About a week after Mona's visit to Auntie Bell, Dr Dudley was sitting alone in the dining-room at Carlton Lodge. It was nearly midnight, and a terrific storm was raging outside. One of the great trees at the foot of the garden had been blown down into the road, carrying with it a piece of the wall; and the wind roared round the lonely house like a volley of artillery.
Within, a bright wood-fire was reflected dimly on the oak wainscot, and a shaded lamp threw a brilliant light on scattered books and papers, shrouding the rest of the room in suggestive shadows.
Dr Dudley rose to his feet, and kicked a footstool across the room. You would scarcely have recognised his face as the one that had smiled at Mona across the counter. The wind played on his nerves as if they had been an instrument, but he was not thinking of the storm.
"Three years more before I can begin to do a man's work in the world," he said, "and nearly thirty lie behind me! It is enough to make one make tracks for the gold-fields to-morrow. What surety have I that all my life won't drift, drift, drift away, as the last thirty years have done? Upon my soul"—he drew up the blind and looked out on the darkness, which only threw back his image and that of the room—"I envy the poor devils who are called out to their patients in this tempest, for shilling or half-crown fees!"
He was young, you see, but not very young; for, instead of indulging in further heroics, he bit his lip and returned to his books and papers. "Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika!" He drew down his brows, and read aloud from the mighty tome at his side, stopping now and then to add a few lines to the diagram before him.
He held very strongly that, in addition to practical work, which was wellnigh everything, there was only one way of mastering anything approaching an exact science. Firstly, get the best handbook extant; secondly, read the diagrams only; thirdly, read the diagrams, letterpress and all; fourthly, read letterpress alone, constructing your own diagrams as you go. "For after all," he said, "another man's diagrams are but crutches at the best. It is only when you have assimilated a subject, and projected it again through the medium of your own temperament, that it is of any practical use to you, or indeed has any actual existence for you personally."
His opinion ought to have been of some value, for the study of an exact science was by no means the work for which his mind was best fitted; and it is not those whom Nature has endowed with a "royal road" to the attainment of any subject who are best able to direct their fellows.
The clock was striking two when he closed his books and extinguished the lamp. It was not his custom to work so late; he was oddly rational in such ways; but he had learned by experience that to act on the principle that "Hier oder nirgends ist Amerika" was the only cure—sometimes, alas! not a very effectual one—for moods of depression and bitter self-reproach.
The hurricane had raged for several days, but next morning the sun shone down on a smiling innocent world, with a pleasant suggestion of eternal renewal.
"I am going for a long drive past Kilwinnie," said Mrs Hamilton at lunch. "I am perishing for lack of fresh air; and I want you to go with me, Ralph."
"I am sorry I can't," he said shortly. It must be confessed that Dr Dudley was a man of moods.
"Oh, nonsense, Ralph! You have poked over those horrid books for days. You refused to come the last time I asked you, and that was centuries ago, before the storm began. I can't have you always saying 'No.'"
"It is a pity I did not learn to say 'No' a little earlier in life," he said gloomily; and then, with a dismal sense that the old lady was mainly dependent on him for moral sunshine, he got up and laid his hand on her shoulder—
"'I have been the sluggard, and must ride apace,
For now there is a lion in the way,'"
he said, striving to speak cheerfully.
"I declare, Ralph, any one would think, to hear you talk, that you were a worn-out roué. What would have become of me for the last two years if you had been in busy practice? You know quite well that one might walk from Land's End to John o' Groat's in search of your equal in general culture. Professor Anderson was saying to me only the other day that it was impossible to find you tripping. Whether the conversation turned on some unheard-of lake in Central Africa, or the philosophy of Hegel, or Coptic hymnology, or Cistercian hill architecture of the Transition Period, you were as much at home as if it was the weather that was under discussion. I told him he might have included the last new thing in bonnets."
"No, no," said Ralph, laughing in spite of himself. "That was too bad. You know I draw the line there. These things are too wonderful for me."
"But you will come with me, won't you?"
"You coaxing old humbug!" he said affectionately, "I suppose I must. It will only mean burning a little more of the midnight oil. What havoc you must have wrought when you were young, if you understood a man's weakness for flattery as well as you do now!"
"Ah, but I did not," she responded quietly, having gained her point. "It takes a lifetime to fathom it."
He laughed again, kissed her on the forehead, and consented to have some tart after all. People were rather at fault who thought the old aunt poor company for the clever young doctor.
In due time the sleek old coachman brought round the sleek old horse, and they set off at a quiet trot along the level highroad.
"We must stop at Kirkstoun and speak to Hutchison about getting the wall put up," said Mrs Hamilton. "Well, it is like losing an old friend to see that tree! But we shall be at no loss for firewood during the winter. We shall have some royal Yule-logs, well seasoned, to welcome you back."
"Do," he said. "There is nothing like them after meagre London fires; and you know we must make the most of my Christmas visit. If you keep pretty strong, I must not come back till midsummer, when my examination is over. It won't do to come a cropper at my time of life. Just look at that wheat!"
The harvest had promised well before the storm began, but the corn which was still uncut had been beaten down level with the ground, and the "stocks" were sodden with rain.
"Most of the corn will have to be cut with the sickle now," said the old lady. "Next Sunday won't be 'stooky Sunday' after all."
They drove on past Kilwinnie, discussing Dr Dudley's approaching departure, and the date of his return.
"Why, that surely is a strange steamer," said Mrs Hamilton suddenly. "I wonder if she has been disabled. Can you see?"
"There is no use asking me about anything that is more than a yard off," he said. "I have left my eyes at home."
She handed him a field-glass, and he studied the vessel carefully.
"I don't know her from the Ark," he said, "but that is not surprising."
Before returning the glass, he swept it half absently along the coast, and he vaguely noticed two figures—a man's figure and a woman's—stooping towards the ground.
He would have thought nothing of it, but the man's hat was off, and—standing alone as they were on the sandy dunes—they suggested to Dudley's mind the figures in Millet's "Angelus." He laughed at the fancy, focussed the glass correctly, and looked at them again.
Just then the woman straightened herself up, and stood in silhouette against sea and sky. He would have known that lithe young form anywhere; but—all-important question—who was the man? Dudley subjected the unconscious figure to a searching examination, but in vain. To his knowledge he had never seen "the fellow" before.
Mrs Hamilton unwittingly came to his assistance. She took the glass from him, and examined the vessel herself.
"No," she said, "I don't know her at all. I expect she is coming in for repairs. Why, I believe that is Mr Brown, the draper at Kilwinnie. You know he is quite a remarkable botanist, a burning and shining light—under a bushel. I suppose that is one of his sisters with him. They say he is never seen with any other woman."
"Confound his impudence!" muttered Dudley involuntarily.
"Why, Ralph, what do you mean? You talk to me about 'the effete superstitions of an ancient gentry'; but even I have no objection to a well-conducted tradesman amusing himself with a scientific hobby in his spare time. It is a pity all young men of that class don't do the same. It would keep them out of a lot of mischief."
"Yes," said Dudley, rather vaguely.
He did not enter into any explanation of his strangely inconsistent utterance; but such silence on his part was too common an occurrence in his intercourse with his aunt to call for any remark.
Dr Dudley was not in love with Mona. It was his own firm conviction that he never would be really in love at all. All women attracted him who in any respect or in any degree approached his ideal; the devoted wife and mother, the artist, the beautiful dancer, the severe student, the capable housewife, the eloquent platform speaker,—in all of these he saw different manifestations of the eternal idea of womanhood, and he never thought of demanding that one woman should in herself combine the characteristics of all. He was content to take each one for what she was, and to enjoy her in that capacity. He keenly appreciated the society of women; but the moment he was out of their presence—sometimes even before he was out of it—he found himself analysing them as calmly as if they were men. Yet "analyse" is scarcely the right word to use, for Dr Dudley read character less by deliberate study than by a curious power of intuition, which few would have predicated from a general knowledge of his mind and character.
Mona would have been surprised at that time had she known how much truer was his estimate of her than was that of the Sahib. Almost at the first glance, he had understood something of both her simplicity and her complexity, her reserve and her unconventionally; almost at the first interview, he had realised that, whatever might be the case in the future, at present the idea of sex simply did not exist for her. She might well call him simpatico. He was appreciative almost to the point of genius.
Certainly no woman had ever attracted him precisely as Mona did. She attracted him so much that he had been fain to hold his peace about her, and to wish that she were not "Miss Simpson's niece." And yet there was a pathos and a piquancy about her, in her dingy surroundings, which were not without their charm, and which appealed to a latent sense of the fatherly in him, the very existence of which he had scarcely suspected, for Dr Dudley was essentially a college man.
"Surely, surely," he thought as he enjoyed his after-dinner cigar in his tiny smoking-room, "she would never look at that fellow. She could not be such a fool. If she had lived fifty years ago it would have been all en règle, She would have married him as a matter of course, and an excellent match for her too. She would in due course have 'suckled fools and chronicled small-beer,' and at the present moment her granddaughters would be holding entrance scholarships for Newnham or Girton.
"But it's not too late for her yet. If only that dear old aunt of mine were not such a confounded Conservative, I would get her to pay for Miss Maclean's education. By Jove! it would be education in her case, and not mere instruction, as it is with most of the learned women one meets; but even if my old lady had the money to spare, she would infinitely rather give Miss Maclean her linen and her best bedroom furniture, and bestow her with a blessing on the draper!"
It did not occur to him to doubt that Mona was practically a fixture at Borrowness. His aunt had certainly spoken as if she were, on the one occasion when Mona had been mentioned between them. In truth, the old lady had taken for granted that he was referring to the real original niece, of whose departure for America she had never even heard; and Ralph knew no one else in the neighbourhood who was at all likely to give him incidental information about Miss Simpson's assistant. She must of course have been brought up elsewhere—so much at least he could tell from her accent; and, for the rest, he had always maintained that, in these latter days, the daughters of lower middle-class people stand a better chance of a good education than any other girls in the community: it was not altogether marvellous if one in a thousand made a good use of it.