His mother a homeless wanderer among strange people in the winter time! Unendurable thought! She to whom he had looked up with love and reverence all his life, who had soothed and cheered him in the little griefs of his boyhood and the trials of his manhood, now without a fireside of her own!
He had himself never known what poverty, actual poverty, was; but he had heard and read of it, and had come in contact with it as a man connected with the treasurership held by him. There were people in the world at this moment who were hungry and had not a penny to buy bread. Had not a penny such as this.
He had taken a coin out of his pocket, and now held it in his left hand. He was bent forward; his right elbow rested on his knee; his head drooped over the left palm, in which lay the coin.
People who starved for want of such a coin as this! Under privation it was the children and the old people succumbed first. People of middle life like him lived through sieges and famines when the young and the old died.
To think of people being hungry for want of such a coin as this!
He had seen the old hungry. As president of the Coal Fund he had visited poor old people. He had seen their dropped jaws, their dim eyes, their feeble gait, their degraded humanity. He had seen women, old women who had once occupied comfortable positions, hobbling along the frozen streets with tickets for coal in their hands, while boys followed jeering at them. He had heard these respectable old women utter words of gratitude so humiliating to themselves, that he had felt to listen was more the punishment of a crime than the reward of a humane action.
Once at a Christmas-time he went to see a poor widow on behalf of whom application had been made to the fund. Her husband had been a well-to-do tradesman of Daneford. He found the poor creature in a most pitiable plight. She had nothing but a bundle of straw for a bed, and the ragged remains of an old patchwork counterpane. There were two broken chairs, a delf cup, and no saucer. This was a full inventory of the widow's goods. The old woman said she did not feel hunger half so much as cold. She was used to hunger all the year round, now and then; but the winter cold was terrible. When hungry and cold, you were tortured from within and without. For twelve months she had not tasted hot meat, and for six months neither eggs nor butter. Sprats were then three-halfpence for two pounds, and bread three-halfpence a pound. Two pounds of sprats, two pounds of bread, and the use of a neighbour's fire, carried her over two days very nicely, but that came to fourpence-halfpenny; and when she had paid eighteenpence a week for the room, it was not easy to find fourpence-halfpenny every two days for living. In coming away he gave her half-a-sovereign. She threw herself down on her knees to him, and thanked him and Providence that she should now have warm stockings and taste meat once more before she died. That thin old woman had thrown herself on her knees to him because she was hungry and cold, and he had given her half-a-sovereign! Thrown herself on her knees to him! When he came home he told Bee, and Bee had wept and sent the old woman clothes. He told his mother, too, about this old woman, and his mother had gone to see her and sat with her, and never lost sight of her until the poor woman died.
What changes since then! Bee had gone, and his mother was a pauper fugitive.
His stately keen-minded mother a penniless fugitive! Intolerable! There must be some mistake. Fancy for a moment his proud high-spirited mother being obliged to stoop and accept help! Fancy such a thing, she who had always had a full larder and purse at the service of royal generosity! The mere idea was preposterous on the face of it. And yet there were the figures of Evans. His mother prostrate at the feet of a stranger, thanking him for food!
"Oh, God, who is our master, and who is the master of our joys and our woes, afflict me with what Thou wilt, but take away that vision! Take away that vision from before my eyes! Give me all other pains but that sight, the result of my misdoings."