A hired car, which had presumably brought Phineas from Bodmin, was drawn up outside the front door. Faith saw it, as she crossed the hall towards the staircase, but beyond thinking fleetingly that it was strange that Phineas should have come so unexpectedly to call upon Penhallow she wasted no speculation on his visit. The throbbing in her temples had developed into a dull ache which seemed to emanate from a point midway between her brows. The skin across her forehead felt tight and unyielding; she smoothed it once or twice with her hand as she mounted the stairs. When she reached her room, she sat down in a chair by the window, not leaning back in it, but holding herself rigid, with her hands clasped in her lap, the fingers working a little. While she had cowered in the depths of the big chair in the Long drawing-room, wincing at the strident voices of Penhallow and Charmian, she had caught sight of Clay’s white face and had read the sick terror in it. She had seen how his hand shook when he set down his cup-and-saucer, and it had come to her quite suddenly that he and she must escape from Trevellin. He had cast her an imploring look which had recalled to her mind the way he used to run to her for protection when he was a little boy. She realised that for all his lofty talk, and his desperate pretences, he was still near enough to his childhood to cherish the shreds of that old, unreasoning trust in her ability to keep him safe from any hurt or any danger. Her love for him had nerved her in the past to fight his battles for him against her stepsons, and even against Penhallow himself; it flamed high in her heart now; she could not fail Clay.
She began to think of what she must do. She supposed it would be easily possible for them both to leave Trevellin, and for an idle minute considered how such a flight could best be accomplished. Then she remembered that she had too little money to make it feasible; and that Clay was under age. She did not know whether Penhallow could lay legal claim to him, but she thought it very likely. They would never be able to hide from him; he would hunt them down for the sheer sport of it.
Her gaze was fixed and unseeing; she remained motionless, except for the working of her fingers. She thought and thought, trying to find the certain way of escape which must surely exist if she had the wit to perceive it. But every path she explored seemed to lead, in her overwrought brain, only to a huge painted bedstead, in which Penhallow lay roaring with laughter at her attempts to evade him.
So real was this image that she gradually became convinced that there was no scheme she could evolve that he would not be able easily to frustrate. She had always been afraid of him: he was beginning now to assume grotesque proportions in her mind, so that she felt herself to be as powerless, while he lived, as some fairy-tale creature under an evil spell.
She wished that her head would stop aching. She was tired, too; she had not slept naturally for several nights, and had been obliged lately to increase the veronal she took from twenty to thirty drops. She had sent Loveday to Liskeard the day before, to have the prescription made up again at the chemist’s, and Loveday had protested diffidently, telling her that it was not right that she should drug herself, that she ought to see Dr Rame about her insomnia, because he was younger than Dr Lifton, his partner, and was said to be a clever man, and very up-to-date. She had not listened to Loveday, partly because she had drawn away from the girl since her discovery that she meant to marry Bart, and partly because she did not like Dr Rame, and had come to think that she could not do without her sleeping-draught. The new bottle, as yet unopened, stood beside the old on the shelf above her wash-stand. She turned her eyes towards it, thinking that it was as well she had sent Loveday for it, since she would be obliged to broach it tonight, if her headache continued. If it were not for Clay, she thought she might be tempted to empty the bottle into her glass, and drink it all at a gulp, thus putting a painless end to herself.
It seemed to her that her brain, which had not seriously contemplated such an action as this, became suddenly suspended above the thought that had so casually occurred to her. She sat with her eyes riveted to the little bottle, and her heart beating so hard that it thudded against her ribs.
No one would ever know. That was the thought which leaped to her mind, and stayed there, behind all the others which swiftly followed it. Dr Lifton had told her that not even Penhallow’s constitution could stand the strain he was imposing on it. He would feel no surprise it Penhallow were to die suddenly; he would say that he had warned them of what must happen if they could not persuade him to change his way of life. Everyone knew that so far from modifying his eating and his drinking and his crazy spurts of energy he had been going from bad to worse during the past weeks; and although Clara, and perhaps others of his family as well, might be confident that he would survive his excesses, they would only think, when he died, that they had been mistaken after all, and had paid too little heed to the doctor’s warning.
With fatal clarity, the very means by which she could hasten Penhallow’s end (for it was no more than that, she told herself showed themselves to her, so that it almost seemed as though she were meant to take this course. It was so easy that it seemed strange that she had never thought of it before. He would not suffer; he would not even know that he had swallowed the drug, for when he was already a little fuddled, as he had been for so many nights, he had a way of tossing off his whisky at a gulp. It appeared to her that if he felt no pain she could not be thought to have committed so great a crime. She was sure that she had many times heard him inveigh against the life he was forced to lead, saying that the sooner he died the better pleased he would be, and if her brain could not quite accept this declaration at its face-value, at least it was ready to receive it as a half-excuse for what she meant to do.
The more she thought of it, the more clearly she perceived that every trivial circumstance militated so strangely in her favour that her task began to assume the colour of a predestined act.
When they left Penhallow every evening, and the trays of refreshment had been removed from his room, Reuben was compelled to get out the decanter of whisky from the corner-cupboard, and to place it on the table beside the bed. Reuben had a trick of reducing the quantity of liquor in the decanter to a bare minimum, so that there should be a check on the amount his master could consume when he was left alone for the night. There was never anything left in the decanter in the morning, so that there could be no fear that others besides Penhallow might drink the drugged whisky; nor was it ever produced during the course of the evening for the refreshment of those who foregathered in his room. Penhallow would not touch his private store of whisky, she thought, until he had been made ready for sleep, and left alone in his huge, over-heated room.
The fancy had seized him to get up today; he meant to take the head of his table at dinner, when he would no doubt eat and drink too much, grow boisterous, and exhaust himself, as he always did on such occasions. Surely it would seem the most natural thing in the world if he should be found to have died in his sleep after a day of most unwise exertion!
Martha, she knew, had seized the opportunity to turn out his room that afternoon. It was done now, all the sweeping and the dusting, and the great bed stood ready for its occupant. There could be nothing to take anyone to the room again until Penhallow re-entered it; all she had to do was to go down to it at a moment when it was unlikely that she would encounter any of the household in that part of the house. That was as easy as the rest. Before dinner, when the family was gathered in the Yellow drawing-room, drinking sherry; and Reuben, with Jimmy to help him, was busy laying the table in the dining-room, she could pass with little fear of meeting anyone on the way down the narrow stairway at the far end of the house into the small hall on to which Penhallow’s room opened. All she had to do then to win freedom for herself, and for Clay, for Raymond, for Vivian, for Bart, even for Aubrey, was to cross the wide floor to the corner-cupboard, to open it, to lift the stopper from the decanter, and to empty in the contents of one small bottle. It seemed such a little thing to do to achieve so much that was good that it scarcely bore the appearance to her of a crime. All the troubles which now beset the Penhallows would be settled by this one act; there would be peace at Trevellin, and happiness: a release for more persons than herself and Clay from an intolerable bondage.
A long sigh heaved her breast. The thudding of her heart had abated; she felt calm, and clear-sighted; even the ache in her head was less, although it had left her, as it so often did, with a feeling of narcosis, as though the pain had been merely blanketed by a strong anodyne. She glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece, and, getting up from her chair, began to change her dress for dinner.
She thought that if she met anyone on her way to Penhallow’s room, or heard someone in the room when she came to it, it would be a sign to her that she was not, after all, meant to carry out her intention; but she felt so sure that she was meant to that it would have been a shock to her to have encountered even so small a hindrance as a housemaid upon the landing.
When she came out of her room, there was no one in sight. She could hear the twins’ voices raised in the hall below, and Charmian singing, rather unmelodiously, behind the shut bathroom door. The broad corridor at the back of the house, with its deep window embrasures, was deserted too. The doors into the twins’ rooms stood open on to it; Conrad had put his shoes outside; she taught a glimpse, as she passed, of Bart’s clothes tossed carelessly on to the floor of his room. The corridor led into a smaller hall, the counterpart of the one below it. Here was Eugene’s and Vivian’s bedroom, with its dressing-room beyond, and Aubrey’s room opposite. Aubrey had gone downstairs, but a murmur of voices sounded in Eugene’s room. Faith went softly down the narrow, worn stairs, meeting no one, holding the phial in her handkerchief. A scent of lavender drifted into the hall at the foot of the stairs from the door which stood open on to the garden; and one of Bart’s dogs, an old setter, lay on the mat with his head on his paws. He cocked his ears, and followed Faith with his eyes, but he did not lift his head, because he was uninterested in anyone but Bart. The double door into Penhallow’s room stood wide, as though to invite her to enter. From the hall she could see the patchwork quilt upon the bed shimmering and glowing in a shaft of late sunlight striking into the room slantways through one of the windows. She went in, quite unafraid, and crossed the room to the corner-cupboard. The decanter stood there, with a glass beside it, and a siphon, upon a silver tray. As she had expected, there was only a little whisky in it. She removed the heavy cut-glass stopper, and poured in the veronal. A tiny sound behind her made her start, and look over her shoulder. But it was only Penhallow’s cat, Beelzebub, which had awakened. and was stretching luxuriously. She replaced the stopper, and closed the cupboard door. The cat sat on its haunches, and began to wash one foreleg. As she moved away from the cupboard, it paused to regard her fixedly, holding its paw suspended. She did not like cats; she thought that this one looked malevolently at her, as though it knew what she had done. She left the room: and the setter’s eyes followed her again as she went towards the staircase.
Eugene and Vivian were still talking in their room; Charmian was whistling an air from La Boheme in the bathroom. Faith went into her room, and put the empty veronal phial back on the shelf beside the other bottles and pots that stood there. She felt strangely calm, as though she had not done. anything at all out of the ordinary, but she thought that her headache would be sure to return before she had spent many minutes amongst the Penhallows, so she swallowed a couple of aspirin tablets before going downstairs to join the party in the Yellow drawing-room.
No one paid much attention to her when she entered the room, and she went to sit down by the open window. Bart, who was standing by the pie-crust table upon which Reuben had set the tray with the sherry, had the decanter in his hand, and did indeed acknowledge his stepmother’s presence by lifting it suggestively, and saying: “Faith?”
She shook her head. There was a motley collection of glasses in the room, for it seemed that nothing broke quite so readily as a sherry glass, or was so hard to replace. Penhallow held one of an old set in his hand, and Clara had another; but Conrad was drinking from a tinted glass of thin Czecho-Slovakian ware, obtained from Woolworth’s; and Bart had a miniature club-tumbler. Faith thought dreamily that when she and Clay lived together in their London flat, everything should match.
Phineas’s call had left Penhallow in high good humour. Not even the appearance of Aubrey in his maroon velvet jacket provoked him to more than a sardonic crack of laughter. He said, a little boastfully, that he had not felt so well in years. Then he saw Bart look at him with narrowed, frowning eyes, and he added that he was going to die on his feet, or at any rate in his chair. When the time came to go in to dinner, he had his chair wheeled to the head of the table, remarking agreeably to Raymond that he was not going to be deposed yet. Raymond returned no answer to this jibe, but took his place between Charmian and Eugene. His brothers thought that the set look on his face betokened annoyance at Penhallow’s presence, and were amused at seeing him put out of countenance. But Penhallow’s resumption of the place which he had not sat in for so long affected him not at all. He was thinking of the strange interview which had taken place in the Yellow drawing-room after tea.
Hardly knowing what good, if any good at all, he hoped to do, he had joined his father and his uncle there, encountering, as he had entered the room, so bleak a look of hatred from Phineas that it had surprised a laugh out of him. In her dread of having her youthful indiscretion exposed by Penhallow, it appeared that Delia had cast herself upon her brother’s protection, openly acknowledging what Phineas had known, or perhaps only guessed, for forty years, but had shrunk fastidiously from facing. It was evident that he was furious at having the discreet veil in which he lived torn down by rude, Penhallow hands; and from the expression of distaste on his countenance it seemed that he blamed Raymond as much as Penhallow himself for the disturbance created in his ordered life.
“Hallo, Ray!” had said Penhallow genially. “Here’s your uncle been playing ostrich for forty years! You’ve upset his apple-cart nicely! What did you go running off to Delia for, you fool?”
“To learn the truth!” Raymond replied.
Penhallow had chuckled. “There’s an undutiful son for you! Mistrusting your own father! Didn’t I tell you that Delia was the sort of little fool who couldn’t keep a still tongue in her head? You might have known she’d scuttle off to blurt the whole thing out to Phineas, who didn’t want to hear it.” He directed his attention to his visitor, scanning him appreciatively. “Knew it all along, didn’t you, Phin? Old pussy-cat Phin! I thought you did. Lacked the plain guts to tackle me! Lord, there was never more than one man in your family, and that was my Rachel!”
Phineas had passed his tongue between his lips. The hostility he had been at pains to disguise for so many years was naked in his eyes, but his dread of scandal was more powerful than his dislike of Penhallow, and he had not allowed himself to be goaded into any intemperate rejoinder. He had said smoothly, picking his words with care: “I conceive it to be useless, my dear Penhallow, to indulge in idle recriminations. I have come here today to learn from you what your object was in making this unsavoury disclosure to the — er — unfortunate outcome of an interlude in your past which I prefer not to dwell on.
“That’s you, Ray,” remarked Penhallow.
“He wants an answer,” Raymond had replied. “So do I”
One of his soundless laughs had shaken Penhallow. “Damme if I ever thought I was going to get so much amusement out of it when I told you!” he had said. “Maybe I hadn’t got an object.”
Phineas had set his slightly trembling finger-tips together. “I require your assurance, Penhallow, that this affair will go no farther.”
“You won’t get it,” Penhallow answered genially.
Phineas’s voice had become a little shrill. “Have you considered what my sister’s position must be if any word of this disgraceful story passes your lips?”
“Your position is what you mean, Phin!” Penhallow had retorted. “A fat lot you ever cared for Delia’s troubles! All you want is to be able to live snug and soft in your damned respectability! Well, you won’t live quite so snug in future. Time some of the lard was sweated off you!”
“What about me?” Raymond had demanded, his words falling heavily between the two older men.
His father’s eyes had glinted at him mockingly. “You’ll learn to sing small, Ray. Maybe if you behave yourself I’ll hold my tongue.”
Raymond had been silent, bitterly envisaging his future at Penhallow’s hands.
“I apprehend,” had said Phineas, “that a woman why was once in my father’s employ, and later became nursemaid to your children, is also privy to this affair. I must insist that adequate steps be taken to ensure her silence.”
“Oh you must insist, must you?” had retorted Penhallow, kindling to quick wrath. “By God, Phineas.. I’d like to know where you think you are! This is my stamping ground, let me tell you, and the only man to do any insisting at Trevellin is Penhallow! Perhaps you’d like to offer old Martha a fat bribe? Or perhaps you’re going to insist that I should? That ’ud be more like you, wouldn’t it, so careful as you are with your money? Well, I shan’t do it, but I’ve no objection to your trying it on! Lord, I’d like to see your smug face well scratched!"
“If you are satisfied that the woman’s loyalty may be trusted,” had replied Phineas, with what dignity he could muster, “I must of course bow to your superior knowledge of her character, but I would point out to you—”
“You’ll bow to more than my superior knowledge of Martha’s character!” Penhallow had interrupted brutally.
Phineas had been obliged to swallow that. For how long the interview had been prolonged Raymond did not know. He had left the room, perceiving that neither he nor Phineas was serving any other purpose in remaining than that of providing Penhallow with a sport after his own heart. From the exultant joviality of Penhallow’s present mood, he inferred that he had succeeded in thoroughly discomfiting Phineas. He was obviously enjoying an extension of his power, and had as obviously begun to exercise it in a fashion as fiendish as it was capricious, since he announced, with a good deal of relish, that the Otterys were going to join his birthday party on the morrow.
“Well, it’s your party, sir,” said Eugene, in a tone that left no one in any doubt of his own sentiments.
“Who’s coming?” asked Conrad. “Have old Ma Venngreen, and make it a real riot of clean fun!”
“Damned if I don’t!” said Penhallow gleefully. “Faith, my girl, you’ll attend to that!”
She was quietly eating her dinner, safe in the citadel of her knowledge that there would be no nightmare of a party to be endured. She raised her eyes, and said: “Very well, Adam.” The length of the table separated them, but she had an odd fancy that he was farther removed from her than that.
Reuben, who had watched with patent disapproval his master’s zestful attack upon a lobster, interposed at this point, remarking severely that since shell-fish were fatal to Penhallow’s digestion the chances were that the party would have to put off, anyway.
The only result of this was to make Penhallow curse him cheerfully for being a meddling old buzzard, and demand the other half of his lobster. He next bethought himself of a piece of information likely to infuriate Raymond, and let it be widely known that he had sent Aubrey to cash a cheque for him in Bodmin that morning.
“Going the pace a bit, aren’t you, Guv’nor?” said Bart. “Thought you drew out a tidy bit not so long ago?”
“What’s it got to do with you how much I choose to keep by me?” demanded Penhallow. “If I have any damned criticism from any of you, I’ll give the whole three hundred to Aubrey to pay his debts with!”
“Good lord!” ejaculated Conrad. “You didn’t draw out three hundred at one blow, did you?”
“Yes,” said Aubrey, “and I do hope that you will all of you criticise him a great deal, because if Father were to give it to me it would be a very lovely gesture, I feel.”
“We shouldn’t!” Conrad retorted.
“Well, I hope you’re as rich as you think you are. Father,” said Charmian. “Though personally I should doubt it.”
Penhallow signed imperatively to Reuben to refill his wine-glass, and turned his head to look at Raymond. “Well? well?” he said. “You’re not usually backward in giving me your opinion of my actions? Lost your tongue all of a sudden?”
“You know very well what my opinion is,” Raymond replied curtly.
“To think I was forgetting that I’d already had the benefit of your criticism!” Penhallow exclaimed. “Held a pistol to my head, didn’t you? Well, well, it’s been a foolish day one way or another! Clara, old lady, here’s to you!”
Raymond chanced to look up, as Penhallow was drinking his sister’s health. He found that Jimmy, who was helping Reuben to wait upon them all, was watching him covertly, an expression of mingled curiosity and gloating on his dark face. He stiffened, remembering what had seemed of little importance in the first shock of his discovery, that it had been Jimmy who had rushed in to pull him off his father’s throat that morning, and that with a promptitude which suggested that he had all the time been listening at the door. As he stared into Jimmy’s spiteful eyes, so deadly a look came into his own that Jimmy changed colour.
The blood seemed to Raymond to drum in his head. He lowered his gaze to his plate, thinking, He knows!
There were too many animated conversations in progress round the table for anyone to have leisure to observe this tiny interlude; nor did Raymond’s silence occasion any remark. It was supposed that one of his moody, taciturn fits had descended upon him. By the time that Bart addressed an inquiry to him across the table he had regained command over his faculties, and was able to answer with a calm that surprised himself.
Having disposed of several glasses of burgundy, Penhallow was inspired, when he was left alone with his sons at the table, to order Reuben to go down to the cellars to fetch up a couple of bottles of the ’96 port.
“Anyone would think,” said Reuben dampingly, “that it was your birthday today, which it isn’t.”
“I shan’t waste the ’96 port on Venngreen and Phin Ottery,” declared Penhallow. “You be off with you, and fetch it up! A glass of port. will do me a power of good.”
“It won’t do your gout any good,” grumbled Reuben, but he went off to obey the order.
When he had drunk as much port as he wanted to, and had reached that stage of boisterous elation which his wife so much dreaded, Penhallow had himself wheeled into the Long drawing-room to join the ladies. His intellect was just sufficiently clouded to prevent his keeping his usual strict tally on the various members of his family, so that both Clay and Bart were able to slip away unperceived; Clay to spend an unmolested evening morosely knocking the balls about in the billiard-room and Bart to keep an assignation with Loveday in the schoolroom. However, when Penhallow decided at last to go to bed, and it was discovered that Jimmy had taken French leave, and was nowhere to be found, he insisted on having Bart to help Reuben to undress him, and get him into his bed, and for the first time noticed his absence from the room. Conrad, who, for all his jealous of Loveday, would have been torn in pieces before, betraying his twin to their father, at once said that Bart was working on some accounts in Ray’s office, and went off to find him; while Reuben diverted Penhallow’s rising anger by announcing that he had had enough of Jimmy’s habit of sneaking off to the village as soon as his back was turned. Penhallow promptly forgot about Bart, and said that they all grudged poor little Jimmy his bit of fun, but that he was the only one amongst the whole pack who cared two pins for his old father.
“A more unjust observation,” murmured Eugene, “in face of the Bastard’s practice of deserting his post whenever he hears the call of the flesh, I have yet to listen to.”
“Ah, you’re all jealous of Jimmy!” said Penhallow, shaking his head. “You’re afraid of his cutting you out!”
An expression of acute nausea came into Eugene’s face, but as Conrad and Bart came back into the room at that moment, his reply was lost.
Bart was looking heated, Conrad having walked without warning into the schoolroom, where he had been sprawling in a deep chair, with Loveday on his knee, and interrupted this idyll by saying caustically that if he could think of something besides wenching for a few minutes Penhallow wanted him to assist him into bed.
Bart had leaped to his feet in quick wrath, and there would undoubtedly have been a minor brawl had not Loveday represented to him the folly of keeping his lather waiting, and so arousing his suspicions.
“And where the devil have you been?” demanded Penhallow. “Don’t give me any of your lies, because I know damned well what you’ve been up to!”
“All right, then why ask me?” Bart retorted. “What do you want me for, anyway? Where’s Jimmy?”
“Need you ask?” said Eugene. “He seeks his pleasures in the village. Unlike some others one might mention.”
“Shut up, you swine!” said Conrad, under his breath.
Eugene smiled sweetly at him. “What a touching picture of loyalty you do present, to be sure, Con!”
Bart looked dangerous, and took a step towards Eugene’s chair. He was arrested by Raymond, who caught his eye, and jerked his chin imperatively in the direction of the door. After hesitating for an instant, he shrugged, and turned to lay hold of Penhallow’s chair. He pushed it out of the room, Reuben following him.
“And to think,” said Aubrey, stretching himself out at full length on the sofa, “that this evening has been but a foretaste of what we shall be called upon to undergo tomorrow! Oh, I do think, don’t you, that Father is becoming quite too dreadfully oppressive?”