The Jervaise Comedy Part 25

"I'll come with you--as far as the car," Brenda said, and the pair of them went out together.

Jervaise stretched himself with a self-conscious air. "It will take him the best part of an hour getting the car into the garage and all that," he remarked, looking at me.

I could see, of course, that he wanted me to go; his hint had been, indeed, almost indecently pointed; and I had no wish to intrude myself upon them, if Anne's desire coincided with his. I got to my feet and stood like an awkward dummy trying to frame some excuse for leaving the room. I could think of nothing that was not absurdly obvious. I was on the point of trying to save the last remnant of my dignity by walking out, when Anne relieved my embarra.s.sment. I knew that she had been watching me, but I was afraid to look at her. I cannot say why, exactly, but I felt that if I looked at her just then I should give myself away before Jervaise.

"I must go and see about Mr. Melhuish's room," she said.

She was half-way to the door when Jervaise stopped her.

"I should rather like to speak to you for a minute first," he remarked, and scowled again at me.

"There's nothing more to be said until Arthur has seen Mr. Jervaise," Anne replied, as though any subject other than the affair Brenda, could not conceivably be of interest to her.

"It wasn't about them," Jervaise said awkwardly.

"What was it, then?" Anne asked. I dared to look at her, now, and her face was perfectly serious as she added, "Was it about the milk, or eggs, or anything?"

Without doubt there was a delicious strain of minx in her!

Jervaise lost his temper. I believe that if I had offered to fight him, then, he would have welcomed the opportunity.

"Oh! you know what I want to say," he snorted.

"Then why not say it?" Anne replied.

He turned savagely upon me. "Haven't you got the common sense..." he began, but Anne cut him short.

"Oh! we don't suspect _our_ guests of spying," she said.

I was nearly sorry for Jervaise at that moment. He could not have looked any more vindictive than he looked already, but he positively trembled with anger. He could not endure to be thwarted. Nevertheless, he displayed a certain measure of self-control.

"Very well," he said as calmly as he could. "If you're going to take that tone..."

"Yes?" Anne prompted him. She showed no sign of being in any way disconcerted.

"It will hardly help your brother," he concluded.

"I made a mistake in trying to help him this morning," she said. "I shan't make the same mistake twice in one day."

He evidently knew what she meant, although I did not. His heavy eyebrows twitched, and then, with a half-contemptuous shrug of his shoulders he strode out of the room with an air of leaving us to the doom we so justly deserved.

"The worst of it is that the second mistake doesn't cancel the first,"

Anne remarked thoughtfully.

XI

THE STORY

She still stood by the great oak table, her hands resting lightly on its dark polished surface. I could see the vague reflection of her fingers reaching up through the deep solidity of the oak to join hands with her.

She produced, I thought, an impressive effect of fragility and power in her contrast with that ma.s.sive table. The material of her flesh was so delicate compared to the inert, formidable ma.s.s before her. She could not have lifted or moved it by her own effort. And yet it seemed that she had absolute command over that ponderous obstacle, that in some way the mobility of her spirit must give her control of it, that she might, if she wished, plunge those relatively fragile hands of hers deep into the lake of that dark and adamant surface.

She had not looked at me since Jervaise left the room, and when she spoke again she gazed with a kind of concentrated abstraction out of the window at the quiet glory of the calm August evening. Nevertheless her speech showed that all her attention was being given to the human interests that had just been absorbing us.

"Are you really a friend of ours?" she asked, "or did you just come here faute de mieux?" The little French phrase came like an unexpected jewel, as if she had relapsed unconsciously into a more familiar language.

I was strangely confused by the fact of our being alone together. I had an entirely unwarranted feeling that we were about to make up a quarrel. And I wanted to do my utmost to produce the best possible impression upon her.

"I hope I may call myself your brother's friend," I began lamely. "All my sympathies are with him."

"You don't know the Jervaises particularly well?" she inquired. For one moment she glanced down at her poised hands, but almost instantly returned to her rather absent-minded gazing through the open window.

"Except for Frank and his brother, I never met one of them until last night," I explained. "I was at school and Cambridge with Frank."

"But they are your sort, your cla.s.s," she said. "Don't you agree with them that it's a dreadful thing for Arthur, their chauffeur--and he was in the stables once, years ago--to try to run away with their daughter?"

"All my sympathies are with Arthur," I repeated.

"Not because the Jervaises were so rude to you?" she asked.

"I liked him before that; when we met on the hill, very early this morning," I said. "But, perhaps, he didn't tell you."

"Yes, he told me," she said. "And was that the beginning of all the trouble between you and the Jervaises?"

"In a way, it was," I agreed. "But it's an involved story and very silly.

I admit that they had grounds for suspecting that I had interfered."

"Mrs. Jervaise and Olive are always suspecting people," she volunteered.

"I've often wondered why?"

"Like that, by nature," I suggested.

"Perhaps," she said carelessly as if she did not care to pursue that speculation. "You know that my mother was governess to Olive and Frank before she married my father?" she continued, still with that same air of discussing some remote, detached topic.

"I heard that she had been a governess. I didn't know that she had ever been with the Jervaises," I said.

"She was there for over two years," pursued Anne. "She is French, you know, though you'd probably never guess it, now, except for an occasional word here and there. She left years before Brenda was born. Brenda is so much younger than the others. There's eight years between her and Robert, the next one. Olive's the eldest, of course, and then Frank."

I made some conventional acknowledgment for this information. I was wondering if she were merely talking to save the embarra.s.sment of silence.

We had drifted, apparently, a long way from any matter of personal interest and I was hesitating as to whether I should not attempt a new opening, when she began again with the least little frown of determination.

"I'm talking about them, because if you are to be Arthur's friend you ought to know more or less how things are between us and the Jervaises, and I might just as well say right out at once that we don't like them; we've never liked them. Mother, more particularly. She has got something against them that she has never told us, but it isn't that." Her frown was more p.r.o.nounced as she went on, "They aren't nice people, any of them, except Brenda, and she's so absolutely different from the rest of them, and doesn't like them either--in a way."

"You don't even except Frank?" I mumbled. I could not resist the opportunity she had offered to ask that too pointed question; but I looked down at the floor as I spoke; I wanted her to understand that I was not cross-examining her.