The Jervaise Comedy Part 20

"Oh! that'd be all right," he said with conviction.

"There's nothing I should like better than to stay with you," I continued, "if I thought that your--people would care to have me."

"Well, as a matter of fact," he said, "my father and mother haven't come home yet. They drove over to some relations of ours about twelve miles away, yesterday afternoon, and they won't be back till about seven, probably. Last chance my father had before harvest, and my mother likes to get away now and again when she can manage it."

"They don't know yet, then, about you and...?" I said, momentarily diverted by the new aspect this news put on the doings of the night.

"Not yet. That'll be all right, though," Banks replied, and added as an afterthought, "The old man may be a bit upset. I want to persuade 'em all to come out to Canada, you see. There's a chance there. Mother would come like a shot, but I'm afraid the old man'll be a bit difficult."

"But, then, look here, Banks," I said. "You won't want a stranger up there to-night of all nights--interfering with your--er--family council."

Banks scratched his head with a professional air. "I dunno," he said. "It might help." He looked at me reflectively before adding, "You know She's up there--of course?"

"I didn't," I replied. "Was she there last night when Jervaise and I went up?"

He shook his head. "We meant to go off together and chance it," he said.

"May as well tell you now. There's no secret about it among ourselves. And then she came out to me on the hill without her things--just in a cloak.

Came to tell me it was all off. Said she wouldn't go, that way.... Well, we talked.... Best part of three hours. And the end of it was, she came back to the Farm."

"And it isn't all off?" I put in.

"The elopement is," he said.

"But not the proposed marriage?"

He leaned against the door of the car with the air of one who is preparing for a long story. "You're sure you want to hear all this?" he asked.

"Quite sure--that is, if you want to tell me," I said. "And if I'm coming home with you, it might be as well if I knew exactly how things stand."

"I felt somehow as if you and me were going to hit it off, last night," he remarked shyly.

"So did I," I rejoined, not less shy than he was.

Our friendship had been admitted and confirmed. No further word was needed. We understood each other. I felt warmed and comforted. It was good to be once more in the confidence of a fellowman. I have not the stuff in me that is needed to make a good spy.

"Well, the way things are at present," Banks hurried on to cover our lapse into an un-British sentimentality, "is like this. We'd meant, as I told you, to run away...."

"And then she was afraid?"

"No, it was rather the other way round. It was me that was afraid. You see, I thought I should take all the blame off the old man by going off with her--him being away and all, I didn't think as even the Jervaises could very well blame it on to him, overlooking what she pointed out, as once we'd gone they'd simply have to get rid of him, too, blame or no blame. They'd never stand having him and mother and Anne within a mile of the Hall, as sort of relations. _I_ ought to have seen that, but one forgets these things at the time."

I nodded sympathetically.

"So what it came to," he continued, "was that we might as well face it out as not. She's like that--likes to have things straight and honest. So do I, for the matter of that; but once you've been a gentleman's servant it gets in your blood or something. I was three years as groom and so on up at the Hall before I went to Canada. Should have been there now if it hadn't been for mother. I was only a lad of sixteen when I went into service, you see, and when I came back I got into the old habits again. I tell you it's difficult once you've been in service to get out o' the way of feeling that, well, old Jervaise, for instance, is a sort of little lord G.o.d almighty."

"I can understand that," I agreed, and added, "but I'm rather sorry for him, old Jervaise. He has been badly cut up, I think."

Banks looked at me sharply, with one of his keen, rather challenging turns of expression. "Sorry for him? You needn't be," he said. "I could tell you something--at least, I can't--but you can take it from me that you needn't waste your pity on him."

I realised that this was another reference to that "pull" I had heard of, which could not be used, and was not even to be spoken of to me after I had been admitted to Banks's confidence. I realised, further, that my guessing must have gone hopelessly astray. Here was the suggestion of something far more sinister than a playing on the old man's affection for his youngest child.

"Very well, I'll take it from you," I said. "On the other hand, you can take it from me that old Jervaise is very much upset."

Banks smiled grimly. "He's nervous at dangerous corners, like you said,"

he returned. "However, we needn't go into that--the point is as I began to tell you, that we've decided to face it out; and well, you saw me go up to the Hall this morning."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Nothing," Banks said. "I saw the old man and Mr. Frank, and they were both polite in a sort of way--no shouting nor anything, though, of course, Mr. Frank tried to browbeat me--but very firm that nothing had got to happen; no engagement or running away or anything. She was to come home and I was to go back to Canada--they'd pay my fare and so on..."

"And you?"

"Me? I just stuck to it we were going to get married, and Mr. Frank tried to threaten me till the old man stopped him, and then I came out."

"Did you wind up the stable-clock?" I put in.

"Yes. I forgot it last night," he said. "And I hate to see a thing not working properly."

Dear Banks! I did not know, then, how characteristic that was of him.

I returned to the subject in hand.

"What do you propose to do, then?" I asked. "To get their consent?"

"Just stick to it," he said.

"You think they'll give way?"

"They'll have to, in the end," he affirmed gravely, and continued in a colder voice that with him indicated a flash of temper. "It's just their respectability they care about, that's all. If they were fond of her, or she of them, it would be another thing altogether. But she's different to all the others, and they've never hit it off, she and them, among themselves. Why, they treat her quite differently to the others; to Miss Olive, for instance."

"Do they?" I said, in astonishment. I had been romantically picturing Brenda as the favourite child, and I could not, at once, see her in this new light.

"She never got on with 'em, somehow," Banks said. "Anyway, not when they were alone. Always rows of one sort or another. They couldn't understand her, of course, being so different to the others."

I was not satisfied with this explanation, but I did not press him for further details. His insistence on Brenda's difference from the rest of the Jervaises was evidently as far as he could get. The difference was obvious enough, certainly, but he would naturally exaggerate it. He was, as Miss Tattersall had said, "infatuated," but I put a more kindly construction on the description than she had done--perhaps "enthralled"

would have been a better word.

We had come to a pause. His confidences were exhausted for the present. He had told me all that it was necessary for me to know before I met Brenda and his sister; and I waited for him, now, to renew his invitation. I preferred that _he_ should re-open that subject; but he came to it rather obliquely.

"Well!" he remarked. "Might as well be getting on, I suppose?"

I nodded and got out of the car.

"Can you find your way up?" he proceeded.

"Alone?" I asked.

"It's only about half a mile," he explained, "You can't miss it. You see, I want to get the car back to the house. Don't do it any good standing about here. Besides, it wouldn't do for them to think as I was holding it over them."