第3章 THE SON'S VETO(3)

Thus she lived on in the city,and wasted hours in braiding her beautiful hair,till her once apple cheeks waned to pink of the very faintest.Her foot had never regained its natural strength after the accident,and she was mostly obliged to avoid walking altogether.

Her husband had grown to like London for its freedom and its domestic privacy;but he was twenty years his Sophy's senior,and had latterly been seized with a serious illness.On this day,however,he had seemed to be well enough to justify her accompanying her son Randolph to the concert.

CHAPTER II

The next time we get a glimpse of her is when she appears in the mournful attire of a widow.

Mr.Twycott had never rallied,and now lay in a well-packed cemetery to the south of the great city,where,if all the dead it contained had stood erect and alive,not one would have known him or recognized his name.The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave,and was now again at school.

Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she was in nature though not in years.She was left with no control over anything that had been her husband's beyond her modest personal income.In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he had safeguarded with trustees all he possibly could.The completion of the boy's course at the public school,to be followed in due time by Oxford and ordination,had been all previsioned and arranged,and she really had nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink,and make a business of indolence,and go on weaving and coiling the nut-brown hair,merely keeping a home open for the son whenever he came to her during vacations.

Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her,her husband in his lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa in the same long,straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced,which was to be hers as long as she chose to live in it.Here she now resided,looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front,and through the railings at the ever-flowing traffic;or,bending forward over the window-sill on the first floor,stretching her eyes far up and down the vista of sooty trees,hazy air,and drab house-facades,along which echoed the noises common to a suburban main thoroughfare.

Somehow,her boy,with his aristocratic school-knowledge,his grammars,and his aversions,was losing those wide infantine sympathies,extending as far as to the sun and moon themselves,with which he,like other children,had been born,and which his mother,a child of nature herself,had loved in him;he was reducing their compass to a population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people,the mere veneer of a thousand million or so of others who did not interest him at all.He drifted further and further away from her.

Sophy's milieu being a suburb of minor tradesmen and under-clerks,and her almost only companions the two servants of her own house,it was not surprising that after her husband's death she soon lost the little artificial tastes she had acquired from him,and became--in her son's eyes--a mother whose mistakes and origin it was his painful lot as a gentleman to blush for.As yet he was far from being man enough--if he ever would be--to rate these sins of hers at their true infinitesimal value beside the yearning fondness that welled up and remained penned in her heart till it should be more fully accepted by him,or by some other person or thing.If he had lived at home with her he would have had all of it;but he seemed to require so very little in present circumstances,and it remained stored.

Her life became insupportably dreary;she could not take walks,and had no interest in going for drives,or,indeed,in travelling anywhere.Nearly two years passed without an event,and still she looked on that suburban road,thinking of the village in which she had been born,and whither she would have gone back--O how gladly!--even to work in the fields.

Taking no exercise,she often could not sleep,and would rise in the night or early morning and look out upon the then vacant thoroughfare,where the lamps stood like sentinels waiting for some procession to go by.An approximation to such a procession was indeed made early every morning about one o'clock,when the country vehicles passed up with loads of vegetables for Covent Garden market.

She often saw them creeping along at this silent and dusky hour--waggon after waggon,bearing green bastions of cabbages nodding to their fall,yet never falling,walls of baskets enclosing masses of beans and peas,pyramids of snow-white turnips,swaying howdahs of mixed produce--creeping along behind aged night-horses,who seemed ever patiently wondering between their hollow coughs why they had always to work at that still hour when all other sentient creatures were privileged to rest.Wrapped in a cloak,it was soothing to watch and sympathize with them when depression and nervousness hindered sleep,and to see how the fresh green-stuff brightened to life as it came opposite the lamp,and how the sweating animals steamed and shone with their miles of travel.

They had an interest,almost a charm,for Sophy,these semirural people and vehicles moving in an urban atmosphere,leading a life quite distinct from that of the daytime toilers on the same road.

One morning a man who accompanied a waggon-load of potatoes gazed rather hard at the house-fronts as he passed,and with a curious emotion she thought his form was familiar to her.She looked out for him again.His being an old-fashioned conveyance,with a yellow front,it was easily recognizable,and on the third night after she saw it a second time.The man alongside was,as she had fancied,Sam Hobson,formerly gardener at Gaymead,who would at one time have married her.