"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.