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The Jervaise Comedy by J. D. Beresford

J >> J. D. Beresford >> The Jervaise Comedy




On the other hand...? I had no idea what awaited me on the other hand. I
could see that I should have to accept the stigma that had been put upon
me; that I should be thrown into the company of a young woman whose
personality had extraordinarily attracted me, who probably detested me,
and who might now be engaged to a man I very actively disliked; that I
should involve myself in an affair that had not fully engaged my sympathy
(I still retained my feeling of compassion for old Jervaise); that I
should, in short, be choosing the path of greatest resistance and
unpleasantness, with no possibility of getting any return other than scorn
and disgrace.

I saw these alternatives in a flash, and no sane man would have hesitated
between them for one moment.

"But look here, Banks," I said. "What would your mother and--and your
sister say to having an unknown visitor foisted upon them without notice?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He shook his head. "We meant to go off together and chance it," he said.
"May as well tell you now. There's no secret about it among ourselves. And
then she came out to me on the hill without her things--just in a cloak.
Came to tell me it was all off. Said she wouldn't go, that way.... Well,
we talked.... Best part of three hours. And the end of it was, she came
back to the Farm."

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

"The elopement is," he said.

"But not the proposed marriage?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"And then she was afraid?"

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

I nodded sympathetically.

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

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

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

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

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

Banks smiled grimly. "He's nervous at dangerous corners, like you said,"
he returned. "However, we needn't go into that--the point is as I began to
tell you, that we've decided to face it out; and well, you saw me go up to
the Hall this morning."

"What happened?" I asked.

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

"And you?"

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

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

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

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

I returned to the subject in hand.

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

"Just stick to it," he said.

"You think they'll give way?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

I nodded and got out of the car.

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

"Alone?" I asked.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Not to me, though," I said.

He laughed. "Perhaps not," he agreed.

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

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

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

"Who is it, then?" I asked.

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

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

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




X

THE HOME FARM


I must own that I was distinctly uncomfortable as I followed Banks into
the same room in which I had sat on my previous visit to the Home Farm.
The influence of tradition and habit would not let me alone. I cared
nothing for the Jervaises' opinion, but I resented the unfairness of it
and had all the innocent man's longing to prove his innocence--a feat that
was now become for ever impossible. By accepting Banks's invitation, I had
confirmed the worst suspicions the Jervaises could possibly have harboured
against me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"But it is--partly," Brenda put in.

"My dear girl, do let's have the thing clear," her brother returned, but
she diverted his apparent intention of making a plain statement by an
impatient,--

"Oh! it's all _clear_ enough."

"But it isn't, by any means," Jervaise said.

"To us it is," Banks added, meaning, I presume, that he and Brenda had no
doubts as to their intentions.

"You're going to persist in the claim you made this morning?" Jervaise
asked.

Banks smiled and shrugged his shoulders.

"Don't be silly, Frank," Brenda interpreted. "You must know that we can't
do anything else."

"It's foolish to say you _can't_," he returned irritably, "when so
obviously you _can_."

"Well, anyway, we're going to," Banks affirmed with a slight
inconsequence.

"And do you purpose to stay on here?" Jervaise said sharply, as if he were
posing an insuperable objection.

"Not likely," Banks replied. "We're going to Canada, the whole lot of us."

"Your father and mother, too?"

"Yes, if I can persuade 'em; and I can," Banks said.

"You haven't tried yet?"

"No, I haven't."

"Don't they know anything about this? Anything, I mean, before last
night's affair?"

"Practically nothing at all," Banks said. "Of course, nothing whatever
about last night."

"And you honestly think..." began Jervaise.

"That'll be all right, won't it, Anne?" Banks replied.

But Anne, still leaning back in the corner of the settle, refused to
answer.

Jervaise turned and looked down at her. "If you all went...?" he said,
giving his incomplete sentence the sound of a question.

"Oh! I should certainly go, too," she replied.

Jervaise frowned moodily. I could see that he was caught in an awkward
dilemma, but I was not absolutely sure as to the form it took. Had Anne
made conditions? Her remark seemed, I thought, to hint a particular
stipulation. Had she tried to coerce him with the threat of accompanying
her brother to Canada unless the engagement to Brenda was openly
sanctioned by the family?

"But you must see how impossible it is," Jervaise said, still looking at
Anne.

"_We_ don't think so," Brenda put in.

"You don't understand," her brother returned savagely.

"_You_ don't," Brenda replied.

Jervaise snorted impatiently, but he had enough control of himself to
avoid the snare of being drawn into a bickering match.

"It isn't as if the decision rested with me," he went on, looking down at
the hearth-rug, but still, I fancy, addressing himself almost exclusively
to Anne. "I can't make my father and mother see things as you do. No one
could. Why can't you compromise?"

"Oh! _How_?" Brenda broke out with a fierce contempt.

"Agree to separate--for a time," Jervaise said. "Let Banks go to Canada
and start a farm or something, and afterwards you could join him without
any open scandal."

"Any mortal thing to save a scandal, of course," Brenda commented
scornfully.

"Would _you_ be prepared to do that?" Jervaise asked, turning to Banks.

I thought Banks seemed a trifle irresolute, as though the bribe of finally
possessing Brenda was tempting enough to outweigh any other consideration.
But he looked at her before replying, and her contemptuous shake of the
head was completely decisive. He could not question any determination of
hers.

"No, I wouldn't," he said.

"But look here, Brenda, why..." Jervaise began on a note of desperate
reasonableness.

"Because I'm going out _with_ him," Brenda said. They might have chased
that argument round for half an hour if Ronnie had not once more
interposed.

His dudgeon had been slowly giving place to a shocked surprise. It was
being borne in upon his reluctant mind that Brenda and Banks honestly
intended to get married. And here was Frank Jervaise, for some mistaken
purpose of his own, calmly admitting the possibility of the outrage,
instead of scorning the bare idea of it with violence.

"I think you're making a ghastly mistake, Frank," he said with a composure
that was intended to be extremely ominous.

Jervaise clutched at the interruption, probably to give himself a little
more time. The women were proving so unamenable to his excellent
reasoning. One simply contradicted him, and the other refused to speak.
"What's a mistake, Ronnie?" he asked.

"Listening to them at all," Turnbull said, with a preposterous attempt to
be dignified. He would not look at Brenda as he continued, but he was
certainly aware that she had turned towards him when he spoke, and the
consciousness that she was watching him steadily increased his
embarrassment. "It's perfectly absurd, I mean, to talk as if you and your
people would allow the thing to go on--under any circumstances--perfect
rot! Why can't you say at once that it's got to stop--absolutely,
and--Good Lord!--I don't care what any one thinks--if I were in your place
I'd jolly well sling Banks off the premises--I tell you I would--" he
got to his feet, his vehemence was increasing, as if he would shout down
Brenda's silent disdain--"I'd confoundedly well kick him out of the
county..." He looked almost equal to the task as he stood there roaring
like a young bull-calf; but although he could have given his rival a good
three stone in weight there was, I fancy, a difference in the quality of
their muscles that might have left the final advantage with Banks in a
rough-and-tumble engagement.

But despite, or perhaps on account of his complete ineptitude, I had a
feeling of sympathy for Turnbull. It must have been very exasperating for
him to stand there, roaring out his sincerest convictions and to be
received by every one of us with a forbearing contempt.

Even Brenda expressed something of pity for him.

"My dear Ronnie, don't be absolutely idiotic," she said, forbearingly, but
rather as though she warned him that he had said quite enough.

He breathed heavily, resentfully, but still declined to look at her. "Of
course if you'd sooner I went away altogether..." he remarked.

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