Irene within three miles of him!—and again in flight! He stood with a very queer smile on his lips. This was more than he had bargained for!
About noon he set out on foot across Richmond Park, and as he went along, he thought: “Richmond Park! By Jove, it suits us Forsytes!” Not that Forsytes lived there—nobody lived there save royalty, rangers, and the deer—but in Richmond Park Nature was allowed to go so far and no further, putting up a brave show of being natural, seeming to say: “Look at my instincts—they are almost passions, very nearly out of hand, but not quite, of course; the very hub of possession is to possess oneself.” Yes! Richmond Park possessed itself, even on that bright day of June, with arrowy cuckoos shifting the tree-points of their calls, and the wood doves announcing high summer.
The Green Hotel, which Jolyon entered at one o’clock, stood nearly opposite that more famous hostelry, the Crown and Sceptre; it was modest, highly respectable, never out of cold beef, gooseberry tart, and a dowager or two, so that a carriage and pair was almost always standing before the door.
In a room draped in chintz so slippery as to forbid all emotion, Irene was sitting on a piano stool covered with crewel work, playing “Hansel and Gretel” out of an old score. Above her on a wall, not yet Morris-papered, was a print of the Queen on a pony, amongst deer-hounds, Scotch caps, and slain stags; beside her in a pot on the window-sill was a white and rosy fuchsia. The Victorianism of the room almost talked; and in her clinging frock Irene seemed to Jolyon like Venus emerging from the shell of the past century.
“If the proprietor had eyes,” he said, “he would show you the door; you have broken through his decorations.” Thus lightly he smothered up an emotional moment. Having eaten cold beef, pickled walnut, gooseberry tart, and drunk stone-bottle ginger-beer, they walked into the Park, and light talk was succeeded by the silence Jolyon had dreaded.
“You haven’t told me about Paris,” he said at last.
“No. I’ve been shadowed for a long time; one gets used to that. But then Soames came. By the little Niobe—the same story; would I go back to him?”
“Incredible!”
She had spoken without raising her eyes, but she looked up now. Those dark eyes clinging to his said as no words could have: “I have come to an end; if you want me, here I am.”
For sheer emotional intensity had he ever—old as he was—passed through such a moment?