Summer Will Show Read Online Free PDF

her hair, plastered dark and limp on her forehead.
    “Certainly, Hannah. Let us rest by all means. I expect you are tired too.”
    “Oh no, madam.”
    However, she retreated with alacrity to the shade of the sycamore, sat down, spread out her skirts for the children to sit on, and took out her knitting.
    “Hannah, my head thumps,” said Damian.
    “Never mind, dear. It will soon be better.”
    From a neighbouring field a bull blared. The noise, so thick and shrill and dully furious, seemed the very voice of the midday heat. It was as though the sun thrust its voice from the heavens. The cows in the meadow went on feeding, whisking their tails against the flies that pestered them, and snatching at the herbage. The bull blared again and again, and the cows cropped on, uninterested. Sensible cows, thought Sophia. She was tearing up grasses also, and mechanically stripping off the
Loves-me, Loves-me-not
seed-heads. This waiting irked her, this waiting for the next cough. She disliked sitting down in the middle of a walk, she disliked any kind of dawdling. A slow and rigid thinker, to sit still and contemplate was an anguish to her. Presently she jumped to her feet, saying,
    “Children, I shall walk on. You can stay here with Hannah until you have rested enough, then you can walk slowly to the end of the path. Meanwhile, I shall have reached home, and sent the carriage to bring you the rest of the way.”
    I wonder how Hannah will like listening to that bull, she thought with amusement, as she climbed the stile, and set out briskly along the grass ridge. But the amusement faded from her mind, and with a few more steps she was teased by cares again. Suppose the lime-kiln treatment did not work, what was she to try next? And presently there would be that boy from the West Indies that Uncle Julius was sending. True, he would not be in the house for more than a week, but in that week a number of things might go wrong, he might tease Augusta, or corrupt Damian. For however necessary it was to be broad-minded about negroes and half-castes, the necessity to be broad-minded about bastards was not so imperative; and now she half wished that she had not undertaken to look after the brat. Well, it was another responsibility, another care — and she straightened her shoulders, and walked more erectly, feeling herself with every step deepening her hold upon the earth that she trod upon and owned, and resolutely absorbing the rays of the down-beating sun. It was an extraordinary thing that she, who had been so strong all her life, should have given birth to two such delicate children. Nor was Frederick delicate either, though he had fussed inordinately about his health. No, the delicacy was not inherited. It was struck out in the conjunction of the parents, it was the worst, the only enduring result of that deplorable mating.
    She could still hear the bull blaring — a furious monotonous cry, a wail almost, ringing through the unmoved countryside. It was Dymond’s bull, she supposed, not a good beast, at any time, and ageing. Dymond must be spoken to. A place in service must be found for Topp’s eldest girl, who was doing herself no good, hanging about among the farmhands. Mamma’s tomb must be scrubbed again, and a room (the red dressing-room would do) made ready for that Caspar, Gaspar, whatever the child was called. She was a landowner, and a mother, and every day there was more to do, more to oversee the doing of. Duties came out of thought, one after another, swift as bees coming out of a hive. She was a mother, and a landowner; but fortunately, she need no longer be counted among the wives.
    Now she saw her hand as it had been eighteen months ago, a hand whitened with winter and indoor living, holding the quill that moved swiftly and decisively over the paper. She could see the very look of the four pages, neatly filled with her even Italian script, and her signature, exactly filling the calculated space at the bottom of the