‘Surely you’re too big for a rocking-horse!’ his mother had remonstrated.
‘Well, you see, mother, till I can have a real horse, I like to have some sort of animal about,’ had been his quaint answer.
‘Do you feel he keeps you company?’ she laughed.
‘Oh yes! He’s very good, he always keeps me company, when I’m there,’ said Paul.
So the horse, rather shabby, stood in an arrested prance in the boy’s bedroom.
The Derby was drawing near, and the boy grew more and more tense. He hardly heard what was spoken to him, he was very frail, and his eyes were really uncanny. His mother had sudden strange seizures of uneasiness about him. Sometimes, for half an hour, she would feel a sudden anxiety about him that was almost anguish. She wanted to rush to him at once, and know he was safe.
Two nights before the Derby, she was at a big party in town, when one of her rushes of anxiety about her boy, her first-born, gripped her heart till she could hardly speak. She fought with the feeling, might and main, for she believed in common-sense. But it was too strong. She had to leave the dance and go downstairs to telephone to the country. The children’s nursery governess was terribly surprised and startled at being rung up in the night.
‘Are the children all right, Miss Wilmot?’
‘Oh yes, they are quite all right.’
‘Master Paul? Is he all right?’
‘He went to bed as right as a trivet. Shall I run up and look at him?’
‘No!’ said Paul’s mother reluctantly. ‘No! Don’t trouble. It’s all right. Don’t sit up. We shall be home fairly soon.’ She did not want her son’s privacy intruded upon.
‘Very good,’ said the governess.
It was about one o’clock when Paul’s mother and father drove up to their house. All was still. Paul’s mother went to her room and slipped off her white fur cloak. She had told her maid not to wait up for her. She heard her husband downstairs, mixing a whisky-and-soda.
And then, because of the strange anxiety at her heart, she stole upstairs to her son’s room. Noiselessly she went along the upper corridor. Was there a faint noise? What was it?
She stood, with arrested muscles, outside his door, listening. There was a strange, heavy, and yet not loud noise. Her heart stood still. It was a soundless noise, yet rushing and powerful. Something huge, in violent, hushed motion. What was it? What in God’s Name was it? She ought to know. She felt that she knew the noise. She knew what it was.
Yet she could not place it. She couldn’t say what it was. And on and on it went, like a madness.
