"Don't be a clown, Monty. Have you been to Scotland Yard?"
Placing the revolver against his chest, Dartie had pulled the trigger
several times. It was not loaded. Dropping it with an imprecation,
he had muttered: "For shake o' the children," and sank into a chair.
Winifred, having picked up the revolver, gave him some soda water. The
liquor had a magical effect. Life had illused him; Winifred had never
'unshtood'm.' If he hadn't the right to take the pearls he had given
her himself, who had? That Spanish filly had got'm. If Winifred had
any 'jection he w'd cut--her--throat. What was the matter with that?
(Probably the first use of that celebrated phrase--so obscure are the
origins of even the most classical language!)
Winifred, who had learned self-containment in a hard school, looked up
at him, and said: "Spanish filly! Do you mean that girl we saw dancing
in the Pandemonium Ballet? Well, you are a thief and a blackguard." It
had been the last straw on a sorely loaded consciousness; reaching
up from his chair Dartie seized his wife's arm, and recalling the
achievements of his boyhood, twisted it. Winifred endured the agony with
tears in her eyes, but no murmur. Watching for a moment of weakness,
she wrenched it free; then placing the dining table between them,
said between her teeth: "You are the limit, Monty." (Undoubtedly the
inception of that phrase--so is English formed under the stress of
circumstances.) Leaving Dartie with foam on his dark moustache she went
upstairs, and, after locking her door and bathing her arm in hot
water, lay awake all night, thinking of her pearls adorning the neck of
another, and of the consideration her husband had presumably received
therefor.
The man of the world awoke with a sense of being lost to that world, and
a dim recollection of having been called a 'limit.' He sat for half
an hour in the dawn and the armchair where he had slept--perhaps the
unhappiest half-hour he had ever spent, for even to a Dartie there is
something tragic about an end. And he knew that he had reached it.
Never again would he sleep in his dining-room and wake with the light
filtering through those curtains bought by Winifred at Nickens and
Jarveys with the money of James. Never again eat a devilled kidney at
that rose-wood table, after a roll in the sheets and a hot bath. He took
his note case from his dress coat pocket. Four hundred pounds, in fives
and tens--the remainder of the proceeds of his half of Sleeve-links,
sold last night, cash down, to George Forsyte, who, having won over
the race, had not conceived the sudden dislike to the animal which he
himself now felt. The ballet was going to Buenos Aires the day after
to-morrow, and he was going too. Full value for the pearls had not yet
been received; he was only at the soup.