"What made you go off in that way?" asked Maurice, who did not see the connection.
Geoffrey made no verbal reply, but he held out his left hand with the two last fingers out of joint. Then he showed how easily he could put them "in" and "out."
"None of my father's family can do this, but my mother could. Both my mother and the pig of an uncle held out these two fingers in their gestures, and curled the others up so, and I do the same. I can laugh now, but it killed me at the time.
"I traveled all over the world before I came back to England. My half-brothers were then pretty well grown up and were fully acquainted with everything concerning my birth and my mother's history. My step-mother hated me because I was the eldest son, and she poisoned her children's minds against me. She sought out my old tutor, who, when paid well, told her a lot of vile and untrue stories about me. With these she tried to poison my father's mind also in regard to me. I was moody, morbid, and restless. They looked at me as if I was some other kind of creature, the son of a savage, and it galled me, for all my subsequent travelings had never removed the sting of my birth. Some deplore illegitimacy. Rubbish! Wrong selection, not want of a ceremony, is the real sin that is visited unto the children.
"After my return home I could have died with more complacency than I felt in living. Even my father seemed at last to be turned against me by my step-mother. One day while we were at dinner my step-mother, who possessed a fiend's temper, had a hot discussion with me about something which I have forgotten. Words were not well chosen on either side, and she flew into a tantrum. I remember saying at last: 'Madame, it would take two or three keepers to keep you in order.' Everybody was against me, of course, and when her own eldest son half arose and addressed me, his remarks met with applause. What he said to me, in quiet scorn, was:
"'Our mother's temper may not be good, sir, but we don't find it necessary to send a keeper with her to keep her from stealing.'
"I have since found out, in a roundabout way, that my beautiful mother preferred to steal a thing out of a shop rather than pay for it. My father had always looked at this weakness of hers as a most humorous thing. Anything she did charmed him. Sometimes she would show him what she had stolen, and it would be returned or paid for. However, at the time that this was said to me at the table I did not know of these facts. I arose, amid the derisive laughter that followed the 'good hit,' and demanded of my father how he dared to allow my mother's name to be insulted. I secretly felt at the time that the slur upon her honesty might be well founded, but the possible truth of it made the insult all the worse to me.
"This was the last straw. I felt myself growing wild. Father did not look at me. He merely went on with his dinner, laughing quietly at the old joke and at my discomfiture. He said: 'I can not see any insult, when what Harry says is perfectly true—and a devilish good joke it was.'
"I did not appreciate that joke. I was almost crazy at the time. My father's laughter seemed the cruelest thing I had ever heard. I 'turned to,' as Jack Cresswell would say, and cursed them all, individually and collectively, and then took my hat and left the house, which I have never seen since and never intend to see again."
"And what about the tutor that told the stories about you?" asked Rankin.