“And where the devil have you been?” demanded Penhallow. “Don’t give me any of your lies, because I know damned well what you’ve been up to!”
“All right, then why ask me?” Bart retorted. “What do you want me for, anyway? Where’s Jimmy?”
“Need you ask?” said Eugene. “He seeks his pleasures in the village. Unlike some others one might mention.”
“Shut up, you swine!” said Conrad, under his breath.
Eugene smiled sweetly at him. “What a touching picture of loyalty you do present, to be sure, Con!”
Bart looked dangerous, and took a step towards Eugene’s chair. He was arrested by Raymond, who caught his eye, and jerked his chin imperatively in the direction of the door. After hesitating for an instant, he shrugged, and turned to lay hold of Penhallow’s chair. He pushed it out of the room, Reuben following him.
“And to think,” said Aubrey, stretching himself out at full length on the sofa, “that this evening has been but a foretaste of what we shall be called upon to undergo tomorrow! Oh, I do think, don’t you, that Father is becoming quite too dreadfully oppressive?”
Chapter Sixteen
Raymond was long in falling asleep that night. Unable to lie still in his bed, but continually tossing and turning, he got up after an hour, and, putting on his trousers and a tweed jacket over his pyjamas, and thrusting his feet into a pair of brogues, went downstairs, and let himself softly out of the house into the moonlit garden. Here he walked up and down with his pipe gripped between his teeth, and his head filled with hard, tangled thoughts, until the chill of the night, and his own physical and mental fatigue, finally drove him in again. The broad stairs creaked under his feet as he went up them, and as he crossed the upper hall the door into his sister’s room opened, and Charmian came out with an electric torch in her hand.
“Who’s that?” she said sharply.
The moonlight, streaming in through the great uncurtained window above the stairs, made the torch superflous. She switched it off as she saw Raymond, with his hand already upon his bedroom door-handle.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Sorry I woke you.”
She had cast a severe, masculine dressing-gown over her shoulders, and now slid her arms into it, and tied its cord round her waist. “Anything wrong?” she asked, observing his attire.
“No, nothing. I couldn’t sleep, that’s all.”
“I thought you looked a bit off-colour at dinner. Have you been out?”
“Yes. Couldn’t get to sleep.”
She glanced shrewdly at him. “Getting on your nerves?”
“Is what getting on my nerves?”
“Oh — !”This place.”
“No,” he replied.
“No, of course you’ve always been ridiculous about Trevellin. Father, then.”
“I haven’t got any nerves.”
“Don’t be too sure of that! How long has Father been like this?”
He looked at her under his brows. “Like what?”.
“Oh, don’t be a fool!” she said impatiently. “You know what I mean! He wasn’t as bad as this when I was last here. Is he breaking up?”
He shrugged. “Lifton thinks so.”
“I never had the least opinion of that old idiot. What do you think?”
“I’m not a doctor: I don’t know. I should say he’d last a good few years yet.”
“Well, I think he’s going mad!” Charmian said roundly.
“He’s not mad.”
“He may not be technically mad, but he seems to me to be perfectly irresponsible. Do you know that he told Aubrey today that he was to come home and study forestry, or some such nonsense? Aubrey! And why has he suddenly removed Clay from college?”
“Thought he was wasting his time there. So he was. Clay’s a waster.”
“He won’t cure him of that by encouraging him to chop and change about. What was the sense of sending him to Cambridge at all if he meant to take him away before he got a degree?”
“There was never any sense in sending him there, except that it got rid of him. You’d better get back to bed you’ll catch cold if you stand about much longer.”
He opened his own door as he spoke, but she detained him for a moment, saying: “Well, I’m not worrying my head about Clay, but I wish you’d tell me if Father’s in the habit of drawing out vast sums of money by way of petty cash.”
“Why? What’s it got to do with you?” he asked.
She disregarded this question. “Why the hell don’t you put a stop to it?” she asked.
“I have no power to stop Father doing anything he wants to do,” he replied roughly. “Good night!”
He went into his room and shut the door. When he got into bed again he still could not sleep, and lay for a long time flogging his brain over and over the events of what had surely been the longest day of his life.
It seemed to him that he had been to sleep for only a few minutes when he was awakened by a hand shaking his shoulder, and Reuben’s voice insistently speaking his name in his ear; but when he opened his eyes he found that the sunlight was flooding the room, and that the hands of the clock beside his bed pointed to eight o’clock. He raised himself on his elbow, yawning, and passing a hand across his sleep-drenched eyes. He realised that Reuben’s voice sounded unusually urgent, and said:
“What’s the matter?” Then he saw that tears were running down Reuben’s lined cheeks, and this extraordinary sight fully awoke him, and he sat up with a jerk. “What the devil’s up with you?” he demanded.
“Master!” Reuben said, his lower lip trembling grotesquely. “He’s gone, Mr Ray!”
“Gone?” Raymond repeated. “What do you mean, gone? Gone where?”
“He’s dead!” Reuben said. “He’s dead, Mr Ray. Cold dead!”
“What?” Raymond ejaculated incredulously. He flung back the bed-clothes, and got up quickly, snatching up Iris dressing-gown. “When? How?”
“I don’t know when. He must have gone in the night. You should know how, Mr Ray!”
Raymond tied his dressing-gown cord, and groped for his slippers. “What the devil do you mean?” he asked.
Reuben drew his sleeve across his eyes. “It was you setting on him the way you did, trying to choke the life out of him, and him as good as bedridden! I told you then we’d know whose door to set it to if he was to go off sudden! Yes, sure, I told you!”
“Don’t be such a blithering old fool!” Raymond said roughly. “He was perfectly well last night! I had nothing whatsoever to do with his dying! More likely what he ate and drank at dinner. Who knows about this? Who found him?”
Reuben followed him to the door. “Martha found him, poor soul! Stiff, he is. He must have gone in his sleep. And today his birthday! I told him how it would be if he ate that lobster! I told him!”
“Shut up! There’s no need to rouse the whole house yet!” Raymond said, turning into the corridor at the back of the house, and going swiftly along it to the narrow stairs down which Faith had passed the day before.
As he approached the small hall at the head of these stairs, the sound of wailing reached his ears. Martha was lamenting over Penhallow’s body, and it was plain that this noise had already awakened those who slept at the end of the house. Eugene’s door stood open; and even as Raymond set his foot on the top step of the stair, Aubrey came out of his room, in a very exotic-looking pair of black pyjamas piped with silver, and asked plaintively what new horror had come upon the house.
“Reuben says Father’s dead,” Raymond replied over his shoulder.
He did not wait to see how this news was received, but as he ran down the stairs he heard Aubrey exclaim: “Oh, no, not really? I simply can’t believe it! You’re not serious, Ray?”
In Penhallow’s room, Martha was rocking herself to and fro on a chair beside the vast bed, and Vivian, with a kimono caught hurriedly round her, and clutched together with one hand, was standing in the middle of the room staring as though she could not believe her eyes, first at Martha, and then at Penhallow’s still form. When she heard Raymond’s footsteps, she turned, and said in a queer, hushed voice: “He’s dead!”