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"I was prepared to dislike the Jervaises and all they stood for, before this talk with you. Now..." "But you're well off, aren't you?" she said with a faint air of contempt. "You can't be an insurgé. You'd be playing against your own side." "If you think that, why did you give me so much confidence to begin with?" I retaliated. "Oh! I'm always doing silly things," she said.
The only trouble was that I could find no personal satisfaction in the consideration of the Jervaises' restored happiness. I was aware of a feeling of great disappointment for which I could not account; and although I tried to persuade myself that this feeling was due to the evaporation of the emotional interest of the moving drama that had been playing, I found that explanation insufficient.
Anne's manner of entrance alone would have been sufficient to demonstrate her attitude to the intruders, but she elected to make it still more unmistakable by her announcement of them. "The Jervaises, mother," she said, with a supercilious lift of her head. She might have been saying that the men had called for the rent. Little Mrs. Banks looked every inch an aristocrat as she received them.
For the strange Fate that had planned this astounding revelation to me, had apparently led up to it by the subtlest arrangement of properties and events. My disgrace at the Jervaises' had prepared me for this moment. My responses to humiliation had been, as it were, tested and strained by that ordeal.
"How could it?" "And you'd do all that just because you've remembered me?" "There was another influence," I admitted. "What was that?" she asked, with the sound of new interest in her voice. "All this affair with the Jervaises," I said. "It has made me hate the possession of money and the power money gives. That farm of ours is going to be a communal farm.
The Jervaises were uncomfortably warm in their reassurances. They felt, no doubt, the growing impatience of all their other visitors pressing forward with the reminder that if the Sturtons' cab did not come at once, there would be no more dancing. Half-way up the stairs little Nora Bailey's high laughing voice was embroidering her statement with regard to the extra stroke of the stable-clock.
What I mean is that the Jervaises mayn't be of any account in London, or even in the county, alongside of families like Lord Garthorne's; but just round here they're the owners and always have been since there have been any private owners. Their word's law. If you don't like it, you can get out, and that's all there is about it." He gazed thoughtfully in front of him and thrust out his lower lip.
"You see, it isn't so much a suit-case as a parable," I explained. He looked at me, still reluctant, with an air of perplexity. "A badge of my friendship for you and your family," I enlarged. "You and I, my boy, are pals, now. I take it you've left the Jervaises' service for good. Imagine that this is Canada, not an infernal Park with a label on every blade of grass warning you not to touch."
It was like passing from the desolate sanitation of a well-kept workhouse straight into the lighted auditorium of a theatre. That contrast dramatised, for me, the Jervaises' tremendous ideal of the barrier between owner and servant; but it had, also, another effect which may have been due to the fact that it was, now, three o'clock in the morning.
I had, by running away, finally branded myself in the Jervaises' eyes as a mean and despicable traitor to my own order; and now it appeared that I was not to be afforded even the satisfaction of having proved loyal to the party of the Home Farm. I was a pariah, the suspect of both sides, the ill-treated hero of a romantic novel. I ought to have wept, but instead of that I laughed.
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