“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.