A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs

Only women did things like that. Men came right out and said: “If I see you within a quarter of a mile of St. Nectan’s I’ll skin you.” But women put their scheming heads together and concocted a job for you to do somewhere else.

“I suppose you and Mummy worked out how long it would take me to fill this thing,” he said, dropping the basket on the grass, “and took jolly good care to make it an all-morning job. All right, I’ll fill it. And she’ll have to get down to it and bottle the lot today, and serve her right.”

“Your mother has nothing whatever to do with this. If you want to blame anyone for it,” she said grimly, “you can blame yourself and me—no one else. You went straight out from here, yesterday, and hunted out Simon. After I’d expressly told you not to! Didn’t you?”

“All right,” he said, roused and scowling, “I did. How did you know about it? But I’d have told you, anyhow, if you’d asked me.”

“Simon let it out, last night. Oh, quite innocently, don’t worry, he didn’t know you’d gone flatly against my orders and your parents’ wishes. Paddy Rossall, how could you!”

“They asked for it,” said Paddy, goaded. “If you want to know, I wasn’t going to go after Simon, by the time I got here I’d got over it, and it seemed mean and silly. But it didn’t seem mean and silly to her, did it, to get together with you just to balk me? That’s different, isn’t it? It doesn’t count if you gang up on your son, but it’s a crime if you do the same to your mother.”

“Now, you stop this nonsense this minute,” commanded the old lady, quivering with indignation. “Your parents have a perfect right to check you—and to expect at least obedience from you, if nothing else. They’re responsible for you, of course they’re entitled to take whatever steps they think necessary for your good. You don’t realise how much you owe to them, or how badly you’re behaving to them. You take all their love and care for granted. Well, let me tell you, young man, if you had any gratitude in you, you’d never be able to think of enough ways to repay them for all they’ve done for you.”

He couldn’t bear it. To have the most secret, penitent and loving promptings of his heart ripped out and brandished in front of him, made cheap and public and sanctimonious like the disgusting parables in some old- fashioned moral book for children—it was too much. He reacted violently against it, with flooding colour and reckless rage, crying out things he didn’t mean and didn’t believe, in an effort to restore at least a balance of decency.

“So only one side’s got any rights! What about my rights? Did I ask them to have me? They could have helped it, couldn’t they? But I couldn’t, I didn’t have any choice. I’m their son, remember?”

Whether Miss Rachel can be said at this point to have taken any actual decision to resort to extreme measures, or whether she was quite simply pushed over the edge of action before she realised it, the result was the same. She drew herself to her full modest height, looking more like Queen Victoria than Paddy had ever seen her, and in a half-smothered voice of shocked and royal rage, with judgment in every syllable, she said what could never again be unsaid.

“No” said Miss Rachel, full into his angry, miserable face, “you are not!”

His first instinct was quite simply not to hear her, to pick up his basket and back out of this argument now, before events overwhelmed him. Such a thing could not have been said, and therefore it had not been said. He cast one desperate glance round him, looking for a way of escape.

“Which tree am I supposed to—to start—”

It was no use, the words were still there in his ears, stinging like an echo, and he could not get rid of them by pretending they were mere meaningless sound. His second impulse was to laugh. If this was her way of punishing him, it was a splendidly silly one. But she stood there squarely before him, watching his face intently and maintaining her unrelenting gravity, and there wasn’t the ghost of a chance that she was just being spiteful. The laugh collapsed in ruins. He stared at her, his eyes enormous and stricken, pushing the inconceivable thing away from him with one last convulsive effort at regaining the normal ground of everyday.

“It isn’t true,” he said passionately.

“However angry I may be with you,” said Miss Rachel harshly, “I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“No,” he owned forlornly, “that’s right, you wouldn’t.” He began to shake. “But I must be, I have to be, I am. I can’t start being somebody else—”

“Now, don’t be silly. You’re old enough to understand these things, and there’s no need to get upset about it. Here, come and sit down, and listen to me.”

She took him by the arm, unresisting, and led him to the stone seat under the sunny wall, and there plumped him down before her, diminished strangely in years, a lost small boy. Big, stunned eyes stared at, and round, and through her, and saw nothing at all. She tapped his cheek lightly, and nothing whatever happened. It took quite a sharp slap to startle those eyes back into focusing, and jolt a spark of warmth and feeling back into the fixed face.

“Oh, come along, now, you know people often adopt children, there’s nothing so strange about it. Tim and Phil adopted you, you’re not their own child. They took you legally, as a very young baby, from a friend of theirs whose wife had died. And don’t run away with the idea that you were chosen for the part, either. They took you against their inclinations at the time, out of pity, because your father didn’t want you.”

That brought the live and angry colour back to his cheeks, and a flare to his eyes that still looked like mutiny, even in the face of the firing-squad.

“Yes, you heard me correctly. Didn’t want you! He could perfectly well have afforded to pay for proper care for you, but a baby was a nuisance to him. He took advantage of the fact that Phil had lost a child of her own, and couldn’t have another, and he worked on her feelings until she took you off his hands. That’s how much your father cared about you. Tim and Phil took you out of pity, and they’ve loved and cared for you ever since. And this is how you behave to them in return! You’ll see,” said Miss Rachel with stern emphasis, “if you go on like this, no one will be able to love you.”

Somewhere deep inside him that started an echo that hurt and frightened him. He shut himself fiercely about it to contain the fear and pain, unwilling to give her the satisfaction of having moved him.

“I don’t believe it,” he said obstinately. But he did, that was the worst part of it, that he couldn’t even hope for