“Well, that’s one of the abuses in this house that’s going to stop more quickly than the little bastard thinks for!” Raymond said grimly.
Then he remembered the look he had surprised on Jimmy’s face the previous evening, and his eyelids flickered, and he turned away abruptly, and went up the stairs, feeling as though an icy hand had closed upon the pit of his stomach. His mind, at one moment lightened of its fear, plunged again into an abyss of uncertainty and dread. If Jimmy knew the truth, there could never be any security for him while he lived. Buy him off? Send him out to the colonies? He thought bitterly that he would do better to strangle the little beast. He could visualise, though as yet only vaguely, years of being bled white by Jimmy, of living for ever in the fear that Jimmy’s malice, or perhaps his own inability to satisfy a blackmailer’s greed, would prompt him to carry his story to Ingram. In an instant, his father’s death, which had seemed in the first shock of discovery to be no less than a direct intervention of providence in his favour, became fraught with lurking danger. There was Martha too. He would have to do something about her, though what he hardly knew. He fancied that her devotion to Penhallow would lead her to pursue the course she supposed him to have wished her to; her silence, then, would depend not upon bribery but upon what Penhallow might have said to her.
He went into his bedroom, and shut the door. He was in his shirt-sleeves when a gentle tap fell on one of the oaken panels, and Loveday Trewithian came in with a jug of boiling water. He looked at her frowning , realising that she was one of those most nearly affected by Penhallow’s death. She was a little pale, but her face was quite calm, and her dark eyes met his with no other discernible expression in them than one of timid respect.
“I’ve brought your shaving-water, sir,” she said, in her gentle way. “Things is a little at sixes and sevens.”
“Thanks,” he said briefly. “Doctor arrived yet?”
“No, sir,” she replied, setting the jug down on the old fashioned marble-topped wash-stand, and covering it with a folded towel. “Not yet.”
“Tell Reuben to let me know as soon as he does. Does your mistress know what’s happened?”
“She’s sleeping, Mr Ray. Leave me tell her when I take her tea in to her!”
“You’d better do so at once. Mrs Hastings, too.”
“Mrs Hastings went out early. She’s up at the stables.” Loveday moved towards the door, adding as she reached it: “Bart, too.”