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Updated: May 11, 2025
But Vassie said if you thought it was the right thing to do by her you'd do it." Boase had as little vanity as any man, but it was pleasurably pricked by this. Also he still reproached himself. "John-James," he began almost diffidently, "you mustn't talk like that about bastards as though it made any difference to me.
The day when he came over to Cloom and found Lord Luxullyan and John-James having tea together was too much for his grasp of social values, and he straightway bought a practice in Plymouth, where he did very well and rose to be an alderman, though the gleaming eminence of mayor never was to be for him.
A week earlier Ishmael had been called up to Devon to see his mother, who had taken a turn for the worse: she had died a few hours after his arrival; he had had to stay and see to the funeral, and was not due back till that evening. John-James was in the fields and the maids were all in the dairy, working hard to finish the butter for market.
Blanche thought it rather silly and tiresome of Ishmael to keep on at it; surely he could leave that clumsy brother of his for the first time the realisation that John-James actually was whole brother to Ishmael flashed into her mind and wander away somewhere with her! What was the good of being the owner and master if he could not get some one else to do the work when it became a bore?
She had been received politely, but without enthusiasm; and she had overheard some of the other guests saying that they supposed young Ruan had had to be invited, but that it was really dashed awkward!... And she was beginning to realise that Ishmael, when he had paid his mother a little income, paid Vassie enough to live on, paid John-James bigger wages to allow of his living elsewhere, would not be nearly as well off as she had thought ... a visit to London once a year would be the utmost to be hoped for.
At home he found John-James waiting to consult him about the breaking up of a grass-field, and harnessing the horse to the iron-toothed tormentor, he took it out himself and spent the rest of the day driving it over the tumbling clods. A month later Annie's religiosity, which had been increasing in violence, unmistakably took the form of mania.
Ishmael was just the "lil' un" and a trouble because the cause of trouble, but Vassie was something so infinitely quicker, cleverer, more elusive than himself that she stood to John-James for what of beauty was interwoven with the very everyday stuff of his life.
They stood in silence, John-James because he hardly ever spoke unless spoken to, and Ishmael because over his spirit rushed a flood of memory that for an aching moment overwhelmed him.
Vassie, to whom any gathering was better than none, was already gone with a girl friend; John-James, who was the Martha of the family, had too much to attend to at the farm; while Archelaus was frankly a scoffer, though an uneasy one. Neither was Annie anxious for the presence of her other children at chapel.
"There you go, John-James Beggoe, talken' as though I grudged my own cheild maken' herself 'ansome. Vassie, my worm, you may have that bit o' blue ribbon I bought last Corpus Fair 'tes in the chest." Vassie was off before her mother had time to change her mind, and John-James began slowly to rinse the china through the darkened water, on whose surface the grease lay in a shimmering arabesque.
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