CHAPTER LV.
LUCY TO THE RESCUE.
"I have an idea, Mona," said Lucy.
"Have you, dear? I wish I had!"
The two girls were in the Gower Street garden again, and Lucy was swinging lazily in the hammock, just as she had done that summer day nearly two years before.
"You know I told you the Pater had had a little money left him?"
"Yes, and very glad I was to hear it."
"Well, the more I see of what is being done in a medical way in the hub of the profession here, the more I am inclined to think it might be worth while for the Mater to come in to town."
Mona did not answer for a minute or two. She was trying to intensify her recollections of Mrs Reynolds's somewhat mysterious illness.
"I think it is extremely likely," she said at last.
"I would take her to Dr Bateson, get her to go into the case thoroughly, and then choose any specialist she liked—man or woman—to consult with. Don't you think that would be wise?"
"Very."
"It is perfectly awful to think how helpless people are who are quite outside the profession. I think it is worth while studying medicine, if only to be able to tell your friends whom, to consult,—or rather, whom not to consult."
"I know. When I am low-spirited I brood over all the people whose deaths I might have prevented, if I had known what I know now. If I were a reformer, like Miss Lascelles, there is one change I would try to work in the profession. Every family able to pay for a doctor at all should give a yearly amount to some sharp-eyed, keen-witted, common-sense man or woman, who would keep an eye on the children, and detect the first trace of struma, or lateral curvature, or any of the neuroses. He need not be a great don at all. He must understand the dynamics of a vital organism in relation to its surroundings——"
"The what?" said Lucy.
"——know the value of iron and cod-liver oil; and, above all, see when the moment has arrived to send for a specialist. It seems to me that half the mistakes that are made would be prevented, if that plan were carried out."
"Or you might adopt the Chinese system,—salary the doctor, and stop his pay when you get ill."
Mona laughed. "The fact is, the public have not begun to realise yet how medicine is specialised, and most doctors are afraid to tell them."
There was a few minutes' silence.
"Edgar Davidson took me over St Kunigonde's yesterday," said Lucy presently.
"Who is Edgar Davidson?"
"I wish somebody would prescribe for your memory, Mona. Believe me, the moment has come, when your jog-trot, common-sense adviser"—she bowed—"suggests a specialist. Don't you remember the boy we met at Monte Carlo?"
"Oh yes, to be sure."
"He is developing a very wholesome admiration for me."
"I thought boy-worshippers were the special appanage of middle-aged women, like myself!"
"He is not such a boy, after all," said Lucy, colouring slightly. "And all his worship is reserved for a wonderful fellow-student of his, whom he introduced to me yesterday—Dr Dudley."
Mona rearranged her cushions.
"Do you still believe in nice men, Mona?"
"I always did."
"Ah, that's a pity. You will never know the joys of conversion."
"Who has been converting the pessimist in the hammock?"
"Oh, I am a hopeless sceptic. But I like Dr Dudley all the same. He seems to have an awfully good influence on the students. He is a good deal older than they are, and he lives his life according to his own tastes, without posing as a saint or being mistaken for a muff. What I liked was his manner with those horrid dirty 'casuals.' And then he is just enough of a cynic to give an edge to it all."
"I am afraid I am too old to appreciate cynics."
"Poor soul!" said Lucy, in a tone of profound commiseration. "Life is indeed a thing of the past for you. Cynics are the spice of the world. However, it seems to me the Mater should come up at once. It would not do for her to be here during the hottest of the summer. I will write to her this very day."
She proceeded to alight from the hammock as she spoke.
"By the way, Mona," she said suddenly, "you must have seen Dr Dudley. He was Anatomy medallist."
"Yes," said Mona, and she said no more. She hoped the broad brim of her garden-hat would conceal the whiteness of her face.
This was almost the first time that any outsider had spoken to her of Dr Dudley, and she was amazed to find how strong was her sense of possession in him. It was very characteristic of her that, after the first moment of indignation, she scarcely blamed Dudley at all for his frigid greeting in Burlington Gardens. She realised vividly how things must look from his point of view—so vividly that, with that quick power of seeing both sides of a question which was her compensation for "not being a reformer," she saw also her own danger, and cried out in her heart, "Whatever happens, let me not lose my pride!"
"I want you to come and have tea with me at the Hall on Saturday," Lucy said, when the friends met at hospital a few days later. "Knowing your love for what you are pleased to call 'sensuous beauty,' I have asked Edgar Davidson's sister to meet you. She has just come home from San Remo, and she really is the prettiest girl I ever saw in my life."
"I would go a long way to see a really beautiful woman," said Mona laughing; "but I have a young friend whose swans show an awkward tendency to turn out ugly ducklings."
"Ah, well! wait till you see Miss Davidson."
And when Saturday afternoon came, Mona confessed that Lucy was right. There could be no doubt that Angela Davidson was a beauty. A winter in the South had banished every apparent trace of delicacy, while leaving behind a bloom that was really flower-like.
"Miss Reynolds tells me that Lady Munro is your aunt," she said to Mona. "Do you think she would mind my calling to thank her for her wonderful kindness to Edgar at Monte Carlo?"
"I am sure she would be delighted to see you," Mona answered warmly; "but I expect she has entirely forgotten the incident."
"I shall not forget it as long as I live. Edgar never knew what it was to have a mother; and it seems as if people understood by a kind of instinct how terribly unwilling I was to leave him without a sister."
"A propos of that," said Lucy, "Miss Maclean is a co-medallist with Dr Dudley."
Miss Davidson raised wondering eyes. "You must be awfully clever," she said simply.
"Oh no; I failed twice before I carried home the medal. Do you know Dr Dudley?"
She scarcely even blushed as she asked the question. She was delighted at her own assurance and self-possession.
The girl's beautiful face lighted up. "I should think I did," she said. "He has been the turning-point in my brother's life. There is no one in the world to whom I owe so much as to Ralph Dudley."
A curious pain shot through Mona's heart. She had never experienced anything like it before, and it was gone before she could ask herself what it meant.
A few minutes later she rose to go.
"I am afraid it is taking a great liberty, with any one so busy and so clever," Miss Davidson said, in her pretty childlike fashion, "but I should be so proud if you would come and see me next Thursday. Miss Reynolds has promised to come, and I am expecting some of my very best friends."
"I will come with pleasure," said Mona quickly; and this time a more perceptible colour rose into her white forehead. She wanted to see this beautiful girl again, and—it would be interesting to know whether "Ralph Dudley" was one of her "very best friends."
That night as she sat by the open window in the twilight, looking out on the lime-trees in the garden, the same unaccountable pain came over her, and she proceeded to analyse it mercilessly. For a long time she remained there with a deep furrow on her brow.
"I thought I had attained," she said at last. "Were they all for nothing, those years of striving after the highest, with strong crying and tears? I thought I had attained, and here I am, at the end of it, only a commonplace, jealous woman after all!"
"Well," said Lucy the next day, "did I exaggerate? or is she as sweet and as pretty as they make 'em now-a-days?"
"I think she is," Mona said reflectively. "But don't introduce her to other people as a 'sensuous beauty.' The word is misleading in that connection."
"So I suppose. I used it in strict accordance with your own definition."
"No doubt; but you will find that, on hearing it, the popular imagination flies at once to a Rubens' model."
"I am so glad you promised to go and see her on Thursday. I was afraid you would not. When you were gone, I made her promise to ask Dr Dudley to meet us."
"Lucy!"
"Why not? I like him, and it must be most refreshing to him, after all the learned women he meets, to have this ignorant, beautiful creature look at him with great worshipping eyes."
"And you don't mind her telling him that we wished to meet him?"
"Oh, she won't do that. I told her not to breathe the words 'medical student.' It would be enough to keep him away. A man does not go out to afternoon tea with the prospect of being waylaid on the threshold of the drawing-room by an advanced woman who invites him to 'forget sex.'"
But Mona was not listening.
"It is so schoolgirl, so undignified! I would not stoop to ask a mere acquaintance not to repeat something I had said."
But now it was Lucy's turn to fire up.
"And suppose she does repeat it?" she said. "Is it a crime to say one wants to meet a good and clever man, who is years and years older than one's self? If it is a crime, I can only say your influence over me for the last three years has been less elevating than I supposed. You have a perfect right to be inconsistent, Mona; but if you expect me to be inconsistent at the same moment, and on precisely the same lines, you might give me a little warning!”