"You said you had something on, didn't you,—supper, or something?" said Peter.
"Yes; but I'll cut it out if you want me to."
"No, don't. Why should you? I feel pretty rotten and I shall turn in right away. Don't bother about me any more, old man."
"I'd rather stay with you."
"Yes, I know you would, old boy, but you push off and have a good time. As a matter of fact, I rather want to—to be alone for a bit. D'you see?"
"All right, then." And to show that he had become a man again and his own master, Graham went off whistling the latest tango.
And by letting his brother go at that moment, Peter did a very unwise thing. He was still weak and ill. His brain, which had not recovered itself from the effects of Kenyon's poisonous mixture, was in no condition to be tortured by solitary thought. He needed to be kept away from self-analysis—to be set to work on the ordinary commonplaces of everyday life. Most of all, his thoughts required to be put to rest by sleep.
Left to himself, Peter sat down, almost in the dark, with his arms folded, his legs stuck out and his chin buried in his chest, and thrashed the tired machinery of his brain into action. All that had happened in the last forty-eight hours coming on top of the suffering that he had undergone through having been separated from Betty and having failed to bring about the new relationship with his father, upon which he had set his heart, gradually became distorted. He began to look at everything through an enormous magnifying glass and to see himself, not as one whose loyal, simple and unsuspicious nature had been taken advantage of by Kenyon, but as a common drunken creature who had had to be lifted into a cab and who had spent two nights in the apartment of a woman of the street. He began to look at himself with so deep a humiliation and disgust that the mere thought of his ever again holding Betty in his arms seemed outrageous. And having by stages, made conceivable by the condition of his health and the strain that had been put upon him by all the things that had happened since his return from England, come up to this morbid and hyperconscientious point in his self-condemnation, he stood up suddenly, obsessed by a new and appalling thought. He said to himself: "I'm not only unworthy of Betty, I'm unclean, and so unfit to live." And having seized at that with the avidity and even triumph that comes with a sudden disorder of the understanding, he began to dramatize his death—to ask himself how to make it most effective. And then his father entered his thoughts. "Ah!" he cried inwardly. "Father—it's father who is responsible—it's father who must be made to pay! I'm his eldest son. He's very proud of me. He shall come into the room to-night in which he spends all his time for the benefit of other men's sons and find the one he neglected lying dead on the floor. That's it! Now I've got it! There's a hideous irony about this that'll sink even into his curious mind. I'd like to be able to see his face when he finds me. There'd be just a little satisfaction in that."
If only Graham could have come back at that moment, or the little mother to put her arms round that poor, big, over-sensitive, uninitiated lad and bring him out of his mental dejection with her love and warmth!
There was a revolver somewhere among his things. He had bought it when he went camping during one of his vacations from Harvard. He hadn't seen it for several years. With feverish haste he instituted a search, going through one drawer after another, flinging his collars and socks and all his personal things aside, talking in a half-whisper to himself, until, with a little cry of glee, he found it with a box of cartridges. And then, with the most scrupulous care he loaded it, slipped it into his pocket and crept out of the room and downstairs. The door of the drawing-room was ajar. He heard laughter and the intermingling of voices, heard some one say "Good-bye." He dodged quickly past, through the library and into the room in which he had last stood with his hand on the shaking shoulders of his father. He would give him something to weep about this time,—yes, by jove, he would! He would make him wake up at last to the fact that his sons were human beings and needed to be treated as such!