Magnum Bonum; Or, Mother Carey's Brood Part 117

The two cousins had come home to dinner in high spirits at the various kind things that had been said to, and of, Jock, and discussing the various suggestions for the future that had been made to them. They thought Mother Carey strangely silent, but when they rose she called her son into the consulting room, as she still termed it.

"My dear," she said, "this slate will tell you why this is the moment I have looked forward to from the time your dear father was taken from us with his work half done. He had been working out a discovery. He was sure of it himself, but none of the faculty would believe in it or take it up. Even Dr. Lucas thought it was a craze, and I believe it can only be tested by risky experiments. All that he had made out is in this book. You know he could not speak for that dreadful throat. This is what he wrote. I copied it again, putting in my answers lest it should fade, but these are his very words, and that is my pledge. Magnum Bonum was our playful pet name for it between ourselves.

"'I promise to keep the Magnum Bonum a secret, till the boys are grown up, and then only to confide it to the one that seems fittest, when he has taken his degree, and is a good, religious, wise, able man, with brains and balance, fit to be trusted to work out and apply such an invention, and not make it serve his own advancement, but be a real good and blessing to all.' And oh, Jock," she added, "am I not thankful that after all it should have come about that you should fulfil those conditions."

"Did you not once mean it for John?" said Jock, hastily looking up.

"Yes, when I thought that hateful money had turned you all aside."

"Then I think he ought to share this knowledge."

"I thought you would say so, but it is your first right."

"Perhaps," said Jock. "But he is superior in his own line to me. He gave himself up to this line of his own free will, not like me, as a resource. And moreover, if it should bring any personal benefit, as an accident, it would be more important to him than to me. And these other conditions he fulfils to the letter. Mother, let me fetch him."

She kissed his brow by way of answer, and a call brought John into the room. The explanation was made, and John said, "If you think it right, Aunt Caroline. No one can quite fulfil the conditions, but two may be better than one."

"Then I will leave you to read it together," she said, after pointing them to the solemn words in the first page. "Oh, you cannot think how glad I am to give up my trust."

She went upstairs to the drawing-room, and about half an hour had pa.s.sed in this way, when Jock came to the door, and said, "Mother, would you please to come down."

It was a strange, grave voice in which he spoke, and when she reached the room, they set Allen's most luxurious chair for her, but she stood trembling, reading in their faces that there was something they hesitated to tell her. They looked at one another as if to ask which should do it, and a certain indignation and alarm seized on her. "You believe in it!" she cried, as if she suspected them of disloyalty.

"Most entirely!" they both exclaimed.

"It is a great discovery," added Jock, "but--"

"But," said John, as he hesitated, "it has been worked out within the last two years."

"Not Dr. Hermann!" she cried.

"No, indeed!" said Jock. "Why?"

"Because poor Janet overheard our conversation, and obtained a sight of the book. It was her ambition. I believe it was fatal to her. She may have caught up enough of the outline to betray it. Jock, you remember that scene at Belforest?"

"I do," said Jock; "but this is not that scoundrel. It is Ruthven, who has worked it out in a full and regular way. It is making a considerable sensation though it has scarcely yet come into use as a mode of treatment. Mother, do not be disappointed. It will be the blessing that my father intended, all the sooner for not being in the hands of two lads like us, whom all the bigwigs would scout!"

"And what I never thought of before," said John. "You know we are so often asked whether we belong to Joseph Brownlow, that one forgets to mention it every time; but that day, when Dr. Medlicott took me to the Westminster hospital, we fell in with Dr. Ruthven, and after the usual disappointment on finding I was only the nephew and not the son, he said, 'Joseph Brownlow would have been a great man if he had lived. I owe a great deal to a hint he once gave me?'"

"He ought to see these notes," said Jock. "It strikes me that there is a clue here to that difficulty he mentions in that published paper of his."

"You ought to show it to him," said John.

"You ought," said Jock.

"Do you know much about him?" asked Mother Carey. "I don't think I ever saw him, though I know his name. A fashionable physician, is he not?"

"A very good man," said John. "A great West-end swell just come to be the acknowledged head in his own line. I suppose it is just what my uncle would have been ten years ago, if he had been spared."

"May we show it to him, mother?" said Jock. "I should think he was quite to be trusted with it. I see! I was reading an account of this method of his to Dr. Lucas one day, and he was much interested and tried to tell me something about my father; but it was after his speech grew so imperfect, and he was so much excited and distressed that I had to lead him away from the subject."

"Yes, Dr. Lucas's incredulity made all the difference. How old is Dr.

Ruthven, John?"

"A little over forty, I should say. He may have been a pupil of my uncle's."

After a little more consultation, it was decided that John should write to Dr. Ruthven that his cousin had some papers of his father's which he thought the Doctor might like to see, and that they would bring them if he would make an appointment.

And so the Magnum Bonum was no longer a secret, a burden, and a charge!

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."

"Bobus is not really cleverer than Jock," said Armine.

"Yet the Skipjack seemed the most improbable one of all," said his mother. "I wish he were not deprived of it, after all!"

"Perhaps he is not," said Armine. "He told me he had been comparing the MS. notes with Dr. Ruthven's published paper, and he thought my father saw farther into the capabilities."

"Well, he will do right with it. I am thankful to leave it in such hands as his and the Monk's."

"Then it was this," continued Allen, "that was the key to poor Janet's history. I suppose she hoped to qualify herself when she was madly set on going to Zurich."

"Though I told her I could never commit it to her; but she knew just enough to make that wretched man fancy it a sort of quack secret, and he managed to persuade her that he had real ability to pursue the discovery for her. Poor Janet! it has been no magnum bonum to her, I fear. If I could only know where she is."

A civil, but not a very eager note came in reply to John from Dr.

Ruthven, making the appointment, but so dispa.s.sionately that he might fairly be supposed to expect little from the interview.

However, they came home more than satisfied. Perhaps in the interim Dr.

Ruthven had learnt what manner of young men they were, and the honours they had won, for he had received them very kindly, and had told them how a conversation with Joseph Brownlow had put him on the scent of what he had since gradually and experimentally worked out, and so fully proved to himself, that he had begun treatment on that basis, and with success, though he had only as yet brought a portion of his fellow physicians to accept his system.