The Citadel Read Free Page B

solid, painstaking and steady. He had never made a success of the land and when he was killed in the Yeomanry in the last year of the War, he had left the affairs of the little steading in a sad muddle. For twelve months Jessie Manson had struggled to run the farm as a dairy, even driving the float upon the milk-round herself when she felt Andrew was too busy with his books to do so. Then the cough which she had unsuspectedly endured for a period of years turned worse and suddenly she surrendered to the lung complaint which ravages that soft skinned, dark haired type.
    At eighteen Andrew found himself alone, a first year student at St Andrews University, carrying a scholarship worth £40 a year, but otherwise penniless. His salvation had been the Glen Endowment, that typically Scottish foundation which in the naïve terminology of the late Sir Andrew Olen ‘invites deserving and necessitous students of the baptismal name of Andrew to apply for loans not exceeding £50 a year for five years provided they are conscientiously prepared to reimburse such loans whenever they have qualified.’
    The Glen Endowment, coupled with some gay starvation, had sent Andrew through the remainder of his course at St Andrews, then on to the Medical Schools in the city of Dundee. And gratitude to the Endowment, allied to an inconvenient honesty, had sent him hurrying down to South Wales – where newly qualified assistants could command the highest remuneration – to a salary of £250 a year, when in his heart he would have preferred a clinical appointment at the Edinburgh Royal and an honorarium of one tenth that sum.
    And now he was in Drineffy, rising, shaving, dressing, all in a haze of worry over his first patient. He ate his breakfast quickly, then ran up to his room again. There he opened his bag and took out a small blue leather case. He opened the case and gazed earnestly at the medal inside, the Hunter Gold Medal, awarded annually at St Andrews to the best student in clinical medicine. He, Andrew Manson, had won it. He prized it beyond everything, had come to regard it as his talisman, his inspiration for the future. But this morning he viewed it less with pride than with a queer, secret entreaty, as though trying to restore his confidence in himself. Then he hurried out for the morning surgery.
    Dai Jenkins was already in the wooden shanty when Andrew reached it, running water from the tap into a large earthenware pipkin. He was a quick little whippet of a man with purple veined, hollow cheeks, eyes that went everywhere at once and the tightest pair of trousers on his thin legs that Andrew had ever seen. He greeted Manson ingratiatingly:
    ‘You don’t have to be so early, doctor. I can do the repeat mixtures and the certificates before you come in. Miss Page had a rubber stamp made with doctor’s signature when he was taken bad.’
    ‘Thanks,’ Andrew answered. ‘I’d rather see the cases myself.’ He paused, shaken momentarily from his anxiety by the dispenser’s procedure. ‘What’s the idea?’
    Jenkins winked. ‘ Tastes better out of here. We know what good old aqua means, eh, doctor, bach. But the patients don’t. I’d look a proper fool too, wouldn’t I, them standin’ there watchin’ me fillin’ up their bottles out the tap.’
    Plainly the little dispenser wished to be communicative, but here a voice rang out from the back door of the house forty yards away.
    ‘Jenkins! Jenkins! I want you – right away.’
    Jenkins jumped, his nerves were apparently in a very poor state. He muttered: ‘Excuse me, doctor. There’s Miss Page callin’ me. I’ll… I’ll have to run.’
    Fortunately there were few people at the morning surgery, which was over at half past ten and Andrew, presented with a list of visits by Jenkins, set out at once with Thomas in the gig. With an almost painful expectancy he told the old groom to drive direct to 7 Glydar Place.
    Twenty minutes later he came out of No 7, pale, with his lips