The Jervaise Comedy. John Davys Beresford

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СКАЧАТЬ brilliant and fascinating young woman’s affairs. The plan that I had in mind when the door opened was to say politely to Jervaise, “I’ll wait for you here”—I had a premonition that he would raise no objection to that suggestion—and then when he and Miss Banks were safely inside, I meant to go and find rapture in solitude. The moon was certainly coming out; the dawn was due in three hours or so, and before me were unknown hills and woods. I had no sort of doubt that I should find my rapture. I may add that my plan did not include any further sight of Jervaise, his family, or their visitors, before breakfast next morning.

      I had it all clear and settled. I was already thrilling with the first ecstasies of anticipation. But when the door was opened I turned my back on all that magical beauty of the night, and accompanied Jervaise into the house like a scurvy little mongrel with no will of its own.

      I can’t account for that queer change of purpose. It was purely spontaneous, due to something quite outside the realm of reason. I was certainly not in love with Anne, then. My only sight of her had left an impression as of an amateur copy of a Rembrandt done in Indian ink with a wet brush. It is true that I had heard her voice like the low thrilling of a nightingale—following a full Handel chorus of corncrakes.

      She had evidently spent an active ten minutes while we waited for her. She had done her hair, and she was, so far as I could judge from superficialities, completely dressed. Also she had lighted the lamp in what I took to be the chief sitting-room of the farm.

      As a room it deserved attention, but it was not until I had been there for ten minutes or more, that I realised all that the furniture of that room was not. My first observations were solely directed to Miss Banks.

      Jervaise had grossly maligned her by saying that she was “frightfully pretty.” No one but a fool would have called her “pretty.” Either she was beautiful or plain. I saw, even then, that if the light of her soul had been quenched, she might appear plain. Her features were good, her complexion, her colouring—she was something between dark and fair—but she did not rely on those things for her beauty. It was the glow of her individuality that was her surpassing charm. She had that supremely feminine vitality which sends a man crazy with worship. You had to adore or dislike her. There was no middle course.

      And Jervaise quite obviously adored her. All that tactful confession of his in the park had been a piece of artifice. It had not, however, been framed to deceive me. I do not believe that he considered me worth bothering about. No, those admissions and denials of his had been addressed, without doubt, to a far more important person than myself. They had been in the nature of a remonstrance and assurance spoken to Frank Jervaise by the heir to the estate; which heir was determined with all the force of his ferocious nose and dominant chin to help him, that he would not make a fool of himself for the sake of the daughter of a tenant farmer. I had been nothing more than the register upon which he had tentatively engraved that resolve. But he should have chosen a more stable testament than this avowal made to a whimsically-minded playwright with an absurd weakness for the beauties of a midnight wood.

      And if I had been a witness to his oath, I was, now, a witness to his foreswearing.

      He began well enough on the note proper to the heir of Jervaise. He had the aplomb to carry that off. He stood on the hearthrug, austere and self-controlled, consciously aristocrat, heir and barrister.

      “I’m so sorry, Miss Banks. Almost inexcusable to disturb you at this time of night.” He stopped after that beginning and searched his witness with a stare that ought to have set her trembling.

      Anne had sat down and was resting her forearms on the table. She looked up at him with the most charming insouciance when he paused so portentously at the very opening of his address. Her encouraging “yes” was rather in the manner of a child waiting for the promised story.

      Jervaise frowned and attempted the dramatic. “My sister, Brenda, has run away,” he said.

      “When?”

      “This evening at the end of the Cinderella. You knew we were giving a dance?”

      “But where to?”

      “Oh! Precisely!” Jervaise said.

      “But how extraordinary!” replied Miss Banks.

      “Is she here?” asked Jervaise. He ought to have snapped that out viciously, and I believe that was his intention. But Anne’s exquisitely innocent, absorbed gaze undid him; and his question had rather the sound of an apology.

      “No, certainly not! Why ever should she come here?” Anne said with precisely the right nuance of surprise.

      “Is your brother here?”

      “No!”

      It looks such an absurd little inexpressive word on paper, but Anne made a song of it on two notes, combining astonishment with a sincerity that was absolutely final. If, after that, Jervaise had dared to say, “Are you sure?” I believe I should have kicked him.

      How confounded he was, was shown by the change of attitude evident in his next speech.

      “It’s horribly awkward,” he said.

      “Oh! horribly,” Anne agreed, with a charming sympathy. “What are you going to do?”

      “You see, we can’t find your brother, either,” Jervaise tried tactfully.

      “I don’t quite see what that’s got to do with Brenda,” Anne remarked with a sweet perplexity.

      Apparently Jervaise did not wish to point the connection too abruptly. “We wanted the car,” he said; “and we couldn’t find him anywhere.”

      “Oh! he’s almost sure to have gone to sleep up in the woods,” Anne replied. “Arthur’s like that, you know. He sort of got the habit in Canada or somewhere. He often says that sometimes he simply can’t bear to sleep under a roof.”

      I had already begun to feel a liking for Anne’s brother, and that speech of hers settled me. I knew that “Arthur” was the right sort—or, at least, my sort. I would have been willing, even then, to swap the whole Jervaise family with the possible exception of Brenda, for this as yet unknown Arthur Banks.

      Jervaise’s diplomacy was beginning to run very thin.

      “You don’t think it conceivable that Brenda…” he began gloomily.

      “That Brenda what?”

      “I was going to say…”

      “Yes?” She leaned a little forward with an air of expectancy that disguised her definite refusal to end his sentences for him.

      “It’s a most difficult situation, Miss Banks,” he said, starting a new line; “and we don’t in the least know what to make of it. What on earth could induce Brenda to run off like this, with no apparent object?”

      “But how do you know she really has?” asked Anne. “You haven’t told me anything, yet, have you? I mean, she may have gone out into the Park to get cool after the dance, or into the woods or anything. Why should you imagine that she has—run away?”

      I joined in the conversation, then, for the first time. I had not even been introduced to Anne.

      “That’s very reasonable, surely, Jervaise,” I said. “And wouldn’t it—I hardly know her, I’ll admit—but wouldn’t it be rather like your sister?”

      So СКАЧАТЬ