Читать книгу Old Pybus - Warwick Deeping - Страница 42

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A moon as big and yellow as a harvest moon raised its face over Castle Craven, and the whiteness of the Venerable’s head was like the sheen of a helmet. The shadows of the ash trees lay like the shadows of clouds upon the broken walls of the castle, and the castle field was a goblin ground pocketed with darkness between folds of silver. John Pybus had finished his supper. He had come out with a pipe and his own thoughts. He took the path to the swinging gate in the stone wall, and passing across the grass-grown courtyard, climbed the three steps to one of the windows. The stone mullion cut the sky into halves. A hundred feet below, the dark river slid beneath the droop of beech boughs, and into the moonlight rose the soft thunder of the abbey weir.

John Pybus—of course—was thinking of his grandson, for, in Lance’s own words, the day had been a great occasion. And if it is possible for an old man to succumb to flattery, Lance’s grandfather should have succumbed to it, but flattery floats on shallow water, and old Pybus was deep.

He had been touched. He could think of nothing but the grandson in the place of the father; Lance coming to help him with that luggage. What an ironical reversion to type! If Probyn! Ought Probyn to know? But there was no spirit of malicious exultation in old Pybus. Did one gloat over the strange unexpectedness of human kinship, that sacred something in the blood?

He felt accountable to youth, and for it. He had overcome temptation. In his little kitchen, with the brown teapot in his hand, and Lance’s voice coming to him from the other room, he had confronted and frowned down facility. No Agag easiness. Rather would he be Samuel to the young David.

Watching the smoke blow from his pipe drifting into the moonlight he reviewed his resolution.

“I’ll not try to bribe him. If there is to be anything between us that will last it shall be worth lasting. Not the easy thing. It is so pleasant to prophesy the easy thing. He is asking for the most difficult thing that a man can desire.”

Looking at the moon, old Pybus went back to his cottage. His head had a radiance, and in the face of the moon he seemed to see the ardent, questioning face of his grandson.