The child was now absorbed in the bronze dragon head supporting the ivory handle of the sword.
“I see; perhaps you'd like pictures of children better,” Galt said, and he took up one of the water-color sketches he had shown to Dearing. “Here, look at this little boy.”
“Oh yes, that's me! Mamma says it is hard to keep them from all looking alike. Sometimes I'm a boy—then I'm a girl, and even a baby—but they are all me. Mamma says I'm her bread and butter. But I don't like to sit for them; it is too tiresome to stay still so long. Sometimes she lets me play in the yard, and watches me through the window; then I don't mind it.”
“Do you mean to say”—Galt was grave, and his hands trembled as he picked up another picture, this time the sketch of a boy riding on a spring-board supported in the middle by a saw-horse, and fastened at the end to a crude rail-fence—“do you mean that your mother really painted this?” And as he spoke Galt recalled Dearing's evident recognition of the work, and his prompt reservation in regard to it.
“Yes, and stacks and stacks of others,” the child said, abstractedly, his little fingers toying with the handle of the sword again. “Is it sharp enough to cut a man's head off?”
“Yes, yes.” Galt sat down in a chair, his mind now full of startled memories—Dora's wonderful artistic taste, her early love of music, books on art, and the drawings which she had spoken of timidly, but never shown him. And this was her work—the pictures he had seen groups of people admiring, as they hung in the shop-window in Atlanta—and which he knew was the work of actual creative genius. And it had come from the spirit he had crushed, exiled from humanity, and left destitute! His ambition had won its sordid goal through the darkness of damnation, while hers—unconscious of its own deity—was growing toward the outer light, like a flower in a dungeon. And this was his child and hers! Compounded in the winsome personality of the boy was all that was good and noble of her, all that was bad and despicable of him, and Dearing would say that it was not going to end with the temporary breath which had been blown into the little form. The child was to live on and perpetuate the qualities he had inherited. He was like a little God now, in the likeness of the child-mother who had borne him, but 'the time might come when he would take on to himself the cringing, soul-lashed features of his father—be guilty of the same crimes against virtue and eternal justice, and fight the same cruel battle between spirit and flesh, between the forces of light and darkness. God forbid! “God!”—had he actually used the word? Was there such a Being? He had sneered at the thought all his life, but now the bare possibility cowed him.
Lionel, astride the sheathed sword, now half boy, half prancing steed, came to him. “Whoa! Can't you stand still, sir? Watch him kick up! Look out!” as he pirouetted about, “he'll get you with his hind heels! He wants to run; something has scared him! Look how he's trembling!”
Galt laid his hand on the sunny curls, and drew the excited little horseman to him, gazing into the dreamy, fathomless eyes so accusingly like Dora's.
“I think I'd better hold you both,” he said, in an attempt at playfulness. He had heard sordid business men who had children say that there was no love like that of a man for an eldest son. This was his eldest son, if not by the writs of man, by the mandates of something infinitely higher.
“I wish I had a really-really horse,” Lionel ran on, plaintively. “Grover Weston has a pony, but mamma says he can have everything because his father is rich. I don't like him. He threw my ball back over the fence the other day and called me names. I don't know what he meant by them, but my mother said they were not nice, and told me not to remember them. I've already forgot what he said. It was bas—bast—How funny! I knew it once.”