As that first day at home wore on, Beth was seized with an importunate
yearning to go out, and it was with difficulty that she got through
her self-appointed tasks. She thought of the sea, the shore, the
silence and solitude, which were apt to be so soothing to her dull
senses that she ceased to perceive with them, and so passed into the
possession of her farther faculty for blissful moments. She fancied
the sea was as she best loved to have it, her favourite sea, with tiny
wavelets bringing the tide in imperceptibly over the rocks, and the
long stretch of water beyond heaving gently up to the horizon, with
smooth unruffled surface shining in the sun. When she had done her
work she fared forth to the sea, to sit by it, and feel the healthy
happy freshness of it all about her, and in herself as well. She went
to the rocks. The tide was coming in. The water, however, was not
molten silver-grey, as she had imagined it, but bright dark sapphire
blue, with crisp white crests to the waves, which were merry and
tumbled. It was the sea for an active, not for a meditative mood; its
voice called to play, rather than to that prayer of the whole being
which comes of the contemplation of its calmness; it exhilarated
instead of soothing, and made her joyous as she had not been since she
went to school. She stood long on the rocks by the water's edge,
retreating as the tide advanced, watching wave after wave curve and
hollow itself and break, and curve and hollow itself and break again.
The sweet sea-breeze sang in her ears, and braced her with its
freshness, while the continuous sound of wind and water went from her
consciousness and came again with the ebb and flow of her thoughts.
But the strength and swirl of the water, its tireless force, its
incessant voices choiring on a chorus of numberless notes, invited
her, fascinated her, filled her with longing--longing to trust herself
to the waves, to lie still and let them rock her, to be borne out by
them a little way and brought back again, passive yet in ecstatic
enjoyment of the dreamy motion. The longing became an impulse. She put
her hand to her throat to undo her dress--but she did not undo it--she
never knew why. Had she yielded to the attraction, she must have been
drowned, for she could swim but little, and the water was deeper than
she knew, and the current strong; and she might have yielded just as
she resisted, for no reason that rendered itself into intelligible
thought.
She turned from the scene of her strange impulse, and began to wander
back over the rocks, suffering the while from that dull drop of the
spirit which sets in at the reaction after moments of special
intensity; and in this mood she came upon "the doctor," also climbing
the rocks.
"Now, it is a singular coincidence that I should meet you here again,"
he said.
Beth smiled. "I am afraid those nice boots of yours will suffer on
these sharp rocks," she remarked by way of saying something. "We
natives keep our old ones for the purpose."
"Ah," he said, "I don't keep old ones for any purpose. I have an
objection to everything old, old people included."
Beth had a book under her arm, and he coolly took it from her as he
spoke, and read the title: "Dryden's Poetical Works." "Ah! So you
carry the means of improving your mind at odd moments about with you.
Well, I'm not surprised, for I heard you were clever."
Beth smiled, more pleased than if he had called her beautiful; but she
wondered if Dryden could properly be called improving.
"It is absurd to keep a girl at school who has got as far as this kind
of thing," he added, tapping the old brown book; "but it seems to me
they don't understand you much at home, little lady."
"What makes you think so?" Beth asked shrewdly.
"Oh," he answered, somewhat disconcerted, "I judge from--from things I
hear and see."
This implied sympathy, and again Beth was pleased.
It was late when she got in, and she expected her mother to be
annoyed; but Mrs. Caldwell was all smiles.
"I suppose the doctor found you?" she said. "He asked where you were,
and I said on the rocks probably."
"That accounts for the singular coincidence," Beth observed; but,
girl-like, she thought less at the moment of the little insincerity
than of the compliment his following her implied.
They dined that evening with Lady Benyon. It was a quiet little family
party, including Uncle James and Aunt Grace Mary. The doctor was the
only stranger present. He looked very well in evening dress.
"Striking, isn't he?" Aunt Grace Mary whispered to Beth. "Such
colouring!"
"And how are you, Dan?" was Uncle James's greeting, uttered with an
affectation of cordiality in his unexpected little voice that
interested Beth. She wondered what was toward. She noticed, too, that
she herself was an object of special attention, and her heart expanded
with gratification. Very little kindness went a long way with Beth.
Dr. Dan took her in to dinner.
"By the way," he said, looking across the table at Uncle James, "I
went to see that old Mrs. Prince, your keeper's mother, as I promised.
She's a wonderful old woman for eighty-five. I shouldn't be surprised
if she lived to a hundred."
"Dear! dear!" Uncle James ejaculated with something like
consternation.
"I seem to have put my foot in it somehow," Dr. Dan remarked to Beth
confidentially.
"If you do anything to keep her alive you will," Beth answered. "Uncle
James always speaks bitterly about elderly women;--about old ones he
is perfectly rabid. He seems to think they rob worthy men of part of
their time by living so long."
It was arranged before the party broke up that the doctor should drive
Beth to Fairholm in the Benyon dogcart to lunch next day. Beth was
surprised and delighted to find herself the object of so much
consideration. Dr. Dan, as they all called him, began to be associated
in her mind with happy days.
"Have you come to live here?" she asked as they drove along.
"No," he answered. "I am only putting in the time until I can settle
down to a practice of my own. I have just heard of one which I shall
buy if I can get an appointment I am trying for in the same place."
"What is the appointment?" Beth asked.
"It's a hospital I want to be put in charge of," he answered
casually,--"a small affair, but I should get a regular income from it,
and that would make my rent, and all that sort of thing, secure. A
doctor has to set up with a show of affluence."
"It is a terrible profession to me, the medical profession," Beth
said. "The responsibilities must be so great and so various."
"Oh, I never think of that," he answered easily.
"_I_ should," Beth rejoined.
"Yes, _you_ would, of course," he said; "and that shows what folly it
is for women to go in for medicine. They worry about this and that,
things that are the patient's look-out, not the doctor's, and make no
end of mischief; besides always losing their heads in a difficulty."
Just then the horse, which had been very fidgety all the way, bolted.
The blood rushed into the doctor's face. "Sit tight! sit tight!" he
exclaimed. "Don't now,--now don't move and make a fuss. Keep cool."
"Keep cool yourself," said Beth dryly. "_I_'m all right."
Dr. Dan glanced at her sideways, and saw that she was laughing.
When they arrived at Fairholm, he made much of the incident. "If I
hadn't had my wits about me, there would have been a smash," he vowed.
"But I happened to be on the spot myself, and Miss Beth behaved
admirably. Most girls would have shrieked, you know, but she behaved
heroically."
This was all rather gushing, but it did not offend Beth, because she
associated gush with Aunt Grace Mary, who had always been kind to her.
Gushing people are usually weak and amiable, gush being the ill-judged
outcome of a desire to please; but at that happy age it was the
amiable intention that Beth took into account. Her desire to be
pleased, which had so seldom been gratified, had become a danger to
her judgment by this time; it made her apt to respond to any attempt
to please her without considering means and motives which should have
discounted her appreciation. Everybody was trying to please her now,
and all her being answered only too readily. She spent a delightful
day at Fairholm, and went home in extravagantly high spirits.
Dr. Dan called early the next morning, and found her with her hat on,
just going out.
"How are you this misty cold grey day?" he asked.
"Oh, very bright," she answered. "I feel as if I were the sun, and I'm
just going to shine out on the world to enliven it."
"May I accompany you?" he asked.
"The sun, alas! is a solitary luminary," she answered, shaking her
head.
"Then I shall hope for better luck next time," he said, and let her go
alone.
In the evening he came in again to have a game of cribbage with Mrs.
Caldwell. Beth was sleepy and had gone to bed early. In the pauses of
the game they talked about her, and the responsibilities of a family.
"A girl wants some one to look after her," the doctor said,
"especially if she has money."
"Yes, indeed," Mrs. Caldwell replied, "girls are a great anxiety. Now
a boy you can put into a profession and have done with it. But it is
not so easy to find a suitable husband for a girl."
"But, of course, if she has a little money it makes a difference," he
observed. "Only she should have some one to advise her in the spending
of it. Now, Miss Beth, for instance, will be as much a child at
twenty-one in money matters as she is now."
"I hope we shall find the right man for her before then," Mrs.
Caldwell answered archly; "not that I think her aunt's fortune will
cause her much anxiety." She alluded to the smallness of the sum.
"She gets some of the interest, I suppose, to go on with," he said.
"Just enough to dress on."
Beth saw a great deal of Dr. Dan after that. She was not in the least
in love with him, but they became intimate all the sooner on that
account. A girl shrinks more shyly from a man she loves than from one
for whom she has only a liking; in the one case every womanly instinct
is on the alert, in the other her feeling is not strong enough to seem
worth curbing. Beth was fond of men's companionship, and Dr. Dan's
assiduous attentions enlivened her, made her brain active, and brought
the vision and the dream within reach; so that she moved in a happy
light, but considered the source of it no more than she would have
considered the stick that held the candle by which she read an
entrancing book.
There are idyllic gleams in all interesting lives; but life as we live
it from day to day is not idyllic. In Beth's case there was the
inevitable friction, the shocks and jars of difficulties and
disagreements with her mother. These had been suspended for a time
after her return, but began to break out again, fomented very often by
Bernadine, who was always her mother's favourite, but was never a
pleasant child. Dr. Dan came one very wet day, and found Beth sitting
in the drawing-room alone, looking miserable. She had done all her
little self-imposed tasks honestly, but had reaped no reward. On the
contrary, there had come upon her a dreadful vision of herself doing
that sort of thing on always into old age, as Aunt Victoria did her
French, with no object, and to no purpose; and for the first time she
formulated a feeling that had gradually been growing up in her of
late: "I must have more of a life than this." What could she do,
however, tied to that stupid place, without a suspicion as yet that
she had it in her to do anything special, and without friends to help
her, with no one to advise. As she reflected, the hopelessness of it
all wrung from her some of the bitterest tears she ever shed. If her
mother would only send her back to Miss Blackburne she would be
learning something, at all events; but, although Mrs. Caldwell had
said nothing definite on the subject, Beth was pretty certain by this
time that she did not mean to let her return to school.
Beth was in the middle of this misery when Dr. Dan arrived.
"How's this?" he said, "Down? You should have the window open. It's
not cold to-day, though it's wet; and the room is quite stuffy. Never
be afraid of fresh air, you know."
"I'm not," Beth said. "I didn't know the window was shut. Open it as
wide as you like--the wider the better for me."
"That's better," he said, as the fresh air flowed in. "It's singular
how women will shut themselves up. No wonder they get out of spirits!
Now, I never let myself run down. When one thing goes wrong, I just
take up another, and don't bother. You'd think I wasn't having much of
a time here; but I'm as happy as the day is long, and I want to see
you the same." He sat down beside her on the old-fashioned sofa, took
her hand, and began to stroke it gently. "Cheer up, little girl," he
added. "I believe you've been crying. Aren't they kind to you?"
"Oh yes, they're kind enough," Beth answered, soothed by the caress;
"at least they mean to be. The misery is in myself. I feel all
dissatisfied."
"Not when I'm with you, do you?" he asked reproachfully.
"No, I don't bother about myself when I have you to talk to," Beth
answered. "You come in fresh, and give me something else to think
about."
"Then, look here, Beth," he said, putting his arm round her. "I don't
think I can do better than take you away with me. You've a head on
your shoulders, and an original way with you that would be sure to
bring people about the house, and you're well connected and look
it;--all of which would be good for my practice. Besides, a young
doctor must marry. I'm over thirty, though you might not think it.
Come, what do you say? You'd have a very good time of it as my wife, I
can tell you. All your own way, and no nagging. You know what _I_ am,
a cheery fellow, never put out by anything. Now, what do you say?"
"Are you asking me to marry you?" said Beth, breaking into a smile.
The position struck her as comical rather than serious.
"Why, what else?" he replied, smiling also. "I see you are recovering
your spirits. You'll be as happy as the day is long when we're
married. You'd never get on with anybody else as you'd do with me. I
don't think anybody else would understand you."
Beth laughed. She liked him, and she liked to be caressed. Why not
marry him and be independent of every one? She hadn't the slightest
objection at the moment; far from it, for she saw in the offer the one
means of escape she was likely to have from the long dull dreary
days, and the loneliness, which was all the life she could have to
look forward to when he had gone. And he was good-looking, too, and
nice--everybody said so. Besides, they would all be pleased if she
accepted him, her mother especially so. Now that she came to think of
it, she perceived that this was what they had been suggesting to her
ever since her return.
"It is settled then?" he said, stooping forward to look into her face.
She looked at him shyly and laughed again. For the life of her she
could not keep her countenance, although she felt she was behaving in
the silly, giggling-girl sort of way she so much despised.
"That's all right," he exclaimed, looking extremely well pleased; and
at that moment Mrs. Caldwell walked into the room, just in time to
witness a lover-like caress. Beth jumped up, covered with confusion.
Mrs. Caldwell looked from one to the other, and waited for an
explanation.
"We've just come to the conclusion that we cannot live apart," Dan
said deliberately, rising at the same time and taking Beth's hand.
"My dear child!" Mrs. Caldwell exclaimed, embracing Beth with happy
tears in her eyes. "This _is_ a joy! I _do_ congratulate you."
Beth became suddenly serious. The aspect of the affair had changed. It
was no longer a game of the moment, but a settled business, already
irrevocable. She wanted to explain that she had not actually pledged
herself, that she must take time to consider; but her heart failed her
in view of her mother's delight. It was Beth's great weakness that, as
a rule, she could neither spoil pleasure nor give pain to save herself
in an emergency.