XIII
Farmer Banks
Anne showed me up to my room as soon as we entered the house, but her manner was that of the hostess to a strange guest. She was polite, formal, and, I thought, a trifle nervous. She left me hurriedly as soon as she had opened the door of the bedroom, with some apology about having to “see to the supper.” (The smell of frying bacon had pervaded the staircase and passages, and had helped me to realise that I was most uncommonly hungry. Except for a very light lunch I had eaten nothing since breakfast.)
I got my first real feeling of the strangeness of the whole affair while I was unpacking my suit-case in that rather stiff, unfriendly spare-room. Until then the sequence of events had followed a hot succession, in the current of which I had had no time to consider myself—my ordinary, daily self—in relation to them. But the associations of this familiar position and occupation, this adaptation of myself for a few hours to a strange household, evoked the habitual sensations of a hundred similar experiences. Twenty-four hours earlier I had been dressing for dinner at Jervaise Hall, and despite my earnest affirmations that in the interval my whole life and character had changed, I was very surely aware that I was precisely the same man I had always been—the man who washed, and changed his tie, and brushed his hair in just this same manner every day; who looked at himself in the glass with that same half-frowning, half-anxious expression, as if he were uncertain whether to resent or admire the familiar reflection. I was confronted by the image of the Graham Melhuish to whom I had become accustomed; the image of the rather well-groomed, rather successful young man that I had come to regard as the complete presentation of my individuality.
But now I saw that that image in the glass could never have done the things that I had done that day. I could not imagine that stereotyped creature wanting to fight Frank Jervaise, running away from the Hall, taking the side of a chauffeur in an intrigue with his master’s daughter, falling in love with a woman he had not known for twenty-four hours, and, culminating wonder, making extraordinary determinations to renounce the pleasures and comforts of life in order to … I could not quite define what, but the substitute was something very strenuous and difficult and self-sacrificing.
Nevertheless, some one had done all these things, and if it were not that conventional, self-satisfied impersonation now staring back at me with a look of perplexed inquiry, where was I to find his outward likeness? Had I looked a different man when I was talking to Anne in the Farm parlour or when I had communed with myself in the wood? Or if the real Graham Melhuish were something better and deeper than this fraudulent reflection of him, how could he get out, get through, in some way or other achieve a permanent expression to replace this deceptive mask? Also, which of us was doing the thinking at that moment? Did we take it turn and turn about? Five minutes before the old, familiar Melhuish had undoubtedly been unpacking his bag in his old familiar way, and wondering how he had come to do all the queer things he unquestionably had been doing in the course of this amazing weekend. Now, the new Melhuish was uppermost again, speculating about the validity of his soul—a subject that had certainly never concerned the other fellow, hitherto.
But it was the other fellow who was in the ascendant when I entered the farm sitting-room in answer to the summons of a falsetto bell. I was shy. I felt like an intruder. I was afraid that Farmer Banks would treat me as a distinguished visitor, and that my efforts to attain the happy freedom of an equal might—in the eyes of Anne—appear condescending. The new self I had so lately discovered was everybody’s equal, but, just then, I was out of touch with my new self.
Nor did Farmer Banks’s natural courtesy tend to put me at ease. He and Arthur were alone in the room when I came down and it was Arthur who, with an evident self-consciousness, introduced me.
“Mr. Melhuish, father,” was all he said, and I had no idea how much of the story the old man had, as yet, been told.
He made a kind of stiff bow and held out his hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mr. Melhuish,” he said, and his manner struck a mean between respectfulness and self-assertion. It was the kind of manner that he might have shown to a titled canvasser just before an election.
He was a notably handsome man, tall and broad, with regular, impassive features and blue eyes exactly the colour of Arthur’s. Save that his back was slightly rounded and that his closely-cropped hair was iron-gray, he showed little mark of his sixty years. He seemed to me the very type of an English yeoman, not markedly intelligent outside his own speciality, and conservative to the point of fanaticism. When I thought of trying to persuade him to forsake the usage of a lifetime and begin again in a foreign country under new conditions, my heart failed me. Upstairs, before the looking-glass, I had had my doubts of the possibility of ever ousting the old Graham Melhuish; but those doubts appeared the most childish exaggerations of difficulty when compared with my doubts of persuading the man before me to alter his habits and his whole way of life. It seemed to me that the spirit of Farmer Banks must be encrusted beyond all hope of release.
I mumbled some politeness in answer to his unanswerable opening, and started the one possible topic of the weather. I was grossly ignorant of the general requirements of agriculture in that or any other connection, but any one knows a farmer wants fine weather for harvest.
He took me up with a slightly exaggerated air of relief, and I dare say we could have kept the subject going for ten minutes if it had been necessary, but he had hardly begun his reply before the three women for whom we had been waiting came into the room together.
When I met Mr. Banks I felt, at once, that I might have inferred him with nice accuracy from what I already knew of him. Mrs. Banks was a surprise. I had pictured her as tall and slight, and inclined to be sombre. Anne’s hints of the romantic side of her mother’s temperament had, for some reason, suggested that image to me, and I was quite absurdly dumfounded for the moment when I saw this little, roundabout, dark-haired Frenchwoman, as typically exotic as her husband was home-grown, voluble, brisk despite the handicap of her figure, and with nothing English about her unless it were her accent.
Fortunately she gave me no time to display the awkwardness of my surprise. She came straight at me, talking from the instant she entered the door. “Discussing the crops already?” she said. “You must forgive us, Mr. Melhuish, for being so interested in the weather. When one’s fortune depends upon it, one naturally thinks of little else.” She gave me her small plump hand with an engaging but, as it were, a breathless smile. “And you must be starving,” she continued rapidly. “Anne tells me you had no tea at all anywhere, and that the people at the Hall have been treating you outrageously. So! will you sit there and Anne next to you, and those two dreadful children who won’t be separated, together on the other side.”
She was apparently intent only upon this business of getting us into our places about the supper-table, and not until I had sat down did I realise that her last sentence had been an announcement intended for her husband.
“What did you say, Nancy?” he asked with a puzzled air. He was still standing at the head of the table and staring with obvious embarrassment at his wife.
She waved her hands at him. “Sit down, Alfred,” she commanded him, and in her pronunciation of his name I noticed for the first time the ripple of a French “r.” Possibly her manner of speaking his name was a form of endearment. “All in good time, you shall hear about it directly. Now, we are all very hungry and waiting for you.” And without the least hint of a pause she turned to me and glided over an apology for the nature of the meal. “We call it supper,” she said, “and it is just a farm-house supper, but better in its way, don’t you think, than a formal dinner?” She took me utterly into her confidence with her smile as she added, “Up at the Hall they make so much ceremony, all about nothing. I am not surprised that you ran away. But it was very original, all the same.” She introduced me to the first course without taking breath, “Eggs and bacon. So English. Isn’t there a story of a man who starved to death on a walking-tour because he could no longer endure to eat eggs and bacon? And when you have eaten something you must tell us what you have all four been doing while my husband and I were away. So far as I can understand you have turned the universe completely inside out. We came back believing that we return to the Farm, but I think it has become a Fortress….”
I ventured a glance at her husband. These flickering allusions of hers to the tragedy that was threatening him, seemed to me indiscreet and rather too frivolous. But when I saw his look of puzzled wonder and admiration, I began to appreciate the subtlety and wisdom of her method. Using me as a convenient intermediary, she was breaking the news by what were, to him, almost inappreciable degrees. He took in her hints so slowly. He was not sure from moment to moment whether or not she was in earnest. Nevertheless, I recognised, I thought, at least one cause for perturbation. He had been perceptibly ruffled and uneasy at the reference to an understanding between his son and Brenda. Probably the fear of that complication had been in his mind for some time past.
Mrs. Banks had slid away to the subject of local scenery.
“It is beautiful in its own way,” she was saying, “but I feel with Arthur that it has an air of being so—preserved. It is so proper, well-adjusted, I forget the English word …”
I suggested “trim” as a near translation of “propre” and “bien-ajusté.”
“Trim, yes,” she agreed enthusiastically. “My daughter tells me you are an author. There are three lime trees in the pasture and the cattle have eaten the branches as high as they can reach, so that now the trees have the precise shape of a bell. Even the trees in the Park, you see, are trim—not, it is true, like Versailles, where the poor things are made to grow according to plan—but all the county is one great landscape garden; all of England, nearly. Don’t you agree with me? One feels that there must always be a game-keeper or a policeman just round the corner.”
She waited for my answer this time, and something in the eagerness of her expression begged me to play up to her lead.
“I know exactly what you mean,” I said, intensely aware of Anne’s proximity. “I was thinking something of the same kind, only this evening, when I went to meet Arthur in the wood. He and I were discussing it, too, as we came back. That sense of everything belonging to some one else, of having no right, hardly the right to breathe without the Jervaises’ permission.”
Her gesture finally confirmed the fact that perfect confidence was established between us. I felt as if she had patted my shoulder. But she may have been afraid that I might blunder into too obvious a statement, if I were permitted to continue, for she abruptly changed her tactics by saying to Brenda,—
“So you ran away in the middle of the dance?”
“Well, we’d finished dancing, as a matter of fact,” Brenda explained.
Mr. Banks shifted uneasily in his chair. “Ran away, Miss Brenda?” he asked. “Did you say you’d run away?”
She flattered him with a look that besought his approval. “I simply couldn’t stand it any longer,” she said.
“But you’ll be going back?” he returned, after a moment’s pause.
She shook her head, still regarding him attentively with an air of appeal that implied submission to his judgment.
He had stopped eating, and now pushed his chair back a little from the table as though he needed more space to deal with this tremendous problem.
“You’ll be getting us into trouble, Miss Brenda,” he warned her gravely. “It wouldn’t do for us to keep you here, if they’re wanting you to go back home.”
“Well, Alfred, we’ve as much right to her as they have,” Mrs. Banks put in.
The effect upon him of that simple speech was quite remarkable. He opened his fine blue eyes and stared at his wife with a blank astonishment that somehow conveyed an impression of fear.
“Nancy! Nancy!” he expostulated in a tone that besought her to say no more.
She laughingly waved her hands at him, using the same gesture with which she had commanded him to sit down. “Oh! we’ve got to face it, Alfred,” she said. “Arthur and Brenda believe they’re in love with one another, and that’s all about it.”
Banks shook his head solemnly, but it seemed to me that his manner expressed relief rather than the added perturbation I had expected. “No, no, it won’t do. That’d never do,” he murmured. “I’ve been afraid of this, Miss Brenda,” he continued; “but you must see for yourself that it’d never do—our position being what it is. Your father’d never hear of such a thing; and you’d get us all into trouble with him if he thought we’d been encouraging you.”
He drew in his chair and returned to his supper as if he regarded the matter as being now definitely settled. “I don’t know what Mr. Melhuish will be thinking of us,” he added as an afterthought.
“Oh! Mr. Melhuish is on our side,” Mrs. Banks returned gaily.
“Nancy! Nancy!” he reproved her. “This is too serious a matter to make a joke about.”
I was watching Mrs. Banks, and saw the almost invisible lift of the eyebrows with which she passed on the conduct of the case to Anne.
“Mother isn’t joking, dear,” Anne said, accepting the signal without an instant’s hesitation. “Really serious things have been happening while you were away.”
Her father frowned and shook his head. “This isn’t the place to discuss them,” he replied.
“Well, father, I’m afraid we must discuss them very soon,” Anne returned; “because Mr. Jervaise might be coming up after supper.”
“Mr. Jervaise? Coming here?” Banks’s tone of dismay showed that he was beginning, however slowly, to appreciate the true significance of the situation.
“Well, we don’t know that he is,” Arthur put in. “I just thought it was possible he and Mr. Frank might come up this evening.”
“They will certainly come. Have no doubt of that,” Mrs. Banks remarked.
The old man turned to his son as if seeking a refuge from the intrigues of his adored but incomprehensible womenfolk.
“What for?” he asked brusquely.
“To take her back to the Hall,” Arthur said with the least possible inclination of his head towards Brenda.
Banks required a few seconds to ponder that, and his wife and daughter waited in silence for his reply. I had a sense of them as watching over, and at once sheltering and directing him. Nevertheless, though I admired their gentle deftness, I think that at that point of the discussion some forcible male element in me sided very strongly with old Banks. I was aware of the pressure that was so insensibly surrounding him as of a subtly entangling web that seemed to offer no resistance, and yet was slowly smothering him in a million intricate intangible folds. And, after all, why should he be torn away from his root-holds, exiled to some forlorn unknown country where his very methods of farming would be inapplicable? Brenda and Arthur were young and capable. Let them wait, at least until she came of age. Let her be tried by an ordeal of patient resistance. If she were worthy she could fight her family for those thirteen months and win her own triumph without injuring poor Banks.
And whether because I had communicated my thought to her by some change of attitude or because she intuitively shared my sympathy for her father, Anne turned to me just before she spoke, with a quick little, impatient gesture as if beseeching me not to interfere. I submitted myself to her wish with a distinct feeling of pleasure, but made no application of my own joy in serving her to the case of her father.
He was speaking again, now, with a solemn perplexity, as if he were confusedly challenging the soft opposition of his women’s influence.
“But, of course, she must go back to the Hall,” he said. “You wouldn’t like to get us into trouble, would you, Miss Brenda? You see,” he pushed his chair back once more, in the throes of his effort to explain himself, “your father would turn me out, if there was any fuss.”
He was going on, but his wife, with a sudden magnificent violence, scattered the web she and her daughter had been weaving.
“And that might be the best thing that could happen to us, Alfred,” she said. “Oh! I’m so sick and tired of these foolish Jervaises. They are like the green fly on the rose trees. They stick there and do nothing but suck the life out of us. You are a free man. You owe them nothing. Let us break with them and go out, all of us, to Canada with Arthur and Brenda. As for me, I would rejoice to go.”
“Nancy! Nancy!” he reproached her for the third time, with a humouring shake of his head. They were past the celebration of their silver wedding, but it was evident that he still saw in her the adorable foolishness of one who would never be able to appreciate the final infallibility of English standards. He loved her, he would make immense personal sacrifices for her, but in these matters she was still a child, a foreigner. Just so might he have reproached Anne at three years old for some infantile naughtiness.
“It may come to that,” Arthur interjected, gloomily.
“You’re talking like a fool, Arthur,” his father said. “What’d I do at my age—I’ll be sixty-one next month—trapesing off to Canada?” He felt on safer ground, more sure of his authority in addressing his son. He was English. He might be rebellious and need chastisement, but he would not be swayed by these whimsical notions that sometimes bewitched his mother and sister.
“But, father, we may have to go,” Anne softly reminded him.
“Have to? Have to?” he repeated, with a new note of irritability sounding in his voice. “He hasn’t been doing anything foolish, has he? Nothing as can’t be got over?”
It was his wife who replied to that. “We’ve had our time, Alfred,” she said. “We have to think of them now. We must not be selfish. They are young and deeply in love, as you and I were once. We cannot separate them because we are too lazy to move. And sixty? Yes, it is true that you are sixty, but you are strong and your heart is still young. It is not as if you were an old man.”
Arthur and Brenda looked acutely self-conscious. Brenda blushed and seemed inclined to giggle. Arthur’s face was set in the stern lines of one who hears his own banns called in church.
Banks leaned back in his chair and stared apprehensively at his wife. “D’ye mean it, Nancy…?” he asked, and something in his delivery of the phrase suggested that he had come down to a familiar test of decision. I could only infer that whenever she had confessed to “meaning it” in the past, her request had never so far been denied. I guessed, also, that until now she had never been outrageous in her demands.
“What else can be done, dear?” she replied gently. “There is no choice otherwise, except for them to separate.”
He looked at the culprits with an expression of bewilderment. Why should their little love affair be regarded as being of such tragic consequence, he seemed to ask. What did they mean to him and his wife and daughter? Why should they be considered worthy of what he could only picture as a supreme, and almost intolerable sacrifice? These young people were always having love affairs.
He thrust his inquiry bluntly at Brenda. “Are you in earnest, then, Miss Brenda?” he asked. “D’you tell me that you want to marry him—that you’re set on it?”
“I mean to marry him whatever happens,” Brenda replied in a low voice. She was still abashed by this public discussion of her secrets. And it was probably with some idea of diverting him from this intimate probing of her desires that she continued more boldly. “We would go off together, without your consent, you know, if we thought it would do any good. But it wouldn’t, would it? They’d probably be more spiteful still, if we did that. Even if they could keep it dark, they’d never let you stay on here. But do you really think it would be so awful for us all to go to Canada together? It’s a wrench, of course, but I expect it would be frightfully jolly when we got there. Arthur says it is.”
He turned from her with the least hint of contempt to look at his son. “You’ve lost your place a’ready, I suppose?” he said, trying to steady himself by some familiar contact, an effort that would have been absurd if it had not been so pathetic.
Arthur nodded, as stolid as an owl.
His father continued to search him with the same half-bewildered stare.
“What are you going to do, then?” he asked.
“She and I are going back, whatever happens.” Arthur said.
“And suppose they won’t let her go?”
“They’ll have to.”
“Have to!” Banks recited, raising his voice at the repetition of this foolish phrase. “And how in the world are you going to make ’em?”
“The Jervaises aren’t everybody,” Arthur growled.
“You’ll find they’re a sight too strong for the like of us to go against,” Banks affirmed threateningly.
Arthur looked stubborn and shook his head. “They aren’t what you think they are, father,” he began, and then, seeing the incredulity on the old man’s face, he went on in a slightly raised voice, “Well, I know they aren’t. I’ve been up there twice to-day. I saw Mr. Jervaise this morning; went to the front door and asked for him, and when I saw him I put it to him straight that I meant to—that we were going to get married.”
“You did,” murmured Banks in an undertone of grieved dismay.
“I did, father,” Arthur proceeded; “and if it hadn’t been for young Mr. Frank, we’d have come to some sort of understanding. Mr. Jervaise didn’t actually say ‘No,’ as it was.”
“And you went up again this evening?” Banks prompted him.
“Yes; I only saw Mr. Frank, then,” Arthur replied, “and he was in such a pad, there was no talking to him. Anne can tell you why.”
Banks did not speak but he turned his eyes gravely to his daughter.
Anne lifted her head with the movement of one who decides to plunge and be done with it. “He’d been making love to me in the morning,” she said; “and I—played with him for Arthur’s sake. I thought it might help, and afterwards I showed him that I’d been letting him make a fool of himself for nothing, that’s all.”
The old man made no audible comment, but his head drooped a little forward and his body seemed to shrink a little within the sturdy solidity of his oak armchair. Anne, also, had betrayed him. Perhaps, he looked forward and saw the Home Farm without Anne—she could not stay after that—and realised that the verdict of his destiny was finally pronounced.
I turned my eyes away from him, and I think the others, too, feigned some preoccupation that left him a little space of solitude. We none of us spoke, and I knew by the sound of the quick intake of her breath that Mrs. Banks was on the verge of weeping.
I looked up, almost furtively, when I heard the crash of footsteps on the gravel outside, and I found that the other three with the same instinctive movement of suspense were turning towards Mrs. Banks.
She dabbed at her eyes with her handkerchief and nodded to Anne, a nod that said plainly enough, “It’s them—the Jervaises.”
And then we were all startled by the sound of the rude and unnecessary violence of their knock at the front door. No doubt, Frank was still “in a pad.”
Yet no one moved until the old man at the head of the table looked up with a deep sigh, and said,—
“They’d better come in and be done with it, Nancy.”
His glance was slowly travelling round the room as if he were bidding those familiar things a reluctant farewell. All his life had been lived in that house.
XIV
Mrs. Banks
The insulting attack upon the front door was made again with even greater violence while we still waited, united, as I believe, in one sympathetic resolve to shield the head of the house from any unnecessary distress. He alone was called upon to make sacrifice; it was our single duty and privilege to encircle and protect him. And if my own feelings were representative, we fairly bristled with resentment when this vulgar demand for admittance was repeated. These domineering, comfortable, respectability-loving Jervaises were the offenders; the sole cause of our present anxiety. We had a bitter grievance against them and they came swaggering and bullying, as if the threat to their silly prestige were the important thing.
“You’d better go, dear,” Mrs. Banks said with a nod to Anne. The little woman’s eyes were bright with the eagerness for battle, but she continued to talk automatically on absurdly immaterial subjects to relieve the strain of even those few seconds of waiting.
“Our maid is out, you see, Mr. Melhuish,” she explained quickly, and turning to Brenda, continued without a pause, “So Anne has even had to lend you a dress. You’re about of a height, but you’re so much slighter. Still, with very little alteration, her things would fit you very well. If we should be obliged …” She broke off abruptly as Anne returned, followed by Mr. Jervaise and the glowering, vindictive figure of his son.
Anne’s manner of entrance alone would have been sufficient to demonstrate her attitude to the intruders, but she elected to make it still more unmistakable by her announcement of them.
“The Jervaises, mother,” she said, with a supercilious lift of her head. She might have been saying that the men had called for the rent.
Little Mrs. Banks looked every inch an aristocrat as she received them. The gesture of her plump little white hands as she indicated chairs was almost regal in its authority.
Old Jervaise, obviously nervous, accepted the invitation, but Frank, after closing the door, stood leaning with his back against it. The position gave him command of the whole room, and at the same time conveyed a general effect of threat. His attitude said, “Now we’ve got you, and none of you shall leave the room until you’ve paid in full for your impertinence.” I had guessed from his knock that he had finally put his weakness for Anne away from him. He was clever enough to realise just how and why she had fooled him. His single object, now, was revenge.
Banks brooded, rather neglected and overlooked in a corner by the window. He appeared to have accepted his doom as assured, and being plunged into the final gulf of despair, he had, now, no heart even to be apologetic. The solid earth of his native country was slipping away from him; nothing else mattered.
There was one brief, tense interval of silence before old Jervaise began to speak. We all waited for him to state the case; Frank because he meant to reserve himself for the dramatic moment; we others because we preferred to throw the onus of statement upon him. (I do believe that throughout that interview it is fair to speak of “we others,” of the whole six of us, almost as of a single mind with a single intention. We played our individual parts in our own manners, but we were subject to a single will which was, I firmly believe, the will of Mrs. Banks. Even her husband followed her lead, if he did it with reluctance, while the rest of us obeyed her with delight.)
Old Jervaise fumbled his opening. He looked pale and tired, as if he would be glad to be out of it.
“We have called,” he began, striving for an effect of magisterial gravity; “we have come here, Mrs. Banks, to fetch my daughter. I understand that you’ve been away from home—you and your husband—and you’re probably not aware of what has taken—has been going on in your absence.”
“Oh! yes, we know,” Mrs. Banks put in disconcertingly. She was sitting erect and contemptuous in her chair at the foot of the table. For one moment something in her pose reminded me of Queen Victoria.
“Indeed? You have heard; since your return?” faltered old Jervaise. “But I cannot suppose for one moment that either you or your husband approve of—of your son’s gross misbehaviour.” He got out the accusation with an effort; he had to justify himself before his son. But the slight stoop of his shoulders, and his hesitating glances at Mrs. Banks were propitiatory, almost apologetic. It seemed to me that he pleaded with her to realise that he could say and do no less than what he was saying and doing; to understand and to spare him.
“But that is new to me,” Mrs. Banks replied. “I have heard nothing of any gross misbehaviour.”
She was so clearly mistress of the situation that I might have been sorry for old Jervaise, if it had not been for the presence of that scowling fool by the door.
“I—I’m afraid I can describe your son’s conduct as—as nothing less than gross misbehaviour,” the old man stammered, “having consideration to his employment. But, perhaps, you have not been properly informed of the—of the offence.”
“Is it an offence to love unwisely, Mr. Jervaise?” Mrs. Banks shot at him with a sudden ferocity.
He blustered feebly. “You must see how impossible it is for your son to dream of marrying my daughter,” he said. The blood had mounted to his face; and he looked as if he longed to get up and walk out. I wondered vaguely whether Frank had had that eventuality in mind when he blockaded the door with his own gloomy person.
“Tchah!” ejaculated Mrs. Banks with supreme contempt. “Do not talk that nonsense to me, but listen, now, to what I have to say. I will make everything quite plain to you. We have decided that Arthur and Brenda shall be married; but we condescend to that amiable weakness of yours which always demands that there shall be no scandal. It must surely be your motto at the Hall to avoid scandal—at any cost. So we are agreed to make a concession. The marriage we insist upon; but we are willing, all of us, to emigrate. We will take ourselves away, so that no one can point to the calamity of a marriage between a Banks and a Jervaise. It will, I think, break my husband’s heart, but we see that there is nothing else to be done.”
Old Jervaise’s expression was certainly one of relief. He would, I am sure, have agreed to that compromise if he had been alone; he might even have agreed, as it was, if he had been given the chance. But Frank realised his father’s weakness not less surely than we did, and although this was probably not the precise moment he would have chosen, he instantly took the case into his own hands.
“Oh! no, Mrs. Banks, certainly not,” he said. “In the first place we did not come here to bargain with you, and in the second it must be perfectly plain to you that the scandal remains none the less because you have all gone away. We have come to fetch my sister home, that’s the only thing that concerns you.”
“And if she will not go with you?” asked Mrs. Banks.
“She must,” Frank returned.
“And still, if she will not go?”
“Then we shall bring an action against you for abducting her.”
Mrs. Banks smiled gently and pursed her mouth “To avoid a scandal?” she asked.
“If you persist in your absurd demands, there will be a scandal in any case,” Frank replied curtly.
“I suppose my wishes don’t count at all?” Brenda put in.
“Obviously they don’t,” Frank said.
“But, look here, father,” Brenda continued, turning to old Jervaise; “why do you want me to come back? We’ve never got on, I and the rest of you. Why can’t you let me go and be done with it?”
Jervaise fidgeted uneasily and looked up with a touch of appeal at his son. He had begun to mumble some opening when Frank interposed.
“Because we won’t,” he said, “and that’s the end of it. There’s nothing more to be said. I’ve told you precisely how the case stands. Either you come back with us without a fuss, or we shall begin an action at once.”
I know now that Frank Jervaise was merely bluffing, and that they could have had no case, since Brenda was over eighteen, and was not being detained against her will. But none of us, probably not even old Jervaise himself, knew enough of the law to question the validity of the threat.
Little Mrs. Banks, however, was not depending on her legal knowledge to defeat her enemies. What woman would? She had been exchanging glances with her husband during the brief interval in which she had entrusted a minor plea to her junior, and I suppose she, now, considered herself free to produce her trump card. Banks had turned his back on the room—perhaps the first time he had ever so slighted his landlord and owner—and was leaning his forehead against the glass of the window. His attitude was that of a man who had no further interest in such trivialities as this bickering and scheming. Perhaps he was dimly struggling to visualise what life in Canada might mean for him?
His wife’s eyes were still shining with the zest of her present encounter. She was too engrossed by that to consider just then the far heavier task she would presently have to undertake. She shrugged her shoulders and made a gesture with her hands that implied the throwing of all further responsibility upon her antagonists. “If you will have it,” she seemed to say, “you must take the consequences.” And old Jervaise, at all events, foresaw what was coming, and at that eleventh hour made one last effort to avert it.
“You know, Frank…” he began, but Mrs. Banks interrupted him.
“It is useless, Mr. Jervaise,” she said. “Mr. Frank has been making love to my daughter and she has shown him plainly how she despises him. After that he will not listen to you. He seeks his revenge. It is the manner of your family to make love in that way.”
“Impertinence will not make things any easier for you, Mrs. Banks,” Frank interpolated.
“Impertinence? From me to you?” the little woman replied magnificently. “Be quiet, boy, you do not know what you are saying. My husband and I have saved your poor little family from disgrace for twenty years, and I would say nothing now, if it were not that you have compelled me.”
She threw one glance of contempt at old Jervaise, who was leaning forward with his hand over his mouth, as if he were in pain, and then continued,—
“But it is as well that you should know the truth, and after all, the secret remains in good keeping. And you understand that it is apropos to that case you are threatening. It might be as well for you to know before you bring that case against us.”
“Well,” urged Frank sardonically. He was, I think, the one person in the room who was not tense with expectation. Nothing but physical fear could penetrate that hide of his.
“Well, Mr. Frank,” she did not deign to imitate him, but she took up his word as if it were a challenge. “Well, it is as well for you to know that Brenda is not your mother’s daughter.” She turned as she spoke to Brenda herself, with a protective gesture of her little hand. “I know it will not grieve you, dear, to hear that,” she continued. “It is not as if you were so attached to them all at the Hall…”
“But who, then…?” Brenda began, evidently too startled by this astonishing news to realise its true significance.
“She was my step-sister, Claire Sévérac, dear,” Mrs. Banks explained. “She was Olive’s governess. Oh! poor Claire, how she suffered! It was, perhaps, a good thing after all that she died so soon after you were born. Her heart was broken. She was so innocent; she could not realise that she was no more than a casual mistress for your father. And then Mrs. Jervaise, whom you have believed to be your mother, was very unkind to my poor Claire. Yet it seemed best just then, in her trouble, that she should go away to Italy, and that it should be pretended that you were Mrs. Jervaise’s true daughter. I arranged that. I have blamed myself since, but I did not understand at the time that Mrs. Jervaise consented solely that she might keep you in sight of your father as a reminder of his sin. She was spiteful, and at that time she had the influence. She threatened a separation if she was not allowed to have her own way. So! the secret was kept and there were so few who remember my poor Claire that it is only Alfred and I who know how like her you are, my dear. She had not, it is true, your beautiful fair hair that is so striking with your dark eyes. But your temperament, yes. She, too, was full of spirit, vivacious, gay—until afterwards.”
She paused with a deep sigh, and I think we all sighed with her in concert. She had held us with her narrative. She had, as a matter of fact, told us little enough and that rather allusively, but I felt that I knew the whole history of the unhappy Claire Sévérac. Anne had not overrated her mother’s powers in this direction. And my sigh had in it an element of relief. Some strain had been mercifully relaxed.
The sound of Frank’s harsh voice came as a gross intrusion on our silence.
“What evidence have you got of all this?” he asked, but the ring of certainty had gone from his tone.
Mrs. Banks pointed with a superb gesture at his father.
The old man was leaning forward in his chair with his face in his hands. There was no spirit in him. Probably he was thinking less of the present company than of Claire Sévérac.
Frank Jervaise showed his true quality on that occasion. He looked down at his father with scowling contempt, stared for a moment as if he would finally wring the old man’s soul with some expression of filial scorn, and then flung himself out of the room, banging the door behind him as a proclamation that he finally washed his hands of the whole affair.
Old Jervaise looked up when the door banged and rose rather feebly to his feet. For a moment he looked at Arthur, as though he were prepared, now, to meet even that more recent impeachment of his virtue which he had feared earlier in the day. But Arthur’s face gave no sign of any vindictive intention, and the old man silently followed his son, creeping out with the air of a man who submissively shoulders the burden of his disgrace.
I had been sorry for him that morning, but I was still sorrier for him then. Banks was suffering righteously and might find relief in that knowledge, but this man was reaping the just penalties of his own acts.
XV
Remembrance
I do not believe that any of them saw me leave the room.
As soon as old Jervaise had gone, all of them had turned with an instinct of protection towards the head of the family. He, alone, had been sacrificed. Within an hour his whole life had been changed, and I began to doubt, as Anne had doubted, whether so old a tree would bear transplanting. Whatever tenderness and care could do, would be done for him, but the threat of uprooting had come so suddenly. In any case, I could not help those gentle foresters whose work it would be to conduct the critical operation; and I walked out of the room without offering any perfunctory excuse for leaving them.
I made my way into the garden by the side door through which I had first entered the Home Farm; and after one indeterminate moment, came to a halt at the gate on the slope of the hill. I did not want to go too far from the house. For the time being I was no more to the Banks than an inconvenient visitor, but I hoped that presently some of them—I put it that way to myself—would miss me, and that Arthur or Anne would come and tell me what had been arranged in my absence. I should have been glad to talk over the affair with Arthur, but I hoped that it would not be Arthur who would come to find me.
For a time my thoughts flickered capriciously over the astonishing events of my adventurous week-end. I was pleasantly replete with experience. In all my life I had never before entered thus completely into any of the great movements of life. I recalled my first thrills of anticipation amidst the glowing, excited youth of the resting dancers at the Hall. We had been impatient for further expression. The dragging departure of the Sturtons had been an unbearable check upon the exuberance of our desires. In my thought of the scene I could see the unspent spirit of our vitality streaming up in a fierce fount of energy.
And with me, at least, that fount, unexpectedly penned by the first hints of disaster, had still played furiously in my mind as I had walked with Frank Jervaise through the wood. My intoxicated imagination had created its own setting. I had gone, exalted, to meet my wonderful fate. Through some strange scene of my own making I had strayed to the very feet of enduring romance.
But after that exciting prelude, when the moon had set and slow dawn, like a lifting curtain, had been drawn to reveal the landscape of a world outside the little chamber of my own being, I had been cast from my heights of exaltation into a gloomy pit of disgrace. Fate, with a fastidious particularity, had hauled me back to the things of everyday. I was not to be allowed to dream too long. I was wanted to play my part in this sudden tragedy of experience.
My thought went off at a tangent when I reached that point of my reflection. I had found myself involved in the Banks’s drama, but what hope had I of ever seeing them again after the next day? What, moreover, was the great thing I was called upon to do? I had decided only an hour or two before that my old way of life had become impossible for me, but equally impossible was any way of life that did not include the presence of Anne.
I looked at my watch, and found that it was after ten o’clock, but how long I had been standing at the gate, I had no idea; whether an hour or ten minutes. I had been dreaming again, lost in imaginative delights; until the reminder of this new urgency had brought me back to a reality that demanded from me an energy of participation and of initiative.
I wished that Anne would come—and by way of helping her should she, indeed, have come out to look for me, I strolled back to the Farm, and then round to the front of the house.
The windows of the sitting-room had been closed but the blinds were not drawn. The lamp had been lit and splayed weak fans of yellow light on to the gravel, and the flower-beds of the grass plot. The path of each beam was picked out from the diffused radiance of the moonlight, by the dancing figures of the moths that gathered and fluttered across the prisms of these enchanted rays. But I did not approach the windows. In the stillness of the night I could hear Anne’s clear musical voice. She was still there in the sitting-room, still soothing and persuading her father. Her actual words were indistinguishable, but the modulations of her tone seemed to convey the sense of her speech, as a melody may convey the ideas of form and colour.
I returned to my vigil at the gate and to thoughts of Anne—to romantic thoughts of worship and service; of becoming worthy of her regard; of immense faithfulness to her image when confronted with the most provocative temptations; to thoughts of self-sacrifice and bravado, of humility and boasting; of some transcending glorification of myself that should make me worthy of her love.
I was arrested in the midst of my ecstatic sentimentalism by the sight of the Hall, the lights of which were distantly visible through the trees. The path by the wood was not the direct line from the Hall to the Farm; the sanctities of the Park were not violated by any public right of way. The sight of the place pulled me up, because I was suddenly pierced by the reflection that perhaps old Jervaise had thus postured to win the esteem of his daughter’s governess. He, it is true, had had dignity and prestige on his side, but surely he must have condescended to win her. Had he, too, dreamed dreams of sacrifice at the height of his passion? Had he alternately grovelled and strutted to attract the admiration of his lady? I found the reflection markedly distasteful. I was sorry again, now, for the old man. He had suffered heavy penalties for his lapse. I remembered Mrs. Banks’s hint that his wife had adopted Brenda in the first place in order that he might have before him a constant reminder of his disgrace. I could believe that. It was just such a piece of chicane as I should expect from that timid hawk, Mrs. Jervaise. But while I pitied the man, I could not look upon his furtive gratifications of passion with anything but distaste.
No; if my love for Anne was to be worthy of so wonderful an object, I must not stupefy myself with these vapours of romance. The ideal held something finer than this, something that I could not define, but that conveyed the notion, however indeterminately, of equality. I thought of my fancy that we had “recognised” each other the night before. Surely that fancy contained the germ of the true understanding, of the conceptions of affinity and remembrance.
No tie of our present earth life could be weighed against that idea of a spirit love, enduring through the ages; a love transcending and immortal, repeating itself in ever ascending stages of rapture. The flesh was but a passing instrument of temporal expression, a gross medium through which the spirit could speak only in poor, inarticulate phrases of its magnificent recognition of an eternal bond. … Oh! I was soon high in the air again, riding my new Pegasus through the loftiest altitudes of lonely exaltation. I was a conqueror while I had the world to myself. But when at last I heard the rustle of a woman’s dress on the path behind me, I was nothing more than a shy, self-conscious product of the twentieth century, all too painfully aware of his physical shortcomings.
She came and stood beside me at the gate, without speaking; and my mind was so full of her, so intoxicated with the splendour of my imaginings, that I thought she must surely share my newfound certainty that we had met once more after an age of separation. I waited, trembling, for her to begin. I knew that any word of mine would inevitably precipitate the bathos of a civilised conversation. I was incapable of expressing my own thought, but I hoped that she, with her magic voice, might accomplish a miracle that was beyond my feeble powers. Indeed, I could imaginatively frame for her, speech that I could not, myself, deliver. I knew what I wanted her to say—or to imply. For it was hardly necessary for her to say anything. I was ready, wholly sympathetic and receptive. If she would but give me the least sign that she understood, I could respond, though I was so unable to give any sign myself.
I came down from my clouds with a feeling of bitter disappointment, a sense of waking from perfect dreams to the realisation of a hard, inimical world, when she said in a formal voice.
“It’s after eleven. My mother and father have gone to bed.”
“Is he—is he in any way reconciled?” I asked, and I think I tried to convey something of resentment by my tone. I still believed that she must guess.
“In a way,” she said, and sighed rather wearily.
“It must have been very hard for him to make up his mind so quickly—to such a change,” I agreed politely.
“It was easier than I expected,” she said. “He was so practical. Just at first, of course, while Mr. Jervaise was there, he seemed broken. I didn’t know what we should do. I was almost afraid that he would refuse to come. But afterwards he—well, he squared his shoulders. He is magnificent. He’s as solid as a rock. He didn’t once reproach us. He seemed to have made up his mind; only one thing frightened him…”
“What was that?” I asked, as she paused.
“That we haven’t any capital to speak of,” she said. “Even after we have sold the furniture here, we shan’t have more than five or six hundred pounds so far as we can make out. And he says it isn’t enough. He says that he and mother are too old to start again from small beginnings. And—oh! a heap of practical things. He is so slow in some ways that it startled us all to find out how shrewd he was about this. It was his own subject, you see.”
“There needn’t be any difficulty about capital,” I said eagerly. I had hardly had patience for her to finish her speech. From her first mention of that word “capital” I had seen my chance to claim a right in the Banks’s fortunes.
“I don’t see…” she began, and then checked herself and continued stiffly, “My father would never accept help of any kind.”
“Arthur might—from a friend,” I said.
“He thinks we’ve got enough—to begin with,” she replied. “They’ve been arguing about it. Arthur’s young and certain. Father isn’t either, and he’s afraid of going to a strange country—and failing.”
“But in that case Arthur must give way,” I said.
Anne was silent for a moment and then said in a horribly formal voice. “Am I to understand, Mr. Melhuish, that you are proposing to lend Arthur this money?”
“On any terms he likes,” I agreed warmly.
“Why?”
I could not mistake her intention. I knew that she expected me to say that it was for her sake. I was no less certain that if I did say that she would snub me. Her whole tone and manner since she had come out to the gate had challenged me.
“Here we are alone in the moonlight,” her attitude had said. “You’ve been trying to hint some kind of admiration for me ever since we met. Now, let us get that over and finished with, so that we can discuss this business of my father’s.”
“Because I like him,” I said. “I haven’t known him long, of course; only a few hours altogether; but…” I stopped because I was afraid she would think that the continuation of the argument might be meant to apply to her rather than to Arthur; and I had no intention of pleading by innuendo. When I did speak, I meant to speak directly, and there was but one thing I had to say. If that failed, I was ready to admit that I had been suffering under a delusion.
“Well?” she prompted me.
“That’s all,” I said.
“Weren’t you going to say that it wasn’t how long you’d known a person that mattered?”
“It certainly didn’t matter in Arthur’s case,” I said. “I liked him from the first moment I saw him. It’s true that we had been talking for some time before there was light enough for me to see him.”
“You like him so much that you’d be willing to lend him all the money he wanted, without security?” she asked.
“Yes, all the money I have,” I said.
“Without any—any sort of condition?”
“I should make one condition,” I replied.
“Which is?”
“That he’d let me come and stay with him, and Brenda, and all of you—on the farm.”
“And, of course, we should all have to be very nice to you, and treat you as our benefactor—our proprietor, almost,” she suggested cruelly.
I was hurt, and for a moment I was inclined to behave much as young Turnbull had behaved that afternoon, to turn away and sulk, and show that I had been grievously misunderstood. I overcame that impulse, however. “I shouldn’t expect you to curtsey!” I said.
She turned to me with one of her instant changes of mood.
“Why don’t you tell me the truth?” she asked passionately.
“The truth you mean hasn’t anything whatever to do with what we’re talking about now,” I said.
“Oh! but it has. It must have,” she protested. “Aren’t you trying to buy my good-will all the time? All this is so heroic and theatrical. Aren’t you being the splendid benefactor of one of your own plays—being frightfully tactful and oh! gentlemanly? It wouldn’t be the right thing, of course, to—to put any sort of pressure on me; but you could put us all under every sort of obligation to you, and afterwards—when you came to stay with us—you’d be very forbearing and sad, no doubt, and be very sweet to my mother—she likes you already—but every one would know just why; and you’d all expect me—to—to do the right thing, too.”
If I had not been truly in love with her I should have been permanently offended by that speech. It stung me. What she implied was woundingly true of that old self of mine which had so recently come under my observation and censure. I could see that; and yet if any one but Anne had accused me I should have gone off in high dudgeon. The hint of red in my hair would not permit me to accept insult with meekness. And while I was still seeking some way to avoid giving expression to my old self whose influence was painfully strong just then, she spoke again.
“Now you’re offended,” she said.
I avoided a direct answer by saying, “What you accused me of thinking and planning might have been true of me yesterday; it isn’t true, now.”
“Have you changed so much since yesterday?” she asked, as if she expected me to confess, now, quite in the familiar manner. She had given me an opportunity for the proper continuation. I refused it.
“I have only one claim on you,” I said boldly.
“Well?” she replied impatiently.
“You recognised me last night.”
It was very like her not to fence over that. She had a dozen possible equivocations, but she suddenly met me with no attempt at disguise.
“I thought I did,” she said. “Just for a minute.”
“And now? You know…?”
She leaned her elbows on the gate and stared out over the moonlit mysteries of the Park.
“You’re not a bit what I expected,” she said.
I misunderstood her. “But you can’t…” I began.
“To look at,” she interrupted me.
I felt a thrill of hope. “But neither are you,” I said.
“Oh!” she commented softly.
“I’ve had romantic visions, too,” I went on; “of what she would look like when I did meet her. But when I saw you, I remembered, and all the visions—oh! scattered; vanished into thin air.”
“If you hadn’t been so successful…” she murmured.
“I’m sorry for that,” I agreed. “But I’m going to make amends. I realised it all this afternoon in the wood when I went to meet Arthur. I’m going to begin all over again, now. I’m coming to Canada—to work.” The whole solution of my problem was suddenly clear, although I had not guessed it until that moment. “I’m going to buy a farm for all of us,” I went on quickly, “and all the money that’s over, I shall give away. The hospitals are always willing to accept money without asking why you give it. They’re not suspicious, they don’t consider themselves under any obligation.”
“How much should you have to give away?” she asked.
“Thirty or forty thousand pounds,” I said. “It depends on how much the farm costs.”
“Hadn’t you better keep a little, in case the farm fails?” she put in.
“It won’t fail,” I said. “How could it?”
“And you’d do all that just because you’ve—remembered me?”
“There was another influence,” I admitted.
“What was that?” she asked, with the sound of new interest in her voice.
“All this affair with the Jervaises,” I said. “It has made me hate the possession of money and the power money gives. That farm of ours is going to be a communal farm. Our workers shall have an interest in the profits. No one is to be the proprietor. We’ll all be one family—no scraping for favours, or fears of dismissal; we’ll all be equal and free.”
She did not answer that, at once; and I had an unpleasant feeling that she was testing my quality by some criterion of her own, weighing the genuineness of my emotion.
“Did you feel like this about things this afternoon?” she asked, after what seemed to me an immense interval.
I was determined to tell her nothing less than the truth. “No,” I confessed, “much of it was a result of what you said to me. I—I had an illumination. You made me see what a poor thing my life had been; how conventional, artificial, worthless, it was. What you said about my plays was so true. I had never realised it before—I hadn’t bothered to think about it.”
“I don’t remember saying anything about your plays,” she interrupted me.
“Oh! you did,” I assured her; “very little; nothing directly; but I knew what you felt, and when I came to think it over, I agreed with you.”
“I’ve only seen one,” she remarked.
“They’re all the same,” I assured her, becoming fervent in my humility.
“But why go to Canada?” she asked. “Why not try to write better plays?”
“Because I saw my whole life plainly, in the wood this afternoon,” was my reply. “I did not know what to do then. I couldn’t see any answer to my problem. But when you were speaking to me a minute ago, I realised the whole thing clearly. I understood what I wanted to do.
“It’s a form of conversion,” I concluded resolutely.
“I’m sure you mean it all—now,” she commented, as if she were speaking to herself.
“It isn’t a question of meaning anything,” I replied. “The experiences of this week-end have put the whole social question in a new light for me. I could never go back, now, to the old life. My conscience would always be reproaching me, if I did.”
“But if you’re rich, and feel like that, oughn’t you to shoulder your responsibilities?” she asked.
“Do something? Wouldn’t it be rather like running away to give your money to the hospitals and go to Canada to work on a farm?”
“That’s my present impulse,” I said. “And I mean to follow it. I don’t know that I shall want to stay in Canada for the rest of my life. I may see further developments after I’ve been there for a few years. But…”
“Go on,” she urged me.
“But I want to—to stay near you—all of you. I can’t tell you how I admire your father and mother and Arthur and—all of you. And you see, I admit that this conversion of mine has been very sudden. I—I want to learn.”
“Do you always follow your impulses like this?” she put in.
“I’ve never had one worth following before,” I said.
“What about wanting to fight Frank Jervaise?” she asked. “And running away from the Hall? And suddenly taking Arthur’s side in the row? and all those things? Didn’t you follow your impulses, then?”
And yet, it had never before occurred to me that I was impulsive. I had imagined myself to be self-controlled, rather business-like, practical. I was frankly astonished at this new light on my character.
“I suppose I did, in a way,” I admitted doubtfully.
“To say nothing of…” she began, and stopped with a little, rather embarrassed laugh.
“Of what?” I urged her.
“How many times before have you imagined yourself to be head over ears in love?” she asked.
I was repaid in that moment for all the self-denials and fastidious shrinkings of my youth.
“Never once!” I acclaimed triumphantly. “It’s the one common experience that has passed me by. I’ve often wondered why I could never fall in love. I’ve admired any number of women. I’ve tried to fall in love with them. And I have never been able to, try as I would. I could deceive myself about other things, but never about that. Now, I know why.”
I waited for her encouragement, but as she did not speak I went on with more hesitation. “You’ll think me a romantic fool, I suppose, if I tell you why?”
“Oh! I know, I know,” she said. “You’ve told me already in so many words. You mean that you’ve been waiting for me; that you had to wait for me. You’ve been very frank. You deserve some return. Shall I tell you just how I feel? I will. I don’t mind telling you the truth, too. I did remember you last night. But not since; not even now. But I like you—I like you very much—as you are this evening. More than I’ve ever liked any man before. And if you went away, I should remember you; and want you to come back. But you must give me time. Lots of time. Don’t make love to me any more; not yet; not till I’ve really remembered. I think I shall—in a little while—when you’ve gone away. You’re so near me, now. And so new. You don’t belong to my life, yet.”
She paused and then went on in another tone. “But I believe you’re right about Canada. I’ll explain it all to the others. We’ll make some kind of arrangement about it. I expect it will have to be your farm, nominally, for a time—until we all know you better. I can feel that you do—that you have taken a tremendous fancy to all of us. I felt it just now, after supper. I was watching you and—oh! well, I knew what you were feeling about my father and mother; and it seemed to be just what I should have liked you to feel. But I don’t think I would give all my money to the hospitals, if I were you. Not without thinking it over a bit, first. Wait until we get to Canada and see—how we get on.”
“You don’t trust my impulses,” I said.
She laughed. “Wait till to-morrow anyway,” she replied.
And as she spoke I heard far away, across the Park, the sound of the stable-clock at the Hall, striking twelve. The artificial sound of it was mellowed and altered by distance; as different from that theatrical first striking I had noticed in the exciting atmosphere of the crowd, as was my present state of mind from that in which I had expectantly waited the coming of romance….
“To-morrow begins now,” I said.
“And I have to be up before six,” she added, in the formal voice she knew so well how to assume.
I felt as though she had by that one return to civility cancelled all that she said, and as we turned back to the house, I began to wonder whether the promise of my probation was as assured as I had, a minute earlier, so confidently believed.
We were nearly at the little porch that would for ever be associated in my mind with the fumbling figure of Frank Jervaise, when she said,
“One moment. I’ll get you something,” and left me standing in almost precisely the same spot from which I had gazed up at her window the night before.
She returned almost immediately, but it was not until we were inside the house and she had lighted my candle that she gave me the “something,” pressing it into my hand with a sudden delicious, girlish embarrassment.
She was gone before I recognised that the precious thing she had given me was a sprig of Rosemary.