When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along the
terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and confusion.
Leaning against the creepered wall he tore open the letter. It was
long--very long! This added to his fear, and he began reading. When he
came to the words: "It was Fleur's father that she married," everything
seemed to spin before him. He was close to a window, and entering by it,
he passed, through music-room and hall, up to his bedroom. Dipping his
face in cold water, he sat on his bed, and went on reading, dropping
each finished page on the bed beside him. His father's writing was easy
to read--he knew it so well, though he had never had a letter from him
one quarter so long. He read with a dull feeling--imagination only half
at work. He best grasped, on that first reading, the pain his father
must have had in writing such a letter. He let the last sheet fall, and
in a sort of mental, moral helplessness began to read the first again.
It all seemed to him disgusting--dead and disgusting. Then, suddenly, a
hot wave of horrified emotion tingled through him. He buried his face in
his hands. His mother! Fleur's father! He took up the letter again, and
read on mechanically. And again came the feeling that it was all
dead and disgusting; his own love so different! This letter said his
mother--and her father! An awful letter!
Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their property?
Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him--red,
stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent faces;
hundreds, thousands of them! How could he know what men who had such
faces thought and did? He held his head in his hands and groaned.
His mother! He caught up the letter and read on again: "horror and
aversion-alive in her to-day.... your children.... grandchildren.... of
a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave...." He got
up from his bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his
love and Fleur's, was true, or his father could never have written it.
'Why didn't they tell me the first thing,' he thought, 'the day I first
saw Fleur? They knew I'd seen her. They were afraid, and--now--I've--got
it!' Overcome by misery too acute for thought or reason, he crept into
a dusky corner of the room and sat down on the floor. He sat there, like
some unhappy little animal. There was comfort in dusk, and the floor--as
if he were back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all
over it. He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped round
his knees, for how long he did not know. He was wrenched from his blank
wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from his mother's room.
The blinds were down over the windows of his room, shut up in his
absence, and from where he sat he could only hear a rustle, her
footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her standing before
his dressing-table. She had something in her hand. He hardly breathed,
hoping she would not see him, and go away. He saw her touch things on
the table as if they had some virtue in them, then face the window-grey
from head to foot like a ghost. The least turn of her head, and she must
see him! Her lips moved: "Oh! Jon!" She was speaking to herself; the
tone of her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her hand a little
photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at it--very small. He
knew it--one of himself as a tiny boy, which she always kept in her bag.
His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had heard it, she turned
her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave, and the movement of her
hands pressing the photograph against her breast, he said: