§ 9

Gervase reproached himself for having done his part of the business badly, though he never felt quite sure how exactly he had blundered. He had reached Conster two hours before dinner, and trusted that this phenomenon might prepare his father for some surprise. But, disappointingly, Sir John did not notice his return—he had grown lately to think less and less about his youngest son, who was seldom at home and whom he looked upon as an outsider. Gervase had deliberately alienated himself from Alard, and Sir John could never, in spite of Peter’s efforts, be brought properly to consider him as an heir. His goings out and his comings in were of little consequence to the head of the house. So when at six o’clock Gervase came into the study, his father was quite unimpressed.

“May I speak to you for a minute, Sir?”

“Well, well—what is it?”

Sir John dipped Country Life the fraction of an inch to imply a temporary hearing.

“It’s about Jenny, Sir.”

“Well, what about her?”

“She’s—I’ve been with her in town today. I’ve just come back. She asked me to tell you about her and young Godfrey.”

“What’s that? Speak up, Sir, can’t you? I can’t hear when you mumble. Come and stand where I can see you.”

Gervase came and stood on the hearthrug. He was beginning to feel nervous. Uncomfortable memories of childhood rushed up confusedly from the back of his mind, and gave him sore feelings of helplessness and inferiority.

“It’s about Jenny and young Godfrey, Sir.”

“Godfrey! Who’s Godfrey?”

“Benjamin Godfrey of Fourhouses—the man who bought your Snailham land.”

“Well, what about him?”

“It’s about him and Jenny, Sir.”

“Well, what about ’em? What the devil’s he got to do with Jenny?”

“Don’t you remember she went to tea at Fourhouses last week?”

“She hasn’t been there again, has she?”

Gervase considered that the subject had been sufficiently led up to—anyhow he could stand no more of the preliminaries.

“Well, yes, Sir—at least she’s having tea with him now—at least not tea.... I mean, they were married this morning.”

Sir John dropped Country Life.

“Married this morning,” he repeated in a lame, normal voice.

“Yes, Sir, at St. Ethelburga’s, Paddington. They’ve been in love with each other for some time, but as they didn’t expect you’d quite see things as they did, they thought they’d better wait to tell you till after the ceremony.”

“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——”

“My God!” said Peter.

He was perhaps the most scandalised of all the Alards, and had about him a solemn air of wounding which was more distressing to Gervase than his father’s wrath.

“I introduced him to her,” he said heavily—“I introduced him. I never thought ... how could I think ... that she held herself so cheap—all of us so cheap.”

“You really needn’t treat the matter as if Jenny had married the rag-and-bone man——” began Gervase.

“I know Godfrey’s position quite well.”

“He farms his own land, and comes of good old stock. He’s well off, and will be able to give her everything she’s been accustomed to——”

“He won’t. She’s been accustomed to the society of gentlepeople, and he’ll never be able to give her that. She’s gone to live on a farm, where she’ll have her meals in the kitchen with the farm-men. I tell you I know the Godfreys, and they’re nothing more than a respectable, good sort of farming people who’ve done well out of the war. At least, I won’t call them even that now,” he added fiercely—“I won’t call a man respectable who worms himself into intimacy with my sister on the strength of my having introduced him.”

“However, it’s some comfort to think they’ve gone to the Poldhu hotel at Mullion,” said Lady Alard; “the Blakelocks were there once, you know, Doris, and the Reggie Mulcasters. She won’t notice the difference quite so terribly since he’s taken her there.”

“Yes, she will,” said Peter—“she’ll notice the difference between the kind of man she’s been used to meeting here and a working farmer, who wasn’t even an officer during the war. If she doesn’t—I’ll think worse of her even than I do now. And as for you——” turning suddenly on Gervase—“I don’t trust myself to tell you what I think of you. I expect you’re pleased that we’ve suffered this disgrace—that a lady of our house has married into the peasantry. You think it’s democratic and all that. You’re glad—don’t say you’re not.”

“Yes, I am glad, because Jenny’s happy. You, none of you, seem to think of that. You don’t seem to think that ‘the kind of man she’s been meeting here’ hasn’t been the slightest use to her—that all he’s done has been to trouble her and trifle with her and then go off and marry money—that now at last she’s met a man who’s treated her honourably——”

“Honourably! He’s treated her like the adventurer he is. Oh, it’s a fine thing of him to marry into our family, even if she hasn’t got a penny—his ancestors were our serfs—they ran at our people’s stirrups, and our men had the droit du seigneur of their women——”

“And pulled out the teeth of your wife’s forefathers,” said Gervase, losing his temper. “If you’re going back five hundred years, I don’t think your own marriage will bear the test.”

He knew that if he stayed he would quarrel with them all, and he did not want to do that, for he was really sorry for them, wounded in their most sensitive feelings of family pride. He walked out of the room, and made for the attic stairs, seeking the rest and dignity of solitude. But it was not to be. The door of his father’s dressing-room opened as he passed, and Sir John came out on the landing, already dressed for dinner.

“You understand that after what has happened I cannot keep you here.”

He was quite calm now, and rather terrifying.

“I—oh, no—I mean yes, of course,” stammered Gervase.

“You have work at Ashford, so you can go and lodge near it. Or you can go to your Ritualist friends at Vinehall. I refuse to have you here after your treachery. You are a traitor, Sir—to your own family.”

“When—when would you like me to go?”

“You can stay till tomorrow morning.”

“Thanks—I’ll leave tonight.”

So the day’s catastrophe ended in Gervase driving off through the darkness in Henry Ford, his suit-case and a few parcels of books behind him. He had decided to go to Luce—the Priest would take him in till he was able to go to Thunders Abbey.

“Well, anyhow, I’m spared that other row,” he thought to himself; “or, rather, I’ve got through two rows in one. Father won’t mind what I do with myself after this.”

He felt rather forlorn as the lorry’s lights swept up the Vinehall road. During the last few months he had been stripped of so many things—his devotion to Stella, his comradeship with Jenny—he knew that he could never be to her what he had been before she married—and now his family and his home. And all he had to look forward to was a further, more complete stripping, even of the clothes he wore, so that in all the world he would own nothing.