"Beth," her mother began emphatically, "that is so like you! Will you never get out of the habit of answering so? You are always in opposition, and it is too conceited of you at your age. I did hope they would have cured you of the trick at school; but no sooner do you get home, than you begin again as bad as ever."
"Well, rather than displease you, mamma, I"ll do my best to hold my tongue for the future when I can"t say what you want me to say," Beth answered cheerfully. "I came home to be a comfort to you, and if I can"t be a comfort to you and express myself as well, why, I must go unexpressed."
"Now, there you are again, Beth," Mrs. Caldwell cried peevishly. "Is that a nice thing to say?"
Beth looked at her mother and smiled enigmatically. Then she reflected. Then her countenance cleared.
"Mamma," she said, "your hair is much whiter than it was; but I don"t think I ever saw you look so nice. You have such a pretty complexion, and so few wrinkles, and such even teeth! What a handsome girl you must have been!"
Mrs. Caldwell smiled complacently, and went to bed in high good humour. She told Bernadine, as they undressed, that she thought Beth greatly improved.
But Beth herself lay long awake that night; tossing and troubled, feeling far from satisfied either with herself or anybody else.
The next morning she rose early and drew up her plan of life.
CHAPTER x.x.xV
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 sh.o.r.e, the silence and solitude, which were apt to be so soothing to her dull senses that she ceased to perceive with them, and so pa.s.sed 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, pa.s.sive 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 t.i.tle: "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 e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed 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 a.s.sociated 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."