Ronnie Turnbull, also, evidently shared that opinion. The boyish and rather theatrical movement with which he turned his back upon me, showed at once that he had been coached in the suspicions that were now so finally clinched.
“This fellow simply isn’t worth speaking to,” was the inarticulate message of his gesture.
And certainly I gave neither of them any occasion to speak to me. Banks’s opening plunged us into one of those chaotic dialogues which are only made more confused by any additional contribution.
“What have you come up here for?” Banks asked, displaying his immediate determination to treat the invaders without respect of class on this common ground of his father’s home.
“That’s our affair,” Frank snapped. He looked nervously vicious, I thought, like a timid-minded dog turned desperate.
“What the devil do you mean?” Turnbull asked at the same moment, and Brenda got up from her chair and tried to address some explanation to her lover through the ominous preparatory snarlings of the melée.
I heard her say, “Arthur! They’ve been trying to…” but lost the rest in the general shindy.
Turnbull, by virtue of his lung-power, was the most audible of the four.
“You’ve jolly well got to understand, my good man,” he was saying, “that the sooner you get out of this the better”; and went on with more foolishness about Banks having stolen the motor—all painfully tactless stuff, if he still had the least intention of influencing Brenda, but he was young and arrogant and not at all clever.
Banks and Jervaise were sparring at each other all the time that Turnbull fulminated, and Brenda’s soprano came in like a flageolet obbligato—a word or two here and there ringing out with a grateful clearness above the masculine accompaniment.