A Houseful of Girls Part 14

Then a complete revolution was wrought in May's opinions and wishes.

Nothing would serve her but that she too must go as a shop-girl to "Robinson's," and share the fortunes of her friend.

May did not yet confide her purpose to her father and mother, but she poured it in daily and nightly outbursts into the startled ears of Dora, to whom the hallucination sounded like a mocking retribution on the young Millars' old scornful estimate of shopkeepers and shops. May stuck to her point with a tenacity which, touching as it did a tender, trembling chord in Dora's heart, threatened also to subvert her judgment, that was at once sounder and more matured than May's.

The vibrating chord lay in the knowledge that May too was destined to quit Redcross at no distant day, with the aching reluctance of Dora to give her up, and to find herself in the position that domineering, selfish girls sometimes covet--that of being the only girl at home, having none to share with her in the rights and privileges of the daughter of the house.

A sort of feverish anxiety, which was in itself ominous, had taken hold of Dr. Millar to see all he had projected accomplished in so far as it was still possible. That is, he would fain set in motion, at least, the wheels which would carry out his purpose. Perhaps he had reason to distrust his health and life; perhaps it was simply that he was not insensible to the fact, that money had a trick of running through his fingers and those of Mrs. Millar like water, though they did their best to catch it up and arrest it in its rapid course. Mrs. Millar's little private income was still in part free, and not engulfed in the needs of the household at Redcross, as it might not long continue. Rose had only sixty pounds of it, and Annie fifteen for pocket-money till she should have pa.s.sed her probation and be in a position to receive her nurse's salary, which would be as soon as she had completed her first year in the hospital. There were seventy-five pounds remaining, which might serve to keep May at Thirlwall Hall in St. Ambrose's with the chance of her gaining a scholars.h.i.+p and partly maintaining herself for the rest of her stay in college. "Little May's" maintaining herself in any degree was a notion half to laugh at, half to cry over, while it took possession of Dr. Millar's imagination just as serving in "Robinson's"

along with Phyllis Carey had hold of May's.

Another year (who knew?) it might not be in the Millars' power to afford May the opportunity of growing up a scholar, on which her father had set his heart. That consciousness, and the sense of the value which her husband put on May's abilities and their culture, brought round Mrs.

Millar. She began to contemplate with something like composure what she would otherwise have strongly objected to, the sending forth of her youngest darling--the child who so clung to her and to home--into an indifferent or hostile world.

Truth to tell, it was May herself who was the great obstacle. She was not cast in the heroic mould of Annie and Rose. It was like tearing up her heart-strings to drag her away from her father and mother, Dora, Tray, the Old Doctor's House, Redcross itself. She had enough perception of what was due to everybody concerned--herself included--and just sufficient self-control not to disgrace herself and vex her father by openly opposing and actively fighting against his plans for her welfare.

But she threw all the discouraging weight of a pa.s.sive resistance and dumb protest into the scale.

CHAPTER XV.

TOM ROBINSON TAKEN INTO COUNSEL.

At last May, in the innocence of her heart, took a rash step. She heard her father say it was good, showery, fis.h.i.+ng weather, and she was aware Tom Robinson often fished in the Dewes; what was to hinder her from making a detour by the river on her way home from school, and if she saw Tom near the old bridge--the pools below were specially patronized by fishers--she might go up to him and ask him frankly if he had an opening for her services, along with those of Phyllis Carey, in his shop? If he had, would he do her the great favour to speak to her father and mother, and ask them not to send her away to be a scholar at St. Ambrose, but to let her stay and be a shop-woman in Redcross?

Tom Robinson, at the first word of her appeal, put up his fis.h.i.+ng-rod, slung his basket, in which there were only a couple of fish, on his back, shouldered her books, and turned and walked back with her, as if it was he who was seeking her company and not she his. How else was he to make the little girl who might have been his pet sister see that there was any harm in the irregular course she had pursued? How, otherwise, was she to understand that she was big enough--nearly a head taller than her sister Dora--and old enough with her seventeen years, though she was still the child of the family, to render it indecorous for her to come, out of her own head, without the knowledge of anybody, to have a private interview with him on the banks of the Dewes?

"'Robinson's' is highly honoured," he told her, in a tone partly bantering, partly serious, and wholly friendly, "and I too should, and do, thank you for the trust in me which your proposal implies, but I am afraid it would not do, Miss May."

May's fair young face fell.

"Oh! I am so sorry," she said simply; "but, please, may I know why you have Phyllis and will not have me?"

"The case is altogether different. Mrs. Carey made up her mind that Miss Phyllis should go into a shop--mine or another's. Phyllis was not happy at home; she is not a clever, studious girl, though she is your friend and is very nice--of course all young ladies are nice. There is no comparison between you and her."

"But why shouldn't clever people go and work in shops?" persisted May, in her half-childish way--"not that I mean I am clever; that would be too conceited. But I am sure it would be a great deal better for shops if they had the very cleverest people to work in them."

"It depends on the kind of cleverness," he told her. "With regard to one sort you are right, of course; with respect to another it would not answer, and it would be horrible waste."

She opened her brown eyes wide. "Why do you waste your abilities and college education?" she asked him navely--"not that everybody calls it a waste; some people say 'Robinson's' is the high-cla.s.s shop it is, because its masters have not only been respectable people, they have always been educated men and gentlemen."

"I ought to say for myself and my predecessors that I am much obliged to 'some people' for acknowledging that," he remarked coolly.

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Robinson," said May humbly. "I know I have been very rude--I am constantly saying stupid things."

"Not at all; and though you did, never mind--say them to me if you like," he gave her _carte blanche_ to comfort her. "But look here, Miss May, I don't wish you to make mistakes. Indeed it is my duty, since I am a great deal older than you--old enough to be, well, your uncle I should say--to prevent it if I can."

"I don't see how you could be my uncle," said May bluntly, "when you are not more than five or six years older than Annie--I have heard her say so--you are more like my brother."

The instant she mentioned the relations.h.i.+p to which he had aspired in vain, she felt the blood tingling to her finger-tips, and she could see him redden under the shade of his soft felt hat.

May groaned inwardly. "Oh! I am a blundering goose; I wonder anybody can be so infatuated as to think me clever."

"I have not said what I wished to say," he resumed, for somehow, in spite of her forgetfulness and lack of tact, he could talk well enough to May. "I must set you right. I have not a grain of the scholar in me such as you have, neither do I believe that those who went before me had; we could never have been more than fair students. We did not go out of our way to get learning. We did what our a.s.sociates and contemporaries did, that was all. I fancy I may take the small credit to us of saying that we had no objection to learn what the ancients thought, saw, and did, after we had been lugged through the Latin grammar and caned into familiarity with Greek verbs. We were like other men who had the same advantages. I honestly believe if we had anything special and individual about us it was a turn for trade. That is the only manner in which I can account for our sticking to the shop, unless we were mere money-grubbers. But all that signifies very little; what does signify is that you are not quite like other girls. What, May, do you pretend that you do not prize the roll of a sonorous pa.s.sage, or the trip of an exquisite phrase in Latin or Greek? That it does not tickle your ears, cling to your memory, and haunt you as a theme in music haunts a composer? Do you not care to go any deeper in Plato or in the dramatists? Is it a fact that you can bear to have heard the last of Antigone, and Alcestis, and Electra?"

May hung her head like one accused of gross unfaithfulness, with some show of reason.

"No, I cannot say that, Mr. Robinson," she owned, "I shall think and dream of them all my life. They are so grand and persecuted and sad. But there--if I do not turn my back on them and my books, I must go to St.

Ambrose's, there is no choice," ended May disconsolately.

"But why not go to St. Ambrose's?"

"Oh! you do not know, Mr. Robinson," protested May with fresh energy.

"In the first place you are a man and cannot understand. In the second, I suppose it is because I am so silly and childish and cowardly," she went on incoherently. "Annie always said it was cowardly; she and Rose went away quite bravely and cheerfully, keeping up their own and everybody's spirits to the last. But Dora and I could not do it, yet I do not know that anybody ever thought of calling our Dora cowardly exactly, or silly, and childish. She was not a bit cowardly with the horrid big dog and dear little Tray, you remember?--she would not let me interfere, but she would have stoned the dog herself."

"Which would have been very foolish of her," said Tom Robinson with decision. "I should say she was timid, not cowardly--there is a broad distinction between the two conditions."

"It is just that we cannot leave home for any length of time, Dora and I," said May piteously.

"So you and your sister Dora cannot leave home--that is the objection, is it?" he repeated, slowly pulling his red moustache. "What do you call home? The Old Doctor's House or Redcross?"

"Both," cried May quickly; "where father and mother and the rest of us are, of course."

"But the rest of you are gone, and what if your father and mother were to go too?"

"They won't, they never will," insisted May--"not until they come to die. You were not meaning that? Oh! you could not be so cruel, so barbarous," cried May, pa.s.sionately, "when death is such a long way off, I trust. I know that G.o.d is good whether we live or die, and that we shall meet again in a better world. But we are not parted yet, and it is not wrong to pray that we may be a long time together here on this very earth, which we know so well, where we have been so happy. Why, father and mother are not more than middle-aged--mother is not, and if father is older, he is as strong and hale as anybody. Think how he was able to give up his carriage and attend his patients on foot last autumn without feeling it," urged the girl defiantly, in her pa.s.sion of love and roused dread, which she would not admit.

"Certainly," he strove to rea.s.sure her, feeling himself a savage for frightening her by his inadvertence, "I never saw anybody wear so well as Dr. Millar. He might be sixty or fifty--he may live to be a hundred--I hope with all my heart he will; and I shall not be astonished if I live to see it. As for Mrs. Millar, it is an insult to call her middle-aged. It is something quite out of keeping to come across her with such a tall daughter as you are."

"Yes, I am the tallest of the four," exclaimed May complacently, diverted from the main topic, as he had intended her to be. "And I have not done growing yet; my last summer's frock had to be let down half an inch."

"Is it possible? What are we all coming to? You will soon have to stoop to take my arm--if you ever condescend to take my arm."

"No," she denied encouragingly, "I am not so far above your shoulder now," measuring the distance with a critical eye. "I shall not grow so much as that comes to. You are bigger than father, and you would not call him a little man; you are hardly even short."

"Thanks, you are too kind," said Tom Robinson, with the utmost gravity.

"But I say, Miss May, if I were you, I don't think I should do anything to vex and thwart Dr. Millar, though he is so strong and active--long may he continue so. You know how disappointed he would be if you were to close your books."

"I am afraid he would," said May reluctantly. "I had almost forgotten all about it for the last minute or two. But don't you think if you spoke to him as I came to ask if you would," she continued unblus.h.i.+ngly and coaxingly, "if you were to try and show him--it would be so kind of you--how comfortable and happy I should be with Phyllis Carey in your shop--doing my best--indeed, I should try hard to please you and Miss Franklin, all day--and getting home every evening--he might change his mind?"

"No, he would not," said Tom with conviction; "and what is more, he ought not. He would never cease to regret his shattered hopes for you--which, remember, you would have shattered--and your spoilt life."

"But your life is not spoilt?" she said wistfully, unable to resign her last hope.

"How can you tell?" he said, with a slight sharpness in his accent. Then he added quickly, "No, for I am a born shopkeeper in another sense than because I am one of a nation of shopkeepers."

He gave himself a rea.s.suring shake, and resumed briskly--"I crave leave to say, Miss May, that I actually enjoy making up accounts, turning over samples, and giving orders. Sometimes I hit on a good idea which the commercial world acknowledges, and then I am as proud as if I had unearthed an ancient ma.n.u.script, or found the philosopher's stone. I pulled a fellow through a difficulty the other day, and it felt like taking part in an exciting fight. I have speculated occasionally when I was fis.h.i.+ng--paying myself a huge compliment, no doubt--whether old Izaak Walton felt like me about trade."