He leaned against the door of the car with the air of one who is preparing for a long story. “You’re sure you want to hear all this?” he asked.
“Quite sure—that is, if you want to tell me,” I said. “And if I’m coming home with you, it might be as well if I knew exactly how things stand.”
“I felt somehow as if you and me were going to hit it off, last night,” he remarked shyly.
“So did I,” I rejoined, not less shy than he was.
Our friendship had been admitted and confirmed. No further word was needed. We understood each other. I felt warmed and comforted. It was good to be once more in the confidence of a fellowman. I have not the stuff in me that is needed to make a good spy.
“Well, the way things are at present,” Banks hurried on to cover our lapse into an un-British sentimentality, “is like this. We’d meant, as I told you, to run away….”
“And then she was afraid?”
“No, it was rather the other way round. It was me that was afraid. You see, I thought I should take all the blame off the old man by going off with her—him being away and all, I didn’t think as even the Jervaises could very well blame it on to him, overlooking what she pointed out, as once we’d gone they’d simply have to get rid of him, too, blame or no blame. They’d never stand having him and mother and Anne within a mile of the Hall, as sort of relations. I ought to have seen that, but one forgets these things at the time.”
I nodded sympathetically.
“So what it came to,” he continued, “was that we might as well face it out as not. She’s like that—likes to have things straight and honest. So do I, for the matter of that; but once you’ve been a gentleman’s servant it gets in your blood or something. I was three years as groom and so on up at the Hall before I went to Canada. Should have been there now if it hadn’t been for mother. I was only a lad of sixteen when I went into service, you see, and when I came back I got into the old habits again. I tell you it’s difficult once you’ve been in service to get out o’ the way of feeling that, well, old Jervaise, for instance, is a sort of little lord god almighty.”