The Jervaise Comedy | Page 4

into the Hall, and began to put John under a severe
cross-examination.
"What's up now, do you suppose?" Miss Tattersall asked, with the least

tremor of excitement sounding in her voice.
"Perhaps the chauffeur has followed the example of Carter, and
afterwards hidden his shame," I suggested.
I was surprised by the warmth of her contradiction. "Oh, no" she said.
"He isn't the least that sort of man." She said it as if I had aspersed the
character of one of her friends.
"He seems to have gone, disappeared, any-way," I replied.
"It's getting frightfully mysterious," Miss Tattersall agreed, and added
inconsequently, "He's got a strong face, you know; keen--looks as if
he'd get his own way about things, though, of course, he isn't a
gentleman."
I had a suspicion that she had been flirting with the romantic chauffeur.
She was the sort of young woman who would flirt with any one.
I wished they would open that Hall door again. The action of my play
had become dispersed and confused. Frank Jervaise had gone off
through the baize door with John, and the Sturtons and their host and
hostess were moving reluctantly towards the drawing-room.
"We might almost as well go and sit down somewhere," I suggested to
Miss Tattersall, and noted three or four accessible blanks on the
staircase.
"Almost," she agreed after a glance at the closed door that shut out the
night.
In the re-arrangement I managed to leave her on a lower step, and
climbed to the throne of the gods, at present occupied only by Gordon
Hughes, one of Frank Jervaise's barrister friends from the Temple.
Hughes was reputed "brilliantly clever." He was a tallish fellow with
ginger red hair and a long nose--the foxy type.
"Rum start!" I cried, by way of testing his intellectual quality, but
before I could get on terms with him, the stage was taken by a dark,
curly-haired, handsome boy of twenty-four or so, generally addressed
as "Ronnie." I had thought him very like a well-intentioned retriever
pup. I could imagine him worrying an intellectual slipper to pieces with
great gusto.
"I say, it's all U.P. now," he said, in a dominating voice. "What's the
time?" He was obviously too well turned out to wear a watch with
evening dress.
Some one said it was "twenty-five to one."

"Fifty to one against another dance, then," Ronnie barked joyously.
"Unless you'll offer yourself up as a martyr in a good cause," suggested
Nora Bailey.
"Offer myself up? How?" Ronnie asked.
"Take 'em home in your car," Nora said in a penetrating whisper.
"Dead the other way," was Ronnie's too patent excuse.
"It's only a couple of miles through the Park, you know," Olive Jervaise
put in. "You might easily run them over to the vicarage and be back
again in twenty minutes."
"By Jove; yes. So I might," Ronnie acknowledged. "That is, if I may
really come back, Miss Jervaise. Awfully good of you to suggest it. I
didn't bring my man with me, though. I'll have to go and wind up the
old buzz-wagon myself, if your fellow can't be found. Do you think ...
could any one..."
He was looking round, searching for some one who was not there.
"Want any help?" Hughes asked.
"No, thanks. That's all right. I know where the car is, I mean," Ronnie
said, and still hesitated as if he were going to finish the question he had
begun in his previous speech.
Olive Jervaise anticipated, I think wrongly, his remark. "They're in the
drawing-room," she said. "Will you tell them?"
"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