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_ She was reassured as to Cyril during the next few days. He did not
attempt to repeat his ingenious naughtiness of the Monday evening,
and he came directly home for tea; moreover he had, as a kind of
miracle performed to dazzle her, actually arisen early on the
Tuesday morning and done his arithmetic. To express her
satisfaction she had manufactured a specially elaborate straw-
frame for the sketch after Sir Edwin Landseer, and had hung it in
her bedroom: an honour which Cyril appreciated. She was as happy
as a woman suffering from a recent amputation can be; and compared
with the long nightmare created by Samuel's monomania and illness,
her existence seemed to be now a beneficent calm.
Cyril, she thought, had realized the importance in her eyes of
tea, of that evening hour and that companionship which were for
her the flowering of the day. And she had such confidence in his
goodness that she would pour the boiling water on the Horniman
tea-leaves even before he arrived: certainty could not be more
sure. And then, on the Friday of the first week, he was late! He
bounded in, after dark, and the state of his clothes indicated too
clearly that he had been playing football in the mud that was a
grassy field in summer.
"Have you been kept in, my boy?" she asked, for the sake of form.
"No, mother," he said casually. "We were just kicking the ball
about a bit. Am I late?"
"Better go and tidy yourself," she said, not replying to his
question. "You can't sit down in that state. And I'll have some
fresh tea made. This is spoilt."
"Oh, very well!"
Her sacred tea--the institution which she wanted to hallow by long
habit, and which was to count before everything with both of them-
-had been carelessly sacrificed to the kicking of a football in
mud! And his father buried not ten days! She was wounded: a deep,
clean, dangerous wound that would not bleed. She tried to be glad
that he had not lied; he might easily have lied, saying that he
had been detained for a fault and could not help being late. No!
He was not given to lying; he would lie, like any human being,
when a great occasion demanded such prudence, but he was not a
liar; he might fairly be called a truthful boy. She tried to be
glad, and did not succeed. She would have preferred him to have
lied.
Amy, grumbling, had to boil more water.
When he returned to the parlour, superficially cleaned, Constance
expected him to apologize in his roundabout boyish way; at any
rate to woo and wheedle her, to show by some gesture that he was
conscious of having put an affront on her. But his attitude was
quite otherwise. His attitude was rather brusque and overbearing
and noisy. He ate a very considerable amount of jam, far too
quickly, and then asked for more, in a tone of a monarch who calls
for his own. And ere tea was finished he said boldly, apropos of
nothing:
"I say, mother, you'll just have to let me go to the School of Art
after Easter."
And stared at her with a fixed challenge in his eyes.
He meant, by the School of Art, the evening classes at the School
of Art. His father had decided absolutely against the project. His
father had said that it would interfere with his lessons, would
keep him up too late at night, and involve absence from home in
the evening. The last had always been the real objection. His
father had not been able to believe that Cyril's desire to study
art sprang purely from his love of art; he could not avoid
suspecting that it was a plan to obtain freedom in the evenings--
that freedom which Samuel had invariably forbidden. In all Cyril's
suggestions Samuel had been ready to detect the same scheme
lurking. He had finally said that when Cyril left school and took
to a vocation, then he could study art at night if he chose, but
not before.
"You know what your father said!" Constance replied.
"But, mother! That's all very well! I'm sure father would have
agreed. If I'm going to take up drawing I ought to do it at once.
That's what the drawing-master says, and I suppose he ought to
know." He finished on a tone of insolence.
"I can't allow you to do it yet," said Constance, quietly. "It's
quite out of the question. Quite!"
He pouted and then he sulked. It was war between them. At times he
was the image of his Aunt Sophia. He would not leave the subject
alone; but he would not listen to Constance's reasoning. He openly
accused her of harshness. He asked her how she could expect him to
get on if she thwarted him in his most earnest desires. He pointed
to other boys whose parents were wiser.
"It's all very fine of you to put it on father!" he observed
sarcastically.
He gave up his drawing entirely.
When she hinted that if he attended the School of Art she would be
condemned to solitary evenings, he looked at her as though saying:
"Well, and if you are--?" He seemed to have no heart.
After several weeks of intense unhappiness she said: "How many
evenings do you want to go?"
The war was over.
He was charming again. When she was alone she could cling to him
again. And she said to herself: "If we can be happy together only
when I give way to him, I must give way to him." And there was
ecstasy in her yielding. "After all," she said to herself,
"perhaps it's very important that he should go to the School of
Art." She solaced herself with such thoughts on three solitary
evenings a week, waiting for him to come home. _
Read next: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER VII - BRICKS AND MORTAR: PART I
Read previous: BOOK II CONSTANCE: CHAPTER VI - THE WIDOW: PART II
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