A spacious hall with a well-waxed floor; a profusion of coloured lights and hothouse plants; a small string-band capable of posing any healthy, human thing under twenty-three with the reiterated query, "Where are the joys like dancing?"—all these things may be had on occasion, even in an old-world fishing town on the bleak east coast.
For youth is youth, thank heaven! over all the great wide world; and the sturdy, sonsy northern girl, in her spreading gauzy folds of white or blue, is as desirable in the eyes of the shy young clerk, in unaccustomed swallow-tails, as is the languid, dark-eyed daughter of the South to her picturesque impassioned lover. Nay, the awkward sheepish youth himself, he too is young, and, for some blue-eyed girl, his voice may have the irresistible cadence, his touch the magnetic thrill, that Romeo's had for Juliet.
So do not, I pray you, despise my provincial ball, because the dancing falls short alike in the grace of constant habit and in the charm of absolute naïveté. The room is all aglow with youth and life and excitement. One must be a cynic indeed not to take pleasure in that. There is something beautiful too, surely, even in the proud self-consciousness with which the "Provost's lady" steps out to head the first quadrille with good Sir Roderick, and in the shy delight with which portly dames, at the bidding of grey-haired sires, forget the burden of years, and renew the days of their youth.
At Doris's earnest request, Mona had come to the ball with her party, for of course the Bonthrons disapproved of the whole proceeding. Rachel had insisted on going to the bazaar on the last day, to see the show and pick up a few bargains; and, as the hall was overheated, and nothing would induce her to remove her magnificent fur-lined cloak, she had caught more cold on returning to the open air. Mona had offered very cordially to stay at home with her on the night of the ball; but Rachel had been sufficiently ill to read two sermons in the course of the day; and, in the fit of magnanimity naturally consequent on such occupation, she had stoutly and kindly refused to listen to a proposal which seemed to her more generous than it really was.
It was after ten when the party from the Towers entered the brilliant, resounding, whirling room. The Sahib had half expected that Lady Kirkhope, in her pursuit of a "lark," would accompany them; but she "drew the line," she said, "at dancing with the grocer," so a few of the gentlemen went alone. There was a good deal of amusement among them as they drove down in the waggonette, on the subject of the partners they might reasonably expect; and it was with no small pride that the Sahib introduced them to Doris and Mona.
Mona wore the gown in which Lucy had said she looked like an empress. It was not suitable for dancing, but she did not mean to dance; and certainly she in her rich velvet, and Doris in her shimmering silk, were a wondrous contrast to most of the showily dressed matrons and gauzy girls.
Doris as usual was very soon the quiet little centre of an admiring group; and even Mona, who had come solely to look on, and to enjoy a short chat with the Sahib, received an amount of attention that positively startled her when she thought of her "false position."
Of course she was pleased. It seemed like a fairy tale, that almost within a mile of the shop she should be received so naturally as a lady and a woman of the world; but, in point of fact, the Cooksons and Mrs Ewing were the only people who knew that she was Miss Simpson's assistant. Her regular clientèle was of too humble a class socially to be represented at the ball; her acquaintances in the neighbourhood were limited almost entirely to Rachel's friends and the members of the Baptist Chapel,—two sections of the community which were not at all likely to give support to such a festivity; and even people who had seen her repeatedly in her everyday surroundings, failed to recognise her in this handsome woman who had come to the ball with a very select party from St Rules.
Matilda glowed with triumph as she watched her friend move in a sphere altogether above her own; she longed to proclaim to every one how she had known all the time that Miss Maclean was a princess in disguise. How aghast Clarinda would be at her own stupidity, and with what shame she would recall her pointless sarcasms—Clarinda, who that very evening had said, she at least gave the shop-girl the credit of believing that the lace was imitation and the pearls false.
The night was wearing on, and Mona was sitting out a galop with Captain Steele, a handsome middle-aged man, whom the Sahib had introduced to her. They were conversing in a gay, frivolous strain, and Mona was reflecting how much easier it is to be entertaining in the evening if one has not been studying hard all day.
"Are you expecting any one?" asked the Captain suddenly.
"No; why do you ask?"
"You look up so eagerly whenever a new arrival is ushered in."
"Do I? It must be automatic. I scarcely know any one here."
But she coloured slightly as she spoke. His question made her conscious for the first time of a wish away down in the depths of her heart—a wish that Dr Dudley would come and see her small success. He had seen her under such very different conditions; he might arrive now any day in Borrowness for the Christmas holidays; why should he not be here to-night? It was surely an innocent little wish as wishes go; but on discovery it was treated ignominiously with speedy and relentless eviction; and Mona gave all the attention she could spare from the Captain's discourse to watching Doris and the Sahib.
Poor little wish! Take a regret along with you. You were futile and vain, for Dudley had a sufficiently just estimate of his capabilities to abstain at all times from dancing; and at that moment, with fur cap over his eyes, he was sleeping fitfully in the night express; and yet perhaps you were a wise little wish, and how different things might have been if you could have been realised!
The wish was gone, however, and Mona was watching her friends. A woman must be plain indeed if she is not to look pretty in becoming evening dress; and Doris, in her soft grey silk, looked like a Christmas rose in the mists of winter. She was talking brightly and eagerly, and the Sahib was listening with a smile that made his homely face altogether delightful. Mona wondered whether in all his honest life he had ever looked at any other woman with just that light in his eyes. "What a lucky man he will be who wins my Doris!" she said to herself; and close upon that thought came another. "They say matchmakers are apt to defeat their own ends, but if one praises the woman to the man, and abuses the man to the woman, one must at least be working in the right direction."
With a burst of harmony the band began a new waltz.
"Our dance, Miss Maclean," said the Sahib, coming up to her. "We are going to wander off to some far-away committee-room and swop confidences."
"It sounds nice, but my confidences are depressing."
"So are mine rather. Do you like this part of the world?"
"Do I like myself, in other words? Not much."
"Don't be philosophical. When all is said, there is nothing like gossip. I don't like this part of the world; in fact, I don't know myself in it; it is a fast, frivolous, imbecile world!"
"Socially speaking, I presume, not geographically. At least, those are not strictly the adjectives I should apply to my surroundings. How come you to be in such a world?"
"Oh, I met Kirkhope a few years ago. He was indulging in a fashionable run across India, and he ran up against me. I was able to put him up to a thing or two, and last month when I met him in Edinburgh, he invited me down. In a weak moment I accepted his invitation, and now you see Fortune has been kinder to me than I deserve."
"I saw you in Edinburgh as I went through one day," said Mona, and she told him she had been disappointed not to be able to speak to him at the station.
"How very disgusting!" he said. "Yes, Edinburgh is my home—my father's, at least."
"And had you never met Doris before I introduced you to her?"
The Sahib did not answer for a moment.
"I had not been introduced. I had seen her. Hers is not a face that one forgets."
"And yet it only gives a hint of all that lies behind it. You might travel from Dan to Beersheba without finding such a gloriously unselfish woman, and such a perfect child of Nature."
"She is delightfully natural and unaffected. I think that is her great charm. What sort of man is Colquhoun? Of course every one knows him by name."
"Yes; he is very near the top of the tree in his profession. He is a scientist, too, but in that capacity he is a trifle—pathetic. Shall you call when you go back?"
"I have obtained permission to do so."
"You would do me a personal favour if you would enter into his scientific fads a little. Dear lovable old man! You will have to laugh in your sleeve pretty audibly before he suspects that you are doing it."
"I don't think I shall feel at all inclined to. Is Miss Colquhoun a scientist too?"
"She is something better. She loves a dog because it is a dog, a worm because it is a worm. Science must stand cap in hand before such genuine inborn love of Nature as hers."
Again there was a pause before the Sahib answered. Then he roused himself suddenly.
"It seems to me, Miss Maclean, that you are shirking your part of the bargain. I have confided to you how it is I come to be here. It is your innings now."
Mona sighed.
"When I last saw you, you were a burning and shining medical light. Wherefore the bushel?"
"That is right. Strike hard at the root of my amour propre. It is good for me, though I wince. I am here, Sahib, mainly because I failed twice in my Intermediate Medicine examination."
Another of the Sahib's characteristic pauses.
"How on earth did you contrive to do it?" he asked at last. "When one sees the duffers of men that pass——"
The colour on Mona's cheek deepened. "I don't think a very large proportion of duffers pass the London University medical examinations," she said. "Of course one makes excuses for one's self. One began hospital work too soon; one's knowledge was on a plane altogether above the level of the examination papers, &c. It is only in moments of rare and exceptional honesty that one says, as I say to you now, 'I failed because I was a duffer, and did not know my work.'"
"Nay, you don't catch me with chaff. That is not the truth, and you don't think it is. I don't call that honesty!"
But although the Sahib spoke harshly, his heart was beating very warmly towards her just then. He had always considered Mona a clever and charming girl—a little too independent, perhaps, but her habitual independence made it the more delightful to see her submitting like a child to his questions, holding herself bound apparently for the moment to answer honestly without fencing, however much the effort might cost her.
"It is the truth, and nothing but the truth." she said. "I venture sometimes to think it is not the whole truth."
"Shall you go in again?"
"Yes."
"When?"
"July."
"Do you think you will pass?"
"No."
"Then why do you do it?"
"I have promised."
Another long pause, and then it came unpremeditatedly with a rush.
"Look here, Miss Maclean,—chuck the whole thing, and come back to India with me!"
It was so absolutely unexpected, that for a moment Mona thought it was a joke. "That would be a delightfully simple way of cutting the knot of the difficulty," she said gaily, but before her sentence was finished she saw what he meant. She tried not to see it, not to show that she saw it, but the blood rushed over her face and betrayed her.
"Do come," he said. "Will you? I never cared for any woman as I care for you."
"Oh, Sahib," said Mona, "we cared for each other, but not in that way. You have taught me all I have missed in not having a brother."
She was not sorry for him; she was intensely annoyed at his stupidity. Not for a moment did it occur to her that he might really love her. He liked her, of course, admired her, sympathised with her, at the present moment pitied her; but did he really suppose that a woman might not gladly accept his friendship, admiration, sympathy, even his pity, without wishing to have it all translated into the vulgar tangible coin of an offer of marriage? Was marriage for a woman, like money for a beggar, the sole standard by which all good feeling was to be tried?
She was not altogether at fault in her reading of his mind. The Sahib's sister Lena was engaged to be married, and he had started on his furlough with a vague general idea that if he could fall in love and take a wife back with him to India, it would be a very desirable thing. Such an idea is as good a preventive to falling in love as any that could be devised.
Among the girls he had met, Miss Maclean was undoubtedly facile princeps. In many respects she was cut out for the position; she was one of those women who acquire a lighter hand in conversation as they grow older, and who go on mellowing to a rich matronly maturity. In Anglo-Indian society she would be something entirely new, and three months in her own drawing-room would make a brilliant woman of her.
During all the autumn months, while he was shooting in Scotland, the Sahib had delighted in the thought that he was deliberately keeping away from her, and had delighted still more in the prospect of going "all by himself" to call upon her in London, to see whether the old impressions would be renewed in their full force. He had been bitterly angry and disappointed when he failed to find her at Gower Street, but the failure had gone very far to convince him that he really did love her.
And now had come this curious unexpected meeting at Kirkstoun. "Do you see that—person in the fur cloak?" Mona had said to him when he had dropped in for half an hour on the third day of the bazaar. "Don't be alarmed; I don't mean to introduce you; but that is my cousin. Now you know all that I can tell you." His momentary start and look of incredulity had not been lost upon her; but he had recovered himself in an instant, and had shown sufficient sense not to attempt any remark. And in truth, although he had been surprised and shocked, he had not been greatly distressed. "After all," he had said, "anybody could rake up a disreputable forty-second cousin from some ash-heap or other;" and the existence of such a person, together with Mona's breakdown in her medical career, gave him a pleasant, though unacknowledged, sense of being the knight in the fairy tale who is to deliver the captive princess from all her woes. Moreover, Mona's peculiar circumstances had brought about an intimacy between them that might otherwise have been impossible. He had been admitted into one of the less frequented chambers of her nature, and he said to himself that it was a goodly chamber. It was pleasant to see the colour rise into her cheeks, to hear her breath come quick while she talked to him; and to-night—to-night she looked very beautiful, and no shade of doubt was left on his mind that he loved her.
"I suppose you are the best judge of your feelings towards me," he said coldly; "but you will allow me to answer for mine."
The Sahib was a good man, and a simple-hearted, but he knew his own value, and it would have been strange if Mona's reply had not surprised him. In fact he could only account for it on one supposition, and that supposition made him very angry and indignant. His next words were natural, if unpardonable. Perhaps Mona's frankness was spoiling him.
"Tell me," he said sharply, "in the old Norway days, when we saw so much of each other, was there some one else then?"
Mona drew herself up. "I do call that an insult," she said quietly. "Do you suppose that every unmarried woman is standing in the market-place waiting for a husband? Is it impossible that a woman may prefer to remain unmarried for the sake of all the work in the world that only an unmarried woman can do?"
The Sahib's face brightened visibly for a moment. Perhaps it was true, after all, that this clever woman was more of a child in some respects than half the flimsy damsels in the ball-room.
"Miss Maclean," he said, "bear with my dulness, and say to me these five words, 'There is no one else.'"
Mona lifted her honest eyes.
"There is no one else," she said simply.
"Thank you. Then if my sole rival is the work that only an unmarried woman can do, I decline to accept your answer."
"Don't be foolish, Mr Dickinson," said Mona gently. "You call me honest, and in this respect I am absolutely honest. If there were the faintest shadow of a doubt in my mind I would tell you. There are very few people in the world whom I like and trust as I do you, but I would as soon think of marrying Sir Douglas Munro. And you—you are sacrificing yourself to your own chivalry. You want to marry me because you are sorry for me, because I have muddled my own life."
"That is not true. My one objection to you is that you are twice the man that I am."
Mona laughed. "Eh bien! L'un n'empêche pas l'autre. No, no; you are much too good a man to be thrown away on a woman who only likes and trusts you."
"When do you leave this place?" he asked doggedly.
"In March."
"And do you stop in Edinburgh on the way?"
"Yes; I have promised to spend a week with the Colquhouns."
"Good. I will ask you then again."
"Dear Sahib," said Mona earnestly, "I have not spoilt your life yet. Don't let me begin to spoil it now. You cannot afford to waste even three months over a chivalrous fancy. Put me out of your mind altogether, till you have married a bright young thing full of enthusiasms, not a worn-out old cynic like me. Then by-and-by, if she will let me be her sister, you and I can be brother and sister again."
"May I write to you during the next two months?"
"I think it would be a great mistake."
"Your will shall be law. But remember, I shall be thinking of you constantly, and when you are in Edinburgh I will come. Shall we go back to the ball-room?" He rose and offered her his arm.
"Mr Dickinson, I absolutely refuse to leave the question open. What is the use?"
"You will not do even that for me?"
"It would be returning evil for good."
"No matter. The results be on my own head!"
They were back in the noise and glare of the ball-room, and further conversation was impossible.
"Who would have thought of meeting two charming émancipées down here?" said Captain Steele, as the men drove back to the Towers.
"If all émancipées are like Miss Colquhoun," said a young man with red hair and a retreating chin, "I will get a book and go round canvassing for women's rights to-morrow!”