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 nobody 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.

"Well, if not a fortune, at least a comfortable income," said Nancy eagerly; "and if I did, Mother, I should give it all to you!"

"Thank you for nothing, my dear," was the ungracious reply.

To this Nancy made no answer. She carried the big basket of stockings to the window, and sat down in the cold winter light to do such repairs as were necessary. Poor child! It was a hard fate for her. She was the eldest of a family of five, all dependent on the exertions of her widowed mother in keeping afloat the big boarding-house by which they lived. For a boarding-house, be it ever so liberally managed, be the receipts ever so generous, is but a sordid abode, especially to those who have the trouble and care of managing it; and to an eldest daughter, and one who stands between the anxious mother and the younger children, who mostly resemble young rooks with mouths chronically open, such a life appears perhaps more sordid than it does to any one else.

To Nancy Macdonald, with her mind full of visionary beauty, and living daily in a world of her own--not a world of boarding-houses--the life they lived seemed even more sordid, more trivial, more petty, than it was in reality. Her wants were not many; she was never inclined to rail at fate because she had not been born with a silver spoon in her mouth, not at all. But if only she could have a quiet home, with an assured income, just sufficient to cover their modest wants, to provide good wholesome food, to buy boots and shoes for the little ones, to pay the wages of a good servant, to take those lines of anxious care from her mother's forehead, so that she could employ her leisure in cultivating her Art--she always called it her Art, poor child!--she would have been perfectly happy, or she _thought_ she would have been perfectly happy, which, in the main, amounted to the same thing. As she sat in the cold light of that winter's afternoon, darning, as if for dear life, the great pile of stockings which were her portion, she soon drifted away from the tall Bloomsbury dwelling into a bright, brilliant land of romance, where there were no troubles, no cares, where nothing was sordid, and everything was bright and rosy, and even troubles and worries might have been adequately described as "double water gilt."

Young writers do indulge in these blessed dreams of fancy, and Nancy, remember, was only twenty. Her heroines were always lovely, always extravagantly rich or picturesquely poor; her heroes were all lithe and long, and most of them had tawny moustaches, and violet eyes like a girl's. They were all guardsmen or noblemen. They knew not the want of money; if they were _called_ poor, they went everywhere in hansoms, and had valets and gambling debts. It was an ideal world, and Nancy Macdonald was very happy in it.

From that time forward a new life began for the girl. The household certainly went more smoothly, because of that promise to her mother; and Mrs. Macdonald's sharp tongue whetted itself on other grievances more frequently than on that old one about Nancy's scribbling propensities. It was irritating to Nancy, of course, to hear her mother continually nagging about something or other; but then, as she reminded herself very often during the day, her mother had great anxieties and grievous worries. She was a sort of double-distilled Martha, "careful and troubled," not about many things, but about everything--everything that did happen, or might happen, even what could happen under given circumstances which might and probably never would occur. Still, it was not so trying to bear when the shafts of sarcasm and complaining were aimed at others instead of herself, and to do Nancy strict justice, she did try honestly to do the work which lay to her hand.

In the midst of the multitudinous cares of the large household it must be owned that the girl's writing suffered. It is all very well for a girl in fiction to do scullery work all day long, and write the brilliant novel of a season in odd moments, in a cold and cheerless bedroom, but in real life it is very different. Nancy Macdonald gave her attention to stockings and table-linen, and shopping and ordering and dusting; to keeping boarders in good temper, and making herself generally useful; to superintending the education and manners of the little ones, to smoothing down the rough edges of her mother's chronic asperity--in short, to being a real help; but her much loved work practically went to the wall. She dreamed a good deal while she was doing other things, but mere dreaming is not of much help towards making name or fortune; work is the only road which leads to either. Still, you cannot do your duty without improving your character, and Nancy Macdonald's character was strengthening and softening every day. She worked a little at night, but often she was far too tired and weary to attempt it. Very often when she did so, she found that the words would not run, the incidents would not connect themselves, and frequently that her eyes would not keep open; and then I am obliged to say that it was not an uncommon thing for Nancy Macdonald to get into bed and cry herself to sleep.

Still, her character was strengthening. With every day that went by she learnt more of the power of endurance; she became more patient, more fixed in her ideas; the goal of her desires was set more immediately in front of her. It was less visionary, but it was infinitely more substantial. In a desultory kind of a way she still worked, still wrote of lords and ladies whom she did not know in the flesh, still drew pictures of guardsmen with longer legs and tawnier moustaches even than before. She spent the whole of her pocket-money (which, by the bye, consisted of certain perquisites in the house, the medicine bottles and the dripping forming her chief sources of income) on manuscript paper, and was sometimes hard pushed to pay the postage on the mysterious packages which she smuggled into the post-office, and to provide the stamps for paying the return fare of these children of her fancy. Poor things, they always required it. No enterprising editors wanted the long-legged guardsmen, their blue eyes and tawny moustaches notwithstanding. Nobody had a welcome for the lovely ladies, who were all dressed by Worth, though they never seemed to have heard of such a person as Felix. The disappointments of their continued return were very bitter to her; yet, at heart, Nancy Macdonald was a true artist, and had all the true artist's pluck and perseverance, so that she never thought of giving up her work. It was only that she had not yet found her _metier_.