The Jervaise Comedy Part 17

"You were seen coming into the house after eight o'clock in the morning,"

he continued, paused again and then, as I kept silence, added, "In evening dress."

"Is that all?" I asked.

It was not. He had kept the decisive accusation until the end.

"Your bed had not been slept in," he concluded wearily, as if to say, "My good idiot, why persist in this d.a.m.ning a.s.sumption of innocence?"

"You've been examining the servants, I see," I remarked.

He was not to be drawn by such an ingenuous sneer as that. "The housekeeper told the mater when she came back from church," he said. "I suppose the thing came up in some arrangement of household affairs."

"Very likely," I agreed; "but why did your mother tell _you_?"

I saw at once that he meant to evade that question if possible. For some reason Miss Tattersall was to be kept out of the case. Possibly she had made terms to that effect. More probably, I thought, Jervaise was a trifle ashamed of the source of his evidence against me.

"Oh! look here, Melhuish," he said, with a return to his bullying manner.

"You're only making things look worse for yourself by all this beating about the bush. It's evident that you didn't sleep in the house, and I want to know why."

"Is sleeping in the house a condition of your hospitality?" I asked.

"Not in ordinary circ.u.mstances," he said. "But the circ.u.mstances are not ordinary. I suppose you haven't forgotten that something happened last night which very seriously affects us?"

"I haven't, but I don't see what the deuce it's got to do with me," I returned.

"Nor I; unless it's one of your idiotic, romantic tricks," he retorted; "but I have very good evidence, all the same, that you were concerned in it."

"Oh! is that what you're accusing me of?" I said.

"It is," Jervaise replied.

"Then I can put your mind at rest," I said. "I am ready to swear by any oath you like that I had nothing whatever to do with your sister's elopement, and that I know..." I was going to add "nothing more about it than you do yourself," but remembering my talk with Banks, I decided that that was not perfectly true, and with the layman's respect for the sanct.i.ty of an oath I concluded, "and that I know very little more about it than _you_ do."

"It's that little bit more that is so important," Jervaise commented sardonically.

After all, a legal training does count for something. I was not his match in this kind of give and take, and I decided to throw down my hand. I was not incriminating Banks. I knew nothing about his movements of the night, and in that morning interview with old Jervaise the most important admission of all must almost certainly have been made.

"Well, you have a right to know that," I began, "although I don't think you and your family had any right whatever to be so d.a.m.nably rude to me at lunch, on the mere spiteful accusations of Miss Tattersall."

"Miss Tattersall?" Jervaise put in, with a very decent imitation of surprise.

"Oh! I'm going to be perfectly honest with you," I returned. "Can't you drop that burlesque of the legal manner and be equally honest with me?"

"Simply dunno what you're driving at," he said.

"Very well, then, answer the question you shirked just now," I retorted.

"Why did your mother rush to tell you that I hadn't slept in the house last night?"

"The mater's in an awful state of nerves," he said.

Incidentally I had to admit to myself that I had not made sufficient allowance for that indubitable fact, but I chose to disregard it at the moment. I wanted to be sure of the treachery of Grace Tattersall.

"You asked me not to beat about the bush, a minute ago," I said, "and now you're trying to dodge all my questions with the most futile and palpable evasions."

"For instance?" he replied calmly, with a cunning that nearly trapped me.

For when I tried to recall, as I thought I could, a specific and convincing instance of his evasion, I realised that to cite a case would only draw us into an irrelevant bickering over side issues.

"Your last three or four answers were all obvious equivocations," I said, and raising my voice I went straight on over his attempt to expostulate by adding, "And if Mrs. Jervaise's state of nerves is an excuse for her confiding in _you_, it isn't, in my opinion, any excuse for her confiding in Miss Tattersall and Nora Bailey and Hughes, and setting them on to--ostracise me."

"Oh! come," Jervaise protested, a little taken aback. I had put him in a quandary, now. He had to choose between an imputation on his mother's good taste, savoir faire, breeding--and an admission of the rather shameful source of the present accusation against me.

"As a matter of fact, it's absolutely clear to me that Grace Tattersall is at the bottom of all this," I continued, to get this point settled. "I'm perfectly sure your mother would not have treated me as she did unless her mind had been perverted in some way."

"But why should she--Miss Tattersall--I mean she seemed rather keen on you..."

"I can explain that," I interrupted him. "She wanted to gossip with me about the whole affair this morning, and she made admissions that I suppose she was subsequently ashamed of. And after that she discovered by an accident that I had met Banks, and jumped to the totally false conclusion that I had been drawing her out for my own disreputable purposes."

"Where did you meet Banks?" was Jervaise's only comment on this explanation.

"I'm going to tell you that," I said. "I told you that I meant to be perfectly honest with you, but I want to know first if I'm not right about Miss Tattersall."

"She has been a bit spiteful about you," he admitted.

"So that's settled," I replied by way of finally confirming his admission.

"Now, I'll tell you exactly what happened last night."

I made a fairly long story of it; so long that we reached the lodge at the Park gates before I had finished, and turned back again up the avenue. I was careful to be scrupulously truthful, but I gave him no record of any conversation that I thought might, however indirectly, inculpate Banks.

Jervaise did not once interrupt me, but I saw that he was listening with all his attention, studying my statement as he might have studied a complicated brief. And when I had done, he thrust out his ugly underlip with an effect of sneering incredulity that I found almost unendurably irritating.

"Do you mean to say that you don't believe me?" I asked pa.s.sionately.

We were just opposite the side road that I had taken the night before, the road that led through the thickest part of the spinney before it came out into the open within a quarter of a mile of Jervaise Clump. And as if both our minds had been unconsciously occupied with the same thought, the need for a still greater privacy, we turned out of the avenue with an air of deliberate intention and a marked increase of pace. It seemed as though this secluded alley had, from the outset, been the secret destination of our walk.

He did not reply to my challenging question for perhaps a couple of minutes. We were walking quite quickly, now. Until the heat of our rising anger could find some other expression, we had to seek relief in physical action. I had no doubt that Jervaise in his own more restrained way was as angry as I was myself. His sardonic sneer had intensified until it took the shape of a fierce, brooding anger.

We were out of sight of the junction of the side road with the avenue, when he stopped suddenly and faced me. He had manifestly gathered himself together for a great effort that was, as it were, focussed in the malignant, dominating scowl of his forbidding face. The restraint of his language added to the combined effect--consciously studied, no doubt--of coa.r.s.e and brutal authority.

"And why did you spy on me this morning?" he asked. "Why did you follow me up to the Home Farm, watch me while I was talking to Miss Banks, and then slink away again?"

I have two failings that would certainly have disqualified me if I had ever attempted to adopt the legal profession. The first is a tendency to blush violently on occasion. The second is to see and to sympathise with my opponent's point of view. Both these failings betrayed me now. The blush seemed to proclaim my guilt; my sudden understanding of Jervaise's temper confirmed it.

For, indeed, I understood precisely at that moment how enraged he must be against me. He, like Miss Tattersall, had been playing an underhand game, though his was different in kind. He had been seduced (my bitterness against Anne found satisfaction in laying the blame at her door!) into betraying the interests of his own family. _I_ did not, in a sense, blame him for that; I had, the night before, been more than a little inclined to honour him for it; but I saw how, from the purely Jervaise point of view, his love-making would appear as something little short of criminal. And to be caught in the act, for I had caught him, however unwillingly, must have been horribly humiliating for him. Little wonder that coming home, hot and ashamed from his rendezvous, and being confronted with all the tale of my duplicity, he had flamed into a fury of resentment against me. I understood that beyond any question. Only one point still puzzled me. How had he been able until this moment to restrain his fury? I could but suppose that there was something cold-blooded, calculating, almost reptilian in his character; that he had planned cautiously and far-sightedly what he regarded as the best means for bringing about my ultimate disgrace.

And now my blush and my powers of sympathy had betrayed me. I felt like a convicted criminal as I said feebly, "Oh! that was an accident, absolutely an accident, I a.s.sure you. I had no sort of idea where you were when I went up to the Home Farm...."

"After keeping an eye on the front of the house all the morning," he put in viciously.

A sense of awful frustration overcame me. Looking back on the past fifteen hours, I saw all my actions ranged in a long incriminating series. Each one separately might be explained, but regarded as a consequent series, those entirely inconsequent doings of mine could bear but one explanation: I was for some purpose of my own, whether idiotically romantic or not, on the side of Banks and Brenda. I had never lifted a finger to help them; I was not in their confidence; and since the early morning I had withdrawn a measure of my sympathy from them. But I could not prove any of these things. I could only affirm them, and this domineering bully, who stood glowering at me, wanted proof or nothing. He was too well accustomed to the methods of criminals to accept explanations.