He would like to have a look at the house, however. A house appealed to any Forsyte, and especially to one who had been an auctioneer. After all he said the distance was nothing. When he was a younger man he had had rooms at Richmond for many years, kept his carriage and pair there, and drove them up and down to business every day of his life.
Four-in-hand Forsyte they called him! His T-cart, his horses had been known from Hyde Park Corner to the Star and Garter. The Duke of Z.... wanted to get hold of them, would have given him double the money, but he had kept them; know a good thing when you have it, eh? A look of solemn pride came portentously on his shaven square old face, he rolled his head in his stand-up collar, like a turkey-cock preening himself.
She was really--a charming woman! He enlarged upon her frock afterwards to Aunt Juley, who held up her hands at his way of putting it.
Fitted her like a skin--tight as a drum; that was how he liked 'em, all of a piece, none of your daverdy, scarecrow women! He gazed at Mrs. Septimus Small, who took after James--long and thin.
"There's style about her," he went on, "fit for a king! And she's so quiet with it too!"
"She seems to have made quite a conquest of you, any way," drawled Aunt Hester from her corner.
Swithin heard extremely well when anybody attacked him.
"What's that?" he said. "I know a--pretty--woman when I see one, and all I can say is, I don't see the young man about that's fit for her; but perhaps--you--do, come, perhaps--you -do!"
"Oh?" murmured Aunt Hester, "ask Juley!"
Long before they reached Robin Hill, however, the unaccustomed airing had made him terribly sleepy; he drove with his eyes closed, a life-time of deportment alone keeping his tall and bulky form from falling askew.
Bosinney, who was watching, came out to meet them, and all three entered the house together; Swithin in front making play with a stout gold-mounted Malacca cane, put into his hand by Adolf, for his knees were feeling the effects of their long stay in the same position. He had assumed his fur coat, to guard against the draughts of the unfinished house.
The staircase--he said--was handsome! the baronial style! They would want some statuary about! He came to a standstill between the columns of the doorway into the inner court, and held out his cane inquiringly.
What was this to be--this vestibule, or whatever they called it?
But gazing at the skylight, inspiration came to him.
"Ah! the billiard-room!"
When told it was to be a tiled court with plants in the centre, he turned to Irene:
"Waste this on plants? You take my advice and have a billiard table here!"
Irene smiled. She had lifted her veil, banding it like a nun's coif across her forehead, and the smile of her dark eyes below this seemed to Swithin more charming than ever. He nodded. She would take his advice he saw.
He had little to say of the drawing or dining-rooms, which he described as 'spacious"; but fell into such raptures as he permitted to a man of his dignity, in the wine-cellar, to which he descended by stone steps, Bosinney going first with a light.
"You'll have room here," he said, "for six or seven hundred. dozen--a very pooty little cellar!"
Bosinney having expressed the wish to show them the house from the copse below, Swithin came to a stop.
"There's a fine view from here," he remarked; "you haven't such a thing as a chair?"
A chair was brought him from Bosinney's tent.
"You go down," he said blandly; "you two! I'll sit here and look at the view."
He sat down by the oak tree, in the sun; square and upright, with one hand stretched out, resting on the nob of his cane, the other planted on his knee; his fur coat thrown open, his hat, roofing with its flat top the pale square of his face; his stare, very blank, fixed on the landscape.
He nodded to them as they went, off down through the fields. He was, indeed, not sorry to be left thus for a quiet moment of reflection. The air was balmy, not too much heat in the sun; the prospect a fine one, a remarka.... His head fell a little to one side; he jerked it up and thought: Odd! He--ah! They were waving to him from the bottom! He put up his hand, and moved it more than once. They were active--the prospect was remar....
His head fell to the left, he jerked it up at once; it fell to the right. It remained there; he was asleep.
And asleep, a sentinel on the--top of the rise, he appeared to rule over this prospect--remarkable--like some image blocked out by the special artist, of primeval Forsytes in pagan days, to record the domination of mind over matter!
And all the unnumbered generations of his yeoman ancestors, wont of a Sunday to stand akimbo surveying their little plots of land, their grey unmoving eyes hiding their instinct with its hidden roots of violence, their instinct for possession to the exclusion of all the world--all these unnumbered generations seemed to sit there with him on the top of the rise.
