"I've brought this cable round. Otherwise I wouldn't have rushed in on you quite so soon."
"My dear old boy," said Kenyon, "you know very well that you have the complete run of whatever place I may be living in, at all hours of the day and night. A cable for me, eh? What the devil—? I was jolly careful to give my address here to very few people in England. Too many are anxious to serve me with summonses. Baby Lennox is going to be married, perhaps, and sends me the glad tidings. By Jove, I wonder who she's nabbed!" He shot out a laugh and tore open the envelope. "Oh, my God!"
"What is it?" asked Peter, anxiously.
Kenyon held out the cablegram and remained standing rigid, with his mouth open and his eyes shut, and his face as white as a stone.
It was from Baby Lennox. "Your father died last night. A heart attack. Come home at once."
"Oh, my dear Nick!" said Peter. "My dear old boy! I can't tell you how——"
"No," said Kenyon; "don't say anything. Just sit down and wait for me. Whatever you do, don't go." And he went out of the room and across the passage to his bedroom, and shut himself in.
Peter waited. The few cold, definite and even brutal words contained in the cablegram would have hit him much harder and rendered his sympathy for his friend very much more real if he could have felt what it would have been to him to hear of the death of his own father. While he waited, mechanically holding that slip of paper between his fingers, his respect for his friend's grief widened into an odd and powerful feeling of envy. The man who was dead had been infinitely more than a father. He had been a friend and a brother as well. It made him sick and cold to feel that the receipt of such a cablegram bringing to him the news of the death of his own father would have moved him only to extreme sympathy for his mother. He was ashamed and humiliated to realize that no actual grief would touch him, because his father was nothing more than a sort of kind but illusive guardian or a good-natured step-father—altogether unused to children—who effaced himself as much as he could and threw all responsibility upon his wife.
It was an hour before Kenyon reappeared, and during that time—which seemed to Peter no more than a few minutes—he went over again in his mind the scene which had taken place in the Doctor's laboratory, out of which he had gone stultified and thrown back upon himself. He was as grateful as Graham had been for the Doctor's generosity, but appalled at the thought that he had utterly failed to realize not only the gravity of Graham's act, but the long years of parental neglect which made such an act possible. It seemed to him that the way in which his father had taken that deplorable incident was all wrong. He should not have written another cheque. He should have had Graham up in front of him, strongly and firmly, and tried him as a judge would have tried him if his act had been discovered and dealt with by law. He should have gone into all the circumstances which led up to the forgery and thereby have cleared the way for a new understanding. As it was, his acceptance of it was so weak that it gave Peter and Graham a feeling almost of contempt for that too kind man to whom children were obviously without significance, and the unmistakable knowledge that he was unable to understand his grave responsibility and the fact that he, alone among men, must take the blame for all their misdeeds and mistakes, because they had been allowed to enter life unwarned, unguided and unhelped. The outcome to Peter of this hour's bitter thought was finally this: That if news were brought to him at that moment of his father's death the only sorrow that he could feel would be at the fact that he felt no sorrow.
When Kenyon came back into the room it was with his usual imperturbability. He might merely have left it to answer the telephone or interview the man who had come to collect his clothes to be ironed. But his eyes were red. In his own peculiar way he had loved his father and admired him. It was the first time that he had wept since he had been a child.