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 …”