Penhallow began to stir his tea, in a way which made Aubrey exchange a pained glance with Charmian. “I shall sit up to dinner,” he announced.
This piece of intelligence was greeted with such a marked lack of enthusiasm that Aubrey felt it incumbent on him to say: “How lovely for us, Father dear!”
“I don’t know which of you gives me the worst bellyache, you or Clay!” said Penhallow, with a look of disgust. “I don’t want you slobbering over me!” His fiery glance again swept the room; his lip curled. “A nice, affectionate lot of children I’ve got!” he said scathingly.
“One hates to criticise Father,” murmured Eugene in his sister’s ear, “but one cannot but feel that to be a most unreasonable remark.”
“Considering you mean to sit up to dinner tomorrow, you’d better be in bed today, I should have thought,” said Clara.
“You keep your thoughts to yourself, old lady!” retorted Penhallow. “I daresay there’s a lot of you would like to see me keep my bed, but you’re going to be disappointed. By God, I’ve let you get so out of hand, the whole pack of you, it’s time I showed you who’s master at Trevellin!” He stabbed a finger at his wife. “And that goes for you too!” he said unnecessarily. “Don’t think you’re going to take to your bed with a headache, or any other such tomfoolery, because you’re not! And as for you,” he added, directing the accusing finger at Charmian, “you can make what kind of a guy of yourself you please in London, but you won’t do it here! You let me see you in those trousers again, and I’ll lay my stick across your bottom!”
“Oh, no, you won’t!” said Charmian, with a look quite as fierce as his. “You’ve no sort of control over me, so don’t you think it! I’m not dependent on you! I shan’t burst into tears because you choose to shout at me! You’ll get as good as you give if you go for me!”
“Oh, don’t! Please don’t!” Faith gasped, shrinking back in her chair involuntarily.
Neither of the combatants paid the slightest heed to her. Battle was fairly joined, and had anyone wished to speak it would have been quite impossible to have done so above the thunder of Penhallow’s voice and the fury of Charmian’s more strident accents. Eugene, lounging on a sofa, lay laughing at them both; Clara went on drinking her tea in perfect unconcern; Clay found that his hand was trembling so much that he was obliged to set his cup-and-saucer down on the table beside him; and Conrad, entering the room when the quarrel was at its height, promptly encouraged his sister by calling out: “Loo in, Char! Loo in, good bitch!”
Reuben Lanner, who had come in behind Conrad, crossed the room to his master’s chair, and shook his arm to attract his attention. “Shet your noise, Master, do!” he shouted in his ear.
Penhallow broke off in the middle of an extremely coarse description of his daughter’s character to say: “What do you want, you old fool?”
“It’s Mr Ottery wants to see you, Master. I’ve put un in the Yellow drawing-room.”
The rage died out of Penhallow’s enflamed countenance quite suddenly. An interested gleam came into his eyes; he turned them towards Raymond in a speculative glance; a slow grin dispersed the remnants of his scowl. “Phineas, eh?” he said. His great frame shook with a soundless laugh. “Well, that’s very interesting, damme if it isn’t! Show him in! What do you want to put him in the Yellow room for?”
“Because he wants to see you private, Master, that’s what for.”
“Why on earth?” demanded Conrad, staring at him.
Raymond, who had heard the message delivered with an imperceptible stiffening of his face, laid down his cup and-saucer, and said: “I’ll see him.”
“You’re a damned fool, Ray,” said his father, but with more amusement than annoyance in his tone. “So old Phineas wants to see me! Well, well, and why shouldn’t he? Push me into the Yellow room, Reuben.”
Raymond said no more. As Reuben pushed the wheeled chair forward, Penhallow put out a hand and grasped Charmian by the arm. “There, my girl! Give me a kiss! Damned if you don’t make me think of your mother when you fly into your tantrums, though God knows the messy way you live is enough to make her turn in her grave! But you’re a high-couraged filly, and that’s something!” He pulled her down as he spoke, gave her a noisy kiss, and a resounding spank, and let her go.
As soon as he had been pushed out of the room, speculation on the cause of Phineas’s visit broke out, his brothers looking inquiringly at Raymond, who said, however, that he had no more idea than they.
“Why, particularly, are you a "damned fool", Ray?” asked Eugene, a little curiosity in his eyes.
Raymond shrugged. “I don’t know. Did you order those buckets, Bart?”
“No, of course I didn’t. You said you’d attend to it yourself,” Bart replied, surprised.
“Oh!” Raymond coloured slightly. “All right: slipped my memory.”
“Good God, how are the mighty fallen!” exclaimed Conrad, folding a slice of bread-and-butter, and putting it into his mouth. “Chalk it up, somebody! The Great, the Methodical Ray has at last forgotten something he ought to have remembered! Keep it up, Ray: you’ll become quite human in time!”
Raymond smiled in a rather perfunctory way, and soon after left the room. Aubrey sighed audibly. “There is something more than oppressive about this house,” he said. “I expect you’re all quite used to it, but coming as I do from the beautiful peace of my own chambers it strikes me quite too dreadfully forcibly.” He described a vague gesture with his delicate hands. “I shan’t say that an evil influence appears to me to brood over the place, because I do think esoteric remarks of that nature are terribly embarrassing, don’t you? But you all seem to me to be a trifle more than life-size, and definitely febrile!”
“You’re perfectly right!” Charmian said. “But can you wonder at it?”
“No, my sweet. At least, I don’t mean to waste my time in trying. I’m just profoundly repelled. Something so deplorably indecorous about an uninhibited display of the more violent emotions, don’t you agree? Ah, no! How unremembering of me! You have just demonstrated to us, haven’t you, darling, that you don’t agree at all?”
As Eugene, who was as jealous of Aubrey’s clever tongue as he was of his success in the field of literature, began to engage him in a wordy duel, Faith got up, and quietly left the room.
Chapter Fifteen
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.