The Jervaise Comedy

by J. D. Beresford

I made a fairly long story of it; so long that we reached the lodge at the Park gates before I had finished, and turned back again up the avenue. I was careful to be scrupulously truthful, but I gave him no record of any conversation that I thought might, however indirectly, inculpate Banks.

Jervaise did not once interrupt me, but I saw that he was listening with all his attention, studying my statement as he might have studied a complicated brief. And when I had done, he thrust out his ugly underlip with an effect of sneering incredulity that I found almost unendurably irritating.

“Do you mean to say that you don’t believe me?” I asked passionately.

We were just opposite the side road that I had taken the night before, the road that led through the thickest part of the spinney before it came out into the open within a quarter of a mile of Jervaise Clump. And as if both our minds had been unconsciously occupied with the same thought, the need for a still greater privacy, we turned out of the avenue with an air of deliberate intention and a marked increase of pace. It seemed as though this secluded alley had, from the outset, been the secret destination of our walk.

He did not reply to my challenging question for perhaps a couple of minutes. We were walking quite quickly, now. Until the heat of our rising anger could find some other expression, we had to seek relief in physical action. I had no doubt that Jervaise in his own more restrained way was as angry as I was myself. His sardonic sneer had intensified until it took the shape of a fierce, brooding anger.

We were out of sight of the junction of the side road with the avenue, when he stopped suddenly and faced me. He had manifestly gathered himself together for a great effort that was, as it were, focussed in the malignant, dominating scowl of his forbidding face. The restraint of his language added to the combined effect—consciously studied, no doubt—of coarse and brutal authority.

“And why did you spy on me this morning?” he asked. “Why did you follow me up to the Home Farm, watch me while I was talking to Miss Banks, and then slink away again?”

I have two failings that would certainly have disqualified me if I had ever attempted to adopt the legal profession. The first is a tendency to blush violently on occasion. The second is to see and to sympathise with my opponent’s point of view. Both these failings betrayed me now. The blush seemed to proclaim my guilt; my sudden understanding of Jervaise’s temper confirmed it.

For, indeed, I understood precisely at that moment how enraged he must be against me. He, like Miss Tattersall, had been playing an underhand game, though his was different in kind. He had been seduced (my bitterness against Anne found satisfaction in laying the blame at her door!) into betraying the interests of his own family. I did not, in a sense, blame him for that; I had, the night before, been more than a little inclined to honour him for it; but I saw how, from the purely Jervaise point of view, his love-making would appear as something little short of criminal. And to be caught in the act, for I had caught him, however unwillingly, must have been horribly humiliating for him. Little wonder that coming home, hot and ashamed from his rendezvous, and being confronted with all the tale of my duplicity, he had flamed into a fury of resentment against me. I understood that beyond any question. Only one point still puzzled me. How had he been able until this moment to restrain his fury? I could but suppose that there was something cold-blooded, calculating, almost reptilian in his character; that he had planned cautiously and far-sightedly what he regarded as the best means for bringing about my ultimate disgrace.

And now my blush and my powers of sympathy had betrayed me. I felt like a convicted criminal as I said feebly, “Oh! that was an accident, absolutely an accident, I assure you. I had no sort of idea where you were when I went up to the Home Farm….”