The Jervaise Comedy

“Yes, isn’t it?” Miss Tattersall agreed. “Of course, they are the only important people in the place,” she added thoughtfully.

“So important that it’s slightly presumptuous to worship God without the sanction of their presence in church,” I remarked. And then, feeling that this comment was a trifle too strong for my company, I tried to cover it by changing the subject.

“I say, do you think we ought to stay on here over the week-end?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be more tactful of us to invent excuses and leave them to themselves?”

“Certainly it would. Have you only just thought of it?” Miss Tattersall said pertly. “Nora and I agreed about that before we came down to prayers. But there’s a difficulty that seems, for the moment, insuperable.”

“Which is?” I prompted her.

“No conveyance,” she explained. “There aren’t any Sunday trains on the loop line, Hurley Junction is fifteen miles away, and the Jervaises’ car is Heaven knows where and the only other that is borrowable, Mr. Turnbull’s, is derelict just outside the Park gates.”

I thought she was rather inclined to make a song of it all, genuinely thankful to have so sound an excuse for staying to witness the dramatic developments that might possibly be in store for us. I do not deny that I appreciated her feeling in that matter.

“And the horses?” I suggested.

“Too far for them, in the omnibus,” she said. “And nothing else would be big enough for four people and their luggage. But, as a matter of fact, Nora and I talked it all over with Mrs. Jervaise before prayers, and she said we weren’t to think of going—especially as it was all right, now, about Brenda.”

“I’m glad it is all right, if only for old Jervaise’s sake,” I said, craftily.

She looked up at me, trying to guess how far I was honest in that remark.

“But you don’t really believe…” she said.

“I don’t see why not,” I returned.

“That Brenda has come back?”

“Mrs. Jervaise said…”

“Had to, of course,” Miss Tattersall replied curtly.

I pursed my mouth and shook my head. “It would be too risky to deceive us as crudely as that,” I said. “Make it so much more significant if we discovered that they had been lying about her.”

Miss Tattersall looked obstinate, putting on that wooden enduring expression peculiar to fair people with pale eyes.

“I don’t believe she has come back,” she said.

I continued to argue. I guessed that she had some piece of evidence in reserve; also, that for some reason she was afraid to produce it. And at last, as I had hoped, my foolish, specious arguments and apparent credulity irritated her to a pitch of exasperation.

“Oh! you can talk till all’s blue,” she broke in with a flash of temper, “but she hasn’t come back.”

“But…” I began.

“I know she hasn’t,” Miss Tattersall said, and the pink of her cheeks spread to her forehead and neck like an overflowing stain.

“Of course if you know…” I conceded.

“I do,” she affirmed, still blushing.

I realised that the moment had come for conciliation. “This is tremendously interesting,” I said.

She looked up at me with a question in her face, but I did not understand until she spoke, that what had been keeping back her confession was not doubt of my trustworthiness but her fear of losing my good opinion.

“I expect you’ll think it was horrid of me,” she said.

I made inarticulate sounds intended to convey an effect of reassurance.

“You will,” she insisted, and gave her protest a value that I felt to be slightly compromising. I could only infer that the loss of my good opinion would be fatal to her future happiness.

“Indeed, I shan’t,” I protested, although I had to say it in a tone that practically confirmed this talk of ours as a perfectly genuine flirtation.

“Men have such queer ideas of honour in these things,” she went on with a recovering confidence.

“Do you mean that you—peeped,” I said. “Into Brenda’s room?”

She made a moue that I ought to have found fascinating, nodding emphatically.

“The door wasn’t locked, then?” I put in.

She shook her head and blushed again; and I guessed in a flash that she had used the keyhole.

“But could you be sure?” I persisted. “Absolutely sure that she wasn’t there?”

“I—I only opened the door for a second,” she said, “But I saw the bed. It hadn’t been slept in.”

“And this happened?” I suggested.

“Just before I came down to prayers,” she replied.

“Well, where is she?” I asked.

Miss Tattersall laughed. Now that we had left the dangerous topic of her means of obtaining evidence, she was sure of herself again.

“She might be anywhere by this time,” she said. “She and her lover obviously went off in the motor together at twelve o’clock. They are probably in London, by now.”

I did not give her confidence for confidence. I had practically promised Banks not to say that I had seen him on Jervaise Clump at five o’clock that morning, and I was not the least tempted to reveal that important fact to Miss Tattersall. I diverted the angle of our talk a trifle, at the same time allowing my companion to assume that I agreed with her conclusion.

“Do you know,” I said, “that the person I’m most sorry for in this affair is Mr. Jervaise. He seems absolutely broken by it.”

Miss Tattersall nodded sympathetically. “Yes, isn’t it dreadful?” she said. “At breakfast this morning I was thinking how perfectly detestable it was of Brenda to do a thing like that.”

“Or of Banks?” I added.

“Oh! it wasn’t his fault,” Miss Tattersall said spitefully. “He was just infatuated, poor fool. She could do anything she liked with him.”

I reflected that Olive Jervaise and Nora Bailey would probably have expressed a precisely similar opinion.

“I suppose he’s a weak sort of chap?” I said.