Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/478

 “Is my father in?” he asked.

“He is, but he's ill,” she answered him, eyeing him doubtfully. “He won't know yer—I doubt he'll know any one. He's had a great set-back—”

Peter pushed past her into the hall—“Is he ill?”

“Indeed he is. He was suddenly took—the other evenin' I being in my kitchen heard a great cry. I come runnin' and there in the dining-room I found him, standing there in the midst, his hands up. His eyes, you must understand, sir, were wide and staring—‘They've beaten me,’ he cried, ‘They've beaten me’—just like that, sir, and then down he tumbled in a living fit, foaming at the mouth and striking his poor head against the fender. Yer may come up, sir, but he won't know yer which he doesn't me either.”

Peter followed her up to the dreary room that his father inhabited. Even here the paper was peeling off the walls, some of the window-glass was broken and the carpet was torn. His father lay on his back in an old high four-poster. His eyes stared before him, cheeks were ashen white—his hands too were white like ivory.

His lips moved but he made no sound. He did not see Peter, nor did his eyes turn from the blank stare that held them.

“Has he a doctor?” Peter asked the old woman.

“Ay—there's a young man been coming—” the old woman answered him. She was, he noticed, more subservient than she had been on the former occasion. She obviously turned to him now with her greedy old eyes as the one who was likely soon to be in authority.

Peter turned back to the door. “This room must be made warmer and more comfortable. I will send a doctor from the hotel this evening—I will come in again to-night.”

As he looked about the poor room, as he saw the dust that the sunlight made so visible, he wondered that the house of cards could so recently have held him within its shadow. He felt as though he had passed through some terrible nightmare that the light of day rendered not only fantastic but incredible. That old Peter Westcott had indeed been flung out of the high window of Norah Monogue's room.

Leaving Scaw House on his right he struck through the dark belt of trees and came out at the foot of the Grey Hill.