He drove back to Robin Hill under a brilliant sky to his late dinner,
served with an added care by servants trying to show him that they
sympathised, eaten with an added scrupulousness to show them that he
appreciated their sympathy. But it was a real relief to get to his cigar
on the terrace of flag-stones--cunningly chosen by young Bosinney for
shape and colour--with night closing in around him, so beautiful a
night, hardly whispering in the trees, and smelling so sweet that it
made him ache. The grass was drenched with dew, and he kept to those
flagstones, up and down, till presently it began to seem to him that he
was one of three, not wheeling, but turning right about at each end,
so that his father was always nearest to the house, and his son always
nearest to the terrace edge. Each had an arm lightly within his arm; he
dared not lift his hand to his cigar lest he should disturb them, and
it burned away, dripping ash on him, till it dropped from his lips,
at last, which were getting hot. They left him then, and his arms felt
chilly. Three Jolyons in one Jolyon they had walked.
He stood still, counting the sounds--a carriage passing on the highroad,
a distant train, the dog at Gage's farm, the whispering trees, the groom
playing on his penny whistle. A multitude of stars up there--bright and
silent, so far off! No moon as yet! Just enough light to show him the
dark flags and swords of the iris flowers along the terrace edge--his
favourite flower that had the night's own colour on its curving crumpled
petals. He turned round to the house. Big, unlighted, not a soul beside
himself to live in all that part of it. Stark loneliness! He could
not go on living here alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty, why
should a man feel lonely? The answer--as to some idiot's riddle--was:
Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness,
for at the back of beauty was harmony, and at the back of harmony
was--union. Beauty could not comfort if the soul were out of it. The
night, maddeningly lovely, with bloom of grapes on it in starshine, and
the breath of grass and honey coming from it, he could not enjoy, while
she who was to him the life of beauty, its embodiment and essence, was
cut off from him, utterly cut off now, he felt, by honourable decency.
He made a poor fist of sleeping, striving too hard after that
resignation which Forsytes find difficult to reach, bred to their own
way and left so comfortably off by their fathers. But after dawn he
dozed off, and soon was dreaming a strange dream.