"I wished sometimes that I might have offered her some of mine, the
finest garden in the town, sir. But, of course, I did not know her. I
am sorry to have had to give them to her like this."

"You are very good," said David, softly.

Captain Garraway-Kyle turned away and looked up for a moment at the
sombre church which rose above them. "You had not been married long, I
think, Mr. Willis?"

"Not quite a year," replied David.

"Ah! The child lives, I think?"

"Yes."

They walked back together to the gate which led to the cottage; and
there the captain held out his hand. "Thank you," he said, stiffly; and
then, "I am very sorry. By the way--boy or girl?"

"Oh, it's a boy," replied David.

The captain had gone a few paces down the street when he turned on his
heel and came back again. "I beg your pardon, Mr. Willis, but what will
you call him?"

It was almost an idle question, prompted in the captain's mind for
want of something better to say; but it set the old train of thought
running in David Willis's mind as it had run all that afternoon. The
words he had heard at the grave-side seemed to sound in his ears again;
the sudden thought struck him to give the boy some name that should
keep in memory his mother, and the purpose for which he came into
the world, and all that he meant to his father. He faced about, and
looked at his visitor with a new light in his eyes. "I shall call him
'Comethup,'" he said, slowly.

"I beg your pardon----" The captain looked a little startled.

"'Comethup,'" said David again, half to himself. "Yes, that's the name."

"Oh, I see; family name, I presume?" said the other.

"Yes," replied David Willis, "a family name. Good-night." And he went
inside, and sat down in the darkness to think about it.




CHAPTER II.

AND MAKES DISCOVERIES.


David Willis stuck to his determination, so suddenly made on that night
of the captain's visit, and the child was duly baptized under the name
of Comethup Willis. Simple David Willis chuckled to himself a little
over his ingenuity; he grew to like the quaintness of the name, and it
was a constant reminder--if such were necessary--of the tragedy which
belonged to the boy's birth. He always spoke the name rapidly when
addressing the child or when referring to it to any one else, slurring
the cumbrous name that he might hide the secret of it; only to himself
did he ever speak it slowly with the added words, "as a flower." It was
a never-ceasing source of joy to him to think how cleverly the name
had been conceived; he dwelt upon it lovingly, with the pride of the
inventor; and it became on his tongue a caress whenever it was uttered.

Apart from the mere name, the child filled his life and his thoughts to
a greater extent than he had ever even dared to hope. He grew rapidly,
and shook off the childish ailments which came with his years with
greater ease than most children; he had about him, even as a little
fellow, the grave, shy tenderness of his mother. Captain Garraway-Kyle
murmured once, as he held him at arms'-length and looked critically at
him, that he had his mother's eyes.

It was a strange life for the child, alone with a dreamy man in that
old house under the shadow of the church; if he could have written down
his impressions of life and those about him at that time, they would
have made curious reading. He remembered when it was possible for him,
by a great effort, to get both hands up to the door knob, and to twist
it round and stagger backward, pulling the door with him; understood
fully what a steep and treacherous affair the stone step was which led
down to the garden; and what a proud and wonderful day it was when he
summoned courage to step straight down upon it, instead of manipulating
the descent with one small bare knee on the stone and the foot of the
other leg feeling for the earth below. He knew his mother's garden by
heart, and all the wondrous corners of it, where strange things hid
which no one saw but himself. He learned early that the roses which
grew there, and nodded in a friendly fashion to him as he passed, only
grew there for a small boyish nose to be poked up at them to get their
scent, and were not to be pulled except on rare occasions, when his
father went round the garden with a basket, and gathered the choicest,
and tied them into a rude kind of wreath. Comethup knew then that a
great expedition was on foot; that they would go out of the gate at the
farthest end of the garden, and that he would stumble--holding fast by
his father's hand--through a place where the grass was very soft and
very green, and where some of it was raised in long hillocks higher
than the rest; a place where large flat stones with curious marks
upon them, and little babies' heads with wings cut on some, cropped up
out of the earth. On one of these hillocks the little homely wreath
would be laid, and his father would kneel and seem to whisper something
behind his hand. He knew that his mother slept there, and that she
would never wake up again, and never walk with him, as his father
walked, in the garden of the roses. Child though he was, he always felt
a little sadness as he stumbled back over the hillocks to the garden
gate, because the mother he had never seen lay, an inscrutable mystery,
out of his sight under the grass.

There was one never-to-be-forgotten day when he first learned of
something outside his own small world. It was Sunday, and the heavy old
bells were swinging, and his father had gone out through the sunlight
with books under his arm to the church. It struck suddenly upon the
child that this day was different from all the rest; that the little
maid-servant had a cleaner face and a whiter apron, and that his own
tiny suit was one which was laid by in a tall old press all the rest of
the week. Most of our impressions, whatever age we may be, come to us
through the sense of smell, and Comethup's impression of the day came
to him through the scent of the clothes. They bore the same scent as
the big best bedroom upstairs--a room in which no one ever slept and
into which he had peeped one day when the door was open; just such a
scent as that which hung about it had been wafted out to his nostrils
then. He began to see that there must be something "best" about this
day also, as there was about everything connected with it.

When David Willis came back from church, the child had got his
questions ready, and knew exactly what answers he required, as a child
always unerringly does. He asked why all the shops along the other side
of the street were closed, and why the bells rang on that day, and why
the people sang in the big church which loomed above them. And then
he heard for the first time of that other world into which we try so
hard to peer; of that dread Presence--dread to a child--beyond the
skies that shuts in our vision. He was puzzled to understand how his
mother could be right above him, watching to see if he were a good
boy or a bad; and why, in that case, those flowers were put upon that
grass-covered bed of hers out in the churchyard. He pondered the matter
deeply, and was much disconcerted to think that the God of whom every
one seemed so much afraid was all round him and could see everything he
did.

He went one day into the church with his father--an experience indeed!
It was quite empty, save for themselves, and the first thought
that occurred to him was to wonder where the roof was; and why his
voice rumbled and rattled and sprang at him from far above when he
incautiously spoke in his usual shrill treble. The phrase which his
father used--"the house of God"--awed him; he understood why the roof
was so much higher than that of their own house. A lovely pattern of
many colours on the stone pavement at his feet arrested his attention.
He followed the shafts of light upward to the great rose window high
up in the wall over the porch. His heart went a little quicker, and he
gripped his father's hand with his baby fingers. That surely must be
the eye of God looking down at him.

He went home tremblingly to think the matter over; saw in the childish
wonder of discovery something that no one had found before; screwed his
courage to make further inquiries of his father concerning this dread
Being. It was a terror to him to learn that the Being was everywhere,
not alone in the great place where people went in their best clothes to
worship him. He crept up to his tiny bedroom under the roof that night,
and hurriedly closed the door and drew the curtains, and lay in bed
quakingly triumphant at the thought that he had shut It out, only to
wake up with a start in a little while at the remembrance that It must
have been in the room before his precautions were taken. He climbed out
of bed, and pattered across to the window; pulled back the curtains,
and pushed open the casement. All the benign influence of a summer
starlight night was about him; the lights were twinkling sleepily and
safely down in the town; and he could hear calm, slow country voices in
the street beyond the garden. Life--great and wonderful to his childish
mind, although bounded by