Lifes Little Ironies | Page 4

Thus she lived on in the city, and wasted hours in braiding her beautiful
hair, till her once apple cheeks waned to pink of the very faintest. Her
foot had never regained its natural strength after the accident, and she
was mostly obliged to avoid walking altogether. Her husband had
grown to like London for its freedom and its domestic privacy; but he
was twenty years his Sophy's senior, and had latterly been seized with a
serious illness. On this day, however, he had seemed to be well enough
to justify her accompanying her son Randolph to the concert.
CHAPTER II

The next time we get a glimpse of her is when she appears in the
mournful attire of a widow.
Mr. Twycott had never rallied, and now lay in a well-packed cemetery
to the south of the great city, where, if all the dead it contained had
stood erect and alive, not one would have known him or recognized his
name. The boy had dutifully followed him to the grave, and was now
again at school.
Throughout these changes Sophy had been treated like the child she
was in nature though not in years. She was left with no control over
anything that had been her husband's beyond her modest personal
income. In his anxiety lest her inexperience should be overreached he
had safeguarded with trustees all he possibly could. The completion of
the boy's course at the public school, to be followed in due time by
Oxford and ordination, had been all previsioned and arranged, and she
really had nothing to occupy her in the world but to eat and drink, and
make a business of indolence, and go on weaving and coiling the
nut-brown hair, merely keeping a home open for the son whenever he
came to her during vacations.
Foreseeing his probable decease long years before her, her husband in
his lifetime had purchased for her use a semi-detached villa in the same
long, straight road whereon the church and parsonage faced, which was
to be hers as long as she chose to live in it. Here she now resided,
looking out upon the fragment of lawn in front, and through the railings
at the ever-flowing traffic; or, bending forward over the window-sill on
the first floor, stretching her eyes far up and down the vista of sooty
trees, hazy air, and drab house-facades, along which echoed the noises
common to a suburban main thoroughfare.
Somehow, her boy, with his aristocratic school-knowledge, his
grammars, and his aversions, was losing those wide infantine
sympathies, extending as far as to the sun and moon themselves, with
which he, like other children, had been born, and which his mother, a
child of nature herself, had loved in him; he was reducing their
compass to a population of a few thousand wealthy and titled people,
the mere veneer of a thousand million or so of others who did not

interest him at all. He drifted further and further away from her.
Sophy's milieu being a suburb of minor tradesmen and under-clerks,
and her almost only companions the two servants of her own house, it
was not surprising that after her husband's death she soon lost the little
artificial tastes she had acquired from him, and became--in her son's
eyes--a mother whose mistakes and origin it was his painful lot as a
gentleman to blush for. As yet he was far from being man enough--if he
ever would be--to rate these sins of hers at their true infinitesimal value
beside the yearning fondness that welled up and remained penned in
her heart till it should be more fully accepted by him, or by some other
person or thing. If he had lived at home with her he would have had all
of it; but he seemed to require so very little in present circumstances,
and it remained stored.
Her life became insupportably dreary; she could not take walks, and
had no interest in going for drives, or, indeed, in travelling anywhere.
Nearly two years passed without an event, and still she looked on that
suburban road, thinking of the village in which she had been born, and
whither she would have gone back--O how gladly!--even to work in the
fields.
Taking no exercise, she often could not sleep, and would rise in the
night or early morning and look out upon the then vacant thoroughfare,
where the lamps stood like sentinels waiting for some procession to go
by. An approximation to such a procession was indeed made early
every morning about one o'clock, when the country vehicles passed up
with loads of vegetables for Covent Garden market. She often saw
them creeping along at this silent and dusky hour--waggon after
waggon, bearing green bastions of cabbages nodding to their fall, yet
never falling,