With a smile quivering and breaking on her lips, and trying, how hard! not to show that she was watching she searched his face, saw it waver and hesitate, saw a troubled line come between his brows, the blood rush into his face. He answered: ‘Not Sunday, dear, some other day!’
‘Why not Sunday? I shouldn’t be in the way on Sunday.’
He made an evident effort and said: ‘I have an engagement.’
‘You are going to take –’
His eyes grew angry; he shrugged his shoulders, and answered: ‘An engagement that will prevent my taking you to see the house!’
June bit her lip till the blood came, and walked back to her seat without another word, but she could not help the tears of rage rolling down her face. The house had been mercifully darkened for a crisis, and no one could see her trouble.
Yet in this world of Forsytes let no man think himself immune from observation.
In the third row behind, Euphemia, Nicholas’s youngest daughter, with her married sister, Mrs Tweetyman, were watching.
They reported at Timothy’s how they had seen June and her fiancé at the theatre.
‘In the stalls?’ ‘No, not in the –’ ‘Oh, in the dress circle of course. That seems to be quite fashionable nowadays with the young people!’
Well – not exactly. In the – Anyway, that engagement wouldn’t last long. They had never seen anyone look so thunder and lightningy as that little June! With tears of enjoyment in their eyes, they related how she had kicked a man’s hat as she returned to her seat in the middle of an act, and how the man had looked. Euphemia had a noted, silent laugh, terminating most disappointingly in squeaks; and when Mrs Small, holding up her hands, said: ‘My dear! Kicked a ha-at?’ she let out such a number of these that she had to be recovered with smelling-salts. As she went away, she said to Mrs Tweetyman: ‘“Kicked a ha-at! “Oh! I shall die.’
For ‘that little June’ this evening, that was to have been ‘her treat’, was the most miserable she had ever spent. God knows she tried to stifle her pride, her suspicion, her jealousy!
She parted from Bosinney at old Jolyon’s door without breaking down; the feeling that her lover must be conquered was strong enough to sustain her till his retiring footsteps brought home the true extent of her wretchedness.
The noiseless ‘Sankey’ let her in. She would have slipped up to her own room, but old Jolyon, who had heard her entrance, was in the dining-room doorway.
‘Come in and have your milk,’ he said. ‘It’s been kept hot for you. You’re very late. Where have you been?’
June stood at the fireplace, with a foot on the fender and an arm on the mantelpiece, as her grandfather had done when he came in that night of the opera. She was too near a breakdown to care what she told him.
‘We dined at Soames’s.’
‘H’m! the man of property! His wife there – and Bosinney?’
‘Yes.’
Old Jolyon’s glance was fixed on her with the penetrating gaze from which it was so difficult to hide; but she was not looking at him, and when she turned her face, he dropped his scrutiny at once. He had seen enough, and too much. He bent down to lift the cup of milk for her from the hearth, and, turning away, grumbled: ‘You oughtn’t to stay out so late: it makes you fit for nothing.’
He was invisible now behind his paper, which he turned with a vicious crackle; but when June came up to kiss him, he said: ‘Good night, my darling,’ in a tone so tremulous and unexpected, that it was all the girl could do to get out of the room without breaking into the fit of sobbing that lasted her well on into the night.
When the door was closed, old Jolyon dropped his paper, and stared long and anxiously in front of him.
‘The beggar!’ he thought. ‘I always knew she’d have trouble with him!’
Uneasy doubts and suspicions, the more poignant that he felt himself powerless to check or control the march of events, came crowding upon him.
Was the fellow going to jilt her? He longed to go and say to him: ‘Look here, you sir! Are you going to jilt my granddaughter?’ But how could he? Knowing little or nothing, he was yet certain, with his unerring astuteness, that there was something going on. He suspected Bosinney of being too much at Montpelier Square.
‘This fellow,’ he thought, ‘may not be a scamp; his face is not a bad one, but he’s a queer fish. I don’t know what to make of him. I shall never know what to make of him! They tell me he works like a nigger, but I see no good coming of it. He’s unpractical, he has no method. When he comes here, he sits as glum as a monkey. If I ask him what wine he’ll have, he says: “Thanks, any wine.” If I offer him a cigar, he smokes it as if it were a twopenny German thing. I never see him looking at June as he ought to look at her, and yet, he’s not after her money. If she were to make a sign, he’d be off his bargain tomorrow. But she won’t – not she! She’ll stick to him! She’s as obstinate as fate – she’ll never let go!’