Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 19

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Lance sat down on the moss-stained stone seat. He still seemed to hear his father’s voice suavely conspiratorial and bland. Sir Probyn had said that he would drive over to Castle Craven—by himself, of course—and visit the Sarcen’s Head. He had suggested the making of certain proposals to John Pybus, proposals that included independence, a settled income of—say—£500 a year, and a little house on the south coast or in the suburbs. Conrad had agreed to the proposals, but had shown a scepticism. You might take this old horse to the water, but you could not make him drink.

And to Lance Pybus hidden in the Bosquet came the consciousness of shame. His father and his uncle were ashamed of their father—while he——! But was his the same kind of shame? Was he not ashamed of their shame? Yet, what did he know of old John Pybus, this grandfather of his who was “boots” at a country inn? Might not the old boy be a shabby reprobate, an impossible old man, a very solid skeleton hanging in the family cupboard?

A fellow had to be fair. And in fairness to those others he had to remember those qualms of his own, those very personal memories of the stuffy, stuccoed, semi-detached house at Putney which had been followed by a very new and raw red villa-mansion on the outskirts of an industrial town. Eton and Trinity and Windover Hall, and these beech woods, and the pleasant spaciousness and beauty, and the intimate aloofness of this very Bosquet had come to him as the result of his father’s climbings. Material success. His father had always been generous.

What right had he to criticise his father? He could remember the double and secret shame of the last May Week when Sir Probyn and Lady Pybus had put up at the “University Arms,” and his people had met the people of his friends, and he had been conscious of torturing differences. His mother talked too much and too loudly. His father——What a beastly sensitiveness was his! Surely you ought to be able to respect your father, and especially the human foibles of your father? Wasn’t it a question of affection? Why these hypersensitive qualms, this feeling of vague antagonism?

Which was the more vulgar, a pretentious shame, or snobbish mortification in the presence of that shame?

For Lance was in the first flush of his season of ideals. He meant to take life with immense seriousness. He was serious. There were the realities, or what seemed to him to be the realities, love, beauty, endeavour, the following of your inspiration, accomplishment. He had a young dignity. Youth can have a stateliness of its own, inward pageantry, a graciousness of movement. It is the age of protest, of a passionate questioning, of eyes that look up and out. Its very defects are active, not passive.

“A man ought to know. I—myself—ought to know. Let’s be honest.”

He was a far more subtle creature than his parents, and perhaps he knew it. Their reactions were so obvious. And a part of his trouble was that while he saw—or thought he saw—these two people as two rather mechanical figures moved by the most simple of impulses—they understood him not at all. Their visualising of him was arbitrary and conventional. He was the son, the heir, the gilded youth, success in the flesh, Eton and Trinity, the future dictator, the wearer of the Golden Fleece. They had no knowledge of the bird in him, of the musician, the saint, the child of original sin, the scribbler, the dreamer, the rebel. They wanted him to be the conventional son, the “Lance, old lad,”—the nicely polished product of their material union. And he wasn’t.

Well—what of it? He got up off that Roman seat, and walking like a young prophet full of inward stirrings out into the sunlight, turned instinctively towards the Dutch garden and the splash of its little fountain.