PART II CHAPTER I

OLD Stafford had changed wonderfully L in the six years which passed after Fred Walton’s flight. The building of President Galt’s trunk-line to the sea had marked the turning-point in the town’s career. The older portion of the place remained quite as it was, but new suburbs and new centres of commerce had sprung up beyond the old incorporated limits. Where farms, fields, and pastures had once been, now lay even, well-graded, and electric-lighted streets. No small city in the South had a better freight-rate to all points, and this had brought about the establishment of various manufacturing enterprises which had greatly increased the population. The clang and clatter of new growth was in the air; speculation in building-sites was rife. The modest price of one day was the jest of the next. Owning a great deal of the land along the new railway, General Sylvester was now more wealthy than ever, and the new interest in life had given him back his youth and health.

As for Kenneth Galt, he had scarcely spent a day in the town of his birth since his hurried journey to New York to meet the capitalists whose co-operation had made the road a certainty. His explanation to Sylvester was that other points on the long line constantly demanded his attention. His old home was still cared for by Mrs. Wilson as housekeeper and John Dilk as gardener, and now and then a false report had emanated from these proud and worshipful menials that the distinguished owner was coming back to reside there permanently. Indeed, he had promised General Sylvester to do so time after time, only to make more delays and more excuses.

“He’s coming this time sure,” the old soldier said to his nephew on the veranda one day in the early part of the present summer. “I had a letter from him this morning, in which he promised to come and spend the hot weather here and take a good long rest. Mrs. Wilson said, also, that he had written her about renovating his rooms, so I reckon it is settled. And when he comes you will see that I was right about my prophecy concerning him and Madge. He’s a woman-hater, they say—won’t have a thing to do with society; and, quiet and reserved as your sister is, the two will naturally drift together. I’ll be glad to have him back. That shady old place, with its early associations, will fairly make him over. When I spent that week with him in Savannah I naturally expected to find him at the top of the social heap, but he went nowhere at all, and even seemed to shun the men who extended courtesies to him. He’s had too big a load on him; his face shows wrinkles, and his hair is turning at the temples.”

“Yes, he is a strange chap,” Dearing answered. “I have been thrown with him in Atlanta several times of late, and while he really seemed glad to see me, and was cordial enough, in a way, I couldn’t exactly make him out. As usual, I found him moping over his favorite books, and every bit as anxious, as of old, to prove that the grave ends everything. That will ruin any man, Uncle Tom. When a fellow actually gets to fighting the belief that we are more than sticks and stones he can’t rise very high in any spiritual sense. Why, Kenneth has even reached the point of defending some of the lowest things that men do. He and I were walking away out in the outskirts of the city one night. He had asked me to go, because he wanted to avoid some clubmen who were bent on having him preside at a banquet given by the Chamber of Commerce. We were all alone, and it was dark. He had asked me, I remember, if any news had come as to the whereabouts of Fred Walton, and I had told him that nothing at all had been heard except that his father had cut him off forever. To my astonishment, Kenneth actually sighed. Then I distinctly heard him muttering to himself: ‘Poor fellow. Poor chap! He’s been treated like a dog!”’ “Huh, the idea!” Sylvester broke in. “Well, that’s like Kenneth. He is always ready to take up for somebody or something that no one else believes in.”

“Well, feeling as I did, and knowing what I do of the case,” Dearing continued, warmly, “I couldn’t hold my tongue. I didn’t leave a grain of sand for Fred Walton to stand on, and it made me hot for Galt not to agree with me. He made some weak remark about men obeying natural laws, and being cursed with uncontrollable passions, and the like; but I flatter myself that I silenced him. I gave him a picture of that beautiful girl’s isolated life with her son and old mother, wholly ostracized in the only community they had ever known or loved. I saw, then, that I had touched his sympathies in another direction.

“‘You think,’ he said, ‘that Walton ought, even now, to go back and marry her—at this late date?”

“I told him that I had grave doubts as to whether a woman who had suffered as she had at a man’s hands would ever want to see her betrayer again, and he answered that he felt sure she wouldn’t. Then he asked about the boy. You know, he was always fond of children—that is one redeeming quality he has, and it makes me hope that he isn’t so heartless as he would have us believe. He listened attentively to all I said about Lionel, even asking me questions as to how the child looked and how he amused himself. When I told him that the little fellow was completely cut off from other children, and that his association only with his mother and grandmother had made him act and speak more like an older person than a child, he seemed actually shocked.”

“‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ he said, ‘that the people of old Stafford would turn against a helpless child because of any fault or mistake of its parents!’

“I explained to him that it was mostly due to the pride of his mother, and to the natural fear that such an intelligent boy, and one so sensitive and observant as he is, might learn of his misfortune and suffer from it. That conversation raised Kenneth Galt in my estimation, Uncle Tom. I know now that he has true feeling and sympathy for the unfortunate, and that his ambition is not all there is to him.”

“I must confess that the child has greatly interested me,” the General said. “From my window I can see him playing in that narrow yard, always dressed neatly, and as strong and straight as an Indian in his bearing. I have never seen him outside the fence. I have stopped to speak to him once or twice in passing, and have been actually charmed by his face and manner. I don’t think I ever heard of a case exactly like his. Of course, there have been thousands of children born like that in straitlaced communities, but I never heard of one being brought up in that prison-like way. It surely is wrong, and it will make the truth all the harder to bear when it does come out, as it must sooner or later. She is a wonderful woman—I started to say girl, for she seems almost like a child to me with that sad, young face, and wistful, artistic beauty. I have met her mother on the street a few times, her old face thickly veiled, but I have not seen Dora or the child away from the cottage.”

“As their family doctor,” said Dearing, “I urged Dora to go out herself for exercise and to take the boy with her. At first she flatly refused. I frightened her, however, by saying that the constant confinement would injure Lionel’s health. Since then she has taken him with her in fine weather when she goes sketching in the woods and swamp back of the cottage, but she is as shy as a fawn about it. I venture to say that no one has ever met her on those excursions. I’ve seen mother-love, Uncle Tom, in all its phases. I’ve met it at the death-beds of scores of children, but the love between that unfortunate mother and child is the prettiest thing on earth. No pair of lovers were ever more constant and affectionate. Lionel is really a sort of psychological oddity in his way. I have a theory that the mother’s morbid suffering was in some prenatal way stamped on her offspring.’ He is queerly supersensitive for one so young, and seems constantly afraid that he won’t be liked. He is rather fond of me—perhaps it is because I’m the only visitor at the house; and when I take him in my lap to hold him, I can see that he enjoys it as if it were an unusual luxury. He closes his eyes sometimes and smiles, and says he wants to go to sleep that way. Then he will ask me over and over again if I love him. After being told that I do, he will detect some slight change in my face or voice and cry out, ‘Now, you don’t like me—do you?’ I am not sentimental, Uncle Tom, but that little chap’s condition has worried me a lot. I pity him as I’ve never pitied a human being before.”

“I have often wondered whether Madge has taken notice of him,” General Sylvester remarked, reflectively. “A woman is hard to read on the surface, and while Madge never mentions Fred Walton’s name any more than if he were dead, I’ve been afraid that the mere sight of his child might keep the old memory alive. Do you know, my son, a woman will condone exactly that failing in a man more quickly than any other? I suppose they lay most of the blame on the woman in the case. A high-strung creature like your sister wouldn’t for a moment consider herself a rival of a fallen woman, and it may be that the explanation of her never having shown interest in other men is that—”

“That she still cares for the rascal?” Dearing broke in, his face darkening.

“Yes, and that she still clings to some sort of faith in his constancy,” the General added. “You can’t crush love in a woman’s heart so long as she believes she is loved by a man who is longing for her and is kept away by adverse circumstances. You see, if our dear girl attributes Walton’s predicament to a simple act of low, impulsive passion, and believes that he loved her, and her alone, in a pure way, why—”

“I see, I see, and I am afraid you may be right,” Dearing said, bitterly. “And instead of curing her, the scoundrel’s absence is only making the thing worse. Did you tell her about Kenneth’s coming?”

“Yes, only an hour ago, and it seemed to me that she was rather pleased. She remarked that she was glad John Dilk had kept up the place so well, and that the flowers would gratify him. I really fancied that she was more pleased by the news than she was willing to show, for she changed the subject by offering to play for me.”

At this juncture a woman came round the house hurriedly, wiping her red, bare arms, and trying to adjust the damp dress she wore. It was Mrs. Chumley, the washerwoman. Her tawny hair was disarranged, and her fat, freckled face flushed with an excitement that was almost pleasurable.

“Oh, here you are, Doctor Wynn!” she panted. “I hain’t been told to come; in fact, them highfalutin’ neighbors of mine never let a body know anything they can get out of. But Mrs. Barry is having another of her falling spells. She was on the side porch brushing little Lionel’s head when I heard her cry out to Dora for help, and then she struck the floor of the kitchen with a thump you could have heard up here if you’d been listening.”

“Well, I’ll run down,” Dearing said to his uncle. “It may not be very serious. She is subject to such attacks.”