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 ofme?” 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, Ididthink 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 from from his sight, and then he would see; he would understand; he would know who to blame. And hewouldblame, 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 Westondoesn'tlike 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 youdowant 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 afewthings!” 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.
EVERYTHING is as merry as a marriage bell, and the goose hangs high!” Stephen Whipple quoted, with a hearty laugh, as he and Fred Walton sat on the old man's veranda after breakfast one Sunday morning. “And I'm a-thinking, my boy, that the suspended fowl is none other than our fellow citizen, J. B. Thorp. He is as mad as a wet hen. He had us plumb down, and, like the bully he is, was pounding the blood out of us with no thought of letting up. Then the rest of the hungry pack of wolves piled on top, and began to get in their work. I was so crazy I didn't know my hat from a hole in the ground. Then your keen young brain turned the trick, and here we are. Dick has got the dandiest retail store that ever saw the light in a Western town, and it is literally packed and jammed with customers.”
“I am certainly glad it turned out as it did,” Fred replied. “It has been a great thing for Dick.”
The merchant was silent for a moment, and Fred saw him twirling his heavy thumbs as he often did when embarrassed. Finally, after clearing his throat and rather awkwardly crossing his legs, he said:
“I've got a silly sort of confession to make, Fred. I reckon nobody is, on the outside, exactly what they are within, and I've got my faults like other fellows. On the outside I'm as strait-laced as a hard-shell Baptist, but I've always hankered after a periodical lark of some sort. Once in a great while I've taken trips just for the pure fun' of the thing. During the Centennial at Philadelphia I laid down everything and went. I stayed a week, put up at a fine hotel, and lived as high as I knew how. I saw all that there was to see. Then I struck work at one time and went to the Mardi-gras at New Orleans, and then another time I hiked off to the Cotton Exposition in Atlanta. I don't know why I'm that way, but I am. It is my periodical spree, I reckon. You remember I told you about my boy—the little fellow that passed away?”
“Yes, I remember,” Walton returned, sympathetically.
“Well, as he was growing up, I used to love, above all things, for just me and him—just me and him, you know—to go to places together. Sometimes it was a ride in the country, or fishing, or to do something a little boy would like, but I always sort o' kept the thought before me that when he'd reached man's estate, me and him would do some sure-enough 'bumming,' as I used to call it—bumming to New York City, where we could take in all the sights like two boys. It may sound silly, but that was one thing I always had to look forward to; but then he took sick and died, and it was out of the question. Since then I've never counted on the New York trip.”
“It was sad,” Walton said, gently. “It is a pity he couldn't have been spared to you.”
“Yes, but he wasn't,” the merchant sighed. “He wasn't, and this is what I started out to say: Of all folks I have ever known since my boy's death, you come nearer filling his place than any one else. No”—and Whipple held up his broad hand—“don't stop me! I don't know how it was, but in our first talk that night you kind o' got hold of my heart-strings. I pitied you as I had never pitied a young fellow before because of the fight you were making. I got interested in it, and determined to help you win. I prayed for you. You were on my mind the last thing at night and the first thing in the morning. You'd said you wanted the money just to pay off the debt you owed your father, and I would have planked the cash right down many and many a time if I hadn't been afraid I'd spoil a thing that seemed to be of God's own making. I used to sneak and look at your bank-account. That was mean, but I couldn't help it. I saw your savings piling up week after week until I forced that five hundred on you, and knew you had three thousand in hand. Then, all at once, it sunk to nothing. Fred, my boy, I went home that night, hugged the old lady, and cried. You needn't tell me what became of that money. It went to your old daddy as fast as the trains could take it.”
“Yes, I paid him, Mr. Whipple. I am still behind two thousand, with the interest at the rate he charges his customers.”
“He's a money-lender then?” Whipple said, lifting his brows.
“Yes, he—” Fred hesitated a moment, and then finished, “He is a banker, in a small town in—”
“Don't—don't tell me!” Whipple broke in. “Don't tell me a thing about him! I'm human to the core. I don't know why it is, but for a long time I have been jealous of his blood claim on you. He throwed you off, and I want to think that I have some sort of right to you. He never loved you as a natural father should, or he couldn't have driven you to the wall like he did, forcing you to live off among strangers, away from home-ties and all the associations of your young days. Oh, I know I have your good-will, my boy! I heard about the way you stood up for me during the strike my men tried to get up. One of the clerks told me of the nightmeeting that was held, and how you sprang into their midst like an infuriated tiger, and of the ringing speech you made about me and my fair treatment of them, and how they finally begged you not to report the matter and slunk away like egg-sucking dogs. You never would have mentioned it, but it got to me—it got to me.”
“Oh, I only did my duty, Mr. Whipple.” Fred's face was dyed red. “I thought they were unreasonable, and could not help putting in a word of protest.”
“You were the only one in the entire bunch that did it, all the same,” Whipple said, huskily. “Oh, I know they poke fun at me and laugh at my peculiarities, but I don't believe you ever did. I am coarse and awkward—I don't have to be told that; but I try to be genuine and fair to all mankind. But I've got away off from what I started to say. Fred, there never was a time when I felt more like one of my periodical sprees than right now. I have never been to New York, and I can't get over wanting to take it in. My wife don't care to go. She says such trips tire the very life out of her. She is younger than I am in years, but she ain't in spirit. I want you to lay off work for a week and go bumming with me. Somehow, I feel like if you'll go, it will be as if my own boy had lived and grown up and was taking the trip with me. I want to go by New Orleans and spend a day there, and then on to the East, through Georgia, Tennessee, and Virginia. What do you say, Fred? The expense is nothing. I want to celebrate. For a week I want to be a new man, and have a high old time.”
“I should like it very much,” Walton said, “if you really want me to go.”
“Well, pack your grip, and we'll be off day after tomorrow. We'll tell the boys that we have to see our New York importers and our sugar men in New Orleans, and they can guess the rest. Now, I'm going up to tell the old lady that it is settled, and she can sleep or do any other old thing she likes till, we come back. We'll have a rip-roaring time, Fred. We'll go all the gaits, even if we get put in the lock-up.”
FRED and his jovial employer spent a ===day and night at New Orleans, and early the following morning took a fast train for New York. Ensconced in the luxurious Pullman, which contained few other passengers, Fred felt that by remaining close in the car as it passed through Georgia he would run little risk of being recognized by any acquaintance or friend of the past. Nevertheless, as the train was leaving Atlanta and speeding toward Stafford, he was literally besieged with gloomy memories. Every station or familiar landmark along the way brought back with crushing force occurrences he had completely forgotten. Once or twice he fancied that Whipple was watching him with an unusually sympathetic eye, but he put the thought from him. Never having been told of the fact, how could the old man even suspect that he was nearing the home of his childhood—the spot of his dreams? He had a yearning to confide more fully to his kindly companion, but the thought came to him that such a disclosure just now might throw a damper upon a journey which he had determined should contain nothing but joy to his benefactor.
It was six o'clock when Cherry Hill was reached. Only seven rapidly shortening miles lay between him and his old home. Fred sat at a window, pretending to read a newspaper. It struck him as highly incongruous that Whipple should think no more of that particular town than of any of the others through which they had passed when it means so much—so very much—to him. The time-table told him that the train stopped only a few minutes at Stafford, and he was both glad and disappointed—glad that the short stop would render his detection the more remote, and sad that he was not to see with his actual eyes the spot dearer to him than any other. There was a prolonged scream from the locomotive's whistle at the extreme end of the train. Could it be that the station was reached? No, for through the gathering dusk Fred could see that the suburbs of the town, as indicated by the electric lights in the distance, were still half a mile away. Perhaps it was to take on water, he thought; but that couldn't be the explanation, for the porter of the car had thrown up a window and was looking out inquiringly.
“What is it?” he inquired of the porter, who had drawn his head back into the car.
“I don't know, sir,” the negro answered. “Something must be wrong ahead. We never slow up till we get to the crossing.” He hurriedly left the car, and Fred followed. Outside there was a rushing to and fro of trainmen with flags and lanterns, a jumble of calls in stentorian tones, the slow clanging of the locomotive's bell, the exhausting of steam. The porter ran to the porter of the car ahead, and came back to where Walton stood waiting on the step.
“Freight-train knocked all to smash in the edge of town,” he explained. “Nobody hurt, but it is sure to hold us here awhile.”
“We'll have to stop, then!” Fred exclaimed, fearing a vague something which seemed to hover, like a threat, in the air about him. At that moment he gave way to the superstitious feeling that it was the direct hand of Providence which had delayed him there, of all spots on the long journey.
“It looks like it now, sir,” the porter answered; and as he left, Walton turned and saw Whipple close beside him.
“Why, it won't make any difference to us,” the old man said, in evident wonder over his protégé's disappointment. “We'll be sound asleep in our berths. I don't know but what I'd kind o' likeonenight's rest without so much jostle and motion. We can get a good breakfast in the dining-car in the morning, and go on our way as smooth as goose-grease.”
“Yes, yes,” Fred said. But the thought had come to him that they might be delayed till the next morning, and the idea of passing through his old home in the broad light of day was far from pleasant. What if he should actually meet his father or some officer of the law whose duty it would be to arrest him, right when he had begun to hope that he might ultimately earn his freedom?
Fred went back into the car, followed by the drowsy Whipple, and took a seat by a window. It was open, and by leaning out he could see the lights of Stafford. Under the skies he had known as a child, on the same hillsides, they blazed and beckoned. Suppressing a groan, he told himself that he would go to bed and try to sleep; but he delayed, held in his place by some weird charm. At ten o'clock, when Whipple was stowed away, Fred went out of the car once more. On the sidetrack he met the conductor.
“How long shall we be here?” Walton inquired.
“Till three o'clock, sir,” the conductor said, as they walked along toward the locomotive.
“I wonder if I'd have time to walk to town and look around,” Fred said. “I don't feel like turning in right now.”
“Plenty, plenty,” the conductor answered. “It is only a mile or so to the square.”
“Then I'll go,” Walton said, and he walked away, thankful that the night was cloudy. On he went down the railway, in the streaming glare of the locomotive's headlight, till he reached the first street leading into Stafford. Ahead, in the light of many lanterns, a throng of trackmen were at work on the wreck.
How changed was the landscape he had once known so well! Spots which had been old barren fields, dismantled brick-yards, and stretches of forest, were now, thanks to the enterprise of Kenneth Galt, filled with cottages, cotton factories, iron-foundries, and other industries. To the right, on a common, which used to be the ball-ground where the team, of which Fred had been the popular captain, had played in his schooldays, the round-house and machine-shops of the S. R. & M. had risen. New thoroughfares had been opened, natural elevations graded away, and uncouth gullies filled.
Taking the darker and quieter streets by choice, Walton strode onward, headed toward the old part of town, his heart wrung with a pain more poignant than any he had ever felt. Once, as he was passing through a cluster of small houses which seemed inhabited by negroes, he saw a few dusky faces he had known, and recognized some familiar voices coming from the unlighted porches and open windows. On trudged the wayfarer, his step slow, his feet heavy. Presently he came to a stone and iron bridge which spanned a small arm of the river, and, crossing to the other side, he ascended a slight elevation from which he had a view of the entire town. It was a lonely, unimproved spot, where a few scrubby pines grew and some gray primitive bowlders lay half embedded in the ground. Farther along the brow of the narrow hill stood the old brick school, which, as a boy, he had attended. A thousand memories flogged his quickened brain—memories of those lost days, when his gentle mother had dressed him and sent him off with a kiss and the admonition to be a good boy. She was dead, she was gone forever, and her prayers in his behalf had fallen on the deaf ear of Infinite Providence. He had not been a good boy, and she had prayed in vain. Her grave was there beyond the town's lights on another hill, and he who had been the sole hope of her motherhood was an alien. He stifled a cry of sheer agony. In his active life in the West he had, in a measure, dulled his senses to much of the past, but here, in view of all he had lost, it was upon him like a monster as long and broad as the universe, with a million sinister claws sunken into his being. There below was the home which might have been his; there, veiled from his sight by the kindly pall of night, lived the men and women who might still have been his friends; there, too, lived the girl, the one girl in all the earth, who—He groaned, and, throwing himself on the ground, he folded his arms and sobbed. How long he remained there he hardly knew, but it was late, for the lights in the houses below were blinking and going out one by one. He was tempted to steal down the hillside, now that deeper darkness offered shelter, and wander through the streets he had loved so well—to wander on till he could see his father's house. Perhaps he might even pass Margaret's home without detection. It would be a risk, an awful risk, he told himself, for he might be recognized, pursued, and even arrested. His hungry heart told him to take the chance, his inbred caution warned him strongly to return to the car without delay, and yet he lingered. He fancied he could see, as his blurred eyes strove to probe the curtain of darkness, the very spot his old home stood upon. Yes, he would risk it. He had been away for years, and he might never return to the old town again. Providence itself had caused the accident to which he owed the opportunity.
Down the incline he went, into the quiet street below, and along it to another which led toward his father's house. Once he saw a man and woman approaching, and he stepped behind a high fence in the grounds of an old mill. He crouched down, and heard their voices as they went by, but they sounded strange to him. He followed now in their wake, and saw them turn in another direction. Then he saw a man approaching, but he walked from side to side of the pavement, as if he were intoxicated, and Walton avoided him by crossing the street and pursuing his way on the other side.
At last he was at his old home. The grounds were the same in size, but the old house had been repainted, and trees which had been small and slender were now large and dense. There was a heartless alteration in the appearance of it all. The white paint on the house somehow made it seem a veritable ghost of its former self; its whole aspect was cold and forbidding. He opened the gate and entered. He was not afraid, for as a boy he had gone into the grounds at any hour he liked; he had even raised an unfastened window in the old dining-room, when he had mislaid his key, and climbed in long after midnight.
There was a light in his father's room on the ground floor, but the blind was drawn down. Fred could not look in from where he stood, so he crept up close to the wall, and moved noiselessly along against it till he could peer through the crack between the window-sill and the blind. He started back, for in the light of the green-shaded lamp he saw his father seated at a table reading a paper. How strange it seemed to see him after all those years! And yet the banker had changed very little. It was the same harsh, imperturbable face. In it lay no sign of concern over the absence of the son who now loved him with a woman's tenderness.
“Poor, poor father!” the young man said, in his heart. “I never understood you. I didn't know what life meant then as I do now. You are living according to your lights. It was I who was wrong—wofully wrong. God help me!”
With a low groan he crept away. Out into the street he went. He must hurry now, for his time was limited. There must be no mistake about the train. He must not let his employer suspect this stolen excursion of his, for it would mar the pleasure of the old man's journey.
Fred now met and had to avoid few passers-by, and he hurried on to Margaret's home, thankful that it lay in the direction of the waiting train. The great structure was wholly dark, and there was no sign of life about it. That was her window; he could plainly see it as he stood at the fence. But what, after all, could it matter to him? Perhaps she had not occupied the room for years. His heart seemed turned to stone as the new fear sank into him that she might have married and moved away. She had loved him once; he was as sure of that as he was of her honesty. Yes, she had loved him! She had told him so with her arms tightly clasped about his neck. His shameful conduct had separated them—that and nothing else. With his head lowered he turned away, wholly indifferent now as to whether he was seen or not.
Almost before he realized it the wrecked freight-cars were before him; the track was being rapidly cleared; the headlight of the train that was to bear him away was streaming on him with insistent fierceness.
“How long will you keep us waiting?” he asked the foreman of the gang, who, in greased and blackened overalls, stood near an overturned truck.
“Only an hour or so longer. It is past one now,” was the reply.
The Pullman was dimly lighted from the overhead lamps which were turned low, but the outer door was open, and, passing the porter half asleep in the smoking-room, Fred went to his berth, drew the curtains aside, and began to undress.
“Is that you, Fred?” a low, anxious voice inquired, and Whipple thrust his shaggy head out from his berth.
“Yes, sir. Is there anything I can do for you, Mr. Whipple?”
“No; that is—” The curtains slowly parted, and the old man came out, completely dressed, save for the absence of his coat, collar, and cravat. He looked around cautiously, and seemed relieved to find that they were the only passengers awake. He sank into a seat opposite Fred's berth and sighed. “I've been awfully worried,” he said. “You see, my boy, I missed you. I waited and waited and couldn't sleep a wink, and the longer you stayed away the worse I got. You see, I have my clothes on. I got up, and went out to the wreck, and tried to find you. I don't know what got into me. I was worried—worried like rips.”
“I felt restless and—went for a walk,” Walton explained, lamely. “I didn't know it was so late; besides, I thought you'd be sound asleep and not miss me.”
“I reckon I'm old and childish,” Whipple said, with a forced laugh. “The fact is, Fred, if the truth must be told, I reckon I feel powerful close to you. I didn't know the thing had taken such a deep hold on me. I reckon it is this trip with just you and me off together like two boys. I've got so I think I can detect when you are happy and when you ain't over your old trouble, and ever since morning I sort o' fancied you looked uneasy and downhearted. Then when you went off, leaving me away out here all by myself, why, somehow, I was afraid—actually afraid that—”
“You were afraid that in my despondency I might injure myself,” Fred broke in; “but you needn't ever—”
“I wasn't afraid of any such thing!” Whipple threw in, almost indignantly. “I knew there was no such danger when you had fought the fight you have for six years hand-running, and got as high up as you have; but I was a little afraid—well, to be honest—I was afraid you might have seen somebody on the train who you wanted to avoid on account of matters long past and buried, and that you thought it might be advisable to—to keep out of sight, that's all.”
“It wasn't that, Mr. Whipple, I assure you,” Walton answered, in a husky voice, and he sat down opposite his friend and laid his hands firmly on the old man's knees. “The time has come, Mr. Whipple, when I must tell you more about my past life. After I have done so, you will fully understand how I—”
“No, no, I won't listen!” Whipple raised his hands in protest. “I don't want to hear a word. It wrings my silly old heart, anyway, to think of what may lie away back there before you come to me. You seem to be a son of my own, born to me in your terrible trouble, and I want to think of you that way. I thought, at first, that it would be a pretty thing to let you pay back the debt hanging over you with just your own earnings; but I don't think so now. That amount of money would be nothing to me, and you know it. You've seen me donate more than that to causes that didn't interest me one-hundredth part as much as this does. My boy, when we get to New York I'll draw the money, and you must take it and clear yourself. I'll never rest till you do.”
“I can't do that, Mr. Whipple,” Walton said, in a grateful tone. “When I left home I told my father the money should be replaced by my own earnings, and it must be that way.”
“You can't keep me from raising your salary if I see fit and proper,” Whipple argued. “You are the best man I ever employed from any standpoint, and you don't draw pay enough—not half enough.”
“I can't let you do it,” Walton said, with a grateful smile. “I am already paid more than any other man in my position. To give me more would be charity, and I don't want that. I want to pay my way out, Mr. Whipple.”
“Well, you'll do it,” the old man gave in, fervently.
“If you was to be hampered now, my brave boy, I'd actually lose faith in God and the hereafter. I honestly believe you'll get your reward, and be reinstated in all you ever wanted. Now, good-night. Sleep sound, and let's not allow this to spoil our good time. I reckon this trip has sort o' turned your thoughts onto bygone days, but we'll have other things to think of in New York. Good-night, my son, good-night.”
“Good-night, sir.”
The heavy curtains hid the portly old man, and Walton proceeded to undress and lie down. But he could not sleep. What human being with a normal heart could have done so under like circumstances? An hour later the dull, rumbling movement of the car told him that they were off. There was no stop at the station, but Walton propped himself upon his elbow and raised the little window-shade and peered out as they passed through the switch-yard of the town. On the platform a night-watchman stood swinging a lantern. In the rapidly shifting glare of light Fred recognized him. It was Dan Smith, a faithful negro who used to work about the bank and whom Fred had known from childhood up.
“Poor old Uncle Dan!” the outcast said, bitterly, as the kindly features were spirited away in the distance.' “You know why 'Marse Freddie' had to leave, don't you? It was because he was a thief, Uncle Dan. The little fellow you used to carry on your shoulders and be so proud of grew up to be a thief—athief, and he is hiding now from you and all the rest!”