The Land of Promise: A Comedy in Four Acts (1922)

'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.