“I know him so well, his wife of fourteen years,” she said to herself. “Can I doubt for an instant that he did his duty to her; that he was loyal and kind; that whatever sadness there was in her fate it could have been brought about by no act of his?”
Pamela behaved admirably all this time. She respected Mildred’s silence, and was not overpoweringly gay. She would sit at her aunt’s feet working, wrapped in her own thoughts, or poring over a well-thumbed Shelley, which seemed to her to express all her emotions for her without any trouble on her part. She found her feelings about César Castellani made to measure, as it were, in those mystic pages, and wondered that she and Shelley could be so exactly alike.
When Mildred was well enough to go out of doors Miss Fausset suggested a morning with her poor.
“It will brace your nerves,” she said, “and help you to make up your mind. If you have really a vocation for the higher life, the life of self-abnegation and wide usefulness, the sooner you enter upon it the better. Mind, I say if. You know I have given you my advice conscientiously as a Christian woman, and my advice is that you go back to your husband, and forget everything but your duty to him.”
“Yes, aunt, I know; but you and I think differently upon that point.”
“Very well,” with an impatient sigh. “You are obstinate enough there: you have made up your mind so far. You had better make it up a little further. At present you are halting between two opinions.”
Mildred obeyed with meekness and indifference. She was not interested in Miss Fausset’s district; she had given no thought yet to the merits of life in a Christian community, among a handful of pious women working diligently for the suffering masses. Her only thought had been of that which she had lost, not of what she might gain.
Miss Fausset came in from the morning service at half-past eight, breakfasted sparingly, and at nine the ne plus ultra brougham, the perfection of severity in coach-building, was at the door, and the perfect brown horse was champing his bit and rattling his brazen headgear in over-fed impatience to be off. It seemed to be the one aim of this powerful creature’s life to run away with Miss Fausset’s brougham, but up to this point his driver had circumvented him. He made very light of the distance between the aristocratic East Cliff and the shabbiest outlying district of Brighton, at the fag end of the London Road, and here Mildred saw her aunt in active work as a ministering angel to the sick and the wretched.
It was only the old, old story of human misery which she saw repeated under various forms; the old, old evidence of the unequal lots that fall from the urn of Fate—Margaret in her sky-blue boudoir, Peggy staggering under her basket of roses—for some only the flowers, for others only the thorns. She saw that changeless background of sordid poverty which makes every other sorrow harder to bear; and she told herself that the troubles of the poor were heavier than the troubles of the rich. Upon her life sorrow had come, like a thunderbolt out of a summer sky; but sorrow was the warp and woof of these lives; joy or good luck of any kind would have been the thunderclap.
She saw that her aunt knew how to deal with these people, and that underneath Miss Fausset’s hardness there was a great power of sympathy. Her presence seemed everywhere welcome; and people talked freely to her, unbosoming themselves of every trouble, confident in her power to understand.