“Why do you keep tagging after me like a child of three? I don’t want you around us all the time. Children should not always be with their elders. Please remember that. Spend an hour or two by yourself for once. Read something, or do whatever you want. Leave me alone. You make me nervous with your creepy ways and that disgusting hang-dog air of yours!”
He had wrested it from her at last—the confession! He smiled, while the baron and his mother seemed embarrassed. She swung about, turning her back, and was about to leave, in a fury with herself for having admitted so much to her little son, when Edgar’s voice came, saying coolly:
“Papa does not want me to be by myself here. He made me promise not to be wild, and to stay with you.” Edgar emphasized “Papa,” having noticed on the previous occasion when he used the word that it had had a paralyzing effect upon both of them. In some way or other, therefore, he inferred, his father must be implicated in this great mystery and must have a secret power over them, because the very mention of him seemed to frighten and distress them. They said nothing this time either. They laid down their arms.
The mother left the room with the baron, and Edgar followed behind, not humbly like a servitor, but hard, strict, inexorable, like a guard over prisoners, rattling the chains against which they strained in vain. Hate had steeled his child’s strength. He, the ignorant one, was stronger than the two older people whose hands were held fast by the great secret.
CHAPTER IX
THE LIARS
TIME was pressing. The baron’s holiday would soon come to an end, and the few days that remained must be exploited to the full. There was no use, both he and Edgar’s mother felt, trying to break down the excited child’s pertinacity. So they resorted to the extreme measure of disgraceful evasion and flight, merely to escape for an hour or two from under his yoke.
“Please take these letters and have them registered at the post-office,” his mother said to Edgar in the hall, while the baron was outside ordering a cab. Edgar, remembering that until then his mother had sent the hotel boys on her errands, was suspicious. Were they hatching something against him? He hesitated.
“Where will you wait for me?”
“Here.”
“For sure?”