Jules had been away from school for a day or two with a bad headache, which had made him look very pale and given him an air of sadness; but he was a little better now and, feeling bored in his own room, he went downstairs to the empty drawing-room and sat at the piano. Papa was at work in his study, but it would not interfere with Papa if he played. Dolf spoilt him, seeing in his son something that was wanting in himself and therefore attracted him, even as possibly it had formerly attracted him in his wife also: Jules could do no wrong in his eyes; and, if the boy had only been willing, Dolf would have spared no expense to give him a careful musical education. But Jules violently opposed himself [178]to anything resembling lessons and besides maintained that it was not worth while. He had no ambition; his vanity was not tickled by his father’s hopes of him or his appreciation of his playing: he played only for himself, to express himself in the vague language of musical sounds. At this moment he felt alone and abandoned in the great house, though he knew that Papa was at work two rooms off and that when he pleased he could take refuge on Papa’s great couch; at this moment he had within himself an almost physical feeling of dread at his loneliness, which caused something to reel about him, an immense sense of utter desolation.

He was fourteen years old, but he felt himself neither child nor boy: a certain feebleness, an almost feminine need of dependency, of devotion to some one who would be everything to him had already, in his earliest childhood, struck at his [179]virility; and he shivered in his dread of this inner loneliness, as if he were afraid of himself. He suffered greatly from vague moods in which that strange something oppressed and stifled him; then, not knowing where to hide his inner being, he would go to play, so that he might lose himself in the great sound-soul of music. His thin, nervous fingers would grope hesitatingly over the keys; he himself would suffer from the false chords which he struck in his search; then he would let himself go, find a single, very short motive, of plaintive, minor melancholy, and caress that motive in his joy at possessing it, at having found it, caress it until it returned each moment as a monotony of sorrow. He would think the motive so beautiful that he could not part with it; those four or five notes expressed so well everything that he felt that he would play them over and over again, until Suzette [180]burst into the room and made him stop, saying that otherwise she would be driven mad.

Thus he sat playing now. And it was pitiful at first: he hardly recognized the notes; cacophonous discords wailed and cut into his poor brain, still smarting from the headache. He moaned as if he were in pain afresh; but his fingers were hypnotized, they could not desist, they still sought on; and the notes became purer: a short phrase released itself with a cry, a cry which returned continually on the same note, suddenly h............