OLD Stafford had changed wonderfully L in the six years which passed after Fred Walton’s flight. The building of President Galt’s trunk-line to the sea had marked the turning-point in the town’s career. The older portion of the place remained quite as it was, but new suburbs and new centres of commerce had sprung up beyond the old incorporated limits. Where farms, fields, and pastures had once been, now lay even, well-graded, and electric-lighted streets. No small city in the South had a better freight-rate to all points, and this had brought about the establishment of various manufacturing enterprises which had greatly increased the population. The clang and clatter of new growth was in the air; speculation in building-sites was rife. The modest price of one day was the jest of the next. Owning a great deal of the land along the new railway, General Sylvester was now more wealthy than ever, and the new interest in life had given him back his youth and health.
As for Kenneth Galt, he had scarcely spent a day in the town of his birth since his hurried journey to New York to meet the capitalists whose co-operation had made the road a certainty. His explanation to Sylvester was that other points on the long line constantly demanded his attention. His old home was still cared for by Mrs. Wilson as housekeeper and John Dilk as gardener, and now and then a false report had emanated from these proud and worshipful menials that the distinguished owner was coming back to reside there permanently. Indeed, he had promised General Sylvester to do so time after time, only to make more delays and more excuses.
“He’s coming this time sure,” the old soldier said to his nephew on the veranda one day in the early part of the present summer. “I had a letter from him this morning, in which he promised to come and spend the hot weather here and take a good long rest. Mrs. Wilson said, also, that he had written her about renovating his rooms, so I reckon it is settled. And when he comes you will see that I was right about my prophecy concerning him and Madge. He’s a woman-hater, they say—won’t have a thing to do with society; and, quiet and reserved as your sister is, the two will naturally drift together. I’ll be glad to have him back. That shady old place, with its early associations, will fairly make him over. When I spent that week with him in Savannah I naturally expected to find him at the top of the social heap, but he went nowhere at all, and even seemed to shun the men who extended courtesies to him. He’s had too big a load on him; his face shows wrinkles, and his hair is turning at the temples.”
“Yes, he is a strange chap,” Dearing answered. “I have been thrown with him in Atlanta several times of late, and while he really seemed glad to see me, and was cordial enough, in a way, I couldn’t exactly make him out. As usual, I found him moping over his favorite books, and every bit as anxious, as of old, to prove that the grave ends everything. That will ruin any man, Uncle Tom. When a fellow actually gets to fighting the belief that we are more than sticks and stones he can’t rise very high in any spiritual sense. Why, Kenneth has even reached the point of defending some of the lowest things that men do. He and I were walking away out in the outskirts of the city one night. He had asked me to go, because he wanted to avoid some clubmen who were bent on having him preside at a banquet given by the Chamber of Commerce. We were all alone, and it was dark. He had asked me, I remember, if any news had come as to the whereabouts of Fred Walton, and I had told him that nothing at all had been heard except that his father had cut him off forever. To my astonishment, Kenneth actually sighed. Then I distinctly heard him muttering to himself: ‘Poor fellow. Poor chap! He’s been treated like a dog!”’ “Huh, the idea!” Sylvester broke in. “Well, that’s like Kenneth. He is always ready to take up for somebody or something that no one else believes in.”
“Well, feeling as I did, and knowing what I do of the case,” Dearing continued, warmly, “I couldn’t hold my tongue. I didn’t leave a grain of sand for Fred Walton to stand on, and it made me hot for Galt not to agree with me. He made some weak remark about men obeying natural laws, and being cursed with uncontrollable passions, and the like; but I flatter myself that I silenced him. I gave him a picture of that beautiful girl’s isolated life with her son and old mother, wholly ostracized in the only community they had ever known or loved. I saw, then, that I had touched his sympathies in another direction.
“‘You think,’ he said, ‘that Walton ought, even now, to go back and marry her—at this late date?”
“I told him that I had grave doubts as to whether a woman who had suffered as she had at a man’s hands would ever want to see her betrayer again, and he answered that he felt sure she wouldn’t. Then he asked about the boy. You know, he was always fond of children—that is one redeeming quality he has, and it makes me hope that he isn’t so heartless as he would have us believe. He listened attentively to all I said about Lionel, even asking me questions as to how the child looked and how he amused himself. When I told him that the little fellow was completely cut off from other children, and that his association only with his mother and grandmother had made him act and speak more like an older person than a child, he seemed actually shocked.”
“‘You don’t mean to tell me,’ he said, ‘that the people of old Stafford would turn against a helpless child because of any fault or mistake of its parents!’
“I............