“It seems when she went home in August her mother wasn’t satisfied with her looks and made her see a physician. He said she is consumptive—one lung affected—and that she ought to winter abroad.”
“Dear, dear, I am sorry!”
“Yes, it’s a bad business. I don’t know what they can do! A curate with four children can’t be expected to have means to send his wife abroad at a moment’s notice.”
“But can nothing be done?”
“Well, Mr. Coombes has been talking to the Vicar, and they are making a collection. Fifty pounds will be wanted, and so far they have fifteen towards it. I’m afraid they will never raise it. It’s a pity, because the doctor said she was a hopeful case—probably the winter away would save her life. But I must be going, Miss Colbourne; my husband will be wondering where I am. You do look cold. Why don’t you have your fire lit again?”
Her visitor gone, Miss Colbourne did not settle to her work again. Usually she did not find time for all she wanted to accomplish, but to-night she tried one thing after another without success. At last, flinging her books on one side, she fell to pacing up and down the room.
After a while she opened the secret drawer in her desk, and taking out an old-fashioned long silk purse, she turned out its contents—five ten-pound notes and a little loose gold. She weighed them in her hands—the savings of ten years. Often had she sat without a fire and gone without a hot meal to add to that hoard. It explained why she wore a threadbare jacket and shabby bonnet. With it she thought to turn the dream of her youth into reality. Once and again she had been on the point of visiting Italy, but illness and bereavement had barred the way. Now she was so near attainment that she had planned to go after Christmas. She did not lock the money up again, but laid it in a heap on the open desk and resumed her pacing.
She knew the Batesons well. She respected and admired the curate and sincerely loved his wife. She knew enough of their circumstances to be sure that, unless help from outside were forthcoming, the doctor’s advice could not be followed. She felt equally sure that Mrs. Coombes was right, and that the necessary sum would not be raised by so poor a congregation.
Must the invalid then face the rigours of an English winter? There seemed no other solution to the problem. And yet as she turned in her deliberate walk, there was the little pile of money glittering in the lamplight that offered quite another solution.
Miss Colbourne was not given to sentiment; she was a woman who had faced the world and earned her own living for thirty years, and was not quickly moved by any sudden impulse of compassion. Neither was she one to grasp at her own advantage. Had it been merely her own pleasure she was asked to sacrifice, she would have done it willingly. It was characteristic that this aspect of the question did not trouble her. In her heart she knew well that this was her last opportunity of realising her dreams: never again would she possess the necessary funds; youth had gone, health and strength were both on the wane. To give up now meant to give up for life. She realised this, but it did not move her; it hurt her, but it did not shake her purpose. It was not her own pleasure that she hesitated to relinquish; it was rather a question of her duty to herself. Miss Colbourne took life very seriously, and lived up to a delicately poised standard of right and wrong. She had a few months before refused an invitation to a performance of the Agamemnon, because she did not consider her knowledge of Greek equal to its perfect comprehension, and she would not pose as a Greek scholar. The pleasure the spectacle would have given her was not allowed to influence her decision. In the same way now she hesitated whether she ought to give up this opportunity of widening and enriching her mind, cramped by narrow horizons at home. The months she dreamed of spending abroad would not only increase her mental stores, but send her back with enlarged and quickening powers to her pupils. “Where,” she debated, “does one’s duty to one’s higher nature leave off and that to one’s neighbour begin? Shall I not be a more useful member of society if I go abroad, and ought I not to consider my work first?”