“No ... what I want to tell you isn’t about women. It’s about my mother.” He looked at her directly, piercingly. “You see ... my mother and my father were never married. Good old Monsieur de Cyon only adopted me.... I’ve no right to the name ... really. My name is really John Shane.... They were never married, only it’s not the way it sounds. She’s a great lady, my mother, and she refused to marry my father because ... she says ... she says she found out that he wasn’t what she thought him. He begged her to. He said it ruined his whole life ... but she wouldn’t marry him ... not because she was weak, but because she was strong. You’ll understand that when you come to know her.”
What he said would have shocked her more deeply if she had not been caught in the swift passion of a rebellion against all the world about her, all the prejudices and the misunderstandings that in her young wisdom she knew would be ranged against herself and Jean. In this mood, the mother of Jean became to her a sort of heroic symbol, a woman to be admired.
She leaned toward him. “It doesn’t matter ... not at all, Jean ... things like that don’t matter in the end.... All that matters is the future....” She looked away from him and added in a low voice, “Besides, what I have to tell you is much worse.” She pressed his hand savagely. “You won’t let it change you? You’ll not give me up? Maybe you know it already ... that I have a grandmother who is mad.... She’s been mad for years ... almost all her life.”
He kissed her quickly. “No, it won’t matter.... Nothing could make me think of giving you up ... nothing in the world.”
“I’m so happy, Jean ... and so peaceful ... as if you had saved me ... as if you’d changed all my life. I’ve been frightened sometimes....”
But a sudden cloud had darkened the happiness ... the cloud that was never absent from the house at Pentlands.
“You won’t let your father keep us apart, Sybil.... He doesn’t like me.... It’s easy to see that.”
“No, I shan’t let him.” She halted abruptly. “What I am going to say may sound dreadful.... I shouldn’t take my father’s word about anything. I wouldn’t let him influence me. He’s spoiled his own life and my mother’s too.... I feel sorry for my father.... He’s so blind ... and he fusses so ... always about things which don’t matter.”
For a long time they sat in silence, Sybil with her eyes closed leaning against him, when suddenly she heard him saying in a fierce whisper, “That damned Thérèse!” and looking up she saw at the rim of the hill beyond the decaying tombstones, the stocky figure of Thérèse, armed with an insect-net and a knapsack full of lunch. She was standing with her legs rather well apart, staring at them out of her queer gray eyes with a mischievous, humorous expression. Behind her in a semicircle stood a little army of dirty Polish children she had recruited to help her collect bugs. They knew that she had followed them deliberately to spy on them, and they knew that she would pretend blandly that she had come upon them quite by accident.
“Shall we tell her?” asked Jean in a furious whisper.