“And where—where are they now?”
“At Mullion, Sir—in Cornwall.”
Sir John said nothing. His face turned grey, and he trembled. Gervase was distressed.
“Don’t take it so dreadfully to heart, Father. I’m sure it’s really for the best. He’s a decent chap, and very well-to-do—he’ll be able to give her everything she’s been accustomed to”—remembering an old tag.
“Get out!” said Sir John suddenly.
“I’m frightfully sorry if you think we’ve treated you badly, Sir. But really we tried to do it in the way we thought would hurt you least.”
“Get out!” repeated his father—“get out of here. This is your doing, with your socialism, with your contempt for your own family, with your.... Get out of the room, or I’ll....”
His shaking hand groped round for a missile, and Gervase moved hastily to the door, too late, however, to escape a bound volume of Punch, which preceded him into the hall.
Wills was standing outside the dining-room door with a tray, and Gervase found it very difficult to look dignified. Such an attitude was even more difficult to keep up during the alarms that followed. He retreated to his bedroom, taking Punch with him, partly as a solace, partly in a feeble hope of persuading Wills that to have a book thrown at your head is a normal way of borrowing it. He had not been alone a quarter of an hour before he was summoned by Speller, his mother’s maid. There followed an interview which began in reproaches, passed on to an enquiry into Jenny’s luggage—had she bought brushes and sponges in London, since she had taken nothing away?—and ended cloudily in hysterics and lavender water. Gervase went back to his room, which ten minutes later was entered by the sobbing Doris, who informed him he had “killed Mother,” who apparently required a post-mortem interview. Once again he went down to the boudoir with its rose-coloured lights and heavy scents of restoratives, and to the jerky accompaniment of Doris’s weeping told his story over again. He had to tell it a fourth time to Peter, who had been summoned from Starvecrow, and found that it was hardening into set phrases, and sounded rather like the patter of a guide recounting some historic elopement from a great house.
“They’ve been in love for some time, but as they didn’t expect you’d quite see things as they did——”