CHAPTER VII

WHEN Dearing had gone blithely down the street, Galt strode up and down the veranda, hot and cold, by turns, with fury and remorse.

“To think that any man could lecture me like that, while I have had to stand and take it like a sneaking coward!” he fumed. “I am not a jot worse than thousands of others who were led astray by passion. I had to do as I did. I couldn’t give up what I had sought so long, and fought for so fiercely. She knew it; she admitted there was nothing else to do. All these years she has not once reproached me, and she has kept her word—the secret is ours. Wynn says she has advanced, that her solitary life has only ripened her beauty of mind and body, and she is the mother of my child—the little fellow I held in my arms the other day, the outcome of a marriage as sacred under high heaven as any ever solemnized at an altar.” He groaned as he remembered how he and Dora used to boast that their superior mental attitude, and the height and glory of their troth, as compared to the dull code of the vulgar herd, had made them a law unto themselves. He had sown the seeds of such logic in the rich soil of her trusting, girlish inexperience. He had led her, as a candle leads a moth, on to the yawning brink of the abyss; he had closed her gentle mouth, even as it uttered words of love and fidelity, and then, by sheer brute force, he had flung her down to darkness and despair. That was the truth he had not fully allowed himself to face in those years of gratified ambition which had followed, and it was the truth that Wynn Dearing, with his maddening manliness, had hurled into his face to-day. And Dearing had argued that the end was not yet—that the earthly struggle wasn’t all there was to man—that to eat, procreate, and live a certain span of years was not the solution of the problem of existence. How utterly absurd! And yet what was his present ailment? It was not of the body, as he had well known when Dearing was speaking of his condition; and since it was not so, what was it? What force known to science had kindled the raging fires within him, made him desire to shim his own kind, and hate the success which, like a hellish will-o’-the-wisp, had once blazed over him. There was nothing to do, of course, but to continue the fight on his own lines, by the light of the reason born in him. Of course, a man could be sad and gloomy over an old love affair if he continued to brood over it—if he continued to allow it to dominate him. Dora had accepted the inevitable, as any sensible woman would have done, and it was left for him to go on his way unmolested—free! General Sylvester wanted him to marry his niece; she was his social equal, and in time would be as well off in point of fortune. She was a beautiful, imposing, gracious woman, and would make a wife any man would be proud of. Yes, his duty to himself was clear, and dreams like young Dearing indulged in would have to be banished for ever and ever. Yes, he would marry Margaret Dearing, and he and she would travel the world over. He was ready to resign the active management of the big enterprise he had created, and he would be free in every sense. Yes, he would be free—just as other men were free.

He had stepped down on the grass of the lawn and strolled round the house. Shouts and peals of childish laughter came from the yard adjoining his on the left, and on the grass, engaged in a joyous game of hide-and-seek, twoscore boys and girls ran merrily about. Galt walked farther down toward the lower boundary of his premises, seeking with his eyes an object he would not have confessed to himself that he desired to see—the child Dearing had mentioned. Now he saw the boy, but he was not within the Dearing grounds; Lionel had crossed over to Galt’s land, and stood shielded from the view of the merrymakers by a hedge of boxwood. Galt saw him peering cautiously over the hedge, now stealthily lowering his head, now eagerly raising it. He was neatly dressed in white, as when his father had first seen him; there was a jaunty grace about the flowing necktie and low, broad collar which could have been accounted for only by the taste of an artistic mother. He held his broad-brimmed straw hat in his hand, and the breeze swept his tresses back from his fine brow.

Why he did it Galt could not have explained, especially on top of the resolutions just formed, but he went down to him. Lionel’s face was averted, and he was not aware of his father’s approach till his attention was attracted by Galt’s step on the grass. Then he started, flushed, and with alarm written in his face he made a movement as if to run away.

“Surely you are not afraid of me?” Galt said, reassuringly, and in a tone which, for its unwonted gentleness, was a surprise to himself.

“I have no right to be on your land,” the boy faltered, his great, startled eyes downcast. “Doctor Wynn said I must never leave his place. But there wasn’t any fence, and I—I saw the children playing over there, and I wanted to get a little closer.”

“Well, you needn’t be afraid; you have done no wrong,” Galt heard himself saying, as undefined pangs and twinges shot through him. “You may come here whenever you wish.”

“Oh, may I? Thank you. You are very good, and I thought you’d be angry.”

“Angry? How absurd! What in the world could cause you to think I could be angry with a harmless little chap like you?”

“I don’t know; but I did. I was sure at first that you liked me. You know the day I almost went to sleep in your lap, when the pretty lady and the old gentleman were at the tea-table? Well, I did think you liked me then, at first, you know, but when the doctor came and said it was late for children to be out, you put me down quick, and got red in the face, and never looked at me again.”

There was a rustic bench near by, and Galt sat down on it. He found himself unable to formulate a satisfactory reply, and he was going to let the remark pass unnoticed, but Lionel came forward now more confidently, and sat on the end of the bench. A thrill akin to that which he had felt when he discovered the identity of the child passed over Galt. There was an indescribable something in the boy’s great eyes so like his mother’s, in the artistic slenderness of his hands, in his exquisite profile, that dug deep into the soul of the man who sat there self-convicted of the crime of wilful desertion.

“Yes, I’m sure something was wrong that day,” Lionel said, tentatively. “I can always ‘tell when mamma is angry at me, and I knew you were, for you didn’t say good-bye. The others didn’t, either, but I didn’t care for them. I like Doctor Wynn, and I like you, but that is all, except Granny and my mother.”

“You like me, and why?” Galt questioned, almost under his breath.

“Oh, I don’t know, but I do. I did when I first saw you looking up at me in that tree, and then when you held me in your lap. I wanted to go to sleep there, it felt so good—your arms are so fine and strong. Doctor Wynn says your father was a great soldier, and that you have his sword and a picture of him. Oh, I should love to see them! I’d like to be a soldier. Some day, if I am a good boy, will you let me see the sword?”

“Why, yes, you may come—now, if you wish.”

“You are joking, aren’t you?” Lionel asked, in surprise.

“No, I’m in earnest. Come on!”

“Really, do you mean it?”

“Why, of course. Come on!”

They started toward the house side by side. Suddenly Lionel remarked, timidly, “You haven’t said you like me yet, but I suppose you do, or you wouldn’t let me go with you in your house.”

“Yes, I like you—of course I do,” Galt answered, lamely and abashed.

“Very, very much, or just a little—which is it?”

“As much as any boy I ever met; there, will that do you, little man?”

“Have you met many? That’s the question,” the boy laughed out, impulsively, and then his face settled into gravity as he eagerly waited.

“Yes, a great many,” Galt answered, as he wondered over the child’s peculiar persistency. Dearing had said he was supersensitive. Could the trait be an unremovable birth-mark of the mother’s unhappiness when overwhelmed with the sense of utter desertion? If so, then there was physical proof of the Biblical statement that the sins of fathers were visited on their children. Galt shuddered and avoided the appealing face upturned to his. Again he heard the musical voice, so like an echo out of the dreamy, accusing past, rising to him.

“If you did like me, it looks like you would take my hand. I wish you would.”

“There!” Galt forced a laugh as he took the soft, pulsating little fingers into his. As flesh touched flesh a thrill as of new life throbbed and bounded through him, and again he had the yearning to clasp his son to his breast as a woman would have done. As it was, no lover could have felt the touch of the hand of his mistress with keener, more awed delight. At one time, in a talk with Bearing, Galt had argued that even parental love was merely a physical function, like hunger for food, but that had been before this perplexing awakening. They had reached the front steps of the great house. An impulse he could not have analyzed led Galt to think of lifting the boy from the ground to the floor of the veranda, and he held out his arms. The child Sprang into them; his little arm went round the man’s neck, and thus the steps were ascended. Was it a lingering pressure of affection in Lionel’s arm that kept Galt from lowering him to the carpet when they had entered the great hall? He was sure he would put him down as they entered the library, but again he refrained, for the magnitude and splendor of the room had actually startled the child.

“Oh!” Lionel exclaimed, his eyes first on the great crystal chandelier, then on the gilt-framed pier-glass reaching from the floor to the ceiling.

“Why, what is the matter?” Galt asked, holding him tighter.

“I did not know it was so beautiful, so grand!” Lionel cried. “This room alone is as large as our whole house. Ah! is that the sword your father killed men with? And will you please let me see it? Could I hold it, just once?”

“I am afraid it is too heavy for you,” Galt said, as he reached for the heavy sabre in its carved brass scabbard and took it down from a hook under his father’s portrait. “It wasn’t made for little hands like yours. You’d have to grow a lot before you could use it.”

Lionel stood down on the floor as the sword was put into his hands. He made a valiant effort to flourish the unwieldy blade as he thrust and lunged at an imaginary enemy. “Boom! Boom!” he cried, his eyes flashing, “Boom! t-r-r-r boom!”

“Oh, you’ve killed them—they are as dead as doornails!” Galt laughed, impulsively. “Now your men will have a pretty time picking all those corpses up in an ambulance.”

“Is that your father?” the boy leaned on the sabre to ask, as he looked up at the portrait of the elder Galt.

“Yes. Does he look like me?” Galt answered.

“A little bit, maybe”—the child had his wise-looking head tilted to one side as he had seen his mother stand in criticising one of her pictures—“but I don’t like it much. It is full of cracks, and so—dauby.”

“‘Dauby’? Where in the world could you have heard that word?”

“Oh, my mother says it often when she doesn’t like one of her pictures.”

The child was now absorbed in the bronze dragon head supporting the ivory handle of the sword.

“I see; perhaps you’d like pictures of children better,” Galt said, and he took up one of the water-color sketches he had shown to Dearing. “Here, look at this little boy.”

“Oh yes, that’s me! Mamma says it is hard to keep them from all looking alike. Sometimes I’m a boy—then I’m a girl, and even a baby—but they are all me. Mamma says I’m her bread and butter. But I don’t like to sit for them; it is too tiresome to stay still so long. Sometimes she lets me play in the yard, and watches me through the window; then I don’t mind it.”

“Do you mean to say”—Galt was grave, and his hands trembled as he picked up another picture, this time the sketch of a boy riding on a spring-board supported in the middle by a saw-horse, and fastened at the end to a crude rail-fence—“do you mean that your mother really painted this?” And as he spoke Galt recalled Dearing’s evident recognition of the work, and his prompt reservation in regard to it.

“Yes, and stacks and stacks of others,” the child said, abstractedly, his little fingers toying with the handle of the sword again. “Is it sharp enough to cut a man’s head off?”

“Yes, yes.” Galt sat down in a chair, his mind now full of startled memories—Dora’s wonderful artistic taste, her early love of music, books on art, and the drawings which she had spoken of timidly, but never shown him. And this was her work—the pictures he had seen groups of people admiring, as they hung in the shop-window in Atlanta—and which he knew was the work of actual creative genius. And it had come from the spirit he had crushed, exiled from humanity, and left destitute! His ambition had won its sordid goal through the darkness of damnation, while hers—unconscious of its own deity—was growing toward the outer light, like a flower in a dungeon. And this was his child and hers! Compounded in the winsome personality of the boy was all that was good and noble of her, all that was bad and despicable of him, and Dearing would say that it was not going to end with the temporary breath which had been blown into the little form. The child was to live on and perpetuate the qualities he had inherited. He was like a little God now, in the likeness of the child-mother who had borne him, but ‘the time might come when he would take on to himself the cringing, soul-lashed features of his father—be guilty of the same crimes against virtue and eternal justice, and fight the same cruel battle between spirit and flesh, between the forces of light and darkness. God forbid! “God!”—had he actually used the word? Was there such a Being? He had sneered at the thought all his life, but now the bare possibility cowed him.

Lionel, astride the sheathed sword, now half boy, half prancing steed, came to him. “Whoa! Can’t you stand still, sir? Watch him kick up! Look out!” as he pirouetted about, “he’ll get you with his hind heels! He wants to run; something has scared him! Look how he’s trembling!”

Galt laid his hand on the sunny curls, and drew the excited little horseman to him, gazing into the dreamy, fathomless eyes so accusingly like Dora’s.

“I think I’d better hold you both,” he said, in an attempt at playfulness. He had heard sordid business men who had children say that there was no love like that of a man for an eldest son. This was his eldest son, if not by the writs of man, by the mandates of something infinitely higher.

“I wish I had a really-really horse,” Lionel ran on, plaintively. “Grover Weston has a pony, but mamma says he can have everything because his father is rich. I don’t like him. He threw my ball back over the fence the other day and called me names. I don’t know what he meant by them, but my mother said they were not nice, and told me not to remember them. I’ve already forgot what he said. It was bas—bast—How funny! I knew it once.”

Galt’s inner being seemed to shrink and wither. Already the world’s persecution of the innocent had begun, and the sensitive, poetic, imaginative child would grow up to a full realization of his social shame. Nurtured in gentleness and refinement, he was yet to have the scales which hid his humiliation tom from his sight, and then he would see; he would understand; he would know who to blame. And he would blame, poignantly and justly. The time might come when this tender sprig of himself, grown strong, and yet galled by his burden, might face his father as the cowardly churl who had stamped the unbearable stigma upon him and her. This child might live to curse him and spit upon him. The world might forgive in the glow of his power and gold, but the one he yearned for now, as he had yearned for nothing before, would go over his infamous past as minutely as an ant over the bark of a rotten tree.

The child had put down the weapon of his honored ancestor, and now stood with his little hands on the knee of his father, another side of his personality uppermost.

“I don’t care,” he said, in his charmingly premature way, “if Grover Weston doesn’t like me, because you say you do. He’s nothing but a mean, horrid boy, while you are—”

“I am what, Lionel?” Galt’s voice was stayed by huskiness in his throat, and he put an unsteady arm round the little form, resisting the yearning to clasp him tightly.

“Oh, you are everything—everything in the world. Doctor Wynn says you are very, very rich, and that you love all little boys—that’s why I jumped that day. I wouldn’t be afraid to jump from a higher tree than that if you were there to catch me. Oh, I like to have people love me! I like it better than anything.”

“And yet you do want other things?” Galt said, tentatively.

“Oh yes.” The child, guided by the gentle pressure round him, slid between his father’s knees, and, putting his arm confidingly about Galt’s neck, he drew himself to a seat in the man’s lap, and laughed. “Mamma says I want the whole earth. I want a bicycle; and a gun; and a pony; and roller-skates; and—”

“You certainly do want a few things!” Galt tried to jest. “But we can’t have everything, you know, in this life.”

“Not unless we are rich; and we are very poor at our house; but when the expressman brings the money for the pictures we are very glad. Then we have a good dinner. Last time Granny got a dress, and I got several suits like this one. Mother says some day we may go away off to another country where I’ll have children to play with. I think that would be nicer than having toys.”

“Yes, yes,” Galt responded, from the depths of a new and rasping remorse, as the boy reclined on his arm and stretched out with a delicious sigh.

“You said you liked me,” the child said, quite seriously, “but you never have kissed me—not once.”

“But men don’t kiss little boys,” Galt answered, with a start.

“Oh, yes they do; Doctor Wynn has often kissed me, and hugged me, so!” Lionel put his arms round Galt’s neck, pressed his soft, warm cheek against the cold, rough one, and kissed it, once, twice, three times.

“And I’ve seen Mr. Weston kiss Grover when he runs to meet him at the gate.”

“We’ve known each other such a short time,” Galt apologized, lamely, as the hot blood coursed through his veins, and the child released him and lay staring at him from his great, reproachful eyes.

“I don’t care, you’d kiss me if you loved me as—as much as I do you. Won’t you, just one time? Then I’ll go.”

“Yes, I’ll kiss you—there!” Galt said, as he folded the child in his arms and pressed his lips to the warm, pink brow.

“I had to make you!” Lionel said, as he stood down on the floor. “That is the way I do when my mother is angry. I keep begging her to kiss me till she does; then she laughs and hugs me tighter than ever. Granny says I know how to manage a woman. Good-bye. I thank you for bringing me to your house. Now I am sure you like little boys.”

After the child had gone, Galt walked up and down the veranda, his mind upon problems he had never faced before. He was interrupted by General Sylvester, who hurried across the lawn to speak to him on his way down-town.

“I’ve only a bare minute,” the old gentleman said. “I suppose you know we are off for New York. You’d better come along and help us have a good time.”

“I am afraid Wynn would hardly prescribe a remedy so strenuous as that in my case,” Galt returned. “You see, I was tied down there recently, and got enough of it for a man who is said to need quiet and a change of scene.”

“That’s true,” Sylvester admitted. “It was only because we’d like to have you so much that I mentioned it. But we’ll take you in hand when we get back. So you be ready, young man.”

When the old gentleman had walked away, with his springy, boyish step, and the gate-latch had clicked behind him, Galt went back into the library. He gathered up Dora’s pictures with reverent hands, and took them up to his bedroom. He arranged them in good positions, and stood looking at them steadily.

“Yes, she’s in them all,” he said. “Her weeping soul speaks out from every one. She has done those things in spite of the disgrace and misery that my cowardice has heaped upon her. What must she think of me—of me, whom she once placed upon such a pinnacle? Her own purity created the place for me in her heart which I once held, and from which her contempt has long since banished me. I’ve lost her. I owe her the world, and can pay her nothing—absolutely nothing!”

His attention was attracted to the children on Weston’s lawn. They were loudly laughing, shouting, and singing. He went to the window and looked out.

“‘King William was King James’s son,’” they sang, as hand in hand they circled round on the grass. Galt’s eyes rested only momentarily on the players. He was searching for some one else. Finally he espied the object of his quest. Lionel—his son, a full-blooded Galt, and, for aught he knew, the flower of the race—was hidden behind a tree peering out like a half-starved urchin at a window filled with sweets. He stood erect and motionless, as if hardly daring to breathe lest he be seen by his social superiors.

“He is waking!” Galt exclaimed. “He is wondering and pondering. The time will come when he will understand and remember, perhaps, that I kissed him with the lips of Judas—I, who should have been his mainstay and supporter—kissed him as he lay in my arms, conscious of my love and ignorant of my weakness. No, I can’t help him. Drawn to him as I am by every fibre of my being, still I must deny him. The man does not live who, in the same circumstances, could act otherwise. I haven’t the moral backbone. I simply haven’t.”

Leaving the window, and sinking into a chair, Galt bent forward, locked his cold hands together, and wrung them as a man might in the agony of death.