"Don't you think it possible that many cases of apparent coincidences are
probably due to telepathy?" I said genially, addressing the
dangerous-looking profile of my hostess.
She gave an impatient movement of her head that reminded me of a parrot
viciously digging out the kernel of a nut.
"I really can't say," she said, pointedly turned to Gordon Hughes, who was
on her other side, and asked him if he had played much tennis lately.
I looked round the table for help, but none of the party would meet my
eyes, avoiding my glance with a determination that could not be mistaken.
I might have suffered from some loathsome deformity. Frank, alone,
appeared unaware of my innocent appeal for an explanation. He was bending
gloomily over his plate, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts--though
how any man could be gloomy after his recent experience it was beyond me
to imagine.
My astonishment flamed into a feeling of acute annoyance. If any one had
spoken to me at that moment, I should have been unforgivably rude. But no
one had the least intention of speaking to me, and I had just sense enough
to restrain myself from demanding an apology from the company at large.
That was my natural inclination. I had been insulted; outraged. I was the
Jervaises' guest, and whatever they imagined that I had done, they owed it
to me and to themselves to treat me with a reasonable courtesy.
It was a detestable situation, and I was completely floored by it for the
moment. We were not half-way through lunch, and I felt that I could not
endure to sit there for another twenty minutes, avoided, proscribed, held
fast in a pillory, a butt for the sneers of any fool at the table. On the
other hand, if I got up and marched out of the room, I should be
acknowledging my defeat--and my guilt of whatever crime I was supposed to
have committed. If I ever wished to justify my perfect innocence, I should
forfeit my chances, at once, by accepting the snub I had received. To do
that would be to acknowledge my sense of misbehaviour.
I leaned a little forward and glanced at Miss Tattersall who was sitting
just beyond Nora Bailey on my side of the table. And I saw that my late
confidante, the user of keyholes, was faintly smiling to herself with an
unmistakable air of malicious satisfaction.
I wished, then, that I had not looked. I was no longer quite so conscious
of outraged innocence. It is true that I was guiltless of any real
offence, but I saw that the charge of complicity with the chauffeur--a
charge that had certainly not lost in substance or in its suggestion of
perfidy by Miss Tattersall's rendering--was one that I could not wholly
refute. I was in the position of a man charged with murder on good
circumstantial evidence; and my first furious indignation began to give
way to a detestable feeling of embarrassment, momentarily increased by the
necessity to sit in silence while the inane chatter of the luncheon table
swerved past me. If I had had one friend with whom I could have talked, I
might have been able to recover myself, but I defy any one in my situation
to maintain an effective part with no active means of expression.
I glanced a trifle desperately at Olive Jervaise. I judged her to be
rather a colourless creature who would not have the spirit openly to snub
me. She was nearly opposite to me, between her brother and Hughes, and
well placed for an open attack if I could once engage her attention. But
when I came to consider an opening, every reasonably appropriate topic
seemed to have some dangerous relation to the _affaire Brenda_. Any
reference to the dance, to the Sturtons, the place, the weather, suddenly
assumed in my mind the appearance of a subtle approach to the subject I
most wished to avoid. If I was, indeed, regarded in that house as a spy in
league with the enemy, the most innocent remark might be construed into an
attempt to obtain evidence.
I fancy, too, that I was subject to an influence other than the heightened
self-consciousness due to my awkward situation. I had only just begun to
realise that the absence of Brenda must be a horribly insistent fact to
her own family. She was so entirely different from the rest of them. Her
vivacity, her spirit must have shown amidst the nervous respectability of
this dull and fearful household like the gleam of unexpected water in the
blankness of a desert. Her absence must have seemed to them a positive
thing. Probably every one at the table was thinking of her at that moment.
And the result of this combined thought was producing a hallucination of
Brenda in my mind, strong enough to hypnotise me. In any case, her
apparition stood at the end of every avenue of conversation I could
devise. I could think of no opening that did not lead straight up to the
subject of her absence.
And even while I was still pondering my problem (I had come to such
fantastic absurdities as contemplating an essay on the Chinese gamut,
rejecting it on the grounds that Brenda was the only musician in the
family), that awful lunch was abruptly closed by a unanimous refusal of
the last course. Perhaps the others were as eager as I was to put an end
to that ordeal; all of them, that is, with the exception of the spiteful
snake who was responsible for my humiliation.
The family managed to get out of the room this time without their usual
procrastinating civilities. I went ahead of Frank and Hughes. I intended
to spend a lonely afternoon in thinking out some plan for exposing the
treachery of Grace Tattersall, but as I was crossing the Hall, Frank
Jervaise came up behind me.
"Look here, Melhuish," he said.
I looked. I did more than that; I confronted him. There is just a
suspicion of red in my hair, and on occasion the influence of it is shown
in my temper. It must have shown then, for Jervaise was visibly
uncomfortable.
"It's no damned good being so ratty, Melhuish," he said. "Jolly well your
own fault, anyway."
"What's my own fault?" I demanded.
"We can't talk here," he said uneasily. "Let's go down the avenue."
I had an impression that he was going to offer to fight me. I certainly
hoped that he would.
"Very well," I agreed.
But when he spoke again, I realised that it was as a lawyer and not as a
fighter. He had, indeed, been preparing a cautious impeachment of me. We
had reached the entrance to the avenue before he began, and the cloister
of its cool shade seemed a sufficiently appropriate setting for his
forensic diplomacy. Outside, in the glare of the brilliant August sun, I
should have flared out at him. In the solemnity of that Gothic aisle, I
found influences which helped me to maintain a relative composure.
He posed his first question with an assumed indifference.
"Why didn't you sleep in the house last night?" he asked.
I took time to consider my answer; I was taken aback by his knowledge of
the fact he had disclosed. My first impulse was to retort "How do you know
that I didn't sleep in the house?" but I was determined to be very
cautious at the outset of this cross-examination. Obviously he meant it to
take the form of a cross-examination. I was equally determined that I
would presently reverse the parts of counsel and witness--or was I the
prisoner giving evidence on my own behalf?
We must have gone another fifteen or twenty deliberate paces before I
replied,--
"I'll answer that question in a minute. I should like to know first what
grounds you have for stating that I didn't sleep in the house?"
He shrugged his shoulders. "You admit that you didn't?" he retorted.
"If you're going to conduct your conversation on the principles of the
court room," I said, "the only thing I can do is to adopt the same
method."
He ignored that. "You admit that you didn't sleep in the house?" he
repeated.
"I'll admit nothing until I know what the devil you're driving at," I
replied.
He did not look at me. He was saving himself until he reached the
brow-beating stage. But I was watching him--we were walking a yard or two
apart--and I noted his expression of simulated indifference and
forbearance, as he condescendingly admitted my claim to demand evidence
for his preliminary accusation.
"You were very late coming down," he began and paused, probably to tempt
me into some ridicule of such a worthless piece of testimony.
"Go on," I said.
"You were seen coming into the house after eight o'clock in the morning,"
he continued, paused again and then, as I kept silence, added, "In evening
dress."
"Is that all?" I asked.
It was not. He had kept the decisive accusation until the end.
"Your bed had not been slept in," he concluded wearily, as if to say, "My
good idiot, why persist in this damning assumption of innocence?"
"You've been examining the servants, I see," I remarked.
He was not to be drawn by such an ingenuous sneer as that. "The
housekeeper told the mater when she came back from church," he said. "I
suppose the thing came up in some arrangement of household affairs."
"Very likely," I agreed; "but why did your mother tell _you_?"
I saw at once that he meant to evade that question if possible. For some
reason Miss Tattersall was to be kept out of the case. Possibly she had
made terms to that effect. More probably, I thought, Jervaise was a trifle
ashamed of the source of his evidence against me.
"Oh! look here, Melhuish," he said, with a return to his bullying manner.
"You're only making things look worse for yourself by all this beating
about the bush. It's evident that you didn't sleep in the house, and I
want to know why."
"Is sleeping in the house a condition of your hospitality?" I asked.
"Not in ordinary circumstances," he said. "But the circumstances are not
ordinary. I suppose you haven't forgotten that something happened last
night which very seriously affects us?"
"I haven't, but I don't see what the deuce it's got to do with me," I
returned.
"Nor I; unless it's one of your idiotic, romantic tricks," he retorted;
"but I have very good evidence, all the same, that you were concerned in
it."
"Oh! is that what you're accusing me of?" I said.
"It is," Jervaise replied.
"Then I can put your mind at rest," I said. "I am ready to swear by any
oath you like that I had nothing whatever to do with your sister's
elopement, and that I know..." I was going to add "nothing more about it
than you do yourself," but remembering my talk with Banks, I decided that
that was not perfectly true, and with the layman's respect for the
sanctity of an oath I concluded, "and that I know very little more about
it than _you_ do."
"It's that little bit more that is so important," Jervaise commented
sardonically.
After all, a legal training does count for something. I was not his match
in this kind of give and take, and I decided to throw down my hand. I was
not incriminating Banks. I knew nothing about his movements of the night,
and in that morning interview with old Jervaise the most important
admission of all must almost certainly have been made.
"Well, you have a right to know that," I began, "although I don't think
you and your family had any right whatever to be so damnably rude to me at
lunch, on the mere spiteful accusations of Miss Tattersall."
"Miss Tattersall?" Jervaise put in, with a very decent imitation of
surprise.
"Oh! I'm going to be perfectly honest with you," I returned. "Can't you
drop that burlesque of the legal manner and be equally honest with me?"
"Simply dunno what you're driving at," he said.
"Very well, then, answer the question you shirked just now," I retorted.
"Why did your mother rush to tell you that I hadn't slept in the house
last night?"
"The mater's in an awful state of nerves," he said.
Incidentally I had to admit to myself that I had not made sufficient
allowance for that indubitable fact, but I chose to disregard it at the
moment. I wanted to be sure of the treachery of Grace Tattersall.
"You asked me not to beat about the bush, a minute ago," I said, "and now
you're trying to dodge all my questions with the most futile and palpable
evasions."
"For instance?" he replied calmly, with a cunning that nearly trapped me.
For when I tried to recall, as I thought I could, a specific and
convincing instance of his evasion, I realised that to cite a case would
only draw us into an irrelevant bickering over side issues.
"Your last three or four answers were all obvious equivocations," I said,
and raising my voice I went straight on over his attempt to expostulate by
adding, "And if Mrs. Jervaise's state of nerves is an excuse for her
confiding in _you_, it isn't, in my opinion, any excuse for her confiding
in Miss Tattersall and Nora Bailey and Hughes, and setting them on
to--ostracise me."
"Oh! come," Jervaise protested, a little taken aback. I had put him in a
quandary, now. He had to choose between an imputation on his mother's good
taste, savoir faire, breeding--and an admission of the rather shameful
source of the present accusation against me.
"As a matter of fact, it's absolutely clear to me that Grace Tattersall is
at the bottom of all this," I continued, to get this point settled. "I'm
perfectly sure your mother would not have treated me as she did unless her
mind had been perverted in some way."
"But why should she--Miss Tattersall--I mean she seemed rather keen on
you..."
"I can explain that," I interrupted him. "She wanted to gossip with me
about the whole affair this morning, and she made admissions that I
suppose she was subsequently ashamed of. And after that she discovered by
an accident that I had met Banks, and jumped to the totally false
conclusion that I had been drawing her out for my own disreputable
purposes."
"Where did you meet Banks?" was Jervaise's only comment on this
explanation.
"I'm going to tell you that," I said. "I told you that I meant to be
perfectly honest with you, but I want to know first if I'm not right about
Miss Tattersall."
"She has been a bit spiteful about you," he admitted.
"So that's settled," I replied by way of finally confirming his admission.
"Now, I'll tell you exactly what happened last night."
I made a fairly long story of it; so long that we reached the lodge at the
Park gates before I had finished, and turned back again up the avenue. I
was careful to be scrupulously truthful, but I gave him no record of any
conversation that I thought might, however indirectly, inculpate Banks.
Jervaise did not once interrupt me, but I saw that he was listening with
all his attention, studying my statement as he might have studied a
complicated brief. And when I had done, he thrust out his ugly underlip
with an effect of sneering incredulity that I found almost unendurably
irritating.
"Do you mean to say that you don't believe me?" I asked passionately.
We were just opposite the side road that I had taken the night before, the
road that led through the thickest part of the spinney before it came out
into the open within a quarter of a mile of Jervaise Clump. And as if both
our minds had been unconsciously occupied with the same thought, the need
for a still greater privacy, we turned out of the avenue with an air of
deliberate intention and a marked increase of pace. It seemed as though
this secluded alley had, from the outset, been the secret destination of
our walk.
He did not reply to my challenging question for perhaps a couple of
minutes. We were walking quite quickly, now. Until the heat of our rising
anger could find some other expression, we had to seek relief in physical
action. I had no doubt that Jervaise in his own more restrained way was as
angry as I was myself. His sardonic sneer had intensified until it took
the shape of a fierce, brooding anger.
We were out of sight of the junction of the side road with the avenue,
when he stopped suddenly and faced me. He had manifestly gathered himself
together for a great effort that was, as it were, focussed in the
malignant, dominating scowl of his forbidding face. The restraint of his
language added to the combined effect--consciously studied, no doubt--of
coarse and brutal authority.
"And why did you spy on me this morning?" he asked. "Why did you follow me
up to the Home Farm, watch me while I was talking to Miss Banks, and then
slink away again?"
I have two failings that would certainly have disqualified me if I had
ever attempted to adopt the legal profession. The first is a tendency to
blush violently on occasion. The second is to see and to sympathise with
my opponent's point of view. Both these failings betrayed me now. The
blush seemed to proclaim my guilt; my sudden understanding of Jervaise's
temper confirmed it.
For, indeed, I understood precisely at that moment how enraged he must be
against me. He, like Miss Tattersall, had been playing an underhand game,
though his was different in kind. He had been seduced (my bitterness
against Anne found satisfaction in laying the blame at her door!) into
betraying the interests of his own family. _I_ did not, in a sense, blame
him for that; I had, the night before, been more than a little inclined to
honour him for it; but I saw how, from the purely Jervaise point of view,
his love-making would appear as something little short of criminal. And to
be caught in the act, for I had caught him, however unwillingly, must have
been horribly humiliating for him. Little wonder that coming home, hot and
ashamed from his rendezvous, and being confronted with all the tale of my
duplicity, he had flamed into a fury of resentment against me. I
understood that beyond any question. Only one point still puzzled me. How
had he been able until this moment to restrain his fury? I could but
suppose that there was something cold-blooded, calculating, almost
reptilian in his character; that he had planned cautiously and
far-sightedly what he regarded as the best means for bringing about my
ultimate disgrace.
And now my blush and my powers of sympathy had betrayed me. I felt like a
convicted criminal as I said feebly, "Oh! that was an accident, absolutely
an accident, I assure you. I had no sort of idea where you were when I
went up to the Home Farm...."
"After keeping an eye on the front of the house all the morning," he put
in viciously.
A sense of awful frustration overcame me. Looking back on the past fifteen
hours, I saw all my actions ranged in a long incriminating series. Each
one separately might be explained, but regarded as a consequent series,
those entirely inconsequent doings of mine could bear but one explanation:
I was for some purpose of my own, whether idiotically romantic or not, on
the side of Banks and Brenda. I had never lifted a finger to help them; I
was not in their confidence; and since the early morning I had withdrawn a
measure of my sympathy from them. But I could not prove any of these
things. I could only affirm them, and this domineering bully, who stood
glowering at me, wanted proof or nothing. He was too well accustomed to
the methods of criminals to accept explanations.
"You don't believe me?" I said.
"Candidly, I don't," he replied.
And at that my temper finally blazed. I could not bear any longer either
that awful sense of frustration or the sight of Frank Jervaise's absurdly
portentous scowl.
I did not clench my fists, but I presume my purpose showed suddenly in my
face, for he moved quickly backwards with a queer, nervous jerk of the
head that was the precise counterpart of the parrot-like twist his mother
had given at the luncheon table. It was an odd movement, at once timid and
vicious, and in an instant I saw the spirit of Frank Jervaise revealed to
me. He was a coward, hiding his weakness under that coarse mask of the
brooding, relentless hawk. He had winced and retreated at my unspoken
threat, as he had winced at the thought of his thrashing at school. He had
taken his punishment stoically enough then, and might take another with
equal fortitude now; though he had been weakened in the past five or six
years by the immunity his frowning face had won for him. But he could not
meet the promise of a thrashing. I saw that he would do anything, make any
admission, to avoid that.
"Look here, Melhuish..." he began, but I cut him short.
"Oh! go to hell," I said savagely.
I was disappointed. I wanted to fight him. I knew now that since the scene
I had witnessed in the wood the primitive savage in me had been longing
for some excuse to break out in its own primitive, savage way. And once
again I was frustrated. I was just too civilised to leap at him without
further excuse.
He gave me none.
"If you're going to take that tone..." he said with a ridiculous
affectation of bravado, and did not complete his sentence. His evasion
was, perhaps, the best that he could have managed in the circumstances. It
was so obvious that only the least further incentive was required to make
me an irresponsible madman. And he dared not risk it.
He turned away with a pretence of dignity, the craven brag of a schoolboy
who says, "I could lick you if I wanted to, but I don't happen to want
to." I watched him as he walked back towards the avenue with a
deliberation that was so artificial, I could swear that when he reached
the turn he would break into a run.
I stood still in the same place long after he was out of sight. As my
short-lived passion evaporated, I began to realise that I was really in a
very awkward situation. I could not and would not return to the Hall. I
had offended Frank Jervaise beyond all hope of reconciliation. He would
never forgive me for that exposure of his cowardice. And if I had not had
a single friend at the house before, I could, after the new report of my
treachery had been spread by Frank, expect nothing but the bitterness of
open enemies. No doubt they would essay a kind of frigid politeness, their
social standards would enforce some show of outward courtesy to a guest.
But I simply could not face the atmosphere of the Hall again. And here I
was without my luggage, without even a hat, and with no idea where I could
find refuge. The only idea I had was that of walking fifteen miles to
Hurley Junction on the chance of getting a train back to town.
It was an uncommonly queer situation for a perfectly innocent man,
week-ending at a country house. I should have been ashamed to face the
critics if I had made so improbable a situation the crux of a play. But
the improbability of life constantly outruns the mechanical inventions of
the playwright and the novelist. Where life, with all its extravagances,
fails, is in its refusal to provide the apt and timely coincidence that
shall solve the problem of the hero. As I walked on slowly towards
Jervaise Clump, I had little hope of finding the peculiarly appropriate
vehicle that would convey me to Hurley Junction; and I did not relish the
thought of that fifteen mile walk, without a hat.
I kept to the road, skirting the pudding basin hill, and came presently to
the fence of the Park and to what was evidently a side gate--not an
imposing wrought-iron erection between stone pillars such as that which
announced the front entrance, but just a rather high-class six-barred
gate.
I hesitated a minute or two, with the feelings of one who leaves the
safety of the home enclosure for the unknown perils of the wild, and then
with a sigh of resignation walked boldly out on to the high road.
I had no notion in which direction Hurley Junction lay, but luck was with
me, so far. There was a fourth road, opposite the Park gate, and a
sign-post stood at the junction of what may once have been the main
cross-roads--before some old Jervaise land-robber pushed the park out on
this side until he was stopped by the King's highway.
On the sign-post I read the indication that Hurley Junction was distant
14-1/2 miles, and that my direction was towards the north; but I felt a
marked disinclination to begin my walk.
It was very hot, and the flies were a horrible nuisance. I stood under the
shadow of the hedge, flapped a petulant handkerchief at the detestably
annoying flies, and stared down the road towards the far, invisible
distances of Hurley. No one was in sight. The whole country was plunged in
the deep slumber of a Sunday afternoon, and I began to feel uncommonly
sleepy myself. I had, after all, only slept for a couple of hours or so
that morning.
I yawned wearily and my thoughts ran to the refrain of "fourteen and a
half miles; fourteen and a half miles to Hurley Junction."
"Oh! well," I said to myself at last. "I suppose it's got to be done," and
I stepped out into the road, and very lazily and wearily began my awful
tramp. The road ran uphill, in a long curve encircling the base of the
hill, and I suppose I took about ten minutes to reach the crest of the
rise. I stayed there a moment to wipe my forehead and slap peevishly at my
accompanying swarm of flies. And it was from there I discovered that I had
stumbled upon another property of the Jervaise comedy. Their car--I
instantly concluded that it was their car--stood just beyond the rise,
drawn in on to the grass at the side of the road, and partly covered with
a tarpaulin--it looked, I thought, like a dissipated roysterer asleep in
the ditch.
I decided, then, without the least compunction, that this should be my
heaven-sent means of reaching the railway. The Jervaises owed me that; and
I could leave the car at some hotel at Hurley and send the Jervaises a
telegram. I began to compose that telegram in my mind as I threw off the
tarpaulin preparatory to starting the car. But Providence was only
laughing at me. The car was there and the tank was full of petrol, but
neither the electric starter nor the crank that I found under the seat
would produce anything but the most depressing and uninspired clanking
from the mechanism that should have responded with the warm, encouraging
thud of renewed life.
I swore bitterly (I can drive, but I'm no expert), climbed into the
tonneau, pulled back the tarpaulin over me like a tent to exclude those
pestilent flies, and settled myself down to draw one or two deep and
penetrating inductions.
My first was that Banks had brought the car here the night before with the
fixed intention of abducting Brenda Jervaise.
My second was that the confounded fellow had cautiously removed some
essential part of the car's mechanism.
My third, that he would have to come back and fetch the car sometime, and
that I would then blackmail him into driving me to Hurley Junction.
I did not trouble to draw a fourth induction. I was cool and comfortable
under the shadow of the cover. The flies, although there were many
openings for them, did not favour the darkness of my tent. I leaned well
back into the corner of the car and joined the remainder of the county in
a calm and restful sleep.