ON his left, farther away from the town, and about a mile distant, stood a small mountain. Dark-red as to soil, bristling with sandstone bowlders, sparcely grown with pines and thorny locust-trees, and gashed by rain-washed gullies, it rose majestically against the cloud-flecked blue of infinite space beyond.
Hardly knowing why he did so, Galt turned his face toward it and strode on, vaguely conscious that he was battling against the soul-calamity which had beset him as a dumb beast might fight for its physical life. Around the sloping base of the mountain lay old worn-out fields, now given over to the riotous possession of anything which would take root upon its soil. There was no path leading to the seldom visited elevation, but with his eyes constantly on the solitary finger of earth he climbed over the old rail-fence encompassing the land, and forged his way through the dense undergrowth, now ploughing his feet through a matting of heather and dewberry-vines, or plunging unexpectedly into some weed-hidden spring or fresh-water stream. Between him and the mountain ran a creek, and he suddenly found himself at a spot on the banks of it, where, as a boy, home on his vacations, he used to fish. But it had changed, he told himself, as everything else had changed—he was a man now, but such a man!
Crossing the creek on a foot-log formed from the fallen corpse of a giant oak he had once known, he walked onward. The land was now sloping sharply upward, and his way was less impeded. The air was becoming more rarefied, the view on either side and behind him was unfolding more rapidly in the hazy distance. The sun, which had been beating on him mercilessly, was now behind a drifting cloud, and the cool breezes of a higher altitude fanned his flushed face.
Finally he reached a flat, jutting bowlder near the top, and, exhausted from the inconsiderate tax on his muscles, he sank down panting. There lay old Stafford nearest at hand, and beyond stretched out the new town under its web of smoke, the besmudged handwriting of mercantile progress. His brain had fostered the idea, and made it practicable. Reaching out southward, in the sunlight, like two threads of silver, lay the great steel highway which his foresight and ambition had brought into existence. His fancy pictured with lightning flashes the growing villages and towns, as he had seen them on the opening day when he, like an emperor of a conquered territory, had been escorted over it. The moment had given him the thrill of gratified avarice and the empty glory of conquest, but the eyes of the eager throngs which had gazed upon him in wonder and envy that day saw nothing of the cancer which even then was eating into the vitals of his higher nature. Then—But why contemplate it? The juggernaut of relentless Right had ground him under its wheels.
He locked his arms over his knees, lowered his head, and groaned in sheer despair. If Dora had only given him a bare chance! But she hadn’t, and now, loved as woman never was loved before, desired in spirit and body as woman never was desired by man, she had coldly, firmly put him from her. The sight of her as she sat holding his child in her arms, and spurning him as was her right to spurn him, would haunt him into and through the Eternity which had now become such a hopeless reality.
Suddenly raising his eyes to the relentless blue above, he tried to frame a prayer.
“O God, have mercy!” he cried. “Show me, a sinner, a way out of the darkness of my damnation. Give them to me, that I may atone by my conduct to them throughout my life. Soften her heart, O God, and open her eyes to the depths of my woe! I have suffered, I will suffer on to the end, but give me my wife and child!”
Noon came and passed, but he had no thought of thirst or of hunger. He remained there on the rock and watched the sun go down, and saw the soft veil of coming darkness thicken over the earth. Now old Stafford lay in darkness, save for the dazzling circles of light where the arc-lamps swung across the streets and were grouped like a constellation in the square. He waited till the town clock had struck nine; then, still without sense of fatigue or hunger, he went down, now with considerable difficulty, owing to the darkness of the incline.
He managed to reach his front gate without meeting any one, and was entering when he saw the figure of a woman emerge from the veranda and come slowly down the walk. Could it be one of the servants? he asked himself. But his answer was the recognition of the woman herself. It was Mrs. Barry. She paused, unable, it seemed, to formulate what she had to say, so sudden was the meeting, and his heart sank lower, as the thought came to him that something might have happened to Dora or the child.
“I came to see you,” she began, pushing back the bonnet which had partially obscured her face. “Your servants told me they didn’t know where you were.”
“You wanted to see me?” he gasped. “Has anything gone wrong?”
“No, it is not that,” the woman said, leading the way toward a clump of cedars on the grass, as if from the sensitive fear of meeting some one on the walk. “My daughter and the child came home at noon. I saw from her looks that she was troubled over something, and that Lionel had been crying, from the marks on his face; but I did not question either of them. All this afternoon she did not speak of you, but to-night, after she had put the boy to sleep, she came into my room and sat down near me. I knew she was in awful struggle over something. She began telling me, in a slow, halting voice, of all that you had said. She is my only child, Kenneth Galt, but I don’t understand her any better than if she were not of my flesh and blood. I never fully understood her father. I suppose no practical-minded person can comprehend those who live in the imagination, surrounded by ideals which become real to them. She began to go over the whole history of her trouble from the very first, and she never left out a single detail. She summed it all up in the most marvellous manner. My heart ached for her as it never had before. She wants to do right, she says, and she knows what would be right and self-sacrificing on her part, but she says she simply can’t conquer the offended pride within her. She has had trouble and we are poor, but there never was born a queen with more pride of womanhood.”
“Yes, yes,” Galt gasped, as he stared at her. “I know; I know.”
“Then I tried to advise her,” Mrs. Barry went on. “At first it was like talking to a person born deaf, but finally she began to listen, for, as a last resort, I was holding up the child’s interests. I spoke of what a glorious thing a trip to Paris............