Peter's Mother

by Mrs. Henry De La Pasture

"She will die if this goes on. There were few hopes and little enough pleasure in her life before; but what is left to her now? De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But just picture to yourself for a moment, man, what her life has been."

He stopped and drew breath, and strove to speak calmly and dispassionately.

"I was born in the valley of the Youle," he said. "My people live in a cottage—they call it a house, but it's just a farm—on the river,—Cullacott. I was a raw medical student when she came here as a child. Her father was killed in the Afghan War. He had quarrelled with his uncle, they said, who afterwards succeeded to the earldom; so she was left to the guardianship of Sir Timothy, a distant cousin. Every one was sorry for her, because Sir Timothy was her guardian, and because she was a little young thing to be left to the tender mercies of the two old ladies, who were old even then. If you will excuse my speaking frankly about the family"—John nodded—"they bullied their brother always; what with their superiority of birth, and his being so much younger, and so on. Their bringing-up made him what he was, I am sure. He went nowhere; he always fancied people were laughing at him. His feeling about his—his mother's lowly origin seemed to pervade his whole life. He exaggerated the importance of birth till it became almost a mania. If you hadn't known the man, you couldn't have believed a human being—one of the million crawling units on the earth—could be so absurdly inflated with self-importance. It was pitiful. He went nowhere, and saw no one. I believe he thought that Providence had sent a wife of high rank to his very door to enable him partially to wipe out his reproach. She looked like a child when she came, but she shot up very suddenly into womanhood. If you ask me if she was unhappy, I declare I don't think so. She had never realized, I should think, what it was to be snubbed or found fault with in her life. She was a motherless child, and had lived with her old grandfather and her young father, and had been very much spoilt. And they were both snatched away from her, as it were, in a breath; and she alone in the world, with an uncle who was only glad to get rid of her to her stranger guardian. Well,—she was too young and too bright and too gay to be much downcast for all the old women could do. She laughed at their scolding, and when they tried severity she appealed to Sir Timothy. The old doctor who was my predecessor here told me at the time that he thought she had bewitched Sir Timothy; but afterwards he said that he believed it was only that Sir Timothy had made up his mind even then to quarter the Setoun arms with his own. Anyway, he went against his sisters for the first and only time in his life, and they learnt that Lady Mary was not to be interfered with. Whether it was gratitude or just the childish satisfaction of triumphing over her two enemies, I can't tell, but she married him in less than two years after she came to live at Barracombe. The old ladies didn't know whether to be angry or pleased. They wanted him to marry, and they wanted his wife to be well-born, no doubt; but to have a mere child set over them! Well, the marriage took place in London."

"I was present," said John.

"The people here said things about it that may have got round to Sir Timothy; but I don't know. He never came down to the village, except to church, where he sat away from everybody, in the gallery curtained off. Anyway, he wouldn't have the wedding down here. He invited all her relatives, and none of them had a word to say. It wasn't as if she were an heiress. I believe she had next to nothing. She was just like a child, laughing, and pleased at getting married, and with all her finery, perhaps,—or at getting rid of her lessons with the old women may be,—and the thought of babies of her own. Who knows what a girl thinks of?" said the doctor, harshly. "I didn't see her again for a long time after. But then I came down; the Brawnton doctor was getting old, and it was a question whether I should succeed him or go on in London, where I was doing well enough. And—and I came here," said the doctor, abruptly.

John nodded again. He filled in the gaps of the doctor's narrative for himself, and understood.

"She had changed very much. All the gaiety and laughter gone. But she was wrapt up in the child as I never saw any woman wrapt up in a brat before or since; and I've known some that were pretty ridiculous in that way," said the doctor, and his voice shook more than ever. "It was—touching, for she was but a child herself; and Peter, between you and me, was an unpromising doll for a child to play with. He was ugly and ill-tempered, and he wouldn't be caressed, or dressed up, or made much of, from the first minute he had a will of his own. As he grew bigger he was for ever having rows with his father, and his mother was for ever interceding for him. He was idle at school; but he was a manly boy enough over games and sport, and a capital shot. Anyway, she managed to be proud of him, God knows how. I shouldn't wonder if this war was the making of him, though, poor chap, if he's spared to see the end of it all."

"I have no doubt the discipline will do him a great deal of good," said John, dryly.

It cannot be said that his brief interview at Southampton had impressed John with a favourable opinion of the sulky and irresponsive youth, who had there listened to his mother's messages with lowering brow and downcast eye. Peter had betrayed no sign of emotion, and almost none of gratitude for John's hurried and uncomfortable journey to convey that message.

"A few hard knocks will do you no harm, my young friend; and I almost wish you may get them," John had said to himself on his homeward journey; dreading, yet expecting, the news that awaited him at Peter's home, and for which he had done his best to prepare the boy.