Part 7 (2/2)
”It is a pleasure.”
”I know just how it will be,” he complained mournfully, ”the moment Aymer is here you will hound me off to work and I shall see nothing of you at all. You won't even give me new pens. Charlotte, I should look horrid if I had no hair: be merciful.”
Renata smiled and shook her head. ”I shall get no more work out of you this side of Christmas, sir. I have no such impossible dreams. Perhaps Aymer won't want either of us now he has got Christopher.”
”I wonder now,” remarked Nevil, depositing Miss Charlotte on a seat while he took out his cigarette case, ”I wonder if you are jealous, Renata.”
She flushed indignantly and denied the fact with most unnecessary emphasis, so her husband told her in his gentle teasing way. He turned her face up to his and professed to look stern, which he never could do.
”Confess now,” he insisted. ”Just a little jealous of Christopher?”
”Well,” she admitted, laughing and still pink, ”Aymer has never stayed away from us for so long before. I don't know what was the use of his having those rooms done up for himself if he never means to use them.”
Renata continued to pick violets, and Max to decapitate those he could find. The dachshund and kitten continued to watch with absorbing interest, and Nevil continued to smoke and to let Charlotte investigate his cigarette case till her mother turned round and saw her.
”You dreadful child!” she cried, ”Nevil, just look. Charlotte is sucking the ends of your horrid cigarettes! How can you let her?”
Charlotte was rescued from the cigarettes, or the cigarettes from Charlotte, with considerable difficulty and at the cost of many tears.
Indeed her protestations were so loud that nurse appeared and bore her and Max away and silence again reigned in the warm garden between the sunny borders.
The dachshund gave a sigh and flopped down on the path, and the kitten began a toilet for want of better employment. Renata, who had stood aside during the small domestic storm, gazed at her violets gravely as if she were counting them.
Nevil watched her contentedly and did not observe the trouble in her face.
”Nevil,” she said at last, ”about Charlotte I wonder--do you think----” she stopped and edged a little nearer her husband and slipped her hand in his.
”Well, dear?”
”You don't think, do you, Nevil, that Charlotte is--is getting like Patricia?”
He put his arm round her and drew her down on the seat.
”You dear silly child, no,” he said, kissing her.
She seemed only half a.s.sured and leant her head against him, sighing.
”It is quite, quite different,” he insisted. ”Charlotte's temper is just like anyone else's, yours or mine, or anyone's.”
”Yours--you haven't got one,” she returned with pretended contempt and then lapsed back into her troubled mien, ”but I feel so frightened sometimes.”
”My dear, be reasonable. Patricia's temper isn't a temper at all.
It's--it's a possession--a wretched family inheritance. She can't help it, poor child, any more than she could help a squint or a crooked nose, and she doesn't inherit it from _your_ mother but only from your step-father, so why on earth you should imagine it likely to crop up in our family I can't conceive. It's absurd.”
He tilted her pretty face up to his again and kissed her. Nevil would like to have killed all his wife's cares with a caress. It is not always a successful method, but it is more efficacious than the world believes.
”Of course I know all that, though Patricia always seems quite like my own sister. I do hope Christopher won't tease her.”
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