Penhallow (8 page)

Clifford went on fidgeting with the lid of the ink-pot. His face now wore an extremely thoughtful expression. Faith’s artless exposition of her son’s character inspired him with a strong desire to be exempt from the necessity of admitting Clay into his firm, but there were reasons which made it extremely difficult, not to say impossible, for him to refuse to oblige his uncle in the matter. It was almost equally impossible for him to explain to Faith that fond as he was of his widowed mother, he would find it very awkward indeed if she were to be ejected from Trevellin, and thus (for her private means were of the slenderest) thrown upon his hands. It was not that he was an undutiful or an unaffectionate son, but he was married to a lady who would certainly not welcome to her home anyone so eccentric as her mother-in-law. Nor, he knew, would she feel at all inclined to retrench her household expenditure so as to enable him to make Clara a suitable allowance. Indeed, he scarcely knew how he would be able to manage such a thing, considering the difficulty of the times, and the increasing demands made on his purse by his three daughters, damsels aged twelve, ten, and seven years respectively, whose careers, he was assured, would inevitably be blighted by any failure on his part to provide them with riding, dancing, and music lessons. His father having died when he had been a boy at school, and his mother having then returned to the house which was her birthplace, it had never fallen to Clifford’s lot to support her. He had spent his holidays at Trevellin, and was indebted to his uncle for his present position in a respectable firm of country solicitors. This circumstance alone made him very unwilling to disoblige his uncle; when, to ordinary feelings of gratitude, a lively dread of having to add another member to his household was added, there could be no question of his doing such a thing. He wished very much that he had not admitted Faith into his office, for although she would probably understand his reluctance to take the support of his mother upon his shoulders, he really did not see how he could put such a delicate matter into plain words without appearing to her in the guise of a most unnatural, not to say callous, son.

He cleared his throat, and began to draw patterns on the blotter with one of the pencils scattered over the table. ‘Well, but after all, Faith!’ he said. ‘Clay must do something, mustn’t he? You’ll have him living at home, too, if he comes to me. You’d like that, wouldn’t you?’

Her eyes filled with tears. ‘If everything were different! Not as things are. He hates it at home. He doesn’t get on with Adam, and his stepbrothers are horrid to him. They don’t understand how anyone can be more sensitive than themselves. I’ve suffered from their absolute unfeelingness all my life, and I’m determined Clay shan’t be sacrificed as I was!’

The conversation seemed to Clifford to be soaring towards an elevated plane which he, a plain man, could not aspire to. He said in a soothing way: ‘Well, if he finds he doesn’t like law, after he’s given it a fair trial, we shall have to think of something else.’

‘If you think that Adam would ever let him leave the firm, once he’d got him into it, you don’t know him!’ exclaimed Faith.

‘Well, well, a great many things may happen to alter circumstances, after all! Really, Faith, I don’t think you need ‘

‘You mean Adam might die,’ she said. ‘He won’t. I know he won’t. He’ll go on for years and years, making us all miserable! Look at his grandfather! He lived to be over eighty, and had all sorts of things the matter with him.’

‘Really, Faith!’ expostulated Clifford, quite shocked.

She burst into tears. ‘Oh, I know I ought not to say so, even to you, but if you only knew what I have to put up with, Cliff, you wouldn’t be surprised at my having reached the end of my tether! I could bear it while Clay was safe from Adam’s tyranny, but if he’s to be forced into doing something he doesn’t want to do, and kept down here at the back of beyond, when he’d rather be in London, I simply can’t go on!’

He began to feel very uncomfortable, and wondered how much of this interview was audible to the clerk and the boy in the outer office. Faith’s sobs had, he thought, it peculiarly penetrative quality. He made sympathetic noises in his throat, and was glad to see her making an effort to calm herself.

‘‘Taking him away from college, too, for no reason!’ choked Faith, applying her handkerchief to her reddened eyes. ‘It’s so unfair!’

‘Yes, well, I do feel that that is perhaps a mistake,’ agreed Clifford, perceiving in this circumstance a means of pacifying, if only temporarily, his unwelcome visitor. ‘ I’ll tell you what, Faith: I’ll have a talk with Uncle Adam, and see if I can get him to let Clay finish his three years at Cambridge. You never know: something might happen between now and then to make Uncle alter his mind.’

‘He won’t,’ Faith replied wretchedly, but in quieter accents. ‘I don’t suppose he’ll even listen to you.’

Clifford felt quite sure that he wouldn’t, but naturally did not say this. Instead, he looked at his watch, discovered, with artless surprise, that it was already one o’clock, and suggested, with a return of his usual hearty manner, that Faith should postpone her return to Trevellin until the afternoon, and should take luncheon with himself, and his wife, Rosamund. ‘Rosamund,’ he said mendaciously, ‘would never forgive me if I let you go home without seeing her. Besides, you haven’t seen the kiddies for I don’t know how long! We can talk it over after lunch. It’s a pity Uncle won’t have the telephone installed at Trevellin, but I daresay they won’t worry if you don’t turn up to lunch, will they?’

‘No one at Trevellin would miss me if I never turned up again,’ said Faith tragically, opening her compact, and beginning to powder her nose. ‘But I don’t see why I should inflict myself on Rosamund, only that it’s like being let out of prison, to get away from Trevellin for a bit.

‘Now, now, now!’ said Clifford, rising and patting her clumsily on the shoulder. ‘It isn’t as bad as that, Faith. I’ll tell you what: I’ve got one or two things to see to before I leave the office. You trot off to the house, and have a chat with Rosamund. I’ll join you in a few minutes. Perhaps I shall have thought of something,’ he added hopefully.

She was not very fond of Rosamund, whom she considered to be a cold, unsympathetic young woman, but being in that state of mind when it was imperative to her to unburden herself to as many people as possible, she accepted his invitation, and went out again to reenter the ponderous landaulette. The under-gardener received her order to drive to the Laurels with evident gratification; and in a few moments the landaulette was once again in motion.

The Laurels, a square Georgian house, was situated on the outskirts of the town, so that by the time Faith had walked up its well-kept front path Clifford had been able to warn his wife by telephone of the trial in store for her. Rosamund, who thought Faith the least objectionable member of the Penhallow family, received the tidings with her usual calm, issued a few necessary orders to her domestic staff, and was ready to receive her guest when Faith set her finger to the electric bell-push.

A neat house-parlourmaid (so unlike the servants at Trevellin!) admitted Faith into a square, white-painted hall, and conducted her across it to the drawing-room at the back of the house. This was a comfortable apartment overlooking the garden, and was furnished in a somewhat characterless but agreeable style, which included well-sprung chairs; a plain pile carpet of neutral hue; a low tea-table of burr-walnut; oxidised fire-irons dangling from a stand in one corner of a hearth lined with glazed tiles; a swollen floor cushion, shaped like a cottage-loaf, and covered with the same flowered cretonne which provided loose-covers for the chairs, and the sofa, and for the curtains hanging in the bay window. The pictures on the walls, which were all framed alike, were inoffensive, and gave a general air of quiet decoration to the room without attracting any particular attention to themselves. One or two illustrated papers were piled neatly on a long, cane-seated stool placed in front of the fireplace; and several books bearing the label of a local lending library stood upon a semi-circular table by the wall, maintained in an upright position by a pair of book-rests fashioned in the shape of china dogs. Everything in the room was new, and well-kept. The pictures were arranged symmetrically; no single piece of furniture had been placed in such a position that it was not balanced by another, similar, piece; nothing had been chosen to go into the room which did not match its surroundings. There was no dust anywhere to be seen; there were no thin patches on the carpet; no priceless rugs flung down with an entire disregard for jarring colours; no jumble of ornaments on the mantelpiece; no sagging springs to any of the chairs; no discordant note introduced by the juxtaposition of a Victorian chiffonier with a Chippendale ladder-back chair. Rosamund had no Victorian furniture in her house. Similarly, she had no Chippendale chairs either, although her dining-room was furnished with a set of very good replicas.

Faith, to whom the queer, distorted beauty of Trevellin made no appeal, liked the room, and envied Rosamund her possession of a clean, compact house, full of labour-saving devices and seemly, unambitious suites of furniture. She considered, looking round the room, with its nicely graduated tones of blending browns and yellows, that Rosamund had an eye for colour, and thought that if she had stood in Rosamund’s shoes she could have achieved very much the same pleasing result.

Her hostess came into the room while she was still taking stock of her surroundings. Rosamund Hastings was a handsome woman with a somewhat chilly pair of blue eyes, and a quantity of fashionably waved fair hair. She was dressed suitably in a well-cut suit of grey flannel, with a canary shirt, and low-heeled shoes over very good quality silk stockings. She was five years younger than Faith, but was possessed of more assurance than Faith would ever own. She was a good, if a rather frigid wife; an excellent mother; a competent housekeeper; and an attentive hostess, who never forgot to order sherry from the wine-merchant, nor to offer her guests Indian as well as China tea.

She came forward now, with her well-manicured hand held out, and a polite word of greeting on her lips. The two ladies kissed, without conviction; Faith was placed in a chair with its back to the light; Rosamund sat down on the sofa at right-angles to her; and while she inquired civilly after all the members of the household at Trevellin, the neat house-parlourmaid quietly entered the room with a silver tray supporting a cut-glass decanter, and three sherry glasses, and set it down on the low table in front of her mistress. Faith noticed wistfully that the tray was brightly polished, and that the decanter and the glasses all matched each other.

‘ It seems an age since I saw you last,’ remarked Rosamund. ‘Now, do tell me all about yourself. You’ll have a glass of sherry, won’t you?’

Faith accepted the sherry, remembered to ask after the three daughters of the house, and prepared to unbosom herself.

Rosamund listened to her with an air of calm interest, offering neither criticism nor advice. In reality she was not at all interested. She disliked her husband’s maternal relatives, and profoundly disapproved of them. There was a raffishness about them that offended her sense of propriety. She was sorry that her husband’s occupation necessitated his residing within eight miles of Trevellin; and although she never made any attempt to stop his consorting with his cousins, she herself did not visit Trevellin more frequently than she was obliged to. She was aware of the circumstances which made it desirable for Clifford to accept Clay as an articled pupil, and .although she felt that it was disgraceful that his hand should have been forced in such an unscrupulous manner, she considered the entry of a young man, however unwanted, into the firm as preferable to the entry of Clara into her well-ordered house. She never permitted herself to utter any criticism of her mother-in-law, but she privately thought her an extremely trying cold lady, eccentric in her behaviour, not over-clean in her habits, and very injudicious in her spoiling of her nicely behaved granddaughters.

It was not, then, to be expected that Rosamund would support Faith in her endeavour to keep— Clay out of Clifford’s office. However, she lent an indulgent ear to Faith’s rather agitated history of the morning’s interview with Penhallow, and agreed with perfect sincerity that he had behaved in a thoroughly ill-bred and overbearing manner. She even bore with unmoved composure Faith’s disparaging comments on Clifford’s profession. and did not allow herself to do more than raise her plucked eyebrows slightly at Faith’s assertion that Clay’s intellect was of too high an order for the law.

Clifford came in a little after half-past one o’clock, but any hopes Faith might have cherished of reopening the discussion with him were blighted by the houseparlourmaid’s announcement that luncheon was served. Rosamund said: ‘You know the way, Faith,’ and Faith preceded her across the hall to the dining-room in the front of the house. Here the three little girls, Isabel, Daphne, and Monica, awaited them, and any private conversation had naturally to be abandoned. The children, who attended a day-school in the town, were dressed alike, and closely resembled their mother. They were very well brought up, answered politely when spoken to, and prattled, until hushed by a sign from Rosamund, about their activities at school. Clifford was very proud of them, and encouraged them to show off by asking them leading questions. It was obvious that while they were present he had no attention to spare for Faith’s troubles, and as he looked at his wrist-watch when they all rose from the table, and exclaimed that he had an appointment, and must hurry off immediately, it became equally obvious that he did not intend, at least for the present, to go any further into the question of Clay’s future. Saying that he knew Faith would excuse him, he bustled away. The two ladies returned to the drawing-room for coffee; Rosamund told Faith what the head-mistress at St Margaret’s School had said to her about Isabel’s music; and how Monica seemed to have a real talent for dancing; and how the head-mistress believed that Daphne was going to be an influence for good in the school. Faith complimented Rosamund upon her excellent management of her children, and her household, and wondered how she contrived to get such well-trained servants in these days. In this innocuous fashion, an hour passed, at the end of which time Faith said that she must really be going. Rosamund, who was going out to a bridge-party, made no effort to detain her; the under-gardener was hailed from the kitchen, where he had been regaling the cook and the houseparlourmaid and the nursery-maid with tales of the goings-on up at Trevellin; and Faith, after bidding farewell to her hostess, once more entered the landaulette, and was driven back to Trevellin.