Читать книгу Roper's Row - Warwick Deeping - Страница 9

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Mary Hazzard wore her black silk dress and the gold brooch with the amethyst set in it.

She came down the path through the vegetable plot at the back of her cottage carrying a rush basket in which were two brown eggs. A yew tree threw a patch of shadow on the white wall beside the green door which when open showed the well-washed red bricks of the kitchen floor. On the dresser stood a yellow bowl half full of eggs, and Kit’s mother added these other two to the hoard. For a week before one of Christopher’s visits she would collect and save every egg that her hens laid so that he could take them back with him to London, together with a plum-cake, and a bunch of roses or sweet-scented stocks or purple and rose asters.

Passing through the cottage into what was both flower-garden and orchard, a little green place dabbling its hands in the river, she sat down in a Windsor chair under an apple tree to wait for the great occasion. Christopher’s train reached Barrowbourne at three minutes past five. He had to walk the three miles from Barrowbourne to Melfont, for the carrier’s cart was as slow as a funeral, and you saved sixpence at the expense of shoe leather. The day of the motor was not yet.

Mary Hazzard loved these minutes of waiting, though the expectant tumult of them was inward. She was one of those silent, deliberate, tall women, with an air of passive dignity. She was black and white. Her dark eyes were steady and large. The lesser, fidgety, garrulous, crudely egotistical fry did not understand her silences or her reserves. Her heart was a dark flower, fragrant but hidden.

Always in summer she waited for her son in that patch of garden, with the river going by, and the light playing in the willows. In winter she had her chair by the window where she could watch the gate. A path led down from the lane over a slope of grass. There was a damson tree by the gate.

Suddenly she saw Christopher at the gate. It never ceased to be a thing of wonder to her that he should return out of that other world which she never knew into this little world that was hers. She rose from her chair, but remained standing under the apple tree. She had that dignity that is seen in some country women, but is very rare in cities.

“Well—Kit—my dear——”

Both their faces were alight. He came to her with something of the air of a child, for she was taller than he was. The man disappeared in the boy.

“I have some news for you.”

He kissed her, and not as most sons kiss their mothers. His kiss was meant, and in kissing her he seemed to kiss the hills and the trees and that gently flowing water, the very mother earth of his world.

“You’ve never brought me bad news yet, my dear.”

She had her hands on his shoulders. His grave face had ceased to be a London face, watchful, and shut up behind shutters of sensitiveness.

“It’s the Angus Sandeman Prize. I’ve won it. Fifty pounds and a medal.”

“Oh—my dear—that’s grand.”

“You’ll have to come and see me take it, Mother, in the autumn on Bennet’s Day.”

“I’ll come,” said she. “And to think, Kit, that I have been to London only once in my life.”

He looked down through the greenness towards the river.

“London and you—don’t belong.”

For he was thinking how old and shabby and wrinkled London looked, and how young his mother seemed with her clear eyes and her white skin. He knew that she was sixty-five years old, but her black and whiteness were like the black and whiteness of a stately house. To him she was unique.