The next afternoon the grey ponies trotted Mona down to Granton.
It was strange to find herself on the deck of a steamer once more; the same experience as that of yesterday, and yet how different! Yesterday she had been the centre of her little circle—admired, flattered, indulged by every one; to-day she was nothing and nobody—a young woman travelling alone. And yesterday, she kept assuring herself, was the anomaly, the exception; to-day was in the ordinary course of things—a fair average sample of life.
It would have been strange if her thoughts had been very bright ones, and a heavy ground-swell on the Forth did not tend to make them any brighter.
"It's a cross-water, ye ken," an old countryman was explaining to a friend. "They say ye might cross the Atlantic, an' no' get onything waur."
The wind was chill and cutting, and it carried with it an easterly haar, that seemed to penetrate to Mona's very marrow. She was thankful when they reached Burntisland, and she found herself ensconced in a dirty, uncomfortable third-class carriage.
"If Borrowness is your destination," Mr Colquhoun had said, "it is not a question of getting there sooner or later; it is a question of never getting there at all;" and so Mona began to think, as the train drew up for an indefinite period at every little station. And yet she was not anxious to hasten her arrival. The journey from Edinburgh to Borrowness was short and simple, compared with that which her mind had to make from the life behind to the life before.
"I have no right to enter upon it in the spirit of a martyr," she said to herself, "even if that would make it any easier. For better or worse it is all my own doing. And I will not dream the time away in prospects and memories. I will take up each day with both hands, and live it with all my might."
The twilight was beginning to gather when at length the guard shouted "Borrowness!" and Mona sprang to her feet and looked out.
It was a quiet, dreary, insignificant wayside station. A few men were lounging about—fisher-folk chiefly—and one woman.
No, that could not be her cousin Rachel.
During her life in London, Mona had often met an elderly lady whose dress was sufficiently eccentric to attract attention even in "blessed Bloomsbury." A short wincey skirt, a severely uncompromising cloth jacket, and a black mushroom hat, had formed a startling contrast to the frivolities in vogue; and, by some curious freak of fancy, a mental picture of this quaint old lady had always flashed into Mona's mind when she thought of her cousin.
But the woman on the platform was not like that. Her face was ruddy and good-natured, and her dress was a hideous caricature of the fashion of the year before. Every picturesque puff and characteristic excrescence was burlesqued to the last point compatible with recognition. Mona might have met fifty such women in the street, and never have noticed their attire; but the hang of that skirt, the showiness of that bonnet, the general want of cut about every garment, as seen in that first momentary glance, were burnt into her recollection for a lifetime.
"No doubt, the woman I used to meet in London was a duchess," she thought a little bitterly, "but this cannot be my cousin Rachel."
She gave an order to the porter, alighted from the carriage, and waited—she scarcely knew for what. She was the only young woman who got out of the train there; so if Rachel Simpson were anywhere in sight, she must soon identify her cousin by a process of exclusion.
And so she did.
But she did it very slowly and deliberately, for Mona was looking rather impressive and alarming in her neat travelling dress, not at all unlike some of the young ladies who came to stay at the Towers.
The train puffed away out of the station, and then the little woman came up with a curious, coy smile on her ruddy face, her head a little on one side, and an ill-gloved hand extended. Mona learned afterwards that this was her cousin's best company manner.
"Miss Maclean?" she said half shyly, half familiarly.
"Yes: I am Mona Maclean. I suppose you are my cousin Rachel?"
They kissed each other, and then there was an awkward silence.
Rachel Simpson was thinking involuntarily, with some satisfaction, that she had seen Mona in a third-class carriage. She herself usually travelled second, and the knowledge of this gave her a grateful and much-needed sense of superiority, as regarded that one particular. She wondered vaguely whether Mona would object to having been seen under such disadvantageous circumstances.
"I suppose my luggage arrived about a fortnight ago?" said Mona, forcing herself to speak heartily. "You were kind enough to say you would give it house-room. What shall I do about this little valise?"
"Oh, the man will bring it to-night. Bill," she said familiarly to the rough-looking porter, "mind and bring that little trunk when ye gang hame."
"Ay," said the man, without touching his cap.
Rachel Simpson was one of the many lower middle-class people in Scotland who talk fairly good English to their equals and superiors, but who, in addressing their inferiors, relapse at once into the vernacular. Mona greatly admired the pure native Scotch, and had looked forward to hearing it spoken; but her cousin's tone and accent, as she addressed this man, jarred on her almost unbearably. Mona was striving hard, too, to blot out a mental picture of Lady Munro, as she stood on the platform at Newcastle, giving an order with queenly graciousness to the obsequious porter.
The two cousins walked home together. The road was very wet with recent rain, and they had to pick their steps in a way that was not conducive to conversation; but they talked eagerly about the weather, the crops, the crossing to Burntisland, and everything else that was most uninteresting. Mona had never mentioned the Munros nor her visit to Norway.
In about five minutes they reached the house, and indeed it was not such a bad little house after all, opening, as it did, on a tiny, well-kept garden. The two windows on the ground-floor had of course been sacrificed to the exigencies of the "shop"; and as they went in, Mona caught a glimpse of some extraordinary hats and bonnets in one window, and of dusty stationery and sundry small wares in the other.
"Marshall & Snelgrove and Parkins & Gotto," she said to herself judicially, "and I suppose Fortnum & Mason, are represented by those two wooden boxes of sweetmeats beside the blotting-books."
As they opened the glass door, the automatic shop-bell rang sharply, and an untidy girl looked out from the kitchen.
"It's you," she said briefly, and disappeared again.
Rachel Simpson would never have dreamt of giving a domestic order in the hearing of a visitor, so she went into the kitchen, and a whispered conversation took place while Mona waited in the passage. The old-fashioned clock ticked loudly, and the air was close and redolent of rose-leaves and mustiness. Evidently open windows were the exception here, not the rule. The house seemed curiously far away from the beach, too, considering how small the town was.
"If I can only catch a glimpse of the sea from my bedroom window," thought Mona, "I shall be happy in a garret."
But it was no garret to which her cousin presently conducted her, nor, alas! did it command a view of the sea. It was a fair-sized room above the kitchen—a room filled up with ugly, old-fashioned furniture—and its window overlooked a wide prospect of cabbage-beds.
"Just come into the front parlour when you get off your things," said Rachel, "and we'll have a cup of tea."
"Thank you," said Mona pleasantly, and she was left alone.
She seated herself absently on a chair, and then sprang suddenly to her feet again.
"Well, you don't suppose you are going to take stock now," she said to herself savagely. "Wash your hands, and be quick about it!"
She took the liberty of opening the window first, however. The upper sash declined to move at all, and the lower one slipped down again as often as she raised it. In vain she looked about the room for something to support it.
"Stay open you shall," she said, "if I put my own head underneath! but I will resort to the Family Bible first," and her eye rested on the substantial volume that surmounted the chest of drawers.
Finally, she rolled her travelling cloak into a tight bundle, and propped up the sash with that.
"A little rain will do you no harm," she said, "and a little air will do this musty hole a vast deal of good."
She looked about for hot water, but there was none, so with a shiver she washed in cold. Then after a glance at the distorting looking-glass, to make sure that her hair was smooth and her expression tolerably amiable, she betook herself to the front parlour.
There was no fire in the grate. There never was a fire in that grate while the white curtains were up, from May to October. Rachel often indulged in the luxury of sitting by the kitchen fire when she was alone on a chilly evening, and had Mona known this she would thankfully have done the same; but Rachel's "manners" were her strong point, and she would have been horrified at the idea of suggesting such a thing to a comparative stranger. When Mona had really settled down, she could afford to be comfortable again, to use the old brown teapot, put away the plated spoons, and keep her Sunday bonnet for Sunday.
In truth the teapot on the table was a wonderful thing, and Rachel glowed with pride as Mona's eye returned to it incessantly; but Mona was only thinking vaguely that she had never before seen one single object—and that not a very big one—which so absolutely succeeded in setting at defiance every canon of common decency in art.
But all at once she thought of Rachel's affectionate letters, and her heart smote her. This woman, with her shop and all her ugly surroundings, her kind heart and her vulgar formalities, seemed to Mona so infinitely pathetic that, tired and overstrained as she was, she bit her lip to keep back a rush of tears.
"Do you know, dear," she said warmly, "it is very kind of you to have me here."
"Oh, I'm only too glad to have you, if you can make yourself happy."
"No fear of that. Give me a day or two to settle down, and I shall be as happy as a king."
"Yes, it does just take a while to get used to new ways and new people; but blood is thicker than water, I say. My niece, now, had settled down wonderfully. She knew all my ways, and we were so suited to each other. She was a great hand at the millinery, too; I suppose that's not much in your line?"
Mona laughed. "I was going to say, like the Irishman, that I did not know, because I had never tried," she said; "but I do trim my own summer hats. I should enjoy it immensely." "And it will go hard with me," she added to herself, "but I shall eclipse those productions in the window."
"I am afraid," said Rachel uneasily, "we could not sell plain things like you had on. It was very nice and useful and that, of course, but they are all for the feathers and flowers here."
"Oh, I should not attempt a hat like mine. It takes genius to do a really simple thing, don't you think so?"
Rachel laughed, uncertain whether to take the remark in jest or earnest. "Well, you know," she said doubtfully, "it is easier to cover a hat up like."
"Very much," agreed Mona.
"And now you must make a good tea, for I am sure you are hungry after the journey. That's ham and eggs in front of you, and this is hot buttered toast,—only plain food, you see. I have made your tea nice and strong; it will do you more good."
"Farewell, sleep!" thought Mona, as she surveyed the prospect before her; and it occurred to her that the sound of champagne, creaming into a shallow glass, was one of the most delightful things on earth. She blushed violently when her cousin said a moment later—
"I suppose you are blue-ribbon? Everybody nearly is now-a-days. It is wonderful how many of the gentry have stopped having wine on their tables. Nobody needs to have it now. The one thing is as genteel as the other, and it makes a great difference to the purse."
"Doesn't it?" said Mona sympathetically, thankful that no answer had been required to the original question. "And after all," she thought, "when I am living a life like that of the cabbages at the back, what do I want with the 'care-breaking luxury'?"
"I hope you don't object to the shop," Rachel went on presently, à propos apparently of the idea of gentility. "I don't really need it now, and it never did very much in the way of business at the best; but I have got used to the people dropping in, and I would miss it. And you knew the ladies, the minister's wife and the doctor's wife like, they come in sometimes and have a cup of tea with me: they don't think me any the less genteel for keeping a shop. But I always tell everybody that it is not that I require to do it. Everybody in Borrowness knows that, and of course it makes a difference."
"The question of 'gentility,'" said Mona, with a comical and saving recollection of Lucy's letter, "seems to me to depend entirely on who does a thing, and the spirit in which it is done, not on the thing itself."
"That is just it. They all know me, you see, and they know I am not really caring about the shop at all. Why, they can see that whiles I lock the door behind me and go away for a whole day together."
Mona bit her lip and did not attempt an answer this time.
It was still early when she excused herself and went to her room. She paced up and down for a time, and then stopped suddenly in front of the looking-glass. It had become a habit with her, in the course of her lonely life, to address her own image as if it were another person.
"It is not that it is terrible," she said gravely; "I almost wish it were; it is just that it is all so deadly commonplace. Oh, Lucy, I am an abject idiot!" And like the heroines of the good old days, when advanced women were unknown, she threw herself on the great four-post bed and burst into a passion of tears.
The torrent was violent but not prolonged. In a few minutes she threw away her handkerchief and looked scornfully at her swollen face.
"After all," she said philosophically, "I suppose a good howl was the cheapest way of managing the thing in the long-run. That will be the beginning and the end of it. Hörst du wohl?—And if it so please you, Mistress Lucy, I don't regret what I have done one bit, and I would do the same thing to-morrow."
She curtseyed low to the imaginary Lucy, betook herself to bed, and in spite of grief, excitement, and anxiety, in spite of ham and egg, strong tea and hot buttered toast, she slept like a healthy animal till sunrise.