the spirit of the Scotch
that can get drunk on the early afternoon of a clear grey day; and ten
minutes after a turn of the road brought him to an overturned cart, its
inside wheels shattered like cracked biscuits and a horse struggling
wildly in the shafts, and a lad lying under the hedge with blood
spattered on a curd-white face. Men and a hurdle had to be fetched from
the farm that was in sight, the doctor had to be summoned from a village
three miles away, and then he was asked to wait lest there should be
need of a further errand to a cottage hospital. He was in a jarred mood
by then, for the farm people had been inhumanly callous to the lad's
suffering, but were just human enough to know that their behaviour was
disgusting, and were disguising their reluctance to lift their little
fingers to save a stranger's life as resentment against Yaverland
himself for his peremptory way of requesting their help. They had known
from his speech that he came from the south, so as he sat in the kitchen
they exchanged comments on the incapacity of the English to understand
the sturdy independence of the Scotch. He began to fret at this delay
among these beastly people in their sour smoke, and to think greedily
of how by this time he might have been with Ellen listening to the grave
conversation that sat as quaintly on her loveliness as tortoiseshell
spectacles on an elfin nose, and looking at that incomparable hair.

But it struck him that this impatience was a rotten thing to feel when
it was a matter of helping a poor chap in pain. He rose and opened the
door to see if the doctor was coming out of the room across the passage
where the patient lay; but he could hear nothing but the lad's moans. He
shivered. They reminded him of the night when for the first time he had
heard his mother make just such anguished sounds as these. He was
twenty-one then, and a student at South Kensington, and it was on one of
his week-ends at Yaverland's End. He had sat up late working, and as he
was passing his mother's door on his way to bed he heard the sound of a
lament sadder than any weeping, since it had no hint of a climax but
went on and on, as if it knew the sorrow that inspired it would not fail
all through eternity. It appalled him, and he felt shy of going in, so
he went on to his room and sat on his bed. After an hour he went out
into the passage and listened. She still was moaning. Without knocking,
lest her pride should forbid him to c