It was Faith Penhallow’s custom to breakfast in bed, a habit she had adopted not so much out of regard for her health, which was frail, but because she resented her sister-in-law’s calm assumption of the foot of the table, behind the coffee-cups. She had no real wish to pour out tea and coffee for a numerous household, but like a great many weak people she was jealous of her position, and she considered that Clara’s usurpation of her place at table made her appear ridiculous. She had several times hinted that it was the mistress of the house who ought to take the foot of the table, but while she was incapable of boldly stating a grievance Clara was equally incapable of recognising a hint. So Clara, having taken the seat upon her first coming home to the house of her birth, kept it, and Faith, refusing to acknowledge defeat, never came downstairs until after breakfast.
It was twenty years since Faith Clay Formby, a romantic girl of nineteen, had been swept off her feet by Adam Penhallow, a great, handsome, dark man, twenty two years her senior, and had left the shelter of her aunt’s house to marry him. She had been very pretty in those days, with large blue eyes, the softest of fair curls, and the most appealing mouth in the world. Penhallow’s age had lent him an added enchantment; he knew just how to handle a shy girl; and the knowledge that he was a rake did not in anyway detract from his charm. She had been flattered, had pictured to herself the future, when she would be mistress of a Manor in Cornwall, moving gracefully about the beautiful old house, worshipped by her (reformed) husband, adored by her stepchildren. She had meant to be so kind to his motherless family. She was prepared to encounter enmity, but she would win them over by her patience, and her understanding, until, within a few months, they would all confide in her, and vie with one another in waiting on her.
At first glance, Trevellin had been all and more than she had imagined. Situated not many miles from Liskeard, the big Tudor house, with its Dutch gables, its fall chimney-stacks, its many mullioned windows, was large enough and lovely enough to draw a gasp from her. She saw it on a clear summer’s evening, cool grey in a setting of pasture-land, with its walled gardens bright with flowers, its heavy oak doors standing hospitably open, and allowing her, before she set foot across the threshold, a glimpse of floors black with age, of a warped gateleg table, of a warming-pan hanging on a panelled wall. North of Trevellin, in the distance, the Moor rose up, grand in the mellow evening light. Penhallow had pointed out Rough Tor to her, and had asked her if she could smell the sharp peat-scent in the air. Oh, yes, it had quite come up to her expectations! Even the discovery that most of the bewildering number of rooms in the house were badly in need of decoration; that many of the carpets and curtains were shabby; that the most hideous examples of a Victorian cabinet-maker’s art stood cheek by jowl with pieces of Chippendale, or Hepplewhite; that it would have needed an army of servants to keep so rambling a house in good order, failed to dash her spirits. She would change all that.
But she couldn’t change Penhallow’s children.
Whatever picture she had conjured up faded, never again to be recalled, at that first sight of them, drawn up in formidable array for her inspection. It was forcibly borne in upon her that her eldest stepson was of the same age as herself, and a good deal more assured. Had Penhallow told her that Raymond was nineteen? She didn’t know; probably he had, but she was the type of woman who found little difficulty in glossing over such information as did not fit into her dream-pictures, and she had forgotten it.
There they had stood, seven of them, ranging in age from nineteen to five: Raymond, scowling and taciturn; Ingram, taller than Raymond, and brusque in manner; Eugene, a slim edition of Ingram, but with a livelier countenance, and, even at fifteen, a quick, bitter tongue; Charmian, five years younger than Eugene, as blackbrowed as the rest of the family, and quite as hardy; Aubrey looking, at eight, deceptively delicate; the twins, sturdy and unfriendly little boys of five, resisting all her attempts to cuddle them, and plunging after their great, rough brothers.
They showed no enmity towards their stepmother; they did not appear to feel the smallest pang of resentment at her stepping into their mother’s shoes. It was some time before she had realised that they had encountered, and taken for granted, too many of Penhallow’s mistresses to cavil at a second wife. She had a horrifying suspicion that they regarded her from the start as just another of Penhallow’s women, to be tolerated, but not admitted into their charmed circle. She had pictured them as neglected: she had never imagined that she would find them revelling in neglect, impatient of caresses, tumbling in and out of scrapes, scandalising the countryside, dodging their father’s wrath, never happy except when astride plunging horses, the very sight of which terrified her.
She had never had a chance to mother them. You couldn’t mother a young man as old as yourself; or striplings who despised the tenderer emotions; or a wild, wiry little girl who scornfully rescued you from a field full of aggressive-looking bullocks, and thought you a fool for calling a blood-mare “a pretty horse”. As for Aubrey, and the twins, their creature comforts were administered to them by Martha, and whatever fondness they had for any female was given to her. Her overtures had not been repulsed so much as endured; she had never been able to flatter herself that her marriage to Penhallow had made the smallest difference to any one of them.
She had tried, of course, to shape herself into the pattern Penhallow desired, even learning to ride under his ruthless instruction. She endured hours of sick terror in the saddle, never achieving mastery over any but the quietest old horse in the stable; and she cried because Penhallow roared with laughter at her; and sometimes wondered why she had married him, and still more why he had married her. She had not enough perception to realise that Penhallow never weighed a question in his impatient mind, never subordinated his body’s needs to the counsel of his brain, never troubled to look to the future. He had wanted to possess Faith, and since he could not get her without marrying her, he had married her, leaving the future to providence, or perhaps not even caring for it.
She had never understood him, probably never would; and although his love-making frightened her sometimes, she was too young and innocent to realise, until the knowledge was forcibly borne in upon her, that she had married an incontinent man who would never be faithful to one woman all his life long. She was shocked beyond measure, and bitterly hurt, when she first discovered that he had a mistress; and might have left him had she not been pregnant at the time. Her son, Clay, was born, and after that there could be no question of leaving Penhallow. But she did not love Penhallow any more. She was sickly all through the months of her pregnancy, nervous, and often peevish. Still living in a world of make-believe, forming her expectations on what she had read between the covers of novels, she imagined that Penhallow would treat her with loving solicitude, waiting on her tenderly, begging her to take care of herself, and certainly pacing the floor in an agony of dread while her child was born. But Rachel Ottery, his first wife, had borne her children without fuss or complication, riding her high-bred horses to within a few weeks of her deliveries, and making no more ado over the whole business than she would have made over the extraction of a tooth. Penhallow, then, had little patience with an ailing, querulous wife, and no more sympathy with her nervous fears than he had with what he thought was her squeamishness. Faith, who believed that the more primitive functions of the human body were “not nice”, and could only be spoken of under a veil of euphemism; who called bitches lady-dogs; and who would certainly tell the twins that God had sent them a little baby brother, felt her very soul shrink at Penhallow’s crudities. On the day that he jovially informed the Vicar that his wife was breeding, she knew that she had married a brute; and on that day died her youth.
Clay was born at four o’clock on a damp autumn day. Scent was breast-high; Penhallow was hunting. He came into Faith’s room at seven, mud-splashed, smelling of the stables and leather and spirits, singing out: “Well, my girl, well? How are you feeling now? Clever, eh? Where’s the young Penhallow? Let’s have a look at the little rascal!”
But he had not thought much of Clay, a wizened scrap, tucked up in a cradle all hung with muslin and blue ribbons. “Damme if ever I saw such a puny little rat!” he said, accustomed to Rachel’s bouncing, lusty babies. “Not much Penhallow about him!”
Perhaps because he saw so little of the Penhallow in this youngest son he permitted Faith to give him her own name, Clay. The child was inclined to be weakly, a fault ascribed by Penhallow to Faith’s cosseting of herself when she was bearing him. He was a tow-headed baby, darkening gradually to an indeterminate brown, and with his mother’s colouring he inherited her timid disposition. Nothing terrified him as much as the sound of his father’s voice upraised either in wrath, or in boisterous joviality; he would burst into tears if startled; he early developed a habit of sheltering behind his mother; and was continually complaining to her that his half-brothers had been unkind to him. In defence of him, Faith could find the courage to fight. She dared her stepsons to lay a finger on her darling, and was so sure that their rough ways must harm him that she instilled into his head a dread of them which they had in actual fact done little to deserve. The twins certainly bullied him, but the elder Penhallows, who would have goodnaturedly taught him to ride, and to fish, and to shoot, and to defend himself with his fists, had he shown the least spark of spirit, shrugged their shoulders, and generally ignored him. Fortunately for himself, he was intelligent, and managed to win a scholarship to a public school of good standing. Penhallow, who had allowed the younger sons of his first marriage to be educated locally, in the most haphazard fashion, said that as he didn’t seem to be good for much else, he might as well get some solid book-learning into his head, and raised no objection to his taking up the scholarship. Later, he was to consent to his going on to Cambridge, where he was at present. For this, Faith had Raymond to thank. “He’s no damned good to anyone, and we don’t want him here, eating his head off,” Raymond had said bluntly. Penhallow had seen the force of this argument. Clay was the only one of his sons whom he did not wish to keep at home. He said the sight of the boy’s pasty face and girlish ways turned his stomach.
The boy’s colouring had from the outset been a source of mortification to him. The Penhallows, with their usual forthrightness, animadverted frequently on the incongruity of light hair in a Penhallow; and casual visitors were all too apt to comment artlessly on it, saying that it was strange to meet a fair member of that family, resenting these remarks as much as Clay, wondered why the Penhallow in him should be expected to predominate, and would say in an aggrieved tone that , the first Mrs Penhallow had been as dark as Penhallow himself it was not surprising that his elder sons should be all dark as was apparently desired.
Faith used to stare at the portrait of Rachel Penhallow, which hung in the hall, trying to imagine what kind of a woman she had been, how she had managed to hold her own against Penhallow, or if she had not. She thought that she had: the painted face was strong, even arrogant, with hard challenging eyes, and a full underlie thrusting lip against the upper. Faith felt that she would have disliked Rachel, perhaps have been afraid of her; and sometimes, in one of her morbidly fanciful moods, she would take the notion into her head that the painted eyes mocked her. She would have liked to have thought that Rachel’s spirit brooded darkly over the house, for she was superstitious by inclination, but it was impossible to suppose that any other spirit than Penhallow’s reigned at Trevellin. So curious was she about her predecessor that during the early years of her marriage, she was forever trying to make those who had known Rachel intimately talk of her, even cultivating a friendship with Delia Ottery, who was Rachel’s younger sister, and who lived with her brother Phineas in a square grey house on the outskirts of Bodmin. But the inconsequent stories Delia told of Rachel did not help her to form a composite picture, because it was plain that Delia, admiring her sister, had yet had no real understanding of her. She knew what Rachel did, but not what Rachel was. She had an unspeculative mind, and was, besides, stupid and very shy. She had developed into the old maid of fiction: there could be nothing in common between her and Faith; and the friendship languished. It had lasted for long enough to provide the young Penhallows with food for ribaldry, Delia having always been regarded by them as the Family Eccentric.
It would have been better for Faith could she but have found a friend, but this she was unable to do, being convinced that she could have nothing in common with her neighbours. They were country-bred, and she was never able to interest herself in country pursuits, always preferring to dwell upon the amenities of the life she had abandoned when she married Penhallow rather than to adapt herself to circumstances. Her relations with the matrons of the district never extended beyond acquaintanceship. She blamed the inelasticity of their minds; it was not given to her to understand that a craving for sympathy was no foundation for friendship.
This craving had grown with the years; because of it she had taken Loveday Trewithian out of the kitchen, and had promoted her to be her personal maid, and, later, her confidante. Loveday was gentle, and patient. She would listen to Faith’s complainings, and agree that she was hardly used; and she invested her services with a tender cajolery immensely gratifying to a woman who all her life long had passionately desired to be cosseted, and considered.
“Oh, Loveday!” Faith said, in her fretful voice, when Loveday came into her bedroom. “Has anything happened?”
Beside the fair, faded woman in bed, with the thin hands and dilating blue eyes, Loveday Trewithian seemed to glow with life and vigour. She lifted the breakfast-tray from her mistress’s knees, and smiled down at her warmly. “It’s nothing,” she said soothingly.
“I thought I heard Mr Penhallow shouting,” Faith said falteringly.
“Yes, sure,” Loveday said. “My uncle Reuben’s saying it’s Mr Aubrey that’s made him angry. You don’t need to upset yourself, ma’am.”
Faith relaxed on to her pillows with a little sigh, her mind relieved of its most pressing anxiety, that Clay, whose career at Cambridge was not fulfilling his early promise, might have done something to enrage his father. She watched Loveday set the tray down near the door, and begin to move about the room, laying out what clothes she thought Faith would wear. Her mind turned to a lesser care; she said: “The bath water was tepid again this morning. I do think Sybilla might pay a little attention to it."
“I’ll speak to her for you, ma’am, never fear! They say it’s the system that’s wrong.”
“Everything’s out-of-date or out-of-order in this house!” I’aith said.
“It isn’t fit for a delicate lady like you, ma’am, to have to live where there’s so little comfort,” murmured Loveday. “It’s wonderful the way you put up with it, surely.”
“Nobody cares whether it’s fit for me or not,” Faith said. “I’m used to that. Trevellin never agreed with me. I never feel well here, and you know how badly I sleep. I had to take my drops last night, and even then I had a wretched night!”
“It’s your nerves, and no wonder!” Loveday said. “You ought to get away for a change, ma’am, if I may say so. This is no place for you.”
“I wish I could go away, and never come back!” Faith said, half to herself.
A knock sounded on the door, and before she could reply to it Vivian had walked in. Loveday set the brushes straight on the dressing-table, picked up the breakfast tray, and went away. Faith saw from the crease between Vivian’s brows that she was in one of her moods, and at once said in a failing voice that she had passed a miserable night and had a splitting headache.
“I’m not surprised at all,” responded Vivian. “Your precious husband saw to it we should all have thoroughly disturbed nights.”
“Oh! I didn’t know,” Faith said nervously. “Was he awake in the night?”
“Was he! You’re lucky: you don’t sleep on his side of the house. When he wasn’t pealing his bell, he was shouting for Martha. Disgusting old hag!” Vivian took a cigarette from a battered packet in the pocket of her tweed jacket, and lit it. “Is it true that she was one of his mistresses?” she asked casually. “Eugene says she was.”
Faith flushed scarlet, and sat up in bed. “That’s just the sort of thing Eugene would say!” she said angrily. “And I should have thought you would have had more decent feeling than to have repeated it to me!”
“Oh, sorry!” Vivian answered. “Only Penhallow’s affairs are always so openly talked about that I didn’t think you’d mind. It’s no use pretending you don’t know anything about them, Faith, because of course you do. And for God’s sake don’t pretend that you mind, because I know darned well you don’t.”
"Well, I do mind!” said Faith. “You needn’t think that because I say nothing I like having that old woman in my house, doing all the sort of things for Adam which any decent man would have had a valet for! But I think it’s disgraceful of Eugene to go about saying she used to be Adam’s mistress! Even if it were true, such things are better not spoken of.”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said reflectively. “Practically the only thing I like about the Penhallows — except Eugene, of course — is their way of having everything aboveboard ;and freely spoken of. I mean, there’s nothing furtive about them.”
“I was brought up to consider that certain things were better left unsaid!” said Faith primly.
“So was I, and damned dull it was. If you wouldn’t pretend so much—”
“You seem to forget that I’m Eugene’s stepmother,” said Faith, snatching at the rags of her dignity.
“Oh, don’t be silly! You’re not quite eleven years older than I am, and I know perfectly well that you loathe this place as much as I do. But I do think you might do something to make it more possible! After all, you’re Penhallow’s wife! But just look at the servants, for a start! Sybilla’s just been extremely insolent to Eugene, and as for Reuben, and that loathsome creature, Jimmy-"
“It’s no use complaining to me,” interrupted Faith. “I can’t do anything about it. And Sybilla’s a good cook. I should like to know who else would stay in a place like this, or cook for a positive army of people on a stove that was out-of-date twenty years ago! I’m only thankful she and Reuben do stay.”
“And then there’s that maid of yours,” Vivian continued, disregarding her. “You’ll have to get rid of her, Faith.”
“Get rid of Loveday! I’ll do no such thing! She’s the one person in the house who considers me!”
“Yes, I know, but Aunt Clara always says she’s a double-faced girl.”
“I don’t want to listen to what Clara says! She’s a spiteful old woman, and just because I’m fond of Love day—”
“No, it isn’t that. They all say the same. Bart’s at his old tricks again. It’s absolutely fatal to employ good-looking servants in this house. I should have thought you must have known that.”
“Loveday Trewithian is a thoroughly nice girl, and I won’t hear a word against her!”
“Eugene says she means to marry Bart.”
Faith’s blue eyes started a little. She stammered: “I don’t believe it! Bart wouldn’t—”
“I know he’s never wanted to marry any of his other bits of stuff,” said Vivian, “but honestly, Faith, he does seem to have gone in off the deep end this time. Conrad’s livid with jealousy. You must have noticed it! Eugene says—
“I don’t want to hear what Eugene says! He always was a mischief-maker, and I don’t believe one word of this!”
Any criticism of Eugene at once alienated Vivian. She put out her cigarette in the grate, and got up, saying coldly: “You can believe what you like, but if you’ve a grain of sense you’ll get rid of the girl. I don’t know if Bart means to marry her or not, and I care less, but if it’s true, and Penhallow gets to hear of it, you’ll wish you’d paid attention to me, that’s all.”
“I don’t believe a word of it!” Faith repeated, on the verge of tears.
Vivian opened the door, remarking over her shoulder: “You never believe anything you don’t want to believe. I’ve no patience with people like you.”
After she had gone, Faith lay for quite half an hour thinking how brutal Vivian had been, and how rude, and how no one cared for her nerves, or hesitated to upset her when she had had a bad night. It was characteristic of her that she did not let her mind dwell on the unwelcome tidings which Vivian had imparted. If they were true, there would be the sort of trouble she dreaded; but she did not want to dismiss Loveday, and so she refused even to contemplate the possibility of their being true.
It was past ten o’clock when Faith at last got up and began to dress. Fortunately for herself, and indeed for the rest of the household, it was Sybilla Lanner who undertook the housekeeping at Trevellin. She had done so from the time of Rachel’s death. An attempt by Faith, in the early days of her marriage, to take the reins into her own hands had failed, not because Sybilla opposed it, or showed the slightest jealousy of the new Mrs Penhallow, but because Faith had no idea how to cater for a large family, and was, besides, the kind of woman who could never remember people’s individual tastes. Easy-going, slovenly, wasteful Sybilla, never planning ahead, always sending one of the maids running to the village to buy another couple of loaves of bread or a tin of baking powder, yet never forgot that Mr Raymond would not touch treacle, or that Mr Conrad liked his eggs fried on both sides, or that the Master would not eat a pasty unless scalded cream was served with it, in the old-fashioned way. On the only two occasions that Faith’s aunt, who had brought her up, visited her at Trevellin, she had exclaimed against Sybilla’s extravagance, and had tried to introduce her to more methodical ways. She had failed. Sybilla, soft-spoken like all her race, agreed with every word she said, and continued to rule the kitchen as she had ruled it for years.
By the time Faith came out of her bedroom it was eleven o’clock, and the family had dispersed. The maids were still making beds, emptying slops, and raising a dust with long-handled brooms; for since no one bothered to oversee their work they went about it in a cheerful, leisurely fashion, with a good deal of chatter, and singing, and no attention paid to the clock. Faith remarked, encountering a stout girl who had just come out of Raymond’s room with a dustpan-and-brush in her hand, that the rooms ought to have been finished an hour ago. The girl agreed with her, smiling good-humouredly, and adding that they did seem to be a bit behindhand today. They were always behindhand. Faith passed on, down the wide, oaken stair, feeling irritated, knowing that she ought to look after the maids better, but telling herself that she had neither the health nor the energy to train raw country girls.
The stairs led down to the central hall, a low-pitched, irregularly-shaped space with several passages leading from it, and a number of doors. Rachel’s portrait hung over the great stone fireplace, facing the staircase; a gateleg table, with a bowl of flowers on it, stood in the middle of the hall; there were several Jacobean chairs, with tall carved backs, and worn seats; a faded Persian rug; a large jar containing peacocks’ feathers, which stood in one corner; an ancient oak coffer; a coal-scuttle of tarnished copper; two saddle-back armchairs; a Chippendale what-not, its several tiers piled with old newspapers, magazines, garden-scissors, balls of string, and other such oddments; and a kneehole-desk, of hideous design, under one of the windows which flanked the open front door. Besides Rachel’s portrait, the walls bore several landscapes, in heavy gilt frames; a collection of mounted masks and pads; four stags’ heads; two warming-pans; a glass case enclosing a stuffed otter; and a fumed oak wall-fixture, from whose hooks depended a number of hunting-crops and dog-whips.
The season was late spring, and the air which stole in through the open Gothic door was sharp, and made Faith shiver. She crossed the hall to the morning-room, a pleasantly shabby apartment which looked out on to a tangle of shrubbery and flower-beds. There was no one in the room, or in the Yellow drawing-room which led out of it. She guessed that her sister-in-law was either gardening amongst the ferns which were her obsession, or driving herself along the hollow lanes in her high dogcart, behind the rawboned horse which Faith always thought so like her. She looked about for the morning’s paper, and, not finding it, left the room, and went to look in the dining-room for it. She was returning with it in her hand when Reuben came into the hall from the broad passage which led to the western end of the house, and delivered an unwelcome message.
“Master wants to see you, m’m.”
“Oh! Yes, of course. I was just going,” she said. She always hoped that the servants were not aware of her dread of Penhallow, who seemed to her so much more monstrous now that he was confined nearly always to his bed. “Loveday tells me that he isn’t so well this morning,” she added.
“I knew how it would be when he was so set on having Sybilla bake him a starry-gaze pie,” responded Reuben gloomily. " It never did agree with him.”
Faith barely repressed a shudder. Penhallow had suddenly taken it into his head, on the previous day, to demand a dish rarely seen now in Cornwall. He had wanted to know why starry-gaze pies were never served at Trevellin, had recalled those made under his grandmother’s auspices, had reviled the modern generation for turning away from the customs of their fathers, and had ended by sending for Sybilla, and commanding her to make him a starry-gaze pie for his dinner. By God, they should all of them have starry-gaze pie for dinner, and know what good Cornish food could be like! He had got up from his huge bed, and had had himself wheeled into the dining-room to preside over this memorable meal, and had had the pie set down before him, so that he could serve it with his own hands. Since eight persons sat down to dinner, the pie was of generous proportions, a great mound of pastry through which protruded the heads of a number of pilchards. Faith had felt sick, but she had forced herself to eat some of it, lacking the moral courage which made Vivian reject it with loathing.
She thought privately that a bout of indigestion served her husband right; and hoped that it might prevent his again demanding this objectionable dish.
As though he read this thought, Reuben said: “But no one won’t get him to believe it was the pie, tell him till Doomsday, set in his ways, that’s what he is.”
It seemed to her beneath her dignity to discuss her husband with his manservant, so she returned no answer, but laid the newspaper down on the table, and moved towards the corridor which ran along the back of the western end of the house.
A series of small windows, set deep in the stone wall, lit the corridor, which led past a winding staircase to a smaller hall with a door leading out of the back of the house into Clara’s fern-garden. Beyond this, double doors gave on to a room which seemed to have been designed as a ballroom, and which had been for several years Penhallow’s bedroom.
Faith hesitated for a moment, with her hand on the door, and her head slightly bent to catch any sound of voices within the room. She could hear nothing, and after drawing in her breath, rather in the manner of a diver about to plunge into deep waters, she turned the handle, and went in.