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
