“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.