Peter spoke in a whisper--"Good-night, Maradick, you've done me a lot of good--I shan't forget it."

"Good luck to you," Maradick whispered back. Peter stole into the house.

The little drawing-room looked very cosy; the fire was burning, the lamp lighted, the thick curtains drawn. Maria Theresa smiled, with all her finery, from the wall.

Peter sat down in front of the fire. Maradick was right. One must have one's hand on the bridle--the Rider on the Lion again. It's better that the beast under you should be a Lion rather than a Donkey, but let it once fling you off its back and you're done for. And Maradick had said these things! Maradick whom once Peter had considered the dullest of his acquaintances. Well, one never knew about people--most of the Stay-at-homes were Explorers and vice versa, if one only understood them.

How still the house was! What was happening upstairs? He could not go and see--he could not move. He was held by the stillness. The doctor would come and tell him....

He thought of the toyshop--that blue ball--it would be the first thing that he would buy for the boy--and then soldiers--soldiers that wouldn't hurt him, that he couldn't lick the paint from--

Now the little silver clock ticked! He was so terribly tired--he had never been tired like this before....

The stillness pressed upon the house. Every sound--the distant rattling of some cab, the faint murmur of trams--was stifled, extinguished. The orchard seemed to press in upon the house, darker and darker grew the forest about it--The stars were shut out, the moon... the world was dead.

Then into this sealed and hidden silence, a voice crying from an upper room, suddenly fell--a woman in the abandonment of utter pain, pain beyond all control, was screaming. Somewhere, above that dark forest that pressed in upon the house, a bird of prey hovered. It hung for a moment; it descended--its talons were fixed upon her flesh... then again it ascended. Shriek after shriek, bursting the silence, chasing the shadows, flooding the secrecy with horrible light, beat like blows upon the walls of the house--rose, fell, rose again. Peter was standing, his back against the wall, his hands spread out, his face grey.

"My God, my God... Oh! my God!"

The sweat poured from his forehead. Once more there was silence but now it was ominous, awful....

The little silver clock ticked--Peter's body stood stretched against the wall--he faced the door.

Hours, hours passed. He did not move. The screaming had, many years ago, ceased. The doctor--a cheerful man with blue eyes and a little bristling moustache--came in.

"A fine boy, Mr. Westcott--I congratulate you. You might see your wife for a moment if you cared--stood it remarkably well--"

Slowly the forest, dark and terrible, moved away from the house. Very faintly again could be heard the distant rattling of some cab, the murmur of trams.

CHAPTER VII

DECLARATION OF HAPPINESS

I

Extracts from letters that Bobby Galleon wrote to Alice Galleon about this time:

"... But, of course, I am sorrier than I can say that it's so dull.

That's due to charity, my dear, and if you will go and fling yourself into the depths of Yorkshire because a girl like Ola Hunting chooses to think she's unhappy and lonely you've only yourself to thank. Moreover there's your husband to be considered. I don't suppose, for a single instant, that he really prefers to be left alone, with his infant son, mind you, howling at the present moment because his nurse won't let him swallow the glass marbles, and you can picture to yourself--if you want to make yourself thoroughly unhappy--your Robert sitting, melancholy throughout the long evening, alone, desolate, creeping to bed somewhere about ten o'clock.

"So there we are--you're bored to death and I've no one to growl at when I come back from the City--all Ola Hunting's fault--wring the girl's neck. Meanwhile here I sit and every evening I'll write whatever comes into my head and never look back on it again but stick it into an envelope and send it to you. You know me too well by now to be disappointed at anything.

"I'm quite sure that, if you were here with me now, sitting in that chair opposite me and sewing for all you were worth, that the thing that we'd be talking about would be Peter. If, therefore, these scrawls are full of Peter you won't mind, I know. He's immensely occupying my attention just now and you love him as truly and deeply as I do, so that if I go on at length about him you'll excuse it on that score. You who know me better than any one else in the world know that, in my most secret heart, I flatter myself on my ability as a psychologist. I remember when I told you first how you laughed but I think since then you've come round not a little, and although we both keep it to ourselves, it's a little secret that you're a tiny bit proud of. I can see how brother Percival, or young Tony Gale, or even dear Peter himself would mock, if I told them of this ambition of mine. 'Good, dear, stupid, old Bobby' is the way they think of me, and I know it's mother's perpetual wonder (and also, I think, a little her comfort) that I should be so lacking in brilliance when Percival and Millie are so full of it.

"You know Peter's attitude to me in these things--you've seen it often enough. He's patronising--he can't help it. That isn't, he considers, my line in the least, and, let me once begin to talk to him of stocks and shares and he'll open all his ears. Well, I can't blame him--but I do think these writers and people are inclined to draw their line a little too sharply with their Philistines--great big gulf, please--and Artists.

At any rate, here goes for my psychology and good luck to it. Peter, in fact, is so interesting a subject if one sees anything of him at all that I believe he'd draw speculation out of any one. There was old Maradick talking about him the other night--fascinated by him and understanding him most amazingly well--another instance of your Philistine and Artist mixed.

"But I knew him--and knew him jolly well too--when he was about twelve, so that I really get a pull over the rest of you there, for it adds of course immensely to the interest and if ever child was Father of the Man, Peter was. You know how we both funked that marriage of his for him--you because you knew Clare so well, I because I knew Peter. And then for a time it really seemed that we were both entirely wrong.

Clare's is a far simpler personality than Peter's, and if you work along one or two recognised lines--let her have her way, don't frighten her, above all keep her conventional--it's all right. Clare was, and is, awfully in love with him, and he madly with her of course--and that helped everything along. You know how relieved we both were and indeed it seemed, for a time, that it was going to be the making of both of them--going to make Clare braver and Peter less morbid.

"Well, it's since you've been away that everything's happened. Although the baby was born some weeks before you went, it's only lately that Clare has been up and about. She's perfectly well and the baby's splendid--promises to be a tremendous fellow and as healthy as possible.

You can imagine, a little, the effect of it all on Clare. I don't suppose there's any girl in London been so wrapped in cotton wool all her life, and that old ass of a father and still more irritating ass of a mother would go on wrapping her still if they had their way. The fuss they've both made about this whole business is simply incredible--especially when the man's a doctor and brings Lord knows how many children into the world every week of his life. But it's all been awfully bad for Clare. Of course, she was frightened--frightened out of her wits. It's the very first time life ever had its wrappings off for her, and that in itself of course is a tremendously good thing. But you can't, unfortunately, wrap any one up for all those years and then take the wrappings off and not deliver a shock to the system. Of course there's a shock, and it's just this shock that I'm so afraid of. I'm afraid of it for one thing because Peter's so entirely oblivious of it.

He was in an agony of terror on the day that the baby was born, but once it was there--well and healthy and promising--fear vanished. He could only see room for glory--and glory he does. I cannot tell you what that boy is like about the baby; at present he thinks, day and night, of nothing else. It is the most terrific thing to watch his feeling about it--and meanwhile he takes it for granted that Clare feels the same....

Well, she doesn't. I have been in a good deal during these last few days and she's stranger than words can say--doesn't see the child if she can help it--loves it, worships it, when it is there, and--is terrified of it. I saw a look in her eyes when she was nursing it yesterday that was sheer undiluted terror. She's been frightened out of her life, and if I know her the least little bit she's absolutely made up her mind never to be frightened like that again. She is going to hurl herself into a perfect whirlpool of excitement and entertainment and drag Peter with her if she can. Meanwhile, behind that hard little head of hers, she's making plans just as fast as she can make them. I believe she looks on life now as though it had broken the compact that she made with it--a compact that things should always be easy, comfortable, above all, never threatening. The present must be calm but the Future's absolutely got to be--and I believe, although she loves him devotedly in the depths of her strange little soul, that she half blames Peter for all of this disturbance, and that there are a great many things about him--his earlier life, his earlier friends, even his work--that she would strip from him if she could.

"Well, enough for the present. I don't know _what_ nonsense there isn't here. Into the envelope it all goes. I've been talking to you for an hour and a half and that's something...."

II

"... I've just come in from dinner with Peter and Clare and feel inclined to talk to you for hours ahead. However, that I can't do, so I shall write to you instead and you're to regard it all as a continuation of the things that I said in last night's letter. I am as interested as ever and indeed, after this evening's dinner more interested. The odd thing about it all is that Peter is so completely oblivious to any change that may be going on in Clare. His whole mind is centred now on the baby, he cannot have enough of it and it was he, and not Clare, who took me up after dinner to see it sleeping.

"You remember that they had some kind of a dispute about the name of the boy at the time of the christening. Peter insisted that it should be Stephen, after, I suppose, that odd Cornish friend of his, and Clare, weak and ill though she was, objected with all her might. I don't know why she took this so much to heart but it was all, I suppose, part of that odd hatred that she has of Peter's earlier life and earlier friends. She has never met the man Brant, but I think that she fancies that he is going to swoop down one of these days and carry Peter off on a broomstick or something. She gave in about the name--indeed I have never seen Peter more determined--but I think, nevertheless, that she broods over it and remembers it. My dear, I am as sorry for her as I can be. There she stands, loving Peter with all her heart and soul, terrified out of her wits at the possibilities that life is presenting to her, hating Peter's friends at one moment, his work the next, the baby the next--exactly like some one, walking on a window-ledge in his sleep and suddenly waking and discovering--

"Peter's a more difficult question. He's too riotously happy just at the moment to listen to a word from any one. His relation to the child is really the most touching thing you ever saw, and really the child, considering that it has scarcely begun to exist, has a feeling for him in the most wonderful way. It is as good as gold when he is there and follows him with its eyes--it doesn't pay much attention to Clare.

I think it knows that she's frightened of it. Yes, Peter is quite riotously happy. You know that 'The Stone House' is coming out next week. There is to be a supper party at the Galleons'--myself, Mrs.

Launce. Maradick, the Gales, some woman he knew at that boarding-house, Cardillac and Dr. and Mrs. Rossiter.

"By the way, Cardillac is there a great deal and I am both glad and sorry. He is very good for Clare and not at all good for Peter. He seems to understand Clare in the most wonderful way--far better than Peter does. He brings her out, helps her to be broader and really I think explains Peter to her and helps things along. His influence on Peter is all the other way. Peter, of course, worships him, just as he used to do in the old days at school, and Cards always liked being worshipped.

He has an elegance, a savoir-faire that dear, square-shouldered rough-and-tumble Peter finds entrancing, but, of course, Peter's worth the dozen of him any day of the week. He drags out all Peter's worst side. I wonder whether you'll understand what I mean when I say that Peter isn't _meant_ to be happy--at any rate not yet. He's got something too big, too tremendous in him to be carved easily into any one of our humdrum, conventional shapes. He takes things so hard that he isn't intended to take more than one thing at a time, and here he is with Clare and Cards both, as it seems to me, in a conspiracy to pull him into a thousand little bits and to fling each little bit to a different tea-party.

"He ought to be getting at his work and he isn't getting at it at all.

'The Stone House' is coming out next week and it may be all right, but I don't mind betting that the next one suffers. If he weren't in a kind of dream he'd see it all himself, and indeed I think that he'll wake one day soon and see that a thousand ridiculous things are getting in between him and his proper life.

"He was leading his proper life in those days at Dawson's when they were beating him at home and hating him at school, and it was that old bookshop and the queer people he met in it that produced 'Reuben Hallard.'

"He's so amazingly young in the ways of the world, so eager to make friends with everybody, so delighted with an entirely superficial butterfly like Cards, so devotedly attached to his wife, that I must confess that the outlook seems to me bad. There's going to be a tremendous tug-of-war in a minute and it's not going to be easy for the boy--nor, indeed for Clare.

"I hope that you don't feel so far removed from this in your Yorkshire desert that it has no interest for you, but I know how devoted you are to Peter and one doesn't want to see the boy turned into the society novelist creature--the kind of creature, God forgive me, that brother Percival is certain to become. You'll probably say when you read this that I am trying to drag out all the morbid side of Peter and make him the melancholy, introspective creature that he used to be, in fits and starts, when you first knew him. Of course that's the last thing I want to do, but work to a man of Peter's temperament is the one rock that can save him. He has, I do believe, a touch of genius in him somewhere, and I believe that if he's allowed to follow, devoutly and with pain and anguish, maybe, his Art, he'll be a great creature--a great man and a great writer. But he's in the making--too eager to please, too eager to care for every one, too desperately down if he thinks things are going badly with him. I notice that he hasn't been to see my father lately--I think too that all this reviewing is bad for him--other people's novels pouring upon him in an avalanche must take something from the freshness of his own.

"Anyhow I, Robert Galleon, your clever and penetrating husband, scent much danger and trouble ahead. Clare, simply out of love for him and anxiety for herself, will I know, do all she can to drag him from the thing that he should follow--and Cards will help her--out of sheer mischief, I verily believe.

"On their own heads be it. As to the carpets you asked me to go and look at...."

III

"... And now for the supper party. Although there's a whole day behind me I'm still quivering under the excitement of it. As I tell you about it it will in all probability, declare itself as a perfectly ordinary affair, and, indeed, I think that you should have been there yourself to have realised the emotion of it. But I'll try and give it you word for word. I was kept in the city and arrived late and they were all there.

Mrs. Launce, twinkling all over with kindness, Maradick in his best Stock Exchange manner, the Gales (Janet Gale perfectly lovely), the old Rossiters, Cards, shining with a mixture of enterprise and knowledge of the world and last of all a very pale, rather nervous, untidy Irish woman, a Miss Monogue. Clare was so radiantly happy that I knew that she wasn't happy at all, had obviously taken a great deal of trouble about her hair and had it all piled up on the top of her head and looked wonderful. I can't describe these things, but you know that when she's bent on giving an impression she seems to stand on her toes all the time--well, she was standing on every kind of toe, moral, physical, emotional last night. Finally there was Peter, looking as though his evening dress had been made for something quite different from social dinner parties. It fitted all right, but it was too comfortable to be smart--he looked, beside Cards, like a good serviceable cob up against the smartest of hunters. Peter's rough, bullet head, the way that he stands with his legs wide apart and his thick body holding itself deliberately still with an effort as though he were on board ship--and then that smile that won all our hearts ages ago right out of the centre of his brown eyes first and then curving his mouth, at last seizing all his body--but always, in spite of it, a little appealing, a little sad somewhere--can't you see him? And Cards, slim, straight, dark, beautifully clothed, beautifully witty and I am convinced, beautifully insincere. Can't you see Cards say 'good evening' to me--with that same charm, that same ease, that same contempt that he had when we were at school together? Bobby Galleon--an honest good fellow--but dull--mon Dieu--dull (he rather likes French phrases)--can't you hear him saying it? Well from the very first, there was something in the air. We were all excited, even old Mrs. Rossiter and the pale Irish creature whom I remembered afterwards I had met that day when I went to that boarding--house after Peter. Clare was quite extraordinary--I have never seen her anything like it--she talked the whole time, laughed, almost shouted. The only person she treated stiffly was Cards--I don't think she likes him.

"He was at his most brilliant--really wonderful--and I liked him better than I've ever liked him before. He seemed to have a genuine pleasure in Peter's happiness, and I believe he's as fond of the boy as he's able to be of any one. A copy of 'The Stone House' was given to each of us (I haven't had time to look at mine yet) and I suppose the combination of the baby and the book moved us all. Besides, Clare and Peter both looked so absurdly young. Such children to have had so many adventures already.

You can imagine how riotous we got when I tell you that dessert found Mrs. Rossiter with a paper cap on her head and Janet Gale was singing some Cornish song or other to the delight of the company. Miss Monogue and I were the quietest. I should think that she's one of the best, and I saw her look at Peter once or twice in a way that showed how strongly she felt about him.

"Well, old girl, I'm bothered if I can explain the kind of anxiety that came over me after a time. You'll think me a regular professional croaker but really I suppose, at bottom, it was some sort of feeling that the whole thing, this shouting and cheering and thumping the table--was premature. And then I suppose it was partly my knowledge of Peter. It wasn't like him to behave in this sort of way. He wasn't himself--excited, agitated by something altogether foreign to him. I could have thought that he was drunk, if I hadn't known that he hadn't touched any liquor whatever. But a man of Peter's temperament pays for this sort of thing--it isn't the sort of way he's meant to take life.