The Jervaise Comedy Part 33

She was so clearly mistress of the situation that I might have been sorry for old Jervaise, if it had not been for the presence of that scowling fool by the door.

"I--I'm afraid I can describe your son's conduct as--as nothing less than gross misbehaviour," the old man stammered, "having consideration to his employment. But, perhaps, you have not been properly informed of the--of the offence."

"Is it an offence to love unwisely, Mr. Jervaise?" Mrs. Banks shot at him with a sudden ferocity.

He bl.u.s.tered feebly. "You _must_ see how impossible it is for your son to dream of marrying my daughter," he said. The blood had mounted to his face; and he looked as if he longed to get up and walk out. I wondered vaguely whether Frank had had that eventuality in mind when he blockaded the door with his own gloomy person.

"Tchah!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed Mrs. Banks with supreme contempt. "Do not talk that nonsense to me, but listen, now, to what I have to say. I will make everything quite plain to you. We have decided that Arthur and Brenda shall be married; but we condescend to that amiable weakness of yours which always demands that there shall be no scandal. It must surely be your motto at the Hall to avoid scandal--at any cost. So we are agreed to make a concession. The marriage we insist upon; but we are willing, all of us, to emigrate. We will take ourselves away, so that no one can point to the calamity of a marriage between a Banks and a Jervaise. It will, I think, break my husband's heart, but we see that there is nothing else to be done."

Old Jervaise's expression was certainly one of relief. He would, I am sure, have agreed to that compromise if he had been alone; he might even have agreed, as it was, if he had been given the chance. But Frank realised his father's weakness not less surely than we did, and although this was probably not the precise moment he would have chosen, he instantly took the case into his own hands.

"Oh! no, Mrs. Banks, certainly not," he said. "In the first place we did not come here to bargain with you, and in the second it must be perfectly plain to you that the scandal remains none the less because you have all gone away. We have come to fetch my sister home, that's the only thing that concerns you."

"And if she will not go with you?" asked Mrs. Banks.

"She must," Frank returned.

"And still, if she will not go?"

"Then we shall bring an action against you for abducting her."

Mrs. Banks smiled gently and pursed her mouth "To avoid a scandal?" she asked.

"If you persist in your absurd demands, there will be a scandal in any case," Frank replied curtly.

"I suppose my wishes don't count at all?" Brenda put in.

"Obviously they don't," Frank said.

"But, look here, father," Brenda continued, turning to old Jervaise; "_why_ do you want me to come back? We've never got on, I and the rest of you. _Why_ can't you let me go and be done with it?"

Jervaise fidgeted uneasily and looked up with a touch of appeal at his son. He had begun to mumble some opening when Frank interposed.

"Because we won't," he said, "and that's the end of it. There's nothing more to be said. I've told you precisely how the case stands. Either you come back with us without a fuss, or we shall begin an action at once."

I know now that Frank Jervaise was merely bluffing, and that they could have had no case, since Brenda was over eighteen, and was not being detained against her will. But none of us, probably not even old Jervaise himself, knew enough of the law to question the validity of the threat.

Little Mrs. Banks, however, was not depending on her legal knowledge to defeat her enemies. What woman would? She had been exchanging glances with her husband during the brief interval in which she had entrusted a minor plea to her junior, and I suppose she, now, considered herself free to produce her trump card. Banks had turned his back on the room--perhaps the first time he had ever so slighted his landlord and owner--and was leaning his forehead against the gla.s.s of the window. His att.i.tude was that of a man who had no further interest in such trivialities as this bickering and scheming. Perhaps he was dimly struggling to visualise what life in Canada might mean for him?

His wife's eyes were still shining with the zest of her present encounter.

She was too engrossed by that to consider just then the far heavier task she would presently have to undertake. She shrugged her shoulders and made a gesture with her hands that implied the throwing of all further responsibility upon her antagonists. "If you will have it," she seemed to say, "you must take the consequences." And old Jervaise, at all events, foresaw what was coming, and at that eleventh hour made one last effort to avert it.

"You know, Frank..." he began, but Mrs. Banks interrupted him.

"It is useless, Mr. Jervaise," she said. "Mr. Frank has been making love to my daughter and she has shown him plainly how she despises him. After that he will not listen to you. He seeks his revenge. It is the manner of your family to make love in that way."

"Impertinence will not make things any easier for you, Mrs. Banks," Frank interpolated.

"Impertinence? From me to you?" the little woman replied magnificently.

"Be quiet, boy, you do not know what you are saying. My husband and I have saved your poor little family from disgrace for twenty years, and I would say nothing now, if it were not that you have compelled me."

She threw one glance of contempt at old Jervaise, who was leaning forward with his hand over his mouth, as if he were in pain, and then continued,--

"But it is as well that you should know the truth, and after all, the secret remains in good keeping. And you understand that it is apropos to that case you are threatening. It might be as well for you to know before you bring that case against us."

"Well," urged Frank sardonically. He was, I think, the one person in the room who was not tense with expectation. Nothing but physical fear could penetrate that hide of his.

"Well, Mr. Frank," she did not deign to imitate him, but she took up his word as if it were a challenge. "Well, it is as well for you to know that Brenda is not your mother's daughter." She turned as she spoke to Brenda herself, with a protective gesture of her little hand. "I know it will not grieve you, dear, to hear that," she continued. "It is not as if you were so attached to them all at the Hall..."

"But who, then...?" Brenda began, evidently too startled by this astonishing news to realise its true significance.

"She was my step-sister, Claire Severac, dear," Mrs. Banks explained. "She was Olive's governess. Oh! poor Claire, how she suffered! It was, perhaps, a good thing after all that she died so soon after you were born. Her heart was broken. She was so innocent; she could not realise that she was no more than a casual mistress for your father. And then Mrs. Jervaise, whom you have believed to be your mother, was very unkind to my poor Claire. Yet it seemed best just then, in her trouble, that she should go away to Italy, and that it should be pretended that you were Mrs.

Jervaise's true daughter. I arranged that. I have blamed myself since, but I did not understand at the time that Mrs. Jervaise consented solely that she might keep you in sight of your father as a reminder of his sin. She was spiteful, and at that time she had the influence. She threatened a separation if she was not allowed to have her own way. So! the secret was kept and there were so few who remember my poor Claire that it is only Alfred and I who know how like her you are, my dear. She had not, it is true, your beautiful fair hair that is so striking with your dark eyes.

But your temperament, yes. She, too, was full of spirit, vivacious, gay--until afterwards."

She paused with a deep sigh, and I think we all sighed with her in concert. She had held us with her narrative. She had, as a matter of fact, told us little enough and that rather allusively, but I felt that I knew the whole history of the unhappy Claire Severac. Anne had not overrated her mother's powers in this direction. And my sigh had in it an element of relief. Some strain had been mercifully relaxed.

The sound of Frank's harsh voice came as a gross intrusion on our silence.

"What evidence have you got of all this?" he asked, but the ring of certainty had gone from his tone.

Mrs. Banks pointed with a superb gesture at his father.

The old man was leaning forward in his chair with his face in his hands.

There was no spirit in him. Probably he was thinking less of the present company than of Claire Severac.

Frank Jervaise showed his true quality on that occasion. He looked down at his father with scowling contempt, stared for a moment as if he would finally wring the old man's soul with some expression of filial scorn, and then flung himself out of the room, banging the door behind him as a proclamation that he finally washed his hands of the whole affair.

Old Jervaise looked up when the door banged and rose rather feebly to his feet. For a moment he looked at Arthur, as though he were prepared, now, to meet even that more recent impeachment of his virtue which he had feared earlier in the day. But Arthur's face gave no sign of any vindictive intention, and the old man silently followed his son, creeping out with the air of a man who submissively shoulders the burden of his disgrace.

I had been sorry for him that morning, but I was still sorrier for him then. Banks was suffering righteously and might find relief in that knowledge, but this man was reaping the just penalties of his own acts.

XV

REMEMBRANCE

I do not believe that any of them saw me leave the room.

As soon as old Jervaise had gone, all of them had turned with an instinct of protection towards the head of the family. He, alone, had been sacrificed. Within an hour his whole life had been changed, and I began to doubt, as Anne had doubted, whether so old a tree would bear transplanting. Whatever tenderness and care could do, would be done for him, but the threat of uprooting had come so suddenly. In any case, I could not help those gentle foresters whose work it would be to conduct the critical operation; and I walked out of the room without offering any perfunctory excuse for leaving them.

I made my way into the garden by the side door through which I had first entered the Home Farm; and after one indeterminate moment, came to a halt at the gate on the slope of the hill. I did not want to go too far from the house. For the time being I was no more to the Banks than an inconvenient visitor, but I hoped that presently some of them--I put it that way to myself--would miss me, and that Arthur or Anne would come and tell me what had been arranged in my absence. I should have been glad to talk over the affair with Arthur, but I hoped that it would not be Arthur who would come to find me.

For a time my thoughts flickered capriciously over the astonishing events of my adventurous week-end. I was pleasantly replete with experience. In all my life I had never before entered thus completely into any of the great movements of life. I recalled my first thrills of antic.i.p.ation amidst the glowing, excited youth of the resting dancers at the Hall. We had been impatient for further expression. The dragging departure of the Sturtons had been an unbearable check upon the exuberance of our desires.

In my thought of the scene I could see the unspent spirit of our vitality streaming up in a fierce fount of energy.