Graham was before his time. He hurried in, as anxious to get Peter out
of that apartment as Peter was to go. He found his brother sitting on
one side of the kitchen table and Nellie Pope on the other. Both had
magazines. The girl tore herself out of the marble house of the
heroine's father with reluctance. Peter had been holding his magazine
upside down for an hour. He had been looking right through it and into
his father's laboratory. There was not even the remote suggestion of a
smile on his pale face when Graham threw open the door.
"Come on, old man," urged Graham. "The taxi's waiting."
Peter got up. "Well, good-bye, Nellie," he said. "I'll come and see you
soon."
The girl darted a quick look at him. She saw that she was mistaken. "Oh,
yes, that'll be very kind of you. I 'aven't got any friends."
"Yes you have," said Graham,--"two."
Nellie Pope led the way into the narrow passage, stood on tiptoe, made a
long arm and got Peter's hat off the peg. Then she stood in front of him
and her lips trembled, although her well-practised smile curled up the
corners of her mouth. "Not good-bye, but orevoy, eh? Well, good luck and
God bless you. I shall miss you both most awfully. It's been a fair
treat to 'ave you 'ere."
Peter waved his hand and went down the bare stairs. His knees felt weak
and shaky and his eyes seemed to be at the back of his head. He drew
back to let a woman pass. She cocked her golden head at him with an
enquiring eye and a flash of teeth and pushed open the half-closed door
of an apartment. Her high-pitched metallic voice rang out. "Say, Kid,
there goes Nellie Pope's boarder. By Gosh, don't yer think some one
oughter stop her?"
The two boys drove home in silence. They had both caught the meaning of
those significant words.
Graham, the self-imagined man of the world, who had picked up a large
collection of half-facts--as all the precocious do--but who, for all
that, or in spite of that, had walked into the trap set by Ita Strabosck
without the faintest perception of his danger, threw those words aside.
Everything would be right, he told himself, and if _he_ had been coming
out of Nellie Pope's apartment in the ordinary way and had overheard her
rival's loud comment, he would simply have shrugged his shoulders, like
the rest of the young men of his type and spirit, and knowing only the
tail end of the truth, told himself that all men take "chances" and that
the odds were largely in his favor. And what would this attitude of
puerile bravado have proved? That he and all the men like him were just
as much a menace to society from knowing the half-facts which did
nothing more for them than allow them to take "chances," as the men who
were wholly ignorant and so blundered blindly into tragedy.
To Peter, the words of the painted woman came as a finishing blow. In
his crass and culpable ignorance, into which Kenyon had flung one most
terrific fact, he came away from Nellie Pope not knowing whether he was
immune--not able to assure himself that he was safe. Think of it! Big
and strong as he was, he remained a mere child in the matter of plain,
necessary and urgent truths, and if ever a man knew himself for a fool
he was Peter Guthrie, as he drove home.
No less grateful to God than ever for having been assisted to go
through Harvard and Oxford clean and straight, he cursed himself for not
having sought out the facts of life,--not from grinning and salacious
arguments of half-informed young men, but from a proper source,--since
his father had not conceived it to be his duty to give them to him early
in his life. If Kenyon had not opened out a new and awful vista of
thought the night that he talked about Graham and Ita Strabosck, Peter's
ignorance, so jealously and mistakenly preserved, would have remained so
colossal that he would have gone home humiliated, but unworried. As it
was, this one thing at any rate--this one most awful thing--had sunk
into his mind, making him dangerously less ignorant but without proper
knowledge. He arrived home a prey, therefore, to the most hideous fear.
Luckily there were people dining with his father and mother. Belle had
gone out of town for several days, suffering from the shock of finding
out the truth about Kenyon, and Ethel had returned to school. Peter was
able to go up to his own room unnoticed.
Graham, whose loyalty and concern had been good to see, went up with him
and threw the suit-case into a corner.
"Gee!" he said, with a touch of emotion that he made no attempt to hide,
"but I'm glad you're home, Petey." It was many years since he had called
Peter by the name that he had gone by in the nursery. He seemed to have
come so close to his big brother during those recent hours.
Peter did a surprising thing. He turned quickly, strode over to Graham,
put his arm round his shoulder and kissed his cheek. For just those few
moments both men had gone back through the years and were little boys
again.
Two things happened to Graham. He blushed to the roots of his hair, and
swallowed something that threatened to choke him.
"You said you had something on, didn't you,--supper, or something?" said
Peter.
"Yes; but I'll cut it out if you want me to."
"No, don't. Why should you? I feel pretty rotten and I shall turn in
right away. Don't bother about me any more, old man."
"I'd rather stay with you."
"Yes, I know you would, old boy, but you push off and have a good time.
As a matter of fact, I rather want to--to be alone for a bit. D'you
see?"
"All right, then." And to show that he had become a man again and his
own master, Graham went off whistling the latest tango.
And by letting his brother go at that moment, Peter did a very unwise
thing. He was still weak and ill. His brain, which had not recovered
itself from the effects of Kenyon's poisonous mixture, was in no
condition to be tortured by solitary thought. He needed to be kept away
from self-analysis--to be set to work on the ordinary commonplaces of
everyday life. Most of all, his thoughts required to be put to rest by
sleep.
Left to himself, Peter sat down, almost in the dark, with his arms
folded, his legs stuck out and his chin buried in his chest, and
thrashed the tired machinery of his brain into action. All that had
happened in the last forty-eight hours coming on top of the suffering
that he had undergone through having been separated from Betty and
having failed to bring about the new relationship with his father, upon
which he had set his heart, gradually became distorted. He began to look
at everything through an enormous magnifying glass and to see himself,
not as one whose loyal, simple and unsuspicious nature had been taken
advantage of by Kenyon, but as a common drunken creature who had had to
be lifted into a cab and who had spent two nights in the apartment of a
woman of the street. He began to look at himself with so deep a
humiliation and disgust that the mere thought of his ever again holding
Betty in his arms seemed outrageous. And having by stages, made
conceivable by the condition of his health and the strain that had been
put upon him by all the things that had happened since his return from
England, come up to this morbid and hyperconscientious point in his
self-condemnation, he stood up suddenly, obsessed by a new and appalling
thought. He said to himself: "I'm not only unworthy of Betty, I'm
unclean, and so unfit to live." And having seized at that with the
avidity and even triumph that comes with a sudden disorder of the
understanding, he began to dramatize his death--to ask himself how to
make it most effective. And then his father entered his thoughts. "Ah!"
he cried inwardly. "Father--it's _father_ who is responsible--it's
_father_ who must be made to pay! I'm his eldest son. He's very proud of
me. He shall come into the room to-night in which he spends all his
time for the benefit of other men's sons and find the one he neglected
lying dead on the floor. That's it! Now I've got it! There's a hideous
irony about this that'll sink even into his curious mind. I'd like to be
able to see his face when he finds me. There'd be just a little
satisfaction in that."
If only Graham could have come back at that moment, or the little mother
to put her arms round that poor, big, over-sensitive, uninitiated lad
and bring him out of his mental dejection with her love and warmth!
There was a revolver somewhere among his things. He had bought it when
he went camping during one of his vacations from Harvard. He hadn't seen
it for several years. With feverish haste he instituted a search, going
through one drawer after another, flinging his collars and socks and all
his personal things aside, talking in a half-whisper to himself, until,
with a little cry of glee, he found it with a box of cartridges. And
then, with the most scrupulous care he loaded it, slipped it into his
pocket and crept out of the room and downstairs. The door of the
drawing-room was ajar. He heard laughter and the intermingling of
voices, heard some one say "Good-bye." He dodged quickly past, through
the library and into the room in which he had last stood with his hand
on the shaking shoulders of his father. _He_ would give him something to
weep about this time,--yes, by jove, he would! _He_ would make him wake
up at last to the fact that his sons were human beings and needed to be
treated as such!
He welcomed the fact that away in the distance a storm had broken with
the deep artillery of thunder, and that already heavy rain was swishing
down on the city. It fitted into his half-maddened mood.
He shut the door. He walked quickly about the room, speculating as to
the most effective place to be found outstretched. He had a decision and
then, so that there might be no loop-hole for his father, sat down to
write a final indictment.
Time fled away. He covered page after page of note paper, pouring out
all his soul, making a great appeal for the right treatment of Graham
and his sisters, and finally signed his name, having scrawled in his
large round writing, "This is my protest."
The storm had come nearer. Outbursts of thunder rolled over the house
followed by stabs of lightning.
He then deliberately placed himself on the chosen spot, cocked the
trigger and put the cold barrel of the revolver to his temple.
There was a sort of scream.
Peter swung round, with his nerves jangling like a wire struck suddenly
with a stick.
There stood his father, unable to form a sentence, his face grey, his
eyes distended and his arms thrown out in front of him.