Grimshaw drew the inference. Here, at any rate, sport reigned supreme. He examined the cows. Unless his experience was at fault, some few were furnishing milk not fit for human consumption. The farmyards into which he stared confirmed this unhappy conclusion. Water lay close to the surface of a clayey soil, and in winter time must have oozed up everywhere. The ditches were not deep enough, and overgrown with rank vegetation. But he saw some handsome colts—prospective hunters—and brood mares. Of high farming there was no evidence whatever. The plough, for some occult reason, seemed to have been banished.
Grimshaw seated himself upon an ancient gate and lit his pipe.
“By their gates ye shall know them,” he murmured.
And then——
“Can I stick it?”
Sitting on the gate, his thoughts took a swallow’s flight into the past. He had been born in just such a parish, where Peter was robbed to pay Paul, where shift had degenerated into makeshift, where Compromise crowed lustily over Justice and Common Sense. And his father, the parson of the parish, had been a soured man, unable to cope with his environment. Fortunately for Grimshaw an uncle and godfather had sent him to Winchester, where he shone in the playing-fields rather than the class-rooms. After that he had been pitchforked into Medicine, simply because the uncle aforesaid happened to be a fairly prosperous physician.
And then his father had died——!
Up to the very day of the funeral—and how dismal it had been!—Henry Grimshaw had taken life very easily. Looking back, analytical of himself and the motives that had governed and misgoverned him, he could remember vividly how keen he had been to distinguish himself at cricket, partly because his father had no stomach for games or sport. Really, he had shirked Latin and Greek out of sheer contrariety, under the lash of a tongue that perhaps unduly exalted classical attainments. And because his sire had been something of an ascetic, he had decided to mortify parental ambitions rather than his own flesh.
In the same odd spirit of contrariety, he had scrapped cricket and football, concentrating all energies upon the study of his profession. The friends of his own age held out the lure of playing for the Gentlemen of England at Lord’s. Their insistence exasperated him. After his father’s death he found himself in possession of a few thousand pounds and a mother and sister on his hands. His uncle, something of a cynic, said to him:
“Harry, you have good looks and good manners. In my profession these count enormously. When I retire, which I intend to do, you can slide into a capital practice chiefly amongst aged handmaidens of the Lord.”