The Jervaise Comedy

But Anne, still leaning back in the corner of the settle, refused to answer.

Jervaise turned and looked down at her. “If you all went…?” he said, giving his incomplete sentence the sound of a question.

“Oh! I should certainly go, too,” she replied.

Jervaise frowned moodily. I could see that he was caught in an awkward dilemma, but I was not absolutely sure as to the form it took. Had Anne made conditions? Her remark seemed, I thought, to hint a particular stipulation. Had she tried to coerce him with the threat of accompanying her brother to Canada unless the engagement to Brenda was openly sanctioned by the family?

“But you must see how impossible it is,” Jervaise said, still looking at Anne.

“We don’t think so,” Brenda put in.

“You don’t understand,” her brother returned savagely.

“You don’t,” Brenda replied.

Jervaise snorted impatiently, but he had enough control of himself to avoid the snare of being drawn into a bickering match.

“It isn’t as if the decision rested with me,” he went on, looking down at the hearth-rug, but still, I fancy, addressing himself almost exclusively to Anne. “I can’t make my father and mother see things as you do. No one could. Why can’t you compromise?”

“Oh! How?” Brenda broke out with a fierce contempt.

“Agree to separate—for a time,” Jervaise said. “Let Banks go to Canada and start a farm or something, and afterwards you could join him without any open scandal.”

“Any mortal thing to save a scandal, of course,” Brenda commented scornfully.

“Would you be prepared to do that?” Jervaise asked, turning to Banks.

I thought Banks seemed a trifle irresolute, as though the bribe of finally possessing Brenda was tempting enough to outweigh any other consideration. But he looked at her before replying, and her contemptuous shake of the head was completely decisive. He could not question any determination of hers.

“No, I wouldn’t,” he said.

“But look here, Brenda, why…” Jervaise began on a note of desperate reasonableness.

“Because I’m going out with him,” Brenda said. They might have chased that argument round for half an hour if Ronnie had not once more interposed.

His dudgeon had been slowly giving place to a shocked surprise. It was being borne in upon his reluctant mind that Brenda and Banks honestly intended to get married. And here was Frank Jervaise, for some mistaken purpose of his own, calmly admitting the possibility of the outrage, instead of scorning the bare idea of it with violence.

“I think you’re making a ghastly mistake, Frank,” he said with a composure that was intended to be extremely ominous.

Jervaise clutched at the interruption, probably to give himself a little more time. The women were proving so unamenable to his excellent reasoning. One simply contradicted him, and the other refused to speak. “What’s a mistake, Ronnie?” he asked.

“Listening to them at all,” Turnbull said, with a preposterous attempt to be dignified. He would not look at Brenda as he continued, but he was certainly aware that she had turned towards him when he spoke, and the consciousness that she was watching him steadily increased his embarrassment. “It’s perfectly absurd, I mean, to talk as if you and your people would allow the thing to go on—under any circumstances—perfect rot! Why can’t you say at once that it’s got to stop—absolutely, and—Good Lord!—I don’t care what any one thinks—if I were in your place I’d jolly well sling Banks off the premises—I tell you I would—” he got to his feet, his vehemence was increasing, as if he would shout down Brenda’s silent disdain—“I’d confoundedly well kick him out of the county…” He looked almost equal to the task as he stood there roaring like a young bull-calf; but although he could have given his rival a good three stone in weight there was, I fancy, a difference in the quality of their muscles that might have left the final advantage with Banks in a rough-and-tumble engagement.

But despite, or perhaps on account of his complete ineptitude, I had a feeling of sympathy for Turnbull. It must have been very exasperating for him to stand there, roaring out his sincerest convictions and to be received by every one of us with a forbearing contempt.

Even Brenda expressed something of pity for him.

“My dear Ronnie, don’t be absolutely idiotic,” she said, forbearingly, but rather as though she warned him that he had said quite enough.

He breathed heavily, resentfully, but still declined to look at her. “Of course if you’d sooner I went away altogether…” he remarked.

“I don’t see that you can help us by staying,” Brenda said.

“I mean for good,” he explained tragically.

I heard afterwards that he had been in love with Brenda since she was nine years old, but I might have inferred the fact from his present attitude. He simply could not believe, as yet, that she would let him go—for good, as he said. No doubt she had tricked and plagued him so often in the past that the present situation seemed to him nothing more than the repetition of a familiar experience.

Brenda must have realised that, too; but, no doubt, she shrank from wounding him mortally in public. The ten years of familiar intercourse between her and Ronnie were not to be obliterated in a day, not even by the fury of her passion for Arthur Banks.

“I know,” she said. “But you are interrupting, Ronnie. Do go!”

“And leave you here?” He was suddenly encouraged again by her tone. He looked down at her, now; pleading like a great puppy, beseeching her to put a stop to this very painful game.

“Surely, Ronnie, you must realise that I—mean it, this time,” she said.

“Not that you’re going to … going to Canada,” he begged.

“Yes. Yes. Definitely and absolutely finally yes,” she said.

“With—him?”

“Yes.”

“But, Brenda!” The long-drawn appeal of her name showed that the full bitterness of the truth was coming home to him at last.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and the sound of it was in some way painfully final.

“It isn’t because…” he began, but she anticipated his well-known reasons by saying,—

“It’s nothing to do with you or with anything you’ve done, nothing whatever. I’m sorry, Ronnie, but it’s fate—just fate. Do go, now. I’ll see you again before—before we go.”

And still he stood for an instant undecided; and I could see the struggle that was going on in him, between the influence of Harrow and Oxford and those of the honest, simple primitive man. He knew that the right, conventional thing for him to do was to be magnanimous; to admit that he was the defeated lover, and to say something that would prove how splendid he could be in the moment of disaster. The traditions of Harrow, Oxford, and the melodrama united to give him an indication of the proper conduct of the situation, and against them was ranged nothing more than one feral impulse to take Banks by the throat and settle his blasphemous assumption of rivalry off-hand.

But it was, I think, a third influence that decided the struggle for that time. His glare of wrath at Banks had been followed by one last yearning look at Brenda, and some sentimental realisation of his loss rose and choked him, temporarily superseding the powers both of make-believe and instinct. One lesson he had learnt at Harrow and Oxford so thoroughly that he re-acted to it even in this supreme crisis of his life. He might give expression to brutal passion, but in no circumstances whatever must he break down and weep in public.

He turned quickly and blundered out of the room with a stumbling eagerness to be alone that was extraordinarily pathetic.

“You’ll admit, B., that it’s cursedly hard lines on Ronnie after all these years,” Frank said with what sounded like genuine emotion.

She took that up at once. “I know it is,” she said. “It’s going to be hard lines on lots of people, but there’s no way out of it. You may think it’s silly tosh to talk about Fate; but it is Fate.”

And then she looked at Banks with something in her expression that was surely enough to compensate him for any pain or sacrifice he might have to endure for her.

“We can’t help it, can we, Arthur?” she said.

He was too moved to answer. He set his lips tightly together and shook his head, gazing at her with a look of adoration and confidence that was almost violent in its protestation of love.

Jervaise turned round and leaned his forehead against the high mantelpiece. I looked out of the window. Anne remained hidden in the corner of the settle. We all, no doubt, had the same feeling that this love-affair was showing itself as something too splendid to be interfered with. Whether or not it had the qualities that make for endurance, it had a present force that dwarfed every other emotion. Those two lovers ruled us by their perfect devotion to each other. I felt ashamed of my presence there, as if I had intruded upon some fervent religious ceremony. They were both so sincere, so gallant, and so proud.

It was Banks who re-started the conversation. The solitude we had permitted to the lovers was at once too little and too much for them. What had passed between them by an exchange of signals in the brief interval, I could only guess; they certainly had not spoken, but Banks’s new subject suggested that they had somehow agreed to divert the interest momentarily from themselves.

“I’ve brought Mr. Melhuish back with me,” he said. “He’s going to stay the night with us.” He may have been addressing Brenda in answer to some look of inquiry that had indicated my resolutely unconscious back.

Since Turnbull had gone, I was more than ever the outsider and intruder, and I was all too keenly aware of that fact as I turned back towards the room. My embarrassment was not relieved by the slightly perplexed astonishment the announcement had evoked in the faces of the two women.

“But I thought you were staying at the Hall,” Brenda said, looking at me with that air of suspicion to which I was rapidly growing accustomed.

“I was,” I said; “but for reasons that your brother may be able to explain, I’m staying there no longer.”

She looked at Jervaise, then, but he had no reply ready. I had put him in a difficult position. I had a chance to revenge myself at last.

“I don’t understand, Frank,” Brenda prompted him; and Anne began to come to life for the first time since I had entered the room—there was a new effect of mischief about her, as if she had partly guessed the cause of my expulsion from the Hall.

“It’s a long story,” Jervaise prevaricated.

“But one that I think you ought to tell,” I said, “in justice to me.”

“We found that Melhuish had been, most unwarrantably, interfering in—in this affair of yours, B.,” he grumbled; “and, in any case, it’s no business of his.”

Brenda’s dark eyebrows lifted with that expression of surprised questioning to which she could give such unusual effect. I suppose it emphasised that queer contrast—unique in my experience—between her naturally fair hair, and her black eyebrows and eyelashes. I have to emphasise the fact that the straw gold of her abundant vital hair was its natural colour. She had often, I believe, threatened to dye it, in order to avoid the charge of having already done so.

“What piffle!” she remarked. “How has Mr. Melhuish interfered? Why, this is the first time I’ve seen him since last night at the dance. Besides,” she glanced at me with a half-whimsical touch of apology, “I hardly know him.”

“Oh! it’s some romantic rot of his, I suppose,” Jervaise returned sullenly. “I never thought it was serious.”

“But,” Anne interposed, “it sounds very serious…if Mr. Melhuish has had to leave the Hall in the middle of his visit—and come to us.” I inferred that she was deliberately overlooking my presence in the room for some purpose of her own. She certainly spoke as if I were not present.

“Partly a misunderstanding,” Jervaise said. “No reason why he shouldn’t come back with me now if he wants to.”

“You would in that case explain, of course, how the misunderstanding arose?” I put in.

“I don’t know what your game is,” he returned allusively.

“I never had one,” I said.

“Looked infernally suspicious,” was his grudging answer.

The two girls exchanged a look of understanding, but I had no notion what they intended by it. I had not learnt, then, how cleverly they played up to each other.

“Yes, but suspicious of what, Mr. Jervaise?” Anne said, taking up the cross-examination.

“Spying upon us,” Jervaise growled.

“Upon you or me?” asked Brenda.

“Both,” Jervaise said.

“But why?” asked Anne.

“Lord knows,” Jervaise replied.

I made no effort to interrupt them. The two girls were clearing my character for me by the simple obvious method that I had not had the wit to adopt for myself. I might have argued and protested for hours, and the only result would have been to confirm Jervaise’s suspicions. Confronted by an innocent demand for explanation, he had not a leg to stand on.

Brenda’s eyebrows went up again, with that slightly bizarre, exotic air which was so arresting. She spoke to me this time.

“And do you mean to say that they were all so horrid to you that you had to come away?” she asked.

“Precisely that,” I said.

“But you don’t tell us what Mr. Melhuish has done!” Anne persisted, continuing her cross-examination of Jervaise.

“Well, for one thing, he went out to meet your brother at three o’clock this morning,” he replied grudgingly.

“Didn’t come out to meet me,” Banks put in. “We did meet all right, but it was the first time we’d ever seen each other.”

We all four looked at Jervaise, awaiting his next piece of evidence with the expectant air of children watching a conjurer.

He began to lose his temper. “I can’t see that this has got anything to do with what we’re discussing…” he said, but I had no intention of letting him off too easily. He had saved me the trouble of making tedious explanations, and my character had been cleared before Anne and Brenda, which two things were all that I really cared about in this connection; but I wanted, for other reasons, to make Jervaise appear foolish. So I interrupted him by saying,—

“Hadn’t you better tell them about Miss Tattersall?”

He turned on me, quite savagely. “What the devil has this affair of ours got to do with you, Melhuish?” he asked.

“Nothing whatever,” I said. “You dragged me into it in the first instance by bringing me up here last night, but since then I haven’t interfered one way or the other. What does affect me, however, is that you and your family have—well—insulted me, and for that you do owe me, at least, an explanation.”

“What made you come up here, now?” he asked with that glowering legal air of his; thrusting the question at me as if I must, now, be finally confuted.

“After you ran away from me in the avenue,” I said promptly, “it seemed that the only thing left for me to do was to walk to Hurley Junction; but a quarter of a mile from the Park gate I found your car drawn up by the side of the road. And as I had no sort of inclination to walk fourteen miles on a broiling afternoon, I decided to wait by the car until some one came to fetch it. And when presently Banks came, I tried my best to persuade him to take me to the station in it. He refused on the grounds that he wanted to take the car back at once to the garage; but when I explained my difficulty to him, his hospitable mind prompted him to offer me temporary refuge at the Home Farm. He brought me back to introduce me, and we found you here. Simple, isn’t it?”

Jervaise scowled at the hearth-rug. “All been a cursed misunderstanding from first to last,” he growled.

“But what was that about Grace Tattersall?” Brenda asked. “If you’d accused her of spying, I could have understood it. She was trying to pump me for all she was worth yesterday afternoon.”

“I’ve admitted that there must have been some misunderstanding,” Jervaise said. “For goodness’ sake, let’s drop this question of Melhuish’s interference and settle the more important one of what we’re going to do about—you.”

“I resent that word ‘interference,’” I put in.

“Oh! resent it, then,” Jervaise snarled.

“Really, I think Mr. Melhuish is perfectly justified,” Brenda said. “I feel horribly ashamed of the way you’ve been treating him at home. I should never have thought that the mater…”

“Can’t you understand that she’s nearly off her head with worrying about you?” Jervaise interrupted.

“No, I can’t,” Brenda returned. “If it had been Olive, I could. But I should have thought they would all have been jolly glad to see the last of me. They’ve always given me that impression, anyhow.”

“Not in this way,” her brother grumbled.

“What do you mean by that exactly?” Anne asked with a great seriousness.

I think Jervaise was beginning to lose his nerve. He was balanced so dangerously between the anxiety to maintain the respectability of the Jervaises and his passion, or whatever it was, for Anne. Such, at least, was my inference; although how he could possibly reconcile his two devotions I could not imagine, unless his intentions with regard to Anne were frankly shameful. And Jervaise must, indeed, be an even grosser fool than I supposed him to be if he could believe for one instant that Anne was the sort of woman who would stoop to a common intrigue with him. For it could be nothing more than that. If they loved each other, they could do no less than follow the shining example of Brenda and Anne’s brother. I could see Anne doing that, and with a still more daring spirit than the other couple had so far displayed. I could not see her as Frank Jervaise’s mistress. Moreover, I could not believe now, even after that morning’s scene in the wood, that she really cared for him. If she did, she must have been an actress of genius, since, so far as I had been able to observe, her attitude towards him during the last half-hour had most nearly approached one of slightly amused contempt.

Jervaise’s evident perplexity was notably aggravated by Anne’s question.

“Well, naturally, my father and mother don’t want an open scandal,” he said irritably.

“But why a scandal?” asked Anne. “If Arthur and Brenda were married and went to Canada?”

“I don’t say that I think it would be a scandal,” he said. “I’m only telling you the way that they’d certainly see it. It might have been different if your brother had never been in our service. You must see that. We know, of course, but other people don’t, and we shall never be able to explain to them. People like the Turnbulls and the Atkinsons and all that lot will say that Brenda eloped with the chauffeur. It’s no good beating about the bush—that’s the plain fact we’ve got to face.”

“Then, hadn’t we better face it?” Anne returned with a flash of indignation. “Or do you think you can persuade Arthur to go back to Canada, alone?”

Jervaise grunted uneasily.

“You know it’s no earthly, Frank,” Brenda said. “Why can’t you be a sport and go back and tell them that they might as well give in at once?”

“Oh! my dear girl, you must know perfectly well that they’ll never give in,” her brother replied.

“Mr. Jervaise might,” Banks put in.

Frank turned to him sharply. “What do you mean by that?” he asked.

“He’d have given in this morning, if it hadn’t been for you,” Banks said, staring with his most dogged expression at Jervaise.

“What makes you think so?” Jervaise retaliated.

“What he said, and the way he behaved,” Banks asserted, the English yeoman stock in him still very apparent.

“You’re mistaken,” Jervaise snapped.

“Give me a chance to prove it, then,” was Banks’s counter.

“How?”

“I’ve got to take that car back. Give me a chance for another talk with Mr. Jervaise; alone this time.”

I looked at Banks with a sudden feeling of anxiety. I was afraid that he meant at last to use that “pull” he had hinted at on the hill; and I had an intuitive shrinking from the idea of his doing that. This open defiance was fine and upright. The other attitude suggested to my mind the conception of something cowardly, a little base and underhand. He looked, I admit, the picture of sturdy virtue as he stood there challenging his late master to permit this test of old Jervaise’s attitude, but the prize at stake was so inestimably precious to Banks, that it must have altered all his values. He would, I am sure, have committed murder for Brenda—any sort of murder.

Frank Jervaise did not respond at once to the gage that had been offered. He appeared to be moodily weighing the probabilities before he decided his policy. And Brenda impatiently prompted him by saying,—

“Well, I don’t see what possible objection you can have to that.”

“Only want to save the pater any worry I can,” Jervaise said. “He has been more cut up than any one over this business.”

“The pater has?” queried Brenda on a note of amazement. “I shouldn’t have expected him to be half as bad as the mater and Olive.”

“Well, he is. He’s worse—much worse,” Jervaise asserted.

I was listening to the others, but I was watching Banks, and I saw him sneer when that assertion was made. The expression seemed to have been forced out of him against his will; just a quick jerk downwards of the corners of his mouth that portrayed a supreme contempt for old Jervaise’s distress. But that sneer revealed Banks’s opinion to me better than anything he had said or done. I knew then that he was aware of something concerning the master of the Hall that was probably unknown either to Brenda or Frank, something that Banks had loyally hidden even from his sister. He covered his sneer so quickly that I believe no one else noticed it.

“But, surely, it would be better for the pater to see Arthur and have done with it,” Brenda was saying.

“Oh! I dare say,” Jervaise agreed with his usual air of grudging the least concession. “Are you ready to go now?” he asked, addressing Banks.

Banks nodded. “I’ll pick up the car on the way,” he said.

“I’ll come with you—as far as the car,” Brenda said, and the pair of them went out together.

Jervaise stretched himself with a self-conscious air. “It will take him the best part of an hour getting the car into the garage and all that,” he remarked, looking at me.

I could see, of course, that he wanted me to go; his hint had been, indeed, almost indecently pointed; and I had no wish to intrude myself upon them, if Anne’s desire coincided with his. I got to my feet and stood like an awkward dummy trying to frame some excuse for leaving the room. I could think of nothing that was not absurdly obvious. I was on the point of trying to save the last remnant of my dignity by walking out, when Anne relieved my embarrassment. I knew that she had been watching me, but I was afraid to look at her. I cannot say why, exactly, but I felt that if I looked at her just then I should give myself away before Jervaise.

“I must go and see about Mr. Melhuish’s room,” she said.

She was half-way to the door when Jervaise stopped her.

“I should rather like to speak to you for a minute first,” he remarked, and scowled again at me.

“There’s nothing more to be said until Arthur has seen Mr. Jervaise,” Anne replied, as though any subject other than the affair Brenda, could not conceivably be of interest to her.

“It wasn’t about them,” Jervaise said awkwardly.

“What was it, then?” Anne asked. I dared to look at her, now, and her face was perfectly serious as she added, “Was it about the milk, or eggs, or anything?”

Without doubt there was a delicious strain of minx in her!

Jervaise lost his temper. I believe that if I had offered to fight him, then, he would have welcomed the opportunity.

“Oh! you know what I want to say,” he snorted.

“Then why not say it?” Anne replied.

He turned savagely upon me. “Haven’t you got the common sense…” he began, but Anne cut him short.

“Oh! we don’t suspect our guests of spying,” she said.

I was nearly sorry for Jervaise at that moment. He could not have looked any more vindictive than he looked already, but he positively trembled with anger. He could not endure to be thwarted. Nevertheless, he displayed a certain measure of self-control.

“Very well,” he said as calmly as he could. “If you’re going to take that tone…”