Whether his saying "small" when he ought to have said "little" was
genuine mistake or affectation Val could not decide; the fellow was
evidently capable of anything.
Among the ring of buyers round the Mayfly filly who had won her race,
Monsieur Profond said:
"You goin' to bid?"
Val nodded. With this sleepy Satan at his elbow, he felt in need of
faith. Though placed above the ultimate blows of Providence by the
forethought of a grand-father who had tied him up a thousand a year
to which was added the thousand a year tied up for Holly by her
grand-father, Val was not flush of capital that he could touch, having
spent most of what he had realised from his South African farm on his
establishment in Sussex. And very soon he was thinking: 'Dash it! she's
going beyond me!' His limit-six hundred-was exceeded; he dropped out of
the bidding. The Mayfly filly passed under the hammer at seven hundred
and fifty guineas. He was turning away vexed when the slow voice of
Monsieur Profond said in his ear:
"Well, I've bought that small filly, but I don't want her; you take her
and give her to your wife."
Val looked at the fellow with renewed suspicion, but the good humour in
his eyes was such that he really could not take offence.
"I made a small lot of money in the War," began Monsieur Profond in
answer to that look. "I 'ad armament shares. I like to give it away. I'm
always makin' money. I want very small lot myself. I like my friends to
'ave it."
"I'll buy her of you at the price you gave," said Val with sudden
resolution.
"No," said Monsieur Profond. "You take her. I don' want her."
"Hang it! one doesn't--"
"Why not?" smiled Monsieur Profond. "I'm a friend of your family."
"Seven hundred and fifty guineas is not a box of cigars," said Val
impatiently.
"All right; you keep her for me till I want her, and do what you like
with her."
"So long as she's yours," said Val. "I don't mind that."
"That's all right," murmured Monsieur Profond, and moved away.
Val watched; he might be "a good devil," but then again he might not. He
saw him rejoin George Forsyte, and thereafter saw him no more.
He spent those nights after racing at his mother's house in Green
Street.
Winifred Dartie at sixty-two was marvellously preserved, considering the
three-and-thirty years during which she had put up with Montague Dartie,
till almost happily released by a French staircase. It was to her a
vehement satisfaction to have her favourite son back from South Africa
after all this time, to feel him so little changed, and to have taken
a fancy to his wife. Winifred, who in the late seventies, before her
marriage, had been in the vanguard of freedom, pleasure, and fashion,
confessed her youth outclassed by the donzellas of the day. They seemed,
for instance, to regard marriage as an incident, and Winifred sometimes
regretted that she had not done the same; a second, third, fourth
incident might have secured her a partner of less dazzling inebriety;
though, after all, he had left her Val, Imogen, Maud, Benedict (almost a
colonel and unharmed by the War)--none of whom had been divorced as yet.
The steadiness of her children often amazed one who remembered their
father; but, as she was fond of believing, they were really all
Forsytes, favouring herself, with the exception, perhaps, of Imogen. Her
brother's "little girl" Fleur frankly puzzled Winifred. The child was as
restless as any of these modern young women--"She's a small flame in a
draught," Prosper Profond had said one day after dinner--but she did
not flop, or talk at the top of her voice. The steady Forsyteism in
Winifred's own character instinctively resented the feeling in the
air, the modern girl's habits and her motto: "All's much of a muchness!
Spend, to-morrow we shall be poor!" She found it a saving grace in Fleur
that, having set her heart on a thing, she had no change of heart until
she got it--though--what happened after, Fleur was, of course, too young
to have made evident. The child was a "very pretty little thing," too,
and quite a credit to take about, with her mother's French taste and
gift for wearing clothes; everybody turned to look at Fleur--great
consideration to Winifred, a lover of the style and distinction which
had so cruelly deceived her in the case of Montague Dartie.