We were reminded of Martha whenever a beggar came to the back-door, or a dusty man on the heath-road asked us for his fare to Brighton.
Martha would have told the beggar to go and wait in the first clump of gorse. And she would have smuggled food out to him. She used to borrow our threepenny-bits to make up the dusty man's fare. But she always paid us back.
I knew quite well why Mrs. Klaus had been kind to Martha. For a whole year the Klauses had been having bad luck. One of the children died. And, what seemed to be much more serious, something happened to the horse. He died, too. So the Klauses had no horse at all now, but they had four little children left. And one or other of the children was always cutting or bruising himself, or else falling ill. Martha would tell me about them. She and I would collect pieces of flannel or linen for bandages; and Martha would take mustard over to the cottage for plasters, and bread and milk for poultices. The little Klauses needed a fearful lot of poultices.
Martha was sure of my sympathy in these ministrations, because of a peculiarity of mine. When I was still quite a little girl my mother had admitted my skill in making compresses. I could take temperatures, too, and I learned how to prepare invalid foods. I found a fascinating book thrust away behind Gibbon's "Decline and Fall." The book was called "Household Medicine." I read it a great deal—especially when one of the little Klauses had a new symptom. If I refrained from hoping my mother and sister might have more and worse maladies, that I might nurse them back to health, I would willingly have sacrificed the servants. So that the diseases that attacked the little Klauses were a godsend to me. I glanced at those unfortunates, as I passed, with the eye of the specialist. Yet often, to my shame, I could detect no sign of their sufferings.
One day I heard wailing as Betty and I went by. I told Betty to walk on slowly and wait by the Dew Pond. And I made my first visit to Mrs. Klaus. She was in bed in the tiny inner room, nursing the new baby. Mr. Klaus was sitting by the kitchen fire, with his back to the door. He had Jimmy in his arms. Jimmy had been the baby. His little face, all crumpled with crying, looked at me over his father's shoulder. He had been like this for two days.
"Just pining," they said, with the resignation of the poor. We parted upon the understanding that the thing for them to do was to give Jimmy a warm bath, and no tea or bacon for supper; and the thing for me to do was to send him some proper food—all of which was done in collusion with Martha.
I was not a secretive person, but I had learned years before that my mother was unwilling that we should ever go into any of the cottages. Not even for shelter in a storm were we to cross one of those thresholds. I felt sure that this precaution was on Betty's account.
I never let Bettina go into the cottage. Indeed, she never wished to. That instinctive shrinking from ugliness and suffering seemed quite natural in a rose-leaf creature like Bettina. But I was made of commoner clay. And long after she had left us I missed that other piece of common clay, Martha Loring.
The thought of Martha was specially vivid in my mind on one occasion two years or more after she "went under."
Bettina caught one of her dreadful colds. But we had made her well again—so well that she insisted on going for a walk.