The Little Warrior by P. G. Wodehouse

“You want to buy,” said Mr Mariner every time he shut a front-door behind them. “Not rent. Buy. Then, if you don’t want to live here, you can always rent in the summer.”

It seemed incredible to Jill that the summer would ever come. Winter held Brookport in its grip. For the first time in her life she was tasting real loneliness. She wandered over the snow-patched fields down to the frozen bay, and found the intense stillness, punctuated only by the occasional distant gunshot of some optimist trying for duck, oppressive rather than restful. She looked on the weird beauty of the ice-bound marshes which glittered red and green and blue in the sun with unseeing eyes; for her isolation was giving her time to think, and thought was a torment.

On the eighth day came a letter from Uncle Chris,—a cheerful, even rollicking letter. Things were going well with Uncle Chris, it seemed. As was his habit, he did not enter into details, but he wrote in a spacious way of large things to be, of affairs that were coming out right, of prosperity in sight. As tangible evidence of success, he enclosed a present of twenty dollars, for Jill to spend in the Brookport shops.

The letter arrived by the morning mail, and two hours later Mr Mariner took Jill by one of his usual overland routes to see a house nearer the village than most of those which she had viewed. Mr Mariner had exhausted the supply of cottages belonging to himself, and this one was the property of an acquaintance. There would be an agent’s fee for him in the deal, if it went through, and Mr Mariner was not a man who despised money in small quantities.

There was a touch of hopefulness in his gloom this morning, like the first intimation of sunshine after a wet day. He had been thinking the thing over, and had come to the conclusion that Jill’s unresponsiveness when confronted with the houses she had already seen was due to the fact that she had loftier ideas than he had supposed. Something a little more magnificent than the twelve thousand dollar places he had shown her was what she desired. This house stood on a hill looking down on the bay, in several acres of ground. It had its private landing-stage and bath-house, its dairy, its sleeping-porches,—everything, in fact, that a sensible girl could want. Mr Mariner could not bring himself to suppose that he would fail again today.

“They’re asking a hundred and five thousand,” he said, “but I know they’d take a hundred thousand. And, if it was a question of cash down, they would go even lower. It’s a fine house. You could entertain there. Mrs Bruggenheim rented it last summer, and wanted to buy, but she wouldn’t go above ninety thousand. If you want it, you’d better make up your mind quick. A place like this is apt to be snapped up in a hurry.”

Jill could endure it no longer.

“But, you see,” she said gently, “all I have in the world is twenty dollars!”

There was a painful pause. Mr Mariner shot a swift glance at her in the hope of discovering that she had spoken humorously, but was compelled to decide that she had not. His face under normal conditions always achieved the maximum gloom possible for any face, so he gave no outward sign of the shock which had shattered his mental poise; but he expressed his emotion by walking nearly a mile without saying a word. He was stunned. He had supported himself up till now by the thought that, frightful as the expense of entertaining Jill as a guest might be, the outlay was a good sporting speculation if she intended buying house-property in the neighbourhood. The realization that he was down to the extent of a week’s breakfasts, lunches, and dinners, with nothing to show for it, appalled him. There had been a black morning some years before when Mr. Mariner had given a waiter a ten-dollar bill in mistake for a one. As he had felt then, on discovering his error when it was too late to retrieve it, so did he feel now.

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