Read Online The Pandervils by Gerald Bullet - Free Book Online

room.
    â€˜Well, Jinny, how are you, my dear, and all at home? You’ll stay to a cup of tea, won’t you?’ Seeing that Egg hovered in the doorway Mrs Pandervil added, with a smile: ‘Be off with you, my boy. Jinny’s come to talk to me. We don’t want young men about us, do we Jinny?’
    For answer, catching an imploring look from the girl, Egg diffidently stepped into the room and shut the door behind him. ‘She asked me to stay, mama. Made quite a point of it, she did. Do you mind?’
    Jinny said quickly: ‘Yes, Mrs Pandervil. I asked Egg to stay. Please let him. It’s about Willy that I’ve come, and Willy said …’
    Bright-eyed, the two women faced each other; the one alert, suspicious; the other already afraid and faltering. Egg, staring almost agape, was aware that the relationship between them had in an instant changed. In Jinny’s face the flame of her secret mounted; the light in his mother’s eyes was like the glint of steel. That one word, ‘Willy’, had made division where formerly there had been on his mother’s part nothing but goodwill, tinctured, perhaps, with curiosity; and, on Jinny’s, nothing but timid hope. Now, for an instant, they were at primitive enmity: jealous, implacable, ripe for murder.
    â€˜Ah!’ sighed Mrs Pandervil. With a satisfaction in which was a hint of cruelty—Egg’s starebecame incredulous—she watched the girl’s confusion. ‘I think we’ll sit down, maybe.’ They sank into chairs opposite each other. Egg remained standing by the door, forgotten by both of them.
    â€˜Well, Jinny Randall,’ said Mrs Pandervil, ‘what have you to say about my Willy?’
    The girl raised her eyes from the ground. ‘He was
my
Willy too, Mrs. Pandervil. That’s what I came to tell you.’
    Mrs Pandervil answered nothing. Her lips were set in a hard line, her gaze was unrelenting. She waited to hear more, yet contrived to let it appear that whatever more was said could not greatly interest her.
    â€˜He was mine, Mrs Pandervil,’ Jinny repeated. And after a pause she added, in a breathless whisper: ‘And I’m near my time.’
    â€˜Ah!’ said Mrs Pandervil again. ‘So that’s it!’ She turned in her chair. ‘Egbert, this is no place for you.’
    Egg, standing his ground, made no answer. That he should leave Jinny to the mercy of this strange woman, this mother he had never seen before, was out of the question. He was in the presence of something alien, monstrous, half-insane—something to which he could not even try to give a name; and he felt as perhaps a man may feel when for the first time he hears the sound of turning thumbscrews and creaking rack. Hatred and terror surged in the silent room; pain quivered into life but uttered no cry. To his secret sense, sword met sword, and the treacherous dagger flashed and fell;yet still unmoving, still without words, the antagonists gazed at each other.
    Presently the older woman got out of her chair, stepped rigidly a pace forward, and began speaking in low angry tones, while Jinny sat staring and flaming at the ground, twisting and untwisting her fingers. Egg—so oddly did the scene strike him—hardly listened to the words that were said. If these two women had been made of wood, they and their gestures could not have seemed to him more queer and stiff and unlifelike. He was bewildered by the release in his mother of a personality utterly strange to him. He had seen her angry; he had seen her sternly judicial; but he had never before been allowed to lose his sense of a fundamental kindness in her, and the experience was so shocking as to falsify everything that was said, everything that happened. The spate of denunciation flowed past him, so that he did not consciously hear it; but, after it was past, chance phrases returned to him to mingle with his circling thoughts. The