“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.
II
Anne
The moon must have been nearly at the full, but I could not guess its position behind the even murk of cloud that muffled the whole face of the sky. Yet, it was not very dark. The broad masses of the garden through which Jervaise led