The woman kissed the hand with a fervor contrasting incongruously with her staid demeanor and homely simple face, as she answered:
“I’ll try, my dear. Though to see you in this bare, plainly-furnished room, with scarce a bit of comfort in it beyond the fire in the grate, and not a stick of furniture beyond the bed and the wardrobe, and washstand and bath, and the chintz-covered armchair you’re sitting in, and a bookshelf of grave books, scalds my heart—that it do! And your sitting-room nigh as skimping. When either at Wraye Rest or at Oakenwode, or at the house in Park Lane, you have everything beautiful about you, as you ought; with paintings and statues and music, and carpets like velvet for you to tread upon, and flowers everywhere for you that love them so to take pleasure in them, and your dogs and horses, and cats and birds!... Eh! deary me! But I promised I’d never breathe a murmur, not if you let me come, and here I am forgetting!....”
“We will overlook it this time. And I will help you to understand why I am happier here, and more at peace than at Wraye or Oakenwode, or at the Park Lane house, dear to me as all three are. It is because, wherever I am, and whether I am walking or sleeping, I seem to hear voices that call to me for help. Chiefly the voices of women, weak, and faint, and imploring.... And they appeal to me, not because I am any wiser, or better, or stronger than others of my sex, but because I am able, through circumstances,—and have the wish and the will to aid them, I humbly believe, from God! And if I stayed at home and yielded to the desire for pleasant, easy, delightful ways of living, and bathed my eyes and ears in lovely sights and sounds, I should hear those voices over all, and see with the eyes of my mind the pale, wan, wistful faces that belong to them. And I should know no peace!... But here, even if the work I do be insignificant and ineffective, I am working for and with my poor sisters, sick and well. And on the day when I turn back and leave my plow in the furrow, then those voices will have a right to cry to me without ceasing: ‘Oh, woman! why have you deserted us?—you who might have done so much!’”
She ceased, but the rush and thrill of the words as they had come pouring from her, vibrated yet on the quiet atmosphere of the room.
“You had a pleasant talk, Miss Ada, with Master Robert?” the woman asked her, turning down the snowy sheet from the pillows, and preparing to leave the room.
“A long, grave talk, Husnuggle, even a little sad in places, but pleasant nevertheless. Now go down to supper, for it is eight o’clock.”
Husnuggle went, having bound up the wealth of hair into a great silken twist, and her mistress knelt at a prie-Dieu beneath an ebony and olive-wood crucifix that hung upon the wall, and said her prayers, and sought her rest. When she slept, less easily and less soundly than usual, she dreamed; and the figure and face of the slight, ruddy-skinned, black-eyed man who had visited the Hospice that day, moved with others across the stage of her vision, and his voice echoed with other voices in the chambers of her sleeping brain.
The Havre packet had not sailed that evening, by reason of a boisterous gale and a great sea, and Dunoisse was spending the evening dismally enough at the T. R. Southampton, where “As you Like It” was being given for the benefit of Miss Arabella Smallsopp, advertised as of the “principal London theaters,” upon the last night of a Stock Season which had been “a supreme artistic success.”
Mr. Hawkington Bulph and a Full Company—which collectively and individually looked anything but that,—supported the star; and to the fatal sprightliness of the hapless Smallsopp, disguised as the immortal page, in a lace collar, drop-earrings, and a short green cotton-velvet ulster, dadoed with catskin, and adorned down the front with rows of brass buttons not distantly resembling coffin-nails (worn in combination with a Spanish hair-comb and yellow leather top-boots), must be ascribed the violent distaste which one member of the audience did then and there conceive for England’s immortal Bard. But ere long his attention strayed from the dingy, ill-lit Forest Scene, with a cork-and-quill nightingale warbling away in the flies, as Miss Smallsopp interpolated the pleasing ditty, “O Sing Again, Sweet Bird of Eve!” and he ceased to see the dirty boards, where underpaid, underfed, and illiterate actors gesticulated and strutted, and he went back in thought to Ada Merling, and her pure earnest face rose up before his mental vision, and the very sound of her crystal voice was in his ears.