Chapter VI: A Dream of Youth

One August afternoon, about a month after Mina’s return from the Highlands, and before Allan Frazer had been, as the hacknied phrase runs, “made completely happy,” John Merapie’s niece asked Miss Caldera if she should have any objection to go out with her.

“Not the least,” was the response; and, accordingly, out they went together, Mina piloting their way up streets and down streets and across squares and through all sorts of strange places with an expertness and “knowledge of her business,” which would have struck the worthy Laird of Craigmaver as something rather remarkable.

“Why did you never ask me where I was going?’” she demanded at length, after they had walked a considerable distance in silence.

“Because I know, my dear, you can occasionally give a short answer,” was the reply.

“Just because of that ill-natured one of yours, then, I won’t tell you,” said Mina, colouring even while she laughed, for the little thrust, like all Miss Caldera ever attempted, went home; and—perhaps rather glad of the excuse than otherwise—she spoke not another word on the subject till she finally paused before a door, graced by a dingy brass plate, intimating to the world in general, and to authors with money in their pockets, in particular, that on the other side of it lay the publishing office of the Messrs. Hannade.

It might have cost any one, excepting Mina Frazer, a smile to behold the contortion Miss Caldera pulled when her former charge halted in front of the above-mentioned inscription; but the only visible effects it produced upon that young lady were to heighten her colour considerably, and to induce a rather irritable inquiry of,

“Will you come in?”

“I may as well see the play out,” said Miss Caldera, resignedly.

Mina made no reply, but turning the handle, entered without ceremony and without fear—(as is the fashion of young aspirants, who, never having gone through the ordeal of a rejection, entertain little dread of a repulse)—a dreary-looking place, so strewed with books and papers, that somehow it gave Mina the idea of being painted, furnished, and carpeted with manuscripts.

There was no one in the office when they first glanced around it; but almost immediately after an individual of the shortest stature, with fiery red hair, brushed angrily back from his forehead, and a quick, shrewd, intelligent, though not intellectual, expression of countenance, emerged from an inner chamber, and advanced to learn what business might have brought two ladies from the fates knew where, and set them down on the much worn matting covering the floor the fates, not he, knew how.

It was palpable to the most unobservant that he must have been engaged in the not very literary or romantic, though occasionally necessary, operation of washing his hands, for the cuffs of his coat and the wristbands of his shirt being turned back, in a suspicious manner, implied the fact, whilst a very coarse towel, with which he was industriously drying his fingers, confirmed it.

He appeared, however, not in the least degree concerned at having been detected in this employment, but coolly continuing it, looked first at the elder lady, and then at the younger, not speaking, but calmly awaiting information.

Mina glanced appealingly towards her friend, but Miss Caldera remained impracticable. It was her principle to let “everybody talk for himself;” and as, moreover, Mina had never asked her to interpose in her behalf, she resolved to permit her emancipated pupil to say what she chose as she chose.

“Is Mr. Hannade in?” stammered the girl at last, feeling some one ought to say something, and that her companion would not, “is Mr. Hannade in?”

“My name is Hannade,” responded that gentleman, in a rapid manner; indeed, he talked so fast that his words tripped over each other in their passage from tongue to lips, the result of which was that the listener came quite as soon into possession of the last syllable as the first; and, having intimated the fact, he shut up his mouth again and looked at Mina to see what impression the intelligence produced upon her.

“I wished to speak to you about a book,” she said.

“Pray be seated,” answered the publisher, and down went a pile of papers on the floor, after which performance Mr. Hannade graciously presented his visitors with—chairs.

A long pause ensued, the only noticeable thing during which was, that whilst he appeared to be waiting for Mina to speak, and keeping an attentive ear open to catch any word of wisdom which might fall from her lips, he fastened his eyes on Miss Caldera, and never once removed them from her face, as though he were endeavouring to discover from its expression whether her companion, the young Miss in her teens, were a hoax, crazy, or jesting.

“Do you ever read manuscripts?” was the question with which Mina ventured, after some deliberation, to break the ice.

“It is what we are here for,” tumbled out Mr. Hannade, with a facetious grin.

“Would you then read one of mine?” asked the girl, a smile on Miss Caldera’s lips having rendered her quite desperate.

“We are rather overstocked at present,” he said, cautiously; and, in rather a slower tone, “you desire to publish on your own account?” this last was interrogatively.

“I do not precisely understand,” observed Mina.

“You wish to retain the copyright and pay the expenses,” he explained.

“No,” said the would-be authoress, “I want you to do that,” which reply brought a less agreeable expression over Mr. Hannade’s face and caused Miss Caldera to smile again.

“We are rather overstocked at present,” repeated Mr. Hannade, in a tone sufficient to have annihilated the hopes of a much more confident individual than Mina Frazer.

It was the first time in her life she had ever been refused anything by a stranger; it was the first check that had met her in this absurd literary attempt, and absurd though it assuredly was, it did not strike her as being such. She made a violent effort to appear unconcerned, but it would not do: a deep burning flush came up into her cheek and a tear persisted in dimming her eye; and when, after an instant’s hesitation, she arose to go, there was a look of such mortification in her face as moved the pity of the governess, even while she tried to convince herself, “the conceited child deserved a regular ‘setting down’ for her presumption.”

Now, spite of the war-like style in which he arranged his hair, and the dry, shortness of his address, and the excessive rapidity of his speech, Mr. Hannade was really a kind-hearted man; though he was a publisher, he was still a mortal, and he did not like to send anything of the feminine description out of his office almost crying: no doubt he would have acted more prudently and kindly in the end, had he permitted Mina to depart and take her manuscript with her; but the sorrowful look in her dark soft eyes, and a certain tremor about the mouth, fairly conquered his previous determination, “not to be tormented with her,” and he, therefore, let in a gleam of sunshine upon the previous darkness of his address, by inquiring on what subject the work in question was written.

“It is a novel, sir,” answered Mina brightening up so suddenly, that Mr. Hannade felt he had “fairly committed himself.”

“I knew that, well enough,” he thought; then added aloud, “So I presume, but what kind of a novel?”

“I cannot tell——” Mina began.

“I mean, what sort of a novel: is it a religious one or——”

A violent fit of coughing from Miss Caldera caused the remainder of the sentence to be strangled in Mr. Hannade’s throat; but, after a moment, he resumed, a just perceptible smile lingering around the corners of his mouth, “Or historical, perhaps, or sentimental, eh?” and the publisher insinuated this last idea in a well-pleased tone, as if the right nail had been finally struck on the head by him.

“No,” answered Mina in all seriousness, “it is not exactly any of the three; it is more, I think, what would be called, a moral novel.”

“A what?” gasped out Mr. Hannade.

“A moral novel,” she repeated, blushing to her very forehead; “that is, I mean it is about people trying to do right and be good, and there is some religion in it too, and——but perhaps you would be so good as to read it, and then you would know better what is in it.”

And the girl stretched out the manuscript so entreatingly that Mr. Hannade felt himself constrained to take it from her and promise to “look over it,” even whilst he shrunk with horror from the idea of fulfilling that promise, and made a sort of composition of one page in the hundred with his conscience, which whispered he ought not to tantalize and deceive his visitor by accepting the imposing looking parcel, with the intention merely of laying it carefully aside till she called for it again. Yes, yes, he would “look at it.”

Oh! if young authors could only be made to understand the precise meaning publishers attach to those three words, how many an hour of weary sickening suspense, how many a bitter disappointment, how many a dispiriting miserable walk they might save themselves! How many a high vision that brief sentence has conjured up; how many an air-castle has been built on the strength of it, raw youths fresh from college and women just cast adrift on the world’s wide ocean, who have unadvisedly flown to the pen as to a means of fame and wealth, could tell: they turn from the publisher’s door as Mina Frazer did, fancying the rubicon is past, the battle won, the prize gained; and they come back to have all their lovely edifices levelled in the dust, to be recalled from dreams of countless sovereigns to the horrible actuality of scanty shillings, to be sent out despairing as they had entered triumphant by the three other words, which sound the knell of the rejected manuscript, “does not suit.”

Mina Frazer, however, in common with many another aspirant after literary reputation, had never been favoured with a peep into the brief convenient dictionary publishers have compiled for their own especial behoof, relief, and benefit; and imagining, as most young scribblers do, that if she could only get her book read, it was certain to be accepted, Mr. Hannade’s tardy “I will look over it,” appeared to her merely next door neighbour and intimate friend to “I will take it.”

“I am greatly obliged,” she said, in a tone so polite it might have astounded Malcolm, though it did not surprise Miss Caldera.

“If you knew all, you need not be,” thought the publisher with a sort of compunctious twinge, holding the door open for his visitors to pass out, and wishing most fervently they had never come in; but he merely smiled and bowed in actual reply.

“When shall I call to know?” vaguely demanded Mina on the threshold.

“Oh! give me a few days,” answered Mr. Hannade; then noticing Miss Caldera’s quick glance settling on him, he turned a little red and added, “let me see, I fear I can scarcely promise to read it under a fortnight, we are so very busy,” and he looked hopelessly at the papers around, as Mina thought, in utter despair. “Could I write to you?” he added; “I should be very happy to do so.”

“I don’t doubt that in the least,” half murmured Miss Caldera; but her charge settled his hopes of escape through the medium of the post by hastily replying,

“No, thank you, I will call again in about a fortnight; I need not give you the trouble of writing.”

“It would be no trouble,” said Mr. Hannade: “rather a pleasure,” he added, after he had returned Mina’s good evening and Miss Caldera’s stiff bow and seen them fairly “off the premises.” “Rather a pleasure: I wish I had let her go at the first, it would have saved me an immense deal of subsequent annoyance, but it is no use wishing now. Bless my heart, what a bundle! and such a title, and a moral novel, of all things under the sun, written so carefully: well, I promised to look at it, and I will.” And Mr. Hannade, leaning with folded arms upon his desk, skimmed the first page, read a few lines of the fifty-seventh, glanced again at the hundredth, and, after making one rapid jump to the end of all, found himself master of the contents of the entire manuscript; at least he had seen enough of the contents to know, “it would not suit.”

“Won’t do,” he soliloquised, tying it up again in a meditative manner, “won’t do, and she won’t do; but how I am to tell her that, I don’t know: no good her starting in that line at all: she has not the gift as they call it; only if she’d publish herself, that would be no great concern of mine if she wished to test the experiment. If she only had it back now: but still it is a fortnight a-head, and perhaps she may get some new ideas in the meantime.” Haying concluded which speech, complimentary to Mina’s talents, and really creditable to his own rapid powers of discrimination, he thrust the parcel into a box filled with others in a similar predicament, and, on the old principle of “out of sight out of mind,” forgot all about Mina Frazer and Mina Frazer’s “effort.”

Totally unconscious, however, of the very summary manner in which her darling child had been tried, condemned—or, to speak more properly, left in a sort of literary morgue, to be claimed—Mr. Merapie’s niece walked along the London streets by her friend’s side, waiting eagerly for the latter to speak, longing, yet still not liking, to open the conversation herself. Miss Caldera, however, maintained a resolute silence, until at length, as they were crossing one of the most crowded of the many crowded thoroughfares, she chanced to meet Mina’s eye fastened so intently upon her, that she found it impossible to repress a smile.

There was something about that smile which annoyed the girl so much, that, forgetting all her good resolutions, all her affection for her friend, all she had thought about her when in Scotland, all about the omnibuses and carts and cabs and vans and broughams, she came to a dead halt right in the middle of the crossing, and demanded in an extremely angry manner, what Miss Caldera was laughing at?

“You, my dear,” returned that lady, as she dragged her from under the nose of a carriage horse, and so over the broom of an Irish ‘sweeper’ to the side path and safety; “if you do not wish to form the subject of an interesting newspaper paragraph, I should advise you never again to halt right in the centre of a London street; you were very nearly knocked down that time.”

“Well, suppose I had been?” said Mina, sulkily.

“And if not killed, been crippled or invalided for life, perhaps!” added the governess; “how should you have liked a finish of that kind?”

“Not at all,” was Mina’s frank confession; “but, you see, you provoked me just then.”

“As I very often do,” retorted Miss Caldera; “as it is not a very difficult business to effect: but still I do not see why you should endanger your life every time you get out of temper.”

“I do not get out of temper so very often,” pleaded the girl, who felt she had been both irritable and ungrateful; “and, indeed, I try not to be cross, but you know I cannot endure to be laughed at, particularly when I am in earnest about anything: and I am very much in earnest about beginning to write and make money, and——”

“Make folly,” interposed Miss Caldera; “have you not everything you want, everything money can procure? What new mania is it that has set you scribbling now? I declare, Mina, I thought you had more sense.”

“Well, don’t be angry without a reason, dear, cross old friend,” said the young lady, “and I’ll tell you all about it, and how the idea of writing occurred to me; only, remember, you are to keep it a great secret, and not to speak about the matter to anybody.”

“I have too much regard for you to do anything of the kind,” retorted the governess.

“You see,” continued Mina, without noticing this friendly remark, “my cousin Allan is very, very clever, and he has published a great deal, and——”

“You thought the talent ran in the family,” interrupted Miss Caldera.

“I thought nothing of the kind,” responded Mina; “and, if you keep catching me up so every minute, I will stop talking altogether. I had been wishing for months and months to have money, you understand, _of my own_, to do what I liked with: but it never once crossed my mind I could by possibility make any myself, till one day, at Glenfiord, Cecilia said, when we were all out on the lake together—I knew she was making fun of me, but that did not matter—

“‘I do so wish, Mina, you would begin to write a book, I am sure it would be unique; I would pay all expenses just for the pleasure of getting a peep at it:’ then she turned to Allan, and added, ‘could not she write a book, don’t you think?’

“‘Anybody could do that,’ he answered, in the stiff brief way he has trained himself occasionally to speak in, ‘anybody could do that; but Mina is quite clever enough to write a book worth reading, though I hope she will never be so foolish as to make the endeavour.’”

“Your cousin Allan is a simpleton,” broke in Miss Caldera; “as if you were not conceited and puffed up enough with flattery before, he must commence complimenting, to see if it were possible to make you vainer, and more absurd than you had become without his assistance.”

“Indeed, you are mistaken,” said Mina; “Allan has, I admit, changed into rather a fashionable man, but still he never complimented me.”

“Oh! you thought it all truth, I have no doubt,” replied her friend.

“And whenever,” resumed the girl, without heeding this remark, “he heard Cecilia Warmond praising me, even in the most simple things, he seemed vexed and irritated.”

“I don’t care what he did, or what he did not do,” persisted Miss Caldera; “if it be he who set you on this ridiculous writing scheme, he has a great sin to answer for, that is all.”

“But he did not; it was Cecilia who spoke at first, he merely answered her. Well, I thought and I thought after that whether I could not make out a book some way, and at last I resolved to try; and, whenever I came home I did try, and I have managed to finish one, and you know the rest.”

“Yes, I know plenty,” grumbled Miss Caldera; “and pray what do you propose to do now you have ‘made out a book?’”

“I propose—always supposing I can get enough sold—to buy Malcolm a commission, and then work very hard till I grow very rich indeed; then some time, many years hence, when Malcolm is a great man, and has retired from the army, he and I will club together and buy a fine place in the Highlands and have carriages for mamma, and Uncle John will come and stay with us, and you shall give up that horrid teaching and have everything in the world you want, and we shall all be as happy, oh! as happy, dear old friend, as kings and queens.”

Miss Caldera fairly faced about and stared at Mina, who, with flushed face and beaming eye had uttered the above rapid sentence.

Having satisfied herself that she had not suddenly been deprived of whatever small amount of sense might formerly have belonged to her, she became completely bewildered which course out of three to adopt; whether to cry over the simple nonsensical vision Mina had so speedily conjured up, in which the comfort of her quaint governess had not been forgotten,—to reason with her on the worse than folly of such wild day dreams,—or to laugh at her excessive absurdity: ridicule being, as she well knew, the only weapon capable of making any permanent wound, she resolved to use it and let matters take their course.

“And have you informed Malcolm of your benevolent intentions concerning him?” she demanded, after a short pause.

“No,” said Mina, “I thought it would be so delightful a surprise.”

“Decidedly, when it comes to pass,” acquiesced Miss Caldera, laying an ominous emphasis on the three last words; “and you have no fear of success?”

“Mr. Hannade said he would look it over,” was Mina’s reply.

“Yes, to please a foolish girl whom he knew had no more genius than I have; to get rid of you without a crying scene, in short, my dear, as men, you know, have a horror of hysterics: and, when you go back, he will tell you he is extremely sorry that ‘it does not suit;’ that the public are tired of moral novels; that historical, or religious, or sentimental, or, to speak plainer English, every kind but that you happen to have tried, are those which go down at present; that he is greatly obliged by your favouring him with a perusal; in brief, he will tell you everything under the sun but—truth.”

“Well, we shall see,” said Mina, in a rather crest-fallen tone; “but I do not think,” she added, “it is kind of you to snub me as you are doing, particularly when it was you who first made me reflect about our being dependants, and the possibility of our having, at some time or other, to maintain ourselves; I do not think it kind of you.”

“When I reminded you that business was uncertain, affection quite as much so, that changes came into all houses, and affliction into most, I said also distinctly that the reason I asked you to reflect on these things was, to induce you to consider well before you rejected a comfortable settlement, for no conceivable motive that I was ever able to divine. I never recommended you to turn milliner, or governess, or amanuensis, or scribbler, or adopt any other absurd expedient for making a few pounds per annum; if you are not satisfied with your present position, and desire to assist Malcolm to become an officer, why do you not marry Mr. Westwood? He would do anything in the world you asked him, even to buying your brother the right to wear a scarlet uniform. I should advise you to think of it.”

“Should you!” retorted Mina; “well, I won’t: I am determined to assist Malcolm myself by my own exertions, by my own labour.”

“Just try the experiment,” said Miss Caldera, “you will soon tire; I have only two other things to say to you before we part for to-day: I know not one woman out of a thousand can effect anything, and I seriously recommend you to marry Mr. Westwood.”

“And I say,” replied Mina, “that one woman will effect much, and that I will not marry Mr. Westwood;” and having given her head a decided nod as she concluded this sentence, the girl bade her friend good-bye, with her hopes a little shaken, perhaps, but her resolution never, under any circumstances, to marry from prudential motives, as she fondly fancied, more immovable than ever.