The Silver Spoon

“Michael,” he said, “tells me you want him to take you round the world.”

“Well, he can’t; so that ends it.”

“If she had said: ‘Yes, and why can’t he?’ Soames would have joined the opposition automatically. But her words roused his natural perversity. Here she was, and here was her heart’s desire—and she wasn’t getting it! He put the Chardin down, and took a walk over the soft carpet.

“Tell me,” he said, coming to a halt, “where do you feel it exactly?”

Fleur laughed: “In my head, and my eyes, and my ears, and my heart.”

“What business,” muttered Soames, “have they to look down their confounded noses!” And he set off again across the room. All the modern jackanapes whom from time to time he had been unable to avoid in her house, seemed to have come sniggering round him with lifted eyebrows, like a set of ghosts. The longing to put them in their places—a shallow lot—possessed him at that moment to the exclusion of a greater sanity.

“I—I don’t see how I can take you,” he said, and stopped short.

What was that he was saying? Who had asked him to take her? Her eyes, widely open, were fixed on him.

“But of course not, Dad!”

Of course not! He didn’t know about that!

“I shall get used to being laughed at, in time.” Soames growled.

“I don’t see why you should,” he said. “I suppose people do go round the world.”

Fleur’s pallor had gone, now.

“But not you, dear; why, it would bore you stiff! It’s very sweet of you, even to think of it; but of course I couldn’t let you—at your age!”

“At my age?” said Soames. “I’m not so very old.”

“No, no, Dad; I’ll just dree my weird.”

Soames took another walk, without a sound. Dree her weird, indeed!

“I won’t have it,” he ejaculated; “if people can’t behave to you, I—I’ll show them!”

She had got up, and was breathing deeply, with her lips parted, and her cheeks very flushed. So she had stood, before her first party, holding out her frock for him to see.

“We’ll go,” he said, gruffly. “Don’t make a fuss! That’s settled.”

Her arms were round his neck; his nose felt wet. What nonsense! as if—!…

He stood unbuttoning his braces that night in the most peculiar state of mind. Going round the world—was he? Preposterous! It had knocked that young fellow over anyway—he was to join them in August wherever they were by that time! Good Lord! It might be China! The thing was fantastic; and Fleur behaving like a kitten! The words of a comic ditty, sung by a clergyman, in his boyhood, kept up a tattoo within him:

Yes! Indeed! His affairs were in apple-pie order, luckily! There was nothing to do, in Timothy’s or Winifred’s Trusts—the only two he had on his hands now; but how things would get on without him, he couldn’t tell! As to A

Chapter XII.

ENVOI

Away from Fleur five months at least!

Soames’ astounding conduct had indeed knocked Michael over. And yet, after all, they had come to a crisis in their life together, the more serious because concerned with workaday feelings. Perhaps out there she would become afflicted, like himself, with an enlarged prospect; lose her idea that the world consisted of some five thousand people of advanced tastes, of whom she knew at the outside five hundred. It was she who had pushed him into Parliament, and until he was hoofed therefrom as a failure, their path was surely conjoined along the crest of a large view. In the fortnight before her departure he suffered and kept smiling; wryly thankful that she was behaving ‘like a kitten,’ as her father called it. Her nerves had been on edge ever since the autumn over that wretched case—what more natural than this reaction? At least she felt for him sufficiently to be prodigal of kisses—great consolation to Michael while it lasted. Once or twice he caught her hanging with wet eyes over the eleventh baronet; once found her with a wet face when he awoke in the morning. These indications were a priceless assurance to him that she meant to come back. For there were moments when possibilities balled into a nightmare. Absurd! She was going with her father, that embodiment of care and prudence! Who would have thought Old Forsyte could uproot himself like this? He, too, was leaving a wife, though Michael saw no signs of it. One didn’t know much about Old Forsyte’s feelings, except that they centred round his daughter, and that he was continually asking questions about labels and insects. He had bought himself, too, a life-saving waistcoat and one for Fleur. Michael held with him only one important conversation.