Page:Walpole - Fortitude.djvu/75

 And yet, with it all, he knew, as every holiday came, more clearly, that again and again they, his mother and himself, were on the verge of speech or action. He could see it in her eyes, her beautiful grey eyes that moved him so curiously. There were days when he was on the edge of a rush of questions, and then something held him back—perhaps the unconscious certainty that his mother's answers would precipitate his relations with his father—and he was not, as yet, ready.

Anyhow a grim place, Scaw House, grimmer with every return to it, and not a brightly coloured interlude to Dawson's, grim enough in its own conditions. The silence that was gradually growing with Peter—the fixed assurance, whether at home or at school, that life was easier if one said nothing—might have found an outlet in Stephen's company, but here again there was no cheerful chronicle.

Each holiday showed Peter less of Stephen than the last had done, and he was afraid to ask himself why this was. Perhaps in reality he did not know, but at any rate he was sure that the change was in Stephen. He cared for Stephen as devotedly as ever, and, indeed, in that perhaps he needed him more than ever and saw him so little, his affection was even stronger than it had been. But Stephen had changed, not, Peter knew, in any affection towards himself, but in his own habits and person. Burstead—his old enemy—had taken a farm near his own farm, in order, so they said at The Bending Mule, that he might flaunt Mrs. Burstead (once Stephen's sweetheart) in Stephen's face.

They also said that Burstead beat his wife and ill-used her horribly, and that she would give all her soul now that she was Stephen Brant's wife, but that she was a weak, silly young woman, poor thing. They said that Stephen knew all this, and that he could hear her crying at nights, and that it was sending him off his head—and that he was drinking. And they shook their heads, down at The Bending Mule, and foreboded ill. Moreover, that old lady, Mrs. Brant, had died during Peter's first year at Dawson's, and Stephen was alone now. He had changed in his appearance, his beard tangled and untidy, his clothes unbrushed and his eyes wild and bloodshot, and once Peter had ventured up to Stephen's farm and had climbed the stairs and had opened