“You have not much satisfaction out of them,” said John, “though I know you have always kept on doing all sorts of things for them. They ought at least to be grateful to you.”
“Well, my dear,” said Mrs Mitford, with anxious gravity, “I don’t like to blame her—but I am afraid sometimes their mother is not very judicious, poor woman. It sours one sadly to have so much misfortune. She is always contradicting and crossing them for things that don’t matter. I don’t like to blame her, she has had so much to put up with; but still, you know—and of course it is discouraging, whatever one may try to say.”
“And then there are the Littles,” said John, leading his mother on.
“Oh, the Littles, dear! I wish you would not speak of them. Every month or so I think I have just got their mind up to the point of going to church. If you but knew the number of bonnets that woman has had, and shoes for the children, and even your papa’s last old greatcoat which I got the tailor to alter for Robert. But it is never any good. And though I pay myself for the children’s schooling, they never go. It is enough to break one’s heart.”
“And Lizzie’s people are always a trouble to you,” said John.
“Ah, my dear, but then the old woman is a Dissenter,” said Mrs Mitford, with alacrity; “and in such a case what can one do?”
“But, mother dear, with all these things before you, does it sometimes strike you what a hopeless business it is?” cried John. “You have been working in the parish for twenty years——”
“Twenty-five, my dear boy—since before you were born.”
“And what is it the better?” said John; “the same evils reappear just in the same way—the same wickedness, and profanity, and indifference. For all the change one can see, mother dear, all your work and fatigue might never have been.”
“I must say so far as that goes I don’t agree with you at all, John,” cried his mother, with a certain sharp ring in her voice. The colour came to her cheeks and the water to her eyes. If it had been said to her that her life itself had been a mistake and failure, she could not have felt it more. Indeed the one implied the other; and if there was any one thing that she had built upon in all her modest existence, it was the difference in the parish. John’s words gave her such a shock that she gasped after them with a sense of partial suffocation. And then she did her best to restrain the momentary sharp thrill of resentment; for how could she be angry with her boy? “My dear,” she said, humbly, with the tears in her soft eyes, “I don’t suppose I have done half or quarter what I ought to have done; but still if you had seen the parish when we came—— If I had been a woman of more energy, and cleverer than I am——”