The Jervaise Comedy / Beresford, J. D. (John Davys), 1873-1947

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Title: The Jervaise Comedy

Author: J. D. Beresford

Release Date: February 20, 2005 [EBook #15116]

Language: English

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THE JERVAISE COMEDY


BY


J.D. BERESFORD



New York

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

1919




CONTENTS


CHAPTER
      I  THE FIRST HOUR
     II  ANNE
    III  FRANK JERVAISE
     IV  IN THE HALL
      V  DAYBREAK
     VI  MORNING
    VII  NOTES AND QUERIES
   VIII  THE OUTCAST
     IX  BANKS
      X  THE HOME FARM
     XI  THE STORY
    XII  CONVERSION
   XIII  FARMER BANKS
    XIV  MRS. BANKS
     XV  REMEMBRANCE
         POSTSCRIPT--THE TRUE STORY




THE JERVAISE COMEDY


I

THE FIRST HOUR


When I was actually experiencing the thrill, it came delightfully,
however, blended with a threat that proclaimed the imminent consequence of
dismay. I appreciated the coming of the thrill, as a rare and unexpected
"dramatic moment." I savoured and enjoyed it as a real adventure suddenly
presented in the midst of the common business of life. I imaginatively
transplanted the scene from the Hall of Thorp-Jervaise to a West-End
theatre; and in my instant part of unoccupied spectator I admired the art
with which the affair had been staged. It is so seldom that we are given
an opportunity to witness one of these "high moments," and naturally
enough I began instinctively to turn the scene into literature; admitting
without hesitation, as I am often forced to admit, that the detail of
reality is so much better and more typical than any I can invent.

But, having said that, I wonder how far one does invent in such an
experience? The same night I hinted something of my appreciation of the
dramatic quality of the stir at the Hall door to Frank Jervaise, Brenda's
brother, and he, quite obviously, had altogether missed that aspect of the
affair. He scowled with that forensic, bullying air he is so successfully
practising at the Junior Bar, as he said, "I suppose you realise just what
this may _mean_, to all of us?"

Jervaise evidently had failed to appreciate the detail that I had relished
with such delight. He had certainly not savoured the quality of it. And in
one sense I may claim to have invented the business of the scene. I may
have added to it by my imaginative participation. In any case my
understanding as interpreter was the prime essential--a fact that shows
how absurd it is to speak of "photographic detail" in literature, or
indeed to attempt a proper differentiation between realism and romance.

We were all of us in the Hall, an inattentive, chattering audience of
between twenty and thirty people. The last dance had been stopped at ten
minutes to twelve, in order that the local parson and his wife--their name
was Sturton--might be out of the house of entertainment before the first
stroke of Sunday morning. Every one was wound up to a pitch of satisfied
excitement. The Cinderella had been a success. The floor and the music and
the supper had been good, Mrs. Jervaise had thrown off her air of
pre-occupation with some distasteful suspicion, and we had all been
entertained and happy. And yet these causes for satisfaction had been
nothing more than a setting for Brenda Jervaise. It was she who had
stimulated us, given us a lead and kept us dancing to the tune of her
exciting personality. She had made all the difference between an
ordinarily successful dance and what Mrs. Sturton at the open door
continually described as "a really delightful evening."

She had to repeat the phrase, because with the first stroke of midnight
ringing out from the big clock over the stables, came also the first
intimation of the new movement. Mrs. Sturton's fly was mysteriously
delayed; and I had a premonition even then, that the delay promised some
diversion. The tone of the stable clock had its influence, perhaps. It was
so precisely the tone of a stage clock--high and pretentious, and with a
disturbing suggestion of being unmelodiously flawed.

Miss Tattersall, Olive Jervaise's friend, a rather abundant fair young
woman, warmed by excitement to the realisation that she must flirt with
some one, also noticed the theatrical sound of that announcement of
midnight. She giggled a little nervously as stroke succeeded stroke in an
apparently unending succession.

"It seems as if it were going on all night," she said to me, in a
self-conscious voice, as if the sound of the bell had some emotional
effect upon her.

"It's because it's out of place," I said for the sake of saying something;
"theatrical and artificial, you know. It ought to be..." I did not know
quite what it ought to be and stopped in the middle of the sentence. I was
aware of the wide open door, of the darkness beyond, and of the timid
visiting of the brilliant, chattering crowd by the fragrance of scented
night-stock--a delicate, wayward incursion that drifted past me like the
spirit of some sweet, shabby fairy. What possible bell could be
appropriate to that air? I began, stupidly, to recall the names of such
flowers as bluebell, hare-bell, Canterbury-bell. In imagination I heard
their chime as the distant tinkling of a fairy musical-box.

Miss Tattersall, however, took no notice of my failure to find the ideal.
"Yes, isn't it?" she said, and then the horrible striking ceased, and we
heard little Nora Bailey across the Hall excitedly claiming that the clock
had struck thirteen.

"I counted most carefully," she was insisting.

"I can't think why that man doesn't come," Mrs. Sturton repeated in a
raised voice, as if she wanted to still the superstitious qualms that Miss
Bailey had started. "I told him to come round at a quarter to twelve, so
that there shouldn't be any mistake. It's very tiresome." She paused on
that and Jervaise was inspired to the statement that the fly came from the
Royal Oak, didn't it, a fact that Mrs. Sturton had already affirmed more
than once.

"What makes it rather embarrassing for the dear Jervaises," Miss
Tattersall confided to me, "is that the other things aren't ordered till
one--the Atkinsons' 'bus, you know, and the rest of 'em. Brenda persuaded
Mrs. Jervaise that we might go on for a bit after the vicar had gone."

I wished that I could get away from Miss Tattersall; she intruded on my
thoughts. I was trying to listen to a little piece that was unfolding in
my mind, a piece that began with the coming of the spirit of the
night-stock into this material atmosphere of heated, excited men and
women. I realised that invasion as the first effort of the wild romantic
night to enter the house; after that.... After that I only knew that the
consequences were intensely interesting and that if I could but let my
thoughts guide me, they would finish the story and make it exquisite.

"Oh! did she?" I commented automatically, and cursed myself for having
conveyed a warmth of interest I certainly did not feel.

"She's so enthusiastic, isn't she? Brenda, I mean," Miss Tattersall went
on, and as I listened I compared her to the stable-clock. She, too, was a
persistent outrage, a hindrance to whatever it was that I was waiting for.

Mrs. Sturton and her husband were coming back, with an appearance of
unwillingness, into the warmth and light of the Hall. The dear lady was
still at her congratulations on the delightfulness of the evening, but
they were tempered, now, by a hint of apology for "spoiling it--to a
certain extent--I hope I haven't--by this unfortunate contretemps."

The Jervaises were uncomfortably warm in their reassurances. They felt, no
doubt, the growing impatience of all their other visitors pressing forward
with the reminder that if the Sturtons' cab did not come at once, there
would be no more dancing.

Half-way up the stairs little Nora Bailey's high laughing voice was
embroidering her statement with regard to the extra stroke of the
stable-clock.

"I had a kind of premonition that it was going to, as soon as it began,"
she was saying.

Gordon Hughes was telling the old story of the sentry who had saved his
life by a similar counting of the strokes of midnight.

And at the back of my mind my daemon was still thrusting out little spurts
of enthralling allegory. The Sturtons and Jervaises had been driven in
from the open. They were taking refuge in their house. Presently...

"Given it up?" I remarked with stupid politeness to Miss Tattersall.

"They've sent John round to the stables to inquire," she told me.

I do not know how she knew. "John" was the only man-servant that the
Jervaises employed in the house; butler, footman, valet and goodness knows
what else.

"Mrs. Sturton seems to be afraid of the night-air," Miss Tattersall
remarked with a complacent giggle of self-congratulation on being too
modern for such prejudices. "I simply love the night-air, don't you?" she
continued. "I often go out for a stroll in the garden the last thing."

I guessed her intention, but I was not going to compromise myself by
strolling about the Jervaise domain at midnight with Grace Tattersall.

"Do you? Yes," I agreed, as if I were bound to admire her originality.

They are afraid of the night-air, my allegory went on, and having begun
their retreat, they are now sending out their servant for help. I began to
wonder if I were composing the plot of a grand opera?

John's return convinced me that I was not to be disappointed in my
expectation of drama.

He came out from under the staircase through the red baize door which
discreetly warned the stranger that beyond this danger signal lay the
sacred mysteries of the Hall's service. And he came down to the central
cluster of faintly irritated Sturtons and Jervaises, with an evident
hesitation that marked the gravity of his message. Every one was watching
that group under the electric-lighted chandelier--it was posed to hold the
stage--but I fancy that most of the audience were solely interested in
getting rid of the unhappy Sturtons.

We could not hear what John said, but we inferred the general nature of
the disaster from the response accorded to his news. The vicar merely
clicked his tongue with a frown of grave disapproval, but his wife
advertised the disaster for us by saying,--

"It's that man Carter, from the Oak, you know; not our own man. I've never
liked Carter."

"Quite hopelessly, eh?" Jervaise asked John, and John's perturbed shake of
the head answered that question beyond any doubt.

"In any case," Mrs. Sturton began, and I hazarded a guess that she was
going to refuse to drive behind Carter in any stage of intoxication; but
she decided to abandon that line and went on with a splendid imitation of
cheerfulness, "However, there's nothing to be done, now, but walk. It's
quite a fine night, fortunately." She looked at her husband for approval.

"Oh! quite, quite," he said. "A beautiful night. Let us walk by all
means."

A general rustle of relief spread up the gallery of the staircase, and was
followed at once by a fresh outburst of chatter. The waiting audience of
would-be dancers had responded like one individual. It was as if their
single over-soul had sighed its thankfulness and had then tried to cover
the solecism. Their relief was short-lived. Mrs. Jervaise "couldn't think"
of the Sturtons walking. They must have the motor. She insisted. Really
nothing at all. Their chauffeur was sure to be up, still.

"Of course, certainly, by all means," Jervaise agreed warmly, and then, to
John, "He hasn't gone to bed yet, I suppose?"

"I saw him not half an hour ago, sir," was John's response.

"Tell him to bring the motor round," Jervaise ordered, and added something
in a lower voice, which, near as I was to them, I could not catch. I
imagined that it might be an instruction to have the chauffeur out again
if he had by any chance slunk off to bed within the last half-hour.

I think Miss Tattersall said "Damn!" Certainly the over-soul of the
staircase group thought it.

"They'll be here all night, at this rate," was my companion's translation
of the general feeling.

"If they have to wake up the chauffeur," I admitted.

"He's a new man they've got," Miss Tattersall replied. "They've only had
him three months..." It seemed as if she were about to add some further
comment, but nothing came.

"Oh!" was all that I found appropriate.

I felt that the action of my opera was hanging fire. Indeed, every one was
beginning to feel it. The Hall door had been shut against the bane of the
night-air. The stimulus of the fragrant night-stock had been excluded.
Miss Tattersall pretended not to yawn. We all pretended that we did not
feel a craving to yawn. The chatter rose and fell spasmodically in short
devitalised bursts of polite effort.

I looked round for Brenda, but could not see her anywhere.

"Won't you come back into the drawing-room?" Mrs. Jervaise was saying to
the Sturtons.

"Oh! thank you, it's _hardly_ worth while, is it?" Mrs. Sturton answered
effusively, but she loosened the shawl that muffled her throat as if she
were preparing for a longer wait. "I'm _so_ sorry," she apologised for the
seventh time. "So very unfortunate after such a really delightful
evening."

They kept up that kind of conversation for quite a long time, while we
listened eagerly for the sound of the motor-horn.

And no motor-horn came; instead, after endlessly tedious minutes, John
returned bearing himself like a portent of disaster.

The confounded fellow whispered again.

"What, not anywhere?" Jervaise asked irritably. "Sure he hasn't gone to
bed?"

John said something in that too discreet voice of his, and then Jervaise
scowled and looked round at the ascending humanity of the staircase. His
son Frank detached himself from the swarm, politely picked his way down
into the Hall, and began to put John under a severe cross-examination.

"What's up now, do you suppose?" Miss Tattersall asked, with the least
tremor of excitement sounding in her voice.

"Perhaps the chauffeur has followed the example of Carter, and afterwards
hidden his shame," I suggested.

I was surprised by the warmth of her contradiction. "Oh, no" she said. "He
isn't the least that sort of man." She said it as if I had aspersed the
character of one of her friends.

"He seems to have gone, disappeared, any-way," I replied.

"It's getting frightfully mysterious," Miss Tattersall agreed, and added
inconsequently, "He's got a strong face, you know; keen--looks as if he'd
get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn't a gentleman."

I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur.
She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.

I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play had
become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off through the
baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and hostess were
moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.

"We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere," I suggested to Miss
Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the staircase.

"Almost," she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the
night.

In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and climbed
to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon Hughes, one
of Frank Jervaise's barrister friends from the Temple. Hughes was reputed
"brilliantly clever." He was a tallish fellow with ginger red hair and a
long nose--the foxy type.

"Rum start!" I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but
before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark,
curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed as
"Ronnie." I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever pup. I
could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with great
gusto.

"I say, it's all U.P. now," he said, in a dominating voice. "What's the
time?" He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with evening
dress.

Some one said it was "twenty-five to one."

"Fifty to one against another dance, then," Ronnie barked joyously.

"Unless you'll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause," suggested
Nora Bailey.

"Offer myself up? How?" Ronnie asked.

"Take 'em home in your car," Nora said in a penetrating whisper.

"Dead the other way," was Ronnie's too patent excuse.

"It's only a couple of miles through the Park, you know," Olive Jervaise
put in. "You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back again
in twenty minutes."

"By Jove; yes. So I might," Ronnie acknowledged. "That is, if I may really
come back, Miss Jervaise. Awfully good of you to suggest it. I didn't
bring my man with me, though. I'll have to go and wind up the old
buzz-wagon myself, if your fellow can't be found. Do you think ... could
any one..."

He was looking round, searching for some one who was not there.

"Want any help?" Hughes asked.

"No, thanks. That's all right. I know where the car is, I mean," Ronnie
said, and still hesitated as if he were going to finish the question he
had begun in his previous speech.

Olive Jervaise anticipated, I think wrongly, his remark. "They're in the
drawing-room," she said. "Will you tell them?"

"Better get the car round first, hadn't I?" Ronnie asked.

The sandy Atkinson youth found an answer for that. He cleared his long,
thin throat huskily and said, "Might save time to tell 'em first. They'd
be ready, then, when you came round." His two equally sandy sisters
clucked their approval.

"All serene," Ronnie agreed.

He was on the bottom step of the stairs when the Hall door was thrown wide
open and Frank Jervaise returned.

He stood there a moment, posed for us, searching the ladder of our
gallery; and the spirit of the night-stock drifted past him and lightly
touched us all as it fled up the stairs. Then he came across the Hall, and
addressing his sister, asked, in a voice that overstressed the effect of
being casual, "I say, Olive, you don't happen to know where Brenda is, do
you?"

I suppose our over-soul knew everything in that minute. A tremor of dismay
ran up our ranks like the sudden passing of a cold wind. Every one was
looking at Ronnie.

Olive Jervaise's reply furnished an almost superfluous corroboration. She
could not control her voice. She tried to be as casual as her brother, and
failed lamentably. "Brenda was here just now," she said. "She--she must be
somewhere about."

Ronnie, still the cynosure of the swarm, turned himself about and stared
at Frank Jervaise. But it was Gordon Hughes who demonstrated his power of
quick inference and response, although in doing it he overstepped the
bounds of decency by giving a voice to our suspicions.

"Is the car in the garage? Your own car?" he asked.

"Yes. Rather. Of course," Jervaise replied uneasily.

"You've just looked?" Hughes insisted.

"I know the car's there," was Jervaise's huffy evasion, and he took Ronnie
by the arm and led him off into the drawing-room.

The Hall door stood wide open, and the tragedy of the night flowed
unimpeded through the house.

Although the horror had not been named we all recognised its finality. We
began to break up our formation immediately, gabbling tactful
irrelevancies about the delightful evening, the delinquent Carter, and the
foolishness of Sabbatarianism. Mrs. Atkinson appeared in the Hall, cloaked
and muffled, and beckoned to her three replicas. She announced that their
omnibus was "just coming round."

In the general downward drift of dispersion I saw Grace Tattersall looking
up at me with an expression that suggested a desire for the confidential
discussion of scandal, and I hastily whispered to Hughes that we might go
to the extemporised buffet in the supper-room and get a whisky and seltzer
or something. He agreed with an alacrity that I welcomed at the time, but
regret, now, because our retirement into duologue took us out of the
important movement, and I missed one or two essentials of the development.

The truth is that we were all overcome at the moment by an irresistible
desire to appear tactful. We wanted to show the Jervaises that we had not
suspected anything, or that if we had, we didn't mind in the least, and it
certainly wasn't their fault. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why in the
privacy of the supper-room--we had the place to ourselves--I should not
talk to Hughes. I had never before that afternoon met any of the Jervaise
family except Frank, and on one or two occasions his younger brother who
was in the army and, now, in India; and I thought that this was an
appropriate occasion to improve my knowledge. I understood that Hughes was
an old friend of the family.

He may have been, although the fact did not appear in his conversation;
for I discovered almost immediately that he was, either by nature or by
reason of his legal training, cursed with a procrastinating gift of
diplomacy.

"Awkward affair!" I began as soon as we had got our whiskies and lighted
cigarettes.

Hughes drank with a careful slowness, put his glass down with superfluous
accuracy, and then after another instant of tremendous deliberation, said,
"What is?"

"Well, this," I returned gravely.

"Meaning?" he asked judicially.

"Of course it may be too soon to draw an inference," I said.

"Especially with no facts to draw them from," he added.

"All the same," I went on boldly, "it looks horribly suspicious."

"What does?"

I began to lose patience with him. "I'm not suggesting that the Sturtons'
man from the Royal Oak has been murdered," I said.

He weighed that remark as if it might cover a snare, before he scored a
triumph of allusiveness by replying, "Fellow called Carter. He's got a
blue nose."

Despite my exasperation I tried once more on a note of forced geniality,
"What sort of man is this chauffeur of the Jervaises? Do you know him at
all?"

"Wears brown leather gaiters," Hughes answered after another solemn
deliberation.

I could have kicked him with all the pleasure in life. His awful
guardedness made me feel as if I were an inquisitive little journalist
trying to ferret out some unsavoury scandal. And he had been the first
person to point the general suspicion a few minutes earlier, by his
inquiry about the motor. I decided to turn the tables on him, if I could
manage it.

"I asked because you seemed to suggest just now that he had gone off with
the Jervaises' motor," I remarked.

Hughes stroked his long thin nose with his thumb and forefinger. It seemed
to take him about a minute from bridge to nostril. Then he inhaled a long
draught of smoke from his cigarette, closed one eye as if it hurt him, and
threw back his head to blow out the smoke again with a slow gasp of
relief.

"One never knows," was all the explanation he vouchsafed after this
tedious performance.

"Whether a chauffeur will steal his master's motor?" I asked.

"Incidentally," he said.

"But, good heavens, if he's that sort of man..." I suggested.

"I'm not saying that he is," Hughes replied.

I realised then that his idea of our conversation was nothing more nor
less than that of a game to be played as expertly as possible. He had all
the makings of a cabinet minister, but as a companion he was, on this
occasion, merely annoying. I felt that I could stand no more of him, and I
was trying to frame a sentence that would convey my opinion of him without
actual insult, when Frank Jervaise looked in at the door.

He stared at us suspiciously, but his expression commonly conveyed some
aspect of threat or suspicion. "Been looking all over the place for you,"
he said.

"For me?" Hughes asked.

Jervaise shook his head. "No, I want Melhuish," he said, and stood
scowling.

"Well, here I am," I prompted him.

"If I'm in the way..." Hughes put in, but did not attempt to get himself
out of it.

Jervaise ignored him. "Look here, Melhuish," he said. "I wonder if you'd
mind coming up with me to the Home Farm?"

"Oh! no; rather not," I agreed gladly.

I felt that Hughes had been scored off; but I instantly forgot such small
triumphs in the delight of being able to get out into the night. Out there
was romance and the smell of night-stock, all kinds of wonderment and
adventure. I was so eager to be in the midst of it that I never paused to
consider the queerness of the expedition.

As we left the Hall, the theatrical stable-clock was just striking one.




II

ANNE


The moon must have been nearly at the full, but I could not guess its
position behind the even murk of cloud that muffled the whole face of the
sky. Yet, it was not very dark. The broad masses of the garden through
which Jervaise led me, were visible as a greater blackness superimposed on
a fainter background. I believed that we were passing through some kind of
formal pleasance. I could smell the pseudo-aromatic, slightly dirty odour
of box, and made out here and there the clipped artificialities of a yew
hedge. There were standard roses, too. One rose started up suddenly before
my face, touching me as I passed with a limp, cool caress, like the
careless, indifferent encouragement of a preoccupied courtesan.

At the end of the pleasance we came to a high wall, and as Jervaise
fumbled with the fastening of a, to me, invisible door, I was expecting
that now we should come out into the open, into a paddock, perhaps, or a
grass road through the Park. But beyond the wall was a kitchen garden. It
was lighter there, and I could see dimly that we were passing down an
aisle of old espaliers that stretched sturdy, rigid arms, locked finger to
finger with each other in their solemn grotesque guardianship of the
enciente they enclosed. No doubt in front of them was some kind of
herbaceous border. I caught sight of the occasional spire of a hollyhock,
and smelt the acid insurgence of marigolds.

None of this was at all the mischievous, taunting fairyland that I had
anticipated, but rather the gaunt, intimidating home of ogres, rank and
more than a trifle forbidding. It had an air of age that was not immortal,
but stiffly declining into a stubborn resistance against the slow rigidity
of death. These espaliers made me think of rheumatic veterans, obstinately
faithful to ancient duties--veterans with knobbly arthritic joints.

At the end of the aisle we came to a high-arched opening in the ten-foot
wall, barred by a pair of heavy iron gates.

"Hold on a minute, I've got the key," Jervaise said. This was the first
time he had spoken since we left the house. His tone seemed to suggest
that he was afraid I should attempt to scale the wall or force my way
through the bars of the gates.

He had the key but he could not in that darkness fit it into the padlock;
and he asked me if I had any matches. I had a little silver box of wax
vestas in my pocket, and struck one to help him in his search for the
keyhole which he found to have been covered by the escutcheon. Before I
threw the match away I held it up and glanced back across the garden. The
shadows leaped and stiffened to attention, and I flung the match away, but
it did not go out. It lay there on the path throwing out its tiny
challenge to the darkness. It was still burning when I looked back after
passing through the iron gates.

As we came out of the park, Jervaise took my arm.

"I'm afraid this is a pretty rotten business," he said with what was for
him an unusual cordiality.

       *       *       *       *       *

Although I had never before that afternoon seen Jervaise's home nor any of
his people with the exception of the brother now in India, I had known
Frank Jervaise for fifteen years. We had been at Oakstone together, and
had gone up the school form by form in each other's company. After we left
Oakstone we were on the same landing at Jesus, and he rowed "two" and I
rowed "bow" in the college boat. And since we had come down I had met him
constantly in London, often as it seemed by accident. Yet we had never
been friends. I had never really liked him.

Even at school he had had the beginning of the artificially bullying
manner which now seemed natural to him. He had been unconvincingly blunt
and insolent. His dominant chin, Roman nose, and black eyebrows were
chiefly responsible, I think, for his assumption of arrogance. He must
have been newly invigorated to carry on the part every time he scowled at
himself in the glass. He could not conceivably have been anything but a
barrister.

But, to-night, in the darkness, he seemed to have forgotten for once the
perpetual mandate of his facial angle. He was suddenly intimate, almost
humble.

"Of course, you don't realise how cursedly awkward it all is," he said
with the evident desire of opening a confidence.

"Tell me as little or as much as you like," I responded. "You know that
I..."

"Yes, rather," he agreed warmly, and added, "I'd sooner Hughes didn't
know."

"He guesses a lot, though," I put in. "I suppose they all do."

"Oh! well, they're bound to guess something," he said, "but I'm hoping
we'll be able to put that right, now."

"Who are we going to see?" I asked.

He did not reply at once, and then snapped out, "Anne Banks; friend er
Brenda's."

My foolishly whimsical imagination translated that queer medley of sounds
into the thought of a stable-pump. I heard the clank of the handle and
then the musical rush of water into the pail.

"Sounds just like a pump," I said thoughtlessly.

He half withdrew his arm from mine with an abrupt twitch that indicated
temper.

"Oh! don't for God's sake play the fool," he said brutally.

A spasm of resentment shook me for a moment. I felt annoyed, remembering
how at school he would await his opportunity and then score off me with
some insulting criticism. He had never had any kind of sympathy for the
whimsical, and it is a manner that is apt to look inane and ridiculous
under certain kinds of censure. I swallowed my annoyance, on this
occasion. I remembered that Jervaise had a reasonable excuse, for once.

"Sorry," I said. "I didn't mean to play the fool. But you must admit that
it had a queer sound." I repeated the adjectival sentence under my breath.
It really was a rather remarkable piece of onomatopoeia. And then I
reflected on the absurdity of our conversation. How could we achieve all
this ordinary trivial talk of everyday in the gloom of this romantic
adventure?

"Oh! all serene," Jervaise returned, still with the sound of irritation in
his voice, and continued as if the need for confidence had suddenly
overborne his anger. "As a matter of fact she's his sister."

"Whose sister?" I asked, quite at a loss.

"Oh! Banks's, of course," he said.

"But who in the name of goodness is Banks?" I inquired irritably. The
petulant tone was merely an artifice. I realised that if I were meek, he
would lose more time in abusing my apparent imbecility. I know that the
one way to beat a bully is by bullying, but I hate even the pretence of
that method.

Jervaise grunted as if the endeavour to lift the weight of my ignorance
required an almost intolerable physical effort.

"Why, this fellow--our chauffeur," he said in a voice so threateningly
restrained that he seemed on the point of bursting.

There was no help for it; I had to take the upper hand.

"Well, my good idiot," I said, "you can't expect me to know these things
by intuition. I've never heard of the confounded fellow before. Haven't
even seen him, now. Nor his sister--Anne Banks, Frienderbrenda's."

Jervaise was calmed by this outburst. This was the sort of attitude he
could understand and appreciate.

"All right, keep your shirt on," he replied quite amicably.

"If you'd condescend to explain," I returned as huffily as I could.

"You see, this chap, Banks," he began, "isn't quite the ordinary chauffeur
Johnnie. He's the son of one of our farmers. Decent enough old fellow,
too, in his way--the father, I mean. Family's been tenants of the Home
Farm for centuries. And this chap, Banks, the son, has knocked about the
world, no end. Been in Canada and the States and all kinds of weird
places. He's hard as nails; and keen. His mother was a Frenchwoman; been a
governess."

"Is she dead?" I asked.

"Lord, no. Why should she be?" Jervaise replied peevishly.

I thought of explaining that he had made the implication by his use of the
past tense, but gave up the idea as involving a waste of energy. "How old
is this chap, Banks; the son?" I asked.

"I don't know," Jervaise said. "About twenty-five."

"And his sister?" I prodded him.

"Rather younger than that," he said, after an evident hesitation, and
added: "She's frightfully pretty."

I checked my natural desire to comment on the paradox; and tried the
stimulation of an interested "_Is_ she?"

"Rather." He tacked that on in the tone of one who deplores the
inevitable; and went on quickly, "You needn't infer that I've made an ass
of myself or that I'm going to. In our position..." He abandoned that as
being, perhaps, too obvious. "What I mean to say is," he continued, "that
I can't understand about Brenda. And it was such an infernally silly way
of going about things. Admitted that there was no earthly chance of the
pater giving his consent or anything like it; she needn't in any case have
made a damned spectacle of the affair. But that's just like her. Probably
did it all because she wanted to be dramatic or some rot."

It was then that I expressed my appreciation of the dramatic quality of
the incident, and was snubbed by his saying,--

"I suppose you realise just what this may mean, to all of us."

I had a vivid impression, in the darkness, of that sudden scowl which made
him look so absurdly like a youthful version of Sir Edward Carson.

I was wondering why it should mean so much to all of them? Frank Jervaise
had admitted, for all intents and purposes, that he was in love with the
chauffeur's sister, so he, surely, need not have so great an objection.
And, after all, why was the family of Jervaise so much better than the
family of Banks?

"I suppose it would be very terrible for you all if she married this
chap?" I said.

"Unthinkable," Jervaise replied curtly.

"It would be worse in a way than your marrying the sister?"

"I should never be such an infernal fool as to do a thing like that," he
returned.

"Has she ... have there been any tender passages between you and Miss
Banks?" I asked.

"No," he snapped viciously.

"You've been too careful?"

"As a matter of fact, I don't think she likes me," he said.

"Oh!" was all my comment.

I needed no more explanations; and I liked Jervaise even less than I had
before. I began to wish that he had not seen fit to confide in me. I had,
thoughtlessly, been dramatising the incident in my mind, but, now, I was
aware of the unpleasant reality of it all. Particularly Jervaise's part in
it.

"Can't be absolutely certain, of course," he continued.

"But if she did like you?" I suggested.

"I've got to be very careful who I marry," he explained. "We aren't
particularly well off. All our property is in land, and you know what sort
of an investment that is, these days."

I tried another line. "And if you find your sister up at the Home Farm;
and Banks; what are you going to do?"

"Kick him and bring her home," he said decidedly.

"Nothing else for it, I suppose?" I replied.

"Obviously," he snarled.

We had come into a wood and it was very dark under the trees. I wondered
why I should restrain the impulse to strangle him and leave him there? He
was no good, and, to me, quite peculiarly objectionable. It seemed, in
what was then my rather fantastic state of mind, that it would be a
triumph of whimsicality. I should certainly have resisted the impulse in
any case, but my attention was diverted from it at that moment by a sudden
pattering of feet along the leaves of the great trees under which we were
walking--light, clean, sharp, little dancing feet, springing from leaf to
leaf--dozens of them chasing each other, rattling ecstatically up and down
the endless terraces of wide foliage.

"Damn it all, it's beginning to rain like blazes," remarked the foolish
Jervaise.

"How much farther is it?" I asked.

He said we were "just there."

       *       *       *       *       *

I saw the Home Farm first as a little square haze of yellow light far up
in the sky. I didn't realise the sharp rise in the ground immediately in
front of us, and that rectangular beacon, high in the air, seemed a
fantastically impossible thing. I pointed it out to Jervaise who was
holding his head down as if he were afraid the summer rain might do some
serious injury to his face.

"Some one up, anyway," was his comment.

"Very far up," I murmured. I could not quite believe, even then, that it
could be a window. I was disappointed when we had climbed the hill and
stood only a few feet below the beacon, to discover that this too, was
another instance of the all too credible commonplace. I suppose men like
Frank Jervaise never long to believe in the impossible. I was, however,
agreeably surprised to find that he could be nervous.

He hesitated, looking up at the prism of light that splayed out through
the first floor window, and set a silver fire to the falling rain.
"Suppose we'd better knock," he grumbled.

"D'you know whose window it is?" I asked.

Apparently he didn't. He made a dive into a deeper obscurity and I lost
him until I heard his knock. I was glad that he should have knocked with
such decent restraint, but all the effect of it was instantly shattered by
the response. For at his first subdued rap, a dog with a penetratingly
strident bark set up a perfectly detestable clamour within the house. It
was just as if Jervaise's touch on the door had liberated the spring of
some awful rattle. Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled
dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more than
half inclined to follow.

Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this
midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure, altogether
in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the chime of the
stable-clock. That confounded terrier, whose voice so clearly proclaimed
his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest realism. We were intruders
upon the decencies of civilisation. That dog was not to be misled by any
foolish whimsies of the imagination. He was a thorough-going realist,
living in a tangible, smellable world of reality, and he knew us for what
we were--marauders, disturbers of the proper respectable peace of
twentieth century farms. He lashed himself into ecstasies of fury against
our unconventionality; he rose to magnificent paroxysms of protest that
passionately besought High Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and
let him get at us.

But no one came. There may have been other sounds coming from the house
besides that infuriated demand for vengeance, but all inferior noises--and
surely all other noises must have been inferior to that clamour--were
absorbed and flattened out of existence. We were in a world occupied by
the bark of a single dog, and any addition to that occupation would have
been superfluous.

The owner of the voice was doing his level best now to get the door down
on his own account. I hoped he might succeed. I should have excuse then to
fly to the woods and claim sanctuary. As it was, I retreated a couple of
steps, holding my breath to ease the pain of my nerves, and some old
instinct of prayer made me lift my face to the sky. I welcomed the cold,
inquisitive touch of the silent rain.

Then I became aware through the torture of prolonged exasperation that my
upturned face was lit from above; that a steady candle was now perched on
the very sill of the one illuminated window; and that behind the candle
the figure of a woman stood looking down at me.

She appeared to be speaking.

I held my hands to my ears and shook my head violently to intimate my
temporary deafness; and the figure disappeared, leaving the placid candle
to watch me as it seemed with a kind of indolent nonchalance.

I decided to pass on the news to Jervaise, and discovered that besotted
fool in a little trellised porch, stimulating the execrations of the Irish
terrier by a subdued inaudible knocking. I was beginning to scream my news
into his ear when silence descended upon us with the suddenness of a
catastrophe. It was as if the heavens had been rent and all the earth had
fallen into a muffled chaos of mute despair.

I had actually began my shriek of announcement when all the world of sound
about us so inexplicably ceased to be, and I shut off instantly on the
word "_Someone_...," a word that as I had uttered it sounded like a
despairing yelp of mortal agony.

Out of the unearthly stillness, Jervaise's voice replied in a frightened
murmur, "Someone coming," he said, as if he, alone, had knowledge of and
responsibility for that supreme event.

And still no one came. The door remained steadfastly closed. Outside the
porch, the earth had recovered from the recent disaster, and we could hear
the exquisitely gentle murmur of the rain.

"Damned odd," commented Jervaise. "That cursed dog made enough noise to
wake the dead."

I was inspired to go out and search the window where burned the indigent,
just perceptibly, rakish candle.

She was there. She had returned to her eyrie after quelling the racket in
the hall, and now she leaned a little forward so that I could see her
face.

"Who's there?" she asked quietly.

Her voice was low and clear as the reed of a flute, but all sounds had the
quality of music at that instant of release.

I was nonplussed for the moment. I ought to have taken up the key of high
romance. She deserved it. Instead of that I dropped to the awful
commonplaces of a man in evening dress and a light overcoat standing in
the rain talking to a stranger.

"I came up with Mr. Jervaise, Mr. Frank Jervaise," I explained. "He--he
wants to see you. Shall I tell him you're there?"

"All serene, I'm here," whispered the voice of Jervaise at my elbow, and
then he cleared his throat and spoke up at the window.

"Rather an upset down at the Hall, Miss Banks; about Brenda," he said.
"Might we come in a minute?"

"It's rather late, isn't it?" the vision returned--it wasn't only the ease
of the silence, she had a delicious voice--and added rather mischievously,
"It's raining, isn't it?"

"Like anything," Jervaise said, and ducked his head and hunched his
shoulders, as if he had suddenly remembered the possible susceptibility of
his exposed face.

"Is it so very important?" the soft, clear voice asked, still, I thought,
with a faint undercurrent of raillery.

"Really, Miss Banks, it is," Jervaise implored, risking his delicate face
again.

She hesitated a moment and then said, "Very well," and disappeared, taking
this time the dissipated candle with her. I heard her address a minatory
remark within the room to "Racket"--most excellently described, I thought;
though I discovered later that I had, in imagination, misspelt him, since
he owed his name to the fact that his mother had sought her delivery on
the bed of a stored tennis-net.

Jervaise and I hurried back to the front door as if we were afraid that
Miss Banks might get there first; but she kept us waiting for something
like ten minutes before she came downstairs. The silence of that interval
was only broken by such nervous staccato comments as "Long time!"
"Dressing, presumably," and occasional throaty sounds of impatience from
Jervaise that are beyond the representative scope of typography. I have
heard much the same noises proceed from the throat of an unhopeful pig
engaged in some minor investigation.

The rain was falling less heavily, and towards the west a pale blur of
light was slowly melting its way through the darkness. I noted that spot
as marking the probable position of the setting moon. I decided that as
soon as this infernal inquisition was over, I would get rid of Jervaise
and find some God-given place in which I might wait for the dawn. I knew
that there must be any number of such places between the Farm and the
Hall. I was peering westward towards the rolling obscurity of hills and
woods that were just beginning to bulk out of the gloom, when I heard the
click of the door latch.

I should not like to be put in the witness-box and cross-examined by
Jervaise as to my reason for entering the house with him that night. All
that part of me with which I have any sort of real friendship, wanted
quite definitely to stay outside. That would have been the tactful thing
to do. There was no reason why I should intrude further on the mystery of
Brenda's disappearance; and as a matter of fact I was no longer very
keenly interested in that brilliant and fascinating young woman's affairs.
The plan that I had in mind when the door opened was to say politely to
Jervaise, "I'll wait for you here"--I had a premonition that he would
raise no objection to that suggestion--and then when he and Miss Banks
were safely inside, I meant to go and find rapture in solitude. The moon
was certainly coming out; the dawn was due in three hours or so, and
before me were unknown hills and woods. I had no sort of doubt that I
should find my rapture. I may add that my plan did not include any further
sight of Jervaise, his family, or their visitors, before breakfast next
morning.

I had it all clear and settled. I was already thrilling with the first
ecstasies of anticipation. But when the door was opened I turned my back
on all that magical beauty of the night, and accompanied Jervaise into the
house like a scurvy little mongrel with no will of its own.

I can't account for that queer change of purpose. It was purely
spontaneous, due to something quite outside the realm of reason. I was
certainly not in love with Anne, then. My only sight of her had left an
impression as of an amateur copy of a Rembrandt done in Indian ink with a
wet brush. It is true that I had heard her voice like the low thrilling of
a nightingale--following a full Handel chorus of corncrakes.

       *       *       *       *       *

She had evidently spent an active ten minutes while we waited for her. She
had done her hair, and she was, so far as I could judge from
superficialities, completely dressed. Also she had lighted the lamp in
what I took to be the chief sitting-room of the farm.

As a room it deserved attention, but it was not until I had been there for
ten minutes or more, that I realised all that the furniture of that room
was not. My first observations were solely directed to Miss Banks.

Jervaise had grossly maligned her by saying that she was "frightfully
pretty." No one but a fool would have called her "pretty." Either she was
beautiful or plain. I saw, even then, that if the light of her soul had
been quenched, she might appear plain. Her features were good, her
complexion, her colouring--she was something between dark and fair--but
she did not rely on those things for her beauty. It was the glow of her
individuality that was her surpassing charm. She had that supremely
feminine vitality which sends a man crazy with worship. You had to adore
or dislike her. There was no middle course.

And Jervaise quite obviously adored her. All that tactful confession of
his in the park had been a piece of artifice. It had not, however, been
framed to deceive _me_. I do not believe that he considered me worth
bothering about. No, those admissions and denials of his had been
addressed, without doubt, to a far more important person than myself. They
had been in the nature of a remonstrance and assurance spoken to Frank
Jervaise by the heir to the estate; which heir was determined with all the
force of his ferocious nose and dominant chin to help him, that he would
not make a fool of himself for the sake of the daughter of a tenant
farmer. I had been nothing more than the register upon which he had
tentatively engraved that resolve. But he should have chosen a more stable
testament than this avowal made to a whimsically-minded playwright with an
absurd weakness for the beauties of a midnight wood.

And if I had been a witness to his oath, I was, now, a witness to his
foreswearing.

He began well enough on the note proper to the heir of Jervaise. He had
the aplomb to carry that off. He stood on the hearthrug, austere and
self-controlled, consciously aristocrat, heir and barrister.

"I'm so sorry, Miss Banks. Almost inexcusable to disturb you at this time
of night." He stopped after that beginning and searched his witness with a
stare that ought to have set her trembling.

Anne had sat down and was resting her forearms on the table. She looked up
at him with the most charming insouciance when he paused so portentously
at the very opening of his address. Her encouraging "yes" was rather in
the manner of a child waiting for the promised story.

Jervaise frowned and attempted the dramatic. "My sister, Brenda, has run
away," he said.

"When?"

"This evening at the end of the Cinderella. You knew we were giving a
dance?"

"But where to?"

"Oh! Precisely!" Jervaise said.

"But how extraordinary!" replied Miss Banks.

"Is she here?" asked Jervaise. He ought to have snapped that out
viciously, and I believe that was his intention. But Anne's exquisitely
innocent, absorbed gaze undid him; and his question had rather the sound
of an apology.

"No, certainly not! Why ever should she come here?" Anne said with
precisely the right nuance of surprise.

"Is your brother here?"

"No!"

It looks such an absurd little inexpressive word on paper, but Anne made a
song of it on two notes, combining astonishment with a sincerity that was
absolutely final. If, after that, Jervaise had dared to say, "Are you
sure?" I believe I should have kicked him.

How confounded he was, was shown by the change of attitude evident in his
next speech.

"It's horribly awkward," he said.

"Oh! horribly," Anne agreed, with a charming sympathy. "What are you going
to do?"

"You see, we can't find your brother, either," Jervaise tried tactfully.

"I don't quite see what that's got to do with Brenda," Anne remarked with
a sweet perplexity.

Apparently Jervaise did not wish to point the connection too abruptly. "We
wanted the car," he said; "and we couldn't find him anywhere."

"Oh! he's almost sure to have gone to sleep up in the woods," Anne
replied. "Arthur's like that, you know. He sort of got the habit in Canada
or somewhere. He often says that sometimes he simply can't bear to sleep
under a roof."

I had already begun to feel a liking for Anne's brother, and that speech
of hers settled me. I knew that "Arthur" was the right sort--or, at least,
my sort. I would have been willing, even then, to swap the whole Jervaise
family with the possible exception of Brenda, for this as yet unknown
Arthur Banks.

Jervaise's diplomacy was beginning to run very thin.

"You don't think it conceivable that Brenda..." he began gloomily.

"That Brenda what?"

"I was going to say..."

"Yes?" She leaned a little forward with an air of expectancy that
disguised her definite refusal to end his sentences for him.

"It's a most difficult situation, Miss Banks," he said, starting a new
line; "and we don't in the least know what to make of it. What on earth
could induce Brenda to run off like this, with no apparent object?"

"But how do you know she really has?" asked Anne. "You haven't told me
anything, yet, have you? I mean, she may have gone out into the Park to
get cool after the dance, or into the woods or anything. Why should you
imagine that she has--run away?"

I joined in the conversation, then, for the first time. I had not even
been introduced to Anne.

"That's very reasonable, surely, Jervaise," I said. "And wouldn't it--I
hardly know her, I'll admit--but wouldn't it be rather like your sister?"

So far as I was concerned, Anne's suggestion carried conviction. I was
suddenly sure that our suspicions were all a mistake.

Jervaise snubbed me with a brief glance of profoundest contempt. He
probably intended that commentary on my interruption to go no further; but
his confounded pose of superiority annoyed me to the pitch of
exasperation.

"You see, my dear chap," I continued quickly, "your unfortunate training
as a lawyer invariably leads you to suspect a crime; and you overlook the
obvious in your perfectly unreasonable and prejudiced search for the
incriminating."

Jervaise's expression admirably conveyed his complete boredom with me and
my speeches.

"You don't know anything about it," he said, with a short gesture of final
dismissal.

"But, Mr. Jervaise," Anne put in, "what can you possibly suspect, in this
case?"

"He'd suspect anything of anybody for the sake of making a case of it," I
said, addressing Anne. I wanted to make her look at me, but she kept her
gaze fixed steadily on Jervaise, as if he were the controller of all
destinies.

I accepted my dismissal, then, so far as to keep silence, but I was
annoyed, now, with Anne, as well as with Jervaise. "What on earth could
she see in the fellow?" I asked myself irritably. I was the more irritated
because he had so obviously already forgotten my presence.

"Have you no reason to suspect anything yourself, Miss Banks?" he asked
gravely.

"If you're suggesting that Brenda and Arthur have run away together," she
said, "I'm perfectly, perfectly certain that you're wrong, Mr. Jervaise."

"Do you mean that you know for certain that they haven't?" he returned.

She nodded confidently, and I thought she had perjured herself, until
Jervaise with evident relief said, "I'm very glad of that; very. Do you
mind telling me how you know?"

"By intuition," she said, without a trace of raillery in her face or her
tone.

I forgave her for ignoring me when she said that. I felt that I could
almost forgive Jervaise; he was so deliciously sold.

"But you've surely some other grounds for certainty besides--intuition?"
he insisted anxiously.

"What other grounds could I possibly have?" Anne asked.

"They haven't, either of them, confided in you?"

"Confided? What sort of things?"

"That there was, or might be, any--any sort of understanding between
them?"

"I know that they have met--occasionally."

"Lately! Where?"

"Brenda has been having lessons in driving the motor."

"Oh! yes, I know that. You didn't mean that they had been meeting here?"

"No, I didn't mean that," Anne said definitely. All through that quick
alternation of question and answer she had, as it were, surrendered her
gaze to him; watching him with a kind of meek submission as if she were
ready to do anything she could to help him in his inquiry. And it was very
plain to me that Jervaise was flattered and pleased by her attitude. If I
had attempted Anne's method, he would have scowled and brow-beaten me
unmercifully, but now he really looked almost pleasant.

"It's very good of you to help me like this, Miss Banks," he said, "and
I'm very grateful to you. I do apologise, most sincerely for dragging you
out of bed at such an unholy hour, but I'm sure you appreciate my--our
anxiety."

"Oh! of course," she agreed, with a look that I thought horribly
sympathetic.

I began to wonder if my first estimate of her--based to a certain extent,
perhaps, on Jervaise's admission that she did not like him--had not been
considerably too high. She might, after all, be just an ordinary charming
woman, enlivened by a streak of minx, and eager enough to catch the heir
of Jervaise if he were available. How low my thought of her must have sunk
at that moment! But they were, now, exchanging courtesies with an air that
gave to their commonplaces the effect of a flirtation.

I distracted my attention. I couldn't help hearing what they said, but I
could refrain from looking at Anne. She was becoming vivacious, and I
found myself strangely disliking her vivacity. It was then that I began to
take note of the furnishing of the room which, when I considered it, was
so peculiarly not in the manner of the familiar English farm-house.
Instead of the plush suite, the glass bell shades, the round centre table,
and all the other stuffy misconceptions so firmly established by the
civilisation of the nineteenth century, I discovered the authentic marks
of the old English aesthetic--whitewashed walls and black oak. And the
dresser, the settles, the oblong table, the rush-bottomed chairs, the big
chest by the side wall, all looked sturdily genuine; venerably conscious
of the boast that they had defied the greedy collector and would continue
to elude his most insidious approaches. Here, they were in their proper
surroundings. They gave the effect of having carelessly lounged in and
settled themselves; they were like the steady group of "regulars" in the
parlour of their familiar inn.

I came out of my reflection on the furniture to find that Jervaise was
going, at last. He was smiling and effusive, talking quickly about
nothing, apologising again for the unseemliness of our visit. Anne was
pathetically complacent, accepting and discounting his excuses, and
professing her willingness to help in any way she possibly could. "But I
really and truly expect you'll find Brenda safe at home when you get
back," she said, and I felt that she honestly believed that.

"I hope so; I hope so," Jervaise responded, and then they most
unnecessarily shook hands.

I thought that it was time to assert myself above the clatter of their
farewells.

"We might add, Miss Banks," I put in, "that we've been making a perfectly
absurd fuss about nothing at all. But, no doubt, you're used to that."

She looked at me, then, for the first time since I had come into the
house; and I saw the impulse to some tart response flicker in her face and
die away unexpressed. We stood and stared at one another for a long
half-second or so; and when she looked away I fancied that there was
something like fear in her evasion. It seemed to me that I saw the true
spirit of her in the way her glance refused me as some one with whom she
did not care to sport. Her voice, too, dropped, so that I could not catch
the murmur of her reply.

We had, indeed, recognised each other in that brief meeting of our eyes.
Some kind of challenge had passed between us. I had dared her to drop that
disguise of trickery and show herself as she was; and her response had
been an admission that she acknowledged not me, but my recognition of her.

How far the fact that I had truly appraised her real worth might influence
her, in time, to think gently of me, I could not guess; but I hoped, even
a little vaingloriously, that she would respond to our mutual appreciation
of truth. I had shown her, I believed, how greatly I admired the spirit
she had been at such pains to conceal during that talk in the honest
sitting-room of the Home Farm. And I felt that her failure to resent the
impertinence of my "No doubt, you're used to that," had been due to an
understanding of something she and I had in common against the whole
solid, stolid, aristocratic family of Jervaise.

Moreover, she gave me what I counted as two more causes for hopefulness
before we left the house. The first was her repetition, given, now, with a
more vibrating sincerity, of the belief that we should find Brenda safely
at home when we got back to the Hall.

"I feel sure you will, Mr. Jervaise," she said, and the slight pucker of
anxiety between her eyebrows was an earnest that even if her belief was a
little tremulous, her hope, at least, was unquestionably genuine.

The second sign was the acceptance of a hackneyed commonplace; the proffer
of a friendly message through the medium of a cliche which, however false
in its general application, offered a short cut to the interpretation of
feeling. Racquet who had maintained a well-bred silence from the first
moment of his mistress's reproof, had honoured me with his approval while
we sat in the farm-house sitting-room, and sealed the agreement by a
friendly thrust of his nose as we said "Goodnight."

Anne did not look at me as she spoke, but her soft comment, "You are fond
of dogs," seemed to me a full acknowledgment of our recognition of each
other's quality.

I must admit, however, that at two o'clock in the morning one's sense of
values is not altogether normal.




III

FRANK JERVAISE


I should have preferred to maintain a thoughtful, experiencing silence
throughout our walk home. I had plenty of material for reflection. I
wanted, now, to look at all this disappearing Brenda business from a new
angle. I had a sense of the weaving of plots, and of the texture of them;
such a sense as I imagine a blind man may get through sensitive
finger-tips. Two new characters had come into my play, and I knew them
both for principals. That opening act without Brenda, Arthur Banks, or his
sister was nothing more than a prologue. The whole affair had begun again
to fascinate my interest. Moreover, I was becoming aware of a stern,
half-tragic background that had not yet come into proper focus.

And the circumstances of our walk home were of a kind that I find
peculiarly stimulating to the imagination. The sky was clearing. Above us,
widening pools of deep sky, glinting here and there, with the weak
radiance of half-drowned stars, opened and closed again behind dispersing
wreaths of mist. While in the west, a heaped indigo gloom that might in
that light have been mistaken for the silhouette of a vast impending
forest, revealed at one edge a thin haze of yellow silver that stretched
weak exploring arms of light towards the mysterious obscurity of the upper
clouds. I knew precisely how that sky would look at sunset, but at moonset
it had a completely different quality that was at once more ethereal and
more primitive. It seemed to me that this night-sky had the original,
eternal effect of all planetary space; that it might be found under the
leaping rings of Saturn or in the perpetual gloom of banished Neptune.
Compared to the comprehensible, reproducible effects of sunlight, it was
as the wonder of the ineffable to the beauty of a magnificent picture.

But I was not left for many minutes to the rapture of contemplation. Even
the primitive had to give place to the movement of our tiny, civilised
drama. Jervaise and I were of the race that has been steadily creating a
fiction of the earth since the first appearance of inductive science in
the days of prehistoric man; and we could not live for long outside the
artificial realism of the thing we were making. We were not the creatures
of a process, but little gods in a world-pantheon.

       *       *       *       *       *

I made no attempt to check him when he began to talk. I knew by the raised
tone of his voice--he was speaking quite a third above his ordinary
pitch--that he was pleasantly excited by our interview with Anne: an
excitement that he now wished either to conceal, or, if that were
impossible, to attribute to another cause.

"It occurs to me that there are one or two very puzzling points about that
visit of ours, Melhuish," he began.

"At least two," I agreed.

"Which are?" he asked.

"I'd prefer to hear yours first," I said, having no intention of
displaying my own.

He was so eager to exhibit his cleverness that he did not press me for my
probably worthless deductions.

"Well, in the first place," he said, "did it strike you as a curious fact
that Miss Banks, and she alone, was apparently disturbed by that dog's
infernal barking?"

"It hadn't struck me," I admitted; and just because I had not remarked
that anomaly for myself, I was instantly prepared to treat it as unworthy
of notice. "I suppose her father and mother and the servants, and so on,
heard her let us in," I said.

Jervaise jeered at that. "Oh! my good man," he said.

"Well, why not?" I returned peevishly.

"I put it to you," he said, "whether in those circumstances the family's
refusal to make an appearance admits of any ordinary explanation?"

I could see, now, that it did not; but having committed myself to a point
of view, I determined to uphold it. "Why _should_ they come down?" I
asked.

"Common curiosity would be a sufficient inducement, I should imagine,"
Jervaise replied with a snort of contempt, "to say nothing of a reasonable
anxiety to know why any one should call at two o'clock in the morning. It
isn't usual, you know--outside the theatrical world, perhaps."

I chose to ignore the sneer conveyed by his last sentence.

"They may be very heavy sleepers," I tried, fully aware of the inanity of
my suggestion.

Jervaise laughed unpleasantly, a nasty hoot of derision. "Don't be a
damned fool," he said. "The human being isn't born who could sleep through
that hullabaloo."

I relinquished that argument as hopeless, and having no other at the
moment, essayed a weak reprisal. "Well, what's your explanation?" I asked
in the tone of one ready to discount any possible explanation he might
have to make.

"It's obvious," he returned. "There can be only one. They were expecting
us."

"Do you mean that Miss Banks was deliberately lying to us all the time?" I
challenged him with some heat.

"Why that?" he asked.

"Well, if she were expecting us..."

"Which she never denied."

"And had warned all her people..."

"As she had a perfect right to do."

"It makes her out a liar, in effect," I protested. "I mean, she implied,
if she didn't actually state, that she knew nothing whatever of your
sister's movements."

"Which may have been true," he remarked in the complacent tone of one who
waits to formulate an unimpeachable theory.

"Good Lord! How?" I asked.

"Brenda may have been expected and not have arrived," he explained,
condescending, at last, to point out all the obvious inferences I had
missed. "In which case, my friend, Miss Banks's _suppressio veri_ was, in
my judgment, quite venial. Indeed, she was, if the facts are, as I
suppose, perfectly honest in her surprise. Let us assume that she had
arranged to let Brenda in, at say twelve-thirty, and having her father and
mother under her thumb, had warned them to take no notice if Racquet
started his cursed shindy in the middle of the night. The servant may have
been told that Mr. Arthur might be coming. You will notice, also, that
Miss Banks had not, at one-thirty, gone to bed, although we may infer that
she had undressed. Furthermore, it is a fair assumption that she saw us
coming, and having, by then given up, it may be, any hope of seeing
Brenda, she was, no doubt, considerably at a loss to account for our
presence. Now, does that or does it not cover the facts, and does it
acquit Miss Banks of the charge of perjury?"

I was forced, something reluctantly, to concede an element of probability
in his inferences, although his argument following the legal tradition was
based on a kind of average law of human motive and took no account of
personal peculiarities. He did not try to consider what Anne would do in
certain circumstances, but what would be done by that vaguely-conceived
hermaphrodite who figures in the Law Courts and elsewhere as "Anyone." I
could hear Jervaise saying, "I ask you, gentlemen, what would you have
done, what would Anyone have done in such a case as this?"

"Hm!" I commented, and added, "It still makes Miss Banks appear
rather--double-faced."

"Can't see it," Jervaise replied. "Put yourself in her place and see how
it works!"

"Oh! Lord!" I murmured, struck by the grotesque idea of Jervaise
attempting to see life through the eyes of Anne. Imagine a rhinoceros
thinking itself into the experiences of a skylark!

Jervaise bored ahead, taking no notice of my interruption. "Assuming for
the moment the general probability of my theory," he said, "mayn't we
hazard the further assumption that Brenda was going to the farm in the
first instance to meet Banks? His sister, we will suppose, being willing
to sanction such a more or less chaperoned assignation. Then, when the
pair didn't turn up, she guesses that the meeting is off for some reason
or another, but obviously her friendship for Brenda--to say nothing of
loyalty to her brother--would make her conceal the fact of the proposed
assignation from us. Would you call that being 'double-faced'? I
shouldn't."

"Oh! yes; it's all very reasonable," I agreed petulantly. "But how does it
affect the immediate situation? Do you, for instance, expect to find your
sister at home when we get back?"

"I do," assented Jervaise definitely. "I believe that Miss Banks had some
good reason for being so sure that we should find her there."

I am not really pig-headed. I may not give way gracefully to such an
opponent as Jervaise, but I do not stupidly persist in a personal opinion
through sheer obstinacy. And up to Jervaise's last statement, his general
deductions were, I admitted to myself, not only within the bounds of
probability but, also, within distance of affording a tolerable
explanation of Anne's diplomacy during our interview. But--and I secretly
congratulated myself on having exercised a subtler intuition in this one
particular, at least--I did not believe that Anne expected us to find
Brenda at the Hall on our return. I remembered that anxious pucker of the
brow and the pathetic insistence on the belief--or might it not better be
described as a hope?--that Brenda had done nothing final.

"You haven't made a bad case," I conceded; "but I differ as to your last
inference."

"You don't think we shall find Brenda at home?"

"I do not," I replied aggressively.

I expected him to bear me down under a new weight of argument founded on
the psychology of Anyone, and I was startled when he suddenly dropped the
lawyer and let out a whole-hearted "Damnation," that had a ring of fine
sincerity.

I changed my tone instantly in response to that agreeably human note.

"I may be quite mistaken, of course," I said. "I hope to goodness I am. By
the way, do you know if she has taken any luggage with her?"

"Can't be sure," Jervaise said. "Olive's been looking and there doesn't
seem to be anything missing, but we've no idea what things she brought
down from town with her. If she'd been making plans beforehand..."

We came out of the wood at that point in our discussion, and almost at the
same moment the last barrier of cloud slipped away from before the moon.
She was in her second quarter, and seemed to be indolently rolling down
towards the horizon, the whole pose of the scene giving her the effect of
being half-recumbent.

I turned and looked at Jervaise and found him facing me with the full
light of the moon on his face. He was frowning, not with the domineering
scowl of the cross-examining counsel, but with a perplexed, inquiring
frown that revealed all the boy in him.

Once at Oakstone he had got into a serious scrape that had begun in
bravado and ended by a public thrashing. He had poached a trout from the
waters of a neighbouring landowner, who had welcomed the opportunity to
make himself more than usually objectionable. And on the morning before
his thrashing, Jervaise had come into my study and confessed to me that he
was dreading the coming ordeal. He was not afraid of the physical pain, he
told me, but of the shame of the thing. We were near to becoming friends
that morning. He confessed to no one but me. But when the affair was
over--he bore himself very well--he resumed his usual airs of superiority,
and snubbed me when I attempted to sympathise with him.

And I saw, now, just the same boyish dread and perplexity that I had seen
when he made his confession to me at Oakstone. He looked to me, indeed,
absurdly unchanged by the sixteen years that had separated the two
experiences.

"You know, Melhuish," he said; "I'm not altogether blaming Brenda in one
way."

"Do you think she's really in love with Banks?" I asked.

"I don't know," he said. "How can any one know? But it has been going on a
long time--weeks, anyhow. They were all getting nervous about it at home.
The mater told me when I came down this afternoon. She wanted me to talk
to B. about it. I was going to. She doesn't take any notice of Olive.
Never has." He stopped and looked at me with an appeal in his face that
begged contradiction.

We were standing still in the moonlight at the edge of the wood and the
accident of our position made me wonder if Jervaise's soul also hesitated
between some gloomy prison of conventional success and the freedom of
beautiful desires. I could find no words, however, to press that
speculation and instead I attempted, rather nervously, to point the way
towards what I regarded as the natural solution of the immediate problem.
"Come," I said, "the idea of a marriage between Banks and your sister
doesn't appear so unreasonable. The Bankses are evidently good old yeoman
stock on the father's side. It is a mere accident of luck that you should
be the owners of the land and not they."

"Theoretically, yes!" he said with a hint of impatience. "But we've got to
consider the opinions--prejudices, if you like--of all my people--to say
nothing of the neighbours."

"Oh! put the neighbours first," I exclaimed. "It's what we think other
people will think that counts with most of us."

"It isn't," Jervaise returned gloomily. "You don't understand what the
idea of family means to people like my father and mother. They've been
brought up in it. It has more influence with them than religion. They'd
prefer any scandal to a mesalliance."

"In your sister's case?" I put in, a trifle shocked by the idea of the
scandal, and then discovered that he had not been thinking of Brenda.

"Perhaps not in that case," he said, "but..." he paused noticeably before
adding, "The principle remains the same."

"Isn't it chiefly a matter of courage?" I asked. "It isn't as if ... the
mesalliance were in any way disgraceful."

I can't absolve myself from the charge of hypocrisy in the making of that
speech. I was thinking of Jervaise and Anne, and I did not for one moment
believe that Anne would ever marry him. My purpose was, I think,
well-intentioned. I honestly believed that it would be good for him to
fall in love with Anne and challenge the world of his people's opinion for
her sake. But I blame myself, now, for a quite detestable lack of
sincerity in pushing him on. I should not have done it if I had thought he
had a real chance with her. Life is very difficult; especially for the
well-intentioned.

Jervaise shrugged his shoulders. "It's all so infernally complicated by
this affair of Brenda's," he said.

Yet it has seemed simple enough to him, I reflected, an hour before. "Kick
_him_ and bring _her_ home," had been his ready solution of the
difficulties he thought were before us. Evidently Anne's behaviour during
our talk at the farm had had a considerable effect upon his opinions.
That, and the moon. I feel strongly inclined to include the moon--lazily
declining now towards the ambush of a tumulus-shaped hill, crowned, as is
the manner of that country, with a pert little top-knot of trees.

"Complicated or simplified?" I suggested.

"Complicated; damnably complicated," he replied irritably. "Brenda's a
little fool. It isn't as if she were in earnest."

"Then you don't honestly believe that she's in love with Banks?" I asked,
remembering his "I don't know. How can any one know," of a few minutes
earlier.

"She's so utterly unreliable--in every way," he equivocated. "She always
has been. She isn't the least like the rest of us."

"Don't you count yourself as another exception?" I asked.

"Not in that way, Brenda's way," he said. "She's scatter-brained; you
can't get round that. Going off after the dance in that idiotic way. It's
maddening."

"Well, there are two questions that must be resolved before we can get any
further," I commented. "The first is whether your sister has gone
back--she may have been safe in bed for the last hour and a half for all
we know. And the second is whether she is honestly in love with Banks.
From what I've heard of him, I should think it's very likely," I added
thoughtfully.

Jervaise had his hands in his pockets and was staring up at the moon.
"He's not a bad chap in some ways," he remarked, "but there's no getting
over the fact that he's our chauffeur."

I saw that. No badge could be quite so disgraceful in the eyes of the
Jervaises as the badge of servitude. Our talk there, by the wood, had
begun to create around us all the limitations of man's world. I was
forgetting that we were moving in the free spaces of a planetary republic.
And then I looked up and saw the leaning moon, whimsically balanced on the
very crown of the topknot that gave a touch of impudence to the
pudding-basin hill.

"What's the name of that hill?" I asked.

He looked at it absently for a moment before he said, "The people about
here call it 'Jervaise Clump.' It's a landmark for miles."

There was no getting away from it. The Jervaises had conquered all this
land and labelled it. I watched the sharp edge of the tree-clump slowly
indenting the rounded back of the moon; and it seemed to me that
Jervaise-Clump was the solid permanent thing; the moon a mere incident of
the night.

"Oh! Lord! Lord! What bosh it all is!" I exclaimed.

"All what?" Jervaise asked sharply.

"This business of distinctions; of masters and servants; of families in
possession and families in dependence," I enunciated.

"It isn't such dangerous bosh as socialism," Jervaise replied.

"I wasn't thinking of socialism," I said; "I was thinking of
interplanetary space."

Jervaise blew contemptuously. "Don't talk rot," he said, and I realised
that we were back again on the old footing of our normal relations.
Nevertheless I made one more effort.

"It isn't rot," I said. "If it is, then every impulse towards beauty and
freedom is rot, too." (I could not have said that to Jervaise in a house,
but I drew confidence from the last tip of the moon beckoning farewell
above the curve of the hill.) "Your, whatever it is you feel for Miss
Banks--things like that ... all our little efforts to get away from these
awful, clogging human rules."

I had given him his opportunity and he took it. He was absolutely
ruthless. "No one but a fool tries to be superhuman," he said. "Come on!"

He had turned and was walking back in the direction of the Hall, and I
followed him, humiliated and angry.

It was so impossible for me at that moment to avoid the suspicion that he
had led me on by his appealing confidences solely in order to score off me
when I responded. It is not, indeed, surprising that that should be my
reaction while the hurt of his sneer still smarted. For he had pricked me
on a tender spot. I realised the weakness of what I had said; and it was a
characteristic weakness. I had been absurdly unpractical, as usual, aiming
like a fool, as Jervaise had said, at some "superhuman" ideal of freedom
that perhaps existed solely in my own imagination; and would certainly be
regarded by Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise and their circle of county friends as
the vapourings of a weak mind. In short, Jervaise had made me aware of my
own ineptitude, and it took me a full ten minutes before I could feel
anything but resentment.

We had passed back through the kitchen garden with its gouty espaliers,
and come into the pleasance before I forgave him. According to his habit,
he made no apology for his rudeness, but his explicit renewal of
confidence in me more nearly approached an overt expression of desire for
my friendship than anything I had ever known him to show hitherto.

"Look here, Melhuish," he said, stopping suddenly in the darkness of the
garden. I could not "look" with much effect, but I replied, a trifle
sulkily, "Well? What?"

"If she hasn't come back..." he said.

"I don't see that we can do anything more till to-morrow," I replied.

"No use trying to find her, of course," he agreed, irritably, "but we'd
better talk things over with the governor."

"If I can be of any help..." I remarked elliptically.

"You won't be if you start that transcendental rot," he returned, as if he
already regretted his condescension.

"What sort of rot do you want me to talk?" I asked.

"Common sense," he said.

I resisted the desire to say that I was glad he acknowledged the Jervaise
version of common sense to be one kind of rot.

"All serene," I agreed.

He did not thank me.

And when I looked back on the happenings of the two hours that had elapsed
since Jervaise had fetched me out of the improvised buffet, I was still
greatly puzzled to account for his marked choice of me as a confidant. It
was a choice that seemed to signify some weakness in him. I wondered if he
had been afraid to trust himself alone with Anne at the Farm; if he were
now suffering some kind of trepidation at the thought of the coming
interview with his father? I found it so impossible to associate any idea
of weakness with that bullying mask which was the outward expression of
Frank Jervaise.




IV

IN THE HALL


We found the family awaiting us in the Hall--Mr. and Mrs. Jervaise, Olive,
and "Ronnie" Turnbull, whose desire to become one of the family by
marrying its younger daughter was recognised and approved by every one
except the young lady herself. Ronnie had evidently been received into the
fullest confidence.

We had come in by the back door and made our way through the rather arid
cleanliness of the houses' administrative departments, flavoured with a
smell that combined more notably the odours of cooking and plate-polish.
The transition as we emerged through the red baize door under the majestic
panoply of the staircase, was quite startling. It was like passing from
the desolate sanitation of a well-kept workhouse straight into the lighted
auditorium of a theatre. That contrast dramatised, for me, the Jervaises'
tremendous ideal of the barrier between owner and servant; but it had,
also, another effect which may have been due to the fact that it was, now,
three o'clock in the morning.

For just at the moment of our transition I had the queerest sense not only
of having passed at some previous time through a precisely similar
experience, but, also, of taking part in a ridiculous dream. At that
instant Jervaise Hall, its owners, dependants and friends, had the air of
being not realities but symbols pushed up into my thought by some prank of
the fantastic psyche who dwells in the subconscious. I should not have
been surprised at any incongruity in the brief passing of that illusion.

The sensation flashed up and vanished; but it left me with the excited
feeling of one who has had a vision of something transcendental, something
more vivid and real than the common experiences of life--just such a
feeling as I have had about some perfectly absurd dream of the night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Mr. Jervaise was a man of nearly sixty, I suppose, with a clean-shaven
face, a longish nose, and rather loose cheeks which fell, nevertheless,
into firm folds and gave him a look of weak determination. I should have
liked to model his face in clay; his lines were of the kind that give the
amateur a splendid chance in modelling.

Mrs. Jervaise was taller and thinner than her husband, but lost something
by always carrying her head with a slight droop as if she were for ever
passing through a low doorway. Her features were sharper than his--she had
a high hawk nose and a thin line of a mouth--but either they were
carelessly arranged or their relative proportions were bad, for I never
felt the least desire to model her. Jervaise's face came out as a
presentable whole, my memory of his wife delivers the hawk nose as the one
salient object of what is otherwise a mere jumble.

Old Jervaise certainly looked the more aristocratic of the pair, but Mrs.
Jervaise was a woman of good family. She had been a Miss Norman before her
marriage--one of the Shropshire Normans.

       *       *       *       *       *

The four people in the Hall looked as if they had reached the stage of
being dreadfully bored with each other when we arrived. They did not hear
us immediately, and as my momentary dream dissolved I had an impression of
them all as being on the verge of a heartrending yawn. They perked up
instantly, however, when they saw us, turning towards us with a movement
that looked concerted and was in itself a question.

Frank Jervaise, striding on ahead of me, answered at once, with a gloomy
shake of his head.

"Isn't she there?" his mother asked. And "Hasn't she been there at all?"
she persisted when Frank returned a morose negative.

"Who did you see?" put in young Turnbull.

"Miss Banks," Frank said.

"You are quite sure that Brenda hadn't been there?" Olive Jervaise added
by way of rounding up and completing the inquiry.

It was then Frank's turn to begin an unnecessary interrogation by saying
"She isn't here, then?" He must have known that she was not, by their
solicitude; but if he had not put that superfluous question, I believe I
should; though I might not have added as he did, "You're absolutely
certain?"

Young Turnbull then exploded that phase of the situation by remarking, "I
suppose you know that the car's gone?"

Frank was manifestly shocked by that news.

"Good Lord! no, I didn't. How do you know?" he said.

"I left my own car in the ditch, just outside the Park," Ronnie explained.
"Don't know in the least how it happened. Suppose I was thinking of
something else. Anyway, I've fairly piled her up, I'm afraid. I was coming
back from the vicarage, you know. And then, of course, I walked up here,
and Mr. Jervaise was good enough to offer me your car to get home in; and
when we went out to the garage, it had gone."

"But was it there when you went to get your own car?" Frank asked.

"I'm bothered if I know," Ronnie confessed. "I've been trying hard to
remember."

Mr. Jervaise sighed heavily and took a little stroll across to the other
side of the Hall. He seemed to me to be more perturbed and unhappy than
any of the others.

Frank stood in a good central position and scowled enormously, while his
mother, his sister, and Ronnie waited anxiously for the important decision
that he was apparently about to deliver. And they still looked to him to
find some expedient when his impending judgment had taken form in the
obvious pronouncement, "Looks as if they'd gone off together, somewhere."

"It's very dreadful," Mrs. Jervaise said; and then Olive slightly lifted
the awful flatness of the dialogue by saying,--

"We ought to have guessed. It's absurd that we let the thing go on."

"One couldn't be sure," her mother protested.

"If you're going to wait till you're sure, of course..." Frank remarked
brutally, with a shrug of his eyebrows that effectively completed his
sentence.

"It was so impossible to believe that she would do a thing like that," his
mother complained.

"Point is, what's to be done now," Ronnie said. "By gad, if I catch that
chap, I'll wring his neck."

Mr. Jervaise, who was taking a lonely promenade up and down the far side
of the Hall, looked up more hopefully at this threat.

"Oh! we can _catch_ him," Frank commented. "He has stolen the car, for one
thing..." his inflection implied that catching Banks might be only the
beginning of the trouble.

"Well, once we've got him," returned Ronnie hopefully.

"Don't be an ass," Frank snubbed him. "We can't advertise it all over the
county that he has gone off with Brenda."

"I don't see..." Ronnie began, but Mrs. Jervaise interrupted him.

"It was so unfortunate that the Atkinsons should have been here," she
remarked.

"Every one will know, in any case," Olive added.

Those avowals of their real and altogether desperate cause for distress
raised the emotional tone of the two Jervaise women, and for the first
time since I had come into the Hall, they looked at me with a hint of
suspicion. They made me feel that I was an outsider, who might very well
take this opportunity to withdraw.

I was on the point of accepting the hint when Frank Jervaise dragged me
into the conclave.

"What do you think, Melhuish?" he asked, and then they all turned to me as
if I might be able in some miraculous way to save the situation. Even old
Jervaise paused in his melancholy pacing and waited for my answer.

"There is so little real evidence, at present," I said, feeling their need
for some loophole and searching my mind to discover one for them.

"It really does seem almost impossible that Brenda should have--run away
with that man," Mrs. Jervaise pleaded with the beginning of a gesture that
produced the effect of wanting to wring her hands.

"She's under age, too," Frank put in.

"Does that mean they can't get married?" asked Ronnie.

"Not legally," Frank said.

"It's such madness, such utter madness," his mother broke out in a tone
between lament and denunciation. But she pulled herself up immediately and
came back to my recent contribution as presenting the one possible straw
that still floated in this drowning world. "But, as Mr. Melhuish says,"
she went on with a little gasp of annoyance, "we really have very little
evidence, as yet."

"It has occurred to me to wonder," I tried, "whether Miss Jervaise might
not have been moved by a sudden desire to drive the car by moonlight..." I
was going on to defend my suggestion by pleading that such an impulse
would, so far as I could judge, be quite in character, but no further
argument was needed. I had created a sensation. My feeble straw had
suddenly taken the form of a practicable seaworthy raft, big enough to
accommodate all the family--with the one exception of Frank, who, as it
were, grasped the edge of this life-saving apparatus of mine, and tested
it suspiciously. His preliminary and perfectly futile opening to the
effect that the moon had already set, was, however, smothered in the
general acclamation.

"Oh! of _course_! So she may!" Mrs. Jervaise exclaimed.

"Well, we might have thought of that, certainly," Olive echoed. "It would
be so _like_ Brenda."

While Ronnie hopefully murmured "That _is_ possible, quite possible," as a
kind of running accompaniment.

Then Mr. Jervaise began to draw in to the family group, with what seemed
to me quite an absurd air of meaning to find a place on the raft of the
big rug by the fireplace. Indeed, they had all moved a little closer
together. Only Frank maintained his depressing air of doubt.

"Been an infernally long time," he said. "What's it now? Half-past three?"

"She may have had an accident," Olive suggested cheerfully.

"Or gone a lot farther than she originally meant to," Ronnie substituted;
the suggestion of an accident to Brenda obviously appearing less desirable
to him than it apparently did to Brenda's sister.

"It seems to me," Mr. Jervaise said, taking the lead for the first time,
"that there may very well be half a dozen reasons for her not having
returned; but I can't think of one that provides the semblance of an
excuse for her going in the first instance. Brenda must be--severely
reprimanded. It's intolerable that she should be allowed to go on like
this."

"She has always been spoilt," Olive said in what I thought was a slightly
vindictive aside.

"She's so impossibly headstrong," deplored Mrs. Jervaise.

Her husband shook his head impatiently. "There is a limit to this kind of
thing," he said. "She must be made to understand--_I_ will make her
understand that we draw the line at midnight adventures of this kind."

Mrs. Jervaise and Olive agreed warmly with that decision, and the three of
them drew a little apart, discussing, I inferred, the means that were to
be adopted for the limiting of the runaway, when she returned. But I was
puzzled to know whether they were finally convinced of the truth of the
theory they had so readily adopted. Were they deceiving, or trying very
hard, indeed, to deceive themselves into the belief that the whole affair
was nothing but a prank of Brenda's? I saw that my casual suggestion had a
general air of likelihood, but if I had been in their place, I should have
demanded evidence before I drew much consolation from so unsupported a
conclusion.

I joined young Turnbull.

"Good idea of yours, Melhuish," Ronnie said.

Frank grunted.

"I've no sort of grounds for it, you know," I explained. "It was only a
casual suggestion."

"Jolly convincing one, though," Turnbull congratulated me. "So exactly the
sort of thing she would do, isn't it, Frank?"

"Shouldn't have thought she'd have been gone so long," Jervaise replied.
He looked at me as he continued, "And how does it fit with that notion of
ours about Miss Banks having expected her?"

"That was only a guess," I argued.

"Better evidence for it than you had for your guess," he returned, and we
drifted into an indeterminate wrangle, each of us defending his own theory
rather because he had had the glory of originating it than because either
of us had, I think, the least faith in our explanations.

It was Ronnie who, picking up the thread of our deductions from the Home
Farm interview in the course of our discussion, sought to reconcile us and
our theories.

"She might have meant to go up to the Farm," he suggested, "and changed
her mind when she got outside. Nothing very unlikely in that."

"But why the devil should she have made an appointment at the Home Farm in
the first instance?" Frank replied with some cogency.

"If she ever did," I put in unwisely, thereby provoking a repetition of
the evidence afforded by Miss Banks's behaviour, particularly the damning
fact that she, alone, had responded to Racquet's demand for our instant
annihilation.

And while we went on with our pointless arguments and the other little
group of three continued to lay plans for the re-education of Brenda, the
depression of a deeper and deeper ennui weighed upon us all. The truth is,
I think, that we were all waiting for the possibility of the runaway's
return, listening for the sound of the car, and growing momentarily more
uneasy as no sound came. No doubt the Jervaises were all very sleepy and
peevish, and the necessity of restraining themselves before Turnbull and
myself added still another to their many sources of irritation.

I put the Jervaises apart in this connection, because Ronnie was certainly
very wide awake and I had no inclination whatever to sleep. My one longing
was to get back, alone, into the night. I was fretting with the fear that
the dawn would have broken before I could get away. I had made up my mind
to watch the sunrise from "Jervaise Clump."

It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was
attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible. I saw
the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic
fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and
made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must
come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a
sentence--undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious
craving that was obsessing her.

"Oh, dear!" she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and
then "Dear me!" Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to
draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that
relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox
genteel attitude.

"I don't know when I've been so tired," she apologised.

But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all
like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to
stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do
Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of
gentility.

"Oh! Lord, mater, you've started us now," he said, and gave away almost
sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively
racked us with the longing to imitate him.

"Really, my dear, no necessity for you," began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more
or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, "no
necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any
case, _do_ anything until the morning."

"Even if she comes in, now," supplemented Olive.

"As I'm almost sure she will," affirmed Mrs. Jervaise.

And she must have put something of genuine confidence into her statement,
for automatically we all stopped talking for a few seconds and listened
again with the ears of faith for the return of the car.

"But as I said," Olive began again, abruptly ending the unhopeful suspense
of our pause, "there's nothing more we can do by sitting up. And there's
certainly no need for you to overtire yourself, mother."

"No, really not," urged Ronnie politely, "nor for you, either, sir," he
added, addressing his host. "What I mean is, Frank and I'll do all that."

"Rather, let's get a drink," Frank agreed.

We wanted passionately to get away from each other and indulge ourselves
privately in a very orgie of gapes and stretchings. And yet, we stuck
there, idiotically, making excuses and little polite recommendations for
the others to retire, until Frank with a drastic quality of determination
that he sometimes showed, took command.

"Go on, mater," he said; "you go to bed." And he went up to her, kissed
her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in
the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint protestations
of apology.

Olive followed, and with a last feint of hospitality, her father brought
up the tail of the procession.

"Coming for a drink?" Frank asked me with a jerk of his head towards the
extemporised buffet.

"Well, no, thanks. I think not," I said, seeking the relief afforded by
the women's absence; although, now, that I could indulge my desire without
restraint, the longing to gape had surprisingly vanished.

"Going to bed?" Jervaise suggested.

"Yes. Bed's the best place, just now," I lied.

"Right oh! Good-night, old chap," Ronnie said effusively.

I pretended to be going upstairs and they did not wait for me to
disappear. As soon as they had left the Hall, I sneaked down again,
recovered from the cloak-room the light overcoat I had worn on our
expedition to the Farm--I have no idea to whom that overcoat
belonged--borrowed a cap, and let myself out stealthily by the front door.

As I quietly shut the door behind me, a delicious whiff of night-stock
drifted by me, as if it had waited there for all those long hours seeking
entrance to the stale, dry air of the Hall.

       *       *       *       *       *

And it must have been, I think, that scent of night-stock which gave me
the sense of a completed episode, or first act, as I stood alone, at last,
on the gravel sweep before the Hall. Already the darkness was lifting. The
dawn was coming high up in the sky, a sign of fair weather.

I have always had a sure sense of direction, and I turned instinctively
towards the landmark of my promised destination, although it was invisible
from that side of the Hall--screened by the avenue of tall forest trees,
chiefly elms, that led up from the principal entrance to the Park. I had
noticed one side road leading into this avenue as I had driven up from the
station the previous afternoon, and I sought that turning now, with a
feeling of certainty that it would take me in the right direction. As,
indeed, it did; for it actually skirted the base of "Jervaise Clump,"
which touched the extreme edge of the Park on that side.

As I cautiously felt my way down the avenue--it was still black dark under
the dark trees--and later up the tunnel of the side road which I hit upon
by an instinct that made me feel for it at the precise moment when I
reached the point of its junction with the avenue--I returned with a sense
of satisfaction to the memory of the last four hours. I was conscious of
some kind of plan in the way the comedy of Brenda's disappearance had been
put before us. I realised that, as an art form, the plan was essentially
undramatic, but the thought of it gave me, nevertheless, a distinct
feeling of pleasure.

I saw the experience as a prelude to this lonely adventure of mine--a
prelude full of movement and contrast; but I had no premonition of any
equally diverting sequel.

The daylight was coming, and I believed, a trifle regretfully, that that
great solvent of all mysteries would display these emotions of the night
as the phantasmagoria of our imagination.

Before I had reached the end of the tunnel through the wood and had come
out into the open whence I could, now, see the loom of Jervaise Clump
swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided
that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had
fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the
motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not
be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had
accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I
had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if
they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other
indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight
drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had
said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.

As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was
constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the
Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the
statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly
headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me,
whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.

It isn't one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.




V

DAYBREAK


He was whistling Schubert's setting of "Who is Sylvia?" and as I climbed
slowly and as silently as I could towards him, I fitted the music to the
words of the second verse:--

  Is she kind as she is fair?
  For beauty lives with kindness.

Only a man in love, I thought, could be whistling that air with such
attention and accuracy. He hit that unusual interval--is it an augmented
seventh?--with a delicacy that was quite thrilling.

He had the world to himself, as yet. The birds of the morning had not
begun their orisons, while the birds of the night, the owls and the
corncrakes had, happily, retired before the promise of that weakening
darkness which seemed nevertheless to have reached a moment of
suspense--indeed, I fancied that it was darker, now, than when I had come
out of the Hall a quarter of an hour before.

The whistler had stopped before I reached the crest of the hill, and after
trying vainly to locate his whereabouts in the gloom, I leaned up against
one of the outermost trunks of the perky little clump of trees, and facing
East awaited developments. A thin, cold wind had sprung up, and was
quietly stirring the leaves above me to an uneasy sibilance. I heard, now,
too, an occasional sleepy twitter as if a few members of the orchestra had
come into their places and were indolently testing the tune of their
pipes. It came into my mind that the cold stir of air was the spirit of
the dying night, fleeing westward before the sun. Also, I found myself
wondering what would be the effect on us all if one morning we waited in
vain for the sunrise? I tried to picture my own emotions as the truth was
slowly borne in upon me that some unprecedented calamity had silently and
without any premonition befallen the whole world of men. Would one crouch
in a terror of apprehension? I could not see it that way. I believed that
I should be trembling with a furious excitement, stirred to the very
depths by so inspiring and adventurous a miracle. I had forsaken my
speculation and was indulging in the philosophical reflection that a real
and quite unaccountable miracle, the more universal the better, would be
the most splendid justification of life I could possibly conceive, when
the whistler began again, only a few yards away from me.

I could just see him now, sitting propped against the trunk of another
tree, but I waited until he had finished what I chose to believe was the
third verse of his lyric before I hailed him. It came to me that I might
test his quality by continuing the play in proper form, so when he paused,
I went on with the speech of the "host" which immediately follows the song
in "The Two Gentlemen of Verona."

"How now?" I said. "Are you sadder than you were before?"

He did not move, not even to turn his head towards me, and I inferred that
he was aware of my presence before I spoke.

"You, one of the search party?" he asked.

I went over and sat down by him. I felt that the situation was
sufficiently fantastic to permit of free speech. I did not know who he was
and I did not care. I only knew that I wanted to deliver myself of the
dreams my lack of sleep had robbed from me.

"The only one," I said, "unless you also belong to the very small and
select party of searchers."

I fancy that he turned his head a little towards me, but I kept my gaze
fixed on the indigo masses of the obscure prospect before us.

"Who are you looking for?" he asked.

"Not so much who as what," I said. "And even then it isn't so easy to
define. I've heard men call it beauty and mystery, and things like that;
but just now it seemed to me that what I wanted most was a universal
miracle--some really inexplicable happening that would upset every law the
physicists have ever stated. I was thinking, for instance, how thrilling
it would be if the sun did not rise this morning. One would know, then,
that all our scientific guesses at laws were just so many baby
speculations founded on nothing more substantial than a few thousand years
of experience which had, by some chance given always more or less the same
results. Like a long run on the red, you know."

"I know," he said. "Well? Go on."

I was greatly stimulated by his encouragement. Here, at last, was the
listener I had been waiting for all through the night.

"One gets so infernally sick of everything happening according to fixed
rules," I continued. "And the more you learn the nearer you are to the
deadly ability of being able to foretell the future. If we ever do reach
that point in our intellectual evolution, I only hope that I shan't be
there to see it. Imagine the awful ennui of a world where the expected
always happened, and next year's happenings were always expected! And yet
we go on seeking after knowledge, when we ought surely to avoid it, as the
universal kill joy."

"Hm!" commented my new friend on what I felt to be a note of doubtful
agreement.

"You don't agree with that?" I asked.

"Well, I see what you're after, in a way," he acknowledged; "but it
doesn't seem to me that it amounts to very much--practically."

I was a trifle disappointed. I had not expected any insistence on the
practical from a man who could whistle Schubert and Shakespeare to the
dawn.

"Oh, practically! Perhaps not," I replied with a hint of contempt for
anything so common.

He gave a little self-conscious laugh. "You can't get away from the
practical in this life," he said. "Even in--" He seemed to bite off the
beginning of confidence with an effort. "You may dream half the night," he
began again, with a thin assumption of making an impersonal statement,
"but before the night's over you'll come up against the practical, or the
practicable, or the proper right thing, or something, that makes you see
what a fool you are. The way this world's run, you can't avoid it,
anyhow."

I knew that what he said was true, but I found it damping. It fitted all
too well with the coming realism of day. The contours of the landscape
were slowly resigning themselves to the formal attitudes imposed upon them
by expectation. The blood of colour was beginning to run weakly through
the monochrome. The nearer slopes of the hill and the leaves of the trees
were already professing a resolute green. Moment by moment the familiar
was taking prudent shape, preparing itself for the autocrat whose
outriders were multitudinously busy about their warnings of his approach.
Presently the scene would take on the natural beauty of our desire, but
the actual process of transformation rather depressed me that morning. I
had been so deeply in love with the night.

I took up my companion's last sentence--spoken, I fancied, with a
suggestion of brooding antagonism.

"You think the world might be 'run,' at least, more interestingly?" I put
in.

"More sensibly," he said in a voice that hinted a reserve of violence.
"There's no _sense_ in it, the way we look at things. Only we don't look
at 'em, most of us, not with any intelligence. We just take everything for
granted because we happen to be used to it, that's all."

"But would any form of socialism..." I tried tentatively.

"I don't know that I'm a socialist," he returned. "I don't belong to any
union, or anything of that kind." He stopped and looked at me with a
defiant stare that was quite visible now. "You know who I am, I suppose?"
he challenged me.

"No idea," I said.

"Banks, the chauffeur," he said, as if he were giving himself up as a
well-known criminal.

I was not entirely unprepared for that reply, but I had no tactful answer
to make. I rejected the spontaneous impulse that arose, as I thought quite
fantastically, to say "I believe I have met your sister;" and fell back on
an orthodox "Well?" I tried to convey the effect that I still waited to be
shocked.

"I suppose you're staying up at the Hall?" he said.

"For the week-end only," I admitted.

"Been a pretty fuss there, I take it?" he said.

"Some," I acknowledged.

He set his resolute-looking mouth and submitted me to cross-examination.

"Been looking for me?" he began.

"In a way. Frank Jervaise and I went up to your father's house."

"What time?"

"Between two and three."

"Not since?"

"No; we left about half-past two."

"Is she back?"

"Who?" I asked. I was thinking of his sister, and could find no
application for this question.

"Miss Jervaise."

"Oh--er--Miss Brenda? No. She hadn't come in when I left the house."

"What time was that?"

"About four. I came straight here."

"Not back, eh?" he commented with a soft, low whistle, that mingled, I
thought, something of gladness with its surprise.

"You don't know where she is, then?" I ventured.

He turned and looked at me suspiciously. "I don't see why I should help
your friends," he said.

I realised that my position was a difficult one. My sympathies were
entirely with Banks. I felt that if there was to be any question of making
allowances, I wanted to be on the side of Brenda and the Home Farm. But,
at the same time, I could not deny that I owed something--loyalty, was
it?--to the Jervaises. I pondered that for a few seconds before I spoke
again, and by then I had found what I believed to be a tolerable attitude,
though I was to learn later that it compromised me no less than if I had
frankly thrown in my lot with the Banks faction.

"You are quite right," I said. "And I would sooner you gave me no
confidences, now I come to think of it. But I should like you to know, all
the same, that I'm not taking sides in this affair. I have no intention,
for instance, of telling them at the Hall that I've seen you."

The daylight was flooding up from the North-West, now, in a great stream
that had flushed the whole landscape with colour; and I could see the full
significance of honest inquiry in my companion's face as he probed me with
his stare. But I could meet his gaze without confusion. My purpose was
single enough, and if I had had a moment's doubt of him when he failed to
respond to my mood of fantasy; I was now fully prepared to accept him
without qualification.

He was not like his sister in appearance. He favoured the paternal stock,
I inferred. He was blue-eyed and fairer than Anne, and the tan of his face
was red where hers was dusky. Nevertheless, I saw a likeness between them
deeper than some family trick of expression which, now and again, made me
feel their kinship. For Banks, too, gave me the impression of having a
soul that came something nearer the surface of life than is common in
average humanity--a look of vitality, zest, ardour--I fumbled for a more
significant superlative as I returned his stare. And yet behind that
ardour there was, in Arthur Banks, at least, a hint of determination and
shrewdness that I felt must be inherited from the sound yeoman stock of
his father.

Our pause of mutual investigation ended in a smile. He held out his hand
with a pleasant frankness that somehow proclaimed the added colonial
quality of him.

"That's all right," he said, "but anyway I couldn't give you any
confidences, yet. I don't know myself, you see."

"Are you going back to the Hall?" I asked.

"I don't know that, either," he said, and added, "I shan't go back as the
chauffeur, anyway."

And, indeed, there was little of the chauffeur in his appearance, just
then. He was wearing a light tweed suit and brown brogues, and his clothes
sat upon him with just that touch of familiarity, of negligence, that your
professional servant's mufti can never accomplish.

There was a new air of restlessness about him since he had put me under
cross-examination. He looked round him in the broadening day as if he were
in search of something, or some one, hopefully yet half-despairingly
expected.

"Look here--if you'd sooner I went..." I began.

He had risen to his feet after his last statement and was looking back
towards the Hall, but he faced me again when I spoke.

"Oh, no!" he said with a hint of weariness.

"It isn't likely that..." He broke off and threw himself moodily down on
the grass again before he continued, "It's not that I couldn't trust you.
But you can see for yourself that it's better I shouldn't. When you get
back to the Hall, you might be asked questions and for your own sake it'd
look better if you didn't know the answers."

"Oh, quite," I agreed, and added, "I'll stay and see the sun rise."

"You won't see the sun for some time," he remarked. "There'll be a lot of
cloud and mist for it to break through. It's going to be a scorcher
to-day."

"Good," I replied; and for a few minutes we discussed weather signs like
any other conventional Englishmen. A natural comparison led us presently
to the subject of Canada. But through it all he bore himself as a man with
a preoccupation he could not forget; and I was looking for a good opening
to make an excuse of fatigue and go back to the Hall, when something of
the thought that was intriguing him broke through the surface of his talk.

"I'm going back there as soon as I can," he said with a sudden impatience.
"There's room to turn round in Canada without hitting up against a notice
board and trespassing on the preserves of some landed proprietor. I'd
never have come home if it hadn't been for the old people. They thought
chauffering for Mr. Jervaise would be a chance for me! Anyhow my father
did. He's got the feeling of being dependent. It's in his bones like it is
with, all of 'em--on the estate. It's a tradition. Lord, the old man would
be horrified, if he knew! The Jervaises are a sort of superior creation to
him. We've been their tenants for God knows how many hundred years. And
serfs before that, I suppose. I get the feeling myself, sometimes. It's
infectious. When you see every one kow-towing to old Jervaise as if he
were the angel Gabriel, you begin to feel as if there must be something in
it."

The full day had come, and the cold draught of air that had preceded the
sunrise came now from behind me as if the spirits of the air had
discovered that their panic-stricken flight had been a mistake and were
tentatively returning to inquire into the new conditions. The birds were
fully awake now, and there was a tremendous gossiping and chattering going
on, that made me think of massed school-children in a railway station,
twittering with the excitement of their coming excursion. In the
North-East the gray wall of mist was losing the hardness of its edge, and
behind the cloud the sky was bleaching to an ever paler blue.

"And yet," I said, as my companion paused, "the Jervaises aren't anything
particular as a family. They haven't done anything, even in the usual way,
to earn ennoblement or fame."

"They've squatted," Banks said, "that's what they've done. Set themselves
down here in the reign of Henry II., and sat tight ever since--grabbing
commons and so on, now and again, in the usual way, of course. The village
is called after them, Thorp-Jervaise, and the woods and the hills, and
half the labourers in the neighbourhood have got names like Jarvey and
Jarvis. What I mean is that the Jervaises mayn't be of any account in
London, or even in the county, alongside of families like Lord
Garthorne's; but just round here they're the owners and always have been
since there have been any private owners. Their word's law. If you don't
like it, you can get out, and that's all there is about it." He gazed
thoughtfully in front of him and thrust out his lower lip. "I've got to
get out," he added, "unless..."

I hesitated to prompt him, fearing the possibly inquisitive sound of the
most indirect question, and after what I felt was a very pregnant silence,
he continued rather in the manner of one allusively submitting a case.

"But you get to a point where you feel as if no game's worth winning if
you can't play it fair and open."

"So long as the other side play fair with you," I commented.

"They can afford to," he returned. "They get every bit of pull there is to
have. I told you we've been tenants of the Home Farm ever since there's
been a Home Farm, but old Jervaise could turn my father out any time, at
six months' notice. Would, too. Probably have to, for the sake of public
opinion. Well, would you call that playing fair?"

"I shouldn't," I said with emphasis.

"Most people would," he replied gloomily. I was wondering what his own
"pull" might be, the pull he would not use because the use of it
conflicted with his ideal of playing the game. I was inclined, with a
foolish romanticism to toy with the notion of some old blood relationship
between the families of Jervaise and Banks--some carefully hidden scandal
that might even throw a doubt on the present owner's right of
proprietorship. I was still rebuilding that foolish, familiar story of the
lost heir, when my new friend put an end to further speculation by
saying,--

"But what's the good of thinking about that--yet? Why, I don't even
know..."

I could not resist a direct question this time. "Don't even know what?" I
asked.

"I was forgetting," he said. He got to his feet again, looked round for a
moment, and then gave a yawn which seemed to spring from a nervous rather
than a muscular origin.

"No good my compromising you, just now," he said with a friendly smile.
"You've probably guessed more, already, than'll be altogether convenient
for you when you see the family at breakfast. Perhaps, we'll meet again
some day."

"I'm staying here till Monday," I said.

"But I don't know if I am," he replied with a whimsical twist of his firm
mouth. "Well, so long," he went on quickly. "Glad to have met you,
anyway." He nodded with a repetition of that frank, engaging smile of his,
and turned away.

He did not take the road by which I had found Jervaise Clump, but
descended the hill on the opposite side; and, after he had gone for five
minutes or so, I got up and took a view of the prospect in that direction.
I had no thought of spying upon him. I just wished to see if the Home Farm
lay over there, as I guessed it must from my memory of the general lie of
the land during our moonlit return to the Hall.

I was right. The farm was clearly visible from the northern slope of the
hill--an L-shaped, low, white house with a high, red-tiled roof. It stood
on another little tumulus about a mile away, a small replica of Jervaise
Clump; and the whole house was visible above the valley wood that lay
between us.

At first I could not decide why the effect of the place gave me an
impression of being unusual, and finally decided that this apparent air of
individuality was due to the choice of site. In that country all the farms
were built in the lower lands, crouching under the lee of woods and hills,
humbly effacing themselves before the sovereignty of the Hall. The Home
Farm alone, as far as I could see, presented a composed and dignified face
to its overlord.

"There is a quality about these Bankses," I thought, and then corrected
the statement by adding, "about the children, at least." From what Arthur
Banks had said, I gathered that his father conformed to the faith of the
estate, both in act and spirit.

I stared at the Farm for a few minutes, wondering what that French wife
might be like. I found it difficult to picture the ci-devant governess in
those surroundings, and more particularly as the mother of these two
fascinating children. They, like their home, produced an effect of being
different from the common average....

I became aware that the green of woods and grass had leapt to attention,
and that sprawling shadows had suddenly come into being and were giving a
new solidity to the landscape. Also, I felt a touch of unexpected warmth
on my right cheek.

I returned to the place where Banks and I had talked, and sat down again
facing the glorious light of the delivered sun. And almost at once I was
overcome by an intense desire to sleep. My purpose of walking back to the
Hall, undressing and going to bed had become impossible. I stretched
myself full length on the turf, and surrendered myself, exquisitely, to
the care of the sunlight.




VI

MORNING


I awoke suddenly to the realisation of sound. The world about me was alive
with a murmurous humming. It was as if in passing through the silent
aisles of sleep, some door had been unexpectedly thrown open and let in
the tumultuous roar of life from without--or as if after a brief absence I
had returned and with one movement had re-established all the
communications of my body.

All sense of tiredness had left me. I opened my eyes and saw that the sun
had leapt far up into the sky. The whole population of Jervaise Clump was
plunged into the full bustle of its daily business. Industrious bees were
methodically visiting the buttercups; their bustling, commercial eagerness
in marked contrast to the bluebottles and flies that seemed to choose
their point of alighting with a sham intentness which did not disguise
their lack of any definite purpose. Now and again a feral, domineering
wasp would join the crowd, coming up with the air of a fussy, inquisitive
overseer.

I looked at my watch and found that the time was a quarter past eight. I
had been asleep for nearly three hours. I had no idea what time the
Jervaises had breakfast, but I knew that it was high time I got back to
the Hall and changed my clothes.

I unbuttoned my coat and looked down at my shirt front and thought how
incongruous and silly that absurd garb of evening dress appeared in those
surroundings.

And as I trotted back to the Hall, I found a symbol in my dress for the
drama of the night. It was, I thought, all artificial and unreal, now that
I looked back upon it in the blaze of a brilliant August morning.
Beginning with the foolishness of a dance at that time of year--even a
"tennis-dance" as they called it--the subsequent theatrical quality of the
night's adventure seemed to me, just then, altogether garish and
fantastic. I began to wonder how far I had dramatised and distorted the
actual events by the exercise of a romantic imagination? In the sweet
freshness of the familiar day, I found myself exceedingly inclined to be
rational. Also, I was aware of being quite unusually hungry.

The front door of the Hall was standing wide open, and save for a glimpse
of the discreet John very busy in his shirt-sleeves, I saw no one about. I
was glad to reach my room unobserved. I knew that my feeling was
unreasonable, but entering that sedate house, under the blaze of the
morning sun, I was ashamed of my tawdry dress. A sense of dissipation and
revelry seemed to hang about me--and of an uncivilised dirtiness.

A cold bath and a change of clothes, however, fully restored my
self-respect; and when I was summoned by the welcome sound of a booming
gong, the balance of sensation was kicking the other beam. My sleep in the
open had left me finally with a feeling of superiority. I was inclined to
despise the feeble, stuffy creatures who had been shut up in a house all
night.

I knew the topography of the house fairly well after my night's experience
of it, and inferred the breakfast-room without any difficulty. But when I
reached the door I stood and listened in considerable astonishment.
Luckily, I was not tempted to make the jaunty entrance my mood prompted. I
had not seen a soul as I had made my way from my room in the north wing
down into the Hall. The place seemed to be absolutely deserted. And, now,
in the breakfast-room an almost breathless silence was broken only by the
slow grumbling of one monotonous voice, undulating about the limited range
of a minor third, and proceeding with the steady fluency of a lunatic's
muttering. I suppose I ought to have guessed the reasonable origin of
those sounds, but I didn't, not even when the muttering fell to a pause
and was succeeded by a subdued chorus, that conveyed the effect of a score
of people giving a concerted but strongly-repressed groan. After that the
first voice began again, but this time it was not allowed to mumble
unsupported. A murmured chant followed and caricatured it, repeating as
far as I could make out the same sequence of sounds. They began "Ah! Fah!
Chah! Hen...." That continued for something like a minute before it came
to a ragged close with another groan. Then for a few seconds the original
voice continued its grumbling, and was followed by an immense quiet.

I stared through the open door of the Hall at the gay world of colour
outside and wondered if I was under the thrall of some queer illusion. But
as I moved towards the garden with a vague idea of regaining my sanity in
the open air, t