II
And now Peter was out to be hurt, hurt more horribly than he could have ever believed possible. It was like walking—as they did in the days of the Ordeal—on red-hot iron, every step an agony. Always there was something to remind him! He could go nowhere, see nobody, summon no kind of recollection out of the past without this coming to him. There were a thousand things that Stephen had done, that he, Peter, had never noticed at the time. He was haunted now with regrets, he had not made enough of him whilst he was there! Ah! had he only known that the time was to be so short! How he would have spent those precious, precious moments! It was as though he had flung away, wilfully, possessions of the utmost price—cast them off as though it had been his very intention to feel, afterwards, this burning regret. The things in the nursery were packed away, but there remained the room, the frieze with the dragons and princesses, the fire-place, the high broad window. Again and again he saw babies in the streets, in the parks and fancied that Stephen had come back again.
The thing had happened to him so swiftly that, behind reason, there lurked the thought that perhaps, with equal suddenness, Stephen would be restored. To come back one afternoon and to find him there! To find him lying there on his back in his cot looking up at the ceiling, to find him labouring unsteadily on his feet, clinging to the sides of his bed and shouting—to find him laughing at the jumping waves in the fire—to find him!... No, never to be found again—gone, hopelessly, cruelly, for no reason, for no one's good or benefit—simply for some one's sport.
But, strangely, more than the actual Stephen did he miss the imaginary future Stephen at school, hero of a thousand games, winner of a thousand prizes, the Stephen grown up, famous already at so young an age, loved by men and women, handsome, good.... Oh! the folly of it! No human being could carry all the glories that Peter had designed for his son—no human being, then how much less a Westcott. It might be best after all, young Stephen had been spared. Until every stone of Scaw House was level with the ground no Westcott could be termed safe—perhaps not then.
Now he realised how huge a place in his heart the boy had filled dimly, because as yet he refused to bring it to the open light he was conscious that, during these past two years he had been save for Stephen, a very lonely man. It was odd that Stephen the elder and Stephen the younger should have been the only two persons in his life to find the real inside of him—they, too, and perhaps Norah Monogue. But, otherwise, not Bobby, nor Cards, nor Alice Galleon, nor Mr. Zanti—nor Clare.
Not Clare. He faced the fact with a sudden shudder. Now that Stephen was gone he and Clare were face to face—face to face as they had never been since that first happy year of their marriage. That first year of their marriage—and now!
With an instant clenching of his teeth he pulled down the blinds upon that desolating view.