Jane--Our Stranger: A Novel

by Mary Borden

I looked from one to the other—“But if the fortune is immense—” I ventured.

“It is all tied up,” wailed my mother. “Her trustees insist on his debts being paid beforehand. I understand nothing—but nothing.” Her head dropped forward. She pressed her thumb and forefinger against her worn eyelids. She began to cry.

Claire, with a strange sidelong look at her expressive of compassion and exasperation and wonder, got up and walked to the window and stood with her back to us looking out into the garden.

“I should have thought my son-in-law would have saved me this humiliation,” said my mother, fumbling with her left hand for her handkerchief. “But Claire says he has already lent Philibert very considerable sums.” I saw my sister’s slender figure stiffen. “What curious people Americans are. It seems that the father made such a will as passes belief. The child comes into the entire fortune but can only dispose of the income. The mother has an annuity, Claire says it must be a big one as she entertains a great deal. Why did you not tell me your brother was getting so dreadfully into debt? The girl is just eighteen. It appears that in America girls reach their majority at eighteen. Her name is Jane. A most unpleasant name. Philibert says she is not pretty. These mésalliances are so tiresome. If only he could have married that exquisite little Bianca. I shall be obliged to receive the mother. I am sure she has a very strong accent.”

My poor mother stretched out her hand to me. “What is to become of us?” she wailed gently. I felt very sorry for her. I understood that she was afraid of the invasion of a horde of big noisy strangers. I tried to comfort her. She seemed to me for the first time pitiful, and I saw that her youthfulness was after all, just one of the illusions she cast by the exercise of her will. It fell from her that evening as if it had been some gossamer veil destroyed by her tears.

Claire remained silent. Only once during all my mother’s broken lament did she speak, and then she said without turning—“I should have thought one such marriage in a family was enough.”

It transpired that Philibert needed five hundred thousand francs to put him straight, that the house was being sold for a million and that the remaining half was my mother’s, since they owned the property between them. He had brought her the deed of sale to sign that afternoon, and had gone away with the signature in his pocket. She said—“Naturally I could not refuse. It is not as if he could have sold half the building.”

I felt humiliated for my mother. It seemed to me that my brother had injured her in a most offensive way. There was a kind of indecency about the proceeding that made me ashamed. It was the kind of thing I had hoped we were none of us capable of doing. He was taking away from her not only her shelter and security, but a part of her own personality. It was as outrageous as if he had forced her to cut off her hair and had taken it round to a wigmaker to turn into a handful of gold. I saw that without that fine old house, so like her own self expressed in architecture, with its bland and graceful exterior and delicate ornamented rooms, she would lose a vital part of her entity. She was not one of those people whose public and private selves are distinct. The proud little bright-eyed lady who drove out of those stately doors in her brougham to dispense finely gradated smiles to the meticulously selected people of her acquaintance, and the passionate intriguing mother so given to subterfuges of kindness and ineffable make-believe of disinterested affection, were one and the same person. She had no special manner for the world. There was no homely naturalness for her to subside into, no loose woolly dressing-gown of conduct and no rough carpet slippers of laziness to don in the presence of her family or by her lonely self. What she was when in attendance on the Bourbons that she was in her own silent bedroom. Even about her weeping there was a certain style. Her tears were pitiful but not ugly. They had destroyed the illusion of her youthfulness, but they had not marred her elegance. There was measure and appropriateness and dramatic worth in her weeping. Her son had not broken her heart or her spirit; he had merely dragged off some of her clothing. She stood denuded, impoverished, a little shrunken in stature, that was all. It was that that enraged me. I said—“What a brute.” My mother pulled me up sharply.

“My son,” she said to me, with more of haughtiness than I had ever seen in her manner to any one of us. “I have consented to do what your brother has asked. I have approved of his conduct. That is sufficient.”

I felt then the finality, the hopelessness. I believe I smiled. The change was sudden. It had always been like that with mother. She might complain of Philibert but no one could criticize him to her.