‘Will you oblige me,’ said Major de Blacquaire, ‘by going to the devil?’
‘Are you a-going,’ said John Jervase, ‘to make a scandal of this business when you get home again? I’ve paid your lawyer to the last farthing. My cousin’s hooked it with pretty near a quarter of a million sterling, and gone out to Venezuela. And if I hadn’t struck on a pretty fat thing in the way of a contract for forage and horseflesh for these French chaps here, I should have been pretty well a bankrupt. But I found the money, and you’re as well off as you would have been if old General Airey had never heard my name.’
‘That is good news to a poor man,’ said De Blacquaire. ‘And now, my dear sir, will you oblige me by going to the devil?’
‘Are you a-going to make a scandal about this business when we get home again?’ Jervase asked.
‘No, you purblind clown,’ said Major de Blacquaire, rising, and fitting his crutches to his armpits. ‘I am not. You have about as much notion of what a man is bound to do under these conditions as an ox would have. Please do as I have asked you, and leave me, and send the boy along. I don’t think that he will leave the same flavour on the palate as the father does.’
‘I suppose,’ said Jervase, ‘that from your point of view I’ve been a badish sort of a lot?’
‘I suppose you have,’ said Major de Blacquaire.
‘But Polly never knew about it, and you’ve never had any sort of a right to look down on him. Old Sir Ferdinand was the first of your crowd as ever climbed to the top of the tree, and I can remember him when he was no better off than I am.’
‘I do not think,’ said Major de Blacquaire, ‘that I have ever encountered quite so pestiferous a stupidity. Will you go?’
The tension of the curious interview was relieved, for Polson, who had slowly paced the circular path which ran round the cemetery, came limping back again, dinting the wet gravel with the crutch-headed stick and leaning on it like a man who had achieved a forced march of many miles.