Lifted Masks | Page 9

unpopularity.
It seemed sacrificial.
He wondered why it was Senator Dorman had thrown himself into it so
whole-heartedly. All during the session the Senator from Maxwell had
neglected personal interests in behalf of this boy, who was nothing to
him in the world. He supposed it was as a sociological and
psychological experiment. Senator Dorman had promised the Governor
to assume guardianship of the boy if he were let out. The Senator from
Johnson inferred that as a student of social science his eloquent
colleague wanted to see what he could make of him. To suppose the
interest merely personal and sympathetic would seem discreditable.
"I need not dwell upon the story," the Senator from Maxwell was
saying, "for you all are familiar with it already. It is said to have been
the most awful crime ever committed in the State. I grant you that it
was, and then I ask you to look for a minute into the conditions leading
up to it.
"When the boy was born, his mother was instituting divorce
proceedings against his father. She obtained the divorce, and remarried
when Alfred was three months old. From the time he was a mere baby
she taught him to hate his father. Everything that went wrong with him
she told him was his father's fault. His first vivid impression was that
his father was responsible for all the wrong of the universe.
"For seven years that went on, and then his mother died. His stepfather
did not want him. He was going to Missouri, and the boy would be a
useless expense and a bother. He made no attempt to find a home for
him; he did not even explain--he merely went away and left him. At the

age of seven the boy was turned out on the world, after having been
taught one thing--to hate his father. He stayed a few days in the barren
house, and then new tenants came and closed the doors against him. It
may have occurred to him as a little strange that he had been sent into a
world where there was no place for him.
"When he asked the neighbours for shelter, they told him to go to his
own father and not bother strangers. He said he did not know where his
father was. They told him, and he started to walk--a distance of fifty
miles. I ask you to bear in mind, gentlemen, that he was only seven
years of age. It is the age when the average boy is beginning the third
reader, and when he is shooting marbles and spinning tops.
"When he reached his father's house he was told at once that he was not
wanted there. The man had remarried, there were other children, and he
had no place for Alfred. He turned him away; but the neighbours
protested, and he was compelled to take him back. For four years he
lived in this home, to which he had come unbidden, and where he was
never made welcome.
"The whole family rebelled against him. The father satisfied his
resentment against the boy's dead mother by beating her son, by
encouraging his wife to abuse him, and inspiring the other children to
despise him. It seems impossible such conditions should exist. The only
proof of their possibility lies in the fact of their existence.
"I need not go into the details of the crime. He had been beaten by his
father that evening after a quarrel with his stepmother about spilling the
milk. He went, as usual, to his bed in the barn; but the hay was
suffocating, his head ached, and he could not sleep. He arose in the
middle of the night, went to the house, and killed both his father and
stepmother.
"I shall not pretend to say what thoughts surged through the boy's brain
as he lay there in the stifling hay with the hot blood pounding against
his temples. I shall not pretend to say whether he was sane or insane as
he walked to the house for the perpetration of the awful crime. I do not
even affirm it would not have happened had there been some human
being there to lay a cooling hand on his hot forehead, and say a few
soothing, loving words to take the sting from the loneliness, and ease
the suffering. I ask you to consider only one thing: he was eleven years
old at the time, and he had no friend in all the world. He knew nothing

of sympathy; he knew only injustice."
Senator Harrison was still looking out at the budding things on the
State-house grounds, but in a vague way he was following the story. He
knew when the Senator from Maxwell completed the recital of facts
and entered upon