Mary Gray Part 8

He had almost reached the doors of his club--Grogan might eat the curry for him, and be hanged to him!--when he saw advancing towards him the spare, elegant figure that sat its horse in front of the regiment below the General's window every morning. The oddest gleam came into his eyes.

The young man had recognised him, and was blushing like a girl as he came towards him. He had velvety brown eyes and regular features, was a handsome lad, the General said to himself as young Langrishe lifted his hat from his sleek, well-shaped head. He had the barest acquaintance with Sir Denis, and he would have pa.s.sed by if the old soldier had not stopped him.

"How do you do, Captain Langrishe?" he said. "I am very much obliged to you for the pleasure you give me every morning. I take it as uncommonly kind of you to bring 'the boys' past my house. I a.s.sure you I quite look forward to it--I quite look forward to it."

Langrishe stammered something about the regiment delighting to do honour to its old General, growing redder and redder as he did so. His confusion became him in the General's eyes. He was certainly a pleasant-looking, well-mannered boy, the General decided, and the confusion of the young soldier in the presence of the old soldier an entirely natural and creditable thing.

"I'll tell you what, my lad," said Sir Denis, putting his arm within the other's: "if you've nothing better to do, supposing you come and lunch with me. I'm just going in to the club. And you--on your way to it? I thought so. You'll give me the pleasure of your company?"

The General was half an hour late, yet he found a small table in a window recess unappropriated. It was set for two, and a screen was drawn about it so that the two could be as retired as they wished. More--the General had not been forgotten in the distribution of the curry. Their portions came up piping hot. From where they sat the General could see Sir Rodney Vivash and Grogan b.u.t.ton-holing each other. They were the bores of the club, and for once they had foregathered, willingly or unwillingly.

After all, there were compensations--there were compensations; and the General was hungry. His manner towards young Langrishe had an air of fatherly kindness. There was a gratified flush on the young fellow's lean, dark cheek. What was it the General had heard about Langrishe? Oh, yes, that he had had rough luck--that his old uncle. Sir Peter--the General remembered him for a curmudgeon--had married and had a son, after rearing the young fellow as his heir. No wonder the lad looked careworn. The regiment was an expensive one; not too expensive for Sir Peter Langrishe's heir, but much too expensive for a poor man.

However, it was no business of the General's--not just yet.

"You have met my daughter, I think?" he said. They were at the cheese by this time, and the General was apparently divided between the merits of Gruyere and Stilton. He did not glance at Captain Langrishe, but he knew quite as well as if he had that the colour came again to his cheek, that the brown eyes looked unhappily conscious.

"I have met Miss Drummond several times," he answered.

"Ah, you must dine with us one evening."

Young Langrishe looked at him in a startled way.

"Thank you very much, sir," he said, "but, as a matter of fact, I am negotiating a change into an Indian regiment. I don't know how long I shall be here. And I shall be very busy, I'm afraid."

"Ah! Just as you like--just as you like." The General, by the easiest of transitions, pa.s.sed on to the subject of soldiering in India. He had an unwontedly exhilarated feeling which later had its reaction in a consciousness of guilt.

"What would poor Gerald have said?" he thought, as he walked homewards that evening. "And I've nothing against Robin--I've nothing really against Robin, except his Peace Societies and all the rest of it. And the Dowager--yes, there's always the Dowager. I should like to know what on earth ever induced poor Gerald to marry the Dowager."

CHAPTER VIII

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 Princ.i.p.al, 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 Princ.i.p.al 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 s.p.a.cious cla.s.s-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 cla.s.s 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 pa.s.sed 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 grat.i.tude towards those dear cla.s.s-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 cla.s.s, 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 das, 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 G.o.dmother, 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.