"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."
It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was
attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible. I saw
the incipient symptoms of the attack and watched her with a sympathetic
fascination, as she clenched her jaw, put her hand up to her lips, and
made little impatient movements of her head and body. I knew that it must
come at last, and it did, catching her unawares in the middle of a
sentence--undertaken, I fancy, solely as a defence against the insidious
craving that was obsessing her.
"Oh, dear!" she said, with a mincing, apologetic gesture of her head; and
then "Dear me!" Having committed the solecism, she found it necessary to
draw attention to it. She may have been a Shropshire Norman, but at that
relaxed hour of the night, she displayed all the signs of the orthodox
genteel attitude.
"I don't know when I've been so tired," she apologised.
But, indeed, she did owe us an apology for her yawning fit affected us all
like a virulent epidemic. In a moment we were every one of us trying to
stifle the same desire, and each in our own way being overcome. I must do
Frank the justice to say that he, at least, displayed no sign of
gentility.
"Oh! Lord, mater, you've started us now," he said, and gave away almost
sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively
racked us with the longing to imitate him.
"Really, my dear, no necessity for you," began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more
or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, "no
necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever. We cannot, in any
case, _do_ anything until the morning."
"Even if she comes in, now," supplemented Olive.
"As I'm almost sure she will," affirmed Mrs. Jervaise.
And she must have put something of genuine confidence into her statement,
for automatically we all stopped talking for a few seconds and listened
again with the ears of faith for the return of the car.
"But as I said," Olive began again, abruptly ending the unhopeful suspense
of our pause, "there's nothing more we can do by sitting up. And there's
certainly no need for you to overtire yourself, mother."
"No, really not," urged Ronnie politely, "nor for you, either, sir," he
added, addressing his host. "What I mean is, Frank and I'll do all that."
"Rather, let's get a drink," Frank agreed.
We wanted passionately to get away from each other and indulge ourselves
privately in a very orgie of gapes and stretchings. And yet, we stuck
there, idiotically, making excuses and little polite recommendations for
the others to retire, until Frank with a drastic quality of determination
that he sometimes showed, took command.
"Go on, mater," he said; "you go to bed." And he went up to her, kissed
her in the mechanical way of most grown-up sons, and gently urged her in
the direction of the stairs. She submitted, still with faint protestations
of apology.
Olive followed, and with a last feint of hospitality, her father brought
up the tail of the procession.
"Coming for a drink?" Frank asked me with a jerk of his head towards the
extemporised buffet.
"Well, no, thanks. I think not," I said, seeking the relief afforded by
the women's absence; although, now, that I could indulge my desire without
restraint, the longing to gape had surprisingly vanished.
"Going to bed?" Jervaise suggested.
"Yes. Bed's the best place, just now," I lied.
"Right oh! Good-night, old chap," Ronnie said effusively.
I pretended to be going upstairs and they did not wait for me to
disappear. As soon as they had left the Hall, I sneaked down again,
recovered from the cloak-room the light overcoat I had worn on our
expedition to the Farm--I have no idea to whom that overcoat
belonged--borrowed a cap, and let myself out stealthily by the front door.
As I quietly shut the door behind me, a delicious whiff of night-stock
drifted by me, as if it had waited there for all those long hours seeking
entrance to the stale, dry air of the Hall.
* * * * *
And it must have been, I think, that scent of night-stock which gave me
the sense of a completed episode, or first act, as I stood alone, at last,
on the gravel sweep before the Hall. Already the darkness was lifting. The
dawn was coming high up in the sky, a sign of fair weather.
I have always had a sure sense of direction, and I turned instinctively
towards the landmark of my promised destination, although it was invisible
from that side of the Hall--screened by the avenue of tall forest trees,
chiefly elms, that led up from the principal entrance to the Park. I had
noticed one side road leading into this avenue as I had driven up from the
station the previous afternoon, and I sought that turning now, with a
feeling of certainty that it would take me in the right direction. As,
indeed, it did; for it actually skirted the base of "Jervaise Clump,"
which touched the extreme edge of the Park on that side.
As I cautiously felt my way down the avenue--it was still black dark under
the dark trees--and later up the tunnel of the side road which I hit upon
by an instinct that made me feel for it at the precise moment when I
reached the point of its junction with the avenue--I returned with a sense
of satisfaction to the memory of the last four hours. I was conscious of
some kind of plan in the way the comedy of Brenda's disappearance had been
put before us. I realised that, as an art form, the plan was essentially
undramatic, but the thought of it gave me, nevertheless, a distinct
feeling of pleasure.
I saw the experience as a prelude to this lonely adventure of mine--a
prelude full of movement and contrast; but I had no premonition of any
equally diverting sequel.
The daylight was coming, and I believed, a trifle regretfully, that that
great solvent of all mysteries would display these emotions of the night
as the phantasmagoria of our imagination.
Before I had reached the end of the tunnel through the wood and had come
out into the open whence I could, now, see the loom of Jervaise Clump
swelling up before me in the deep, gray gloom of early dawn, I had decided
that my suggestion had been prompted by an intuition of truth. Brenda had
fallen under the spell of the moon, and gone for a long drive in the
motor. She had taken Banks with her, obviously; but that action need not
be presumed to have any romantic significance. And the Jervaises had
accepted that solution. They had been more convinced of its truth than I
had imagined. They would never have gone to bed, tired as they were, if
they had not been satisfied that Brenda had committed no other
indiscretion than that of indulging herself in the freak of a moonlight
drive. It had, certainly, been unduly prolonged; but, as old Jervaise had
said, there might be half a dozen reasons to account for that.
As I turned off the road and breasted the lower slopes of the hill, I was
constructing the details of the Jervaises' explanatory visit to the
Atkinsons. I had reached the point of making Mrs. Jervaise repeat the
statement she had made in the Hall that "dear Brenda was so impossibly
headstrong," when I heard the sweet, true notes of some one ahead of me,
whistling, almost miraculously, in tune.
It isn't one man in a million who can whistle absolutely true.
V