Chapter 10

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 melée.

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.

"I don't see that you can help us by staying," Brenda said.

"I mean for good," he explained tragically.

I heard afterwards that he had been in love with Brenda since she was nine years old, but I might have inferred the fact from his present attitude. He simply could not believe, as yet, that she would let him go--for good, as he said. No doubt she had tricked and plagued him so often in the past that the present situation seemed to him nothing more than the repetition of a familiar experience.

Brenda must have realised that, too; but, no doubt, she shrank from wounding him mortally in public. The ten years of familiar intercourse between her and Ronnie were not to be obliterated in a day, not even by the fury of her passion for Arthur Banks.

"I know," she said. "But you _are_ interrupting, Ronnie. Do go!"

"And leave you here?" He was suddenly encouraged again by her tone. He looked down at her, now; pleading like a great puppy, beseeching her to put a stop to this very painful game.

"Surely, Ronnie, you must realise that I--mean it, this time," she said.

"Not that you're going to ... going to Canada," he begged.

"Yes. Yes. Definitely and absolutely finally yes," she said.

"With--him?"

"Yes."

"But, _Brenda_!" The long-drawn appeal of her name showed that the full bitterness of the truth was coming home to him at last.

"I'm sorry," she said, and the sound of it was in some way painfully final.

"It isn't because..." he began, but she anticipated his well-known reasons by saying,--

"It's nothing to do with you or with anything you've done, nothing whatever. I'm sorry, Ronnie, but it's fate--just fate. Do go, now. I'll see you again before--before we go."

And still he stood for an instant undecided; and I could see the struggle that was going on in him, between the influence of Harrow and Oxford and those of the honest, simple primitive man. He knew that the right, conventional thing for him to do was to be magnanimous; to admit that he was the defeated lover, and to say something that would prove how splendid he could be in the moment of disaster. The traditions of Harrow, Oxford, and the melodrama united to give him an indication of the proper conduct of the situation, and against them was ranged nothing more than one feral impulse to take Banks by the throat and settle his blasphemous assumption of rivalry off-hand.

But it was, I think, a third influence that decided the struggle for that time. His glare of wrath at Banks had been followed by one last yearning look at Brenda, and some sentimental realisation of his loss rose and choked him, temporarily superseding the powers both of make-believe and instinct. One lesson he had learnt at Harrow and Oxford so thoroughly that he re-acted to it even in this supreme crisis of his life. He might give expression to brutal passion, but in no circumstances whatever must he break down and weep in public.

He turned quickly and blundered out of the room with a stumbling eagerness to be alone that was extraordinarily pathetic.

"You'll admit, B., that it's cursedly hard lines on Ronnie after all these years," Frank said with what sounded like genuine emotion.

She took that up at once. "I know it is," she said. "It's going to be hard lines on lots of people, but there's no way out of it. You may think it's silly tosh to talk about Fate; but it _is_ Fate."

And then she looked at Banks with something in her expression that was surely enough to compensate him for any pain or sacrifice he might have to endure for her.

"_We_ can't help it, can we, Arthur?" she said.

He was too moved to answer. He set his lips tightly together and shook his head, gazing at her with a look of adoration and confidence that was almost violent in its protestation of love.

Jervaise turned round and leaned his forehead against the high mantelpiece. I looked out of the window. Anne remained hidden in the corner of the settle. We all, no doubt, had the same feeling that this love-affair was showing itself as something too splendid to be interfered with. Whether or not it had the qualities that make for endurance, it had a present force that dwarfed every other emotion. Those two lovers ruled us by their perfect devotion to each other. I felt ashamed of my presence there, as if I had intruded upon some fervent religious ceremony. They were both so sincere, so gallant, and so proud.

It was Banks who re-started the conversation. The solitude we had permitted to the lovers was at once too little and too much for them. What had passed between them by an exchange of signals in the brief interval, I could only guess; they certainly had not spoken, but Banks's new subject suggested that they had somehow agreed to divert the interest momentarily from themselves.

"I've brought Mr. Melhuish back with me," he said. "He's going to stay the night with us." He may have been addressing Brenda in answer to some look of inquiry that had indicated my resolutely unconscious back.

Since Turnbull had gone, I was more than ever the outsider and intruder, and I was all too keenly aware of that fact as I turned back towards the room. My embarrassment was not relieved by the slightly perplexed astonishment the announcement had evoked in the faces of the two women.

"But I thought you were staying at the Hall," Brenda said, looking at me with that air of suspicion to which I was rapidly growing accustomed.

"I was," I said; "but for reasons that your brother may be able to explain, I'm staying there no longer."

She looked at Jervaise, then, but he had no reply ready. I had put him in a difficult position. I had a chance to revenge myself at last.

"I don't understand, Frank," Brenda prompted him; and Anne began to come to life for the first time since I had entered the room--there was a new effect of mischief about her, as if she had partly guessed the cause of my expulsion from the Hall.

"It's a long story," Jervaise prevaricated.

"But one that I think you ought to tell," I said, "in justice to me."

"We found that Melhuish had been, most unwarrantably, interfering in--in this affair of yours, B.," he grumbled; "and, in any case, it's no business of his."

Brenda's dark eyebrows lifted with that expression of surprised questioning to which she could give such unusual effect. I suppose it emphasised that queer contrast--unique in my experience--between her naturally fair hair, and her black eyebrows and eyelashes. I have to emphasise the fact that the straw gold of her abundant vital hair was its _natural_ colour. She had often, I believe, threatened to dye it, in order to avoid the charge of having already done so.

"What piffle!" she remarked. "How has Mr. Melhuish interfered? Why, this is the first time I've seen him since last night at the dance. Besides," she glanced at me with a half-whimsical touch of apology, "I hardly know him."

"Oh! it's some romantic rot of his, I suppose," Jervaise returned sullenly. "I never thought it was serious."

"But," Anne interposed, "it sounds very serious...if Mr. Melhuish has had to leave the Hall in the middle of his visit--and come to us." I inferred that she was deliberately overlooking my presence in the room for some purpose of her own. She certainly spoke as if I were not present.

"Partly a misunderstanding," Jervaise said. "No reason why he shouldn't come back with me now if he wants to."

"You would in that case explain, of course, how the misunderstanding arose?" I put in.

"_I_ don't know what your game is," he returned allusively.

"I never had one," I said.

"Looked infernally suspicious," was his grudging answer.

The two girls exchanged a look of understanding, but I had no notion what they intended by it. I had not learnt, then, how cleverly they played up to each other.

"Yes, but suspicious of what, Mr. Jervaise?" Anne said, taking up the cross-examination.

"Spying upon us," Jervaise growled.

"Upon you or me?" asked Brenda.

"Both," Jervaise said.

"But why?" asked Anne.

"Lord knows," Jervaise replied.

I made no effort to interrupt them. The two girls were clearing my character for me by the simple obvious method that I had not had the wit to adopt for myself. I might have argued and protested for hours, and the only result would have been to confirm Jervaise's suspicions. Confronted by an innocent demand for explanation, he had not a leg to stand on.

Brenda's eyebrows went up again, with that slightly bizarre, exotic air which was so arresting. She spoke to me this time.

"And do you mean to say that they were all so horrid to you that you had to come away?" she asked.

"Precisely that," I said.

"But you don't tell us what Mr. Melhuish has _done!_" Anne persisted, continuing her cross-examination of Jervaise.

"Well, for one thing, he went out to meet your brother at three o'clock this morning," he replied grudgingly.