“Where some one can’t see us,” Peter stipulated.

“Oh! I love spooning,” said the ardent Sydney. “’Member when I kissed you before?...”

“The girls refine the boys and the whole atmosphere is just a family atmosphere,” Miss Murgatroyd was explaining at the window.

CHAPTER THE EIGHTH
THE HIGH CROSS PREPARATORY SCHOOL

§ 1

From the time when he was christened until he was ten, Lady Charlotte Sydenham remained only a figure in the remotest background of Peter’s life. Once or twice he saw her in the downstairs room at The Ingle-Nook with his aunts bristling defensively beside her, and once she came to the school, and each time she looked at him with a large, hard, hostile smile and said: “And ha-ow’s Peter?” and then with a deepening disapproval: “Ha-ow’s Joan?” But that did not mean that Lady Charlotte had done with Joan and Peter, nor that she had relinquished in the slightest degree her claims to dominate their upbringing. She was just letting them grow up a little “according to their mother’s ideas, poor woman,” and biding her time. She wrote every now and then to Aunts Phyllis and Phœbe, just to remind them of her authority, and she wrote two long and serious letters to Oswald about what was to be done. He answered her briefly in such terms as: “Let well alone. Religion comes later.” Oswald had never returned to England. He had been in Uganda now for five long years, and her fear of him was dying down. She was beginning to think that perhaps he did not care very much for Joan and Peter. He had had blackwater fever again. Perhaps he would never come home any more.

Then in the years 1901 and 1902 she had been much occupied by a special campaign against various London socialists that had ended in a libel case. She was quite convinced that all socialists were extremely immoral people, she was greatly alarmed at the spread of socialism, and so she wrote and employed a secretary to write letters to a number of people marked “private and confidential,” warning them against this or that prominent socialist. In these she made various definite statements which, as her counsel vainly tried to argue, were not to be regarded as statements of fact so much as illustrations of the tendency of socialist teaching. She was tackled by a gentleman in a red necktie named Bamshot, of impregnable virtue, in whom her free gift of “numerous illegitimate children” had evoked no gratitude. Her efforts to have him “thoroughly cross-examined” produced no sympathy in either judge or jury. All men, she realized, are wicked and anxious to shield each other. She left the court with a passionate and almost uncontrollable desire to write more letters about Bamshot and more, worse than ever, and with much nastier charges. And it was perhaps a subconscious effort to shift the pressure of this dangerous impulse that turned her mind to the state of spiritual neglect in which Joan and Peter were growing out of childhood.

A number of other minor causes moved her in the same direction. She had had a violent quarrel about the bill with the widow of an Anglican clergyman who kept her favourite pension at Bordighera; and she could still not forgive the establishment at Pallanza that, two years before, had refused to dismiss its head-waiter for saying “Vivent les Boers!” in her hearing. She had been taking advice about a suitable and thoroughly comfortable substitute for these resorts, and meanwhile she had stayed on in England—until there were oysters on the table. Lady Charlotte Sydenham had an unrefined appetite for oysters, and with oysters came a still less refined craving for Dublin stout. It was an odd secret weakness understood only by her domestics, and noted only by a small circle of intimate friends.

“I don’t seem to fancy anything very much today, Unwin,” Lady Charlotte used to say.

“I don’t know if you’d be tempted by a nice oyster or two, m’lady. They’re very pick-me-up things,” the faithful attendant would suggest. “It’s September now, and there’s an R in the month, so it’s safe to venture.”