The Jervaise Comedy Part 26

"I knew you saw us," she returned in the same even tone that she had used all through this conversation of ours. She had not once raised or lowered her voice. She might have been speaking a part, just to test her memory.

"Yes, I did," I said. "Quite by accident, of course. I had no idea that he had come up here. I hadn't seen him since breakfast."

"It was a mistake," she said simply.

I looked up at her, hoping with no shadow of reason that I might have played some part in her discovery that that caress in the wood had been a mistake. But she had not changed colour nor moved her att.i.tude, and her voice was still free from any emotion as she said,--

"We thought, Brenda and I thought, that we might trick him. It was a piece of chicane. She and I were rather silly this morning. We excite each other. In a sort of way she dared me. But I was sorry afterwards and so was Brenda, although she thought it might be better as I'd gone so far to keep it up until Arthur had got a promise or something out of Mr.

Jervaise. I had meant to do that. I don't know why I didn't."

"But do you think that Frank Jervaise realises that you were only playing with him for your own ends, this morning?" I asked.

"Oh! yes," she said with perfect a.s.surance. "As a matter of fact, he was very suspicious this morning. He's like his mother and sister in suspecting everybody."

"Do you think he'll make trouble?" I said. "Now? Up at the Hall?"

"Yes, I do. He's vindictive," she replied. "That's one reason why I'm glad you are with us, now. It might help--though I don't quite see how. Perhaps it's just the feeling of having some one else on our side. Because I'm afraid that there's going to be a lot of trouble when my father and mother come home. With my father, more particularly. He'll be afraid of being turned out. It will be very difficult to make him take up a new idea.

He'll hate the thought of leaving here and starting all over again in Canada. He loves this place so."

"And I suppose he likes, or at least respects, the Jervaises?" I said.

"Not much," she replied. "They've made it very difficult for us in many ways."

"Deliberately?" I suggested.

"They don't care," she said, warming a little for the first time. "They simply don't think of any one but themselves. For instance, it mayn't seem much to you, but it's part of our agreement with Mr. Jervaise to provide the Hall with dairy when they're at home--at market prices, of course. And then they'll go to town for two or three months in the summer and take a lot of the servants with them, and we're left to find a market for our dairy as best we can, just when milk is most plentiful." She lifted her hands for a moment in a graceful French gesture as she added, "Often it means just giving milk away."

"Does your father complain about that?" I asked.

She turned and looked at me with a complete change of expression. Her abstraction had vanished, giving place to an air that confessed a deliberate caprice.

"To _us_," she said with a laugh that delightfully indulged her father's weakness.

I needed nothing more to illuminate the relations of the Banks family.

With that single gesture she had portrayed her father's character, and her own and her mother's smiling consideration for him. Nevertheless I was still interested in his att.i.tude towards the Hall--with Anne as interpreter. I knew that I should get a version noticeably different from the one her brother had given me on the hill that morning.

"But you said that your father hadn't much _respect_ for the Jervaises?" I stipulated.

"Not for the Jervaises as individuals," she amended, "but he has for the Family. And they aren't so much a family to him as an Idea, an Inst.i.tution, a sort of Religion. Nothing would break him of that, nothing the Jervaises themselves ever could do. He'd be much more likely to lose his faith in G.o.d than in the Rights of the Hall. That's one of his sayings. He says they have rights, as if there was no getting over that.

It's just like people used to believe in the divine right of kings."

I do not know whether I was more fascinated by her theme or by her exposition of it. "Then, how is it that the rest of you...?" I began, but she had not the patience to wait while I finished the question. She was suddenly eager, vivid, astonishingly alive; a different woman from the Anne who had spoken as if in her sleep, while plunged in some immense, engrossing meditation.

"My mother," she broke in. "The Jervaises mean nothing to her, nothing of that sort. She wasn't brought up on it. It isn't in her blood. In a way she's as good as they are. Her grandfather was an emigre from the Revolution--not t.i.tled except just for the 'de', you know--they had an estate near Rouen ... but all this doesn't interest you."

"It does, profoundly," I said.

She looked at me with a spice of mischief in her eyes. "Why?" she asked.

It was a tempting opening for a flirtation, but I could not flirt with her. When I had first heard the clear, soft tones of her voice at the window, I must have known that my meeting with her was a new and decisive experience. I had always idealised a certain type of woman, and perhaps for that reason I had always held back from the possible disillusions of an exploring intimacy. But my recognition of Anne had nothing in common with all my old deliberately romantic searchings for a theoretical affinity. If I had been asked at any time before two o'clock that morning to define my ideal, the definition would not have described Anne. Indeed, I could never have imagined her. She was altogether too individual, too positive, too independently real, to fit the mawkish vapourings of a man's imaginary woman. There was something about her that conquered me. Already I was blushingly ashamed of my jealous suspicion that she could sell herself by a marriage with Jervaise. In all her moods, she appeared to me with an effect that I can only describe as "convincing."

She was a perpetual revelation, and each new phase of her thrilled me with admiration, and a sense of long-sought satisfaction. I could be content to watch and to listen to her. The revelations of her personality were to me as a continual and glorious adventure. To flirt with her would be a confession on my part of a kind of superiority that I could never feel; a suggestion of the ridiculous a.s.sumption that I could afford to dally with and in certain circ.u.mstances flout her. I could sooner have dallied with and flouted a supreme work of art. Wherefore when she challenged me with her daring "Why?" I met her eyes with a look that if it in any way represented what I was feeling, must have expressed a grave and sincere humility.

"I can hardly tell you why," I said. "I can only a.s.sure you that I am profoundly interested."

She accepted that statement with a readiness that gave me another thrill of satisfaction. She understood my desire and gave way to it, instantly fulfilling my present need of her.

"My great-grandfather went back to Paris after things had settled down,"

she went on, as if there had been no break in her narrative; "just as a common workman. He was about thirty-five, then, I believe; his first wife and his two children had died of small-pox in Holland, and he didn't marry again until he was sixty. He had only one child afterwards; that was my grandmother. But I can't tell you the story properly. You must get my mother to do that. She makes such a lovely romance out of it. And it _is_ rather romantic, too, isn't it? I like to feel that I've got that behind me rather than all the stodgy old ancestors the Jervaises have got.

Wouldn't you?"

"Rather," I agreed warmly.

"If I didn't miss all the important points you'd think so," Anne replied with a little childish pucker of perplexity coming in her forehead. "But story-telling isn't a bit in my line. I wish it were. I can listen to mother for hours, and I can never make out quite what it is she does to make her stories so interesting. Of course she generally tells them in French, which helps, but I'm no better in French than in English. Mother has a way of saying 'Enfin' or 'En effet' that in itself is quite thrilling."

"You don't know quite how well you do it yourself," I said.

She shook her head. "Not like mother," she a.s.serted. With that childish pucker still wrinkling her forehead she looked like a little girl of fourteen. I could see her gazing up at her mother with some little halting perplexed question. I felt as if she were giving me some almost miraculous confidence, obliterating all the strangeness of new acquaintanceship by displaying the story of her girlhood.

"She puts mystery into it, too," she went on, still intent on the difference between her own and her mother's methods. "And, I think, there really is some mystery that she's never told us," she added as an afterthought. "After my grandfather died, her mother married again, a widower with one little girl, and when she grew up mother got her over here as a sort of finishing governess to Olive Jervaise. She came a year or two before Brenda was born. She was born in Italy. Did you know that? I always wonder whether that's why she's so absolutely different from all the others."

"She certainly is. I don't know whether that's enough to explain it," I commented. "And did your mother's step-sister go abroad with them?"

"I believe so. She never came back here afterwards. She has been dead for ages, now. But mother's always rather mysterious about her. That's how I began, wasn't it? I know that she was very beautiful, and sometimes I think I can just remember her. I must have been about four when she left here, because I'm rather more than four years older than Brenda."

The thought of Anne at four was not less fascinating to me than the picture of her at fourteen. I was jealous of all her twenty-three years of life. I wanted to have an intimate knowledge of all her past being; of every least change and development that she had suffered since babyhood.

But I was to have no more confidences of that sort just then. The child disappeared from her face and speech as quickly as it had come. She appeared to be dreaming, again, as she continued almost without a pause,--

"But it isn't my mother I'm sorry for in this affair. She'll arrange herself. I think she'll be glad, in a way. We all should if it weren't for my father. We're so ruled by the Jervaises here. And it's worse than that.

Their--their prestige sort of hangs over you everywhere. It's like being at the court of Louis Quatorze. The estate is theirs and they are the estate. Mother often says we are still feodal down here. It seems to me sometimes that we're little better than slaves."

I smiled at the grotesqueness of the idea. It was impossible to conceive Anne as a slave.

She was still gazing out of the window with that appearance of abstraction, but she was evidently aware of my smile, for she said,--

"You think that's absurd, do you?"

"In connection with you," I replied. "I can't see you as any one's slave."

She gave me her attention again. "No, I couldn't be," she threw at me with a hint of defiance; and before I had time to reply, continued, "I was angry with Arthur for coming back. To go into service! I almost quarrelled with mother over that. She was so weak about it. She hated his being so far away. She didn't seem to mind anything as long as she could get him home again. But Arthur's more like my father. He's got a strain of Jervaise-worship in him, somewhere."

"A very strong strain, just now," I suggested.

She laughed. "Yes, he's Brenda's slave; always will be," she said. "But I don't count her as a Jervaise. She's an insurgee like me--against her own family. She'd do anything to get away from them."

"Well, she will now," I said, "and your brother, too."

That seemed to annoy her. "It may sound easy enough to you," she said, "but it's going to be anything but easy. You can't possibly understand how difficult it's going to be."