"No, I don't."
"Nothing has happened, Ina," he said, coldly. "I am an old, sick man. You tire me. Leave me in peace. Leave me in peace."
He rose from his chair, nervous, agitated. She drew up her weary eyes with her well-bred expression, with her mother's expression, the expression of the IJsselmondes, who were her source of pride.
"I will not tire you, Papa," she said—and her voice, sharp but tuned to the correct social enunciation, sounded affected—"I will not tire you. I will leave you in peace. I came to you, I wanted to speak to you ... because I thought ... that you had some worry ... some sorrow. I wanted to share it. But I will not insist."
She went on, slowly, with the offended haughtiness of a grande dame, as Harold Dercksz remembered seeing his mother leave the room after a conversation. A reproachful tenderness welled up in him; he had almost kept her back. But he restrained his emotion and let her go. She was a good daughter to him, but her soul, the soul of a small-minded woman, was all consumed with money needs, with foolish conceit about small, vain things—because her mother was a Freule IJsselmonde—and with a passionate curiosity. He let her go, he let her go; and his loneliness remained around him. He sank into his chair again, screened his eyes with his hand; and the lamplight under the green shade furrowed the wrinkles sharply in his worn face of anguish. He stared out before him. What did she know? What did she guess? What had she overheard perhaps ... in the conservatory, as she came to them?... He tried to remember the last words which he had exchanged with Daan. He could not remember. He decided that Ina knew nothing, but that she guessed, because of his increased depression.... Oh, if the Thing would only pass!... Oh, if the old people would only die!... Oh, that no one might be left to know!... It was enough, it was enough, there had been enough years of self-reproach and silent, inward punishment for people who were so old, so very old....
And he stared, as though he were looking the Thing in the eyes.
He stared all the evening long; sitting in his chair, his face twisted with illness and pain, he fell asleep with the light sleep of old people, quick to come and quick to go, and he saw himself again, a child of thirteen, in the night in the pasangrahan and heard his mother's voice:
"O my God, O my God, no, no, not in the river!"
And he saw those three—but young still—his mother, Takma, Ma-Boeten; and between them his father's lifeless body, in the pelting rain of that fatal night....