was heard of as sailor on a merchantman in the African trade, having a
kind of reputation for feats of strength and climbing, but finally
disappearing one night as his ship lay off the Congo coast.
In the son of Sir Philip Jermyn the now accepted family peculiarity took a
strange and fatal turn. Tall and fairly handsome, with a sort of weird
Eastern grace despite certain slight oddities of proportion, Robert Jermyn
began life as a scholar and investigator. It was he who first studied
scientifically the vast collection of relics which his mad grandfather had
brought from Africa, and who made the family name as celebrated in
ethnology as in exploration. In 1815 Sir Robert married a daughter of the
seventh Viscount Brightholme and was subsequently blessed with three
children, the eldest and youngest of whom were never publicly seen on
account of deformities in mind and body. Saddened by these family
misfortunes, the scientist sought relief in work, and made two long
expeditions in the interior of Africa. In 1849 his second son, Nevil, a
singularly repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip
Jermyn with the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar
dancer, but was pardoned upon his return in the following year. He came
back to Jermyn House a widower with an infant son, Alfred, who was one day
to be the father of Arthur Jermyn.
Friends said that it was this series of griefs which unhinged the mind of
Sir Robert Jermyn, yet it was probably merely a bit of African folklore
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