The Essential W. Somerset Maugham Collection. W. Somerset Maugham
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 laugh, 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.