Charmian, exclaiming that the room smelled like a pothouse, strode out of it as soon as her father’s recollections became raffish. Faith longed for the courage to follow her example, and glanced at Vivian, wondering what she was thinking. Vivian’s face showed only indifference. Faith supposed that she had become inured to these evenings, or perhaps had never been very squeamish.
“One would imagine,” Aubrey said later, picking up his candle from the table in the hall, “that Father will be very, very unwell in the morning.”
“No, he won’t,” Vivian replied curtly. “Merely bad-tempered. He’s been going on like this for weeks.”
“What, every night?” asked Aubrey, horrified. “Oh, I am glad I don’t live at home!”
“You may well be!” she said, with such suppressed passion that he blinked at her. “It’s hell here! The worst hell you ever dreamed of He’s like a giant squid, lying there, sucking you all in!”
He giggled, and, with a glance of contempt, she went past him up the stairs.
The morning found Penhallow in a brittle, dangerous mood. He had apparently passed a considerable portion of the night in weaving fuddled plans for the future activities of his numerous offspring. These were in general too extravagant to be taken seriously, but the recital of them exasperated Raymond, who had been summoned at an early hour to learn his father’s pleasure, and to receive a quantity of arbitrary orders, not the least maddening of which was one to cash another of Penhallow’s lavish cheques.
“What the devil have you done with the money you drew out only a week ago?” demanded Raymond, his straight brows beginning to lower.
“What the hell has that got to do with you?” retorted Penhallow, kindling at once. “By God, it’s coming to something when you cubs start questioning my doings! I don’t want any comments from you, my lad! You’ll do as you’re told.”
“I’m damned if I will!” Raymond said forcibly. “Do you know the extent to which your personal account is already overdrawn?”
“I know all I want to know — and I’ve heard more than I want to from you! You’ll take my cheque into Bodmin, and keep your comments to yourself!”
Raymond drove his hands deep into the pockets of his breeches, and stood facing the bed, with his feet widely planted and his head a little thrust forward, in a belligerent attitude, which added to Penhallow’s anger. “You’ll have my comments whether you want them or not,” he said. “I’ll cash no more of these senseless cheques.”
“No?” said Penhallow, his eyes narrowing. “You’d rather I sent Jimmy, would you?”
“You can send whom you please. You won’t do it often. I’ve already had an interview with the manager. It may interest you to know that he wanted to know if I considered you fit to be trusted with a cheque-book. I don’t, but I haven’t said so — yet.”
There was silence for a few hard-breathing seconds. Penhallow had heaved himself forward from his supporting pillows, as though in an attempt to reach his son. His face had become suffused with dull colour, and his eyes blazed with an expression of naked hatred. “You hound, Raymond!” he said thickly, panting. “You ill conditioned mongrel-cur! So that’s it, is it? You’d like to get a couple of doctors to declare me incapable, would you?”
“No,” Raymond answered coldly. “I prefer to wash our dirty linen at home. But I won’t stand by idly while you waste the estate, so don’t think it! If you drive me to it, I will have you declared incapable — God knows it’s the truth!”
Penhallow raised his clenched fists in an impotent, raging gesture. He let them fall again, and began to rock himself from side to side. “Have me declared incapable!” he said. “By God, I’ve been too easy with you! Think yourself master here already, don’t you? You’re not! Not by a long chalk, Raymond! I’ve been watching you; I’ve seen you beginning to think you own Trevellin, grudging every penny I’ve spent on my other sons. You didn’t like it when I had Eugene and his wife give up that damned London folly. You didn’t want Clay here. You’re like a bear with a sore head because I mean to keep Aubrey under my eye. That doesn’t matter to me. I get a laugh out of seeing you play the Squire. But my hand’s still on the reins, my fine son, and there was never a horse could unseat me, no, nor get the better of me! There’s been no love lost between you and me, but I’ve made use of you because it suited me to. You were always a surly, cross-grained boy. I should have known that you wouldn’t stand corn!”
Raymond shrugged his shoulders, indifferent to this flood of abuse. “You should know better than to waste your breath telling me what you think of me,” he said. “I’ve never cared what you thought, and I’m not likely to start now. All I care for is the place, which you’re doing your best to ruin. But you’ll not do it! You’ve been behaving for the past weeks as though you were out of your mind: it wouldn’t be so difficult to get all the business out of your hands.” A grim little smile curled his mouth; he said with a note of mockery in his voice: “You’re not certifiable, but it isn’t necessary that you should be. I’ve been into all that.”
“Have you?” Penhallow said. “Have you indeed, Ray? Maybe you think it’s you who are in the saddle now?”
“It’s I who am going to hold the purse-strings,” Raymond replied uncompromisingly. “Better make up your mind to that. You can yield gracefully, or you can wait to be forced into it.”
“Yield!” Penhallow ejaculated. He flung back his head, and broke into a roar of laughter. The spaniel lying at his feet sat up on her haunches, flattening her ears, and lolling her tongue at him. He kicked at her, and she jumped down from the bed, and waddled over to a patch of sunlight, and lay down in it. “Yield!” Penhallow said again. “And what would you like me to do, Master Ray? Turn Eugene out, I suppose, for a start! Ask you politely for a little pocket-money every week? You’re riding for a fall, Ray!”
“Turn Eugene out for a start,” Raymond agreed. “Leave Aubrey to settle his own debts, and Ingram to pay for his brats’ schooling! And stop squandering money on your dirty little bastard!”
Penhallow’s eyes glinted suddenly. He began to rock himself about again, chuckling with a kind of fiendish amusement. “Don’t like Jimmy, do you, Ray? God, that’s given me the best laugh of my life! It was always you who objected to him the most. Like me to turn him off, wouldn’t you?”
“Keep him to wait on you, if you want him,” Raymond said contemptuously. “But teach him his place!”
“I’ll teach you yours, you misbegotten young swine!” Penhallow said, an ugly sneer disfiguring his countenance. “He has as much right to be here as you, let me tell you!”
Raymond gave a short laugh. “Has he, by God? He’ll learn his mistake when I’m master here!”
“When you’re master here!” Penhallow repeated. “So sure of yourself, aren’t you? So damned sure of yourself You’ll never be master here except by my consent!”
Raymond glanced scornfully at him. “I shall be master here as soon as you’re dead, and nothing you can do can alter that. I’m as familiar with the terms of the entail as you are yourself, so you may as well reserve that kind of bluster for someone it’ll impress. It cuts no ice with me.”
Penhallow leaned right forward, supporting himself on one fist, and clenching and unclenching the other. “You cocksure fool, the estate goes to my eldest legitimate son!
“I am your eldest son,” Raymond said impatiently.
“Not by a long chalk you’re not!” Penhallow replied, with a hiccough of a laugh. “I had at least a couple of sons before I begot you. Bastards, of course. Like you, Ray! Like you, and poor little Jimmy!”
There was a moment’s stunned silence. The colour draining from his face, Raymond stared into his father’s wickedly twinkling eyes. He seemed for an instant to cease to breathe; then he shattered the silence with a rasping laugh. “I don’t believe it!”
Penhallow jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the painted cupboards set in the bed-head. “I’ve got papers to prove it.”
> The old grandfather clock in the corner gave a whirring sound, and began timely to strike the hour. Raymond found that the palms of his hands were sweating and cold. Wisps of thought jostled one another in his brain; he was unable to seize any one of them, but the wild improbability of his father’s words prompted him to say again: “I don’t believe it! You old fool, you must be in your dotage to put up such a tale as that to frighten me with! It couldn’t be true!”
Penhallow leaned back against his pillows once more. The rage had faded from his face, leaving it gloating and grinning. “I thought that ’ud make you sing a different tune,” he said, with diabolical satisfaction. “It’s done me good too. Damme, it’s gone against the grain with me to keep that secret from you during all the years that you’ve been giving yourself enough airs to make a cat sick!”
Raymond drew one hand from his pocket, found that it was shaking, and put it back again. He passed his tongue between his lips, and said carefully: “I think you’re more insane than any of us suspected. How could I possibly have been brought up here — Oh, don’t talk such damned rubbish!”
“Ah, that was Rachel’s doing!” Penhallow said amiably. “I wasn’t in favour of it, but she would have it so. She was a grand lass, my Rachel!”
“Mother.” Raymond said incredulously. “My God, you are mad!”
“She wasn’t your mother,” Penhallow replied, heaving himself on to his elbow, and picking up the decanter of claret from the table by the bed. He poured himself out a glass, and relaxed again, sipping the wine and grinning at Raymond. “Haven’t you ever wondered why you were born abroad? Lord, I made sure you’d smell a rat! Especially when Rachel left her money to Ingram!”
The over-furnished room seemed to close in on Raymond, although he saw it through a blur. He felt as though he were hot and cold at once, and became aware presently of the spaniel, which had got up, and was whining and scratching at the door to be let out. This trivial circumstance, intruding upon a moment heavy with a sense of impending disaster, recalled him from the whirling nightmare which had caught him up and threatened, for an instant, to overpower him. The dog’s insistence was not to be borne; he moved to the door and let her out, feeling this mundane action to have in it some quality of unreality. He went back to the huge fireplace, and took up his former position before it. He was extremely pale, but he thought he had himself under rigid control. Yet his voice, when he spoke, sounded unfamiliar in his ears. “If what you say is true, why did my — why did your wife bring me up as her son?”
“She was proud, was Rachel,” Penhallow responded reminiscently. “She didn’t want a breath of scandal about the business. Damned nearly murdered me, when she found out about it! But she loved me, she did, through it all. A grand lass! There was never any need to explain to Rachel: she knew what I was! Knew it didn’t mean a thing. She took me as I came: never dripping forgiveness over me, bless her!”
“I don’t want to hear about your relations with Mother!” Raymond interrupted roughly. “I should have thought you’d created plenty of scandal! She never paid any heed to what you did, that I can remember!”
“Ah, but this was different!” Penhallow said, pouring out more wine. “Touched her more nearly. She didn’t mind a village affair or two.”
There was something else in the room besides Penhallow’s malice, some dark shadow of horror creeping towards Raymond. He laid his hands on the back of the Gothic chair, and gripped it hard. “Why did it touch her more nearly?” he forced himself to ask. “Who was my mother?”
Penhallow gave a chuckle. “Delia,” he replied.
To Raymond’s shocked senses, his father’s swollen figure, lying in the bed in the middle of the room, had become inseparable from the ivory god, Ho-Ti, leering at him from the top of the red lacquer cabinet. Everything in the room assumed nightmarish proportions; the warring colours in curtains, carpet, and table-cloths almost seemed to shout at him; the bright hexagons of the patchwork quilt danced before him, dazzling him. He lifted his hand instinctively to his eyes, saying hoarsely: “No! It’s a lie!”
“Oh, no, it isn’t!” retorted Penhallow. “You mightn’t think it to look at her now, but when she first came home from some finishing school or other in Switzerland Delia was as pretty as a picture!”
Raymond gripped the chair-back again. He stared into his father’s face, unable either to believe a tale so fantastic, or to think himself in his right senses. “But I was born — Are you telling me you seduced a girl just out of school? The sister of the woman you were engaged to? It isn’t possible! Damn you, you’re making all this up!”
“Ho-ho!” jeered Penhallow. “Precious little seduction about it! She was head over ears in love with me. She thought she knew what she was about. I believed she did. The trouble was, I didn’t know as much about women in those days as I do now. You’d have thought I’d have had sense enough to realise that Delia was just the sort of romantic little fool who’d talk a lot of highfalutin balderdash about no one’s being the worse for our precious affair, and then lose her nerve, and run bleating to her sister as soon as she found that she hadn’t been quite so damned clever as she thought. But I was only a bit over twenty-one myself, and I’d a lot to learn.”
“But Mother — Rachel!” Raymond uttered numbly. “How can such a thing have happened, under her very nose?”
“Lord bless you, it didn’t!” Penhallow said cheerfully. “Daresay it wouldn’t have happened at all if she hadn’t been away at the time. By the time she got back, the mischief was done, and that damned fool, Delia, was spending her time shuddering at the sight of me — a fat lot of right she had to do that! — and trying to put an end to herself by drinking disinfectant, or some such tomfoolery. The wonder is that she hadn’t blurted out the whole story to her father!”
Raymond lifted one hand from the chair-back, and brought it down again. “No!” he jerked out. “It’s preposterous! Grotesque! It couldn’t have happened! Why, you must have married her, if there were a word of truth in any of this!”
“Marry her! I was sick to death of the sight of her!” exclaimed Penhallow callously. “She didn’t want to marry me, don’t make any mistake about that! I gave her the horrors, that’s what I did.” A laugh shook him; he drank some of his wine. “I’ve met her type often and often since. Don’t you ever be taken in by a girl who tells you she’s got advanced ideas! She’ll be the first to talk about being betrayed. Marry her, by God! No, there was never any question of that.”
“But Mother!” Raymond said, the words sticking in his throat. “Are you telling me that she knew this, and married you herself?”
“Put the date forward,” said Penhallow, chuckling at the memory. “Oh, she scratched my face for me all right! But she was a remarkable woman, was Rachel. She hadn’t got a pack of sentimental ideas, like that whey-faced bitch I took for my second wife, God help me! Queer, the way I’ve never been able to steer clear of baby-faced women who think you’re a sort of hero to start with, and shudder at you the instant they find their mistake. But Rachel wasn’t like that. Not she! She knew what I was like. She knew it was herself I really cared for. She never set a bit of store by any of my little sideshows. But she was proud, and she was determined no one should ever know the fool Delia had made of herself. She fixed it so that no one ever did — no one in this country, barring Martha. Unless old Phineas guessed, which he may have done, for all I can tell.”
A wave of nausea swept over Raymond. “Martha! Oh, my God, no! no!”
Penhallow regarded him with a satirical twist to his full lips. “You fool, you don’t suppose we could have worked the trick without her, or another like her, do you?” he said. “Rachel and I were married at once. She gave it out that I was impatient to put the date forward. True enough: I was. Lord, and she made Delia be chief bridesmaid, just as it had been arranged at the outset!” He began to laugh again, his great bulk shaking. “What a woman! What a woman! No half-measures about my Rachel! We went off on our honeym
oon. She’d fixed it all up that Delia was to join us, with Martha, before it got to be obvious that she was big with child. She’d thought up a whole lot of cast-iron reasons for remaining abroad beyond the time we’d arranged. I had nothing to say to any of it: she’d drive the lot of us the way she meant to go, and never even see how damned comical it was, the three of us living under one roof in some Godforsaken Austrian village or other — forget its name for the moment. As a matter of fact, you’re a couple of months older than we gave out. That was all right: you were a backward, undersized brat. I never thought you’d turn out as well as you have. I didn’t want Rachel to palm you off as one of her own, but I’m bound to admit there’s precious little of your mother in you.” He set his empty glass down, and surveyed Raymond, triumph gleaming in his eyes. “But you’re only another of my bastards, Ray, and don’t you forget it! Maybe I’ll let you succeed me, and maybe I won’t! But whichever way I decide, that’s where you are, my boy!” He jabbed his thumb down hard upon the table as he spoke, and grinned malevolently at his son’s ashen face.
The gesture seemed to release Raymond from the spell of horror which had held him rooted to the ground, gripping the Gothic chair, and listening with only half-comprehending ears to the story so casually recounted. The blood rushed suddenly to his head; an uncontrollable shudder ran through him; he flung the heavy chair out of his way; and with a sound between a groan and a curse launched himself upon Penhallow, seizing him by the throat, trying with all his strength to choke the breath out of him.
Penhallow Page 19
