Chapter 28

THE ROUNDABOUT

I

Mrs. Rossiter and Mrs. Galleon sat solemnly, with the majesty of spreading skirts and Sunday Best hats, in the little drawing-room of The Roundabout, awaiting the return from the honeymoon.

The Roundabout is the name that Peter has given to the little house in Dorset Street, Chelsea, that he has chosen to live in with his bride. High spirits lead to nicknames and Peter was in the very highest of spirits when he took the house. The name alluded both to the shape--round bow-windowed like--fat bulging little walls, lemon-coloured, and to the kind of life that Peter intended to lead. All was to be Happiness. Life is challenged with all the high spirits of a truly happy ceremony.

It is indeed a tiny house--tiny hall, tiny stairs, tiny rooms but quaint with a little tumble-down orchard behind it and that strange painted house that old mad Miss Anderson lives in on the other side of the orchard. Such a quiet little street too ... a line of the gravest trees, cobbles with only the most occasional cart and a little church with a sleepy bell at the farthest end ... all was to be Happiness.

Wedding presents--there had been six hundred or so--filled the rooms. People had, on the whole, been sensible, had given the right thing. The little drawing-room with its grey wall-paper, roses in blue jars, its two pictures--Velasquez' Maria Theresa in an old silver frame and Rembrandt's Night Watch--was pleasant, but overwhelmed now by the presence of these two enormous ladies. The evening sun, flooding it all with yellow light, was impertinent enough to blind the eyes of Mrs. Rossiter. She rose and moved slowly to draw down the blinds. A little silver clock struck half-past four.

“They must soon be here,” said Mrs. Galleon gloomily. Her gloom was happy and comfortable. She was making the very most of a pleasant business with the greatest satisfaction in the world. She had done exactly the same at Bobby's wedding, and, in her heavy, determined way she would do the same again before she died. Alice Galleon would be there in a moment, meantime the two ladies, without moving in their chairs, flung sentences across at one another and smoothed their silk skirts with their white plump hands.

“It's not really a healthy house--”

“No--with the orchard--and it's much too small--”

“Poor dears, hope they'll be happy. But one can't help feeling, Jane dear, that it was a little rash of you ... your only girl ... and one knows so little about Mr. Westcott, really--”

“Well, your own Bobby vouched for him. He'd known him at school after all, and we all know how cautious Bobby is about people--besides, Emma, no one could have received him more warmly--”

“Yes--Oh! of course ... but still, having no family--coming out of nowhere, so to speak--”

“Well, it's to be hoped they'll get on. I must say that Clare will miss her home terribly. It takes a lot to make up for that--And her father so devoted too....”

“Yes, we must make the best of it.”

The sun's light faded from the room--the clock and the pictures stood out sharply against the gathering dusk. Two ladies filled the room with their shadows and the little fire clicked and rattled behind the murmuring voices.

II

Alice Galleon burst in upon them. “What! Not arrived yet! the train must be dreadfully late. Lights! Lights! No, don't you move, mother!”

She returned with lamps and flooded the room with light. The ladies displayed a feeble protest against her exultant happiness.

“I'm sure, my dear, I hope that nothing has happened.”

“My dear mother, what _could_ happen?”

“Well, you never know with these trains--and a honeymoon, too, is always rather a dangerous time. I remember--”

“I hear them!” Alice cried and there indeed they were to be heard bumping and banging in the little hall. The door opened and Peter and Clare, radiant with happiness, appeared.

They stood in the doorway, side by side, Clare in a little white hat and grey travelling dress and Peter browner and stronger and squarer than ever.

All these people filled the little room. There was a crackling fire of conversation.

“Oh! but we've had a splendid time--”

“No, I don't think Clare's in the least tired--”

“Yes, isn't the house a duck?”

“Don't we just love being back!”

“... hoping you hadn't caught colds--”

“... besides we had the easiest crossing--”

“... How's Bobby?”

“... were so afraid that something must have happened--”

Mrs. Rossiter took Clare upstairs to help her to take her hat off.

Mother and daughter faced one another--Clare flung herself into her mother's arms.

“Oh! Mother dear, he's wonderful, wonderful!”

Downstairs Alice watched Peter critically. She had not realised until this marriage, how fond she had grown of Peter. She had, for him, very much the feeling that Bobby had--a sense of tolerance and even indulgence for all tempers and morosities and morbidities. She had seen him, on a day, like a boy of eighteen, loving the world and everything in it, having, too, a curious inexperience of the things that life might mean to people, unable, apparently, to see the sterner side of life at all--and then suddenly that had gone and given place to a mood in which no one could help him, nothing could cheer him... like Saul, he was possessed with Spirits.

Now, as he stood there, he looked not a day more than eighteen. Happiness filled him with colour--his eyes were shining--his mouth smiling.

“Alice, old girl--she's splendid. I couldn't have believed that life could be so good--”

A curious weight was lifted from her at his words. She did not know what it was that she had dreaded. Perhaps it had been merely a sense that Clare was too young and inexperienced to manage so difficult a temperament as Peter's--and now, after all, it seemed that she had managed it. But in realising the relief that she felt she realised too the love that she had for Peter. When he was young and happy the risks that he ran seemed just as heavy as when he was old and miserable.

“Oh, Peter! I'm so glad--I know she's splendid--Oh! I believe you are going to be happy--”

“Yes!” he answered her confidently, “I believe we are--”

The ladies--Mrs. Galleon, Mrs. Rossiter and Alice--retired. Later on Clare and Peter were coming into Bobby's for a short time.

Left alone in their little house, he drew her to the window that overlooked the orchard and silently they gazed out at the old, friendly, gnarled and knotted tree, and the old thick garden-wall that stretched sharply against the night-sky.

Behind them the fire crackled and the lamps shed their pleasant glow and that dear child with the great stiff dress that Velasquez painted smiled at them from the wall.

Peter gave a deep sigh of happiness.

“Our House...” he said and drew her very close to him. The two of them, as they stood there outlined against the window were so young and so pleasant that surely the Gods would have pity!

III

In the days that followed he watched it all with incredulity. So swiftly had he been tossed, it seemed, from fate to fate, and so easily, also, did he leave behind him the things that had weighed him down. No sign now of that Peter--evident enough in the Brockett days--morose, silent, sometimes oppressed by a sense of unreasoned catastrophe, stepping into his bookshop and out again as though all the world were his enemy.

Peter knew now that he was loved. He had felt that precious quality on the day that his mother died, he had felt it sometimes when he had been in Stephen's company, but against these isolated emotions what a world of hate and bitterness.

Now he felt Clare's affection on every side of him. They had already in so short a time a store of precious memories, intimacies, that they shared. They had been through wild, passionate wonders together and standing now, two human beings with casual words and laughing eyes, yet they knew that perfect holy secrets bound them together.

He stood sometimes in the little house and wondered for an instant whether it was all true. Where were all those half cloudy dreams, those impulses, those dread inheritances that once he had known so well? Where that other Peter Westcott? Not here in this dear delicious little house, with Love and Home and great raging happiness in his heart.

He wrote to Stephen, to Mr. Zanti, to Norah Monogue and told them. He received no answers--no word from the outer world had come to him. That other life seemed cut off, separated--closed. Perhaps it had left him for ever! Perhaps, as Clare said, walls and fires were better than wind and loneliness--comfort more than danger.... Meanwhile, in his study at the top of the house, “The Stone House” was still lying, waiting, at