: The Lovely Lady by Austin Mary Grant Gordon Illustrator - Fiction

@FreeBooksTue 06 Jun, 2023

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at that would be like if you should find it." She turned his face up to her with a tender anxiety and yet with a little timidity; they did not talk much of such things in Bloombury.

"I know, mother."

"Yes...." after a long look, "you would; you're so like your father. But if you know, you mustn't ever be led by dullness or loneliness into anything less, Peter. Not that I'm afraid you'll be led into anything wrong ... but there are things that are almost more wrong than downright wickedness....

"I've been thinking a great deal lately about when I was your age, and there didn't seem anything for me but to marry one of the neighbour's boys that I'd known always, or a long plain piece of school teaching. It wasn't easy with everybody egging me on--but I stuck it out, and at the last along came your father ... I'd like you to have something like that, Peter,--and your son coming to you the way you came to me, like it was through a cloud of glory...." He looked up presently on her silence, silver tipped now with the hope of renewal, and he saw her as a man sometimes when he is young and clean, sees his mother, the Sacred Door ... and he did not observe at all that her hands were berry stained and the nails broken, nor that her cheek had fallen in and her hair gray and wispy. But being a young man and never good at talking, it made no difference with him except that as they walked home across the pastures he was more than ever careful of her and teased her more whimsically.

He forgot, after he had settled in his room again at Blodgett's, that Miss Minnie Havens had ever walked with him in the purlieus of the House, for he was quite taken up with a new set of rooms he had thrown out from it for his mother. She was always there with him now until the day of her death and long after, made a part of all his dreaming by the touch with which she had limned in herself for him, the feature of all Lovely Ladies.

He would write her long letters into which crept much that had been uttered only in the House, which that winter became an estate in Florida, moved there because of Mrs. Weatheral's need of mild climate. They went abroad after the Christmas Holidays in which she had coughed more than usual and consented to have her breakfast brought up to bed, setting out every evening from Peter's reading-lamp and arriving very shortly at Italian Cathedrals and old Roman seaport towns that smelled of history.

Dreaming of lovely ladies who have no face or form other than they borrow from the passing incident is a very pleasant way of passing the time, and does not necessarily lead to anything; but when a man goes about afraid lest his mother should die for lack of something he might have got for her, he dreams closer at home. More than ever since the revelation of his mother's frailness, Peter dreamed of being rich, and since there was nothing nearer to him than the way Siegel Brothers had managed it, he devoted so much time to the scrutiny of their methods that he passed in a very short time from being head of the delivery department to the right hand of Mr. Croker. Even Blinders could not recall, in the three years he had been bundle boy, so marked an example of favouritism.

"They don't make partners any more out of underlings," Croker let him know confidentially. "What do you think you're headed for?" Peter explained himself.

"I wanted to find out how they did it."

"And when you find out," Croker wagged at him, "you won't be able to do anything with it. You have to have capital. Look at the time I've been with them!"

"How long is that?" Peter was interested.

"Twenty years." Croker told him.

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