Chapter II

As Mr. Bracknel drove along in his motor he caught a glimpse of a slight, bare-headed figure scudding across the fields in the direction of the house, and he seemed to recognise his younger son. The recognition was apparently unaccompanied by any feeling of satisfaction, for his face immediately grew darker, though it had not been shining with benevolence before. Mr. Bracknel was not pleased with his family. Each separate member of it, to his present sense, seemed to vie with all the others in a tireless endeavour to give him the greatest possible annoyance. The girls, first of all, with their silly questions about a young man they had never seen. Probably they would chatter about him all the morning in the foolish idleness they had been brought up to. Idleness was a thing Mr. Bracknel utterly detested. It loomed gigantically before his eyes, swelling up in a sinister way till it became something like the source of all vice; yet his own abhorrence of it had apparently served merely to put it within easy reach of every other member of the family. They accepted his years of constant labour as giving them the right to live in luxurious, slothful ease, and he doubted if, in their hearts, they even thanked him for the privilege. The despondency of his expression grew more profound....

What use was Alfred in the business? More of an anxiety than anything else; and, so far as the work he did went, not worth a pound a week. And Denis, too, was growing up. There rose before him again a vision of a slight, bareheaded figure scudding across the fields in the direction of the house. What could he possibly do with him? What use would he ever be in the world? He would never even be able to earn his own living. He felt suddenly a violent grudge against his wife; a woman not capable of bringing up her children, in the end not capable of bringing a properly healthy child into the world. He had an obscure sense that she must have known all this before she got married, that she ought to have known it at any rate. She might not exactly have been able to foresee the illness that had so greatly changed her, but she must always have been delicate. He felt that he had a grievance, and that it was one for which there was no redress.

He drove on, his face still set in an expression of deepest gloom. He was now fifty-seven years old, and, as regarded the work of his life, an exceptionally successful man. In contrast with his stoutness and commonplace coarseness there was something strange about his eyes--strange, because it did not harmonize with what would otherwise have been the perfect animality of his appearance--a kind of fretfulness and evasiveness, as if, beneath its outer covering of heavy flesh, the spirit were uneasy, troubled, possibly afraid. He wore a moustache and a short beard, and his dark skin had a fatty and unhealthy appearance, giving the impression that he was not too fastidious in the care of his person.

He was a self-made man, and the struggle for wealth, notwithstanding an amazing share of luck, had been hard and probably hardening. His energy, his mind, his entire life had been given to his business. It was almost as if he had come to look upon it as a huge game of skill which had for its end the making of a fortune he would never have either time or desire to spend. During business hours he had rarely left the office except to attend a commercial meeting. He had had a room fitted up there, where he could sleep when it did not suit him to go home, and where he had taken his meals during the day.

And in the midst of it all he had fallen in love with, and married, a charming girl, without fortune, but extremely pretty--pretty with a kind of soft radiance that was too delicate to last. It had not been the first, and it was not to be the last, amorous episode in his career, but neither it nor any of the others had been able to divert his life for even a brief period from the deep narrow groove in which it ran. He had grown tired of his wife, his children had been born, he had fallen in love elsewhere, he had bought and largely rebuilt an old house with a fine stretch of land attached to it, and he had asked his acquaintances to dinner on certain somewhat rare occasions. Also he had attended a Presbyterian church, where, Sunday after Sunday, he had sat at the end of his pew, apparently listening to a string of platitudes setting forth a theory of life he could never for a moment dream of putting into practice. Only, all that was nothing. His life had been one thing--the building up of a business.

And he was not happy. The main causes of his discontent were connected with his health and with his wife and children. His sons were failures, and Amy, ever since the discovery of her flirtation with an under-gardener, had given him more cause for anxiety than for self-congratulation.