He did not know that his son Keith had risen from his bed, and stolen from his room to pace the hall outside his mother’s door. He did not know that Keith had been eavesdropping upon this sacred communion of theirs.
Keith was a soldier. He had been killing his fellow-Americans in great numbers for their own sakes and their country’s. He had been sending his own beloved men into traps of death and had acquired a godlike repose in the presence of multitudinous agonies.
He, too, when he heard Patty’s appeal for release, wondered why he had been so dull and so slow, so unmerciful through brutish stupidity.
He had not hesitated in the field to cry “Charge!” and lead the long line like a breaker pursuing a fleet rider up a beach, a breaker crested with bright bayonets. This duty before him was not so easy to meet. Yet it seemed a more certain duty than his lately finished task of slaying Southern men.
If he did not kill his mother, his father must. He could save them both by one brief gesture. Yet he shrank from it, fought within himself a war of loves and duties. Then he heard his mother’s wailing again and he set his teeth together fiercely, laid his hand upon the knob, turned it softly, and softly thrust the door ajar.
CHAPTER L
When he had been confronted with the opportunity to end the life of Immy’s baby and with it numberless perils, RoBards had hesitated until the chance was taken from him.
But now he did not even question the high necessity for action. Whether he were insane from the laceration of his sympathies or superhumanly wise, his mind was made up the instant the idea came to him.
As if some exterior power considered and ordained the deed, his mind was made up for him. He felt it his solemn duty to give Patty surcease of existence. He wondered only at his long delay in recognizing the compulsion.
The patriarch Abraham in the Old Testament had heard a voice in the air bidding him despatch his only son for a burnt offering; he did not waver, but clave wood and piled it upon his son’s back and lured him to an altar and drew his knife against him. The curious god who could take pleasure in a child’s blood was amused at the last moment to send an angel to order the tortured old man to substitute a ram caught by his horns in the thicket. And the poor ram was burned instead. But Abraham had been ready to slash his boy’s young throat across at the divine whim and to watch him roast.