Free Dance of the Years by Margery Allingham Page B

In her programme for him there was no escape by sublimation, no silly turning a disadvantage into an asset, nor yet magnifying it into a life tragedy. She just made him understand he had a special danger. By the time she had a quarter done talking to him, he was still able to consider himself an important addition to the human race, but one who had perhaps, a somewhat uncertain hold on that position. It made him a very good, very serious, very watchful little boy. All this was Dorothy’s doing, and in that she lived on in James until he died.
    The destructive part of her work on James lay, of course, in the things she told him which were not true. It was only because they were lies that her wild ideas about Shulie’s people did such bad work. They were false; they put him out.
    James grew to hate and fear Shulie, so that he lost much of her, and disliked that which he was forced to keep. Had she ever been a mother to him, so that he loved her, the complications might have been serious; but as it was, he was spared that ordeal by confusion. The older James grew the less he liked Shulie. She embarrassed him a hundred times a day. Coarsenesses which tickled old Galantry, who had no trace of them in himself, frightened James, who saw in them reminders of his own impulses. He avoided her as much as possible, and in secret imitated his father and the Vicar, who gave him his first lessons.
    It was over this question of education that James met his first fence. Old Galantry had been to Westminster School, then the first in the land, and had sent all his sons there. But when James’s turn arrived, a hitch occurred. Dorothy had been waiting for something like it. She found out all the details, passed them through the mill of her indignation, and let James have the result. The trouble was that about the time when James should have gone to the school, Galantry’s first grandchild, eldest son of Young Will and his wife, was due to go there also; and Young Will’s father-in-law sent him down to see Galantry with urgent representations that the uncle and nephew should not be allowed to be educated together. It was a narrow, unkindly move, infuriating to old Galantry and not pleasant for either of his sons, but it marked a change, a new era. The casual days of the eighteenth century had gone.
    Young Will arrived unexpectedly one hot Saturday afternoon about four o’clock, when James was sitting hidden in the shrubbery,a place of which he was very fond. He saw his half brother get out of the little box carriage, and noticed that both master and servant were in furious tempers. The man went round to the yard and the visitor strode into the house. James only saw his face for a moment, but he saw that he was ashamed-angry. These fine distinctions in emotion were very clear to James, and he never understood that he saw them more easily than do most people. On this occasion he was alarmed, for ashamed-anger he well knew was the most unreasonable, erratic anger of all. He kept out of the way all day, and the next thing he remembered about the incident was himself eating kidneys toasted on a fork for his supper in the breakfast-room, while Richard stood waiting to take him in to see his father and the newcomer, who were dining by themselves.
    He remembered afterwards the feeling of obstinate pleasure in the food slowly wearing down his apprehension about the coming interview. As they went through the hall, he looked up and saw Shulie peering over the banisters; curiosity and excitement and nervousness in her face. It was so exactly what he was feeling himself that he was suddenly angry with her as if she had taken something from him instead of him taking it from her. He scowled at her, and she drew back at once, eyeing him sulkily like another child. Even Richard was inquisitive. It was evident that something very unusual was happening, for old Galantry belonged to a period when no gentleman saw anybody, or anything for that