"You know--father--that..."

"Yes?"

Peter rose suddenly from the table--they faced one another.

"I want you to let me go. You have never cared in the least for me and you do not want me here. I shall go mad if I stay in this place. I must go."

"Oh, you must go? Well, that's plain enough at any rate--and when do you propose leaving us?"

"After Easter--the Wednesday after Easter," he said. "Oh, father, please. Give me a chance. I can do things in London--I feel it. Here I shall never do anything."

Peter raised his eyes to his father's and then dropped them. Mr.

Westcott senior was not pleasant to look at.

"Let us have no more of this--you will stay here because I wish it. I like to have you here--father and son--father and son."

He placed his hand on the boy's shoulder--"Never mention this again for your own sake--you will stay here until I wish you to go."

But Peter broke free.

"I _will_ go," he shouted--"I _will_ go--you _shall_ not keep me here. I have a right to my freedom--what have you ever done for me that I should obey you? I want to leave you and never see you again. I ..." And then his eyes fell--his legs were shaking. His father was watching him, no movement in his short thick body--Peter's voice faltered--"I _will_ go,"

he said sullenly, his eyes on the ground.

His grandfather stirred in his sleep. "Oh, what a noise," he muttered, "with the rain and all."

But Mr. Westcott removed with a careful hand the melodrama that his young son had flung about the room.

"That's enough noise," he said, "you will _not_ go to London--nor indeed anywhere else--and for your own peace of mind I should advise you not to mention the subject again. The hour is a little early but I recommend your bedroom."

Peter went. He was trembling from head to foot. Why? He undressed and prepared himself for battle. Battle it was to be, for the Wednesday in Easter week would find him in the London train--of that there was to be no question.

Meanwhile, with the candle blown out, and no moon across the floor, it was quite certain that courage would be necessary. He was fighting more than his father.

V

He woke suddenly. A little wind, blowing through the open door flickered the light of a candle that flung a dim circle about the floor. Within the circle was his father--black clothes and white face, he was looking with the candle held high, across the room to the bed.

He drew back the candle and closed the door softly behind him. His feet made no sound as they passed away down the passage.

Peter lay quaking, wide eyed in his bed, until full morning and time for getting up.

The opening, certainly, of a campaign.

CHAPTER X

SUNLIGHT, LIMELIGHT, DAYLIGHT

I

Easter fell early that year; the last days of March held its festival and the winds and rains of that blustering month attended the birth of its primroses.

Young Peter spent his days in preparation for the swift coming of Easter Wednesday and in varying moods of exultation, terror, industry and idleness. He did not see Mr. Zanti during this period--that gentleman was, he was informed, away on business--and it was characteristic of him that he asked Zachary Tan no questions whether of the mysterious bookshop, of London generally, or of any possible news about Stephen, the latter a secret that he was convinced the dark little curiosity shop somewhere contained.

But he had an amazing number of things to think about and the solicitor's office was the barest background for his chasing thoughts.

He spoke to no one of his approaching freedom--but the thought of it hung in rich and burning colour ever at the back of his thoughts.

Meanwhile the changing developments at Scaw House were of a nature to frighten any boy who was compelled to share in them. It could not be denied that Mr. Westcott had altered very strangely since his wife's death. The grim place with its deserted garden had never seen many callers nor friendly faces but the man with the milk, the boy with the butcher's meat, the old postman with the letters stayed now as brief a time over their business as might be and hurried down the grass-grown paths with eager haste. Since the departure of the invaluable Mrs. Trussit a new order reigned--red-faced Mrs. Pascoe, her dress unfastened, her hair astray, her shoes at heel, her speech thick and uncertain, was queen of the kitchen, and indeed of other things had they but known all. But to Peter there was more in this than the arrival of Mrs. Pascoe. With every day his father was changing--changing so swiftly that when Peter's mother had been buried only a month, that earlier Mr.

Westcott, cold, stern, reserved, terrible, seemed incredible; he was terrible now but with how different a terror.

To Peter this new figure was a thing of the utmost horror. He had known how to brace himself for that other authority--there had, at any rate, been consistency and even a kind of chiselled magnificence in that stiff brutality--now there was degradation, crawling devilry, things unmentionable....

This new terror broke upon him at supper two nights after he had first spoken about London. The meal had not been passed, as usual, in silence.

His father had talked strangely to himself--his voice was thick, and uncertain--his hand shook as he cut the bread. Mrs. Pascoe had come, in the middle of the meal, to give food to the old grandfather who displayed his usual trembling greed. She stood with arms akimbo, watching them as they sat at table and smiling, her coarse face flushed.

"Pudding," said Mr. Westcott.

"Ye'll be 'aving the pudding when it's ready," says she.

"Damn" from Mr. Westcott but he sits still looking at the table-cloth and his hand shaking.

To Peter this new thing was beyond all possibility horrible. This new shaking creature--

"I didn't kill her, you know, Peter," Mr. Westcott says quite smoothly, when the cloth had been cleared and they are alone. And then suddenly, "Stay where you are--I have stories to tell you."

Peter, white to the lips, was held in his place. He could not move or speak. Then during the following two hours, his father, without moving from his place, poured forth a stream of stories--foul, filthy, horrible beyond all telling. He related them with no joy or humour or bestial gloating over their obscenities--only with a staring eye and his fingers twisting and untwisting on the table-cloth. At last Peter, his head hanging, his cheeks flaming, crept to his attic.

At breakfast his father was again that other man--stern, immovable, a rock-where was that trembling shadow of the night before?

And Mrs. Pascoe--once more in her red-faced way, submissive--in her place.

The most abiding impression with Peter, thinking of it afterwards in the dark lanes that run towards the sea, when the evening was creeping along the hill, was of a fiery eye gleaming from old grandfather Westcott's pile of rugs. Was it imagined or was there indeed a triumph there--a triumph that no age nor weakness could obscure?

And from the induction of that first terrible evening Peter stepped into a blind terror that gave the promised deliverance of that approaching Easter Wednesday an air of blind necessity. Also about the house the dust and neglect crept and increased as though it had been, in its menace and evil omen, a veritable beast of prey. Doors were off their hinges, windows screamed to their clanging shutters, the grime lay, like sand, about the sills and corners of the rooms. At night the house was astir with sound but with no human voices.

II

But it was only at night that Terror crept from its cupboard and leapt on to Peter's shoulders. He defied it even then with set lips and the beginning of a conception of the duties that Courage demands of its worshippers. He would fight it, let it develop as it would--but, during these weeks, in the sunlight, he thought nothing of it at all, but only with eager eyes watched his father.

His reading had, in these latter years, been slender enough. It was seldom that he had any money, there was no circulating library in Treliss at that time and he knew no one who could lend him books. He fell back, perforce, on the few that he had and especially on the three "Henry Galleons." But he had in his head--and he had known it without putting it into words, for a very long time--"The Thousand and One Nights of Peter Westcott, Esq."--stories that would go on night after night before he went to sleep, stories that were concerned with enormous families whose genealogies had to be worked out on paper (here was incipient Realism)--or again, stories concerning Treasure and Masses of it--banks of diamonds, mountains of pearls, columns of rubies, white marble temples, processions of white elephants, cloth of gold (here was incipient Romance). Never, be it noticed, at this time, incipient Humour; life had been too heavy a thing for that.

But these stories, formerly racing through his brain because they must, because indeed they were there against his own will or any one else's, had now a most definite place and purpose in their existence. They were there now because they were to be trained, to be educated, to be developed, until they were fit to appear in public. He had, even in these early days, no false idea of the agonies and tortures of this gift of his. Was it not in "Henry Lessingham"?... "and so with this task before him he knew that words were of many orders and regiments and armies, and those that were hard of purchase and difficult of discipline were the possessions of value, for nothing that is light and easy in its production is of any duration or lasting merit."

And so, during these weeks, when he should have attended to the duties of a solicitor his mind was hunting far away in those forests where very many had hunted before him. And, behold, he was out for Fame....