“Yes, but suspicious of what, Mr. Jervaise?” Anne said, taking up the cross-examination.
“Spying upon us,” Jervaise growled.
“Upon you or me?” asked Brenda.
“Both,” Jervaise said.
“But why?” asked Anne.
“Lord knows,” Jervaise replied.
I made no effort to interrupt them. The two girls were clearing my character for me by the simple obvious method that I had not had the wit to adopt for myself. I might have argued and protested for hours, and the only result would have been to confirm Jervaise’s suspicions. Confronted by an innocent demand for explanation, he had not a leg to stand on.
Brenda’s eyebrows went up again, with that slightly bizarre, exotic air which was so arresting. She spoke to me this time.
“And do you mean to say that they were all so horrid to you that you had to come away?” she asked.
“Precisely that,” I said.
“But you don’t tell us what Mr. Melhuish has done!” Anne persisted, continuing her cross-examination of Jervaise.
“Well, for one thing, he went out to meet your brother at three o’clock this morning,” he replied grudgingly.
“Didn’t come out to meet me,” Banks put in. “We did meet all right, but it was the first time we’d ever seen each other.”
We all four looked at Jervaise, awaiting his next piece of evidence with the expectant air of children watching a conjurer.
He began to lose his temper. “I can’t see that this has got anything to do with what we’re discussing…” he said, but I had no intention of letting him off too easily. He had saved me the trouble of making tedious explanations, and my character had been cleared before Anne and Brenda, which two things were all that I really cared about in this connection; but I wanted, for other reasons, to make Jervaise appear foolish. So I interrupted him by saying,—
“Hadn’t you better tell them about Miss Tattersall?”
He turned on me, quite savagely. “What the devil has this affair of ours got to do with you, Melhuish?” he asked.
“Nothing whatever,” I said. “You dragged me into it in the first instance by bringing me up here last night, but since then I haven’t interfered one way or the other. What does affect me, however, is that you and your family have—well—insulted me, and for that you do owe me, at least, an explanation.”
“What made you come up here, now?” he asked with that glowering legal air of his; thrusting the question at me as if I must, now, be finally confuted.
“After you ran away from me in the avenue,” I said promptly, “it seemed that the only thing left for me to do was to walk to Hurley Junction; but a quarter of a mile from the Park gate I found your car drawn up by the side of the road. And as I had no sort of inclination to walk fourteen miles on a broiling afternoon, I decided to wait by the car until some one came to fetch it. And when presently Banks came, I tried my best to persuade him to take me to the station in it. He refused on the grounds that he wanted to take the car back at once to the garage; but when I explained my difficulty to him, his hospitable mind prompted him to offer me temporary refuge at the Home Farm. He brought me back to introduce me, and we found you here. Simple, isn’t it?”
Jervaise scowled at the hearth-rug. “All been a cursed misunderstanding from first to last,” he growled.
“But what was that about Grace Tattersall?” Brenda asked. “If you’d accused her of spying, I could have understood it. She was trying to pump me for all she was worth yesterday afternoon.”
“I’ve admitted that there must have been some misunderstanding,” Jervaise said. “For goodness’ sake, let’s drop this question of Melhuish’s interference and settle the more important one of what we’re going to do about—you.”
“I resent that word ‘interference,’” I put in.
“Oh! resent it, then,” Jervaise snarled.
“Really, I think Mr. Melhuish is perfectly justified,” Brenda said. “I feel horribly ashamed of the way you’ve been treating him at home. I should never have thought that the mater…”
“Can’t you understand that she’s nearly off her head with worrying about you?” Jervaise interrupted.
“No, I can’t,” Brenda returned. “If it had been Olive, I could. But I should have thought they would all have been jolly glad to see the last of me. They’ve always given me that impression, anyhow.”
“Not in this way,” her brother grumbled.
“What do you mean by that exactly?” Anne asked with a great seriousness.
I think Jervaise was beginning to lose his nerve. He was balanced so dangerously between the anxiety to maintain the respectability of the Jervaises and his passion, or whatever it was, for Anne. Such, at least, was my inference; although how he could possibly reconcile his two devotions I could not imagine, unless his intentions with regard to Anne were frankly shameful. And Jervaise must, indeed, be an even grosser fool than I supposed him to be if he could believe for one instant that Anne was the sort of woman who would stoop to a common intrigue with him. For it could be nothing more than that. If they loved each other, they could do no less than follow the shining example of Brenda and Anne’s brother. I could see Anne doing that, and with a still more daring spirit than the other couple had so far displayed. I could not see her as Frank Jervaise’s mistress. Moreover, I could not believe now, even after that morning’s scene in the wood, that she really cared for him. If she did, she must have been an actress of genius, since, so far as I had been able to observe, her attitude towards him during the last half-hour had most nearly approached one of slightly amused contempt.
Jervaise’s evident perplexity was notably aggravated by Anne’s question.
“Well, naturally, my father and mother don’t want an open scandal,” he said irritably.
“But why a scandal?” asked Anne. “If Arthur and Brenda were married and went to Canada?”
“I don’t say that I think it would be a scandal,” he said. “I’m only telling you the way that they’d certainly see it. It might have been different if your brother had never been in our service. You must see that. We know, of course, but other people don’t, and we shall never be able to explain to them. People like the Turnbulls and the Atkinsons and all that lot will say that Brenda eloped with the chauffeur. It’s no good beating about the bush—that’s the plain fact we’ve got to face.”
“Then, hadn’t we better face it?” Anne returned with a flash of indignation. “Or do you think you can persuade Arthur to go back to Canada, alone?”
Jervaise grunted uneasily.
“You know it’s no earthly, Frank,” Brenda said. “Why can’t you be a sport and go back and tell them that they might as well give in at once?”
“Oh! my dear girl, you must know perfectly well that they’ll never give in,” her brother replied.
“Mr. Jervaise might,” Banks put in.
Frank turned to him sharply. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.
“He’d have given in this morning, if it hadn’t been for you,” Banks said, staring with his most dogged expression at Jervaise.
“What makes you think so?” Jervaise retaliated.
“What he said, and the way he behaved,” Banks asserted, the English yeoman stock in him still very apparent.
“You’re mistaken,” Jervaise snapped.
“Give me a chance to prove it, then,” was Banks’s counter.
“How?”
“I’ve got to take that car back. Give me a chance for another talk with Mr. Jervaise; alone this time.”
I looked at Banks with a sudden feeling of anxiety. I was afraid that he meant at last to use that “pull” he had hinted at on the hill; and I had an intuitive shrinking from the idea of his doing that. This open defiance was fine and upright. The other attitude suggested to my mind the conception of something cowardly, a little base and underhand. He looked, I admit, the picture of sturdy virtue as he stood there challenging his late master to permit this test of old Jervaise’s attitude, but the prize at stake was so inestimably precious to Banks, that it must have altered all his values. He would, I am sure, have committed murder for Brenda—any sort of murder.
Frank Jervaise did not respond at once to the gage that had been offered. He appeared to be moodily weighing the probabilities before he decided his policy. And Brenda impatiently prompted him by saying,—
“Well, I don’t see what possible objection you can have to that.”
“Only want to save the pater any worry I can,” Jervaise said. “He has been more cut up than any one over this business.”
“The pater has?” queried Brenda on a note of amazement. “I shouldn’t have expected him to be half as bad as the mater and Olive.”
“Well, he is. He’s worse—much worse,” Jervaise asserted.
I was listening to the others, but I was watching Banks, and I saw him sneer when that assertion was made. The expression seemed to have been forced out of him against his will; just a quick jerk downwards of the corners of his mouth that portrayed a supreme contempt for old Jervaise’s distress. But that sneer revealed Banks’s opinion to me better than anything he had said or done. I knew then that he was aware of something concerning the master of the Hall that was probably unknown either to Brenda or Frank, something that Banks had loyally hidden even from his sister. He covered his sneer so quickly that I believe no one else noticed it.
“But, surely, it would be better for the pater to see Arthur and have done with it,” Brenda was saying.
“Oh! I dare say,” Jervaise agreed with his usual air of grudging the least concession. “Are you ready to go now?” he asked, addressing Banks.
Banks nodded. “I’ll pick up the car on the way,” he said.
“I’ll come with you—as far as the car,” Brenda said, and the pair of them went out together.
Jervaise stretched himself with a self-conscious air. “It will take him the best part of an hour getting the car into the garage and all that,” he remarked, looking at me.
I could see, of course, that he wanted me to go; his hint had been, indeed, almost indecently pointed; and I had no wish to intrude myself upon them, if Anne’s desire coincided with his. I got to my feet and stood like an awkward dummy trying to frame some excuse for leaving the room. I could think of nothing that was not absurdly obvious. I was on the point of trying to save the last remnant of my dignity by walking out, when Anne relieved my embarrassment. I knew that she had been watching me, but I was afraid to look at her. I cannot say why, exactly, but I felt that if I looked at her just then I should give myself away before Jervaise.
“I must go and see about Mr. Melhuish’s room,” she said.
She was half-way to the door when Jervaise stopped her.
“I should rather like to speak to you for a minute first,” he remarked, and scowled again at me.
“There’s nothing more to be said until Arthur has seen Mr. Jervaise,” Anne replied, as though any subject other than the affair Brenda, could not conceivably be of interest to her.
“It wasn’t about them,” Jervaise said awkwardly.
“What was it, then?” Anne asked. I dared to look at her, now, and her face was perfectly serious as she added, “Was it about the milk, or eggs, or anything?”
Without doubt there was a delicious strain of minx in her!
Jervaise lost his temper. I believe that if I had offered to fight him, then, he would have welcomed the opportunity.
“Oh! you know what I want to say,” he snorted.
“Then why not say it?” Anne replied.
He turned savagely upon me. “Haven’t you got the common sense…” he began, but Anne cut him short.
“Oh! we don’t suspect our guests of spying,” she said.
I was nearly sorry for Jervaise at that moment. He could not have looked any more vindictive than he looked already, but he positively trembled with anger. He could not endure to be thwarted. Nevertheless, he displayed a certain measure of self-control.
“Very well,” he said as calmly as he could. “If you’re going to take that tone…”
“Yes?” Anne prompted him. She showed no sign of being in any way disconcerted.
“It will hardly help your brother,” he concluded.
“I made a mistake in trying to help him this morning,” she said. “I shan’t make the same mistake twice in one day.”
He evidently knew what she meant, although I did not. His heavy eyebrows twitched, and then, with a half-contemptuous shrug of his shoulders he strode out of the room with an air of leaving us to the doom we so justly deserved.
“The worst of it is that the second mistake doesn’t cancel the first,” Anne remarked thoughtfully.
XI
The Story
She still stood by the great oak table, her hands resting lightly on its dark polished surface. I could see the vague reflection of her fingers reaching up through the deep solidity of the oak to join hands with her. She produced, I thought, an impressive effect of fragility and power in her contrast with that massive table. The material of her flesh was so delicate compared to the inert, formidable mass before her. She could not have lifted or moved it by her own effort. And yet it seemed that she had absolute command over that ponderous obstacle, that in some way the mobility of her spirit must give her control of it, that she might, if she wished, plunge those relatively fragile hands of hers deep into the lake of that dark and adamant surface.
She had not looked at me since Jervaise left the room, and when she spoke again she gazed with a kind of concentrated abstraction out of the window at the quiet glory of the calm August evening. Nevertheless her speech showed that all her attention was being given to the human interests that had just been absorbing us.
“Are you really a friend of ours?” she asked, “or did you just come here faute de mieux?” The little French phrase came like an unexpected jewel, as if she had relapsed unconsciously into a more familiar language.
I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her.
“I hope I may call myself your brother’s friend,” I began lamely. “All my sympathies are with him.”
“You don’t know the Jervaises particularly well?” she inquired. For one moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window.
“Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last night,” I explained. “I was at school and Cambridge with Frank.”
“But they are your sort, your class,” she said. “Don’t you agree with them that it’s a dreadful thing for Arthur, their chauffeur—and he was in the stables once, years ago—to try to run away with their daughter?”
“All my sympathies are with Arthur,” I repeated.
“Not because the Jervaises were so rude to you?” she asked.
“I liked him before that; when we met on the hill, very early this morning,” I said. “But, perhaps, he didn’t tell you.”
“Yes, he told me,” she said. “And was that the beginning of all the trouble between you and the Jervaises?”
“In a way, it was,” I agreed. “But it’s an involved story and very silly. I admit that they had grounds for suspecting that I had interfered.”
“Mrs. Jervaise and Olive are always suspecting people,” she volunteered. “I’ve often wondered why?”
“Like that, by nature,” I suggested.
“Perhaps,” she said carelessly as if she did not care to pursue that speculation. “You know that my mother was governess to Olive and Frank before she married my father?” she continued, still with that same air of discussing some remote, detached topic.
“I heard that she had been a governess. I didn’t know that she had ever been with the Jervaises,” I said.
“She was there for over two years,” pursued Anne. “She is French, you know, though you’d probably never guess it, now, except for an occasional word here and there. She left years before Brenda was born. Brenda is so much younger than the others. There’s eight years between her and Robert, the next one. Olive’s the eldest, of course, and then Frank.”
I made some conventional acknowledgment for this information. I was wondering if she were merely talking to save the embarrassment of silence. We had drifted, apparently, a long way from any matter of personal interest and I was hesitating as to whether I should not attempt a new opening, when she began again with the least little frown of determination.
“I’m talking about them, because if you are to be Arthur’s friend you ought to know more or less how things are between us and the Jervaises, and I might just as well say right out at once that we don’t like them; we’ve never liked them. Mother, more particularly. She has got something against them that she has never told us, but it isn’t that.” Her frown was more pronounced as she went on, “They aren’t nice people, any of them, except Brenda, and she’s so absolutely different from the rest of them, and doesn’t like them either—in a way.”
“You don’t even except Frank?” I mumbled. I could not resist the opportunity she had offered to ask that too pointed question; but I looked down at the floor as I spoke; I wanted her to understand that I was not cross-examining her.
“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 attitude, 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 assurance. “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 attitude 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 Institution, 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 God 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 emigré from the Revolution—not titled 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 assumption that I could afford to dally with and in certain circumstances 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 assure 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 asserted. 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 féodal 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 insurgée 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.”
“Can’t you tell me?” I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders as if she had suddenly become tired of my questions, perhaps of myself, also.
“You’re so outside it all,” she said.
“I know I am,” I admitted. “But—I don’t want to remain outside.”
“I don’t know why I’ve been telling you as much as I have,” she returned.
“I can only plead my profound interest,” I said.
“In Arthur? Or in us, generally?” she inquired and frowned as if she forbade me to say that my chief interest might be in herself.
“In all of you and in the situation,” I tried, hoping to please her. “I was prepared to dislike the Jervaises and all they stood for, before this talk with you. Now…”
“But you’re well off, aren’t you?” she said with a faint air of contempt. “You can’t be an insurgé. You’d be playing against your own side.”
“If you think that, why did you give me so much confidence to begin with?” I retaliated.
“Oh! I’m always doing silly things,” she said. “It was silly to play with that foolish Jervaise man this morning. It was silly to offend him this evening. I don’t—think. I ought to be whipped.” She had apparently forgotten her recent distrust of me, for she continued in the tone of one who makes an ultimate confession. “As a matter of fact, I suppose I’m chiefly responsible for the whole thing. I egged them on. Arthur would have gone on adoring Brenda as a kind of divinity for ever, if I hadn’t brought them together. He’s afraid to touch her, even now. I just didn’t think. I never do till it’s too late.”
“But you’re not sorry—about them, are you?” I put in.
“I’m sorry for my father,” she said. “Oh! I’m terribly sorry for him.” Her eyes were extraordinarily tender and compassionate as she spoke. I felt that if any lover of Anne’s could ever inspire such devotion as showed in her face at that moment, he would indeed be blest.
“He’s sixty,” she went on in a low, brooding voice, “and he’s—he’s so—rooted.”
“Is there no chance of their letting you stay on, if Arthur and Brenda went to Canada?” I asked.
Her face was suddenly hard again as she replied. “I don’t think there’s one chance in a million,” she said. “The Jervaise prestige couldn’t stand such relations as us, living at their very doors. Besides, I know I’ve upset that horrid Jervaise man. He’ll be revengeful. He’s so weak, and that sort are always vindictive. He’ll be mean and spiteful. Oh! no, it’s one of two things, either Arthur will have to go back to Canada without Brenda, or we’ll all have to go together.”
Her tone and attitude convinced me. If I had been able to consider the case logically and without prejudice, I should probably have scorned this presentation of rigid alternatives as the invention of a romantic mind; I might have recognised in it the familiar device of the dramatist. But I had so far surrendered myself to the charm of Anne’s individuality that I accepted her statement without the least shadow of criticism. It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises’ decision that reminded me of Arthur Banks’s hint of an advantage that he might use in a last emergency.
“But your brother told me last night,” I said, “that there was some—‘pull’ or other he had, that might make a difference if it came to desperate measures.”
“He didn’t tell you what it was?” she asked, and I knew at once that she was, after all, in her brother’s confidence.
“No, he gave me no idea,” I replied.
“He couldn’t ever use that,” she said decidedly. “He told me about it this morning, before he went up to the Hall, and I—”
“Dissuaded him?” I suggested, as she paused.
“No! He saw it, himself,” she explained.
“It wasn’t like Arthur—to think of such a thing, even—at ordinary times. But after his quarrel with Brenda on the hill—if you could call it a quarrel, when, so far as I can make out, Arthur never said a word the whole time—after that, and Brenda being so eager to face them all out, this morning; he got a little beyond himself.”
“Does Brenda know about this—pull?” I asked.
“Of course not!” Anne replied indignantly. “How could we tell her that?”
“I haven’t the least notion what it is, you see,” I apologised.
“Oh! it’s about old Mr. Jervaise,” Anne explained without the least show of reluctance. “There’s some woman or other he goes to see in town. And once or twice Arthur took him in the car. They forget we’re human beings at all, sometimes, you know. They think we’re just servants and don’t notice things; or if we do notice them, that we shouldn’t be so disrespectful as to say anything. I don’t know what they think. Anyhow, he let Arthur drive him—twice, I believe it was—and the second time Arthur looked at him when he came out of the house, and Mr. Jervaise must have known that Arthur guessed. Nothing was said, of course, but he didn’t ever take Arthur again; but Arthur knows the woman’s name and address. It was in some flats, and the porter told him something, too.”
I realised that I had wasted my sympathy on old Jervaise. His air of a criminal awaiting arrest had been more truly indicative than I could have imagined possible. He had been expecting blackmail; had probably been willing to pay almost any price to avoid the scandal. I wondered how far the morning interview had relieved his mind?
“That explains Mr. Jervaise’s state of nerves this morning,” I remarked. “I could see that he was frightfully upset, but I thought it was about Brenda. I had an idea that he might be very devoted to her.”
Anne pushed that aside with a gesture, as quite unworthy of comment.
“But, surely, that really does give your brother some kind of advantage,” I went on thoughtlessly. I suppose that I was too intent on keeping Anne in England to understand exactly what my speech implied.
She looked at me with a superb scorn. “You don’t mean to say,” she said, “that you think we’d take advantage of a thing like that? Father—or any of us?”
I had almost the same sense of being unjustly in disgrace that I had had during the Hall luncheon party. I do not quite know what made me grasp at the hint of an omission from her bravely delivered “any of us.” I was probably snatching at any straw.
“Your mother would feel like that, too?” I dared in my extremity.
Any ordinary person would have parried that question by a semblance of indignation or by asking what I meant by it. Anne made no attempt to disguise the fact that the question had been justified. Her scorn gave way to a look of perplexity; and when she spoke she was staring out of the window again, as if she sought the spirit of ultimate truth on some, to me, invisible horizon.
“She isn’t practical,” was Anne’s excuse for her mother. “She’s so—so romantic.”
“I’m afraid I was being unpractical and romantic, too,” I apologised, rejoicing in my ability to make use of the precedent.
Anne just perceptibly pursed her lips, and her eyes turned towards me with the beginning of a smile.
“You little thought what a romance you were coming into when you accepted the invitation for that week-end—did you?” she asked.
“My goodness!” was all the comment I could find; but I put a world of feeling into it.
“And I very nearly refused,” I went on, with the excitement of one who makes a thrilling announcement.
Anne humoured my eagerness with a tolerant smile. “Did you?” she said encouragingly.
“It was the merest chance that I accepted,” I replied. “I was curious about the Jervaise family.”
“Satisfied?” Anne asked.
“Well, I’ve been given an opportunity of knowing them from the inside,” I said.
“You’ll be writing a play about us,” Anne remarked carelessly.
I was astonished to find that she knew I had written plays. “How did you know that I did that sort of thing?” I asked.
“I’ve seen one of them,” she said. “’The Mulberry Bush’; when mother and I were in London last winter. And Arthur said you were the same Mr. Melhuish. I suppose Frank Jervaise had told him.”
“People who go to the theatre don’t generally notice the name of the author,” I commented.
“I do,” she said. “I’m interested in the theatre. I’ve read dozens of plays, in French, mostly. I don’t think the English comedies are nearly so well done. Of course, the French have only one subject, but they are so much more witty. Have you ever read Les Hannetons, for instance?”
“No. I’ve seen the English version on the stage,” I said.
I was ashamed of having written The Mulberry Bush, of having presumed to write any comedy. I felt the justice of her implied criticism. Indeed, all my efforts seemed to me, just then, as being worthless and insincere. All my life, even. There was something definite and keen about this girl of twenty-three that suddenly illuminated my intellectual and moral flabbiness. She had already a definite attitude towards social questions that I had never bothered to investigate. She had shown herself to have a final pride in the matter of blackmailing old Jervaise. And in half a dozen words she had exposed the lack of real wit in my attempts at playwriting. I was humbled before her superior intelligence. Her speech had still a faint flavour of the uneducated, but her judgments were brilliantly incisive; despite her inferentially limited experience, she had a clearer sight of humanity than I had.
“You needn’t look so depressed,” she remarked.
“I was thinking what a pity it is that you should go to Canada,” I returned.
“I want to go,” she said. “I want to feel free and independent; not a chattel of the Jervaises.”
“But—Canada!” I remonstrated.
“You see,” she said, “I could never leave my father and mother. Wherever they go, I must go, too. They’ve no one but me to look after them. And this does, at last, seem, in a way, a chance. Only, I can’t trust myself. I’m too impulsive about things like this. Oh! do you think it might kill my father if he were torn up by the roots? Sometimes I think it might be good for him, and at others I’m horribly afraid.”
“Well, of course, I’ve never seen him…” I began.
“And in any case, you’re prejudiced,” she interrupted me. Her tone had changed again; it was suddenly light, almost coquettish, and she looked at me with a challenging lift of her eyebrows, as if, most astonishingly, she had read my secret adoration of her and defied me to acknowledge it.
“In what way am I prejudiced?” I asked.
“Hush! here’s Brenda coming back,” she said.
I regretted extremely that Brenda should have returned at that moment, but I was tremendously encouraged. Anne seemed in that one sentence to have sanctioned the understanding that I was in love with her. Her warning of the interruption seemed to carry some unspoken promise that I should be given another opportunity.
XII
Conversion
Anne had not once moved from her original place by the table in the course of that long conversation of ours, and she still stood there, her finger-tips resting on the oak with a powerful effect of poise when Brenda came into the room.
Brenda’s actions were far more vivacious than her friend’s. She came in with an air of youthful exuberance, looked at me with a shade of inquiry, and then sat down opposite Anne.
“I came back over the hill and through the wood,” she said, resting her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. “It’s a topping evening. Poor Arthur; I wish I could have gone with him. I offered to, but he didn’t want me to come. I’m not sure he didn’t think they might kidnap me if I went too near.” She turned to me with a bright smile as she added, “Could they keep me, Mr. Melhuish; shut me up or something?”
“I’m not quite sure about that,” I said, “but they could arrest—Arthur”—(I could not call him anything else, I found)—“if he ran away with you. On a charge of abduction, you know.”
“They could make it pretty nasty for us all round, in fact,” Brenda concluded.
“I’m afraid they could,” I agreed.
She was looking extraordinarily pretty. The bizarre contrast between her dark eyelashes and her fair hair seemed to find some kind of echo in the combination of health and fragility that she expressed in her movements. She appeared at once vital and delicate without being too highly-strung. I could well understand how the bucolic strain in Arthur Banks was prostrate with admiration before such a rare and exciting beauty.
By the side of Brenda, Anne looked physically robust. The developed lines of her figure emphasised Brenda’s fragility. And yet Anne’s eyes, her whole pose, expressed a spirituality that Brenda lacked. Anne, with her amazing changes of mood, her rapid response to emotion, gave expression to some spirit not less feminine than Brenda’s, but infinitely deeper. Behind the moving shadows and sunlight of her impulses there lay always some reminder of a constant orientation. She might trifle brilliantly with the surface of life, but her soul was more steadfast than a star. Brenda might love passionately, but her love would be relatively personal, selfish. When Anne gave herself, she would love like a mother, with her whole being.
I came out of my day-dream to find that she was speaking of me.
“Mr. Melhuish is half asleep,” she was saying. “And I haven’t got his room ready after all this time.”
“He didn’t get much sleep last night,” Brenda replied. “We none of us did for that matter. We were wandering round the Park and just missing each other like the people in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
“Come and help me to get that room ready,” Anne said. “Father and mother may be home any minute. They ought to have been back before.”
Brenda was on her feet in a moment. She appeared glad to have some excuse for action. She was, no doubt, nervous and excited as to the probable result of her lover’s mission to the Hall, and wanted to be alone with Anne in order that they might speculate upon those probabilities which Banks’s return would presently transform into certainties.
Anne turned to me before they left the room and indicated three shelves of books half hidden behind the settle. “You might find something to read there, unless you’d sooner have a nap,” she said. “We shan’t be having supper until eight.”
I preferred, however, to go out and make my own estimate of probabilities in the serenity of the August evening. My mind was too full to read. I wanted to examine my own ideas just then, not those of some other man or woman.
“I’m going for a walk,” I said to Anne. “I want to think.” And I looked at her with a greater boldness than I had dared hitherto. I claimed a further recognition of that understanding she had, as I believed, so recently admitted.
“To think out that play?” she returned lightly, but her expression did not accord with her tone. She had paused at the door, and as she looked back at me, there was a suggestion of sadness in her face, of regret, or it might even have been of remorse. She looked, I thought, as though she were sorry for me.
She was gone before I could speak again.
I found my way out by the back door through which Jervaise and I had entered all those incalculable hours ago; and I looked up at the window from which Anne’s beautiful voice had hailed me out of the night. I wanted to think about her, to recall how she had looked and spoken—at that window; in the course of her talk with Frank Jervaise; in the recent scene in the farm sitting-room when she had ambushed herself so persistently behind the ear of the settle; and, most of all, I desired to weigh every tone and expression I could remember in that last long conversation of ours; every least gesture or attention that might give me a hope of having won, in some degree, her regard or interest.
But the perplexing initiative of my intelligence would not, for some reason, permit me to concentrate my thoughts on her at that moment. My mind was bewilderingly full of Anne, but I could not think of her. When I fell into the pose of gazing up at her window, the association suggested not the memory I desired, but the picture of Frank Jervaise fumbling in the darkness of the porch, and the excruciating anguish of Racquet’s bark. From that I fell to wondering why I had not seen Racquet on this occasion of my second visit? I had not remembered him until then.
I pulled myself up with an effort, and finding the surroundings of the yard so ineffectual as a stimulus, I wandered down the hill towards the wood. I suggested to myself that I might meet Banks returning from the Hall, but my chief hope was that I might revive the romance of the night.
The sun was setting clear and red, a different portent from the veiled thing that had finally hidden itself in a huddle of purple and gray cloud the night before. I had seen it from my bedroom at the Hall as I dressed for dinner and had mildly regretted the threat of possible bad weather. I had been a little bored by the anticipations I had formed of my week-end. The Jervaises, from what I had seen of them, promised, I thought, to be uncommonly dull. I had not seen Brenda before dinner.
I roused myself again and made an effort to shift the depression that was settling upon me, but the mood was not to be exorcised by any deliberate attempt to revive the glow of adventure that had warmed my earlier excursions through the wood. The very stillness of the evening, the air of preparation for repose, the first faint suggestions of the passage from summer to autumn, all had some effect of pervading melancholy. I found myself speculating on the promise of change that my talk with Anne had foreshadowed; of the uprooting of Farmer Banks, of the family’s emigration, and the sadness of their farewells to this exquisitely peaceful country of England.
And then the thought that I had unconsciously feared and repressed since I had left the farm, broke through all these artificial abstractions and forced itself upon my attention. I struggled against it vainly for a few seconds and then braced myself to meet the realisation of my own failure. For it was that shadow which had been stalking me since Anne had so obliquely criticised my comedy. And it seemed to me now that her last strange expression as she left the room, that look of pity and regret, had all too surely indicated the certainty that she—I faced it with a kind of bitter despair—that she despised me. I was “well-off.” I belonged to the Jervaises’ class. She had flung those charges at me contemptuously before she had finally dismissed my one futile claim to distinction by classing me among the writers of that artificial English comedy which had not even the redeeming virtue of wit.
Not once in that long conversation with her had she shown the sudden spark of recognition that had so wonderfully lighted my parting with her in the night. She had given me her confidence about her family affairs because she counted me as a new ally, however ineffective, coming in unexpectedly to fight against the Jervaises. She had acknowledged my worship of her because she was too clear-sighted and too honest to shirk my inevitable declaration. But I could not doubt that she rated me as unworthy of her serious attention. Her whole attitude proclaimed that her one instant of reaching out towards me had been a mistake; one of the many impulses that continually blossomed and died in her close intercourse with the spirit of life.
And I could not blame her for her contempt of me. I despised myself. I was a man without a serious interest. I had escaped vice, but I had always lived among surface activities. My highest ambition after I left Cambridge had been to have one of my foolish plays mounted in a West-End theatre. I had wanted to be talked about, to be a social success. And I had achieved that ambition without much difficulty. I had had an independent income—left me by my father who had died when I was in my second year at Jesus—only three hundred a year, but enough for me to live upon without working. I had gone often to the theatre in those days, and had scraped up an acquaintance with a middle-aged actor, whose chief occupation had been the stage-managing of new productions. With his help I had studied stagecraft by attending rehearsals, the best possible school for a would-be dramatist. And my first accepted play had been written in collaboration with him. It had not been a great success, but I had gained invaluable experience, and, after that, success had come to me rapidly and easily. I found that I had the knack of writing pleasant little artificial comedies. None of them had run for longer than eight months, and I had only written five in all, but they had made me comparatively rich. At that time my investments alone were bringing me in nearly two thousand a year.
I was thirty-two, now, and it seemed to me looking back, that I had never had one worthy ambition in all those years. I had never even been seriously in love. Most deplorable of all I had never looked forward to a future that promised anything but repetitions of the same success.
What had I to live for? I saw before me a life of idleness with no decent occupation, no objects, but the amassing of more money, the seeking of a wider circle of acquaintances, dinner-parties at more select houses, an increasing reputation as a deviser of workmanlike, tolerably amusing plays. If I had had vices such as a promiscuous love of women, I might have found the anticipation of such a future more tolerable. There might, then, have been some incitement to new living, new experience. But I had nothing.
Yet until that evening in the wood I had hardly paused to consider what would presently become of me. The gradual increase in my scale of personal luxury had brought sufficient diversion and satisfaction. I had lived in the pleasures of the moment, and had only rarely been conscious that those pleasures were growing stale; that the crust of life upon which I had so diligently crawled, was everywhere and always the same.
Now it was as if that monotonous surface had amazingly split. My crawling was paralysed and changed to a terrified stillness. I had paused, horrified, at the mouth of a pit, and gazed down with a sick loathing at the foundations of my life that had been so miraculously revealed. I did, indeed, stand suddenly stock still in the wood, and staring down the darkening vista of the path, saw not the entranced twilight that was sinking the path in a pool of olive green shadows, but a kind of bioscopic presentation of my own futile, monotonous existence.
If Anne would have nothing to do with me, what, I asked myself, did the world hold that could conceivably make my life worth living?
I suppose most men and women have asked themselves the same question when they have been unexpectedly stirred by a great love. The sense of unworthiness comes with a shock of surprise that seems violently to tear open the comfortable cloak of self-satisfaction. I had been content with my life, even a little vain of my achievement, until that last conversation with Anne; now I loathed the thought of my own inefficiency and all my prospects of success appeared unendurably tame. I was in the spiritual state of a religious convert, suddenly convinced of sin.
And yet somehow in the depths of my consciousness there was a sensible stir of resentment. The artificial being I had created during my thirty-two years of life had an existence of its own and protested against this threat of instant annihilation. I wanted to defend myself, and I was petulantly irritable because I could find no defence.
For the strange Fate that had planned this astounding revelation to me, had apparently led up to it by the subtlest arrangement of properties and events. My disgrace at the Jervaises’ had prepared me for this moment. My responses to humiliation had been, as it were, tested and strained by that ordeal. And at the same time I had been powerfully influenced to despise the life of the Jervaises and all that they stood for, socially and ethically. Then, almost without a pause, a new ideal of life had been presented to me; and the contrast had been so vivid as to awaken even my dulled powers of apprehension. The Jervaise type was more or less familiar to me; their acceptance of security as an established right, their lack of anything like initiative, their general contentment with themselves, their standards of judgment and their surroundings, represented the attitude towards life with which I was most familiar. It had been my own attitude. I had even dreamed of re-establishing the half-ruined home of the elder branch of the Melhuish family in Derbyshire!
And the contrast afforded by the lives and ambitions of Anne and her brother had been so startling that I believe I must have been stirred by it to some kind of awakening even had I not fallen in love with Anne. I had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all that was typified by the rule of the Hall. By reason of my sympathy with the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such landowners as old Jervaise. And in condemning him and his family, I must condemn myself also. We were all of us so smug and self-satisfied. We had blindly believed that it was our birthright to reap where we had not sown.
Nevertheless, though the truth was so plain to me in that moment, I accepted it grudgingly. The voice of my artificial self clamoured for a hearing. But these things were so, had always been so, it protested; what could I do to change them? And probably, if it had not been for the force of the thrilling passion of reverence and admiration for Anne that had suddenly illuminated my whole being, the cultivated inertia of a life-time would finally have conquered me. I should have thrust the problem away from me and returned with a sensual satisfaction to the familiar way of life I understood. I should have consoled myself with the reflection that mine was not the temperament to face the ardours and disappointments of struggle.
As it was, I longed so furiously to justify myself before Anne; to win, by some heroic measure, her good opinion, that the incentive of my passion bore me triumphantly over the first re-actions of inertia and protest. I could never return to my old complacency, although the mechanical, accustomed habit of my thought had for me, as yet, no suggestion other than some change in the ideal and manner of my writing. I thought vaguely of attempting some didactic drama to illustrate the tragic contrast between gentle and simple that had been so glaringly illuminated for me by recent experience. Yet, even as I played with that idea, I recognised it as a device of my old self to allay my discontent. I caught myself speculating on the promise of the play’s success, on the hope of winning new laurels as an earnest student of sociology. I thrust that temptation from me with a sneer at my own inherent hypocrisy.
“But what else can you do?” argued my old self and my only reply was to bluster. I bullied myself. I treated myself as a foolish child. The new spirit in me waved its feeble arms and shouted wildly of its splendid intentions. I could be immensely valiant in the presence of this single listener, but the thought of Anne humiliated and subdued even this bright new spirit that had so amazingly taken possession of me. I wondered if I might not submit my problem to her ask her what she would have me to do. Nevertheless, I knew that if I would win her esteem, I must act on my own initiative.
My conflict and realisation of new desires had had, however, one salutary effect. The depression of my earlier mood had fallen from me. When I looked round at the widening pool of darkness that flowed and deepened about the undergrowth, I found that it produced no longer any impression of melancholy.
I lifted my head and marched forward with the resolution of a conqueror.
I was nearly clear of the wood when I saw Banks coming towards me. He was carrying my suit-case, and behind him Racquet with a sprightly bearing of the tail that contradicted the droop of his head, followed with the body of a young rabbit.
“Loot from the Hall?” I asked when I came within speaking distance.
“Yes, he’s been poaching again,” Banks said, disregarding the application of my remark to the suit-case. “Well, he can, now, for all I care. He can have every blessed rabbit and pheasant in the Park if he likes. I’m done with ’em.”
“Things gone badly?” I asked, stretching out my hand for the suit-case.
“I’ll carry it,” he said, ignoring my question. “John had it ready packed when I got there.”
I remembered with a passing qualm that John had not been tipped, but put that thought away as a matter of no pressing importance. “Had he?” I commented. “Well, you’ve carried it half-way, now, I’ll carry it the other half.”
“I can do it,” he said.
“You can but you won’t,” I replied. “Hand it over.” I regarded the carrying of that suit-case as a symbol of my new way of life. I hoped that when we arrived at the Farm, Anne might see me carrying it, and realise that even a writer of foolish comedies, who was well off and belonged to the Jervaises’ class, might aspire to be the equal of her brother.
“It’s all right,” Banks said, and his manner struck a curious mean between respect and friendship.
I laid hold of the suit-case and took it from him almost by force.
“You see, it isn’t so much a suit-case as a parable,” I explained.
He looked at me, still reluctant, with an air of perplexity.
“A badge of my friendship for you and your family,” I enlarged. “You and I, my boy, are pals, now. I take it you’ve left the Jervaises’ service for good. Imagine that this is Canada, not an infernal Park with a label on every blade of grass warning you not to touch.”
“That’s all right,” he agreed. “But it’s extraordinary how it hangs about you. You know—the feeling that they’ve somehow got you, everywhere. Damn it, if I met the old man in the wood I don’t believe I could help touching my hat to him.”
“Just habit,” I suggested.
“A mighty strong one, though,” he said.
“Wait till you’re breathing the free air of Canada again,” I replied.
“Ah! that’s just it,” he said. “I may have to wait.”
I made sounds of encouragement.
“Or go alone,” he added.
“They’ve cut up rough, then?” I inquired.
“Young Frank has, anyway,” he said with a brave assumption of breaking away from servility.
“You didn’t see the old man?”
“Never a sight of him.”
“And young Frank…?”
“Shoved it home for all he was worth. Threatened me with the law and what not. Said if I tried to take Her with me they’d have us stopped and take an action against me for abduction. I suppose it’s all right that they can do that?”
“I’m afraid it is,” I said; “until she comes of age.”
“Glad I’d taken the car back, anyhow,” Banks muttered, and I guessed that young Frank’s vindictiveness had not been overestimated by Anne. No doubt, he would have been glad enough to complicate the issue by alleging Banks’s theft of that car.
“Well, what do you propose to do now?” I asked, after a short interval of silence.
“I don’t know,” Banks said desperately, and then added, “It depends chiefly on Her.”
“She’ll probably vote for an elopement,” I suggested.
“And if they come after us and I’m bagged?”
“Don’t let yourself get bagged. Escape them.”
“D’you think she’d agree to that? Sneaking off and hiding? Dodging about to get out of the country, somehow?” His tone left me uncertain whether he were asking a question or spurning the idea in disgust.
“Well, what’s the alternative?” I replied.
“We might wait,” he said. “She’ll be of age in thirteen months’ time.”
I had no fear but that Banks would wait thirteen months, or thirteen years, for Brenda. I was less certain about her. Just now she was head over ears in romance, and I believed that if she married him his sterling qualities would hold her. But I mistrusted the possible effect upon her of thirteen months’ absence. The Jervaises would know very well how to use their advantage. They would take her away from the Hall and its associations, and plunge her into the distractions of a society that could not yet have lost its glamour for her. I could picture Brenda looking back with wonder at the foolishness of the girl who had imagined herself to be in love with her father’s chauffeur. And even an hour earlier, so recent had been my true conversion, I should have questioned the advisability of a hasty, secret marriage between these two temporarily infatuated people. Now I was hot with the evangelising passion of a young disciple. I wanted to deliver Brenda from the thrall of society at any price. It seemed to me that the greatest tragedy for her would be a marriage with some one in her own class—young Turnbull, for instance.
“I shouldn’t wait,” I said decidedly.
“Why not?” he asked with a touch of resentment, as if he had guessed something of my mistrust of Brenda.
“All very well, in a way, for you,” I explained. “But think what an awful time she’d have, with all of them trying to nag her into a marriage with young Turnbull, or somebody of that kind.”
“He isn’t so bad as some of ’em,” Banks said, evading the main issue. “She’d never marry him though. She knows him too well, for one thing. He’s been scouring the county in a dog-cart all the morning—went to Hurley to make inquiries before breakfast, and all over the place afterwards. John’s been telling me. He heard ’em talking when young Turnbull turned up at tea-time. He’s got guts all right, that fellow. I believe he’d play the game fair enough if they tried to make her marry him. Besides, as I said, she’d never do it.”
“I don’t suppose she would,” I said, humouring him—it was no part of my plan to disturb his perfect faith in Brenda—“I only said that she’d have a rotten bad time during those thirteen months.”
“Well, we’ve got to leave that to her, haven’t we?” Banks returned.
I thought not, but I judged it more tactful to keep my opinion to myself.
“We shall be quite safe in doing that,” I said as we turned into the back premises of the Home Farm.
Banks had forgotten about my suit-case, and I bore the burden of it, flauntingly, up the hill. Racquet followed us with an air of conscious humility.
And it was Racquet that Anne first addressed when she met us at the door of the house.
“Whose rabbit is that?” she asked sternly.
Racquet instantly dropped his catch and slowly approached Anne with a mien of exaggerated abasement.
“If you were an out and out socialist, I shouldn’t mind,” Anne continued, “but you shouldn’t do these things if you’re ashamed of them afterwards.”
Racquet continued to supplicate her with bowed head, but he gave one surreptitious flick of his stumpy tail, that to me had the irresistible suggestion of a wink.
“Hypocrite!” Anne said, whereupon Racquet, correctly judging by her tone that his forgiveness was assured, made one splendid leap at her, returned with an altogether too patent eagerness to his rabbit, picked it up, and trotted away round the corner of the house.
“Isn’t he a humbug?” Anne asked looking at me, and continued without waiting for my confirmation of the epithet, “Why didn’t you let Arthur carry that?”
“He carried it half the way,” I said. “He and I are the out and out kind of socialist.”
She did not smile. “Father and mother are home,” she said, turning to her brother. “I can see by your face the sort of thing they’ve been saying to you at the Hall, so I suppose we’d better have the whole story on the carpet over supper. Father’s been asking already what Brenda’s here for.”