He looked at it and shuddered. It gave him a sense of absolute physical nausea to see suffering. He had had a strange bringing-up by a visionary mother, who, absorbed in a vision of the Pain of the world, had impressed her morbid ideas upon her child, until now, in manhood, he was as sensitive to even the abstract idea of pain as the eye is to dust. Before real suffering his whole being shrank. At that moment Mr. Lansing drove up in the democrat waggon; but a change which was very apparent had come over his countenance.
Vashti and Mabella looked at each other and nodded apprehensively.
“Get in, girls,” said the old man in abrupt, authoritative tones. “Come up beside me here,” he said to Sidney.
They drove through the yard in silence, old Lansing nodding good-bye curtly to his neighbours. The moment they were on the road he turned to the two girls:
“What’s this I hear?” he demanded. “Lanty has been fighting again! Verily ‘he that slayeth with the sword shall perish by the sword.’ It’s a scandal.”
“It wasn’t a sword; ’twas his fist,” said Mabella sotto voce.
“He only knocked the man down,” said Vashti, “and he needed it.”
“You’re a judge of such things, evidently,” said her father irately. “I say it’s a disgrace to be a common brawler—to——”
Mabella spoke up eagerly. “Oh, but uncle,” she said. “The man said something about Vashti and me—I don’t know what, but not pleasant, and——”
“He did, did he?” demanded the old man, his face growing strangely like Lanty’s in its anger. “He did. Wait till I see him! I’ll break every bone in his body if I catch him”; he cut the horses viciously with his whip. “Only wait.” Evidently he had forgotten his doctrine of peace. As a sky is lighted by an after-glow into the beauty of dawn, so old Lansing’s face illumined by his wrath was youthful once more.