The Land of Promise: A Comedy in Four Acts (1922) Page 4

  "Thirty pounds a year."

  "Really?" in a tone of excessive surprise. "Many ladies are glad to go as companion without any salary, just for the sake of a home and congenial society. I daresay you've been able to save a good deal in all these years."

  "I had to dress myself decently, Mrs. Wickham," said Nora frigidly.

  Mrs. Wickham was graciousness itself. "Well, I'm sure my husband will be very glad to give you a year's salary, won't you, Jim?"

  "It's very kind of you," replied Nora coldly, "but I'm not inclined to accept anything but what is legally due to me."

  "You must remember," went on Mrs. Wickham, "that there'll be very heavy death duties to pay. They'll swallow up the income from Miss Wickham's estate for at least two years, won't they, Mr. Wynne?"

  "I quite understand," said Nora.

  "Perhaps you'll change your mind."

  "I don't think so."

  There was an awkward pause. Mr. Wynne rose from his seat at the table. His manner showed unmistakably that he was not impressed by Mrs. Wickham's great generosity.

  "Well, I think I must leave you," he said, looking at Nora. "Good-by, Miss Marsh. If I can be of any help to you I hope you'll let me know."

  "That's very kind of you."

  Bowing slightly to Mrs. Wickham and nodding to her husband, he went out.

  "We must go, too, Dorothy," said James uneasily.

  Mrs. Wickham began drawing on her gloves. "Jim will be writing to you in a day or two. You know how grateful we both are for all you did for our poor aunt. We shall be glad to give you the very highest references. You're such a wonderful nurse. I'm sure you'll have no difficulty in getting another situation; I expect I can find you something myself. I'll ask among all my friends."

  Nora made no reply to this affable speech.

  "Come on, Dorothy; we really haven't any time to lose," said Wickham hurriedly.

  "Good-by, Miss Marsh."

  "Good-by," said Nora dully. She stood, her hands resting on the table, her eyes fastened on the long blue envelope which Mr. Wynne had forgotten. From a long way off she heard the wheels of the cab on the driveway.

  CHAPTER IV

  "I thought they were never going. Well?"

  It was Miss Pringle who had come in from her retreat in the garden, eager to hear the news the moment she had seen the Wickhams driving away. Nora turned and looked at her without a word.

  Miss Pringle was genuinely startled at the drawn look on her face.

  "Nora! What's the matter? Isn't it as much as you thought?"

  "Miss Wickham has left me nothing," said Nora in a dead voice.

  Miss Pringle gave a positive wail of anguish. "Oh-h-h-h."

  "Not a penny. Oh, it's cruel!" the girl said, almost wildly. "After all," she went on bitterly, "there was no need for her to leave me anything. She gave me board and lodging and thirty pounds a year. If I stayed it was because I chose. But she needn't have promised me anything. She needn't have prevented me from marrying."

  "My dear, you could never have married that little assistant. He wasn't a gentleman," Miss Pringle reminded her.

  "Ten years! The ten best years of a woman's life, when other girls are enjoying themselves. And what did I get for it? Board and lodging and thirty pounds a year. A cook does better than that."

  "We can't expect to make as much money as a good cook," said Miss Pringle, with touching and unconscious pathos. "One has to pay something for living like a lady among people of one's own class."

  "Oh, it's cruel!" Nora could only repeat.

  "My dear," said Miss Pringle with an effort at consolation, "don't give way. I'm sure you'll have no difficulty in finding another situation. You wash lace beautifully and no one can arrange flowers like you."

  Nora sank wearily into a chair. "And I was dreaming of France and Italy--I shall spend ten years more with an old lady, and then she'll die and I shall look out for another situation. It won't be so easy then because I shan't be so young. And so it'll go on until I can't find a situation because I'm too old, and then some charitable people will get me into a home. You like the life, don't you?"

  "My dear, there are so few things a gentlewoman can do."

  "When I think of those ten years," said Nora, pacing up and down the length of the room, "having to put up with every unreasonableness! Never being allowed to feel ill or tired. No servant would have stood what I have. The humiliation I've endured!"

  "You're tired and out of sorts," said Miss Pringle soothingly. "Everyone isn't so trying as Miss Wickham. I'm sure Mrs. Hubbard has been kindness itself to me."

  "Considering."

  "I don't know what you mean by 'considering.'"

  "Considering that she's rich and you're poor. She gives you her old clothes. She frequently doesn't ask you to have dinner by yourself when she's giving a party. She doesn't remind you that you're a dependent unless she's very much put out. But you--you've had thirty years of it. You've eaten the bitter bread of slavery till--till it tastes like plum cake!"

  Miss Pringle was distinctly hurt. "I don't know why you say such things to me, Nora."

  "Oh, you mustn't mind what I say; I----"

  "Mr. Hornby would like to see you for a minute, Miss," said Kate from the doorway.

  "Now?"

  "I told him I didn't think it would be very convenient, Miss, but he says it's very important, and he won't detain you more than five minutes."

  "What a nuisance. Ask him to come in."

  "Very good, Miss."

  "I wonder what on earth he can want."

  "Who is he, Nora?"

  "Oh, he's the son of Colonel Hornby. Don't you know, he lives at the top of Molyneux Park? His mother was a great friend of Miss Wickham's. He comes down here now and then for week-ends. He's got something to do with motor cars."

  "Mr. Hornby," said Kate from the door.

  Reginald Hornby was evidently one of those candid souls who are above simulating an emotion they do not feel. He had regarded the late Miss Wickham as an unusually tiresome old woman. His mother had liked her of course. But he could hardly have been expected to do so. Moreover, he had a shrewd notion that she must have been a perfect Tartar to live with. Miss Marsh might be busy or tired out with the ordeal of the day, but as she also might be leaving almost immediately and he wanted to see her, he had not hesitated to come, once he was sure that the Wickham relatives had departed. That he would find the late Miss Wickham's companion indulging in any show of grief for her late employer, had never entered his head.

  He was a good-looking, if rather vacuous, young man with a long, elegant body. His dark, sleek hair was always carefully brushed and his small mustache trimmed and curled. His beautiful clothes suggested the fashionable tailors of Savile Row. Everything about him--his tie, his handkerchief protruding from his breast pocket, his boots--bore the stamp of the very latest thing.

  "I say, I'm awfully sorry to blow in like this," he said airily.

  He beamed on Nora, whom he had always regarded as much too pretty a girl to be what he secretly called a 'frozy companion' and sent a quick inquiring glance at Miss Pringle, whom he vaguely remembered to have seen somewhere in Tunbridge Wells. But then Tunbridge Wells was filled with frumps. Oh, yes. He remembered now. She was usually to be seen leading a pair of Poms on a leash.

  "You see, I didn't know if you'd be staying on here," he went on, retaining Nora's hand, "and I wanted to catch you. I'm off in a day or two myself."

  "Won't you sit down? Mr. Hornby--Miss Pringle."

  "How d'you do?"

  Mr. Hornby's glance skimmed lightly over Miss Pringle's surface and returned at once to Nora's more pleasing face.

  "Everything go off O. K.?" he inquired genially.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "Funeral, I mean. Mother went. Regular outing for her."

  Miss Pringle stiffened visibly in her chair and began to study the pattern in the rug at her feet with an absorbed interest. Nora was conscious of a wild desire to la
ugh, but with a heroic effort succeeded in keeping her face straight out of deference to her elderly friend.

  "Really?" she said, in a faint voice.

  "Oh, yes," went on young Hornby with unabated cheerfulness. "You see, mother's getting on. I'm the child of her old age--Benjamin, don't you know. Benjamin and Sarah, you know," he explained, apparently for the benefit of Miss Pringle, as he pointedly turned to address this final remark to her.

  "I understand perfectly," said Miss Pringle icily, "but it wasn't Sarah."

  "Wasn't it? When one of her old friends dies," he went on to Nora, "mother always goes to the funeral and says to herself: 'Well, I've seen her out, anyhow!' Then she comes back and eats muffins for tea. She always eats muffins after she's been to a funeral."

  "The maid said you wanted to see me about something in particular," Nora gently reminded him.

  "That's right, I was forgetting."

  He wheeled suddenly once more on Miss Pringle, who had arrived at that stage in her study of the rug when she was carefully tracing out the pattern with the point of her umbrella.

  "If Sarah wasn't Benjamin's mother, whose mother was she?"

  "If you want to know, I recommend you to read your Bible," retorted that lady with something approaching heat.

  Mr. Hornby slapped his knee. "I thought it was a stumper," he remarked with evident satisfaction.

  "The fact is, I'm going to Canada and mother told me you had a brother or something out there."

  "A brother, not a something," said Nora, with a smile.

  "And she said, perhaps you wouldn't mind giving me a letter to him."

  "I will with pleasure. But I'm afraid he won't be much use to you. He's a farmer and he lives miles away from anywhere."

  "But I'm going in for farming."

  "You are? What on earth for?"

  "I've jolly well got to do something," said Hornby with momentary gloom, "and I think farming's about the best thing I can do. One gets a lot of shooting and riding yon know. And then there are tennis parties and dances. And you make a pot of money, there's no doubt about that."

  "But I thought you were in some motor business in London."

  "Well, I was, in a way. But--I thought you'd have heard about it. Mother's been telling everybody. Governor won't speak to me. Altogether, things are rotten. I want to get out of this beastly country as quick as I can."

  "Would you like me to give you the letter at once?" said Nora, going over to an escritoire that stood near the window.

  "I wish you would. Fact is," he went on, addressing no one in particular, as Nora was already deep in her letter and Miss Pringle, having exhausted the possibilities of the rug, was gazing stonily into space, "I'm broke. I was all right as long as I stuck to bridge; I used to make money on that. Over a thousand a year."

  "What!"

  Horror was stronger than Miss Pringle's resolution to take no further part in the conversation with this extraordinary and apparently unprincipled young man.

  "Playing regularly, you know. If I hadn't been a fool I'd have stuck to that, but I got bitten with chemi."

  "With what?" asked Nora, over her shoulder.

  "Chemin de fer. Never heard of it? I got in the habit of going to Thornton's. I suppose you never heard of him either. He keeps a gambling hell. Gives you a slap-up supper for nothing, as much pop as you can drink, and cashes your checks like a bird. The result is, I've lost every bob I had and then Thornton sued me on a check I'd given him. The governor forked out, but he says I've got to go to Canada. I'm never going to gamble again, I can tell you that."

  "Oh, well, that's something," murmured Nora cheerfully.

  "You can't make money at chemi," went on Hornby, relapsing once more into gloom; "the cagnotte's bound to clear you out in the end. When I come back I'm going to stick to bridge. There are always plenty of mugs about, and if you have a good head for cards, you can't help making an income out of it."

  "But I thought you said you were never going----" began Miss Pringle, but, thinking better of it, abandoned her sentence in mid-air.

  "Here is your letter," said Nora, holding it out to him.

  "Thanks, awfully. I daresay I shan't want it, you know. I expect I shall get offered a job the moment I land, but there's no harm having it. I'll be getting along."

  "Good-by, then, and good luck."

  "Good-by," he said, shaking hands with Nora and Miss Pringle.

  "Nora, why don't you go out to Canada?" said Miss Pringle thoughtfully, as soon as the door had closed after young Hornby. "Now your brother has a farm of his own, I should think----"

  "My brother's married," interrupted Nora quickly. "He married four years ago."

  "You never told me."

  "I couldn't."

  "Why? Isn't his wife--isn't his wife nice?"

  "She was a waitress at a scrubby little hotel in Winnipeg."

  "What are you going to do then?"

  "I? I'm going to look out for another situation."

  Miss Pringle shook her head sadly.

  "Well, I must be going. Mrs. Hubbard will be back from her drive by this time. She's sure to have you in for tea or something before you go. She's always been quite fond of you. At any rate, I'll see you again, of course."

  "Oh, yes, indeed."

  Nora was thankful to be alone once more. She wanted to think it all out. What a day it had been. Starting with such high hopes to end only in utter disaster. She felt completely exhausted by the emotions she had undergone. Time enough to plan to-morrow. To-night she needed rest.

  Two days later, in the late afternoon, she found herself in the train for London, the second journey she had taken in ten years. Once, three years before, Miss Wickham had been persuaded to go up and pay the James Wickhams a short visit and had taken Nora with her.

  It could hardly have been described as a pleasure trip. Miss Wickham detested visiting and had only yielded to her nephew's importunities because she had never been in his London house to stay any time and had an avid curiosity to see how they lived. She had of course disapproved of everything she saw about the establishment. But, as it was no part of her purpose to let the fact be known to her relatives, she had in a large measure vented her consequent ill-humor upon her unfortunate companion.

  The last few days had seemed full, indeed. No matter how little one may really care for a place, the process of uprooting after ten years is not an easy one. Mr. Wynne had been to see her to renew his offer of assistance and counsel in any plan she might have for the future and she had spent an hour with the good doctor and his wife. The dreaded invitation from Mrs. Hubbard had duly arrived and had turned out to be for dinner, an extraordinary honor. Nora had accepted it entirely on Miss Pringle's account. Mrs. Hubbard had been condescension itself and had even gone the length of excusing Miss Pringle from the evening's game of bezique, in order that she might have a farewell chat with her friend.

  She had mildly deprecated Miss Wickham's carelessness in not altering her will, but had reminded Miss Marsh that she should be grateful to her late employer for having had such kindly intentions toward her, vaguely ending her remarks with the statement that as her dear husband had always said in this imperfect world one had often to consider intentions.

  It was from her more humble friends that Nora found it hardest to part. She had had tea with the gardener's wife and children of whom she was genuinely fond. But it was the parting from Kate that had brought the tears to her eyes. She had confided to that motherly soul how large she had loomed in the rosy plans she had made while she still had expectations from Miss Wickham, and been assured in turn that Kate couldn't have fancied herself happier than she would have been in looking after her, and the faithful Kate refused to regard the plan as anything more than postponed. It developed that she was an adept in telling fortunes with tea leaves. She hoped her dear Miss Marsh wouldn't consider it a liberty for her to say so, but in every forecast that Kate had made for herself in the last twelfth month, Miss Marsh had always bee
n mixed up, which showed beyond the peradventure of a doubt that they were to meet again.

  It was already dusk when London was reached, but Nora had an address of an inexpensive little private hotel which the doctor's wife had given her. She had written ahead to engage a room so that her mind was at ease on that subject. Not knowing exactly where the street might be, further than that it led off the Strand, she indulged herself in the novel luxury of a taxi and drove to her new lodgings in state.

  "If it isn't too much out of the way, would you take me by way of Trafalgar Square, please."

  The chauffeur touched his cap. His "Yes, Miss," was non-committal.

  She was conscious of an unusual feeling of exaltation as she went along. London, while it can be one of the most depressing cities in the world when one is alone and friendless, quickens the imagination. As they went through Trafalgar Square and caught a fleeting glimpse of the National Gallery, Nora resolved that she would give herself a real treat and renew old acquaintance with that institution as well as see the Wallace collection and the Tate Gallery, both of which would be new to her. She realized more poignantly than ever how starved her love of beauty had been for the last ten years. It awoke in her afresh with the thought that for a few days, at least, she could permit herself the luxury of gratifying it.

  She was shown to her room by a neat maid who said she would see what might be done in the way of a light tea. As a rule breakfast was the only repast that was supposed to be furnished. But she was quite sure Miss Horn, the proprietor, would, in view of the fact that the young lady was a stranger in London and would hardly know where to go alone for a bite of dinner, make an exception.

  Nora thanked her and set about making the bare little room, which was quite at the top of the house, look a little more homelike by unpacking some of her own things. After all, she reflected, it wasn't much less cheerful than the room she had had for ten years. Perhaps her late participation in the splendors of Miss Wickham's guest chamber, which had been part of Dr. Evans' prescription, had spoiled her for simpler joys. She laughed aloud at the thought.

  By the time she had had her supper, which was sufficiently good, and written a few notes--one to the doctor's wife to say that she thought she would be quite comfortable in her new quarters, and one to the head of the agency through which she had obtained her post with Miss Wickham--Nora found herself ready for bed.