“I don't see that that matters,” he began doubtfully. His stepmother cut him short.
“You would very soon find that it matters a good deal,” she said coldly. “It would be quite simple for your father to get some kind of legal injunction, forbidding you to interfere with your sister. Home training is what she needs, and we are determined that she shall get it. You will only unsettle and injure her by trying to induce her to disobey us.”
The hard voice fell like lead on the boy's ears. He felt very helpless; if he did indeed snatch his sister away from this extremely unpleasant home, and their father had only to stretch out a long, legal tentacle and claw her back, it was clear that her position would be harder than ever. He could only give in, at any rate, for the present, and in his anxiety for the little sister whom Aunt Margaret had always trained him to protect, he humbled himself to beg for better treatment for her. “No one ever was angry with her,” he said. “She'll do anything for you if you're decent to her.”
“She might give less cause for annoyance if she had had a little more severity,” said Mrs. Rainham with an unspoken sneer at poor Aunt Margaret. “You had better advise her to do her best in return for the very comfortable home we give her.” With which Bob had to endeavour to be content, for the present. He went off to find Cecilia, with a lowering brow, leaving his stepmother not nearly so easy in her mind as she seemed. For Bob had a square jaw, and was apt to talk little and do a good deal; and his affection for Cecilia was, in Mrs. Rainham's eyes, little short of ridiculous.
Thereafter, the brother and sister took counsel together and made great plans for the future, when once the Air Force should decide that it had no further wish to keep Captain Robert Rainham from earning his living on terra firma. What that future was to be for Bob was very difficult to plan. Aunt Margaret had intended him for a profession; but the time for that had gone by, even had the money been still available. “I'm half glad that it isn't,” Bob said; “I don't see how a fellow could go back to swotting over books after being really alive for nearly five years.” There seemed nothing but “the land” in some shape or form; they were not very clear about it, but Bob was strenuously “keeping his ears open”—like so many lads of his rank in the early months of 1919, when the future that had seemed so indefinite during the years of war suddenly loomed up, very large and menacing. Cecilia had less anxiety; she had a cheerful faith that Bob would manage something—a three-roomed cottage somewhere in the country, where he could look after sheep, or crops, or something of the kind, while she cooked and mended for him, and grew such flowers as had bloomed in the dear garden at Fontainebleau. Sheep and crops, she was convinced, grew themselves, in the main; a person of Bob's ability would surely find little difficulty in superintending the process. And, whatever happened, nothing could be worse than life in Lancaster Gate.
Neither of them ever thought of appealing to their father, either for advice or for help. He remained, as he had always been to them, utterly colourless; a kind of well-bred shadow of his wife, taking no part in her hard treatment of Cecilia, but lifting not a finger to save her. He did not look happy; indeed, he seldom spoke—it was not necessary, when Mrs. Rainham held the floor. He had a tiny den which he used as a smoking-room, and there he spent most of his time when at home, being blessed in the fact that his wife disliked the smell of smoke, and refused to allow it in her drawing-room. Nobody took much notice of him. The younger children treated him with cool indifference; Bob met him with a kind of strained and uncomfortable civility.
Curiously enough, it was only Eliza who divined in him a secret hankering after his eldest daughter—Cecilia, who would have been very much astonished had anyone hinted at such a thing to her. The sharp eyes of the little Cockney were not to be deceived in any matter concerning the only person in the house who treated her as if she were a human being and not a grate-cleaning automaton.
“You see 'im foller 'er wiv 'is eyes, that's all,” said Eliza to Cook, in the privacy of their joint bedroom. “Fair 'ungry he looks, sometimes.”
“No need for 'im to be 'ungry, if 'e 'ad the sperrit of a man,” said Cook practically. “Ain't she 'is daughter?”
“Well, yes, in a manner of speakin',” said Eliza doubtfully. “But there ain't much of father an' daughter about them two. I'd ruther 'ave my ole man, down W'itechapel way; 'e can belt yer a fair terror, w'en 'e's drunk, but 'e'll allers tike yer out an' buy yer a kipper arterwards. Thet's on'y decent, fatherly feelin'.”