A Novel
It was a delightfully gloomy old drawing-room. The quaint, heavily-curtained latticed windows, with their deep cushioned recesses, gave very little light. The furniture was almost as old as the faded family portraits that here and there broke the monotony of the oak-empanelled walls. It was the one place of all others in which to dream pleasantly over melancholy recollections. Just now, however, no one there could have been melancholy very long, for a bright, lithesome little figure flitted up and down, like a butterfly, carrying the sunshine with her into every dusky corner. In her tightly-fitting white frock, Edith Falconer appeared rather younger than she really was, for her blue eyes were frank and merry as a child’s. But sometimes there was an earnest, yearning look in them that made her graver and older than nineteen. Sometimes, too, she tried to look staid, but the laughing dimples in her cheeks always got the better of the frown on her white forehead; and perhaps no one knew this better than Edith herself. She was pretending to “put things to rights” by moving the ornaments out of their proper places, and by flicking at the prim, old-fashioned, straight-backed mahogany articles of furniture with a big bunch of feathers. But in reality she was travelling round the room, partly to kill time, and partly so as to have a peep into one tarnished old mirror after another; and, unlike most travellers, she was always satisfied with what she saw. She had the big bunch of feathers in one hand, but in the other she carried a coquettish little mortar-board cap; and this little square cap she put on her pretty little head whenever she came to a looking-glass, and then she nodded at its reflection pleasantly, and said gently to herself, “I think that will do for Master Tom!”
What a joke it was, she thought, to have found him out, especially as no one else, not even Hermione, knew anything about it. She had followed his route home from India, stage by stage. He had landed at Plymouth the morning before. He must be here by the 3.30 train. It was the only through train in the day, and if Cousin Tom missed that—why, he must be very unlike the Cousin Tom of three years back. But he wouldn’t miss it—she felt sure of that. People often had presentiments, and she had just now a presentiment stronger than any one else had ever had. She would punish him for not writing. She would pretend not to know him at all; and oh, would he find her changed?
Just then she heard the shriek of a railway whistle echoing and re-echoing across the little village green. She put on her gravest air at once. She leant her left arm on the big marble mantel-piece, and rested her dimpled chin on her hand, for, without quite knowing why, she felt nervous. She looked at the glass, for that was the best way to see Cousin Tom when he opened the door. But she would not turn round when he came, and not for a long time afterwards, for he really ought to have written.
“What can be the matter?” she thought. “Why doesn’t he come? How awfully white I look, and my cap is all awry!” She gave it a ferocious little tug to make it sit nicely, and then, before she could guess he was there, somebody had kissed her on the cheek.
She hardly knew at first what she did. She had never thought he would kiss her. She had a lump in her throat, and felt inclined to cry; and her face was horribly red as she turned round quickly from the glass.
“You here, Mr Thornton!” she said, as calmly and indifferently as she could. “Whoever expected to see you here!”
Then she took her handkerchief out of her pocket. She felt that if Tom did not speak she could not possibly help crying. But, as she looked at Tom, he appeared so cool and composed and so much older, that she thought better of it, and began to rub her cheek savagely with her handkerchief. Then she looked at Tom again, and in spite of his composure he was very, very like the Cousin Tom of three years back.
“Mr Thornton,” she said softly, “you shouldn’t have done that, and you shouldn’t have taken me by surprise. I hate myself, and feel quite ashamed of you. What would they say at Girton!”
“Girton, Edy!” cried Thornton. “What do you mean by Girton? Not that place at Cambridge surely, where strong-minded women go when they are young! Are you there?”
“Yes, Mr Thornton, I am at Girton College. I am there—at least I was there till yesterday morning.”
“What a shame, Edy!” exclaimed Thornton. “But bother Girton, and please don’t call me Mr Thornton. You kissed me at Portsmouth when I sailed for India. Now I come back again and kiss you, and you absolutely scowl! How you have grown, to be sure!”
“I really could not help it, Tom,” she said, rather ruefully. “There, you see it’s Tom now, not Mr Thornton. Three years makes a dreadful difference, of course; but I should have known you anywhere but for your moustaches. Have I improved too?”
“I am not quite sure,” answered Thornton, critically. “Please turn round. You were all zigzags and angles then, but you never rubbed your cheek in that aggravating way. You kept your handkerchief to wipe your eyes with, and I have always dreamt of you like that, Edy.”
“How very unkind of you,” said Edith, stealing a furtive glance at the nearest mirror. “What a red-eyed fright I must have looked!”
“No, no! Not rubbing your eyes, of course, but with the same strange, sad, wistful look I saw in them when we parted. And I have thought, often and often, how pleased you would be when I came marching home. Another illusion, I suppose. But how you have grown!”
“Please don’t keep harping on my growth like that, Tom,” exclaimed Edith. “I might be ten feet high by the way you talk! I really can’t help it. And I’m not an illusion. Have I improved or not, sir? The Girton girls are terribly hard to please, and I am only in the second class for looks.”
They were leaning, one on either side of a big marble mantelpiece, covered with cramped and grotesque carvings of saints and sirens and dolphins and mermaids, and all manner of medieval monsters, Edith, in a simple muslin dress that showed every curve and line of her supple, girlish figure, and Tom Thornton, in a loose suit of some soft home-spun Shetland stuff, embodied between them the careless, easy grace of the nineteenth century. They were each for the moment so full of the other, and so wrapt in early memories, that they were almost afraid to speak; and very young indeed they looked in the gloomy atmosphere of a dismal old chamber that had in the course of two or three centuries grown callous as to the fresh innocent feelings of any of the passing guests, who, before they made room for others in their turn, had paused to tell their loves and woes there. For a moment or two, to Edith, at all events, they were standing on enchanted ground, and the dismal old Priory drawing-room seemed to be distinctly haunted. Beautiful young ladies in powder and patches, and hoops and furbelows, descended from their picture-frames and flirted almost openly with spruce young gallants in big wigs, and stiff gorgeous waistcoats, and long cherry-coloured coats. Then Thornton, who had somehow or other been rather impressed, too, by the silent gloom of his surroundings, looked at Edith; but Edith would not look back; and then, as fate would have it, a sonorous Louis Quatorze clock struck four. They both started; and when the clock had finished striking, Edith, forgetting that she had just been joking, repeated, almost mechanically, “I was telling you, Tom, that I am only in the second class for looks at Girton.”
“Serve you right, Edy, for going to such an extraordinary place,” cried Thornton. “I don’t quite believe in the second class for looks; but still what you say is almost enough to make one see Girton, and the envy, hatred, and malice of it, and all its petty feminine jealousies. If I were a girl, though, I daresay I should have put you lower still; but as I am not a girl, I think you ought to be a double-first, with nobody proxime accessit, for even in India I never saw a woman who was a patch on you. But why did you, of all girls in the world, go to Girton?”
“Papa died, Tom,” said Edith gravely. “I wrote and told you. We had to do something. Fred and Charley went to Australia. I was not big enough for a sheep-farm; and you never wrote back. So Dr Hartley, who bought poor papa’s place when he died, sends me to Girton, and pays for me too. Isn’t that kind? Isn’t that liberal? And if I pass well, Dr Hartley promises that I shall walk the hospitals, and after that we shall live together, and fight on together, and make grand names for ourselves. Isn’t that generous?”
“Perhaps,” muttered Tom, doubtfully. “I don’t know. It seems an odd sort of arrangement, on the face of it, and I think I’d rather see Dr Hartley before I speak.”
Edith’s story was a very simple one. Her father, like many other country gentlemen roundabout, had wasted his fortune and estate in searching for iron-ore. When he died broken-hearted two years back, he was on the verge of bankruptcy. The property, and even the house, had to be sold to luckier people, and a few old friends sent his sons to the colonies. Thornton knew, of course, of his uncle’s death, but had been too lazy and too selfish in his pleasant Indian life to trouble himself about home affairs. He ought to have inquired; but as a matter of fact, Edith had never told him of the sale of the Priory, which had almost broken her heart at the time, or that she was living as a stranger in the house of her ancestors. He had never even known that Edith had lost her home, and had never properly realised her situation till he saw the tears in her eyes now.
“Poor girl!” he exclaimed, in a sudden fit of contrition. “What a brute I have been.”
Then as he tried to think of something pleasant to say, he took her hand for a moment.
“Thank you, Tom,” said Edith, withdrawing her hand, and giving him a kindly little pat on the arm with it. “I knew there must have been some mistake. I knew you would have written if you could. Of course, you thought I was living here as usual, or you would never have come straight on here, as you did.”
This was so obvious that Thornton forgave himself off-hand, and then at last he thought of something pleasant to say.
“I wish you would tell me, Edy,” he continued, “why you cut off all that beautiful hair of yours. It framed you like an aureole. Was it for fever? Or did those paragons of the first class for looks at Girton make you do it?”
“You are wrong, Tom, and unjust,” said Edith, smiling as brightly as before. “It is nice of you, of course, to talk of aureoles. But we, most of us, wear our hair short at Girton.”
“To be like men, I suppose?”
“Yes,” answered Edith thoughtfully; “I suppose so. But certainly not in the way you think. As for the men, you can’t imagine how we despise them (at Girton, I mean, and in a body of course); and we show them, whenever we can, that we require no adventitious adornments.”
“Stop! stop! Edy, stop!” cried Thornton. “This is terrible. You are the very last person I should have expected to hear talking like that.”
“I am sorry you don’t approve of me, Cousin Tom; but you need not call me ‘a person’ for all that. Education, like age, makes a difference, I suppose. And the army is not educated yet, is it?”
“Never mind the army, Cousin Edy,” said Thornton. “You are a schoolgirl on her first holiday, and I——”
“I am an undergraduate in vacation, if you please, sir; and you, what—a subaltern on leave?”
“Well,” exclaimed Thornton, “a holiday is a jolly good thing, whatever we call it. Don’t you remember my first holidays, when I came back with the guard in a luggage-train, and found you sobbing your heart out because the guinea-pigs had eaten up all their little ones?”
“Don’t!, Tom! And your second holidays too, when I tore almost as far as the Scrubbs to meet you on old Cherry, and——”
“Not exactly on a side-saddle?”
“Never mind the side-saddle,” exclaimed Edith, with a pretty little grimace. “I was not ten feet high then. And do you remember how I got the brush that Christmas, though there were nine grown-up ladies out? And how pleased papa was with you because old Jorkins sent him a lawyer’s letter to say you had cut out a great gap in his new wire-fencing, and with his own man’s pruning-hook, to let me through?”
“I remember everything,” said Thornton,—“I remember everything like yesterday, only better, right up to the last holidays of all, when you said you hated mistletoe, and your father said you were getting on.”
“Poor papa!”
“Poor uncle! What good old times they were! But they were my holidays then. What will you do with yours now that you have got them?”
Edith thought a little. They were both so happy now, and so full of exuberant spirits, that all her troubles seemed to lie years behind her.
“I think,” she said mischievously, “that I shall loaf, Tom,—loaf, as you men call it. I hate loafing, worse even than I hate Becky Elliot or the differential calculus; but one has to do it. You used to be fond of loafing, sir, and I wonder if you loafed much in India? And, pray, what were those ladies like who you were good enough to say were not ‘a patch’ on me? ‘Patch’ was what you said, wasn’t it? I must introduce that word at Girton, ‘Miss Elliot, you are not a patch on Elsie Stewart.’ Won’t that make her mad? But are those wonderful Indian ladies yon were talking of very, very black? And did you loaf much on board ship coming home, Cousin Tom?”
“They weren’t black at all,” said Thornton, rather indignantly, “and there was no loafing on board ship, I can tell you, not for a minute. They were much too lively for that. But there is something queer in the sea air in the tropics, Edy, that upsets all one’s theories completely.”
“It is just the same, Tom, in going over to the Isle of Man.”
“No, no, no! Edy,” interrupted Thornton. “I mean when you get used to it, of course. On the real ocean, all one’s theories of right and wrong are mixed up topsy-turvy. Everything and everybody is new and strange. Around you a melancholy ocean, above you a starlit sky, and there, close beside you on the quarter-deck, other sufferers full of sympathy and longing for consolation. Why, even the old Judge began to flirt most desperately after we passed Aden.”
“What fun! And you, Tom?” asked Edith. “Well, never mind about yourself. Tell me all about the other people, and I’ll guess it out about you. Tell me everything that went on, for the other girls will go back to Girton with such lots of stories, and I must have something to tell them.”
“I hardly know how to begin,” said Thornton. “But when we weren’t eating or drinking, we played ‘bull,’ and ‘buckets,’ and whist, and nap. We had ‘selling sweeps’ on the run, and the time of dropping anchor. We danced a little, and sung a little, and acted—well, a very little; and looked over the stern of the ship a good deal, at the phosphorus you know, and perhaps some of us flirted. The Judge now——”
“The Judge! I like that, Tom. The Judge!”
“A most amusing man, I assure you,” continued Thornton, “and the life and soul of the ship. His new love game——”
“His new——”
“Love game. It was very like the old one, though, and with the same sort of forfeits in it. But it was delightful to see the fat, grey-haired old buffer on his knees before the youngest girl in the ship.”
“What a funny Judge!” exclaimed Edith indignantly, “and what a queer game, and what a queer girl she must have been! How did you say he played it?”
“I said nothing at all about the way he played it. But I am the Judge. I go down on my knees, I take your hand, I——”
“For shame, Tom!” cried Edith. “Get up, please, get up at once. What donkeys we should look if anybody came in. We are grown up now! I was so glad to see you at first, that I almost forgot that I am grown up now. Tom, don’t be so ridiculous.”
“And wasn’t I glad to see you, too! But one moment, Edy. I am only the Judge, you know, but everything here reminds me of the dear old times. I take your hand, and what a pretty little hand it is——”
And before Edith could snatch it away, Thornton had lifted it tenderly to his lips.
“Tom,” she cried, “get up, for heaven’s sake, get up! Of course—I knew it!”
Just then a lady, and a very tall and stately lady too, entered the room. Thornton sprang to his feet, and Edith started from the little low chair in which she had been sitting.
“Mr Thornton,” she said quickly, “this is Dr Hartley, the kindest and dearest friend I have; Dr Hartley, Dr Hermione Hartley—Dr Hermione, as we all call her here.”
Edith’s dearest friend drew herself back a little stiffly, and looked so severely at them both that Thornton lost his head altogether.
“Dr Hartley!” he exclaimed. “Dr Hermione! A woman! The devil!”
“Sir!” cried Hermione; and then she turned round disdainfully. “Edith, Edith! will you explain?”
“It is too absurd to explain, Hermione,” ejaculated Edith. “It was all Tom’s fault. It was the Judge’s love game. It was——”
“I beg your pardon,” cried Thornton, beginning to recover a little confidence; “I would never have spoken as I did, if I had not been so dreadfully taken aback. I knew you were a doctor, and I didn’t know you were a woman; and really, I only meant that you were not so black as you had been painted.”
Hermione, as Edith knew to her cost, seldom lost her temper. She lost it for once now. “Tom!” she said scornfully. “The Judge’s love game! A woman! The devil! Not so black as I am painted! And why should I be black at all, sir?”
“Hermione, dear,” said Edith humbly, “don’t be so horribly cross. I spoke of you as Dr Hartley, and how could he know you were a woman? He has only come from India this very afternoon. The most beautiful people are as black as black can be there; and I don’t think he can help what he says.”
“Then I am sorry for both of you,” exclaimed Hermione, recovering her temper. “I am always glad to see any of your friends, Edith, but I confess I don’t like charades by daylight.”
“It’s not a charade,” murmured Edith, plaintively.
“What is it, then?” asked Hermione, beginning to look a little stern again.
“It’s cousin Tom from Rawal Pindi.”
“Your cousin in the army! And I took him for a medical student. But, Edith, why didn’t you tell me he was coming? My head is in a whirl. Please explain.”
Just then Dr Jones opened the door. He carefully placed his thick oak stick and his worn old wideawake hat on the marble-topped table near the first window, and then he came on in the leisurely placid way that people who were strange to him often thought his chief characteristic.
But even Dr Jones was nonplussed for once.
“Holloa, Hermione!” he cried. “I never saw you so flustered before. Holloa, Tom, my boy! You back again! How you have grown!”
Edith laughed quietly to herself at this, and she thought, as she looked at Tom, “I am so glad he says that.”
“But how you have filled out,” continued Dr Jones, studying him professionally. “And what a pretty welcome you seem to be having. And why are you all glaring at one another? Will nobody speak? Miss Edith, you are generally voluble enough; explain, please.”
“I can’t, Dr Jones,” said Edith. “Please, don’t ask me anything about it. Ask Hermione.”
Then before Hermione could speak, she leant across the sofa and whispered into her ear, “Hermione, dear, don’t be so ridiculous; I will explain everything to you by and by.”
“Well, Hermione,” continued Dr Jones good-naturedly, “don’t keep me on the tenter-hooks longer than necessary. Edith says you know all about it. What is the matter with you all?”
“Dr Jones,” said Hermione, “there is nothing the matter with any of us that I know of. I only found him——”
“Kissing her!” cried Dr Jones. “Of course. I am deuced glad, deuced glad. It will do her good, and do you good too, with your theories and your colleges, and your nunneries and your nonsense.”
Dr Jones ought to have a chapter to himself. His cynicism—and he is very cynical—has been fostered by the milk of human kindness. He will probably tell you, if you ask him, that the growth of a cancer is quite as interesting as the development of a rose. But people whose business or whose pleasure it is in these restless times to journey round the world, to visit strange cities, to hide for a while in the desert, and to study human nature when they meet it, all of them somehow or another come back, jaded and worn, to the place of their birth at last, and there they find Dr Jones—or their old country doctor, whatever name he bears—going exactly the the same rounds he went when they were boys. His hair is greyer, his step perhaps a trifle slower, and his fine face even more benevolent than it was. But Dr Jones himself has only ripened for the better. Some of us should probably think his narrow round a treadmill, but it contains in its restricted boundaries an epitome of the world. There is no phase of human nature with which he is not familiar. Crime and disease and suffering are the books in which he has studied daily for more than thirty years. He accepts them as inevitable, and to their alleviation he has devoted a life which, in his student days, was probably as full of adventure as any traveller’s. Disease is his peculiar province; but he knows more of crime and suffering than any policeman or relieving officer or magistrate in the county. He has sympathy and hope for all, and for many a cure. Disease and suffering are fungoid growths that he analyses up to midnight with the aid of the latest scientific journals. They belong to humanity as much as he does. They are phenomena to be studied almost microscopically, and to be reduced and relieved by science. But for himself, and for the narrow circle of his real friends, Dr Jones has a different code altogether. The crime there must have its punishment, and the sufferer his penalty. But Dr Jones’s daily work is with the unhappy people who have no code at all, and not much chance of ever having any. They grumble at him when he comes, but for all that the sound of his big umbrella on the threshold is the pleasantest music they hear all through the four-and-twenty hours of every dreary day. Dr Jones is cynical, but everybody discounts his cynicism, and many of the stupid old men and women whom he contrives to keep alive, treasure up the almost forgotten mystery of his bitterness as one of the pleasantest secrets of their own useless lives.
Just then, however, Dr Jones was still standing in the middle of Hermione’s drawing-room in a state of amused bewilderment. No explanation seemed to be forthcoming, and before he had taken a seat, so as to continue his investigations at leisure, the footman announced a strange visitor—Major Dundas.
“What a godsend!” whispered Edith to Tom. “Who is he, Tom? Introduce us quickly all round,—that will stop Hermione.”
While the introductions were being duly made, afternoon tea was brought in, and Hermione was soon doing her best to show Major Dundas that he really had not come at an inopportune moment.
Major Dundas had a bronzed face that in profile reminded one not unpleasantly of an eagle. He had keen black eyes, and a black moustache, just sprinkled with grey. His bearing was soldier-like, and his manner, as he spoke to Hermione, was very quiet and wonderfully courteous. This distinct and chivalric and deferential way of addressing a lady seems to have gone sadly put of fashion of late; but there is nothing that women even now appreciate better.
“Who is he, Tom?” asked Edith, when the others were all pleasantly engaged in conversation.
“Major Dundas? Oh, he is a wonderful man the Major. Always keeping me out of scrapes, and always getting into them himself. A good unselfish old fellow, if ever there was one, and the only man I’ve known, Edy, who really believes in me.”
“Why does he do that? He has such a nice, clever, sensible face too. Is he very old?”
“Yes, more than forty.”
“What a fine face he has, though,” said Edith, “and how clever he must be to keep you out of scrapes. Just look over there, Tom. He has got you out of another scrape already. He has tamed Hermione off-hand.”
“That is Major Dundas’s little way, Edy; and that is what I meant by saying he was always getting into scrapes himself. He is a wonderful ladies’ man.”
“I don’t believe it,” cried Edith at once. “He looks far too nice for that; and Hermione never took him for a medical student. I’ll say something pleasant of her by and by, and smooth everything down, and then have it out with you, sir, for making me look such a goose.”
Afternoon tea, once you have fallen under its spell, has an extraordinary advantage over all the other meals in the day. You can sit where you like, and talk to whom you please, and, in the hum of general conversation, say what you wish. Edith thought that this particular afternoon tea was nicer than the nicest dinner-party she had been to. However, in the middle of it a message came for Hermione. Her patients, it seems, were waiting for her in the consulting-room, and she rose at once.
“Tuts, Hermione!” cried Dr Jones, impatiently. “Sit down, my dear. Tell George to give them half-a-crown each instead; that’s the very best physic in your pharmacopoeia. Would you believe it, Major Dundas, this accomplished young woman, known to the whole of our little town as Dr Hermione, when she might as Miss Hartley have London at her feet, devotes her nights and days to a set of village harpies and harridans, who gobble up all her game and her grapes, and drink all her port-wine, and pocket most of her money, and then call me in whenever they have a real pain in their insides? Send them half-a-crown each, Hermione, and sit down.”
“And she sits down,” said Edith softly to Tom. “Now I’ll mollify her. Dr Jones, you are most shamefully and horribly unjust.”
“Perhaps so, Miss Edith,” said Dr Jones in his most benevolent tones; rivalry, perhaps. “I happen, however, to know there is not a single case of illness in the village that could come here in person, which brings the question to what you would now call the reductio ad absurdum. And then, my dear young lady, you might, in spite of Girton, be a little warm too, if you had happened to have been Hermione’s guardian for more than ten years, and still went to bed every night expecting to find her taken up for manslaughter every morning.”
“I expect to find her famous every morning, Dr Jones. Hermione resolved to be a doctor when she was quite a child, Tom, and she has stuck to her work like a——”
“Man, Edy?” suggested Tom.
“No, sir—a brick. And when all the medical schools here were shut against her, she went to Paris and took her degree there, and beat all the men, or nearly all the men. And now, when she spends her time and her money and her life in doing good, Dr Jones and his brethren——”
“My dear,” said Dr Jones placidly, “I brought you both into the world. Say what you like.”
“I shan’t, Dr Jones,” continued Edith. “I shall only say that Hermione’s life is my ideal life, and that I mean to join her when I am fit for it. Look at the immense amount of misery, far and wide, that no mere man can alleviate. Now, Tom,” said Edith aside to him, as she twitched his sleeve, “you say something.”
“Edith, you are right,” echoed Thornton, rather too sententiously. “You make me speak in spite of myself——”
“Like Balaam’s beast, eh, Tom?” inquired Dr Jones.
“Well, he spoke to the point, too, Doctor. Old Surgeon-Major Dick often told us over mess of the purdah ladies up at Pindi. He never saw more of them than their tongues through a curtain, and so he could not help them much. That was because he was a man; and though he hated women, even old Dick used to own that in India lady-doctors had a grand mission.”
“There, Dr Jones!” cried Edith, turning round. “You are always scolding Hermione for wasting her health, and her wealth, and her looks—think of that! Think of those poor secluded creatures in India, and there are millions and millions of them out there! Isn’t that a mission for any girl to be proud of? Dr Jones, you are hopeless. Gentlemen from India, I appeal to you!”
“Wait a little, Miss Edith,” said Dr Jones, gently. “We do not happen to be in India just now, and Hermione doesn’t find many of her old women shrinking behind curtains. Not a bit of it; it is rather the other way, I fancy. And to be candid, Hermione, I don’t care two straws what the gentlemen from India say they think. They admire you (and who could help it, my dear?) and not your trade. They would admire you and Miss Edith ten times more if either of them were singing a duet with either of you, or helping you on to a horse, or waltzing down a ball-room, or sitting out a quadrille in a draughty corridor.”
“Stop, Dr Jones,” answered Hermione. “The attack is unprovoked. I have said nothing yet; but be just as well as incisive. Did you ever know me sing a duet or go to a ball?”
“Or do you really think, Dr Jones,” cried Edith, rising in her indignation, “that Hermione would like any man, or even permit any man to admire her, or that I——?”
“Not two at once, my dears, if you please. But the Major, I see, is on my side. You said ‘Exactly so,’ I think, Major Dundas, and so say I. The young ladies have betrayed themselves. There is one thing the cleverest women, Miss Edith—to say nothing of the cleverest women-doctors, Hermione—will never obtain,—and that is, experience of human nature, a common doctor’s stock-in-trade. You all think you are each different from everybody else.”
“I am sure we don’t, Dr Jones,” said Edith.
“Yes, you do, my dear. So many women, if you listen to them, as I have done for thirty odd years, so many cases. Hermione, I daresay, can rattle off all the muscles and bones and arteries, and heaven knows what beside, much more glibly than I can. But does she believe that there is anything in common between her and her red-armed housemaid down-stairs?”
“I don’t believe it either,” cried Thornton. “Different clay, different souls, Doctor. Look at Sevres china and——”
“I daresay! Your Dr Dick didn’t find that, I’ll be bound, in the black ladies’ tongues he saw through their curtains, supposing he ever saw them there, and that this isn’t what Miss Edith in her unregenerate days would have called one of your old tarradiddles, Master Tom. Not a bit of it. If you want a champion, Hermione, why don’t you ask the Major to take up the glove?”
“Thank you, Dr Jones,” said Hermione, smiling.
“I don’t want a champion. Edith may. She was apparently giving a brief to Mr Thornton when I came in. But I really don’t understand Edith to-day.”
“Well, we’ll leave Edith and the gentlemen alone, Hermione, and we’ll look at your dear friend Mrs Percival, the best and happiest and comeliest woman on this side of the county. She thought like you once, and I remember her far thinner than you ever were, and a perfect little vixen. She teased her father out of his life, and worried her mother into promising she should be a hospital nurse or a Sister of Mercy, or something of that kind; for, thank God! there were no lady-doctors then.”
“Dr Jones,” cried Edith, “how can you!”
“One moment, Miss Edith. Her mother, poor soul, fretted over this till I was called in. I wrote my prescription out at once. She rang for her footman to take it to the chemist’s. ‘You had better let me read it over first, ma’am,’ I said; and I began—‘Why doesn’t Julia marry young Percival? That would stop all this hospital nonsense, and stop all your headaches, and hers too.’”
“Sensible advice that, Doctor,” began Major Dundas.
“And a sensible woman, sir. ‘No, John,’ she answered, when the footman asked if he should go to the chemist’s as usual,—‘run over to the cricket-ground, and tell Mr Percival we expect him to dine here to-night.’ “
“Well, Doctor, and the result?” asked Dundas and Thornton simultaneously.
“The result? You didn’t catch either of the young ladies asking what the result was! ‘Doctor,’ said Mrs Percival to me one afternoon, with tears in her eyes, ‘I was far worse than ever you thought. You cured me. I always tell my husband so.’ ‘Tuts, nonsense, madam! your husband knows more about it than I do,’ I cried, taking her baby from the nurse’s arms. ‘That’s what cured you! You have something of your own to care for now, and I daresay you are cutting down Mr Percival’s subscriptions to the hospitals already.’ And so she was.”
“Thank you, Dr Jones,” said Hermione, rising. “I have stood worse banter than that in my day, and I am certainly not going to put off my patients because you chaff me before two gentlemen, strange to you and strange to me, who cannot possibly know how little you mean.”
“I mean nothing, Hermione,” cried Dr Jones, rising too. “If you are vexed I withdraw every word I said.”
“It is too late. And, absurd as it is, I am vexed—a little. I really cannot help going now, Major Dundas. But you must both dine here to-night, and then perhaps, Dr Jones, I shall take my revenge, and tell them how it was that I resolved, as Edith says, to be a doctor, and why I stuck to it so as to do a little good—in a woman’s way, of course—where Dr Jones was doing so much. Major Dundas, don’t you judge Dr Jones by his words.”
“Pray don’t, Major,” said Dr Jones. “Hermione, I plead guilty, and throw myself on the mercy of the court.”
“Don’t listen to him, Major Dundas,” answered Hermione. “His tongue is as sharp as one of his own lancets, but his heart is softer than mine or Edith’s. The half-crown he speaks of plays a far more important part in his pharmacopoeia than in mine, and is a far bigger tax on his income. My dear old guardian, you have teased me shamefully, and vexed me a good deal, but I really can’t on that account keep those poor old creatures waiting any longer. I must go now; and, Edith, you must see that the gentlemen come back here to dinner. The Dragon is not a bad place to stay at, but its dinners are not exactly famous.”
“Bravo, Hermione!” cried Dr Jones, as she closed the door behind her. “And except when she referred to me, every word she says is literally true. She was fifteen, Major, when they found that wretched ironstone on her little bit of an estate, and made an heiress of her. She changed completely. She insisted on being fit for something, and upon spending her money in doing good to others.”
“And so she became a doctor?”
“Yes. But no one will ever know what misery and suffering and persecution that sensitive young girl suffered for years!”
“She must have had plenty of pluck, Dr Jones?” suggested Dundas.
“Pluck is no word for it. Her whole heart is in her work. And, by gad! she does it like a nun or like a saint. If she thinks of men at all, she thinks of them as she thinks of the medical students who used to hoot her. She knows absolutely nothing of the real world outside her consultation-room, and she will very likely fall into the hands of the first young jackanapes, with melancholy eyes and a sympathetic manner, who hears of her fortune, and is ’cute enough to insinuate all she has lost by devotion to an impossible ideal.”
“Precisely so, Doctor,” exclaimed Thornton. “To borrow a phrase of yours, that’s the very way I diagnosed Dr Hermione from the first.”
“I was neither speaking to you nor at you, Master Tom. But since Miss Edith and Major Dundas appear to have found an interesting topic, you may like to ask me about the old folks here? You don’t, eh? Well, Molly Barnes is back again. She is not one of Miss Hartley’s patients, but she is one of mine. That’s all, Master Tom. Molly broke down in London, poor soul. She is a wreck now, and I daresay she would be glad to talk over all the old days with you. Miss Edith, whatever is Major Dundas telling you?”
“About Tom, Dr Jones,” cried Edith. “Tom, they used to abuse you here, but I had no idea you were a hero in India.”
“No more had I,” said Dr Jones, gruffly. “Perhaps Major Dundas will give a lecture to the village on the subject before he goes. But in the meantime, if the gentlemen care to walk down to the Dragon before dinner, I am going their way, so you might as well come too, Miss Edith. I want to see the effect of your hat upon our only milliner.”
Edith waited behind with Thornton until the others had gone. She was trying to button a glove, and when she had given that up in despair, she raised her soft blue eyes to his. “Understand one thing, Tom,” she said quietly—“your conduct today was simply horrid. I was so glad to see you that I let you do what you liked, and now you can’t despise me more than I despise myself. I will never speak to you again, never—if you tell Major Dundas anything about that wretched old Judge’s miserable game.”
Life is a parody of something better, and so is every phase of it; and as soon as the party from the Priory drawing-room were fairly started on their afternoon stroll, the party in the snug little housekeeper’s room down below continued the interminable comedy. Mrs Price, the housekeeper, had been Edith’s nurse. Blood is thicker than water, but milk is thicker than blood; and Mrs Price still loved Edith more than she had ever loved any of her own children. Mrs Price was in Hermione’s pay now; but even on the first day of each month she always thought of Hermione as an interloper, and never, in talking to her, seemed quite certain about her social rank. It spoke volumes for Miss Hartley’s good-natured indifference that she invariably looked upon Mrs Price as an admirable servant. On this particular afternoon Mrs Price was unusually flustered. She had been making conserves all the morning, and through some occult sense, altogether perhaps peculiar to old servants, she knew everything that had happened upstairs since the first strange knock at the door, Mrs Price, too, had a soft spot in her heart for Master Tom, whom she had known a little longer than she had known Edith. She was glad to see him through the window, but sorry that he had come; and these contrary feelings were beginning to put her into a very bad temper, when George, the coachman’s son, humblest and most subservient of footmen, knocked at the door of the housekeeper’s room and entered discreetly.
“Can’t you see that I am busy with the pots?” said Mrs Price, crossly. “Be good enough to wait till I call for you before you knock.”
“Beg your pardon, ma’am,” answered George, clumsily, “but I couldn’t wait. I had to knock first. There’s a man from Egypt, Mrs Price, with a letter for an officer here, and I thought you’d like to see him before I sent him on to the Dragon.”
George knew that he was safe here, for what little interest Mrs Price could spare from Miss Edith had for the last few months been devoted to matters Egyptian.
“Thank you kindly, George,” she cried; “I thank you kindly for intruding. But where is he, George, and is my cap straight? You always were considerate, George, except about the dishes and the girls.”
Corporal Seton entered the room as she spoke, and Mrs Price forthwith forgot all about her pots.
“Sir, sir,” she exclaimed, “do you know my son in Egypt?”
The corporal had, however, learnt from long experience to be very slow of speech. He looked at Mrs Price for some time before he answered her, and then he spoke thoughtfully.
“Know your son in Egypt, ma’am?” he said. “Not to my knowledge, ma’am. Not a soul do I know in Egypt, but the blackamoors on the banks of the blooming canal. What’s your son’s name, ma’am, if I might make bold to ask? And what’s your son?”
“Price; a soldier like yourself, sir, and a handsome man, a fine set-up man, too. There were three of them. Jim’s the last, poor lad, and the tallest.”
“There were likewise two of us, Mrs Price, and likewise I am the last,” answered Seton. “But don’t you take on. It was India we went to, not Egypt; and Egypt’s not India. It’s a rare hungry, healthy place, the little I saw of it. All sand, ma’am, like Margate, but more so. There’s no jungle-fever there; why, you might cover all the jungle round with one pocket-handkerchief. And as for the cholera morbus, they made the canal on purpose to let it through without touching. Ask Major Dundas, Mrs Price. He’ll tell you; he knows everything. He’ll know where your son is.”
“That’s what I thought as I watched him through the window. ‘You’re an officer,’ said I to myself, ‘if ever there was one, and I wish my Jim was with you.’ What’s he like now, the Major?”
“Gold, ma’am! All pure gold! No carrots about the Major! The kindest, truest, bravest officer that ever stepped! That’s all!”
“That’s all, sir, and that’s enough. My thoughts to a tee, as I watched him through the window.”
“But begging your pardon, ma’am,” interrupted Seton quickly, “that’s not all. I was speaking when you spoke. You asked what the Major was like, and I waited to think over my answer. He is a kind man, and a true man, and a brave man. But Mrs Price, ma’am, you should see him killing the natives off in a flare-up—that’s the Major. You should see him nursing them in the hospital afterwards—that’s the Major. Ask the chief, ask the colonel, ask the chaplain, ask the doctor, ask the drummer-boy, ask me,—that’s the Major as we see him. If you want more, Mrs Housekeeper, ask the ladies, who are always flirting and fooling at him—that’s the Major too.”
“There you are, George, with your wimmin!” cried Mrs Price, turning fiercely round on the unlucky lad who was gazing in admiration at the corporal. “There you are with your wimmin. The East Indies out there, and the servants’ hall here! They are all much of a muchness to a lad like you. But to think that a fine grown man like the Major should be fond of the ladies!”
“You’ve laid hold of the wrong end of the stick, Mrs Price. It’s the ladies who are fond of the Major, if you please.”
“That’s another pair of shoes, of course; and Master Tom?”
“Mr Thornton! Oh, he’s fond of them, or says so; but he’s a blooming sight fonder of himself. Gold, ma’am, gold, and tinkling brass. Why, when the Major rides by in the morning, there’s something in his eyes that makes the women in the lines run out, and hold their babbies up, and cry, ‘God bless you!’”
“And Master Tom?”
“Oh, he looks at ’em differently. But I only hear what their men say. I am not a family man myself, ma’am.”
“Then Master Tom hasn’t changed much, I take it. But, Lord of Mercy, here they are with a rush!”
Edith had had a happy walk down to the Dragon with Dr Jones. Thornton and the strange gentleman had both been much interested in her quaint little stories of Girton life. Her cap had secured exactly the right amount of attention in the village; and several old women had come out of their cottages to curtsey at Tom. Tom himself had seemed quite vexed more than once to see how interested she and Major Dundas were in each other’s conversation. Then Hermione had joined the party, and Edith was left behind to walk with old Dr Jones. When he went off home she waited behind till the others had turned the corner, and then she hurried to the Priory by a short cut through the park. She ran breathlessly to the drawing-room, and tried to repeat her old tour of inspection. Two hours ago her little journey had seemed a sort of triumphal progress; now every old tarnished mirror, as she looked into it, reflected nothing more than the head of a very cross young woman, with a flushed face, and hair cropped short like a tomboy’s.
“What a fool I was to cut it off!” she cried, when she stopped for a moment at a mirror that was not quite so bad as the others. “What a fool I was to cut it off! It framed me like an aureole, he said. I hate Tom; I hate myself; I quite hate Hermione.”
“My dearie, my dearie!” cried Mrs Price, who had been watching her excited journey round the room ever since she had entered it. “My dearie, don’t take on like that. Whatever has upset you so, Miss Edy?”
“Oh, Price, how you startled me!” said Edith. “What has upset me? Nothing—— Yes, something. Tom has come back again, and I have fought with him already!”
“I saw him through the window,” said Mrs Price, soothing her as if she had been a child. “But why, Miss Edy, why?”
“Because I’d cut my hair off, and he kissed me.”
“Well, to be sure!” cried Mrs Price. “Your mamma always was particular, but she never would have objected to that.”
“I know she wouldn’t, Price. He had been away for three years. But then, that horrid Hermione was there! And Tom’s my cousin, not hers. Hers indeed! I wish I were going back to Girton tomorrow.”
“My dearie! Dr Hermione! And you think so much of her.”
“No, I don’t. Stop! Hush, Price; here she is.”
Hermione, as she dropped her cloak on to a sofa, formed as striking a contrast to Edith as it would be easy to find. She was a tall woman, tall and stately, with broad shapely shoulders that made her waist look slimmer than it was. She was cast in a large mould, but everything about her was gracious, and every movement graceful. Her features, though regular and finely cut, were habitually placid, but there was something imperious in the poise of the neck and head. Her large grey eyes were at once penetrating and pathetic. They were limpid and clear enough to show that she did not know much of the world; yet she had evidently studied other people sufficiently to feel always sure of herself; and if she could not understand the varying moods of Edith’s impetuous temper, she could at all events sympathise with her.
“Edith, my dear,” said Hermione gently, “I am afraid that something has put you out a little. Perhaps, when Mrs Price goes, you will kindly tell me what it all means.”
Mrs Price retired rather sulkily.
“I don’t know, Hermione,” said Edith, when Mrs Price had gone; “I really don’t. I’m very sorry. I’ll go back to Girton directly if you wish it.”
“Wish it! Nonsense, dear,” said Hermione. “I only want to make your holidays as pleasant as I can. But why did you stop behind like that, and why did you say you wished you were back at Girton before all those men? They’ll think I am a regular martinet in petticoats.”
“Oh, they won’t. They’ll only think me a simpleton. But, Hermione, doesn’t it seem silly of me to be a sort of a schoolgirl in a cap like this when you are a real doctor?”
And here Edith snatched her little cap from her head, and threw it half across the room.
“‘Silly,’ dear?” said Hermione. “Don’t be stupid. Not at all silly, Edy. You are much younger than I am——”
“Hermione, how good of you! But then Tom made me look such a goose.”
“Poor Mr Tom! I thought nothing of that. I have never had time to be a real girl myself. Sometimes I wish I had. There, Edy! And then Mr Thornton looks like a bit of a goose himself.”
“Cousin Tom look like a goose!” cried Edith, jumping to her feet, and forgetting her contrition altogether. “Cousin Tom look like a goose! Why, poor papa always used to say that Cousin Tom’s looks would ruin him!”
“Well, Edith,” rejoined Hermione meekly, “I hope your father was wrong; but you ought to know best. Mr Thornton is the Apollo Belvedere of your school-room days, I daresay, and I never had any. He is certainly a gentleman; and he is not a medical student; and I never really thought he was. You have three points in his favour, from your own way of looking at him, and I daresay I could give you a point or two in from mine. But what a striking-looking man Major Dundas is; there is a mystery and a meaning in every line of his rugged sunburnt face.”
“Yes, perhaps there is. But surely you can’t compare the two.”
“A general,” said Hermione, “would, I think, know which to choose.”
“Yes,” cried Edith; “but what a blind, silly old general he would be! Why, Tom is twenty years younger than Major Dundas!”
“And Major Dundas is twenty years wiser than Mr Thornton, and twenty times cleverer!”
“And Dr Jones,” cried Edith impatiently, “is twenty times cleverer than Major Dundas!”
“I think he is.”
“Then Dr Jones’s great-grandfather, if he were alive now, would be your ideal man, I suppose, Hermione?”
“He would certainly be interesting from an historical point of view. But, Edith, I don’t want to tease you, dear. You and I have each our own work cut out. We must be thoroughly in earnest, or we shall be like Dr Jones’s Sirs Percival.”
“Of course we shall,” said Edith. “Oh, Hermione, I do try to be earnest and thorough, and I really mean to be a doctor too, by-and-by. I would work my eyes out to be like you! But I could never, never, never bring myself to draw comparisons between Major Dundas and Tom. Why, there is Tom listening!”
This was not quite true; but just as Edith stopped, Thornton and Major Dundas and Dr Jones entered the room. They were dressed for dinner, and Dr Jones was good-naturedly satirical about the young ladies’ forgetfulness as to merely mundane matters. They went off at once to dress, and as Edith was going into her bedroom Hermione gave her a kiss,—and this from Dr Hermione was a very wonderful proceeding indeed.
The days passed quickly by, but they were days worth months. Even from the first the presence of Major Dundas had prevented any of the little awkwardnesses that sometimes follow the meeting of friends who have been parted. Before long, however, Hermione and her guests seemed to be one family party, and to have known each other all their lives. To Hermione, and in a lesser degree to Edith, the change from a seclusion almost ascetic, and breathing of the nunnery, to a healthy buoyant life in the open air was singularly exhilarating. For some time back, as it happened, Hermione had depended on herself or Dr Jones for any little entertainment she might get. Now she had two most energetic men catering for her pleasure and theirs; and military men from India are not only keen caterers for pleasure, but experts in making things go smoothly. They never obtrusively suggested anything. They shot and fished and rode whenever there was nothing better to be done. But, somehow or other, the ladies gradually fell into their ways, and began to ride and fish too, and sometimes they used to drive down with the luncheon-basket so as to help the men to count the hares and partridges and moor-fowl.
In that wonderful country of lakes and mountains and bleak moors and broad stretches of yellow sea-sand, the early autumn is generally the loveliest time of the year; and so it was now. From the Priory they could ride to the foot of one of the great lakes, and there take the steamer if they chose, or better still, a small boat, with Thornton and Dundas to manage the sails or to row them on and on till they were all fairly tired; and then they could come back by train. Or when they did not care to venture so far afield, they returned in the twilight, riding lazily or sauntering along; and no matter whether they were on horseback or afoot, there was a keen physical delight in returning home in the gloaming across low-lying meadows, and along the banks of streams and tarns and rivers, and through gloomy thickets of larch and coppices of young oak-trees and pine-woods, that filled the evening air, as they rode or walked, with sharp pungent odours. The sturdy dalesmen, whenever they loitered at the quaint little country inns, told them legends of great wrestlers and great poets. The poets had long since disappeared, but now and then some venerable giant was persuaded by his woman-folk to show them his belts and cups and other trophies of wrestling immortality. And the inns themselves—half inn, half farmhouse—were very curious; while nothing could well be more substantial, and at the same time more tempting, than the evening meal served at each of these little hostelries under the homely name of “a meat tea.” The trout came fresh from the nearest stream; the potted char had a flavour as delicate and rare as its faint aroma; the mountain mutton tasted like venison, and the mountain honey of the heather. At all the smaller inns the refreshments were served in the “parlour,” a room that was always daintily clean, and in which the home-spun tablecloths were the finest of all fine linen. But even the “parlour” was scarcely so scrupulously clean as the kitchen.
There the white floor was strewn with red sand that crunched pleasantly as you trod on it. Overhead the “rannel balk” was piled with home-made cheeses, and the black oak rafters were hung with great sides of bacon and huge hams, that had been smoked for weeks in the broad chimneys, and with nets full of eggs, and wherever there was place for them, rows on rows of thick oatcakes, doubled in the middle, and suspended on strings, and almost enamelled with dust.
Outside, at the back, the cows lowed in their byres till the bare-armed farming wenches came to milk them; and in a little bar-room, somewhere well in the front, the dalesmen drank their beer in great pewter-pots, on which their grandfathers had scratched their names before them.
It was difficult to pass any one of these little roadside hostelries without wishing to halt, and at all of them alike a comely landlady came out to make you as welcome as if you were her own especial guest. Then, after a rest, one or another of their little party invariably proposed a stroll through the sweet-scented fir-trees, to see the distant view of shimmering water, through the vista of tall tree-trunks that in the solemn twilight hours looked like the aisle of some leafy but immeasurable cathedral; or to stand silently in the woods listening to the owls far away, or watching the squirrels, close at hand, as they darted nimbly through the branches, or ran noiselessly across footpaths covered with new-fallen leaves. To men from India the whole thing was a paradise, bringing back the half-forgotten fairy tales of their childhood; while the sturdy independence of the country people, their courtesy and their self-possession, came upon Dundas, and almost upon Thornton, as a surprise.
But even to the young ladies this leafy unknown world, that had always been within a few miles of them, was a revelation altogether, and both Hermione and Edith blossomed into a new existence.
Hermione’s beautiful grave face was always bright now with serious merriment; while Edith, like everything around her, seemed, whenever one looked into her eyes, to be rippling over with innocent laughter.
Dr Jones, who did not like to be “out of it” so often, swore roundly at Hermione’s new vagaries. He had no great love for riding now; but he was still a famous walker, and still an eager fisherman, catching, as he was fond of saying, little but Nature’s ways. Thornton and he used to fish side by side sometimes; and Thornton, who never caught any of Nature’s ways, and never cared to, pulled out all the trout. But Dr Jones was not envious. Nature was enough for him, for he had an almost passionate affection for the beautiful country in which he lived.
And what a glorious country it was just then!
The rich summer green had changed into the gorgeous brilliant colours of autumn, and these rich colours played one into the other on every mountainside. The turf, as it rose higher and higher, was tawny-green, olive, and brown; the ferns were lemon, then orange, then russet. Here and there the interstices of the rocks were filled with soft broad cushions of moss, parched and brown. The oak coppices that framed the blue unruffled lakes were covered with russet leaves; the foliage of the birches was lemon-coloured, and their leafless twigs purple. The lichens on every boulder above the glistening waterfalls were vividly green in their undying beauty. The little clumps of feathery grasses, scattered about among the rocky hills, were in themselves a delicate epitome, so far as colour goes, of all autumnal loveliness; while the lights and shadows cast by the trees and the great mountains, whether on land or in the water, were clearer, and for that very reason, perhaps, more delicate, than at any other time of the year; and even in the broken weather, rain and vapour, as they alternated with sudden bursts of sunshine, brought new vigour and extraordinary freshness to everything alive, whether man or beast, or plant or tree.
“It is almost impossible not to quote poetry,” said Thornton, who did not know much poetry to quote, as they were riding quietly home one evening; and Edith thoroughly agreed with him. But to exist just then was a poem in itself.
“Hush, Tom!” she cried suddenly. “There is some one quoting poetry for us.”
They checked their horses to listen. They could not see the singer, but her voice was fresh and full, and she seemed to be singing on the water:—
“Lal Dinah Grayson’s fresh, fewsome, an’ free,
Wid a lilt iv her step an’ a glent iv her e’e;
She glowers ebbem at mé whativer I say,
An’ meàstly mak’s answer wid ‘M’appen I may!’
‘M’appen I may,’ she says, ‘m’appen I may;
Thou thinks I believe the’, an’ m’appen I may!’Gay offen, when Dinah I mannish to meet
O’ Mūndays, i’t’ market i’ Cockerm’nth street,
I whisper ‘Thou’s nicer nor owte here to-day!’
An’ she cocks up her chin an’ says, ‘M’appen I may!
M’appen I may, my lad, m’appen I may;
There’s nowte here to crack on, an’ m’appen I may!’But she met me ya neeght aside Pards’aw Lea yatt—
I tock her seàf heàm, but I keep’t her oot leàt;
An’ offen I said i’ my oan canny way,
‘Will t’e like me a lai bit?’—‘Whey,—M’appen I may!
M’appen I may, Harry—m’appen I may;
Thou’s rayder a hoaf-thick, but m’appen I may!’”
Then they heard the splash of oars: another boat had come up. Perhaps the song had been a signal. In any case there was no more of it.
“What a wonderful voice that girl has,” said Tom, still listening. “Why don’t you quote poetry like that, Edy?”
“‘M’appen I may! M’appen I may!”’ sang Edith, laughing. “Why, that’s one of dear old Dr Gibson’s songs. You remember Dr Gibson, don’t you?”
But Tom did not remember Dr Gibson, though somehow or other he managed to remember the refrain.
“What a happy ring there was in her voice,” said Thornton, after they had ridden on for a little.
“Oh, she’s courting, Tom, as they call it here; but that’s a queer courting song.”
“Why?”
“I was thinking of the end of it,” answered Edith merrily, “when he tells the parson——
‘To mind, when she sud say love, honour, obey,
At she doesn’t slip through wid her M’appen I may.’”
Life might be a poem just then, but it was also a series of idyllic pictures; and Edith and Thornton were both so fond of change that they were always giving the kaleidoscope a shake. When there was nothing really definite to be done, they had a last resort in the nearest of the lakes,—a small lake, but the wildest and weirdest and gloomiest of them all; and they could drive to it without much trouble in a queer old Irish jaunting-car belonging to the Dragon. The young ladies, in spite of their devotion to science, and to such tough studies as are generally left to men, both happened to be very fond of rowing; and nothing pleased them better than to be allowed to take the oars when the men youth at the prow and pleasure at the helm, as Edith said by way of a gentle gibe—consented to give way to them. And there was not much that Thornton or Dundas themselves liked better than to lie in the boat smoking lazily, while Edith and Hermione bent vigorously to the oars.
“We ought to have told Dr Jones,” said Edith, as her conscience suddenly pricked her.
Dr Jones, it may be necessary to explain, always went away early on Saturday morning. On this particular Saturday they had ordered the jaunting-car surreptitiously, and had been playing truant all day long. But it was getting late now, and Dr Jones’s Saturday evening was the only evening he much cared for out of the seven.
Tom laughed at Edith’s easy thoughtfulness, and so did the others.
“Tom,” continued Edith, “you really must make everybody get back in good time for Dr Jones.”
Tom, by way of an answer, started a catch, and the ladies, though neither of them could sing much, both joined in; and as they rested on their oars, their voices went very sweetly and musically across the water. Then they took to their oars again, and Thornton, as he held the tiller, thought that he had never watched anything so charming as the supple grace of these young ladies in their neat white flannels.
The afternoon had been still and almost sultry. It had been so warm indeed when they started that the cows were standing knee-deep in the lake, just as in the middle of summer. In a moment, however, the air grew cold. The thin mists upon the gloomy mountains suddenly swelled into heavy thunder-clouds. A gust of wind rushed noisily down the mountain valley, and then burst upon the lake, and almost before the ladies could recover their hold upon the oars, their little cockle-shell of a boat was tossing wildly on the angry crests of long rolling waves. The spray flew over them; the foaming water from the higher waves dashed in and swept across their feet. Two or three minutes before the lake had been as placid and blue and beautiful as the sky; now it was as black and ugly as the whirling clouds above them. Fierce flashes of zigzagged lightning played round the peaks of all the loftier mountains; the thunder rolled along, echoing and re-echoing hoarsely among the hills; and the sun sank in a blur of dense clouds, blood-red and black.
“Give us the oars,” cried Thornton, jumping up, and Dundas immediately followed him.
“Oh, do let us stop and watch the lightning,” said Edith. But her pale face belied her bravery.
“Nonsense, Edith,” answered Tom, abruptly. “It will be as dark as pitch in half an hour, and we shall be deluged with rain directly.”
He had scarcely stopped speaking when the blinding rain fell heavily, just as if some one in Nature’s secret had suddenly pulled the strings of a mighty shower-bath in the heavens. Through rain like this it was absolutely impossible to look ahead. Edith, as the boat leapt over the waves, was frightened and half-stunned; but Hermione, as she sat at the stern, with a pale set face, and eyes that gleamed through the stormy twilight, knew exactly what she had to do with the tiller-ropes. The men strained gallantly at their oars; and as soon as the wind was steadier, and the boat under some sort of control, Thornton routed up his boating-jacket and Dundas’s, and insisted upon the ladies putting them over their shoulders. By this time, however, everybody was wet through.
But Hermione, no matter how wet she was, contrived to steer the boat straight on; and with the rain and sleet and stinging hail, too, in their eyes, the men had to trust her implicitly. They rowed on without speaking, and were very nearly exhausted, when their boat grated harshly on a shallow, gravel landing-place.
“Tie the boat up, Major Dundas,” cried Hermione, springing lightly ashore. “We will go as your advance-guard, gentlemen,” she continued, laughing, “and warn the people of the inn of your approach.”
Then the ladies disappeared through a narrow avenue in a broad plantation of larches.
Nature had had her own way that afternoon, and they were now in the very middle of the laboratory from which her freshest, strangest scents were being distilled. The wood was fragrant with resin and turpentine, or of something like them, but infinitely sweeter; and the rich earth-odours awakened by the rain seemed full of vigour and vitality.
How wet the girls were though, and how it rained still, and how the rain as they ran poured off the branches of the overhanging trees in bucketfuls at a time!
“I am so glad the men stopped behind,” said Edith, when they both slackened their speed a little for want of breath.
Hermione, though she had given no reason for her flight, was probably equally thankful. Their soft wet flannels, as wet as bathing-dresses, clung to them just as bathing-dresses would have done.
“Do you feel cold?” said Edith.
“No; very hot,” answered Hermione.
“Well, hot or cold, dear, we are both almost diaphanous. Isn’t it dreadful?”
So it was. But the whole thing was so ludicrous, that the girls laughed heartily at each other as they ran.
“We must look like water-nymphs,” cried Edith. “Why, Hermione, your hair is all over your shoulders!”
But luckily it was dark now, and then there was no one to see them.
The darkness, however, had its drawbacks, and towards the end of their journey they had to go on hand in hand like the babes in the wood. At last they saw the lights in the inn, and then Edith tried to draw back.
“I can’t go in, Hermione,” she said; “I really can’t.”
Hermione laughed good-naturedly; but the inn as they came up to it was no laughing matter, for the bar-parlour was full of rollicking farmers, who were resting here to refresh on their way back from Saturday’s market.
They found an entrance eventually through the back-yard, and somehow or other the maids contrived to smuggle them quietly into an upper chamber, and then a motherly old landlady came to their assistance, and provided each of them with change of raiment. But before all this was duly accomplished, Thornton, in his anxiety to be useful, was hammering noisily at their door.
“Edith,” he cried, “what are we to do? The landlord says the rain won’t stop to-night, and that we can’t leave before the morning.”
Just before he came the two girls had been laughing at each other’s quaint costumes. But the thought of having to face the gentlemen sobered them at once.
“Tell him,” whispered Hermione, “that we’ll meet them in the morning, and can’t possibly see them till then.”
“All right, Tom,” cried Edith; “we’ll be ready in the morningHermione. Good night!”
“And what about Dr Jones?” asked Thornton from the other side of the door.
By this time Dundas and the landlady had joined him; and eventually it was settled that a boy on a pony should be despatched to the nearest telegraph office with a message for Dr Jones.
“Then you’ll meet us at tea in a quarter of an hour?” said Thornton.
“How can we meet them!” cried Edith, as she looked at herself in the glass. “These dresses are almost as bad as our flannel suits.”
“Not quite so bad, surely,” answered Hermione, laughing. “Still, we can’t go down as we are.”
“Of course not,” said Edith in a whisper. “Tom,” she cried, speaking through the door again, “we can’t come down, and we won’t come down, and we must have tea up here. Good night, Tom!”
“Good night at seven o’clock!” muttered Tom. “Not quite, Miss Edy!”
Then, with a happy inspiration, he retorted—“The landlady says she has given you her daughter’s finest things. She is sure you will be comfortable and look very nice, and if there is anything you don’t like she can easily change it.”
The landlady liked Tom’s pleasant manner, and so, as he rapped away at the door, she continued to address the young ladies until they began to feel ungrateful; and when once she obtained admission there was nothing for them but to capitulate.
In half an hour they all met again over a table generously furnished with every dainty of the country-side. But Hermione and Edith were so much amused with the extraordinary costumes worn by Thornton and Dundas, that they almost forgot their own discomfiture.
The rain, as it still fell, pattered steadily against the windows, that made their warm, well-lit little room seem all the snugger; and then the wetting had given an unusually keen edge to their appetites—to all, perhaps, but Hermione’s. At first she was as gay and lively and as hungry as the others; but the fatigue of the day or the thunder in the air had affected her, and before the tea-things had been cleared away she was almost silent. Edith and Thornton, however, were in the highest of all high spirits. They voted the day a success. They were glad that they had come, and delighted that they had stopped. They laughed so merrily, and looked so bright and happy, that Dundas, never at his worst of a saturnine turn of mind, began to side with Hermione. Edith, he thought to himself rather uncomfortably, could be a hoyden when she chose, and she was perhaps nicer when Dr Jones was there to tone her down a little. And as for Thornton—why, Thornton had done his best in rather a coarse, ostentatious sort of way to monopolise both the young ladies all through the afternoon; and as Hermione had never shown any interest in anything Thornton had said to her, it was little wonder that she was very sleepy and a trifle cross now.
“There is thunder in the air still”—and just as Dundas suggested this to Hermione, a violent peal broke right over the little inn, and almost blew its roof off. “Does thunder upset you, Dr Hermione?”
“Not usually, but I am certainly out of sorts tonight. You won’t think me very foolish, Major Dundas? I never much care how I am dressed. But still I don’t like making a guy of myself, and I can’t feel comfortable in this costume.”
“Ah! but look at me!” retorted Dundas, grimly. “I am ten thousand times more uncomfortable than you are. That won’t account for it. I fancy it must be the electricity in the atmosphere.”
“Perhaps it is,” said Hermione. “But neither Edith nor Mr Thornton seem to know what nerves mean. Don’t they strike you as being almost too uproariously happy to-night?”
Dundas, though he was half-ashamed to confess it, owned that they had struck him in that way already. And his present opinion was fairly warranted. The landlady had brought in the toddy-kettle, and Edith had just brewed Thornton a glass of whisky-punch after Dr Jones’s favourite recipe. Then, through some evil chance of fortune, they had discovered the visitors’ book, and they were now reading it aloud, turn and turn and turn about.
“Stupenjous mounting! Mi!”—
(It was Thornton who was reading then)—
“I never se’ed anything half so high!
Was yer contracted for, or did yer grow,
Or was yer blown up in a volcano1
Snakes!
How my legs aches!
Adieu!
I guess the sublime
Will wait a few
Before agen I climb!”
They laughed a good deal over this, and Edith somehow or other began to suspect that they were annoying Hermione.
“Hey diddle, dollar,”—
she read out in her turn, and as gravely and impressively as she could—
“Hey diddle, dollar,
Rossthwaite and Seatoller,
The Pikes grew up to the moon;
Helvellyn it laugh’d to see much fine sport,
As Scawfell was climbed up by a coon!”
“It is ‘a coon,’ Tom,” said Edith, glancing almost repentantly at Hermione; “and I could not help reading what was written.”
Then Thornton took the book—
“Furring climes is very well
For sich as roming likes;
There ain’t no climbs, as I’ve heard tell,
To equal Scawfell Pikes.The furring peak and furring pass
May charm, but cannot snub
An English scene, an English lass,
A decent English pub.”
“A good sentiment, though roughly worded,” cried Thornton, replenishing his glass. “But this is better. A Jolly Old Idiot writes: ‘It will always remain an open question in the writer’s mind whether it is worth while to travel more than two hundred and fifty miles so as to be shut up in the wet here for a week, with a full view of a stone wall, one gate slightly out of repair, one duck and a goose.’ That suits us, Edith, exactly; but stop, this might suit us better. Look here, Edy,—a bride and bridegroom—who sign their names in full, too—say that they have spent the happiest fortnight of their lives here, and that either together or singly they will return to write their names again in five-and-twenty years.”
“What a funereal couple they must have been!” laughed Edith. “Together or singly! Of course they should only have thought of coming together.”
Edith, as we have said, was in peculiarly high spirits. She did not care two straws for the inanities they had been reading. But Tom seemed to be himself again. Hermione had monopolised him a good deal lately—(here it may, perhaps, be noted that Edith and Dundas did not take exactly the same view of the situation). How bored Hermione and Major Dundas looked now with each other’s society. It was in the fitness of things that Hermione should be punished a little.
There was certainly nothing tragic in these doggerel verses by Cockney tourists; but, as Edith and Thornton continued to laugh over them, the little room began to look like the scene of a tragedy—not perhaps exactly a tragedy, but the kind of Surrey melodrama in which the stage is cut into two halves by a screen, with exaggerated tragedy on one side of it, and the lowest of low comedy on the other.
Edith, kindly little soul that she was, suddenly repented her of her wickedness. She took the visitors’ book away from Thornton, and shut it up.
“Hermione,” she cried, “we have vexed you both, and I am awfully sorry. People shouldn’t scribble nonsense like that, and people should not read it out.”
“Never mind, dear,” said Hermione. “It is a shame to let our bad temper spoil your pleasure.”
“Whose temper, whose pleasure?” asked Thornton, opening his eyes.
“I don’t know,” said Dundas, as he rose to light the candles, “It’s not your bad temper, my dear old fellow, but your insufferably good temper that has put us out; and the way you mouthed that atrocious poetry was enough to set anybody’s teeth on edge. Wasn’t it, Miss Edith?”
Edith wanted to defend Thornton, but she really could not defend the poetry in the visitors’ book. So she looked at Thornton sympathetically, and said nothing to Major Dundas.
“The itch to scrawl,” said the Major, as he handed Hermione her candle, “is at the bottom of most of our modern worries. Here is your candle too, Miss Edith. But I must have a Parthian revenge for those verses, and here, in reply to Thornton, are some lines I once saw on the walls of Shakespeare’s house.” Then in a mock-heroic tone Dundas began:—
“No intellect above the itch to scrawl,
The weak and strong alike go to the wall.
The walls grown dark with names, a loftier feeling
Raised hands and eyes to scribble on the ceiling.
For me, poor nameless bard, O sad disaster!
Remains no single inch of nameless plaster.
Yet I thy pearls have trampled, and must sign
My name among the other grateful swine
That come to make a sty of Shakespeare’s shrine.”
“There, Miss Edith, one of Wordsworth’s shrines ought to be almost as sacred as Shakespeare’s, I fancy. What do you say?”
But as Edith was only wondering if there could be anything in Major Dundas’s recitation to hurt Tom’s feelings, she said nothing but “Good night.” So Dundas opened the door for Hermione, and followed her out. Thornton and Edith went too. But there was a tempting old oak chest—the kind of exquisitely carved oak chest that you see nowhere else in the world—at the foot of the old oak staircase, and somehow or other they both sat down upon it.
Edith thought, as she sat there, that this really had been one of the happiest evenings of her life. Thornton, too, was well pleased with himself. To him his share in the evening had been brilliant and successful, and Dundas’s chaff or ill-humour, or whatever it was, was only another tribute of admiration.
So they sat there on the old oak chest by the stairs, too full, as they talked of the absurd adventures of a day that had made them both feel children again, to have a thought left for Dundas’s criticism or Hermione’s weary looks.
“Good night, Tom!” cried Edith at last. “I can’t stay any longer. But, you naughty boy, you mustn’t smoke any more,”—and in pure fun and mischief she snatched away the tobacco-pouch with which Thornton was just about to replenish his pipe. “What a pretty purse! What is it?”
“A bearskin pouch,” he answered, “set with a clasp of tiger claws. It has a queer story that pouch, and now that you have stolen it, Edy, you had better keep it.”
“Oh! I can’t steal it like that!” said Edith, as Thornton showed her how to open the clasp, and then emptied the tobacco out on to the chest. “I’ll buy it from you, sir. What shall I give you in return? A pair of slippers?”
“Give me! Give me what you would have given me in the dear old days.”
“For shame, Tom!” she cried, blushing, and then she ran away. But as she looked back from the landing on the stairs, he appeared so repentant and crest-fallen that she called out, “But I’ll keep the purse, Tom, all the same.”
Then, as she went to her room along the gloomy narrow passage, she sang gently to herself—
“M’appen I may, my lad, m’appen I may;
There’s nowte here to crack on, an’ m’appen I may!”
Edith had had a pleasant evening, and her night was full of pleasant dreams. She dreamt not only of Tom as he was in the dear old days of which he had reminded her too abruptly, but of Tom as a hero killing bears and tigers—for just before going to sleep she had given the ugly little bearskin pouch a furtive kiss, and had then hidden it shyly under her pillow.
They were all up betimes in the morning, properly clothed and in their right minds, and at peace with each other and all the world. But before breakfast was half over, they were startled by the sudden and tumultuous appearance of Dr Jones. Of course, he abused everybody soundly. Nothing would convince him that their excursion was not a plot, with Thornton and the unfortunate landlady as chief conspirators. He had come in the coach to take them back, and was sorry he had not been able to lay hands on a prisoners’ van. However, as it was still raining, the coach was very welcome, and when once the young ladies had placed Dr Jones between them, it is easy to guess that his bad temper did not last long.
For the next few days the weather was generally wet, as it often is in that little corner of the north of England. But, even when it rained all day long, and the two men had nothing for it but to clean their guns and make flies, they were graciously permitted to carry their fishing tackle up to the Priory after lunch, and there the ladies helped them, or at any rate tried to help them, with the intricate knots of fine gut and delicate silk. And even on the wettest days just then the landscape from the windows always looked like one of Mr Peter Graham’s pictures. With the return of fine weather, however, they noticed that the days had grown visibly shorter. Winter was coming apace.
On one bright still afternoon, with everything around them suffused by sunlight, Thornton and Edith sat on Dr Jones’s lawn waiting for the sunset, and waiting, too, till Hermione and Dundas were tired of pretending to catch anything in the doctor’s little trout-stream, that wound itself round two sides of his leafy garden, and then flowed right across it. They often came here now when their own excursions were over, to wait till Dr Jones returned from his rounds, but, as a rule, Dundas and Hermione were sitting with them.
Now, however, they were virtually alone, and they had been alone all through the afternoon. Since that happy evening at the inn they had drifted back almost imperceptibly into their old relations—a kind of girlish and boyish affection, half tender, half chivalric, quite sufficient in itself, and altogether oblivious of the possibilities that lay beyond. On this especial afternoon, however, they were unusually serious. The unruffled splendour of the scenery had somehow or other stolen into their souls; and, then, they were deliciously lazy after a long ride, and just tired enough to be perfectly natural.
The tide had been at its lowest. The sands had been firm and hard, and they had galloped, close to the edge of the grey sea, till their horses were covered with foam. Then, when they had turned homewards, Thornton told Edith some of his wild adventures on the Indian frontier. He was never a braggart, and scarcely mentioned himself. But his stories were very enthralling, and to Edith herself—and perhaps she was not far wrong—he was the hero of them all.
Now as he lay at her feet in Dr Jones’s shady garden, with Hermione and Dundas fishing on the other side of a clump of curious firs from one of the Norwegian fjords, Edith was giving him in return a series of vivid little pictures of Girton life.
“There will soon be a hundred girls there, Tom,” she cried; “and there is no reason, if I go on working as I am working now, why I shouldn’t be the head of them all.”
Then they were both silent for a while. It was a dreamy afternoon; the horizon was edged with clouds very slowly drifting to and fro, and only waiting to be studied to become dazzling castles in the air; and they were both busy with their dreams.
“M’appen I may! M’appen I may!” sang Edith softly to herself; for this had been the catch-word that held her thoughts ever since the rhythm of the old song had come back to her.
Then she was silent again, as she began to wonder why Thornton did not speak. What was he thinking of? And this thought made her rather impatient.
“How dreadfully reserved men are!” she thought. “He wouldn’t tell me anything about himself before, and now, when he has let me guess something, he won’t let me know what his dreams are. Oh!” she cried at last, impetuously, “what a triumph for a man to see realised in his own lifetime!”
“What triumph? What man?” asked Thornton.
“Girton, Tom. Tennyson made Girton, made it out of his own head. He wrote a poem, and there it was, as new and real as Aladdin’s palace. You remember ‘The Princess’?”
“M’appen I may,” laughed Tom.
“Oh, you unenthusiastic creature! M’appen you may! I should think so. But you ought to read it as we do at Girton! Some of the girls there know it by heart, and I know all the best bits.”
“Do you?” said Tom, wondering, as he looked steadily under the firs, why Dundas let Hermione throw her line so clumsily. “And what is the best bit of all?”
“This,” said Edith—”this is the bit we all like best. They were talking, Tom, of a lady braver and nobler than any man.”
Then in a soft low voice, and with a shyness that wore off as she advanced, Edith recited Lilia’s lines:—
“There are thousands now
Such women, but convention beats them down:
It is but bringing up; no more than that:
You men have done it: how I hate you all!
Ah, were I something great! I wish I were
Some mighty poetess, I would shame you then,
That love to keep us children! O, I wish
That I were some great princess, I would build
Far off from men a college like a man’s,
And I would teach them all that men are taught;
We are twice as quick!”
Thornton smiled a little, and Edith detected him at once.
“O Tom!” she cried, enthusiasm having conquered shyness altogether, “wait till I know everything you men are taught! There is nothing a woman cannot do if she is only taught how to do it. I will learn and learn, and learn till——”
“You are like Hermione.”
“Yes, Tom; but cleverer, perhaps, and quicker. I am not trying to run Hermione down, and please don’t think me conceited. I only mean that Hermione has her land, and her practice, and her money, and everything in her favour, while I have nothing but myself; so I must make a fight of it.”
Then she half sighed, and again for a while they were silent. The sun sank slowly. The sky was red and crimson and orange, and flaked with bright lines of purple; and the clouds, grey and white, and sometimes almost black, were just touched with gold on the further margin.
“Oh! what a lovely world it is!” sighed Edith, almost involuntarily.
“I am astonished at your innocence, Miss Edy,” cried Dr Jones, suddenly appearing. “A lovely world! An unknown world, a world of which you know nothing if you like, but not lovely. Wait until you get into the thick of it, and have to fight for your own hand, as you were telling Mr Tom you meant to do, then it will be a world of petty spites and jealousies; and if you care for peace and content, never, above all things, be successful! It is not a bad world perhaps for mediocre people.”
“But I don’t mean to be a mediocre person, Dr Jones.”
“No; I heard what you and Tom were talking of as I came up, and that is the worst of it, my dear. Fulfil your dreams, do anything, write anything, paint anything, invent anything, out of the common, and you’ll have all your dear good mediocre friends snarling and snapping at your heels wherever you turn. They have tried, or fancy they have tried, and they have failed; and that at all events they know, and see what a pull that gives them! There is nothing like failure for making stupid people quick-witted and keen and revengeful; and for their own particular failures they will never forgive you. My advice, my dear—the advice of a commonplace old man to an enthusiastic young lady—is, be mediocre.”
“I shan’t, if I can help it, Dr Jones,” cried Edith. “I mean to excel in everything I can, to know everything I can, and to do everything I can, and then I shall be happy!”
Dr Jones smiled more gravely than usual as he took a pinch of snuff.
Just then Hermione came up, with her little fishing-rod over her shoulder.
“You thought like that, Hermione,” said Dr Jones, abruptly turning to her. “Do you think like that now?”
Hermione put her rod down on the grass. She looked at Dundas, and then she looked at Dr Jones, but his face did not quite give her the solution of the difficulty.
“No, perhaps not. And you, Dr Jones?”
“Well, my dear, I own there was a time when I thought like Miss Edy too. In my college days I was perhaps as enthusiastic as she is now, and my enthusiasm, odd as it will seem to her later on, lasted for a year or two afterwards.”
“It lasts still!” cried Hermione. “Nobody, Dr Jones, who does not know you ever imagines that those marvellous scientific papers of yours come from a country practitioner who insists upon living as a recluse.”
“My dear, your flattery is very pleasant. I take it as I take all flattery, in a single dose; and my moral digestion is unfortunately so weak, that I daresay it will act as a tonic. But I had ambitions once, beyond the limits of the medical journals, and some day perhaps, as an antidote to Miss Edy’s ambition, I will lend her a little story—a story I wrote for a magazine that was not exactly medical.”
“A true story, Dr Jones?”
“That depends on what you call a true story, Are there any true stories left, Hermione? You and I hear them every day, and so did Jesting Pilot before either of us. But it is true enough in the main, and quite as applicable to Miss Edy as to the man I wrote of in the paper that I am some day going to give her to read.”
“A story applicable to me! Oh, we must have it at once, Dr Jones.”
So Dr Jones yielded, and went to a queer old Japanese cabinet in his study, in which he kept all manner of old treasures carefully locked up. When he returned to the lawn, twilight had darkened into night. The air, however, was so still that the old-fashioned lamp he brought with him scarcely flickered. His little audience sat round him in the darkness. The trout-stream made gentle music at their feet, the midges hummed about them, and the moths beat their fragile wings against the lamp.
This was Dr Jones’s story, and he read it with so much feeling that even Edith did not venture to ask him a single question until he had finished it. The symbols puzzled her at first, but as Hermione said nothing, she too managed to keep quiet. But here is Dr Jones’s story, title and symbols and all.
The faded yellow manuscript was so creased and crumpled and torn that I could scarcely decipher the fragmentary symbols on it.
“There!” he said, as he took it back from me—“there lies the key to supreme power and universal knowledge. If I only knew what was missing, I should be omnipotent!”
Omnipotent! Poor Tomkins! We did not think much of him when he came to Barnard’s Inn. His forehead was low but unusually broad, his lips were firm but sensual, and he had an extraordinarily strong jowl. His eyes were bright and frank in the morning, but in the evening they looked pale and worn, and his clothes were always shabby.
He lived on my staircase, and at night I used to hear him tramping up and down his chambers like a caged tiger. One evening, when I had happened to waste my last match, I ventured to knock him up for a light. That was the beginning of our slender acquaintance, and after that I sometimes managed to capture him on the stairs and carry him into my quarters for an hour or two. He spoke very shyly at first, and blushed like a girl when he spoke. But as he learned to know me, and, I think, to like me, his conversation became freer, and no one I ever heard yet talked so brilliantly.
“You know everything!” I cried one evening, after he had remorselessly demolished all my pet social and literary theories, one after the other.
“Not now,” he answered, quietly; “but some day I hope to know everything, and then I shall have the world at my feet!”
I should have commenced my story here, for it was then that he first asked me to come into his chambers, and then that he showed me this cabalistic scrap of yellow paper.
I took his arm-chair at once, though it was the only chair in the room. I filled my pipe. I had my chance, and meant to use it.
“And what,” I asked, when I was comfortably settled, “what on earth will you do with your universal knowledge when you have got it?”
“Do! Do everything!” he exclaimed, feverishly. “Let me play to you. That will show you something of what I mean.”
He took down an old violin from a wooden peg in the wall, and after dusting it reverentially, he leant upon the edge of a big table covered with books and papers, and half-finished sketches, and retorts and odd things in queer bottles, and began to play.
My eyes filled with tears. In one sudden flash after another every detail of the past came back to me. Then he played very slowly and with extraordinary sweetness, and as I listened, all the interrupted incidents of my life seemed to be fulfilled. His music was the complement of my dreams. Years ago, sleeping or awake, I had been always haunted by one girlish face. By night and by day her soft red girlish lips were close to my lips. Had I dared to kiss them, her life and my life too might have been strangely altered. I guessed that then. I know it now. But it was only as he played that her lips met mine. Then at this supreme moment his music abruptly changed, becoming sadder and softer until it died out altogether. I could see him play, but I could no longer hear his music. I could only feel the subtle perfume of the little bunch of violets that nestled in her white bosom, when I fled away like a traitor.
“Stop! stop!” cried I; “for God’s sake, stop! What right have you, sir, who can know nothing of me, and nothing at all of her, to reveal the one secret of my life?”
He smiled almost regretfully, as he carefully rosined his bow.
“I shall know everything some day,” he said; “but listen again.”
He played a mad fantasia now. I was in an exhilarating atmosphere of brilliant colours—red and blue and yellow—common primary colours that I had, of course, known before, but how mystically and beautifully they were blended now! They seemed to flow from his bow as he lightly touched the strings, and in their curious combinations, they too told me of hopes and joys irretrievably lost.
Then, without a word of warning, he hung his old violin upon its wooden peg again. He pushed aside a mocking, grinning human skull that occupied a corner of the table, and took its place, and, unbuttoning his breast-pocket, produced that yellow scrap of crumpled paper.
“You don’t think much of me,” he said, “and don’t take much trouble to disguise your feelings. But wait, wait until I discover the missing symbols. Knowing what I know now, I know enough to puzzle you, sceptic as you are. Some day I shall know everything, and then, with half an hour’s labour at my desk, I shall be able to let the whole world into my secret, and then the student will be the king.”
The sight of the white fleshless skull behind him, and the faint acrid smell from the chemical preparations crowding his book-shelves, had made me dizzy, and had almost turned my brain.
“You are mad, or I am,” I exclaimed, rising. “I think——”
“Never mind what you think. It is a question of what you know and I know, and how we can translate our knowledge. Look at this—
C44 H90 N P O9 + 2 N H4 H C O3 + 2 H2
O2 + * * * * * * *
“Just so,” I said, almost shuddering as I opened the door a little wider.
“Just so; but don’t be afraid of me, and in the name of all that is ludicrous, don’t be cross. I am not mad, and if I were, there is a method in my madness. It is the first business of my life to know everything.”
“That is rather a big order,” I answered, with my right hand on the handle of the door.
“A big order!” he retorted, “but an order all the same. All human knowledge is one. Poetry, painting, sculpture, music, science, all mean the same things under different names, and all convey precisely the same set of impressions to the brain, Gardiner, though you may not know it now. We laugh sometimes, and sometimes we cry, when the barbarous old natural forces are too much for us. But why should not the brain reproduce all we do know in a coherent and connected form? Why should not you or I, in half an hour’s intense labour at a writing table, strike the key-note to this universal music, and give our world, at all events, the missing links?”
“Why not?” I said mechanically, opening the door a little wider.
“Why not?” he cried, almost fiercely. “Why not? Because we are human, and our miserable mechanical brain-power is defective—far more defective now than it once was when we dressed naturally, and lived, as we should do, in the open air. But strengthen the brain with lecithin properly accompanied, so as to have one concentrated effort, and the whole thing is achieved, and all the learning of a lifetime, all the inherited experiences of countless generations, will be brought to a focus. We shall know then what we are all told we shall know after death—we shall know everything; and life and knowledge and power will lie before us like an open scroll, in which each one of us can read.”
“Ah!” I said, still longing to escape from the heated atmosphere of his little chamber into the cool night air outside. “You talk of life lying unscrolled before you, but what is your substitute for death?”
“This,” he answered, again showing me that torn and faded piece of yellow paper. “The greatest chemist of the century gave me this tattered scrap of paper: he gave it to me on his deathbed. He died before he could complete the formula upon it. But the real potentiality and meaning of his life, or mine, or yours, are here, or almost here. When I can complete his formula, I shall have a philtre strong enough to make my will do what my brain commands, so as to embody in one single effort all the knowledge and experience of a lifetime.”
Then at last I managed to escape into the little, cool, stone quadrangle down below.
I did not put myself out of the way to see Tomkins for some time after this, and two or three months must have elapsed when he knocked at my door one bright sunny afternoon and asked me up to tea.
This from Tomkins, of all men in the world, was a strange request; but, of course, I went at once, and as I entered his chambers a young girl sprang forward to meet me.
“This is Mr Gardiner, Ethel,” he said, as he introduced me.
There was something very confiding in the frank way she gave me her little hand. We became firm friends directly; and then she was a girl of sympathetic and almost indescribable beauty, Her eyes were blue—the soft, pathetic deep-blue eyes of the fairy tales. Her complexion was singularly fair, though her hair was a dark chestnut. Her dress was some faint colour that looked almost white in the dusky atmosphere of these gloomy chambers, and it fitted her so admirably that her slender eloquent figure seemed to be draped rather than dressed.
We talked, all three of us, very pleasantly for five minutes. Then Tomkins, intent on hospitable thoughts, went to look after the tea.
“Poor George!” she said, “don’t you think him dreadfully changed?”
“He looks ill and fagged,” I replied, “but I hardly know him well enough to think that——”
“Oh!” she cried, “from what he told me about you, I thought you were his good angel, and I am sure he has no other friend in the Inn. But stop; he is always very reticent, and perhaps you do not know his history.”
“I know that he plays the violin marvellously well, but I don’t think I know anything more.”
“Ah, but that is just it! That is the curse of his life, poor fellow, and the curse of mine. He does everything marvellously well. He won every prize open to him at Rugby. He passed out first for Woolwich, just to see what he could do. He passed out first for the Indian Civil Service, and threw it up. After that he went to Cambridge and became a Wrangler. He has been walking one of the hospitals since then, and now he is painting at the Academy.”
“Is it not rather a pity that he should fritter away his time like that?”
“Hush!” she said very gently, “don’t blame him, please;” and her pale face as she spoke was suddenly suffused with a lovely, faint, transparent colour. “He loves me, Mr Gardiner; he loves me, and I have loved him ever since I can remember anything; and I love him so much now that I never think of hiding it. I would do anything in the world for him. I would come to him to-morrow for good and all, if I might. But he always says, ‘Wait, wait till I am worth it. I shall be worth it some day.’”
“And you,” I asked suddenly, “are you worth nothing?”
“I don’t know, and don’t much care,” she said. “I am like all other girls, I suppose. But I am weary of waiting when I see him growing paler and thinner every day. Can’t you help us?”
Just then Tomkins returned, and in a minute or two his laundress had tea ready.
Miss Ethel, of course, had to make the tea, and the trouble she took in making it seemed to please Tomkins immensely; and I know how much her dainty hesitations pleased me. It was a new experience to her, and almost as new to him as to me. She was the queen, as she had all the right to be, of a bachelor’s little kingdom; and, as Tomkins talked to her, his soft brown eyes grew brighter than ever, and there was a new, strange, manly look of triumphant assurance about him that I attributed wrongly, probably, to the presence of his fiancée. And, oh! how happy she was to sit there at the head of his rickety table, because it was his, and to be able to pour out tea for him, and a stray half-hearted friend of his!
Tomkins, poor fellow, had forgotten himself altogether in the loving sunshine of his sweetheart’s eyes. Once or twice in a lifetime, perhaps, a shrewd observer of things close at hand sees, and not always without jealousy and a vague feeling of regret, a girl look at a man as Miss Ethel looked at Tomkins then. But he goes to bed all the better for what he has seen. Of course, just then I fancied myself to be that shrewd observer; but my personal pique disappeared when I tried to study Tomkins. The strong ugly lines on his broad forehead were smoothed away as if by magic, and his face grew quite boyish again, as they laughed and chatted over all the old reminiscences of their girlish and boyish days.
When the clock in the little tower struck six, Miss Ethel rose, and said, with half a sigh, that she really must go now. Her mother, it seemed, knew that she had come here, and it was not difficult to guess that there had been a family quarrel over her coming. At all events, Tomkins was not to be allowed to accompany her home. He sent out for a hansom; and when they went down the creaking stairs together, arm in arm, I purposely kept a long way behind. I could not, however, help seeing that he kissed her very tenderly before they rounded the last corner, and that just after he kissed her he whispered something into her ear.
They waited for me at the bottom of the steps. Her sweet, fair, finely-chiselled face, which had been so radiantly happy in the gloomy chamber up above, was very pale, indeed, now in the garish light of the dying sunset. Her lips quivered a little as she said good-bye to me on the steps; and when she was seated in the hansom-cab, she took my hand a second time. She looked at me very earnestly then, and her blue eyes were dim with tears as she whispered, in such a low tone that her lover would not possibly hear what she said, “Take care of George, Mr Gardiner, and for heaven’s sake, take especial care of him to-night!”
“It is my birthday to-day, Gardiner,” he said when she had gone. “Won’t you congratulate me?”
I did so heartily, though not without misgivings; and I begged him to come with me to my club and celebrate it properly in a snug little dinner for two.
“No, no!” he cried impatiently; “I must be alone to-night. To-day is not only my birthday, Gardiner—it is a great deal more than that, for early this morning I discovered those missing symbols.”
“Let them wait, man,” I urged, “and come down to the club with me.”
“Not to-night of all nights,” he cried. “I have found what I wanted; I have my philtre ready, and I am in the vein to-night, for Ethel’s unexpected presence has brought me fresh inspiration. Tomorrow, if you like, I will come, and then I will show you what I have accomplished.”
“And that?” I asked sadly.
“That! That will be the one key to all human knowledge, the secret to supreme happiness, and the only way to illimitable power. Oh, after years of intense labour and privation, and almost sordid self-denial, it is stranger than you can possibly imagine to feel that to-morrow everything will be changed, for you, for me, for all of us!”
I was so alarmed by his enthusiasm, and Miss Ethel’s warning had been so earnest, that I begged him again and again to come with me, or at least to allow me to stop there with him.
He repulsed me blankly, and at last with some rudeness. Then, when he was half-way up the stairs, he turned and apologised very courteously; and as he stood for a moment under the lamp at the corner, his eyes seemed to be lit up with a look of triumphant and almost superhuman joy.
I left him reluctantly, but I had no help for it. I ate my dinner without tasting what I ate, and then, as if under a spell, I hastened back to Barnard’s Inn.
There were bright lights burning in his windows. I walked straight up to his chambers, but his “oak” was “sported.” I went back to my room and tried to find an interest in the last French novel, whatever it was. I could not, however, follow a word of what I read; and I was still thinking of Miss Ethel’s parting words, when I heard a heavy crash overhead.
The “oak” outside Tomkins’ chamber was as tightly locked as before; but I was honestly frightened this time, and sending down for the Inn porter, we soon broke it open with a chisel.
Tomkins was crouching on the floor beside the overthrown table. He had completed his formula; he had taken his philtre; he had written his thesis—the thesis that was to give him and me and all the world the key to universal knowledge, and supreme happiness, and illimitable power—and he was tearing it into tiny fragments as we entered. An hour or two back his face in its rare intellectuality and conscious strength had been almost weirdly beautiful. Now, as we lifted him up from the floor, he was a hopeless, gibbering idiot. Poor Tomkins!
“And who was the man you wrote it of?” cried Edith eagerly, when Dr Jones had finished his story, and wiped his spectacles, and turned the lamp down.
“Never you mind, Miss Edy. But I really must have been half mad myself to have gone back for more than thirty years, simply to give you a warning that neither you nor Hermione are ever likely to take.”
“How do you know that, Dr Jones? I thought the story was a deception at first. I thought, when you went through the symbols, that it was only a medical paper after all. But I liked the way you described Ethel. She seemed rather like me.”
“Whew!” cried Dr Jones. “And so you are your own ideal of feminine beauty, are you, Miss Edith?”
“No, Dr Jones. Don’t make me out worse than I am. I only wanted to put you in a good temper, so as to get you to answer one question. Would lecithin, properly combined, do all that that poor man thought it would?”
“I shall tell you no more,” said Dr Jones gruffly; “and I am an old fool for telling you so much. But I certainly shan’t help you to poison yourself in the pursuit of useless knowledge; and I shall not let either of you ladies sit here any longer, now that the mist is coming down from the mountains.”
There was not much in Dr Jones’s queer old-fashioned story, but somehow or other it spoiled Hermione’s evening. At dinner she tried to be as equable as usual, and of course she succeeded; but the smart small-talk of the others vexed her beyond measure, for it made her own thoughts seem absurdly grandiose and stilted. Was Dr Jones right? Was she merely an impostor like that feeble creature Tomkins? And was all out-of-the-way effort of that kind nothing but pretentious self-assertion? Hermione felt so vexed with herself, after she had bidden Dr Jones good night, that as soon as she had locked the door of her room—half bed-chamber and half study—she allowed her temper for once to get the mastery altogether. Unlike Edith, she seldom made much use of her mirror. Now she turned all the lamps up, and stood for a minute or two before the glass, studying herself intently.
Hermione was, as we have already said, a tall woman—not divinely tall, but still tall enough to give a perfect and exquisite balance to a figure essentially feminine in its beauty. In all her movements she was stately and ordered. Her eyes were grey, with a tint of green in them whenever she was excited, as she was just now. Her hair, as she brushed it down her back, was the rich auburn hair of the old Venetian painters, and it fell below her waist. Her cheeks were almost as colourless as her bare arms and shapely shoulders; but as she looked at herself contemptuously in the glass, they were flushed and almost reddened by the warm blood beneath. A sculptor, if he had seen her as she stood there, would have likened her to the Venus de Milo—so healthy, so natural, so absolutely Greek was her pale beauty. But Hermione was very soon tired of her own image, and she turned the lamps down suddenly before she slipped her robes off.
“Must all high effort,” she wondered, “be abortive, and was Dr Jones talking in parables?”
She opened the window and leant across the bars. The sky was bright with stars. Nature lay before her, immutably mapped out in the heavens with infinite points of light. That was her book, just as Dr Jones had always said it was his; but it was a long way off. It was the business of her life to study nature; and the old women and village children he had teased her about were only the Alpha Beta of the language she was determined to learn. The night was very beautiful; the wind sighed and soughed through the trees, and everywhere in the darkness there was a soothing sound of rippling water.
But still, as she looked into the night, she could not help thinking of Edith’s happy girlish face at dinner-time and afterwards, and her innocent Girton “patter,” her brightness and vivacity, that had killed everything else. A few days before, Hermione had told Edith that she had never had time to be a real girl herself. Was she right? Did not her mirror show that she was every whit as fascinating as that chit of a girl who had contrived somehow or other to make herself the life and soul of all the company? Then she lit a reading-lamp that always stood at her bedside, and, as Edith had been talking of it all through the evening, she took Tennyson’s ‘Princess’ down from a bookcase, and tried to read. But she had never cared much for poetry, and the poetry in the ‘Princess’ seemed false and almost maudlin to her now. Science was her “line,” not poetry. Her goal lay there, far away in front, and nothing should divert her from it. What had she to do with maudlin love-poems, and the fantastic tenderness of the girls in the ‘Princess,’ and the regret they pretended to feel for the days when they “made bricks in Egypt”? She came, however, abruptly upon the four finest lines in the little volume, and in her present mood the thought of the deserted baby moved her strangely:—
“I took it for an hour in mine own bed This morning; there the tender orphan hands Felt at my heart and seemed to charm from thence The wroth I nursed against the world.”
Then she turned down her reading-lamp and tried to sleep. She could not sleep, however, even then; and so she cross-examined herself severely. Why had she allowed a boy like Tom Thornton to break the even tenor of her ways? and why should Major Dundas be permitted to interrupt her plans, just as if she were a girl of Edith’s calibre, a mere schoolgirl, hungry for excitement? As she thought of Dundas and Thornton, she thought of a few years back; of the students in the hospital who used to look askance at her every morning; of the horrors of the dissecting-room, and the false shame of it at first, when at last she, and half-a-dozen other girls with her, won admission. But what a victory that was to their cause, and how much more she had learned there any afternoon than all her books could have taught her! Would she ever work so hard again? She had worked hard, but how little she had really done.
Then her early triumphs in Paris came back to her, and her struggles in London afterwards, and the eagerness and energy with which she had started a modest little dispensary for women and children in a crowded East End slum. Had she unsexed herself by her earnestness, and had she left her girlhood behind, simply because she had tried to turn her talents to the best account? It was no fault of hers that she was a woman, and happened to be rich enough to pay for the experiment, without pretending to starve, or having to pose for notoriety. That, at all events, she had never done; and she had always been in earnest, and she was not to be moved from a life-long purpose now, because Dr Jones chose to tease her, and tell her an impossible story of an impossible Mr Tomkins.
That story, though, as she thought it over, made her rather unhappy again. If Dr Jones’s story meant anything, it meant that a quiet, unambitious, uneventful home-life is the ideal life after all, with its double joys, and double interests, and double responsibilities. Edith would have laughed gaily at her thoughts just then; but she knew more of the world than Edith. Dr Jones’s hero had been led away by the will-o’-the-wisp of a mad ambition, but Dr Jones’s heroine thought love enough. And as Hermione tried to look upon them both as people who had actually existed, she caught a glimpse of a little white-curtained nursery, somewhere in the clouds perhaps, in which the feelings of each of them might have been mutually blended by and by. Why had not that visionary lover been satisfied with Ethel’s love? Was Dr Jones’s story only another of his rapier-thrusts at her? But night, drawing sometimes on the future and sometimes on the past, is always friendly to unhappy people, and still half-waking, half-asleep, she began to think very pleasantly of a devoted man—poet, philanthropist, and enthusiast—who had aided her bravely in the battle in the old London days. He had shown her what a comrade could be; but he had upbraided her fiercely when, at Dr Jones’s bidding, she had brought herself to own that the misery and responsibility of her struggles in London were almost more than she could bear. She had scarcely thought of him for many months now, but now, to-night, when her brain, as she tried to sleep, was excited, she saw him again as vividly as when Dr Jones had carried her off from Euston. She had never heard any man speak as earnestly as he spoke then. He had called her a deserter. And of course she was a deserter, living here as she did in comfort on her own estate, pretending to look after a handful of villagers. What a coward she had been to let Dr Jones take her away from London. No wonder that Mr Vaughan had spoken bitterly to her at the station. Yes, she was a deserter, and was becoming more and more of a deserter day by day. The word, however, as it kept recurring, reminded her somehow of the deserted baby in the ‘Princess’: and again the lines, as she recalled them, moved her strangely:—
“I took it for an hour in mine own bed
This morning; there the tender orphan hands
Felt at my heart and seemed to charm for thence
The wroth I nursed against the world.”
“The wroth I nursed against the world!” she repeated.
Then at last her fitful thoughts came to an end and she fell asleep, vowing, with her last clear idea, that she would begin her own independent life again in the morning.
But the morning found Hermione dressed almost as soon as Edith for that famous picnic to the Scrubbs, which was intended to show Dr Jones that he was not quite forgotten in their incessant round of amusement, and which had, as a matter of fact, been planned as an especial atonement for the night they had passed at the inn.
There was a highroad all the way up to the Scrubbs, and for once Dr Jones bad promised to take a holiday and follow the ladies as they rode. Of course he was late. They walked up and down the Priory grounds till they almost gave him up. They walked down to his house and waited there. But it was nearly twelve o’clock before they started, and Dr Jones only started then because he was fond of his old barometer, and in another half-hour Edith would, he said, have tapped it all to bits in her anxiety about the rain. However, the sun broke out of the clouds, and the threatening rain went on to interfere, as he explained, with some other young lady’s pleasure.
But neither Edith nor Hermione were inclined to take an altruistic view of the situation just then. They mounted their horses and rode away between Thornton and Dundas; and Dr Jones, trying to look discontented, followed them in his dogcart. His old grey mare, however, who was almost as old as his practice, knew somehow or other that they were both out for a holiday, and trotted along quite friskily. The day, though not promising at first, turned out to be one of those unexpectedly fine days that, when they do occur, give the Lake country its chief charm.
As they passed through the village, the whole population to a child turned out to view their little cavalcade. Then the road ran for a while among moist green meadows. Like a long glittering serpent the Doctor’s trout-stream lay behind them, and behind that again, as the road twisted and turned, Dr Jones could catch glimpses of the sea, here and there dazzling bright, as the clouds broke and the sun shone out through a chink between them, just as it sometimes does in some medieval pictures. Then everything was darkened and hushed, as they passed through a thick oak coppice springing from a gloomy little tarn, and broadening upwards as it went until it was lost on the shoulders of a shaggy grey mountain. The coppice itself was the colour of ripe hazel-nuts, but near the water’s edge and in the luxuriant undergrowth the young oak-trees were a vivid green, and the highest points of the foliage, as the sun touched them, were yellow. To nine strangers out of ten it is the trees about the lakes that give the lakes themselves their fascinating beauty. You leave London or Manchester, or any other sterile wilderness of bricks and mortar, at night, and next morning, when you wake up, you have green trees everywhere through your open window. They border the blue lake as far as you can follow it; they run up every mountain-side until they almost disappear; they invade the hotel grounds, and tap against your lattice.
But as Dr Jones drove on, the country grew bleaker and bleaker, and seemed at last to be all the more bare and desolate, from the bleak stone huts of the shepherds dotted above it here and there; but both sides of the road were now skirted, almost as far as the distant mountains, with patches of purplish brown heath.
The view, like most views when you admire them alone, became monotonous; and having nothing better to look at, Dr Jones looked at the little cavalcade in front, and the ladies, as seen in silhouette against the grey sky-line, appeared so charming, that he urged Jenny quickly forward. How light and bright and buoyant they were in their tight habits. Dr Jones admired them so much, that Hermione, as she was chatting to Thornton, all at once suspected that he was thinking of her, and was suddenly ashamed of the selfish way in which she had neglected him since starting. She told the others to ride on, and then turned back, and for the rest of the journey she rode close beside her old guardian’s dogcart.
“What a shame it was of us all to run away,” she said, as soon as she had quieted her horse down to the paces of Dr Jones’s mare.
“Not at all, my dear,” answered the doctor. “Sooner or later you will have to gallop off. ‘Train up a child, and away it will go,’ as your old friend Diddy Payne used to say. And I quite enjoyed the dexterous way in which you and Miss Edith were practising just now.”
Hermione’s face flushed a little. “You think me a simpleton, I know,” she said, rather savagely. “I knew you thought that when I came back last evening with a fishing-rod over my shoulder, and heard you lecturing Edith. Lecture me, Dr Jones—I want it far more than Edith does. I felt so mean last night that I could hardly sleep. Give me a good talking to.”
“Not I, my dear,” cried Dr Jones. “I never saw either of you look better than you do just now. You are both getting the very kind of mild excitement that you need, and you are both living as you ought to do in the open air. Girls, like kittens, should have plenty of animal spirits, and should always have some one to play with them. And whenever they don’t like it, they can be kittens again—and scratch.”
“Dr Jones, please don’t talk to me as if you were talking to Edith. Last night I began to study myself. I learnt something,—I don’t quite know what yet.”
“Oh, but you must never study yourself, Hermione. What can you know about yourself, my dear? Don’t you play with edged tools. You are a doctor too, now, and no doctor in his sober senses ever dares to study himself, for if he once begins that, it is all over with him.”
“Oh, I was only studying myself in the light of your story, Dr Jones. That set me thinking last night. Do you really believe that I am wasting my life, like Mr Tomkins, in the pursuit of an impossible chimera?”
“No, my dear,” answered Dr Jones, pausing just long enough to give Jenny another flick on the flank.
“I don’t think you are—honestly, I don’t think so. But haven’t you been trying to overdo it a little? I tease you about your love for your calling. But haven’t you been deserting it lately, and throwing yourself rather too eagerly into a novel set of ideas altogether?”
“And if I have, Dr Jones, isn’t that what you are always urging me to do?”
“Perhaps it is; but I am never quite in earnest, Hermione; and in spite of anything I may have said, I like you best as you were. You were never vexed and nervous before, and now you seem to be all nerves; and you know as well as I do that all our new diseases, as we call them, my dear, come from a set of nerves that must be as old as Eve’s. She knew something about nature, but she never worried about science; and as for Eve’s religion——”
“I don’t see what Eve and her nerves and her religion, if she had any, have got to do with me.”
“No! Then let us put it in another way. You are fretting yourself, my dear, about something. I thought it might be nerves, or religion, or——”
“Why did you bring me back here?” interrupted Hermione. “I was happy in London, and doing good work there. Why didn’t you leave me where I was?”
“Perhaps I was wrong,” answered Dr Jones, gravely. “I thought you were killing yourself; I thought that you must break down if you stopped there, and that a rest might save you. But perhaps Vaughan was right after all.”
“Mr Vaughan!” cried Hermione, checking her horse. “And what made you think of Mr Vaughan to-day, Dr Jones?”
“I don’t know. Hypnotism, perhaps. I had a hazy kind of idea that you were thinking of him too. Isn’t that true, Hermione?”
Hermione rode on in silence, with her eyes on the distant fells.
“Vaughan,” continued Dr Jones, “though we quarrelled fiercely about you at the time, is worth a dozen Major Dundases or Tom Thorntons.”
“Thank you, Dr Jones,” cried Hermione. “I don’t think much of you as a father-confessor. And next time I ride beside you, Dr Jones——”
“That is just it, Hermione. Don’t you ever ride beside me if you want advice. You and Miss Edith, in your trim riding-habits, are quite fascinating enough to dictate the law to all the world, instead of teasing an old fogey like me to say that black is white and white black. But here we are at the Scrubbs.”
When Dr Jones and Hermione pulled up on the Scrubbs, they found Thornton and Edith already hard at work unpacking a hamper.
“I call this jolly—don’t you, Tom?” they heard Edith say, as she tried to sort the knives and forks out in proper couples.
“Awfully jolly, Edy! A fine view, a rattling good appetite, and two of the prettiest girls in England! One couldn’t wish for more.”
“No, Tom. And perhaps one needn’t wish for so much. Hermione is one of the prettiest girls in England now, is she?”
“I was speaking for Major Dundas. You saw them as they were riding together?”
“Of course I did. But he thought so from the first; you didn’t.”
“Miss Edith,” cried Dr Jones, when at last Jenny permitted him to alight—“Miss Edith, respect the pie-crust. Hermione, Major, the tiffin-bell has rung, and creeping things innumerable are rallying to the front. No, Master Tom, your seat is next Miss Edith, on the other side. Now that we have all fallen into our places, and a painful process too, will a little pickled salmon tempt you, Hermione, with caterpillar and blue-bottle sauce?”
“Don’t be satirical, Dr Jones,” answered Hermione. “Nobody, if they like it, can be nicer at a picnic than you.”
“That only shows my natural affability, my dear, and your extraordinary powers of fascination. Here I am, a respectable, elderly parish doctor, ready to play at being an Ancient Briton for the best part of a day, and quite ready, at your bidding, to revert entirely to barbarism, and to appear in woad, and with a war-whoop.”
“Oh, Dr Jones, please do,” cried Edith. “That spreading oak in front wants an interesting figure in the foreground, and a little music would enliven us immensely.”
“Dr Jones,” said Hermione gravely, “don’t let them make fun of your self-denial. I know——”
“And so do I, my dear; and why then should we both hide my light under a bushel? To drive ten miles in a dogcart, in the dust of your horses’ hoofs, for the chance of eating a cold dinner on the damp grass at mid-day, which would have been so much nicer hot in the evening, on a well-laid table indoors, and without rheumatism for a dessert! Why, I really am a perfect paragon.”
“Perfect paragons,” suggested Edith, “ought to be fed on nectar or champagne, Dr Jones, and so ought young women, I think.”
“You are right, Miss Edith. I beg your pardon. Let us drown our miseries in the one thing a picnic cannot spoil. What do you say, Major?”
“That you are blasé, or an impostor. Live in India for a few years, Doctor, skulking from the sun from nine o’clock till five, and you’ll enjoy the luxury of a whole day in the open here.”
“You are blasé of Indian sunshine; I am blasé of English fogs. You have been here three weeks—three fine weeks. I shouldn’t grumble at our climate either, if I only spent three fine weeks in it out of every seven years.”
“At all events you shall not grumble to-day, Dr Jones,” said Hermione. “Pull this merry-thought with Edith.”
“Not I, my dear. Vainly is the snare spread in the sight of any bird of fifty-seven! You two pull it together. No cheating, please. A dead heat, as I live! A dead heat! a miracle! It has broken exactly in the middle. You are both to be married at the selfsame moment, and one smart tie will do for me. There is something in a picnic after all!”
“Of course there is, Dr Jones,” cried Thornton. “How you would have enjoyed the last picnic Dundas and I had, with the ping of an Afridi bullet every half-minute or so in the deodar-tree that just sheltered us and our plates.”
“Was the ping like the popping of champagne corks?” asked Edith, innocently.
“Well, perhaps, yes, but much more exhilarating: and then, if one wanted them, there were the most fiendish war-whoops in the distance. I never saw a man with a broken arm so hungry as Dundas was.”
“That is what I was telling you, Dr Hermione,” said Dundas; “that was when Tom rushed forward and carried me off on his saddle-tree, through a crowd of ruffians in sheepskin.”
“Tell it again,” exclaimed Edith eagerly,—“tell the Doctor, please.”
“Please do, Major,” said Dr Jones, curtly; “we shall want it for a village lecture by-and-by. Master Tom and his achievements! But give us a taste now.”
“Not quite, Dr Jones,” interrupted Thornton. “Make a fool of me if you like—Dundas won’t.”
“Not I, Tom. You risked your life a dozen times over——”
“Hermione told me all that,” cried Edith. “But, Major Dundas, you must have been in front if Tom rushed forward and saved you?”
“Of course he was, Edy; in front then, and always. What an ass I was to mention that beastly picnic. I beg your pardon, Dr Jones; you were quite right to think so.”
“I beg yours, Tom, most sincerely,” said Dr Jones; “I never thought so. You were a plucky young demon from the first. Hermione, I am evidently drifting back to the uncivilised stage,—I must take a corrective. Trifle or Périgord pie—which, Tom? Either will avenge you. Well, as you let me off, here’s a toast for you and the Major and the rest of us—‘To each other and one other.’”
“What a pretty toast, Dr Jones. Major Dundas, here’s to the ‘one other.’ Tom, here’s to your ‘one other.’”
“Make the Doctor drink it in a bumper, please,” said Thornton; “it is his toast, not ours. There are no ‘others’ for us when you and Dr Hermione are here.”
“Isn’t that nice, Hermione? Make the Doctor drink his bumper. It will serve him right. But, Tom, you really mustn’t pull the crackers till the right end comes. No; I won’t look. I can’t see. Greek, I suppose. All the mottoes are Greek at Girton.”
“And in the Ionian Isles,” said Dundas. “I spent some months once at Corfu. May I see Miss Edith?”
“No, Major Dundas,” answered Hermione for Edith; “you shall tempt Providence yourself. Try. Has Providence treated you kindly?”
“Major Dundas, you must give it me, or lend it me,” cried Edith. “Please, do. Here’s Tom’s. I’ll change.”
“I think not, Miss Edith. I’ll——”
“You’ll consult your Ionian lexicon first, eh, Major?” said Dr Jones. “Very much what I do when a pretty girl makes a fool of me in a dead language of thirty or forty years ago.”
“I wonder who writes all the mottoes, Hermione?” said Edith, looking one by one at the little slips of paper piled before her.
“My dear Edith, I have not the remotest idea.”
“Disappointed confectioners, Miss Edith,” explained Dr Jones.
“What a treasure they’d have found in that old Judge, Dundas,” cried Thornton. “He forged all the mottoes coming home, Edy. He’d a rap for everybody, and he made everybody on board blush, except the Commissioner’s wife. The Judge used to say a smart motto should——”
“Oh, do leave the Judge alone, Tom. You seem to be drinking up all the champagne, and if Major Dundas and Dr Jones really won’t take any more wine, Hermione——”
“Dr Jones and Major Dundas,” added Hermione, rising, “might like to smoke.”
“All right, my dears,” said Dr Jones, contentedly; “twos into five go twice and one over, and the odd one is no good at climbing boulders. I’ll smoke here, if you let me, and have forty winks, perhaps, before you all come back from the Water’s Meet.”
“And then Hermione and I will each win a pair of gloves,” said Edith: “see if we don’t. Tell the servants to put Major Dundas’s easel out, Dr Jones. He has to paint the view over the Scrubbs before we let him mount and ride away.”
Then Dr Jones lit his cigar; and as soon as they had all disappeared behind the copse, he called to the servants to take the things away.
“Eat them, or drink them, or get rid of them somehow,” he said crossly—“only don’t come to me for a black draught to-morrow morning.”
Then he became aware that, behind George the footman, and Seton, Major Dundas’s man, Mrs Price was curtseying at him.
“What brings you here with the men, Mrs Price?” he asked in some surprise. “And who is looking after Dr Hermione’s dispensary?”
“I just came along with the men, Dr Jones. The sergeant’s been in Egypt, and I’ve a son there, so we forgathered; and George never can manage the ices. Dinah was to dispense, sir, when the washing up was done.”
“I see. Sergeant——”
“Corporal, sir,” said Seton promptly. “Mrs Price always gives me brevet rank.”
“You and the corporal seem pretty thick, Mrs Price. Let George take the things away, and tell me what you and the corporal really think about Master Tom and the Major.”
“All that’s good of the Major, sir,” exclaimed Mrs Price, “and all that’s bad of Master Tom.”
“Ah, what do you mean, Seton?”
“Nothing at all, sir, except what Mrs Price puts into my mouth. She doesn’t like Mr Thornton; no more do I. But I know my duty to my officers.”
“Shirks his work, eh? Doesn’t care for a brush with the enemy?”
“Doesn’t he, though!” said Seton, as loudly as he thought respectful. “None of our officers shirk that, sir, least of all Mr Thornton. He’s a regular fire-eater; and if I may say so, sir, he fire-eats in peace as well as in war, and when he hasn’t anything else to conquer, some poor female comes smiling up to the scratch.”
“I see. Look out, Mrs Price; it’s a way they have in the army. You can go, all of you; and you, Seton, stick up the Major’s easel somewhere hereabouts, and as I want a snooze, take care that I don’t come within range of his camera.”
But when the men had gone, Mrs Price remained behind, coughing a little until she attracted Dr Jones’s attention.
“I beg your pardon, sir,” she said, eventually; “I don’t like Miss Edy’s looks.”
“Then you’re confoundedly hard to please. But you might have told me that any time this last two years, instead of keeping it for my first holiday. What are you crying for?”
“Master Tom is making a fool of both of them, with the same soft words to each. I hear what I hear, and many a sad hour it gives me.”
“Then why the devil do you listen?” asked the Doctor, angrily.
“Because I’ve ears, Dr Jones, and Miss Edy was my baby from the month. She has been peeked and peevish since Master Tom came. Is it love, thought I to myself—and I made bold to follow her to-day, so as to watch her quietly. And, Dr Jones, if I might make so bold as to ask, is love——?”
“Is it what, woman? It’s a microbe, a bacillus, gout, measles, typhoid, cholera——”
“Oh, Doctor! Oh——”
“Consumption, perhaps, and certainly a lingering death to old stagers like you and me. To young ladies like Miss Edith it’s very different.”
“Ah, that’s it, Dr Jones,” said Mrs Price; “that’s what frightens me——”
“Very different, and very much easier. They all have it, and all get over it somehow, Mrs Price, if the old people will only let them alone. Aggravate the symptoms by interference, and heaven knows what they’ll suffer.”
“I know that, of course, Dr Jones. Every woman knows that better than any doctor can. But I thought you might speak to Master Tom, perhaps.”
“Perhaps,” said Dr Jones, slowly; “I think not, though. I can’t give Miss Edith fresh eyes. And if she can’t see Mr Tom as he is, neither you nor I can make her do so, Mrs Price.”
“But there’s Dr Hermione too, if you please, Dr Jones.”
“That’s another thing altogether. If Mr Tom tries to make a fool of her, I’ll speak out pretty freely. A hungry, greedy young scoundrel, without money or brains or conscience——”
“Hush! Here’s the sergeant with the easel, Doctor, so I had better go.”
“A sharp, shrewd woman that, with all her wits well about her,” muttered Dr Jones to himself. “She’d speak to Tom to some purpose, and, by gad! I wish I’d told her to; and I wish I’d gone to that confounded Water’s Meet. Five-and-thirty years ago! Heigh-ho! the old place looks just the same, and none of the trees seem to have grown any older. They don’t get grey or bald as we do! I ought to pistol that young beast, and I would too, if I’d a pistol handy, and didn’t feel quite so sleepy.”
But before he went to sleep Dr Jones had a long look at the landscape all around. There was something broad and free about it that contrasted oddly with the narrow groove into which his life had almost naturally dropped. The gorse and the heather were touched for a moment with the sunlight as the sun broke out of a cloud; the russet copse to the right of him and the little cross-barred stile to the left caught the glamour of the sudden sunshine too, and brought him a host of unexpected memories. Far beyond the Scrubbs, in the mystic light of this sudden burst of sunshine, the huge rough mountains threw a shadow, mystic, dignified, and splendid, over the beauty of a country that from early boyhood upwards had always seemed half impenetrable.
“Beauty,” thought Dr Jones, “is always unapproachable. At all events it disappears whenever one approaches it, and then one is a cynic. One ought as a child to have been taught to turn one’s back on the whole thing.”
And then, though rather late in the day, Dr Jones tried to carry his theory into practice. He turned his back on the past; he covered his face with his handkerchief; and in a minute or two found himself in a forgotten but familiar country, in which the sun shone brightly every day and all day long.
But just as Dr Jones had completely lost himself in a very pleasant dream, Edith crept quietly up to him on tiptoe. She looked round her for a moment to see that none of the others were in sight, then she came close to Dr Jones.
“Dr Jones,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Dr Jones! dear Dr Jones! How provoking! he is really asleep. I must ask him. I can’t awake him. Dr Jones! Dr Jones! I needn’t do it. I’ll only say I’ve done it,” and then she lifted the handkerchief.
“Dr Jones, I’ve won a pair of gloves; and, oh dear, Dr Jones, can you—can you love a man you hate?”
“Yes, my dear,” said Dr Jones, rubbing his eyes; “I think so, though I am not quite awake yet. Yes, of course you can, if he is a good man.”
“But he’s not a good man; and he has had, I’m almost sure, too much champagne. He was never nicer till just now, and now he has spoilt everything, and I never really hated him before.”
“The infernal scoundrel! What did he do?”
“He didn’t do anything. He said——”
“The blackguard! What did he say?”
“He said Major Dundas was calling us, and dragged me up to the rest of them, and sat himself down close beside Hermione, and he is there now.”
“Dear me! dear me!” exclaimed Dr Jones. “But you mustn’t cry over that, my dear. You girls are spoiling him between you.”
“Yes; isn’t it horrid of Hermione? But what shall I do, Dr Jones? What shall I do?”
“Do? Do what any woman of spirit would do if she hadn’t been cooped up in a nunnery and sent to Girton. Get hold of the Major at once, and flirt with him—flirt outrageously.”
“Oh, thank you, Dr Jones. What a splendid idea! I will.”
Then Edith, full of this novel plan of campaign, ran up the rocks cheerily and disappeared, and Dr Jones again covered his face with a handkerchief and again dozed off. What he saw, as he slept, was almost too real and lifelike for a dream. There, on the top bar of the little stile opposite the russet fence, sat a slim slip of a girl tapping the lower bars impatiently with her riding-whip. Her horse, tethered to the rail close by, stretched his neck out towards her hand. He saw all this as he came in, splashed and heated after a hard ride of thirty miles across country. She turned her head away as he alighted, and only told him very coldly what he knew to his cost already, that he was half an hour late. Then as he stood with his bridle in his hand, the two horses, friends of old, neighed at each other, and the young lady struck at her horse with her whip, and asked him how he had dared to keep her waiting for half an hour.
The sound of a voice in a dream is always eerie, and the sound of his own voice, as it was five-and- thirty years ago, almost awoke Dr Jones. It did not quite awake him, but it changed the drift of his dream. For a while he followed his voice backward and forward, from the shrill, sharp treble heard all over the old grammar-school playground, to the suave and deliberate utterances of his last scientific lecture; and then he seemed, in a quiet philosophical sort of manner, to explain to himself the physical meaning of these changes of inflexion. What an odd gamut, he thought, as he dreamt; and what a queer line of thought; and how useful if he could apply it to all his patients. But the desire to get back to the theme of the original dream was too much for him. He longed to revert to it, and his volition still counted for something. He listened intently; but it was another voice that spoke—a voice clear and soft and bell-like. Again he saw the stile; and he saw, too, a girl in a brown habit jumping off it. How was it that girls wore such queer old-fashioned hats, and why were they so much more becoming than Edith’s hats, or Hermione’s? And why did not they too wear riding-habits like this, in which the slim waist came almost up to the arms? But what a picturesque costume the lady of his dreams wore as she stood with one arm over her horse’s neck. In his dream Dr Jones himself cut a sorry figure; and what a fool he looked in a pea-green coat, long yellow boots, and a tall beaver hat, splashed with black mud from his velvet collar to his spurs. There he was to the life as he confessed his failure. He had been beaten. Another man had obtained the post that might have meant so much for him just then,—a man whom he had vanquished time after time ever since they had first joined the same hospital. He had played his trump-card, and he had failed. But even in his dreams Dr Jones did not dare to tell the whole truth, or to explain how coldly her mother had told him to consider his position, when he called upon her just after his defeat; or how quickly she had rung for her footman, who had almost grinned as he showed him out of the house. Of all this he said nothing. But in spite of his reticence, he heard a derisive little laugh now, and it seemed in his dream—a dream five-and-thirty years old—to twit him with too ready an acquiescence with “mamma.” Men shouldn’t be frightened by a woman, it seemed to say, and men ought not to fail, and men don’t fail if they love. Then the derisive little laugh stopped short suddenly, and the lady of his dreams said, as distinctly and abruptly as she had said it thirty-five years ago—“Do you love me, Jack?”
Dr Jones was really so sound asleep that he could not hear his own answer properly; but he heard every word of her reply, shyly and softly spoken as it was.
“You are sure of yourself?” she whispered. “Then let us go, dear. Our horses are ready; we are close to the coast, and no one can touch us in the Isle of Man.”
Then the dream became a nightmare, as he argued against himself. What was it that he argued? He could only hear a confused murmuring of the very same arguments that had vexed his soul through all these secret trysts by the old stile.
He had been wrong from the first clandestine meeting. She had always been infinitely above him, and he should never have dared to come there. As her mother had told him, he was only an apothecary after all.
At last, as she nodded an assent to his words, her eyes, for a moment, were perhaps more loving than they ever had been.
“Please put me on my horse,” she said.
Then as she stooped towards him, he looked into her eyes again; there was a look of pity and half-concealed contempt in them now. Her little hand touched his shoulder for a minute, after he had lifted her on to her horse, and before she started she kissed him softly on the forehead. The light touch of a kiss that meant good-bye for ever seemed to end his nightmare, or dream, or whatever it was. Dr Jones, as he awoke, was, however, not in the least astonished to find a young lady really kissing him.
The fates to-day were, it would seem, altogether against Dr Jones. Almost before Edith had disappeared, Hermione had gently taken a seat on the grass beside him. He was dreaming, and his face, as he dreamt, looked almost beautiful.
She looked at him very tenderly for three or four minutes. “He is dreaming,” she thought, “and he does not often have a chance of dreaming in the day-time.”
But when he became troubled, and began to murmur impatiently in his sleep, she determined to awake him.
Hermione, as we have seen, had stolen away from the others to sit beside Dr Jones.
“My dear old guardian,” she said at last, “are you really sound asleep?”
Then she lifted the handkerchief and kissed him on the forehead.
“Dr Jones,” she cried, “I’ve won the gloves!”
“And very good and thoughtful of you too, my dear,” answered Dr Jones, sitting up. “But I shall be simply ruined if this kind of thing goes on. What are your young men about, to let you wander off alone?”
“Our ‘young men,’ as you call them, haven’t much to do with my movements, Dr Jones, I assure you. I thought you might be lonely. I thought it was a shame to leave you in the way we did. And then I wanted——”
“You wanted to ask me if you could love a man you hate, I suppose?”
“You dear, ridiculous, old guardian!” exclaimed Hermione. “What could have put that into your head? No; make your mind easy. I am not in the least likely to love any man at all,” she continued, “and certainly not a man I hated.”
Then Hermione stopped suddenly. There was a strange, wistful, far-away light in Dr Jones’s eyes that seemed full of unexpected sympathy, and he was looking at her as he had never looked before.
She was silent for a little, but that sympathetic look unconsciously compelled her to speak on, and almost before she knew what she was saying, she said: “I could not possibly love a man I hated; but it must be a terrible thing for a woman to love a man she despises. You know everything, Dr Jones. Can a woman love a man she despises?”
“Yes, yes, Hermione! Of course she can, if she is a fool, and ninety women or more out of a hundred are fools, pure and simple.”
“You nasty old cross patch!” exclaimed Hermione, recovering herself completely. “Catch me spoiling your dreams again. And you men! What about you, Dr Jones?”
“Ninety-nine of us out of a hundred are fools, or worse. Hermione, my dear, take an old fool’s advice, and let love alone. I never met a man yet worth a second thought from you. We are all bad, and very selfish, and very silly. When we are able to know ourselves, we despise ourselves.”
“No, no, no! Dr Jones. When you button up your big coat every morning, in a burly English way, and scold the coachman for being late, you don’t despise yourself. Don’t tell me you do. And do you think Mr Thornton ever despises himself?”
“Not he—the puppy! He hasn’t it in him,” cried Dr Jones, starting to his feet in a passion. “But Edith despises him. The Major despises him. The corporal despises him. Mrs Price despises him. I despise him. And you, Hermione?”
“I almost think I despise him a little too perhaps, he is so weak. I am unjust, I know. And, after all, I like Mr Thornton more than I despise him.”
“My poor girl! my poor girl!”
“Dr Jones, don’t call me your poor girl; don’t pity me like that. It is most horribly unkind of you. I don’t care two straws for any Mr Thorntons in the way you mean. I have chalked out my life. I see my path clearly enough, and I mean to follow it to the end.”
“Yes, my dear,” said Dr Jones, gently. “We are all always chalking our lives out. But look me full in the face, and then dissect him.”
“That’s just what I can’t do, and I won’t try.”
“But you must, Hermione. Dissect him; resolve him into his original elements. What do you find there?”
“I find nothing. I want to find nothing. I won’t look!”
“You shall look, my dear!” and here Dr Jones, being thoroughly in earnest, sat down again. “You must look, and what do you find? Mr Thornton in a fine frieze suit that he has not paid for!”
“Perhaps so. Perhaps that’s why I said I almost thought I despised him. Dr Jones, take your eyes off mine. I don’t care for him. I won’t care for him. I sometimes feel——”
“One moment, my dear. You know——”
“And you know, Dr Jones, you know how little I know of men, and that I don’t want to know more. I despise them, and, in return, they despise me, I suppose. But despise him as you may, there surely is something in Mr Thornton, something different from the others, something I never quite felt before——”
“I should hope not. Think of your devoted life, Hermione,—think of your profession, think of your patients!”
“Don’t I think of them? Haven’t I given my life to them, such as it is, ever since I was a girl? And what do they think in reply? And what do you think? That I am a curiosity, a puppet, with a half-crown in each hand, if the strings are properly pulled.”
“I never meant that, my dear. It is unfair——”
“Unfair! And how unfair is it of you to look at me like that, Dr Jones! I care nothing for Mr Thornton. You know that, and you know, too, that he only happens to be different from any of the medical students I ever came across, and that his friend says he is a brave man.”
“We are all brave men, I hope, however bad and selfish and silly we may be,” said Dr Jones. “Of course, you don’t care for Mr Thornton, Hermione; but stop: do you think he cares for you? What do you feel like when he comes into a room?”
“I feel that he is there.”
“I was sure of it! And when he speaks?”
“I seem to know what he is going to say.”
“And when he looks at you?”
“I seem to know what he is thinking.”
“I only wish you did! A selfish young brute! He thinks you have plenty of money and that Edith has none. That is what Tom Thornton thinks.”
“For shame, Dr Jones!” cried Hermione, rising in her turn. “For shame! Sir Thornton has his faults; but it is Edith’s own fault if he doesn’t like her. No man could like a girl who was always throwing herself at him. Watch them when they are together! Watch her, Dr Jones, and then say what you think of Edith! I care nothing for Mr Thornton; I scarcely know him. But it is simply unjust of you to hate him so.”
“I never said I hated him, my dear. But I like Edith now; and I never quite liked him.”
“I knew you didn’t from the first,” said Hermione, tapping her skirt impatiently with the whip she still carried in her hand. “I knew you didn’t from the first. But it wasn’t very nice of you to take me at a disadvantage, and look me through as you did, and try to draw me out, and twit me about never having known anybody else, and about my patients and my practice! You are always scolding me now.”
“I shall never scold you, Hermione. If I dislike Mr Thornton, it is only because I love you very dearly. Look at this ring, Hermione. It was your poor mother’s ring——”
“Dr Jones!”
“It was your mother’s ring, my dear. It was once our engagement-ring, and if I had not been idiotically self-conscious and conceited and inconceivably weak on this very spot five-and-thirty years ago, I might have been your father, Hermione.”
“Oh, Dr Jones! I am so sorry——”
“Tuts, my dear; this is a secret I never meant to have told.”
“Poor mamma! I see it all now! How good you always were to her when we became poor, and to me afterwards!”
“I love you very, very dearly, Hermione,” said Dr Jones, softly; “and because I love you, I hate that young beast, Tom Thornton! How two women of spirit can let a cad like that philander between them——”
“How unlike you, and how unjust! Oh, there’s some one coming! I must go!”
Dr Jones, clever as he was at understanding Hermione’s varying moods, did not notice that she was very nearly crying as she went. However, like a true philosopher, he lay down again and lit another cigar; but the smoke escaped very thoughtfully from his lips, as he looked at the broad landscape around him, and made up his mind that it was no use trying to sleep.
“The older she grows,” he thought to himself, “the more like her mother she looks. How strange that she should have tapped her skirt in that way with her riding-whip. Heredity, I suppose. Well, there’s no one to inherit my tricks!”
And with this meagre consolation, Dr Jones very nearly fell back into that pleasant dream from which Hermione’s gentle kiss had aroused him. Something, however, creaked or rustled, and he turned his head.
“Here’s that young beast himself!” he said. “I shall make an old fool of myself if I speak just now. I had better be asleep.”
Then Dr Jones covered his face once more with his red banana handkerchief.
Thornton came strolling along carelessly, as if all the world belonged to him, and he flicked viciously with his riding-cane, as he walked, at the thistles in the grass. The day that had been so promising to begin with, had not after all been very satisfactory. In the ride out Hermione had laughed at him rather more than she should have done; and when, by an adroit manoeuvre, he had managed to get her alone just now, she had insisted on sending him to join Dundas. He had almost met Edith on the way down, and she had not appeared to see him. But as he thought he could see the flutter of Hermione’s riding-habit, he went on as far as the scene of the picnic. He compared Hermione and Edith as he strolled. If they could only be combined, he said to himself, what a lovely woman the result would be. Then, as we have seen, he almost stumbled across Dr Jones’s recumbent form.
“Hullo!” he said to himself. “There is old Jones sound asleep, with a handkerchief over his face, and puffing away, as I live, at a big cheroot all the time!”
“Dr Jones!” he cried; “Dr Jones! Have you seen Dr Hermione?”
“The old impostor!” he continued, dropping his voice. “I’ll work on his feelings. I’ll try the Ionian lexicon business.” And with a sturdy cough, he began—
“That Ionian lexicon of yours and the Major’s must have been an interesting volume a good many years back. Was love then——?”
Dr Jones started up, as nearly in a towering passion as he had ever been.
“Sir!” he shouted.
“Is love still——?”
“Good God!” exclaimed the Doctor, losing the little control over his temper that these frequent interruptions had left him. “Good God, sir, do you take me for Cupid? Do I look like him? And do you think I care a tuppenny damn what you think love is, or was, or shall be? Make a fool of yourself, Master Tom! Make a fool of those two infatuated young women, if they are geese enough to let you. Spoil their sleep if you can. You shan’t spoil mine. I stayed behind here to be alone.”
Then Dr Jones threw himself back, put his cigar down, and assumed a sleepy attitude.
“Sulky, as he used to be, and surlier,” said Thornton to himself. “But, hullo! here is Edith coming to look for me. She very likely thought me rude for not seeing her on the way down; and, as Hermione is not here, I had better explain it all away at once.”
“Edith, Edith!” he cried. “Here I am.”
Edith had her arms full of Major Dundas’s portfolios, and brushes, and painting materials, as she replied—
“Indeed, Mr Thornton! But you don’t mean to say that you thought I was looking for you. I happen to be looking for Major Dundas, and here he is! Oh, Major Dundas, I tried to forestall you, you see, and I hope you won’t mind. I got Seton to give me your things, so as to save you the trouble of carrying them out. No artist ought to be worried with insignificant details.”
“It is extremely good of you, Miss Edith,” said Dundas; “but I am not an artist——”
“Oh, you are though, Major Dundas—we all saw that at a glance; and, Major Dundas——”
And here, as they adjusted the easel between them, she found something that had to be told in whispers, and when he seemed to protest, she added aloud—“I am right, I am sure I am right, Major Dundas; and there is an insignificant detail over there——”
“What detail, Miss Edith?”
“My cousin, Mr Thomas Thornton. Dr Jones doesn’t seem to want him. Do you?”
“Not I, Miss Edy.”
This was a trifle too much for Thornton’s equanimity. He could hear every word they said, and he fancied they must know that he could hear them.
“Miss Edy,” he said to himself. “It is Miss Edy now! They must have both gone stark staring mad!”
Then he began to think that Hermione might be wandering about alone, and that he had perhaps better go and look for her.
He turned though, after he had gone half-a-dozen paces.
“Oh, Major Dundas!” he heard Edith say, with her hand just touching the Major’s arm. “Oh, Major Dundas, I should so like to be an artist! Of all things, I love art! And, with just a line or two, you have got the very look of the Scrubbs in already. It is simply marvellous!”
“My dear young lady,” he heard Dundas say, “it is a trick, nothing more—a trick I could teach you in half-a-dozen lessons.”
“I should want a dozen or two dozen at least,” said Edith, prettily. “I should like to spend a month here sketching, if you would promise not to be very, very severe.”
“I will promise that at once.”
“And then, when I had learnt landscape-painting thoroughly, you could teach me figure-drawing, and how to paint faces—real living faces, with life and soul and meaning in them. And, Major Dundas, when you have taught me all you know, you might be my model yourself; please promise?”
“Scarcely, Miss Edy,” said Dundas, beginning to be interested in her earnestness, and wondering what it all meant. “I should not be of much use as a model though, and real living faces, with life and soul in them, are very difficult. That is why I paint landscape. But you’ll find some wretched attempts at faces in that portfolio.”
Edith turned over the sketches in the portfolio, looking at them as critically as she could, but full of admiration for the talent she saw in them all the time.
“Oh, what a lovely face!” she said at last. “Why, it’s me!”
“The Scrubbs be damned!” cried Thornton, who had stopped where he had turned five minutes back; and then he walked off in earnest.
Dr Jones, who overheard this disagreeable ejaculation, was so pleased with it that, after laughing a little to himself, he really went to sleep.
“No, it is not you,” continued Dundas. “It is a lovely face, spoiled by a hard, cruel mouth! The likeness never struck me before. But you are right, quite right. It is like. What a fool I was not to see it at once.”
And then he tried to take it from her.
“No, no!” said Edith; “please don’t take it away. I’ll put it back directly. But why do you say the mouth is cruel?”
“Because it was cruel, cruel, hard and false. Miss Edith, whatever you may become when you leave Girton by-and-by, never try to be a flirt.”
“Oh, Major Dundas! You really must be a wonderful man to have found me out so soon. I never wanted to learn to sketch. I couldn’t draw a straight line if I practised till Doomsday; but I am not a flirt, really. I only brought your things out, and talked to you as I did, to see if I could vex Tom. But he is not worth the trouble; and I will never do it again. Tell me about her. Did you love her? And did she love you?”
“I never quite knew about her,” replied Dundas, gravely; “and I’d rather not talk about old times,—and they were very old times, when I was quite a lad, Miss Edith, and almost as full of enthusiasm and faith and generous thoughts as you are now.”
“What a shame! And did she change all that?”
“Something changed it. I was a fool, and I had my punishment. I woke up one fine morning very wretched. I was wretched for some time, and then, by degrees, I came to think that pleasure and excitement were the only things worth living for.”
“That cannot be a proper feeling, of course,” said Edith. “But I quite understand it. I never wished to be a man before; but just now I really should like to be a man for a little, I should like to be a gambler, and go to the play, and sit up all night, and gallop through the jungle, sticking pigs, as Tom calls it, or fighting the Afridis, or——”
“And what about Girton, Miss Edith?”
“I suppose I shall soon be back again at the dear, dull, old place, with its dear, dull, old professors!” exclaimed Edith, ruefully. “But I’m tired of everything just now, and should like a little real excitement first. And then, pleasure and excitement can’t be very bad for one after all, judging by you, Major Dundas. Cousin Tom says you are the most unselfish man in the world, and that all the ladies have always liked you.”
“Cousin Tom is sometimes a humbug, and he was certainly not speaking the truth then, Miss Edith.”
“That’s very likely. Tom has changed dreadfully: anybody can see that,” said Edith, with half a sigh. “But when did you begin to recover? I know a girl, a girl at Girton, who thought very much as you say you did, and it might be useful to her if I knew.”
“Tell her that time works wonders, Miss Edith,” replied Dundas, turning round to tie up the portfolio of sketches. “Time works wonders, Miss Edith. My own trouble made me keener-sighted, perhaps, than some men are. I saw that other people had their troubles too; and women who have lost their illusions are always good to a man who knows that they have lost them.”
“How queer, Major Dundas, and how true!” said Edith, and then she paused for a moment.
“I wonder,” she thought to herself, “if I really like Major Dundas to know that I have lost my illusions.”
But she had to say something aloud, so she began again: “Still Tom said—yes, he really did say it,—he said you have always been a great ladies’ man.”
“Tom is impertinent, and much too free with his tongue. What did you say?”
“I said you looked far too nice for that, and that didn’t believe it.”
“Thank you, Miss Edith—thank you warmly.”
“You are not a ladies’ man, I know. I should hate that. But have you never liked anybody since? Of course, one can’t love twice. But have you never liked anybody since since the time of the portrait, I mean?”
“Of course I have, Miss Edith,” replied Dundas, smiling. “Why, that was before you were born.
“What a long time ago!”
“A long time. But our lives don’t stop short at eighteen or two-and-twenty. And people, whether old or young, have no right to go snarling and scowling through the world. If they are irretrievably sullen, they should get into hermitages.”
“I am sure they should,” cried Edith, heartily. “There’s Miss Elliot—a Girton girl, you know—and when she is out of temper she makes the whole College miserable for a week. That can’t be right. But how did you change again, Major Dundas, about pleasure and excitement?”
“By degrees—as I grew wiser. At first, perhaps, I thought that all women must be alike——”
“With hard, cruel mouths, Major Dundas? Oh! I’m so sorry now that I am so like that picture. Have I really a hard, cruel mouth?”
“No, Miss Edith; there the likeness ceases.”
“Oh! I am so glad. And then?”
“And then?” answered Dundas, more gravely than usual. “Then I soon learnt that most women are very kind and true; and, no matter what they say, very tender and thoughtful. Please don’t allow Thornton to talk about me in that way again. I hope I have never in my life given any woman cause to think hardly or unkindly of me.”
“I am sure you haven’t. But——”
Just then Dr Jones woke up, and as Edith noticed that he was awake she stopped talking; and so nobody will ever know what she was going to say.
“Miss Edith,” said Dr Jones, pretending he had never been asleep at all, “how terribly earnest you and the Major look now. This isn’t the way we used to enjoy our picnics in our young days. We used——”
But before Dr Jones was wide awake enough to put his reminiscences presentably, Hermione and Thornton stood before him.
“What was it you used to do, my dear old guardian?” asked Hermione.
“I was not talking to you, my dear,” said the Doctor. “I did not know you were here; but I trust you have been giving Tom a hearty scolding, too.”
“I have, Dr Jones,” answered Hermione.
“That’s right! That’s as it should be. That’s the modern school, Major. Two young ladies meet two gentlemen at a picnic; they carry off a man apiece for a scramble, and when they have each scolded each of their men for an hour or so, they change partners and scold again. And so the indubitable superiority of the sex is vindicated in all directions. But what can have induced Seton and Mrs Price to be running races in weather like this?”
They were not exactly running a race, but Seton, who was almost breathless, was certainly followed by Mrs Price as a bad second, and the worthy housekeeper was wringing her hands.
“A telegram for you, Major Dundas,” cried Seton, “and a telegram for Mr Thornton. The boy drove over in the butcher’s cart, and the postmaster sent a railway guide.”
“Ordered to Egypt, by Jove!” exclaimed Thornton, when he had torn his telegram open.
Dundas was more deliberate. He looked at the message and the heading and the cover.
“It has been travelling about the country for a couple of days,” he said at last, “and the regiment leaves Portsmouth to-morrow night.”
“Here’s the railway guide, Major.”
“Right, Seton! We can catch the 5.30 down-train at Caxton Junction, if we ride forward instead of going back. Seton, you drive back to the inn in the butcher’s cart; bring all our traps on by the 9.25 train. I will telegraph full instructions in time to catch you at the Dragon. And then we can telegraph to the colonel and the agents, Thornton, from the first station we stop at.”
“Neat and business-like, Major!” said Dr Jones, almost in admiration. “In half a minute you have broken up our party as completely as any Egyptian bombshell could have done it.”
“I am distressed beyond measure, Dr Jones,” answered Dundas. “But we are on duty now. Ladies, you must forgive us. We have not a moment to lose. We must saddle our horses at once, Thornton.”
“We will come to see them saddled, Major Dundas,” said Hermione. “Come, Edith, dear!”
“Major Dundas, is it war? Is it war, Major Dundas?” cried Edith.
“Make your mind easy, my dear,” said Dr Jones aside to Hermione, “I have been watching her, as you told me to, ever since I awoke, and a little before perhaps, and I can’t honestly say that Miss Edith is always throwing herself at Master Tom.”
“Oh, Dr Jones!” exclaimed Hermione. “Never mind Edith now. Never mind what I said.”
“Tuts, nonsense, dear! Of course not, if you don’t like it. Come on, Miss Edith.”
For a moment, as the others started first, Hermione and Thornton were left alone.
“Oh! is it really war, Mr Thornton?” asked Hermione, unconsciously echoing Edith’s words, and laying her hand on his sleeve.
“Yes, Dr Hermione. Yes, Hermione, it is.”
“Hush! You mustn’t call me Hermione, please. And please let go my hand, Mr Thornton,” cried Hermione. “But I am so sorry for you,—so sorry for you both. And perhaps you will never come back.”
“You will think of me sometimes?”
“I will think of you often,” said Hermione, gently.
“Hermione, you will not forget me?”
“Hush! I will remember you always as a very dear friend.”
“Good-bye! good-bye!” cried Thornton, still holding her hand. “I wish I were a better man. I should like to be able to say ‘God bless you!’”
“Oh! But you must be a good man, Mr Thornton.”
“I will try, Hermione. I swear I will try,” said Thornton, very earnestly. “Give me a talisman to wear by day and night to keep me good; something you have worn yourself—a ribbon, a glove. Oh, give me this. May I take it?”
And then he half took the riding-glove from the little hand he held.
“No; I think you ought not to,” said Hermione. “Oh, I don’t know. Oh, Mr Thornton, the news was so sudden, and I am so sorry for you both. Perhaps those dreadful Arabs will kill you. Yes; take it then.”
But just as Thornton took the glove, Edith returned to see why they had not come. Her face grew paler and harder as Hermione continued, and she stood behind them, listening intently.
“Take it,” she heard Hermione say, almost in a whisper. “I am too sorry to say ‘No.’ You are always brave, Mr Thornton,—be a good man too. No, no, Mr Thornton. Let my hand go. Please let my hand go. Oh, you mustn’t kiss my hand. It is cruel of you. Can’t you see I am so sorry I hardly know what I am saying——”
Then Edith lost her temper, and blazed out. “Hermione!” she cried, “Hermione! You sneak! You sneak!”
It is the unexpected, though, that always happens. Thornton and Dundas mounted their horses and rode away, as sadly and disconsolately as heroes always do, whether in real life or in fiction. The girls they left behind them stood facing each other without speaking. Two softer, gentler, kindlier young women it would be difficult to imagine; but to each other, as they stood there, they were as flint and steel. The spark that might have meant a conflagration was consciously or unconsciously avoided, for neither of them spoke. Dr Jones climbed into his dogcart, and at the last moment Edith begged for a seat.
He drove her home in silence, wishing devoutly that “neither of their young men” had ever set foot in the Priory.
Hermione rode off alone. She was offended by Mr Thornton’s temerity; she was hurt by Edith’s extraordinary outburst of temper and that vulgar stinging epithet; she was most bitterly mortified at her own unexpected weakness. At the same time she felt very sorry indeed for Major Dundas and Mr Thornton. “Is it war?” Edith and she had cried, and both the gentlemen had answered her triumphantly that it was. War for men; and for women—even the bravest of them—the charge of a few old people and sick children, and the shrinking horror of having to read, night after night, what the special correspondents in the newspapers chose to tell them about the war. Hermione, though she tried to scout her anxiety, foresaw it all. And how intolerably rude Edith had been to her! She would never forgive her! Never! Then she set her horse at an old stone fence, and galloped him straight across country as hard as she could make him go. Dr Jones thought she was mad.
“John Peel” himself—with his hounds and his horn in the morning—had always hunted this rough country on foot. Beneath a picturesque veneer of gorse and heather the scanty soil was almost paved with sharp, jagged little rocks. Stiff stone “fences,” deep ravines, and treacherous, shingly little becks, divided the estates of rival squires. Hermione’s horse, having never really felt the whip before, had his bit in his teeth now, and looked as though he meant mischief as he galloped madly down the steep mountain-side in a bee-line for the Priory. She was soon too tired to try and hold him in; but, as he took one obstacle after another, she sat back defiantly on her saddle, almost enjoying the sudden rush of fresh mountain air against her face. She ought, to have broken her neck a dozen times over. But she never for a moment realised the danger she was in, and the excitement of this helter-skelter ride did her good at the time; but she felt sick and rather faint when the groom helped her off her saddle.
The two girls met again at dinner. They were both too much in earnest to malinger in their rooms. But neither of them spoke a word to the other; and Dr Jones, who had volunteered to come over and dine because he fancied they were dull, began, poor man, to lay all the blame at his own door. He was glad to be left alone with the port. But when he entered the drawing-room he found the ladies flown. Hermione had gone up-stairs at once, Mrs Price said, as she opened the hall door to let him out, and Miss Edy had followed without taking her candle.
But it is, as we suggested, the unexpected that always happens. In the early morning there was a flutter of pigeons and a clatter of horses’ hoofs in the Priory courtyard. Dundas and Thornton had come back. The delay in the delivery of their telegrams had saved them a useless journey. At Caxton Junction they saw from the London papers that the departure of their regiment had been suddenly deferred; and they were able to verify this by “wire” before the train, late as usual, crawled up to the platform. They had slept at the Station Hotel, and had ridden back to the Priory as soon as there was light enough.
“So nothing is changed,” cried Thornton cheerily, lifting his cap to the young ladies, who had each of them thrown up their bedroom windows in alarm, and were each of them now shivering in white wraps behind their curtains; “nothing is changed, and everything will go on as before.”
Here “Master Tom,” as Mrs Price called him, was wrong. Nothing went on as before.
Dr Jones was wonderfully pleasant all round. He talked to Thornton quite amiably, and when he had the chance he gave the girls a hearty scolding, and succeeded in not only making them cry, but in making them kiss each other before him.
For a day or two the old walks and rides were partially resumed, but in such a half-hearted fashion that Dundas began to think that he was not quite so welcome at the Priory as he had been; and he was suddenly called up to town without telling even Thornton anything about the summons. Thornton was delighted at being left alone with Hermione.
But Hermione was as cold as ice now. He was a fraud, and she made him feel it. She had humbled herself idiotically when he was starting for Egypt—but he had stopped short at Caxton Junction. In a way she was glad that he had not gone to the war, but. she could not forgive him for staying. So after a ride or two through a country strangely changed—for everything began to wear a wintry look now—Thornton found that he really had to follow Dundas to London; and the girls were left alone.
Men, however, count for something in a house, and never for so much perhaps as when they have just left it, and Dundas and Thornton were missed a great deal more than either of them could have imagined. The Priory without them seemed to be very desolate indeed. Neither Edith nor Hermione were inclined to exchange confidences just then; but it would be difficult to say which of them most missed the scent of the fragrant tobacco in the garden, or the firm stamp of the heavy boots in the hall, as one or other of the gentlemen used to come up to beg them to go out and do something.
The situation had one advantage that was, however, sadly neglected. Now that the men had gone, the girls were left to have their own battle out, face to face, if they wished. But, oddly enough, neither of them wished it. Hermione could have been a good fighter if she chose; but she was not quite satisfied with herself just now. And then, all the fun and gaiety in Edith had suddenly died out. She never seemed to be vexed now. She was, indeed, unusually thoughtful, and quite unselfish about all the small things that often make one’s life a worry to other people. She was always courteous and always willing to accompany Hermione anywhere.
Dr Jones gave Edith a tonic, and Mrs Price administered a good deal of homely, motherly advice every evening when she was helping her to undress. But this was all to no purpose. So at last Mrs Price formed a resolution—she had never probably formed half-a-dozen in her life—and this resolution of hers she carried next morning to Dr Jones for approval.
“He will call me an old fool,” she said; “but what does that matter at my age? And Miss Edy must be helped.”
Dr Jones, to Mrs Price’s profound astonishment, agreed with her off-hand, and declared that her little conspiracy was one of the very cleverest things he had ever heard of. So, fortified in this unexpected manner, it was easy for Mrs Price to tell a pitiable story about a young woman who had just drifted back to the village from London, and who lay sick, and perhaps dying, close at hand.
The story went straight to Edith’s gentle heart. Directly luncheon was over, she hung a little basket of grapes and port-wine and other comforting things over her arm; and then she accompanied Mrs Price to a little fell-side hamlet just out of the village where only the very poorest people lived. Here, in a miserable hovel built of rough stone slabs, piled one on the other, they found Molly Barnes, the girl of whom Dr Jones had, by the way, reminded Thornton rather unpleasantly in their first little passage of arms. Edith remembered her name directly Mrs Price mentioned it. Molly had been the prettiest and brightest girl in the village, a tomboy and a romp, a year or two back, and a little earlier a familiar playmate of hers.
Coming, as they did, out of the warm sunshine, the damp wind seemed to whistle coldly through every cranny in the stone walls of the dismal little shanty; and as Molly Barnes lay there shivering under a tattered tawdry covering, nothing but her preternaturally bright eyes reminded either of her visitors of what she had been.
Mrs Price gave the slovenly old beldame of a grandmother a shilling, and sent her off on a message—probably to buy gin. But she gave Molly a couple of glasses of port, one after the other, and told her that Miss Edith had come down to try and help her in her troubles, but must, of course, hear her story first.
Molly, however, was sulky and suspicious and defiant. She drank up the port-wine eagerly enough, but stolidly refused to answer any of Edith’s kindly questions. Mrs Price, who had shrewdly suspected the possibility of a difficulty of this kind from the first, suddenly whispered something quietly, that made Molly, weak and feeble as she was, start from her bed. She fell back again; for a moment she pushed Edith’s hand away with a feeble shiver, and then, in excited tones and almost in the delirium of fever, she plunged into the story of her life. She began at the end though, the part she remembered best, and then went slowly backward.
It was a common, brutal, miserable story, and as sad, perhaps, as it was common. Edith, poor child, had never heard anything so painful before, and scarcely knew what it all meant, until, quite at the last, when Molly’s voice had grown husky and faint, a familiar name struck her ears. The whole thing seemed too dreadful to be true, but now it was far too important to be left unfathomed. With trembling hands she managed to pour out another glass of wine. She had been crying before, but now she stopped her tears; and before giving the wine to Molly she gave her companion a prompt quick order to go outside and wait there till she came.
Mrs Price was already alarmed at the result of her little conspiracy with Dr Jones. But she was terribly frightened when her young lady reappeared.
Edith’s eyes, as she came slowly out of the narrow doorway, were still red with weeping; but they had a fixed, intent look, like a somnambulist’s, or as if she were trying to gaze at something out of sight; her cheeks were flushed with shame, and she was quivering all over with indignation. She said nothing till they were well out of the village. Then, in spite of all her gentleness, she turned fiercely on Mrs Price.
“How did you dare to take me there?” she cried; “and what did you mean by making me talk to a woman like that?”
“My dearie! my dearie!” said Mrs Price, panting with emotion. “I asked Dr Jones before I took you there, and he thought it would be for the best.”
“Then Dr Jones knows her too!” cried Edith, putting her hand quickly to her bosom. “And does he think it true, too?”
“He knows it to be true, my dearie, and he thought you ought to know it too.”
“Why should he think that? and why should I be told things about Tom? What do I care for Tom, or he for me? Oh, Price, help me! I feel so faint, and there is Hermione driving up to us! I can’t face Hermione just now, Price. Help me to run down the turning. I couldn’t bear her to see how I have been crying.”
However, Hermione was clever enough to guess, from the way in which Mrs Price was clinging on to Edith, that there must be something wrong. She whipped up her ponies briskly. But the blood rushed back again to Edith’s heart with the first touch of Hermione’s hand, as she was assisted into the carriage.
She lay back in the pony-carriage, still and white and tearless. She clenched her teeth, and held her little hands tightly clasped. She bore herself bravely, and she would not give in. But she looked like a broken lily, as she wondered, while the carriage rolled along, if it would be mean to tell Hermione what she had heard. Hermione had taken Tom from her, just when she had begun to think so much of him again; why should not Hermione suffer too? What a weary, wicked world it was! But perhaps Hermione had not meant to take Tom after all. And Tom! was he worth anybody’s taking now? Were all men like that? No! Some men were brave and true, and girls should be like those men; they should never be mean. They should never be mean, she thought, as she closed her little hands tightly in a last brave effort—and then she fainted, and had to be carried up to bed.
It was Hermione, however, who aroused her from her stupor at last. But she could not bear to have Hermione near her, and would scarcely allow Mrs Price to bring Dr Jones into the room.
The Doctor, very unlike Mrs Price, was perfectly content with the results of their little conspiracy.
“If it had been Dr Hermione instead of Miss Edy,” said Mrs Price on the landing, “you wouldn’t have thought she was getting on so nicely.”
“Who the dickens said I would?” cried Dr Jones. “Tuts, my good woman. We needn’t all of us be good-natured, devoted old lunatics like you. But surely I ought to know my patients by this time! What is meat and drink to one woman might be rank poison to another, and Molly Barnes’s story will do Miss Edith a world of good.”
Perhaps Dr Jones would not have been quite so well satisfied with his opinion if he had watched poor Edith all night long as she tossed about her bed.
Boys, too, have their ideals and day-dreams, and sooner or later they too are disillusionised. But most of them have something to fall back upon—sport or study, or pursuits of one kind or another, and these make the hours go quickly; and then, for every lad who is not an utter simpleton, there is always the chance of a career at the end of his wild fancies.
But Edith, tossing about her bed, as the old Louis Quatorze clock in the drawing-room down below struck the hours, had no hope of this kind. “M’appen I may!” The old song came back to her as the clock struck. How full of life she had been the day before, and now a blight had fallen on her, and her troubles, as she thought them over, were so magnified by the darkness, that they spread back in some mysterious way to the earliest trouble of all. Her father was dead; her brothers were away in Australia; for her next day’s breakfast she depended on the charity of a woman to whom she could scarcely bring herself to speak civilly. Tom, as long as she remembered him, had been part and parcel of herself. Her toys and pets, as she recalled them, all somehow or other reminded her of him. A little later, but scarcely more than a child still, she used to think that everything would be right when Tom came back. Tom had come back, but how changed he was! And Hermione, who had been so good to her and so much to her before Tom came, had cast some dreadful spell over him. He had kissed Hermione’s hand, and Hermione had let him do it. That must be true, for she had seen it, and had thought of nothing else since she saw it. But was it Hermione’s fault or Tom’s? How could she tell, now that that wretched girl under the tawdry quilt in the shanty seemed to be mixed up with Tom too? And what a hero she had thought him once, when he came down to the Priory to show them his uniform and his sword. And how she had cried at Portsmouth when they went to see him off. Of course, he might have forgotten her a little in India; but that he should have forgotten her before he started—that was maddening. Had Tom ever been true? The old clock in the drawing-room below struck again, and the night-light almost expired. It was impossible to think coherently; it was difficult to think at all. She had quarrelled with Hermione, who had been an elder sister to her for more than two years, and probably Hermione had not been half so much to blame as she herself was. Hermione had never set Tom up on a pedestal. She had laughed at him a great deal. Why had she let him kiss her hand, though? Perhaps she could not help it.
Edith tried hard to unriddle her puzzle, not knowing yet that the puzzles of life are Gordian knots that must be cut. Then she strove to change her thoughts, by thinking of what Major Dundas had said about the beautiful face with the hard cruel mouth. But she could not think of Major Dundas just then, and her thoughts wandered back again to Hermione. What would Hermione think if anybody ever told her about Molly Barnes? She pondered over this till she felt almost as sorry for Hermione as she was for herself. Everything had come to an end, and everything was deceitful and wicked.
It does a manly boy good to come face to face with real life and the evil that is always somewhere in it. He sets his teeth and thinks of his mother, and is ready for the battle. But girls, as part and parcel of their girlish nature, have, like exquisite fruit, a delicate bloom which cannot be touched with impunity. To Edith, all she had heard was a horrible nightmare, strange and ghastly, and almost impossible. At last nature helped her out of her troubles with a flood of very girlish tears and a delicious dreamless sleep.
“Ten days,” she heard Dr Jones say, as she awoke. “Two months for you or me, Mrs Price, but a couple of days will be quite enough for Miss Edith. Look at her pillow; she has cried the worst part of her troubles away by this time.”
This seemed so heartless, that Edith again hardened her face against Dr Jones, and refused all his drugs. So for two days Dr Jones kept discreetly out of the road, and she only got up at last when the housemaid told her that Dr Jones and Hermione were starting for London.
She found them in the breakfast-room, studying Bradshaw.
“So you are going to desert me!” she cried.
“Not we, my dear,” said Dr Jones. “We are going to take you with us, if you please. A little run up to town will do us all good.”
Edith protested, but in spite of her protest it was soon settled that they should start that very afternoon. And then Edith, who had been fasting for three days, made a really hearty breakfast.
Even to a Girton girl—tired of Girton, tired of everything and everybody at home, and only just out of an invalid’s bed—there was a wonderful charm in the idea of going to London. They had a carriage to themselves, and that was pleasant, though it did not promise any extraordinary adventures on the road. Just, however, as the pompous old station-master rang his bell before their window, the great bell of the village church tolled slowly out, and Edith, still weak and rather morbid, could not help thinking of Molly Barnes.
But Dr Jones would not allow her to think of anything at all, and compelled her, in spite of herself, to talk instead. To men, Dr Jones explained, London was a deception and a fraud; but to any young lady with a face for a fortune, London was a perennial paradise. The Dick Whittington business had been done to death. Who cared, or ever had cared, two buttons for the raw country lads who went up to town with a borrowed half-crown in their pockets? But to any young lady from the country, London was, and always had been, and always would be, a world of romance—a romance that had never yet been properly interpreted, and Miss Edith must write it autobiographically. Miss Edith Whittington! What a splendid title! And she must begin to record her impressions as soon as ever she reached the outskirts of the streets that were paved with gold.
And so the good old Doctor rambled on, trying to draw his patient out of herself. He succeeded in making her forget the village, and in turning all her thoughts to London, until at last she actually began to wonder what they should do when they got there.
That, however, Edith guessed quickly enough from a few words Dr Jones said to Hermione; and the thought of being obliged to see Tom again made her wish that she had never started. But, nevertheless, she could not help feeling so grateful to Dr Jones, that she began to be sorry for the way she had treated him when she was ill. She knew how much he always hated leaving his practice, and how thoroughly, ever since she had known him, he detested London. Still for her sake he had come himself, and had forced her to come with him, and was as bright and gay as if the whole thing were a pleasure trip. And how nice he was at all the bustling stations, and how good he had been to her all through, and what an ungrateful wretch she must be!
Under the sinking sun the rugged mountains faded away almost imperceptibly, and green parklands and broad meadows took their place. The North Country and its honest Doric soon lay far behind them, and with every new station the porters’ voices grew disagreeably sharper and shriller.
They were feeling very sleepy, when a gentleman jumped into the carriage, and clasped Hermione warmly by the hand. Here was an adventure at last! Hermione flushed as Edith had never seen her flush before. Dr Jones, too, appeared to be delighted beyond measure. The three of them sat close together. But how excited they all were, and how pleased! And how they all talked, and how eagerly Hermione listened to every word the strange gentleman said!
This was another puzzle. “What does it all mean, Price?” Edith managed to ask that worthy soul in the middle of a long tunnel.
“Nothing to do with you, my precious,” said Mrs Price, patting Edith’s dress softly in the dark. “It is Dr Hermione this time. That queer-looking gentleman must be some old friend of hers, dearie; and though Dr Jones has told me nothing, it is as clear as day that he has come at the Doctor’s bidding to cheer her up, and I think she wanted it, poor thing, almost as much as you did.”
Then, as the tunnel grew smokier and darker, Mrs Price took one of Edith’s hands.
“Don’t you fret about Mr Thornton, dearie,” she whispered. “I oughtn’t to have taken you to see Molly Barnes. Hush! they’ll hear us, Miss Edy. Molly died before we started, and I only got this at the station.”
“This what?” whispered Edith hastily; and then, as Mrs Price slipped a scrap of paper into her hand, she started to her feet, and tried to spell the contents out by the lamp, as the train jolted along. There were only two lines written in a kind of rough print—
“It was not all true that I said—not as I said it——”
That was all, and there was no signature. It was a half-finished scrawl, but the ill-formed letters set Edith speculating wildly. If it was not all true, was there anything true?
Edith was dazed and bewildered. It was impossible to reconcile her thoughts for the last few days with that friendly little party in the corner of the railway carriage. If she were wrong about Tom and Hermione, she might be wrong about Tom and Molly Barnes; and she was evidently quite wrong about Hermione.
“How engrossed Hermione is with the strange gentleman,” she thought. “Fancy Hermione speaking to any man like that, and fancy my thinking that she was fond of Tom!”
Then, as the smoke from the tunnel died away, Edith sat down; and Hermione, merely for the sake of drawing her into their conversation, asked her what wonderful document it was that she had been studying so intently by the lamp.
“I don’t know,” answered Edith, without quite knowing what she said; “I couldn’t make it out.”
“Of course you couldn’t, my dear,” said Dr Jones, good-naturedly. “Words were given us to conceal our thoughts, and writing to conceal our words. At least that is the case with my handwriting. Don’t you think so, Hermione?”
Hermione was certain of it; and as Edith would not join them, they left her alone again.
The more she thought over the letter in her pocket, the more perplexed she felt. She had been wrong about Hermione. That seemed clear, for Hermione had never looked so happy or so excited before, and she might be wrong about Tom.
Before the difficulty was solved, she found Thornton helping her out of the carriage at Euston; and when she had contrived to snatch her hand out of his, she saw Major Dundas shaking hands with the strange gentleman as warmly as Hermione had done a short time before.
Slush and lamp-lights, shop-windows, cabs, and crowds, that was Edith’s first confused idea of London.
They went to one of the great modern hotels, in which everything goes as if by clock-work. They saw Dundas and Thornton every day, but they also saw much of Mr Vaughan; and so they were shown, whether they wished it or not, two very opposite phases of London life.
With Thornton and Dundas as guides, everything was light, and bright, and cheerful; and Edith was never tired of the shops and streets, the parks and gardens, the concerts and picture-galleries, the choice dinners and luxurious carriages, and all the other things that give London, even in mid-autumn, its advantage over a wholesome country life. In a day or two she began to feel almost as much at home in Regent Street as among the lakes and mountains.
Mr Vaughan’s days and nights were, however, absorbed in a very different London. He lived—absolutely lived—among the poor and wretched, criminals actually, or potential criminals—the pariahs of the great city itself, or outcasts who had flocked to London from every part of Europe, in the hope of hiding their misery in the whirlpool of wretchedness that is always seething there, unnoticed or ignored.
But Dr Jones enjoyed Vaughan’s society so much that he accepted without a murmur all the queer people that Vaughan thrust upon him. He was, too, keenly interested in this new study of humanity; and Dundas, who was reminded by all Vaughan’s surroundings of a not unpleasant past, shared his feelings.
“How long have I known Vaughan?” said Dundas to Hermione one day. “I scarcely remember the time when I did not know him. We were at school together, Dr Hermione, and the Commune brought us together again.”
“Is he a Communist?” asked Edith, with interest.
“I fancy not,” answered Dundas,laughing, “though I never quite knew. But he probably still has his little nest of Nihilists, who, having failed in anarchy and assassination, have to be cared for like babies, and fed and fostered until their strength comes back, and with their strength their venom.”
As soon as she really knew Mr Vaughan, Edith began to admire his utter unselfishness, though she saw, what Hermione did not seem to see at all, that Dundas’s interest in his friend’s protégés was only a touching relic of their old friendship, and that his own enthusiasm had been tempered by the usage of the world. As for Hermione, Mr Vaughan possessed so much influence over her even now, that she liked Dundas all the better for his devotion to her “Master,” as she sometimes called him still.
Though a man not prone to discouragement or depression, Thornton began to think that he was “out of it”; and for the first few days the ladies spent in town he was probably right. Hermione, whose wrist still smarted with the kiss he had given it on the Scrubbs, liked him best when he was away. Edith liked him best when he was there, for when he was absent she could judge him clearly, and when she thought him over at night she began to feel sure that he really was not the Cousin Tom of the dear old days. Old feelings, however, have very tenacious roots, and Thornton’s presence had still a subtle magnetic influence.
London lay before them, and they saw it all thoroughly. They knew nobody there, and were therefore able to do exactly what they pleased, and to see much more of it than any London young lady can ever hope to see. With Thornton they drove through all the fashionable resorts in a comfortable carriage. But Vaughan introduced them to the most outlandish places—to Islington and Clapham and the Old Kent Road, to Shoreditch and Whitechapel and Bow. Sometimes he took them on the top of an omnibus or a tram-car, so as to let them see something of the humours of the busy street life that goes on after dark. And on one Saturday night, when Thornton was dining out, they all went together on foot through a densely crowded street half a mile long, lit up like a market, and with costermongers’ barrows on either side. Here the poorest of the London poor did their week’s shopping with as much courtesy and economy and foresight as if they had been gentlefolk in Bond Street. To Edith, everything she saw was new, while to Hermione, the luxurious and artistic side of London life was still a strange experience. Both were interested, but to both their keen personal likings and antipathies made the other four million and odd people in London look very insignificant.
All this time, however, the officers had to make their preparations for the Egyptian campaign; the ladies naturally helped, and this thawed them a little.
“I only wish I had a chance of going to Egypt!” cried Edith one afternoon, as she and Hermione were checking off a number of new things that had just come in. “I wish I could go to Egypt. I wish I could go anywhere. The journey to London, Dr Jones, has given me a longing to travel.”
“Travel in London itself then, Miss Edith,” replied Vaughan. “Nothing is easier. You can drive from this to any part of the world in half an hour. You can stop there and dine there, if you like, for two or three shillings, and see its people, eat its food, drink its wines, hear its songs, and read its papers.”
“Really, Mr Vaughan?”
“Yes, really. That is one of my pet fads whenever I feel so down-hearted that even ‘Don Quixote’ palls upon me. Russia, Greece, Turkey, Italy, Norway, Spain, or the Brazils, or any other country you care to visit—they all have their restaurants here. You won’t, of course, see the best of their people there, but you will certainly meet the strongest types.”
So next day they all dined together in a big low-roofed room in Greek Street, Soho, and a very cosmopolitan restaurant it was.
The appearance of two frank-eyed, well-dressed young ladies attracted naturally a good deal of silent but not ill-bred attention, as the lady of the counter led them up to their table.
“How young or how old they all look!” said Edith, sympathetically.
“Yes,” answered Vaughan; “so they do. I never exactly recognised the contrast before, but it has always been in my mind. What are they? They belong to one set or the other: men serving their apprenticeship to life, artists, writers, and what not, from the unsalaried classes; or battered old refugees doing their last term of penal servitude, and longing for the prison bars to be opened.”
“Nihilists, eh?” asked Dundas. “They used to be all Communists or Poles in our young days. But I don’t see any of the old faces here.”
“No,” answered Vaughan, glancing round. “There are two or three Poles left, and two or three Hungarians; but they don’t seem to be here to-night.”
Then the two men began to talk over their reminiscences, and Edith and Hermione and Dr Jones were soon enlightened as to the tie that had bound them together.
They had been schoolfellows, and had met again by chance, it seems, as fellow-workers in an Ambulance Corps at the time of the Franco-Prussian war; they had been through the Commune together, and had fought on in London after that.
“Oh, stop!” cried Edith. “Tell us about the Ambulance Corps! That is the only way in which a woman can help in a war, and every one of us at Girton is always longing to join the Sisters of St John.”
So the gentlemen stopped to tell her a little about the Sisters they had met. Then they went on with their reminiscences. And as they talked and laughed over the past now, it was easy to see how hard they must have laboured. To all the existing London institutions Communism had been an abomination, and every door was shut. But having begun with the refugees from the Commune, they had, it seemed, not only tried to grapple with all the misery of London, but to reform the reformers, and expose the shams and swindles of professional philanthropy. They had started their own office for emigrants, their own night-schools for the industrious, and their own Labour Organisation Bureau, with a little society of co-operative boardmen as the handiest form of labour.
“And how disintegrated our co-operators were!” said Dundas. “Don’t you think that by beginning at the bottom we began at the worst possible stratum?”
“I don’t know that, Jack,” answered Vaughan, stoutly.
“Ah! but you do, for you were the cashier, and how many of them ever paid the agent’s fees? And don’t you remember that letter from Ruskin, when we asked him to help us in ‘Fors Clavigera’—‘a lie pinned on in front, and a lie pinned on behind.’”
“Yes; and a poor starving devil between the two! That is what Ruskin would not realise. Times have changed. He advertises a good deal himself now, and one of our boardmen is a doctor in large practice at Toronto. That is something, Jack. We did good work there, though it did not look much like it when you left. Many of the servant-girls we helped out to Canada are mistresses of big farms now, and some of them do a good deal to keep my new schemes going still.”
“But the Communists, Mr Vaughan?” interrupted Edith. “You promised us the Communists, and neither Hermione nor I care much about the servant-girls.”
“That is all over,” replied Vaughan. “But I don’t think Jack Dundas will ever again join me in keeping a lodging-house for Communists. What extraordinary vitality they had, Jack. At their last gasp they breathed fire and vengeance in a wretched little morning paper printed on the other side of Greek Street. And what a paper it was, full of ideal liberty and atrocious French novels, written night after night, and turn and turn about, by one amateur novelist after another. And the only honorarium any of them ever received was a scanty supper afterwards at the back of the composing-room!”
“Poor things! were there any women amongst them?” asked Edith.
“Yes,” said Vaughan, “there were.” Then he was silent for a little.
“One of them,” he continued, “was a lady whose beautiful voice was almost as well known in Paris as in the French provinces. One dismal snowy evening, when cold and hunger had got the better of most of them, she started off with a troupe of friends behind her, and she sang as she went up and down the French quarters of Soho.”
“Poor soul!” said Dr Jones, who in his student days had lived in Soho before he moved to Barnard’s Inn.
“What did she sing?” asked Edith.
“Nursery songs and children’s songs; and wherever she went the women threw their windows up to listen, and the men ran out into the streets. No one knew who she was, but I have never in my life seen such real enthusiasm. The man who held the hat brought it back full to the brim of copper coins, and they all made a hearty supper here—here in this very restaurant, round the big stove there, before they went to bed.”
“Well, and what became of all your Communistic friends, Vaughan?” asked Dr Jones.
“Ah! that would be an odd study, if you like, Doctor. They were all, or nearly all of them, enthusiasts; many were talented, and a few something more than that. Some of them found refuge in art—especially in industrial art, in wood-engraving, photography, lithography, and so on—and amongst them they gave a new stamp altogether to the great London pottery works. A few took to journalism, a few to teaching; one of them is a famous painter now; and one of them a foreign minister—the man who held the hat.”
“And the rank and file?”
“Oh! they were all rank and file. Many of them, of course, died or went to the bad here. But no matter how they fared, they were always full of humour and high spirits.”
“That is more than you can say of your London protégés?” said Dr Jones.
“Yes, so it is, but they have never had the excitement of a Commune. They are hopeless and helpless. They were born in the gutter, and would as soon die there as not.”
“But surely your experiment has not been a failure?” exclaimed Edith.
“Yes,” he answered slowly; “so far, I am afraid, it has been. And it must be a failure till women take their part in the regeneration of men. I was never cut out for a leader. Dundas, who might have done better, had his own business to attend to, and he could not stay here indefinitely as a lieutenant of mine in the slums when his country promised him glory and bloodshed abroad. And in one way or another it is the same with most men. But when I met Dr Hermione, Miss Edith, I thought the problem was solved. Have you made her happier by carrying her off to the Priory, Dr Jones?”
“I have tried to,” said Dr Jones. “But Hermione must speak for herself. I admire your life in a way, Vaughan, now that I know it; but whether it be useful or not, the strain and effort and hopelessness of the whole thing must be too much for any woman.”
“No, sir!” cried Vaughan, for the first time growing enthusiastic. “You simply don’t know what modern women are worth, once they have passed through the mill. Look at the American women! Two or three generations ago we shipped the scum of Europe off to America; and now their women are coming back to us, after having been nurtured on ample draughts of the healthy air of a free country. They are beginning to carry everything before them in every capital in Europe. In America itself they are intellectually and morally already as strong as their men, and they are inspired as no other women ever have been by the broad life, homely, cultured, and refined, that is based on perfect sexual equality. Ah! Dr Hermione! If you had only been American!”
Just then the lady from the counter came up to say that none of the gentlemen in the room would smoke unless the ladies said they did not mind tobacco. The ladies, of course, begged them to smoke at once; and Dundas declared that Vaughan had never had such a compliment paid to him before, for, as a rule, many of the habitués smoked over their dinner as they ate it.
Then for the first time Edith noticed that they were the only women there.
“Perhaps we oughtn’t to have come here,” she said, “and we had certainly no right to keep them from their cigars. Do ladies often come here, Tom?”
Thornton shook his head in despair.
“No; you mustn’t go,” exclaimed Vaughan. “They’ll think you are offended if you do, and, as Dundas said, they have really paid me a rare compliment to-night. This is their club, the one place in all London that is anything like a home to them, and they have suspended their capital rule in your honour. Wait; you will here something interesting; and we will smoke too, if you let us.”
So after this unselfish compromise the ladies waited a little, and were amply rewarded for their patience. Some of the men crowded round the piano, and sang the songs of their own people, as men only can sing them in exile. Others, Russian Nihilists or German Socialists, sat apart in twos and threes, playing dominoes or talking of the past or the future, or drawing up new rules for an ideal world on the back of the well-thumbed menus.
In a few minutes the room was full of smoke, and the ladies began to cough a little.
“Come on, Vaughan,” said Thornton; “let us get out of this beastly atmosphere.”
The night was pleasant, and, as they had not far to go, they all walked home. The ladies said that they had enjoyed themselves immensely. But Thornton, when Vaughan had bade them all good night, stuck to it that the place was a “pot-house.”
Next night, however, Thornton had his revenge. A fashionable beauty—in those days “fashionable beauties” still existed—was to reappear on the stage. So many scandalous stories had been told about her lately, that for weeks beforehand every seat in the theatre had been taken. Thornton, however, at a moment’s notice, managed to secure a box; for just as Vaughan seemed almost intuitively to know all about the outcasts in London, Thornton, somehow or another, knew all about the London theatres. Vaughan envied them their good luck at dinner, but refused to come. In Dr Jones they had a fifth wheel to the coach already, and he wasn’t going to be the sixth. Hermione, however, ordered him to attend them. Dr Jones declared that he was far too sleepy to go out, and that if he were not allowed one good night’s rest in the hotel he would be off to the country in the morning. So there was nothing more to be said; and then Vaughan was a little curious as to what Edith would think of the play.
The house was full to overflowing, and it was the very house for a grand spectacle—in the audience. By the lavish use of tinted marble, thick gilding, Parian statues, medieval frescoes, and rich hangings, a fitting frame had been achieved for the beautiful women who were good enough to honour the theatre with their presence; and underneath the bright electric light their exquisite dresses, their gleaming white shoulders, their gorgeous flowers, and their pretty fans, were set off to the best advantage by the black coats of the men who had come with them.
“What a wonderful sight!” cried Edith. “It looks like a——”
“Chess-board,” suggested Vaughan. “But there is the curtain going up, and, after all, we have come to look at the play.”
The performance was more successful, perhaps, than edifying. The heroine had a face of rare physical beauty and a perfect figure; but neither the part she played nor the costume she wore suited her in the least. Like a painter’s amateur model, she gave them the idea of not being used to her business. Yet when the. first act was over, the curtain went down amidst showers of bouquets and shouts of applause from an audience unmistakably aristocratic and well-bred.
“What a guy she looked, poor thing!” said Hermione, laughing heartily. “Did you see her wig, Edith? I was so afraid it would come off before the curtain fell!”
“I wish it had!” replied Edith. “I never saw anything so dreadful in my life; and yet she talks like a lady!”
Then, as the ladies were evidently interested in comparing notes with each other, the gentlemen rose. Vaughan, however, and Dundas speedily returned with ices and bon-bons, while Thornton wandered off down the corridor, stopping here and there to exchange a word or two with people whom Vaughan knew well enough by sight to name to the ladies.
“How popular he seems!” said Edith, when they had at last persuaded the gentlemen to go and smoke a cigarette in the saloon.
“I don’t know that,” answered Hermione. “Half the men here to-night are military men, and of course they know Mr Thornton.”
“And why?” asked Edith.
“Why? Because of his mad adventure in the Afrida Pass. That made him famous.”
“Tom never told me this. Did Tom tell you?”
“No!” said Hermione, shortly. “Major Dundas told me.”
Edith felt rather hurt that Major Dundas had not taken her into his confidence also.
However, there was no doubt of Thornton’s social popularity that evening, or of the admiration he attracted everywhere. He might be “out of it” in the country round the Priory; but here, to-night, he had an air of rare distinction that somehow or other carried everything before it. And then, if Mr Vaughan was right, people whose names were known everywhere seemed pleased to have a hurried introduction to him.
Ladies, perhaps unluckily, are peculiarly susceptible to this sort of popularity in the men they know, and both Edith and Hermione felt rather pleased at Thornton’s triumphal progress, as they watched him from their box. Then he disappeared for a moment. When they saw him again, he was in the stage-box down below; and then he disappeared again.
“He has gone to her,” said Edith, tapping Hermione nervously on the shoulder with her fan. “He has gone to her now, and it is not very complimentary to us. Fancy Tom going behind the scenes to-night to talk to a creature like that, when he may be shot in a fortnight!”
“Don’t be foolish, dear,” answered Hermione softly, though her heart too was beating time to her thoughts a trifle more indignantly than it should have done. “Perhaps Mr Tom knows her, and it might have been rude of him not to go. Many of the other gentlemen have gone.”
Edith looked rather curiously at Hermione. Why, she thought, should Hermione make so many excuses for him? For days the name of Molly Barnes had been on her tongue. What would Hermione answer if she spoke out now, and told her all she guessed? But, night by night, whenever their carriage stopped anywhere in the streets, the type of Molly Barnes had become horribly familiar. In the chorus down below there had been a dozen girls almost like her.
Suddenly, however, Edith had the disagreeable fancy that some one was trying to guess what she was thinking. She turned, and a lady in the very next box seemed to be viewing her critically through a pince-nez.
“So that was the great Mr Vaughan, the philanthropist,” said another lady. “He certainly doesn’t strike one as a woman-hater.”
“Ah! you haven’t studied the species properly; misogynist first—philanthropist afterwards; that is the invariable rule.”
“And does Mr Vaughan really do as much good as some of the newspapers are always saying?”
“Good, my dear? Good gracious, no! To the poor deluded wretches who follow him he does no end of harm. He may, perhaps, do himself good, just as all ascetics try to do; but he is essentially selfish au fond. He enjoys his calling, and is fit for nothing else; he is an ascetic, not a saint.”
“And you used to know him?”
The lady with the pince-nez, a pretty fair woman, with beautiful shoulders rather too décolleté, took her eyes off Edith and began to study Hermione instead.
“Yes, my dear,” she replied, eventually. “I knew him well before he took to woman-hating and the rest of it. But he wouldn’t look at me to-night.”
Then her voice fell, and Edith, though she did not want to listen, heard that Mr Vaughan had cared nothing for anybody since something—she could not quite catch what—had happened, and was never likely to care for anybody again. The other lady nodded her head expressively, laughed a little, and seemed to know all about it. They only spoke in whispers, but Edith was listening so eagerly that she soon realised what she was doing, and, altogether ashamed of herself, she jumped up from her chair.
“Can’t we go outside, Hermione?” she asked; and then she saw that Hermione’s grey eyes were gleaming and her pale cheeks quite flushed. Hermione’s ears must have been sharper than hers. In her heart of hearts Edith still half hated her. But in spite of that she admired the half-contemptuous, half-indifferent way in which Hermione, as she swept out of the box, looked the lady with the pince-nez up and down.
Fine ladies can be as rude, though, as fishwives if they like.
“Country cousins!” said the lady in the next box, turning her attention to the stalls.
The two girls hesitated for a moment when they were outside. However, Vaughan and Dundas luckily happened to be close at hand, and they all went to have a look at the people in the theatre from the top of the dress circle.
When Thornton returned more than half an hour afterwards, he found the ladies still rather out of temper. Hermione was intent on the stage, and Edith said nothing.
“There has been an awful row,” said Thornton. “The critics were divided.”
“You weren’t divided, at any rate!” exclaimed Edith; “and what had you to do with the row?”
“The Duke was there too,” continued Thornton, quite unruffled, “and each of the critics in turn had a word with him. On a first night like this it is really a ballot, and every vote counts. Some of the critics were awfully stubborn. She won her way, though, and will be praised in all the papers tomorrow. She conquered them one after the other. She could fascinate anything, Edy. She’d fascinate Vaughan himself in ten minutes.”
Thornton scarcely meant to be rude, but he was rather excited by the gracious welcome he had had down below.
Vaughan looked at him for a moment, and half rose from his chair. The lady in the next box laughed gently over her fan. Perhaps Vaughan noticed her,—at all events there was a curiously grave smile on his face as he sat down again.
“It is a stupid play,” said Hermione.
“Yes,” said Dundas; “I infinitely prefer Vaughan’s Greek Street collection of curiosities. Don’t you, Miss Edith?”
“I am not quite sure,” answered Edith. “I had heard so much about her as a sort of ‘swell,’ that it is rather fun to see how uncomfortable she looks now among the common chorus girls who are used to it.”
“But what a beautiful woman she is!” exclaimed Thornton. “Half the men in town are raving about her shoulders.”
“How horrid of them!” said Edith, shrinking away from Thornton; “and how horrid of her too, if she knows it. She ought to keep her shoulders to herself.”
Dundas laughed drily. “I am inclined to agree with you, Miss Edith, but look at the house and the money it means.”
“The money it means!” exclaimed Edith. “She is a lady, isn’t she? I’d like to be a real ‘swell,’ and I’d like to be a real actress; but I wouldn’t like to be her.”
“Heaven forbid!” said Dundas softly, as he rose; and as he rose they all rose too, but as they left the theatre they heard another enthusiastic burst of applause, and loud shouts of “encore.” They turned to watch her. She was making a vulgar, ignoble little gesture, borrowed from a notorious danseuse who was the idol just then of all the shop-boys in Paris. The Duke led the applause, and the success of the performance was secured.
Edith, as it happened, had to drive home in a hansom with Major Dundas. She was still thinking of Molly Barnes, and she was so eager for help and advice that, somehow or other, she let Dundas guess something of what she had heard. She told him nothing definite, and only said what she did say as a kind of running commentary upon what she had seen on the stage and heard in the next box. He saw, however, that she was unhappy, and was sympathetic enough to guess the truth pretty accurately.
“Don’t you be led away by any village gossip about Thornton, Miss Edy,” he said firmly, just before their hansom pulled up. “I have known him for nearly three years, and he has been straight as a die all through.”
Then they all went to bed very tired. Edith’s blood tingled while she was undressing, and she felt that she hated everybody, and especially hated herself. Hermione thought a little about Mr Vaughan, and a good deal about the strange story that the lady in the next box had told of him. She felt that the story was true, because it explained a good many things. Then she thought of Thornton, and dissatisfied as she was with his desertion at the theatre, she fell asleep, dreaming in a pleasant though rather shame-faced way about his social success there. Tom himself had a series of brilliant visions, with “Master Tom,” of course, as the centre-piece of them all. Dr Jones, the only one amongst them who had had a really satisfactory evening, snored placidly; and Vaughan, when he reached home, put on an old coat and started off at once for Fleet Street, to add something more to an article he had written for a paper that was beginning to make a stir among people who believed, as he did, that Socialism was the only possible cure for all the evils of the time.
Thornton had a grand time of it for the next few days among the fashionable people he had met at the theatre. The homely people in the hotel only saw him at breakfast-time now, and not always then.
“Why have you deserted us, Tom?” asked Edith one day as they met in the passage.
“Isn’t it rather the other way?” he answered; “and didn’t you all make me feel as if I had been sent to Coventry—and for nothing?”
And there was a substratum of truth in what he said.
However, Dundas and Dr Jones were always ready to take them about, and as both the girls seemed a little nettled at Thornton’s conduct, Dundas was indefatigable in planning new expeditions, and it was no fault of his if their stay in London was not so delightfully entertaining as that pleasant spell of a few weeks in the lakes.
Vaughan, though busy as usual, gave them every spare moment of his time; and it was Vaughan who told them at last that their London season was over.
They had all breakfasted together—all but Thornton. It was Edith’s birthday, and she was young enough to appreciate an anniversary that becomes monotonous as the years roll on. Dr Jones, who had taken a wonderful liking for Edith lately, was a good deal annoyed at Thornton’s absence, and insisted on carrying her off to Hancocks to choose a birthday present. He did not, of course, care for her as he cared for Hermione. But during their short stay in town Edith’s character had developed in an extraordinary manner, and Dr Jones, though he could not quite understand the alteration, admired it immensely. To people not used to it, London is said to be an education in itself; and in a few days she had somehow changed from a laughing girl into a woman, grave, unselfish, thoughtful, and beautiful. Dr Jones did not compare her to Hermione; perhaps he did not care to; and just then the comparison might not have been altogether in Hermione’s favour.
But he determined to make her birthday a happy one, and so, though his country habits had naturally made him niggardly, he carried her off to Hancocks to choose a necklace, and the men were to meet them for lunch afterwards at the St James’s Hall.
Dr Jones and the girls were standing over a glittering show-case as Vaughan came in. He waited nearly half an hour till the necklace, and a really costly necklace too, was selected, and then he gave them his message. There had been a fresh outbreak in the Soudan, and Thornton and Dundas had orders to start that evening for Egypt by the Indian overland mail train to Brindisi.
The news, though it had been expected for so long, came upon them as a shock at last. They drove back to the hotel in silence, and both the girls looked frightened. They found their sitting-room in confusion. Dundas and Thornton, and Seton and Mrs Price, and two or three men from the outfitters, were hard at work, sorting out things and nailing up the packing cases. Everything was bustle and confusion.
“Many happy returns of the day, Edy!” cried Thornton, as he came forward without his coat to shake hands with her. “Many happy returns of the day!”
“Oh no, Tom, not happy returns of a day like this.”
“Here is my present, Edy,” continued Thornton, slipping a little case into her hand. “I have had it ready for the last week in time for the breakfast this morning. I was awfully sorry that I could not give it to you then. But I met one of our officers on the stairs as I came down, and went off at once to see if the news were true, and they kept me there.”
“How good of you, Tom,” said Edith, “and how beautiful it is! But give me something to pack up or I shall cry.”
Edith was pleased with her present, and pleased still more that Tom had not forgotten her birthday. They had all been talking of it for the last week, and she had felt terribly hurt, though she had managed not to show it, at Tom’s absence in the morning. And now they had all been blaming him wrongly.
Fortunately there was work enough to keep everybody occupied, and the young ladies did their best to be cheerful. But to some of their little party it was the longest and unhappiest and most dismal day they had ever known. The air, too, was so foggy and wet outside that they had to light the gas at three o’clock, and they were almost thankful when it was time to start for Charing Cross. They left the luggage at the station, and then dined with Vaughan in a private room at the great hotel over the booking-offices. Thornton proposed Edith’s health, and Dr Jones, in drinking to Dundas and Thornton, and in wishing them honour and glory and a safe return, was so pathetic that Edith nearly broke down. In spite of the wine, and the plucky way in which everybody tried to talk cheerfully, the fine dinner was scarcely tasted. To the girls, at all events, the food tasted like ashes, and nearly choked them whenever they tried to swallow it. But it was their duty to keep the men in good heart, and they did their best.
Then came the farewell at the train, the last shake of the hand, the last word, the last look. Dante’s Inferno has nothing more horrible than this commonplace parting under a gaslit iron railway shed, in the middle of a bustling crowd of vulgar sightseers. But as all the officers of the regiment were there, Edith and Hermione bore themselves bravely. And there were others who suffered more than they did, and had no reason to conceal their feelings—white-faced wives clinging to their husbands, and weeping children to their mothers, in a cruel parting that seemed almost eternal. For, to most of the passengers by this Friday evening’s mail train, the journey that began at Charing Cross would only end in years of exile in India or the Straits or China.
“May I come in?”
There was a tap at Edith’s bedroom door, and then Hermione appeared in a white dressing-gown.
“May I come in?” said Hermione, as she sat down on the side of the bed. “I couldn’t sleep to-night. I wanted a good long talk with you. I couldn’t contradict you, dear, when Dr Jones was there; but I don’t hate you, and I can’t imagine why you said so. I like you better than anybody, except, perhaps, dear old Dr Jones; and now that the men have gone, we must fight on together and help each other just as we used to do.”
“And if we don’t, we shall both be Mrs Percivals! Oh, you dear old thing!” said Edith, half crying and half laughing, as she threw her arms round Hermione, “How good it was of you to come to me to-night, Hermione. I was feeling dreadfully lonely. I did not mean a word of what I said in the train; I really didn’t, but I couldn’t help being sorry about the war.”
So the girls, as they nestled there close to each other, had a long talk about the campaign, and anybody who might have been privileged to listen to their forecast of it must have trembled at the fearful odds. Dundas and Thornton, the two of them, it seemed, were about to engage in battle the Mahdi’s countless hordes of ferocious Soudanese.
However, this little unexpected talk about their friends did Edith a world of good. She burst into tears when, at last, Hermione kissed her and left her. But they were happy tears, for they washed away all the bad, bitter thoughts of the last few weeks. She vowed solemnly that, no matter what might happen, she would never now breathe a word about Molly Barnes to Hermione. But the victory was a hard one after all, and she was still crying a little as she fell asleep on her arm.
There is a good deal of heroism sometimes in those who stay at home; and, as it happened, their two heroes, hastening to the wars, were at that particular moment attending assiduously to the material entertainment of a fascinating young Italian countess in the uncomfortable refreshment-room at Modane.
Hermione, who was in a way made of sterner stuff than Edith, refused herself the luxury of sleep at all. She lit her lamp and produced her diary, and relentlessly filled in all the pages that had remained blank since she had started from the Priory. She wrote for herself; she wrote truthfully, and in full assurance that every word would be kept under lock and key. The whole of this precious little volume might possibly be worth publication; but for the moment we must content ourselves with the very last entry she made. Most girls start a diary, which they stop directly they have anything to chronicle. But, to any intensely self-contained young woman, a diary, with a stout Chubbs’ lock to it, is, faut de mieux, the pleasantest of all companions. Hermione told her diary everything that happened to her, and almost everything she thought, just as frankly as she might have told it to her mother, if her mother had been alive now. To saint and sinner, to Rousseau equally with St Augustine, the confession of weaknesses is their best absolution; and in a diary, at all events, you can always turn over a new leaf.
At last she had exhausted all that her conscience told her ought to be put down in black and white about her flying visit to London. But that scarcely concerns us just now, whereas the final excerpt from her diary may be of some moment.
“Back at the Priory,” she wrote, “as selfish and dissatisfied as when I started, and unhappier. Seeing Mr Vaughan again convinced me that I ought never to have left London. No real enthusiasm, even for a woman, without real hard work. Here I am an impostor; I know it, and that is hateful. Dr Jones, and Edith too, in her gentle way of it, believe in me; but I can’t believe in myself. They were both wonderfully good to me to-day. But am all wrong in myself. Have no fixed plans now, no ambition, no care for anything, and am far too fond of dreaming. Felt, like Edith, very sorry for the gentlemen who have gone to the wars, and am vexed that neither of them saw it. To Edith, and everybody else, I am perhaps, as Mr Tom would say, ‘as hard as nails.’”
Here Hermione kept her pen in the ink-pot for a while.
“I am a fraud,” she went on, filling in her diary as rapidly as she could. “Am a fraud. I despise myself, and hate everybody else, and am possessed with the extraordinary fancy that everybody else despises me. That is a bad sign of cerebral affection.”
Here she dipped her pen into the inkstand again, and kept it there, as if reluctant to go on.
“I like both the men who have gone,” she continued, “and can’t help feeling sorry for them both. To-morrow won’t be the same as yesterday without them. I have lost tone, not on their account, and neither of them could ever think that. But am degenerating. Mr Vaughan saw that, and I could not help showing that I knew he saw it. Was a fool to leave London, and all my work there. Have never been happy since. But am unhappier now than when I started for London again—and whose fault is that?”
This was such a big question that Hermione shirked it.
The tardy daylight broke as she sat there at her writing-table; the maids began to open the doors and windows, and for very shame she had to go to bed.
The two girls, as the dreary days rolled on, were fonder of each other now than they ever had been. But to Dr Jones they appeared dreadfully apathetic. News about the war soon began to come in, and at the Priory, as in hundreds of other quiet homes in England, nearly every day had its few minutes of intense excitement, when the ‘Times’ arrived, with a list of killed and wounded, and its sober, measured account of the wild Arab fanatics who threw themselves upon the bayonets of the English troops. But when there was no Egyptian news in the papers, both the girls went through the day’s routine so listlessly that Dr Jones at last determined to arouse them. He began with Edith.
“My dear,” he said to her one morning in the garden, “I have come to confess to you. I am an old fool. I was wrong to let you see that wretched girl, Molly Barnes.”
“No!” answered Edith firmly, but colouring a little as she spoke. “I don’t think you were, Dr Jones; and I am sure it does not matter now.”
“Yes, it does, my dear. I did not like Tom’s conduct to Hermione and you at one time; but I never really thought Tom very much to blame about Molly; and when I see you fretting——”
“Fretting!” cried Edith, blushing now like a peony, but rather from indignation than shame. “Fretting for Tom! How dare you say so, Dr Jones? I used to care for him,” she added, after a pause; “but I don’t think I care for him in the way I used to. Tom was very selfish in London——”
“He was always selfish.”
“In London, too, he was far too fond of fine people; and don’t you think he neglected us a good deal? I like Tom, of course, and I am sorry for them both; but I am quite as sorry for Major Dundas as I am for Tom.”
“And you are quite right, Miss Edith,” said the Doctor heartily. “I fancied you might like to know what I really thought of Tom’s conduct. That was all.”
Edith shook her head. But she waited, nevertheless, until Dr Jones had explained in a shy, roundabout manner exactly what he wanted to say. Then she escaped to think it over by herself. Secretly she was very glad indeed to hear what Dr Jones had told her.
He was the kindest man she knew, but unflinchingly just, and sometimes very stern. She believed every word he said most implicitly; and she was glad that poor Tom was not so much to blame after all. But she was, as she had honestly told Dr Jones, thinking less and less of Tom every day.
She was deadly dull—that was all; but to any healthy young girl ennui is often far more fatal than love.
Dr Jones then tried to arouse Hermione. Here he was still less successful. She turned upon him at once, and refused to make up the quarrel afterwards.
So Dr Jones went off to his study in despair, and poured out all his troubles in a long letter to Vaughan.
“She is moping to death,” he concluded. “The reaction after all this excitement has been too much for her. She is quite unmanageable, poor thing. I can’t manage her; perhaps you can. I have always thought that she would do anything you asked her.”
Dr Jones smiled to himself as he sealed this fateful letter. He had said what he wanted to say, without betraying Hermione or himself. Vaughan had always wished to marry Hermione. That was really why Dr Jones had taken her away from London and from Vaughan originally. He had been absurdly jealous of her then, but Vaughan was a good fellow at heart. Let him marry her if he chose, and then everybody would be happy again.
Vaughan, however, as he read the Doctor’s letter, had not the slightest inkling of the drift of it. He wrote a pleasant reply. He was too busy to leave town. There was an anti-Socialist bill before Parliament that must be closely watched. Then in half-a-dozen lines he said much the same things about Hermione that Hermione had said about herself in her diary.
“A pretty lover!” cried Dr Jones, as he seated himself at his desk and wrote off another letter begging Vaughan to come down at once.
Vaughan replied, still full of the anti-Socialist bill, which had been “hung up.” “I could come down now,” he added, “and I know Dr Hermione so thoroughly that I might perhaps be useful; but I know her so well, that I really cannot waste my time unless you give me full discretion to act as I like.”
Dr Jones rubbed his hands when he read this. He walked over to the station at once, and telegraphed back: “Come to-morrow, and do what you please. Carte blanche.”
When Vaughan arrived he found the Priory ladies waiting on the platform to receive him. They had been cunningly enticed there by Dr Jones to see the train come in, and they gave him the hearty welcome always due to the unexpected guest. The dismal old Priory was quite gay again for an evening. They talked about everything—about London, about themselves, about the Socialists, and whenever there was an opening for it, about the war. Then, when Hermione went to see that Mr Vaughan’s room was properly aired and prepared for so illustrious a guest, Dr Jones managed to escape. The small boy who held the lantern in front of him heard him laugh once or twice. He was chuckling at his own foresight and his extraordinary ingenuity.
Vaughan and Edith and Hermione did not, however, retire when the Doctor left. They had another long and absorbing talk; and when the servants went to bed, they all sat round the big fire in the hall and talked again. The girls at first were very eager, and Vaughan, who wanted to test them thoroughly, allowed them to imagine that they had originated his idea.
Next afternoon—for it happened to he a Saturday, his busy parish day—Dr Jones called again. The Priory was deserted, and even Mrs Price had gone. He rushed off to the station. None of them had been near it. Then he went to the Dragon. They had hired the jaunting-car, and Mrs Price (the infernal wretch that she was!) had taken the seat beside Miss Edith.
Dr Jones spent a sleepless night. He hung about the Dragon all the morning, to the delight of the urchins in the street. The jaunting-car eventually came back empty, but the driver, very garrulous, as the result of a handsome “tip,” had seen the Priory party into the London train at Caxton Junction the afternoon before. Dr Jones telegraphed at once to Scotland Yard, and in an hour or two afterwards he started in pursuit.
<p class="separator">
⁎  ⁎  ⁎
</p>“What a beastly hole!” said Thornton.
“It might be worse,” said Dundas.
“Not in this world.”
“Well, perhaps not. I don’t mind the place itself, Thornton, but I hate the work; and all our men, I think, hate having to kill off those splendid black fellows whenever they fling themselves on to our bayonets. It’s butchery—sheer butchery!”
“Don’t be dismal about it, old man. The butchery, at all events, is not all on one side.”
Thornton stopped talking, and went to light his pipe with a stick of smouldering firewood from a fire in the far corner of the great bare hall they sat in.
“You heard about Marshall?” he asked, as he pressed a lighted stick on the top of his tobacco.
“Yes, poor chap! He died like a man, and that’s something for his widow to be proud of. The ‘Army List’ won’t worry him again. He has solved the great problem by this time. ‘Now he knows what Rameses knows.’”
Thornton replied, rather impatiently, by throwing a whole bundle of fagots on the fire. He merely meant to prepare the way for certain little culinary operations that must precede supper; but the dry wood blazed up in a moment, and showed, in a fitful, eerie sort of way, every corner and cranny of a great hall, the four walls of which were covered with richly-coloured sculptures in bas-relief, as fresh and brilliant as if they had been executed yesterday. Thoth and Horus, Rameses and Ammon Ra, and scores of other Egyptian immortals sat there, serene and placid, above long friezes representing river festivals, and battle scenes, and processions of sacred apes, and strange beings with the heads of the cow, the hawk, the ibis, and the jackal. The English sappers had been at work here, and had left their mark in a huge door that filled in the arched stone entrance, and a couple of deep windows closed with rough wooden Venetians. The great hall, as the firelight flamed and flickered, looked terribly bare. In one corner Thornton and Dundas had their kit, and in another there was a row of a dozen or so of soldiers’ cots.
“Holloa!” cried Thornton, suddenly; “there’s some one knocking. Another sortie on, I suppose.”
He opened the door in a very bad temper, and outside he saw two women in burnouses, thrown over the dresses of hospital nurses.
“Would you kindly direct us to the hospital?” asked one of the ladies.
“Women, by Jove!” muttered Thornton.
“This is the hospital,” said Dundas, taking his cap off.
“But where are the wounded?” asked the other lady.
“The Arabs never leave any.”
Then Thornton, who had been standing with his hand over his eyes for a minute or so, suddenly darted forward, and seized first one of the ladies and then the other by the hand.
“Edith!” he cried—“Edith and Dr Hermione, by all that’s living! This is jolly!”
“Awfully jolly, Tom!” said Edith, as she slipped off her burnouse. “I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.”
“How odd, Edy. That’s just my feeling too.”
Thornton and Hermione walked towards the fire, but Dundas and Edith stopped beside the door. They were both rather embarrassed.
“I was thinking of you, Miss Edy,” said Dundas at last,—“I was thinking of you just as you opened the door. This is like a fairy tale. But how did you come?”
“By sea, and land, and river, Major Dundas, like other travellers. With Mr Vaughan’s help, Hermione’s diplomas got us through. The General, when he saw them, said he supposed he must let us pass as hospital nurses, if we insisted on it, though he would far rather have put us under arrest and sent us back.”
“But why did you come, Miss Edy?”
“I don’t quite know. The Priory was very dismal after you and Tom left. Even Hermione quite missed the sound of your big boots about the house, and the smell of your pipes and cigars. Fancy Hermione saying that!”
“I can scarcely fancy it.”
“She said so, though, and said so often. And then, when we came back from London, she suddenly discovered that all her old women were only shamming sick; and when we read, day after day, of the terrible fighting here, Mr Vaughan and she thought that a little real practice would do her good.”
“So Vaughan was in it!” exclaimed Dundas. “That explains a good deal. But how about you, Miss Edy?”
“Oh, it was time for me to go back to Girton, yon know, and I thought, as you told me once, that I would rather have a little real excitement first. And so, as it was our duty to start, we started with Mr Vaughan to see us into the steamer at Assiout, and with Mrs Price as our escort.”
“A pretty escort! One old woman for two young ladies! But where is the escort? Have the enemy waylaid her?”
“Not the enemy exactly, Major Dundas,” said Edith, smiling, “but Seton. He knew us the moment we landed on the bank. He brought us to the door here, and then Mrs Price carried him back again to see the things unloaded. Oh, Tom!” she cried, as he approached her, “Mrs Price has got such lots of things for you to eat and drink.”
“The dear old creature!” answered Tom. “I expect our Egyptian appetite will rather astonish her”
But here even Thornton himself almost quailed. There was a terrible hurly-burly in the darkness, dominated only by one angry voice.
“You infernal old woman!” they heard some one say, in tones that quite deadened every syllable of the soft Arabic of the crowd of porters outside.
“You infernal old woman! I’ll teach you to steal young ladies, and to bring me groaning and panting after you, across seas and deserts, till I have no breath left in my body, and all my bones are broken! In here, are they? In with you, you confounded old baggage!”
Then the great door was flung wide open and Mrs Price was swung violently into the room by—Dr Jones.
Hermione, who had just sat down beside Edith on one of the cots, sprang to her feet in a moment.
“My dear old guardian!” she cried, running towards him with both her hands outstretched.
“Your dear old fiddlestick, madam! A pretty trick to play a man of my years! Tuts, Hermione, I am only half in earnest. I am so glad to see you alive, my dear, that I want to swear at somebody. Well, Major! Well, Tom! Well, Miss Edith! You are at the bottom of this precious little plot, I’ll be bound. So much for the Girton experiment.”
“No. It’s my fault, not Edith’s,” cried Hermione. “But to be frank, Dr Jones, we should have turned back a dozen times over when Mr Vaughan left us at Assiout, if we had not been so terribly afraid of what you might say when we reached home. We never dreamt for a moment that you would follow. How could you get away? And who is looking after your practice?”
“Our practices, if you please, Hermione,” said the Doctor, smiling grimly—“our practices, if you please. Dinah is. There! Dinah, and a locum tenens rather less competent than Dinah. Holloa, Seton! you here too? What have you there? Medicine-chests, eh?”
Seton had appeared, almost as unexpectedly as Dr Jones, at the head of a little army of Egyptian fellaheen. He had them in perfect drill and discipline already. At a glance from him they distributed their burdens in the right places.
Then he formally saluted Dr Jones.
“Glad to see you here, Dr Jones,” he said. “No, Dr Jones. Mrs Price’s cases from Fortnum & Mason’s.”
“Hurrah!” cried Edith. “Now we’ll have a real picnic, Tom, with real war-whoops, and real rifle-shots in the distance. What fun! And to think that I might have been quietly in bed at Girton.”
“Oh, my dear Miss Edith,” said Dundas, “never mind the food to-night.”
“Not mind the food, Major Dundas! cried Edith, holding up her hands in pretended horror. “How selfish the best men are. Why, we’ve had nothing to eat since noon.”
“For once I agree with you, Miss Edith,” said Dr Jones.
“And I agree with you too, Edy, as I always do,” cried Tom. “The rations we have for dinner here always give one an amazing appetite.”
“Then help me out with the things, Tom. Chicken curry—‘heat for five minutes in boiling water;’ send for boiling water at once, Seton, and keep some over for the mulligatawny soup.”
Seton saluted and went out.
“Herrings à la sardine, to be eaten cold,” continued Edith; “pâté de foie gras, mortadella, and boar’s head, ditto, ditto. Mrs Price, where are the biscuits? And where have you put the champagne? No salt, of course. I was sure there’d be no salt. Tom, what is the music for?”
Here a bugle sounded shrilly, and Dundas and Thornton sprang to their feet.
“For nothing at all, Edy,” answered Thornton carelessly. “The Colonel wants to see us to tell us the last news, I suppose. We’ll be back by the time supper is ready.”
But just as he spoke Seton ran in with their swords and revolvers.
“A sortie at once, Major,” he cried.
“Be quiet, you damned fool!” said Thornton, aside. Then he spoke aloud, and in the same cheery tones as ever: “We have always to take our arms, Edy, when we visit the Colonel on duty,—a form, a mere form. He’s a stickler for form.”
But as the dull heavy tramp of men was heard outside, Edith flew to the doorway.
“Hermione,” she cried, “the whole place is crammed with armed men. Oh, Hermione, they are going to fight! I know they are going to fight. Don’t let them go. I never thought war was so terrible.”
“My dear ladies,” said Dundas, “this is nothing,—nothing but a sortie. Nothing at all. It happens every night. We show ourselves, and they run away. Come on, Thornton. Doctor, cheer them up, and have supper ready for us in half an hour.” Then, as he put on his cloak, he whispered to Tom, “Come quickly and quietly, and don’t say good-bye. It would only frighten them.”
“Major Dundas,” cried Edith, as they disappeared, “come back! Tom! Tom!”
“Edith, dear,” said Hermione gently, “don’t be a coward,—the men will hear you. Remember they are officers on duty.”
Edith burst into tears. “Don’t be a coward! It is easy to say ‘Don’t be a coward’ when one has walked the hospitals, and been a kind of man all one’s life. Oh, Hermione dear, forgive me. I didn’t really mean it, but I am so afraid for them. I wish I had never come.”
“They must do their duty, and we must do ours. Come and put supper out. They will want it when they come back, and it will do us good to do something.”
“That’s it, Hermione,” said Dr Jones; “that’s a plucky girl. That’s a good bottle of champagne by the way the cork goes. A little champagne is just what we all need after our race here. Miss Edith, take this at once.”
Edith tried to taste the champagne. “I can’t, Dr Jones; it makes me sick. Oh, there I the firing has begun.”
She ran to one of the windows, and threw the clumsy wooden Venetians wide open in an instant.
“Edith is quite upset, poor thing,” said Dr Jones, busying himself with the packing cases. “We’d better leave her alone for a little. How do you feel, Hermione?”
“Shaken by the journey, and rather nervous, Dr Jones, but quite able to be useful if I am wanted. You forget my Paris training, and that I’ve been a kind of man all my life. Don’t stand at the window, Edith, dear. Come in and help to put the things out.”
“Hush, Hermione,” said Edith, holding up a warning hand behind her. “I can just see them,— a great black body of men in the dark. I can see them better now. They are sending up fireworks—rockets, I suppose. They are firing guns, too. Can’t you hear them? Oh, the flash from their guns is dreadful! Now they’re all going on that side. Now they’re going forward. Oh, Hermione! come here. They are coming back; I know they are coming back.”
Hermione advanced to the window, and looked over Edith’s shoulder.
“They are coming back—can’t you see them? They are carrying something; can’t you see them, Hermione? Dear Hermione, why won’t you speak? Dr Jones, please look too——”
Dr Jones came to the window, and Edith seized his hand.
“It is a man! I know it is a man! See, Dr Jones, it is covered with the Major’s cloak! It is the Major. I know it is the Major——”
Hermione clasped her hands eagerly together. “Yes,” she cried, “it is the Major’s cloak. “Hush, Edith, dear. Keep cool. Be ready for them. We can be useful now. Dr Jones, keep Edith quiet. Edith, don’t be silly, dear. Don’t be weak; don’t give way.”
The door was slowly opened, and four soldiers entered with a body on a doolie.
Edith rushed forward and lifted the cloak. “It’s not Major Dundas! It’s Tom!”
Hermione fell on her knees beside him. “Tom, Tom,” she sobbed; “it’s Tom!”
On the other side Dr Jones had Tom’s shirt open in a moment.
“Hush, girls,” he said. “Let me see. What’s this? A glove with a hole in it, and a stab clean through the breast. Your handkerchief—quick, Hermione. What is the matter with you, girl? Quick, I say.”
“Nothing,” murmured Hermione, struggling to keep quiet; “nothing. I can’t get out my handkerchief. I can’t quite see. I can’t kneel. I——”
Then she gave a wild hysterical sob and fell senseless on the floor.
For two or three weeks Thornton’s life hung almost literally on a thread, and it was perhaps Hermione’s incessant and assiduous care that kept him from the grave. But they were all engaged in nursing now, for the campaign that began so brilliantly had come to a disastrous and heart-breaking end, and relays of wounded, one after the other, began to pour in from stations higher up the Nile. Edith’s character had developed itself very rapidly in London. But here, in the hospital, so much depended on her that she became another woman altogether. In youthful beauty, and gentleness, and sympathy of manner, she was perhaps much the same. But as she passed thoughtfully and cautiously from bed to bed, it would have been almost impossible to have identified her with the bright young being, fresh from Girton, who had flitted so happily from one tarnished old mirror to another in the gloomy Priory drawing-room, to see what each of them told her. She was as much in earnest now, and as indefatigable as Dr Jones himself, and it is difficult to say which of them was the more popular in the hospital. Thornton was the worst of all the patients who survived, and as soon as he was fit to be moved, most of the others were convalescent. So the little party, in whom we are peculiarly interested, followed the regiment down the river in a couple of large dahabeyahs.
A dahabeyah in full sail is one of the prettiest boats afloat. But in going down the river, and with the stream, the great sails were useless; so they were rolled up and put aside, and the long yards were lashed across the masts. The sleek-skinned, sleepy-eyed boatmen, who, when they were off duty, were always singing or praying, pulled away heartily at their sweeps; and the dahabeyahs, with their long, low, comfortable cabins in the stern, looked like a couple of Roman galleys.
After the feverish excitement, the hard work, and the cruel disappointments of the last few weeks, the tranquil easy life on the Nile was refreshing and gladdening beyond description. Thornton of course kept to his cabin, with Dr Jones and Hermione in close attendance. But Dundas had a month’s leave, and although he never cared to quit the regiment for long, he was not bound to it now, and they could halt whenever they pleased.
The air was ineffably clear, and it is perhaps the extraordinary freshness of the air from the desert that gives its chief charm to life on a Nile boat. There was a pleasure almost voluptuous in the very act of breathing; to take in the delicious draughts of desert air was a keen physical enjoyment. All of our travellers succumbed to the charm, and were, after a day or two on the river, lotus-eaters and dreamers; while their absolute content in the present gave them ample time to think, in a hazy, pleasant sort of way, about the past and the future.
To Edith the whole thing was a dream, with the nightmare of the fighting and the hospital far behind her already. She could hardly believe that Dundas was actually lying at her feet, reading Lord Houghton’s delightfully old-fashioned Nile poems aloud to her as they glided almost imperceptibly through the strangest scenery in the world.
They had been thrown constantly together of late, and Edith had come to appreciate, and almost to reverence, the Major’s character. He was one of those quiet, grave, unassuming men, with an indomitable will that only permits itself to be visible in times of great emergency. No one ever thought of giving Dundas the credit of heroic qualities; and yet, when the bugle sounded, every man in the regiment knew that he was really in Dundas’s hands and not his colonel’s.
It was, of course, Dundas who organised the hospital and rearranged the scattered transport, and, so far as it was possible, retrieved the disaster. He felt the humiliation of their failure more bitterly, perhaps, than most of them, and fretted more than any at the incompetence of those who had brought it about, for he had genius enough to know what ought to have been done. But he never allowed himself a word of reproach or blame. For weeks together he had spent his days in the field, and his nights in the hospital, and had still found time to attend to such minor details as the cooking of the men’s food and the sanitation of their huts. In the regiment it was a popular myth that he never slept. Those who knew him well, however, knew that he had the rare gift of sleeping at any time, were it only for ten minutes, when there was nothing better to be done. No one in the regiment thought of Major Dundas as a hero, but he was loved, and obeyed too, as no officer ever had been. Edith remembered all this now.
And as the lazy days on the river passed quietly on, she found herself studying Dundas’s character almost with anxiety. Every day she seemed to sound new depths of strength or tenderness. To his men he had been stern, brief, abrupt—a man of instant action. Now, under the fresh free air of the Nile, he was an artist, and, in the gentle deference of his manner, almost a courtier. He was not only, she began to think, the most masterful man she had ever known, but in every way the cleverest, the best read, the most polished, the most accomplished, the most thoughtful, and always the least selfish.
They were far beyond the zone of the ordinary tourist, and perhaps no English girl had ever had a chance of looking at these curious scenes before her. But under Major Dundas’s guidance, and with the help of his conversation, his pencil and his books, this lazy voyage down the Nile became a source of never-ceasing enchantment and delight.
At first they were impressed chiefly by a sense of unending space,—by the grandeur of the illimitable desert, the length and beauty of the reaches of the river. For five days a yellow desert lay to the west of them, and to the east a desert of dark rocks. On the east the rugged hills shone out every evening in marvellous tints of purple, or caught a sudden flash from the level sunlight beyond the horizon; while on the west the billowy ridges of desert sand were steeped in rich cream colours. The river was sparsely bordered by palm-trees, seventy or eighty feet in height. Here and there, like some black Apollo, a stray Nubian marched along; or by the pools beside the river, young girls, with leathern fringes round their slender hips, shy as antelopes and as graceful, carried tall earthen water-jars or great broad baskets of grain on their heads. Occasionally a line of white pebbles marked a deserted graveyard, but the rare villages were hidden from view; and four or five miles inland on either side there were vast stretches of desert that no human foot had ever trodden. Solitude is never, perhaps, so fascinating as to two people who are beginning, very shyly, and almost without knowing it, to think a good deal about each other; and in this way Edith and Dundas soon learned to love the Nile, with its blue-grey surface in the purple morning, its reflected sunsets, its infinite gradations of colour and sound,—the distant creaking of the sakkieh wheels, the perpetual murmur of flowing water, the plaintive songs of the boatmen, and the throbbing notes of the darabukah.
Then they came to the second cataract, where the colour, and little else, was beautiful. The polished rocks were black and purple, the sands amber, the mountains pink and pearl, the greenish, greyish-brown of the Nile was flecked with foam, the tamarisks and pomegranate trees were a vivid green, and the sky an intensely deep blue.
After the second cataract the scenery changed. In the desert everything, of course, was still quiet and deathlike. But the rich vegetation along the banks was now some miles in depth, and the further they went the more crowded either bank was with villages and palm-groves, and the ruins of great cities, and the broken columns of old temples. On the banks there were lizards, and snakes, and prowling wild dogs, and occasional crocodiles; on the river, pelican and ibises and Nile geese; and overhead, turtle-doves, hoopoes, and birds of paradise. The palm-trees, not so lofty as before, now grew in groves, and were often companioned by sycamores and fig-trees, orange-trees, locust-trees, and pomegranate-trees. The waving dharra stood tall and ripe, fed everywhere by the sakkieh wheel, turned to the same eternal song of the boys who drove the oxen round and round. Palm-groves overlooking the embankments, now some ten or twelve feet above the river, linked each village to the next. The people, like the land, became almost Biblical as the dahabeyahs drifted slowly down the stream, and you saw them all—the dusty fellaheen, the colour of their own unburnt bricks; their women, with massive voluptuous faces, deep bosomed, and barely clad in thin shifts of blue, with blue mantles over their heads; their naked children, racing along the banks under the palms; their flocks and herds, their camels and asses, their sheep that looked like goats, and their goats like sheep.
The lower Nile was infinitely more picturesque than the upper. Here it expanded into reaches, there it narrowed in shining creeks, or broke on grassy islands or banks of golden sands. The river was alive now with huge-sailed craft forcing their way against the current; and everywhere white houses glistened amidst the dense green of the palm-groves. At sundown the river shone like burnished steel, and one by one the stars stole out of a sky, blue at first, and then rosy tinted with the dying sunset. Then the moon crept slowly up; the broad, turgid stream became a delicate silvery blue, and the palm-groves and tall columns and disfigured sphinxes, and monuments and crumbling temples and great blocks of red stone, were all wrapped in a golden glory. What a marvellous story could the Nile tell as it
“Flows through hushed old Egypt and its sands,
Like some grave mighty thought, threading a dream.”
But by night and day alike the creaking sakkieh wheels were busy in giving life and sustenance to the thirsty land. For Egypt itself, as some one says, is only “a gift of the Nile,” the mere precipitate of the rich solution that flows down from its unknown source far beyond those mysterious Nubian boundaries.
The intense love of beautiful scenery is often associated, no one knows why, with a sort of strait-laced and almost puritanical morality. But it would be hard to find any theory more difficult of proof. Rousseau, when he was jaded with the sensual pleasures that drove him into exile on a desert island, discovered the refined and soothing and sensuous charm that has always lurked about the lakes and mountains of Switzerland. He wrote of them as he felt; and ever since they have been the happy hunting-ground, the playground, and the resting-place of the busiest minds in Europe. So it was now with our little party on the Nile. They needed rest, and found it. Dundas and Edith, as they sketched the scenery or read what the historians and poets told them of the Nile, were always comparing it with the lake country in which their first mutual impressions had been formed. But any comparison was impossible. Dr Jones, who had nothing else to think of, fell completely under the spell of the local colour and its delicious dolce far niente. He took a lively interest, that astounded them all, in the fantastic and voluptuous dances of the Almé and Gawazees. To Dundas he was fond of quoting Lady Duff Gordon’s remark that you must visit the Nile before you realise that a woman’s breast is the most beautiful thing in the world; and he shocked Edith dreadfully one evening by declaring that every man ought to have three wives—one for the kitchen, one for the mind, and one for pleasure—a saying he had contrived to pick up from their soft bronze-tinted boatmen. That Dr Jones could repeat such a sentiment with approbation, shows how thoroughly he too had succumbed to the spell.
They reached the first cataract late one glorious afternoon. Away beyond the palm-groves lay the desert, as bleak and desolate as when they had boarded their dahabeyahs, with the noise of battle still in their ears, and the smell of the hospital still about their garments. The gleaming river even here was blue until it reached the falls, and was then black with shadows and white with foam. Just above the falls the Nile widened into a sky-coloured lake, studded with hundreds of islands. Some of these islands were green with grass or gold with sand, some covered with purple flowers, others nothing but fantastic rocks, red and purple and black; a few were crowned with clumps of palms or gum-trees or acacias or tamarisks, festooned with yellow-blossomed creepers. On the banks the desert was thickly fringed with the mimosa, the sycamore, the lebek, the orange-tree, and citron-tree. There were ruins everywhere, and beyond the ruins the clear air showed each outline of the great rocks that kept ward and watch over the wastes of the western desert. But banks and islands, boats, river, rocks and ruins, groves, mountains, and desert, were all just then suffused in a saffron after-glow.
Here they had to halt for a while, for Thornton was still very feeble with fever; but they could not have chosen a better halting-place. The regiment had bivouacked there two days before, and the colonel had found them a charming old Egyptian palace, with a sunny verandah, looking straight into the beautiful island of Philae. Here their voyage was really over; for from here there was a regular service of steamboats to the railway station at Assiout, and they could choose their own time now for any further journeying. It was late when they reached the palace. The view all around, with the full moon shining on the weird masses of syenite and granite rocks, was exquisitely beautiful. It was very late indeed before they retired; but none of them slept much, and they were all of them, except Dr Jones, early afoot.
“Well, Mrs Price,” cried Dr Jones cheerily, as he paced the broad verandah next morning after breakfast, “how’s our patient to-day?”
“As lively as a kitten, Dr Jones. I think he ought to get up.”
“I think so too, Mrs Price; and I suppose Hermione won’t let him. But don’t you give in to her. Talk of those girls being doctors and nurses, or whatever they like to call themselves! It takes a woman with half-a-dozen children of her own to make a nurse worth trusting.”
“Three, if you please, Dr Jones.”
“Tuts, woman! Three or a dozen! What does it matter? Look at Hermione, Mrs Price. She has had nursing to her heart’s content, and is worn to a skeleton, while you are as fresh as paint.”
“Oh, Dr Jones! That’s just what the colonel told the sergeant when he called us both up this morning to say that Master Tom is to have the Victoria Cross. ‘You are a woman, Mrs Price,’ he said—he’s always a pleasant-spoken man, the colonel—‘and you’ve only one fault,—you’ve got a woman’s tongue. Corporal Seton tells me you’ve been blackballing Mr Thornton all over the place, on account of some young woman somewhere five years ago! Now you shut up!’ (Those were the colonel’s very words, Dr Jones.) ‘You shut up! Mr Thornton’s the gallantest officer in my regiment, bar none. And if young women of five years back are to be cast up at us, you would have to drum every man out of the regiment, including the colonel, Mrs Price!’”
“A pretty state of things, to be sure,” muttered Dr Jones. “But how did Mr Tom win the Victoria Cross? He never even said that he expected it.”
“For saving the Major’s life again. Master Tom never did talk about himself,—I’ll do him that credit. And I am sorry I have talked about him either. Why, he’s the talk of the whole regiment now! The sergeant talks of nothing else.”
“The sergeant!” cried Dr Jones, testily. “He’s not the sergeant, woman! He said so himself, and you said just now that the colonel called him the corporal.”
“Ah! but I’ll never give in to that injustice.”
“Well, never mind Seton now, Mrs Price,” answered Dr Jones, in a pleasanter voice. “Call him anything you like. Confound the man! What I want to find out is, what the regiment are always saying about Mr Tom, and why he is to have the Victoria Cross now.”
“This is how it was, Dr Jones,” said Mrs Price, very slowly. “The Major was stooping to pick up Captain Stanley, when a big buck nigger (that’s what the regiment calls him) jumped through the ranks, threw himself upon the Major with a spear in his hand, and Master Tom, without as much as a thank you or by your leave, flung himself on the nigger’s spear and shot him dead with his revolver! No woman could speak against a man after that.”
“I suppose not, Mrs Price,” replied Dr Jones, rather sadly; “I suppose not. That’s settled our hash, I expect. Hermione! Hermione! Mr Tom is to have the Victoria Cross!”
“I knew he would!” cried Hermione. “I said he would from the first. Here, Mrs Price, take the bowl; he wants some more broth. Oh, Dr Jones, I am so glad! I came out to speak to you, Dr Jones, but I must run in and tell him first.”
In two or three minutes Hermione returned. Her pale cheeks were paler than usual, and her beautiful grey eyes looked as if she had been crying. She kept her face, however, carefully away from Dr Jones, and sat down quietly on a wicker stool at his feet. Dr Jones was in a bad temper, and would not encourage her to begin.
“Dr Jones,” she said at last, “I want to speak to you. I told you I did. You know what I want to say. I want to ask——”
“Of course I know, my dear; I should be a born fool if I didn’t. You want to ask if you can love a man you despise?”
“I don’t, Dr Jones. I don’t despise him. I never really despised him. I don’t know whether I love him or not; but do you, do you, Dr Jones, do you think he loves me?”
“He’d be a precious nincompoop if he didn’t!”
“Oh, Dr Jones,” said Hermione, “don’t say that! But I thought he might think I had unsexed myself. Edith is always saying I have been a sort of man all my life, because I walked the hospitals. And then for a little while I thought he might really be fond of Edith. But I know he’s not that, and that Edith does not really care for him.”
“Not he! Not she!” cried Dr Jones, indignantly.
“No! I knew it! But he has never said a word, Dr Jones—not when he was at his worst; and though he was as weak as a child then, he couldn’t help seeing that I was crying over him. But he is so good now, Dr Jones, and so brave, and so proud! And now that he is better I don’t suppose he will ever speak. Oh, Dr Jones! what shall I say if he speaks?”
“My poor girl! my poor girl!” said Dr Jones, sadly. “Don’t you throw away the efforts and dreams of a life for the fancy of a moment.”
“My efforts and dreams, Dr Jones! And what has come of my dreams and my efforts? A dreary, loveless, wasted existence, with a dreadful blank in front of me. Oh, Dr Jones, what a proud fool I have been! I thought I was superior to all the women I knew, and now I feel as if I were the most womanly woman in the world. Dr Jones, don’t hate me, don’t despise me, and do help me a little. You don’t know what I feel like now. I was never so happy and so miserable before. I had no idea any woman could have all these feelings at once. Dr Jones, it was cruel of you to call it the fancy of a moment.”
“Are you sure it was cruel of me, my dear?”
“Yes, Dr Jones,” cried Hermione, starting to her feet; “it was cruel, for you knew me far better than I knew myself. You know I have never been like other girls. I thought I could live without love, and now all the love of all these loveless years seems to have welled up suddenly in my heart, and I care for nothing else. Dr Jones, a mistake now would ruin my life. Oh, Dr Jones, help me!”—here she took his hand and kissed her mother’s ring. “Why should we make mistakes like this because we are proud and think we are strong? I never hurt anybody by being a doctor. I tried my hardest to do good. And you don’t know how hard I worked in London before you took me away from it. Surely I was not wrong there. And now, why should I not be as happy as other women are who have never attempted anything at all?”
“But you say Tom has not spoken yet, and you don’t know if he loves you.”
“Oh, don’t I, though?” said Hermione, very quietly. “And if he hasn’t spoken, it is only because he is too proud to speak. Whenever I look into his eyes he is always asking if he may. And I always look back ‘No.’ I have grown so weak and foolish, I don’t know what I shall do next. But I shall be strong again by-and-by, and if he loves me really, and I know he does, he will love me so well that he will make a grand name for himself, and every woman in the world will envy me!”
“My dear! And the grand name you were to have made?”
“It will be changed a little, Dr Jones, and I will fight for him instead of myself.”
“God bless you, my darling!” said Dr Jones. “Perhaps you are right. Your sacrifice will be Tom’s salvation, and you yourself a second Mrs Percival.”
“And you said she was the best and happiest and comeliest woman on our side of the country.”
“And now she’ll be the second-best. God bless you, my dear! Your mother, if she saw you now, would think you right, I know”—and here Dr Jones kissed her softly on the forehead. “Always keep a corner of your heart for me, Hermione. And now go to him.”
“Oh! Dr Jones,” she said,—then she looked at him, just as her mother had looked once before, and she kissed him very shyly in return,—“Dr Jones, I thought you would scold me so, and you have made me so happy!”
“A lucky young scoundrel!” muttered Dr Jones, as she disappeared under a thick red curtain that hung over Thornton’s doorway. “A lucky young scoundrel! I hope she’ll dose him well when her eyes are opened. But that’s the worst of it. Her eyes never will be opened! She’ll never see him as I do. It’s odd how these fine-strung women are always taken with brute strength.”
Dr Jones, after Hermione had deserted him so readily for Thornton, continued to pace up and down the broad verandah that looked into beautiful Philae. He wanted to walk his ill-humour off, and, as an almost natural consequence, he came suddenly and very unexpectedly into a violent collision with Mrs Price.
“Holloa, Mrs Price!” he exclaimed, angrily. “Why, Mrs Price, whatever are you crying for? Nothing amiss with Miss Edith, eh?”
“The sergeant,” answered Mrs Price, with a huge silk pocket-handkerchief to her eyes,—“the sergeant has found my Jim in a hut!”
“Well, the huts here are good enough. You surely needn’t cry about that.”
“Not cry, Doctor! Not when he’s down with fever!”
“Oh! fever is it? We’ll soon pull him through,”
“That’s what Dr Hermione says, heaven bless her! Oh, Doctor, Doctor! whatever do they make these horrible wars for?”
“Make them for, woman?” cried Dr Jones, continuing to pace up and down in front of her, and now at a furious rate,—“make them for? To keep themselves in power, of course. When a Government’s on its last legs, they hold a consultation. ‘Try a brush with the niggers in Zululand,’ says one; ‘that’s cheap, and that will make you popular!’ ‘March into Afghanistan and out again,’ says another; ‘think of the glory and hang the expense!’ ‘Lick the Egyptians,’ says a third; ‘they have never had a kick in them since the Pharaohs went out!’ ‘Have a shy at the Soudan,’ says a fourth. And here we are. Anything, Mrs Price, for a vigorous policy and columns of special correspondence in the newspapers. A damned set of quacks! Why don’t they hit a man of their own size if they want to fight, instead of killing off a few thousand wretched barbarians here and there?”
“I wasn’t thinking of the barbarians, Dr Jones,” said Mrs Price, still crying, “and I wasn’t thinking of the Government. The one is as bad as the other, and worse. I was thinking of Jim. He’s the last of three fine lads, poor fellow! and the other two died in the army. All savages are much of a muchness, and so, from what the papers say, are all Governments! They come and go. But it’s poor women like me, Dr Jones, who have to find their food for powder.”
“Not all the food, Mrs Price,” said the Doctor, coming to a halt at last—“not all the food. Major Dundas and Tom Thornton had mothers too, and so for that matter had Edith and Hermione. And here they are, all of them in the middle of it. And then, Mrs Price, there have been almost more officers than men killed in this wretched campaign. Let us go and have a look at your son Jim.”
And as Dr Jones had worked himself up into a really bad temper by this time, poor Jim had to take such a strong dose of quinine as rendered fever impossible for the rest of his life.
But on an eventful day like this, we are bound to follow the fortunes of all our travellers. Dundas and Edith had started at a very early hour to explore the beautiful island of Philae. It was, as they rowed up to it in the early morning light, wonderfully wild and weird. In front they saw at first nothing but masses of gloomy rocks, piled pell-mell one on the other. But behind the black rocks there were the golden mountains of Hermaceuta as a background. The bright river flowed amidst islands and villages. In the distance they could hear the roar of the cataract, and they could still see something of the desert. Philae, when they had climbed its rockbound coast, was not more than forty or fifty acres in extent; but it bristled all over with famous buildings, and its rich turf was thickly strewn with marble monuments, carved in every possible form known to ancient art. Everything in the old temple city was in the most exquisite proportion, but strange beyond conception. Osiris—“he who sleeps in Philae,” the most beautiful of men—had here erected a shrine to his most beautiful beloved, so that they should live in most perfect beauty and happiness all alone. Many temples had been built since then, and in the middle of them a Coptic church. But its old legends seemed as fresh as its clean-cut marble. As he strolled on, stopping here and there to make a note in his sketch-book, Dundas told Edith so many of those old legends that she was almost in a dream as she followed him through courts and corridors and desolate chambers; through groves of airy columns, and avenues of altars and obelisks and propylons and horrid colossi; across broken walls, crowned with palms and acacias; over prostrate pillars, and round tall pyramids and towers and terraces. Wall after wall, chamber after chamber, column after column, were covered with thousands of sculptured figures and huge hieroglyphics, giving the histories of triumphant wars and conquered countries. At last they came to the great temple of Horus, and the famous portico, where the tender colours and delicate half-tones that decorated the ceiling, and the wonderfully carved capitals of the tall columns, gleamed fresh and vivid as if the bright enamel had been laid on yesterday.
The weird pictures, the grotesque figures, the fantastic architecture around them, might have belonged to another world altogether. The sun began to grow very hot. Edith was tired, and half amazed, and strangely languid. She really felt as if she were walking in a dream, and at last she had to beg Dundas to take her back to the palace. No one seemed to be about, so they had luncheon together on the broad verandah looking into Finite; and now, under the fierce mid-day sun, its rocks and palms and colonnades rose from the river like a mirage.
Dundas was brighter and more vivacious than Edith had ever seen him. Something had excited him. What was it? Was it some news that had come to him in a great blue envelope almost directly after they returned? Edith herself felt very languid, and very tired, and almost afraid. But he had been very good to her all the morning, and she was determined not to give in; so she begged Dundas to bring out his painting things and sketch the wonderful panorama in front of them.
“May I help you, Major Dundas?” she asked, almost timidly, as he began to arrange his easel.
“For Tom’s sake, Miss Edy, like that time on the Scrubbs?” said Dundas, smiling.
Edith felt so nervous now that she felt hurt, she scarcely knew why, and she could hardly help crying.
“No, sir!” she answered, as merrily as if she were really joking. “No, sir; and you shouldn’t have such a terribly long memory, and you shouldn’t be such a tease. What a goose I must have been to have spoken to you as I did then! Talk of travel making a man! It has made another girl of me altogether! Do you know, Major Dundas, I think I must have been what Hermione would call ‘morbid.’”
“Not morbid, Miss Edy, but piqued, perhaps, if you’ll allow me to suggest a word; but perhaps even that’s too strong.”
“No; it’s not too strong a bit. It is the very word I wanted!” cried Edith. “You see, Tom and I had always been like brother and sister ever since I can remember anything. And when any of the girls at Girton lent me a novel with a hero in it, I used to say, ‘That’s Tom!’ But when Tom came back I saw it wasn’t Tom a bit!”
“Not quite at first, Miss Edy?”
“Yes! quite at first, Major Dundas, though I was too stubborn to own it, even to myself! And then, any girl would have been a little vexed at the way Tom and Hermione monopolised each other!”
Edith had, as we have tried to show, become very womanly of late. She was a girl still, but her slim supple figure was more rounded in its outline, and more gracious in its curves; she had lost her trick of instantaneous repartee, and there was something in the way Dundas looked at her just then that brought a new light into her eyes.
“You were fond of Tom?” he said, in a voice that seemed to thrill through her.
“I thought so,” she answered, when she was able to control her voice; “I thought so, Major Dundas.” Then she added very slowly, “Perhaps I was wrong.”
They were both silent for a little, and it was Dundas who broke the silence at last.
“You said the other day on the Scrubbs, Miss Edy, that of course one can never love twice. Is that true?”
“Oh! don’t let us talk about love, Major Dundas. I don’t think I know anything about it now; and six months back I thought I knew everything. I used to think it is just as it is in the novels. Now I am sure that if it is anything at all, it must mean a great deal more than that—that it is kindness and sympathy, and self-sacrifice and trust and devotion, and many, many things the novelists never write about.”
Dundas took her hand and kissed it gently, and drew her towards him. “Edith,” he whispered, “I love you!”
Edith tried to resist him; but for weeks his ascendency over her had been so masterful and so dear to her, that she could say nothing but “Major Dundas! Oh, Major Dundas!”
Did she love him? Her first feeling was that she could almost hate him if he looked into her eyes, and saw there how she loved him,
“I love you, Edy!” continued Dundas gently, as her supple figure was quite involuntarily drawn towards him. “I love you, darling, with the love you have described, and with all my heart and soul beside. I loved you from the first moment I saw you. I am a poor man, dear, with nothing but a soldier’s pay; but to-day I hear this wretched war has given me my colonelcy, and I am now quite rich enough for two. And now I am able to speak out. Poor little hand,”—and her hand trembled like a frightened dove as he kissed it,—“Poor little hand. If you say you will be mine, and stop in mine for ever, how I will defend you! Sorrow and trouble shall never come near you. We will live for ourselves and by ourselves in a paradise of our own. Edy, look at me. Speak!”
“I can’t speak,” she murmured.
“Look at me, darling.”
“I can’t look. I tried. Oh, it’s a dreadful thing for a girl to hear of real, true love like yours!”
“Edy—do you like me, Edy?” he pleaded, kissing the little hand he held.
“How can I like you, Major Dundas, when you will kiss my hand?”
“There! Your hand is free now! Won’t you like me now? Why should you be so cruel?”
“Oh, I am not cruel. Don’t say that.”
“And you don’t hate me?”
“No—I think not; I think not. I don’t know; I don’t know,” she murmured, as he caught her hand again in his.
“Oh! but you should know. There must be some people you like, and some people you don’t.”
“Of course there are, Major Dundas,” she said, simply. “I don’t like Becky Elliot.”
“And me?”
“Oh, I always liked you from the first.”
“But do you like me well enough to love me?”
“Oh, Major Dundas! Don’t look at me! There! Yes!”
“Say ‘Yes, Jack.’”
“Yes—Jack.”
“Did you love me, as well as like me, from the first?”
“No—no! Not quite from the first. From that day on the Scrubbs, I think. I couldn’t help wondering why you stopped so long among the lakes, when you only came for a fortnight; and then I wondered—why you didn’t go.”
“And then?”
“And then, here,” she whispered, very shyly. But her heart began to beat with pride, as well as shame too, now that she felt strong enough to speak out to him. “Then, here, when I saw how everybody was fond of you, and how fond you were of everybody, and how you helped them all, I knew then, Jack, that I liked you better than ever. But I never thought you saw I did; I tried so hard to hide it. And I tried harder than before when you took to calling me ‘Miss Edy’ instead of ‘Miss Edith.’ But I never dreamt you ever thought of me.”
“I have thought of nothing else since I met you, Edy!” said Dundas, as she could not help letting him read what her eyes said. “I used to dream of you so much in that wretched old temple or library, or whatever it was that we made into a hospital, that it seemed quite natural when you opened the big door and walked in. My darling! we will go to India. There our pay will be a great deal more than we can spend.”
“Oh, how nice!” exclaimed Edith, earnestly. “Not that I care for the money. You know I don’t care for that, Jack. But I would never, never marry you if it made you a poor man. Never!”
“I know that, Edy. How proud I shall be of you—and, my darling, how I love you!”
Then he kissed her on the lips, and though her lips trembled as they met his, she never dreamt of stirring now. A strange feeling of rest and content and perfect peace thrilled through her. She did not want to protest, but for very shame she had to protest a little; and so she contented herself with saying—
“Oh, but you mustn’t. Dear, dear Jack, you mustn’t. Hush! I hear Hermione’s footstep. She will want to know why you are not painting your picture. Please go, Jack, just for a little. I should cry if Hermione found us together like this.”
Dundas himself did not feel as if he cared to face Hermione just then, so he disappeared abruptly.
“Edith!” cried Hermione, running up to her. “Edith! my heart is so full, I must speak to somebody. Edith, dear, I am going to be married!”
“Oh, you darling! I am so glad,” said Edith, throwing both her arms round Hermione’s neck and kissing her,—“and so am I!”
“You, Edith!” exclaimed Hermione in amazement. “And who on earth is going to marry you?”
“Jack, the Colonel,—Major Dundas, I mean.”
“Oh, how glad I am! I am so happy to-day, that I should like to see all the world happy too. But I had not the remotest suspicion that Major Dundas was in love with you.”
“No, dear—of course not,” answered Edith, gently, but with just the slightest suspicion of scorn in her voice; “you were too busy with poor Tom. I had, though. But he’s not the Major now, he’s the Colonel. And we are to go to India, Hermione; we are to go together. Oh, what a wonderful world it is!”
“Yes, dear, it is a wonderful world. But you are very young to go so far away. And what about Girton?”
“Bother Girton!” exclaimed Edith, almost angrily. “I beg your pardon, Hermione. It was very good and very generous of you to send me there, and I shall never forget your kindness. Hermione, dear, I should like to go and see Tom, and tell him how delighted I am to hear your news. I should like to be the very first to congratulate him.”
“How nice of you, Edith,” said Hermione, peeping through the heavy red curtain. “Yes, you can come now, dear,—come before he is tired.”
“Oh, Mrs Price!” cried Seton, entering the verandah at one end as she entered it at the other—“Mrs Price, the Major’s done for!”
“Lack-a-daisy me, sergeant!” exclaimed Mrs Price, hastily fanning herself with a huge palm-leaf fan. “He was all beams and gleams when I saw him five minutes back. I never saw him like that before. Done for? Not he!”
“Done for, Mrs Price, ma’am! I stick to it,” said Seton, drawing himself up, so as to hold his own properly. “The Major’s going to be married!—to be married, Mrs Price! Contradict me if you like, but he has just told me so himself.”
“Done for! You call that being done for! I’m ashamed of you, sergeant. It will make another man of him. Married! Of course, the Major’s going to be married. And you didn’t see it before? I saw it weeks and weeks ago, when it was no bigger than a little cloud, the size of a young lady’s hand, and many a sleepless night it gave me. My poor bairn! I am so glad! I am so glad it is not Master Tom. Oh, sergeant, I was never so happy in my life before!”
“I don’t wish to spoil your happiness, Mrs Price,” said Seton, rather sheepishly, “but I am done for too!”
“Oh, sergeant! sergeant! And now that I look at you, you are a-beaming and a-gleaming just like the Major. What can you mean?”
“I mean that, Mrs Price,” cried Seton, taking her in his arms and kissing her heartily; “I mean that, Mrs Price. Mrs Price, if I have offended you, I will never, never do it again!”
“Oh, sergeant, what an impetuous man you are, and how inconsiderate! It wouldn’t be very nice for me if you didn’t.”
“Not inconsiderate, Mrs Price,” said Seton, firmly. “Never inconsiderate. Jacob waited fourteen years, and I will wait four times fourteen years, if you tell me to.”
“And what a terrible old woman I should be then!” replied Mrs Price, with something like a shiver.
“Old or young, you would always be the same to me, Mrs Price. But I only said what I did say, to show I was not inconsiderate. But it would be inconvenient, Mrs Price—inconvenient, very. ‘Corporal,’ said the Major to me, ‘I am going to India, with Miss Edy as my bride. Do you think you could persuade airs Price to come too, and look after her?’”
“My lamb!” cried Mrs Price, catching Seton by both his hands. “Of course, I’ll come. Oh, sergeant, sergeant, there’s rare good men in the army! Now that Dr Jones says my Jim was never really in danger, I’ll go anywhere with you and Miss Edy. Do you know, sergeant, that when I told you I looked through the window, and I saw Major Dundas, and said to myself, ‘You’re an officer, if ever there was one’ that I looked through the window again and saw you, and said I to myself, ‘There’s a soldier, if ever there was one!’ Oh, here’s the Doctor coming. We had better go to the end of the verandah.”
“Yes, Dr Jones,” said Hermione,as she walked in, tenderly tucked under his arm, “I think I must be the very happiest woman in the world! People don’t like people being married, I know. But nothing shall be changed. It shall make no difference to you, my dear old guardian, I can promise you that. And Tom has been so good and so generous! He has actually consented to give up the army, though he loves it better than anything in the world but me.”
“I think he does, dear,” answered Dr Jones, simply.
“I know he does; he told me so himself. And now he will go into the yeomanry instead—and all for me!”
“Miss Edith,” cried the Doctor, as he saw her in the distance, “good morning to you. Come here for a moment and listen to our wonderful news——”
“Come on, Jack,” said Edith, putting her little hand in Dundas’s arm.
“Hermione is going to be married,” answered Dr Jones, solemnly. “There!”
“Oh, Edith knows that already, Dr Jones,” said Hermione, smiling: “and we are all going to be married together. It’s all settled.”
“The deuce it is!” said the Doctor. “And who are ‘all,’ pray?”
“Edith herself——”
“Well, yes. Edith herself, and——”
“Major Dundas!”
“Major, your hand. I’m delighted beyond measure, and astounded! Miss Edith, my dear, I wish you both all the joy the world can give you! Why, Mrs Price, you’ll be getting married next, I suppose.”
“If you please, Dr Jones.”
“If I please!” cried Dr Jones, almost in alarm,—“if I please! What have I to do with it? Is the woman mad?”
“Not mad, sir, but mine!” said Seton, proudly appropriating her arm.
“What’s the matter, Hermione?” asked Dr Jones, as Hermione hurriedly snatched her hand away.
“I see Tom at the curtain, Dr Jones. His temperature was going up. I told him not to come out.”
“I heard what you were all saying,” said Thornton, putting his head out of the curtain; “I wanted to see how you all looked. Let me have my own way, Hermione, for the last time.”
“Tuts, nonsense!” cried Dr Jones, roughly. “Don’t you dream of it, Hermione. Take him back; break him in at once,—break him in. Be Mrs Thornton if you will, but don’t forget that you have been Dr Hermione!”