He lit a plump Turkish cigarette, and lay back to ponder both present and future.
Had this Oxford that he loved anything more to give him, he wondered? Who could tell? Maybe an answer would come from the Babylonian sphinx whose smoky breath he could now see besmirching the virgin sky. Who could tell? But, meanwhile, his thoughts could scarcely move beyond the long-looked for pleasure of once again seeing his mother. She would be waiting for him, he felt sure, at Paddington, and as the train rushed thitherwards he let his mind run ahead of it to feast on the exquisite prospect.…
Yes, Julia, Lady Penhaligon had played a more urgent and immediate rôle in her son’s life than is the privilege of most mothers. And she had her reward. He always chose her hats for her now.
The only daughter of Sir Piers ffoulis, one of the last of the English statesmen, she had been married when but twenty-nine to a famous explorer of the Arctic Seas. An altogether unexpected thawing of the Great Krioquhkho pack-ice, which soon after the wedding he went to survey, brought him back to England a year before his return was anticipated, and he found himself obliged to divorce poor Julia directly after, and indeed on account of, her son’s birth.
But she had drawn consolation from the boy’s eyes, which were already remarkable, and had determined that at all costs _he_ should be beautiful and happy.
“And you’ve succeeded, mother dear,” he would often tell her in a burst of grateful confidence.
Her love, she resolved, would be recompense enough for the cruelty of his fate. She would remain young, no matter what the expense (and it was great), to keep him company, and in the meantime she remarried. But, as the autumn came remorselessly round, she was once more divorced. (Gaveston could still remember her tears when she came up to the night-nursery to tell him how absurdly unreasonable the King’s Proctor had threatened to be that time.…) Then for quite a considerable period she lived in singleness, but, just before Gav was going to Eton, a Baronet had proposed to her. He was old. But, as the precocious boy pointed out, the title was older. And so Mrs. Fünck, as Mums then was, had accepted Sir Evan Penhaligon.