“'Put the house in order for its new mistress,'” he almost snarled. “'Inform her that I was married last Wednesday'! Of course he's married. Am I not to inform your mother? Isn't the car to meet Mrs Brood and him? Does he say anything about his son meeting him at the pier? No! Does he cable his son that he is married? No! Does he do anything that a real, human father would do? No! That message was a deliberate insult to me, Lydia, a nasty, rotten slap in the face. I mean the way it was worded. Just as if it wasn't enough that he had gone and married some cheap show-girl or a miserable foreigner or Heaven knows——”
“Freddy! You forget yourself. Your father would not marry a cheap show-girl. You know that. And you must not forget that your mother was a foreigner.”
“I'm sorry I said that,” he exclaimed hoarsely. Then fiercely: “But can't you see what all this will come to? A new mistress of the house! It means your mother will have to go—that maybe you'll go. Nothing will be as it has been. All the sweetness gone—all the goodness! A woman in the house who will also treat me as if I didn't belong here! A woman who married him for his money, an adventuress. Oh, you can't tell me; I know! 'You might inform Mrs Desmond that I was married'! Good Lord!”
He began to pace the floor, striking one fist viciously in the palm of the other hand. Lydia, pale and trembling, seemed to have forgotten his presence. She was staring fixedly at the white surface of a door down the hall, and there was infinite pain in her wide eyes. Her lips moved once or twice; there was a single unspoken word upon them.
“Why couldn't he have wired me last week?” the young man was muttering. “What was his object in waiting until to-day? Wouldn't any other father in the world have telegraphed his only son if he were going to—to bring someone home like this? 'Have the car meet Mrs Brood and me'! If that isn't the quintessence of scorn! He orders me to do these things. He doesn't even honour me with a direct, personal message. He doesn't tell me he is married. He asks me to inform someone else.”
Lydia, leaning rather heavily against the door, spoke to him in a low, cautious voice.
“Did you tell Mr Dawes and Mr Riggs?”
He stopped short.
“No! And they waited up to see if they could be of any assistance to him in an hour of peril! What a joke! Poor old beggars! I've never felt sorry for them before, but, on my soul, I do now. What will she do to the poor old chaps? I shudder to think of it. And she'll make short work of everything else she doesn't like around here, too. Your mother, Lydia—why, God help us, you know what will just have to happen in her case. It's——”
“Don't speak so loudly, dear—please, please! She is asleep. Of course, we—we shan't stay on, Freddy. We'll have to go as soon as——”