“Fifteen, love,” said Dora mechanically, as she jotted down the score.
“No, I beg pardon, it isn’t; it’s fifteen all.”
“Nothing of the sort,” snapped her pet aversion, Gwen Morley, turning
on her with a flash of angry resentment. “You’re not paying attention.
It’s thirty, fifteen; that last ball was a fault, if it’s all the same
to you, Miss Vance, and our side had scored a point before that. It’s
thirty, fifteen, if you please.”
“Oh, very well,” said Dora--she made a point of never bandying words
with Gwen Morley. “If it is thirty, fifteen, I’ll set it down that way.
No doubt I made a mistake; my head aches. Go on with the game, please,
and I will try to keep the score properly--if I can.”
“If you can? Well, I like that! What are you here for? I don’t suppose
Miss Skimmers sent you out here to twiddle your thumbs and look at the
sky, although that’s about all you have done since we started playing.
If you can’t keep the score correctly, say so, and we’ll get some other
gifted and condescending pupil teacher to do it for you.”
Dora swallowed the affront with no more outward show of her feelings
than a slight heightening of her color, and presently the white balls
were skimming over the tennis net and flying through the hot, still air
again.
But if she said nothing, she thought a great deal, and the term “pupil
teacher” rankled, though why it should have done so--unless it was
because of the sneering tone in which it had been spoken--she could not
tell. For a pupil teacher she undoubtedly was, and had been for this
many a long day.
“It is your mother’s desire that, as she cannot afford to give you
the full advantages enjoyed by more fortunate pupils, you should do
something yourself to assist in paying for your education,” explained
Miss Skimmers, with something of a sneer, when Dora was old enough and
advanced enough to enter upon this stage of her existence. “You will
divide your time in future between receiving lessons and in imparting
them. You are quite advanced enough now to teach the little children of
the third form, and I will write and tell your mother so.”
“Oh, yes, do, please,” Dora had said, when she was told this. “If my
mother is poor, Miss Skimmers--and I suppose from what you say, she
must be--I don’t want to be a drag on her, and I should like very
much to do something to help pay for my education. But what is my
mother? You see, I was such a little thing when I first came here that
I don’t remember living anywhere else or belonging to any one else,
and I thought--oh, Miss Skimmers, I didn’t know until this minute that
I belonged to anybody or had a single relation in the world. But a
mother! How delightful! Have I a father, too?”
“No; I was told that your mother was a widow when you were brought to
me; a widow in good circumstances was how the man--he claimed to be her
solicitor--who brought you here put it, and I was not undeceived until
a year later, when she wrote me to the contrary, and said that, when
you were old enough, she desired you to do something toward reducing
the expenses of your education.”
Casting back her memory, when she heard this, Dora could readily guess
when that time was; for she had a distinct recollection of coming
suddenly--and for some reason unexplained at the time--down from the
giddy eminence of “show pupil,” who was trotted out to be exhibited
whenever a possible new client made his or her appearance, to the
undignified position of something that ought to be--and was--kept in
the background and translated from the splendors of a bedroom on the
first floor to one that had broken furniture and discolored walls and
nothing but a thin layer of leaky slates between it and heaven. She
had suffered in that upper-story bedroom--suffered agonies of heat
in summer and tortures of cold in winter, and the dread of scurrying
plaster-disturbing rats at all seasons, whether hot or cold--but it all
sank into insignificance now before the glory of having a mother.
“Who is my mother?” she asked of Miss Skimmers, in the gladness of her
heart and the joy of finding that she possessed such a glorious thing.
“Where is she? What is she? Oh, tell me, please.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” Miss Skimmers answered, as she shrugged
her shoulders and walked away. “All my dealings with her have been
through a third party. But she is evidently not a person of my class or
the class and standing of my other patrons.”
And considering that Miss Skimmers’ parents had been in the
green-grocer line, and that her pupils were the daughters of successful
drapers, butchers, milliners, and publicans, Dora was rather glad to
hear it.
In some strange indefinable way she felt herself of a different clay
from the rest of Miss Skimmers’ pupils, and held herself aloof from
them. And they felt it, too, and hated her for it, hardly knowing
why--only that she always reminded them of a rose in a bed of
dandelions, and, try as they would to remember that the dandelions
were gifted with the hue of gold, they could not forget that they were
little, undersized, glaring, stiff-stalked, piggish, close-to-the-earth
things and that the rose was always the rose, and that it was nature’s
law that it should hold its head above them and be a nobler flower than
they.
For a time, the knowledge that she had a mother somewhere in the world
filled Dora with a sense of a joy that was sufficient in itself, and
she used to lie awake nights and dream of the time when that wonderful
mother would come and take her away, or perhaps call in the mid-term
just to see her, as the other girls’ mothers sometimes did. But as the
weeks and the months and the years rolled by and brought no realization
of the dream, it died slowly down into the dead level of her daily life
and was forgotten entirely--or if not actually forgotten, at least
laid away, as children lay away the fables and the fairy tales of the
nursery when they have grown too old to believe in them as possible
things.
“There wasn’t any truth in it; it was all a ‘make-believe’ of Miss
Skimmers, and I haven’t any mother at all,” she said to herself
whenever the phantom of that dead hope came back to haunt her. “If
I had, she would not have left me so utterly alone for all these
years--it isn’t human. She will never come--I know it now--because she
doesn’t exist. I seem fated to pass my life enduring the cold insolence
of brewers’ daughters, like Gwen Morley, and the sneers of people like
Miss Skimmers. I won’t, however. I’ll get out of it all, as soon as I
am old enough to go away, and I’ll earn my living and make a place for
myself in the world, somehow.”
That had been her determination months and months ago, she was thinking
of it now as she sat, a dreary, shabby, spiritless figure, in the
grounds of Miss Skimmers’ “School for Young Ladies,” and watched the
tennis balls fly to and fro through the hot, still air of the summer
afternoon.
The hot sun beating down upon her made her head ache, and the glare
of the white dresses of the tennis players hurt her eyes; even the
whistling of a thrush in a near-by tree seemed to irritate her to-day,
and the loud laughter of the girls was positively maddening. But she
kept on with the distasteful task of umpiring the match, and said never
a word, until suddenly a shadow lengthened across the grass, fell upon
her score book, and made her look up. Then she saw that one of the
housemaids was standing beside her, and became conscious that the girl
was saying something to her.
“You will have to get some one else to umpire for a time,” she said, as
she rose from her seat and laid the score book down beside Gwen Morley.
“Miss Skimmers has sent word that she wants to see me at once.”
She was unspeakably glad to get out of the heat and the blinding glare
of the sun, and she walked away instantly, going straight to the
cool, shadowy, little room where Miss Skimmers passed her hours of
relaxation, and where the maid had told her that lady was waiting for
her.
She opened the door and walked in--wondering the while what she was
going to be taken to task for now; a summons to Miss Skimmers’ presence
usually meaning that. She was not at all surprised when she beheld that
large plethoric female pacing the room in a state of violent excitement
and wheezing like an asthmatical dragon.
“Shameful, I call it, Miss Vance!” she blurted out, without any
preface, as Dora came into the room. “After all the sacrifices I have
made for you, after all the consideration I have shown you both! And in
the middle of the term, too, without a word of notice or a chance to
supply the vacancy”--her voice rising to a sort of shriek, as she flung
her unwieldy body about the room. “Shameful, I call it; outrageous, I
call it, and wanting in all respect, all decency, all consideration for
me.”
“If you will tell me what all this is the prelude to, Miss Skimmers,
perhaps I shall be able to understand what you mean,” said Dora, in
that calm, low, reposeful voice, which was one of nature’s birth gifts
to her, and which even fourteen years in the Skimmers’ establishment
had not been able to destroy. “Will you tell me, please, what has
happened and let me draw my own conclusions with regard to what you are
pleased to term the ‘shamefulness’ of it; I suppose it has something to
do with me, or you would not have sent for me.”
“It has everything to do with you,” cried Miss Skimmers, in what Dora,
in unholy moments of secret mirth, was wont to call her “here’s your
fine cauliflowers and nice fresh radishes” voice. “It has everything to
do with you and with that inconsiderate person, your mother.”
“My mother? Let us leave that phantom out of the matter, Miss Skimmers.
I am eighteen years of age--or I shall be in a month--and it is hardly
complimentary to my intelligence to expect me to have faith in fairy
tales now.”
“I don’t know what you mean,” said Miss Skimmers. “You were always a
queer girl, and I never could understand you. I dare say that your
mother is like you, or she wouldn’t be treating me in this shameful
way and sending for you in the middle of the term and not giving me a
moment’s notice to get some one to fill your place.”
Dora’s head swam and she staggered a little as though the heat had
overcome her.
“My mother,” she said faintly. “You say that my mother has sent
for--oh, Miss Skimmers, are you losing your senses or am I? My mother?
Mine? She exists? And has sent for me? Oh, Miss Skimmers, is it really
true?”
“Yes, it is; and very uncommon shabby of her I call it, too--sending
for you like this, and not giving me time to fill your place. Here’s
her letter, if you want to see it. She’s stopping at a place called
Minorca Villa, in Crumplesea, on the Kentish coast, and she writes
that you’re to go to her there at once, and not to delay a moment in
starting. And here’s a five-pound note she inclosed for you to get a
new frock and to pay your railway ticket, and here’s a card, too, with
the address on it, ‘Minorca Villa, Nightingale Road, Crumplesea, Kent.’”
Dora took both the letter and the card, read each--in a state of
blissful excitement--and then took possession of the five-pound note.
“To think of my mother being a really existing person!” she said, with
a happy little laugh. “Oh, Miss Skimmers, I can scarcely believe it. I
shall go at once, at once.”
She was as good as her word. Within the space of half an hour, she
had packed her small belongings into a shabby valise--a relic of
her “first-floor” days--sent them over to the railway station by a
housemaid, said good-by to the house cat, her only friend and companion
in the dreary days she was leaving behind her, and had shaken the dust
of the Skimmers’ establishment from her feet forever.
The day no longer seemed hot and suffocating, and the sun no longer
hurt her eyes as she walked down the dusty, glaring, treeless road to
the railway station--she was going to her mother, that poor, sorely
tried, wonderful mother, who was an existent, after all, and whose
poverty had kept them so long apart. For by some strange process of
reasoning which was not compatible with the facts of the case, she had
arrived at the conclusion that poverty was the sole explanation of her
mother’s long neglect of her.
“Poor little mother!” she thought, as she hurried out; “it took all
she could spare to pay for my education, of course, and she could not
afford to waste money in coming to see me. What a dear she is to
have done so much! But never mind, I’ll make it all up to you, and
there will be two now to fight the battle, and as the proverb says,
‘Many hands make light work.’ I can teach music, and no end of things,
and--you’ll see!--it won’t be long before I find pupils and am in
a position to give you a nice little home and at least some of the
comforts a lady should have.”
For, of course, her mother was a lady; there could be no possible
doubt of that, considering that in the old days she had had her
affairs attended to by a family solicitor and was spoken of as a
person of considerable importance--a lady in reduced circumstances, it
is true, but still a lady. In her mind’s eye, Dora could almost see
her already--a sweet-faced, sweet-voiced motherly old lady with gray
hair and mild eyes; a dear, soft-treading, soft-speaking, gentle old
darling, with a tiny white cap on her head and such beautiful shapely
old hands.
“How I shall love her; how I shall love her!” said the girl, with a
little rush of happy tears; then she laughed aloud in her happiness,
and, catching sight of the station at last, quickened her steps, until
she was almost running when she finally entered it. Going up to the
ticket office, she purchased her ticket.
“Have to change at Morecome Junction,” said the clerk, in answer to her
query; “and if you catch the connection, you ought to be at Crumplesea
about six-forty. If you miss it, you’ll have to stop at Morecome the
night; there’s no other trains to Crumplesea until the morning. Train
for Morecome’s coming in now.
“Number four platform--and you’ll have to step lively if you want to
catch it.”
“Thank you,” said Dora, as she gathered up her ticket and the change.
In another moment, she was flying down the stairs to the train and to
the beginning of the strange new life that lay before her.