“Oh, they always say that,” returned Mrs. Brand. “Their ‘knowing’ means that they have seen the man in the street, or in some shop, or, at best, at their chapel. Pollie was a great hand at chapel-going. I always thought there was something at the bottom of it. Then as for her ‘happiness,’ if these girls knew what was good for them, they wouldn’t marry at all. In less than a year’s time, she will wish she hadn’t. Very likely she will come and tell you so. She will come with a black eye, and a baby in her arms, and she will own she would be glad to come back to you, if it wasn’t for that baby! That has happened to me more than once.”
“Flo, Flo,” cried Lucy, her own heart soft with tender remembrance of her absent husband, “do you think that nobody can be loving and happy save the wealthy and leisurely?”
“I’m not blaming the poor wretches, I’m sure,” Flo defended herself. “If Jem and I had to live in one room, I should not wonder much if he beat me sometimes. He’s cross enough often; but then I can leave him to himself. What would he get like, fancy, if he saw me worn out with cleaning up and nursing, and dressed in rags? When all that comes in at the door, love goes out at the window. Pollie will soon find there is a great difference between workaday reality and the courting times of her evenings out and bank holidays.”
“Well, the love that cannot sustain any conditions that life imposes, has never been love at all. So it is not much loss when it goes!” said Lucy, with an indignant note in her voice. She felt keenly how her own position looked in such eyes as those of Florence and Jem Brand.
“Ah, you live in the grand style—in blank verse, I may say,” Flo went on carelessly. “But that was never my way. Perhaps, after all, each gets what each most cares for. I should not have married Jem, perhaps, if I had been of the blank verse style. But here we are, wandering off into the fields of romance. The business in hand is, let Pollie go. Engage your washerwoman—you say you have one once a month—to come to you every day till you are suited. Then you’ll get at the bottom of all Pollie’s little ways, and will find out what kitchen things you have really got, and what is gone past recovery, down the sink or up the chimney. You can make out new lists, and then the minute you see a suitable girl, there’s the place ready for her, and so she starts fair.”
Lucy resented all Mrs. Brand’s doubts of Pollie. She could not see why a single act of inconsideration and rashness should so condemn character, root and branch, in a servant, when the same would be easily condoned in a friend or relative, and possibly even regarded as rather pretty and romantic; simply another illustration of “all for love and the world well lost.” She knew young men and women, too, who had treated their own parents quite as thoughtlessly as Pollie had treated her master’s household. Lucy had always regarded such conduct with great severity, whereas Flo had only laughed over it, retailing “delicious” incidents of how the “old folks” had been “sold.” This was but another instance of higher standards of conduct being set for the kitchen than for the drawing-room. It had always seemed to Lucy’s chivalrous nature to be a gross injustice that, from those members of society who are presumed, conventionally, to have had the fewest “advantages,” more should be expected than from those who are said to have had “every advantage.” She could not understand it, not yet having learned that this injustice, like all injustice, is rooted in sheer selfishness. Many people care nothing at all for “rights and wrongs” save as these affect their own personal convenience. Many more are seldom brought even to consider “rights and wrongs” until these reach the same point.
Alas, our household state would be actually worse than it is, were not our servants in a general way, at least, more punctual and more “tidy” than many of ourselves!
Notwithstanding Lucy’s instinctive abhorrence of so many of her sister’s domestic standpoints, she yet accepted Mrs. Brand’s advice as to letting Pollie go and having a charwoman interregnum. Indeed, as no other alternative offered, she was forced to accept it.
Pollie went off, tearful and subdued, and full of humbly-expressed hopes “that the master would come back quite strong.”
“It would have troubled him terribly to know you were leaving me just now, Pollie,” said Lucy, sufficiently reconciled to be able to show the wound to the hand which had dealt it. “I believe he would have deferred going away. Yet this is the right season for him to go—to say nothing of the opportunity of going with a good friend. You have made me keep a secret from my husband, Pollie, for the very first time, and the bare thought of it makes me unhappy!”