A Houseful of Girls Part 7

Mrs. Millar said no more, though the poor lady still s.h.i.+vered, as she looked at the girl in her brilliant youthful bloom. It was too terrible to think of her a.s.sociated with disease and death, she whom her father and mother would have sheltered from every rough wind. Yet what was pretty Annie in the ranks of humanity, in the march of history? The frivolous product of a heathen world, the feminine counterpart of some

"Idle singer of an empty day"?

or--

"A creature breathing thoughtful breath, A traveller 'twixt life and death"--

a Christian girl who with all true Christians had the Lord Christ, who went about doing good, for an everlasting example? And had there not all along been something fine in Annie, under her superficial hardness and inclination to conceal her feelings, something which her family had not suspected, brought to light by their troubles? something of which everybody connected with her would be prouder in all humility, with reason, in the days to come, than they had ever been proud of her supreme prettiness and lively tongue in times past.

"It is a pity about my age," went on Annie ingenuously, lamenting over her deficiency in years as other people lament over their superfluity in that respect, "but it is a fault which will mend every day. I have found out that there are two hospitals which make twenty-three--just a year older than I am--the age of admission for probationers, and there is one hospital that admits them at twenty. Would not the fact of my being a doctor's daughter go for something? Have you not interest, father, if you care to exert it, to get the hospital authorities to stretch a point where I am concerned? You might tell them that I am the eldest of the family," drawing up her not very tall figure, "that I have been treated as grown-up for years and years, and that I have several younger sisters whom I have tried to keep in order." There was a returning twinkle in Annie's brown eyes and a comical curve of her rosy lips.

But she relapsed into extreme gravity the next moment; indeed, she was more agitated than she had yet been, and for Annie to betray an approach to tearfulness was a rare spectacle.

"There is something worse than my age. I am afraid I am not half good enough. I have a hasty temper; you have frequently said so, mother. I often speak sharply, and am not always aware when I am doing it. I hurt people, as I hurt myself, without being able to help it--something seems to come over me and impel me to do it. Often I cannot resist making game of people. I am so silly and fond of fun, like a child, a great deal worse than 'little May' ever is, when the fit is upon me. Now, if I could think that I should lose patience with poor sick people, and wound instead of comforting them, or that I should find them food for my love of the ridiculous, and forget and neglect their wants in following my own amus.e.m.e.nt, I should hate myself--I would die sooner than so disgrace a nurse's calling."

"You would not do it, my dear," said Dr. Millar, with calm conviction.

"Why, what treason is this you are speaking against yourself?" cried Mrs. Millar, bristling up in her daughter's defence, the a.s.sailant being that daughter. "You unkind or unfeeling when there was any call for kindness--whoever heard of such a thing? I should as soon suspect Dora of harshness or levity in the same circ.u.mstances. Don't you remember my bad eyes last winter, when I had to get that tincture dropped into them so often that your father could not always be at home to do it? You dropped the tincture as well as your father could, and though I know I must have made faces wry enough to frighten a cat, you never vouchsafed a remark, and I did not hear the ghost of a laugh. Poor Dora was ready to read to me by the hour, and to fetch and carry for me all day long, but when she tried to drop the tincture her hand shook so that she sent the liquid down my cheeks; and she was so frightened for giving me pain that I could see when I opened my eyes she was as white as a sheet, and fit to faint herself."

"Dora's hand will get steadier and her heart harder by and by," said Dr.

Millar, laughing. "Not that she has the knack of the operator, any more than you have, Maria. I don't think one of you has it, except Annie here."

"That was nothing," said Annie quickly. She added in a lower tone, "And oh, mother, how could you imagine that I should laugh at your pain?"

"It was only for a moment, and I daresay it was not agonizing, as I was tempted to call it; very likely your father and you would not have so much as winced at it. Then there was Miss Sill, poor old Miss Sill.

Annie, I am afraid you girls laughed at her. Girls will be girls, and she does dress outrageously. You all said her mantles were worse than my cap," tenderly touching that untrustworthy piece of head-gear. "When she sent for your father all of a sudden, just when he had been summoned to Dr. Hewett's brother, who was very ill, as we knew, while we thought Miss Sill had only one of her maiden-lady fancies, your father told you to go over and say he would be with her in the course of the day. But you found her nearly choking with bronchitis. How you were not frightened out of your senses, I, who am a great deal more than twice your age, and the mother of a family, cannot tell. You propped her up in exactly the right position, saw to the temperature of the room, and caused her cook to bring in the kitchen boiler and set it to steam on the hob, before another doctor could be found. Miss Sill told me all about it afterwards; she believes she owes her life to you."

"Oh, nonsense," protested Annie, "I was a little better than her two servants, who stood looking at her, and beginning to sob and cry; but I made several gross mistakes. You told me about them afterwards, father; it was a great mercy that I did not cause her death."

"So far from that," continued Mrs. Millar, in triumphant defiance, "she calls you her young doctor to this day, and says she will send for you in preference to your father or any other doctor the next time she has an attack."

"Infatuated woman!" declared Annie.

"I have not needed to talk to you in order to get you to go with your sisters and see her since then. You have gone of your own accord twice as often, and I am sure you have not laughed at her half so much. In fact, I believe you are becoming quite attached to her."

"I suppose I am grateful to her for not dying in my unskilled hands. I am afraid I still think her rather fantastic and foolish; but it does make a difference in one's judgment of a person to have really rendered him or her a service. I ought to be fond of Miss Sill, after all, if she is to rank as my first patient."

Mrs. Millar sank into silence on the instant. She stood convicted in her own eyes. What had she been doing? Proving to her daughter's satisfaction that she had the special talents of a nurse!

"I am very glad that mother and you think me--not by any means good enough, of course, not that, but not too impatient, sarcastic, and trifling to be a nurse," said Annie brightly, addressing her father, who simply acquiesced in an absent-minded fas.h.i.+on.

After that there was no serious objection made to Annie's wish, great as the wonder was at first--a shock to her relations no less than to her acquaintances. The former reconciled themselves sooner to it than did the latter, with an entire faith in Annie and an affectionate admiration which was genuine homage. It swelled Dora's heart well-nigh to bursting with sister-wors.h.i.+p. How good Annie was showing herself, how capable of great acts of self-denial and self-consecration, while she was prettier than ever with her graceful head, her merry brown eyes, and that soft, warm colour of hers!

Only Mrs. Millar lay awake at night and cried quietly over what lay before her young daughter, her first-born, the flower of the flock, as people had called her in reference to her beauty. Annie's pretty Grand-aunt Penny had at least enjoyed her day; she had had her triumph, however short-lived, in marrying the man of her heart, who was also a Beauchamp of Waylands, and in being raised for even a brief s.p.a.ce to the charmed circle of the county. What she had to go through--whether she would or not--in the end, was not worse than Annie was proposing to encounter in the beginning, to live in an hospital, to spend her blooming life amidst frightful accidents, raging fevers, the spasm of agony replaced by the chill silence and stillness of death. Annie's father's time and strength had been given in much the same cause, ever since he was a young man pa.s.sing his examinations and taking his diploma. But he was a man, which changed the whole aspect of affairs; besides he had always had a cheerful home to come back to, with the command of all the social advantages which Redcross, his native town, could afford. He had not lived among his patients with no life to speak of separate from theirs.

At the same time Mrs. Millar felt herself powerless. She dared no more interfere to keep back Annie from her calling than a good Roman Catholic mother would forbid her daughter's "vocation."

CHAPTER VIII.

STANDING AND WAITING.

It was all over in its earlier stages, that dividing and dispersing of the goodly young group of sisters, that bereaving and impoveris.h.i.+ng of the abandoned home to which Dora and May had looked forward with such fear and pain, for which all Dr. Millar's fort.i.tude and all his wife's meekness had been wanted to enable them to bear it with tolerable calmness. It was only Annie and Rose doing what every young man, with few exceptions, has to do. It was only their going away to work out their bents in London. They had often gone from home and followed various impulses and promptings before. But this was different. All who were left behind had a sure intuition that this was the beginning of the end, the sifting and scattering which every large family must undergo if their time is to be long on earth. Annie and Rose might often come back on visits. Rose might even set up a studio in Redcross and work there, but it would not be the same. She would be an independent member of society, with her own interests to think of--however faithfully and affectionately she might still be concerned for the interests of others--and her individual career to follow. Her separate existence would no longer be merged in that of a band of sisters; it would stand out clearly and distinctly far apart from the old state of tutelage and subserviency of each unit to the ma.s.s. The lament of the tender old Scotch song over the departing bride applied equally to Annie and Rose, though there were no gallant "Jamies" to accuse of taking them "awa', awa'." In the same manner it was not so much over the cause of their going that Dora and May lamented, or the father and mother's hearts were sorrowful, as

"Just that they'd aye be awa', awa'."

One day as May was coming back from school she met Tom Robinson, and he stopped her to ask how the family were, and to tell her something. There had always been less restraint in his and May's greetings than there had been in those of the others since his dismissal as a suitor. There was something in May's mingled studiousness and simplicity, and in the strong dash of the child in her, which dissipated his shyness and tickled his fancy. If matters had turned out otherwise than they had done, he told himself vaguely, he and "little May" would have been a pair of friends. He had no sister, and she had no brother, and he would have liked to play the brother to this most artless of learned ladies.

"Look here, Miss May," he said, after the usual formulas, while he turned and walked a few paces by her side, "do you remember the fox-terrier puppy I was to have got for you and your sister Rose, in the spring? Well, he died of distemper, poor little brute; but I have heard of another of the same kind that has had the complaint. I could get him for you if you cared to have him."

"Oh! I am so much obliged to you, Mr. Robinson, so very much obliged,"

cried May, beaming with grat.i.tude and pleasure. "Rose and I did so wish to have that dear little puppy which you brought down to show to us once--don't you remember? and so it is dead, poor little pet; and Rose has gone away to London to be regularly trained as an artist, just as Annie is in St. Ebbe's learning to be a nurse. I suppose you have heard," she ended a little solemnly.

"Yes, I have heard--let me carry these books for you a bit--what is there of Redcross news that one does not hear?" Then he paused abruptly, while there darted simultaneously across his mind and May's whether his speech did not sound as if he thought that Dora Millar's refusal of him must be public property? "For that very reason," he went on with a momentary shade of awkwardness, "I mean, because two of your sisters are gone, I fancied you might like this other little dog to keep you company."

"I have Dora," said May simply, and then she dashed on in an unhappy consciousness that she ought not to have mentioned Dora's name to him on any account. "I should like it immensely though--thank you a hundred thousand times, it was so good of you to think of me. But Rose could not have it now, could she? and she wished it quite as much as I did. It does not seem nice to have it when she is not here to share it,"

finished May, with wistful jealousy for Rose's rights in the matter.

"I do not see the force of that objection," said Tom Robinson, cheerfully. "Rose has something else instead. She has all London to occupy her. I am certain she would like you to make the best of Redcross without her."

"Yes, and of course the little dog would be half hers, the same as if Rose were here. She would see it every time she came home. She might have her turn of it at her studio, when she gets a studio. In the meantime I could write full particulars of it, how it grew and what it learnt. Oh, Mr. Robinson, has it white boots like the other you brought?"

"I am afraid I did not attend to his boots, or to his stockings either for that matter," said Tom with a laugh; "but he has a coal-black muzzle, his teeth are in perfect order, and I believe he has the correct tan spots."

"If mother would let us," said May longingly. "You know Rose and I had not spoken to her about it; we were waiting for a good opportunity to ask her, when you were so kind as to give us the chance of having the other little dog. Mother seldom refuses us anything which she can let us have, still Rose was not sure that mother would give her consent. You see she is troubled about the stair-carpets and the drawing-room rugs, and the garden-beds, and we were afraid she would think we should have the dog with us everywhere."

"Then it rested with yourself, I should say, to show her that you could keep a dog in his proper place."

"But I doubt if I could," said May candidly, shaking her head, with the brown hair which had till recently hung loose on her shoulders, now combed smoothly back, and twisted into as "grown-up" a twist as she could accomplish the feat; while to keep the tucked-up hair in company, her skirt was let down to the regulation length for young ladies.

"Indeed, I am almost certain I could not refuse anything to a dear little dog coming to me and sitting up and begging for what he wanted.

What is more, if I could Dora couldn't." She could have bitten out her tongue the next instant. What was she doing always speaking of Dora?

What would he think? That she was wilfully dragging her sister's name into the conversation? And what had tempted her to say that Dora could not refuse anything to a dog, when she had refused her heart in exchange for his to the man walking beside May?

He made no remark. If his mouth twitched a little in reproach or sarcasm, she could not see it under his red moustache; besides, she dared not look at him.

"I wonder," continued Miss Malapropos, "how I could let you know what mother thought." She never once suggested his bringing the dog for inspection, as he had brought the other, or calling for her answer.

"You might drop me a note," he said, stopping to give her back her books, "and I hope for your sake that it may be favourable, for this is a nice little dog, and I think you would like him."

May went home more nearly on the wings of the wind than she had done since Rose's departure, and presented her pet.i.tion. Mrs. Millar could not find it in her heart to refuse it, though the stair-carpet, the drawing-room rugs, and the garden-beds were all to be sacrificed.

"Poor little May! she misses Rose, though Dora and May have become great friends of late. Dora is very good, and puts herself on an equality with May, as Annie could not have done. Still, she does not rouse the child as Rose roused her. What do you think, Jonathan? Would a little dog be in your way? Would its barking disturb you?" Mrs. Millar appealed to her husband.

"Not in reason, Maria; not if it does not take to baying at the moon, or yelping beyond bounds. Dora gives in too much to May, in place of taking the child from her books, on which naturally she is inclined to fall back. Dora has become her audience, and listens to her performances--even aids and abets them. I caught them at it yesterday.

First May actually declaimed several paragraphs from a speech of Cicero's, and next she got Dora to repeat after her the most crabbed of the Greek verbs. I shall have a couple of blue-stockings, and what is worse, one of them spurious, in the room of the single real production I reckoned upon among my daughters. By all means let May have a howling monster. She is not too old for a game of romps; and I must say, though I have never opposed the higher education of women, I don't want her cultivated into a gossamer, a woman all nerves and sensations, before she is out of her teens."