The Forsyte Saga - Volume 3
Page 38"June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?"
"No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it was."
Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
"I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from him. He'll
find out some day."
"The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard judgment.
When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your mother if she
had done what I have?"
Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of the
tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the prisoned
grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or passion--knew
nothing at all, as yet!
"What have you told him?" he said at last.
"That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had never
you."
Jolyon smiled. "This promises to take the place of air-raids," he said.
"After all, one misses them."
Irene looked up at him.
"We've known it would come some day."
He answered her with sudden energy:
"I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan't do that, even in
thought. He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's put to
him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets to know
otherwise."
"Not yet, Jolyon."
That was like her--she had no foresight, and never went to meet trouble.
Still--who knew?--she might be right. It was ill going against a
till experience had given him some touchstone by which he could judge
the values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing, had
deepened his charity. All the same, one must take precautions--every
precaution possible! And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake
turning over those precautions. He must write to Holly, telling her that
Jon knew nothing as yet of family history. Holly was discreet, she would
make sure of her husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter
with him when he went to-morrow.
And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate
died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for
Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so
rounded off and polished....
But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the
first sight!" He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of those
dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno--a conviction that this was
his 'dream'; so that what followed had seemed to him at once natural
and miraculous. Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for one who was
terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when
boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was
almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy
friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore, been inoculated
against the germs of love by small doses of the poison. And now in
the dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay awake, featuring
Fleur--as they called it--recalling her words, especially that "Au
revoir!" so soft and sprightly.