United States or Laos ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
And, as if distrusting the efficacy of those words on the boy, he went on quickly: "He took your mother's pearls to give to her." Val jerked up his hand, then. At that signal of distress Winifred cried out: "That'll do, Soames stop!" In the boy, the Dartie and the Forsyte were struggling. For debts, drink, dancers, he had a certain sympathy; but the pearls no! That was too much!
Bellby's breezy recapitulation of the facts, he growled, and said: "I know all that;" and coming round the corner at Winifred, smothered the words: "We want to get him back, don't we, Mrs. Dartie?" Soames interposed sharply: "My sister's position, of course, is intolerable." Dreamer growled. "Exactly.
Dartie," and saw that there was no longer any empty place. That fellow was sitting between Annette and Imogen. Soames ate steadily on, with an occasional word to Maud and Winifred. Conversation buzzed around him. He heard the voice of Profond say: "I think you're mistaken, Mrs. Forsyde; I'll I'll bet Miss Forsyde agrees with me." "In what?" came Fleur's clear voice across the table.
At this high-water mark of what was once the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon moved on, and turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club, to which he had just been elected. "Hallo! young man! Where are you off to?" Jon gushed. "I've just been to my tailor's."
Closing it softly behind him, he walked out, burdened as he had never been in all his life, and made his way round the corner to wait there for an early cab to come by. Thus had passed Montague Dartie in the forty-fifth year of his age from the house which he had called his own.
By that simple if wholesale device James Forsyte had secured a certain stability in the lives of his daughter and his grandchildren. After all, there is something invaluable about a safe roof over the head of a sportsman so dashing as Dartie. Until the events of the last few days he had been almost-supernaturally steady all this year.
That next Sunday, last of the term, Jolly was bidden to wine with 'one of the best. After the second toast, 'Buller and damnation to the Boers, drunk no heel taps in the college Burgundy, he noticed that Val Dartie, also a guest, was looking at him with a grin and saying something to his neighbour. He was sure it was disparaging.
With some such feeling did Val Dartie, in the fortieth year of his age, set out that same Thursday morning very early from the old manor-house he had taken on the north side of the Sussex Downs. His destination was Newmarket, and he had not been there since the autumn of 1899, when he stole over from Oxford for the Cambridgeshire.
In this way he greeted her from whom he hoped for a grandson of his name. Gazing at him, so old, thin, white, and spotless, Annette murmured something in French which James did not understand. "Yes, yes," he said, "you want your lunch, I expect. Soames, ring the bell; we won't wait for that chap Dartie." But just then they arrived.
That a man of the world so subject to the vicissitudes of fortunes as Montague Dartie should still be living in a house he had inhabited twenty years at least would have been more noticeable if the rent, rates, taxes, and repairs of that house had not been defrayed by his father-in-law.
Word Of The Day