“I should very much like to hear all about your life in this—strange neighbourhood,” he said.
“There is not much to tell. When my little fortune—left by my uncle, the drysalter—fell in to me I was a lonely old woman, without one surviving relative for whom I cared twopence. I was pretty tired of teaching French and German—God knows how many hundred times I must have gone through Ollendorff in both languages—and I’ve done him a good many times in Italian, par dessus le marché. Perhaps I might have held on for a year or two longer, as I was very fond of those nice girls and boys at Kettisford Vicarage, if it hadn’t been for Ollendorff. He decided me. Leila, the youngest girl, had only just begun that accursed book. She was blundering over ‘the baker’s golden candlestick’ the very morning I got the lawyer’s letter to tell me of my uncle’s death, and the will, and the legacy. I snatched the book out of her hand, and shut it with a bang. ‘Ain’t I to do any more Ollendorff, Sally?’ she asked. ‘You may do as much as you like, my love,’ I said, ‘but you’ll do no more with me. I’m a millionaire, or at least I feel as rich and independent as if I were a Rothschild.’ Well, I lay awake all that night making plans for my life, and trying to think out how I could get the most comfort out of my little fortune, enjoy my declining years, have everything I wanted, and yet be of some use to my fellow-creatures; and the end of it was that I made up my mind to take a roomy lodging in a poor neighbourhood, where I should not be tempted to spend a penny upon appearances, furnish it after my own heart, and make myself happy in just my own way, without caring a straw what anybody thought about me. I knew that I was plain as well as elderly, that I could never be admired, or cut a figure in the genteel world, so I determined to renounce the gentilities altogether and to be looked up to in a little world of my own.”
“And you have found your plan answer——”
“It has answered beyond my hopes. Ever since I was thirty years of age and had finished with all young ideas and day-dreams, I had one particular ideal of earthly bliss, and that was the position of a country squire’s wife—an energetic, active, well-meaning woman, the central figure in a rural village, having her model cottages and her allotment gardens, her infirmary, her mission-house—the good genius of her little community, a queen in miniature, and without political entanglements, or menace of foreign war. Now it could never be my lot to reign on a landed estate, to build cottages, or cut up fertile meadows for cottagers’ gardens; but I thought by taking up my abode in a poor neighbourhood, and visiting in a friendly, familiar way—no tracts or preachings—among the most respectable of the inhabitants, and slowly feeling my way among the difficult subjects, I might gradually acquire an influence just as strong as that of the Lady Bountiful in a country parish, and might come to be as useful in my small way as the squire’s wife with her larger means. And I have done it,” added Miss Newton, triumphantly. “There are rooms in this street and in other streets that are to me my model cottages. There are overworked, underfed women who look up to me as their Providence. There are children who come and hang to my skirts as I pass along the streets. There are great hulking men who ask my advice and get me to write their letters for them. What could a squire’s wife have more than that? And yet I have only a hundred and fifty pounds a year to spend upon my people.”
“You give them something more than money. You give them sympathy—the magnetism of your strong and generous nature.”
“Ah, there is something in that. Magnetism is a good word. There must be some reason why people attach themselves so ardently to Mr. Gladstone, don’t you know,—some charm in him that holds them almost in spite of themselves, and makes them think as he thinks, and veer as he veers. Yes, they swing round with him like the boats going round with the tide, and they can’t help it any more than the boats can. And I think, to compare small things with great, there must be some touch of that magnetic power in me,” concluded Miss Newton.
“I am sure of it,” said Theodore, “and I am sure, too, that you must be like a spot of light in this dark little world of yours.”
“I live among my friends. That is the point,” explained Miss Newton. “I don’t come from Belgravia, or from a fashionable terrace in Kensington, and tell them they ought to keep their wretched rooms cleaner, and open their windows and put flower-pots on their window-sills. I live here, and they can come and see how I keep my rooms, and judge for themselves. Their landlord is my landlord; and a nice life I lead him about water, and whitewash, and drains. He is thoroughly afraid of me, I am happy to say, and generally bolts round a corner when he sees me in the street; but I am too quick for his over-fed legs. I tackle him about all his shortcomings, and he finds it easier to spend a few pounds upon his property now and then than to have me upon his heels at every turn; so now Crook’s tenements have quite a reputation in Lambeth. If you were to see the old dragon you would wonder at my pluck in attacking him, I can assure you.”
“Your whole life is wonderful to me, Miss Newton; and I only wish there were hundreds of women in this big city living just as you live. Tell me, please, what kind of people your neighbours are.”
“Oh, there are people of all kinds, some of course who are quite impracticable, for whom I can do nothing; but there are many more who are glad of my friendship, and who receive me with open arms. The single women and widows are my chief friends, and some of those I know as well as if we had been brought up and educated upon the same social level. They are workwomen of all kinds, tailoresses, shirt-makers, girls who work for military outfitters, extra hands for Court dressmakers, shop-girls at the humbler class of shops, shoe-binders, artificial-flower-makers. I wonder whether you would like to see some of them.”