Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/448

 “I want to drive to Treliss,” said Peter.

They bargained. The battered optimist obtained the price that he demanded and cocked his eve, derisively, at the rising moon.

Peter surveyed the cab.

“I'll sit with you on the box,” he said.

The thin driver made way for him. It was a high jolting cab of the old-fashioned kind, a cab you might have sworn was Cornish had you seen it anywhere, a cab that smelt of beer and ancient leather and salt water, a cab that had once driven the fashion of Treliss to elegant dances and now must rattle the roads with very little to see, for all your trouble, at the end of it.

The sleeping fields, like grey cloths, stretched on every side of them and the white road cut into the heart of the distance. It was a quarter to eight and a blue dusk. The driver tilted the top hat over one ear and they were off.

“I know this road as yer might say back'ards. Ask any one down along Treliss way. Zachy Jackson they'll say—which is my name, sir, if yer requirin' a good 'orse any time o' day. Zachy Jackson! which there ain't no man,—tarkin' of 'orses, fit to touch 'im, they'll tell yer and not far wrong either.”

But now with every stumbling step of that bony horse Peter was being shaken into a more active consciousness, consciousness not of the past, very slightly of the present, but rather of an eager, excited anticipation of events shortly to befall him, of the acute sense—the first that had, as yet, come to him—that, very shortly, he was to plunge himself into an absolute abandonment of all the restraints and discipline that had hitherto held him. He did not know, he could not analyse to himself—for what purpose those restraints had been formerly enforced upon his life. Only now—at this moment, his body was being flooded with a warm, riotous satisfaction at the thought of the indulgences that were to be his.

Still this fortress of his house was bare and desolated, but now in some of the rooms there were lights, fire, whispers, half-hidden faces, eyes behind curtains.

The wind struck him in the face. “Enough of this—you're done for—you're beaten—you're broken you're