The suit—Dartie _versus_ Dartie—for restitution of those conjugal
rights concerning which Winifred was at heart so deeply
undecided, followed the laws of subtraction towards day of
judgment. This was not reached before the Courts rose for
Christmas, but the case was third on the list when they sat
again. Winifred spent the Christmas holidays a thought more
fashionably than usual, with the matter locked up in her low-cut
bosom. James was particularly liberal to her that Christmas,
expressing thereby his sympathy, and relief, at the approaching
dissolution of her marriage with that “precious rascal,” which
his old heart felt but his old lips could not utter.
The disappearance of Dartie made the fall in Consols a
comparatively small matter; and as to the scandal—the real animus
he felt against that fellow, and the increasing lead which
property was attaining over reputation in a true Forsyte about to
leave this world, served to drug a mind from which all allusions
to the matter (except his own) were studiously kept. What worried
him as a lawyer and a parent was the fear that Dartie might
suddenly turn up and obey the Order of the Court when made. That
would be a pretty how-de-do! The fear preyed on him in fact so
much that, in presenting Winifred with a large Christmas cheque,
he said: “It’s chiefly for that chap out there; to keep him from
coming back.” It was, of course, to pitch away good money, but
all in the nature of insurance against that bankruptcy which
would no longer hang over him if only the divorce went through;
and he questioned Winifred rigorously until she could assure him
that the money had been sent. Poor woman!—it cost her many a pang
to send what must find its way into the vanity-bag of “that
creature!” Soames, hearing of it, shook his head. They were not
dealing with a Forsyte, reasonably tenacious of his purpose. It
was very risky without knowing how the land lay out there. Still,
it would look well with the Court; and he would see that Dreamer
brought it out. “I wonder,” he said suddenly, “where that ballet
goes after the Argentine”; never omitting a chance of reminder;
for he knew that Winifred still had a weakness, if not for
Dartie, at least for not laundering him in public. Though not
good at showing admiration, he admitted that she was behaving
extremely well, with all her children at home gaping like young
birds for news of their father—Imogen just on the point of coming
out, and Val very restive about the whole thing. He felt that Val
was the real heart of the matter to Winifred, who certainly loved
him beyond her other children. The boy could spoke the wheel of
this divorce yet if he set his mind to it. And Soames was very
careful to keep the proximity of the preliminary proceedings from
his nephew’s ears. He did more. He asked him to dine at the
Remove, and over Val’s cigar introduced the subject which he knew
to be nearest to his heart.
“I hear,” he said, “that you want to play polo up at Oxford.”
Val became less recumbent in his chair.
“Rather!” he said.
“Well,” continued Soames, “that’s a very expensive business. Your
grandfather isn’t likely to consent to it unless he can make sure
that he’s not got any other drain on him.” And he paused to see
whether the boy understood his meaning.
Val’s thick dark lashes concealed his eyes, but a slight grimace
appeared on his wide mouth, and he muttered:
“I suppose you mean my Dad!”
“Yes,” said Soames; “I’m afraid it depends on whether he
continues to be a drag or not;” and said no more, letting the boy
dream it over.
But Val was also dreaming in those days of a silver-roan palfrey
and a girl riding it. Though Crum was in town and an introduction
to Cynthia Dark to be had for the asking, Val did not ask;
indeed, he shunned Crum and lived a life strange even to himself,
except in so far as accounts with tailor and livery stable were
concerned. To his mother, his sisters, his young brother, he
seemed to spend this Vacation in “seeing fellows,” and his
evenings sleepily at home. They could not propose anything in
daylight that did not meet with the one response: “Sorry; I’ve
got to see a fellow”; and he was put to extraordinary shifts to
get in and out of the house unobserved in riding clothes; until,
being made a member of the Goat’s Club, he was able to transport
them there, where he could change unregarded and slip off on his
hack to Richmond Park. He kept his growing sentiment religiously
to himself. Not for a world would he breathe to the “fellows,”
whom he was not “seeing,” anything so ridiculous from the point
of view of their creed and his. But he could not help its
destroying his other appetites. It was coming between him and the
legitimate pleasures of youth at last on its own in a way which
must, he knew, make him a milksop in the eyes of Crum. All he
cared for was to dress in his last-created riding togs, and steal
away to the Robin Hill Gate, where presently the silver roan
would come demurely sidling with its slim and dark-haired rider,
and in the glades bare of leaves they would go off side by side,
not talking very much, riding races sometimes, and sometimes
holding hands. More than once of an evening, in a moment of
expansion, he had been tempted to tell his mother how this shy
sweet cousin had stolen in upon him and wrecked his “life.” But
bitter experience, that all persons above thirty-five were
spoil-sports, prevented him. After all, he supposed he would have
to go through with College, and she would have to “come out,”
before they could be married; so why complicate things, so long
as he could see her? Sisters were teasing and unsympathetic
beings, a brother worse, so there was no one to confide in. Ah!
And this beastly divorce business! What a misfortune to have a
name which other people hadn’t! If only he had been called Gordon
or Scott or Howard or something fairly common! But Dartie—there
wasn’t another in the directory! One might as well have been
named Morkin for all the covert it afforded! So matters went on,
till one day in the middle of January the silver-roan palfrey and
its rider were missing at the tryst. Lingering in the cold, he
debated whether he should ride on to the house: But Jolly might
be there, and the memory of their dark encounter was still fresh
within him. One could not be always fighting with her brother! So
he returned dismally to town and spent an evening plunged in
gloom. At breakfast next day he noticed that his mother had on an
unfamiliar dress and was wearing her hat. The dress was black
with a glimpse of peacock blue, the hat black and large—she
looked exceptionally well. But when after breakfast she said to
him, “Come in here, Val,” and led the way to the drawing-room, he
was at once beset by qualms. Winifred carefully shut the door and
passed her handkerchief over her lips; inhaling the violette de
Parme with which it had been soaked, Val thought: “Has she found
out about Holly?”
Her voice interrupted
“Are you going to be nice to me, dear boy?”
Val grinned doubtfully.
“Will you come with me this morning....”
“I’ve got to see....” began Val, but something in her face
stopped him. “I say,” he said, “you don’t mean....”
“Yes, I have to go to the Court this morning.” Already!—that d—-d
business which he had almost succeeded in forgetting, since
nobody ever mentioned it. In self-commiseration he stood picking
little bits of skin off his fingers. Then noticing that his
mother’s lips were all awry, he said impulsively: “All right,
mother; I’ll come. The brutes!” What brutes he did not know, but
the expression exactly summed up their joint feeling, and
restored a measure of equanimity.
“I suppose I’d better change into a ‘shooter,’” he muttered,
escaping to his room. He put on the “shooter,” a higher collar, a
pearl pin, and his neatest grey spats, to a somewhat blasphemous
accompaniment. Looking at himself in the glass, he said, “Well,
I’m damned if I’m going to show anything!” and went down. He
found his grandfather’s carriage at the door, and his mother in
furs, with the appearance of one going to a Mansion House
Assembly. They seated themselves side by side in the closed
barouche, and all the way to the Courts of Justice Val made but
one allusion to the business in hand. “There’ll be nothing about
those pearls, will there?”
The little tufted white tails of Winifred’s muff began to shiver.
“Oh, no,” she said, “it’ll be quite harmless to-day. Your
grandmother wanted to come too, but I wouldn’t let her. I thought
you could take care of me. You look so nice, Val. Just pull your
coat collar up a little more at the back—that’s right.”
“If they bully you....” began Val.
“Oh! they won’t. I shall be very cool. It’s the only way.”
“They won’t want me to give evidence or anything?”
“No, dear; it’s all arranged.” And she patted his hand. The
determined front she was putting on it stayed the turmoil in
Val’s chest, and he busied himself in drawing his gloves off and
on. He had taken what he now saw was the wrong pair to go with
his spats; they should have been grey, but were deerskin of a
dark tan; whether to keep them on or not he could not decide.
They arrived soon after ten. It was his first visit to the Law
Courts, and the building struck him at once.
“By Jove!” he said as they passed into the hall, “this’d make
four or five jolly good racket courts.”
Soames was awaiting them at the foot of some stairs.
“Here you are!” he said, without shaking hands, as if the event
had made them too familiar for such formalities. “It’s Happerly
Browne, Court I. We shall be on first.”
A sensation such as he had known when going in to bat was playing
now in the top of Val’s chest, but he followed his mother and
uncle doggedly, looking at no more than he could help, and
thinking that the place smelled “fuggy.” People seemed to be
lurking everywhere, and he plucked Soames by the sleeve.
“I say, Uncle, you’re not going to let those beastly papers in,
are you?”
Soames gave him the sideway look which had reduced many to
silence in its time.
“In here,” he said. “You needn’t take off your furs, Winifred.”
Val entered behind them, nettled and with his head up. In this
confounded hole everybody—and there were a good many of
them—seemed sitting on everybody else’s knee, though really
divided from each other by pews; and Val had a feeling that they
might all slip down together into the well. This, however, was
but a momentary vision—of mahogany, and black gowns, and white
blobs of wigs and faces and papers, all rather secret and
whispery—before he was sitting next his mother in the front row,
with his back to it all, glad of her violette de Parme, and
taking off his gloves for the last time. His mother was looking
at him; he was suddenly conscious that she had really wanted him
there next to her, and that he counted for something in this
business.
All right! He would show them! Squaring his shoulders, he crossed
his legs and gazed inscrutably at his spats. But just then an
“old Johnny” in a gown and long wig, looking awfully like a funny
raddled woman, came through a door into the high pew opposite,
and he had to uncross his legs hastily, and stand up with
everybody else.
“Dartie _versus_ Dartie!”
It seemed to Val unspeakably disgusting to have one’s name called
out like this in public! And, suddenly conscious that someone
nearly behind him had begun talking about his family, he screwed
his face round to see an old be-wigged buffer, who spoke as if he
were eating his own words—queer-looking old cuss, the sort of man
he had seen once or twice dining at Park Lane and punishing the
port; he knew now where they “dug them up.” All the same he found
the old buffer quite fascinating, and would have continued to
stare if his mother had not touched his arm. Reduced to gazing
before him, he fixed his eyes on the Judge’s face instead. Why
should that old “sportsman” with his sarcastic mouth and his
quick-moving eyes have the power to meddle with their private
affairs—hadn’t he affairs of his own, just as many, and probably
just as nasty? And there moved in Val, like an illness, all the
deep-seated individualism of his breed. The voice behind him
droned along: “Differences about money matters—extravagance of
the respondent” (What a word! Was that his father?)—“strained
situation—frequent absences on the part of Mr. Dartie. My client,
very rightly, your Ludship will agree, was anxious to check a
course—but lead to ruin—remonstrated—gambling at cards and on the
racecourse—” (“That’s right!” thought Val, “pile it on!”) “Crisis
early in October, when the respondent wrote her this letter from
his Club.” Val sat up and his ears burned. “I propose to read it
with the emendations necessary to the epistle of a gentleman who
has been—shall we say dining, me Lud?”
“Old brute!” thought Val, flushing deeper; “you’re not paid to
make jokes!”
“‘You will not get the chance to insult me again in my own house.
I am leaving the country to-morrow. It’s played out’—an
expression, your Ludship, not unknown in the mouths of those who
have not met with conspicuous success.”
“Sniggering owls!” thought Val, and his flush deepened.
“‘I am tired of being insulted by you.’ My client will tell your
Ludship that these so-called insults consisted in her calling him
‘the limit’,—a very mild expression, I venture to suggest, in all
the circumstances.”
Val glanced sideways at his mother’s impassive face, it had a
hunted look in the eyes. “Poor mother,” he thought, and touched
her arm with his own. The voice behind droned on.
“‘I am going to live a new life. M. D.’”
“And next day, me Lud, the respondent left by the steamship
_Tuscarora_ for Buenos Aires. Since then we have nothing from him
but a cabled refusal in answer to the letter which my client
wrote the following day in great distress, begging him to return
to her. With your Ludship’s permission. I shall now put Mrs.
Dartie in the box.”
When his mother rose, Val had a tremendous impulse to rise too
and say: “Look here! I’m going to see you jolly well treat her
decently.” He subdued it, however; heard her saying, “the truth,
the whole truth, and nothing but the truth,” and looked up. She
made a rich figure of it, in her furs and large hat, with a
slight flush on her cheek-bones, calm, matter-of-fact; and he
felt proud of her thus confronting all these “confounded
lawyers.” The examination began. Knowing that this was only the
preliminary to divorce, Val followed with a certain glee the
questions framed so as to give the impression that she really
wanted his father back. It seemed to him that they were “foxing
Old Bagwigs finely.”
And he received a most unpleasant jar when the Judge said
suddenly:
“Now, why did your husband leave you—not because you called him
‘the limit,’ you know?”
Val saw his uncle lift his eyes to the witness box, without
moving his face; heard a shuffle of papers behind him; and
instinct told him that the issue was in peril. Had Uncle Soames
and the old buffer behind made a mess of it? His mother was
speaking with a slight drawl.
“No, my Lord, but it had gone on a long time.”
“What had gone on?”
“Our differences about money.”
“But you supplied the money. Do you suggest that he left you to
better his position?”
“The brute! The old brute, and nothing but the brute!” thought
Val suddenly. “He smells a rat he’s trying to get at the pastry!”
And his heart stood still. If—if he did, then, of course, he
would know that his mother didn’t really want his father back.
His mother spoke again, a thought more fashionably.
“No, my Lord, but you see I had refused to give him any more
money. It took him a long time to believe that, but he did at
last—and when he did....”
“I see, you had refused. But you’ve sent him some since.”
“My Lord, I wanted him back.”
“And you thought that would bring him?”
“I don’t know, my Lord, I acted on my father’s advice.”
Something in the Judge’s face, in the sound of the papers behind
him, in the sudden crossing of his uncle’s legs, told Val that
she had made just the right answer. “Crafty!” he thought; “by
Jove, what humbug it all is!”
The Judge was speaking:
“Just one more question, Mrs. Dartie. Are you still fond of your
husband?”
Val’s hands, slack behind him, became fists. What business had
that Judge to make things human suddenly? To make his mother
speak out of her heart, and say what, perhaps, she didn’t know
herself, before all these people! It wasn’t decent. His mother
answered, rather low: “Yes, my Lord.” Val saw the Judge nod.
“Wish I could take a cock-shy at your head!” he thought
irreverently, as his mother came back to her seat beside him.
Witnesses to his father’s departure and continued absence
followed—one of their own maids even, which struck Val as
particularly beastly; there was more talking, all humbug; and
then the Judge pronounced the decree for restitution, and they
got up to go. Val walked out behind his mother, chin squared,
eyelids drooped, doing his level best to despise everybody. His
mother’s voice in the corridor roused him from an angry trance.
“You behaved beautifully, dear. It was such a comfort to have
you. Your uncle and I are going to lunch.”
“All right,” said Val; “I shall have time to go and see that
fellow.” And, parting from them abruptly, he ran down the stairs
and out into the air. He bolted into a hansom, and drove to the
Goat’s Club. His thoughts were on Holly and what he must do
before her brother showed her this thing in to-morrow’s paper.
When Val had left them Soames and Winifred made their way to the
Cheshire Cheese. He had suggested it as a meeting place with Mr.
Bellby. At that early hour of noon they would have it to
themselves, and Winifred had thought it would be “amusing” to see
this far-famed hostelry. Having ordered a light repast, to the
consternation of the waiter, they awaited its arrival together
with that of Mr. Bellby, in silent reaction after the hour and a
half’s suspense on the tenterhooks of publicity. Mr. Bellby
entered presently, preceded by his nose, as cheerful as they were
glum. Well! they had got the decree of restitution, and what was
the matter with that!
“Quite,” said Soames in a suitably low voice, “but we shall have
to begin again to get evidence. He’ll probably try the divorce—it
will look fishy if it comes out that we knew of misconduct from
the start. His questions showed well enough that he doesn’t like
this restitution dodge.”
“Pho!” said Mr. Bellby cheerily, “he’ll forget! Why, man, he’ll
have tried a hundred cases between now and then. Besides, he’s
bound by precedent to give ye your divorce, if the evidence is
satisfactory. We won’t let um know that Mrs. Dartie had knowledge
of the facts. Dreamer did it very nicely—he’s got a fatherly
touch about um!”
Soames nodded.
“And I compliment ye, Mrs. Dartie,” went on Mr. Bellby; “ye’ve a
natural gift for giving evidence. Steady as a rock.”
Here the waiter arrived with three plates balanced on one arm,
and the remark: “I ’urried up the pudden, sir. You’ll find plenty
o’ lark in it to-day.”
Mr. Bellby applauded his forethought with a dip of his nose. But
Soames and Winifred looked with dismay at their light lunch of
gravified brown masses, touching them gingerly with their forks
in the hope of distinguishing the bodies of the tasty little
song-givers. Having begun, however, they found they were hungrier
than they thought, and finished the lot, with a glass of port
apiece. Conversation turned on the war. Soames thought Ladysmith
would fall, and it might last a year. Bellby thought it would be
over by the summer. Both agreed that they wanted more men. There
was nothing for it but complete victory, since it was now a
question of prestige. Winifred brought things back to more solid
ground by saying that she did not want the divorce suit to come
on till after the summer holidays had begun at Oxford, then the
boys would have forgotten about it before Val had to go up again;
the London season too would be over. The lawyers reassured her,
an interval of six months was necessary—after that the earlier
the better. People were now beginning to come in, and they
parted—Soames to the city, Bellby to his chambers, Winifred in a
hansom to Park Lane to let her mother know how she had fared. The
issue had been so satisfactory on the whole that it was
considered advisable to tell James, who never failed to say day
after day that he didn’t know about Winifred’s affair, he
couldn’t tell. As his sands ran out; the importance of mundane
matters became increasingly grave to him, as if he were feeling:
“I must make the most of it, and worry well; I shall soon have
nothing to worry about.”
He received the report grudgingly. It was a new-fangled way of
going about things, and he didn’t know! But he gave Winifred a
cheque, saying:
“I expect you’ll have a lot of expense. That’s a new hat you’ve
got on. Why doesn’t Val come and see us?”
Winifred promised to bring him to dinner soon. And, going home,
she sought her bedroom where she could be alone. Now that her
husband had been ordered back into her custody with a view to
putting him away from her for ever, she would try once more to
find out from her sore and lonely heart what she really wanted.