But Jean wasn’t going to become a saint, he was only born a musician, and he had inherited on both sides of his nature a certain recklessness, only thinly covered by a reticence which was not natural to him, the inevitable result of a sensitive nature that has not found in its early years any direct response.
His mother had had a romantic zest for all the adventures of the spirit, even her broken heart had not checked her dauntless craving for the impossible; she had ceased to look for it in her husband, but she had never found that the world was small. The Baron on his side had a lucid, unwavering instinct for pleasure, it was his intention to make everything serve his senses. This instinct had descended upon Jean in the shape of a fierce desire, of which he was hardly conscious, to tear something living and responsive from the grip of his future. As he strode off once more upon his innocent adventures his mind was fiercely and ardently awake and busy. “What had he done with his life?” he asked himself, in frenzied self-reproach. Here he was at twenty—no older, no more experienced, no more active than many a boy of fourteen. He did not take his attempted opera nearly as seriously as Miss Prenderghast had taken it; he was possessed by melody, he always had been; ever since he could remember he seemed to have been listening to a tune, but he hardly knew that he was peculiar in this, and he knew enough of the music to which great musicians had listened not to think too much of his own ambitious flutterings. “I have done nothing,” he said to himself bitterly. “I am nothing—I have no powers!” And he flung himself face downwards on the dry, dead leaves of the late summer in the terrible abandonment of youth. To have never left Ucelles in his life, to have been brought up a good Catholic, to have no friends but a sour-faced English cook and a few inarticulate peasants (it is sad to say that Jean forgot the Curé and the doctor), wasn’t that a certain proof of his failure in life? He thought of Maurice Golaud, that magnificent young man he had met at the Choral Society. Maurice had all the world before him—money, a family of admiring sisters, and that unacquirable self-confidence which the artist, except in rare moments of creation, never knows! Jean had tried to play to Maurice once, but he had broken down in the middle; it was the only thing he could do—play—and it had come over him suddenly that Maurice did not think much of playing. He thought a great deal more of how to curl your moustache and look at a woman, and for the moment Jean was not sure that Maurice was not right.
Jean buried his face in the long dried grass, and drank in the haunting, fresh scent of the dead leaves; the air was full of a faint, warm haze that crept across the distant fields and hung above the trees. The leaves that were still upon them were very dry with the heat and rattled a little as the soft breeze shook them together. The birds spoke in sharp, disconnected twitters; all the sounds and all the life of the earth seemed interrupted now, and yet urgent. The swallows flung themselves in long, unsettled curves about the sky; everything was changing, moving, departing. Jean alone must stay here always to the bitter sound of his own wasted life! He watched himself grow tamely, narrowly old, through the coming years; there would be nothing in him to challenge life. Maurice and his fellow-officers and their fun would go out once more into the merry world, Jean would remain. In time he would cease attending the Lycée, he would come home and farm Ucelles. In the evenings he would play a little if he was not too tired, but never his own music any more! Why should he shame the divine flickering gift within him, which he could never develop, nor yet throw away? He wanted to be a musician—he wanted only that—and he buried his face in the friendly dry leaves that scratched his cheeks, and wept.
“I shall never be able to do anything,” sobbed Jean. “I shall never be able to go anywhere, and I shall never meet anyone to love.”
Miss Prenderghast waited half an hour for dinner. It was an unfortunate half hour; in it all the sacrifices she had made for Jean increased with the inroad he was making upon punctuality.
For the last ten years Miss Prenderghast had been practising the stoic virtues, and though these are probably the hardest of all the virtues to practise, they rarely, if ever, make the possessor lovable. In this one half hour Miss Prenderghast saw their worthlessness, but she could not admit that she was to blame; surely the guardians of youth only owed to their special charges the one great duty of correction, to be met by youth in its turn with implicit obedience? And Miss Prenderghast knew that she had corrected Jean and that he had usually obeyed her. Between them these two admirable virtues had destroyed any human relationship. “He is lacking in consideration,” said Miss Prenderghast to herself, and she wiped her glasses. She had given Jean a gold watch for his birthday present, and he had not kissed her. She had told him at the time that she hoped it would make him more punctual.
Elizabeth brought in the soup at nine.
“Master Jean is very late,” said Miss Prenderghast; “put something cold on the sideboard, Elizabeth, and go to bed. I will sit up for him.”
There was such a tone of finality in Miss Prenderghast’s voice that Elizabeth almost obeyed her. She put some soup on the kitchen fire and began to do her hair in curl-papers on the stairs.
Jean came in a few minutes afterwards. He apologized perfunctorily for the lateness of the hour, and his aunt remarked that careless people always gave trouble. Jean accepted the thrust in silence; he did not think it fair to receive an apology with further correction; it had the result also of drying up any possible springs of remorse.