CHAPTER XV

IT was a delightfully cool and crisp morning for midsummer, and Doctor Dearing was on the lawn between his house and Galt’s, when he noticed that the railroad president had come out into his own grounds for a smoke. The two exchanged greetings through cordial signals, and Galt crossed over and joined his friend.

“What news from New York?” he asked, as he flicked the ashes from his cigar.

“They will be here to-morrow,” Dearing replied. “Madge has been homesick for fully two weeks; but Uncle Tom made her stay longer, hoping that she would become more interested in what was going on. They have had all sorts of attentions paid them, but he writes me that he has never been worried so much in his life over her. He says she enjoyed the first two weeks thoroughly, but lately she has been actually depressed. He tried everything imaginable, but home was what she wanted and would have.”

“And so they are coming?” Galt said, reflectively.

“Yes, they are on the way now. After all, what better could one ask for than a snug retreat like this in hot weather? Madge is fond of home. She doesn’t care for giddy social things among a lot of money-spending Yankees, and I admire her taste.”

“Yes, so do I,” Galt answered, and he smoked steadily, his eyes bent on the ground. .

“I have an unpleasant job on hand,” Dearing remarked. “I have delayed it several times, but I have decided to do it to-day and have it over with.”

“What is it?” Galt asked.

“It is a slight operation I have to perform on little Lionel.”

“Operation? Lionel?” Galt started, and then checked himself and stared blankly. “I didn’t know there was anything at all wrong with him.”

“Oh, it is only a slight and common thing with children,” Dearing explained. “Enlarged tonsils and adenoidal growth which must be removed. Outwardly the little chap is as sound as a dollar, and, so far, his wonderful strength has fought the thing off; but for a child so nervous as he is, and high strung and imaginative, it might, later on affect him seriously. Neglected cases have brought on permanent deafness and lung trouble. It is inherited, as a rule; you, yourself, had something of that sort, I think you told me.”

“Yes, yes,” Galt replied. Deep down within him something seemed to clutch his vitals. In the ear of his naked soul an accusing voice was sounding: “Inherited! Inherited!” The word rang out like a threat from the Infinite—from the vast mystery of life which had of late been so tenaciously closing around him. Even the pain Lionel was to undergo was the outcome of another’s sin.

“Oh, it is a very simple operation,” Dearing went on, “and in any ordinary case I shouldn’t give it a second thought; but, by George, I have become attached to that little chap. He is the pluckiest little man I ever knew. I had an exhibition of his grit one day that was ahead of anything I ever saw in a child. He had fallen, and his upper teeth had cut a deep gash in his tongue. They sent for me, and I saw that I’d have to take a stitch in it to close the ugly gap. It was a ticklish job, and I hardly saw how I could do it, for I didn’t want to use an anaesthetic. But I talked to him just as I would to a man, and he promised me he wouldn’t cry. He didn’t. I give you my word, old man, he didn’t whimper as the needle went through, and even while I was tying the thread; but I could see from his big, strained eyes that it hurt him like rips. A child with grit like that, Kenneth, is bound to make a stir in the world. I have noticed that you like him too, and I am glad you do. The truth is, darn you, you are taking my place! I’m jealous; he thinks you are a regular king. He is always talking about you.”

“When do you think you will do the—the operation?” Galt faltered, as he averted his shrinking glance from Dearing’s face.

“Why, I want to do it right off. It is like this: his mother knows it has to be done, and has agreed to leave it entirely to me; but she is very nervous over it. She has a vein of morbid superstition running through her. She fancies that some disaster is bound, sooner or later, to happen to him—in fact, as she has often put it to me, she hardly believes that a just God would allow such a sensitive and ambitious child to grow up to a full comprehension of his humiliation.

“I see—I see what you mean,” Galt managed to say, and his soul seemed to writhe anew as he stood trying to make his words sound casual.

“So I thought,” the doctor went on, “that I’d like, if possible, to get it over without her knowledge, or without her mother knowing of it. Nervous people standing around, half frightened out of their wits, at such a time, unsteady my hand and upset me generally. Now, as I have everything in readiness up-stairs, I think, when Lionel comes over this morning, as I’ve asked him to do, I’ll talk him into it. Young Doctor Beaman, my new assistant, is up-stairs sterilizing my instruments, and he will give the chloroform. You see, it would be a pleasant surprise and a relief to those doting women to suddenly find out that the thing they have made such a fuss about is over and no harm done.” Galt made no reply. He had seen a trim little figure darting across the lower end of the lawn, and saw a flash of golden tresses in the sunlight, and knew that Lionel was coming—and to what? Galt suppressed an inward groan. The unsuspecting child was bounding along, joyous and full of life, to the grim, inexplicable snare which had been set for him. Young as he was, he was to be asked to be firm and brave, that his little form might take on the semblance of death and submit to the knife, a thing at the thought of which even strong men had quailed. And what might, after all, be the as yet unrevealed outcome? One case in every ten thousand, at least, failed to survive the artificial sleep, owing to this or that overlooked internal defect. Would this child of malignant misfortune be that one?

Lionel drew near, sweeping the two men with merry eyes of welcome. There was an instant’s hesitation as to which to greet first, and then instinct seemed to swerve him toward Galt, his hand outstretched. With a queer throb of appreciation, the father took it and felt it pulsate in his clasp.

“Come here, Lionel, my boy,” Dearing said, with affected lightness of manner. “You remember what I said one day about those ugly lumps down there in your little throat which are going to get bigger and bigger, till after a while you can’t eat any jam and cake? You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“I remember.” Lionel passed his tapering hand over his white throat. “I can feel them when I swallow.”

“And that is why you have those bad dreams, and jump in your sleep, and think you are falling,” Dearing added, adroitly. “You know you promised to let me get them out.”

“Oh, not to-day!” the boy protested, throwing a wistful glance up at the unclouded sky. “I was going to build a really-really house out of the bricks at the barn. I have a stove-pipe for a smoke-stack. I’ll show you both. Come with me! Oh, it’s great!”

“Not to-day. Lionel, listen.” Dearing drew the boy close to him, and tenderly stroked back his hair from his fine brow. “Mamma, you know, is terribly nervous about it. Women are that way, aren’t they? Men and boys, like us, know better. She can hardly sleep at night for thinking about it—even a little thing like that. We can do it now, and I can run over and tell her you are sleeping like a kitten in my big bed up-stairs, and she and Granny will be so glad. It won’t hurt a bit, you know, for the medicine will make you sleep through it all.” A shadow of deep disappointment came into Lionel’s expressive eyes. The warm color of life in his face faded into tense gravity, and they saw him clasp his little hands and wring them undecidedly.

“And you think to-day is the best time?” he faltered, on the edge of refusal.

“The very best of all, Lionel,” Dearing said, gently. “You wouldn’t be afraid of me, would you?”

The child stared dumbly. To Galt’s accusing sense the world had never held a more desolate sentient being than this incipient repetition of himself. The child had proved that he knew no physical fear. To what, then, did he owe this evident clutch of horror? Could it be due to some psychic warning of approaching danger, or was the sensitive child telepathically governed by the morbid fears which, at that moment, were raging in the heart of his father?

“Come, that’s a good, nice boy!” Dearing urged. “I see you are going to be a brave little man.”

“I’m not afraid it will hurt,” Lionel faltered, “but I don’t like to be put to—to sleep.”

“But it must be so, my boy,” the doctor said. “Come on. Mamma will see us in a minute and smell a mouse.” For a moment yet the child stood undecided, his gaze alternately on the two faces before him. Suddenly, while they waited and his eyes were resting in strange appeal on Galt, he asked:

“Will you come, too?”

A shock as if from some unknown force went through the man addressed, but, seeing no alternative, he answered:

“If you wish it, yes, of course.”

“And you think I ought to—to do it?”

“Yes,” Galt nodded, his head rocking like that of an automaton. “The doctor knows best.”

“Well, then, I’ll go,” the boy sighed, with another wistful look over the lawn. “I’ll go.”

As they were entering the house, by some strange mandate of fate or instinct the boy again took his father’s hand, and Galt held it as they began to ascend the broad, walnut stairs. Argue as he would that the operation was only a most ordinary thing, to Galt’s morbid state of mind it assumed the shape of a tragedy staged and enacted by the very imps of darkness.

On the way up the boy tripped on the stair-carpeting and slipped and fell face downward. He was unhurt, but Galt raised him in his arms and bore him up the remainder of the steps into a big, light room off the corridor.

“Here we are, Doctor Beaman!” Dearing cheerily called out to a slender, beardless young man, who, with a towel in hand, was bending over some polished instruments on the bureau. “This is the little chap who never cries when he is hurt. He is a regular soldier, I tell you!”

“No, I’m not afraid,” the boy said, as he stood alone in the centre of the room; but still, as his father noted, there was a certain contradictory rigidity of his features which he had never remarked before.

Galt told himself that the child’s evident dread, vague as it was, was also an inheritance; for he recalled how he himself had once taken ether to have a slight operation performed. He had been a man in years at the time, and yet the effect on his mind as to what might be the outcome had been most depressing. That day, as he was doing now, he had looked upon the drug-induced sleep as a dangerous approach to death; and now, as then, he gravely feared that the tiny thread of reduced vitality might be torn asunder. He stood dumb with accusing horror as the two doctors hastily made their grewsome arrangements, such as securing warm water, fresh towels and sheets, which, in their very whiteness, suggested a shroud.

The noise made as they drew a narrow table across the resounding floor into the best light between the two windows jarred harshly on his tense nerves. These things were grim enough, but the wan isolation of the waiting child, as he stood with that war against fear and shame of fear going on in his great, fathomless eyes, so like those of his artist-mother—that appealing little figure, nameless, disowned among men, was stamped on the retina of Galt’s eye for the remainder of his life.

“Now, take off your waist and collar and necktie,” Dearing said to Lionel—“that will be enough. We’ll have you all right in a jiffy. You are not afraid now, are you?”

Galt’s heart sank like a plummet, for the child’s lips moved, but no sound issued. The little fellow turned his face away as he began to undress. He removed the flowing necktie, but his little fingers could not unfasten the stiff linen collar.

“Help him, Kenneth,” Dearing said. “My hands are full.”

Galt obeyed, his fingers coming into contact with the cold chin of the child and the soft flesh of his neck. He felt like snatching the boy from the damnable spot, as a mother might her young from the claws of a wild beast. Yet, outwardly calm, he drew the sleeves of the child’s blouse off and laid it on a chair.

“Now we are ready for you, young man,” Dearing said, lightly. “I see you are not afraid I’ll hurt you.”

“No, I know it won’t hurt,” Lionel said, “but—”

“Don’t you begin butting me,” Dearing laughed. “You are not a goat like the one that butted Grover Weston heels over head the other day.”

“If I shouldn’t wake up—I mean if I really shouldn’t, you know,” Lionel finished, with a faint effort to smile at the doctor’s jest, “won’t you please not tell my mother too quick? She gets frightened so easily, and, you see, if I didn’t wake up—if I never woke again—”

“Ah, come off!” Dearing laughed, as he turned to his assistant. “Doctor, this kid hints that we don’t know our business.”

“But if I didn’t wake, if I didn’t!” Lionel insisted, “you’d not scare her, would you? And—and”—his lower lip quivered—“wouldn’t you tell her that I wasn’t a bit afraid, and that I didn’t cry, and—wait! wait! Won’t you tell her that it didn’t hurt a single bit, not even a little teensy bit?”

“Yes, yes,” Dearing said, and, considerably taken aback, he stared at Galt rather than at the insistent speaker. “I’ll tell her you are the best boy in the world—the best, the bravest, and the sweetest. And God knows I’ll mean it,” he finished, in a lower tone to Galt. “I’ve seen thousands of kids, Kenneth, but this one gets nearer me than all the rest put together. I swear I am almost tempted to throw the darn job up. But, you see, it has to be done. Doctor,” turning to his assistant, “put him on the table, and I’ll tickle his nose and make him laugh. We’ll make him have the funniest dreams he ever had.”

Doctor Beaman went to the boy and held out his arms, and Lionel was lifted to the table and stretched out on the crisp sheet which had been spread over it. Just then, happening to look round, Dearing saw Galt’s face, and hastily stepped to his side. “My Lord!” he whispered, “I see this thing is going against you, old man. You are nauseated; you look faint. Many men are that way—young students sometimes have to give up surgery for that reason. It is nothing to be ashamed of. You like the little chap, and your sympathies are worked up, that’s all. But, really, I don’t think you ought to stay. I become nervous if others are, and I must have a free hand. Besides, if you were to keel over in a faint at an important moment I couldn’t look after you. You’d better run down-stairs and take a whiff of air. I’ll call you when it is over.”

“Is he going?—must he go?” Lionel asked, as he turned his head and saw Galt moving to the door. “Yes,” Dearing said, “but only down-stairs.”

“Oh,” the child exclaimed, regretfully, and averted his face, “I thought he could stay!”

Down into the still silence of the great hall Galt went. There was something heartlessly maddening in the calm, yellow sunlight on the grass, which he could see through the doorway. The birds in the trees, as they flitted about with twigs in their mouths and chirped in glee, seemed mocking voices of despair from the deliberate tyranny of the universe.

“God have mercy and spare him!” the man cried out from the depths of his agony. “Spare him, O God, spare him!”

Unconscious of the incongruous prayer which had fallen from his lips, he turned into the drawing-room, on the left of the hall, and sank into an easy-chair, covering his face with his stiff hands. Suddenly he heard a light step on the veranda, and, raising his eyes, he saw Dora standing in the hall, glancing wildly and excitedly about her. Possessed by the fear that she might call out, and thus make her presence known at that most crucial moment, he rose and hastened to her. She did not see him till he was close at her side, and then she turned and their eyes met.

“Where is Lionel—where is my child?” she panted.

He stood staring at her, unable to formulate a reply, and, brushing past him with an air of contempt, which he read all too clearly, she turned to the stairs, and started to ascend.

“Oh, you mustn’t—you really mustn’t!” he called out in protest, and he put a detaining hand on her arm.

Shrinking from his touch, she stared at him piteously.

“Then they really are doing it!” she cried. “They are up there operating on my child! I knew it when Doctor Beaman drove up, and Doctor Wynn came and asked Lionel to play over here.”

Galt made no denial. He stood beside her, swept out of himself by the sheer power of her astounding beauty, as he now beheld it for the first time since their parting. In his wildest stretch of fancy as to what the years might have brought her, he had not dreamed that she had become such a flower among women. There was a seductive maturity of intellect in her faultless face. The strange, appealing, and yet unreadable lights of genius were burning in her dark, mystic eyes. He stood before her with the smitten humility, the cringing shame, of a subject rebuked by his queen.

“Yes, I am sure of it!” she moaned, and she lowered her glorious head to the newel of the stairs and shuddered. “They are cutting my darling, and I can’t go to him. Doctor Wynn thought he’d spare my feelings—as if that counted.”

She suddenly looked him squarely in the face, and he shrank before the calm penetration of her stare. “We’ll never see him alive again,” she said, in a low, husky voice—“never again on earth!”

“Oh no, don’t say that!” he cried, finding his submerged voice in the agony produced by her suggestion. “God wouldn’t be so unmerciful—the child has harmed no one!”

“You speak of God,” she suddenly retorted, standing farther from him and drawing herself erect. “The word was a joke with you once,” she added, with a bitter sneer. “And I believed your puny theories, and blindly followed out the deductions you made with your nose in the earth during our vain dream of intellectual supremacy. But a change was wrought in me. Into my wretched darkness Lionel came, and I saw and was convinced. He was my living, pulsating, immortal link to the Infinite. But he is not for the earth. He is above it. God allowed Christ to suffer the pangs of a material existence for the salvation of the world, but He is too merciful to let my sensitive darling face what he would have to face. Lionel was sent to lift me, with his tiny hands, from the slough into which I had fallen, but his mission is over—oh, God, it is over! How can I bear it—how can I live without him? He is my life, my soul!” She covered her tortured face with her bloodless hands and remained still, save for the emotion which quivered through her hysterical frame.

Galt stood gazing at her for a moment, an almost uncontrollable yearning on him to clasp her in his arms and beg her forgiveness. He might have done so but for the fear of offending her. He glanced up the stairs. How still it was above! How like death! In his alarmed fancy he saw the two doctors standing aghast over the still, senseless form of his child. They had miscalculated! The physical examination had misled them; ether should have been the drug employed rather than chloroform!

Uncovering her face, Dora read his thoughts. She uttered a low, despairing wail, and they stood looking into each other’s eyes. There was a sound of sudden movement on the floor above. Some one was raising a window-sash at the top of the stairs.

“I am sweating like an ox!” they heard Dearing say; and—could they believe their ears?—he was actually laughing, and calling out to Lionel: “I told you you’d not know when it was done. Now, lie down and go to sleep. You are as sound as a silver dollar. It may sting just a little tiny bit when you swallow, but that will be gone by to-morrow. Go to sleep, and when you wake I’ll have that tricycle ready.”

“Thank God—thank God,” Dora exclaimed, “he is saved!”

She started up the stairs, and in desperation Galt caught her arm. “Wait one moment, Dora,” he implored, “I have something to say. You must hear me. I am—”

“Don’t stop me!” She shook his hand loose from her sleeve, and the haughty look of contempt he had noticed before rose into her fathomless eyes as she glanced back at him. “I am going up to him. I won’t waken him. I’ll be very quiet, but I must be near him.”

Standing at the foot of the stairs, he saw her ascend and disappear above. How beautiful she was! How rare and exquisite—how infinitely removed from her kind. And that was Dora—the Dora of all that was good and pure of his past, the guileless victim of all that was low, sordid, and unworthy within him!