The Jervaise Comedy Part 21

Even the picture of a herculean Banks holding that car over the Jervaises failed to divert me, just then. I was too much occupied with my new friend's simple absence of tact. I would sooner have faced a return to the Hall than an unsupported appearance at the Farm.

"Oh! I'm not going up there alone," I said.

Banks was honestly surprised. "Why not?" he asked. "You met Anne last night, didn't you? That'll be all right. You tell her I told you to come up. _She'll_ understand."

I shook my head. "It won't take you long to run up to the Hall and put the car in," I said. "I'll cut across the Park and meet you in that wood just below your house--the way that Jervaise and I went last night."

He looked distressed. He could not understand my unwillingness to go alone, but his sense of what was due to me would not permit him to let me wait for him in the wood.

"But, I can't see..." he began, and then apparently realising that he was failing either in respect or in hospitality, he continued, "Oh! well, I'll just run up with you at once; it won't take us ten minutes, and half an hour one way or the other won't make any difference."

I accepted his sacrifice without further protestation; and after he had carefully replaced the tarpaulin over the tonneau of the car, we set off briskly towards the Farm. About a third of a mile farther on we left the highroad for a side road, and another three or four minutes' walk up the hill brought us to the main entrance to the Farm. I saw, now, that I had come with Jervaise to a side door last night. This front approach was more imposing--up a drive through an avenue of limes. The house seen from this aspect looked very sweet and charming. It was obviously of a date not later than the sixteenth century, and I guessed that the rough-cast probably concealed a half-timber work structure. In front of it was a good strip of carefully kept lawn and flower garden. The whole place had an air of dignity and beauty that I had not expected, and I think Banks must have noticed my surprise, for he said,--

"Not bad, is it? Used to be a kind of dower house once upon a time, they say."

"Absolutely charming," I replied. "Now, this is the sort of house I should like to live in."

"I dare say it'll be to let before long," Banks said with a touch of grim humour.

"Not to me, though," I said.

He laughed. "Perhaps not," he agreed.

We had paused at the end of the little avenue for me to take in the effect of the house, and as we still stood there, the sound of a man's voice came to us through the open window of one of the rooms on the ground floor.

"Your father's home sooner than you expected," I remarked.

"That's not the old man," Banks said in a tone that instantly diverted my gaze from the beauties of the Home Farm.

"Who is it, then?" I asked.

"Listen!" he said. He was suddenly keen, alert and suspicious. I saw him no longer as the gentleman's servant, the product of the Jervaise estate, but as the man who had knocked about the world, who often preferred to sleep in the open.

"There are two of them there," he said; "Frank Jervaise and that young fellow Turnbull, if I'm not mistaken." And even as he spoke he began hurriedly to cross the little lawn with a look of cold anger and determination that I was glad was not directed against myself.

As I followed him, it came into my mind to wonder whether Frank Jervaise had taken me with him as a protection the night before? Had he been afraid of meeting Banks? I had hitherto failed to find any convincing reason for Jervaise's queer mark of confidence in me.

X

THE HOME FARM

I must own that I was distinctly uncomfortable as I followed Banks into the same room in which I had sat on my previous visit to the Home Farm.

The influence of tradition and habit would not let me alone. I cared nothing for the Jervaises' opinion, but I resented the unfairness of it and had all the innocent man's longing to prove his innocence--a feat that was now become for ever impossible. By accepting Banks's invitation, I had confirmed the worst suspicions the Jervaises could possibly have harboured against me.

Indeed, it seems probable that I was now revealing more shameful depths of duplicity than their most depraved imaginings had been able to picture. As I entered the room, I looked first at Frank, and his dominant emotion, just then, appeared to be surprise. For a moment I had a sense of reprieve. I guessed that he had not been truly convinced of the truth of his own accusations against me. But any relief I may have felt was dissipated at once. I saw Jervaise's look of surprise give place to a kind of perplexed anger, an expression that I could only read as conveying his amazement that any gentleman (I am sure his thought was playing about that word) could be such a blackguard as I was now proving myself to be.

Ronnie Turnbull, also, evidently shared that opinion. The boyish and rather theatrical movement with which he turned his back upon me, showed at once that he had been coached in the suspicions that were now so finally clinched.

"This fellow simply isn't worth speaking to," was the inarticulate message of his gesture.

And certainly I gave neither of them any occasion to speak to me. Banks's opening plunged us into one of those chaotic dialogues which are only made more confused by any additional contribution.

"What have you come up here for?" Banks asked, displaying his immediate determination to treat the invaders without respect of cla.s.s on this common ground of his father's home.

"That's our affair," Frank snapped. He looked nervously vicious, I thought, like a timid-minded dog turned desperate.

"What the devil do you mean?" Turnbull asked at the same moment, and Brenda got up from her chair and tried to address some explanation to her lover through the ominous preparatory snarlings of the melee.

I heard her say, "Arthur! They've been trying to..." but lost the rest in the general shindy.

Turnbull, by virtue of his lung-power, was the most audible of the four.

"You've jolly well got to understand, my good man," he was saying, "that the sooner you get out of this the better"; and went on with more foolishness about Banks having stolen the motor--all painfully tactless stuff, if he still had the least intention of influencing Brenda, but he was young and arrogant and not at all clever.

Banks and Jervaise were sparring at each other all the time that Turnbull fulminated, and Brenda's soprano came in like a flageolet obbligato--a word or two here and there ringing out with a grateful clearness above the masculine accompaniment.

I dared, in the confusion, to glance at Anne, and she looked up at me at the same moment. She was slightly withdrawn from the tumult that drew together about the counter of the st.u.r.dy oak table in the centre of the room. She was sitting in the towering old settle by the fireplace, leaning a little forward as if she awaited her opportunity to spring in and determine the tumult when something of this grotesque male violence had been exhausted.

She looked at me, I thought, with just a touch of supplication, a look that I misinterpreted as a request to use my influence in stopping this din of angry voices that was so obviously serving no useful purpose. But I felt no inclination to respond to that appeal of hers. I had an idea that she might be going to announce her engagement to Jervaise, an announcement that would critically affect the whole situation; and I had no wish to help her in solving the immediate problem by those means.

Perhaps she read in my face something of the sullen resentment I was feeling, for she leaned back quickly into the corner of the settle, with a movement that seemed to indicate a temporary resignation to the inevitable. I saw her as taking cover from this foolish masculine din about the table; but I had no doubt that she was still awaiting her opportunity.

It was Jervaise who brought back the unintelligible disputants to reasonable speech. He stopped speaking, stepped back on to the hearth-rug, and then addressed the loudly vociferous Turnbull.

"Ronnie!" Jervaise said in a tone that arrested attention, and having got his man's ear, added, "Half a minute!"

"But look here, you know," Turnbull protested, still on the same note of aggressive violence. "What I mean to say is that this feller seems to confoundedly well imagine..."

"Do for G.o.d's sake _shut up!_" Jervaise returned with a scowl.

"I suppose you think that I haven't any right..." Turnbull began in a rather lower voice; and Brenda at last finding a chance to make herself heard, finished him by saying quickly,--

"Certainly you haven't; no right whatever to come here--and _brawl_..."

She spoke breathlessly, as though she were searching in the brief interlude of an exhausting struggle for some insult that would fatally wound and offend him. She tried to show him in a sentence that he was nothing more to her than a blundering, inessential fool, interfering in important business that was no concern of his. And although the hurry of her mind did not permit her to find the deadly phrase she desired, the sharpness of her anxiety to wound him was clear enough.

"Oh! of course, if you think that..." he said, paused as if seeking for some threat of retaliation, and then flung himself, the picture of dudgeon, into a chair by the wall. He turned his back towards Brenda and glared steadfastly at his rival. I received the impression that the poor deluded boy was trying to revenge himself on Brenda. At the back of his mind he seemed still to regard her escapade as a foolish piece of bravado, undertaken chiefly to torture himself. His att.i.tude was meant to convey that the joke had gone far enough, and that he would not stand much more of it.

For a time at least he was, fortunately, out of the piece. Perhaps he thought the influence of his att.i.tude must presently take effect; that Brenda, whom he so habitually adored with his eyes, would be intimidated by his threat of being finally offended?

The three other protagonists took no more notice of the sulky Ronnie, but they could not at once recover any approach to sequence.

"I want to know why you've come up here," Banks persisted.

"That's not the point," Jervaise began in a tone that I thought was meant to be conciliatory.