“Yes, it’s a different story now, isn’t it?” I didn’t care for their combined shocked stare, now centred on myself, and continued to Philibert—“After all, you’ve got what you wanted, haven’t you? You remember you told her not to love you so much.”
“Blaise!” My mother’s exclamation was a check. I had a sensation of shaking myself free. “Well, isn’t it so? Weren’t you all awfully bored with her caring too much for you, and now that she doesn’t, now that she has withdrawn, is leading a life of her own, you are troubled, you wonder. How can you wonder? Isn’t it all quite simple?” But I knew that it was not so simple after all, so I stopped.
“You think then,” put in my sister gravely, “that she no longer cares for us?” Her tone made me stare in my turn. It was earnest and enquiring, and I heard Philibert to my astonishment echoing her words. “Ah, you believe she no longer cares?” And most wonderful of all my mother’s phrase. “Tell us, Blaise, what she does feel. I believe that you understand her better than we do.”
It was quite extraordinary. I had the strangest feeling for a moment of pride and power. They had all turned to me. They had all recognized simultaneously that I possessed something valuable. And for a moment I enjoyed the novel sensation. They wanted something from me, that was pleasant, but what they wanted was Jane’s secret. They believed she had confided in me, and they believed I would tell them. I felt again weary and impatient and humiliated, and I brought out the truth abruptly. “I know no more than you do what is going on in Jane’s mind, she has told me nothing.” But I saw that they did not believe me.
The room, my mother’s room, seemed to shrink visibly. It appeared very small and trivial. Its innumerable bibelots and souvenirs winked and glinted, mischievous and precious, minute tokens of delicate prejudice, obstinate and conventional and colourless. It all looked small and meaningless and pale. I could have laughed. I was important there at last. But it was a tiny place to me now. I pitied it. I felt suddenly free and alone. I thought—“Jane has told me nothing, it is true, nevertheless she trusts me,” and I felt them reading my mind and it didn’t matter. They might know for all I cared that I knew nothing, they would feel all the same that I knew Jane as they would never know her. But what they would never know was, that knowing Jane as I did, I knew many other things, wonderful things. I felt a lift, a lightening, a widening of space, a fresh rush of wind as if I was being blown upon by the breath of those wide American forests. Somewhere in my mind vistas opened. I heard the murmuring of a free wind in high branches. And all the time I saw my frail little mother in her damask chair, in her little crowded silken room, and I loved her with tenderness and compassion. An impulse seized me. I went over to her. I took her hand.
“If only you would love her,” I said, “everything would be all right.” Then I saw that I had blundered. How could I have been so stupid as to have imagined that they had been with me for that moment in those wide high spaces where I knew Jane lived? My words sounded grotesque and fatuous. I saw a shade come over my mother’s face. I heard Claire’s swish of impatient drapery. Philibert snorted. I felt myself blushing. My face tingled. I had made myself ridiculous. My mother’s hand kept me off. Its nervous clasp pushed me from her while she murmured plaintively—“Mais je l’aime bien, mais je l’aime bien.”
Claire followed me out of the room. In the little dark hall we stood close together. She had closed the door of the drawing room after her. Beyond it we heard Philibert’s high nasal voice arguing. “What do you really think, Blaise?” My sister’s voice was low and confidential. I felt her mind pressing upon me with gentle insistence.
“I don’t know.”
“But you see a great deal of her, she talks to you.”