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.”