In the meantime, he explained with a mingled gruffness and languor which Elsie did not understand.
“Oh, it’s perhaps not so great a discovery after all,” Johnny said. “I daresay some fellow has noted it before. That’s what you always find when you take it into your head you have got something new.”
“But you know all about the Medusæ,” said Elsie, “and you would be sure to know if it had been discovered before.”
“I’m not sure that I know anything,” said Johnny, despondently. He cast the jelly fish out of his hand upon the sand. “We’re just, as Newton said, like bairns picking up shells on the shore. We know nothing. It is maybe no new thing at all, but just a variety that everybody knows.”
“Oh, Johnny, that is not like you!” cried Elsie, while the two young men standing by, to whom this mood on Wemyss’s part was quite unknown, gaped at him, vaguely embarrassed, not knowing what to say. Rodie had a great desire to get away from a problem he could not understand, and Frank was feeling a little guilty, he could scarcely tell why. Elsie got down on her knees upon the sand, which was firm though wet, and, gathering a handful of the dulse with its great wet stalks and hollow berries, made a bed for the Medusæ, which, with some repugnance, she lifted on to the little heap.
“You will have to give me a new pair of gloves,” she said, looking up with a laugh, “for I have spoilt these ones that are nearly new; and what will my mother say? But though you think it is very weak, I cannot touch a jelly fish—I am meaning a Medusa, which is certainly a far bonnier name—with my bare hands. There now, it will go easy into a basket, or I would almost carry it myself, with the dulse all about it; but to throw it away is what I will never consent to, for if you think it is a discovery, I know it must be a discovery, and it will be called after you, and a credit to us all.”
“It is a discovery,” cried Johnny, with a sudden change of mien. “I was a fool. I am not going to give it up, whatever happens. The less that comes to me in this world, the more I’ll keep to the little I’m sure of.” When he had uttered this enigmatical sentence, which was one of those mystic utterances, more imposing than wisdom, that fill every audience with confused admiration, he snapped his fingers wildly, and executed a pas of triumph. “It will make the London men stand about!” he said, “and I would just like to know what the Professor will say to it! As for the name——”
“Oh, yes, Johnny, the name?”
“It will be time enough to think of that,” he said, looking at her with mingled admiration and trouble. “Anyway, it is you that have saved it for me,” he said.
“Frank,” said Rodie, “are you meaning to play your foursome with Raaf and Alick, or are you not?”