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Updated: June 7, 2025
The situation was developed by Falk's return from Oxford. When he was away her love for him seemed to her simply all in the world that she possessed. He wrote to her very seldom, but she made her Sunday letters to him the centre of her week, and wrote as though they were a passionately devoted mother and son. She allowed herself this little gentle deception it was her only one.
His indignation and his personality together would have been enough to spoil the reality of the most authentic thing. When I looked at him I doubted the story but the remembrance of Falk's words, looks, gestures, invested it not only with an air of reality but with the absolute truth of primitive passion.
Kipping asked in that accursedly mild voice I could not hear it without thinking of poor Bill Hayden, and to the others, they told me later, it brought the same bitter memory. "How long since Cap'n Falk's ol' unde' shirt done be a p'tection?" muttered the cook grimly. "Yes, laugh! Laugh, you black baboon! Laugh, you silly little fool, Lathrop!" Falk yelled.
It was some while since the last obsession, some ridiculous action about drainage on the part of the Town Council. But the new one threatened to make up in full for the length of that interval. Only just before Falk's unexpected return from Oxford Joan had been congratulating herself on her father's happiness and peace of mind. She might have known the omens of that dangerous quiet.
He who was so far greater than a million Ronders! The situation in the Brandon family had not been made any easier by Falk's strange liking for the man. Joan did not pretend that she understood her brother or had ever been in any way close to him.
Brandon climbed down from his ladder and came, smiling, across to his son. At his happy times, when he was at ease with himself and the world, he had the confident gaiety of a child; he was at ease now. He put his hand through Falk's arm and drew him across to the table by the window.
He had not slept, and had not given way to the horror of the situation. He wanted to live. But during the night the carpenter, without at all trying to approach the pump, had managed to creep quietly along the starboard bulwark, and, unseen, had crouched down right under Falk's deck port.
Because there was a great deal of pressing business he pushed aside Falk's problem. It was there, it was waiting for him, but perhaps time would solve it. He concentrated himself with a new energy, a new self-confidence, upon the Cathedral, the Jubilee, the public life of the town. Nevertheless, that horrible day had had its effect upon him.
I was engaged just then in eating despondently a piece of stale Dutch cheese, being too much crushed to care what I swallowed myself, let along bothering my head about Falk's ideas of gastronomy. I could expect from their study no clue to his conduct in matters of business, which seemed to me totally unrestrained by morality or even by the commonest sort of decency.
Joan's white dress, beyond the circle of lamp-light was a dim shadow. Mrs. Brandon turned the pages of her book, her ears straining for the sound of Falk's return. As she sat there, so inattentively turning the pages of her book, the foreboding sense of some approaching drama flooded the room.
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