_Arnold was a fraud_ ... and a damned impertinent one! Well, it was his mother’s fault ... mothers were Bolsheviks, yes, _Bolsheviks_—by secret propaganda begun in the nursery setting the members of a family against their head. He was nothing to his children—_nothing_.
Just for a second he got a whiff of the sweet, nauseating, vertiginous, emotion he had experienced at the birth of each of them in turn—an emotion rather like the combined odours of _eau de Cologne_ and chloroform; an emotion which, like all the most poignant ones, had a strong flavouring of sadism; for it sprang from the strange fierce pleasure of knowing that the body he loved was being tortured to bear his children.
Yes, he had loved her ... there had been times ... well, was he going to put up with it for ever? _Oh_, how badly he had been used.
Finally he came to a resolution, the daring of which (such is the force of habit) half frightened him, while it made _his_ eyes in their turn bright and shining with pleasure.
The fire of October, which had first been kindled in a crimson semicircle of beeches burning through a blanket of mist on the outskirts of Plasencia, spread, a slow contagion, over all the land. The birch saplings in the garden became the colour of bracken. The border was gold and amethyst with chrysanthemums and Michaelmas daisies. And in the fields there lingered poppies, which of all flowers look the frailest, yet which are the last to go.
Imperceptibly, the breach widened between Teresa and Concha; Concha had now completely given up pretending that their relationship was an affectionate one, and they rarely spoke to each other.
It was evident, too, that the lack of harmony between their parents, noticeable since Pepa’s death, had recently become more pronounced.
Dick was often absent for days at a time; and one day Teresa happening to go into the Doña’s morning-room found her sitting on the sofa looking angry and troubled, a letter on her lap. Teresa took the letter—the Doña offering no protest—and read it. I was a bill to Dick from a London jeweller for a string of pearls. Puzzled, she looked questioningly at the Doña, who merely shrugged her shoulders.
In the servant’s hall, too, there seemed to be discord, rumours of which drifted upstairs _via_ Parker the maid, Parker had a way of beginning in the middle, which made her plot difficult to follow, but which perhaps had a certain value as a method of expressing such irrational things as the entanglement of primitive emotions. Her stories were like this: “And she said: ‘see you don’t get Minchin in the garden,’ and Mrs. Rudge said, ‘oh then some one else’s name would be Walker’; and I said, ‘if Dale hadn’t been killed in the War _he_ would be in your cottage and that’s what the War has done for _you_!’ and I said, ‘you’ve children, Mrs. Rudge,’ I said, ‘and I hope it won’t come knocking at _your_ door some day,’ and Lily said, ‘trust Parker to be after an unmarried man,’ and I said, ‘don’t be so rude, Lily, it’s Nosey Parker yourself ... even though I don’t go to chapel!’ That was one for Mrs. Rudge, you see: oh, they’re a set of beauties!”