"Well, dear, if you've had enough--let's go!"
That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he
waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study. He
opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear
her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair,
closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like that
passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata--so had been his life with her,
a divine third movement. And now this business of Jon's--this bad
business! Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it
were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see
his father in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed,
went, and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was
sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed, glasses
balanced between thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the
deep eyes looking up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his
own, seeming to speak. "Are you facing it, Jo? It's for you to decide.
She's only a woman!" Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how
all the Victorian Age came up with it! And his answer "No, I've funked
it--funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I've got a heart; I've funked
it." But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept
at it; "It's your wife, your son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!" Was it
a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living
on within him? And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old
saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put
the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly he breathed with
difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen.
He got up and went out into the air. The stars were very bright. He
passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through
the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with
lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself she
seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands idle.
Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her breast.
'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of her--it's
natural!'
And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task. He wrote with
difficulty and many erasures.