“You have so much influence on Henry. Do talk to him about his clothes and other things. He won’t mind it from you. He gets so angry if we say anything.”
Philip was not at all sure that Henry would “not mind it from him”. When they were alone Henry would listen with the greatest interest to the things that Philip told him; his eyes would soften, his mouth would smile, his voice would quiver with his excitement. Then, quite suddenly, his face would cloud, he would blush and frown, almost scowl, then, abruptly, with some half-muttered word, fall into a sulky silence. Once he had broken in to Philip’s information with: “Oh! I suppose you think I don’t know anything about it, that I’m a stupid idiot.... Well, if I am, what do you bother to talk to me for?”
This, of course, annoyed Philip, who always liked to feel, after a conversation with anyone, that “everything had gone off all right”. Had it not been for Katherine, he would not have bothered with the fellow. Another thing puzzled and even alarmed Philip. Henry would often, when he thought that he was unwatched, stare at Philip in a perplexed brooding fashion with a look in his eye that said: “I’ll find out one day all right. You think that no one’s watching you, that I’m not worth anyone’s trouble.... You wait and see.”
Henry would look at Philip’s buttons, studs, tie, handkerchief with this same puzzled stare. It was another side of that surveillance of which Philip had been conscious ever since Tim Flaunder’s visit to his rooms. “Ah!” thought Philip, “once I’m married, they can watch as much as they like.... A year’s a long time though.”
He decided then to cultivate Henry and to know the boy better. “I’ll show him that there’s nothing in me to be suspicious about—that I’m worthy of marrying his sister. I’ll make a friend of him.”
He asked George Trenchard whether he might give Henry an evening. “Take him out to dinner and a music-hall. I’ll look after him.”
Trenchard said:
“My dear fellow, if you can make Henry look something like an ordinary civilised being we’ll all be in your debt for ever. I don’t envy you your job ... but, of course, do what you like with him.”
When Philip told Mrs. Trenchard she said:
“How nice for Henry! How kind of you to bother with the boy! He goes out so little. How nice for Henry!”