Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/109

 “It's nerves, dear—I've been stupid about it.”

“And father, how has he treated you these years?”

“Your father has always been very kind.”

“Mother, tell me the truth! I must know. Has he been kind to you?”

“Yes, dear—always.”

But her voice was very faint and that look that Peter had noticed before was again in her eyes.

“Mother—you must tell me. That's not true.”

“Yes, Peter. He's done his best. I have been annoying, sometimes—foolish.”

“Mother, I know. I know because I know father and I know myself. I'm like him—I've just found it out. I've got those same things in me, and they'll do for me if I don't get the better of them. Grandfather told me—he was the same. All the Westcotts—”

He bent over the bed and took her hand and kissed it.

“Mother, dear—I know—father has been frightening you all this time—terrifying you. And you were all alone. If only I had been there—if only there had been some one—”

Her voice was very faint. “Yes he has frightened me all these years. At first I used to think that he didn't mean it. I was a bright, merry sort of a girl then—careless and knowing nothing about the world. And then I began to see—that he liked it—that it gave him pleasure to have something there that he could hurt. And then I began to be frightened. It was very lonely here for a girl who had had a gay time, and he usen't to like my going into Truro—and at last he even stopped my seeing people in Treliss. And then I began to be really frightened—and used to wake in the night and see him standing by the door watching me. Then I thought that when you were born that would draw us together, but it didn't, and I was always ill after that. He would do things—Oh!” her hand pressed her mouth. “Peter, dear, you mustn't think about it, only when I am dead I don't want you to think that I was quite a fool—if they tell you so. I don't want you to think it was all his fault either because it wasn't—I was silly and didn't understand sometimes but it's killed me, that dreadful waiting for him to do something, I never knew what it would