LII
Before long Brodrick was aware that that month of spring had brought him the thing he most desired. He was appeased again with the hope of fatherhood. It tided him over the bad months of nineteen-seven, over the intolerable hours that Levine was giving him in the office of the "Monthly Review." It softened for him the hard fact that he could no longer afford his expensive dream. The old, reckless, personal ambition, the fantastic pride, had been overtaken by the ambition and the pride of race. He wanted to found, not a great magazine, but a family, to have more and more children like the solid little son they had called John Henry Brodrick.
The child justified the double name. The blood of the Brodricks ran in him pure. He flattered the racial and paternal pride. He grew more and more the image of what Brodrick had been at his age. It was good to think that there would be more like him. Brodrick's pride in beholding him was such that he had almost forgotten that in this question of race there would be Jane to reckon with.
In December, in the last night of nineteen-seven, a second son was born. A son so excessively small and feeble that the wonder was how he had contrived to be born at all. Brodrick when he first looked at him had a terrible misgiving. Supposing he had to face the chances of degeneration? There could be only one opinion, of course, as to the cause and the responsibility. He did not require Henry to tell him that.
Not that he could think of it just then. He could think of nothing but Jinny pausing again, uncertain, though for a shorter time, before the dreadful open door.
Nineteen-eight was the year when everything happened. Jinny was hardly out of danger when there was a crisis in the affairs of the "Monthly Review." Levine who had been pestering his brother-in-law for the last eighteen months, was pressing him hard now. The Review was passing out of Brodrick's hands. When it came to the point he realized how unwilling he was to let it go. He could only save it by buying Levine out. And he couldn't do that. As the father of a family he had no business to risk more money on his unprofitable dream.
It was impossible to conceal from Jane the fact that he was worried. She saw it in his face. She lay awake, retarded somewhat in her recovery by the thought that she was responsible for that and all his worries. He had lost money over the Review and now he was going to lose the Review itself, owing, she could perfectly well see, to her high-handed editorship. It would go to his heart, she knew, to give it up; he had been so attached to his dream. It would go to her heart, too. It was in his dream, so to speak, that he had first met her; it had held them; they had always been happy together in his dream. It was his link with the otherwise inaccessible and intangible elements in her, the elements that made for separation. She was determined that, whatever went, his dream should not go. She could not forget that it had been she who had all but wrecked it in its first precarious year when she had planted George Tanqueray on an infatuated editor.
She had saved it then, and of course she could save it now. It wasn't for nothing that she had been celebrated all these years. And it wasn't for nothing that Hugh, poor dear, had been an angel, refusing all these years to take a penny of her earnings for the house. He hadn't married her for that. And there they were, her earnings, diminished by some advances to her father's impecunious family, and by some extravagances of her own, but still swollen by much saving to a sum more than sufficient to buy Louis out.
Her genius, after all, was a valuable asset.
She lay in bed, embracing that thought, and drawing strength from it.