“Ah, I need not ask why she left the Lorenzoni woman. No girl in her senses would stay an hour longer than she could help with her.”
“Hilaire, I think I half hoped to see her at the concert yesterday. When I came on the platform I looked for her, and I am sure I should have seen her in that crowd if she had been there. She is different, somehow. I played like a machine for the first time in my life, I think, and during the interval the manager asked me why I had not given the nocturne that was down on the programme. I said something about a necessary alteration at the last moment, but I don’t know now what I did play. I was thinking of her. A girl alone has a bad time in this world.”
“You are going to find her? Is she in love with you?”
Jean flushed. “I can’t answer that.”
“That’s all right. What I really wanted to know was if you cared for her. I see you do. Oh, Lord!” The older man sighed heavily as he put down his coffee-cup. “I wish you would play to me.”
Jean went into the music-room, leaving the folding doors between open, and sat down at the piano. There was no light but the moon’s, and Hilaire saw the beloved head dark against the silvery grey of the wall beyond. The skilled hands let loose a torrent of harmonies.
“Damn women!” said Hilaire, under cover of the fortissimo.
He spent some hours in the library on the following day re-arranging and dusting his books, lingering over them, reading a page here and there, patting their old vellum-bound backs fondly before he returned them to their shelves. They absorbed him, and yet the footman bringing in his tea on a tray heard him saying, “I must not worry.”
Jean had always come to him with his troubles ever since he was a child, and the worst of all had been brought about by a woman. That was years ago now. Hilaire had been away from England, and he had come back to find his brother aged and altered—and married.
They had got on so well together without women in these latter years that Hilaire had hoped they might live and die in peace, but it seemed that it was not to be. Jean had gone out again in the car to look for his Olive. Well, if she made him happy Hilaire thought they might get on very well after all. But he had forebodings, and later, he sat frowning at the white napery and glittering glass and silver reflected in the polished walnut wood of his well-appointed table, and he refused soup and fish with unnecessary violence. Jean loved this girl and she could make him happy if she would, but would she? She was evidently not of a “coming-on disposition”; she was good, and Jean was, unfortunately, still married to the other.