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 of straggling ends, a fact of which she seemed to be conscious, since she made several ineffectual attempts to secure them. She was wearing an overall fashioned out of a flowered material eminently unsuited to her years and her faded looks; and one of the irritating scraps of lace with which she was in the habit of embellishing her dresses had worked its way over the collar of the overall. There was such an indefinable air of desiccated spinsterhood about her that Raymond could have shouted aloud his disbelief that she could be his mother.
She advanced towards him in a little flutter of shy excitement. She did not immediately perceive, since he was standing with his back to the light, how pale he was. She kept up a gentle flow of chatter, exclaiming at one naughty pussy for having curled up on one of the chairs, apostrophising a canary, which was indefatigably singing in a gilded cage, as her precious Timmy, and directing Raymond’s attention to a pair of budgerigars at his elbow. When she reached him, it was plain from the timid way she raised her face that she expected him to kiss her cheek. He could not do it; it was with an effort of will that he refrained from thrusting her away from his immediate vicinity. He found a difficulty in speaking, but managed, after an uncomfortable moment of struggle, to say: “I came to speak to you.”
Still no inkling of his state of mind penetrated to her understanding; he had always had an abrupt manner, and she noticed nothing amiss. She said: “I’m so glad to see you! It seems such a long time since you were here! Because I don’t count that time you so kindly motored me back from town, you know, because you wouldn’t come in, would you? Not that I didn’t perfectly understand, for of course I know what a lot you always have to do, and how little time you have to spare. But I must tell you about Dicky! You remember that I asked the cornchandler — such an obliging man! — about poor little Dicky, who wasn’t quite well?”
He interrupted her. “I’ve come to speak to you,” he said again. His underlip quivered. “I don’t know how to do it!” he said desperately, looking round the room, at the cats, and the birdcages. “Now that I’m here — No, it isn’t possible!”
The chatter was stilled on her lips. She peered at him short-sightedly, sudden alarm in her face. She saw how haggard he looked, and retreated a step involuntarily. Her voice shook as she faltered: “Of course, dear! Of course! Though I can’t imagine what — You must let me fetch you some refreshment! A glass of sherry, and a biscuit. Phineas will be so pleased to see you! He was only saying the other day — But what am I doing, not asking you to sit down?”
“I don’t want anything. I came to you because of something Father told me. I don’t trust him: he’d say anything! But I’ve got to know the truth, and you’re the only person — Oh no, my God, there’s Martha!”
There was no more colour in her face than in his. She uttered a little moan, and shrank back from him, terror in her eyes. “I don’t know what you mean! I don’t know what you mean!” she cried, her voice rising to a shrill note. “Ray dear, you — you aren’t quite well! You’re not yourself! Do — do sit down! I’ll fetch Phineas. I expect you’ve been doing too much. A glass of sherry!”
He stood perfectly still, looking at her, noticing that her nose was shining, and a hairpin was drooping on to her shoulder. He felt as though this were all happening to someone else, not to him, Raymond Penhallow! No more confirmation was needed than that which he read in Delia’s frightened countenance. He would have gone away, but the situation was so strange that he did not know what to do in it, and so stood there, incongruous amongst the feminine knick-knacks with which the room was crammed. The muscles of his throat felt so rigid that he was obliged to swallow once or twice before he could speak. Then he said in a heavy tone which gave little indication of the turmoil in his breast: “It is true. You are my...” He found that he could not utter the word, and changed the phrase — “You aren’t my aunt.”
She began to cry, in a gasping way, dabbing all the time at her eyes: “Oh, Raymond! Oh, Raymond!”
He regarded her stonily. It seemed to him that she had little cause to cry. It was his life which had been ruined; he could not appreciate that she might be crying for this reason. In his own overwhelming chagrin there was no room for compassion either for her present distress, or for the misery she must have endured forty years ago, ,and perhaps through the intervening years. He was conscious only of loathing her, and that so profoundly that it made him feel actually sick.
She had stumbled blindly to a chair, and was crouched in it, gulping and sniffing, and still dabbing at her eyes. They were already a little swollen. She raised them fleetingly to his face, and at once they overflowed again. “I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry, dear!” she sobbed.
The hopeless inadequacy of her words irritated him. “Sorry!” he ejaculated. “A trifle late in the day for you to be sorry!”
“I didn’t know — I never meant — I’ve always loved you so!” she said piteously.
His hands clenched on the whip he was holding; a rush of bitter, molten words crowded in his throat; he managed to choke them down. All he said, but that in a voice that made her flinch, was one word: “Don’t!”
Her sobs grew louder, more gasping. “If you knew — I did my best...”
"No, you didn’t,” he interrupted. He gave an ugly laugh. “Don’t women manage to dispose of their unwanted infants? Lie on them, or something? Couldn’t you have got rid of me?”
Her horrified eyes started at him. “Oh, Raymond, don’t, don’t! You don’t know what you’re saying! Oh, how wicked — Oh, you mustn’t talk like that!”
“Wicked!” he repeated. “Wasn’t it wicked to palm me off as your sister’s child? To let me grow up in utter ignorance — Oh my God, can’t you see what you’ve done?”
“Rachel promised!” she said desperately. “It wasn’t my fault… Rachel arranged everything! She promised no one should ever know! Adam had no right to tell you!” A terrible thought occurred to her; she gave a whimper of fright, and cowered into the corner of her chair. “What did he do it for? Raymond, why did he do it?”
“Does it matter?” he asked.
“But, Raymond!” Her voice was rising again, on a note of panic. “What’s he going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
She sprang up, catching her foot in the fringe of the rug on the floor, and stumbling over it. “But he can’t say anything! He mustn’t! Not after all these years! He promised! He couldn’t be so dreadful!”
She was advancing towards him, with her shaking hands held out. He deliberately put a table loaded with bibelots between them, not with the intention of hurting her, for he was not thinking of her at all, but because his flesh crept at the thought of being touched by her. “I tell you I don’t know what he means to do. I don’t know that it matters much. The mere fact — now that I know it’s true — It’s no use talking. I only came to find out — and I have. So that’s all.”
He turned towards the door. She called after him in a distracted voice: “Oh, don’t go like that! I can’t think!”
“No,” he said hardly. “I can’t think either. I daresay I shall be able to, when — when I’ve got more used to the idea of being just another of Father’s bastards.”
“Oh, no, no!” she whispered foolishly, and again stretched out her hand to him. But he went away without looking back, and a minute later she heard the clatter of his horse’s hooves diminishing in the distance.