The Project Gutenberg EBook of Saint's Progress, by John Galsworthy

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Title: Saint's Progress

Author: John Galsworthy

Release Date: June 14, 2006 [EBook #2683]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SAINT'S PROGRESS ***

Produced by David Widger

SAINTS PROGRESS

By John Galsworthy

PART I

I

Such a day made glad the heart. All the flags of July were waving; the
sun and the poppies flaming; white butterflies spiring up and twining,
and the bees busy on the snapdragons. The lime-trees were coming
into flower. Tall white lilies in the garden beds already rivaled the
delphiniums; the York and Lancaster roses were full-blown round their
golden hearts. There was a gentle breeze, and a swish and stir and hum
rose and fell above the head of Edward Pierson, coming back from his
lonely ramble over Tintern Abbey. He had arrived at Kestrel, his brother
Robert's home on the bank of the Wye only that morning, having stayed
at Bath on the way down; and now he had got his face burnt in that
parti-coloured way peculiar to the faces of those who have been too long
in London. As he came along the narrow, rather overgrown avenue, the
sound of a waltz thrummed out on a piano fell on his ears, and he
smiled, for music was the greatest passion he had. His dark grizzled
hair was pushed back off his hot brow, which he fanned with his straw
hat. Though not broad, that brow was the broadest part of a narrow
oval face whose length was increased by a short, dark, pointed beard--a
visage such as Vandyk might have painted, grave and gentle, but for its
bright grey eyes, cinder-lashed and crow's-footed, and its strange look
of not seeing what was before it. He walked quickly, though he was tired
and hot; tall, upright, and thin, in a grey parsonical suit, on whose
black kerseymere vest a little gold cross dangled.

Above his brother's house, whose sloping garden ran down to the railway
line and river, a large room had been built out apart. Pierson stood
where the avenue forked, enjoying the sound of the waltz, and the cool
whipping of the breeze in the sycamores and birches. A man of fifty,
with a sense