Читать книгу The Abbey Girls In Town - Elsie Jeanette Dunkerley - Страница 3

Table of Contents

“Good-bye! Good luck to you! I hope they’ll be nice!”

“If they aren’t, come straight to us in Devonshire!” Kitty called shrilly after the outgoing train.

Ruth laughed and waved her hand again. “I’ll wire for you to meet me,” she called back.

Then as the train crept through the mazes of Southampton and gathered speed for its rush to town, she sank back in her corner and faced the new future.

Her dream lasted almost all the way to London. She had no wish to read and did not want anyone to talk to. She had come face to face with the unknown future that morning, when the first glimpse of England came in sight. Escaping from Mrs. Gordon and Kitty, who had been so good to her on the voyage, she had hung over the side and gazed enthralled at England, as England became real; England, that she had dreamed of all her life, out there on the African farm.

She was travelling alone, and looked absurdly childish to be doing so; slight and slim, with short fair hair which had a comforting tendency to be wavy, though no one could have called it curly. The rest of the family were coming in the spring, for circumstances had suddenly made it possible for everybody to have the longed-for trip “home”; but her father could not live in England in the winter; it was his poor health as a young man that had taken him out to the Cape, and it was not advisable for him to run risks now. So the rest were to follow in the spring, and have the summer in England. But Mrs. Gordon and Kitty, from the next farm, were coming in the autumn, and they had offered to bring Ruth to England with them, so that she might have a few months longer “at home”; and Ruth had accepted the offer joyfully. She was eighteen, though she did not look it; she was eager to see anything and everything she could, and was ready for every new experience.

The voyage had been intensely interesting, and Mrs. Gordon and Kitty had been very kind. Ruth had enjoyed every minute of the journey; she rather wished they had come a week later, so that she would have come in for the Christmas festivities on board the liner—she was sure there would have been plenty of fun going on. As it was, she felt a little doubtful about Christmas; in any case, it would probably be a very quiet one.

Everything depended on what her cousins were like; Ruth had felt that from the first, but she felt it with quite new force now that she was racing to meet them at the full speed of the express train. Her cousins were to meet her in London; she had wired to Mary from Southampton.

There were only two of them. Biddy was younger than herself, about sixteen, and went to college; and that was literally all Ruth knew about her.

She knew more about Mary than about Biddy; but what she knew was not all reassuring. Mary had been asked if Ruth might come to stay with them in London, and had written to welcome her. But she had added that they could not promise to do much to entertain her; their income was very small, and she had to go to work in an office every day, while Biddy went to college to prepare herself for a similar post. Their resources and their free time was limited, and Mary was afraid she would have to go about and do her shopping and sightseeing alone.

Ruth was quite equal to that. But she did wonder a trifle anxiously just how poor her cousins were, and whether her coming would really be awkward for them. Had they, for instance, anywhere to put her? What kind of place did they live in?

She would soon know; and it would all be interesting. But she hoped sincerely she was not being a real trouble to Mary and Biddy.

What exactly did she know about Mary? She was so old to begin with. Over thirty, Ruth understood; nearly twice Biddy’s age. Ruth felt secretly a little afraid of her. And she feared very greatly that Mary was “stodgy,”—dull, quiet, uninteresting, middle-aged. Judging from her letters, Mary was staid and dull, and cared only about her office work, with no outside interests.

“I’m afraid she’s going to get several shocks when she sees me!” Ruth thought grimly. “I guess I’ll wake them up a bit! But what about Biddy? Doesn’t she want to go out? Perhaps Mary sits on her and won’t let her have any fun? Then I shall have to stand up for Biddy, that’s all. She and I will go out together, and Mary can sit at home and darn stockings or type manuscripts!”

And then at this point, Ruth’s thoughts were always shipwrecked on one fact, which threw them all into confusion and left her drowning in a sea of uncertainty again. There had been a long time without any letter from Mary; so long that her mother and aunts had begun to say Mary Devine had forgotten them at last. Then, last summer, had come a long letter, longer than any they had ever had, several closely typewritten sheets. It had been as interesting as a story, and had been read with great delight and handed round from farm to farm. It had been full of new interests, new friends; it had been alive, while all that had gone before it had been dull and lifeless.

The letter had been so full of vivid life, and all that it had spoken of had been so new to the dwellers out in the wilderness, and so surprising when taken in connection with the uninteresting Mary! For it had spoken of music, of tunes which “went on and on, haunting one for days together”; and of dancing—dancing!

“Not like ordinary modern dancing at all,” Mary had written. “That always looks so dull to me. This is so full of changes, and so beautiful, and it fits the music so wonderfully. But it looks difficult; one would have to go to classes.”

There had been no hint that she had any thought of trying to learn the dances herself. “She wouldn’t, of course. She’d be too old,” Ruth said to herself. But Mary had said she hoped Biddy would go to classes and learn the dances; it was good to think of poor Biddy getting some change from her shorthand and book-keeping! Ruth’s sympathy for the injured and downtrodden Biddy was very keen.

But the letter had told more, much more, than merely of the classes Mary had watched. It had described how new friends had come into her quiet life; a wealthy pretty girl, who was referred to at first as “Miss Robins,” but who later on in the letter became just “Jen”; and “Miss Shirley,” who, as Mary’s story grew, became “Joy.” Ruth wondered hopefully if she would ever see these two; if the friendships had continued. Quite a big part of Mary’s letter had been given up to the story of a party, and it was this which had given most delight to the distant readers. It had been a children’s party, in a big hall far away in the East End of London; the East End was a very poor district, Ruth understood, and the children had been very poor children; but they had come together to dance country-dances, and Mary had watched and had quite evidently found keen enjoyment in the sight. The party had been managed by someone she referred to as “the Pixie,” a little person in green; and in her descriptions of the Pixie, the dancing children, and the club-building in which the party had been held, Mary had forgotten all her natural restraint and had written freely and with warm enthusiasm.

There had been one more letter from Mary before she left home; but it had been very short, written hastily in answer to the letter asking if Ruth might come; and had been distinctly a return to the earlier style. There had been no time for description or even news. Mary had said briefly that she and Biddy had been away in the country for three weeks; that they were very busy going to “classes”; and that they had many plans which Ruth would hear when she arrived. That had been all, except for her welcome to the unknown cousin. That letter had not helped Ruth at all in her knowledge of Mary; it had rather added to her doubt and perplexity.

One other curious happening had completed her bewilderment. The very night before she left home, an English mail had come in; and among the newspapers had been one which was unfamiliar, a semi-religious weekly paper. Searching its pages to find why it had been sent, Ruth had come on a column marked with blue pencil; and had read it, first curiously, then eagerly. It was signed “M.D.D.”; and it told simply, but powerfully, of a crippled slum child’s day in the country; how a fairy godmother, with red-gold hair, and wearing soft, lovely clothes of a pretty green colour, had taken her and four other girls in a car, away out where there were woods and streams and fields and birds and flowers; had come home in the evening at dusk, laden with the trophies of the countryside; and how some of these—beautiful big brown dried leaves of autumn, and twigs with growing green buds—had been treasured for weeks in the poor home, reminders of one gloriously happy day.

Had Mary Devine really written the little story? Was she suddenly developing into a writer? Ruth had asked the question; her parents had asked it; her aunts had echoed it. There had been no hint of this in Mary’s earlier letters; they had been dull and uninteresting in the extreme. The one letter, the extraordinary letter, had indeed been as interesting as a story; everybody had said so. But—Mary an author? It was too astonishing to be believed. To be sure, her father had been a journalist, and Ruth’s mother remembered that as a child Mary had been reported to be “always trying to write stories”; but no one had heard anything of these for fifteen years. What happened to Mary to make her begin again now? Was the article perhaps not written by her, after all? “M.D.D.” might be somebody else. But then, why had it been sent? No, it must have been Mary.

Ruth awoke to the fact that there were lights outside, that they seemed to be passing through an unbroken succession of towns and stations. And in ten minutes the journey should be over. Then these towns and stations were the beginning of London, and in ten minutes she would see Mary and some of her problems would be answered. How soon could she ask Mary if that article had really been hers?

As the train began to slow up, she leaned forward out of the carriage window, in eager excitement for the first sight of her perplexing, unknown cousin. Or cousins! Would Biddy perhaps come too?