“It shall be the first thing I will buy for him—” thought Peter.
He turned now amongst the light and crowds of Piccadilly. He walked on without seeing and hearing—always with that thought in his heart—“She is in terrible pain. How can God be so cruel? And she was so happy—before I came she was so happy—now—what have I done to her?”
Never, before to-night, had he felt so sharply, so irretrievably his sense of responsibility. Here now, before him, at this birth of his child, everything that he had done, thought, said—everything that he had been—confronted him. He was only twenty-seven but his shoulders were heavy with the confusion of his past. Looking back upon it, he saw a helpless medley of indecisions, of sudden impulses, sudden refusals; into the skeins of it, too, there seemed to be dragged the people that had made up his life—they faced him, surrounded him, bewildered him!
What right had he, thus encompassed, to hand these things on to another? His father, his grandfather . . . he saw always that dark strain of hatred, of madness, of evil working in their blood. Suppose that as his boy grew he should see this in the young eyes? Suppose, most horrible of all, that he should feel this hatred for his son that his grandfather had felt for his father, that his father had felt for him.
What had he done? . . . He stopped, staring confusedly about him. The people jostled him on every side. The old devils were at him—“Eat and drink for to-morrow we die. . . . Give it up . . . We're too strong for you and we'll be too strong for your son. Who are you to defy us? Come down—give it up—”
His white face caught attention. “Move along, guv'nor,” some one shouted. A man took him by the arm and led up a dark side street. He turned his eyes and saw that the man was Maradick.
II
The elder man felt that the boy was trembling from head to foot.
“What's the matter, Westcott? Anything I can do for you?”
