“Napier, you must allow me at least the quality of patience. My one desire, boy, was to protect your happiness. I do not take what you say in the least seriously, for it isn’t you speaking but Iris with your voice. You are enchanted—”
“And I should jolly well think he was enchanted!” cried the boy that was Venice, her arm round Iris. A warrior was Venice then, and her leather jacket like a shining breastplate. “And I’m enchanted, too—and if you really want to know what’s the matter with the whole lot of you, you’re all enchanted—by the love of Napier and Iris. I’d stuff all our marriage-laws down a drainpipe rather than keep them apart for another minute. And I think you must be mad and bad not to see the loveliness of a love like Iris’s—and after all this time she’s beaten you all in the end, and I’m so glad, so glad, so glad!”
“Maurice,” said Hilary gravely, “you are getting more like God every moment. You’re in a minority of one.”
Napier stood in the middle of the room, looking from one to the other of us, scowling, seeing no one, hearing nothing. He was a man lost in an obsession, trying to find his way out. His back was to Iris. Some great man, Balzac, maybe, has said that women do not love with their eyes, but there was a blinding love in her eyes, and her lips trembled, tried to smile at the lost thing that Napier was. Only she seemed to know the obsession in which Napier wandered, and she just managed to say: “Come, Napier. Come. …”
Napier turned to her vaguely, seemed about to go with her, then pulled himself round to his father again: “Before I go, sir, I’d like to tell you—I’d like to say that—that it was a foul thing to do to throw Fenwick at Iris—”
“Napier,” Sir Maurice said quietly, “I have apologised for that—”
“But have you apologised for us all, sir?” Napier seemed at last to awake from his obsession. He looked happy at that moment. “Have you apologised for the opinion we’ve all had of Iris for ten years? Because all these slanders about her go back to—”
“Napier, my Napier, you please mustn’t!”
“Iris, I must put this right! You’ve never had enough respect for yourself—”
“But I have now, dear! Let me … keep it. …”
Napier seemed to appeal to Guy. There was a curious understanding in Guy’s look. He said: “Go on, Naps, let’s have it all now. What’s this about Fenwick?”
“Guy, don’t encourage him!” Iris cried passionately. Venice held her tight. Iris looked at me once just then, and I think that is the last time she ever saw me.
Napier seemed to appeal to Guy: “Iris has always put her friends before herself. And the only time in her life she ever told a lie we all rushed to believe her. And that’s why Iris and I never saw each other after Fenwick’s death until three nights before I married Venice. I wasn’t to know then that I was marrying an angel, and so I couldn’t tell her what had happened to me and Iris. Iris told me about Fenwick that night. I made her. You see, until then I’d never wanted to see her, because the Iris that Boy had killed himself for wasn’t the Iris I’d loved as a boy—”
“But she is now, Napier,” Iris whispered bitterly. “Why can’t you let be, why can’t you!”
“Because,” Napier flashed, “I love you, and I’m damn well going to have these people respect you as I do. … That lie Iris spread about the reason for Boy’s death was because she didn’t care what happened to her. She just didn’t care. But she wanted people to think as well of Boy as people can of a suicide. She wanted Gerald to keep his little tin-god hero. And she had it all her own way because the doctor at the hotel in Deauville was a friend of hers and let nothing out. She just didn’t care what people thought of her, and so she said that Boy had died ‘for purity.’ That might mean anything, and so of course we all took it to mean the worst thing as regards Iris. Oh, she knew we would. Well, so Boy did die ‘for purity.’ He was mad with love for Iris, and from the moment she had to give me up he pestered her to marry him. Then one day she surprised him by saying she would. I suppose she surprised him by giving way in the end, and instead of the cad saying he couldn’t, he took her while he had the chance. He—”
“Napier!”
“He had syphilis when he married her, and went mad when he realised what he had done. That’s all. There’s your Boy Fenwick. There’s Iris, that’s Iris!” He
