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.”