“Answer me,” the nurse insisted. “Have you heard of the Refuges? Have you heard of the Women?”
“Yes.”
“Move your chair a little further away from me.” She paused. Her voice, without losing its steadiness, fell to its lowest tones. “I was once of those women,” she said, quietly.
Grace sprang to her feet with a faint cry. She stood petrified— incapable of uttering a word.
“I have been in a Refuge,” pursued the sweet, sad voice of the other woman. “I have been in a Prison. Do you still wish to be my friend? Do you still insist on sitting close by me and taking my hand?” She waited for a reply, and no reply came. “You see you were wrong,” she went on, gently, “when you called me cruel—and I was right when I told you I was kind.”
At that appeal Grace composed herself, and spoke. “I don’t wish to offend you—” she began, confusedly.
Mercy Merrick stopped her there.
“You don’t offend me,” she said, without the faintest note of displeasure in her tone. “I am accustomed to stand in the pillory of my own past life. I sometimes ask myself if it was all my fault. I sometimes wonder if Society had no duties toward me when I was a child selling matches in the street—when I was a hard-working girl fainting at my needle for want of food.” Her voice faltered a little for the first time as it pronounced those words; she waited a moment, and recovered herself. “It’s too late to dwell on these things now,” she said, resignedly. “Society can subscribe to reclaim me; but Society can’t take me back. You see me here in a place of trust—patiently, humbly, doing all the good I can. It doesn’t matter! Here, or elsewhere, what I am can never alter what I was. For three years past all that a sincerely penitent woman can do I have done. It doesn’t matter! Once let my past story be known, and the shadow of it covers me; the kindest people shrink.”
She waited again. Would a word of sympathy come to comfort her from the other woman’s lips? No! Miss Roseberry was shocked; Miss Roseberry was confused. “I am very sorry for you,” was all that Miss Roseberry could say.
“Everybody is sorry for me,” answered the nurse, as patiently as ever; “everybody is kind to me. But the lost place is not to be regained. I can’t get back! I can’t get back?” she cried, with a passionate outburst of despair—checked instantly the moment it had escaped her. “Shall I tell you what my experience has been?” she resumed. “Will you hear the story of Magdalen—in modern times?”