Read Online Summer Will Show by Sylvia Townsend Warner - Free Book Online Page A

cannot be put up them, so a boy must go instead. Only it happens that I am rich, and so such things do not happen to you or your brother.”
    It was difficult to speak. Her own wrath still kept her throat clenched, her tongue heavy. Her hand trembled, clattering the paper of the book. She laid it aside, and hid the shaking hands in the folds of her shawl. Outside, shrunken in the violent sunlight, she could see Caspar, standing where they had left him, staring at his shadow with hanging head. The gardener’s boy was shearing the edges of the lawn, glancing sometimes over his shoulder at the half-caste, eyeing him with a complacent gulping grin as though the child were a penny spectacle at a fair.
    “On just such a morning as this, some unfortunate child has been driven up a dark chimney. And you — you can find nothing better to do than quarrel like wild beasts. Worse! For no animal quarrels without reason, for food, or for supremacy. Be ashamed of yourselves. Now, get up. Go to Hannah, and tell her to put you both to bed, and to draw the blinds. There you shall spend the rest of the day.”
    They glanced at each other, as though consulting, and rose. Lagging, they moved towards the door. Then Damian turned back.
    “But Caspar. I must say good-bye to him.”
    “No.”
    An hour later Hannah came to say that the boy was still weeping. Sophia shook her head. A profound disgust and weariness held her back from yielding.
    “But I am afraid it will make him ill, madam. He does take on so. Now Miss Augusta — she’s asleep.”
    Sophia shook away the plea. He is always ill, she thought, bitterly impatient; and going to the medicine chest she mixed a sedative. Hannah carried it off, divided in her mind between pity for her nursling and gratification at any sundrance between the white child and the coloured.
    The table was laid for two, and during luncheon Sophia kept the conversation upon the Trebennick Academy. Still locked in cold rage, she spoke to Caspar severely and practically, explaining that if he wished to gain favour with his teachers and fellows it would not do to play the guitar, dance or sing. The carriage appeared before the windows, the small luggage was loaded on, it was time to start. In the hall the boy hesitated, looked round questioningly. “Your cousins are in disgrace,” she said, and he followed her submissively, hanging his head.
    During the journey she spoke little, thought little, still brooding furiously over the morning’s incident. Arriving at Exeter, naked there of the dignity which clothed her on the platform of her own railway station, she was for a moment aware of herself as a spectacle: an English lady travelling with a little black boy. Her mind waved a grim acknowledgment towards Uncle Julius Rathbone, who managed the affairs of his heart so competently. At St. Austell the railway ceased, for the rest of the journey they must drive. They drove in a small closed waggonette, cold as the tomb. It was strange to look out of this mouldy box and see the blazing landscape through which they moved. Armies of ravelled late-summer foxgloves grew beside the stone walls; as the day wore on their purple turned melancholy and discoloured against the hues of a flaming sunset. She leaned her head out of the window, interrogating the air, searching for the romance of her previous visit. It was there still, but the long summer’s warmth had changed it, and now it was turned from an excitement to a menace. With something like fear she felt that her body was heavy, her mind slow, that she was strong and helpless as a stone, strong only to be trampled on and to endure. The boy beside her, so quick, so vulnerable, was better equipped for life than she. Now she would have been glad to talk to him, would have clutched at any expedient which might carry her away from this obsession of being cold and heavy and helpless; but he was listless, half-asleep, and doleful, gone crumpled and dead as suddenly as a tropical