“Ah, but this was different!” Penhallow said, pouring out more wine. “Touched her more nearly. She didn’t mind a village affair or two.”
There was something else in the room besides Penhallow’s malice, some dark shadow of horror creeping towards Raymond. He laid his hands on the back of the Gothic chair, and gripped it hard. “Why did it touch her more nearly?” he forced himself to ask. “Who was my mother?”
Penhallow gave a chuckle. “Delia,” he replied.
To Raymond’s shocked senses, his father’s swollen figure, lying in the bed in the middle of the room, had become inseparable from the ivory god, Ho-Ti, leering at him from the top of the red lacquer cabinet. Everything in the room assumed nightmarish proportions; the warring colours in curtains, carpet, and table-cloths almost seemed to shout at him; the bright hexagons of the patchwork quilt danced before him, dazzling him. He lifted his hand instinctively to his eyes, saying hoarsely: “No! It’s a lie!”
“Oh, no, it isn’t!” retorted Penhallow. “You mightn’t think it to look at her now, but when she first came home from some finishing school or other in Switzerland Delia was as pretty as a picture!”
Raymond gripped the chair-back again. He stared into his father’s face, unable either to believe a tale so fantastic, or to think himself in his right senses. “But I was born — Are you telling me you seduced a girl just out of school? The sister of the woman you were engaged to? It isn’t possible! Damn you, you’re making all this up!”
“Ho-ho!” jeered Penhallow. “Precious little seduction about it! She was head over ears in love with me. She thought she knew what she was about. I believed she did. The trouble was, I didn’t know as much about women in those days as I do now. You’d have thought I’d have had sense enough to realise that Delia was just the sort of romantic little fool who’d talk a lot of highfalutin balderdash about no one’s being the worse for our precious affair, and then lose her nerve, and run bleating to her sister as soon as she found that she hadn’t been quite so damned clever as she thought. But I was only a bit over twenty-one myself, and I’d a lot to learn.”
“But Mother — Rachel!” Raymond uttered numbly. “How can such a thing have happened, under her very nose?”
“Lord bless you, it didn’t!” Penhallow said cheerfully. “Daresay it wouldn’t have happened at all if she hadn’t been away at the time. By the time she got back, the mischief was done, and that damned fool, Delia, was spending her time shuddering at the sight of me — a fat lot of right she had to do that! — and trying to put an end to herself by drinking disinfectant, or some such tomfoolery. The wonder is that she hadn’t blurted out the whole story to her father!”
Raymond lifted one hand from the chair-back, and brought it down again. “No!” he jerked out. “It’s preposterous! Grotesque! It couldn’t have happened! Why, you must have married her, if there were a word of truth in any of this!”