THE DREAM COTTAGE

Otago Witness, Issue 3804, 8 February 1927, Page 75

THE DREAM COTTAGE

By

Alice F. Webb.

(Fob tub Witness.) When I was three years old, and my brother Sam "was learning to walk, Dorothea came to live with us. I do not pretend that I recall her advent, but 1 set the date from her own account oi her life, which I was given at a much later period of my own existence. Our mother’s time was very fully occupied by the constant claims made upon her by the poor among father’s patients, beside the difficulty she had, in common with most doctor’s wives, of obtaining good servants. This led to her being frequently without help, and thus compelled tb devote much of her time to housework generally, and to the production of wellcooked food at verv irregular hours. Often a case in the country would delay my father’s return till long past the set hour for his lunch, or he might have to rush back to the hospital when he should have been ready for dinner. But mother and he held very strong views on the necessity of regular hours for food, sleep, and exercise in the bringing up of healthy children, which is why they decided to engage a nursery governess for their two children, and by great good fortune selected Dorothea. She considered the good luck to be all on her side, for she had been recently left an orphan, and being little more than a child herself, was faced with the problem of earning her own living, for which she was very ill-prepared. She must have been a pretty girl at that time, though sober—almost sad in manner. Hers had been a haonv home, and in all human expectation there had been no likelihood of her having to leave it at the age of seventeen, and provide for herself for the future. She was an only child, the daughter of a country clergyman. Her mother was the victim of an unsuspected heart trouble which caused her death from shock when her husband was drowned at a Sunday School picnic when trying to rescue a child which had slipped into a deen hole in a river. Thus, in a single hour, was she robbed of both her parents and of her sheltered home.

But the hand of Providence was plainly shown to be shaping her career in the fact that the medical man who was hastily summoned to the spot was my father, who was spending a few days in that district fishing. He was much troubled by the prospect of a hard and lonelv life for the sole survivor of this little family, par- •• ticularly when he heard later on that she would inherit nothing after her father’s affairs had been put in order by his lawyer, who was also his churchwarden, and who had taken Dorothea into his own house until her future could be suitably arranged. Writing to my father, he expressed great regret that he, personally, could do little to help her, having a large family of his own to provide for. He asked if father knew of anyone among his patients who needed a companion, as, so far as he was able to judge, the girl was not competent to earn enough to keep herself by any branch of teaching, nor was she strong enough for any very arduous domestic work. Father was going to reply, that several of his patients wanted a companion, but could not afford to have one, when mother said :

“Suppose we try her as nursery governess ourselves? Of course its a drawback her being an only child, because she will know nothing of babies, but it will be something to her to start with, and will save her from marrying some undesirable for a home.” So they wrote to Dorothea and told her they needed some one to take care of their son and daughter, and asked if she would try whether this was work she would like. She replied that she knew nothing about children, but if they would be patient she would learn—so very gladly—and when might she come? That was how she came to us, and she stayed for years. From the verv first we called her •’Dorothea.” Miss MacDonald was too big a mouthful for babies to say. So quickly did she fit into our home life that it seemed as if she had always been there. Shortly after she came, a Httle sister was born, to be followed later by two more brothers. Many times, as a small chlid, I heard my mother say: “What I should have done without you when Edgar was born, or when they all had measles, I cannot think 1” Dorothea said little in response; she was never a loquacious person, but one did not need words to get a sense of her devotion to my mother or of the love she had for us children. But as the years went on we all outgrew " the limited amount of knowledge she was able to impart, and the elder' of us went away to school. By the time Edgar was old enough for a preparatory school, I was “finished,” and able to come home and give mother the help she needed. Therefore, there being no longer any need for her, and school fees for the others being a heavy item in the family expenditure, my parents very reluctantly parted with Dorothea at her own suggestion, and slfe took another somewhat similar situation in the South Island, and for some years we saw nothing of her. And now I must begin to tell you of the cottage. In all the games she played with us, building houses with cards, or wooden blocks, or telling stories round the fire on winter evenings, she preserved an ideal cottage. She used to tell us that she intended to live in it when she was too old to work, and we would laugh at her, prophesying that she would marry and never need her dream cottage, or at a vounger stage, would beer to be chosen as the fellow-occupant of this de-

lightful dwelling. After she left us she frequently made mention of the cottage in her letters, and even drew plans for it, for although she said she couldn’t draw to save her life. She managed, somehow, with a few lines ruled on a scrap of paper, and a vivid sentence or two, descriptive of the vision, to make us see rooms furnished with real furniture, and all pervaded bv a kind of ghostly Dorothea, white haired and feeble, but happy in- the fulfilment of a day-dream which had helped her through many dull hours. In all the time I knew her she laid aside a portion of her earnings, necessarily a small portion, since hers was not the kind of industry which reaps a large reward in cash, though its reward, other than the earthly one, is hard indeed to estimate. These savings were known as “the cottage fund,” and she would often declare that soon she would have enough. But from her letters after she went south we reached the conclusion that with each new situation she took her salary was less, while her work was more. In of things her work could only be for a few short years, unless in very large families, and in some places to which she went, she was unable to stay more than a month or two, finding that although a nursery governess had been advertised for, what was really expected was a kind of cheap drudge who would be perfectly willing, during the. frequent changes in the much more highly paid domestic staff, to act as stop-gap, doublebanking her own duties with those of cook-laundress or house-parlourmaid. For this she had not the strength. Besides as she wrote, hardly any employers in such cases offered any payment for these extra emergency duties, and none were willing to-allow a holiday, however brief, after such special efforts. “Governesses have term holidays,” she once wrote, “but as far as I know nursery governesses have no holidays, only the extra work made by the return of the elder children from school.”

But through it all the thought of her dream-cottage in the future buoyed up her spirit. “I shall not have stairs in my cottage,” she wrote at a time when she was assis-tant-matron in a large girls’ school. “My duties here, which include the care of the linen, and putting away clean clothes, takes me up and down so many times that I find stairs are a weariness to the flesh.” Again she wrote from another place. “Until I can afford a hot water service, I shall not build. Carrying bath water, and then having to re-fill the boiler, is a sad burden at the end of a long day.” In one letter she told me she had chosen the site for her cottage, a small section in Roslyn, with a fine view of the harbour. In her earlier designs of my nursery days the dwelling had but two small rooms and a verandah. Later plans, were more ornate in design, and liberal in accommodation, and consequently more costly to build, as I pointed out, but sh e only replied: “If the plan grows, so does the fund.” A godmother, dying, bequeathed to her a small legacy. It was added to the growing fund, and the interest upon it was capitalised, thus increasing the fund more rapidly. And at last the time came when, by careful economy, she had laid by enough to enable her to build the cottage of her dreams and purchase an annuity which would enable her to live in it.

The cottage fund had been removed from the Post Office Savings Bank when the legacy was added to it, and was invested for her by her lawyer, where it would gain higher interest. Her lawyer was the same man who had been churchwarden to her father, and had befriended her when, as a . child, she had been thrown upon her own resources by the untimely death of her parents. He was an honourable man of good reputation, but unfortunately, being human, he could not live forever, and in course of time he died, leaving his business to his two sons. Dorothea knew little or nothing of these young men, but reposed the same confidence in them as had been so well merited by their good father. She was a woman with no business capacity, and, seeing no reason to doubt the brothers, signed such documents as they sent to her for signature, without a notion of their contents. These precious blackguards, one of whom was an habitual drunkard, both being addicted to racing, regarded her as “an easy mark,” and converted her funds to their own uses, when they -were faced ’with ruin bv reason of their debts ■ on the turf. Doubtless thev intended it only as a temporary loan. Few gamblers deliberately steal—at any rate at the beginning of their career, as such—but the money was lost, and here was Dorothea writing that she intended to withdraw it from their trust account in which she believed it to have been placed on the repayment of the mortgage in which, it had been invested. While awaiting the building of her cottage Dorothea had consented to pay me a long visit in my own home. I'had long been happily married, and Fred, my husband, loved her almost as much as I did. • She was with us, therefore, when the news was published of the flight of one partner and the suicide of the other consequent upon their fraudulent bankruptcy. Dorothea had gone to her room to rest a little before the evening meal when the paper came which contained this news. After reading it ; I went to her room, seeking for words in which to tell her of the cruel downfall of all her plans. But there was no need for words. I found her seated in a chair, leaning forward on thg-table on which she had spread the plans of her dream cottage to study out the final details which remained to be added. She will never need her cottage on earth, for she was dead. Heart failure, the doctor we summoned -certified. “Probably she has had heart trouble for years, and possibly she did not know it,” he told us.

So now slie has left this earth, and occupies “a mansion in the skies.” Does it in anyway resemble her dream-cottage? I wonder ?