The Jervaise Comedy

Old Jervaise’s expression was certainly one of relief. He would, I am sure, have agreed to that compromise if he had been alone; he might even have agreed, as it was, if he had been given the chance. But Frank realised his father’s weakness not less surely than we did, and although this was probably not the precise moment he would have chosen, he instantly took the case into his own hands.

“Oh! no, Mrs. Banks, certainly not,” he said. “In the first place we did not come here to bargain with you, and in the second it must be perfectly plain to you that the scandal remains none the less because you have all gone away. We have come to fetch my sister home, that’s the only thing that concerns you.”

“And if she will not go with you?” asked Mrs. Banks.

“She must,” Frank returned.

“And still, if she will not go?”

“Then we shall bring an action against you for abducting her.”

Mrs. Banks smiled gently and pursed her mouth “To avoid a scandal?” she asked.

“If you persist in your absurd demands, there will be a scandal in any case,” Frank replied curtly.

“I suppose my wishes don’t count at all?” Brenda put in.

“Obviously they don’t,” Frank said.

“But, look here, father,” Brenda continued, turning to old Jervaise; “why do you want me to come back? We’ve never got on, I and the rest of you. Why can’t you let me go and be done with it?”

Jervaise fidgeted uneasily and looked up with a touch of appeal at his son. He had begun to mumble some opening when Frank interposed.

“Because we won’t,” he said, “and that’s the end of it. There’s nothing more to be said. I’ve told you precisely how the case stands. Either you come back with us without a fuss, or we shall begin an action at once.”

I know now that Frank Jervaise was merely bluffing, and that they could have had no case, since Brenda was over eighteen, and was not being detained against her will. But none of us, probably not even old Jervaise himself, knew enough of the law to question the validity of the threat.

Little Mrs. Banks, however, was not depending on her legal knowledge to defeat her enemies. What woman would? She had been exchanging glances with her husband during the brief interval in which she had entrusted a minor plea to her junior, and I suppose she, now, considered herself free to produce her trump card. Banks had turned his back on the room—perhaps the first time he had ever so slighted his landlord and owner—and was leaning his forehead against the glass of the window. His attitude was that of a man who had no further interest in such trivialities as this bickering and scheming. Perhaps he was dimly struggling to visualise what life in Canada might mean for him?

His wife’s eyes were still shining with the zest of her present encounter. She was too engrossed by that to consider just then the far heavier task she would presently have to undertake. She shrugged her shoulders and made a gesture with her hands that implied the throwing of all further responsibility upon her antagonists. “If you will have it,” she seemed to say, “you must take the consequences.” And old Jervaise, at all events, foresaw what was coming, and at that eleventh hour made one last effort to avert it.

“You know, Frank…” he began, but Mrs. Banks interrupted him.

“It is useless, Mr. Jervaise,” she said. “Mr. Frank has been making love to my daughter and she has shown him plainly how she despises him. After that he will not listen to you. He seeks his revenge. It is the manner of your family to make love in that way.”

“Impertinence will not make things any easier for you, Mrs. Banks,” Frank interpolated.

“Impertinence? From me to you?” the little woman replied magnificently. “Be quiet, boy, you do not know what you are saying. My husband and I have saved your poor little family from disgrace for twenty years, and I would say nothing now, if it were not that you have compelled me.”

She threw one glance of contempt at old Jervaise, who was leaning forward with his hand over his mouth, as if he were in pain, and then continued,—

“But it is as well that you should know the truth, and after all, the secret remains in good keeping. And you understand that it is apropos to that case you are threatening. It might be as well for you to know before you bring that case against us.”

“Well,” urged Frank sardonically. He was, I think, the one person in the room who was not tense with expectation. Nothing but physical fear could penetrate that hide of his.

“Well, Mr. Frank,” she did not deign to imitate him, but she took up his word as if it were a challenge. “Well, it is as well for you to know that Brenda is not your mother’s daughter.” She turned as she spoke to Brenda herself, with a protective gesture of her little hand. “I know it will not grieve you, dear, to hear that,” she continued. “It is not as if you were so attached to them all at the Hall…”

“But who, then…?” Brenda began, evidently too startled by this astonishing news to realise its true significance.

“She was my step-sister, Claire Sévérac, dear,” Mrs. Banks explained. “She was Olive’s governess. Oh! poor Claire, how she suffered! It was, perhaps, a good thing after all that she died so soon after you were born. Her heart was broken. She was so innocent; she could not realise that she was no more than a casual mistress for your father. And then Mrs. Jervaise, whom you have believed to be your mother, was very unkind to my poor Claire. Yet it seemed best just then, in her trouble, that she should go away to Italy, and that it should be pretended that you were Mrs. Jervaise’s true daughter. I arranged that. I have blamed myself since, but I did not understand at the time that Mrs. Jervaise consented solely that she might keep you in sight of your father as a reminder of his sin. She was spiteful, and at that time she had the influence. She threatened a separation if she was not allowed to have her own way. So! the secret was kept and there were so few who remember my poor Claire that it is only Alfred and I who know how like her you are, my dear. She had not, it is true, your beautiful fair hair that is so striking with your dark eyes. But your temperament, yes. She, too, was full of spirit, vivacious, gay—until afterwards.”

She paused with a deep sigh, and I think we all sighed with her in concert. She had held us with her narrative. She had, as a matter of fact, told us little enough and that rather allusively, but I felt that I knew the whole history of the unhappy Claire Sévérac. Anne had not overrated her mother’s powers in this direction. And my sigh had in it an element of relief. Some strain had been mercifully relaxed.

The sound of Frank’s harsh voice came as a gross intrusion on our silence.

“What evidence have you got of all this?” he asked, but the ring of certainty had gone from his tone.

Mrs. Banks pointed with a superb gesture at his father.

The old man was leaning forward in his chair with his face in his hands. There was no spirit in him. Probably he was thinking less of the present company than of Claire Sévérac.

Frank Jervaise showed his true quality on that occasion. He looked down at his father with scowling contempt, stared for a moment as if he would finally wring the old man’s soul with some expression of filial scorn, and then flung himself out of the room, banging the door behind him as a proclamation that he finally washed his hands of the whole affair.

Old Jervaise looked up when the door banged and rose rather feebly to his feet. For a moment he looked at Arthur, as though he were prepared, now, to meet even that more recent impeachment of his virtue which he had feared earlier in the day. But Arthur’s face gave no sign of any vindictive intention, and the old man silently followed his son, creeping out with the air of a man who submissively shoulders the burden of his disgrace.

I had been sorry for him that morning, but I was still sorrier for him then. Banks was suffering righteously and might find relief in that knowledge, but this man was reaping the just penalties of his own acts.

XV

Remembrance

I do not believe that any of them saw me leave the room.

As soon as old Jervaise had gone, all of them had turned with an instinct of protection towards the head of the family. He, alone, had been sacrificed. Within an hour his whole life had been changed, and I began to doubt, as Anne had doubted, whether so old a tree would bear transplanting. Whatever tenderness and care could do, would be done for him, but the threat of uprooting had come so suddenly. In any case, I could not help those gentle foresters whose work it would be to conduct the critical operation; and I walked out of the room without offering any perfunctory excuse for leaving them.

I made my way into the garden by the side door through which I had first entered the Home Farm; and after one indeterminate moment, came to a halt at the gate on the slope of the hill. I did not want to go too far from the house. For the time being I was no more to the Banks than an inconvenient visitor, but I hoped that presently some of them—I put it that way to myself—would miss me, and that Arthur or Anne would come and tell me what had been arranged in my absence. I should have been glad to talk over the affair with Arthur, but I hoped that it would not be Arthur who would come to find me.

For a time my thoughts flickered capriciously over the astonishing events of my adventurous week-end. I was pleasantly replete with experience. In all my life I had never before entered thus completely into any of the great movements of life. I recalled my first thrills of anticipation amidst the glowing, excited youth of the resting dancers at the Hall. We had been impatient for further expression. The dragging departure of the Sturtons had been an unbearable check upon the exuberance of our desires. In my thought of the scene I could see the unspent spirit of our vitality streaming up in a fierce fount of energy.

And with me, at least, that fount, unexpectedly penned by the first hints of disaster, had still played furiously in my mind as I had walked with Frank Jervaise through the wood. My intoxicated imagination had created its own setting. I had gone, exalted, to meet my wonderful fate. Through some strange scene of my own making I had strayed to the very feet of enduring romance.

But after that exciting prelude, when the moon had set and slow dawn, like a lifting curtain, had been drawn to reveal the landscape of a world outside the little chamber of my own being, I had been cast from my heights of exaltation into a gloomy pit of disgrace. Fate, with a fastidious particularity, had hauled me back to the things of everyday. I was not to be allowed to dream too long. I was wanted to play my part in this sudden tragedy of experience.

My thought went off at a tangent when I reached that point of my reflection. I had found myself involved in the Banks’s drama, but what hope had I of ever seeing them again after the next day? What, moreover, was the great thing I was called upon to do? I had decided only an hour or two before that my old way of life had become impossible for me, but equally impossible was any way of life that did not include the presence of Anne.

I looked at my watch, and found that it was after ten o’clock, but how long I had been standing at the gate, I had no idea; whether an hour or ten minutes. I had been dreaming again, lost in imaginative delights; until the reminder of this new urgency had brought me back to a reality that demanded from me an energy of participation and of initiative.

I wished that Anne would come—and by way of helping her should she, indeed, have come out to look for me, I strolled back to the Farm, and then round to the front of the house.

The windows of the sitting-room had been closed but the blinds were not drawn. The lamp had been lit and splayed weak fans of yellow light on to the gravel, and the flower-beds of the grass plot. The path of each beam was picked out from the diffused radiance of the moonlight, by the dancing figures of the moths that gathered and fluttered across the prisms of these enchanted rays. But I did not approach the windows. In the stillness of the night I could hear Anne’s clear musical voice. She was still there in the sitting-room, still soothing and persuading her father. Her actual words were indistinguishable, but the modulations of her tone seemed to convey the sense of her speech, as a melody may convey the ideas of form and colour.

I returned to my vigil at the gate and to thoughts of Anne—to romantic thoughts of worship and service; of becoming worthy of her regard; of immense faithfulness to her image when confronted with the most provocative temptations; to thoughts of self-sacrifice and bravado, of humility and boasting; of some transcending glorification of myself that should make me worthy of her love.

I was arrested in the midst of my ecstatic sentimentalism by the sight of the Hall, the lights of which were distantly visible through the trees. The path by the wood was not the direct line from the Hall to the Farm; the sanctities of the Park were not violated by any public right of way. The sight of the place pulled me up, because I was suddenly pierced by the reflection that perhaps old Jervaise had thus postured to win the esteem of his daughter’s governess. He, it is true, had had dignity and prestige on his side, but surely he must have condescended to win her. Had he, too, dreamed dreams of sacrifice at the height of his passion? Had he alternately grovelled and strutted to attract the admiration of his lady? I found the reflection markedly distasteful. I was sorry again, now, for the old man. He had suffered heavy penalties for his lapse. I remembered Mrs. Banks’s hint that his wife had adopted Brenda in the first place in order that he might have before him a constant reminder of his disgrace. I could believe that. It was just such a piece of chicane as I should expect from that timid hawk, Mrs. Jervaise. But while I pitied the man, I could not look upon his furtive gratifications of passion with anything but distaste.

No; if my love for Anne was to be worthy of so wonderful an object, I must not stupefy myself with these vapours of romance. The ideal held something finer than this, something that I could not define, but that conveyed the notion, however indeterminately, of equality. I thought of my fancy that we had “recognised” each other the night before. Surely that fancy contained the germ of the true understanding, of the conceptions of affinity and remembrance.

No tie of our present earth life could be weighed against that idea of a spirit love, enduring through the ages; a love transcending and immortal, repeating itself in ever ascending stages of rapture. The flesh was but a passing instrument of temporal expression, a gross medium through which the spirit could speak only in poor, inarticulate phrases of its magnificent recognition of an eternal bond. … Oh! I was soon high in the air again, riding my new Pegasus through the loftiest altitudes of lonely exaltation. I was a conqueror while I had the world to myself. But when at last I heard the rustle of a woman’s dress on the path behind me, I was nothing more than a shy, self-conscious product of the twentieth century, all too painfully aware of his physical shortcomings.