The Forsyte Saga(16)

Having sat, poor soul, long by the bedside of Small (a man of poor constitution), she had acquired the habit, and there were countless subsequent occasions when she had sat immense periods of time to amuse sick people, children, and other helpless persons, and she could never divest herself of the feeling that the world was the most ungrateful place anybody could live in. Sunday after Sunday she sat at the feet of that extremely witty preacher, the Rev. Thomas Scoles, who exercised a great influence over her; but she succeeded in convincing everybody that even this was a misfortune. She had passed into a proverb in the family, and when anybody was observed to be peculiarly distressing, he was known as ‘a regular Juley’. The habit of her mind would have killed anybody but a Forsyte at forty; but she was seventy-two, and had never looked better. And one felt that there were capacities for enjoyment about her which might yet come out. She owned three canaries, the cat Tommy, and half a parrot – in common with her sister Hester; and these poor creatures (kept carefully out of Timothy’s way – he was nervous about animals), unlike human beings, recognizing that she could not help being blighted, attached themselves to her passionately.

She was sombrely magnificent this evening in black bombazine, with a mauve front cut in a shy triangle, and crowned with a black velvet ribbon round the base of her thin throat; black and mauve for evening wear was esteemed very chaste by nearly every Forsyte.

Pouting at Swithin, she said:

‘Ann has been asking for you. You haven’t been near us for an age!’

Swithin put his thumbs within the armholes of his waistcoat, and replied:

‘Ann’s getting very shaky; she ought to have a doctor!’

‘Mr and Mrs Nicholas Forsyte!’

Nicholas Forsyte, cocking his rectangular eyebrows, wore a smile. He had succeeded during the day in bringing to fruition a scheme for the employment of a tribe from Upper India in the gold-mines of Ceylon. A pet plan, carried at last in the teeth of great difficulties – he was justly pleased. It would double the output of his mines, and, as he had often forcibly argued, all experience tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the British Empire.

His ability was undoubted. Raising his broken nose towards his listener, he would add:

‘For want of a few hundred of these fellows we haven’t paid a dividend for years, and look at the price of the shares. I can’t get ten shillin’s for them.’

He had been at Yarmouth, too, and had come back feeling that he had added at least ten years to his own life. He grasped Swithin’s hand, exclaiming in a jocular voice:

‘Well, so here we are again!’

Mrs Nicholas, an effete woman, smiled a smile of frightened jollity behind his back.

‘Mr and Mrs James Forsyte! Mr and Mrs Soames Forsyte!’

Swithin drew his heels together, his deportment ever admirable.

‘Well, James, well, Emily! How are you, Soames? How do you do?’

His hand enclosed Irene’s, and his eyes swelled. She was a pretty woman – a little too pale, but her figure, her eyes, her teeth! Too good for that chap Soames!

The gods had given Irene dark brown eyes and golden hair, that strange combination, provocative of men’s glances, which is said to be the mark of a weak character. And the full, soft pallor of her neck and shoulders, above a gold-coloured frock, gave to her personality an alluring strangeness.

Soames stood behind, his eyes fastened on his wife’s neck. The hands of Swithin’s watch, which he still held open in his hand, had left eight behind; it was half an hour beyond his dinner-time – he had had no lunch – and a strange primeval impatience surged up within him.

‘It’s not like Jolyon to be late!’ he said to Irene, with uncontrollable vexation. ‘I suppose it’ll be June keeping him!’

‘People in love are always late,’ she answered.

Swithin stared at her; a dusky orange dyed his cheeks.

‘They’ve no business to be. Some fashionable nonsense!’

And behind this outburst the inarticulate violence of primitive generations seemed to mutter and grumble.

‘Tell me what you think of my new star, Uncle Swithin,’ said Irene softly.

Among the lace in the bosom of her dress was shining a five-pointed star, made of eleven diamonds.

Swithin looked at the star. He had a pretty taste in stones; no question could have been more sympathetically devised to distract his attention.

‘Who gave you that?’ he asked.

‘Soames.’