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Peter Alard = Vera Asher Gervase Alard = Stella Mount
(died without male issue) |
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John Peter George Gervase
From the family’s decaying trunk he saw a new healthy branch springing through the grafting in of Stella’s life—healthy but alien, for the children Stella gave Gervase would not be Alards in the true sense of the children she might have given Peter. They would be soaked in their father’s disloyal ideas. His bad sense, his bad form. John, Peter, George and Gervase would probably smash up what was left of the tradition and the estate.... Peter saw them selling Starvecrow, selling Conster, opening shops and works, marrying indiscriminately.... He hated these insurgent nephews his mind had begotten.
Now and then he told himself that his fears were ill-founded. If Stella was going to marry Gervase surely something definite would be known about it by this time. She was not so young that she could afford to wait indefinitely. But against this he knew that Gervase was scarcely twenty-one, and that neither of them had a penny. A long, public engagement would be difficult for many reasons. There might be some secret understanding. His brother still spent most of his Sundays at Vinehall... better not deceive himself with the idea that he went merely for devotional reasons, to gratify this newly-formed taste which to Peter smacked as unseemly as an appetite. No, he went to see Stella, sit with her, talk with her ... kiss her, hold her on his knee, feel the softness of her hair between his fingers ... oh damn!—if only he knew definitely one way or the other, he could choke down his imagination.... His imagination was making a hopeless fool of him with its strokings and its kisses—with its John, Peter, George and Gervase....