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