The girl learned that Captain Saxham's noisy fun and alternating fits of rage were due to over-indulgence in brandy-and-soda. That he gambled away Mildred's income over cards and Turf speculations, as he had wasted the sum of money for which his Commission had been sold. That he was "not even faithful"—that he spent week-ends "at hotels with fast women"; that he was not worthy the sacrifice Mildred had made for him.
Had she not for his sake jilted his younger brother, Owen! Even on the verge of their marriage; the presents received; the house taken and furnished; the trousseau ready, everything perfect to the last pin in the wedding veil. Nobody could resist David when he chose to woo, but why, why had Mildred yielded? So fierce a sense of shame awakened in the daughter as she listened, that it seemed to her as though her face and body scorched in the embrace of an actual, material flame.
"How could he? ... How could you? ... Betray Uncle Owen.... One of you was as low-down as the other, to play a beastly, sneaking game like that!"
"You insult your mother and father. Leave the room!" commanded Mildred. And Patrine left it, vigorously slamming the door.
Captain Saxham, who had sold out of the Army when Patrine and Irma were respectively seven and six years old, never knew what he had lost in the esteem of his elder daughter. She loved him still, but he had ceased to be her god. They lived at Croybourn and occupied three sittings at one of its several Anglican Churches. The Vicar, a strenuous man, whipped in Patrine and Irma for Confirmation classes. They studied the Thirty-Nine Articles, the Athanasian Creed, and dipped once more into the Protestant Church Catechism, first instilled at the certified High School for the Daughters of Gentlemen—an establishment they attended as day-pupils, and were to leave, without passing the Oxford Secondary, in the following year when Captain Saxham died.
For David, that cheerful, easy-going Hedonist, dropped off the perch quite suddenly, in the smoking-room of his London Club. In life he had been of the easy-going type of Christian, who avoids open scandal, and hopes to die at peace with the clergyman.
An attack of cerebral effusion had anticipated the clergyman. Mildred and Irma wept bitterly, Patrine sat dry-eyed. Even in the face of the new tombstone at Woking Cemetery, testifying to the many virtues of David, as soldier, husband, and father, her stiff eyelids remained unmoistened by a tear. At the base of the scrolled Cymric Cross ran a text in leaded letters:
BLESSED ARE THE DEAD WHO DIE IN THE LORD.
The undertaker had recommended the text to the widow because it contained the right number of letters required to fit in at the bottom. But did it fit in, Patrine had sometimes wondered, quite so appropriately, at the close of her father's life?
She treasured his portrait, taken at the age of thirty, the tinted presentment of a handsome, stupid young officer, resplendent in the gold and blue and scarlet of a crack Dragoon regiment. It had fallen to her keeping when her mother had re-married. But she cherished no illusions regarding the original. How often, since her own eyes had been opened to the fact of their existence, had she not screened David's vices from strangers' eyes.