The Young Physician

by Francis Brett Young

“What a colour you’ve got, boy,” said his father. And it struck him also that she was smaller than she used to be.

“Isn’t mother rather thin?” he asked his father. Mr. Ingleby smiled, and in his grave, shy way put out his hand to touch hers as it lay on the table.

“You silly boy,” said his mother.

But her denials did not satisfy him. He knew, for certain, that she was different from the mother whom he had known. He noticed, too, that she was not allowed to eat the same food as the rest of them. Sometimes she would forget their rules and taste things that were forbidden, and then his father would gravely reprove her. Instead of bread she was ordered to eat a sort of biscuit which Edwin’s curiosity made him anxious to taste. He was disappointed; for they had no taste at all. “What are they made of?” he asked; and they told him “Gluten. . . . That’s the sticky part of wheat without starch.”

And yet, in spite of her illness, they had never been happier together. The new intimacy, that had begun with her painful confidences of the first evening, continued. In particular she told him of the difficulties which she was having with his Aunt Laura, her sister, who had lately married a small manufacturer and come to live near Halesby. The story was an old one and rather unhappy. It began years and years ago in the days of his mother’s childhood, days that she remembered so unhappily that she never really wanted to recall them. He had never before known anything about his mother’s childhood. He had just taken her for granted in her present surroundings. Now, in the long firelight evenings, she told him how her forefathers and his had once been great people, living in a stone border castle high above the Monmouth marches, and how, with the lapse of time and the decay of the bloody age in which their violence had prospered, the family had fallen from its estate and lost its lands; how the tower of the castle had been broken and under its shadow a farmhouse had arisen in which they had lived and scraped what income they could make from a little valley-land and many acres of mountain pasture. Now there were none of them left there; but still, where the tracks grew stony and the orchards began to thin away, the walls of the house crumbled patiently under the shadow of overhanging mountain-ridges. “Your grandfather was the last of them, Eddie,” she said. “He was a farmer.” And for a moment consciousness of Griffin and his social prejudices invaded the picture. She told him of spring days, when the clouds would come sweeping out of England on the back of the east wind and be hurried like the frothy comb of a wave against the mountains, and how they would then break asunder on the darens and fall back in a drenching mist over the lonely house by Felindre, and for days the farm would be islanded in fog. But on the summit above them, the sheep were grazing in the sunlight and the buzzards hunting, and in the misty lowlands beneath lay orchards full of faint-scented apple blossom. “We were not the only decayed family there,” she said. “There were others, and greater—such as the Grosmonts of Trecastel. But old Mr. Grosmont had two sons, and father only had three daughters. I was a sort of ugly duckling, Eddie; they never really liked me. And I was never happy there.”

“I think I must be like you, darling,” said Edwin. “I had a rotten time at St. Luke’s at first. Even now I don’t quite seem to be . . . I don’t know . . . ordinary.”

She smiled and kissed him.

“My father was a dear,” she said, “but mother really hated me. Your Aunt Carrie was much cleverer and better-looking than me, and so they always made a fuss of her and left me to myself. She had all the advantages. You see, I suppose they thought she was worth it. She was a beautiful, selfish creature, with the most lovely hair.”

“I’m sure it wasn’t lovelier than yours, darling,” said Edwin.

“Then she went and threw herself away, as mother called it, on a man she met at a hunt ball in Hereford. And she died, poor thing, with her first baby. It was an awful blow to mother. It made her more horrid to me than ever. I suppose she found me such a poor substitute. If it had been me it wouldn’t have mattered. I went to keep house for your great-uncle in North Bromwich; and there I met your father. I have never been really happy. You see, nobody had ever taken any notice of me—before that. Then mother began to put all the hopes that had been disappointed in Carrie on Aunt Laura. Nothing was too good for her. They spoiled her, and spoiled her. It was worse when father died and mother was left to do what she liked with the money. And when your Aunt Laura came here and met Mr. Fellows and married him, your grandmother blamed me. I couldn’t help it . . . and in any case Mr. Fellows is an awfully nice, quiet man. I did all I could for her, too, getting her house ready and that sort of thing, and now she’s so dreadfully difficult. I suppose she’s really annoyed to think that she hasn’t done better for herself with all her advantages of education, and just lets it off on me. It’s dreadfully awkward, Eddie. I think she’s even jealous that their house isn’t as big as ours. I simply daren’t tell your father the sort of things she’s said. If he knew one of them he’d never forgive her. He’s like that about anything that affects me.”