Peter found it very difficult to concentrate his mind upon his work, and although his task was purely mechanical he stopped from time to time and allowed his thoughts to wander. Inevitably they wandered toward that gray building on the Thames Embankment, and a room somewhere in its dark interior where a girl was sitting. He could see her face very clearly. He sighed and took up his pen again, and cursed himself for the folly of dreams.
Far better for him, he thought, that, if he could not concentrate upon his work, he let his mind go roving westward to the bleak moor and those ugly prison buildings that are set in a fold of it; to the carved sneer on the stone arch under which he had walked heavy-footed toward the golden-bearded warder who stood by the iron gates and counted the prisoners in and out; to the long, smelly "ward," and the vaultlike cells with their gayly coloured blankets; to the stretch of bog land from which the convict workers returned soaked to the skin to their lukewarm dinners; to the barnlike laundry, the silent punishment cells, and the cracked asphalt where the prisoners walked in a ring on Sunday mornings. An ugly memory, but at least one of accomplishment, and substantially past. It was much better than letting your fancies go straying toward the straight figure of a girl with violet eyes and red lips that curved everlastingly in laughter.
He had reached the S's in the list, the Simpsons and Sims and Sinclairs. It was ill-paid work, his employer being a aker of dubious probity; but so far as he was concerned, he had been paid something in advance, and he had been promised another job to follow.
Very resolutely he had dismissed from his mind all thought of his mother. Even in Dartmoor he had excluded her from his thoughts. If he remembered at all, it was by the letter that had come to him on the day of his conviction. His father had died that week; he had been sinking for months and had never been conscious of his son's shame. That had been Peter's one comfort, until he received his mother's letter, telling him that in a lucid hour of consciousness old Donald Dawlish had struck his name from his will. So Peter went down from the dock with the bitterness of death in his heart; beside that knowledge of his father's last act, the seven years' sentence was as nothing.
At six o'clock Elizabeth brought him his tea. She was unusually solemn and silent, and when he attempted to start a little conversation with her, she was so embarrassed that he did not attempt to pursue this course.
He went out for an hour, strolling through the Lambeth Cut amid a medley of hawkers' stalls with their glaring acetylene lights. He had some comfort from this contact with his fellows. As he returned, he was opening the door of the house with a key which the woman had given him that day, when he remembered that he had not seen Mrs. Inglethorne since the visitation of the police.
He went upstairs, lit the oil lamp and, putting a paper bag full of biscuits which he had bought on the table before him, he settled down to his task. Eight o'clock was striking when he heard the squeaking of brakes as a motor car stopped before the door, and, going to the window, he pulled aside the shade and looked down. It was too dark to distinguish the visitor, but his heart leaped at the thought that it might be Leslie Maughan and he opened the door and waited. This time he heard Mrs. Inglethorne's voice and after a while she called up to him sourly:
"A lady to see you, Mr. Dawlish."
"Will you ask her to come up, please?"
He went back into the room and waited. The step on the stairs was slower and heavier than Leslie's. And then there came through the open doorway the last woman in the world he expected to see—his mother.
Her cold eyes went from him to the littered table.
"Fine work for the son of a gentleman!" she said in a hard voice.
"I've known worse," he replied coolly.
She closed the door behind her, as though she knew something of Mrs. Inglethorne's irrepressible curiosity.
"I never expected I should see you again," she said, declining with a gesture the chair he pushed forward to her; "but having given the matter a great deal of thought, I have decided that I ought to do something for you. I am buying and stocking a small farm for you in western Canada, and I am making you a small allowance to enable you to live, even if the farm fails, as it probably will. You will leave for Quebec on Saturday week; I have d a second-class passage for you."
And, when he was about to speak:
"I don't want you to thank me. I shall feel happier when you have left the country. You have brought everlasting disgrace upon your father's name, and I do not wish to be reminded constantly of the fact."
Here she stopped.
"You were altogether wrong when you thought I was about to thank you," he said quietly. "In the first place, I have no intention of accepting your charity, and in the second place I have no aptitude for farming either in Canada or in England."
"I have d your passage," she said, with an air of finality.
"Then there will be a vacant bed going cheap on the Atlantic Ocean!" replied Peter, with a smile.
She looked round the room contemptuously and again her eyes went to the table.
"So you'd rather do this waster's work?"
"Waster's work, I agree," he said, "but infinitely more intellectual than mending boots or washing convicts' laundry—my last occupation. I expect nothing from you, Mother. For some reason which I have never quite understood, you have hated me ever since I was a child. I have no wish to reproach you with being 'unnatural.' You have been under the thumb of Anita Bellini ever since I can remember."
"How dare you!" Her voice was vibrant with anger. "'Under the thumb!' What do you mean?"
"I only know that Anita Bellini has withered every good feeling in every good woman who has been brought into contact with her. I only know that she is evil; what hold she has over you, Heaven knows. It has been sufficiently strong to rob me of the one gift which is every man's right—a mother's love. I dare say that sounds a piece of sickly sentimentality, but it is a big thing—a very big thing."
"You have had what you deserved," she interrupted brusquely. "And I did not come here to discuss my duty. If you prefer to go to Australia instead of Canada——"
"I prefer Lambeth to either place at the moment," he said coldly.
She shrugged her shoulders ever so slightly.
"You have made your bed and you must lie on it. I have done all that is humanly possible, more than could be expected, remembering how you have humiliated me and made my name——"
"My father's name," he corrected.
He got under her guard there, and to his wonder the comment to which irritation drove him produced a remarkable effect. Her face flushed; the hard mouth grew harder.
"Your father's name is my name," she said harshly.
Her eyes were blazing; he had never seen her so moved.
"I will give you twenty thousand pounds to leave the country," she said. "That is my final offer."
He shook his head.
"I shall never want money from you," he said, and, walking to the door, opened it and she left the room without another glance at him.
Why had she come? He wasted half an hour of precious time puzzling over this extraordinary action on her part. He had spoken no more than the truth, when he had said that from his childhood she had displayed an antagonism toward him which in maturity had puzzled him more than any other experience in his life. Antagonistic? She hated him! And, curiously enough, his father had known of her feeling, and though he had never made any direct reference to the enmity, had gone out of his way to make up for the affection the mother denied him. It was his father with whom he had corresponded throughout the days of the war; his father who had met him when he came home from France on leave; his father who had come day after day to the hospital to sit by the bedside of his wounded son; and when Peter had been discharged from the army, it was Donald who found him the secretaryship and had planned for him a great career in the world of politics. It was a puzzle beyond unravelment. Peter took up his pen again and tried, by a concentration of his exigent present, to forget the bitter past.
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