Chapter 4

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 mésalliance."

"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 mésalliance 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."