'The girl is well enough,' said he.
She was on the point of retorting that, as far as he knew anything about the matter, Williamina was well enough. But she spared him.
'No, she has no proper pride,' the little Dresden-china woman continued. 'And just now, when everything is in her favour. Agatha never had such chances. Agatha never had Williamina's good looks. Of course, I say nothing against Mr. Gemmill—he is a highly respectable man—and if the business is going on as they say it is going, I don't see why they should not leave Queen's Crescent and take a larger house—up by the West End Park. And he is an intelligent man, too; the society they have is clever and intellectual—you saw in Agatha's last letter about the artists' party she had—why, their names are in every newspaper—quite distinguished people, in that way of life. And, at all events, it would be a beginning. Williamina would learn something. Agatha is a perfect musician—you can't deny that.'
But here the big Doctor rebelled; and he brought the weight of his professional authority to bear upon her.
'Now, look here, Jane, when I said that the girl wanted a change, I meant a change; but not a change to singing-lessons, and music-lessons, and German lessons, and Italian lessons, and not a change to an atmosphere like that of Glasgow. Bless my soul, do you think that kind of change will bring back the colour to her cheek, and give her an appetite, and put some kind of cheerfulness into her? Queen's Crescent! She's not going to Queen's Crescent with my will. Brighton, if you like.'
'Brighton? To get herself laughed at, and put in the background, as a half-educated ignorant Highland peasant girl? So long as she is what she is, she shall not go to Brighton with my will.'
So here was an absolute dead-lock so far as Meenie's future was concerned; but she knew nothing of it; and if she had known she would not have heeded much. It was not of her own future she was thinking. And it seemed so terrible to her to know that there was nothing she would not have adventured to save this man from destruction, and to know that she was incapable of doing anything at all. If she could but see him for a moment—to make an appeal to him; if she could but take his hand in hers; would she not say that there had been timidity, doubt, misapprehension in the past, but that now there was no time for any of these; she had come to claim him and save him and restore him to himself—no matter what he might think of her? Indeed she tried to put all thought of herself out of the matter. She would allow no self-pride to interfere, if only she could be of the smallest aid to him, if she could stretch out her hand to him, and appeal to him, and drag him back. But how? She seemed so helpless. And yet her anxiety drove her to the consideration of a hundred wild and impossible schemes, insomuch that she could not rest in her own room, to which she had retreated for safety and quiet. She put on her bonnet again and went out—still with that guilty consciousness of a secret hanging over her; and she went down the road and over the bridge; and then away up the solitary valley through which the Mudal flows. Alas! there was no laughing over the brown shallows now; there was no thinking of
'the sweet forget-me-nots,
That grow for happy lovers';
all had become dark around her; and the giant grasp of Glasgow had taken him away from her, and dragged him down, and blotted out for ever the visions of a not impossible future with which she had been wont to beguile the solitary hours. 'Drinking himself to death, in the lowest of low company:' could this be Ronald, that but a few months ago had been the gayest of any, with audacious talk of what he was going to try for, with health and happiness radiant in his eyes? And it seemed to her that her sister Agatha had been proud of writing these words, and proud of the underlining of them, and that there was a kind of vengeance in them; and the girl's mouth was shut hard; and she was making vague and fierce resolutions of showing to all of them—far and near—that she was not ashamed of her regard for Ronald Strang, gamekeeper or no gamekeeper, if ever the chance should serve. Ashamed! He had been for her the very king of men—in his generosity, his courage, his gentleness, his manliness, his modesty, and his staunch and unfaltering fealty to his friends. And was he to fall away from that ideal, and to become a wreck, a waif, an outcast; and she to stand by and not stretch out a hand to save?