Now, in Sybil’s re-creation, comes the moment when Lockwood parts, like an overstressed shroud—ping—but on the inside only. On the outside, he achieves that level of anger he has seen so often in his father—not the flares of temper that made him Capitano Furioso but the subzero calm of an offended sense of justice and right. Lockwood sees himself as having nothing to lose, and that is his one advantange. Now he will take everything—everything, that is, but the money—from the father who had refused to marry his mother and had buried her in a pauper’s grave, and had done her the further dishonor of never speaking her name again, and then had trod on her memory by lying to the son she’d borne him and died bearing. Where is Mrs. Braithwaite, Father?… Oh, Boston, is it?… And what’s she doing there?… A doctor, a female problem, you say? But you don’t know anymore?… Well, I do, and I’ll tell you. She’s pregnant, and not by you.… A long silence ensues, Cyrus advancing on his son, his coldness now matching Lockwood’s and the contest to see which glacier shatters the other.… And then Lockwood, surprised that in his despair he has the strength to look into that unyielding face, without yielding himself: Not by you, and it’s never been by you, you’re all thunder and no lightning, old man. Never by you, but you can see yourself in them, can’t you? How would you explain that? That’s something else you didn’t know, but I reckon you do now.…

Maybe it had happened like that, maybe in some other way, and with some other words.

The story of what came afterward requires less speculation. It has been passed down through the generations, and the source was the source of all secret scandals in upper-class families in those times—the help. Whispers overheard in the kitchen, in the hall, in the carriage house, whispers telling of how Moira had heard a shout in the library, and ran downstairs to see Cyrus dragging Lockwood by the collar across the floor, Lockwood’s nose and mouth bloodied, how she watched the father throw the son out the front door, and then kick him in the ribs, there on the lawn of the great house that was monument to all he had achieved, and how Gideon and Dailey pulled him off and held him back, Cyrus shouting, Get him out of here! Put him in the carriage and get him out of here before I kill him!