No breath from the outside world had ever touched this woman. Once she had gone to Paris with her father, but it remained in her mind simply a lovely picture, a little larger and more daring in colour than the pictures she had seen at the Louvre. She had been up to London several times, but that was to make notes at the British Museum. Her life was in no way different from that of most of the women she had known.
Once she had seen an item in a journal that struck her forcibly; it mentioned that there were eight hundred thousand more women than men in Great Britain, and that a good proportion of them were matrimonially eligible women as regarded property and accomplishments, but that they were of the middle classes, where marriage was most infrequent. Sister Faithful had remarked then that she knew a great many attractive women who were not liable to marry. She wondered why, for her education had made her logical. And then she reviewed her own life. All the male members of the families of her friends had gone to larger towns as soon as they were old enough; the girls, after a touch of boarding-school, had come home to assume simple household duties, and, an occasional curate excepted, they did not often meet young men.
“Sister Faithful,” having for her constant companion a man who lived in books, had rather a better-trained mind than most women. It had not been allowed to wander, and her greatest weakness was her way of bestowing charity. She did not like to account to anyone for it, and so tired mothers, who sent their offspring to her for a holiday, were apt to have them returned in new and wholesome garments, which showed that a heart calculated by nature to be a motherly one was bestowing its bounty quietly on other women’s children. Strange to say, Sister Faithful had not given any thought to marriage for herself. That she should ever leave her father, marry, and have children of her own seemed impossible. She was quite content to accept life as she found it, and improve the morals and manners of the children of the lower classes about her. And now she was fifty, and until her brother’s return she had lived alone.
She had remembered yesterday that it was her birthday and had celebrated it by inviting the school children to tea in her garden, which was in its loveliest summer dress. In the evening she had received a letter from her distant and unknown cousin, the Professor, whom she had only met in those long ago excursions to London, saying he was “tired”—“worn out,” his doctor said—and he had written to see if his cousin would take him in for a few weeks’ vacation. “I shall live out-of-doors,” he wrote, “and I promise in no way to disturb your life. I want only my books, and to wander about over your beautiful country.” She wondered if she had been hasty when she wrote back to bid “welcome to our nearest of kin and our father’s friend.” She remembered that after all he was really a cousin once removed, and a little younger than herself, and that when her father had liked him he was very young indeed. A glance at the mirror re-assured her. She was very free from vanity, and she realized she was no longer young. The villagers called her beautiful, but perhaps their sensibilities, sharpened by the lack of beauty about them, were keener in detecting their benefactress’ fine points.
Thanks to her healthy, regular life, Sister Faithful at fifty was very good to look upon. The soft hair, worn lightly back from the low, well-shaped forehead, was only faintly tinged with grey, and her skin was as smooth and fresh as that of a woman of half her age. It was not the firm, quiet mouth, nor even the gentle, sweet brown eyes that attracted one most; it was the unconsciousness of the woman, the very annihilation of self, as it were, without affectation, that made one long to know why she was constantly giving without any question of return. No man had ever told her she was beautiful; her father’s friends had approved of her, but then she ministered to their comfort, when they came to stay at Edgecombe. She attended to everyone’s wants, and seemed to have gone through life without dreaming that in some larger sphere she would have been considered a very attractive woman. Not that she was perfect; she had her idiosyncrasies—as who has not? but she had a disciplined, well-trained, unselfish nature, that overbalanced any faults. Even now her one consideration was for Cousin Emerson, who was to arrive the following day. Would he be comfortable in Edgecombe? Would he not be lonely with her and only an invalid host to look after him? These, and other doubts crossed her mind, and, as a relief, she spent the entire day overlooking the sweeping and dusting of the already clean house.
Next day, the evening train brought Cousin Emerson. As he alighted from the carriage, Sister Faithful thought him only an older edition of the intellectual-looking man she had met in London. He was evidently still ill, and looked as if he had burned too much midnight oil. Her practical mind immediately swept over the entire list of nourishing dishes that she might concoct for him. He, half-an-hour later, glanced over his well-appointed room, and thanked fortune that it had occurred to him to stay with his good cousins.
After dinner this occurred to him again as he stretched himself on the comfortable library lounge, and let the smoke of his cigar curl up in slow, bewitching rings about his head, while Cousin Faithful read aloud in that well-modulated voice of hers.
And so the days went on, bringing health and strength to Cousin Emerson, and great, unspeakable content to “Sister Faithful,” as he too called her.
“Somehow,” he said, after he had been at Edgecombe for several weeks, “it seems as if we were more than cousins. I shall reverse your name; you shall be my Faithful Sister, as you have been nurse and friend.”
At first he had accompanied her in her long afternoon walks, when she visited her cottage people, but after a while he persuaded her to take all sorts of short excursions on foot, or again they would drive over the hills about the estate.