They saw him. He extended his arm, and moved it spasmodically to encourage them. But they had stopped. What were they standing there for, talking – talking? They came on again. She had been giving him a rub, he had not the least doubt of it, and no wonder, over a house like that – a great ugly thing, not the sort of house he was accustomed to.
He looked intently at their faces, with his pale, immovable stare. That young man looked very queer!
‘You’ll never make anything of this!’ he said tartly, pointing at the mansion; ‘too new-fangled!’
Bosinney gazed at him as though he had not heard; and Swithin afterwards described him to Aunt Hester as ‘an extravagant sort of fellow – very odd way of looking at you – a bumpy beggar!’
What gave rise to this sudden piece of psychology he did not state; possibly Bosinney’s prominent forehead and cheek-bones and chin, or something hungry in his face, which quarrelled with Swithin’s conception of the calm satiety that should characterize the perfect gentleman.
He brightened up at the mention of tea. He had a contempt for tea – his brother Jolyon had been in tea; made a lot of money by it – but he was so thirsty, and had such a taste in his mouth, that he was prepared to drink anything. He longed to inform Irene of the taste in his mouth – she was so sympathetic – but it would not be a distinguished thing to do; he rolled his tongue round, and faintly smacked it against his palate.
In a far corner of the tent Adolf was bending his cat-like moustaches over a kettle. He left it at once to draw the cork of a pint-bottle of champagne. Swithin smiled, and, nodding at Bosinney, said: ‘Why, you’re quite a Monte Cristo!’ This celebrated novel – one of the half-dozen he had read – had produced an extraordinary impression on his mind.
Taking his glass from the table, he held it away from him to scrutinize the colour; thirsty as he was, it was not likely that he was going to drink trash! Then, placing it to his lips, he took a, sip.
‘A very nice wine,’ he said at last, passing it before his nose; ‘not the equal of my Heidsieck!’
It was at this moment that the idea came to him which he afterwards imparted at Timothy’s in this nutshell: ‘I shouldn’t wonder a bit if that architect chap were sweet upon Mrs Soames!’
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 clinging 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.