have said that from the first moment I had felt a singular attraction towards my new mistress. As the days went on, and I became better acquainted with the rare beauty and unselfishness of her nature, my respect and affection deepened. I soon grew to love Mrs. Morton as I have loved few people in this life.
My service became literally a service of love; it was with no sense of humiliation that I owned myself her servant; obedience to so gentle a rule was simply a delight. I anticipated her wishes before they were expressed, and an ever-deepening sense of the sacredness and dignity of my charge made me impervious to small slights and moved me to fresh efforts.
I was no longer tormented by my old feelings of uselessness and inefficiency. The despondent fears of my girlhood (and girlhood is often troubled by these unwholesome fancies), that there was no special work for me in the human vineyard, had ceased to trouble me. I was a bread winner, and my food tasted all the sweeter for that thought. I was preaching silently day by day my new crusade. Every morning I woke cheerfully to the simple routine of the day’s duties. Every night I lay down between my children’s cots with a satisfied conscience, and a mind at rest, while the soft breathings of the little creatures beside me seemed to lull me to sleep.
It was a strangely quiet life for a girl of two-and-twenty, but I soon grew used to it. When I felt dull I read; at other times I sang over my work, out of pure lightheartedness, and I could hear Joyce’s shrill little treble joining in from her distant corner.
“I wish I could sing like you, Merle,” Mrs. Morton once said to me, when she had interrupted our duet; “your voice is very sweet and true, and deserves to be cultivated. Since my baby’s death my voice has wholly left me.”
“It will come back with time and rest,” I returned, reassuringly, but she shook her head.
“Rest; that is a word I hardly know. When I was a girl I never knew life would be such a fatiguing thing. There are too many duties for the hours; one tries to fit them in properly, but when night comes the sense of failure haunts one’s dreams.”
“That is surely a symptom of overwork,” was my remark in answer to this.
“Perhaps you are right, but under the circumstances it cannot be helped. If only I could be more with my darlings, and enjoy their pretty ways; but at least it is a comfort to me to know they have so faithful a nurse in my absence.”
She was always making these little speeches to me; it was one of her gracious ways. She could be grateful to a servant for doing her duty. She was not one of those people who take everything as a matter of course, who treat their domestics and hirelings as though they were mere machines for the day’s work; on the contrary, she recognised their humanity; she would sympathise as tenderly with a sick footman or a kitchen-maid in trouble as she would with any of her richer neighbours. It was this large-mindedness and beneficence that made her household worship her. When I learnt more about her former life, I marvelled at her grand self-abnegation. I grew to understand that from the day of her marriage she had simply effaced herself for her husband’s sake; her tastes, her favourite pursuits, had all been resigned without a murmur that she might lead his life.