It was his dead father who had stiffened his arm and
directed the fatal shot! It was hereditary influences--which others
had been so quick to recognize--that had brought about this completing
climax of his trouble. How else could he account for it that he--a
conscientious, peaceful, sensitive man, tender and forgiving as he had
believed himself to be--could now feel so little sorrow or compunction
for his culminating act? He had read of successful duelists who were
haunted by remorse for their first victim; who retained a terrible
consciousness of the appearance of the dead man; he had no such feeling;
he had only a grim contentment in the wiped-out inefficient life,
and contempt for the limp and helpless body. He suddenly recalled his
callousness as a boy when face to face with the victims of the Indian
massacre, his sense of fastidious superciliousness in the discovery of
the body of Susy's mother!--surely it was the cold blood of his father
influencing him ever thus. What had he to do with affection, with
domestic happiness, with the ordinary ambitions of man's life--whose
blood was frozen at its source! Yet even with this very thought came
once more the old inconsistent tenderness he had as a boy lavished upon
the almost unknown and fugitive father who had forsaken his childish
companionship, and remembered him only by secret gifts.
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