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

The Salamanca Corpus: Yeoman Fleetwood (1900)
It happened that before they had completed their round Madam Charnock came stepping
daintily across the grass-plot and paused under the big yew tree to survey the scene. As
she gazed, the old wound in her heart throbbed painfully. She knew the woman before
her had not long to live, yet it seemed to her for a moment that she would willingly
change places with her. Many a time afterwards did the vision rise before her of that
sunlit garden: the long lines of bloom thrown into relief by the yew hedge, the tall figure
of the young man, the handsome face bending with such eager solicitude over the frail
little mother — it was all stamped upon her memory. This woman, too, had besought
the Lord to give her a man-child, and the petition had been denied. Since the death, long
years before, of her stalwart soldier father she had not known what it was to meet in the
eyes of man a look of protecting
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tenderness such as that which the stripling before her was bestowing on his mother. She
pressed her hands upon her bosom with an involuntary little sob, and then, turning
swiftly, went away all unperceived by the other two.
Simon, too, long remembered that summer's day and the subsequent making of the potpourri
which had so pleased and interested his mother; the layers of rose leaves spread
out in her sunny window-seat, the faint, sweet smell of the gums and spices which
pervaded the whole house, the small figure, propped up with cushions, so eagerly
directing, the thin hands so busy and yet so weak. He remembered how once the
wedding-ring had slipped from the emaciated finger, and gone circling round and round
on the fine rose-patterned carpet, falling at length almost at his father s feet He
remembered how hastily his father had picked it up and restored it to its place, and then
how quickly he had gone out of the room.
With the making of the pot-pourri it often seemed to Simon that his youth had come to
an end, for those bright summer days were followed by very dark ones. The invalid sank
rapidly, and Simon, who had been bracing himself to bear manfully his own sorrow and
the overpowering grief of his father, was of a sudden subjected to a trouble far heavier
than that which he had previously anticipated. For early in a wet and windy autumn Mr.
Fleetwood fell dangerously ill. How it happened no one could tell — he had never