"I wonder," he mused, his angry voice sinking to a rumble, "I wonder if you can guess—and of course you can't—what a prize you spent eight years in throwing away. You had a son. And you disowned him and turned your back on him. I've had no son. I shall never have a son. And when I go out into the dark, there'll be no man-child to carry on my name. No lad to inherit this brute body of mine with all its strength and giant endurance; this brain of mine, that has tried so hard to perfect itself and to give its possible successor the faculty for thought and work and self-mastery. My father was a strong man, a great man. And much of the little power and goodness and worthiness that exist in me, I owe to him. No man in future years can say that of me. It must be something that no childless man can understand or dream of, to feel the fingers of one's little son tugging at one. To,—Lord! What would Mother Batholommey say if she could hear me maundering and havering away like this! It means nothing to you, either. Except that you've had, and hated, and thrown away what many a better man would give half his life for."
There was a short silence. McPherson, ashamed of blurting his sacred heart secrets to a fellow he detested, sat gnawing angrily at his ragged grey moustache. Frederik, to whom the last part of the doctor's tirade had passed unheard, stood gazing sightlessly at the ground before him. And for a space, neither of them spoke.
At length Frederik looked up, almost timidly.
"Could—might I see him?" he asked.
"H'm?" grunted McPherson, starting from the maze of his own unhappy thoughts.
"I say, may I go in and see——?"
"Had three years to see him in, didn't you?" demanded McPherson. "I can't recall now that I ever saw you glance at him when you could help it. Why should you go in and see him now? You can't frighten him any more."
He checked himself.
"That last was a rotten thing for me to say," he muttered grudgingly. "I'm sorry."
But Frederik showed no signs of resentment. He was looking moodily at the ground once more, apparently engrossed in the fruitless efforts of a red ant on the walk's edge to lug away a dead caterpillar forty times its size. The doctor peered at him almost apologetically from under his grey thatch of eyebrow. The younger man's face still wore that same blank, dazed mask, as though horror had wiped it clean of expression. Again it was Frederik who broke the silence.