"I hope you are not suggesting, Emmy, that Geoffrey is likely to follow his example?" inquired Mrs. Twining, idly surveying her rings.
"If you don't mind my saying so, I shouldn't think he'd have the guts," said Camilla negligently.
Mrs. Chudleigh's thin bosom swelled. "If by that expression — which, I must confess, I imagined till now to be confined to schoolboys' use — you mean that he would not have the courage, I am afraid you betray your ignorance of human nature, Mrs. Halliday. Not that I wish to imply for an instant that Geoffrey would even contemplate doing such a dreadful thing."
"Surely we are taking this a little too seriously?" suggested Mrs. Twining. "I for one am not led to suppose that Miss de Silva's affections are of a very permanent mature. I wish you would tell me, Fay, what you do to your roses to make them so much more perfect than i nine."
"It isn't me," Fay answered, sitting down beside her. "Arthur looks after the garden, you know. He is very keen on it."
"Ah, yes, of course," said Mrs. Twining, watching Camilla stroll out on to the terrace. "My dear, will you allow a very old friend of your husband to suggest that if you can induce him to take this affair calmly it might be a very excellent thing?"
"I know," Fay said unhappily. "I — I will try, only — it isn't always easy — when Arthur's annoyed — to — to manage him, you know." She flushed a little, and turned with relief as Dinah came in through the French window. "Oh, darling, there you are! Did you manage to make her understand at all?"
"It isn't possible," said Dinah despairingly. "We shall have to make up our minds to it. She's going to be the life and soul of the party."
"Oh, dear, how awful! What on earth shall I do?" demanded Fay helplessly.
"You can't do anything. I warned her there'd be bridge, but she says it will be better if we dance to the radio." She paused, and delivered her final bombshell. "And she thinks Francis looks as though he could tango, and she is going to do an exhibition tango with him for us all to watch. And I should think," concluded Miss Fawcett thoughtfully, "that it'll be pretty lush, what's more."
Chapter Four
Miss Fawcett, awaking betimes on Monday morning, flirted for a while with the idea of staying in bed to breakfast. Her better self won, however, and she got up in time to breakfast at half past right, thus deliberately courting a tete-d-tete with the General, ever an early riser.
This act of heroism was induced by the events of the week-end. Someone, Miss Fawcett thought gloomily, must try to smooth the General down before he actually flung his son out of the house.
Her prognostications on Saturday had not been false. Miss de Silva had indeed been the life and soul of the party, even going so far as to offer to perform a dance for the edification of the assembled company. Only the General's rigid notions of Christian conduct had prevented him disowning his son the first thing on Sunday morning.
But in spite of the fact that Sir Arthur's principles forbade him to quarrel on the Sabbath, Sunday had not been a happy day. Yet every effort was made to please the General. With the exception of Lola, who, it appeared, never rose before eleven, the whole party went dutifully to church, and Francis, who had blandly announced that Geoffrey's lamentable lack of tact was interfering with his own schemes, made elaborate arrangements for the rest of the day. He banished Geoffrey and Lola on an expedition to Clayton-on-Sea, provided his uncle with every opportunity of flirting with Camilla Halliday, and ended the day by inviting his uncle (by this time almost mellow) to recount some of his Indian experiences. By the time Lola and Geoffrey returned from Clayton-on-Sea the air was thick with shikaris, chuckkas, Pathans, Sikhs, sahibs, bazaars, mahouts, and jinrickshas, and the General midway through an anecdote about a fellah who was a Gunner, a minor Rajah, and a Kabul pony.
But from the moment of Miss de Silva's appearance the General's amiability waned. It was plain that Geoffrey had made an attempt to impress upon Lola the necessity of placating his father, for she broke into the anecdote just as the sail was shampooing the Kabul pony's legs before the first chukka, and announced her firm intention of talking to Geoffrey's papa. The General was a ruthless conversationalist, but he was no match for Miss de Silva, whose twenty-three years in the world had provided her with a larger stock of egotistic reminiscences than he had acquired in all his sixty summers. Russian grand dukes, Polish counts, Spanish anarchists, and Mexican bandits took the place of the Pathans, and the Sikhs, and the Gurkhas, and the scene shifted with bewildering rapidity from Rio de Janeiro to New York, Paris, London, and Monte Carlo, the saga being strung together by the principal motif of Miss de Silva's amazing successes in these different cities.
By supper-time the General was in a state of bottled emotion that seemed to put him in danger of explosion at any moment. The sight of his son watching Miss de Silva with an expression of rapt, uncritical adniration was the last straw. The sanctity of the day prevented an immediate outburst, but, as the house party, in various stages of nervous exhaustion, went limply in to supper, he informed Geoffrey that he had just one or two things to say to him, and would see him in his study at half past nine next morning without fail.
Therefore Miss Fawcett arose betimes.
On her way to the bath she passed Fay's room, and the sound of a military voice upraised in furious monologue induced her, as soon as she had dressed, to visit her sister before she went down to breakfast. She found Fay weeping hysterically over the brushes on her dressing table and put her back to bed and dosed her with aspirin. As far as she could gather from a choked and incoherent explanation, Fay had tried to persuade the General not to take his son's engagement too seriously. Whereupon it seemed (but the story was lost in a maze of sobs, I-saids and he-saids) that Sir Arthur had not only called his wife a soft-headed, meddlesome fool, but had laid the blame of every mishap occurring within the last five years at her door, and declared his intention of cutting Geoffrey off with a shilling immediately after breakfast.
Miss Fawcett recommended her sister to pull herself together, promised to order a tray to be sent up to her mom, and went off downstairs to have it out with the General.
She found him eating a solitary breakfast, and wasted no time in skirmishing preliminaries. "Look here, Arthur," she said forcibly, "you've been upsetting Fay. That's a cad's trick, and you know it."
The General bent upon her the famous glare that had caused so many adjutants to shiver in their shoes, and said menacingly: "Will-you-have-the-goodness-to-mind-your-own-business?"
"No," said Dinah, "I will not. You've been throwing your weight about ever since I entered this house, and now it's my turn. If you want to bully anybody, try bullying me! It wasn't Fay's fault that Geoffrey got himself engaged to Lola, and it isn't fair to take it out of her just because you're feeling sore. I quite see that it's very annoying for you to have to put up with Lola, but good Lord, Arthur, you don't suppose it'll last, do you?"
"That's enough!" thundered the General. "By God, haven't I enough whining and puling to put up with from your damned fool of a sister without having your impertinence added to it?"
"No, you haven't," replied Miss Fawcett. She sat down at the table and resolutely forced herself to speak without rancour. "Do try and be sensible, Arthur. You'll look utterly silly if you throw Geoffrey out; you will really. And you know what he is. He's quite likely to go and do something idiotic if he gets into one of his worked-up moods."
Sir Arthur banged his fist on the table with such violence that all the crockery shuddered. "He can go to the devil his own way!" he barked. "A fine son he is! What did he do at Eton? Slacked! No good at games, no good at his work! Delicate! Faugh! What did he do at Oxford? Got himself into a mess with a girl in a tobacconist's shop, that's what he did at Oxford, and a damned fool I was to buy her off. What's he doing now? Wasting his time with a set of long-haired nincompoops and disgracing my name! That's all he's doing, and it's going to stop. Do you hear me? It's going to stop!"