“Sir John was her ideal, so I learned to speak like Sir John, and it was quite a long time before I got over it, if indeed I ever did completely get over it. It was a beautiful voice, and perhaps too beautiful for everybody’s taste. He produced it in a special way, which I think he learned from Irving. His lower lip moved a lot, but his upper lip was almost motionless, and he never showed his upper teeth; completely loose lower jaw, lots of nasal resonance, and he usually spoke in his upper register, but sometimes he dropped into deep tones, with extraordinary effect. She insisted on careful phrasing, long breaths, and never accentuating possessive pronouns—she said that made almost anything sound petty.

“So I spent many an hour reading the Bible to her, and refreshing my memory of the Psalms. ‘Consider and hear me, O Lord my God: lighten mine eyes, lest I sleep the sleep of death. Lest mine enemy say, I have prevailed against him; and those that trouble me rejoice when I am moved.’ We had that almost every day. That, and ‘Open thou mine eyes, that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law.’ It was not long before I understood that Milady was praying, and I was helping her, and after the first surprise—I had been so long away from anybody who prayed, except for Happy Hannah, whose prayers were like curses—I was pleased and honoured to do it. But I didn’t intrude upon her privacy; I was content to be a pair of eyes, and to learn to be a friendly voice. May I put in here that this was another side of apprenticeship to Sir John’s egoism, and it was not something I had greedily sought. On the contrary it was something to which I seemed to be fated. If I stole something from the old man, the impulse for the theft was not wholly mine; I seemed to be pushed into it.

“One of the things that pushed me was that as Milady’s sight grew dimmer, she liked to have somebody near to whom she could speak in French. As I’ve told you, she came from the Channel Islands, and from her name I judge that French was her cradle-tongue. So, under pretence of correcting my French pronunciation, we had many a long talk, and I read the Bible to her in French, as well as in English. That was a surprise for me! Like so many English-speaking people I could not conceive of the words of Christ in any language but my own, but as we worked through Le Nouveau Testament in her chunky old Geneva Bible, there they were, coloured quite differently. Je suis le chemin, & la vérité, & la vie; nul ne vient au Père sinon par moi. Sounded curiously frivolous, but nothing to Bienheureux sont les débonnaires: car ils hériteront la terre. I thought I concealed the surprise in my voice at that one, but Milady heard it (she heard everything) and explained that I must think of débonnaire as meaning clément, or perhaps les doux. But of course we all interpret Holy Writ to suit ourselves as much as we dare; I liked les débonnaires, because I was striving as hard as I could to be debonair myself, and I had an eye on at least a good-sized chunk of la terre for my inheritance. Learning to speak English and French with an upper-class accent—or at least a stage accent, which was a little more precise than merely upper class—was part of my campaign.