Princess Sarah And Other Stories Part 24

"Perhaps, perhaps," answered the little woman, nodding her head wisely.

"That all depends on yourself. If you are good, yes; if you are bad, no--most emphatically, no. I am much too important a person to be familiar to worthless people."

"I'm sure you are very kind," said Marjory meekly. "But what will you do to make me happy? You cannot give me back my Jack, because he has married some one else--the wretch!" she added under her breath, but the e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.n was for the woman whom Jack had married, not for Jack himself.

"You will learn to live without your Jack, as you call him," said the little woman with the soft voice, sagely, "and to feel thankful that he chose elsewhere. You once did me a service, and that is a thing that a familiar never, never forgets. I have been watching you ever since that time, and now I will reward you. Marjory Drummond, from this time henceforth everything shall prosper with you; everything you touch shall turn to gold, everything you wish shall come to pa.s.s; what you strive after you shall have; your greatest desires shall be realised; and you shall have power to draw tears from all eyes whenever you choose. This last I give you in compensation for the tears that you have shed this day. Farewell!"

"Stay!" cried Marjory. "Won't you even tell me your name? May I not thank you?"

"No. The thanks are mine," said the little lady. "When we meet again I will tell you my name--not before."

In a moment she was gone, and so quickly and mysteriously did she go that Marjory did not see her disappear. She rubbed her eyes and looked round. "I must have been asleep!" she exclaimed. "I must have dreamt it."

Several years had gone by. With Marjory Drummond everything had prospered, and she was on the high road to success, and fame, and fortune. Whenever her name was spoken, people nodded their heads wisely, and said: "A wonderful girl, nothing she cannot do"; and they mostly said it as if each one of them had had a hand in making her the clever girl that she was.

As an artist she was extremely gifted, being well hung in the Academy of the year; as an actress, though only playing with that form of art, she was hard to beat; and she had written stories and tales which were so infinitely above the average that editors were one and all delighted at any time to have the chance of a story signed with the initials "M.D.,"

initials which the world thought and declared were those of one of the most fashionable doctors of the day.

And at last the world of letters woke up and rubbed its eyes very much as Marjory had rubbed her eyes that day on the river's bank, and the world said, "We have a great and gifted man among us." "'M.D.' is _the_ writer of the time." And slowly, little by little, the secret crept out, and Marjory was feted and flattered, and made the star of the season. Her name was in every one's mouth, and her work was sought after eagerly and read by all. And among those who worshipped at her shrine was the "Jack" who had flouted her in the old days, yet not quite the same, but a "Jack" very much altered and world-worn, so that Marjory could no longer regret or wish that the lines of her life had fallen otherwise than they had done.

And often and often, as the years rolled by, and she was still the darling star of the people who love to live in the realms of fiction, did Marjory ponder over that vivid dream by the riverside, and try to satisfy herself that it really was no more than a dream, and that the old lady with the sweet clear voice had had no being except in her excited brain. "I wish," she said aloud one day, when she was sitting by the fire after finishing the most important work that had ever yet come from her pen, "I wish that she would come back and satisfy me about it.

It seemed so real, so vivid, so distinct, and yet it is so impossible----"

"Not impossible at all," said a familiar voice at her elbow.

Marjory looked round with a start. "Oh! is it you?" she cried. "Then it was all true! I have never been able to make up my mind whether it was true or only a dream. Now I know that it was quite real, and everything that you promised me has come about. I am the happiest woman in all the world to-day, and, dear friend, if ever I did a service to you, you have amply repaid me."

"We never stint thanks in our world," said the little old lady, smiling.

"Then there is nothing more that you want?"

"Yes, kind friend, just one thing," said Marjory. "You promised me that when we met again you would tell me your name."

The little woman melted away instantly, but somewhere out of the shadows came a small sweet sighing voice, which said softly, "My name is--Genius!"

Jewels to Wear

"Torches are made to burn; jewels to wear."--_Shakespeare_

CHAPTER I

"I can't think, Nancy, why you cannot get something useful to occupy yourself with. It seems to me that I have slaved and sacrificed myself all my life, in every possible direction, simply that you may waste your whole time spoiling good paper, scribbling, scribbling, scribbling, from morning till night, with your fingers inky, and your thoughts in the clouds, and your attention on nothing that I want you to attend to. I don't call it a good reward to make to me. You will never do any good with that ridiculous scribbling--never! When I think of what you _might_ save me, of how you _might_ spare me in my anxious and busy life, it makes me positively ill to think I am your mother. Here have I been thinking of you, Nancy, and working for you, and struggling, and fighting, and slaving for you for twenty years, and now that the time has come when you might do something for me, you have only one idea in your head, and that is writing rubbishy stories that n.o.body will ever want to buy!"

[Ill.u.s.tration: "You have only one idea in your head, and that is writing rubbishy stories that n.o.body will ever want to buy!"]

The girl thus addressed turned and looked at her mother.

"Mother, dear," she said depreciatingly, "I am sorry that I am not more useful. I can't help it. I do think of you, I try to do everything I can to relieve you, and help you; but these stories will come into my head. They won't be put out of it. What am I to do?"

"What are you to do?" echoed the mother. "Why, look at that basket of stockings to darn!"

"I am quite willing to darn them," said Nancy meekly.

"Yes, you are quite willing, I daresay. You are quite willing _when_ I tell you. But you don't seem to see what a burden it is to me to have to tell you everything as if you were a baby. There are the stockings, and there are you; at your age, you don't surely need me to tell you that the stockings need mending!"

"I will do them at once," said Nancy. "I will do them this minute."

"Yes, with your thoughts in the clouds, and your mind fixed on scribbling. What, may I ask you, Nancy, do you think you will ever do with it?"

"I don't know," said Nancy desperately. "Perhaps I may make some money some day."

"Never, never! Waste it, you mean. Waste it over pens, ink, paper and tablecloths. There is the tablecloth in your bedroom spotted with ink from end to end. It is heart-breaking."

"Well, Mother, what do you wish me to do?" the girl asked in desperation.

"Your plain and simple duty. I would like you to give up all idea of wasting your time in that way from now on," said the mother deliberately.

"Won't you even let me write a little to amuse myself in my spare time?"

asked the girl piteously.

"Your spare time!" echoed the mother impatiently. "What spare time have poor people such as we are? What spare time have I? Here are we with this great boarding-house on our hands, twenty-three boarders to be made comfortable, kept in good temper, fed, housed, boarded--everything to be done for them, and I have to do it. Why, in the time that you waste over those stories, you might make yourself a brilliant pianist, and play in the evening to them. Then you would be of some use."

"I don't think," said Nancy, "that anything will ever make me a brilliant pianist, Mother. There's no music in me--not of that kind, and I don't think that the boarders would like me half as well if I went and strummed on the drawing-room piano every evening for an hour or two, I really don't, Mother."

"No, you know better than I do, of course. That is the way with the young people of the present day. You are all alike. Ah, it was different when I was a girl. I would no more have dreamed of defying my mother as you defy me----"

"Mother, I don't defy you," Nancy broke in indignantly. "I never defied you in my life. I never thought of such a thing."

"Don't you write stories in defiance of my wishes?" Mrs. Macdonald asked, dropping the tragedy air, and putting the question in a plain, every-day, businesslike tone.

At this, Nancy Macdonald flushed a deep full red, a blush of shame it was, or what felt like shame, and as it slowly faded away until her face was a dull greyish white, all hope for that gift which was as the very mainspring of her life, seemed to shrink and die within her.

"Mother," she said at last, in a firm tone, "I will do what you wish. I will give up writing, I promise you, from this time forward, and I will not write at all while I have any duty left in the day. You will not mind my doing a little when I have seen the after dinner coffee served, will you?"

"That means, I suppose," said Mrs. Macdonald rather tartly, "that you will sit up half the night ruining your health, spoiling your eyesight, wasting my gas, and making it perfectly impossible that you should get up in good time in the morning."

"Mother," said the girl, in a most piteous tone, "when I am once late in the morning, I will promise you to give it up altogether, and for ever; more than that I cannot say. As you said just now, it is a hard life here, and we have not very much leisure time; but, I implore you, do not take my one delight and pleasure from me altogether!"

"If you put it in that way," said Mrs. Macdonald rather grudgingly, "of course, we can but try the experiment; but what good, I ask you, Nancy, do you think will ever come of it!"

"I don't know," said Nancy; "I can't say. Other people have made fortunes; other people have done well by writing; why should not I?"

"As if _you_ would ever make a fortune!" said Mrs. Macdonald, with the contemptuousness of a woman to whom the struggle of life had been hard and to whom pounds, shillings and pence in the very hand were the only proofs of reason for what she called "wasting time" over story-writing.