He passed the old town wall and stepped out into the high road. Far below him was the sea, above him a sky scattered with shining stars and around him a white dim world. Turning a corner the road lay straight before him and to the right along the common was the black clump of trees that hid his home. He discovered that he was very tired, it had been a most exhausting day with old Parlow so cross in the morning and the scene in the inn at night—and now—!
His steps fell slower and slower as he passed along the road. One hot hand was clutching Parlow's note and in his throat there was a sharp pain that made it difficult to swallow, and his eyes were burning. Suppose he never went home at all! Supposing he went off to Stephen's farm!—it was a long way and he might lose his way in the snow, but his heart beat like a hammer when he thought of Stephen coming to the door and of the little spare room where Stephen put his guests to sleep. But no—Stephen would not want him to-night; he would be very tired and would rather be alone; and then there would be the morning, when it would be every bit as bad, and perhaps worse. But if he ran away altogether? ... He stopped in the middle of the road and thought about it—the noise of the sea came up to him like the march of men and with it the sick melancholy moan of the Bell Rock, but the rest of the world was holding its breath, so still it seemed. But whither should he run? He could not run so far away that his father could not find him—his father's arm stretched to everywhere in the world. And then it was cowardly to run away. Where was that courage of which he had been thinking so much? So he shook his little shoulders and pulled up those stockings again and turned up the little side road, usually so full of ruts and stones and now so level and white with the hard snow. Now that his mind was made up, he marched forward with unfaltering step and clanged the iron gates behind him so that they made a horrible noise, and stepped through the desolate garden up the gravel path.
The house looked black and grim, but there were lights behind the dining-room windows—it was there that they were sitting, of course.
As he stood on his toes to reach the knocker a shooting star flashed past above his head, and he could hear the bare branches of the trees knocking against one another in the wind that always seemed to be whistling round the house. The noise echoed terribly through the building, and then there was a silence that was even more terrible. He could fancy how his aunt would start and put down her Patience cards for a moment and look, in her scared way, at the window—he knew that his father would not move from behind his paper, and that there would be no other sound unless his grandfather awoke. He heard Mrs. Trussit's steps down the passage, then locks were turned, the great door swung slowly open, and he saw her, as he had pictured it, with a candle in her hand raised above her head, peering into the dark.
“Oh! it's you, Master Peter,” and she stood aside, without another word, to let him in. He slipped past her, silently, into the hall and, after a second's pause, she followed him in, banging the hall door behind her. Then she opened the dining-room door announcing, grimly, “It's Master Peter come in, sir.” The marble clock struck half-past ten as she spoke.
He stood just inside the door blinking a little at the sudden light and twisting his cloth cap round and round in his hands. He couldn't see anything at first, and he could not collect his thoughts. At last he said, in a very little voice:
“I've come back, father.”
The lights settled before his eyes, and he saw them all exactly as he had thought they would be. His father had not looked up from his paper, and Peter could see the round bald patch on the top of his head. Aunt Jessie was talking to herself about her cards in a very agitated whisper—“Now it's the King I want—how provoking! Ah, there's the seven of spades, and the six and the five—oh dear! it's a club,” and not looking up at all.
No one answered his remark, and the silence was broken by his grandfather waking up; a shrill piping voice came from out of the rugs. “Oh! dear, what a doze I've had! It must be eight o'clock! What a doze for an old man to have! on such a cold night too,” and then fell asleep again immediately.
At last Peter spoke again in a voice that seemed to come from quite another person.