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 u............