"You're in luck!" he growled. "The law could have compelled you to pay some such munificent sum as four dollars a week for his maintenance. You're safe from that now. And I congratulate you. It'll mean an extra weekly quart of champagne or a brace of musical comedy seats for you. The law is stringent and I was going to invoke it in your case. You smashed a decent girl's life. You helped bring a nameless boy into a world that would have made his life a hell as long as he lived. Just because his father happened to be a yellow cur. And, in penalty for that sin, the power and majesty of an outraged law would have assessed you about one per cent of your yearly income. You're lucky."
Frederik winced as though he had been lashed across the face.
"I sometimes wonder," continued McPherson, urged to fresh vehemence by sight of the effect he was scoring, "if hell holds a worse criminal or a more mercilessly punished one than the man or woman who lets a little child suffer needlessly—who makes it suffer. And of all the suffering that can be heaped upon a child, everything else is like a feather's weight compared to sending it out in life with a name such as Willem would have borne. Oh, but God's merciful when He finds little children crying in the dark and leads them Home! Batholommey and the rest of them sneer at me for sticking to the old hell-fire Calvin doctrines in these days of pew-cushion religion. But I tell you, in all reverence, if there's no hell for the people who torture children, then it's time the Almighty turned awhile from pardoning sinners and built one."
"Don't worry," said Frederik shortly. "There is one. I know. I am in it."
"'Mourner's bench talk,' eh? It's cheap. Penitence is always on the free list. And in your case, as in most, it comes too late to do any good, except to salve the penitent's feelings. Willem lived in the same house with you for three years. All around him was Love. Except from the one person whose sacred duty it was to give that Love. We pitied him. We knew what he'd be facing if he lived. We made his childhood as happy as we could, so that he'd have at least one bright thing to look back on afterward. He was nothing to any of us. Except that he was a child crippled and maimed and fore-damned for life in the worst way any Unfortunate could be. We pitied him and we loved him. Did he ever hear a harsh word or see a forbidding face? Yes; he did. From one person alone. From you, his father. Even last night when he crept downstairs parched with thirst, and begged you for a drink of water——"
"Don't!" cried Frederik, in sharp agony. "Do you suppose you can tell me anything about that? Do you suppose I haven't gone over it all—yes, and over all the three years—a hundred times since I heard he was dead? Do you think you can make me feel it any more damnably than I do? If so, go ahead and try. You spoke of the need for a hell. You can spare your advice to the Almighty. He has made one. And I can't even wait until I'm dead before I walk through it."
"Through it," assented McPherson sardonically. "Through it with many a lamentable groan and a beating of the breast, and with squeaky little wails of remorse—and on through it, out onto the pleasant slopes of forgetfulness and new mischief. Take my condolences on your fearful passage through your purgatory. I fear me it will take you the best part of a week to pass entirely out of it. It's only a man-built hell, that of yours. And, according to the modern theologians, God has no worse one for you later on."
With twitching, pallid face, and anguished eyes, Frederik Grimm looked dumbly at his tormentor. Even in his agony, he felt, subconsciously, far down in his atrophied soul, that the doctor's forecast as to the duration of his remorse's torture was little exaggerated.
Yet, for the moment, his "man-built hell" was grilling and racking the stricken penitent to a point that the Spanish Inquisition's ingenuity could never have devised.
McPherson, with a sombre satisfaction, noted the younger man's misery. Then a wistful look flitted across his gnarled, bearded face.