III
Frank Jervaise
I should have preferred to maintain a thoughtful, experiencing silence throughout our walk home. I had plenty of material for reflection. I wanted, now, to look at all this disappearing Brenda business from a new angle. I had a sense of the weaving of plots, and of the texture of them; such a sense as I imagine a blind man may get through sensitive finger-tips. Two new characters had come into my play, and I knew them both for principals. That opening act without Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern, half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.
And the circumstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us, widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original, eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune. Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.
But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures of a process, but little gods in a world-pantheon.
I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised tone of his voice—he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary pitch—that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were impossible, to attribute to another cause.
“It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that visit of ours, Melhuish,” he began.
“At least two,” I agreed.
“Which are?” he asked.
“I’d prefer to hear yours first,” I said, having no intention of displaying my own.
He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my probably worthless deductions.
“Well, in the first place,” he said, “did it strike you as a curious fact that Miss Banks, and she alone, was apparently disturbed by that dog’s infernal barking?”
“It hadn’t struck me,” I admitted; and just because I had not remarked that anomaly for myself, I was instantly prepared to treat it as unworthy of notice. “I suppose her father and mother and the servants, and so on, heard her let us in,” I said.
Jervaise jeered at that. “Oh! my good man,” he said.
“Well, why not?” I returned peevishly.
“I put it to you,” he said, “whether in those circumstances the family’s refusal to make an appearance admits of any ordinary explanation?”
I could see, now, that it did not; but having committed myself to a point of view, I determined to uphold it. “Why should they come down?” I asked.
“Common curiosity would be a sufficient inducement, I should imagine,” Jervaise replied with a snort of contempt, “to say nothing of a reasonable anxiety to know why any one should call at two o’clock in the morning. It isn’t usual, you know—outside the theatrical world, perhaps.”
I chose to ignore the sneer conveyed by his last sentence.
“They may be very heavy sleepers,” I tried, fully aware of the inanity of my suggestion.
Jervaise laughed unpleasantly, a nasty hoot of derision. “Don’t be a damned fool,” he said. “The human being isn’t born who could sleep through that hullabaloo.”
I relinquished that argument as hopeless, and having no other at the moment, essayed a weak reprisal. “Well, what’s your explanation?” I asked in the tone of one ready to discount any possible explanation he might have to make.
“It’s obvious,” he returned. “There can be only one. They were expecting us.”
“Do you mean that Miss Banks was deliberately lying to us all the time?” I challenged him with some heat.
“Why that?” he asked.
“Well, if she were expecting us…”
“Which she never denied.”
“And had warned all her people…”
“As she had a perfect right to do.”
“It makes her out a liar, in effect,” I protested. “I mean, she implied, if she didn’t actually state, that she knew nothing whatever of your sister’s movements.”
“Which may have been true,” he remarked in the complacent tone of one who waits to formulate an unimpeachable theory.
“Good Lord! How?” I asked.
“Brenda may have been expected and not have arrived,” he explained, condescending, at last, to point out all the obvious inferences I had missed. “In which case, my friend, Miss Banks’s suppressio veri was, in my judgment, quite venial. Indeed, she was, if the facts are, as I suppose, perfectly honest in her surprise. Let us assume that she had arranged to let Brenda in, at say twelve-thirty, and having her father and mother under her thumb, had warned them to take no notice if Racquet started his cursed shindy in the middle of the night. The servant may have been told that Mr. Arthur might be coming. You will notice, also, that Miss Banks had not, at one-thirty, gone to bed, although we may infer that she had undressed. Furthermore, it is a fair assumption that she saw us coming, and having, by then given up, it may be, any hope of seeing Brenda, she was, no doubt, considerably at a loss to account for our presence. Now, does that or does it not cover the facts, and does it acquit Miss Banks of the charge of perjury?”
I was forced, something reluctantly, to concede an element of probability in his inferences, although his argument following the legal tradition was based on a kind of average law of human motive and took no account of personal peculiarities. He did not try to consider what Anne would do in certain circumstances, but what would be done by that vaguely-conceived hermaphrodite who figures in the Law Courts and elsewhere as “Anyone.” I could hear Jervaise saying, “I ask you, gentlemen, what would you have done, what would Anyone have done in such a case as this?”
“Hm!” I commented, and added, “It still makes Miss Banks appear rather—double-faced.”
“Can’t see it,” Jervaise replied. “Put yourself in her place and see how it works!”
“Oh! Lord!” I murmured, struck by the grotesque idea of Jervaise attempting to see life through the eyes of Anne. Imagine a rhinoceros thinking itself into the experiences of a skylark!
Jervaise bored ahead, taking no notice of my interruption. “Assuming for the moment the general probability of my theory,” he said, “mayn’t we hazard the further assumption that Brenda was going to the farm in the first instance to meet Banks? His sister, we will suppose, being willing to sanction such a more or less chaperoned assignation. Then, when the pair didn’t turn up, she guesses that the meeting is off for some reason or another, but obviously her friendship for Brenda—to say nothing of loyalty to her brother—would make her conceal the fact of the proposed assignation from us. Would you call that being ‘double-faced’? I shouldn’t.”
“Oh! yes; it’s all very reasonable,” I agreed petulantly. “But how does it affect the immediate situation? Do you, for instance, expect to find your sister at home when we get back?”
“I do,” assented Jervaise definitely. “I believe that Miss Banks had some good reason for being so sure that we should find her there.”
I am not really pig-headed. I may not give way gracefully to such an opponent as Jervaise, but I do not stupidly persist in a personal opinion through sheer obstinacy. And up to Jervaise’s last statement, his general deductions were, I admitted to myself, not only within the bounds of probability but, also, within distance of affording a tolerable explanation of Anne’s diplomacy during our interview. But—and I secretly congratulated myself on having exercised a subtler intuition in this one particular, at least—I did not believe that Anne expected us to find Brenda at the Hall on our return. I remembered that anxious pucker of the brow and the pathetic insistence on the belief—or might it not better be described as a hope?—that Brenda had done nothing final.
“You haven’t made a bad case,” I conceded; “but I differ as to your last inference.”
“You don’t think we shall find Brenda at home?”
“I do not,” I replied aggressively.
I expected him to bear me down under a new weight of argument founded on the psychology of Anyone, and I was startled when he suddenly dropped the lawyer and let out a whole-hearted “Damnation,” that had a ring of fine sincerity.
I changed my tone instantly in response to that agreeably human note.
“I may be quite mistaken, of course,” I said. “I hope to goodness I am. By the way, do you know if she has taken any luggage with her?”
“Can’t be sure,” Jervaise said. “Olive’s been looking and there doesn’t seem to be anything missing, but we’ve no idea what things she brought down from town with her. If she’d been making plans beforehand…”
We came out of the wood at that point in our discussion, and almost at the same moment the last barrier of cloud slipped away from before the moon. She was in her second quarter, and seemed to be indolently rolling down towards the horizon, the whole pose of the scene giving her the effect of being half-recumbent.
I turned and looked at Jervaise and found him facing me with the full light of the moon on his face. He was frowning, not with the domineering scowl of the cross-examining counsel, but with a perplexed, inquiring frown that revealed all the boy in him.
Once at Oakstone he had got into a serious scrape that had begun in bravado and ended by a public thrashing. He had poached a trout from the waters of a neighbouring landowner, who had welcomed the opportunity to make himself more than usually objectionable. And on the morning before his thrashing, Jervaise had come into my study and confessed to me that he was dreading the coming ordeal. He was not afraid of the physical pain, he told me, but of the shame of the thing. We were near to becoming friends that morning. He confessed to no one but me. But when the affair was over—he bore himself very well—he resumed his usual airs of superiority, and snubbed me when I attempted to sympathise with him.
And I saw, now, just the same boyish dread and perplexity that I had seen when he made his confession to me at Oakstone. He looked to me, indeed, absurdly unchanged by the sixteen years that had separated the two experiences.
“You know, Melhuish,” he said; “I’m not altogether blaming Brenda in one way.”
“Do you think she’s really in love with Banks?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “How can any one know? But it has been going on a long time—weeks, anyhow. They were all getting nervous about it at home. The mater told me when I came down this afternoon. She wanted me to talk to B. about it. I was going to. She doesn’t take any notice of Olive. Never has.” He stopped and looked at me with an appeal in his face that begged contradiction.
We were standing still in the moonlight at the edge of the wood and the accident of our position made me wonder if Jervaise’s soul also hesitated between some gloomy prison of conventional success and the freedom of beautiful desires. I could find no words, however, to press that speculation and instead I attempted, rather nervously, to point the way towards what I regarded as the natural solution of the immediate problem. “Come,” I said, “the idea of a marriage between Banks and your sister doesn’t appear so unreasonable. The Bankses are evidently good old yeoman stock on the father’s side. It is a mere accident of luck that you should be the owners of the land and not they.”
“Theoretically, yes!” he said with a hint of impatience. “But we’ve got to consider the opinions—prejudices, if you like—of all my people—to say nothing of the neighbours.”
“Oh! put the neighbours first,” I exclaimed. “It’s what we think other people will think that counts with most of us.”
“It isn’t,” Jervaise returned gloomily. “You don’t understand what the idea of family means to people like my father and mother. They’ve been brought up in it. It has more influence with them than religion. They’d prefer any scandal to a mésalliance.”
“In your sister’s case?” I put in, a trifle shocked by the idea of the scandal, and then discovered that he had not been thinking of Brenda.
“Perhaps not in that case,” he said, “but…” he paused noticeably before adding, “The principle remains the same.”
“Isn’t it chiefly a matter of courage?” I asked. “It isn’t as if … the mésalliance were in any way disgraceful.”
I can’t absolve myself from the charge of hypocrisy in the making of that speech. I was thinking of Jervaise and Anne, and I did not for one moment believe that Anne would ever marry him. My purpose was, I think, well-intentioned. I honestly believed that it would be good for him to fall in love with Anne and challenge the world of his people’s opinion for her sake. But I blame myself, now, for a quite detestable lack of sincerity in pushing him on. I should not have done it if I had thought he had a real chance with her. Life is very difficult; especially for the well-intentioned.
Jervaise shrugged his shoulders. “It’s all so infernally complicated by this affair of Brenda’s,” he said.
Yet it has seemed simple enough to him, I reflected, an hour before. “Kick him and bring her home,” had been his ready solution of the difficulties he thought were before us. Evidently Anne’s behaviour during our talk at the farm had had a considerable effect upon his opinions. That, and the moon. I feel strongly inclined to include the moon—lazily declining now towards the ambush of a tumulus-shaped hill, crowned, as is the manner of that country, with a pert little top-knot of trees.
“Complicated or simplified?” I suggested.
“Complicated; damnably complicated,” he replied irritably. “Brenda’s a little fool. It isn’t as if she were in earnest.”
“Then you don’t honestly believe that she’s in love with Banks?” I asked, remembering his “I don’t know. How can any one know,” of a few minutes earlier.
“She’s so utterly unreliable—in every way,” he equivocated. “She always has been. She isn’t the least like the rest of us.”
“Don’t you count yourself as another exception?” I asked.
“Not in that way, Brenda’s way,” he said. “She’s scatter-brained; you can’t get round that. Going off after the dance in that idiotic way. It’s maddening.”
“Well, there are two questions that must be resolved before we can get any further,” I commented. “The first is whether your sister has gone back—she may have been safe in bed for the last hour and a half for all we know. And the second is whether she is honestly in love with Banks. From what I’ve heard of him, I should think it’s very likely,” I added thoughtfully.
Jervaise had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the moon. “He’s not a bad chap in some ways,” he remarked, “but there’s no getting over the fact that he’s our chauffeur.”
I saw that. No badge could be quite so disgraceful in the eyes of the Jervaises as the badge of servitude. Our talk there, by the wood, had begun to create around us all the limitations of man’s world. I was forgetting that we were moving in the free spaces of a planetary republic. And then I looked up and saw the leaning moon, whimsically balanced on the very crown of the topknot that gave a touch of impudence to the pudding-basin hill.
“What’s the name of that hill?” I asked.
He looked at it absently for a moment before he said, “The people about here call it ‘Jervaise Clump.’ It’s a landmark for miles.”
There was no getting away from it. The Jervaises had conquered all this land and labelled it. I watched the sharp edge of the tree-clump slowly indenting the rounded back of the moon; and it seemed to me that Jervaise-Clump was the solid permanent thing; the moon a mere incident of the night.
“Oh! Lord! Lord! What bosh it all is!” I exclaimed.
“All what?” Jervaise asked sharply.
“This business of distinctions; of masters and servants; of families in possession and families in dependence,” I enunciated.
“It isn’t such dangerous bosh as socialism,” Jervaise replied.
“I wasn’t thinking of socialism,” I said; “I was thinking of interplanetary space.”
Jervaise blew contemptuously. “Don’t talk rot,” he said, and I realised that we were back again on the old footing of our normal relations. Nevertheless I made one more effort.
“It isn’t rot,” I said. “If it is, then every impulse towards beauty and freedom is rot, too.” (I could not have said that to Jervaise in a house, but I drew confidence from the last tip of the moon beckoning farewell above the curve of the hill.) “Your, whatever it is you feel for Miss Banks—things like that … all our little efforts to get away from these awful, clogging human rules.”
I had given him his opportunity and he took it. He was absolutely ruthless. “No one but a fool tries to be superhuman,” he said. “Come on!”
He had turned and was walking back in the direction of the Hall, and I followed him, humiliated and angry.
It was so impossible for me at that moment to avoid the suspicion that he had led me on by his appealing confidences solely in order to score off me when I responded. It is not, indeed, surprising that that should be my reaction while the hurt of his sneer still smarted. For he had pricked me on a tender spot. I realised the weakness of what I had said; and it was a characteristic weakness. I had been absurdly unpractical, as usual, aiming like a fool, as Jervaise had said, at some “superhuman” ideal of freedom that perhaps existed solely in my own imagination; and would certainly be regarded by Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise and their circle of county friends as the vapourings of a weak mind. In short, Jervaise had made me aware of my own ineptitude, and it took me a full ten minutes before I could feel anything but resentment.
We had passed back through the kitchen garden with its gouty espaliers, and come into the pleasance before I forgave him. According to his habit, he made no apology for his rudeness, but his explicit renewal of confidence in me more nearly approached an overt expression of desire for my friendship than anything I had ever known him to show hitherto.
“Look here, Melhuish,” he said, stopping suddenly in the darkness of the garden. I could not “look” with much effect, but I replied, a trifle sulkily, “Well? What?”
“If she hasn’t come back…” he said.
“I don’t see that we can do anything more till to-morrow,” I replied.
“No use trying to find her, of course,” he agreed, irritably, “but we’d better talk things over with the governor.”
“If I can be of any help…” I remarked elliptically.
“You won’t be if you start that transcendental rot,” he returned, as if he already regretted his condescension.
“What sort of rot do you want me to talk?” I asked.
“Common sense,” he said.
I resisted the desire to say that I was glad he acknowledged the Jervaise version of common sense to be one kind of rot.
“All serene,” I agreed.
He did not thank me.
And when I looked back on the happenings of the two hours that had elapsed since Jervaise had fetched me out of the improvised buffet, I was still greatly puzzled to account for his marked choice of me as a confidant. It was a choice that seemed to signify some weakness in him. I wondered if he had been afraid to trust himself alone with Anne at the Farm; if he were now suffering some kind of trepidation at the thought of the coming interview with his father? I found it so impossible to associate any idea of weakness with that bullying mask which was the outward expression of Frank Jervaise.
IV
In the Hall
We found the family awaiting us in the Hall—Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise, Olive, and “Ronnie” Turnbull, whose desire to become one of the family by marrying its younger daughter was recognised and approved by every one except the young lady herself. Ronnie had evidently been received into the fullest confidence.
We had come in by the back door and made our way through the rather arid cleanliness of the houses’ administrative departments, flavoured with a smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish. The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic panoply of the staircase, was quite startling. 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.
For just at the moment of our transition I had the queerest sense not only of having passed at some previous time through a precisely similar experience, but, also, of taking part in a ridiculous dream. At that instant Jervaise Hall, its owners, dependants and friends, had the air of being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious. I should not have been surprised at any incongruity in the brief passing of that illusion.
The sensation flashed up and vanished; but it left me with the excited feeling of one who has had a vision of something transcendental, something more vivid and real than the common experiences of life—just such a feeling as I have had about some perfectly absurd dream of the night.
Mr. Jervaise was a man of nearly sixty, I suppose, with a clean-shaven face, a longish nose, and rather loose cheeks which fell, nevertheless, into firm folds and gave him a look of weak determination. I should have liked to model his face in clay; his lines were of the kind that give the amateur a splendid chance in modelling.
Mrs. Jervaise was taller and thinner than her husband, but lost something by always carrying her head with a slight droop as if she were for ever passing through a low doorway. Her features were sharper than his—she had a high hawk nose and a thin line of a mouth—but either they were carelessly arranged or their relative proportions were bad, for I never felt the least desire to model her. Jervaise’s face came out as a presentable whole, my memory of his wife delivers the hawk nose as the one salient object of what is otherwise a mere jumble.
Old Jervaise certainly looked the more aristocratic of the pair, but Mrs. Jervaise was a woman of good family. She had been a Miss Norman before her marriage—one of the Shropshire Normans.
The four people in the Hall looked as if they had reached the stage of being dreadfully bored with each other when we arrived. They did not hear us immediately, and as my momentary dream dissolved I had an impression of them all as being on the verge of a heartrending yawn. They perked up instantly, however, when they saw us, turning towards us with a movement that looked concerted and was in itself a question.
Frank Jervaise, striding on ahead of me, answered at once, with a gloomy shake of his head.
“Isn’t she there?” his mother asked. And “Hasn’t she been there at all?” she persisted when Frank returned a morose negative.
“Who did you see?” put in young Turnbull.
“Miss Banks,” Frank said.
“You are quite sure that Brenda hadn’t been there?” Olive Jervaise added by way of rounding up and completing the inquiry.
It was then Frank’s turn to begin an unnecessary interrogation by saying “She isn’t here, then?” He must have known that she was not, by their solicitude; but if he had not put that superfluous question, I believe I should; though I might not have added as he did, “You’re absolutely certain?”
Young Turnbull then exploded that phase of the situation by remarking, “I suppose you know that the car’s gone?”
Frank was manifestly shocked by that news.
“Good Lord! no, I didn’t. How do you know?” he said.
“I left my own car in the ditch, just outside the Park,” Ronnie explained. “Don’t know in the least how it happened. Suppose I was thinking of something else. Anyway, I’ve fairly piled her up, I’m afraid. I was coming back from the vicarage, you know. And then, of course, I walked up here, and Mr. Jervaise was good enough to offer me your car to get home in; and when we went out to the garage, it had gone.”
“But was it there when you went to get your own car?” Frank asked.
“I’m bothered if I know,” Ronnie confessed. “I’ve been trying hard to remember.”
Mr. Jervaise sighed heavily and took a little stroll across to the other side of the Hall. He seemed to me to be more perturbed and unhappy than any of the others.
Frank stood in a good central position and scowled enormously, while his mother, his sister, and Ronnie waited anxiously for the important decision that he was apparently about to deliver. And they still looked to him to find some expedient when his impending judgment had taken form in the obvious pronouncement, “Looks as if they’d gone off together, somewhere.”
“It’s very dreadful,” Mrs. Jervaise said; and then Olive slightly lifted the awful flatness of the dialogue by saying,—
“We ought to have guessed. It’s absurd that we let the thing go on.”
“One couldn’t be sure,” her mother protested.
“If you’re going to wait till you’re sure, of course…” Frank remarked brutally, with a shrug of his eyebrows that effectively completed his sentence.
“It was so impossible to believe that she would do a thing like that,” his mother complained.
“Point is, what’s to be done now,” Ronnie said. “By gad, if I catch that chap, I’ll wring his neck.”
Mr. Jervaise, who was taking a lonely promenade up and down the far side of the Hall, looked up more hopefully at this threat.
“Oh! we can catch him,” Frank commented. “He has stolen the car, for one thing…” his inflection implied that catching Banks might be only the beginning of the trouble.
“Well, once we’ve got him,” returned Ronnie hopefully.
“Don’t be an ass,” Frank snubbed him. “We can’t advertise it all over the county that he has gone off with Brenda.”
“I don’t see…” Ronnie began, but Mrs. Jervaise interrupted him.
“It was so unfortunate that the Atkinsons should have been here,” she remarked.
“Every one will know, in any case,” Olive added.
Those avowals of their real and altogether desperate cause for distress raised the emotional tone of the two Jervaise women, and for the first time since I had come into the Hall, they looked at me with a hint of suspicion. They made me feel that I was an outsider, who might very well take this opportunity to withdraw.
I was on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me into the conclave.
“What do you think, Melhuish?” he asked, and then they all turned to me as if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation. Even old Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.
“There is so little real evidence, at present,” I said, feeling their need for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.
“It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have—run away with that man,” Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.
“She’s under age, too,” Frank put in.
“Does that mean they can’t get married?” asked Ronnie.
“Not legally,” Frank said.
“It’s such madness, such utter madness,” his mother broke out in a tone between lament and denunciation. But she pulled herself up immediately and came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw that still floated in this drowning world. “But, as Mr. Melhuish says,” she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, “we really have very little evidence, as yet.”
“It has occurred to me to wonder,” I tried, “whether Miss Jervaise might not have been moved by a sudden desire to drive the car by moonlight…” I was going on to defend my suggestion by pleading that such an impulse would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to accommodate all the family—with the one exception of Frank, who, as it were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the effect that the moon had already set, was, however, smothered in the general acclamation.
“Oh! of course! So she may!” Mrs. Jervaise exclaimed.
“Well, we might have thought of that, certainly,” Olive echoed. “It would be so like Brenda.”
While Ronnie hopefully murmured “That is possible, quite possible,” as a kind of running accompaniment.
Then Mr. Jervaise began to draw in to the family group, with what seemed to me quite an absurd air of meaning to find a place on the raft of the big rug by the fireplace. Indeed, they had all moved a little closer together. Only Frank maintained his depressing air of doubt.
“Been an infernally long time,” he said. “What’s it now? Half-past three?”
“She may have had an accident,” Olive suggested cheerfully.
“Or gone a lot farther than she originally meant to,” Ronnie substituted; the suggestion of an accident to Brenda obviously appearing less desirable to him than it apparently did to Brenda’s sister.
“It seems to me,” Mr. Jervaise said, taking the lead for the first time, “that there may very well be half a dozen reasons for her not having returned; but I can’t think of one that provides the semblance of an excuse for her going in the first instance. Brenda must be—severely reprimanded. It’s intolerable that she should be allowed to go on like this.”
“She has always been spoilt,” Olive said in what I thought was a slightly vindictive aside.
“She’s so impossibly headstrong,” deplored Mrs. Jervaise.
Her husband shook his head impatiently. “There is a limit to this kind of thing,” he said. “She must be made to understand—I will make her understand that we draw the line at midnight adventures of this kind.”
Mrs. Jervaise and Olive agreed warmly with that decision, and the three of them drew a little apart, discussing, I inferred, the means that were to be adopted for the limiting of the runaway, when she returned. But I was puzzled to know whether they were finally convinced of the truth of the theory they had so readily adopted. Were they deceiving, or trying very hard, indeed, to deceive themselves into the belief that the whole affair was nothing but a prank of Brenda’s? I saw that my casual suggestion had a general air of likelihood, but if I had been in their place, I should have demanded evidence before I drew much consolation from so unsupported a conclusion.
I joined young Turnbull.
“Good idea of yours, Melhuish,” Ronnie said.
Frank grunted.
“I’ve no sort of grounds for it, you know,” I explained. “It was only a casual suggestion.”
“Jolly convincing one, though,” Turnbull congratulated me. “So exactly the sort of thing she would do, isn’t it, Frank?”
“Shouldn’t have thought she’d have been gone so long,” Jervaise replied. He looked at me as he continued, “And how does it fit with that notion of ours about Miss Banks having expected her?”
“That was only a guess,” I argued.
“Better evidence for it than you had for your guess,” he returned, and we drifted into an indeterminate wrangle, each of us defending his own theory rather because he had had the glory of originating it than because either of us had, I think, the least faith in our explanations.
It was Ronnie who, picking up the thread of our deductions from the Home Farm interview in the course of our discussion, sought to reconcile us and our theories.
“She might have meant to go up to the Farm,” he suggested, “and changed her mind when she got outside. Nothing very unlikely in that.”
“But why the devil should she have made an appointment at the Home Farm in the first instance?” Frank replied with some cogency.
“If she ever did,” I put in unwisely, thereby provoking a repetition of the evidence afforded by Miss Banks’s behaviour, particularly the damning fact that she, alone, had responded to Racquet’s demand for our instant annihilation.
And while we went on with our pointless arguments and the other little group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is, I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway’s return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more uneasy as no sound came. No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and peevish, and the necessity of restraining themselves before Turnbull and myself added still another to their many sources of irritation.
I put the Jervaises apart in this connection, because Ronnie was certainly very wide awake and I had no inclination whatever to sleep. My one longing was to get back, alone, into the night. I was fretting with the fear that the dawn would have broken before I could get away. I had made up my mind to watch the sunrise from “Jervaise Clump.”
It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible. I saw the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a sentence—undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious craving that was obsessing her.
“Oh, dear!” she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and then “Dear me!” Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox genteel attitude.
“I don’t know when I’ve been so tired,” she apologised.
But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of gentility.
“Oh! Lord, mater, you’ve started us now,” he said, and gave away almost sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively racked us with the longing to imitate him.
“Really, my dear, no necessity for you,” began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, “no necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any case, do anything until the morning.”
“Even if she comes in, now,” supplemented Olive.
“As I’m almost sure she will,” affirmed Mrs. Jervaise.
And she must have put something of genuine confidence into her statement, for automatically we all stopped talking for a few seconds and listened again with the ears of faith for the return of the car.
“But as I said,” Olive began again, abruptly ending the unhopeful suspense of our pause, “there’s nothing more we can do by sitting up. And there’s certainly no need for you to overtire yourself, mother.”
“No, really not,” urged Ronnie politely, “nor for you, either, sir,” he added, addressing his host. “What I mean is, Frank and I’ll do all that.”
“Rather, let’s get a drink,” Frank agreed.
We wanted passionately to get away from each other and indulge ourselves privately in a very orgie of gapes and stretchings. And yet, we stuck there, idiotically, making excuses and little polite recommendations for the others to retire, until Frank with a drastic quality of determination that he sometimes showed, took command.
“Go on, mater,” he said; “you go to bed.” And he went up to her, kissed her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint protestations of apology.
Olive followed, and with a last feint of hospitality, her father brought up the tail of the procession.
“Coming for a drink?” Frank asked me with a jerk of his head towards the extemporised buffet.
“Well, no, thanks. I think not,” I said, seeking the relief afforded by the women’s absence; although, now, that I could indulge my desire without restraint, the longing to gape had surprisingly vanished.
“Going to bed?” Jervaise suggested.
“Yes. Bed’s the best place, just now,” I lied.
“Right oh! Good-night, old chap,” Ronnie said effusively.
I pretended to be going upstairs and they did not wait for me to disappear. As soon as they had left the Hall, I sneaked down again, recovered from the cloak-room the light overcoat I had worn on our expedition to the Farm—I have no idea to whom that overcoat belonged—borrowed a cap, and let myself out stealthily by the front door.
As I quietly shut the door behind me, a delicious whiff of night-stock drifted by me, as if it had waited there for all those long hours seeking entrance to the stale, dry air of the Hall.
And it must have been, I think, that scent of night-stock which gave me the sense of a completed episode, or first act, as I stood alone, at last, on the gravel sweep before the Hall. Already the darkness was lifting. The dawn was coming high up in the sky, a sign of fair weather.
I have always had a sure sense of direction, and I turned instinctively towards the landmark of my promised destination, although it was invisible from that side of the Hall—screened by the avenue of tall forest trees, chiefly elms, that led up from the principal entrance to the Park. I had noticed one side road leading into this avenue as I had driven up from the station the previous afternoon, and I sought that turning now, with a feeling of certainty that it would take me in the right direction. As, indeed, it did; for it actually skirted the base of “Jervaise Clump,” which touched the extreme edge of the Park on that side.
As I cautiously felt my way down the avenue—it was still black dark under the dark trees—and later up the tunnel of the side road which I hit upon by an instinct that made me feel for it at the precise moment when I reached the point of its junction with the avenue—I returned with a sense of satisfaction to the memory of the last four hours. I was conscious of some kind of plan in the way the comedy of Brenda’s disappearance had been put before us. I realised that, as an art form, the plan was essentially undramatic, but the thought of it gave me, nevertheless, a distinct feeling of pleasure.
I saw the experience as a prelude to this lonely adventure of mine—a prelude full of movement and contrast; but I had no premonition of any equally diverting sequel.
The daylight was coming, and I believed, a trifle regretfully, that that great solvent of all mysteries would display these emotions of the night as the phantasmagoria of our imagination.
Before I had reached the end of the tunnel through the wood and had come out into the open whence I could, now, see the loom of Jervaise Clump swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.
As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was constructing the details of the Jervaises’ explanatory visit to the Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the statement she had made in the Hall that “dear Brenda was so impossibly headstrong,” when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me, whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.
It isn’t one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.
V
Daybreak
He was whistling Schubert’s setting of “Who is Sylvia?” and as I climbed slowly and as silently as I could towards him, I fitted the music to the words of the second verse:—