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.