The Jervaise Comedy

“But not the proposed marriage?”

He leaned against the door of the car with the air of one who is preparing for a long story. “You’re sure you want to hear all this?” he asked.

“Quite sure—that is, if you want to tell me,” I said. “And if I’m coming home with you, it might be as well if I knew exactly how things stand.”

“I felt somehow as if you and me were going to hit it off, last night,” he remarked shyly.

“So did I,” I rejoined, not less shy than he was.

Our friendship had been admitted and confirmed. No further word was needed. We understood each other. I felt warmed and comforted. It was good to be once more in the confidence of a fellowman. I have not the stuff in me that is needed to make a good spy.

“Well, the way things are at present,” Banks hurried on to cover our lapse into an un-British sentimentality, “is like this. We’d meant, as I told you, to run away….”

“And then she was afraid?”

“No, it was rather the other way round. It was me that was afraid. You see, I thought I should take all the blame off the old man by going off with her—him being away and all, I didn’t think as even the Jervaises could very well blame it on to him, overlooking what she pointed out, as once we’d gone they’d simply have to get rid of him, too, blame or no blame. They’d never stand having him and mother and Anne within a mile of the Hall, as sort of relations. I ought to have seen that, but one forgets these things at the time.”

I nodded sympathetically.

“So what it came to,” he continued, “was that we might as well face it out as not. She’s like that—likes to have things straight and honest. So do I, for the matter of that; but once you’ve been a gentleman’s servant it gets in your blood or something. I was three years as groom and so on up at the Hall before I went to Canada. Should have been there now if it hadn’t been for mother. I was only a lad of sixteen when I went into service, you see, and when I came back I got into the old habits again. I tell you it’s difficult once you’ve been in service to get out o’ the way of feeling that, well, old Jervaise, for instance, is a sort of little lord god almighty.”

“I can understand that,” I agreed, and added, “but I’m rather sorry for him, old Jervaise. He has been badly cut up, I think.”

Banks looked at me sharply, with one of his keen, rather challenging turns of expression. “Sorry for him? You needn’t be,” he said. “I could tell you something—at least, I can’t—but you can take it from me that you needn’t waste your pity on him.”

I realised that this was another reference to that “pull” I had heard of, which could not be used, and was not even to be spoken of to me after I had been admitted to Banks’s confidence. I realised, further, that my guessing must have gone hopelessly astray. Here was the suggestion of something far more sinister than a playing on the old man’s affection for his youngest child.

“Very well, I’ll take it from you,” I said. “On the other hand, you can take it from me that old Jervaise is very much upset.”

Banks smiled grimly. “He’s nervous at dangerous corners, like you said,” he returned. “However, we needn’t go into that—the point is as I began to tell you, that we’ve decided to face it out; and well, you saw me go up to the Hall this morning.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“Nothing,” Banks said. “I saw the old man and Mr. Frank, and they were both polite in a sort of way—no shouting nor anything, though, of course, Mr. Frank tried to browbeat me—but very firm that nothing had got to happen; no engagement or running away or anything. She was to come home and I was to go back to Canada—they’d pay my fare and so on…”

“And you?”

“Me? I just stuck to it we were going to get married, and Mr. Frank tried to threaten me till the old man stopped him, and then I came out.”

“Did you wind up the stable-clock?” I put in.

“Yes. I forgot it last night,” he said. “And I hate to see a thing not working properly.”

Dear Banks! I did not know, then, how characteristic that was of him.

I returned to the subject in hand.

“What do you propose to do, then?” I asked. “To get their consent?”

“Just stick to it,” he said.

“You think they’ll give way?”

“They’ll have to, in the end,” he affirmed gravely, and continued in a colder voice that with him indicated a flash of temper. “It’s just their respectability they care about, that’s all. If they were fond of her, or she of them, it would be another thing altogether. But she’s different to all the others, and they’ve never hit it off, she and them, among themselves. Why, they treat her quite differently to the others; to Miss Olive, for instance.”

“Do they?” I said, in astonishment. I had been romantically picturing Brenda as the favourite child, and I could not, at once, see her in this new light.

“She never got on with ’em, somehow,” Banks said. “Anyway, not when they were alone. Always rows of one sort or another. They couldn’t understand her, of course, being so different to the others.”

I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for further details. His insistence on Brenda’s difference from the rest of the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get. The difference was obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it. He was, as Miss Tattersall had said, “infatuated,” but I put a more kindly construction on the description than she had done—perhaps “enthralled” would have been a better word.

We had come to a pause. His confidences were exhausted for the present. He had told me all that it was necessary for me to know before I met Brenda and his sister; and I waited for him, now, to renew his invitation. I preferred that he should re-open that subject; but he came to it rather obliquely.

“Well!” he remarked. “Might as well be getting on, I suppose?”

I nodded and got out of the car.

“Can you find your way up?” he proceeded.

“Alone?” I asked.

“It’s only about half a mile,” he explained, “You can’t miss it. You see, I want to get the car back to the house. Don’t do it any good standing about here. Besides, it wouldn’t do for them to think as I was holding it over them.”

Even the picture of a herculean Banks holding that car over the Jervaises failed to divert me, just then. I was too much occupied with my new friend’s simple absence of tact. I would sooner have faced a return to the Hall than an unsupported appearance at the Farm.

“Oh! I’m not going up there alone,” I said.

Banks was honestly surprised. “Why not?” he asked. “You met Anne last night, didn’t you? That’ll be all right. You tell her I told you to come up. She’ll understand.”

I shook my head. “It won’t take you long to run up to the Hall and put the car in,” I said. “I’ll cut across the Park and meet you in that wood just below your house—the way that Jervaise and I went last night.”

He looked distressed. He could not understand my unwillingness to go alone, but his sense of what was due to me would not permit him to let me wait for him in the wood.

“But, I can’t see…” he began, and then apparently realising that he was failing either in respect or in hospitality, he continued, “Oh! well, I’ll just run up with you at once; it won’t take us ten minutes, and half an hour one way or the other won’t make any difference.”

I accepted his sacrifice without further protestation; and after he had carefully replaced the tarpaulin over the tonneau of the car, we set off briskly towards the Farm. About a third of a mile farther on we left the highroad for a side road, and another three or four minutes’ walk up the hill brought us to the main entrance to the Farm. I saw, now, that I had come with Jervaise to a side door last night. This front approach was more imposing—up a drive through an avenue of limes. The house seen from this aspect looked very sweet and charming. It was obviously of a date not later than the sixteenth century, and I guessed that the rough-cast probably concealed a half-timber work structure. In front of it was a good strip of carefully kept lawn and flower garden. The whole place had an air of dignity and beauty that I had not expected, and I think Banks must have noticed my surprise, for he said,—

“Not bad, is it? Used to be a kind of dower house once upon a time, they say.”

“Absolutely charming,” I replied. “Now, this is the sort of house I should like to live in.”

“I dare say it’ll be to let before long,” Banks said with a touch of grim humour.

“Not to me, though,” I said.

He laughed. “Perhaps not,” he agreed.

We had paused at the end of the little avenue for me to take in the effect of the house, and as we still stood there, the sound of a man’s voice came to us through the open window of one of the rooms on the ground floor.