But the temptation was too great. It was so wonderful to touch her in the darkness, to hear her stir, to feel her hand brush his cheek and the warm sleepy lips turned toward his mouth.
“It’s only Peter,” he would whisper; and, perhaps, he would add, “Little Kay, aren’t you glad I borned you?”
Oh yes, it was he who had contrived her birth. There, as a proof, was the big dim cupboard where it had all commenced.
In the shadowy darkness of the room, before Grace came up to undress, he lived in a world of fancy. Through the oblong of the doorway the faint gold glimmered, made by the lowered gas. In the square of the window, as in a magic mirror, all kinds of strange things happened. Great soft clouds moved across it, like mountains marching. Presently they would stand aside, giving him glimpses of deep lagoons and floating lands. Stars would dance out, like children holding hands, and wink and twinkle at him. The moon would let down her silver ladder, smiling to him to ascend. He laughed back and shook his head. Oh, no thank you; Kay needed his attention.
Beneath the sky was a muffled world, like a Whistler nocturne, of house-tops and drowsy murmurs. It was a vague field of seething shadows in which the blur of street-lamps was a daffodil forest. Dwellings which were blind all day, in streets he had never traversed, now peered stealthily from behind their curtains with the unblinking eyes of cats. What did they do down there? Church bells in the Vale of Holloway would try to tell him. Sometimes strains of a barrel-organ would drift up merrily and he would picture how ragged children danced, beating time with rapid feet upon the muddy pavement. Sometimes in the distance, like a scarlet fear, a train would shoot across the murk and vanish.
But always from these wanderings his imagination would return to the cot where the little sister nestled. Who was it put the thought into his head? Was it some strange confusion between winking stars and the Bethlehem story? Or was it Grace in one of her flights of poetry? Long ago, he told himself, like this the Boy Jesus must have sat keeping guard over a baby sister, while at the bottom of a tall steep house Mary helped Joseph, making chairs and tables.
Once Peter gave things away completely by trusting too much to his wakefulness; he was found asleep on the floor beside Kay’s cot when Grace came up to undress.
If the nights had their spice of adventure because such doings were forbidden, the mornings were not to be sneered at. He would be wakened by a small hand stroking his face and she would snuggle into bed beside him. Years after, when he was a man, he remembered the sensation of her cold feet when she had found him difficult to rouse.
But the greatest treat of all came rarely. When his father went away on a journey, his mother could cast aside her habits. She would make her home in the nursery and hirelings would be driven out. Grace would be given an evening with her policeman, and Peter, and Kay, and Nan would have each other to themselves. If it were winter, they would have supper by firelight, after which they would sit and toast themselves while Nan told stories of her girlhood. Kay would be taken into her lap and Peter would sit on the rug, cuddling against her skirt.
“How did Daddy find you, Mummy?”