“How the devil shall I manage to leave them?” he thought. He went to the window and saw, beyond the garden trees, the low line of those familiar hills: the landscape that he had always delighted in as his own, and that now was to be his no longer. He sighed, for to leave them seemed to him impossible; they were so familiar, so much a definite part of his life. A curious impulse seized him to creep downstairs and out of the house, and visit the grave in the cemetery where his mother was laid; but he restrained himself from this debauch of sentiment. “It will do no good,” he thought. “It’s all over.” He even wondered if he might feel happier if he went down to Aunt Laura’s house and confided in her: perhaps she would understand. At least she was his mother’s sister and might be conscious of the indignity; but when he had almost determined to do this, he reflected that she and his uncle were probably in bed, and a ludicrous picture of her putting her head out of the window to ask what was the matter, with her hair in curling pins, restrained him. Besides, it would be rather ridiculous to fall back upon the sympathies of a person whom he had neglected for several years.
“No. . . . I must go on my own way,” he thought. “It’s a sort of break in my life, just like the big break before. It’s got to be faced, and it’s no good worrying about it.”
He suddenly remembered that in twelve hours’ time he would be sitting for his fourth examination, and that it would be wise for him to get some sleep; so he undressed and went to bed, wondering how many more times he would undress in that little room and caring less than he would have expected. He fell asleep soon, for he was thoroughly tired out, and slept so soundly that he did not see his father enter the room a few hours later. He came in softly, in his dressing-gown, carrying a candle, and stooped above Edwin’s sleeping figure with troubled eyes.
CHAPTER VIII
LOWER SPARKDALE
I
Next day, in a fever of restlessness, Edwin essayed and passed his fourth professional examination. He had expected to get a first-class in it, but when he found himself near the bottom of the list in the neighbourhood of W.G., he was not seriously disturbed. The subjects of Forensic Medicine and Toxicology were unimportant, and now that his life had taken this sudden change of direction, it did not much matter what sort of a degree he took. His one concern was to get qualified and licensed to earn his living on the bodies of his fellow-men as quickly as possible.
Since his interview with his father, the determination to leave Halesby had not faltered, although he had not then calculated the difficulties that now faced him. To begin with, he had no money beyond a few pounds that his mother had placed to his credit in the Post Office Savings Bank in his childhood. Luckily his college and hospital fees had been paid in advance, and he was only concerned with the actual cost of living and the fees for the final examination. In some way or other he would have to live for twelve months, and he smiled to himself to think that he was in very much the same position as his father had occupied thirty years before.
On the whole, he thought, his father must have had less cause for anxiety, with Dr. Marshall’s two hundred pounds behind him and the humble standards of a village boy in place of Edwin’s more elaborate traditions of life. He felt that he needed the advice of a sound man with some knowledge of the world. In an emergency of this kind Matthew Boyce could offer him very little but sympathy, and so he turned naturally to the counsels of that battered warrior, W.G., feeling, at the same time, rather shabby in making use of a friend whom he had practically neglected in the last two years.
W.G. providentially didn’t look at it in that light. He had always regarded Edwin from a fatherly standpoint, and the mere fact that this was a case of rebellion against domestic authority of the kind in which he had been engaged since his childhood made him sympathetic, though he didn’t, as Edwin saw to his despair, appreciate the delicacies of the situation.
“I can quite see why you want to cut adrift,” he said. “It’s a feeling that any one’s who’s dependent gets, if he has any guts in him; but I’m damned if I see any cause or just impediment why these two persons shouldn’t enter into holy matrimony.”