And now she was condemned. She knew it. She knew there could be no appeal. She knew that she might as usefully have besought mercy from a tiger as from her good, industrious, dreamy son.
“It means a pound a week,” said Cyril, his self-consciousness intensified by her silence and by the dreadful look on her face. “And of course free tuition.”
“For how long?” she managed to say.
“Well,” said he, “that depends. Nominally for a year. But if you behave yourself it’s always continued for three years.” If he stayed for three years he would never come back: that was a certainty.
How she rebelled, furious and despairing, against the fortuitous cruelty of things! She was sure that he had not, till then, thought seriously of going to London. But the fact that the Government would admit him free to its classrooms and give him a pound a week besides, somehow forced him to go to London. It was not the lack of means that would have prevented him from going. Why, then, should the presence of means induce him to go? There was no logical reason. The whole affair was disastrously absurd. The art-master at the Wedgwood Institution had chanced, merely chanced, to suggest that the drinking-cup should be sent to South Kensington. And the result of this caprice was that she was sentenced to solitude for life! It was too monstrously, too incredibly wicked!
With what futile and bitter execration she murmured in her heart the word ‘If.’ If Cyril’s childish predilections had not been encouraged! If he had only been content to follow his father’s trade! If she had flatly refused to sign his indenture at Peel’s and pay the premium! If he had not turned from, colour to clay! If the art-master had not had that fatal ‘idea’! If the judges for the competition had decided otherwise! If only she had brought Cyril up in habits of obedience, sacrificing temporary peace to permanent security!
For after all he could not abandon her without her consent. He was not of age. And he would want a lot more money, which he could obtain from none but her. She could refuse....
No! She could not refuse. He was the master, the tyrant. For the sake of daily pleasantness she had weakly yielded to him at the start! She had behaved badly to herself and to him. He was spoiled. She had spoiled him. And he was about to repay her with lifelong misery, and nothing would deflect him from his course. The usual conduct of the spoilt child! Had she not witnessed it, and moralized upon it, in other families?
“You don’t seem very chirpy over it, mater!” he said.
She went out of the room. His joy in the prospect of departure from the Five Towns, from her, though he masked it, was more manifest than she could bear.