“I should think not, indeed,” exclaimed the Dowager.
How difficult is the path of virtue made for most of us by our relations. During the whole of the Freule van Borck’s terrestrial pilgrimage she never committed another action worthy to rank with this voluntary conquest of her ruling passion. Yet nobody understood it.
“Van Helmont of the Horst,” she said to herself, “shall remain Van Helmont of the Horst.” And she deducted the thirty pounds from her already meagre charities.
No one at the Manor-house had ever been prodigal in almsgiving. The old Baron had reckoned the poor a public nuisance; the Baroness provided them with systematically indiscriminate pennies; Gerard flung away an occasional hap-hazard shilling. And the new lord was by no means generally generous. He had very definite ideas on the subject. Charitable help must be strictly limited to the “deserving poor,” whatever that may mean—only the deserving, and all the deserving. The word was his shibboleth. On paper it looks exceedingly well.
Also, he never gave money where he could give work, and he never gave work where he could give advice as to work elsewhere. He was forty when enabled and called upon to put into practice his carefully elaborated theories regarding pauperism. All the paupers of the neighborhood, to a man, resented a charity which had lost the charm of the happy-go-lucky. But to no one came more bitter disappointment than to Ursula, o’er the sun of whose crescent benevolence her husband’s theories spread in tranquil clouds.
How often had she not pictured to her father the wide use she would make of an expanded scope and increasing opportunities! Shall we venture to say that the constant thought had been a comfort, or at least an encouragement, through the months of her love-making? She had always worked fairly hard, with her limited means, in her father’s parish, nothing exaggerating, and setting nobody down in malice.
“And you will find sympathetic support in your husband,” declared the Dominé. “I know that he suffers greatly under his father’s bright indifference”—the Dominé sighed—“for instance as regards the Hemel.”
The Hemel—so it is still inappropriately called; the word means “Heaven”—was at that time a small hamlet outside the Dominé’s jurisdiction which had long been notorious in the whole province for the wild and profligate character of its consanguineous population. The people were mostly Roman Catholics, but, even had this not been the case, their pastor would hardly have paid them much attention. He was a very different man from Roderick Rovers. “The poor ye have always with you,” he repeated. And to his colleague he would have said, “Hands off!” Ursula rejoiced to realize her new position as lady of the Hemel as well as of the Horst. Oh, the cruel disappointment of discovering that the poor of the Hemel were not deserving. They were everything and anything but that.
“Be just before you are generous,” said Otto. “First, we must pay our way, dear Ursula, and that, in a landed proprietor’s life, includes an immense amount of unconscious, and even unintentional, philanthropy. What we have left we will gladly give away, but let us be careful to confine ourselves to worthy recipients of our bounty.”