Iris broke the back of the ace of clubs and dropped it among the others on the green cloth, where it lay cruelly curled.
“Steady, Iris, steady!” said Sir Maurice. And he tried with the black ebony paper-knife to straighten out the ace of clubs. And he smiled. But Iris looked at Guy, and she seemed very tall.
“Iris,” Hilary said gently, “we loved you too much as a child not to be able to hate the woman who has gone out of her way to kill every memory of that child....”
“That’s it, Iris,” Guy murmured, restrained, amiable. “You see, as a child and as a girl you were very much in our hearts. Much more than any other child and girl has ever been. I don’t know why. And in spite of all things you’ve done we’ve always ... well, we’ve always kept one side of us which was yours for the asking. I mean, Iris, we couldn’t believe in you as a ... well, as a decent woman, but we’ve just stayed fond of you. Even when we’ve had to hear your name being pitched about by vile women and ghastly cads. Until now. But now....”
“A moment, Guy!” The clever, darting eyes, the neat figure, the iron-grey hair, waving just a little. He smiled. He waved the black ebony paper-knife at Iris as though she was a naughty girl. He knew Iris inside-out, did Sir Maurice. She wasn’t all bad, not she. Iris looked at him for the first time, and the clear untroubled look seemed now to be fixed stonily. I wondered if she was afraid. The General spoke quickly, brittle-bright: “Guy has just said, Iris, that we’ve known you all your life. But there’s more than that, much more. That’s why I wanted you to come here to-night. I wanted to show you us, Iris. This isn’t an ordinary elopement, Napier’s and yours. It’s a stab in the back——”
“Maurice, am I stabbing you in the back by coming here?”
“You were always a strange, unfrightened girl, Iris. But the stab in the back is made. It’s stabbing us, your people, in the back. Venice’s people aren’t in this as we are. But that isn’t what I want to tell you. Is it, Guy? And I’ve no intention of trying to beg Napier from you. I’m not even yet old enough to beg favours from a woman. No, it seems settled about you and Napier, as he told me this morning. And I tell you, Iris, it wasn’t my son who spoke to me this morning. It was an enchanted boy——”
“We are both of us enchanted, Maurice.” And Iris smiled. Her lips looked very red, silken red.
“Very good, very good! Well, you go to-morrow. That’s fixed. But I just wanted to show you us, Iris. I think you have forgotten us on your travels. You are of us. I think you have forgotten that. And you are stabbing us in the back. I’m not talking of Napier now as my son, my only son. Am I, Guy? Hilary? I’ve taken great pride in the boy’s career, I haven’t married again for his sake—but let all that go. I’m talking of Napier now just as one of us here, the us that you belong to, of the England that we stand for. We, Iris—you and us—we aren’t made only of flesh-and-blood. There’s a little devil of slackness who stands waiting for any of us who thinks he or she is only made of flesh-and-blood. We are made of air, too—this air, Iris, that we are breathing now. We are made of this air, you and us. We were born in it, our fathers and mothers were born in it. Guy, Hilary, I, you, Napier, we were all of us born within a hundred miles of this room, Guy at Mace, Hilary at Magralt, Napier and I here at Sutton Marie, and you not two miles away across the fields. We are of this soil, Iris, of this air, of this England which is still our England. My God, we haven’t much left, but we still have this. That is all I have to say, Iris. I just wanted to show you us, because I thought you must have forgotten us. You have decided, Iris, that you will break into our lives, and break up our lives. Why, Iris? What sort of hell is your ambition in the next world? Tell me that.”
“No, Maurice!” said Hilary sharply. “Keep to this world.”