The Salamanca Corpus: Yeoman Fleetwood (1900 ... - Gredos

The Salamanca Corpus: Yeoman Fleetwood (1900)
possible. If only your father would come back early enough to carry me round the
garden, we would gather them to-day."
"Cannot I carry you, Mother?" asked Simon. "I am as tall as my father, and quite as
strong.”
She looked up at him smiling. "True, true. I was forgetting that you were a grown man
now. I should like it of all things, Simon."
He lifted her up, carefully arranging her white kerchief so that it should shield her face
from the sun, and carried her down the stairs. He felt an almost overpowering emotion
in thus bearing in his arms his mother, and as he glanced down at her face he saw a new
tenderness in it. There was a flush on the thin cheeks, and the large bright eyes
glistened.
"To think that my son should be carrying me in his arms like a baby!” she said. "It
seemed natural enough that your father should do it: I am used to being taken care of by
him. But you, Simon! It seems but the other day that I was crying because your father
had cut off your curls. You cannot remember it, of course, you were so young then, but
at the time I thought I should have broke my heart."
[52]
Simon did remember, better, perhaps, than she did; but all the bitterness which the
recollection might have contained died away at once and for ever at the sound of the
weak little laugh, and at the caressing touch upon his face of the wasted little hand. As it
passed his lips he kissed it passionately, and she looked up into his handsome face with
pride as well as tenderness.
“My fine son!" she said. "My tall, strong son!"
He carried her round the garden, picking his way amid the labyrinth of box-bordered
paths, and pausing ever and anon before a rose-tree. Then his mother lifted her head
from his shoulder and inspected it from beneath the shelter of her kerchief; sometimes
the bush in question was condemned, and sometimes Simon had to stoop with her that
she might herself touch, examine, and smell the roses. When she had made her selection
he was to deposit her on a couch in the shade, and to collect the flowers she had chosen.