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He looked at it absently for a moment before he said, "The people about here call it 'Jervaise Clump. It's a landmark for miles." There was no getting away from it. The Jervaises had conquered all this land and labelled it.
In any case he had had his arm round her, and she had shown no signs of resisting him. My first impression of the curious change in demeanour shown towards me by the Jervaises and their friends at lunch was that it had no existence outside my own recently embittered mind. I thought that I was avoiding them, not that they were avoiding me.
We wanted to show the Jervaises that we had not suspected anything, or that if we had, we didn't mind in the least, and it certainly wasn't their fault. Nevertheless, I saw no reason why in the privacy of the supper-room we had the place to ourselves I should not talk to Hughes.
It's a tradition. Lord, the old man would be horrified, if he knew! The Jervaises are a sort of superior creation to him. We've been their tenants for God knows how many hundred years. And serfs before that, I suppose. I get the feeling myself, sometimes. It's infectious.
Whether Banks were accepted or rejected the Jervaises would not confide the story to their visitors. I must admit that my curiosity was immensely piqued; though I flatter myself that my interest was quite legitimate, that it contained no element of vulgar inquisitiveness.
I could still sympathise with him on that score, even though I was now strongly inclined to side with the Jervaises in the Brenda affair. "Yes, isn't it?" Miss Tattersall agreed. "Of course, they are the only important people in the place," she added thoughtfully. "So important that it's slightly presumptuous to worship God without the sanction of their presence in church," I remarked.
But no one had the least intention of speaking to me, and I had just sense enough to restrain myself from demanding an apology from the company at large. That was my natural inclination. I had been insulted; outraged. I was the Jervaises' guest, and whatever they imagined that I had done, they owed it to me and to themselves to treat me with a reasonable courtesy.
The father was one of the Jervaises' tenants.... A superior kind of young woman in some ways, I've heard; and a friend of the youngest Jervaise girl ... you wouldn't remember her ... she went with her friend to Australia or somewhere ... some quixotic idea of protecting her, I believe ... and married out there. The farmer's name was Baggs.
It was the search to find some mechanical means of influencing the Jervaises' decision that reminded me of Arthur Banks's hint of an advantage that he might use in a last emergency. "But your brother told me last night," I said, "that there was some 'pull' or other he had, that might make a difference if it came to desperate measures."
The Jervaises, from what I had seen of them, promised, I thought, to be uncommonly dull. I had not seen Brenda before dinner. I roused myself again and made an effort to shift the depression that was settling upon me, but the mood was not to be exorcised by any deliberate attempt to revive the glow of adventure that had warmed my earlier excursions through the wood.
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