Penhallow (23 page)

The gesture seemed to release Raymond from the spell of horror which had held him rooted to the ground, gripping the Gothic chair, and listening with only half-comprehending ears to the story so casually recounted. The blood rushed suddenly to his head; an uncontrollable shudder ran through him; he flung the heavy chair out of his way; and with a sound between a groan and a curse launched himself upon Penhallow, seizing him by the throat, trying with all his strength to choke the breath out of him.

‘Devil! Devil!’ he panted, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a snarling grimace. ‘I’ll kill you for this, do you hear me? I’ll kill you, you fiend, you devil!’

Penhallow grabbed at his wrists, trying to wrench them from his throat. They struggled together, Penhallow heaving his bulk half across the bed, and dragging Raymond with it, still pressing on his windpipe with his desperate thumbs, and cursing him in a dreadful whisper.

He was sprawling on top of Penhallow, one knee up on the bed, when the door opened, and Jimmy ran into the room, shouting at him. Jimmy leaped on him from behind, yelling to Reuben to come to his assistance, and managed to jerk back his head. In that instant Penhallow tore the hands from his throat, choking and gasping amongst his tumbled pillows. The table by the bed had been overturned, the papers and fruit on it spilled all over the floor, the glasses smashed, and the decanter was rolling over the carpet, leaving a trail of claret in its wake.

Reuben came hurrying in as Raymond threw Jimmy violently off, and, taking in the scene in one glance from his quick shrewd eyes, attached himself to Raymond’s right arm like a limpet. ‘Give over, Master Ray, give over now! You should knave better than to do like this, and you in your forty! Set down a crum! Lorjimmery, what’s got into un all on a sudden?’

‘He were trying to choke the life out of Master!’ Jimmy said,, picking himself up from the floor. ‘If it hadn’t ha’ been for me he’d ha’ done it, surely!’

‘You keep a still tongue in your head, and get the whisky out of the cupboard, quick!’ Reuben commanded, his concerned gaze on Penhallow. He gave Raymond a push towards a chair, and thrust him down into it, repeating: ‘Set down a crum! Please the pigs you haven’t done for him!’

Raymond sank down and dropped his head between his clenched fists. ‘I hope I have!’ he said savagely.

Reuben, finding that his mad rage was waning, paid no more heed to him, but snatched the whisky from Jimmy, and bade him help him to straighten Penhallow. The laboured breath rattled alarmingly and Penhallow’s colour was very bad, but when they had laid him back on his pillows, and revived him with neat spirit, he began to recover, and even to be able to speak. ‘Murderous dog!’ he gasped, his lips twisting into a rueful grin. ‘Hot-blooded ruffians, my sons, Reuben!’

‘You lay quiet, Master! As for you, Jimmy, get along out of this! You’re not wanted here!’

‘Happen I might be needed yet,’ Jimmy said, looking at Raymond.

Penhallow waved him away with one hand, feeling his bruised throat with the other. His gaze travelled to Raymond, who had risen, and walked over to the fireplace, and was staring down at the smouldering logs in the hearth. He smiled rather unpleasantly, and transferred his attention to Reuben, directing him to pick up the table, and the scattered papers. ‘And clear that mess of glass away before my poor little bitch can cut her paws on it!’ he said huskily. ‘Go and get a dustpan, you old fool! There’s nothing the matter with me. Heave me up a bit first!’

The effort of struggling into a more upright position made him pant again, and drag a hand across his brow to wipe away the sweat, but he nodded dismissal to Reuben, who,. after looking undecidedly from him to Raymond for a moment, reluctantly left the room.

Penhallow lay recovering his breath, allowing his overdriven heart to steady down. Its wild flurry made him feel sick; he pressed his hand to his side, and swallowed once or twice, and licked his lips. Raymond raised his head and, turning it, watched him sombrely and in silence.

‘A nice, dutiful son you are!’ Penhallow said presently. ‘Oh, I don’t blame you! Tickled you up a bit, didn’t I? Well, you asked for it, and, by God, you got it! I shouldn’t wonder but what we’ll get along better now.’

‘Was it true?’ Raymond said, in a low voice.

‘Lord, yes! Truest thing you know!’

‘Then God damn your soul to hell!’ Raymond said, with suppressed violence, and, striding to the door, wrenched it open, and plunged out of the room.

Chapter Thirteen

When he left his father’s room, Raymond was in the grip of an overmastering instinct to get out of the house, and away from the curious eyes of its various inmates. He had no clear notion of where he was going, or what to do. He felt as a man might who, half-stunned, had survived an earthquake only to find his home and his life-work in ruins. He would have gone out of the house by one of the garden-doors but for Reuben, who met him, and checked him, by saying dryly: ‘If you’ve done trying to be the death of the Master, happen you’ll ‘tend to Tideford. He’s been waiting this twenty minutes in your office.’

Raymond stopped, with his hand already on the door, grasping the iron ring that lifted its latch. He stared stupidly at Reuben, feeling himself so remote from the ordinary cares of the estate that a visit from one of Penhallow’s tenants had no meaning for him. He repeated, in a blank tone: ‘Tideford?’

Reuben pulled down thee corners of his mouth, and gave one of his disapproving sniffs. ‘What do you want to go a-losing your temper for?’ he asked severely. ‘Fine doings! If Master was to go off sudden, we’ll knave whose door to lay it at.’

Raymond passed his hand across his eyes, as though to clear away the red mist that still obscured his vision. ‘That’s enough from you!’ he said roughly. ‘Tideford, did you say? All right: I’d forgotten.’

He released the iron ring, and went on down the broad passage towards his office at the other end of the house. He remembered now that Tideford had come up to see him by appointment; and realised that whatever cataclysm had overturned his life, the mundane occurrences of the everyday world had not stopped in sympathy with him, and would have to be attended to. He paused for a few minutes outside his office, attempting at once to thrust to the back of his mind the horror numbing his faculties, and to recall the business upon which Tideford wanted to see him. He was surprised, when he presently confronted Tideford across his desk, to find how calm he was, how steady both his voice and his hands. The interview helped to bring his faculties under his control again; when he saw Tideford off the premises half an hour later, he had recollected various duties waiting to be performed, and was able to attend to them in his usual methodical way. He was still conscious of a sensation of numbness, as though one half of his brain were clogged and weighted, unable to comprehend or to grapple with the hideous secret which had been disclosed to him; and he was still bent on escaping from the house, and carrying his trouble out into the open, as far from human sight as he could contrive. When he had finished such office-work as lay upon his desk, he left the house, and strode off to the stables, and briefly ordered a favourite hack to be saddled. While he was waiting, he listened to some complaint Weens had for him, about one of the stable-hands, and dealt with it rather summarily. Bart came into the yard as his horse was led out, and would have detained him on some question of a strained fetlock, but he cut him short, and, swinging himself into the saddle, rode out of the yard in the direction of the stud-farm.

He did not pause there, however, but rode past it, up the hill towards the Moor, keeping to the west of the upper reaches of the Fowey, and heading for Browngelly Downs, and Dozmary Pool, beyond.

The day was very fine, with a light easterly wind making the air bright and clear. Fleecy white clouds were sailing high overhead; it had been sultry in the valley, but upon the Moor the wind was cool. To the north, Brown Willy reared up its rugged head, with the wild rocks piled on the summit of Rough Tor plainly visible to the northwest of it. Leaving the track, Raymond let his horse break into a canter, skirting some old peat-borings, and crossing one of the streams with which the Moor was intersected. Two or three miles farther on, the still expanse of Dozmary Pool came into sight, its flat, windswept banks lying deserted in the sunlight. It had been a favourite haunt of Raymond’s since the days of his boyhood, and he had made for it instinctively, meaning to sit on the thyme-scented ground beside its mysterious waters, and to force his brain calmly to confront and to consider the intelligence which had so stunned it. But when he had hobbled the grey, he found himself unable to sit still, and began to pace up and down, jerking at his whip-lash, and fancying that he could hear some echo of his father’s jeering voice in the vast solitude around him. It was long before he could achieve any coherence of thought. His mind, at first refusing to credit Penhallow’s words, presently began to flit backwards and forwards across the past, recalling incidents and half-forgotten circumstances, meaningless pieces in a puzzle, which, if fitted together, might show him a picture he shrank from seeing.

Although, in the first moment of revelation, a blinding kaleidoscope, composed of all the various implications attached to his illegitimacy, had flashed across his mind’s eye, this had swiftly faded into a general feeling of shock, and of nausea. It was not until he had been walking up and down beside the Pool for some time that the particular significance of Penhallow’s words began clearly to present itself to him. If the story were true — and his brain still clung to the hope that it might not be true — he would never be Penhallow of Trevellin, for although Penhallow’s unpredictable caprice might lead him to carry the secret into the grave, he, who was most nearly concerned, knew it, and would never, all his life long, be able to forget it. His stiff pride in his name, even his passionate love for Trevellin, seemed in an instant to have become empty things. There was not one of his brothers who had not a better right to call himself Penhallow of Trevellin than he; there could never in the uncertain future be a day unclouded by the fear that someone, by some unforeseen chance, might discover the imposture, and arise to denounce him. It was, he thought, unlikely that Penhallow, having once broken his long silence, would refrain from dislodging him, in the end, from his position as heir to Trevellin. He would no doubt keep the secret for as long as it suited him, using it to compel obedience to his will. He needed a manager for the estate, but a manager who, besides performing his duties conscientiously, would yet permit him to commit whatsoever depredations he chose; and not one of his more favoured sons would fill his requirements as well as the only one amongst them all who, besides having a business head on his shoulders, dared not oppose him in the smallest particular. But Raymond could not doubt that he would see to it that it was Ingram who stepped finally into his shoes.

The thought of Ingram at Trevellin struck Raymond like a blow over the heart. He found that he was uttering a stream of obscene curses aloud, and stopped himself quickly, frightened of his own lack of self-control. He knew an impulse to cast himself down on the sweet-smelling turf, and to writhe there, digging his nails into the earth, as though in such physical abandonment he might find relief from the mental anguish he was suffering. For a time, coherent thought became impossible again, and he foundered in a nightmare of his imaginings, seeing Ingram in his place, enjoying the fruits of his careful husbandry, seeing himself, for a distorted moment, as Ingram’s pensioner. So incalculable are the twists of the human brain that the very abhorrence with which he regarded this image jerked him out of his fog of sick fantasy. He began to laugh, softly at first, and then in lunatic gusts which made his quietly grazing horse raise his head, momentarily startled by this wild sound breaking the stillness.

His laughter was uncontrollable, and largely hysterical, but it did him good. When he at last stopped, and wiped his streaming eyes, he felt exhausted, but relieved of the iron restriction in his chest which had made him feel as though his heart were trying to burst from his body. He could think more reasonably, and could face the future without succumbing to the condition of mindless horror which made sober reflection an impossibility. He began to weigh what his father had recounted against his own memories, trying in these to find some refutation of Penhallow’s monstrous story. After a time it occurred to him that one person only could deny or confirm the story, and without questioning the wisdom of acting upon his sudden impulse he caught and unhobbled his horse, and rode off at a gallop in the direction of Bodmin.

When he reached Azalea Lodge, he called to the gardener who was clipping the borders of the front path to walk his horse up and down, and strode up to the front door, and set his finger on the electric bell-push. The door was opened to him by an elderly parlourmaid, who ushered him into the drawing-room, and said that she would fetch Miss Ottery.

In the shock of first learning that he was not Rachel Penhallow’s son, he had not until this moment had any thought to spare for the woman who might prove to be his mother; but as he stood in the middle of the stuffy, over-furnished room, surrounded, as it seemed to him, by cats and canaries and cabinets crowded with china, the idea that Delta, whom he, in common with his brothers, had all his life made the subject of contemptuous jests, might claim him as her son, swept over him, and filled him with such repugnance that he was seized by an instinct to rush from the house before she could confront him. He mastered it, and picked his way between floor-cushions, spindle-legged tables, and catbaskets to the bay window, and stood there staring out into the neat garden.

He presently heard the door open behind him, and Delia’s voice utter a welcome. ‘Dear Raymond! Such a pleasure! So unexpected, too, not that I mean — because you know that we’re always so delighted to see you, dear! I was just helping Phineas to wash some of his china. Quite an honour, I call it, for he will let no one else touch it! You must excuse my overall — but I daresay you men never notice such things!’

A shudder ran through his frame; he turned to face her, his strained eyes taking in, as perhaps never before, every detail of her appearance. It was not prepossessing. Her hair, escaping from its falling pins, showed a number of straggling ends, a fact of which she seemed to be conscious, since she made several ineffectual attempts to secure them. She was wearing an overall fashioned out of a flowered material eminently unsuited to her years and her faded looks; and one of the irritating scraps of lace with which she was in the habit of embellishing her dresses had worked its way over the collar of the overall. There was such an indefinable air of desiccated spinsterhood about her that Raymond could have shouted aloud his disbelief that she could be his mother.

She advanced towards him in a little flutter of shy excitement. She did not immediately perceive, since he was standing with his back to the light, how pale he was. She kept up a gentle flow of chatter, exclaiming at one naughty pussy for having curled up on one of the chairs, apostrophising a canary, which was indefatigably singing in a gilded cage, as her precious Timmy, and directing Raymond’s attention to a pair of budgerigars at his elbow. When she reached him, it was plain from the timid way she raised her face that she expected him to kiss her cheek. He could not do it; it was with an effort of will that he refrained from thrusting her away from his immediate vicinity. He found a difficulty in speaking, but managed, after an uncomfortable moment of struggle, to say: ‘I came to speak to you.’