GROVES OF ACADEME
After that keen disappointment about the baby's forgetting her, although
she excused it to herself, arguing that at twenty months one cannot be
expected to have a long memory, Mary was more reconciled to the changed
conditions of her life.
"I hope we are going to be together for a good many years," Lady Anne
said, "and presently you must be able to play and sing to me, to read to
me and take an interest in the things in which I am interested. You are
to go to school, Mary."
So Mary went to school, first to the Queen's Preparatory School, then to
the Queen's College. Her years there were very happy ones, especially
those years at the College, after she had found her feet and made
friends, and gained confidence in herself and the world.
"She sucks up knowledge as a sponge sucks up water," was the report of
the Principal, Miss Merton, to the delighted Lady Anne. "I hope Lady
Anne, that you will permit her to go in for her B.A. I should not be
surprised, indeed, if she captured a fellowship."
"No fellowships," Lady Anne said, firmly. "What would she do with a
fellowship? I propose, as soon as she has done with you, to take her
abroad. I have a mind to see the world again through young eyes. And it
will put the coping-stone on her education. I shouldn't dare leave her
too long with you. Learning so often destroys a woman's imagination.
They work too hard, I suppose. It doesn't seem to come natural to them
yet as it does to men."
"There's no question of Mary's working too hard," the Lady Principal
said, bearing these hard sayings of Lady Anne's with composure. "She has
fine brains. Whatever she wants in an intellectual way she can come at
easily."
Mary, indeed, took her B.A. without over-much burning of the midnight
oil. Afterwards she always spoke with the tenderest affection of her old
school-days. She recalled with delight the spacious class-rooms, the old
garden with its great woodland trees, and the tiny rooms of the girls
who were in residence at the College, with their quaint and pretty
adornments--the place of so much young _camaraderie_ and soaring
ambition and happy emulation. "I can hardly remember that anyone was
ever unkind," she used to say long afterwards.
As a matter of fact, the band of elder students with whom Mary was
connected in her latter days at the College had a generous enthusiasm
for her beauty, taking it as in a sense a credit to themselves.
"You will be a living answer to them," said Jessie Baynes, who was small
and plain-looking, "when they say that learned women are always ugly."
And the whole of the class applauded her speech.
"I shall love to see you in your cap and gown," Jessie went on, firing
at the picture in her own imagination. "Very few of the men will be
taller than you, Mary. How they will shout!"
Jessie had no thought at all of her own lack of height and grace, as she
had no idea of how pleasant her little brown face was despite its
plainness. She was going to earn her living by teaching, and, what was
more, going to make living easier and pleasanter for her mother and her
young sister. To get her mother out of stuffy town lodgings to a seaside
cottage, which was an unattainable heaven to the mother's thoughts, to
educate Edie and give her a chance in life--these were the things that
filled Jessie's mind to the exclusion of fear whenever she thought of
her ordeal at the conferring of the University degrees. To be sure, she
trembled a little when she thought of the long, brilliantly lighted
Hall, and all the fine ladies, and the scarlet robes of the Senators,
and the young barbarians in the gallery, and all the thousands of eyes
fixed on the one little dumpling of a woman going up to receive her
degree. If she might only win the fellowship! She would not care what
ordeal she passed through for that. So she put away the fear from her
mind. If she could only win the fellowship! But she was too humble about
her own attainments to have more than a little, little hope of that.
How generous they all were, Mary thought, with an impulse of gratitude
towards those dear class-fellows that brought the tears to her eyes.
"When we are photographed in our caps and gowns," said another, "you
must stand up in the middle of us, Mary, so that they will see how tall
you are."
Mary reported their generosity to Lady Anne, with whom, by this time,
she was on the loving terms that cast out fear.
"Very creditable to them," the old lady said, twinkling. "Don't let it
make you vain, Mary. You're well enough, but you aren't half as pretty
as a rose, or half as tall as a tree, and there are thousands of trees
and roses in the world."
"I don't think myself pretty," Mary said, in a hurt voice. "There are
several of the girls far prettier. As for being tall, it is no pleasure.
I would much rather be little."
"Your skirts will always cost you more than other girls'."
"It is only because they are so kind and generous that they think well
of me," Mary went on. "And, oh! I do hope that Jessie will win the
fellowship. Everyone does, even----"
"Even her opponents," the old lady said, drily. It was always Lady
Anne's way to seem cynical over things, even with those she loved best.
"She has worked so hard for it," said Mary, "and Alice Egerton, who is
in the running, too, has shaken hands with Jessie, and told her that if
she wins it will only prove she is the better man."
"Dear me, we are cultivating the manly virtues, too," said Lady Anne.
"Let me see: there are twenty young ladies in your class, and not a
spiteful one among them. I have never heard of so low a percentage."
"If women were given something to think of besides petty interests,"
Mary began hotly. "If they were educated, if they were given ideals----"
"You are only on your trial yet, child," Lady Anne suggested. "We
produced very good women before Women's Colleges were heard of. I'm glad
they've not spoilt you, anyhow. No stooped shoulders, no narrow chest,
no dimmed eyes. I couldn't have forgiven them if they had made you pay a
price for your learning."
When Mary received her B.A. degree she was applauded more rapturously
from the gallery than even the new Fellow, Miss Jessica Baynes, B.A.,
who knew little enough about her own reception, since, as she left the
daïs, she had glanced up and made out her mother's little nutcracker
face, so like her own, in one of the circles of faces overhead.
There was a little group in the balcony watching Mary with fond pride.
Lady Anne Hamilton's face shone again as the tall, slender young figure
went up amid the furious applause of the undergraduates, through which
the general clapping of hands could hardly be heard. Behind Lady Anne
were Mary's father and stepmother. Lady Anne had taken care that they
should not be forgotten in the distribution of tickets. Walter Gray
looked on quietly. He was very proud of his girl; but he had, perhaps,
too great a wisdom to set much store by the plaudits of the many. Mrs.
Gray, in a bonnet Mary had made for her and a mantle which had been
Mary's gift, was in a timid rapture. She was older by some years than
she had been when Mary went to Lady Anne first, but she was far more
comely. Her family seemed to have reached its limits, for one thing, and
she was no more the helpless drudge she had been. Several of the
children were at school, and that wonderfully elastic salary of Mary's
had done miraculous things in the way of bringing comfort and even
refinement to Walter Gray's home.
"Well," said Lady Anne, turning round, and touching Walter Gray's arm,
"I have not made too bad a fairy godmother, have I, now?"
"She would never have grown so tall," Walter Gray said, with absent
eyes. He had yielded up Mary for her good, but he had never ceased to
miss her.
One person who sat among the most distinguished group in the Hall looked
at Mary with a lively interest.
"What a charming girl!" she said to her host, a very great person.
"I believe she has been adopted as a sort of companion by old Lady Anne
Hamilton, who is a cousin of my wife's," he responded. "The girl has
been educated at her expense. Yes, it's a pretty thing. I only hope it
won't become a blue-stocking."
"I must positively know her," said the lady. "She interests me."
"You make me jealous," returned the great person, with playful
gallantry.
Lady Agatha had been a peeress in her own right since she had attained
the tender age of two years. Her father and mother had died too early
for her to miss them, and she had shown from her childhood a capacity to
think for herself, which nurses and governesses and all such persons
looked on as absolutely shocking. She had had a guardian, a soft,
woolly, comfortable gentleman whose will she had brushed aside and
replaced by her own from the time she was eight years old. Legally, she
was not of age till twenty-one; in reality, she was of age at fifteen or
thereabouts. She consulted Colonel St. John, her guardian, about her
affairs, as an act of grace, because she was so fond of him and wouldn't
hurt his feelings for anything; but she made no secret of the fact that
at twenty-one she was going to be absolutely her own mistress.
"You are your own mistress now," Colonel St. John said once, a little
ruefully. "You never do what I wish--you make me do what _you_ wish.
Don't go too fast, Agatha, my dear. At twenty-one one is not wiser than
old people, though one may feel so."
But he knew that he was talking to empty air. She was so eager to lay
hold on life. And she was equipped for it--there was no doubt of that.
Mr. Grainger, of Grainger, Ellison and Wells, who had had charge of the
business of the estate from time immemorial, whose trade it was to be
cautious, was cheerful over the Colonel's misgivings.
"You wouldn't feel anxious if she was a lad," he said. "I'd set her
against nine hundred and ninety lads out of a thousand for sound
common-sense. She won't do anything foolish. Take my word for it, she
won't do anything foolish."
She did not do anything foolish. She took her own way about some things
against Colonel St. John, and even against Mr. Grainger, but she turned
out to be right in the end. She had a good many people dependent in one
way or another upon her for their well-being, and she insisted on coming
face to face with these--on dealing with them without an intermediary.
And she made no mistakes. She could see through shifty dishonesty as
well as if she had had three times her years and a wide knowledge of the
seamy side of human nature. She had always been an outdoor girl, and now
she displayed a knowledgeable interest in her own Home Farm and in the
affairs of her tenants.
She used to say that the days were not long enough for all she had to
do. Certainly, she contrived to cram into them three times as much
pleasure, business, and philanthropy as her neighbours.
She had an idea of the obligations of her position as lady of the soil
which made poor Colonel St. John gasp when she talked about it. There
was so much to be done for the people--churches to be built, or chapels,
if they preferred them, and school-houses, industries to be fostered--so
much encouragement to be given to honest endeavour. Her idea was that
the land should afford all the people wished for. She was going to stop
the terrible drifting of the people into the towns. Their lives were to
be made gayer. There should be entertainments. The farmers' wives and
daughters were to make butter and cheese like their forbears, to grow
fruit and vegetables, to rear poultry and sell eggs; but they were not,
therefore, to lead a life of narrow toil. They were to be rewarded for
their skill and industry. The fruit of their labours was to make life
sweeter and pleasanter for them. There were to be libraries and
reading-rooms, debating clubs, social gatherings.
"Stuff and nonsense!" Colonel St. John said, with his cotton-wool
eyebrows puffed out. "She'll dip the estate, and then she'll be coming
to ask us to pull her out. Worse, she'll only make them discontented."
"She'll come out all right," Mr. Grainger said, rubbing his hands softly
together. "If she blunders, she'll learn wisdom from the experiment.
You'll see she'll come out all right, Colonel. The only thing that
troubles me is that she may have no time to get married. We don't want
her to be a spinster, hey? I confess I should like to see the succession
assured."
It was this notable young lady who came in not so long after to Queen's
College, where a distinguished woman of letters was giving a series of
lectures on "The Poetry of the Sixteenth Century." Her entrance created
somewhat of a flutter. She was as tall as Mary Gray, but much more
opulently built. She had short, curling, dark hair, irregular features,
and violet eyes--not a bit handsome, but big and bonny and lovesome. Her
dress fluttered even these students. It was of purple velvet, with a
great stole of sables, and her sable muff had a big bunch of real
violets, which brought an odour of the quickening and burgeoning earth.
She sat by the Lady Principal, and afterwards had tea with the students.
She asked especially for an introduction to Mary Gray, and then she
insisted on driving her as far as the Mall in her motor-car, which she
drove herself, while the chauffeur sat with folded arms behind. On the
way she talked poetry and politics with the same fervour she brought to
all her pursuits.
"It has been borne in on me," she said vehemently, "that in working
among my own people as I have been doing I have been only tinkering at
things, just tinkering. One has to go to the root of the matter, to
abolish unjust laws, to replace them by good ones. Supposing I made my
estate, as I hope to make it, a Utopia, still there would be hundreds of
estates where the people would be in misery. It ought not to be left to
our good will to do things. We should be compelled to do them."
Mary watched the flashing eyes with the greatest admiration. She felt
that Lady Agatha was a glorious creature, for whom she could do
anything. The hero-worship which is latent in the heart of all young
people worth their salt sprang into sudden life. Lady Agatha glanced at
her, noticed her expression, and smiled a rich, sweet, gratified smile.
She had made a disciple. To make a disciple was very pleasant to one of
her temperament. Like most women, she was a thorough propagandist.
As she swept up to the gate of Lady Anne's house, the old lady herself
was standing just within it. She had come in from driving her little
pony phaeton, which she liked to drive herself. She had a little wild,
bright-eyed mountain pony, which would eat sugar and apples from her
hands, and was as much of a pet as a dog.
"Well, Mary," she said, "introduce me. How do you do, Lady Agatha? I
know you by sight already. Won't you come inside and have some tea? I'm
very glad my Chloe didn't meet that uncanny monster of yours. I have
something to do to get her past the trams, I can tell you, much less the
motorcars."
"You shouldn't go out alone," Mary said, with tender concern. "Her
little pony is very wild, Lady Agatha, and she won't take the carriage,
unless she goes visiting."
"You want to make me out an old woman," Lady Anne said, "and I shall
never be that. Come along in, Lady Agatha. I've been hearing about you.
What do you mean by making my tenants discontented? They're very well as
they are. We shall have to form a league against you, we indolent ones."
Her Ladyship had a way of winning her welcome wherever she went. Lady
Anne had begun, like a good many other people, with a certain distrust
of the brilliant young woman who desired to conquer so many kingdoms. In
the end she yielded unreservedly.
"A fine, big-hearted, generous creature," she said. "It makes me young
to look at her and hear her talk. And so she has taken a huge fancy to
my Mary. Very well, then, she can come and go; but she's not to have my
Mary for all that, for I want her for myself."
"No one really wants me," said Mary, with suddenly dimmed eyes, "except
you and papa. But if they did they couldn't have me. I belong to you and
papa."