“She professes not to know then, how it was her mother made it?” she asked.
Philibert came as it were to a halt. He looked at us all one after another. His face was of a sudden impudent, cool, smooth. He began to explain lucidly.
“Imagine to yourself, she really did not know it. She believed it was a love match. She believed it till yesterday, I mean last night, or it may be it was this morning, I don’t remember looking at the time. Anyhow, as she wouldn’t let me sleep I told her. I told her all about it.”
“I don’t believe she didn’t know,” said Claire.
He took her up quickly. “There, my dear, you are wrong, and you miss the whole meaning of her boring character.” He was enjoying himself now, was my brother, dissecting a human being was one of his favourite pastimes. In the pleasure it now afforded him to analyze Jane, he forgot for the moment his personal annoyance.
“One must remember,” he mused, “that she is a savage, with the mentality of a Huguenot minister. If you could hear her talk of the sacrament of marriage! She is of a solemnity, and her ideals, Mon Dieu! what ideals! She once said to me that her grandfather loved her grandmother at the day of his death just in the same way that he loved her on the day of her wedding. When I replied ‘How very disgusting’ she merely stared and left the room. She is always quoting her grandmother and her Aunt Patty. What a background—I ask you? St. Mary’s Plains! It would appear that in St. Mary’s Plains they always marry for love and live together in endless monotony. Faithfulness—she is in love with faithfulness; purity too, she thinks a great deal of purity. In fact she has a most unpleasant set of theories. They fill up her brain. There is no room for reality. What goes on before her eyes means nothing to her. No, Claire, you are wrong. She knew nothing of her mother’s bargaining with me for her little life. Believe it or not, it is true. She married me for myself and believed the good God sent me to her, and my revelations were a shock. Impossible she should have simulated the emotion they caused her. The finest actress in the world could not have done it. I admit that as a piece of acting it would have been a fine performance. On the stage I would have enjoyed it, but in one’s own bedroom, the conjugal bedroom—ugh! no.”
“What did she do?” asked Claire.
“She leaned up against the wall, face to the wall, I mean, flattened against it, her hands high above her head, palms on the wall, too, as if she were reaching up to the ceiling.”
“I don’t see anything wonderful in that.”
“It was a fine picture,” said Philibert. “But she stayed there too long. She stayed like that some minutes. In fact I went on talking for a long time to that image, that long back and those outstretched arms. It reminded one of a crucifixion, modern interpretation. I was not sure that she was not dying and expected her to fall backwards.”