Chapter XV: Stony-Hearted London

Still time went on,—oh! with such a steady unwavering march over the city streets, and the tramp of his measured footsteps wore a sort of channel in Mina’s heart, to be filled up with all kinds of griefs, anxiety, self-reproach; for Malcolm could get no “government situation,” Mina no employment; their money dwindled down to “_nil_,” or, at all events, the bottom of their hoard was rendered clearly perceptible by the limited number of sovereigns scattered over it. She grew restless, pale, ill, careworn; he impatient, repining, hard to be satisfied, occasionally snappish, always discontented. “Life in London” now, was a very different affair from what it had once been.

Malcolm detested moping in the house, still he professed himself unable to face the sight of his fellows in a shabby hat and threadbare coat; he would have been glad enough to purchase a commission or anything then, and had come to believe it might be possible for him to exist on his pay, but the money which could once have procured it was gone, and there were no means by which he could get more; for once again—although he did not know that—Mina had cast fortune from him, by declining assistance from Allan Frazer: and, though he candidly confessed he would have accepted help from the “arch fiend,” had that personage only been so obliging as to offer it, he could not go begging to any one; and, as Allan never wrote to him, he never wrote to Allan.

And was there nobody else? Well, yes; he might have asked Mr. Ivraine, but he did not like; his pride, his feelings of delicacy, alike forbade that; for, he argued, it would show “there was a split between us and the Craigmaver people; and, besides, it would look as if, because I once picked him up in the street, I fancied I had a sort of claim. No, hang it! that would be mean; I can’t do that.”

Which was the more praiseworthy in him, as the first time Mr. Ivraine called, after their return from Scotland, he asked very pointedly if there were any way he could forward Malcolm’s views. To be sure he did not know the youth had then no definite ones, but he evidently thought he ought to have; and, on Malcolm answering in the negative, he turned away, as Mina’s brother thought, disappointed: so that, on the whole, that part of his conduct was meritorious; it was about the only part at that period, however.

How Mina toiled, Miss Caldera could almost have wept to see, for she knew nothing but disappointment could ever be in store for her, and yet still no word she said was able to turn the girl from her purpose; the more she talked, the more obstinate Mina became; she wanted to support herself, she said, and truly there was need she should be able to work out her object, as she seemed very little inclined to let any other person provide that support for her—not even Ernest Ivraine, as Miss Caldera had once quietly suggested.

But she was met on that solitary occasion with such a burst of proud, angry, resentful expressions—such a torrent of denunciatory remarks concerning matrimony, and match-making, and wedding for money, and marrying for homes, as fairly astounded her.

The “anti-Westwood fever was nothing to that,” the governess asserted, and so for months Mr. Ivraine’s name was never mentioned between them; but as the financial difficulty increased, her friend seriously began to wish Mina would come to her senses some way or other, and marry any sensible person who would take care of her, and put Malcolm in the way of earning an “honest livelihood”—a favourite phrase of the lady, which she used on all occasions, to the ineffable disgust both of the young gentleman to whom it referred, and of that young gentleman’s sister. They “could not come down to their circumstances,” so Miss Caldera told them frequently, and it was true; Mina had not yet learned patience, nor Malcolm sense.

Miss Caldera felt a weighty charge had devolved on her; she was not actually supporting them yet, but it would soon come to that, she clearly foresaw: and, if she had imagined her small means could prove sufficient, she would never have repined, only she thought Malcolm ought to exert himself, and she knew Mina was breaking her heart in hunting a will-o’-the-wisp, a shadow without a substance, a hope without a foundation.

One day the girl came in, looking angry, vexed, and flushed. Wearily, and yet still pettishly, she flung down a parcel on the table, and dropping into the nearest chair, remained silently gazing at the windows of number 24, just opposite, where a young stock-broker lodged—it was not of him she was thinking though—till Miss Caldera broke the stillness by the brief query,

“Well, Mina?”

“Well,” repeated that young lady, speaking rapidly—as was her wont when much annoyed—“why only what I might have expected. When I tried original English tales, they wanted French translations; when I took them French translations, they thought, perhaps, Italian would suit the public taste better; when I had finished the Italian, they said the rage for that kind of literature was past, and suggested German; and now, when I have nearly lost my eyesight poring over those unchristian hieroglyphics, and half-choked myself learning their horrid gutturals, I find they are overstocked with German translations, and think I had better try the French again.”

“And you——”

“Said I should try no more.”

“And so——” once again suggested Miss Caldera.

“And so, here is my manuscript, and there is an end of it,” finished Mina.

“I told you when you first began this wild goose chase, that no woman could effect anything, and that you had better marry Mr. Westwood, Mina,” remarked her friend.

“And I told you one woman would effect much, and that I would not marry Mr. Westwood,” said the girl; “and I mean to prove my words true yet, in spite of fate.”

“Indeed! I thought you said but just now you would try no more——”

“Translations,” explained Mina; “there are too many clever women, ay, and for that matter, too many clever men, at the business for me to have any chance; no, no, I mean to return to my own work, and stick to it.”

“Certain that in original literature you will meet with no rivals,” her friend said, with a smile.

Mina bit her lip, but made no reply; whilst Miss Caldera proceeded.

“You think me most unsympathising and ill-natured and narrow-minded, I know; but, believe me, I only speak thus to save you from certain misery, positive anxiety, that hope deferred which maketh the heart sick, and, most certainly, ultimate failure and disappointment.”

“Pleasant prospect,” remarked Mina.

“Anything but it,” returned the lady; “you are wasting your youth and your strength and your energies in endeavours which cannot prove otherwise than useless. Where one manuscript is accepted, fifty are rejected—for one author who succeeds, twenty fail; it is the most unsatisfactory, unremunerative, thankless profession in which man ever engaged; and, as for woman! even if she rise to anything beyond a mere scribbler of love tales for some tenth-rate magazine, literary reputation never brings any real satisfaction with it to her. You have not—I must say plainly what I think, what I know, Mina—either the talent or the patience necessary to ensure anything at all like a third or fourth class standing, or, in fact, any standing at all; and, further, I believe you have not sufficient humility to be satisfied except with a place on the daïs.”

“It is agreeable to be complimented,” said Mina, with a very feeble attempt at unconcern.

“It is not agreeable to hear the truth, I admit, but hereafter you will thank me for speaking it; you have, in spite of all your foibles, enough good sense left to bear with me, though I will not compliment: the real fault in your training is to be found in the fact that you have been too much flattered——”

“By you,” suggested Mina tartly.

“No, but by every one else; if I have understood you rightly,—by your father and cousin; to my own knowledge, by mother, brother, Mr. Merapie, Mr. Westwood: it is better for me to tell you these things than a stranger. Your friends imagined you were cleverer than most girls who had the same opportunities, and they were wrong; I admit you have abilities, but I deny you are a genius, and I implore you not to delude yourself into that belief; you can do literally nothing, as I told you long ago; in fact, to repeat what I have said fifty times before, there is, in a general way, nothing a woman can do except——”

“Marry,” supplied Mina.

“Except marry,” acquiesced Miss Caldera.

“Refuge for the destitute,” remarked Mina.

“And not altogether a bad one,” retorted her friend.

“But one of which I do not intend to avail myself just at present,” said Mina. “I wonder, when you have such an opinion of it, you do not set me the example.”

She was sorry the next moment she had uttered the thoughtless speech, for the blood came mantling up into Miss Caldera’s face as she replied,

“The heart knoweth its own bitterness, Mina dear; but,” she proceeded, after a pause, “I know the annoyance these perpetual rejections are giving you, and I really see no use in your persisting in making griefs for yourself and needlessly inflicting pain on others; I never see you take a grammar in your hand, or sit down to write, or put on your bonnet to go out, but a sort of dread comes over me: I do wish, from the very bottom of my heart, dear child, you would give up this wild idea; believe me, you will never make it a reality.”

“I would give it up to-morrow,” returned Mina, “if you could suggest anything in its place.”

The governess remained silent, and Mina continued.

“You see, dear old friend, affairs are getting desperate with us; by some means I _must_ make money: point out to me any other way by which I can earn the amount necessary, and, if that way should turn out to be sweeping a crossing, I will thankfully go and do it.”

Time was when Miss Caldera would have laughed at this declaration, but she did not do so now; she received it as a matter of sober earnest, a thing the girl would actually perform, “for affairs were,” as she said, “getting desperate,” and Mina, though not humbled, was being so; wherefore her friend replied,

“I tell you, Mina, there is no way for you; suppose you had the ‘gift,’ which I say you have not; suppose you had genius, imagination, tact, and the thousand and one _et ceteras_ needful to make a successful author; suppose, again, you had a friend to assist, you might think yourself especially fortunate if, for several years, you could make sufficient to cover the expenses of pens, ink, and foolscap. You see what teaching is; you are unfit for any profession, trade, employment; but such is not the case with Malcolm,—no man who will work need starve: but you encourage him in all his absurd ideas, and talk about this thing and that situation not being genteel, as if he were now in a position to consider gentility, that monstrous bugbear which has only power to influence weak-minded women and foolish men.”

“What would you have him do?” impatiently demanded Mina.

“Work,” was the rejoinder; “abandon this chimerical government situation notion, and put his shoulder to the wheel wherever he sees a vacancy, low down or high up: I have no patience with him, I confess, or sympathy in his aristocratic laziness, nor can I endure to hear you aiding and abetting every distaste and whim and vagary he has: if he cannot be a clerk, let him turn labourer, cabman, porter, anything rather than what he is at present,—a listless, dissatisfied, useless being, who smokes half his time, and sleeps—when he is not grumbling—the remainder.”

“I could not ask him to _work_,” said Mina, laying a painful emphasis on the word, and flushing as she spoke it; “I could not ask him to do that: I brought him here:—because of me—yes, I may as well speak plainly when I am at it—because of me he can hope for no assistance from Craigmaver. He came to London on my suggestion: I meant to make money for us both; if he were not able to get a government appointment, I intended to buy him a commission, and—and I cannot say now—‘disgrace our family and connexions and yourself by accepting some menial situation’—I cannot do it.”

“Disgrace, nonsense,” retorted Miss Caldera, for the conclusion of the above speech trenched on hostile ground, and she rose in arms on the moment; “I declare, Mina Frazer, you would provoke a saint with your anti-business prejudices and your Highland pride and your stuff about family connections who would not care if you died in a workhouse to-morrow. You seem to imagine the sun was made to shine for you; my mother once entertained a similar idea with regard to me, but——”

“But what?” demanded her auditor.

“She found she was mistaken, or, at least, I did for her,” was the response.

“By which remark you mean to imply,” said Mina, “that Malcolm and I will make a similar discovery; do you not think trial enough has fallen to our lot to convince us the sun can go down as well as rise and shine?”

“No,” replied Miss Caldera; “you are not half tamed, nor is Malcolm; but you will both, or I am greatly mistaken, get a ‘settler,’ yet: however, as you are so very fastidious, as you seem so very anxious to make your brother’s path smooth, why do you not marry and ask your husband to help him?”

“Husbands are not to be picked up on every door step, Miss Caldera,” retorted Mina; “they are a rare commodity.”

“All the more valuable for that,” remarked her friend, “as I told you before about Mr. Westwood.”

“Yes, but Mr. Westwood is to me dead and buried; I would not take him when I could get him, and now, when I know the worth of the prize I rejected, I cannot go and ask him to marry me, can I, dear friend?”

“You will get a settler, yet,” repeated the governess; “but,” she added, not perceiving that the girl’s levity of manner was merely assumed, to cover a smarting wound, “but I was not then thinking of Mr. Westwood; I was alluding to Mr. Ivraine.”

“Well,” said Mina, remembering Mr. Westwood’s taunt, and choking back all signs of emotion with a desperate effort, “shall I ask _him_?”

“Mina Frazer,” returned Miss Caldera, “I could shake you.”

“Miss Caldera,” replied Mina, “will you be so kind as to abandon the theme matrimonial? I do not like it. With what kind of feeling do you suppose I could meet Mr. Ivraine, after you have suggested to me the propriety of trying to ‘catch him.’ I loathe and detest the very mention of match-making or marrying from prudential motives.”

“You will repent your conduct some day, Mina,” her friend began; but Mina, whose pride and vanity and sensitiveness were all alike touched by the _finale_ she knew was approaching, here vehemently interposed in a tone of much pique, the reason of her great annoyance finding vent at last.

“If I were rich you would not say such things to me; it is because you know I have no money or the capability of making any, that you speak thus. If I were rich——”

“It would not make the slightest difference in my opinion,” interposed her friend; “if you would only listen to reason for one moment, and consider the value and the rarity of a true disinterested attachment——”

“A true disinterested folly,” broke out Mina, the blood rushing up into her cheeks and the tears into her eyes at a precisely similar ratio of speed; but, almost immediately recovering her self-possession, she added in a less abrupt manner, “I believe it is all nonsense, indeed I do; but supposing every word you utter to be the perfection of wisdom, supposing me to be tractable and willing to follow your advice and—and—settle down into a country squire’s country wife, don’t you think—now don’t you, wisest of friends, think that it might, on the whole, be advisable for me to wait till the aforesaid country squire asketh me, Mina Frazer, to become the aforesaid country wife?”

Miss Caldera could endure with patience any vehement outburst of temper; she very rarely lost her own: she was as fond of a game at argument as some good folks are of a game at chess; and so, whenever her adversary threw a king, or, in other words, an opinion, into a precarious position by over haste or an absence of sufficient reflection, she bore down upon her antagonist in first-rate style, drawing, in the forms of cogent and rapid reasons, bishops, knights, and castles around the stronghold of her unhappy opponent, check-mated and put him _hors de combat_ in a moment.

And thus it chanced that, whenever Mina grew extremely angry on any point, Miss Caldera became proportionably cool and drily provoking; but occasionally—once, perhaps, in a year or so—Mina had a way of turning the tables quietly round and settling herself in a sort of defiant position, from whence she calmly flung missiles at the head of her tormentor. Then Miss Caldera fairly lost all patience; she felt her place had been usurped, that Mina was getting the best of it, that nothing but anger was capable of dislodging her from the post she occupied; and accordingly, on the present occasion, she commenced a vehement denunciation, which was only cut short by Malcolm opening the door and demanding, in the sort of slang Mina always regretted to hear him use, “what was the row.”

“Only the finish of a little altercation Mina and I have had, which originally commenced about her literary efforts.”

“I wish to heavens,” said Malcolm pettishly, coining a word, for his own especial convenience, “I wish to heavens she had never ‘efforted’ anything about them; and that when women are living together they could agree. If she had not deceived me about what she could do, and had kept from quarrelling with Cecilia, we might have been at Craigmaver; still or, at least, she might, for Allan, I’m sure, would have done something for me instead of leaving me here stranded like a shipwrecked waif: men get on together well enough; why the deuce ladies wrangle so tremendously I cannot understand.”

Mina bent her head over her breast, but said never a word, while Miss Caldera answered,

“It is because men are never thrown with men as we are with each other; believe me, you would not stand the ordeal one single bit better if you were subjected to a similar test: but, although your cousin and you are not on very intimate terms at present, is there nothing you can think of which might prove the means of procuring a livelihood for yourself?”

“If it were not for Mina,” he said impatiently, “I’d ship myself off to the colonies to-morrow, or enter as able-bodied seaman on board some man-of-war, or enlist: hang it! I’m so sick of the whole business of life, perhaps I might drown myself; at all events, I would do something, but I cannot leave her.”

It was the old excuse again; but it passed current this time, for Miss Caldera was so eager to get her own ideas into circulation, that she had scarcely leisure to notice the counterfeit coin he handed to her in exchange.

“I want Mina to marry,” she began.

“I wish to goodness she was settled some way or other,” he exclaimed; “I’m sure, as you say, it is the only thing a woman can do, and I know she ought to have married long ago.”

“You told me yourself, Malcolm, you never would give your consent to anything of the kind,” said Mina, raising her face, and speaking hurriedly with parched lips, “you know you did, when you came back from India—when——”

“Things were different then,” he interrupted, “and I did not know so much about the world, and about you, and I thought Westwood beneath us—and so he is; but still he would have been a vast deal better than beggary, as you may find yet, Mina.”

“Well, but she detested Mr. Westwood,” remarked Miss Caldera; “and, besides, we cannot go and ask him if he be still desirous to marry her: but there are others in the world who are fond of your sister,—Mr. Ernest Ivraine, for instance.”

“Ay, Mina, what do you think of him?” demanded Malcolm, for it was a subject he and Miss Caldera had once before discussed, and he was not sorry to have an opportunity of reverting to it; “what do you think of him?”

“I think little of him,” said Mina, rising from her seat and talking very slowly, with clenched hands, and a sort of nervous fierceness, “excepting that he is a strange, reserved, silent individual; but I think of you, Malcolm, that if you had a spark of manly feeling about you, a particle of brotherly consideration, a single idea such as your father’s son ought to have, a regard for yourself and the name you bear, you would not be going over a catalogue of ‘desirable’ husbands in order to select one to fasten me upon: I will be no party to such a conversation; I would leave the house before I would endure further persecution of this kind; I——”

“Mr. Ivraine is in the drawing-room, sir,” said a servant, opening the door at this moment; which announcement curtailed Mina’s speech of its fair proportions, and sent Malcolm upstairs to the old favourite jigging time denominated six-eight.