On the Countess' part there was little dissimulation, for her anxieties had calmed down with surprising ease. She had cornered me again, first thing in the morning, for "just one word."
"They have been talking to you, I know. How late you stayed with Elise! Not for the world would I try to learn their confidences, but one thing as their mother it is my duty and right to know. Tell me that my worst fears are without foundation."
"Absolutely." I looked her full in the face with a confidence-inspiring false honesty. After all, it was the truth; her worst fears, she had said plainly, were for Elise.
Elise alone could not dissimulate her yesterday. Red eyes no craft, no cosmetics, can conjure away. Suzanne was boisterously at ease; de Fouquier suave, unchanging. Suzanne's ease did not seem artificial. There had been a fright and a fuss yesterday, and trouble would no doubt break out again—one of these days. Meanwhile, she would eat, drink and be merry. How I envied her "meanwhile" temperament.
I had a bewildering mass of new impressions to digest, all of one day's serving. That mother and two daughters, from their different angles, all saw menfolk in the same light was a testimony that overbore my passionate resistance. Many men, at least, must be as evil as they said. Frenchmen perhaps. I idealized my own men only the more. Similarly, while the lack of all friendship between mother and daughters sank into my mind as a fact that was probably general, I idealized my own mother all the more. Perhaps the Fifth Commandment is only ever perfectly obeyed by children whose parents are dead.
Above all, I could now visualize to my heart's content without any breach of Resolution. I melo-dramatized the intrigues and troubles of this family, casting myself (of course) for the leading part. I had a friend to rescue from a villain, a family to rid of its foe; secrets and papers with which this man threatened my friends to discover and to use for his own dramatic undoing: here was a rôle I had been destined for from birth....
And here for the first time in this record I shall deviate from the plan of absolute completeness at which I have aimed, and shall pass by much in silence. The whirlpool of petty melodramatic intrigues into which I was now plunged—though no doubt more violent in my imagination than in sober fact—might yet form the subject of an exciting tale. But it has no place in this narrative, which deals with MARY LEE. The person who took her full share in these doings, in absorbing (or, if need be, in worming out) still more intimate confidences from the three Frenchwomen, in gracefully raiding M. de Fouquier's quarters and hunting among his papers, in discovering the prattlings and preferences of the servants, in establishing that Gabrielle was for us and that François was for him, in discovering that while the villainy and vileness of Fouquier had probably been exaggerated by two of his friends his noble passionate character had certainly been overstated by the third, in taking a leading part in all the plans and jealousies and intrigues, which from Countess to Kitchen filled every person and place in this Norman mansion—this person was not the Mary I am chiefly concerned with, but that phantom-personality with brain and with appetites but without fears and without hopes, without love and without God, who, foisted upon me by the real Me's foolish plan of self-effacement, for this year or two ruled within my body, while the real Mary, lulled by the ease and emptiness of that time, lay dormant and almost for dead.
Thus it is that although across forty years the Bear Lawn days are as vivid in my heart as today's noontide, the years in France I can but vaguely reconstruct. Only my brain's memory, the one thing that all the Marys have shared in common, retains them; and what the brain but not the heart remembers is lifeless bones, dimensionless phantoms, as unreal as other people. Château Villebecq, the house, the park, the people, stand before my eyes—now, as I strive to conjure them up—like the cardboard scenes of a stage. When, years later, I first went to the play, the resemblance at once assailed me.
Hardly at all during this period, except at moments in my friendship with Elise, and except in prayer—and then I was no longer in France—was my soul awake. Not until the series of events in which voices from Tawborough and my soul's native surroundings spoke to me again.
To be sure, some of the escapades of that other person are clearer in my memory than others. The most foolish and fantastic is the one I remember best. Diary, rather than my heart, supplies the silly details.