Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/105

 “How is mother to-night, father?”

He had never asked about his mother before, but his voice was quite even and steady. His aunt dropped her knife clattering on to her plate.

His father answered him:

“Why do you wish to know?”

"It is natural, isn't it? I am afraid that she is not so well.”

“She is as well as can be expected.”

They said no more, but once his father suddenly looked at him, as though he had noticed some new note in his voice.

On the next afternoon his father went into Truro. A doctor came occasionally to the house—a little man like a beaver—but Peter felt that he was under his father's hand and he despised him.

It was a clear Autumn afternoon with a scent of burning leaves in the air and heavy massive white clouds were piled in ramparts beyond the brown hills. It was so still a day that the sea seemed to be murmuring just beyond the garden-wall. The house was very silent: Mrs. Trussit was in the housekeeper's room, his grandfather was sleeping in the dining-room. The voices of some children laughing in the road came to him so clearly that it seemed to Peter impossible that his father and, at that, he knew instantly that his chance had come. He must see his mother now—there might not be another opportunity for many weeks.

He left his room and stood at the head of the stairs listening. There was no sound.

He stole down very softly and then waited again at the end of the long passage. The ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall drove him down the passage. He listened again outside his mother's door—there was no sound from within and very slowly he turned the handle.

As the door opened his senses were invaded by that air of medicine and flowers that he had remembered as a very small boy—he seemed to be surrounded by it and great white vases on the mantelpiece filled his eyes, and the white curtains at the window blew in the breeze of the opening door.