Suddenly a twisted grin dawned. “Pigeon-hearted imbecile! No, I don’t mean you, and you know I don’t! Wilton, I’m blue-devilled!”

“Yes, my lord. It has been noticed that you are a trifle out of sorts.”

Rotherham burst out laughing. “Why don’t you say as sulky as a bear, and be done with it? I give you leave! You don’t exasperate me by shaking like a blancmanger merely because I look at you!”

“Oh, no, my lord! But, then, I have known you for a very long time, and have become quite accustomed to your fits of the sullens,” said Mr Wilton reassuringly.

Rotherham’s eyes gleamed appreciation. “Wilton, are you never out of temper?”

“In my position, my lord, one is obliged to master one’s ill-humour,” said Mr Wilton.

Rotherham flung up a hand. “Touché! Damn you, how dare you?”

Mr Wilton smiled at him. “Shall I bring Mr Monksleigh to you here, my lord?”

“No, certainly not! Send Peaslake to do so! You can tell him I won’t snap his nose off, if you like!”

“Very well, my lord,” said Mr Wilton, and withdrew.

A few minutes later, the butler opened the door, and announced Mr Monksleigh, and Rotherham’s eldest ward strode resolutely into the room.

A slender young gentleman, dressed in the extreme of fashion, with skin-tight pantaloons of bright yellow, and starched shirt-points so high that they obscured his cheekbones, he was plainly struggling with conflicting emotions. Wrath sparkled in his eyes, but trepidation had caused his cheeks to assume a somewhat pallid hue, He came to a halt in the middle of the room, gulped, drew an audible breath, and uttered explosively: “Cousin Rotherham! I must and will speak to you!”

“Where the devil did you get that abominable waistcoat?” demanded Rotherham.

17

Since Mr Monksleigh had occupied himself, while left to wait in the Green Saloon, in composing and silently rehearsing his opening speech, this entirely unexpected question threw him off his balance. He blinked, and stammered: “It isn’t ab-bominable! It’s all the c-crack!”

“Don’t let me see it again! What do you want?”

Mr Monksleigh, touched on the raw, hesitated. On the one hand, he was strongly tempted to defend his taste in waistcoats; on the other, he had been given the cue for his opening speech. He decided to respond to it, drew another deep breath, and said, in rather too high-pitched a voice, and much more rapidly than he had intended: “Cousin Rotherham! Little though you may relish my visit, little though you may like what I have to say, reluctant though you may be to reply to me, I will not submit to being turned away from your door! It is imperative—”

“You haven’t been turned away from my door.”

“It is imperative that I should have speech with you!” said Mr Monksleigh.

“You are having speech with me—a vast deal of speech! How much?”

Choking with indignation, Mr Monksleigh said: “I didn’t come to ask you for money! I don’t want any money!”

“Good God! Aren’t you in debt?”

“No, I am not! Well, nothing to signify!” he amended. “And if I hadn’t had to come all the way to Claycross to find you I should be quite plump in the pocket, what’s more! Naturally, I didn’t bargain for that! There’s no way of living economically if one is obliged to dash all over the country, but that wasn’t my fault! First there was the hack, to carry me to Aldersgate; then there was my ticket on the mail-coach; and the tip to the guard; and another to the coachman, of course; and then I had to hire a chaise-and-pair to bring me here from Gloucester; and as a matter of fact I shall have to ask you for an advance on next quarter’s allowance, unless you prefer to lend me some blunt. I daresay you think I ought to have travelled on the stage, but—”

“Have I said so?”

“No, but—”

“Then wait until I do! What have you come to say to me?”

“Cousin Rotherham!” began MrMonksleigh again.

“I’m not a public meeting!” said Rotherham irascibly. “Don’t say Cousin Rotherham! every time you open your mouth! Say what you have to say like a reasonable being! And sit down!

Mr Monksleigh flushed scarlet, and obeyed, biting his oversensitive lip. He stared resentfully at his guardian, lounging behind his desk, and watching him with faint scorn in his eyes. He had arrived at Claycross so burning with the sense of his wrongs that had Rotherham met him on the doorstep he felt sure that he could have discharged his errand with fluency, dignity, and forcefulness. But first he had been kept waiting for twenty minutes; next he had been obliged to suspend his oratory to admit that a monetary advance would be welcome—indeed, necessary, if the post-boys were to be paid; and now he had been sharply called to order as though he had been a schoolboy. All these things had a damping effect upon him, but, as he stared at Rotherham, every ill he had suffered at his hands, every malicious spoke that had been thrust into his ambitions, and every cruel set-down he had received, came into his mind, and a sense of injury gave him courage to speak. “It is of a piece with all the rest!” he said suddenly, kneading his hands together between his knees.

“What is?”

“You know very well! Perhaps you thought I shouldn’t dare speak to you! But—”

“If I thought that, I’ve learnt my mistake!” interpolated Rotherham. “What the devil are you accusing me of?” He perceived that his ward was labouring under strong emotion, and said, with a good deal of authority in his voice, but much less asperity: “Come, Gerard, don’t be a gudgeon! What am I supposed to have done?”

“Everything you could, to blight every ambition I ever had!” Gerard replied, with a suppressed violence.

Rotherham looked considerably taken aback. “Comprehensive!” he said dryly.

“It’s true! You never liked me! Just because I didn’t wish to hunt, or box, or play cricket, or shoot, or—or any of the things you like, except fishing, and it’s no thanks to you I do like fishing, because you forbade me to borrow your rods, as though I had intended to break it—I mean—”

“What you mean,” said Rotherham ruthlessly, “is that I taught you in one sharp lesson not to take my rods without leave! If this is a sample of the various ways in which I have blighted your ambition—”

“Well, it isn’t! I only—Well, anyway, I shouldn’t care for that if it weren’t for all the rest! It has been one thing after another! When I was at Eton, and had the chance to spend the summer holidays sailing with friends, could I prevail upon you to give your consent? No! You sent me to that miserable grinder, just because my tutor told you I shouldn’t pass Little-Go. Much he knew about it! But of course you chose to believe him, and not me, because you have always taken a—a malicious delight in thwarting me! Ay! and when you knew that I wanted to go up to Oxford, with my particular friends, you sent me to Cambridge! If that was not malice, what was it?”

Rotherham, who had stretched both legs out, was lying back in his chair, with his ankles crossed, and his hands in, the pockets of his buckskin breeches, regarding his incensed ward with a look of sardonic amusement He said: “A desire to separate you from your particular friends. Go on!”

This answer not unnaturally fanned the flames of Mr Monksleigh’s fury. “You admit it! I guessed as much! All of a piece! Yes, and you refused to lend me the money to get my poems published, and not content with that, you insulted me!”

“Did I?” said Rotherham, faintly surprised.

“You know you did! You said you liked better security for your investments!”

“That was certainly unkind. You must blame my unfortunate manner! I’ve never had the least finesse, I fear. However, I can’t feel that I blighted that ambition. You’ll be of age in little more than a year, and then you can pay to have the poems published yourself.”

“And I shall do so! And also,” said Gerard belligerently, “I shall choose what friends I like, and go where I like, and do what I like!”

“Rake’s Progress. Have I chosen any friends for you, by the way?”

“No, you haven’t! All you do is to object to my friends! Would you permit me to visit Brighton, that time, when Lord Grosmont asked me to go along with him? No, you would not! But that wasn’t the worst! Last year! When I came down in the middle of term, after Boney escaped from Elba, and begged you to give me permission to enroll as a volunteer! Did you listen to a word I said? Did you consider the matter? Did you give me permission? Did—”

“No,” interrupted Rotherham unexpectedly. “I did not.” Disconcerted by this sudden answer to his rhetorical questions Gerard glared at him. “And very poor-spirited I thought you, to submit so tamely to my decree,” Rotherham added.

A vivid flush rose to Gerard’s face. He said hotly: “I was forced to submit! You have always had the whip-hand! I have been obliged to do as you ordered me, because you paid for my education, and for my brothers’, and Cambridge too, and if ever I had dared to—”

“Stop!” Such molten rage sounded in the one rapped-out word that Gerard quailed. Rotherham was no longer lounging in his chair, and there was no vestige of amusement in his face. It wore instead so unpleasant an expression that Gerard’s heart began to thud violently, and he felt rather sick. Rotherham was leaning forward, one hand on his desk, and clenched hard. “Have I ever held that threat over your head?” he demanded. “Answer me!”

“No!” Gerard said, his voice jumping nervously. “No, but—but I knew it was you who sent me to Eton, and now Ch-Charlie as well, and—”

“Did I tell you so?”

“No,” Gerard muttered, quite unable to meet those brilliant, angry eyes. “My mother—”

“Then how dare you speak to me like that, you insufferable cub?” Rotherham said sternly.

Scarlet-faced, Gerard faltered: “I—I beg your pardon! I didn’t mean—Of course, I am excessively grateful to you, C-Cousin Rotherham!”

“If I had wanted your damned gratitude I should have told you that I had taken upon myself the charge of your education! I don’t want it!”

Gerard cast a fleeting look up at him. “I’m glad you don’t! To know that I’m beholden to you—now!”

“Make yourself easy! You owe me nothing—any of you! I have done nothing for you!” Gerard looked up again, startled. “That surprises you, does it? Do you imagine that I cared the snap of my fingers how or where you were educated? You were wonderfully wrong! All I cared for was that your father’s sons should be educated as he was, and as he would have wished them to be! Anything I’ve chosen to do has been for him, not for you!”

Crestfallen, and considerably shaken, Gerard stammered: “I—I didn’t know! I beg your pardon! I didn’t mean to say—to say what I did say, precisely!”

“Very well,” Rotherham said curtly.

“I didn’t really think you would—”

“Oh, that will do, that will do!”

“Yes, but—I lost my temper! I shouldn’t have—”

Rotherham gave a short laugh. “Well, I must be the last man alive not to pardon you for that! Have you come to the end of your catalogue of my past crimes? What is my present offence?”

Mr Monksleigh, having been obliged to offer his guardian an apology, now found it extremely difficult to hurl his culminating accusation at him with anything approaching the passion requisite to convince him of the magnitude of the charge, and of his own desperate sincerity. He had been forced into a position of disadvantage, and the knowledge of this filled him with annoyance rather than with noble rage. He said sulkily: “You have ruined my life!”

It had sounded better, when he had uttered it in the Green Saloon. If Rotherham had been privileged to have heard it then, it would have shocked him out of his scornful indifference, and might even have penetrated his marble heart, and touched him with remorse. It certainly would not have amused him, which was the only effect it appeared now to have upon him. Venturing to steal a glance at him, Gerard saw that he was faintly smiling. The relaxing of his face from its appalling grimness, the quenching of the menacing glitter in his eyes, enabled Gerard to breathe much more easily, but did nothing to endear his guardian to him. Flushing angrily, he said: “You think that ridiculous, I daresay!”

“Damned ridiculous!”

“Yes! Because you have no more sensibility yourself than—than a stone, you think others have none!”