Mary looked up at me with a startled glance, and then with a smile.
“Bless your kind heart, lady! work’s nat’ral to me—pleasure is for the rich, and labor’s for the poor, and I’m content, I’d sooner sit working than go pleasuring; but it’s another thing with the likes of you.”
Miss Saville was already at the door, and somewhat impatient of this delay, so I hurried after her, arranging with Mary that she was to come that afternoon to Alice at Cottiswoode. When we got out of the house, Miss Saville took me to task immediately.
“You don’t understand the people, my dear,” said Miss Saville. “Mary was very right about the work: it’s far better to give employment than to give charity—and that’s not to save your purse, but to keep up their honest feelings. They’re independent when they’re working for themselves, and they’re bred up to work all their life; and for you to speak of going to help them, it would only make them uneasy, and be unsuitable for you.”
“But I wish to help them—and giving work to Mary does not stand in the place of working myself,” said I, with a little petulance.
“Oh, of course, if you want to do it for pleasure that’s quite a different thing—but I really don’t understand that,” said Miss Saville, abruptly.
“I do not wish it for pleasure,” said I, growing almost angry; but I did not choose to explain myself to her, and it was a good thing that she should confess that she did not understand me.
We visited a number of poor houses after this, but I found nothing encouraging in any of them. There were one or two old people found, who were quite willing to be received into Miss Saville’s asylum—they were all poor stupid old rustics, all helpless with some infirmity, but I did not find that there was anything heroic now in the prospect of waiting upon and serving them. It was not courage nor daring, nor any high and lofty quality which would be required for such an undertaking, but patience—patience, pity, and indeed a certain degree of insensibility, qualities which I neither had nor coveted. I was much discontented with my day’s experience—I was known and recognised latterly wherever we went, and though I had no recollection of the majority of the claimants of my former acquaintance, I was very ready to give them money, and did so to the great annoyance of Miss Saville. As we threaded our way through the muddy turnings, she lectured me on the evils of indiscriminate almsgiving, while I, for my part, painfully pondered what I had to do with these people, or what I could do for them. Though I had read a good deal, and thought a little, I was still very ignorant. I had a vague idea, even now in my disappointment, when I found I could not do what I wanted, that I ought to do something—that these people belonged to us, and had a right to attention at our hands. But I could not lift these cottages and place them in better order. I could not arrange those encumbered and narrow bits of path. Could I do nothing but give them money? I was much discomfited, puzzled, and distressed. Miss Saville plodded along methodically in her thick boots, perceiving what she had to do, and doing it as everyday work should be done—but there was no room here for martyrdom—and I could not tell what to do.
THE EIGHTH DAY.
VISITORS! I did not know how to receive them; and not only visitors but relatives of my own—of my mother’s—her only remaining kindred. I went down with a flutter at my heart to see my unknown kin. He was with them, Alice told me, and I composed myself as well as I could before I entered the room; for by this time we had grown to a dull uncommunicating antagonism, and his presence stimulated me to command myself. It was past Christmas now, and we had spent more than two months in this system of mutual torment. We had been once or twice asked out, and we had gone and behaved ourselves so as not to betray the full extent of the breach between us; but we asked no one to our house—a house in which dwelt such a skeleton; and nobody can fancy how intolerable this dreary tête-a-tête, in which each of us watched the other, and no one spoke save the few necessary formalities of the table, became every day. Yet how every day we began in the same course, never seeking to separate—keeping together as pertinaciously as a couple of lovers, and with the strangest fascination in this silent contest. To look back upon this time is like a nightmare to me. I feel the heavy stifling shadow, the suppressed feverish excitement, the constant expectation and strain of self control when I think of it. I wonder one of us was not crazed by this prolonged ordeal; I think a few days of it would make me frantic now.