“Not at all; you are giving me a great pleasure, Mr. Sefton. I do like knowing about people—their real selves, I mean, not their outside; it is so much more interesting than any book. I think, as a rule, people shut themselves up too much, and so they exclude light and sympathy.”
“One longs for sympathy sometimes,” said Richard; but he turned away his face as he spoke.
“Yes; every one needs it, and most of us get it,” replied Bessie, feeling very sorry for the young man in her heart. He was too manly and too generous to complain openly of his stepmother’s treatment, but Bessie understood it all as well as though he had spoken.
“In a large family there is no complaint to be made on this score. When I have a grievance there is always mother or Hatty, or Christine and father. We take all our big things to father. Oh, at home, no one is left out in the cold.”
“I think your home must be a happy one, Miss Lambert—but here we are at The Grange. I must bid you good-bye for the present, for I have an errand in the village.”
But Richard did not explain that his errand was to sit with a crippled lad, whose life of suffering debarred him from all pleasure. If there were one person in the world whom Bob Rollton adored it was “the young squire.”
“He is a real gentleman, he is,” Bob would say; “and not one of your make-believe gentry. It is all along of him and Spot and the little ’un, Tim, that I don’t hate Sundays; but he comes reg’lar, does the squire; and he brings some rare good books with him; and Tim curls himself up on my blanket, and Spot sits on the window-sill, making believe to listen, and we have a good old time.”
Other people beside Bob could have cited instances of the young squire’s thoughtfulness and active benevolence; but Richard Sefton was one who did good by stealth, and almost as though he were ashamed of it, and neither his stepmother nor Edna guessed how much he was beloved in the village.
Mrs. Sefton was one of those people who never believed in virtue, unless it had the special hall-mark that conventionality stamps upon it, and Richard’s simple charities, his small self-denials, would have appeared despicable in her eyes. She herself gave largely to the poor at Christmas; blankets and clothing by the bale found their way to the East End. The vicar of Melton called her “The benevolent Mrs. Sefton,” but she and Edna never entered a cottage, never sat beside a sick bed, nor smoothed a dying pillow. Edna would have been horrified at such a suggestion. What had her bright youth to do with disease, dirt and misery? “Don’t tell me about it,” was her usual cry, when any one volunteered to relate some piteous story. That such things should be allowed in a world governed by a merciful Providence was incredible, terrible, but that she should be brought into contact with it was an offence to her ladylike judgment.
Many a girl has thought like Edna Sefton, and yet a royal princess could enter a squalid cottage, and take the starving babe to her bosom; and from that day to this Princess Alice has been a type of loving womanhood.