He missed his mother that morning more than
he had missed her for years. How neat she was, how thrifty, how
comfortable, and how comforting! His life was so dreary and aimless;
and was it the best or the right one for Davy, with his talent and
dawning ambition? Would it not be better to have Mrs. Buck live with
them altogether, instead of coming twice a week, as heretofore? No;
he shrank from that with a hopeless aversion born of Saturday and
Monday dinners in her company. He could hear her pour her coffee
into the saucer; hear the scraping of the cup on the rim, and know
that she was setting it sloppily down on the cloth. He could
remember her noisy drinking, the weight of her elbow on the table,
the creaking of her dress under the pressure of superabundant flesh.
Besides, she had tried to scrub his favourite violin with sapolio.
No, anything was better than Mrs. Buck as a constancy.
He took off his hat unconsciously as he entered Lyddy's sitting-room.
A gentle breeze blew one of the full red curtains towards him till it
fluttered about his shoulders like a frolicsome, teasing hand. There
was a sweet pungent odour of pine-boughs, a canary sang in the
window, the clock was trimmed with a blackberry vine; he knew the
prickles, and they called up to his mind the glowing tints he had
loved so well. His sensitive hand, that carried a divining rod in
every finger-tip, met a vase on the shelf, and, travelling upward,
touched a full branch of alder berries tied about with a ribbon.
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