CHAPTER III
Jocelyn Ley’s mother died when she was born. She was an only child, and her father, who was in the army, began immediately to idolise her with an abrupt and well-bred idolatry.
He came into some property shortly after his wife’s death, and, leaving the service, took a place in the country, where he used to spend the winters in hunting. In the spring and summer he would go to London, or on a round of visits, sometimes taking Jocelyn with him. She grew up in rather a lonely way, with dogs and horses for her companions, and her education was of a desultory nature. She was a marvellously quick child, the joy and despair of her governesses, who were always exceedingly fond of her, and who found themselves perpetually obliged to leave at the most promising moments, because Major Ley wanted his daughter to be with him. She grew from a roundabout romp, who could never stay on her feet, and came continually to grief, into a slim sensitive girl, very easily hurt, shrinking like a tender plant from anything rough or unpleasant, with a love for animals, and an innate distrust of her own kind.
When she was eighteen her father died, leaving her independent, and very desolate.
In default of better things, he had entrusted her to his sister, for whom he had a certain contemptuous affection. The two ladies, marvellously dissimilar, got on fairly well together—perhaps because they never remained for long at a time in one place, perhaps because neither expected to understand the other, nor required much at her hands. They had spent most of the four years since Major Ley’s death abroad, in Italy, Spain, Germany, and above all in Paris, which Mrs. Travis loved because of the garments to be obtained.
Jocelyn hated the grey monotony of English skies. She had a fierce love of the sun, of lands where the colouring hit the eye, where life seemed to throb with a fuller pulse.
From her mother, in whose family there was a tradition of gipsy blood, she had inherited a restless, moody nature, which ordained that she should wander, just as it decreed that she should be a slave to the ebb and flow of her emotions. She had a vast capacity for living in the passing moment, which indicated a nature very responsive to outward influences, and to her own physical condition.
In her, qualities, and the negations of those qualities, seemed to swing with a beat and recoil as absolutely weighed and regulated as that of a pendulum; they balanced each other in the scales of her mind. She herself recognised the perpetual equation, standing apart from her moods in a detached consciousness, regretfully indulgent, making no attempt to control or check, rather gauging them with a peculiar pessimism, a sympathetic insight, a tender desire to be good to herself. She extended this desire to all the world—she loved generously to appreciate and to be appreciated, investing herself thereby with a great quality of attraction, not lessened by the essential pride which forbade her to ask a favour from God or man. She never stirred a finger to attract admiration or affection, yet without appreciation she drooped as a flower without water....
As the train droned sleepily on its way to Monte Carlo, she leant forward in the dust-coloured railway carriage to look at the curve of the bay between Cap Martin and Roquebrune. She was smiling unconsciously at the blue sea gleaming in the sunlight, the feathery, white edges of the tiny, tideless waves, the pine-clothed cliffs rising sheer behind the tail of the curving train, and the three sentinel palms on the rocky point in front. Giles sat opposite her, devouring her face with half-closed eyes. Once with an abrupt movement she touched his knees with her own; and then it wanted all of Mrs. Travis—expansive, leaning back, with hands folded on her lap, and quickly-glancing green eyes—to check the mad impulse suddenly roused in him to take the girl in his arms. He spent all the rest of the journey in wondering if she knew of that touch.
They found Nielsen in the garden, fragrantly shaded by a pepper tree. He was sitting on a seat smoking a cigarette, and gravely contemplating the doings of a man, who resembled a Greek statue, and of a sheep-faced boy, who might have stepped out of one of Jean François Millet’s pictures. These two seemed to be committed to the levelling of a heap of earth, which had been let fall from a cart drawn by a large, intelligent-looking mule; they continued, however, to seem, for they did absolutely nothing. Nielsen greeted the ladies with suave effusion; he was a devoted admirer of Jocelyn.