The weeks passed very slowly till the Christmas holidays came round; but, on the whole, life had become more bearable for Mona. The future was as uncertain as ever, but she had at least one definite event to look forward to. There was a light of some kind before her, though it might be only a Will-o'-the-wisp.
And a Will-o'-the-wisp it was destined to prove.
She arrived at Borrowness late in the evening, and immediately after breakfast next morning, Matilda begged her to come to Castle Maclean. Mona assented the more readily, as the walk led them past the gates of Carlton Lodge; but at the first glance she saw that the house was shut up.
It was some minutes before she could measure the full force of the blow.
"What has become of Mrs Hamilton?" she said at last, with averted face.
"Oh, didn't you know? She was awfully ill last autumn. Dr Dudley had some great gun down from London to see her,—as if Edinburgh doctors were not a great deal better!—and she was ordered abroad for the winter. Dr Dudley took her away at once, to Cairo, or Algiers, or some such place. We don't hear anything about them now. By the way, Miss Maclean, the very last time that I saw Dr Dudley he was asking about you."
Mona could not trust herself to speak.
"He wanted to know if you had gone to America with Miss Simpson, and Pa gave him a glowing account of how he had seen you in London."
"At the theatre?"
"No, no. Pa saw you once, long before that, one day in Hyde Park, with a lady—and a young gentleman. I thought it would be Lady Munro, but I never said so to Pa."
It was contrary to all Mona's instincts to ask what any one had said of her, but the opportunity was too precious to be lost. Her dignity must go.
"And what did Dr Dudley say to that?" she asked, as carelessly as she could.
Matilda hesitated; but she felt a pardonable longing to repeat her own brave words.
"I don't know whether I ought to tell you," she said. "You see—Dr Dudley doesn't know you as well as I do. He said in that horrid sneering way of his, 'And do you know what induced her to come masquerading down here?' I gave him a piece of my mind, I can tell you." And Matilda repeated the retort which she had so often gone over with keen satisfaction in her own mind.
"You loyal little soul!" said Mona; but her face had turned very white.
"Dr Dudley asked such an extraordinary thing," Matilda went on. "He wanted to know whether you were—a medical student!"
Ah! so he had noticed her name in the lists. Then why had he not written to her at the School?
"Fancy his imagining such a thing! Pa told him you had no need to do anything for yourself."
Mona was too preoccupied to think of it at the time; but, before she left Borrowness, she broke to the Cooksons the astounding fact that, although she had no need to do anything for herself, she was a medical student.
When she came to think calmly over the incident which Matilda had narrated to her, she did not know whether to draw from it comfort or despair. She was not sorry that Dudley should have been angry,—angry enough to forget himself before little Matilda Cookson; but had he been content to condemn her unheard? Surely he could in some way have got a letter to her. Algiers and Cairo were far off, but they were not on the astral plane.
No, certainly Mona did not despair of her friend. It might have been better for her physically if she had. If she had been sure that he had forgotten her, she would have turned the key with a will on the suite of enchanted rooms; but the suspense, the excitement of uncertainty, was wearing out her strength.
When spring came round she was thoroughly ill. She went about her work as usual, but even her lecturers and fellow-students saw that something was wrong; and Sir Douglas implored her to give up medicine altogether.
"I ought to have trusted my own instincts," he said. "The very first day I saw your face, I felt sure that you were not the sort to make a doctor. That kind of work wants women of coarser fibre. There us no use trying to chop wood with a razor."
In vain Mona protested that medical work had nothing to do with it; that she could not live without her hospital. She was not prepared to suggest any other explanation, and Sir Douglas stuck to his point.
"Don't fret, dear," she said at last. "If you like, I will go and see Dr Alice Bateson to-morrow."
"Do!" he said emphatically. "I have a great mind to go and see her myself."
So next evening Mona found herself in a pleasant, airy consulting-room. Dr Bateson rose as her patient entered, and looked at her steadily, with the penetrating brown eyes.
"I am not ill," Mona said apologetically. "But I can't sleep much, and things get on my nerves; so I thought I would allow myself the luxury of consulting you."
"You do look seedy," was the frank reply, and the brown eyes kept firm hold of the white, sensitive face. "Over-working?"
"No."
"When is your next examination?"
"Not for eighteen months."
"So it isn't that?"
"No, it isn't that."
Dr Bateson put her fingers on the girl's pulse. Her manner could not be called strictly sympathetic—certainly not effusive—but there was something very irresistible in her profound and unassumed interest in her patients.
"Is something particular worrying you?" she said shortly.
Mona smiled drearily.
"There you have me," she said. "Something is worrying me. It lies entirely out of my power, so I cannot control it; and it is still uncertain, so I cannot make up my mind to it."
"And you can't shake it off, and wait?"
"I am afraid it is because I have failed in that, that I have come to you. I suppose I am demanding the impossible—asking you to 'minister to a mind diseased.'"
"I don't mind ministering to a mind diseased at all—if it is not too diseased to carry out my instructions. In this age of worry and strain one laughs at the stories of the old doctors, who declined to undertake a case if the patient had anything on his mind. They would not have a very flourishing practice now-a-days. Thousands of worries and not a few suicides might be prevented by the timely use of a simple tonic. Prosaic, isn't it?"
"Prove it true in my case, and I shall be grateful to you all my life. I don't play the part of invalid con amore."
"That I believe. What are you going to do with your Easter holiday?"
"I am not going to leave town,—at least not for more than a few days."
"Why not?"
Mona's appearance did not suggest the lack of means, to which Dr Alice Bateson was pretty well accustomed in her practice.
"I want to get on with my hospital work; and besides, it is work that keeps one sane."
"That is quite true up to a certain point. I suppose you have friends that you can go to?"
"Yes. My aunt wants me to go to Bournemouth with her," Mona admitted unwillingly.
"And is she a congenial companion?"
"Thoroughly; but I should mope myself to death."
"Not if you follow my advice. Live on the cliffs the whole day long, read what will rest you, and take a tonic that will make you eat in spite of yourself."
She asked a few more questions, and then consulted Mona very frankly about the ingredients of her prescription. Dr Bateson did not at all believe in making a mystery of her art, nor in drawing a hard-and-fast line between students and doctors.
"Thank you very much indeed," Mona said, rising and tendering her fee.
"Nonsense! we are none of us cannibals, as your great Scotch Æsculapius says. I don't take fees from students and nurses."
"But I am not studying in order to support myself."
"I can't help that. Now I wonder if you mean to take my advice as well as my tonic?" She asked the question quite dispassionately, as if it only interested her in an abstract way.
"If you don't accept a fee," Mona said, in an injured tone, "you bind me over to take your advice."
"Ah! if that's the case, I wish I could afford to refuse fees from all my patients. Good-bye. Send me a line from Bournemouth to tell me how you get on. I wish I could be of more use to you!" And for the first time a look of very genuine sympathy shot from the honest brown eyes.
"Well?" said Sir Douglas, when he saw Mona next day.
"Dr Bateson says I am to go to Bournemouth with Aunt Maud."
"Nonsense! Did she really?"
Warmly as Sir Douglas approved of women-doctors, it was a source of great surprise to him that they should recommend anything sensible.
And so it came to pass that Mona began by degrees to pick up fresh health and strength in spite of everything. She could not shake off her worry; but day by day, to her own surprise, it weighed on her more bearably.
One morning near the end of April she took up a copy of the Times, and her eye fell on the following notice—"On the 23d inst., at Carlton Lodge, Borrowness, Eleanor Jane, relict of the late George Hamilton, Esq., J.P. and D.L. of the County, in her 79th year."
"So she came home to die," Mona thought; "and now—now I suppose he will come up to London and go on with his work. I wonder if he will present himself at Burlington House for his medal next month? For, if he does, I shall see him."
And it was well that Presentation Day was so near, or Dr Bateson might have been disappointed, after all, in the results of her prescription.