Fortitude | Page 4

not have
been Peter without it; very often these Heroes, poor things, came
tumbling from their pedestals, often they came, in very shame, down of
their own accord, and perhaps of them all Stephen only was worthy of
his elevation, and he never knew that he was elevated.
He knew now, of course, that Peter loved him; but Peter was a little boy,
and was taken by persons who were strong and liked a laugh and were
kind in little ways. Stephen knew that when Peter grew older he must
love other and wiser people. He was a very large man, six foot three
and broad, with a brown beard, and grey eyes like Peter's. He had been
a fisherman, but now he was a farmer, because it paid better--he had an
old mother, one enemy, and very many friends; he had loved a girl, and
she had been engaged to him for two years, but another man had taken
her away and married her--and that is why he had an enemy. He
greeted his friends and kissed poor Jane Clewer under the mistletoe,
and then kissed old Mother Figgis, who pushed him away with a laugh
and "Coom up there--where are yer at?"--and Peter watched him until
his turn also should come. His legs were beating the wooden bars again
with excitement, but he would not say anything. He saw Stephen as
something very much larger and more stupendous than any one else in
the room. There were men there bigger of body perhaps, and men who
were richer--Stephen had only four cows on his farm and he never did
much with his hay--but there was no one who could change a room
simply by entering it as Stephen could.
At last the moment came--Stephen turned round--"Why, boy!"
Peter was glad that the rest of the room was busied once more with its
talking, laughing, and drinking, and some old man (sitting on a table
and his nose coming through the tobacco-smoke like a rat through a
hole in the wall) had struck up a tune on a fiddle. Peter was glad,
because no one watched them together. He liked to meet Stephen in
private. He buried his small hand in the brown depths of Stephen's
large one, and then as Stephen looked uncertainly round the room, he
whispered: "Steve--my chair, and me sitting on you--please."

It was a piece of impertinence to call him "Steve," of course, and when
other people were there it was "Mr. Brant," but in their own privacy it
was their own affair. Peter slipped down from his chair, and Stephen
sat down on it, and then Peter was lifted up and leant his head back
somewhere against the middle button of Stephen's waistcoat, just where
his heart was noisiest, and he could feel the hard outline of Stephen's
enormous silver watch that his family had had, so Stephen said, for a
hundred years. Now was the blissful time, the perfect moment. The rest
of the world was busied with life--the window showed the dull and then
suddenly shining flakes of snow, the lights and the limitless sea--the
room showed the sanded floor, the crowd of fishermen drinking, their
feet moving already to the tune of the fiddle, the fisher girls with their
coloured shawls, the great, swinging smoky lamp, the huge fire, Dicky
the fool, Mother Figgis, fat Sam the host, old Frosted Moses ... the gay
romantic world--and these two in their corner, and Peter so happy that
no beatings in the world could terrify.
"But, boy," says Stephen, bending down so that the end of his beard
tickles Peter's neck, "what are yer doing here so late? Your father ...?"
"I'm going back to be beaten, of course."
"If yer go now perhaps yer won't be beaten so bad?"
"Oh, Steve! ... I'm staying ... like this ... always."
But Peter knew, in spite of the way that the big brown hand pressed his
white one in sympathy, that Stephen was worried and that he was
thinking of something. He knew, although he could not see, that
Stephen's eyes were staring right across the room and that they were
looking, in the way that they had, past walls and windows and
streets--somewhere for something....
Peter knew a little about Stephen's trouble. He did not understand it
altogether, but he had seen the change in Stephen, and he knew that he
was often very sad, and that moods came upon him when he could do
nothing but think and watch and wait--and then his face grew very grey
and his eyes very hard, and his hands were clenched. Peter knew that

Stephen had an enemy, and that one day he would meet him.
Some of the men and girls were dancing now in the