Man-woman relationships -- Fiction; San Francisco (Calif.) -- Fiction
After three years Alice Gray gave birth to a daughter--and died within
a fortnight afterward. In all truth, I may say that life, for Billy
Gray, ended that day. To lose this tenth muse--I can think of nothing
more complete in tragedy except the loss of her father of Marjorie
Fleming. And he, like Marjorie Fleming's father, spoke her name no
more--until near the end. When after twenty years, his own time came,
Stallard, LeBrun the poet and Lars Wark gathered to pay him their last
respects. LeBrun came all the way from New Orleans, and Stallard
delayed his journey to the South Seas. They had drifted away from him,
such had become his ways and habits; they came back in honor of the
woman who illuminated their youth. So long and so powerful was the
influence of her who never wrote a line except in air and memory.
Billy Gray went on living for the sake of his daughter; but he lived
like a man driven of the furies. He became one of those restless,
wandering journalists whose virtue to their newspapers is their utter
abandonment of courage and enterprise, whose defect is their love of
drink.
Eleanor, they called the baby--Alice had chosen that name "in case it
is a girl." Mrs. Tiffany, childless herself, played second mother
during the first three years of Eleanor's healthy and contented little
life. Perceiving the growth of bad habits in that broken
brother-in-law, strong and generous enough to face her perceptions,
she called him back from a desk in Los Angeles, where, gossip said, he
was drinking himself to death, and gave him over his daughter to keep.
From that time on, during a succession of removes which took him from
Vancouver on the north to Los Angeles on the south, Billy Gray had
establishment after establishment, housekeeper after housekeeper for
this daughter. Her face and ways, the dim shadowing of her mother's,
were the only hold on reality which he kept.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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