It was twenty years since Faith Clay Formby, a romantic girl of nineteen, had been swept off her feet by Adam Penhallow, a great, handsome, dark man, twenty two years her senior, and had left the shelter of her aunt’s house to marry him. She had been very pretty in those days, with large blue eyes, the softest of fair curls, and the most appealing mouth in the world. Penhallow’s age had lent him an added enchantment; he knew just how to handle a shy girl; and the knowledge that he was a rake did not in anyway detract from his charm. She had been flattered, had pictured to herself the future, when she would be mistress of a Manor in Cornwall, moving gracefully about the beautiful old house, worshipped by her (reformed) husband, adored by her stepchildren. She had meant to be so kind to his motherless family. She was prepared to encounter enmity, but she would win them over by her patience, and her understanding, until, within a few months, they would all confide in her, and vie with one another in waiting on her.
At first glance, Trevellin had been all and more than she had imagined. Situated not many miles from Liskeard, the big Tudor house, with its Dutch gables, its fall chimney-stacks, its many mullioned windows, was large enough and lovely enough to draw a gasp from her. She saw it on a clear summer’s evening, cool grey in a setting of pasture-land, with its walled gardens bright with flowers, its heavy oak doors standing hospitably open, and allowing her, before she set foot across the threshold, a glimpse of floors black with age, of a warped gateleg table, of a warming-pan hanging on a panelled wall. North of Trevellin, in the distance, the Moor rose up, grand in the mellow evening light. Penhallow had pointed out Rough Tor to her, and had asked her if she could smell the sharp peat-scent in the air. Oh, yes, it had quite come up to her expectations! Even the discovery that most of the bewildering number of rooms in the house were badly in need of decoration; that many of the carpets and curtains were shabby; that the most hideous examples of a Victorian cabinet-maker’s art stood cheek by jowl with pieces of Chippendale, or Hepplewhite; that it would have needed an army of servants to keep so rambling a house in good order, failed to dash her spirits. She would change all that.
But she couldn’t change Penhallow’s children.
Whatever picture she had conjured up faded, never again to be recalled, at that first sight of them, drawn up in formidable array for her inspection. It was forcibly borne in upon her that her eldest stepson was of the same age as herself, and a good deal more assured. Had Penhallow told her that Raymond was nineteen? She didn’t know; probably he had, but she was the type of woman who found little difficulty in glossing over such information as did not fit into her dream-pictures, and she had forgotten it.
There they had stood, seven of them, ranging in age from nineteen to five: Raymond, scowling and taciturn; Ingram, taller than Raymond, and brusque in manner; Eugene, a slim edition of Ingram, but with a livelier countenance, and, even at fifteen, a quick, bitter tongue; Charmian, five years younger than Eugene, as blackbrowed as the rest of the family, and quite as hardy; Aubrey looking, at eight, deceptively delicate; the twins, sturdy and unfriendly little boys of five, resisting all her attempts to cuddle them, and plunging after their great, rough brothers.
They showed no enmity towards their stepmother; they did not appear to feel the smallest pang of resentment at her stepping into their mother’s shoes. It was some time before she had realised that they had encountered, and taken for granted, too many of Penhallow’s mistresses to cavil at a second wife. She had a horrifying suspicion that they regarded her from the start as just another of Penhallow’s women, to be tolerated, but not admitted into their charmed circle. She had pictured them as neglected: she had never imagined that she would find them revelling in neglect, impatient of caresses, tumbling in and out of scrapes, scandalising the countryside, dodging their father’s wrath, never happy except when astride plunging horses, the very sight of which terrified her.
She had never had a chance to mother them. You couldn’t mother a young man as old as yourself; or striplings who despised the tenderer emotions; or a wild, wiry little girl who scornfully rescued you from a field full of aggressive-looking bullocks, and thought you a fool for calling a blood-mare “a pretty horse”. As for Aubrey, and the twins, their creature comforts were administered to them by Martha, and whatever fondness they had for any female was given to her. Her overtures had not been repulsed so much as endured; she had never been able to flatter herself that her marriage to Penhallow had made the smallest difference to any one of them.
She had tried, of course, to shape herself into the pattern Penhallow desired, even learning to ride under his ruthless instruction. She endured hours of sick terror in the saddle, never achieving mastery over any but the quietest old horse in the stable; and she cried because Penhallow roared with laughter at her; and sometimes wondered why she had married him, and still more why he had married her. She had not enough perception to realise that Penhallow never weighed a question in his impatient mind, never subordinated his body’s needs to the counsel of his brain, never troubled to look to the future. He had wanted to possess Faith, and since he could not get her without marrying her, he had married her, leaving the future to providence, or perhaps not even caring for it.
She had never understood him, probably never would; and although his love-making frightened her sometimes, she was too young and innocent to realise, until the knowledge was forcibly borne in upon her, that she had married an incontinent man who would never be faithful to one woman all his life long. She was shocked beyond measure, and bitterly hurt, when she first discovered that he had a mistress; and might have left him had she not been pregnant at the time. Her son, Clay, was born, and after that there could be no question of leaving Penhallow. But she did not love Penhallow any more. She was sickly all through the months of her pregnancy, nervous, and often peevish. Still living in a world of make-believe, forming her expectations on what she had read between the covers of novels, she imagined that Penhallow would treat her with loving solicitude, waiting on her tenderly, begging her to take care of herself, and certainly pacing the floor in an agony of dread while her child was born. But Rachel Ottery, his first wife, had borne her children without fuss or complication, riding her high-bred horses to within a few weeks of her deliveries, and making no more ado over the whole business than she would have made over the extraction of a tooth. Penhallow, then, had little patience with an ailing, querulous wife, and no more sympathy with her nervous fears than he had with what he thought was her squeamishness. Faith, who believed that the more primitive functions of the human body were “not nice”, and could only be spoken of under a veil of euphemism; who called bitches lady-dogs; and who would certainly tell the twins that God had sent them a little baby brother, felt her very soul shrink at Penhallow’s crudities. On the day that he jovially informed the Vicar that his wife was breeding, she knew that she had married a brute; and on that day died her youth.
Clay was born at four o’clock on a damp autumn day. Scent was breast-high; Penhallow was hunting. He came into Faith’s room at seven, mud-splashed, smelling of the stables and leather and spirits, singing out: “Well, my girl, well? How are you feeling now? Clever, eh? Where’s the young Penhallow? Let’s have a look at the little rascal!”
But he had not thought much of Clay, a wizened scrap, tucked up in a cradle all hung with muslin and blue ribbons. “Damme if ever I saw such a puny little rat!” he said, accustomed to Rachel’s bouncing, lusty babies. “Not much Penhallow about him!”
Perhaps because he saw so little of the Penhallow in this youngest son he permitted Faith to give him her own name, Clay. The child was inclined to be weakly, a fault ascribed by Penhallow to Faith’s cosseting of herself when she was bearing him. He was a tow-headed baby, darkening gradually to an indeterminate brown, and with his mother’s colouring he inherited her timid disposition. Nothing terrified him as much as the sound of his father’s voice upraised either in wrath, or in boisterous joviality; he would burst into tears if startled; he early
developed a habit of sheltering behind his mother; and was continually complaining to her that his half-brothers had been unkind to him. In defence of him, Faith could find the courage to fight. She dared her stepsons to lay a finger on her darling, and was so sure that their rough ways must harm him that she instilled into his head a dread of them which they had in actual fact done little to deserve. The twins certainly bullied him, but the elder Penhallows, who would have goodnaturedly taught him to ride, and to fish, and to shoot, and to defend himself with his fists, had he shown the least spark of spirit, shrugged their shoulders, and generally ignored him. Fortunately for himself, he was intelligent, and managed to win a scholarship to a public school of good standing. Penhallow, who had allowed the younger sons of his first marriage to be educated locally, in the most haphazard fashion, said that as he didn’t seem to be good for much else, he might as well get some solid book-learning into his head, and raised no objection to his taking up the scholarship. Later, he was to consent to his going on to Cambridge, where he was at present. For this, Faith had Raymond to thank. “He’s no damned good to anyone, and we don’t want him here, eating his head off,” Raymond had said bluntly. Penhallow had seen the force of this argument. Clay was the only one of his sons whom he did not wish to keep at home. He said the sight of the boy’s pasty face and girlish ways turned his stomach.
The boy’s colouring had from the outset been a source of mortification to him. The Penhallows, with their usual forthrightness, animadverted frequently on the incongruity of light hair in a Penhallow; and casual visitors were all too apt to comment artlessly on it, saying that it was strange to meet a fair member of that family, resenting these remarks as much as Clay, wondered why the Penhallow in him should be expected to predominate, and would say in an aggrieved tone that , the first Mrs Penhallow had been as dark as Penhallow himself it was not surprising that his elder sons should be all dark as was apparently desired.
Faith used to stare at the portrait of Rachel Penhallow, which hung in the hall, trying to imagine what kind of a woman she had been, how she had managed to hold her own against Penhallow, or if she had not. She thought that she had: the painted face was strong, even arrogant, with hard challenging eyes, and a full underlie thrusting lip against the upper. Faith felt that she would have disliked Rachel, perhaps have been afraid of her; and sometimes, in one of her morbidly fanciful moods, she would take the notion into her head that the painted eyes mocked her. She would have liked to have thought that Rachel’s spirit brooded darkly over the house, for she was superstitious by inclination, but it was impossible to suppose that any other spirit than Penhallow’s reigned at Trevellin. So curious was she about her predecessor that during the early years of her marriage, she was forever trying to make those who had known Rachel intimately talk of her, even cultivating a friendship with Delia Ottery, who was Rachel’s younger sister, and who lived with her brother Phineas in a square grey house on the outskirts of Bodmin. But the inconsequent stories Delia told of Rachel did not help her to form a composite picture, because it was plain that Delia, admiring her sister, had yet had no real understanding of her. She knew what Rachel did, but not what Rachel was. She had an unspeculative mind, and was, besides, stupid and very shy. She had developed into the old maid of fiction: there could be nothing in common between her and Faith; and the friendship languished. It had lasted for long enough to provide the young Penhallows with food for ribaldry, Delia having always been regarded by them as the Family Eccentric.
It would have been better for Faith could she but have found a friend, but this she was unable to do, being convinced that she could have nothing in common with her neighbours. They were country-bred, and she was never able to interest herself in country pursuits, always preferring to dwell upon the amenities of the life she had abandoned when she married Penhallow rather than to adapt herself to circumstances. Her relations with the matrons of the district never extended beyond acquaintanceship. She blamed the inelasticity of their minds; it was not given to her to understand that a craving for sympathy was no foundation for friendship.
This craving had grown with the years; because of it she had taken Loveday Trewithian out of the kitchen, and had promoted her to be her personal maid, and, later, her confidante. Loveday was gentle, and patient. She would listen to Faith’s complainings, and agree that she was hardly used; and she invested her services with a tender cajolery immensely gratifying to a woman who all her life long had passionately desired to be cosseted, and considered.
“Oh, Loveday!” Faith said, in her fretful voice, when Loveday came into her bedroom. “Has anything happened?”
Beside the fair, faded woman in bed, with the thin hands and dilating blue eyes, Loveday Trewithian seemed to glow with life and vigour. She lifted the breakfast-tray from her mistress’s knees, and smiled down at her warmly. “It’s nothing,” she said soothingly.
“I thought I heard Mr Penhallow shouting,” Faith said falteringly.
“Yes, sure,” Loveday said. “My uncle Reuben’s saying it’s Mr Aubrey that’s made him angry. You don’t need to upset yourself, ma’am.”
Faith relaxed on to her pillows with a little sigh, her mind relieved of its most pressing anxiety, that Clay, whose career at Cambridge was not fulfilling his early promise, might have done something to enrage his father. She watched Loveday set the tray down near the door, and begin to move about the room, laying out what clothes she thought Faith would wear. Her mind turned to a lesser care; she said: “The bath water was tepid again this morning. I do think Sybilla might pay a little attention to it."
“I’ll speak to her for you, ma’am, never fear! They say it’s the system that’s wrong.”
“Everything’s out-of-date or out-of-order in this house!” I’aith said.
“It isn’t fit for a delicate lady like you, ma’am, to have to live where there’s so little comfort,” murmured Loveday. “It’s wonderful the way you put up with it, surely.”
“Nobody cares whether it’s fit for me or not,” Faith said. “I’m used to that. Trevellin never agreed with me. I never feel well here, and you know how badly I sleep. I had to take my drops last night, and even then I had a wretched night!”
“It’s your nerves, and no wonder!” Loveday said. “You ought to get away for a change, ma’am, if I may say so. This is no place for you.”
“I wish I could go away, and never come back!” Faith said, half to herself.
A knock sounded on the door, and before she could reply to it Vivian had walked in. Loveday set the brushes straight on the dressing-table, picked up the breakfast tray, and went away. Faith saw from the crease between Vivian’s brows that she was in one of her moods, and at once said in a failing voice that she had passed a miserable night and had a splitting headache.
“I’m not surprised at all,” responded Vivian. “Your precious husband saw to it we should all have thoroughly disturbed nights.”
“Oh! I didn’t know,” Faith said nervously. “Was he awake in the night?”
“Was he! You’re lucky: you don’t sleep on his side of the house. When he wasn’t pealing his bell, he was shouting for Martha. Disgusting old hag!” Vivian took a cigarette from a battered packet in the pocket of her tweed jacket, and lit it. “Is it true that she was one of his mistresses?” she asked casually. “Eugene says she was.”
Faith flushed scarlet, and sat up in bed. “That’s just the sort of thing Eugene would say!” she said angrily. “And I should have thought you would have had more decent feeling than to have repeated it to me!”
“Oh, sorry!” Vivian answered. “Only Penhallow’s affairs are always so openly talked about that I didn’t think you’d mind. It’s no use pretending you don’t know anything about them, Faith, because of course you do. And for God’s sake don’t pretend that you mind, because I know darned well you don’t.”
"Well, I do mind!” said Faith. “You needn’t think that because I say nothing I like having that old woman in my house, doin
g all the sort of things for Adam which any decent man would have had a valet for! But I think it’s disgraceful of Eugene to go about saying she used to be Adam’s mistress! Even if it were true, such things are better not spoken of.”
“I don’t know,” Vivian said reflectively. “Practically the only thing I like about the Penhallows — except Eugene, of course — is their way of having everything aboveboard ;and freely spoken of. I mean, there’s nothing furtive about them.”
“I was brought up to consider that certain things were better left unsaid!” said Faith primly.
“So was I, and damned dull it was. If you wouldn’t pretend so much—”
“You seem to forget that I’m Eugene’s stepmother,” said Faith, snatching at the rags of her dignity.
“Oh, don’t be silly! You’re not quite eleven years older than I am, and I know perfectly well that you loathe this place as much as I do. But I do think you might do something to make it more possible! After all, you’re Penhallow’s wife! But just look at the servants, for a start! Sybilla’s just been extremely insolent to Eugene, and as for Reuben, and that loathsome creature, Jimmy-"
“It’s no use complaining to me,” interrupted Faith. “I can’t do anything about it. And Sybilla’s a good cook. I should like to know who else would stay in a place like this, or cook for a positive army of people on a stove that was out-of-date twenty years ago! I’m only thankful she and Reuben do stay.”
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