'MY DEAR JO,
'The sum (L500) stands in my books for the benefit of your boy, under
the name of Jolyon Forsyte, and will be duly-credited with interest at
5 per cent. I hope that you are doing well. My health remains good at
present.
'With love, I am,
'Your affectionate Father,
'JOLYON FORSYTE.'
And every year on the 1st of January he had added a hundred and the
interest. The sum was mounting up--next New Year's Day it would be
fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to say how much
satisfaction he had got out of that yearly transaction. But the
correspondence had ended.
In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly
constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class, of
the continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him to judge
conduct by results rather than by principle, there was at the bottom of
his heart a sort of uneasiness. His son ought, under the circumstances,
to have gone to the dogs; that law was laid down in all the novels,
sermons, and plays he had ever read, heard, or witnessed.
After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something
wrong somewhere. Why had his son not gone to the dogs? But, then, who
could tell?
He had heard, of course--in fact, he had made it his business to find
out--that Jo lived in St. John's Wood, that he had a little house in
Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into
society--a queer sort of society, no doubt--and that they had
two children--the little chap they called Jolly (considering the
circumstances the name struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both
feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since the
marriage. Who could tell what his son's circumstances really were? He
had capitalized the income he had inherited from his mother's father
and joined Lloyd's as an underwriter; he painted pictures,
too--water-colours. Old Jolyon knew this, for he had surreptitiously
bought them from time to time, after chancing to see his son's name
signed at the bottom of a representation of the river Thames in a
dealer's window. He thought them bad, and did not hang them because of
the signature; he kept them locked up in a drawer.
In the great opera-house a terrible yearning came on him to see his son.
He remembered the days when he had been wont to slide him, in a brown
holland suit, to and fro under the arch of his legs; the times when he
ran beside the boy's pony, teaching him to ride; the day he first took
him to school. He had been a loving, lovable little chap! After he went
to Eton he had acquired, perhaps, a little too much of that desirable
manner which old Jolyon knew was only to be obtained at such places
and at great expense; but he had always been companionable. Always a
companion, even after Cambridge--a little far off, perhaps, owing to
the advantages he had received. Old Jolyon's feeling towards our public
schools and 'Varsities never wavered, and he retained touchingly his
attitude of admiration and mistrust towards a system appropriate to
the highest in the land, of which he had not himself been privileged to
partake.... Now that June had gone and left, or as good as left him, it
would have been a comfort to see his son again. Guilty of this treason
to his family, his principles, his class, old Jolyon fixed his eyes
on the singer. A poor thing--a wretched poor thing! And the Florian a
perfect stick!