Chapter 12

"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.