When he left his father’s room, Raymond was in the grip of an overmastering instinct to get out of the house, and away from the curious eyes of its various inmates. He had no clear notion of where he was going, or what to do. He felt as a man might who, half-stunned, had survived an earthquake only to find his home and his life-work in ruins. He would have gone out of the house by one of the garden-doors but for Reuben, who met him, and checked him, by saying dryly: “If you’ve done trying to be the death of the Master, happen you’ll ’tend to Tideford. He’s been waiting this twenty minutes in your office.”
Raymond stopped, with his hand already on the door, grasping the iron ring that lifted its latch. He stared stupidly at Reuben, feeling himself so remote from the ordinary cares of the estate that a visit from one of Penhallow’s tenants had no meaning for him. He repeated, in a blank tone: “Tideford?”
Reuben pulled down thee corners of his mouth, and gave one of his disapproving sniffs. “What do you want to go a-losing your temper for?” he asked severely. “Fine doings! If Master was to go off sudden, we’ll knave whose door to lay it at.”
Raymond passed his hand across his eyes, as though to clear away the red mist that still obscured his vision. “That’s enough from you!” he said roughly. “Tideford, did you say? All right: I’d forgotten.”
He released the iron ring, and went on down the broad passage towards his office at the other end of the house. He remembered now that Tideford had come up to see him by appointment; and realised that whatever cataclysm had overturned his life, the mundane occurrences of the everyday world had not stopped in sympathy with him, and would have to be attended to. He paused for a few minutes outside his office, attempting at once to thrust to the back of his mind the horror numbing his faculties, and to recall the business upon which Tideford wanted to see him. He was surprised, when he presently confronted Tideford across his desk, to find how calm he was, how steady both his voice and his hands. The interview helped to bring his faculties under his control again; when he saw Tideford off the premises half an hour later, he had recollected various duties waiting to be performed, and was able to attend to them in his usual methodical way. He was still conscious of a sensation of numbness, as though one half of his brain were clogged and weighted, unable to comprehend or to grapple with the hideous secret which had been disclosed to him; and he was still bent on escaping from the house, and carrying his trouble out into the open, as far from human sight as he could contrive. When he had finished such office-work as lay upon his desk, he left the house, and strode off to the stables, and briefly ordered a favourite hack to be saddled. While he was waiting, he listened to some complaint Weens had for him, about one of the stable-hands, and dealt with it rather summarily. Bart came into the yard as his horse was led out, and would have detained him on some question of a strained fetlock, but he cut him short, and, swinging himself into the saddle, rode out of the yard in the direction of the stud-farm.
He did not pause there, however, but rode past it, up the hill towards the Moor, keeping to the west of the upper reaches of the Fowey, and heading for Browngelly Downs, and Dozmary Pool, beyond.
The day was very fine, with a light easterly wind making the air bright and clear. Fleecy white clouds were sailing high overhead; it had been sultry in the valley, but upon the Moor the wind was cool. To the north, Brown Willy reared up its rugged head, with the wild rocks piled on the summit of Rough Tor plainly visible to the northwest of it. Leaving the track, Raymond let his horse break into a canter, skirting some old peat-borings, and crossing one of the streams with which the Moor was intersected. Two or three miles farther on, the still expanse of Dozmary Pool came into sight, its flat, windswept banks lying deserted in the sunlight. It had been a favourite haunt of Raymond’s since the days of his boyhood, and he had made for it instinctively, meaning to sit on the thyme-scented ground beside its mysterious waters, and to force his brain calmly to confront and to consider the intelligence which had so stunned it. But when he had hobbled the grey, he found himself unable to sit still, and began to pace up and down, jerking at his whip-lash, and fancying that he could hear some echo of his father’s jeering voice in the vast solitude around him. It was long before he could achieve any coherence of thought. His mind, at first refusing to credit Penhallow’s words, presently began to flit backwards and forwards across the past, recalling incidents and half-forgotten circumstances, meaningless pieces in a puzzle, which, if fitted together, might show him a picture he shrank from seeing.
Although, in the first moment of revelation, a blinding kaleidoscope, composed of all the various implications attached to his illegitimacy, had flashed across his mind’s eye, this had swiftly faded into a general feeling of shock, and of nausea. It was not until he had been walking up and down beside the Pool for some time that the particular significance of Penhallow’s words began clearly to present itself to him. If the story were true — and his brain still clung to the hope that it might not be true — he would never be Penhallow of Trevellin, for although Penhallow’s unpredictable caprice might lead him to carry the secret into the grave, he, who was most nearly concerned, knew it, and would never, all his life long, be able to forget it. His stiff pride in his name, even his passionate love for Trevellin, seemed in an instant to have become empty things. There was not one of his brothers who had not a better right to call himself Penhallow of Trevellin than he; there could never in the uncertain future be a day unclouded by the fear that someone, by some unforeseen chance, might discover the imposture, and arise to denounce him. It was, he thought, unlikely that Penhallow, having once broken his long silence, would refrain from dislodging him, in the end, from his position as heir to Trevellin. He would no doubt keep the secret for as long as it suited him, using it to compel obedience to his will. He needed a manager for the estate, but a manager who, besides performing his duties conscientiously, would yet permit him to commit whatsoever depredations he chose; and not one of his more favoured sons would fill his requirements as well as the only one amongst them all who, besides having a business head on his shoulders, dared not oppose him in the smallest particular. But Raymond could not doubt that he would see to it that it was Ingram who stepped finally into his shoes.
The thought of Ingram at Trevellin struck Raymond like a blow over the heart. He found that he was uttering a stream of obscene curses aloud, and stopped himself quickly, frightened of his own lack of self-control. He knew an impulse to cast himself down on the sweet-smelling turf, and to writhe there, digging his nails into the earth, as though in such physical abandonment he might find relief from the mental anguish he was suffering. For a time, coherent thought became impossible again, and he foundered in a nightmare of his imaginings, seeing Ingram in his place, enjoying the fruits of his careful husbandry, seeing himself, for a distorted moment, as Ingram’s pensioner. So incalculable are the twists of the human brain that the very abhorrence with which he regarded this image jerked him out of his fog of sick fantasy. He began to laugh, softly at first, and then in lunatic gusts which made his quietly grazing horse raise his head, momentarily startled by this wild sound breaking the stillness.
His laughter was uncontrollable, and largely hysterical, but it did him good. When he at last stopped, and wiped his streaming eyes, he felt exhausted, but relieved of the iron restriction in his chest which had made him feel as though his heart were trying to burst from his body. He could think more reasonably, and could face the future without succumbing to the condition of mindless horror which made sober reflection an impossibility. He began to weigh what his father had recounted against his own memories, trying in these to find some refutation of Penhallow’s monstrous story. After a time it occurred to him that one person only could deny or confirm the story, and without questioning the wisdom of acting upon his sudden impulse he caught and unhobbled his horse, and rode off at a gallop in the direction of Bodmin.
When he reached Azalea Lodge, he called to the gardener who was clipping the borders of the front path to walk his horse up and down, and strode up to the front door, and set his finger on the electric bell-push. The door was opened to him by an elderly parlourmaid, who ushered him into the drawing-room, and said that she would fetch Miss Ottery.
In the shock of first learning that he was not Rachel Penhallow’s son, he had not until this moment had any thought to spare for the woman who might prove to be his mother; but as he stood in the middle of the stuffy, over-furnished room, surrounded, as it seemed to him, by cats and canaries and cabinets crowded with china, the idea that Delta, whom he, in common with his brothers, had all his life made the subject of contemptuous jests, might claim him as her son, swept over him, and filled him with such repugnance that he was seized by an instinct to rush from the house before she could confront him. He mastered it, and picked his way between floor-cushions, spindle-legged tables, and catbaskets to the bay window, and stood there staring out into the neat garden.
He presently heard the door open behind him, and Delia’s voice utter a welcome. “Dear Raymond! Such a pleasure! So unexpected, too, not that I mean — because you know that we’re always so delighted to see you, dear! I was just helping Phineas to wash some of his china. Quite an honour, I call it, for he will let no one else touch it! You must excuse my overall — but I daresay you men never notice such things!”
A shudder ran through his frame; he turned to face her, his strained eyes taking in, as perhaps never before, every detail of her appearance. It was not prepossessing. Her hair, escaping from its falling pins, showed a number
