Читать книгу Miss Bunting онлайн

49 страница из 93

The great Wednesday dawned as grey and blustery as all other days, but the east had gone out of the wind, which was veering, with many capricious rushings back to find something it had forgotten, through north into north-west. By noon it was a mild summer breeze and great loose clouds were billowing away to the south-east, leaving a blue and not unkind sky. By one o'clock it was almost warm, and on the south side of the house really warm. Gradka was in a frenzy of preparation which included decorating the dinner-table with trails of leaves from the outdoor vine. This vine, popularly supposed to be coeval with "the monks" (a date embracing practically everything between St. Augustine's conversion of Kent and the Reformation), grew against the south wall of the house and brought forth in most years rather lopsided bunches of little hard green grapes which occasionally under the influence of an exceptional summer turned purplish, but were none the less sour and unwelcoming, while this year, the weather having been uniformly not only cold but very dry, the miserable grapelets had withered and fallen almost as soon as they formed.