“Certainly. I have every desire to be scrupulously fair to you,” said Philip. “I will hear anything you wish to say.”
“Then, father, I wish to say that you’re not fair to me. If I’m late for dinner, do you chaff me in the way you do Colin? Last night you asked him with a chuckle, ‘Urgent private affairs?’ That was all the rebuke he got. If he says he hasn’t finished his wine, you sit down again, and say ‘Sorry.’ If I haven’t, you tell me I’ve had enough already. Colin’s your favourite, and you show it every minute of the day. You dislike me, you know.”
There was quite enough truth in this to make the hearing of it disagreeable to his father. “I didn’t ask you to discuss my conduct, but to consider your own,” he said. “But you shall have it your own way. My conduct to you is the result of yours to me, and yours to everybody else. Look at yourself and Colin dispassionately, and tell me whether I could be as fond of you as of him. I acknowledge I’m not. Are you fond of me, if it comes to that? But I’m polite to you, until you annoy me beyond endurance, as you are continually doing. If Colin had behaved at lunch as you’ve behaved, I should have thought he was ill.”
“And I’m only sulky,” said Raymond.
“You’re proving it every moment,” said his father. “That’s quite a good instance.”
Raymond paused, biting his lip. “You judge Colin’s behaviour to me, father,” he said, “by what you see of it. You think he’s like that to me when we’re alone. He’s not: he’s fiendish to me. Don’t you understand that when you’re there, or anybody else is there, he acts a part, to make you think that he’s ever so amiable?”
“And how do you behave to him when you’re alone together?” asked Philip. “If I take your word about Colin, I must take Colin’s about you.”
“You’ve done that already, I expect,” said Raymond.
His father got up. “I see I haven’t made myself clear,” he said. “Try to grasp that that’s the sort of remark I don’t intend to stand from you for a moment. If I have any further complaint to make of you, you leave the house. You’ve got to be civil and decently behaved. Otherwise you go. I do not choose to have my general enjoyment of life, or Colin’s, or your uncle’s, or your aunt’s, spoiled by your impertinences and snarlings. You’ll have to go away; you can go to St. James’s Square if you like, but I won’t have you here unless you make a definite effort to be a pleasanter companion. As I told Colin this morning, you seem to think that being disagreeable is a monopoly of your own, but you’ll find that I can be disagreeable, too, and far more effectively than lies in your power.”
Philip was quite aware that he was speaking with extreme harshness, with greater harshness, in fact, than he really intended. But the sight of that heavy brooding face, the knowledge that this was his elder son, who would reign at Stanier when he was dead to the exclusion of Colin, made his tongue bitter beyond control.