Anne of Ingleside - L. M. Montgomery [23]
Walter huddled in despair against the rail. Everybody must have heard that noise… they would come rushing out… he wouldn’t be let go home… a sob of despair choked in his throat.
It seemed hours before he dared believe that nobody had wakened up, before he dare resume his careful passage down the stairs. But it was accomplished at last; he found his shoe and cautiously turned the handle of the front door… doors were never locked at the Parker place. Mrs Parker said they hadn’t anything worth stealing except children, and nobody wanted them.
Walter was out, the door closed behind him. He slipped on his shoes and stole down the street: the house was on the edge of the village and he was soon on the open road. A moment of panic overwhelmed him. The fear of being caught and prevented was past, and all his old fears of darkness and solitude returned. He had never been out alone in the night before. He was afraid of the world. It was such a huge world and he was so terribly small in it. Even the cold raw wind that was coming up from the east seemed blowing in his face as if to push him back.
Mother was going to die! Walter took a gulp and set his face towards home. On and on he went, fighting fear gallantly. It was moonlight, but the moonlight let you see things… and nothing looked familiar. Once when he had been out with Dad he had thought he had never seen anything so pretty as a moonlit road crossed by tree shadows. But now the shadows were so black and sharp they might fly up at you. The fields had put on a strangeness. The trees were no longer friendly. They seemed to be watching him, crowding in before and behind him. Two blazing eyes looked out at him from the ditch and a black cat of unbelievable size ran across the road. Was it a cat? Or…? The night was cold: he shivered in his thin blouse, but he would not mind the cold if he could only stop being afraid of everything… of the shadows and the furtive sounds and the nameless things that might be prowling in the strips of woodland he passed through. He wondered what it would be like not to be afraid of anything… like Jem.
‘I’ll… I’ll just pretend I’m not afraid,’ he said aloud… and then shuddered with terror over the lost sound of his own voice in the great night.
But he went on, one had to go on when Mother was going to die. Once he fell and bruised and skinned his knee badly on a stone. Once he heard a buggy coming along behind him and hid behind a tree till it passed, terrified lest Dr Parker had discovered he had gone and was coming after him. Once he stopped in sheer terror of something black and furry sitting on the side of the road. He could not pass it… he could not… but he did. It was a big black dog… was it a dog?… but he was past it. He dared not run lest it chase him… he stole a desperate glance over his shoulder… it had got up and was loping away in the opposite direction. Walter put his little brown hand up to his face and found it wet with sweat.
A star fell in the sky before him, scattering sparks of flame. Walter remembered hearing old Aunt Kitty say that when a star fell someone died. Was it Mother? He had just been feeling that his legs would not carry him another step, but at the thought he marched on again. He was so cold now that he had almost ceased to feel afraid. Would he never get home? It must be hours and hours since he had left Lowbridge.
It was three hours. He had stolen out of the Parker house at eleven and it was now two. When Walter found himself on the road that dipped down into the Glen he gave a sob of relief. But as he stumbled through the village the sleeping houses seemed remote and far away. They had forgotten him. A cow suddenly bawled at him over a fence and Walter remembered that Mr Alec Reese kept a savage bull. He broke into a run of sheer panic that carried him up the hill to the gate of Ingleside. He was home… oh, he was home!
Then he stopped short, trembling, overcome by a dreadful feeling of desolation. He had been expecting to see the warm, friendly lights of home. And there was not a light at Ingleside!
There really