“Well,” I said, rather embarrassed, “well, I don’t know about all that. I don’t think I’m very kind, or particularly sincere, and as for being modest, I don’t think I’ve ever had much of a chance to be anything else. It was not very modest, of course, being married hurriedly like that, down in Monte Carlo, and being alone there in that hotel, beforehand, but perhaps you don’t count that?”
“My dear Mrs. de Winter, you don’t think I imagine for one moment that your meeting down there was not entirely aboveboard?” he said in a low voice.
“No, of course not,” I said gravely. Dear Frank. I think I had shocked him. What a Frankish expression, too, “aboveboard.” It made one think immediately of the sort of things that would happen below board.
“I’m sure,” he began, and hesitated, his expression still troubled, “I’m sure that Maxim would be very worried, very distressed, if he knew how you felt. I don’t think he can have any idea of it.”
“You won’t tell him?” I said hastily.
“No, naturally not, what do you take me for? But you see, Mrs. de Winter, I know Maxim pretty well, and I’ve seen him through many… moods. If he thought you were worrying about—well—about the past, it would distress him more than anything on earth. I can promise you that. He’s looking very well, very fit, but Mrs. Lacy was quite right the other day when she said he had been on the verge of a breakdown last year, though it was tactless of her to say so in front of him. That’s why you are so good for him. You are fresh and young and—and sensible, you have nothing to do with all that time that has gone. Forget it, Mrs. de Winter, forget it, as he has done, thank heaven, and the rest of us. We none of us want to bring back the past. Maxim least of all. And it’s up to you, you know, to lead us away from it. Not to take us back there again.”
He was right, of course he was right. Dear good Frank, my friend, my ally. I had been selfish and hypersensitive, a martyr to my own inferiority complex. “I ought to have told you all this before,” I said.
“I wish you had,” he said. “I might have spared you some worry.”
“I feel happier,” I said, “much happier. And I’ve got you for my friend whatever happens, haven’t I, Frank?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said.
We were out of the dark wooded drive and into the light again. The rhododendrons were upon us. Their hour would soon be over. Already they looked a little overblown, a little faded. Next month the petals would fall one by one from the great faces, and the gardeners would come and sweep them away. Theirs was a brief beauty. Not lasting very long.
“Frank,” I said, “before we put an end to this conversation, forever let’s say, will you promise to answer me one thing, quite truthfully?”
He paused, looking at me a little suspiciously. “That’s not quite fair,” he said, “you might ask me something that I should not be able to answer, something quite impossible.”
“No,” I said, “it’s not that sort of question. It’s not intimate or personal, or anything like that.”
“Very well, I’ll do my best,” he said.
We came round the sweep of the drive and Manderley was before us, serene and peaceful in the hollow of the lawns, surprising me as it always did, with its perfect symmetry and grace, its great simplicity.
The sunlight flickered on the mullioned windows, and there was a soft rusted glow about the stone walls where the lichen clung. A thin column of smoke curled from the library chimney. I bit my thumb nail, watching Frank out of the tail of my eye.
“Tell me,” I said, my voice casual, not caring a bit, “tell me, was Rebecca very beautiful?”
Frank waited a moment. I could not see his face. He was looking away from me towards the house. “Yes,” he said slowly, “yes, I suppose she was the most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life.”
We went up the steps then to the hall, and I rang the bell for tea.
12
I did not see much of Mrs. Danvers. She kept very much to herself. She still rang the house telephone to the morning room every day and submitted the menu to me as a matter of form, but that was the limit of our intercourse. She had engaged a maid for me, Clarice, the daughter of somebody on the estate, a nice quiet well-mannered girl, who, thank heaven, had never been in service before and had no alarming standards. I think she was the only person in the house who stood in awe of me. To her I was the mistress: I was Mrs. de Winter. The possible gossip of the others could not affect her. She had been away for sometime, brought up by an aunt fifteen miles away, and in a sense she was as new to Manderley as I was. I felt at ease with her. I did not mind saying “Oh, Clarice, would you mend my stocking?”