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

and poets, and the rich treasures of learning, among which a poor little English girl, far far down in the centuries, could only walk with reverend foot and bated breath.

And there was the other May, hanging about her mother, running to bring her father's slippers, sitting on his knee to this day, taking possession of Dora, ordering her about like a young tyrant, adoring Tray—the most guileless, helpless, petted simpleton of a child-woman that ever existed. The second May was at the present date the more prominent and prevailing of the two, so much so that all the sharp-tongued, practical-minded ladies in Redcross made a unanimous remark. Dr. and Mrs. Millar's youngest daughter was the most disgracefully spoilt, badly brought-up, childish creature for her years whom the critics knew. It was a poor preparation in view of her having to work to maintain herself. They could not tell what was to become of her.

At first May lamented, day and night, over the fate of Phyllis Carey, to have to stand behind counters, sort drawers full of ribands, tape,[229] and reels of cotton, and wait on her townswomen! May could think of no fitting parallel unless the pathetic one of that miserable young princess apprenticed to the button-maker, dying with her cheek on an open Bible, at the text, "Come unto Me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest."

Then, as Phyllis accommodated herself to the new yoke, and found it not so galling as she had expected it to be, her friend May altered her tone with sympathetic quickness, and reflected Phyllis's change of mood almost before the mood was established. Phyllis was in mental constitution like her father, single-hearted and submissive—not bright any more than Bell Hewett was bright, but contented and trustful as long as she was suffered to be so. She had been enduring harder and harder lines at home. She found existence actually brightening instead of darkening round her when she was transferred to "Robinson's." For everybody, knowing all about her and her father and mother, with their altered circumstances, began, at least, by treating her with kindly respect and forbearance, in spite of Mrs. Carey's austere request that she should be dealt with exactly like the other shop-girls.

Shop-work, in which Phyllis was to be gradually trained, felt comparatively easy to a girl who had[230] been taken from school and launched into the coarsest drudgery of house-work under an inexperienced, flurried, over-burdened maid-of-all-work. Mrs. Carey was sufficiently just to exact no more home-work from Phyllis, and to arrange that she should have her time to herself, like other shop-girls, after "Robinson's" was closed, while the master of "Robinson's" was inflexible in setting his face against late hours, except for the elder hands on one evening in the week. Everybody was good to Phyllis, who, in truth, just because she was enough of a little lady to be free from arrogance and assumption, while she was willing to do her best to oblige her neighbours, provoked no harsh treatment. Above all Tom Robinson for one person could not be too considerate to her.

Miss Franklin looked on Phyllis Carey as a godsend, a harbinger of other better-class girls going into trade. The woman not only took the girl under her wing, she fell back instinctively and inevitably on Phyllis for companionship, with a selection flattering in a woman to a girl.

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[231] 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,[232] 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 passed 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 scholarship 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[233] 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 passive resistance and dumb protest into the scale.

[234]

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, fishing 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 fishing-rod, slung his basket, in which there were only a couple of fish, on his back, shouldered her books, and turned and walked back[235] 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."

[236]"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 naïvely—"not that everybody calls it a waste; some people say 'Robinson's' is the high-class 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[237]—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 relationship 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 associates 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.[238] 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