III
§
Not a father, for he had long been dead, but a mother, whose single joy and pride he was. There she sat at home by the fire on his wedding night, thinking of him. No complete half-hour of the day could pass without the thought of Jocelyn getting into it. Her only child; so brilliant, so serious, so hard-working, so good. She loved brains. She loved diligence. She loved the man of the house to be absorbed in his work. What a halo he was about her head! Everybody round where she lived knew about him. Everybody had heard of his successes,—‘My son, who is a scholar of Ananias.... My son, who is a Prizeman of his University.... My son, who won this year’s Rutherford Prize....’ Great was her reward for having devoted her life to him and his education, and for having turned a deaf ear to those suitors who had tried to marry her when she was a young widow. She wasn’t even now, twenty years later, an old widow, but she was a widow who was less young.
She lived in one of those suburbs where much is done for the mind. She was popular in it, and looked up to. She was, in fact, one of its leading lights,—cultivated, lady-like, well-read, artistic, interested in each new movement that came along. And of a most pleasing appearance, too, being slender at an age when the mothers of the grown-up are sometimes so no longer, dark haired among the grey, smooth among the puckered, and her eyes had no crow’s feet, and were calm and beautifully clear.
She was serenely happy. The milieu suited her exactly. She had come to South Winch twenty years before from Kensington—real Kensington, not West or North, but the part that clusters round the Albert Hall—on her husband’s death, because of having to be frugal, but soon discovered it was the very place for her. Far better, she intelligently recognised, to be a leading light in a suburb, and know and be known by everybody, than extinguished and invisible in London. Besides, spring came to the suburbs in a way it never did to London, and it was the custom in South Winch, where people were determined to think highly, to think particularly highly of spring. At the bottom of her half acre there was only an iron railing separating her from a real meadow belonging to the big villa of a prosperous City man, and spring, she told the Rector, who was also a Canon, did things in that meadow it would never dream of doing near the Albert Hall.
‘Look at those dandelions,’ said Mrs. Luke. ‘I do think the meanest flower that blows in its natural setting is more beautiful than the whole of those thought-out effects in Kensington Gardens.’
And the Rector—the Canon—said, ‘How true that is,’ and remarked that she was a Wordsworthian; and Mrs. Luke smiled, and said, ‘Am I?’ and wasn’t altogether pleased, for Wordsworth, she somehow felt, was no longer, in the newest opinion, what he was.
While Jocelyn, then, was worshipping Sally across the supper-table of the private sitting-room he had engaged in the hotel at Exeter, where they were breaking their journey to Cornwall, which was the place he was going to hide his honeymoon in, and Sally, unable to make head or tail of his speech and behaviour, was becoming every minute more uneasy, his mother sat, placid in the security of unconsciousness, by the fire in Almond Tree Cottage, a house which used, before the era of her careful simplicity, so foolishly to be called Beulah.
‘A cottage,’ she observed to her sympathetic friends, ‘is the proper place for me. I’m a poor woman. Five hundred a year’—why hide anything?—‘doesn’t go far these days after Income Tax has been deducted. Jocelyn has his own five hundred, or we would really have been in a quite bad way. As it is, I can just manage.’
And she did; and in her clever hands frugality merely seemed comfort gone a little thin, and nobody liked to ask her for subscriptions.