Galt went into the dimly lighted hallway of his house and ascended the stairs. There was nothing to do now, he told himself. The world that had admired him, the men and women who had entrusted him with the investment of their savings in his various schemes, would stare and doubt their senses. They would shun him—one and all they would shun him as they would some loathsome thing; he had used their money well, but their profit had been made by a man who had known no honor.
He entered his room, turned up the light, and critically examined his ghastly image in the mirror on his bureau. What a gashed and blearing mask to all that lay behind it! How could it go on? How could he bear with it another day? Even if he could lay it aside in sleep to-night, the heartless dawn would reveal it all the more relentlessly. Suddenly out of the turmoil of his emotions a grim resolve rose and fastened itself on him. His suicide would be his confession—his belated exoneration of the man who so long had borne the stigma in his stead. In a small drawer in the bureau lay a revolver. It was loaded in all of its six chambers, and as he took the weapon out he almost fondled it in his clammy hand. In the morning his servants would find his body, and the truth would be out. He would close the door and windows that the revolver's report might be smothered. But he started; there was the child, his helpless child, to whom he had given life—and such a life!
“Lionel, Lionel!” he said, aloud. “My son, my son, my beautiful brave boy, who loves me in spite of what I have done against him! Will he grow up and understand? Will he pardon his misguided father, or blush for shame at the thought of him?”
With the revolver still in his hand, he sank into a chair near a window and gazed out into the star-filled sky. Suddenly he started. Whence had come the thought? He could not tell, but a new and dazzling conviction was on him like light streaming through the gates of Paradise. Kill himself? How absurd the thought! He might dash his bleeding, lifeless body to the earth, but he, himself, would remain a deathless witness to the act. Nothing in the shape of matter, no force known to science, could possibly put out of existence the yearning for atonement within him. Nothing so divine as that could die. Such a thing was from the Eternity that had created Eternity. He threw the revolver on his bed, and drew a deep, delectable breath. His now entranced vision seemed to extend further out into the world-filled void above him. He stood up, panting from the sheer ravage his new hope had wrought upon him.
“Eternity! Eternity!” he whispered, in reverential awe. “Now I see—the scales have fallen from my sight. I see! Thank God, I see! I understand!”
CHAPTER XXIII
WHEN Kenneth Galt waked the next morning it was with the new sense of having slept long and restfully for the first time in years. The sun was streaming into his windows from the golden east; the cool air seemed crisp and invigorating; in the boughs of the trees close by birds were flitting about and singing merrily. The dew-wet sward, bespangled with a myriad of sun-born gems, stretched away into the gauzy mist which hung over the town.
“It is glorious—glorious!” he cried, in ecstasy. “She may refuse, but I shall never desist till I have won her forgiveness.”