Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 20

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His mother was there.

She, too, liked glitter, and was pleased as a child is pleased by it. Lance could remember her in a purple dress all covered with silver sequins, but now her stoutness had to be more decorously draped. But at night—on state occasions—she had taken to wearing a tiara. It seemed that any bright thing or any gaily-coloured object had an irresistible lure. Had she had her way she would have covered herself with pieces of lace, and ribbons and scarfs, and brooches and bangles, but the sophisticated simplicity of the day and her modiste had compelled her to refrain.

The French, panelled drawing-room of Windover had not satisfied Lady Pybus. She had filled it with lacquered furniture, and brilliant cushions and tuffets, and painted shades with gold fringes, and orange and blue rugs upon a black and polished floor. Her exuberant taste had invaded the Dutch garden. Liking comfort and shelter and the splash of water she had had erected upon one of the little panels of grass at the end of the water cistern an orange and black striped hammock bed. She was in the act of settling herself under the awning when her son came to one of the openings in the pleached lime hedge.

Lady Dot was very plump. She wore very short skirts. Her bobbed head of very fair hair stood out like a nimbus. She was one of those women with a high colour and a beaked nose, and eyes of hard, bright blue. Her voice was rather high pitched, decisive, and a little brusque, never changing its tone or its timbre and, like her voice, she was without modulations. She was a woman who always set out to manage people or a situation with the same assurance with which—had she been a cottage woman—she would have washed her children and put them to bed. She was utterly without shadow effects. She said at once and with confidence exactly what came into her head.

And her son, standing there at one of the green windows, saw a very stout pair of legs in flesh-coloured stockings, and that atrocity of a hammock bed, an orange blot in the centre of the sunk garden. It was an atrocity, insulting all those old, tired, gentle colours, the grey of the stone, the soft rust red of the old bricks, the lily leaves, the grass, the dark clipped yews, the lavender, the water.

He had dared to call the thing an atrocity.

“My dear, you’re too squeamish. Besides—if I want to be comfy——”

She might have had it put anywhere but in that perfect little garden made for the gentlewoman of another day, and for brocades of old rose and grey and lavender, the subtle shades of twilight moods. His mother was all full noon. Had he tried to tell her some of the intimate truths that a young man never tells to a mother, she would have exclaimed, “How—absurd! Really—my dear—you ought to see a doctor.” Having no reticence, and being a woman who was quite ready to discuss her husband with other women, she did not understand the reticences of her son. In fact she was not aware of his reserve. Lance had silent moods, and silence to Lady Dot was merely the absence of anything that needed saying.

Her son watched the swaying of the hammock bed, the subsidence of the cushions, and his mother’s very large and flesh-coloured legs arranging themselves. He thought “She shouldn’t wear those stockings,” and while he was thinking of it she looked up and discovered him. She was able at all times to find an immediate use for anybody.

“Lance, old lad, I’ve forgotten the oil of lavender. Get it—will you?”

“Yes, mater.”

“And you might see if Mills has put a man to mend the holes in the stop-netting. The Ashleys are coming in this afternoon.”

He was half-way to the house when he heard her calling.

“Lan-cie—Lan-cie.”

He hated being called Lancie.

“Hallo.”

“If Conrad’s still there—tell him I have a bone to pick with him. Send him down here.”