Another explosion was threatening; and, at a sign from Barbara, I ranged myself beside Sonia.
“You’re entitled to pay yourself a salary,” I told him. “As chairman and managing-director of a trust-company with a capital of twenty-five millions, I think five thousand a year . . .”
“I’m pretty sure Sonia will do less harm with it than I shall,” he sighed. “Is that all the advice you can give me, George?”
“Well,” I reminded him, “I told you at Cannes not to touch the money with a pole.”
“And, as I told you ten minutes ago, I should almost certainly follow your advice if you repeated it. Sonia won’t let me talk about that, though . . . Tell me your plans for the winter. The south of France again?”
By the time we left, the last echo of discord was hushed. On our way home, however, Barbara warned me that new trouble would break out if some one did not create a diversion. I hardly know what difference Sonia and her friends expected O’Rane’s inheritance to make; but she was bitterly and undisguisedly disappointed by what she regarded as a life of wasted opportunities.
“Get your mother to invite them out to Cannes,” Barbara suggested; and I sent an invitation that night on my own responsibility.
It was refused, rather tartly, on the ground that David, as we might have known, would not leave his work and that Sonia, as we might have guessed, would not come, “trailing clouds of infants”, without him. I comforted myself with the reflection that, whatever her provocation, she would not try to repeat an effect by running away; and then I dismissed them both from my thoughts till the crisis in my own life should be passed.
The word, I think, is not too strong for a moment and an event that were to test the union of two people who, on any reasoning, ought never to have married. Good friends though we were, Barbara had never pretended to be in love with me; I could judge of all that she was withholding when she forgot to hide her love for Eric Lane. Though he was five thousand miles away, she was still haunted by him; and I sometimes wondered whether anything short of his death would cure the obsession. Then, on the day when she told me that she was going to have a child, I took hope again; what I had never been able to achieve was to be brought about by our son. She had decided that it would be a boy; we had even chosen his name; and I had begun to love him, before he was quickened, for drawing us together.
As Lady Crawleigh wanted Barbara in the country, I spent most of the early spring by myself in London; and at the end of April I went down for a week to be at hand if I were needed. It was the twenty-first of the month when I arrived; and, though the date is of no interest to any one, I am unlikely to forget it; my car crossed the bridge into the abbey precincts at twenty minutes past seven in the evening, and I am not likely to forget that either. I shall not forget the eerie silence in which the abbey was wrapped, nor the scared faces of the servants, nor the darkness of the rooms, nor the atmosphere of disaster impending. I hope I am as self-controlled as my neighbour, but I seemed to feel a hand of ice on my heart as the butler helped me out of my coat and murmured that he believed his lordship was in the garden.