CHAPTER XIII
His mother, though not an invalid, had need to be very careful as to her health. Undoubtedly she had been better since she had come to the Manor than she had been for years; but it so happened that she had not felt well enough to go with her son Jack to the opening day of the Lawn Tennis meeting. She easily submitted to his injunction to remain in her chair on the terrace. The great magnolia that would make the whole side of the house so glorious in another month, was not yet in bloom, but a couple of old-fashioned climbing roses had worked their way round the angle of the wall and laid out fantastic arms heavy with blooms over the trellis, and Mrs. Wingfield loved roses of all sorts, and nightingales and all the other old-fashioned things of the English garden. She was quite content with her surroundings and her canopy and her pavement on this J une day, and felt confident that her son’s assurance that she would enjoy her day very much more as he arranged it for her, than if she were to join the giddy throng in watching him knock the balls about, was well founded. He had settled her in her chair and exclaimed:
“Why was I such an idiot as to enter for the two events? The chances are that I’ll scratch when I get on the ground and come straight back to you.”
“You must do nothing of the sort, my dear,” she said. “Play all your games; it will make a good impression upon the people.”
“My aim in life is to impress Framsby,” said he. “It strikes me that the only impression my play will produce upon the privileged beholders will be that whatever I may be in other respects I’m a thundering duffer at tennis.”
“You can’t tell what their form maybe. You may have to play a second or third class man who is worse even than you,” said his mother, in the tone of the invalid who has been told by her doctor to be cheerful.
He laughed. “Bless you, my dear mother, for your kind intentions; but I feel that you are a sad flatterer,” he said, going off, having lighted his pipe.
She watched him as the mother of an only son watches him; and when he had disappeared and she heard him start the engine of his motor, she laid down her magazine and sighed. She knew very well why she did so. She knew how large her hopes had been that his entering into possession of his property would mean a settling down for him. In the days of their poverty—comparative poverty—the settling up every now and again was what she had good reason to dread, and now that they were wealthy—comparatively wealthy—the settling down occupied her thoughts quite as painfully.
She had seen, with a sinking of the heart, that he was beginning to lose a sense of the novelty of his position. He had become weary of it already. He had not fallen properly into the place which his grandfather had occupied; his grandfather had thought it the highest place to which a human being could aspire—the position of an English country gentleman. Jack Wingfield was beginning to be bored by it already, she could see. It was a life of pottering, she knew, and pottering, as a profession, must either be begun very early or very late in life if one is to attain to eminence in its practice. Jack had set about it too late for a young man and too early for an old one. He had had nearly six years of wandering—a little in Africa and a great deal in South America. They had been busy years, and certainly they had been restless years; but they had been years of life, not of vegetating. The rolling stone does not become associated with even so humble a form of vegetation as moss; but when it has done its rolling and finds itself in a position for such an accumulation, it is rather a pitiable object.
For more than a week Mrs. Wingfield had noted the approach of that cloud of ennui which she had always dreaded when she had thought of him as entering upon a career of pottering. She had made several suggestions to him with a view to its dispersal before it settled down upon him. She thought of the hounds—might it not be possible for him to take the hounds? Was the present master not tired of them yet? And then she thought of the pheasants—the pheasants had never been properly looked after, she knew, though she was quite unaware of how handy the gamekeeper’s wife at the lodge had found their eggs when she had to make an omelette in a hurry.