The Jervaise Comedy Part 16

My first impression of the curious change in demeanour shown towards me by the Jervaises and their friends at lunch was that it had no existence outside my own recently embittered mind. I thought that I was avoiding them, not that they were avoiding me. It was not until I condescended to come down from my pinnacle of conscious superiority that I realised my own disgrace.

My effort at conversation with Mrs. Jervaise was a mere act of politeness.

"I'm afraid you were rather late this morning," I said. It was not, perhaps, a tactful remark, but I could think of nothing else. All the church-party were stiff with the slightly peevish righteousness of those who have fulfilled a duty contrary to their real inclinations.

Mrs. Jervaise lifted her nose savagely. No doubt her head went with it, but only the nose was important.

"Very late, Mr. Melhuish," she said, stared at me as if debating whether she would not instantly give me the coup de grace, and then dipped again to the threat of the imaginary doorway.

"Mr. Sturton give you a good sermon?" I continued, still suffering from the delusion that I was graciously overlooking their obvious inferiority to myself.

"He is a very able man; very able," Mrs. Jervaise said, this time without looking up.

"You are lucky to have such a good man as vicar," I said. "Sometimes there is--well, a lack of sympathy between the Vicarage and the Hall. I remember--the case isn't quite parallel, of course, but the moral is much the same--I remember a curate my father had once..."

Now, my story of that curate is thoroughly sound. It is full of incident and humour and not at all derogatory to the prestige of the church. I have been asked for it, more than once, by hostesses. And though I am rather sick of it myself, I still fall back on it in cases of such urgency as I judged the present one to be. I thought that I had been lucky to get so easy an opening to produce the anecdote with relevance, and I counted on it for a good five minutes relief from the constraint of making polite conversation.

Mrs. Jervaise's response began to open my eyes to the state of the new relations that now existed between myself and the rest of the party. She did not even allow me to begin. She ignored my opening entirely, and looking down the table towards her husband said, "Mr. Sturton preached from the tenth of Hebrews, 'Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering.' Quite a coincidence, wasn't it?"

"Indeed? Yes, quite a coincidence," Mr. Jervaise replied without enthusiasm. He did not look as cheerful as I had antic.i.p.ated, but he wore the air of a man who has had at least a temporary reprieve.

"Olive and I were quite struck by it; weren't we, dear?" Mrs. Jervaise continued, dragging in her daughter's evidence.

"Yes, it was very odd," Olive agreed tepidly.

I never knew what the coincidence was, but I judge from Mrs. Jervaise's insistence that it was something perfectly futile.

I glanced across at Hughes, and guessed that he was not less bored than I was myself, but when I caught his eye he looked hastily away.

I was beginning to wonder what I had done, but I valiantly tried again.

"Don't you think it possible that many cases of apparent coincidences are probably due to telepathy?" I said genially, addressing the dangerous-looking profile of my hostess.

She gave an impatient movement of her head that reminded me of a parrot viciously digging out the kernel of a nut.

"I really can't say," she said, pointedly turned to Gordon Hughes, who was on her other side, and asked him if he had played much tennis lately.

I looked round the table for help, but none of the party would meet my eyes, avoiding my glance with a determination that could not be mistaken.

I might have suffered from some loathsome deformity. Frank, alone, appeared unaware of my innocent appeal for an explanation. He was bending gloomily over his plate, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts--though how any man could be gloomy after his recent experience it was beyond me to imagine.

My astonishment flamed into a feeling of acute annoyance. If any one had spoken to me at that moment, I should have been unforgivably rude. But no one had the least intention of speaking to me, and I had just sense enough to restrain myself from demanding an apology from the company at large.

That was my natural inclination. I had been insulted; outraged. I was the Jervaises' guest, and whatever they imagined that I had done, they owed it to me and to themselves to treat me with a reasonable courtesy.

It was a detestable situation, and I was completely floored by it for the moment. We were not half-way through lunch, and I felt that I could not endure to sit there for another twenty minutes, avoided, proscribed, held fast in a pillory, a b.u.t.t for the sneers of any fool at the table. On the other hand, if I got up and marched out of the room, I should be acknowledging my defeat--and my guilt of whatever crime I was supposed to have committed. If I ever wished to justify my perfect innocence, I should forfeit my chances, at once, by accepting the snub I had received. To do that would be to acknowledge my sense of misbehaviour.

I leaned a little forward and glanced at Miss Tattersall who was sitting just beyond Nora Bailey on my side of the table. And I saw that my late confidante, the user of keyholes, was faintly smiling to herself with an unmistakable air of malicious satisfaction.

I wished, then, that I had not looked. I was no longer quite so conscious of outraged innocence. It is true that I was guiltless of any real offence, but I saw that the charge of complicity with the chauffeur--a charge that had certainly not lost in substance or in its suggestion of perfidy by Miss Tattersall's rendering--was one that I could not wholly refute. I was in the position of a man charged with murder on good circ.u.mstantial evidence; and my first furious indignation began to give way to a detestable feeling of embarra.s.sment, momentarily increased by the necessity to sit in silence while the inane chatter of the luncheon table swerved past me. If I had had one friend with whom I could have talked, I might have been able to recover myself, but I defy any one in my situation to maintain an effective part with no active means of expression.

I glanced a trifle desperately at Olive Jervaise. I judged her to be rather a colourless creature who would not have the spirit openly to snub me. She was nearly opposite to me, between her brother and Hughes, and well placed for an open attack if I could once engage her attention. But when I came to consider an opening, every reasonably appropriate topic seemed to have some dangerous relation to the _affaire Brenda_. Any reference to the dance, to the Sturtons, the place, the weather, suddenly a.s.sumed in my mind the appearance of a subtle approach to the subject I most wished to avoid. If I was, indeed, regarded in that house as a spy in league with the enemy, the most innocent remark might be construed into an attempt to obtain evidence.

I fancy, too, that I was subject to an influence other than the heightened self-consciousness due to my awkward situation. I had only just begun to realise that the absence of Brenda must be a horribly insistent fact to her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the nervous respectability of this dull and fearful household like the gleam of unexpected water in the blankness of a desert. Her absence must have seemed to them a positive thing. Probably every one at the table was thinking of her at that moment.

And the result of this combined thought was producing a hallucination of Brenda in my mind, strong enough to hypnotise me. In any case, her apparition stood at the end of every avenue of conversation I could devise. I could think of no opening that did not lead straight up to the subject of her absence.

And even while I was still pondering my problem (I had come to such fantastic absurdities as contemplating an essay on the Chinese gamut, rejecting it on the grounds that Brenda was the only musician in the family), that awful lunch was abruptly closed by a unanimous refusal of the last course. Perhaps the others were as eager as I was to put an end to that ordeal; all of them, that is, with the exception of the spiteful snake who was responsible for my humiliation.

The family managed to get out of the room this time without their usual procrastinating civilities. I went ahead of Frank and Hughes. I intended to spend a lonely afternoon in thinking out some plan for exposing the treachery of Grace Tattersall, but as I was crossing the Hall, Frank Jervaise came up behind me.

"Look here, Melhuish," he said.

I looked. I did more than that; I confronted him. There is just a suspicion of red in my hair, and on occasion the influence of it is shown in my temper. It must have shown then, for Jervaise was visibly uncomfortable.

"It's no d.a.m.ned good being so ratty, Melhuish," he said. "Jolly well your own fault, anyway."

"What's my own fault?" I demanded.

"We can't talk here," he said uneasily. "Let's go down the avenue."

I had an impression that he was going to offer to fight me. I certainly hoped that he would.

"Very well," I agreed.

But when he spoke again, I realised that it was as a lawyer and not as a fighter. He had, indeed, been preparing a cautious impeachment of me. We had reached the entrance to the avenue before he began, and the cloister of its cool shade seemed a sufficiently appropriate setting for his forensic diplomacy. Outside, in the glare of the brilliant August sun, I should have flared out at him. In the solemnity of that Gothic aisle, I found influences which helped me to maintain a relative composure.

He posed his first question with an a.s.sumed indifference.

"Why didn't you sleep in the house last night?" he asked.

I took time to consider my answer; I was taken aback by his knowledge of the fact he had disclosed. My first impulse was to retort "How do you know that I didn't sleep in the house?" but I was determined to be very cautious at the outset of this cross-examination. Obviously he meant it to take the form of a cross-examination. I was equally determined that I would presently reverse the parts of counsel and witness--or was I the prisoner giving evidence on my own behalf?

We must have gone another fifteen or twenty deliberate paces before I replied,--

"I'll answer that question in a minute. I should like to know first what grounds you have for stating that I didn't sleep in the house?"

He shrugged his shoulders. "You admit that you didn't?" he retorted.

"If you're going to conduct your conversation on the principles of the court room," I said, "the only thing I can do is to adopt the same method."

He ignored that. "You admit that you didn't sleep in the house?" he repeated.

"I'll admit nothing until I know what the devil you're driving at," I replied.

He did not look at me. He was saving himself until he reached the brow-beating stage. But I was watching him--we were walking a yard or two apart--and I noted his expression of simulated indifference and forbearance, as he condescendingly admitted my claim to demand evidence for his preliminary accusation.

"You were very late coming down," he began and paused, probably to tempt me into some ridicule of such a worthless piece of testimony.

"Go on," I said.