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?