Young Jolyon answered in his ironical voice:
"No! I'm not in debt!"
Old Jolyon saw that he was angry, and touched his hand. He had run a risk. It was worth it, however, and Jo had never been sulky with him. They drove on, without speaking again, to Stanhope Gate. Old Jolyon invited him in, but young Jolyon shook his head.
"June's not here," said his father hastily: "went of to-day on a visit. I suppose you know that she's engaged to be married?" "Already?" murmured young Jolyon'.
Old Jolyon stepped out, and, in paying the cab fare, for the first time in his life gave the driver a sovereign in mistake for a shilling. Placing the coin in his mouth, the cabman whipped his horse secretly on the underneath and hurried away.
Old Jolyon turned the key softly in the lock, pushed open the door, and beckoned. His son saw him gravely hanging up his coat, with an expression on his face like that of a boy who intends to steal cherries.
The door of the diningroom was open, the gas turned low; a spirit-urn hissed on a tea-tray, and close to it a cynical looking cat had fallen asleep on the dining-table. Old Jolyon 'shoo'd' her off at once. The incident was a relief to his feelings; he rattled his opera hat behind the animal.
"She's got fleas," he said, following her out of the room. Through the door in the hall leading to the basement he called "Hssst!"
several times, as though assisting the cat's departure, till by some strange coincidence the butler appeared below. "You can go to bed, Parfitt," said old Jolyon. "I will lock up and put out."
When he again entered the diningroom the cat unfortunately preceded him, with her tail in the air, proclaiming that she had seen
through this manouevre for suppressing the butler from the first....
A fatality had dogged old Jolyon's domestic stratagems all his life.
Young Jolyon could not help smiling. He was very well versed in irony, and everything that evening seemed to him ironical. The episode of the cat; the announcement of his own daughter's engagement. So he had no more part or parcel in her than he had in the Puss! And the poetical justice of this appealed to him.
"What is June like now?" he asked.
"She's a little thing," returned old Jolyon; "they say she's like me, but that's their folly. She's more like your mother--the same eyes
and hair."
"Ah! and she is pretty?"
Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely; especially anything for which he had a genuine admiration.
"Not bad looking--a regular Forsyte chin. It'll be lonely here when she's gone, Jo."
23
The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had felt on first seeing his father. "What will you do with yourself, Dad? I suppose she's wrapped up in him?"
"Do with myself ?" repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his voice. "It'll be miserable work living here alone. I don't know how it's to end. I wish to goodness...." He checked himself, and added: "The question is, what had I better do with this house?"
Young Jolyon looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that he remembered as a boy--sleeping dogs with their noses resting on bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapes lying side by side in mild surprise. The house was a white elephant, but he could not conceive of his father living in a smaller place; and all the more did it all seem ironical.
In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the figurehead of his family and class and creed, with his white head and dome-
like forehead, the representative of moderation, and order, and love of property. As lonely an old man as there was in London.
There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had the impersonal eye.
The poor old Dad! So this was the end, the purpose to which he had lived with such magnificent moderation! To be lonely, and grow
older and older, yearning for a soul to speak to!
In his turn old Jolyon looked back at his son. He wanted to talk about many things that he had been unable to talk about all these years. It had been impossible to seriously confide in June his conviction that property in the Soho quarter would go up in value; his uneasiness about that tremendous silence of Pippin, the superintendent of the New Colliery Company, of which he had so long been chairman; his disgust at the steady fall in American Golgothas, or even to discuss how, by some sort of settlement, he could best avoid the payment of those death duties which would follow his decease. Under the influence, however, of a cup of tea, which he seemed to stir indefinitely, he began to speak at last. A new vista of life was thus opened up, a promised land of talk, where he could find a harbour against the waves of anticipation and regret; where he could soothe his soul with the opium of devising how to round off his property and make eternal the only part of him that was to remain alive.
Young Jolyon was a good listener; it was his great quality. He kept his eyes fixed on his father's face, putting a question now and then. The clock struck one before old Jolyon had finished, and at the sound of its striking his principles came back. He took out his watch
with a look of surprise:
"I must go to bed, Jo," he said.
Young Jolyon rose and held out his hand to help his father up. The old face looked worn and hollow again; the eyes were steadily averted.
"Goodbye, my boy; take care of yourself."
A moment passed, and young Jolyon, turning on his, heel, marched out at the door. He could hardly see; his smile quavered. Never in all the fifteen years since he had first found out that life was no simple business, had he found it so singularly complicated.
CHAPTER III--DINNER AT SWITHIN'S
In Swithin's orange and light-blue diningroom, facing the Park, the round table was laid for twelve.
A cut-glass chandelier filled with lighted candles hung like a giant stalactite above its centre, radiating over large gilt-framed mirrors, slabs of marble on the tops of side-tables, and heavy gold chairs with crewel worked seats. Everything betokened that love of beauty so deeply implanted in each family which has had its own way to make into Society, out of the more vulgar heart of Nature. Swithin had indeed an impatience of simplicity, a love of ormolu, which had always stamped him amongst his associates as a man of great, if
24
somewhat luxurious taste; and out of the knowledge that no one could possibly enter his rooms without perceiving him to be a man
of wealth, he had derived a solid and prolonged happiness such as perhaps no other circumstance in life had afforded him.
Since his retirement from land agency, a profession deplorable in his estimation, especially as to its auctioneering department, he had abandoned himself to naturally aristocratic tastes.
The perfect luxury of his latter days had embedded him like a fly in sugar; and his mind, where very little took place from morning till night, was the junction of two curiously opposite emotions, a lingering and sturdy satisfaction that he had made his own way and his own fortune, and a sense that a man of his distinction should never have been allowed to soil his mind with work.
He stood at the sideboard in a white waistcoat with large gold and onyx buttons, watching his valet screw the necks of three champagne bottles deeper into ice-pails. Between the points of his stand-up collar, which--though it hurt him to move--he would on no account have had altered, the pale flesh of his under chin remained immovable. His eyes roved from bottle to bottle. He was debating, and he argued like this: Jolyon drinks a glass, perhaps two, he's so careful of himself. James, he can't take his wine nowadays. Nicholas--Fanny and he would swill water he shouldn't wonder! Soames didn't count; these young nephews--Soames was thirty-one--couldn't drink! But Bosinney?