“Shall we be allowed to read it now it’s finished?” asked Denis.
Mr. Wimbush nodded. “Certainly,” he said. “And I hope you will not find it uninteresting,” he added modestly. “Our muniment room is particularly rich in ancient records, and I have some genuinely new light to throw on the introduction of the three-pronged fork.”
“And the people?” asked Gombauld. “Sir Ferdinando and the rest of them--were they amusing? Were there any crimes or tragedies in the family?”
“Let me see,” Henry Wimbush rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I can only think of two suicides, one violent death, four or perhaps five broken hearts, and half a dozen little blots on the scutcheon in the way of misalliances, seductions, natural children, and the like. No, on the whole, it’s a placid and uneventful record.”
“The Wimbushes and the Lapiths were always an unadventurous, respectable crew,” said Priscilla, with a note of scorn in her voice. “If I were to write my family history now! Why, it would be one long continuous blot from beginning to end.” She laughed jovially, and helped herself to another glass of wine.
“If I were to write mine,” Mr. Scogan remarked, “it wouldn’t exist. After the second generation we Scogans are lost in the mists of antiquity.”
“After dinner,” said Henry Wimbush, a little piqued by his wife’s disparaging comment on the masters of Crome, “I’ll read you an episode from my History that will make you admit that even the Lapiths, in their own respectable way, had their tragedies and strange adventures.”
“Glad to hear what?” asked Jenny, emerging suddenly from her private interior world like a cuckoo from a clock. She received an explanation, smiled, nodded, cuckooed at last “I see,” and popped back, clapping shut the door behind her.
Dinner was eaten; the party had adjourned to the drawing-room.
“Now,” said Henry Wimbush, pulling up a chair to the lamp. He put on his round pince-nez, rimmed with tortoise-shell, and began cautiously to turn over the pages of his loose and still fragmentary book. He found his place at last. “Shall I begin?” he asked, looking up.
In the midst of an attentive silence Mr. Wimbush gave a little preliminary cough and started to read.
“The infant who was destined to become the fourth baronet of the name of Lapith was born in the year 1740. He was a very small baby, weighing not more than three pounds at birth, but from the first he was sturdy and healthy. In honour of his maternal grandfather, Sir Hercules Occam of Bishop’s Occam, he was christened Hercules. His mother, like many other mothers, kept a notebook, in which his progress from month to month was recorded. He walked at ten months, and before his second year was out he had learnt to speak a number of words. At three years he weighed but twenty-four pounds, and at six, though he could read and write perfectly and showed a remarkable aptitude for music, he was no larger and heavier than a well-grown child of two. Meanwhile, his mother had borne two other children, a boy and a girl, one of whom died of croup during infancy, while the other was carried off by smallpox before it reached the age of five. Hercules remained the only surviving child.