you will be at all interested, but I must inform you that Faith is not the only person in this house threatened with a nervous breakdown. And I do hope that when I so far forget myself as to render this board untenable by bursting into tears at it, you will remember that I am not uncountable for my actions.”
“I expect,” said Clara wisely, “that she needs a change of air.”
Clay came back into the room, with the news that his mother was lying down, so no more was said. Faith reappeared at tea-time, but from the look of dismay which came into her face when she paused on the threshold of the Long drawing-room it was plain that she would not have done so had she been informed that Penhallow intended to make one of the tea-party.
He was wrapped in his aged dressing-gown, and it was evident that it had cost him an effort to get up at all. His eyes held a look of strain; his colour was bad; he eased himself in his wheeled chair from time to time, as though he were suffering a considerable degree of discomfort. He was quick to see Faith’s instinctive recoil. He said in his roughest, most derisive voice: “No, you wouldn’t have come down if you’d known you were going to find me here, would you? A fine wife you are! I might be dead for all the notice you ever take of me! Why haven’t you been near me all day? Eh? Why haven’t you?”
She could never accustom herself to being rated in public, and the colour rushed to her face as she answered in a low tone: “I have not been very well, Adam.”
He gave a sardonic bark of laughter at this. “Oh, you’ve not been very well!” he said, mimicking her. “That’s always your bleat!”
Bart crossed the room with a plate of sandwiches, which he offered to Penhallow. “Hit one of your own size, Guv’nor!” he said briefly.
Penhallow looked up at him under his brows. “You, for instance?”
Bart grinned. “Sure! Go ahead!”
Penhallow put up a hand, and pulled his ear. “Coming out as a champion, are you?” His glance swept the room, and alighted on Clay for an instant. He took a sandwich, and addressed his wife again. “I notice it isn’t your own brat who stands up for you, my dear,” he remarked.
Clay turned scarlet, and tried to look as though he had not heard this sally. It was at this moment that Raymond entered the room.
Penhallow forgot about his wife. He seemed to straighten himself in his chair when he saw Raymond. “Didn’t expect to find me up, did you?” he demanded challengingly.
Raymond’s face was always impassive; it showed no change of expression now. “I don’t know that I thought much about it either way,” he replied. He walked over to the table, and waited to receive his tea-cup from Clara’s hands.
“You’re lookin’ tired, Ray,” she remarked.
“I’m all right,” he responded shortly. Conscious of his father’s gaze, he looked up, and met it squarely, his jaw hardening a little. Penhallow grinned at him, but whether in mockery, or in appreciation of his self-command, it would have been difficult to say.
Penhallow began to stir his tea, in a way which made Aubrey exchange a pained glance with Charmian. “I shall sit up to dinner,” he announced.
This piece of intelligence was greeted with such a marked lack of enthusiasm that Aubrey felt it incumbent on him to say: “How lovely for us, Father dear!”
“I don’t know which of you gives me the worst bellyache, you or Clay!” said Penhallow, with a look of disgust. “I don’t want you slobbering over me!” His fiery glance again swept the room; his lip curled. “A nice, affectionate lot of children I’ve got!” he said scathingly.
“One hates to criticise Father,” murmured Eugene in his sister’s ear, “but one cannot but feel that to be a most unreasonable remark.”
“Considering you mean to sit up to dinner tomorrow, you’d better be in bed today, I should have thought,” said Clara.
“You keep your thoughts to yourself, old lady!” retorted Penhallow. “I daresay there’s a lot of you would like to see me keep my bed, but you’re going to be disappointed. By God, I’ve let you get so out of hand, the whole pack of you, it’s time I showed you who’s master at Trevellin!” He stabbed a finger at his wife. “And that goes for you too!” he said unnecessarily. “Don’t think you’re going to take to your bed with a headache, or any other such tomfoolery, because you’re not! And as for you,” he added, directing the accusing finger at Charmian, “you can make what kind of a guy of yourself you please in London, but you won’t do it here! You let me see you in those trousers again, and I’ll lay my stick across your bottom!”
“Oh, no, you won’t!” said Charmian, with a look quite as fierce as his. “You’ve no sort of control over me, so don’t you think it! I’m not dependent on you! I shan’t burst into tears because you choose to shout at me! You’ll get as good as you give if you go for me!”
“Oh, don’t! Please don’t!” Faith gasped, shrinking back in her chair involuntarily.
Neither of the combatants paid the slightest heed to her. Battle was fairly joined, and had anyone wished to speak it would have been quite impossible to have done so above the thunder of Penhallow’s voice and the fury of Charmian’s more strident accents. Eugene, lounging on a sofa, lay laughing at them both; Clara went on drinking her tea in perfect unconcern; Clay found that his hand was trembling so much that he was obliged to set his cup- and-saucer down on the table beside him; and Conrad, entering the room when the quarrel was at its height, promptly encouraged his sister by calling out: “Loo in, Char! Loo in, good bitch!”
Reuben Lanner, who had come in behind Conrad, crossed the room to his master’s chair, and shook his arm to attract his attention. “Shet your noise, Master, do!” he shouted in his ear.
Penhallow broke off in the middle of an extremely coarse description of his daughter’s character to say: “What do you want, you old fool?”
“It’s Mr Ottery wants to see you, Master. I’ve put un in the Yellow drawing-room.”
The rage died out of Penhallow’s enflamed countenance quite suddenly. An interested gleam came into his eyes; he turned them towards Raymond in a speculative glance; a slow grin dispersed the remnants of his scowl. “Phineas, eh?” he said. His great frame shook with a soundless laugh. “Well, that’s very interesting, damme if it isn’t! Show him in! What do you want to put him in the Yellow room for?”
“Because he wants to see you private, Master, that’s what for.”
“Why on earth?” demanded Conrad, staring at him.
Raymond, who had heard the message delivered with an imperceptible stiffening of his face, laid down his cup and-saucer, and said: “I’ll see him.”
“You’re a damned fool, Ray,” said his father, but with more amusement than annoyance in his tone. “So old Phineas wants to see me! Well, well, and why shouldn’t he? Push me into the Yellow room, Reuben.”
Raymond said no more. As Reuben pushed the wheeled chair forward, Penhallow put out a hand and grasped Charmian by the arm. “There, my girl! Give me a kiss! Damned if you don’t make me think of your mother when you fly into your tantrums, though God knows the messy way you live is enough to make her turn in her grave! But you’re a high-couraged filly, and that’s something!” He pulled her down as he spoke, gave her a noisy kiss, and a resounding spank, and let her go.
As soon as he had been pushed out of the room, speculation on the cause of Phineas’s visit broke out, his brothers looking inquiringly at Raymond, who said, however, that he had no more idea than they.
“Why, particularly, are you a 'damned fool', Ray?” asked Eugene, a little curiosity in his eyes.
Raymond shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you order those buckets, Bart?”
“No, of course I didn’t. You said you’d attend to it yourself,” Bart replied, surprised.
“Oh!” Raymond coloured slightly. “All right: slipped my memory.”
“Good God, how are the mighty fallen!” exclaimed Conrad, folding a slice of bread-and-butter, and putting it into his mouth. “Chalk it up, somebody! The Great, the Methodical Ray has at last forgotten something he ought to have remembered! Keep it up, Ray: you’ll become quite human in time!”
Raymond smiled in a rather perfunctory way, and soon after left the room. Aubrey sighed audibly. “There is something more than oppressive about this house,” he said. “I expect you’re all quite used to it, but coming as I do from the beautiful peace of my own chambers it strikes me quite too dreadfully forcibly.” He described a vague gesture with his delicate hands. “I shan’t say that an evil influence appears to me to brood over the place, because I do think esoteric remarks of that nature are terribly embarrassing, don’t you? But you all seem to me to be a trifle more than life-size, and definitely febrile!”
