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"Mother isn't joking, dear," Anne said, accepting the signal without an instant's hesitation. "Really serious things have been happening while you were away." Her father frowned and shook his head. "This isn't the place to discuss them," he replied. "Well, father, I'm afraid we must discuss them very soon," Anne returned; "because Mr. Jervaise might be coming up after supper." "Mr. Jervaise?
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.
The plan that I had in mind when the door opened was to say politely to Jervaise, "I'll wait for you here" I had a premonition that he would raise no objection to that suggestion and then when he and Miss Banks were safely inside, I meant to go and find rapture in solitude. The moon was certainly coming out; the dawn was due in three hours or so, and before me were unknown hills and woods.
I cannot say why, exactly, but I felt that if I looked at her just then I should give myself away before Jervaise. "I must go and see about Mr. Melhuish's room," she said. She was half-way to the door when Jervaise stopped her. "I should rather like to speak to you for a minute first," he remarked, and scowled again at me. "There's nothing more to be said until Arthur has seen Mr.
"Is it so very important?" the soft, clear voice asked, still, I thought, with a faint undercurrent of raillery. "Really, Miss Banks, it is," Jervaise implored, risking his delicate face again. She hesitated a moment and then said, "Very well," and disappeared, taking this time the dissipated candle with her.
I was fretting with the fear that the dawn would have broken before I could get away. I had made up my mind to watch the sunrise from "Jervaise Clump." It was Mrs. Jervaise who started the break-up of the party. She was attacked by a craving to yawn that gradually became irresistible.
I knew nothing about his movements of the night, and in that morning interview with old Jervaise the most important admission of all must almost certainly have been made. "Well, you have a right to know that," I began, "although I don't think you and your family had any right whatever to be so damnably rude to me at lunch, on the mere spiteful accusations of Miss Tattersall." "Miss Tattersall?"
I had been given so perfect an opportunity to enter into their feelings and views by my strange and intimate association with their antagonism to all that was typified by the rule of the Hall. By reason of my sympathy with the Banks I had been able to realise the virtue of struggle and the evils of the almost unlimited and quite indiscriminating power wielded by such landowners as old Jervaise.
He had poached a trout from the waters of a neighbouring landowner, who had welcomed the opportunity to make himself more than usually objectionable. And on the morning before his thrashing, Jervaise had come into my study and confessed to me that he was dreading the coming ordeal. He was not afraid of the physical pain, he told me, but of the shame of the thing.
I commented, and added, "It still makes Miss Banks appear rather double-faced." "Can't see it," Jervaise replied. "Put yourself in her place and see how it works!" "Oh! Lord!" I murmured, struck by the grotesque idea of Jervaise attempting to see life through the eyes of Anne. Imagine a rhinoceros thinking itself into the experiences of a skylark!
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