The Jervaise Comedy | Page 9

It was just as if Jervaise's touch on the door had liberated the spring of some awful rattle. Every lovely impulse of the night must have fled dismayed, back into the peace and beauty of the wood; and I was more than half inclined to follow.
Until that appalling racket was set loose I had been regarding this midnight visit to the farm as a natural and enticing adventure, altogether in keeping with the dramatic movement preluded by the chime of the stable-clock. That confounded terrier, whose voice so clearly proclaimed his breed, had dragged us down to the baldest realism. We were intruders upon the decencies of civilisation. That dog was not to be misled by any foolish whimsies of the imagination. He was a thorough-going realist, living in a tangible, smellable world of reality, and he knew us for what we were--marauders, disturbers of the proper respectable peace of twentieth century farms. He lashed himself into ecstasies of fury against our unconventionality; he rose to magnificent paroxysms of protest that passionately besought High Heaven and Farmer Banks to open the door and let him get at us.
But no one came. There may have been other sounds coming from the house besides that infuriated demand for vengeance, but all inferior noises--and surely all other noises must have been inferior to that clamour--were absorbed and flattened out of existence. We were in a world occupied by the bark of a single dog, and any addition to that occupation would have been superfluous.
The owner of the voice was doing his level best now to get the door down on his own account. I hoped he might succeed. I should have excuse then to fly to the woods and claim sanctuary. As it was, I retreated a couple of steps, holding my breath to ease the pain of my nerves, and some old instinct of prayer made me lift my face to the sky. I welcomed the cold, inquisitive touch of the silent rain.
Then I became aware through the torture of prolonged exasperation that my upturned face was lit from above; that a steady candle was now perched on the very sill of the one illuminated window; and that behind the candle the figure of a woman stood looking down at me.
She appeared to be speaking.
I held my hands to my ears and shook my head violently to intimate my temporary deafness; and the figure disappeared, leaving the placid candle to watch me as it seemed with a kind of indolent nonchalance.
I decided to pass on the news to Jervaise, and discovered that besotted fool in a little trellised porch, stimulating the execrations of the Irish terrier by a subdued inaudible knocking. I was beginning to scream my news into his ear when silence descended upon us with the suddenness of a catastrophe. It was as if the heavens had been rent and all the earth had fallen into a muffled chaos of mute despair.
I had actually began my shriek of announcement when all the world of sound about us so inexplicably ceased to be, and I shut off instantly on the word "Someone...," a word that as I had uttered it sounded like a despairing yelp of mortal agony.
Out of the unearthly stillness, Jervaise's voice replied in a frightened murmur, "Someone coming," he said, as if he, alone, had knowledge of and responsibility for that supreme event.
And still no one came. The door remained steadfastly closed. Outside the porch, the earth had recovered from the recent disaster, and we could hear the exquisitely gentle murmur of the rain.
"Damned odd," commented Jervaise. "That cursed dog made enough noise to wake the dead."
I was inspired to go out and search the window where burned the indigent, just perceptibly, rakish candle.
She was there. She had returned to her eyrie after quelling the racket in the hall, and now she leaned a little forward so that I could see her face.
"Who's there?" she asked quietly.
Her voice was low and clear as the reed of a flute, but all sounds had the quality of music at that instant of release.
I was nonplussed for the moment. I ought to have taken up the key of high romance. She deserved it. Instead of that I dropped to the awful commonplaces of a man in evening dress and a light overcoat standing in the rain talking to a stranger.
"I came up with Mr. Jervaise, Mr. Frank Jervaise," I explained. "He--he wants to see you. Shall I tell him you're there?"
"All serene, I'm here," whispered the voice of Jervaise at my elbow, and then he cleared his throat and spoke up at the window.
"Rather an upset down at the Hall, Miss Banks; about Brenda," he said. "Might we come in a minute?"
"It's rather late, isn't it?" the vision returned--it wasn't only