A Houseful of Girls

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A HOUSEFUL OF GIRLS.
BY
SARAH TYTLER,

AUTHOR OF

"CITOYENNE JACQUELINE," "PAPERS FOR THOUGHTFUL GIRLS,"
ETC., ETC.

LONDON:
WALTER SMITH AND INNES,
31 & 32, BEDFORD STREET, STRAND.
1889.

[_All rights reserved._]

RICHARD CLAY & SONS, LIMITED,
LONDON & BUNGAY.

CONTENTS.

CHAP. PAGE

I. A FLUTTER IN THE DOVE-COT 1

II. THE "COUP DE GRACE" 20

III. THE HEADS OF THE HOUSE LOOK GRAVE 35

IV. THE CRASH 54

V. PROMOTION 72

VI. THE CLOUD DEEPENS 81

VII. ROSE GOES WEST AND ANNIE GOES EAST 106

VIII. STANDING AND WAITING 122

IX. A WILFUL DOG WILL HAVE HIS WAY 136

X. LIFE IN AN HOSPITAL WARD 157

XI. MRS. JENNINGS AND HER DAUGHTER HESTER 182

XII. A YOUNG ARTIST'S EXPERIENCE 188

XIII. MR. ST. FOY'S AND THE MISSES STONE'S 196

XIV. THE OLD TOWN, WITH ITS AIR STAGNANT YET TROUBLED.
IS MAY TO BECOME A SCHOLAR OR A SHOP-GIRL? 214

XV. TOM ROBINSON TAKEN INTO COUNSEL 234

XVI. ROSE'S FOLLY AND ANNIE'S WISDOM 257

XVII. MAY HAS TO FIGHT HER OWN BATTLE 288

XVIII. DORA IS THE NEXT MESSENGER WITH BAD TIDINGS 316

XIX. THE UNEMPLOYED--A FAMILIAR FACE 322

XX. REDCROSS AGAIN 342

XXI. MISS FRANKLIN'S MISTAKE 363

XXII. A SHRED OF HOPE 382

XXIII. SECOND THOUGHTS AND LAST WORDS 392

A HOUSEFUL OF GIRLS

CHAPTER I.

A FLUTTER IN THE DOVE-COT.

Is there any sensation equal to that produced by the first lover and
the first proposal coming to a girl in a large family of girls? It is
delightfully sentimental, comical, complimentary, affronting, rousing,
tiresome--all in one. It is a herald of lovers, proposals, and wonderful
changes all round. It is the first thrill of real life in its strong
passions, grave vicissitudes, and big joys and sorrows as they come
in contact with idle fancies, hearts that have been light, simple
experiences which have hitherto been carefully guarded from rude shocks.

It does not signify much whether the family of girls happen to be rich
or poor, unless indeed that early and sharp poverty causes a precocity
which deepens girls' characters betimes, and by making them sooner
women, robs them of a certain amount of the thoughtlessness,
fearlessness, and impracticability of girlhood. But girlhood, like many
another natural condition, dies hard; and its sweet, bright illusions,
its wisdom and its folly, survive tolerably severe pinches of adversity.

The younger members of such a sisterhood are politely supposed to be
kept in safe ignorance of the great event which is befalling one of the
seniors. It is thought at once a delicate and prudent precaution to
prevent the veil which hides the future, with its casualties, from being
lifted prematurely and abruptly, where juvenile minds are concerned,
lest they become unhinged and unfit for the salutary discipline of
schoolroom lessons, and the mild pleasure of schoolroom treats. The
flower in the bud ought to be kept with its petals folded, in its
innocent absence of self-consciousness, to the last moment.

But there is an electric sympathy in the air which defeats precautions.
There is a freemasonry of dawning womanhood which starts into life
everywhere. How do the young people pick up with such surprising
quickness and acuteness the looks and whispers meant to pass over their
heads, the merry glances, nervous shrugs, quick blushes, and indignant
pouts, which have suddenly grown strangely prevalent in the blooming
circle? The bystanders are understood to be engrossed with their
music-lessons, their drawing-classes, their rudimentary Latin and
Greek--if anybody is going in for the higher education of women--their
pets, their games of lawn-tennis, their girl companions with whom these
other girls are for ever making appointments to walk, to practise
part-singing, to work or read together, to get up drawing-room
_tableaux_ or plays.

The general consciousness is not, in certain lights, favourable to a
lover's pretensions. For human nature is perverse, and there is such a
thing as _esprit-de-corps_ running to excess. There may be a due amount
of girlish pride in knowing that one of the sisters has inspired a
grand passion. There may be a tremulous respect for the fact that she
has passed the Rubicon, that, in place of girlish trifling, she has an
affair which has to do with the happiness or misery of a fellow
creature, not to say with her own happiness or misery, on her burdened
mind. Why, if she does not take care, she may be plunged at once, first
into the whirl of choosing her trousseau and the fascinating trial of
being the principal figure at a wedding, and then involved in the
tremendous responsibilities of housekeeping, butchers' bills, grocers'
bills, cooks' delinquencies, with the heavy obligations--not only of
ordering dinners for two, but of occasionally entertaining a room full
of company, single-handed!

And this is only one side of the shield; there is a reverse side, at
least equally prominent and alarming. The second side upholds maidenly
claims, finds nothing good enough to match with them, and is tempted to
scout and flout, laugh and mock at the rival claims of the lover upon
trial. This is true even in the most innocent of dove-cots, where satire
is still as playful and harmless as summer lightning.

"The idea of Tom Robinson's thinking of one of us!" cried Annie Millar.
"What could possess him to imagine that we should ever get over the
shop--granted that it is a Brobdingnagian shop, an imposing mart of
linen-drapery, haberdashery, silk-mercery enough to serve the whole
county?"

"To be sure it is only Dora, not you, Annie," burst in eighteen years'
old Rose, who had just left school, and was fain to drop the pretence of
being too young to notice the most interesting event in the world to a
family of girls.

"Why do you say that, Rose? Dora may not be so pretty as Annie--I don't
know, and I don't care--it is all a matter of taste; but she is as much
one of us, father's daughter, brought up like the rest of us in the Old
Doctor's House."

The speaker was May, between sixteen and seventeen. She was the tallest
of the four sisters--let them call her "Little May" as long as they
liked. She had so far forgotten herself as to follow Rose's lead.

"Hold your tongues, you two monkeys; what should you know about it?"
Annie, who had a tendency to sit upon her younger sisters, tried to
silence them. She had reached the advanced age of twenty-two, and by
virtue of being the eldest, had been considered grown up for the last
four years, when Rose and May were chits of fourteen and a little over
twelve. Of course this gave Annie a vast advantage in womanly dignity
and knowledge of the world. But at the present moment she was herself so
interested in the discussion that she could not make up her mind to drop
it till Rose and May were out of the way.

"I must say"--Annie started the subject again--"that I think it great
presumption in Tom Robinson, though he is not so ugly as that comes to,
and he's really well enough bred in spite of 'Robinson's.'"

"He is a college-bred man." Dora ventured shyly to put in a word for the
dignity of her suitor, and for her own dignity as so far involved in
his. "And so were his father and grandfather before him, father says."

"But the Robinsons had the silk-mill and the woollen-factory then as
well as the big shop," corrected Annie. "And Tom might have gone into
the Church or into some other profession if he had chosen, when things
might have been a little different. Still, if you are pleased, Dora,"
with a peal of derisive laughter, "if you do not object to the--shop."

"Of course I object," cried Dora, tingling with mortification and shame.
"That is, I should object to his having a shop, if I had ever thought of
him for a single moment in that light. I cannot imagine what put me into
his head--in that sense. Indeed I cannot believe it yet. I am sure it is
just some nonsense on the part of the rest of you to tease me."

"No, no," Annie hastened to contradict her. "It is sober reality. He has
said something to father; you know he has, mother owned it."

"He has been meeting us and throwing himself in our way everywhere,"
broke in the irrepressible Rose and May.

"He has been coming and coming here," resumed Annie, "where, as we
don't happen to have a brother, there is not even another young man to
form an excuse for his coming. We cannot so much as pretend, when
people remark on his visits, that he has come ever since we remember,
and is as familiar with us as we are with ourselves. No doubt, in a
little town like this, everybody who has the least claim to be a
gentleman or a lady, knows every other gentleman or lady--after a
fashion. But naturally father and mother were not intimate with the
late Mr. and Mrs. Robinson; and we--that is, Tom and we girls--are not
so near each other in age as to have been brought together by our
respective nurses. We did not pick daisies in company, or else pull
each other's hair, and slap each other's faces, according to our
varying moods. Tom Robinson is four or five years older than I, not to
speak of Dora."

"He stopped us this very morning," Rose again joined in the chorus,
"when May and I were going with the Hewetts to gather primroses in
Parson's Meadow. He asked if our sisters--that was you, Dora, with Annie
thrown into the bargain--thought of going on the river this afternoon."

"He might be an inch or two taller, I don't suppose he is above five
feet six or seven," suggested Annie, maliciously recalling a detail in
the description of Dora's future husband, that be he who or what he
might, he should certainly not be under six feet in height. Dora, who
was herself considerably below the middle size, would never yield her
freedom to a man who had to admit a lower scale of inches.

"And his hair might be a little less--chestnut, shall we say, Dora?"
put in Rose with exasperating sprightliness, referring to a former
well-known prejudice of Dora's against "_Judas-tinted hair_."

"Would you call his nose Roman or Grecian?" asked May naively, of a
very nondescript feature.

"And he has so little to say for himself," recommenced Annie, "though
when he does speak there is no great fault to be found with what he
says; still it would be dreadfully dull and tiresome to have to do all
the speaking for a silent partner."

"Oh, hold your tongues, you wretched girls," cried Dora, standing at
bay, stamping one small foot in a slipper with a preposterously large
rosette. "What does it signify? The man, like his words, is well
enough--better than any of us, I dare say," speaking indignantly; "but
what does it matter, when I could never look at him, never dream of him,
as anything more than a mere acquaintance? I don't wish for a lover or a
husband--at least not yet," with a gasp; "I don't wish to leave home,
and go away from all of you, though you are so unkind and teasing--not
for a long, long time, till I am quite a middle-aged woman. I don't see
why I should be plagued about it when Annie here, who is two years older
than I am, and ever so much prettier, as everybody knows, has escaped
such persecution."

"My dear," said Annie demurely, "it is because you have the opportunity
of presenting me with a pair of green garters. If it should occur again,
and you choose to avail yourself of it, I mean to accept the garters
with the best grace in the world. Isn't that good of me when you have
been coolly telling me that I have been overlooked as the eldest, and
the belle of the family--flattering my conceit with one breath and
taking it down with another? But it is not a case of Leah and Rachel.
We are not in the East, and in the West the elder sister does not
necessarily take precedence in marriage. You are quite welcome to marry
first, Dora; you are all welcome to marry before me, girls," with a
sweeping curtsey to her audience all round. "I am perfectly resigned to
your leaving your poor worthy elder sister to end her days as a solitary
spinster, a meek and useful maiden-aunt."

The Millars were the daughters of Dr. Millar of Redcross, an
old-fashioned country town in the Midlands. They were happy in having a
good father and mother still spared to them. The girls were what is
called "a fine family," in a stronger sense than that in which Jane
Austen has used the term. Their ages ranged from twenty-two to midway
between sixteen and seventeen. They were all good-looking girls, with a
family likeness. Annie, the eldest, was very pretty, with delicate,
regular features, a soft warm brunette colour, dark eyes, and a small
brown head and graceful throat, like the head and throat of a greyhound.

Dora, the first wooed, was, at a hasty glance, a mere shadow of Annie.
She was pale, though it was a healthy paleness. Her hair was lighter in
tint, her eyes, too, were considerably lighter--granted that they were
clear as crystal. It was difficult to think of Dora as preferred before
Annie, if one did not take into account that there are people who will
turn away from June roses to gather a cluster of honeysuckle, or pick
a sweet pea--people to whom there is an ineffable charm in simple
maidenliness and sweetness. Dora's modest unhesitating acceptance of the
second part in the family and social circle, and her perfect content to
play it, would be a crowning attraction in such people's eyes. So would
her gentle girlish diffidence, which moved her rather to meet and
reflect the tastes and opinions of others than to exercise her own,
though she was by no means without individual capacity and character.

Rose was the least handsome of the family at this stage of her
existence. The family features in her had taken a slightly bizarre
cast, and she had a bad habit of wrinkling her smooth low forehead and
crumpling up her sharpish nose, in a manner which accentuated the
peculiarity. But Annie, who was an authority on the subject of looks,
maintained, behind Rose's back, that there was something _piquante_ and
_recherchee_ about Rose's face and figure. Not one of the Millars was
tall--not even May, though she came nearest to it; but Rose's slight
pliant figure had a natural grace and elegance which its quick,
careless movements did not dispel. When she held herself up, uncreased
her forehead and nose, showed to advantage her very fine, true chestnut
hair, and was full of animation--as to do Rose justice she generally
was--giving fair play to her dimples and little white teeth, Annie said
Rose had a style of her own which did no discredit to the family
reputation for more than a fair share of beauty. In addition to Annie's
high spirit and ready tongue, Rose had a decided turn for art, which
her father had taken pride in cultivating.

"Little May" was like Annie, and promised to be as pretty; but she was a
rose in the bud still, with the unfilled out outlines and crude
angularities of a girl not done growing. She was very much of a child in
many things, and she had Dora's soft clinging nature, yet under it all
she was the born scholar of the family, with a simple aptitude and taste
for learning which surprised and delighted her father still more than
Rose's achievements in pastilles and water-colours pleased him. It was
seeing May at her books, when she was a very different May from the girl
who ran about with Rose, and was kept in her proper place by Annie,
which revived in Doctor Millar the old regret that Providence had not
blessed him with a son. He could not exactly make a son of May, since
from her early childhood she was a little sensitive woman all over, but
he did what he could. He had her taught Latin, Greek, and mathematics
just to afford her the chance of being a scholar. He never told himself,
and nobody else did, in the meantime, what she was to do with her
scholarship when she was a little older. Whether it was merely to grace
her womanhood, or whether the youngest of the family, her father and
mother's last pet, was to summon up courage, tear herself away from
familiar and dear surroundings, and carry her gifts and acquirements out
into the world, in order to win for them the best distinction of
usefulness.

Dora's lightly held suitor was the head of "Robinson's." "Robinson's"
was a great and time-honoured institution in Redcross, while it and its
masters were somewhat of anomalies. The first Robinson whom the town
troubled to remember was as good as anybody in it, the proprietor of a
silk-mill, and latterly of a wool-factory in the neighbourhood. As a
mere convenient adjunct to the mill and the factory he had started a
shop in the town, and kept it going by means of a manager. Even in that
light it was a handsome old shop. The walls were lined with polished
oak, so was the low ceiling, and there was an oak staircase leading
from one storey to another which a connoisseur in staircases might have
coveted. "Robinson's" was a positive feature in Redcross, and if it had
been anything else than a good shop of its kind would have been greatly
admired. The son of the founder of the shop was also reckoned, to begin
with, as good as his professional neighbours. He was college-bred, like
his father, as Dora in her jealousy for the dignity of her first lover
had stated. This was "all to begin with." Whether because it was
advisable, or from mere grovelling instincts, he dropped in turn both
the mill and the factory, neither of which did more than pay its way,
and retained the shop, which was understood to be a lucrative concern.
He did worse; though Redcross continued to acknowledge him--somewhat
dubiously to be sure--as a gentleman, because of the fine presence which
Tom had not inherited, and the perfect good breeding which had descended
to the son. In spite of the magnanimity which forgave frostily the
second Robinson for so far forgetting himself as to take the management
of his great shop into his own hands, walk up and down and receive
customers, and be seen working at his books in the glass office if he
did not go behind the counter, he went and married for his second wife a
farmer's daughter. She was an honest, sensible, comely young woman, but
she had no pretensions to be a lady, and no more inclination to enter
the society of the Redcross upper class than the upper class had a mind
to receive her as an equal. Charles Robinson's first wife had been all
very well, though she was penniless. She had been a curate's daughter,
educated to fill the post of governess in high families. She had died
young, without children, and he had filled her place with the farmer's
daughter, who was the mother of Tom. Thenceforth the Robinson's house,
a good, old-fashioned house, though not so handsome as the shop in an
adjacent street, was effaced, nominally, from the visiting-lists of
those who had visiting-lists in Redcross. The family were ostracised,
and left to their own devices, receiving their sentence, in the case of
the farmer's daughter and her husband, with apparent equanimity.

But there was an exception made in favour of Tom. He went to the Grammar
School along with the other better-class boys in the town and
neighbourhood, and was accepted as their companion and playfellow. He
was sent to college according to the traditions of his family, just as
Cyril Carey, of Carey's Bank, and Ned Hewett, of the Rectory, were sent
according to the traditions of theirs. Presumably the three young men
were on one footing at Cambridge, unless, indeed, Tom had the advantage.
He was slightly the elder of the three, and he took his degree with a
fair amount of honour; while, sad to say, for the credit of Redcross,
neither Cyril nor Ned made their last pass. It was confidently believed
that Tom Robinson would cut the shop, so far as any active management of
it was concerned, and enter either a gallant or a learned profession. If
he had ever entertained the intention, it was put a stop to in the first
place by the death of his father, followed within three months by that
of his mother, shortly after Tom had completed his course at the
university. He stayed at home for a time, to put his house in order it
was supposed. Then all at once, in the most cold-blooded fashion, he
told those who asked him that "Robinson's" was a good business, which he
did not see himself justified in throwing up in these hard times. He was
not such a conceited ass as to believe he must necessarily succeed in
the crowded ranks of the professions, for none of which had he any
particular bent, while he had, he added, with a certain manliness and
doggedness for a pacific fellow like Robinson, a considerable interest
in the great old shop. It had been in the family for three generations;
he had known it from childhood; many of his father's old trusted
servants still served in it. In short, he meant to keep it in his own
hands, and not to let it go to sticks and staves, possibly, in the hands
of others. He did not, for his part, see any mark of gentle breeding
and fine feeling in devolving his responsibilities on others, and only
reserving that tie to the shop which had to do with pecuniary profits.
As for his university training and academic degree, if they did not
benefit him in all circumstances they were not much worth. The town of
Redcross was caught in a trap. The gentle-folks of the place had already
received him as a man and a brother, and they could not refuse to know
him any longer because he stuck to the paternal shop, though they might
exercise their discretion in looking coldly on him in future. For that
matter, there was another opinion among the older professional men--the
Rector, whose tithes were only quarter paid; Dr. Millar, whose paying
patients were no longer able to call him in on all occasions; Carey, the
banker, whose private bank, it was whispered darkly, was struggling in
deep waters; Colonel Russell, who had come home from India on half-pay
and his savings, which every year he found more inadequate for the
expenses of an increasing family. All these gray-headed men, growing
haggard and careworn, agreed that in the present depressed state of the
commercial world, young Robinson was showing himself a sensible fellow
and ought to be commended for his decision. They declared that they were
the more inclined to take him up because of it. It was their wives,
where they had wives, and especially their daughters, with the young men
who had not known the brunt of the battle, and felt inclined to clutch
their professional dignities and privileges, that were of a different
mind. Girls like the Millars turned up their saucy little noses at the
shop. They thought it was mean-spirited and vulgar-minded, "low" of Tom
Robinson to sit down with such a calling. They held it audacious of him
to lift his eyes to Dora, and to follow his eyes with his voice, silent
fellow though he was generally, in asking her from her father.

Certainly it did not help to redeem Tom Robinson's drawbacks in the
judgment of a rash young world that he lacked his late father's fine
presence. Though gentleman-like enough, he was insignificant in person,
and he had little to say for himself. Probably it would have struck his
critics as little short of profane to make the comparison, otherwise
there is a great example that might have stood him and all men not
giants and glib of tongue in good stead. It is written of an apostle,
and he not the least of the apostles, that he might have been termed in
bodily presence mean, and in speech contemptible. But boys and girls are
not wont to take up such examples and ponder their meaning in foolish
young hearts.

The Millars, as one of the girls had said, were brought up in the Old
Doctor's House at Redcross. It would seem that professions and trades
were hereditary in the old-fashioned, stationary town. Dr. Millar's
father had not only been a doctor before him, he had been _the_ doctor
in Redcross, with a practice extending from an aristocratic county to a
parish-poor class of patients. His pretty sister Penny, whom Annie was
not unlike, had married into the county, General Beauchamp of Wayland's
younger son. The marriage, with all its consequences, was a thing of the
long past, leaving little trace in the present. For young Beauchamp,
though he was a squire's son, had not been able to get on at the bar,
and had emigrated with his wife while emigration was still comparatively
untried in Australia, where it was to be hoped his county extraction had
served him in the Bush at least as well as Tom Robinson's university
education would avail him in the shop. It had all happened an age before
the young Millars could remember, still the tradition of a marriage of a
member of a former generation of the Millars into the squirearchy had
its effect on her collateral descendants. It did not signify that the
reigning Beauchamps of Waylands had almost ceased to remember the
ancient alliance in their dealings with their doctor. That dim and
distant distinction established the superior position of the Millars in
their native town, to the girls' entire satisfaction. Dora to marry
Robinson, of "Robinson's," a farthing candle of a man, when her
Grand-aunt Penny had married a Beauchamp of Waylands, by all accounts
the handsomest, most dashing member of the Hunt in his day, was a
descent not to be thought of for a moment.

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