A Houseful of Girls Part 11

The little lad had sunk back when she began to speak, and there he lay without giving her a word or sign of thanks--his best acknowledgment of her compliance with what might be his last wish being his quaking submission. He could not keep still his quivering flesh, or hold back altogether his piercing cries and piteous moans, but he bit his tongue in seeking to stifle them. For he was not fighting with his Maker and his fate; he was trying in his boyish way, with his small fort.i.tude and resignation, to endure, in the might of the support which had been asked for him.

Annie too clenched her teeth, while she opened her eyes to take in everything that pa.s.sed before them, as a mirror may be turned to receive the minutest impression from the scene it reflects. But she did not hear a single shriek or wail, because her ears were filled with the higher harmonies which she had called forth. She clasped one of the boy's trembling hands in her own warm one, which did not grow cold in the contact. She was on the alert to meet his only half-seeing gaze, and to give back a glance of tender sympathy and protection--the true mother's look that is to be found when occasion calls for it in every good woman's face,--ay, it may even be seen in the precociously earnest, kindly eyes of many a loving woman-child.

There were plenty of other helpers to render the surgeon all the a.s.sistance he needed in his work, with far more celerity and ability than Annie could have supplied. But while sense lingered in the little patient's eyes, it was to the woman he turned for the pity and aid which did not fail him; it was through her that he drew from One mightier than all, the spiritual strength for his terrible bodily conflict. In a sense Annie and he were both on their trial, they served their novitiate together, and helped each other to bear and overcome. When the operation was over he lay, with the sweat drops of agony which Annie was gently wiping off, not gone from his forehead, but also with the reflection still lingering on his white face of the courage and patience with which he had been ready to meet death.

"You have behaved remarkably well, and shown no want of pluck, my lad,"

said the surgeon as a parting word of encouragement and cheer. "Lie still and you'll be able to see your friends by and by. I believe you'll do famously, and we'll see whether a subst.i.tute cannot be found for the limb you have lost."

He turned to Annie who had done all, and more than all, that was required of her, probably because she had entirely forgotten herself.

She was not even then sensible of a swift reaction, an overwhelming tide of embarra.s.sment. She continued more than half unconscious of the number of eyes which, now that the operation was over, were fixed upon her, marvelling, admiring, condemning, or ridiculing. For what act is there, let it be ever so disinterested or self-sacrificing, against which no voice will rise in condemnation or in mockery?

But it was not the operating surgeon who either condemned or scoffed at Annie's conduct. He drew her aside, not speaking to her on the religious side of the episode, which he did not conceive that he had the smallest right or t.i.tle to do, but addressing her on the purely medical aspect of the incident, on which he considered that he was ent.i.tled, nay, even bound to speak. His manner was a little blunt and brusque rather than suave, like that of a man who had no time to waste in paying compliments or making soft speeches, but it was thoroughly approving.

"You did quite right, nurse; I'm much obliged to you. That poor boy wanted all the comfort he could get. If he had gone on and worked himself into a frenzy before I had taken up the knife, I do not know that I could have done my work, and certainly the probability of his recovery would have been greatly lessened."

"I am glad," said Annie simply, with a little gasp of returning consciousness. "It is good of you to say so, doctor," but it was doubtful whether she knew what she was saying. She was penetrated through and through with thankfulness, yet thanks to herself seemed so irrelevant that she did not care to hear them.

There was more than Annie who thought that thanks to her were out of place and superfluous. This was specially so with one among the group of younger men, who at the moment of entering the ward had been fully alive to the circ.u.mstance that "the pretty nurse," as she was known to them, was on active duty. They had speculated on whether she would stand an operation, and what a disturbance and nice mess there would be if she fell flat on the small of her back on the floor, or went off in a fit of hysterics in the middle of it; and how their "boss" would endure such a disconcerting interruption to the proceedings. As it happened, the speculators were in their turn startled, abashed, or irritated, according to their respective temperaments and frames of mind, by what followed.

But there was a young giant, with a blonde beard, who let his blue eyes fall on the floor, drew back till he leant against the wall, and thrusting his hands into his pockets, asked himself in a dazed, humbled way, if an angel had come down among them, and where was the good of presuming to thank an angel? It was a thousand times more officious and audacious than to disregard the hackneyed quotation about the folly of painting a lily and perfuming a rose.

Annie, the moment she could be spared, went to her own room, fell down on her knees, and cried as if her heart would break. Yet they were not unhappy, but blissful tears, though they were as much for her own unworthiness as for G.o.d's unmerited goodness.

Then she s.n.a.t.c.hed up a sheet of paper and wrote home. "I was so discontented--such a peevish wretch, this morning, but I have had a tonic, and now I am so unspeakably satisfied with my lot in life that I believe I am the happiest girl in England to-night. I would not change places with a hundred old Aunt Pennys, only I know, alas! that I am not half good enough to be a nurse. Yet I would rather be a nurse than any other character in the world, and I would not go back for a permanency to dear old Redcross, after which I was hankering this very morning, and live at home with you all again, leading the aimless, self-seeking life I led, not though Mr. Carey's bank were to rise out of its ashes and flourish to an extent that its greatest upholders never dreamt of--not though I were to get a pension or an earl's ransom, or whatever else people count magnificent compensations and rewards. But you must not think that it is because I do not love you all as well and a thousand times better than I ever loved you, for that would be a great mistake, since I am just beginning to know your true value. But don't you understand it would break my heart to think that I should no longer be a nurse and never have such another experience as I have had this afternoon." And then she told them in a very few words what had happened and what the surgeon had said to her. How the sister of the ward, and the matron, and everybody she knew in St. Ebbe's had congratulated her.

They had all united in promising that the poor little fellow should be her patient in future; they had begun already to call him "Miss Millar's boy."

The little Doctor not only wiped his spectacles, he held his head higher. Mrs. Millar read the letter again and again, appropriating it and carrying it in her pocket till it was worn to fragments. These were still religiously preserved and portions read to select and sympathetic audiences. And every time she read the lines herself with a full heart, she called on G.o.d to bless her good Annie, and thought she was honoured among mothers in having such a daughter.

As for Dora and May they were long of ceasing to talk with bated breath and the height of loving enthusiasm of how Annie had mastered herself, and what a stay she had been in the hour of need to the lad. They planned and carried out their plans at every spare moment, in the manufacture of knitted socks and cravats for his benefit. But their great achievement was a quilted dressing-gown which Dora contrived to cut out, and May, in spite of her bad sewing, to help to sew together, that in his convalescence he might sit up in bed like a little sick prince.

CHAPTER XI.

MRS. JENNINGS AND HER DAUGHTER HESTER.

Rose Millar had made up her mind to like everything, if possible, in her new surroundings, and when she came up to town it was not only by a piece of good fortune, it was to the girl's credit, that she found so much she could appreciate, and so little, comparatively, that it was difficult to put up with.

In the first place, and as of primary consequence to Rose's well-being, Mrs. Jennings, the lady with whom Rose was boarded, turned out an excellently-disposed gentlewoman. She had a well-ordered house, pervaded with the spirit of a gentlewoman. The whole establishment was full of the self-respect which showed itself in a scrupulous consideration for the rights and claims, the doings and feelings, of others.

Rose did not complain because Mrs. Jennings and her house alike were also antiquated and formal. But the lady was not merely formal; it was a point of honour and an inveterate weakness with her to refuse to own that she had anything to do with such small but welcome boons to her as boarders. There she sat, serenely disclaiming the slightest knowledge of what had taken place, and attributing every attention to her old servant Susan, who had been with Mrs. Jennings since her marriage five-and-thirty years before. Or, if it was not Susan, it was her coadjutor, Marianne, in her housemaid's neat dress, whom Susan, in her working housekeeper's black cap and gold-rimmed spectacles, had trained to all fit and proper service in a gentlewoman's house.

In person Mrs. Jennings was tall and thin, sallow, and slightly hook-nosed, but still handsome. Her upright, broad-shouldered, and, by comparison, slender waisted figure was conventionally good; but it was hard to say how far it was her own, or how much it was made up. For she was one of those women who consider that it is a duty which they owe to the world not only to show themselves to the best advantage in bodily presence to the last, but so to conceal and atone for the ravages of time as to preserve a semblance of their maturity after it is long past.

The performance is not altogether successful. For one thing, it is apt to call forth a spirit of contemptuous pity in the youthful spectator who is still a long way from needing to employ such laborious, self-denying arts.

Mrs. Jennings added to her natural air of dignity by a filmy shawl of black lace in summer, and of white Shetland wool in winter, draped round her without so much as a fold out of order, and by a somewhat elaborate modification of a widow's cap which added half an inch to her height. As Rose wrote in an early letter home, Mrs. Jennings's cap looked as if she had been born with it on her coal black hair, or as if it were glued and gummed there beyond any possibility of being displaced. Mother ought to see it, take an example, and abandon her flighty, waggling head-gear.

No, on second thoughts, Rose would not like to see mother with a cap fitted on her head like the bowl of a helmet, and giving the idea of such stony stability that it might have been fastened with invisible nails hammered into her skull.

Hester Jennings, Mrs. Jennings's daughter, was the young art student like Rose's self, to whom she and her friends had naturally looked for congenial companions.h.i.+p where the girl was concerned; and if she did not find it with Hester, she was not likely to discover it in any of the other residents at No. 12 Welby Square. Naturally Rose did not greatly affect the remaining members of that elderly society, on which Mrs.

Jennings professed to set store. She could not help liking Mrs.

Jennings, though, alas! Rose scarcely believed in her so much as she would have been justified in doing.

In Mrs. Jennings's daughter, who had been from the first thought of as a friend for Rose, she believed entirely. Yet Rose had been in the beginning both startled by Hester Jennings and disappointed in her.

Hester Jennings looked considerably older than she was, which was about Annie Millar's age; in fact, she was prematurely worn with study and work. She was like her mother on a larger scale, with advantages of a fair paleness and remarkable violet-blue eyes, which Mrs. Jennings had never possessed. Hester might have pa.s.sed for a lovely young woman if she had cared in the least to do it. But never was girl more indifferent to such claims or more capable of doing her worst to qualify them and render them the next thing to null and void. When Annie Millar made Hester Jennings's acquaintance, Annie maintained that there was something left out in Hester's composition, the part which makes a woman desire to look well in the eyes of her neighbours, and win admiration, though the admiration be as skin deep as the beauty which creates it.

To think that a daughter of Mrs. Jennings, an artist in her own right, could dress so badly, with such a careless contempt for patterns and colours, in such ill-fitting frocks and dowdy or grotesque hats! Her preference for strident aniline dyes and gigantic stripes and checks in the different articles of her costume looked very like perversity; especially when it was shown that with reference to other persons, in arranging to paint a portrait, for instance, no one, not Mrs. Jennings, displayed such a fine sense of fitness and harmony as Hester exhibited.

Dress was to her, in her private character, mere necessary clothing, warm or cool as the season required. It was not worth the waste of thought implied by turning it over in her mind. Her mother dressed for the family; or, if she did not, Hester understood that her married sisters and sisters-in-law devoted, with success, a great deal of time which they did not value in other respects, to the subject in question.

Speak of Rose Millar's professional notions as to the human figure being left easy and untrammelled! Rose was a pattern of decorous neatness and trimness compared to Hester; indeed, Rose was appalled by the total absence of order and ceremony, not to say of embellishment, in her friend's toilet. Hester abandoned herself permanently to deshabilles.

She appeared in a jacket indoors as well as out. She dispensed with collars in morning and lace in evening wear. She did her hair once when she got up, and regarded pa.s.sing her hand over her head when she took off her hat as all that was inc.u.mbent upon her afterwards. Without intending it, and without dreaming of copying the bushes of hair in Rossetti's pictures, Hester Jennings's sandy-coloured locks, not a good point in her personal appearance, were, as her great-grandmother would have cried in horror, more like a dish-mop than anything else. She stopped short of dirt in her slovenliness because of her purity of soul, her deep respect for the laws of health, and because of the traditions of her cla.s.s, from which she could not altogether escape. But between her bondage to work, and her scornful neglect of other claims which she had known over-exalted and exaggerated, she had accomplished marvels.

Hester Jennings had attained such eminence in her recklessness of consequences, that, in place of being a nearly lovely woman, in accordance with her profile, complexion, and glorious eyes, she was barely good-looking because of them, in a style which repulsed many more people than it attracted others. The sight of Hester was one of the numerous lessons which she was destined to give to Rose Millar. It frightened Rose into becoming tamely conventional and elaborately tidy in dress, to the surprise and edification of her sister Annie, for it was just at the time when Annie was most spent by her new life and labours, and least inclined to put off her hospital gown and cap.

CHAPTER XII.

A YOUNG ARTIST'S EXPERIENCE.

Rose respected Hester Jennings. She could not help respecting her--a creature so much in earnest, so indefatigably industrious, so indifferent to all the distractions of the outer world which might have taken her out of herself and away from her work, while she was not above three or four years Rose's senior. If Hester would have let her, the respect would have deepened to reverence, when Rose discovered what the elder girl neither hid nor boasted of, that she was not only paying for her art lessons at the art school, and in other respects freeing her mother from the burden of her maintenance,--she was steadily earning a small independent income by working incessantly at every spare moment s.n.a.t.c.hed from her studies. She worked at all sorts of designs for the most insignificant and obscure cheaply ill.u.s.trated books and periodicals which cannot exist entirely on old plates excavated from forgotten stores, bought by the thousand at trade sales, procured by transfer from America, or even--now that national costumes are dying out--from France and Germany. These attempts at art were intended to pa.s.s into the hands of children--not the favoured children reared on the charming fancies of Caldecott and Kate Greenaway; but homelier, more stolid, and easily satisfied children. Such art was also for the ma.s.ses of the people who cannot pay for original art, save in its first uncertain developments, when the stagier it is, the blacker, the bolder, the more meretriciously pretty or fantastically horrible, the better it is relished by its public. Even the stereotyped representations of the coa.r.s.er fas.h.i.+on-plates, and the eccentric symbols and arbitrary groups employed in the humbler trade advertis.e.m.e.nts which the magnates in such advertising have left far behind, were food for Hester's unresting pencil. She might have injured herself irreparably by such illegitimate practice had she not studied as faithfully as she designed, with something of a stern, merciless severity, hunting out and correcting in her studies the errors of her crude work.

Stress of circ.u.mstances had lent what the French would have called a brutal side to Hester's natural candour and sincerity. It was one comfort that she was still more brutal to herself than to the rest of the world.

When Rose Millar showed her sister-artist some of Rose's sketches, Hester gave them a glance and a toss aside one after the other.

"There is nothing in that," she said coolly, "though I can see you have taken some trouble with it. This is not so bad. No, don't show that thing to anybody else--it will do you harm." Her highest praise was the "not bad" of mildest negative approval. "When you go to the cla.s.s to-morrow morning," predicted the slas.h.i.+ng critic, "you may depend upon it you will be turned back to a course of free-hand, or to copying from the round again. I don't mean that Mr. St. Foy will be as plain-spoken as I have been; he is a great deal too much afraid of hurting your feelings and his own, and of losing a pupil, though he is not what I should call either a bad man or a bad teacher. He is just like the rest; but wait and see if he does not politely turn you back to very nearly the beginning."

"I have had good teachers before," said Rose, crumpling up her nose and her forehead tightly, and swelling a little with wounded self-respect as well as wounded vanity. "It is queer, to say the least, if all my teachers were in a conspiracy to push me on to what I was not fit for, and to give me work altogether beyond my powers."

"You asked my opinion," said Hester Jennings, with inflexible calmness, "and I am not surprised that you do not like it when you have got it--few people do. The truth is not generally palatable. Not that I go in for infallibility of judgment. Wait and see what Mr. St. Foy does--not says--to-morrow."

"But why were the others--one of them an exhibitor at the Academy and the Grosvenor--so much mistaken?" inquired Rose, with natural indignation.

"How can I tell? But I hope you do not imagine that exhibitors are necessarily geniuses, or not as other men, or that they must be able to do a little bit of tolerable teaching when it pays them to condescend to it? Mr. St. Foy never exhibits--very likely for the good reason that his pictures are not accepted; but it does not follow on that account that he cannot paint a fairly good picture--better even than some which are hung on the line--and teach very tolerably to boot."

This was a new, bewildering doctrine, and a thoroughly disheartening state of matters, to which Rose, extinguished as she was on her own merits, did not make any reply.

"What I think, if you care to hear further what I think," said Hester, with a dry smile, "is that in not taking time and in being wild to paint a complete picture--something which everybody could recognize as a picture, and your friends admire--as if such a thing can be done to any good purpose for years and years--you have fallen into the disastrous habit of forgetting, or of only half remembering, what you learnt before, as you went on learning more. At least, that is the only way in which I can account for the wretchedness of some of your drawing, and the badness of your perspective, when you have got so far as to have a feeling for a scale of colour and the tone of a picture."

"Well, I suppose I can learn it all over again," said Rose, with a mixture of spirit and doggedness, forcing herself not to betray further resentment, and to swallow a little girlish weakness at the uncompromising treatment she was receiving. What would May and Dora say?

But she durst not trust herself to think of them.

"Of course," answered Hester, opening widely a pair of singularly clear keen eyes. "Do you think I should have taken the trouble to say as much if I had thought otherwise?"