A Houseful of Girls by Sarah Tytler (simple ebook reader .txt) 📕

Jennings, it was an instance of "the Queen laughed" with a vengeance. However, Hester stepped in so far. She would not let the soothing regimen, on which Rose was put, go the length of depriving her of her tea and coffee in Welby Square.

Within the next few weeks Hester did Rose a still better turn. She (Hester) came to her friend with an order for decorative designs in scroll-work, which had reached the elder girl from a decorator of some repute.

"I think you could do it, Rose," said Hester. "It would not take much time, and if your work[210] satisfied the great tradesman who has given such an impetus to this kind of art, it might be a perfect windfall to art students wishing to keep themselves. You need not despise it in the light of house-painting. If you read your Ruskin, you will find him as good as calling Titian and Veronese house-painters, though to be sure frescoes are rather an extension of scroll-work."

"Indeed, I should never dream of despising it. I should be only too thankful for any kind of copying or pattern-drawing, or designing for Christmas-cards—like poor Fanny Russell—if it were the beginning of the least little bit of an order," said Rose meekly, with a stifled sigh given to her and May's old magnificent ideas of commissions. "But why don't you keep the work for yourself, Hester?" the young girl inquired. "You could do it so well and so easily, and it would be no pain to you; it would be a pleasure, for it is graceful and true work so far as it goes—not like these cruel illustrations."

But Hester waived aside the undertaking. "You have been more accustomed to this kind of thing than I have. No, I mean to stick to my illustrations, cruel or kind. There is a new man in the publisher's office who is giving me more of my own way, and I feel it would not be fair to leave him in the lurch. Who knows that we may not, between us, lead the way to a revolution in the style of the[211] cheapest original English wood-cut. Besides, I do not want any more diversions from my main business. I am already on four different committees for women's trade unions, the female franchise, and all the rest of it. I must crib a little more time for my hand and foot. Don't you know?—Drawing my own hand and foot from their reflection in a looking-glass till I can put them in any position, and foreshorten them to my mind."

Rose competed for the scroll-work order, and did it so well that she got the order, and along with it a note of commendation, a tolerably large extension of the commission, and the first instalment of a liberal payment for the kind of work. Her elation knew no bounds—

"Oh! Hester, I should never, never even have heard of this delightful job but for you. What can I ever do for you?"

"Don't hug me," said Hester, retreating in veritable terror, for she had a peculiar genuine aversion to caresses, still more than to thanks. "Don't knock off my hat, for I cannot spare another minute to put it straight again."

The next thing Hester heard was a half-impetuous, half-shamefaced admission from Rose that she had resigned her post as assistant drawing-mistress at the Misses Stone's school.

Hester looked grave on the instant. "What did[212] you do that for?" she demanded gruffly. "Did you mention it to your sister? Have you told them at home?"

"No," Rose was forced to own—at least not till the deed was done. She had acted on her own responsibility. "But indeed, Hester, it is the best plan," she argued volubly. "Annie and all of them will say so when they know how I mean to cultivate this scroll-work, which is paying me twice as well already. I put it to you if I could do two things at once, and if it would be wise to sacrifice the more profitable for the less remunerative. Why it would be quite shortsighted and cowardly."

"Humph," said Hester, without the smallest disguise, "much experience you have had of it! Do you know, Rose Millar, these decorators' fads are constantly changing? Perhaps in three months they will all be for mosaic, or tiles, or peacocks' feathers again. If I had thought you were such a rash idiotic little goose, I should never have breathed a word to you of this man and his scroll-work."

"Oh! but, Hester," pled Rose, determined not to be offended, "I was only relieving the poor Misses Stone of a painful necessity. I am sure they have never put any dependence on me since the day I broke down—I grant you idiotically. I cannot stand the repression—suppression—whatever you like to call it. Now that there is a way out of it, I[213] have felt like a wild beast in the school—the girls are so very tame—so much tamer than we were at Miss Burridge's—where I was not a black sheep—May will tell you if you care to ask her," protested Rose with wounded feeling. "But I am so tired of the rosy and snowy cottages and the ruins, and of that long-nosed collie. Sometimes I feel as if I would give the world for him to wag his tail one day, just to give me an excuse for crying out and flinging my india-rubber at him. I wish May saw him; it might stop her ecstasies over her new acquisition—the brute at home. I feel that this other brute, and the rest of the Misses Stone's copies and models, are injuring my drawing—I know they are making it cramped; while the scrolls help my freedom of touch like Hogarth's line of beauty or Giotto's O. And it is such humbug, and so horrid to have to swallow these doses of sel-volatile—a great healthy girl like me!"

"Humph!" said Hester again, "I hope you may not repent what you have done—if so, you need not blame me."

[214]

CHAPTER XIV. THE OLD TOWN, WITH ITS AIR STAGNANT YET TROUBLED. IS MAY TO BECOME A SCHOLAR OR A SHOP-GIRL?

The spring found Redcross still staggering under the failure of Carey's Bank. Hardly a week passed yet without some painful result of the disaster coming to light. These results had ceased to startle, there had been so many of them; but they still held plenty of interest for the fellow-sufferers, and Dora and May's letters were full of the details.

Bell Hewett had left Miss Burridge's; she had got a situation, or rather, she had been appointed to a junior form in the Girls' Day School at Deweshurst, going in the morning and returning in the afternoon by train. It was a good thing for Bell on the whole. She was more independent, had a recognized position as a public school-mistress, which she would not have had as a private governess; and if she continued to study, and passed various examinations, she might rise to higher and higher[215] forms until she blossomed into a head-mistress—fancy Bell a head-mistress! She had quite a handsome salary, more than poor Ned's according to the chroniclers, Dora and May. That was the bright side of it. Unluckily for Bell, as most people thought, there was another. The daily journeys, together with the school-work, constituted a heavy task for a girl. Bell, toiling up from the railway station on a rainy day, with her umbrella ready to turn inside out, and her waterproof flying open, because her left hand, cramped and numb, was laden with a great bundle of exercises to correct at home, presented a dejected figure, tired out and three-fourths beaten. So the Miss Dyers thought as they rolled past her in their carriage, and debated whether they should not stop to pick her up and save her walking the rest of the road. But she was such a fright, positively bedraggled with mud enough to soil the cushions, and she could speak of nothing now save the Deweshurst Girls' Day School and her duties there. It was too tiresome to be borne with. Poor Bell was not clever, she was one-idea'd and slow at work like Ned, and she had also his conscientiousness. Probably promotion was not for her; she must drudge on as best she might. Her great encouragement at this time, next to her father's and sister's approbation and sympathy, was, as she told Dora, the[216] prospect of spending her Easter holidays with Ned at his station-house. What did she care for its being only a station-house? after the fagging school-work it would be great fun to put Ned's small house in order, and play at housekeeping with him for a fortnight. She was bent on making him comfortable, and cheering him as well as herself. If the weather would but be fine they might have glorious rambles on the Yorkshire moors when no trains were due.

Colonel Russell was sailing once more for India, to lay his bones there without fail, the little Doctor prophesied sadly. In the meantime he had got, and been glad to get, a subordinate post in his old field. At the last moment, after he had established Mrs. Russell and her children in a cheerful house in Bath, he made up his mind to take his grown-up daughter out with him. But she was not to stay in his bungalow, for he was going to a small out-of-the-way station where there would be no accommodation or society in the barrack circle for a solitary young lady. Fanny was to be left with a cousin of her father's, in the Bombay Presidency. The lady had offered to take charge of her, and have her for a long visit.

Did Annie and Rose know what that meant? Could they form an indignant, affronted guess? "Father said," Dora quoted, "that if Colonel Rus[217]sell, an honourable gentleman and gallant officer, had not lived in the old days and had his feelings blunted to the situation, he would never have consented to such an arrangement for his daughter. But he had seen his sisters come out to India for the well-understood purpose of getting married to any eligible man in want of a wife, so why should not Fanny do the same thing, when his pecuniary losses rendered it particularly desirable and the opportunity offered itself? It was not in Colonel Russell's eyes an unworthy resource. Of course Fanny was going out to be married and creditably disposed of within a given time, else her father would not have felt justified in paying her outfit and passage-money. Certainly he had no intention of paying her passage-money home as a single woman."

What would the Millars have done in Fanny's case? For was it not dreadful—particularly when all the young people interested in the subject remembered quite well that there had been "something" between Cyril Carey and Fanny Russell for more than a year back? Annie had always wondered what Fanny could see in a silly, trifling fop like Cyril. Rose had not been without a corresponding sense of wonder as to what Cyril could find in Fanny, who, in spite of her grand Norman peasant's carriage and profile, was dawdling and discontented with things in general, and[218] though she pretended to a little knowledge of art, did not in the least understand what she was talking about. However, Annie's and Rose's opinions were of very little consequence when the matter concerned—not them—but Cyril and Fanny. There had been "something" between them which had changed the whole world to them last summer. They would never entirely outlive and forget it—not though Fanny went to far Cathay and married, not one, but half a dozen of Nabobs. For she was going to obey her father, and give herself to the first eligible bidder for her hand. No doubt she would do it with set lips, blanched face, and great black eyes looking not only twice as large as their natural size, but hollow and worn in the young face, because of the dark rings round them. These were produced by the sleepless nights which she pretended were occasioned by the hurry of her preparations, and of her having to say good-bye to all her old friends. But she would do it all the same.

Dora had only once caught Fanny Russell alone, and ventured on a timid, heart-felt expostulation.

"Must you go to India, Fanny? We shall all miss you so much, and it is not as if you were to be with your father, but just to stay with a distant relative whom you have never seen; it does appear such a sacrifice."

"And what should I do if I stayed behind papa,[219] Dora?" asked