CHAPTER XI

KENNETH GALT was now living the life of a recluse in his old home. The tendency to this sort of existence belongs to rare and exceptional temperaments. He kept assuring himself that it was to be only for a time, that when Sylvester returned with his stately niece he would crawl out of his morbid husk and bask in their genial hospitality. Of course, he told himself, this gloomy period of solitary self-accusation simply must not continue. He had taken steps which no living man could retrace in his decision in regard to Dora’s fate and the fate of her child, and there was nothing left for him to do but to try to forget his part in the tragedy. If he now feared that he might never again have complete peace of mind in regard to the girl’s condition, it was due to his present unwise proximity to her, and to his queer, almost ecstatic, pride in his son. Some men are coarse enough to have a contempt for the rights, social and otherwise, of their own children of illegitimate birth; but Kenneth Galt, in despising many of the laws of man, gave little Lionel the credit of being the product of a law he himself had made, and which, therefore, was worthy of consideration. In some States the declaration by a pair that they intend to live together constitutes a legal marriage, and it was with that broad view that Dora, blinded by faith in the superior knowledge of her lover, had unquestioningly delivered herself. He shuddered as the conviction struck into him that, under the same temptation that had swerved him from fidelity to their pact, she would have remained firm. She was scarcely more than a child when he deserted her. What, he asked himself, had she developed into? Dear-ing said she was more beautiful than ever, and as for her advance in strength of mind and soul, there were her pictures to witness. And as he looked at them day after day their subtle, creative depth grew upon him. He had made a fair financial success; but what he had done, he now told himself, was only what butchers and cobblers had accomplished. What she was doing, in her exile from her kind, was the work of deathless inspiration. Dearing had once aptly said that God used Evil as the fertilizer to the soil of Good, and if so, to carry the analogy further, Galt, in his craving for the praise of the world, and in his cowardly shrinking from Right, was the impure soil in which the flower of Dora’s genius was being nurtured. Yes, there was no denying it. Fate was playing a sardonic game with him. Dora, cloaked in suffering frailty, and championed by Truth and Spirit, was pitted against him, the carping, sourfaced apostle of man’s puny material rights; she would go on, and he would go on. What would be the goal, and which the ultimate winner? He had argued that the grave and nothingness comprised the pot of dross at the end of every life’s rainbow; but was he right? Could that mysterious, compelling sense of fatherhood; the thrill of boundless ecstasy, when he held Lionel in his arms; the awful brooding over the boy’s future; the infinite rebuke of the child’s fathomless eyes—could such things be mere functions of matter?

He was in his library when these reflections were passing through his brain, and his attention was attracted by children’s voices somewhere outside raised to a high pitch of anger. Stepping to a window, he looked out toward the house of his neighbor, Congressman Weston. He was just in time to see Weston’s son, Grover, climb over the low paling fence, and, with a loud and abusive threat, approach Lionel, who was shorter by a head.

“You said I shouldn’t say it again,” he cried, “but I do! She is not fit for anybody to go with. My mother wouldn’t notice her, and no other nice lady would. People don’t—they don’t go near her!”

Galt’s blood was shocked to stillness in his veins, and then, as if by reactionary process, it began to boil. He saw the erect figure of his son stand as if stunned for an instant, and then, like a young tiger, Lionel sprang at the other boy, his little hands balled. Galt heard the blows as they fell on young Weston’s fat cheeks, and he chuckled and ground his teeth in blended satisfaction and rage. He sprang through the open window to the grass, and hurriedly skirted a clump of boxwood just in time to see Grover Weston recovering from the unexpected onslaught and beginning to rain blow after blow upon Lionel’s white face. The contest was close, despite the inequality in ages and sizes; but the nameless scion of the Gaits, unconscious of his heritage of bravery, was unconquerable. He was there to fight, justly roused as he was, to his last breath. For one instant Grover tore himself from Lionel’s bear-like clutch, and stood glowering in sheer astonishment from his battered and bruised face.

“You little bastard, I’ll—” And he suddenly hurled his fist into Lionel’s face with all his force. It was a staggering blow, but Lionel met it without a whimper or the loss of a breath. He sprang again at his assailant, and, catching him around the neck with his strong left arm, he battered the other boy’s face with blow after blow.

“Hit him—that’s right, hit him, Lionel!” Galt cried out, in utter forgetfulness of his own incongruous position. “Beat his nasty face to a pulp while you’ve got him! If you don’t do it now, he’ll down you when he gets free. Give him his medicine, and give him a full dose. That’s the thing—trip him up!”

Without sparing an instant to look, but having recognized Galt’s voice, Lionel bent his wiry body toward accomplishing the trick advised. The two combatants swung back and forth, still bound together by Lionel’s clutch, till finally they went down side by side. And then ensued another struggle as to which should get on top.

“Throw your leg over!” Galt cried out. “Ah, that’s a beauty! Now, beat him till he takes it back!” Lionel needed no such advice. His little fists moved like the spokes of a turning wheel. A shrill howl of defeat rose from the conquered bully, and he uttered a prolonged scream of genuine alarm. Then emerged from a side door of the Weston house no less a personage than the Congressman himself, and he ran across the grass, taking flower-pots and beds of roses at long leaps.

Reaching the fighters, he grasped Lionel by the collar of his blouse and drew him off of his cowering son. And as he held him, squirming like a cat, he turned on Galt. “Damn it, man!” he cried, in breathless fury, “what do you mean by standing here and encouraging this brat to fight my boy?”

“Why, I only wanted to see fair play, that’s all,” Galt replied, a dangerous gleam in his eyes. “I happened to hear your big bully of a son dare the little one to fight him, and he brought it on by insulting the little fellow’s mother. God bless him, he didn’t need my advice. He could whip two such whelps as yours, and never half try! He hasn’t a cowardly bone in his body! He was all there!”

“Well, it seems to me, you are in a pretty business!” Weston retorted, white with rage.

“I might be even more active than I am, Weston,” Galt said, with cold significance, “and if you are not satisfied with the part I have taken, you only have to say the word. You know that well enough.”

The Congressman was taken aback. There was something in the unruffled tone and meaning stare of his neighbor’s eyes that perplexed and quelled him. He now turned upon his sniffling offspring.

“You go in the house!” he said, angrily. “You are always picking at some child under your size. I have noticed it.” Weston was a politician before anything else, and the thought of turning against him a man who controlled as many votes as did the president of the greatest railway in the State was not particularly inviting.

“I didn’t mean to offend you, Galt,” he said, as his boy limped away, still mopping his eyes with his fists. “I reckon I got hot because it was my own flesh and blood. Of course, it was natural for you to sympathize with the smaller of the two.”

“That’s the way I felt about it, Weston,” Galt said, staring coldly at the speaker. “I have nothing at all to apologize for.”

“Well, I’ll see that Grover behaves himself better in future,” the Congressman said, still with his political eye open to advantages. “Of course, it would be natural for a child like mine to pick up remarks floating about among older people in regard to the mother of—”

“We’ll let that drop, too, Weston!” Galt snarled. His lip quivered ominously as he glanced significantly at Lionel, who was listening attentively, the blood from a bruised nose trickling down to his chin and neck.

“All right, I understand,” the Congressman said; and he moved awkwardly away, wondering what manner of man the frigid and reticent Galt was, after all.

“I suppose I’ve got myself in a pretty mess,” Lionel remarked, ruefully, when Weston had left him and his father together. “My mother has made me promise time after time not to fight; but, you see, I did.”

“Yes, I see you did,” Galt responded, a lump of queer approval in his throat.

“I couldn’t help it—I really couldn’t,” Lionel said, with a rueful look at his hands, which were covered with the blood of his antagonist. “I must be a bad boy; but oh, I couldn’t let him say my beautiful mother—my sweet mo—” He choked up. “I couldn’t—I simply couldn’t! She is so sweet and good! I couldn’t help it!”

“Of course not, but don’t worry about it,” Galt said, sunken to depths of shame he had never reached before. “You must try to forget it—forget the whole thing.”

“I am afraid my mother will find out about it, and, you know, she mustn’t,” the child said, his great eyes filled with concern. “She would ask what the boy said, and Granny says she must never be told nasty things children say to me. Such things make her sad and keep her from painting. She must not find out about this—this fight.”

“Well, she really need not know,” Galt said, as the heat of his shame mantled his face and brow.

“But she will,” Lionel insisted, gloomily, “for she is sure to see this blood on me. It is on my neck, and running down under my collar. Do you suppose I could get it off without soiling my waist?”

Galt unbuttoned the broad white collar, and drew it away from the child’s neck.

“It hasn’t touched it yet,” he said. “Wait a moment!” And he adroitly, and yet with oddly quivering fingers, inserted his own handkerchief between the collar and the trickling blood. “Now come into the house, and I’ll fix you up. Your clothes are a little rumpled, but when I have washed the blood off no one need know about your fight.”

“Oh, that would be a fine idea!” Lionel exclaimed, joyfully. He put his little hand into his father’s, and together they went into the house. “She won’t know, will she?”

“No, she need not know,” Galt said aloud; but in his thought he added: “Lionel, you are a little gentleman. You are a living proof that blood will tell.”

The lonely man’s heart was warmed by an inward glow of pride which was quickly succeeded by an icy breath of despair that seemed to blow over him. This, he reflected, was only the introductory part of the vast soul tragedy he himself had put on the stage of existence. The trials he had encountered through young manhood were naught to those foreshadowed in the unsuspecting and trusting face at his side.

“Here is the bath,” he said, as they reached the white-tiled room on the second floor. “Now go in, and be careful to take off your blouse without getting it bloody. If we are going to work this thing we must work it right. Perhaps you’d better strip and bathe all over. It will make you feel good anyway, after that fierce round of yours. Let me fill the tub.”

“I think I’d better, maybe,” acquiesced Lionel. “Well, be careful,” Galt warned him, as he turned on the two streams of water and tested the blending temperature.

“I really can’t unbutton this collar behind,” Lionel said, with a touch of manly shame over the confession. “My mother always does it. She has never let me learn. I am big enough, gracious knows!”

“Wait, let me undress you!” the father said, as he hastily dried his hands.

“I wish you would, if you’ll be so kind,” Lionel said, in a tone of reliance, which somehow reached an hitherto untouched fount of feeling in the breast of his companion.

As the child stood before him, Galt, with throbbing pulse and reverent fingers, found himself doing the duties of a mother to his offspring. The flowing necktie and collar were removed; next the blouse and underbody. Then a vision of inexplicable and awe-inspiring beauty greeted the senses of the beholder, as the symetrical form, a veritable poem in flesh and blood, stood bared to his sight. He laid the still unsoiled garments on a chair, and lifted the boy in his arms to put him into the water. The warm, smooth cheek touched his own; a tingling throb of paternity—of starving, yearning fatherhood—shot through him as he held the boy across his arms like a baby and lowered him slowly to the water.

“Look out, I’ll duck you!” he said, jestingly, and the boy replied with a ringing laugh which held no hint of fear.

In the water the child lay with his face smilingly upturned.

“Ugh!” he exclaimed, “it feels good. This tub is big enough to swim in—a little bit, anyway. Will you show me how to swim some day?”

“Yes, my son—yes, Lionel, some day, perhaps.”

“In deep water—in a really-really stream that fish swim in?”

“Yes, Lionel.”

“Oh, that would be so nice! Couldn’t we catch fish, too?”

“I think so—yes, of course, some day, perhaps.”

But would those delights, conceived for the first time to-day, ever be realized? Galt asked himself, as keen pangs from some unknown source darted through him. Sick unto death of the vapid adulation of narrow men and women, would he ever experience the transcendental joy of intimate and daily companionship with this human wonder, such as other fathers enjoyed with their sons?

No, the question was already answered. The bliss—the queer, Heaven-tending bliss of the present moment—was merely stolen. Was it likely that any son at all would ever come to him—a son which he could father in the broadest, holiest sense? No; and he started and fell to quivering superstitiously. Even if he were married and another son was given to him in lawful wedlock, could he dare—in the face of Infinite Justice—dare to put that child forward, acknowledge that child as his own, while deserting, ignoring, denying Lionel?

“Great God!” his quaking soul cried out in sheer anguish. “Lionel, my son; my boy, made in the image of her and me, he who trusts and so innocently loves me! And yet it must be. Fate has ordained it. I have his faith and love now, but later he may turn on me like an avenging angel.”

“My mother soaps me all over before I get out. Must I do it?” the child asked, as his merry, haunting eyes smiled up through their long, wet lashes.

“It won’t be necessary this time,” Galt said. “The blood is entirely washed off. Get out and let me dry you with this big towel.”

“Ugh! it is cold.” The boy shuddered, as he stood out on the rug and allowed himself to be enveloped from head to foot in the big Turkish towel. He was soon dry, and as he stood, his soft skin flushed as delicately pink as the inside of a sea-shell, Galt, making many an awkward mistake, proceeded to dress him.

“Now let me brush your hair; at least, I know how to do that, young man,” the father said, “but I think it ought to be wet more.”

“Oh no; it is too wet now!” the child declared, as he shook his locks, the ends of which had been under water. “My mother combs it dry.”

“There, how will that do, Miss Particular?” Galt asked as he led the child to a large mirror.

“I don’t know; it looks funny, somehow”—Lionel made a grimace at his image in the glass—“but it will have to do. I’d better hurry home. They might miss me, and find out about the fight. I like you for that.”

“For what?” Galt followed him to the door, and as they started across the grass toward the cottage he felt Lionel timidly reaching out for his hand. He had evidently not heard Galt’s half-whispered question.

“What was it you said you liked me for?” his father repeated, taking the little hand and holding it tenderly.

“Oh, because you wanted me to whip him. He’s rich and has everything, and Granny says his father is a great man. I suppose if you liked Grover the best you would have told him how to fight.”

“You are smaller than he,” Galt said, lamely.

“Then it wasn’t because you like me?” Galt felt the little hand stiffen, as if some impulse of dormant confidence in the tiny palm had forsaken it.

“Yes, it was because I like you,” Galt said, warmly, and, obeying a desire he refused to combat, he raised the boy in his arms and held him tight against his breast. “If he had hurt you, Lionel, I don’t know what I should have done.”

“Then I’m glad I made him bellow,” the boy said, with a little laugh, as he got down to the ground. “Something had to be done, you know, after he said that about my mother.”

Yes, something had to be done, Kenneth Galt told his tortured inner self, as he stood and watched the boy trip lightly homeward—some one had to fight and struggle and smart as a consequence of the wrong that had been done, and the duty had fallen on a little child. Through the slow, weary years of perhaps a long life the fight just beginning would go on, and the chief cause of it must shirk it all. Galt groaned, and clinched his hands, and turned back to his desolate home. He had contended that there was no such thing as spirit, and yet this remorse raging like a tempest within him certainly had naught to do with matter. He had argued that man, bom of the flesh, could gratify all animal desires and suffer no ill effects except those excited by physical fear; but there was nothing to fear in this case. Dora’s lips were sealed; no one else knew the truth, or ever would know, and yet the very skies above seemed turning to adamant and closing in around him.