Jocelyn by John Galsworthy

The Legards left Mentone very early the following day; it was necessary for Irma to drive the five miles to the villa in the cool of the morning. Giles had failed to see Jocelyn again; he delayed the departure as much as he could, but she was not down when they left. During the drive he sat silently calm opposite his wife, but with a feeling of rage and despair in his heart. He took the greatest care of her, changing her cushions continually, and making the man drive with the utmost caution. They arrived without incident. He had hoped that he would find some relief and distraction in the familiar surroundings of the villa, but he found instead that they only maddened him by bringing to his mind more forcibly the bar set between him and Jocelyn. He asked himself, a hundred times a day, what he was doing? what he meant to do? and he could give himself no answer. His conscience, his sense of balance, his honour, whatever name best fitted that feeling which struggled with his passion, exacted from him a dying remonstrance. He tried to give himself no time to think, to keep himself busy all day and every day, riding, walking, or with affairs in the house; he was particularly attentive to his wife, and he felt all the time that she knew what was passing in his heart; and all his efforts were of no use -- Jocelyn's face was ever before him. He wrote a note to her, in which he said that he had business which would take him to Genoa. He went there, and stayed two days, at the end of which time he returned more miserable than ever. In this way a week passed without his going to Mentone.

Jocelyn missed him; she had become so used to his companionship in those two months. She had no idea, until he had gone, how much she had depended on him for enjoyment. She felt quite lost without him and the greyhound. He seemed to her so different from the men, Germans, Frenchmen, Poles, or Russians with whom she had been thrown during her wanderings. They had danced with her, ridden with her, paid her compliments, even asked to marry her, and one and all she had distrusted them, with the native distrust peculiar to her. She had always felt as if she understood Giles. It was not because he was her countryman, it was for no defined reason; yet it had been good to be with him; to find some one who loved, like herself, the sun and the flowers, music, the hot, sweet-scented air, the clack of many foreign tongues in the glowing light, and on starry evenings the murmur of the deep-hearted sea. To know that there was some one near who felt the spirit moving in these things, who lived in them, to whom they were not, as to her aunt, merely the chance outside ministers of a bodily ease. After he had gone, she would sometimes go into the garden with her lips pursed up in a dumb whistle, expecting every minute to see Shikari uncoil his snake-like body from under the shade of some shrub, and come lolloping across the grass with arched back to lick her hands; or to see Giles sitting in the sun with a Panama hat over his eyes, and his long legs crossed. Sometimes, as she sat indoors alone, or with her aunt, she would fancy she smelt the smoke of his cigar on the terrace, and she would get up and look through the shutters.