Peter gripped his hand.
“I know you would. If I could forget young Stephen,” he caught his breath—“Bobby, I see him everywhere, all the time. I lie awake hours at night thinking about him. I see him in my sleep, see him sometimes grown-up—splendid, famous.... Sometimes I think he comes back. I can see him, lying on his back and looking up at the ceiling, and I say to myself, 'Now if you don't move he'll stay there' ... and then I move and he's gone. And I haven't any one to talk about him to. I never know whether Clare thinks of him or not. He was so splendid, Bobby, so strong. And he loved me in the most extraordinary way. We'd have been tremendous pals if he'd lived.
“I could have stood anything if I'd been able to see him growing up, had him to care about.... I'm so lonely, Bobby—and if I don't make Clare come back to me, now that the book's failed, I—I—I'll go back to Scaw House and just drink myself to the devil there with my old father; he'll be glad enough.”
“You once told me,” Bobby said, “about an old man in your place when you were a kid, who said once, 'It isn't life that matters but the courage you bring to it—' Well, that's what you're proving now, Peter.”
“Yes, but why me? I've had a bad time all my life—always been knocked about and cursed and kicked. Why should it go on all the time—all the time?”
“Because They think you're worth it, I suppose,” said Bobby.
III
And the result of that conversation was that, on that very night Peter made his appeal. They had had a silent evening (Mrs. Rossiter was staying in the house at this time), and at last they all had gone up to bed. Peter stayed for a moment in his dressing-room, seeing his white face in the looking-glass, hearing the beating of his heart and then with a hand that strangely trembled, knocked on Clare's door.
Her voice sounded frightened, he thought, as she called to him to come in. Indeed, as he entered she folded a letter that she had been reading, and put it in a drawer in the dressing-table at which she was sitting.
It was only seldom now that he disturbed her in that room. She had turned on the electric light over her dressing-table; the rest of the room was in darkness. She seemed to Peter very fragile and tiny as she sat there in her black evening frock, her breast rising and falling as though something had suddenly frightened her, her eyes wide and startled. He felt a gross, coarse brute as he stumbled, coming across the dark floor to her.