The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

And from this moment his pale, round eyes never ceased to bulge with the

interest of his discovery.

"The fellow," he said to Mrs. Septimus, "follows her about with his

eyes like a dog--the bumpy beggar! I don't wonder at it--she's a very

charming woman, and, I should say, the pink of discretion!" A vague

consciousness of perfume caging about Irene, like that from a flower

with half-closed petals and a passionate heart, moved him to the

creation of this image. "But I wasn't sure of it," he said, "till I saw

him pick up her handkerchief."

Mrs. Small's eyes boiled with excitement.

"And did he give it her back?" she asked.

"Give it back?" said Swithin: "I saw him slobber on it when he thought I

wasn't looking!"

Mrs. Small gasped--too interested to speak.

"But she gave him no encouragement," went on Swithin; he stopped, and

stared for a minute or two in the way that alarmed Aunt Hester so--he

had suddenly recollected that, as they were starting back in the

phaeton, she had given Bosinney her hand a second time, and let it stay

there too.... He had touched his horses smartly with the whip, anxious

to get her all to himself. But she had looked back, and she had not

answered his first question; neither had he been able to see her

face--she had kept it hanging down.

There is somewhere a picture, which Swithin has not seen, of a man

sitting on a rock, and by him, immersed in the still, green water, a

sea-nymph lying on her back, with her hand on her naked breast. She has

a half-smile on her face--a smile of hopeless surrender and of secret

joy.

Seated by Swithin's side, Irene may have been smiling like that.

When, warmed by champagne, he had her all to himself, he unbosomed

himself of his wrongs; of his smothered resentment against the new

chef at the club; his worry over the house in Wigmore Street, where the

rascally tenant had gone bankrupt through helping his brother-in-law as

if charity did not begin at home; of his deafness, too, and that pain he

sometimes got in his right side. She listened, her eyes swimming under

their lids. He thought she was thinking deeply of his troubles, and

pitied himself terribly. Yet in his fur coat, with frogs across the

breast, his top hat aslant, driving this beautiful woman, he had never

felt more distinguished.

A coster, however, taking his girl for a Sunday airing, seemed to have

the same impression about himself. This person had flogged his donkey

into a gallop alongside, and sat, upright as a waxwork, in his shallopy

chariot, his chin settled pompously on a red handkerchief, like

Swithin's on his full cravat; while his girl, with the ends of a

fly-blown boa floating out behind, aped a woman of fashion. Her swain

moved a stick with a ragged bit of string dangling from the end,

reproducing with strange fidelity the circular flourish of Swithin's

whip, and rolled his head at his lady with a leer that had a weird

likeness to Swithin's primeval stare.