MAY HAS TO FIGHT HER OWN BATTLE.
All May's frantic efforts at resistance were useless; her destiny was
too strong for her. She had to go away from her mother and father, Dora,
and Tray, and face life all by herself as one of the girl-graduates at
Thirlwall Hall, St. Ambrose's. Dr. Millar had learnt that she would just
be in reasonable time for one of the earlier examinations at the close
of the term. Having passed it without difficulty, she might compete for
one of the Thirlwall scholarships. If she got that--as he allowed
himself to think she had a fair chance of doing--it would greatly
increase her status, as well as aid in defraying the expenses of her
residence at St. Ambrose's. The little Doctor was feverishly anxious to
compass both ends for his pet and scholar. In her own interest no notice
must be taken of her heart-broken looks, though it wrung a manly heart,
in addition to the tender hearts of Mrs. Millar and Dora, to witness
May's desperate unwillingness to depart.
It will be better to throw a veil over the anguish of that leave-taking,
including the final closeting with Tray and the torrents of tears shed
on his irresponsive hairy coat. We shall draw up the curtain on a new
scene--St. Ambrose's, in its classic glory and stately beauty, and
Thirlwall Hall, in its youthful strong-mindedness.
Poor May felt horribly forlorn when her father left her behind, and she
realized that she was for the first time in her life compelled to play
her part without the support of kith or kin. Nobody was in the least
unkind to her, any more than the conservative Miss Stones had been to
Rose, unless in calling "little May" "Miss Millar," a promotion which
somehow cut her to the heart.
The lady principal, Miss Lascelles, was an excellent intellectual woman,
of mingled aristocratic and _spirituelle_ antecedents. In another
country and nation she might have been a distinguished _dame de salon_.
As it was, she was sufficiently harassed and overworked in her double
office of decorous, authoritative chaperon and qualified guide,
philosopher, and friend to the girls under her charge. These might be
vestal virgins or nymphs of Minerva, but they were also girls, so long
as the world lasted--the most of them half curious, half friendly where
May was concerned. This was true even of the wonderful young American
who came and stayed with no other object in view than to say she had
kept her terms at St. Ambrose's, according to what was the sum total of
the ambition of many a young man at the great University. She _would_
call the Atlantic "the herring pond," and speak of "fixing" her hair;
still she was a girl like the rest of them. Miss Lascelles, with all the
other ladies in residence at Thirlwall Hall, the American included,
could not help wondering what the friends and guardians of a budding
beauty and helpless baby like Miss Millar intended by sending her to
live among a set of self-reliant, amply-occupied young women, who, as a
rule, knew exactly what they wanted to do and did it.
The whole place and system overwhelmed May. The hoary dignity of the old
colleges, receptacles of the concentrated learning of ages, the crowds
of capped and gowned tutors and professors, potent representatives of
the learning of the present, even the shoals of young men who were able
to care for none of these things, and to carry their responsibilities
lightly, all to be encountered in the course of a morning walk, struck
May with a sense of inadjustable disproportion, and of intolerable
presumption on her part in pretending to be a scholar. She was still one
of a household largely composed of women, as she had been at home, but
here the household was planted where it was an innovation, in the midst
of a colony of men, which constantly threatened to sweep over it and
submerge it.
The grown-up, independent, yet disciplined routine of Thirlwall Hall,
founded as closely as possible on the venerable routine of the men's
colleges, was widely, crushingly different from life in the Old Doctor's
House at Redcross. Morning chapel, the steady business of individual
reading, the attendance on the selected courses of lectures, with the
new experience of being spoken to, and expected to take notes like men;
the walks and talks, which even with the interruptions of tennis and
boating were apt to be academically shoppy; the very afternoon tea after
evening chapel had an impressively scholastic flavour utterly foreign to
the desultory proceedings of an ordinary family circle. So had the
further reading by one's self, for one's self, to get up a particular
branch of study; the "swell dinner," as May persisted in calling it in
her own mind, though it was simple and social enough--beyond certain
indispensable forms and ceremonies--to the initiated; the withdrawal
once more to the dreary retirement of her own room, since a new girl had
neither the requisite familiarity nor the heart to go and tap at her
neighbours' doors, where no substitute for "sporting the oak" had as
yet been found, and drop in for a little purely human chatter.
May was so "hard hit," as people say--not with love, but with
home-sickness--that she did not believe she could live to the end of the
summer term. She felt as if she must die of strangeness, fright, and
pining; and that was hard, for they would be very sorry at home, and so
would Annie and Rose in London, though both of them had been able to go
and stay away quite cheerfully like the girls at Thirlwall Hall. Perhaps
May and Dora were not like other girls. There was something wanting or
something in excess about them. Perhaps they were not fit to go through
the world, as she had once heard somebody say of her--May. Perhaps they
were meant to die young--like their Aunt Dolly--and not destined to live
long and struggle helplessly with adverse circumstances. In that case,
Dora was the happy one to be left to spend her short life at home,
though, save for father and mother, she too was all alone, and poor dear
Dora would feel that, and was, perhaps, crying in another empty room as
May was crying in hers at this very moment; but at least, Dora would
pass her last days with father and mother in the old familiar places.
This isolated doom for herself and Dora fascinated May's imagination.
She could not get it out of her head. She dreamt about it, and sat up
in her bed crying and shivering in the silence and solitude of night,
where even by day all was silent and solitary. She began to think
that she would never see Redcross or her mother again. With the
morbid sentimentality of early youth, and its lively capacity for
self-torture, in which to be sure there is that underlying luxury of
woe, she commenced to rehearse the loving farewells she would take on
paper, and the harrowing last messages she would send to every member
of her family.
Occasionally May's hallucination took the form of conjuring up a series
of disasters which should suddenly descend on her absent friends. If she
did not die herself, one or all of those she loved might die while she
was separated from them. Her father might fall down in a fit; her mother
might be seized with small-pox or typhoid fever; and what more likely
than that Dora should catch the infection waiting on her mother?
This distempered frame of mind was hardly calculated for the rapid
reception and assimilation of these particles, terminations, and cases
of philological nicety in which May began to recognize that she was
inaccurate and deficient.
If Tray could but have come to her, and laid his shining black nose in
her lap, barked in her face, and invited her to take a turn in the
grounds of Thirlwall Hall, he would have ceased to be the doleful,
shadowy phantom of a Tray she was constantly seeing now, along with
other phantoms. A game of romps with her four-footed friend would have
done something to dissipate the mental sickness which was prostrating
May's powers. But Thirlwall Hall was moulded on the men's colleges, and
there were no dogs for the girl any more than for the boy graduates.
Miss Lascelles was at once conscientious and kind, with considerable
natural sagacity; but she led a busy, rather over-burdened life, and had
little time to spare. Naturally she was tempted, in spite of the logical
faculty which made her a capital principal of Thirlwall Hall, to leap at
conclusions like many of her weaker-minded sisters. She had taken it for
granted that Miss Millar was simply a spoilt child, without more ability
and information than had just served her to surmount the preliminary
test of admission to Thirlwall Hall, where, nevertheless, she had no
business to be. Her time would be completely wasted; she would only be
wretched, and serve to make other people uncomfortable. However, as she
had stood the preliminary test, and was at Thirlwall Hall for the rest
of the term, the most humane thing to do was to set some other girl who
was not particularly engaged on her own account, who could be safely
trusted with such a charge, who had plenty of acquaintances at St.
Ambrose's to render the charge lighter, to make friends with the poor
girl, take her about, cheer and entertain her, as far as possible, till
the end of her stay.
Miss Lascelles, in default of better, fixed on Miss Vanhansen, the
American young lady, as a friend for May. Miss Vanhansen had plenty of
time on her hands, plenty of confidence, plenty of money. She had
taken even exclusive St. Ambrose's by storm, for Athens itself would
have found it difficult to resist her racy indifference, her shrewd
mother-wit, her superb frocks, and her sublime heaps of dollars. At
the same time she was perfectly good-natured and quite trustworthy in
her own free and easy way. She had scandalized Miss Lascelles in the
earlier days of their acquaintance by her energetic determination to
have "a good time of it." She had made the lady principal's hair stand
on end by calmly suggesting nice rides and rows and luncheons at
village inns, _tête-à-tête_ with the "mooniest" young fellows who
could be laid hold of and crammed with stories about America and the
doings of American girls.
But practically Miss Vanhansen had the good sense to do at Rome as the
Romans did; she confined her independence to those sallies of the
tongue, which were not without a rousing charm in a place grown partly
languid, partly esoteric, by dint of a superabundance of culture and of
college statutes elaborate, involved and irreversible as the laws of the
Medes and the Persians.
Keturah Vanhansen rather liked the task imposed upon her. It appealed
at once to her kindliness of nature and her love of creating a
sensation; she would rouse this drooping young beauty who showed such
a sinful disregard of her complexion and eyes. Miss Vanhansen was
herself as sallow as a nabob, her small eyes, by an unkind perversity
on the part of her fairy god-mother, were of a fishy paleness, yet she
managed to her great satisfaction, by dint of dress and carriage, to
be a striking-looking and all but a handsome girl, so that she had no
overpowering reason to be jealous of her better-endowed neighbours.
She would astonish Miss Millar's weak nerves, and give her "a wrinkle
or two," before she had done with her.
At first May shrank back a good deal from the advances of the conquering
princess from the Far West; but here the English girl's humility and
good feeling stood her in better stead than her judgment. May was
grateful to Miss Vanhansen, and went so far as to be flattered by her
attentions even when they gave the recipient no pleasure. That frame of
mind could not last at seventeen. May, the most unsophisticated and
easily pleased of human beings, was won from her sad dreams of Redcross.
She was deeply obliged, she was faintly amused. At last she was fairly
launched on such a mild course of St. Ambrose gaieties as two girls in
a college could with grace pursue. This included tennis parties, rowing
parties, water-lily and fritillary hunts, "strawberries," concerts
instead of lectures in the afternoons as well as in the evenings,
afternoon teas--not _tête-à-tête_, not confined to a party of three,
but under what even Miss Lascelles would have considered sufficient
surveillance in the rooms of liberal heads of houses, hospitable young
dons, social, idle undergraduates. These had no more business on their
hands than could be summed up in cricket-matches or boat-races, and in
meeting Miss Vanhansen and listening to her queer unconventional
remarks.
At all these gatherings, May Millar in the budding beauty of seventeen
and the simplicity of her youthful dress, with her modesty and
_naïveté_, was made very welcome. Soon she began to feel herself ashamed
of the extent to which she was enjoying herself, as she was swept along
by the stream.
She was able to write home now long letters full of girlish enthusiasm
over the kindness of Miss Vanhansen, and the beauties and delights of
St. Ambrose's. Dora, though greatly relieved in her ungrudging devotion
to May, to find that Tom Robinson's words were fulfilled, was still a
little puzzled to understand how May could find time for so many gay
doings, and her studies into the bargain. But Dr. and Mrs. Millar could
only be happy in the happiness of their child, and hug themselves on
having thought more of her welfare than of her feelings at the moment of
parting. It was right she should see all the charming sights which were
to be seen, and enter a little into the special attractions of the great
University town--_that_ would not prevent her from settling down and
doing her proper work presently. You might trust the lady principal and
a studious young creature like May, who liked to be busy with her books
far before any other occupation, with a great deal more license than
that came to.
Then a new turn was given to the dissipation in which May was dipping.
The longing in which she had indulged, ever since she had first heard of
its possible fulfilment, was granted--a Greek play was to be acted by
the young women who stood for the "Grecians" of the year at Thirlwall
Hall, and May was there to see. From the moment the play was decided
upon to the hour of the first rehearsal, May spoke, thought, and dreamed
of nothing save "Alcestis."
Miss Vanhansen gave her up in disgust. "The ungrateful, soft-spoken
wretch!" cried the forsaken fair one; "the hypocritical young blue-grass
Penelope Blue! she has been bluer than the blue clouds all the time she
has been imposing on me as a pining, bread-and-butter, home-sick miss
among us Titanesses and daughters of the gods. Here I am ready to
collapse with trotting her about among the few girls in St. Ambrose's
who are sensible enough not to know the Empire of the East from the
Empire of the West, and would not care which was which if they did know,
and the still wiser young men who spend the long summer days lying on
their backs in their own canoes, reading Mark Twain. Oh! she is a
brazen-faced impostor. 'Molasses!' and 'Great Scott!' are not enough to
say to her. I should like to try her with the final polite remarks of
the last chief of the Dogs' Noses."
But contemporaneously with May's being thus dropped by her first friend,
she was peremptorily claimed and appropriated by the actresses. They had
not failed to notice her interest in their enterprise, and some of the
cleverest of them had already mastered an astonishing problem.
They had been guilty of nicknaming Miss Millar "Baby," because she had
been so lachrymose and shiftless when she came to Thirlwall Hall, and
had never looked up till she was handed over to Miss Vanhansen, who had
given her "airings" and "outings" all very well for a baby, and much to
Baby's taste as it seemed, but not exactly severe study. Yet in spite of
it all, and in spite of the halting inaccuracy of the training in a
private ladies'-school, May Millar knew more by sheer instinct, as it
sounded, of Alcestis, and felt more with her and for her, than the best
of those who professed to be her interpreters.
It was therefore not with wisely repairing the breaches in her Latin and
Greek, and laying these foundations afresh, as Rose was doing with her
art under Mr. St. Foy in London, that May was engrossed. It was with
becoming a bond-slave to those ambitious players. She lent herself to
the minutest details of their attempt, coached herself in them day and
night, till she could coach everybody in turn, and figured behind backs
as universal prompter, dresser, stage-manager--the girl who had been so
lifeless and incapable of looking after herself when she first came
among them that they had styled her the baby of the establishment!
Miss Lascelles, who was deeply interested in the play, both in her
highly-finished scholarship, and for the credit of Thirlwall Hall,
was electrified when she discovered the efficient coadjutor whom
the performers had found. "I am afraid there has been a mistake
made, and time lost," she said to herself ruefully. "How could I be
so shortsighted, when there is the making of the finest scholar in
the Hall in Miss Millar, who threatened to hang so heavily on my hands
that I was fain to send her to play with our generous 'Barbarian.'
What discrimination, what taste and feeling with regard to the
selection and fit declamation of these passages which we were doubtful
whether to retain or reject, or what to do with them! With what pretty
girlish shyness and timidity she made the suggestions! Nothing but her
passionate love of the subject, and her jealousy for its honour, as it
were, with her intense craving to have it fitly expressed, would have
induced her to come forward. I should like to hear what Professor
Hennessy," naming a great name among classical authorities, "thinks
of this young girl's interpretation of several parts of the play when
he comes to hear them. I should like to introduce Miss Millar to him
if she were not so frightened, and if she had taken the place which
she ought to have held to begin with. It is too late to rectify the
mistake and set her to work this term, and she had much better not go
in for the Markham scholarship which her father spoke of--that would
be worse than useless. But we'll turn over a new leaf next term. After
all, she is very young; and I suppose it is of no great consequence
that she has wasted her first half. Her family are professional
people, and these are generally well off." (Miss Lascelles was the
portionless daughter of the impecunious younger son of a poor
nobleman.)
When the play was performed nearly all the classical scholars of St.
Ambrose's--and what was a man doing at St. Ambrose's if he were not a
classical scholar, unless, to be sure, he happened to be a philosopher
of the first water, or a profound expounder of Anglo-Saxon, or a
strangely and wonderfully informed pundit?--came with their wives
and daughters, and graciously applauded the daring deed.
As for Keturah Vanhansen, she wore her _rivière_ of diamonds, dripping,
dancing, flashing like water that was perpetually flowing, and yet, by
some enchantment, arrested in its flow in glorious suspension. Set in
the middle of the enchanted water was such a breast-knot of rare,
exquisite, uncannily grotesque orchids as no queen or princess had ever
been seen to wear in St. Ambrose's. Indeed, it might have suited the
Queen of Sheba.
Miss Vanhansen announced that she wore her war-paint to do honour to the
Thirlwall Hall play, and to May Millar, whom she had forgiven, for
rancour never yet dwelt in the Yankee breast. "Alcestis" was a little
long, and "real right down funny," as her Aunt Sally would have said,
though it was a tragedy, and she, Keturah Vanhansen, did not understand
a word of it, notwithstanding this was her last year at Thirlwall Hall.
One good joke was the man who was in cats' skins, and carried a kitchen
poker for a club, and was half a head shorter than she was, and she was
not big; they should see her Aunt Abe if they wanted to know what a big
woman was like. Another joke was the sacks for the ladies' frocks, with
holes for the head and feet, and holes for the arms, so nice and simple,
and so graceful; Worth ought to get a hint of the costume. Only it was
not very distinctive, when one regarded the corresponding sacks for the
gentlemen. There was really nothing to mark out the ladies except the
large towels which they wore hanging down their backs, while the
gentlemen had Inverness capes over their sacks, fastened on the
shoulders with Highland brooches. How came the Greeks, in the time of
Euripides, to know about Inverness capes and Highland brooches? She,
Keturah Vanhansen, had been so startled by what she feared might be a
frightful anachronism that all her false hair had fallen off, and she
had been left like one of her Aunt Abe's moulting fowls.
The truth was that, in the matter of hair, nature had favoured Miss
Vanhansen with a peculiarly fine and luxuriant crop, so that she had no
need to apply to art for its help.
But as for May, she saw nothing and heard nothing of the discrepancies
which might mar the ancient story to far less ostentatiously
matter-of-fact and mocking critics than the would-be barbarian from
beyond the herring-pond. The piteous tragedy was enacted in all its
terror and pathos to May. She forgot even to sigh for one of the
original great open-air amphitheatres, with the cloudless blue sky of
Greece overhead, which had been the fit setting to those old-world
plays; while she appreciated, without being conscious of the
appreciation, every scenic item--the double stage, the attendant chorus,
the classic dress, that had awakened Miss Vanhansen's ridicule, from the
sandal on the foot to the toque on the head--all which could lend
verisimilitude to the spectacle. For the benefit of happy May, Alcestis
lived again in modern St. Ambrose's. Once more she suffered and died
willingly in the room of Admetus; once more the miserable husband's
half-heroic, half-savage ally, Harakles, fought Death for his pale prey,
and brought back the sacrificed wife from Hades, to restore her--a
figure veiled and motionless, yet instinct with glad life, every vein
throbbing with love and thankfulness--to the arms of her husband, more
joyful, and at the same time, in the middle of his joy, more full of
yearning sorrow and self-abasement than ever was happy bridegroom.
On the day after the play, Miss Lascelles casually mentioned to May that
even if she went in for the coming examination, she, Miss Lascelles,
thought May had better not try for the Markham scholarship.
"But I must, Miss Lascelles," protested May, starting up as if she
were awakening from a dream, and opening great eyes of distress and
apprehension--feelings which were only at that moment called into
life. "My father would be so vexed and disappointed if I did not."
"If you will take my advice, my dear, you will wait till next year;
there will be another scholarship falling in then. Very many of the
Thirlwall Hall girls do much better the second year than they have done
the first," Miss Lascelles continued to warn her girl-graduate, with the
delicate consideration and tact which qualified the lady principal for
her office. "It is bad policy to enter hastily into a competition with
failure staring you in the face. It will only serve to dishearten you,
and to mislead people with regard to what I am now certain--I can
honestly congratulate you on my conviction--are your really exceptional
gifts. You will do Thirlwall Hall credit, and we shall all be proud of
you, if you will have patience. You are very young; you can afford to
wait. It is a common occurrence for clever, studious girls, and lads
too, to come up to St. Ambrose's from the country, from private schools
or home-teaching, who are not sufficiently exact in their scholarship,
and do nothing beyond remedying the defect in their first or even their
second year. You don't grudge giving what is but a fraction of your
life, after all, to thorough as opposed to superficial learning, do you,
dear? Remember, the one is worthy and the other worthless--a mere
pretentious waste."
"I cannot help it," said May, with a little gasp of despair. "To wait is
just what I cannot afford to do. I am almost certain that my coming up
next year depends on what I can do this term. We have grown quite poor.
Father has lost a great deal of money lately. Even if he were content
to send me back here, I do not think it would be right in me to come,
unless I could do something to lessen the expense. My sister Annie is
in London learning to be a nurse, and my sister Rose is coming out as
an artist."
"I thought they were doing it from choice. Why did you not apply
yourself before, Miss Millar? You knew what you could do, better than
any of us here could possibly guess your talents and attainments.
From your general behaviour until the play was started, I for one, I
confess, fell into the grave error of supposing that you could do
little or nothing, or that any progress you had made was entirely
forced work." Miss Lascelles spoke sharply, for she was considerably
discomfited, and full of unavailing regret for her share in the
misadventure.
May could not tell her that she had been too miserable about coming
away from home, and leaving her mother and father, Dora and Tray, to
apply herself to learning; neither would there have been much use in
her applying if she had been destined to fade away presently as she
had imagined, and to die, bereft, among the lexicons, commentaries,
and lecture-notes of Thirlwall Hall. She preferred to say with meek
contriteness that she knew she had been very idle, but she would do
her best to atone for her idleness by working every lawful moment of
every hour of the few weeks which were left to her, if Miss Lascelles
would but allow her to go in for the examination, preparatory to
trying for the scholarship.
Miss Lascelles could not prevent her, she told May a little dryly, for
the students of Thirlwall Hall, though some of them were no more than
seventeen--May's age--were all regarded and treated as grown-up young
women capable of judging and acting for themselves. What Miss Lascelles
was bound to do was to see that Miss Millar did not run into the
opposite extreme, and bring on a brain fever by over-study. "And you
know, my dear," finished the kind, experienced woman, who was easily
softened, who had always the greatest difficulty to keep from being
sympathetic, "that would be a great deal worse than merely being turned
back in your examinations, though Dr. Millar is not rich, and there may
be obstacles--I sincerely trust they will not be insurmountable--to your
coming back in the autumn, to work with a will and at the same time with
moderation."
Poor May did not work herself into a brain fever, but she did in
other respects exactly as Miss Lascelles--a woman who understood
the position--had clearly foreseen. May succeeded in fretting, and
worrying, and getting herself into a state of nervous agitation.
Her brain, or that part of it which had to do with grammatical
declensions, derivations, rules, and principles, became a complete
muddle, so that in place of taking in new information, it seemed to
be rapidly letting go the old which it had once held securely.
Before the eventful day of May's examination, she had lost the last
shred of hope, and so had all who had heard her or formed a correct
estimate of the contents of her papers, of her crossing the rubicon. Of
her own accord she sorrowfully refrained from making any move to enter
the lists for the scholarship.
It is the fashion at St. Ambrose's not to issue the result of the
examinations for a considerable number of weeks, during which the
unhappy candidates hang on the tenterhooks of expectation. A looker-on
is inclined to consider this a refinement of cruelty till he or she has
taken into consideration that the motive of the protracted suspense is
to suit the convenience and lessen the arduous labours of the toil-worn
professors and tutors who serve as examiners.
But in May Millar's case her failure was such a foregone conclusion, was
so remedial by reason of her youth, and so qualified by the share she
had taken in the Greek play, that a point was stretched for her, and she
was privately put out of pain at once. Latterly May had not entertained
the slightest expectation of any other sentence, yet the blow fell so
heavily upon her that it was well it was the end of the term.
To do Thirlwall Hall no more than justice, everybody was sorry for
their youngest, gentlest, prettiest, most inspired, and withal most
inoffensive and obliging student. Miss Lascelles took May into her
private sitting-room and recklessly lavished the few moments the lady
principal had in which to rest and recruit from the fatigue of
receiving company, and playing a becoming part in the academical
gaieties with which the summer term at St. Ambrose's closes, in order
to speak encouraging words to the poor crestfallen child. Miss
Vanhansen implored May to cross the herring-pond at her expense, and
have a good time among the Barbarian's relations in Ol' Virginny and
Kentuck. The girl who had played Alcestis wanted to inaugurate a
reading-party in which May should be coached all round every day.
Failing this, the same adventurous spirit would get up a series of
Greek plays in London drawing-rooms, with Miss Millar's assistance;
and so far as she herself was concerned, she would never be contented
till Miss Millar played Admetus to her Alcestis. A large deputation of
blue-stockinged maidens from Thirlwall Hall escorted May to the
railway station, and more than one was relieved to find that she was
going first to join her sisters in London instead of carrying the
mortification of her failure straight to her country-town home.
It might be the deferring of an ordeal, and yet it was with a white
face, as abashed and well-nigh as scared as if she had committed a
crime, that May awaited Annie in the drawing-room to which the
probationers' friends were free at St. Ebbe's. The consciousness had
come too late of having wasted the little money her father had to spare
on sentimental self-indulgence and the gratification of her own feelings
instead of employing it as it was meant to be employed, in controlling
herself and doing her duty, so as to acquire fitting arms for the battle
of life.
It was this horrible comprehension which made her wistful eyes grow
distended and fixed in their sense of guilt and disgrace. She might have
committed a forgery, and be come to tell Annie what she had done. May
was essentially one-idea'd at this period of her life, and she had dwelt
on the fact of her failure and exaggerated its importance, like the most
egotistical of human beings, till it filled her imagination and blotted
out every other consideration.
Annie, in the full career of a busy professional morning, snatched a
moment between two important engagements to see her sister.
May looked with imploring, fascinated eyes at Annie in her nurse's gown
and cap. The younger girl had some faint inkling of Annie's earlier
experience in the life of an hospital; yet there she was as fresh and
fair and bright as ever--a thousand times cooler and happier-looking
than her visitor.
"Here you are, May," Annie was saying in glad greeting, as she held her
sister by the two shoulders, after she had kissed her; "and I declare
you have grown since you went to St. Ambrose's. Oh, you incorrigible
girl, when you were so much the tallest of us before you went there."
May could only make one answer with parched lips, faltering tongue, and
eyes dry under their heavy cloud of grief, "Annie, I have failed in my
examination!"
Annie started in surprise, while her face fell for a second. "What a
pity!" she could not help exclaiming. "Father will be----" She broke off
in the middle of the sentence. "Don't fret about it," she added, quickly
taking another look into May's face; "that will do no good, and it is
not very much after all. I cannot stay another minute now, May," she
went on to tell the bewildered girl in the most matter-of-fact tone, so
that May was in danger of feeling half-offended at finding her
tribulation taken so cavalierly--"just like Annie!"
"You must wait for me," Annie was saying further. "There is a poor
fellow--a patient of mine--who is to have his arm amputated this
morning, and I must be with him when it is done."
"Oh dear!" cried May, completely taken aback, "that is dreadful. Will he
die, Annie? Will he die?" forgetting all her own high-strung woes, the
product of an advanced stage of civilization, in heart-felt, human
sympathy with the most primitive of all trials--bodily suffering and
loss.
"Not if we can help it, please God," said Annie emphatically. Then an
inspiration came to her as she gazed on the girl's white quivering face.
"You have been working too hard, 'little May'; you shake your head like
a tragedy queen. Then you've been worrying too much, which is a great
deal worse. I shall take you in hand, but I can't stay to talk about it.
Just you think how little my poor fellow would mind not passing an
examination, in comparison with the loss of an arm--fortunately it is
the left one. He is a printer who got his arm crushed under one of the
great rollers, and he has a wife and five little children dependent on
their bread-winner."
Annie was gone, leaving May suddenly transported out of herself, and
plunged into the trials of her neighbours, the awfully near, common
life-and-death trials, of which she had known so little. Her own seemed
to sink into insignificance beside them. St. Ambrose's and its
intellectual lists and wordy contests, even its lofty abstruse
thoughts--excellent things in their way, without which the unlettered
world would become rude, sordid and narrow--faded into the background.
She forgot everything but the poor man passing through a mortal crisis,
with Annie able to succour him in his need, and his wife and children
waiting to hear whether the end were life or death.
May held her breath, and watched, prayed, and waited in her turn, with
no thought left for the news she had brought to town, and was to carry
to Redcross. What did it signify if only the poor man lived when May
herself was well and strong, and all her dear friends were in health,
and likely to be spared to her.
When Annie came in again with a cheerful face, and said, "He has stood
it wonderfully; there is every prospect of his making a speedy
recovery," May's face too cleared till for the moment it was almost
radiant. She acquiesced, with responsive animation, in Annie's
arrangement that since she, Annie, had got leave of absence for the
rest of the day she would put on her walking-dress, and she and May
too would go and pick up Rose at Mr. St. Foy's class-rooms; and what
was to hinder all the three from having an expedition together in the
fine summer weather to Hampton Court, or Kew, or the Crystal Palace,
thus celebrating May's visit to town, and making the most of Annie's
holiday? It would be like dear old times of primrose hunting, blue-bell
gathering, maying, and nutting down at Redcross before the cares and
troubles of the world had taken hold of the girls. Annie had already
sent on May's luggage to Welby Square, to which May would return with
Rose. Annie excluded herself carefully from this part of the programme,
with a kind of unapproachable haughtiness which had three strains of
stubbornness and one strain of fiery youthful anger in its composition,
while it was a complete enigma to May. But all she cared to know was
that she was going with her own two sisters for an entire afternoon's
delightful excursion. In the morning she had felt that she could never
have the heart to be happy again. Even yet she would not be quite happy;
she would be very much affronted when she was telling Annie and Rose the
particulars of her, May's, silliness and selfishness; how she had given
herself up to moping, and then how she had played herself--first with
the St. Ambrose gaieties, and later with the Greek play, instead of
setting about her work methodically and diligently. Annie would,
perhaps, tell her a few home-truths, and Rose would crumple up her
nose, shake her head, and look superhumanly wise--Rose who in the
old days had been more thoughtless than May.
Still she deserved it all a thousand times over, and it would be a
relief to have disburdened herself of the sorry tale.
Her own sisters would defend her from every other assailant. They would
feel for her, seek to reassure her, even make much of her, as they were
doing by taking her away with them this afternoon. May was very sensible
that a burden was lifted off her back.