"If I do remind you of it, I only do so in the hope that I may be able to serve you," answered Victor. "I have tasted all the bitterness of poverty, Miss Brewer. Forgive me, if I ask whether you, too, have been acquainted with its sting?"
"Have I felt its sting?" cried the poor faded creature. "Who has felt the tooth of the serpent, Poverty, more cruelly than I? It has pierced my very heart. From my childhood I have known nothing but poverty. Shall I tell you my story, Mr. Carrington? I am not apt to speak of myself, or of my youth; but you have evoked the demon, Memory, and I feel a kind of relief in speaking of that long-departed time."
"I am deeply interested in all you say, Miss Brewer. Stranger though I am, believe me that my interest is sincere."
As Victor Carrington said this, Charlotte Brewer looked at him with a sharp, penetrating glance. She was not a woman to be fooled by shallow hypocrisies. The light of the winter's day was fading; but even in the fading light Victor saw the look of sharp suspicion in her pinched face.
"Why should you be interested in me?" she asked, abruptly.
"Because I believe you may be useful to me," answered Victor, boldly. "I do not want to deceive you, Miss Brewer. Great triumphs have been achieved by the union of two powerful minds."
I know you to possess a powerful mind; I know you to be a woman above ordinary prejudices; and I want you to help me, as I am ready to help you. But you were about to tell me the story of your youth.
"It shall be told briefly," said Miss Brewer, speaking in a rapid, energetic manner that was the very reverse of the measured tones she was wont to use. "I am the daughter of a disgraced man, who was a gentleman once; but I have forgotten that time, as he forgot it long before he died.
"My father passed the last ten years of his life in a prison. He died in that prison, and within those dingy smoke-blackened walls my childhood was spent—a joyless childhood, without a hope, without a dream, haunted perpetually by the dark phantom, Poverty. I emerged from that prison to enter a new one, in the shape of a West-end boarding-school, where I became the drudge and scape-goat of rich citizens' daughters, heiresses presumptive to the scrapings of tallow-chandlers and coal-merchants, linen-drapers and cheesemongers. For six years I endured my fate patiently, uncomplainingly. Not one creature amongst that large household loved me, or cared for me, or thought whether I was happy or miserable.
"I worked like a slave. I rose early, and went to bed late, giving my youth, my health, my beauty—you will smile, perhaps, Mr. Carrington, but in those days I was accounted a handsome woman—in exchange for what? My daily bread, and the education which was to enable me to earn a livelihood hereafter. Some distant relations undertook to clothe me; and I was dressed in those days about as shabbily as I have been dressed ever since. In all my life, I never knew the innocent pleasure which every woman feels in the possession of handsome clothes.