The Jervaise Comedy

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…”