“I will depend on you to send me up a decent cook. I shall put my bearer at the head of the staff; his son will attend my father.”
“They will rob you, of course,” remarked Cardozo, with a shrug.
“I doubt it. But if they do, it will be in a quiet and respectable manner—not indecently and extravagantly—and to no great extent. The money will pass through my hands. The mallees must learn that they will no longer receive a garden rent free, and wages for working for themselves. We will have some new furniture, the house cleaned and routed out, a daily dâk, papers, books, a pony for my father.”
“You will never do all this—never. I wish you every success, you know”—nodding towards him—“but the labours of Hercules, the cleaning of the Augean stables, were a mere joke to your task. Come, now, I’m a sporting fellow; I bet you fifty rupees to twenty, that when I come back in a couple of months’ time, just to see if you are alive, I shall find our friend Fuzzil and the goats, old hags, children, and chickens, in statu quo.”
Jervis shook his head; he was not in the mood to bet or joke. Life was real, life was earnest—grim earnest, with him now.
“Well, ta-ta! it is nearly twelve o’clock, and I have to make an early start,” said Mr. Cardozo, rising, and with a yawn that seemed to divide his head in two parts, he waved a valediction with his pet hand and ring, and swaggered off to bed.
But Mark Jervis was of stronger stuff than flabby, emotional, self-indulgent Fernandez; and after a desperate struggle he carried out his plans. The desperate struggle being on the part of his father’s good-for-nothing retinue. When in one brief sentence he informed Fuzzil that he no longer required his services, Fuzzil looked as if he could not credit his ears. He blew out his fat cheeks, and struck an attitude of defiance, as with folded arms and head on one side he said—
“You not my master. I take no orders.”
“I am your master now,” said Jervis.
“I never going. This Mr. Cardozo’s house.”