"I am for ever replenishing that thirty-sax, an' it is for ever short," he complained; "will ye no' look in the keetchen?"
She was absent some time on the quest, and Charlotte questioned Mary about the details of her interview at Messrs. Pattenden's. She said she knew that "Pa had been with them for several years," so the business could not be so unprofitable as he had just pretended. Appealed to for support, however, her pa sighed again, and it was obvious that he was impelled towards an unusually pessimistic view of everything that night. A brief reference to a "sink o' ineequity" was accepted as a comment upon the "wine-and-speerit" trade, but he had nothing cheerful to say of books, either; and, recognising the futility of attempting a graceful retreat, the visitor got up abruptly and wished them good-bye. Mrs. Macpherson joined her in the passage, without the shirts.
"Good-night, miss," she murmured; "don't be down in the mouth. Have plenty of cheek, and you'll get along like a house afire! As for me, I'm going back to the kitchen and mean to stop there."
At Mary's third step she called to her to come back.
"Never," she added, "go and settle down with a traveller. You're likely to fetch 'em, but don't do it!" She jerked her head towards the parlour. "A good man, my dear, but his shirts were my cross from our wedding-day!"
Mary assured her that the warning should be borne in mind, and left the little person wiping her brow. The remark about marrying, idle as it was, distressed her. Last night too there had been a mention of the possibility, and, knowing that she could never be any man's wife, the suggestion shook her painfully. How she had wrecked her life, she reflected, and for a man who had cared nothing for her!
The assertion that he cared nothing for her was bitterer to her soul than the knowledge that she had wrecked her life. To have a love despised is always a keener torture to a woman than to a man; for a woman surrenders herself less easily, thinks the more of what she is bestowing, and counts the treasures at her disposal over and over—ultimately for the sake of delighting in the knowledge of how much she is going to give. If one of the pearls that she has laid so reverently at her master's feet is left to lie there, she exonerates him and accuses herself. But his caresses never quite fill the unsuspected wound. If it happens that he neglects them all, then the woman, beggared and unthanked, wonders why the sun shines, and how people can laugh. Some women can take back a misdirected love, erase the superscription, and address it over again. Others cannot. Mary could not. She had lain in Seaton's arms and kissed him; pride bade her be ashamed of the memory; her heart found food in it. It was all over, all terrible, all a thing that she ought to shiver and revolt at. But the depth of her devotion had been demonstrated by the magnitude of her sin, and she was not able, because the sacrifice had been misprized, to say, "Therefore, in everything except my misery, it shall be as if I had never made it."
She could not, continually as she put its fever from her, wrench the tenderness out of her being, recall her guilt and forget its motive. The sin of her life had been caused by her love, and, come weal, come woe, come gratitude or callousness, a love that had been responsible for such a thing as that was not a sentiment to be plucked out and destroyed at the dictates of common-sense. It was not a thing that Carew could kill with baseness. She could have looked him in the face and sworn she hated him; she felt that, though that might not be quite true, she could never touch his hand nor sit in a room with him again. But neither her contempt for him nor for her own weakness could blot out the recollection of the hours of passion, the years of communion, when if one of them had said, "I should like," the other had replied, "Say we should!"
It was well for her that the exigencies of her situation were supplying anxieties which to a great extent penned her thoughts within more wholesome bounds. On the morrow her chief idea was to distinguish herself on her preliminary expedition. Mr. Collins, true to his promise, had prepared a list for her. The houses were all in the neighbourhood of the Abbey, and mostly, he informed her, the offices of civil engineers. He said civil engineers were a "likely class," the principal objection to them being that they were "so beastly irregular in their movements." When she had "worked Westminster," he added, he would start her among barristers and clergy-men.
"Come in, when you've done, and tell me how you've got on," he said pleasantly. "I suppose you haven't a pocket large enough to hold your specimen? Never mind! Keep it out of sight as much as you can when you ask for people; and ask for them as if you were going to give them a commission to build a bridge."