“And you think I ought to—to do it?”
“Yes,” Galt nodded, his head rocking like that of an automaton. “The doctor knows best.”
“Well, then, I'll go,” the boy sighed, with another wistful look over the lawn. “I'll go.”
As they were entering the house, by some strange mandate of fate or instinct the boy again took his father's hand, and Galt held it as they began to ascend the broad, walnut stairs. Argue as he would that the operation was only a most ordinary thing, to Galt's morbid state of mind it assumed the shape of a tragedy staged and enacted by the very imps of darkness.
On the way up the boy tripped on the stair-carpeting and slipped and fell face downward. He was unhurt, but Galt raised him in his arms and bore him up the remainder of the steps into a big, light room off the corridor.
“Here we are, Doctor Beaman!” Dearing cheerily called out to a slender, beardless young man, who, with a towel in hand, was bending over some polished instruments on the bureau. “This is the little chap who never cries when he is hurt. He is a regular soldier, I tell you!”
“No, I'm not afraid,” the boy said, as he stood alone in the centre of the room; but still, as his father noted, there was a certain contradictory rigidity of his features which he had never remarked before.
Galt told himself that the child's evident dread, vague as it was, was also an inheritance; for he recalled how he himself had once taken ether to have a slight operation performed. He had been a man in years at the time, and yet the effect on his mind as to what might be the outcome had been most depressing. That day, as he was doing now, he had looked upon the drug-induced sleep as a dangerous approach to death; and now, as then, he gravely feared that the tiny thread of reduced vitality might be torn asunder. He stood dumb with accusing horror as the two doctors hastily made their grewsome arrangements, such as securing warm water, fresh towels and sheets, which, in their very whiteness, suggested a shroud.
The noise made as they drew a narrow table across the resounding floor into the best light between the two windows jarred harshly on his tense nerves. These things were grim enough, but the wan isolation of the waiting child, as he stood with that war against fear and shame of fear going on in his great, fathomless eyes, so like those of his artist-mother—that appealing little figure, nameless, disowned among men, was stamped on the retina of Galt's eye for the remainder of his life.
“Now, take off your waist and collar and necktie,” Dearing said to Lionel—“that will be enough. We'll have you all right in a jiffy. You are not afraid now, are you?”