CHAPTER XIX.
"LEAVES OF GRASS."
The next day, while Mrs Hamilton was enjoying her afternoon nap, Dudley seated himself as usual with his books; but his head ached, and he soon gave up the attempt to study.
"For every hour I work to-day, I shall waste two to-morrow," he said; and taking a volume of poetry from the shelf, he strode down to the beach.
Other people besides Mona knew of "Castle Maclean"; perhaps some people had even discovered her predilection for it. Dudley reached the spot in about half the time that she would have taken, and scrambled up the huge uneven steps. There, comfortably ensconced at the top, sat the subject of his thoughts; a sketch-book open on her lap, and a well-used, battered paint-box at her side. Dudley was too much of an artist to dabble in colours himself, but he knew one paint-box from another, and he was duly impressed.
"I beg your pardon!" he said. "So you know this place?"
"It is my private property," she said with serene dignity, very different from her bright, alert manner in the shop,—"Castle Maclean."
He bowed low. "Shall I disturb you if I stay?"
"Not in the least." She put her head on one side, and critically examined her sky. "Not unless your hat absolutely comes between me and my subject."
"Change in the weather, is not it?"
"Has it not been glorious!" she said enthusiastically, laying down her brush. "This rocky old coast was in its element. It was something to live for, to see those great waves dashing themselves into gigantic fountains of spray."
"You don't mean to say you were down here?"
"Every minute that I could spare. Why not? A wetting does one no harm in a primitive world like this."
She glanced at his book and went on with her painting. Neither of them had come there to talk, and why should they feel called upon to do it?
"This is scarcely a lady's book," he said,—though he would not have thought this remark necessary to a "Girton girl,"—"but, if I may, I think I could find one or two things that you might like to hear."
She smiled, well pleased. She had not forgotten how
"Build thee more stately mansions, O my soul,"
had rolled out in his musical bass.
He read on for half an hour or so. Mona soon forgot her sketch and sat listening, her head resting on her hand.
He closed the book abruptly; he wanted no verbal thanks.
"And now," he said, "for my reward. May I look at your sketches?"
She coloured awkwardly. How could she show them? The scraps from Norway, and Italy, and Saxon Switzerland, might be explained; but what of the memory sketches of "the potent, grave, and reverend signiors" who had examined her at Burlington House? What of the caricature, which had amused the whole School, of Mademoiselle Lucy undergoing a Viva? What of her chef-d'œuvre, the study of the dissecting-room?
"I promised Rachel that I would keep the dreadful secret," she said ironically to herself, "and I am not going to break my word." But it cost her an effort to refuse. Some of the sketches were, in their way, undeniably clever, and she would have enjoyed showing them to him; and, moreover, she intensely disliked laying herself open to a charge of false modesty.
"I am sorry to seem so churlish," she said, "but I would rather not show you the book."
He was surprised, but her tone was absolutely final. There was nothing more to be said.
"If you like," she said shyly, "I will pay you back in a poor counterfeit of your own coin. I will read to you, and you shall close your eyes and listen to the plash of the waves. That is one of my ideals of happiness."
She took the book from the rock and began to read; but he did not close his eyes. Her voice was not a remarkable one like his own; but it was sympathetic, and her reading suggested much more than it expressed. He enjoyed listening to her, and he was interested in her choice of a poem; but he liked best to watch her mobile, sensitive face.
"One effort more, my altar this bleak sand;
That Thou, O God, my life hast lighted,
With ray of light, steady, ineffable, vouchsafed of Thee,
Light rare, untellable, lighting the very light,
Beyond all signs, descriptions, languages,"—
She seemed to be repeating the words from memory, not reading them; for her eyes were fixed on the hills beyond the sea, and her face was kindled for the moment into absolute beauty. Then, for the first time, a distinct thought passed through Dudley's mind that he would like the mother of his children to have a face like that.
"She would make a man noble in spite of himself," he thought; but aloud he said—
"You knew that poem?"
"Yes."
"Did you know those I read?"
"Not all of them. I knew Vigil Strange and My Captain."
There was silence between them for a few moments.
"Have you the smallest idea," he asked suddenly, "how you are throwing yourself away?"
She coloured, and was about to answer, but just then a gust of wind caught a page of her sketch-book, and blew it over.
She laughed, glad of an excuse for changing the subject.
"The Fates have apparently decreed," she said, "that you are to see this sketch," and she held it out to him.
It represented a red-cheeked, sonsy-faced girl, standing before a mirror, trying on a plain little bonnet. On all sides were suggestions of flowers and feathers, and brilliant millinery; and in the girl's round eyes was an expression of positive horror.
Beneath the picture Mona had written, "Is life worth living?"
Dudley laughed.
"That looks as if there ought to be a story connected with it," he said.
"Only a bit of one," and she gave him a somewhat cynical account of her little scullery-maid.
"I withdraw my remark," he said gravely. "You are not throwing yourself away. Would that we were all using ourselves to as much purpose!"
"Don't make me feel myself more of a fool than I do already."
"Fool! I was wishing there were a few more fools in the place to appreciate you—Ruskin for one!"
"I did try to comfort myself with recollections of Ruskin," she said, with a suspicion of tears in her laughter; "but I could only think of the bit about the crossing-sweeper and the hat with the feather."
He smiled. "You do Ruskin too much honour when you judge him by an isolated quotation," he said. "I thought that distinction was reserved for the Bible."
"But that is only the beginning of the story," said Mona. "I have had several orders since for similar bonnets—more from the mothers than from the girls themselves, I am sorry to say,—and among them the one that suggested the sketch. Have you ever seen Colonel Lawrence's quaint old housekeeper up at the wood?"
"Oh yes. Everybody knows the Colonel's Jenny."
"Her daughter went away to service some time ago, and came home to visit her mother the other day, with all her wages on her back, as Jenny expressed it,—such a poor, little, rosy-cheeked, tawdry bit of humanity! The mother marched her off to me in high dudgeon, and ordered a bonnet 'like Polly's at the Towers'; and that is exactly how the poor child looked when she tried it on. I could have found it in my heart to beg her off myself. Talk of breaking in a butterfly!"
"Yes," he said. "One is inclined to think that human butterflies should be allowed to be butterflies—till one sees them too near the candle!"
"If we knew whether it were really worth while trying to save them," said Mona, "I suppose we should indeed 'know what God and man is'; as it is, we can only act on impulse. But this little Maggie does not belong to the most puzzling class. She is a good little thing, after all. I should not wonder if she had the germ of a soul stowed away somewhere."
"She is a Maggie, is she?" he said, returning with a smile to the baby-face in the picture. "They are all Maggies here. One gets perfectly sick of the name."
"Does one?" said Mona. "Queen Margaret is a heroine of mine, and my very own saint to boot."
"Are you a Margaret?" he said. "You look like one. It is partly because the name is so beautiful that one resents that senseless 'Maggie.'"
Mona was just going to say that with her it was only an unused second name; but his face had grown very grave again, and she did not wish to jar on his mood. How little we can tell in life what actions or omissions will throw their light or shadow over our whole future!
"What right have we," he said musingly at last, "to say what is normal and what is not? How can we presume to make one ideal of virtue the standard for all? Look round the world boldly—not through the medium of tinted glass—and choose at random a dozen types. If there be a God at all, it is awful to think of His catholicity!"
Mona looked up with a smile.
"Forgive me, Miss Maclean," he said. "I have no right to talk like that."
"Why not? Is life never to be relieved by a strong picturesque statement? It takes a lot of conflicting utterances to make up a man's Credo. When I want neat, little, compatible sentences, I resort to my cookery-book. Did you think," she added mischievously, "that I would place you on a pedestal with Ruskin and my Bible, and judge you by an isolated quotation?"
He laughed, and then grew suddenly grave.
"Talking," he said, "is mein Verderben. That is why I have chosen a profession that will give me no scope for it—not that I seem likely to make much of the profession, now that it is chosen! You see—my circumstances have been peculiar, and my education has been different in some respects from that of most men." He hesitated, and then, without a word of introduction, urged by some irresistible impulse, he plunged into the story of his life. Perhaps he was anxious to see how it looked in the eyes of a capable woman; certainly he regarded Mona as a wholly exceptional being, in his intercourse with whom he was bound by no ordinary rules.
"I left school when I was sixteen," he said, "laden with prizes and medals and all that sort of thing. It was my misfortune, not my fault, that I had a good deal of money to spend on my education, and a free hand as to the spending of it. I am inclined sometimes to envy fellows whose parents leave them no voice in the matter at all.
"I went first to Edinburgh University for three years, and took my M.A. There are worse degrees in the world than an Edinburgh M.A. It means no culture, no University life, no rubbing up against one's fellow-men; but it does mean a solid foundation of all-round, useful information, which no man need despise, and which is not heavy enough to extinguish the slumbering fires of genius should they chance to lie beneath. Of course, it is impossible to tell a priori what will prove an education to any man.
"When I left Edinburgh, I announced my intention of going to Cambridge. The classical professor wanted me to go in for the classical tripos, and the mathematical professor urged me to stick to the 'eternal,' of which he believes mathematics to be the sole manifestation granted to erring humanity. But I was determined to have a go at Natural Science. There was a great deal of loose scientific talk in the air, and people seemed to make so much of a minimum of knowledge that I fancied three years of conscientious work would take a man straight in behind the veil. I went to work enthusiastically at first, while hope was strong, more quietly later when I realised that at most I might move back the veil an inch or two, while infinity lay behind; that humanity might possibly in three hundred years accomplish what I had hoped to do in three. Of course, I might have added my infinitesimal might of labour and research, but I was not specially fitted for it. The difficulty all my life has been to find out what I was specially fitted for. However, I took my degree."
"Tripos?" said Mona.
"Third Class," he said contemptuously. "But I was not reading for a place. And, indeed, I grew more in those three years than in any other three of my life. Possibly it was the life at Cambridge. Possibly I might have accomplished more on the plains of Thibet."
He drew a long breath. He had wellnigh forgotten who his companion was, and talked on to give vent to his feelings. After all, it mattered little if she missed a point here and there. She would grasp as much of the spirit of the story as most confessors do.
"Well, then, I travelled for a couple of years. I studied at Heidelberg, and Göttingen, and Jena. I heard good music nearly every night, and I saw all the cathedrals and picture-galleries. Then I came home, determined to choose a profession. I chose medicine, mainly for the reason I gave you, and I studied in London for the examinations of the colleges. Why did I not choose the University? Would that I had! But you see I was past the age when boys 'get up' a subject with ease, and walk through brilliant examinations; and, moreover, in spite of a popular superstition to the contrary effect, two years of travel and art, and music and philosophy, do not tend to furbish up a man's mathematics and classics and natural science.
"Six months after I began to study I loathed medicine. To use a favourite expression here, it was neither fish, flesh, fowl, nor guid red herrin'. It was neither art, science, literature, nor philosophy. It was a hideous pot-pourri of all four, with a preponderating, overwhelming admixture of arrant humbug. Hitherto I had worked fairly well, but there had never been any moral value in my work. It was done con amore. Now that the amor failed, I scarcely worked at all. I suppose it was one of Nature's revenges that, as I had gone into a profession because it demanded silent work, I talked more in those years than at any other period of my life. I read all things rather than medicine, I moved in any society rather than the medical world, but I rubbed along somehow. I passed my first examination by a fluke, and I passed the second likewise. I never was at a loss for a brilliant theory to account for erroneous facts, and with some examiners that goes a long way. When it came to preparing for my Final, I hated surgery because I had scamped my anatomy. Medicine might have shared the same fate, but I had done a good deal of physiology in Gaskell's laboratory at Cambridge—more than was necessary, in fact—for the supposed connection between physiology and medicine is a purely fictitious one. The student has to take a header blindfold from the one to the other. It is almost incredible, but when I went up for my Final in due course, I did scrape through by the skin of my teeth. If ever any man got through those three examinations without a spill on the strength of less knowledge than I did, I should like to shake that man's hand. He deserves to be congratulated.
"The next thing was to look out for a practice, or a locum tenency; but, before doing so, I went down to Cambridge to visit some friends. While there I saw a good deal of M'Diarmid, the Professor of Anatomy. I don't know if you ever heard of him, but if ever a man made literal dry bones live, he does. Thoroughgoing to the soles of his boots—a monument of erudition—and yet with a mind open to fresh light as regards the minutest detail."
Mona flushed crimson, but fortunately he was not looking. This was indeed approaching dangerous ground. She was strongly inclined to think that the professor in question was one of "the potent, grave, and reverend signiors" in her sketch-book.
"It was so odd," continued Dudley. "All my life, while other men walked in shadow, I had seemed to see the light of the eternal, but in medicine I had missed it absolutely. Ah, well! one word will do for a thousand. I am afraid I wrote my 'Sorrows of Werther' once more, for the last time in this world let us hope, and then I began all over again to work for a London degree."
He stopped with an unpleasant sensation of self-consciousness. "And I wonder why I have inflicted all this on you," he said, a little coldly.
"I think it was a grand thing to do—to begin over again." said Mona. "You will make a magnificent doctor when you do take your degree, and none of those past years will be lost. You will be a famous professor yourself some day. How far have you got?"
"I passed the Matriculation almost immediately, and the Preliminary Scientific six months after. In July, I go in for my Intermediate, and two years later comes my Final. Once the Intermediate is over, a load will be taken off my mind. It is all grist that comes to one's mill after that, but it requires a little resolution to plod along side by side with mere schoolboys, as most of the students are."
"It must be an excellent thing for the schoolboys."
She was wishing with all her heart that she could tell him her story in return for his. Why had she made that absurd promise to Rachel? And what would Rachel think if she claimed permission to make an exception in Dr Dudley's favour? It was all too ridiculous, and when she began to think of it, she was inclined to wonder whether she really was the Mona Maclean who had studied medicine in London.
"Why, it is after five," said Dudley suddenly, looking at his watch.
Mona sprang to her feet, and then remembered with relief that, as Rachel was going out to tea, she need not be punctual.
"But I ought to have been in time to prevent her wearing the scarlet cap," she thought with a pang of self-reproach.
"Shall you go on with your sketch to-morrow?" asked Dudley, as they walked up to the road.
"To-morrow? No; my cousin is going to take me to St Rules."
"I thought Miss Simpson was your aunt?"
"No, she is my father's cousin—one of the very few relatives I have."
Dudley was relieved, he scarcely knew why.
"I might have known my old lady was not likely to know much about any one in the village," he thought.
"Have you never been to St Rules?" he said aloud. "That is a treat in store. Almost every stone in it has a history. But I have an appointment now with my aunt in Kirkstoun—I hate saying good-bye, don't you?"
"I do."
"I mean quite apart from the parting involved."
"Oh, quite!"
He looked at her with curious eagerness, and then held out his hand. Apparently he had no objection to that.
"Well, so long!"
"Sans adieu!"
Mona sighed as she re-entered the dreary little sitting-room. However freely she might let the breezes of heaven blow through the house in Rachel's absence, the rooms seemed to be as musty as ever five minutes after the windows had been shut.
The autumn evenings were growing chilly, but the white curtains, by the laws of the Medes and Persians, had to remain on duty a little longer; and great as was Mona's partiality for a good fire, the thermometer must have registered a very low figure indeed before she could have taken refuge in Sally's kitchen—at any other time than on Saturday afternoon, immediately after the weekly cleaning.
Tea was on the table. It had stood there since five o'clock.
Mona sighed again.
"If one divides servants," she said, "into three classes—those, who can be taught to obey orders in the spirit, those who can be taught to obey orders in the letter, and those who cannot be taught to obey orders at all—Sally is a bad second, with an occasional strong tendency to lapse into the third. I wish she had seen fit to lapse into the third to-night."
She pushed aside the cold buttered toast, helped herself to overdrawn tea, and glanced with a shiver at the shavings in the grate. In another moment her sorrows were forgotten. Leaning against the glass shade of the gilt clock on the mantelpiece, smiling at her across the room, stood a fair, fat, friendly budget in Lady Munro's handwriting.
"Gaudeamus igitur!" Mona seized the tea-cosy, tossed it up to the ceiling, and caught it again with an affectionate squeeze.
How delightful that the letter should come when she was alone! Now she could get the very maximum of enjoyment out of it. She stalked it stealthily, lest it should "vanish into thin air" before her eyes, took hold of it gingerly, examined the post-mark, smelt the faint perfume which, more than anything else, reminded her of the beautiful gracious woman in the rooms at Gloucester Place, and then opened the envelope carefully with her penknife.
She took out the contents, and arranged her three treasures on the table. Yes, there were three. They had all written. There was Sir Douglas's "My dear girl"; Lady Munro's "My darling Mona"; and Evelyn's "My very own dearest friend."
They were not clever letters at all, but they were affectionate and characteristic; and Mona laughed and cried over them, as she sat curled up in the corner of the stiff unyielding sofa. Sir Douglas was bluff and fatherly, and to the point. Lady Munro underlined every word that she would have emphasised in speaking. "Douglas was so dull and so cross after we parted from you. In fact even now he is constantly talking of you—constantly." Evelyn gave a detailed circumstantial account of all they had done since Mona had left them,—an account interspersed with many protestations of affection. "Mother and I start for Cannes almost immediately," she wrote. "Of course Father cannot be induced to leave Scotland as long as there is a bird on the moors. Write me long letters as often as ever you can. You do write such lovely letters." All three reminded Mona repeatedly of her promise to spend the whole of next summer with them somewhere.
"How good they are!" Mona kept repeating. "How good they are!"
When Mona was young, like every well-conducted school-girl, she had formed passionate attachments, and had nearly broken her heart when "eternal friendships" failed. "I will expect no friendship, no constancy in life," she had said. "I will remember that here I have no continuing city—even in the hearts of the people I love. I will hold life and love with a loose grasp."
And even now, when increasing years were making her more healthily human, true friendship and constancy had invariably called out a feeling of glad surprise. At every turn the world was proving kinder to her than she had dared to hope.
She was still deep in the letters when her cousin came home.
"Well," said Rachel, "I've just heard a queer thing. You know the work I had last week, teaching Mrs Robertson the stitch for that tidy? Well, she had some friends in to tea last night, and she never asked me! Did you ever hear the like of that? She thinks she's just going to get her use out of me!"
"I expect, dear," said Mona, "that the stitch proved more than she could manage after all, and she was afraid to confess it."
"Well, I never did know any one so slow at the crochet," said Rachel resentfully, releasing the wonderful red cap from its basket. "She may look for some other body to help her the next time. But we'd better take our porridge and be off to our beds, if we're going to St Rules to-morrow."
Mona read her letters once more in her own room, and then another thought asserted itself unexpectedly.
"I wish with all my heart that I could have shown him the sketch-book, and made a clean breast of it," she said to her trusty friend in the glass; "and yet"—her attitude changed—"why should he stand on a different footing from everybody else?"
The face in the glass looked back defiantly, and did not seem prepared with any answer.