Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/439

 first glances at Peter and Bobby she seemed to understand everything, for, instantly, at that glimpse of their faces she became, for the first time in her life, perhaps, a personality, a figure, something defined and outlined.

Her face was suddenly grey. She hesitated back against the door and, with her face on Peter, said in a whisper, to Bobby:

“What—what has happened?”

Bobby was not inclined to spare her. As an onlooker during these last months he felt that she, perhaps, was more guiltily responsible for the catastrophe than any other human being.

“Clare,” he said, trying to fix her eyes. “She's gone off to Cardillac—to Paris.”

Then he was himself held by the tragedy of those two faces. They faced each other across the room. Peter, with eyes and a mouth that were not his, eyes not sane, the eyes of no human being, mouth smiling, drawn tight like a razor's edge, with his hands spread out against the wall, watched Mrs. Rossiter.

Mrs. Rossiter, at Bobby's words, had huddled up, suddenly broken, only her eyes, in her great foolish expressionless face, stung to an agony to which the rest of her body could not move.

Her little soul—a tiny scrap of a thing in that vague prison of dull flesh—was suddenly wounded, desperately hurt by the only weapon that could ever have found it.

“Clare!” that soul whispered, “not gone! It's not possible—it can't be—it can't be!”

Peter, without moving, spoke to her.

“It's you that have sent her away. It's all your doing—all your doing—”

She scarcely seemed to realise him, although her eyes never left his face—she came up to Bobby, her hands out:

“Bobby—please, please—tell me. This is absurd—there's a mistake. Clare, Clare would never do a thing like that—never leave me like that—why—” and her voice rose—“I've loved her—I've loved her as no mother ever loved her girl—she's been everything to me. She knows it—why she often says that I'm the only one who loves her. She'd never go—”