Mr. Ingleby laughed. It seemed that he was really amused at Edwin’s consternation.
“I suppose it’s natural for a schoolboy to be a bit snobbish,” he said.
“No . . . it isn’t that. Honestly it isn’t, father. Only I’d kind of taken us for granted. I wish you’d tell me all about it. You see, I know absolutely nothing.”
“It’s a long story, Eddie. But of course I’ll tell you. Then you won’t have any more of these distressing surprises. Suppose you get into bed first.”
It was a strange sight to Edwin to see his father kneel down in his Jaeger nightgown and pray. The boy had never done that since his second term at St. Luke’s.
II
Lying in bed with his father’s arm about him, Edwin listened to a long and strange narration that overwhelmed him with alternations of humiliation that made him ashamed, and of romance that thrilled him. Mr. Ingleby began at the beginning. Their family had lived, it appeared, for years without number, in the village of Highberrow on Mendip in a combe beneath the great camp of Silbury, and the calling of all these Inglebys had been that of the other inhabitants of Highberrow: they were miners, working for lead in the seams that the Romans, and perhaps the Phoenicians before them, had discovered in the mountain limestone. Even so early as in the youth of Edwin’s father the industry had been decaying, for the traditional methods of the Mendip miner were unscientific: he had been content to dig for himself a shallow working from which he collected enough of the mineral that is called calamine to keep him in pocket and in drink.
“We Mendip folk,” said Mr. Ingleby, “are a strange people, very different in our physique from the broad Saxons of the turf-moors beneath us. I suppose there is a good deal of Cornish blood in us. Wherever there are mines there are Cornishmen; but I think there’s another, older strain: Iberian . . . Roman . . . Phoenician. I don’t know what it is; but I do know that we’re somehow different from all the rest of the Somerset people: a violent, savage sort of folk. Did you ever hear of Hannah More?”
“No.” Edwin had been born too late in the century.
“Well, she was before my time too; but she made the Mendip miners notorious by trying to convert them. I don’t suppose she succeeded. At any rate neither she nor her influences would ever have converted your grandfather. He was a wonderful man. Even though my memory is mostly of the way in which I was afraid of him, I can see what a wonderful man he was. And your Uncle Will would tell you the same.”