The Forsyte Saga, Volume 3(185)

‘He’s done his best to get me outed, and he couldn’t even refrain from that.’

‘It’s I who ought to be angry, not you. It’s I who force you to go about with me. Only, you see, I like it so. But, darling, I don’t shrink in the wash. What is the use of my being your love if you won’t let yourself go with me?’

‘Why should I worry you with what can’t be cured?’

‘I exist to be worried by you. Please worry me!’

‘Oh! Dinny, you’re an angel!’

‘I repeat it is not so. I really have blood in my veins.’

‘It’s like ear-ache; you shake your head, and shake your head, and it’s no good. I thought publishing The Leopard would free me, but it hasn’t. Am I “yellow”, Dinny – am I?’

‘If you were yellow I should not have loved you.’

‘Oh! I don’t know. Women can love anything.’

‘Proverbially we admire courage before all. I’m going to be brutal. Had doubt of your courage anything to do with your ache? Isn’t it just due to feeling that other people doubt?’

He gave a little unhappy laugh. ‘I don’t know; I only know it’s there.’

Dinny looked up at him.

‘Oh! darling, don’t ache! I do so hate it for you.’

They stood for a moment looking deeply at each other, and a vendor of matches, without the money to indulge in spiritual trouble, said:

‘Box o’ lights, sir?’…

Though she had been closer to Wilfrid that afternoon than perhaps ever before, Dinny returned to Mount Street oppressed by fears. She could not get the look on Muskham’s face out of her head, nor the sound of his: ‘You heard that, Yule?’

It was silly! Out of such explosive encounters nothing but legal remedies came nowadays; and of all people she had ever seen, she could least connect Jack Muskham with the Law. She noticed a hat in the hall, and heard voices, as she was passing her uncle’s study. She had barely taken off her own hat when he sent for her. He was talking to the little terrier man, who was perched astride of a chair, as if riding a race.

‘Dinny, Mr Telfourd Yule; my niece Dinny Cherrell.’

The little man bowed over her hand.

‘Yule has been telling me,’ said Sir Lawrence, ‘of that encounter. He’s not easy in his mind.’

‘Neither am I,’ said Dinny.

‘I’m sure Jack didn’t mean those words to be heard, Miss Cherrell.’

‘I don’t agree; I think he did.’

Yule shrugged. The expression on his face was rueful, and Dinny liked its comical ugliness.

‘Well, he certainly didn’t mean you to hear them.’

‘He ought to have, then. Mr Desert would prefer not to be seen with me in public. It’s I who make him.’

‘I came to your Uncle because when Jack won’t talk about a thing, it’s serious. I’ve known him a long time.’

Dinny stood silent. The flush on her cheeks had dwindled to two red spots. And the two men stared at her, thinking, perhaps, that, with her cornflower-blue eyes, slenderness, and that hair, she looked unsuited to the matter in hand. She said quietly: ‘What can I do, Uncle Lawrence?’

‘I don’t see, my dear, what anyone can do at the moment. Mr Yule says that he left Jack going back to Royston. I thought possibly I might take you down to see him tomorrow. He’s a queer fellow; if he didn’t date so, I shouldn’t worry. Such things blow over, as a rule.’

Dinny controlled a sudden disposition to tremble.

‘What do you mean by “date”?’

Sir Lawrence looked at Yule and said: ‘We don’t want to seem absurd. There’s been no duel fought between Englishmen, so far as I know, for seventy or eighty years; but Jack is a survival. We don’t quite know what to think. Horse-play is not in his line; neither is a law court. And yet we can’t see him taking no further notice.’

‘I suppose,’ said Dinny, with spirit, ‘he won’t see, on reflection, that he’s more to blame than Wilfrid?’

‘No,’ said Yule, ‘he won’t. Believe me, Miss Cherrell, I am deeply sorry about the whole business.’

Dinny bowed. ‘I think it was very nice of you to come; thank you!’

‘I suppose,’ said Sir Lawrence, doubtfully, ‘you couldn’t get Desert to send him an apology?’

‘So that,’ she thought, ‘is what they wanted me for.’ ‘No, Uncle, I couldn’t – I couldn’t even ask him. I’m quite sure he wouldn’t.’

‘I see,’ said Sir Lawrence glumly.

Bowing to Yule, Dinny turned towards the door. In the hall she seemed to be seeing through the wall behind her the renewed shrugging of their shoulders, the ruefulness on their glum faces, and she went up to her room. Apology! Thinking of Wilfrid’s badgered, tortured face, the very idea of it offended her. Stricken to the quick already on the score of personal courage, it was the last thing he would dream of. She wandered unhappily about her room, then took out his photograph. The face she loved looked back at her with the sceptical indifference of an effigy. Wilful, sudden, proud, self-centred, deeply dual; but cruel, no, and cowardly – no!