It was a hot day in June, and "blessed Bloomsbury" was converted into one great bakehouse. The flags in Gower Street radiated out a burning glow; the flower-sellers had much ado to preserve the semblance of freshness in their dainty wares; and those of the inhabitants who were the proud possessors of outside blinds were an object of envy to all their neighbours.
Mona was sitting at her writing-table, pen in hand, and with a formidable blue schedule before her. She was looking out of the window, but in her mind's eye the dusty, glaring street had given place to the breezy ramparts of Castle Maclean; and, instead of the noise of the traffic, she heard the soft plash of the waves. Presently she laid down her pen, and leaned against the scorching window-sill, with a smile, not on her lips, but in her eyes.
"My spirit and my God shall be
My seaward hill, my boundless sea,"
she quoted softly.
"What, Mona, caught poetising!" said Lucy unceremoniously entering the room.
"Far from it," said Mona drily. "I was engaged on the most prosaic work it is possible to conceive, filling in the schedule for my Intermediate. It seems to me that I have spent the greater part of my life filling in the schedule for my Intermediate. If I fail again I shall employ an amanuensis for the sole purpose. Come and help me. Full Christian name and surname?"
"Mona Margaret Maclean."
"Oh, drop the Margaret! I am prepared to take the chance of there being another Mona Maclean. Age, last birthday?"
"Ninety-nine."
"No doubt I shall fill that into an Intermediate schedule some day, but not yet awhile. I wonder if they will have reformed the Practical Chemistry by that time? Or will the dear old M.B. Lond. have lost its cachet altogether? It is warm to-day, is it not?"
"Frightfully! I met Miss Lascelles just now, and she informed me, in her bell-like voice, that if we were quite civilised we should go about without any clothes at all just now. I told her I hoped the relics of barbarism would last out my time."
"Then I presume Miss Lascelles will not throw her pearls before swine again. Are you going to hospital?"
"Not to-day. Hospital is unbearable in this weather. The air is thick with microbes."
Mona looked at her friend reflectively. "Suppose you come down to Richmond with me," she said, "and blow away a few of the microbes on the river?"
"Oh, Mona, how lovely! But can you spare the time?"
"Yes, I began early to-day. But we will have some lunch first. In the meantime I will sing you my last song, and you shall criticise."
"Are you still going on with your singing lessons? I can't think how you find time for it."
"I think it saves time in the end. It is a grand safety-valve; and besides—a woman is robbed of half her armour if she cannot use her voice."
Her hands ran lightly up and down the keys of the piano, and she began to sing Schubert's Ave Maria.
"Miss Dalrymple says that is my chef-d'[oe]uvre," she said, when she had finished. "What think you?"
But Lucy made no answer.
"Mona," she said a minute later, "do you think it is worth while to go on the river, after all? It is rather a fag, and why should we?"
Her voice was husky, and suggestive of infinite weariness. Mona rose from the piano, and deliberately, almost brutally, took the girl's face between her hands, and turned it to the light. She was not mistaken. The pretty eyes were dim with tears.
"Lucy," she said, "you and I have pretended long enough. What is the use of friendship, if we never fall back upon it in time of need? I want you to tell me what it was that spoilt your visit to Cannes."
"Nothing," said Lucy, with burning face, "unless, perhaps, my own idiocy. Oh, Mona, you dear old bully, there is not anything to tell! I thought I was always going to get the best of it with men, and now a man has got the best of it with me. It's only fair. Now you know the whole story. Despise me as much as you like."
"When I take to despising people, I imagine I shall have to begin even nearer home than with my plucky little Lucy. Will it be any use to tell me about it, do you think? Or is the whole story better buried?"
"I can't bury it. And yet there is positively nothing to tell. When I look back upon it all, I cannot honestly say that the flirtation went any farther than half-a-dozen others have gone; but this time, somehow, everything was different."
"Is he a friend of the Munros?"
Lucy nodded. "Yes—you know—Mr Monteith. He arrived at the hotel the night of our first dance. I was wearing my mermaid costume for the first time, and—I saw him looking at me again and again. He was not particularly handsome, but there was a sort of bloom about him, don't you know? He made me feel so common and work-a-day. And then when I danced with him I felt as if I had never danced with a man in my life before. I did not see very much of him;—Lady Munro was so particular:—but one afternoon a party of us walked up to the chapel on the hill, and he and I got apart from the others somehow. It was the first time I had seen the Maritime Alps, and I never again saw them as they were that day in the sunset light. It was like looking into a golden future. Well, he went away. I was awfully low-spirited for a day or two; but somehow, whenever I thought of that evening on the hill, I felt as if the future was full of beautiful possibilities. One day we went to Monte Carlo, and there I met him again. He asked if I would like him to come back for a day or two to Cannes, and I said I did not care. He never came. Sometimes I wish I had begged him to,—yes, Mona, I have sunk as low as that—and sometimes I think he must have read my poor little secret all along, and I could kill myself for very shame. Oh, Mona, I wish you could take me out of myself!"
"You poor little soul! Lucy, dear, it sounds very trite and commonplace; but, by hook or by crook, you must get an interest in your hospital work, and go at it as hard as ever you can."
"It is no use. I hate hospital. I wonder now how I ever could care so much about prizes and marks and examinations. It is all such child's-play."
"Yes; but sorrow is not child's-play, and pain and death are not child's-play. It is only a question of working at it hard enough, old woman. You are bound to become interested in it in time, and that is the only way to get rid of yourself;—though it is strange teaching, perhaps, to come from self-centred me. They say we women of this generation have sacrificed a good deal of our birthright; don't let us throw away the grand compensation, the power to light our candles when the sun goes down. Do you remember Werther's description of the country lass whose sweetheart forsakes her, taking with him all the interest in her life? We at least have other interests, Lucy, and we can, if we try hard enough, turn the key on the suite of enchanted rooms, and live in the rest of the house."
"The rest of my house is a poky hole!"
Mona sighed sympathetically. "No matter," she said resolutely; "we must just set to work, and make it something better than a poky hole."
Further conversation was prevented for the time by the entrance of the luncheon-tray.
"Well, is it to be Richmond?" said Mona, when the meal was over.
Lucy blushed. "I have a great mind to go to hospital, after all," she said. "I don't think it is quite so hot as it was."
"No, I think there is a suspicion of a breeze. Au revoir! Come back soon."
I wish I could honestly say that Mona profited as much by Lucy's example as Lucy had by Mona's preaching; but I am forced to record that she did not open a book, nor return to her little laboratory, for the rest of the day. For a long time she sat in her rocking-chair with a frown on her brow. "I wonder if he has only been playing with her," she said—"the cad!" Then another thought crossed the outskirts of her mind. At first it scarcely entered the limits of her consciousness; but, like the black dog in Faust, it went on and on, in ominous, ever-narrowing circles, and she was forced to recognise that she must grapple with it sooner or later. Then she put up her hands to cover her face, although there was no one there to see, and the question sounded in her very ears—"What if he has only been playing with me?"
What then, Mona? Lock the door on the suite of enchanted rooms, and live in the rest of the house! But she never thought of her advice to Lucy. She threw herself on the couch, and lay there for a little while in an agony of shame. After all her lofty utterances, had she given herself away to a man who had not even asked for her? Why had he not spoken just one word, to save her from this torture?
By some curious chain of associations the words flashed into her mind—
"Denn, was man schwarz auf weiss besitzt,
Kann man getrost nach Hause tragen."
She laughed a little breathlessly, and drew her hand across her damp forehead.
"I am a fool and a coward," she said; "I will ask Dr Alice Bateson to give me a tonic. What do mere words matter, after all, between people like him and me?"
She walked up to a calendar that hung on the wall, and carefully counted the days till the second week in August. Then she sighed regretfully.
"Poor little Lucy," she said, "what an unsympathetic brute she must have thought me!”