It was not easy to tell whether she who had so long been its depositary felt the more lightened or disappointed. She had reckoned more than she knew upon the honour of the discovery being connected with the name of Brownlow, and she could not quite surmount the feeling that Dr. Ruthven had somehow robbed her husband, though her better sense accepted and admired the young men’s argument that such discoveries were common property, and that the benefit to the world was the same.
Allen was a good deal struck when he understood the matter. He said it explained a good deal to him which the others had been too young to observe or remember both in the old home and afterwards.
“One wonderful part of it is how you kept the secret, and Janet too!” he said. “And you must often have been sorely tempted. I remember being amused at your disappointment and her indignation when I said I didn’t see why a man was bound to be a doctor because his father was before him; and I suppose if Bobus or I had taken to it, this Ruthven need not have been beforehand with us!”
“It would have been transgressing the conditions to hold it out to you.”
“I don’t imagine I could have done it any way,” said Allen, sighing. “I never can enter into the taste the others have for that style of thing; but Bobus might have succeeded. You must have expected it of him, at the time when he and I used to laugh at what we thought was a monomania on your part for our taking up medical science as a tribute to our father, when we did not need it as a provision.”
“You see, if any of you had taken up the study from pure philanthropy, as some people do—well, at any rate in George Macdonald’s novels—it would have been the very qualification. But I had little hope from the time that the fortune came. I dreamt the first night that Midas had turned the whole of you to gold statues, and that I was wandering about like the Princess Paribanou to find the Magnum Bonum to disenchant you.”
“It has come pretty true,” said Allen thoughtfully, “that inheritance did us all a great deal of mischief.”
“And it took a greater magnum bonum, a maximum bonum, to disenchant us,” said Armine.
“Which I fear did not come from me,” said his mother, “and I am most grateful to the dear people who applied it to you. I wish I saw my way to the disenchantment of the other two!”
“I suppose you quite despaired till John took his turn in that direction,” said Allen. “Bobus could really have done better than any of us, I fancy, but he would not have fulfilled the religious condition, as sine qua non.”