A Houseful of Girls

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At the same time, while it is hard to admit the justness of a criticism
unaffected by the inconsistency of the person who utters it and of the
circumstances under which it is uttered, Rose was perfectly well aware
that Hester Jennings was as excellent a judge of dignity and repose,
apart from her personal proceedings, as any artist could be.

Rose did not retaliate, save in self-defence. Hester was her senior in
art-knowledge still more than in years. She was not her sister to be
treated without ceremony, and pretty deep down in Rose's girlish heart
there was a respectful tolerance, an approach to tender reverence, for
the turbulent-minded, chaotic, gifted creature beside her. Still Rose's
equanimity was considerably disturbed.

The unruffled serenity of the Misses Stone's domain, far from restoring
Rose's composure, seemed to smite her by contrast with an intolerable
sense of personal reproach, and to goad her into rebellion. Rose was
conscious of her variable spirits--the heritage of her years--getting
more and more uncertain, and of being wrought up to a perilously
high-strung pitch. She felt as if she were panting for liberty to
breathe, to express her discordant mood in some unconventional manner.

As it happened, the principal drawing-mistress, a highly decorous,
self-controlled young woman, ten years Rose's senior, was absent, and
her assistant was alone at her post, with the whole class in and on her
hands. Rose had already taken off her hat and gloves, and she tried to
compose her ruffled feelings before she began her round of the
drawing-boards, as Mr. St. Foy inspected his easels. The analogy with
its disproportion struck her, and moved her to silent, unsteady
laughter, which she could not restrain, so that it broke out into a
ringing peal at the first enormity in drawing which she came across.

Nobody laughed like that at the Misses Stone's --certainly no
low-voiced, quietly conducted teacher. Rose was further aggrieved and
tormented by the astonished heads privily raised, and the wondering eyes
covertly looking at her. She laughed no more. She went on examining,
commending, correcting, till she was tired out. Surely the morning hours
were endless that day. She was exhausted, not merely by the "smart walk"
from Welby Square, which, taken at Hester Jennings's pace, was always
tiring, as Rose knew to her cost, but also by the turmoil of spirit she
had been in. All the toils, disappointments, and drudgery of the life
which lay before her seemed suddenly to press upon her and overwhelm
her, and before she knew what she was doing she was sobbing behind her
handkerchief. She had one grain of sense left, she turned her back; but
her heaving shoulders and the muffled sound of a "good cry" were not
hidden from the electrified class.

Nobody cried like that at the Misses Stone's, unless it might be to
somebody's pillow in the darkness of the night. For any teacher to cry
in her class was unheard of. Rose conquered herself in less time than it
has taken to recount her weakness, and resumed the lesson with moist
eyes, a reddened nose, and her whole girlish body tingling and smarting
with girlish mortification. All the rest of the morning she seemed to
hear two startling statements repeated alternately and without pause.

"Miss Rose Millar laughed loudly in the middle of her teaching;" and oh!
shame of shames, for the womanly dignity of the last year of Rose's
teens--"Miss Rose Millar cried before the whole class."

Rose had once joined in a girls' play, full of girlish cleverness and
girlish points and hits. No less a personage than Queen Elizabeth was
introduced into it. In the course of the plot great stress was laid on
the fact that the Queen had laughed at Lord Essex's expense, behind his
back. This was done in order to pique the proud, spoilt young courtier
to resent the laughter, and, in homely parlance, to give Her Majesty
more to laugh at. The phrase "_and the Queen laughed_," had been
emphatically repeated again and again in Lord Essex's hearing, with much
malicious meaning and effect.

That mocking quotation was resounding in Rose's ears with a
characteristic variation. It was no longer "_and the Queen laughed_," it
was "and Miss Rose Millar laughed," then alas! alas! as a fit pendant,
"and Miss Rose Millar cried."

What a big baby she had shown herself, without the decent reticence of a
gentlewoman's good breeding, or the proper pride of a girl who
respected herself. How these school-girls must despise her! What was she
to do? Wait for the girls to whisper and chatter as all girls will,
however trained? Or go at once to the Miss Stone with whom she had most
to do, tell her the solecism of which she, Rose, had been guilty in the
best behaved of schools, and abide by Miss Stone's decision, though it
should be that she and her sisters would in future dispense with the
services of Miss Rose Millar as assistant drawing-mistress.

Rose had the courage and honesty to adopt the latter course, and she
tried to think that the fresh affront it brought her, was part of the
penalty which she was bound to pay for her disgraceful childishness.

Miss Lucilla Stone listened with a little personal discomfiture, for she
was, like Mrs. Jennings, so thoroughly mistress of herself and the
situation, that any _gaucherie_ or boisterous indiscretion was positive
pain to her. Besides, the bad example to the girls for whom Miss Lucilla
and her sisters were responsible, made a matter which people who did not
understand might wrongly consider a trifle, really a serious affair. "No
doubt," acquiesced Miss Lucilla, "something had put you out, as you tell
me," in low-voiced rebuke, which yet sunk Rose in the dust, deeper than
she had been, when she was making her impulsive confession. "You were
tired with your walk, of course, but, my dear Miss Rose Millar, it is
necessary to learn to practise self-control, especially in the presence
of young people. They are so quick to notice and to encroach on their
elders and those placed in authority over them, when the necessary
distance of perfect self-control on the one side--if possible on both
sides--is not preserved between them. Perhaps," added Miss Lucilla
meditatively, and beginning to brighten a little, for she hated to give
the lecture well-nigh as much as Rose hated to receive it, "if you had
swallowed just a teaspoonful of _sel-volatile_ or something of that
kind, when you came in, the little scene would have been avoided. I
shall speak to my sister Charlotte, who has the key of our medicine
chest, and get her to administer a tiny dose to you every drawing day;
you will step into the study the first thing, and it will be ready for
you."

"Oh, no, thank you, Miss Lucilla," exclaimed Rose hastily, "I never took
_sel-volatile_ in my life. Father says not one of us is hysterical, or
is likely to faint on an emergency, not even Dora or May. He is quite
proud of Annie--my sister Annie--for her nerve, and she needs it all,
since she is in training for a nurse."

Miss Lucilla shook her head dubiously, whether at the modern
institution of lady nurses, or at the superiority in nerve of any family
to which Miss Rose Millar belonged.

"You may not have been hysterical before," said Miss Lucilla with mild
obstinacy; "but that is no reason why you should not be so now. If you
dislike _sel-volatile_, you ought to try red lavender drops. I know they
have gone out of fashion, but my dear mother still used them and found
much benefit from them till she was seventy-seven years of age."

Rose longed to say that there was a great gulf between seventy-seven and
nineteen and two months. She was stopped by the quiet determination and
self-satisfaction visible in Miss Lucilla's face and manner, as she rose
and graciously but summarily dismissed the trespasser on her valuable
time.

"Yes, I hope this will meet the case. You have been overdoing
yourself--that explains itself to everybody. Dear Mrs. Jennings must
forbid you tea and coffee and limit you to cocoa in the meantime;
indeed, my sisters and I take that precaution before any mischief
appears. Don't forget Miss Stone's study the first thing on drawing
mornings. I trust a little sedative and stimulant in one will prepare
you nicely for the drawing lessons."

To Rose's disgust she was compelled to make wry faces and choke over so
many doses of _sel-volatile_ and red lavender to the end of the term.
She made secret unfulfilled threats to write to her father and get him
to say that he would not permit her constitution to be tampered with, he
would himself order her what she required, if she needed to be quieted
like an incipient mad woman or a weak emotional fool.

Rose was not sure that Annie ought not to have come to her help. The
younger sister did not see what advantage there was to the family in the
elder sister's being a nurse if she was not to interfere on occasions of
this kind. But Annie had the bad taste to take the story as a good joke
against Rose; and as for Hester 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 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 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 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 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."

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 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 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 Russell,
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 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, Dora?" asked Fanny,
turning upon her with those great burning eyes and parched lips. "The
house here is to be given up and the furniture sold immediately--of
course you know that. It will take all that he can spare after
discharging his share of the bank debts to keep Mrs. Russell and the
children. I am a useless sort of person--a blank in the world. I could
not nurse like Annie, or paint like Rose. I could not even be a
school-mistress like Bell Hewett. Supposing I were qualified I should
break down in a month. I was born in India, and spent the first five
years of my life there, so that I am idle and languid, without stamina
or moral courage; I am like the poor Bengalees, whom I can just
remember. There is nobody who will undertake to keep me in England,"
ended Fanny, with a short, hard laugh.

And Dora, thinking of Cyril Carey--still one of the unemployed, with his
old supercilious airs lost in the gait that was getting slouching, in
keeping with the clothes becoming shabbier and shabbier, and the
downcast, moody looks--could not find words with which to contradict
her.

Indeed, when Dora was betrayed into giving her mother a hint of that
"something," unsuspected by the seniors of the circle, which had been
between Cyril Carey and Fanny Russell, and rendered Fanny's destination
still more heartless and hateful, Mrs. Millar took an entirely
different view of the circumstances from that taken by her daughters,
and was both indignant and intolerant. "What presumption in Cyril
Carey!" broke out the gentle mother of marriageable daughters, full of
righteous wrath. "To dream of making up to a girl and perhaps engaging
her simple affections, with the danger of breaking her heart and
spoiling her prospects, when he had just failed to pass at college, and
had not so much as a calling--not to say an income, with which to keep a
wife! I shall think worse of him than I did before, after hearing this."

"But you forget, mother," remonstrated Dora, "that the bank was in
existence then. His father might have been able to do something for
Cyril."

"He was not going to live on the bank's capital and credit. There was
too much of that going on already with poor James Carey's encroaching,
dishonest relations and their friends. And I beg to tell you, Dora, that
a man who cannot help himself, but has to wait for his father to do
something for him, is a very poor match for any girl. Fanny Russell is
well rid of him. I have no doubt she will think so before she is many
years older--that is, if this is not all a piece of foolish nonsense
such as girls are apt to take into their heads about their companions.
If there was anything in it, and she had not been going away, her
father ought to have been warned, and Cyril Carey spoken to in the way
he deserved--selfish scapegrace! As it is, the bare suspicion is enough
to reconcile one to Fanny Russell's going out to India, though that
custom for girls has fallen into disrepute, and I never had any liking
for it. Still I hope that Fanny will soon make an excellent marriage,
and will learn to laugh at Cyril Carey and his unwarrantable
presumption, together with any girlish folly of which she may have been
guilty."

Mrs. Millar spoke in another fashion to the little Doctor. She had
happened to be at the railway station on the raw, chill morning when
Fanny Russell, in her smart new gray travelling suit--part of her
outfit--was put into a railway carriage by her father and left there
alone, while he went to look after the luggage and find a
smoking-carriage for himself.

Fanny sat like a statue. She did not even raise her veil when she was
bidding farewell to Lucy Hewett and Dora, who were seeing her off--not
to take a last look at Redcross, where she had spent her youth.

Mrs. Millar understood it better when she stumbled against Cyril Carey
half hidden by a lamp-post, watching the vanishing train. She might have
taken the opportunity to rebuke him for his unprincipled recklessness;
instead of doing so--after one glance at the young fellow's haggard
face--the ordinary words of greeting died away on the kind woman's lips.
She turned aside in another direction, making as if she had not seen
him, without breathing a word of the encounter until she had her
husband's ear all to herself in the privacy of the dining-room.

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