But, having thus piqued my curiosity, she gave me no opportunity to gratify it. She checked the question that my change of expression must have foreshadowed by a frown which warned me that she could not give any reason for her suspicion in that company.
“Later on,” she whispered, and got up from her seat in the window, leaving me to puzzle over the still uncertain mystery of Brenda’s disappearance. Miss Bailey had not, apparently, overheard the confidence. She did not, in any case, relinquish for an instant that air of simple, attentive innocence which so admirably suited the fresh prettiness of her style.
There was little conversation over the breakfast table. We were all glad to find an excuse for silence either in the pretence or reality of hunger. Old Jervaise’s excuse was, quite pathetically, only a pretence; but he tried very hard to appear engrossed in the making of a hearty meal. His manner had begun to fascinate me, and I had constantly to check myself from staring at him. I found it so difficult to account satisfactorily for the effect of dread that he in some way conveyed. It was, I thought, much the effect that might have been produced by a criminal in danger of arrest.
But all of us, in our different ways, were more than a little uncomfortable. The whole air of the breakfast-table was one of dissimulation. Gordon Hughes made occasional efforts in conversation that were too glaringly irrelevant to the real subject of our thoughts. And with each beginning of his, the others, particularly Olive, Mrs. Jervaise, and little Nora Bailey, plunged gallantly into the new topic with spasmodic fervour that expended itself in a couple of minutes, and horribly emphasised the blank of silence that inevitably followed. We talked as people talk who are passing the time while they wait for some great event. But what event we could be awaiting, it was hard to imagine—unless it were the sudden return of Brenda, with or without Banks.
And, even when we had all finished, and were free to separate, we still lingered for unnecessary minutes in the breakfast-room, as if we were compelled to maintain our pretence until the last possible moment.
Old Jervaise was the first to go. He had made less effort to disguise his preoccupation than any of us, and now his exit had something of abruptness, as if he could no longer bear to maintain any further semblance of disguise. One could only infer from the manner of his going that he passionately desired either solitude or the sole companionship of those with whom he could speak plainly of his distress.
We took our cue from him with an evident alacrity. Every one looked as if he or she were saying something that began with a half-apologetic “Well…”; and Mrs. Jervaise interpreted our spirit when she remarked to the company in general, “Well, it’s very late, I’m afraid, and I dare say we’ve all got a lot to do before we start for church. We shall have to leave soon after half-past ten,” she explained.
Frank had already left the room when she said that, she herself went out with her elder daughter, and the four of us who remained, all visitors, were left to pair with each other as we chose. It was Miss Tattersall who determined the arrangement. She cleverly avoided the submissive glance of little Nora Bailey, and asked me unequivocally if I would care to take a “stroll” with her in the garden.
I agreed with a touch of eagerness and followed her, wondering if her intriguing sentence before breakfast had been nothing more than a clever piece of chicane, planned to entice me into a tête-à-tête.
(I admit that this may sound like a detestable symptom of vanity on my part, but, indeed, I do not mean to imply that she cared a snap of the fingers for me personally. She was one of those women who must have some man in tow, and it happened that I was the only one available for that week-end. Frank was supposed to be in love with Miss Bailey; Gordon Hughes was engaged to some girl in the north, and used that defence without shame when it suited him.)
I did not, however, permit Miss Tattersall to see my eagerness when we were alone on the terrace together. If she was capable of chicane, so was I; and I knew that if she had anything to tell me, she would not be able to keep it to herself for long. If, on the other hand, I began to ask questions, she would certainly take a pleasure in tantalising me.
“What’s this about going to church?” was my opening.
“Didn’t you know?” she replied. “We all go in solemn procession. We walk—for piety’s sake—it’s over a mile across the fields—and we are rounded up in lots of time, because it’s a dreadful thing to get there after the bell has stopped.”
“Interrupting the service,” I put in with the usual inanity that is essential to the maintenance of this kind of conversation.
“It’s worse than that,” Miss Tattersall explained gaily; “because Mr. Sturton waits for the Jervaises, to begin. When we’re late we hold up the devotions of the whole parish.”
“Good Lord!” I commented; sincerely, this time; and with a thought of my socialist friend Banks. I could still sympathise with him on that score, even though I was now strongly inclined to side with the Jervaises in the Brenda affair.
“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.
“No. It isn’t that,” Miss Tattersall replied. “He doesn’t look weak—not at all. No! he is just infatuated—for the time being.”
We had been pacing up and down the lawn, parallel to the front of the house and perhaps fifty yards away from it—a safe distance for maintaining the privacy of our conversation. And as we came to the turn of our walk nearest to the drive, I looked back towards the avenue that intervened between us and the swelling contours of Jervaise Clump. I was thinking about my expedition towards the sunrise; and I was taken completely off my guard when I saw a tweed-clad figure emerge from under the elms and make its way with a steady determination up the drive.
“Well, one of them isn’t in London, anyway,” I said.
“Why? Who?” she returned, staring, and I realised that she was too short-sighted to make out the identity of the advancing figure from that distance.
“Who is it?” she repeated with a hint of testiness.
I had seen by then that I had inadvertently given myself away, and I had not the wit to escape from the dilemma.
“I don’t know,” I said, hopelessly embarrassed. “It—it just struck me that this might be Banks.”
He had come nearer to us now, near enough for Miss Tattersall to recognise him; and her amazement was certainly greater than mine.
“But you’re right,” she said with a little catch in her breath. “It is Banks, out of uniform.”
For a moment I hoped that her surprise might cover my slip, but she was much too acute to pass such a palpable blunder as that.
“It is,” she repeated; “but how did you know? I thought you had never seen him.”
“Just an intuition,” I prevaricated and tried, I knew at the time how uselessly, to boast a pride in my powers of insight.
The effect upon my companion was neither that I hoped to produce, nor that I more confidently expected. Instead of chaffing me, pressing me for an explanation of the double game I had presumably been playing, she looked at me with doubt and an obvious loss of confidence. Just so, I thought, she might have looked at me if I had tried to take some unfair advantage of her.
“Well, I suppose it’s time to get ready for church,” she remarked coldly. “Are you coming?”
I forget what I replied. She was already slipping into the background of my interest. I was so extraordinarily intrigued by the sight of Arthur Banks, the chauffeur, boldly ringing at the front door of Jervaise Hall.
VII
Notes and Queries
Miss Tattersall had started for the house and her preparations for church-going, but she paused on the hither side of the drive and pretended an interest in the flower beds, until Banks had been admitted to the Hall.
I could not, at that distance, mark the expression on John’s face when he answered the bell, but I noticed that there was a perceptible interval of colloquy on the doorstep before the strange visitor was allowed to enter. I should have liked to hear that conversation, and to know what argument Banks used in overcoming John’s reluctance to carry the astounding message that the chauffeur had “called” and wished to see Mr. Jervaise. But, no doubt, John’s diplomacy was equal to the occasion. Banks’s fine effort in self-assertion was probably wasted. John would not mention the affront to the family’s prestige. He would imply that Banks had come in the manner proper to his condition. “Banks wishes to know if he might speak to you a minute, sir,” was all the warning poor old Jervaise would get of this frontal attack upon his dignities.
So far I felt a certain faith in my ability to guess the hidden action of the drama that was being played in the Hall; but beyond this point my imagination would not carry me. I could not foresee the attitude of either of the two protagonists. I thought over what I remembered of my conversation with Banks on the hill, but the only essential that stuck in my mind was that suggestion of the “pull,” the admittedly unfair advantage that he might possibly use as a last resource. I was conscious of an earnest wish that that reserve would not be called upon. I felt, intuitively, that it would shame both the chauffeur and his master. I had still less material for any imaginative construction of old Jervaise’s part in the scene now being played; a scene that I could only regard as being of the greatest moment. Indeed I believed that the conversation then taking place would reach the climax of the whole episode, and I bitterly regretted that I had apparently no possible chance of ever learning the detail of that confrontation of owner and servant. Worse still, I realised that I might have some difficulty in gathering the upshot. Whether Banks were accepted or rejected the Jervaises would not confide the story to their visitors.
I must admit that my curiosity was immensely piqued; though I flatter myself that my interest was quite legitimate, that it contained no element of vulgar inquisitiveness. Nevertheless, I did want to know—the outcome, at least—and I could decide upon no intermediary who would give me just the information I desired.
Miss Tattersall I ruled out at once. She so persistently vulgarised the affair. I felt that in her mind she regarded the elopement as subject for common gossip; also, that she was not free from a form of generalised jealousy. She did not want Arthur Banks for herself, but she evidently thought him a rather admirable masculine figure and deplored his “infatuation” for Brenda. Moreover, I had a notion that I had fallen from Miss Tattersall’s favour. There was something in her expression when she discovered my deceit in pretending ignorance of the heroic chauffeur that portrayed a sense of personal injury. No doubt she thought that I had squeezed her confidence, while I treacherously withheld my own; and she would certainly regret that confession of having peeped into Brenda’s room, even if she did not guess that I had inferred the final shame of using the keyhole. Subsequent evidence showed that my only mistake in this connection was a fatuous underestimation of the lady’s sense of injury.
Of the other members of the house-party, Frank Jervaise was the only one who seemed likely or able to post me in the progress of the affair, and I felt considerable hesitation in approaching him. I could not expect a return of that mood of weakness he had exhibited the night before; and I had no intention of courting a direct snub from him.
There remained Banks, himself, but I could not possibly have questioned him, even if my sympathies had still been engaged on his side.
And I must admit that as I paced the lawn in front of the house my sympathies were very markedly with old Jervaise. It hurt me to remember that look of apprehension he had worn at breakfast. I wanted, almost passionately, to defend him from the possibly heart-breaking consequences that might arise from no fault of his own.
I was still pondering these feelings of compassion for my host, when the church-party emerged from the front door of the Hall. If my watch were right they were very late. Mr. Sturton and his congregation would have to wait ten minutes or so in patient expectation before they could begin their devotions. And I would gladly have effaced myself if only to save the Jervaises the vexation of a still further delay. But I was too near the line of their approach. Any attempt at retreat would have been a positive rudeness.
I was framing an apology for not accompanying them to church as they came up—Mrs. Jervaise and her daughter leading, with their three visitors in a bunch behind. But I was spared the necessity to offer what would certainly have been a transparent and foolish excuse for absenting myself from their religious observances. Mrs. Jervaise pulled herself together as the party approached me. She had had her head down even more than usual as they came out of the Hall, as if she were determined to butt her way through any further obstacles that might intervene between her and her duty as a Christian. At sight of me, however, she obviously stiffened. She almost held herself erect as she faced me; and her hawk nose jerked up like the head of a pick.
“So you’re not coming with us, Mr. Melhuish?” she said.
“I hope you will excuse me,” I replied with, I hope, a proper air of courtesy.
“Of course,” she said stiffly, her nose still balanced, as it were, in preparation to strike. Then she lowered her head with the air of one who carefully replaces a weapon, and mumbling something about being “dreadfully late as it was,” continued her interrupted plunging into the resistances that separated her from her goal. The others followed, as if they were being trailed in her wake by invisible hawsers. None of them took any notice of me—particularly Miss Tattersall, whose failure to see me was a marked and positive act of omission.
I realised that I had been disapproved and snubbed, but I was not at all distressed by the fact. I put it all down to my failure in piety, begun with my absence from prayers and now accentuated by my absence from church. Olive, Nora Bailey, and Hughes had, I supposed, followed Mrs. Jervaise’s lead in duty bound, and I knew nearly enough why Miss Tattersall had cut me. I had no idea, then, that I had come under suspicion of a far more serious offence than that of a sectarian nonconformity. Indeed, I hardly gave the matter a moment’s attention. The composition of the church-party had provided me with material for further speculation concerning the subject that was absorbing all my interest. Why were old Jervaise and his son also absent from the tale of those devoted pilgrims? Was that interview in the Hall developing some crucial situation, and had Frank been called in? One thing was certain: Banks had not, as yet, come out. I had kept my eye on the front door. I could not possibly have missed him.
And it was with the idea of seeing what inferences I could draw from his general demeanour when he did come, rather than with any thought of accosting him, that I maintained my thoughtful pacing up and down the lawn on the garden side of the drive. I was relieved by the knowledge that that party of church-goers were out of the way. I had a feeling of freedom such as I used to have as a boy when I had been permitted to stay at home, on some plea or another, on a Sunday morning. I had a sense of enlargement and opportunity.
I must have been on that lawn for more than an hour, and my thoughts had covered much ground that is not appropriate to this narrative, when I was roused to a recognition of the fact that my brief freedom was passing and that I was taking no advantage of any opportunity it might afford me.
The thing that suddenly stirred me to a new activity was the sound of the stable-clock striking twelve. Its horrible bell still had the same note of intrusive artificiality that had vexed me on the previous night, but it no longer thrilled me with any sense of stage effect. It was merely a mechanical and inappropriate invasion of that lovely Sunday morning.
There was a strange stimulation, however, in the deductions that I drew from that portentous chiming, for my interest was at once called to the fact that this was the first time that clock had struck since I had been on the lawn. I could not conceivably have missed its earlier efforts at the hours of ten and eleven. There was an insistence about the beastly thing that demanded one’s attention. Had it, then, run down overnight and been recently re-wound? And if so, by whom?
It may seem absurd that I should have made so much of the inferences that followed my consideration of this problem, but the truth is that my mind was so intensely occupied with one subject that everything seemed to point to the participation of the important Arthur Banks. At any other time I should not have troubled about the clock; now, I looked to it for evidence. And however ridiculous it may appear, I was influenced in my excited search for clues by the fact that the clock had, after it was re-wound, only struck the hour of twelve. The significance of that deduction lay in the observation—my experience is, admittedly, limited—that clocks which have run down must be patiently made to re-toll the hours they have missed, or they will pick up their last neglected reminders of the time at the point at which they stopped. And from that I inferred an esoteric knowledge of mechanics from that rewinder of the stable-clock who had got the horrid contrivance correctly going again without imposing upon us the misery of slowly working through an almost endless series of, as it were, historical chimes. I agree that my premises were faulty, far too lightly supported, but my mind leapt to the deduction that the mechanic in this connection could be none other than Banks. And granting that, the further inferences were, undoubtedly, important. For as I saw them they pointed infallibly to the conclusion that Banks had accepted once more the yoke of servitude; that he had made his exit through the servants’ quarters and had meekly taken up his tasks again with the winding of the stable-clock.
(I may add that strangely enough the weak inference was correct, and the well-grounded one fallacious. If you would interpret the riddle of human motives, put no confidence in logic. The principles of logic are founded on the psychology of Anyone. And Anyone is a mechanical waxwork, an intellectual abstraction, a thing without a soul or a sub-consciousness.)
Having taken the side of old Jervaise, I ought to have been comforted by this conclusion, and I tried to persuade myself that it indicated the only satisfactory termination to the brief drama of the night. I attempted to see the affair as a slightly ridiculous episode that had occupied exactly twelve hours and ended with an inevitable bathos. I pictured the return of a disgraced and penitent Brenda, and the temporary re-employment, as an antidote to gossip, of the defeated Banks. They would be parted, of course. She might be taken abroad, or to Scotland, and by the time she returned, he would have been sent back to the country from which he had been injudiciously recalled. Finally, old Jervaise would be able to take up his life again with his old zest. I believed that he was a man who took his pleasures with a certain gusto. He had been quite gay at the dance before the coming of the scandal that had temporarily upset his peace of mind.
All this imaginary restitution was perfectly reasonable. I could “see” things happening just as I had thought them. The only trouble was that I could find no personal satisfaction in the consideration of the Jervaises’ restored happiness. I was aware of a feeling of great disappointment for which I could not account; and although I tried to persuade myself that this feeling was due to the evaporation of the emotional interest of the moving drama that had been playing, I found that explanation insufficient. I was conscious of a loss that intimately concerned myself, the loss of something to which I had been unconsciously looking forward.
I came out of my reverie to find that I had wandered half round the house, across the formal pleasance, and that I was now at the door leading into the kitchen garden.
I hesitated a moment with a distinct sense of wrong-doing, before I opened the door with the air of one who defies his own conscience, and passed up the avenue between the gouty espaliers—fine old veterans they were, and as I could see, now, loaded with splendid fruit. The iron gates that led out into the Park were locked, but a gardener—the head gardener, I suppose—came out of one of the greenhouses close at hand, and let me through.
I began to hurry, then. It was already twenty past twelve, and lunch was at half-past one. Just what I proposed to do, or whom I expected to see, at the Home Farm, I had no idea; but I was suddenly determined to get there and back before lunch. The walk would not take me more than a quarter of an hour each way, but, for no reason that I could explain, the balance of half an hour or so that remained to me appeared far too short. I remember that as I walked through the wood, I persuaded myself that I wanted to see Arthur Banks, who, according to my neat and convincing theory, had taken up his work again and was, therefore, probably at the Hall. But, as I have said, our impulses are never guided, and seldom altered, by that form of reasoning known as logic.
But I never reached the farm, and I forgot all about the pretended motive of my excursion. For in two seconds I came to an entirely new judgment on the whole problem of the Jervaise-Banks intrigue, a judgment that had nothing in common with any earlier turns of sympathy from one party to the other.
Such a little thing it was that temporarily turned me into a disgusted misanthrope, nothing more than a sight of two people seen for a moment in an arresting shock of outraged amazement before I turned a disgusted back upon them and retreated moodily to the Hall. But the sight was enough to throw the affair into a new perspective, and beget in me a sense of contempt for all the actors in that midsummer comedy. “A plague on both your houses,” I muttered to myself, but I saw them no longer as the antagonists of a romantic drama. I was suddenly influenced to a mood of scorn. Jervaises and Banks alike seemed to me unworthy of any admiration. The members of those families were just a crowd of self-seeking creatures with no thought beyond their own petty interests. The Jervaises were snobs upset by the threat to their silly prestige. Brenda was a feather-headed madcap without a scrap of consideration for any one but herself. Banks was an infatuated fool, and the best I could hope for him was that he would realise the fact before it was too late. Frank, confound and confound him, was a coarse-minded sensualist. The thought of him drove me crazy with impatience….
And what on earth could have tempted Anne to let him kiss her, if she had not been a crafty, worldly-minded schemer with an eye on the glories of ruling at the Hall?
It is true that I did not actually see him kiss her. I turned away too quickly. But the grouping left me in no doubt that if he had not kissed her already, he was on the point of doing it. In any case he had had his arm round her, and she had shown no signs of resisting him.