Читать книгу The Young Physician - Francis Brett Young - Страница 13

After this they had wonderful times together. In the mornings Edwin would indulge his glorious idleness among the books of the dining-room shelves, and after middle-day dinner, when his father had gone back to the shop, he would set out with his mother up the lane under the tall elms and through the sloping field that led to the mill pond. They did not walk very far because she must not be over-tired; but the field was so crowded with wonders that they were tempted further. Cowslips steeped the meadows in their vinous perfume; and between the saplings of the hazel copse they saw the sheeted hyacinths gleaming like pools that mirror the sky in open places. Beyond the land of meadows and copses they came to a belt of the old forest, through which they could see up a broad green lane to the very shoulders of the hills: Pen Beacon heaving its fleece of black firs, and the domed head of Uffdown.

His mother would sigh a little when she saw the hills. In weather that threatened rain from the west they would seem so near, with their contour hard against the watery sky and the cloud shadows all prussian blue.

“Oh, I should love to be there, Edwin,” she would say.

“Can’t we walk there some day, dearest?”

“It’s such a terrible drag up. We should both be dreadfully tired.”

“Oh, I wish we could, mother; I do wish we could.”

The day of their last walk together, when they came to the end of the green lane and were sitting on the gate, she jumped down on the far side and set off walking up the track.

“Come along, Eddie,” she said, “I’m going up to Uffdown.”

“Oh, mother,” he cried. “Isn’t it too far? I should like to carry you!”

And half-doubting, but fearfully eager for adventure, they set off together. As they climbed upward it seemed that the air grew sweeter every moment, and when they had left the wood behind them they came out on to a stony lane with a surface of grit veined by the tracks of storm-water, and on either side banks of tufted grass along which gorse was swaying in the breeze. And here the clouds seemed to be racing close above their heads, all dazzling white, and the blue in which they moved was deep and limpid. Mrs. Ingleby’s gray-green eyes were full of laughter and her face flushed with the climb.

“Oh, mother,” Edwin panted, “what an awful lick you go! Hadn’t we better sit down a bit?”

“And catch cold! You careless boy. We’ll get to the top soon now.”

“But you mustn’t tire yourself.”

She laughed at him.

“Oh, this air is wonderful,” she said. “Just as if it had come straight out of the blue, all washed and clean.”

On the top of Uffdown where the cloak of pine droops to a hollow between the two peaks, they sat on a dry, yielding hedge-side, where the grass was thick as the fleece of a mountain sheep, and four lovely counties dreamed below them.

“Eddie,” she asked, half joking, “where does the west wind come from?”

Edwin was willing to instruct.

“Oh, I don’t know, dearest—from Wales and the sea, I suppose.”

“Put your head close to mine and I’ll show you. . . . Those hills that look like mountains cut out of blue cardboard are the Malverns, and far, ever so far beyond them—yes, just to the left you see a level ridge that drops suddenly in the west. You don’t know what that is, Eddie, do you?”

“No—I don’t like to look at single things. I like to feel it’s all—what d’you call it?—all dreamy underneath one.”

“But you must look at that. It’s the mountain, Eddie, close to where I was born.”

“Felindre?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“But I never knew that you could see it from here. You never told me.”

“You know why. I told you that I was never happy there. And now, you see, since the old people died and the land was sold, it really has nothing to do with us.”

“Still, it’s rather wonderful to be looking into—into another country. It is Wales, isn’t it?”

“Yes—part of it’s in Wales. Felindre is in England.”

Edwin pondered for a moment.

“I’m rather glad I’m not half-Welsh, anyway,” he said. “But I wish I’d been there.”

“Do you?” she answered dreamily. “Yes—I wish we had been there together. It was a different sort of life. I thought—I just thought I should like to see it again.”

He was a little alarmed at the wistfulness in her voice.

“Mother—what do you mean?” he cried.

“Nothing, Eddie, nothing. It was another life.”

She put her arms round his neck and pulled him gently to her. He was content to lie there, with his head on her breast, while she talked in a low voice of that distant place and of her own childhood. He listened in a dream and did not speak at all until she began to tell him a long story which the Felindre shepherd, Morgan, had told her when she was a child. Then Edwin opened his eyes and stopped her.

“Dearest, I know that story,” he said. “Oh, go on, it’s wonderful. . . .”

“Perhaps I’ve told it to you before: perhaps I told you when you were a baby—I used to talk to you a great deal in your cradle. Perhaps . . . I was rather lonely when you came, Eddie.”

“Oh, no, I’m sure you haven’t. . . .”

“Look, the cloud is blotting out my mountain now,” she said. “It is time we were going.” The counties were asleep already.

Over the brow of the hill they stepped into a different world, for where the smoke of the black country had blotted the fading skyline a hundred pit fires were beginning to blink out, and nearer still a pillar of flame shot up into the sky.

“Oh, look, mother,” Edwin cried.

“They’re puddling the iron at the great Mawne furnaces. Stand still a moment, we might almost hear their roar.”

But no sound came to them but the clear tinkle of a stream plunging into its mossy cup, and this seemed to bring them back into touch with the lands that they had left. They hurried down through the dark woodland paths, and when they reached the little town lights had bloomed in all the ugly cottage windows, and the streets seemed deserted, for the children were indoors.