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Updated: June 15, 2025
Fleur's wisdom in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros, cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees, greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers, sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.
Fleur's father's first wife had been very foolish. There had been a young man who had got run over, and she had left Fleur's father. Then, years after, when it might all have come right again, she had taken up with their cousin Jolyon; and, of course, her father had been obliged to have a divorce. Nobody remembered anything of it now, except just the family.
If only he could get at that anonymous letter-writer, he would teach him not to meddle and stir up mud at the bottom of water which he wished should remain stagnant!... A distant flash, a low rumble, and large drops of rain spattered on the thatch above him. He remained indifferent, tracing a pattern with his finger on the dusty surface of a little rustic table. Fleur's future!
A voice said cheerfully: "Bit thick, isn't it, sir?" The young man who had handed him his handkerchief was again passing. Soames nodded. "I don't know what we're coming to." "Oh! That's all right, sir," answered the young man cheerfully; "they don't either." Fleur's voice said: "Hallo, Father! Here you are!" precisely as if he had been keeping her waiting.
Draw a form of settlement that passes all my property to Miss Fleur's children in equal shares, with antecedent life-interests first to myself and then to her without power of anticipation, and add a clause that in the event of anything happening to divert her life-interest, that interest passes to the trustees, to apply for her benefit, in their absolute discretion."
This house his father said in that death-bed letter had been built for his mother to live in with Fleur's father! He put out his hand in the half-dark, as if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead. He clenched, trying to feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze them, and reassure him that he he was on his father's side. Tears, prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot.
Thank goodness, the young fellow had shaved off his half-toothbrushes, and no longer looked like a mountebank! With a girl friend of Fleur's who was staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth or so, they made two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music of the electric pianola, which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a surprised shine on its expressive surface.
He realised now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had at first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt there were two camps, his mother's and his Fleur's and her father's. It might be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and enmity, but dead things were poisonous till Time had cleaned them away.
He had a hurried bath and came down to find Holly alone Val had gone to Town and would not be back till the last train. Since Val's advice to him to ask his sister what was the matter between the two families, so much had happened Fleur's disclosure in the Green Park, her visit to Robin Hill, to-day's meeting that there seemed nothing to ask.
That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-invested Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father came down to dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow his nose. "I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and ran upstairs.
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