If Cyril's childish predilections had not been encouraged!
If he had only been content to follow his father's trade!
If she had flatly refused to sign his indenture at Peel's and pay the premium!
If he had not turned from, colour to clay!
If the art-master had not had that fatal 'idea'!
If the judges for the competition had decided otherwise!
If only she had brought Cyril up in habits of obedience, sacrificing temporary peace to permanent security!
For after all he could not abandon her without her consent.
He was not of age.
And he would want a lot more money, which he could obtain from none but her.
She could refuse. ... No!
She could not refuse.
He was the master, the tyrant.
For the sake of daily pleasantness she had weakly yielded to him at the start!
She had behaved badly to herself and to him.
He was spoiled. She had spoiled him.
And he was about to repay her with lifelong misery, and nothing would deflect him from his course.
The usual conduct of the spoilt child!
Had she not witnessed it, and moralized upon it, in other families?
"You don't seem very chirpy over it, mater!" he said.
She went out of the room.
His joy in the prospect of departure from the Five Towns, from her, though he masked it, was more manifest than she could bear.
The Signal, the next day, made a special item of the news.
It appeared that no National Scholarship had been won in the Five Towns for eleven years.
The citizens were exhorted to remember that Mr. Povey had gained his success in open competition with the cleverest young students of the entire kingdom--and in a branch of art which he had but recently taken up; and further, that the Government offered only eight scholarships each year.
The name of Cyril Povey passed from lip to lip.
And nobody who met Constance, in street or shop, could refrain from informing her that she ought to be a proud mother, to have such a son, but that truly they were not surprised ... and how proud his poor father would have been!
A few sympathetically hinted that maternal pride was one of those luxuries that may cost too dear.
III
The holiday in the Isle of Man was of course ruined for her.
She could scarcely walk because of the weight of a lump of lead that she carried in her bosom.
On the brightest days the lump of lead was always there.
Besides, she was so obese.
In ordinary circumstances they might have stayed beyond the month.
An indentured pupil is not strapped to the wheel like a common apprentice.
Moreover, the indentures were to be cancelled.
But Constance did not care to stay.
She had to prepare for his departure to London.
She had to lay the faggots for her own martyrdom.
In this business of preparation she showed as much silliness, she betrayed as perfect a lack of perspective, as the most superior son could desire for a topic of affectionate irony.
Her preoccupation with petty things of no importance whatever was worthy of the finest traditions of fond motherhood.
However, Cyril's careless satire had no effect on her, save that once she got angry, thereby startling him; he quite correctly and sagely laid this unprecedented outburst to the account of her wrought nerves, and forgave it.
Happily for the smoothness of Cyril's translation to London, young Peel-Swynnerton was acquainted with the capital, had a brother in Chelsea, knew of reputable lodgings, was, indeed, an encyclopaedia of the town, and would himself spend a portion of the autumn there.
Otherwise, the preliminaries which his mother would have insisted on by means of tears and hysteria might have proved fatiguing to Cyril.
The day came when on that day week Cyril would be gone.
Constance steadily fabricated cheerfulness against the prospect.
She said:
"Suppose I come with you?"
He smiled in toleration of this joke as being a passable quality of joke.
And then she smiled in the same sense, hastening to agree with him that as a joke it was not a bad joke.