For once, in a way, fortune favored Dora. She managed to catch the connecting train at Morecome Junction, and, as a consequence, arrived at Crumplesea—tired and dusty, but still full of enthusiasm—at a quarter to seven that same evening.
It was the night of the opening of the Crumplesea Opera House, and she found the whole town placarded with gaudy posters of “The Beauty of Gotham”—glaring, highly colored things, depicting women with impossible tresses of an impossible shade of yellow, frisking about in skirts above their knees.
But in that first glance she had seen the name, “Miss Rosalind Montague-Vance,” emblazoned over the boldest and the most conspicuous of them all, and she had felt an added shame because of that.
Not that she had any idea that the bearer of it could be in any way, even the remotest, connected with herself—for there were hundreds of “Vances” in the world; even Miss Skimmers having had more than one of them enrolled among her pupils in Dora’s time—but that the knowledge of there being a woman bearing a name the same as her own, who could let her pictures be shown in public, made the shame of it seem a personal matter.
“How it must shock poor little mother, if she has seen it, too,” she said to herself. “Fancy having one’s name flaunted about by a creature like that, and in the very town where one lives! It must be awful.”
The change of the five-pound note that had been sent her was still in her pocket—there had not been time to stop anywhere and buy the new frock she had been told to do—and hastily summoning a cabman to her aid, she gave him the necessary directions, and was soon speeding away to Minorca Villa with her shabby old valise on the top of the vehicle.
Her destination was a rather shabby little brick house in a side street—there were such things as “apartments” to be had in Crumplesea, and all the available ones were engaged for Mr. Milton Dante’s company—and here at this flat-fronted, dejected-looking little building, Dora’s long journey from Miss Skimmers’ seat of learning came to an end.
“Come in, miss,” said the landlady—who opened the door in person. “The maid, she’s away—’aving been sent a’ errand by your sweet ma. You’re Miss Montague-Vance’s daughter, of course; anybody could see that at a glance, for you’re the livin’ image of ’er. ’Ere, Sarah! come and take the young lady’s luggage and carry it up to the room Miss Montague-Vance selected for ’er. Come in, miss; your sweet ma, she’s awaitin’ of yer—’aving but recent come back from a drive round the town with Mr. Bodwin, as owns the opera ’ouse, and Mr. Dante, as runs the company.”
All this was Greek to Dora. As a matter of fact, she hardly heard it, for her mind was in a whirl between settling with the cabman and realizing that she was now under the same roof with her unknown mother. She scarcely knew what was said or done, until she was led down a short and narrow passage, and the woman beside her was knocking at the door before which they both stood.
“The young lady, mum,” said the woman, as, in answer to a nonchalant, “Come in,” she turned the knob, and, letting a strong odor of Turkish cigarettes stream out into the passage, thrust open the door, “the young lady, mum, and I’m a-showin’ of ’er straight in like you asked.”
Dora waited for nothing more.
“Mother!” she said, with a little throb in her voice as she pressed past the landlady and entered the room, shutting the door behind her.
It seemed so holy, this meeting for the first time since infancy with the mother who had borne her! “It is I; it is Dora; it is——”
Here she stopped. The room was full of smoke, and through the dense aromatic cloud, she saw a figure curled up in a deep armchair beside a table littered with papers, magazines, and cigarette ashes—a figure clad in a beautiful lace tea gown, and with a lovely, alluring face framed in a loose mass of disheveled wine-gold hair.
“Oh! I beg your pardon,” said Dora, coloring and instinctively fumbling for the knob of the door. “Such an absurd mistake. Pray forgive me; the fault was not mine. I expected to find my mother here.”
“Well, so you have done. If you are Dora—and what an absurdly big creature you have grown! I am your mother.”
“You? Absurd! Oh, pardon me, I don’t mean to be rude, but really this is too silly. You can’t be more than a year or two older than I am myself—and I am nearly eighteen years of age.”
“Nearly sixteen, please; I’ve told Dante that, and we may as well stick to it. It’s bad enough to have to confess that I’m old enough to have a daughter nearly sixteen, without adding two years to it, for the sake of truth. What in the world has made you grow like this? Of course, I know that your father was tall, but if I had thought that you were as big and as old-looking as you are, I don’t believe I should had have courage enough to send to that Skimmers woman for you—although I don’t know; it’s worth something to have a dig at your aunt! What are you staring at me like this for? For pity’s sake, sit down. Why didn’t you get a new dress? I sent money for you to do so. But perhaps the Skimmers woman didn’t give it to you? Did she? Why don’t you answer? I hate people who stare and say nothing. Sit down and talk to me, for goodness’ sake. I haven’t much time to waste with you, anyway; I’ve got to be off to the theater in a few minutes. I’m opening the new opera house to-night, you know—or, perhaps, you don’t know! But the town is well billed, and if you have any eyes at all you must have seen my name on the boardings.”
Dora drew back with a sudden influx of memory and with a shuddering sense of repulsion. “Oh, you don’t mean—you can’t mean that you—you are that woman? And that you are my mother as well?”
“Why can’t I mean it? Look here! that Skimmers woman hasn’t raised you like some Puritanical old granny, has she? I’m going to put you on the stage, you know, and have a ‘go’ at your spiteful aunt, in that way. She always treated her brother and me very shabbily. I don’t suppose you ever heard much about your father? Well, he was the unfortunate stepbrother to the richest woman in this part of the country: Mrs. Charles Bonair. He’s dead, by the way, so you won’t be worried by him. Although I wrote her, she wouldn’t give a farthing to me. Stingy old cat! I told her about you—oh, make no mistake about that—and I’ll make her pay dear for what she has tried to do against me in this town. She would not let sleeping dogs lie, and now that she has waked ’em up, she’ll have to pay the price for it, if I know myself.”
Something that was like the pressure of a strong hand gripped Dora’s throat. She did not speak; she could not—all strength, mental as well as physical, seemed somehow to have died within her, and, in a sort of collapse, she sank down on the edge of a convenient seat, and stared dumbly at the shining figure before her; a sense of shuddering repulsion biting into her soul and mirroring itself, in spite of her, in her fixed eyes. For, somehow, this woman, her newly found mother, reminded her of a snake curled up in rose leaves.
“Don’t stare at me like that or I shall throw something at you, in a minute!” blazed wrathfully the object of her attention, reading that look and starting suddenly up in a temper. “I can see how it is: you hate me. No; don’t trouble yourself to tell a polite lie—that sort of thing is wasted on me—and besides, the sentiment is reciprocated. I think I never saw a more ill-favored, unlovable creature in my life! It positively makes me ill to look at you, with your way of looking at people as though they were dirt beneath your feet. Upon my soul, I’m half inclined to send you back to where you came from and to have nothing more to do with you.”
“I wish you would,” said Dora impulsively. “It was a hard life at Miss Skimmers’ but—I wish you would.”
“Oh, do you? Well, I won’t, then! I’m not the kind of person to invest in stocks and then tear up the certificates. I may be like a hen who has hatched out an eagle’s egg, but—the eagle is of some use to me at present, and I’m not going to have it kicked out of the nest, simply because it desires that sort of thing. I’ve made all my arrangements with Milt Dante, and I’m going to put you on the stage.”
“No, never!” said Dora, finding her voice suddenly. “I don’t want to go on the stage; I prefer to be as I am.”
“Oh, do you? Well, perhaps you haven’t any voice in the matter. You are under age, and I am your legal guardian, and it strikes me that you are going to do as you are bid, whether it meets with your approval or not. I’ve made all arrangements with Mr. Dante, and you are going to appear here—in this very town—to-morrow night, and are going to be ‘featured’ on the bill as ‘Miss Vance, the niece of Mrs. Charles Bonair, of Thetford Towers,’ and you are going, in that character, to lead the March of the Amazons and to wear as little as the law allows in the way of dress.”
“I will never do it!” said Dora, starting to her feet, her whole body shaking and her cheeks aflame, as she thought of the “ladies” she had seen on the posters. “I don’t know whether you have told the truth or not about my being the daughter of a gentleman, but—I will never do a thing like that. I will run away first.”
The figure in the chair rose unsteadily, in a froth of lace and a billow of roseate silk, and laughingly drained out the last drop from a champagne bottle on the table and drank it.
“You won’t get the chance to run away,” she said, “I shall keep you under my own eye until then. You will go with me to the theater to-night, and I will put you under Milt Dante’s care whenever I am obliged to leave you. As for your appearing on the stage to-morrow night, you’ll do that if I have to chloroform you and have you carried on. I’ll pay that woman for trying to shut me out of Crumplesea, make no mistake about that. Now, come and help me dress; it’s time I was off to the theater, and that fool of a Bodwin will be round here with his carriage presently, to drive me there.”