Dear man! how I love to think of him! The memory of his dear, placid face, his harmonious voice, his gentle touch, and tread, and tone, makes my heart swell!
Eugenia and I were then left together. She had nothing; I was not rich; and we quitted Nutfield, and went into a country town. We had once been members of a large, cheerful family, but death had mown them all down, and reserved his keenest, most relentless edge for the last. After a few uneventful years, Eugenia became fatally ill. She died; and I was left alone! And then I came here.
People were very kind to me. Miss Burt was my first acquaintance, and I must say she did me good service; never resting till she had fixed me under this roof. Indeed, she is seldom happier than when doing something for somebody; her only faults, that I know of, being a love of vexatious, petty domination, and a great impatience of check. Having nailed me here, as she called it, she next took me round to a few poor people under the hill, whom she put, as it were, under my charge; saying her own hands were full enough, and too full already, and the superintendence would rouse me, and do me good. I shall never forget her tone and attitude when, on entering one of these cottages, and espying a small grease-spot on the floor, she stood transfixed, and tragically exclaimed—
“What’s that I see?”
The poor woman looked cowed; and I am sure I felt so.
When we came out, Miss Burt said to me, complacently and with a little authority, “That’s the way you must do things.” She had looked into every corner, turned up the basins and tea-cups, detected a black-beetle, which scudded away with a very reasonable instinct of self-preservation, and removed the match-box, which she said was too near the fire.
It might be her way, but I could never make it mine. I could not defy the Lares and Lemures of a rustic hearth in that fashion; and never could make myself more at home in a poor person’s dwelling than its owner. But perhaps Miss Burt did most good.
Time had its healing effect. I had practically learnt that here we have no “continuing city,” and the impression of the lesson was perhaps weakening, when I was laid low by a prostrating and painful illness, that at first threatened my life, and then left me in a state of weakness and incapacity that has confined me two years to this sofa.
Thus, the story of my life is comprised in few words. And yet I retain the habit of jotting down its nothings. As a favourite writer of mine in Fraser’s Magazine has said, “There is a richness about the life of a person who keeps a diary, unknown to others. A million more little links and ties must bind him to the members of his family circle, and to all among whom he lives. Life, to him, is surrounded, intertwined, entangled with thousands of slight incidents, which give it beauty, kindliness, reality.”