"Have you had this to bear long?" and Olivia looked at her pityingly. What a life for a young, sensitive girl!
"For some years. Ever since Dacre, my brother, died. It was a boating accident, and they brought him home quite dead. We thought it was the shock, but Dr. Bevan, who attended him, then told us that it was due also to hereditary disease. We dared not send for Dr. Bevan the other night, though he understood him so thoroughly, and was so kind. My father had quarrelled with him, but Dr. Luttrell saw him yesterday and they had a long talk."
"My husband always speaks so highly of Dr. Bevan."
"Yes, and I liked him so much. He was such a comfort to me when poor mother died, and I shall always be grateful to him, but I dared not run the risk of exciting my father. He is a little better today; Dr. Luttrell says so; but of course he is coming again to-night. We have a good nurse, so things are more hopeful, but I shall have to get rid of our man. He is no use. Dr. Luttrell says I must have someone older and more reliable, who can help in an emergency. Roberts is far too young to be any real good."
Olivia listened and assented. She was quick-witted enough to see that it would be better to let Miss Williams talk and unburden herself a little. The girl, in spite of a naturally shy temperament, seemed ready to open her heart to her. Perhaps Olivia's winning personality had already won her. Human nature is so strangely constituted—the laws of attraction and repulsion are so unaccountable.
Some natures seem magnetic; they attract and draw us almost without our own volition. With others we make no way, months and years of intercourse will not bind us more closely. We are not on the same plane.
Olivia's sympathetic manner, the pitying kindness in her eyes, appealed strongly to Greta Williams, the lonely girl—isolated by the worst curse that can affect humanity—grievous hereditary vice—the innocent scape-goat of another's sin. Alas, how many homes even in our favoured land are desolated as well as desecrated from this one cause. What piteous waste of sweet young life, crushed under unnatural burdens. The sin of England, we say—the shameful curse of diseased self-indulgence.
Greta Williams seemed patient by nature; though it was a relief to talk openly to another woman, she did not complain. In spite of her father's faults, he was evidently very dear to her.
"It is a disease—a madness," she said once, "but it would never do to have young people here; one could not be sure, and for his sake it is better not," and in these few words there lay a world of tragedy.
To love, and yet not to be sure that the object of our love will not disgrace us. What misery to a refined and sensitive nature, to have to blush and grow pale from very shame and terror; to stretch out a helping hand to some dear one who has sunk too low to reach it. Ah, only One, the All-merciful, can rightly gauge the anguish of such a sorrow. No wonder Greta Williams looked so worn and pale, and that her eyes had grown sad.