She spoke quite quietly, as if she were not sixty-five, with a tendency to asthma, and more than a tendency to rheumatism,—a nervous, fidgety old maid, to whom a journey to Bristol was an event to flutter the nerves, and cause sleepless nights, and take away the appetite for some time beforehand. I think the very magnitude of her resolution took away her attention from the terrible details, just as we lose sight of the precipices, chasms, and rocks that lie between, when we are looking to the mountain top. The way to Bristol was beset with dangers, such as losing the train, getting wrong change when you take your ticket, the draughtiness of the waiting-room, the incivility of the porters, the trains starting from unexpected platforms, the difficulty of opening doors and shutting windows, the constant tendency to get into smoking carriages by mistake, not to speak of railway accidents, and murderers and thieves for traveling companions; but these were lost sight of in the prospect of a journey to the other end of the world, full of real, substantial dangers of which she was ignorant. This ignorance was no doubt a great help to her in some ways; she could not form the slightest idea of what a missionary's life really is; nor can you, reader, nor can I, though we may have read missionary books by the dozen, which Miss Toosey had not. But this same ignorance, while it covered up many real difficulties, also painted grotesque horrors before Miss Toosey's mind, which might well have frightened any old maiden lady of sixty-five. She mixed up "Greenland's icy mountains" and "Afric's coral strands" with great impartiality in her ideas of Nawaub, forming such a frightful combination of sandy deserts and icebergs, lions and white bears, naked black savages and snow drifts, that the stoutest heart might have quailed at the prospect; and yet, when Miss Toosey came down to breakfast that morning, with her mind firmly made up to the venture, her little maid, Betty, did not notice anything remarkable about her, except that her cap was put on wrong side in front,—which was not a very unusual occurrence—and that she stirred up her tea with her spectacles once. Her interview with Betty had been rather upsetting. Betty was not quick at taking in new ideas; and she had got it so firmly into her head that Miss Toosey was wishing to administer a reproof to her about the handle of a certain vegetable dish, "which come to pieces in my hand as was that cracked," that it was some time before she could be led to think differently; but when at last a ray of the truth penetrated her mental fog, her feelings can only be described by her own ejaculation, "Lor, now!" which I fear may offend ears polite. She had not been at church the evening before, having stepped round to see her mother, who was "doing nicely, thank you, with her fourteenth, a fine boy, as kep' on with fits constant, till Mr. Glover half christened him, which James Joseph is his name, and better ever since."
So it required all Miss Toosey's eloquence to put her scheme before Betty's plain common sense, so as to appear anything but a very crazy notion after all; and it was not till after half an hour's severe talking, and more than one tear falling on the two and a half pounds of neck of mutton that Betty gave in, which she did by throwing her apron over her head, and declaring, with a sob, that if Miss Toosey "would go for to do such a thing, she (Betty) would take and go too, that she would;" and Miss Toosey had to entreat her to remember her poor mother before making up her mind to such a step.
But to come back to John Rossitter. He was a barrister, you must know, and used to examine witnesses and to turn their heads inside out to pick out the grains of truth concealed there; and then, too, he had a great talent for listening, which is a rarer and more valuable gift even than that of fluent speech, which he also had at command on occasion. He had, too, a sympathetic, attentive interest in his face, if it was assumed, would have made a great actor of him, and that opened the people's hearts to him, as the sun does the flowers. And so Miss Toosey found herself laying her mittened hand on his coat sleeve, and looking up into his eyes for sympathy, and calling him "my dear," "just for all the world," she said, "as if he had been an old woman too."
(John Rossitter and Miss Toosey)
And what did he think of it all? Was he laughing at her? Certainly now and then there was a little twitch at the corner of his mouth, and a sparkle in his eye, and once he laughed aloud in uncoupled amusement; but I like John Rossitter too well to believe that he was doing what Dr. Gardener Jones called "getting a rise out of the old lady." It was so very easy to make fun of Miss Toosey, and draw her out and show up her absurdities,—even Mr. Glover, who was not a wit, could be exquisitely funny at her expense. But John Rossitter was too much of a sportsman to aim with his small-bore rifle at a little sparrow in a hedgerow; he left that sort of game for the catapults and pop-guns of the yokels.
And so Miss Toosey confided to him all the difficulties that had already come crowding into her head as she sat over her work that morning, any one of which would have occupied her mind for days at any other time,—the giving notice to leave her house, the disposal of the furniture,—"and you know, Mr. John, I have some really valuable pictures and things;" and she could not trust herself to glance at the portrait of old Toosey over the fireplace, in a black satin waistcoat and bunch of seals, a frilled shirt, a high complexion, and shiny black hair, with Corinthian pillars behind him, lest her eyes, already brimful, should overflow. She even consulted him as to whether it would be worth while to order in more coal, and lamented that she should have taken her sitting in church for another whole year only last Saturday. And then, without quite knowing how, she found herself discussing that all-important subject, dress, with John Rossitter.
"Though to be sure, Mr. John, how should you know about such things?"
"Indeed, Miss Toosey, I'm not so ignorant as you think; and I quite agree with you that nothing looks so nice as a black silk on Sunday."