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Updated: May 27, 2025
"Do you know," I said, "that the person I'm most sorry for in this affair is Mr. Jervaise. He seems absolutely broken by it." Miss Tattersall nodded sympathetically. "Yes, isn't it dreadful?" she said. "At breakfast this morning I was thinking how perfectly detestable it was of Brenda to do a thing like that." "Or of Banks?" I added. "Oh! it wasn't his fault," Miss Tattersall said spitefully.
He appeared to have accepted his doom as assured, and being plunged into the final gulf of despair, he had, now, no heart even to be apologetic. The solid earth of his native country was slipping away from him; nothing else mattered. There was one brief, tense interval of silence before old Jervaise began to speak.
"Good idea of yours, Melhuish," Ronnie said. Frank grunted. "I've no sort of grounds for it, you know," I explained. "It was only a casual suggestion." "Jolly convincing one, though," Turnbull congratulated me. "So exactly the sort of thing she would do, isn't it, Frank?" "Shouldn't have thought she'd have been gone so long," Jervaise replied.
"I have heard nothing of any gross misbehaviour." She was so clearly mistress of the situation that I might have been sorry for old Jervaise, if it had not been for the presence of that scowling fool by the door. "I I'm afraid I can describe your son's conduct as as nothing less than gross misbehaviour," the old man stammered, "having consideration to his employment.
Lord, mater, you've started us now," he said, and gave away almost sensuously to his impulses, stretching and gaping in a way that positively racked us with the longing to imitate him. "Really, my dear, no necessity for you," began Mr. Jervaise, yawned more or less politely behind a very white, well-kept hand, and concluded, "no necessity for you or Olive to stay up; none whatever.
It was Jervaise who brought back the unintelligible disputants to reasonable speech. He stopped speaking, stepped back on to the hearth-rug, and then addressed the loudly vociferous Turnbull. "Ronnie!" Jervaise said in a tone that arrested attention, and having got his man's ear, added, "Half a minute!" "But look here, you know," Turnbull protested, still on the same note of aggressive violence.
But Anne, still leaning back in the corner of the settle, refused to answer. Jervaise turned and looked down at her. "If you all went...?" he said, giving his incomplete sentence the sound of a question. "Oh! I should certainly go, too," she replied. Jervaise frowned moodily. I could see that he was caught in an awkward dilemma, but I was not absolutely sure as to the form it took.
He would imply that Banks had come in the manner proper to his condition. "Banks wishes to know if he might speak to you a minute, sir," was all the warning poor old Jervaise would get of this frontal attack upon his dignities.
"And do you mean to say that they were all so horrid to you that you had to come away?" she asked. "Precisely that," I said. "But you don't tell us what Mr. Melhuish has done!" Anne persisted, continuing her cross-examination of Jervaise. "Well, for one thing, he went out to meet your brother at three o'clock this morning," he replied grudgingly. "Didn't come out to meet me," Banks put in.
He would, I am sure, have committed murder for Brenda any sort of murder. Frank Jervaise did not respond at once to the gage that had been offered. He appeared to be moodily weighing the probabilities before he decided his policy. And Brenda impatiently prompted him by saying, "Well, I don't see what possible objection you can have to that."
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