The Jervaise Comedy Part 6

"Confided? What sort of things?"

"That there was, or might be, any--any sort of understanding between them?"

"I know that they have met--occasionally."

"Lately! Where?"

"Brenda has been having lessons in driving the motor."

"Oh! yes, I know that. You didn't mean that they had been meeting here?"

"No, I didn't mean that," Anne said definitely. All through that quick alternation of question and answer she had, as it were, surrendered her gaze to him; watching him with a kind of meek submission as if she were ready to do anything she could to help him in his inquiry. And it was very plain to me that Jervaise was flattered and pleased by her att.i.tude. If I had attempted Anne's method, he would have scowled and brow-beaten me unmercifully, but now he really looked almost pleasant.

"It's very good of you to help me like this, Miss Banks," he said, "and I'm very grateful to you. I do apologise, most sincerely for dragging you out of bed at such an unholy hour, but I'm sure you appreciate my--our anxiety."

"Oh! of course," she agreed, with a look that I thought horribly sympathetic.

I began to wonder if my first estimate of her--based to a certain extent, perhaps, on Jervaise's admission that she did not like him--had not been considerably too high. She might, after all, be just an ordinary charming woman, enlivened by a streak of minx, and eager enough to catch the heir of Jervaise if he were available. How low my thought of her must have sunk at that moment! But they were, now, exchanging courtesies with an air that gave to their commonplaces the effect of a flirtation.

I distracted my attention. I couldn't help hearing what they said, but I could refrain from looking at Anne. She was becoming vivacious, and I found myself strangely disliking her vivacity. It was then that I began to take note of the furnis.h.i.+ng of the room which, when I considered it, was so peculiarly not in the manner of the familiar English farm-house.

Instead of the plush suite, the gla.s.s bell shades, the round centre table, and all the other stuffy misconceptions so firmly established by the civilisation of the nineteenth century, I discovered the authentic marks of the old English aesthetic--whitewashed walls and black oak. And the dresser, the settles, the oblong table, the rush-bottomed chairs, the big chest by the side wall, all looked st.u.r.dily genuine; venerably conscious of the boast that they had defied the greedy collector and would continue to elude his most insidious approaches. Here, they were in their proper surroundings. They gave the effect of having carelessly lounged in and settled themselves; they were like the steady group of "regulars" in the parlour of their familiar inn.

I came out of my reflection on the furniture to find that Jervaise was going, at last. He was smiling and effusive, talking quickly about nothing, apologising again for the unseemliness of our visit. Anne was pathetically complacent, accepting and discounting his excuses, and professing her willingness to help in any way she possibly could. "But I really and truly expect you'll find Brenda safe at home when you get back," she said, and I felt that she honestly believed that.

"I hope so; I hope so," Jervaise responded, and then they most unnecessarily shook hands.

I thought that it was time to a.s.sert myself above the clatter of their farewells.

"We might add, Miss Banks," I put in, "that we've been making a perfectly absurd fuss about nothing at all. But, no doubt, you're used to that."

She looked at me, then, for the first time since I had come into the house; and I saw the impulse to some tart response flicker in her face and die away unexpressed. We stood and stared at one another for a long half-second or so; and when she looked away I fancied that there was something like fear in her evasion. It seemed to me that I saw the true spirit of her in the way her glance refused me as some one with whom she did not care to sport. Her voice, too, dropped, so that I could not catch the murmur of her reply.

We had, indeed, recognised each other in that brief meeting of our eyes.

Some kind of challenge had pa.s.sed between us. I had dared her to drop that disguise of trickery and show herself as she was; and her response had been an admission that she acknowledged not me, but my recognition of her.

How far the fact that I had truly appraised her real worth might influence her, in time, to think gently of me, I could not guess; but I hoped, even a little vaingloriously, that she would respond to our mutual appreciation of truth. I had shown her, I believed, how greatly I admired the spirit she had been at such pains to conceal during that talk in the honest sitting-room of the Home Farm. And I felt that her failure to resent the impertinence of my "No doubt, you're used to that," had been due to an understanding of something she and I had in common against the whole solid, stolid, aristocratic family of Jervaise.

Moreover, she gave me what I counted as two more causes for hopefulness before we left the house. The first was her repet.i.tion, given, now, with a more vibrating sincerity, of the belief that we should find Brenda safely at home when we got back to the Hall.

"I feel sure you will, Mr. Jervaise," she said, and the slight pucker of anxiety between her eyebrows was an earnest that even if her belief was a little tremulous, her hope, at least, was unquestionably genuine.

The second sign was the acceptance of a hackneyed commonplace; the proffer of a friendly message through the medium of a cliche which, however false in its general application, offered a short cut to the interpretation of feeling. Racquet who had maintained a well-bred silence from the first moment of his mistress's reproof, had honoured me with his approval while we sat in the farm-house sitting-room, and sealed the agreement by a friendly thrust of his nose as we said "Goodnight."

Anne did not look at me as she spoke, but her soft comment, "You are fond of dogs," seemed to me a full acknowledgment of our recognition of each other's quality.

I must admit, however, that at two o'clock in the morning one's sense of values is not altogether normal.

III

FRANK JERVAISE

I should have preferred to maintain a thoughtful, experiencing silence throughout our walk home. I had plenty of material for reflection. I wanted, now, to look at all this disappearing Brenda business from a new angle. I had a sense of the weaving of plots, and of the texture of them; such a sense as I imagine a blind man may get through sensitive finger-tips. Two new characters had come into my play, and I knew them both for princ.i.p.als. That opening act without Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern, half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.

And the circ.u.mstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us, widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original, eternal effect of all planetary s.p.a.ce; that it might be found under the leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune.

Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.

But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures of a process, but little G.o.ds in a world-pantheon.

I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised tone of his voice--he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary pitch--that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were impossible, to attribute to another cause.

"It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that visit of ours, Melhuish," he began.

"At least two," I agreed.

"Which are?" he asked.

"I'd prefer to hear yours first," I said, having no intention of displaying my own.

He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my probably worthless deductions.

"Well, in the first place," he said, "did it strike you as a curious fact that Miss Banks, and she alone, was apparently disturbed by that dog's infernal barking?"

"It hadn't struck me," I admitted; and just because I had not remarked that anomaly for myself, I was instantly prepared to treat it as unworthy of notice. "I suppose her father and mother and the servants, and so on, heard her let us in," I said.

Jervaise jeered at that. "Oh! my good man," he said.

"Well, why not?" I returned peevishly.

"I put it to you," he said, "whether in those circ.u.mstances the family's refusal to make an appearance admits of any ordinary explanation?"

I could see, now, that it did not; but having committed myself to a point of view, I determined to uphold it. "Why _should_ they come down?" I asked.

"Common curiosity would be a sufficient inducement, I should imagine,"

Jervaise replied with a snort of contempt, "to say nothing of a reasonable anxiety to know why any one should call at two o'clock in the morning. It isn't usual, you know--outside the theatrical world, perhaps."

I chose to ignore the sneer conveyed by his last sentence.

"They may be very heavy sleepers," I tried, fully aware of the inanity of my suggestion.

Jervaise laughed unpleasantly, a nasty hoot of derision. "Don't be a d.a.m.ned fool," he said. "The human being isn't born who could sleep through that hullabaloo."

I relinquished that argument as hopeless, and having no other at the moment, essayed a weak reprisal. "Well, what's your explanation?" I asked in the tone of one ready to discount any possible explanation he might have to make.