Shirley
young mistress sat very still. She was always in the same place, always
bent industriously over a piece of work. She did not lift her head to
speak to Fanny, as her custom was; and when the latter remarked that the
day was fine, and she ought to take a walk, she only said, "It is cold."
"You are very diligent at that sewing, Miss Caroline," continued the
girl, approaching her little table.
"I am tired of it, Fanny."
"Then why do you go on with it? Put it down. Read, or do something to
amuse you."
"It is solitary in this house, Fanny. Don't you think so?"
"I don't find it so, miss. Me and Eliza are company for one another; but
you are quite too still. You should visit more. Now, be persuaded: go
upstairs and dress yourself smart, and go and take tea, in a friendly
way, with Miss Mann or Miss Ainley. I am certain either of those ladies
would be delighted to see you."
"But their houses are dismal: they are both old maids. I am certain old
maids are a very unhappy race."
"Not they, miss. They can't be unhappy; they take such care of
themselves. They are all selfish."
"Miss Ainley is not selfish, Fanny. She is always doing good. How
devotedly kind she was to her step-mother as long as the old lady lived;
and now when she is quite alone in the world, without brother or sister,
or any one to care for her, how charitable she is to the poor, as far as
her means permit! Still nobody thinks much of her, or has pleasure in
going to see her; and how gentlemen always sneer at her!"
"They shouldn't, miss. I believe she is a good woman. But gentlemen
think only of ladies' looks."
"I'll go and see her," exclaimed Caroline, starting up; "and if she asks
me to stay to tea, I'll stay. How wrong it is to neglect people because
they are not pretty, and young, and merry! And I will certainly call to
see Miss Mann too. She may not be amiable, but what has made her
unamiable? What has life been to her?"
Fanny helped Miss Helstone to put away her work, and afterwards assisted
her to dress.
"_You_'ll not be an old maid, Miss Caroline," she said, as she tied the
sash of her brown silk frock, having previously smoothed her soft, full,
and shining curls; "there are no signs of an old maid about you."
Caroline looked at the little mirror before her, and she thought there
were some signs. She could see that she was altered within the last
month; that the hues of her complexion were paler, her eyes changed--a
wan shade seemed to circle them; her countenance was dejected--she was
not, in short, so pretty or so fresh as she used to be. She distantly
hinted this to Fanny, from whom she got no direct answer, only a remark
that people did vary in their looks, but that at her age a little
falling away signified nothing; she would soon come round again, and be
plumper and rosier than ever. Having given this assurance, Fanny showed
singular zeal in wrapping her up in warm shawls and handkerchiefs, till
Caroline, nearly smothered with the weight, was fain to resist further
additions.
She paid her visits--first to Miss Mann, for this was the most difficult
point. Miss Mann was certainly not quite a lovable person. Till now,
Caroline had always unhesitatingly declared she disliked her, and more
than once she had joined her cousin Robert in laughing at some of her
peculiarities. Moore was not habitually given to sarcasm, especially on
anything humbler or weaker than himself; but he had once or twice
happened to be in the room when Miss Mann had made a call on his sister,
and after listening to her conversation and viewing her features for a
time, he had gone out into the garden where his little cousin was
tending some of his favourite flowers, and while standing near and
watching her he had amused himself with comparing fair youth, delicate
and attractive, with shrivelled eld, livid and loveless, and in
jestingly repeating to a smiling girl the vinegar discourse of a
cankered old maid. Once on such an occasion Caroline had said to him,
looking up from the luxuriant creeper she was binding to its frame, "Ah!
Robert, you do not like old maids. I, too, should come under the lash of
your sarcasm if I were an old maid."
"You an old maid!" he had replied. "A piquant notion suggested by lips
of that tint and form. I can fancy you, though, at forty, quietly
dressed, pale and sunk, but still with that straight nose, white
forehead, and those soft eyes. I suppose, too, you will keep your voice,
which has another 'timbre' than that hard, deep organ of Miss Mann's.
Courage, Cary! Even at fifty you will not be repulsive."
"Miss Mann did not make herself, or tune her voice, Robert."
"Nature made her in the mood in which she makes her briars and thorns;
whereas for the creation of some women she reserves the May morning
hours, when with light and dew she wooes the primrose from the turf and
the lily from the wood-moss."
* * * * *
Ushered into Miss Mann's little parlour, Caroline found her, as she
always found her, surrounded by perfect neatness, cleanliness, and
comfort (after all, is it not a virtue in old maids that solitude rarely
makes them negligent or disorderly?)--no dust on her polished furniture,
none on her carpet, fresh flowers in the vase on her table, a bright
fire in the grate. She herself sat primly and somewhat grimly-tidy in a
cushioned rocking-chair, her hands busied with some knitting. This was
her favourite work, as it required the least exertion. She scarcely rose
as Caroline entered. To avoid excitement was one of Miss Mann's aims in
life. She had been composing herself ever since she came down in the
morning, and had just attained a certain lethargic state of tranquillity
when the visitor's knock at the door startled her, and undid her day's
work. She was scarcely pleased, therefore, to see Miss Helstone. She
received her with reserve, bade her be seated with austerity, and when
she got her placed opposite, she fixed her with her eye.
This was no ordinary doom--to be fixed with Miss Mann's eye. Robert
Moore had undergone it once, and had never forgotten the circumstance.
He considered it quite equal to anything Medusa could do. He professed
to doubt whether, since that infliction, his flesh had been quite what
it was before--whether there was not something stony in its texture. The
gaze had had such an effect on him as to drive him promptly from the
apartment and house; it had even sent him straightway up to the rectory,
where he had appeared in Caroline's presence with a very queer face, and
amazed her by demanding a cousinly salute on the spot, to rectify a
damage that had been done him.
Certainly Miss Mann had a formidable eye for one of the softer sex. It
was prominent, and showed a great deal of the white, and looked as
steadily, as unwinkingly, at you as if it were a steel ball soldered in
her head; and when, while looking, she began to talk in an indescribably
dry, monotonous tone--a tone without vibration or inflection--you felt
as if a graven image of some bad spirit were addressing you. But it was
all a figment of fancy, a matter of surface. Miss Mann's goblin grimness
scarcely went deeper than the angel sweetness of hundreds of beauties.
She was a perfectly honest, conscientious woman, who had performed
duties in her day from whose severe anguish many a human Peri,
gazelle-eyed, silken-tressed, and silver-tongued, would have shrunk
appalled. She had passed alone through protracted scenes of suffering,
exercised rigid self-denial, made large sacrifices of time, money,
health for those who had repaid her only by ingratitude, and now her
main--almost her sole--fault was that she was censorious.
Censorious she certainly was. Caroline had not sat five minutes ere her
hostess, still keeping her under the spell of that dread and Gorgon
gaze, began flaying alive certain of the families in the neighbourhood.
She went to work at this business in a singularly cool, deliberate
manner, like some surgeon practising with his scalpel on a lifeless
subject. She made few distinctions; she allowed scarcely any one to be
good; she dissected impartially almost all her acquaintance. If her
auditress ventured now and then to put in a palliative word she set it
aside with a certain disdain. Still, though thus pitiless in moral
anatomy, she was no scandal-monger. She never disseminated really
malignant or dangerous reports. It was not her heart so much as her
temper that was wrong.
Caroline made this discovery for the first time to-day, and moved
thereby to regret divers unjust judgments she had more than once passed
on the crabbed old maid, she began to talk to her softly, not in
sympathizing words, but with a sympathizing voice. The loneliness of her
condition struck her visitor in a new light, as did also the character
of her ugliness--a bloodless pallor of complexion, and deeply worn lines
of feature. The girl pitied the solitary and afflicted woman; her looks
told what she felt. A sweet countenance is never so sweet as when the
moved heart animates it with compassionate tenderness. Miss Mann, seeing
such a countenance raised to her, was touched in her turn. She
acknowledged her sense of the interest thus unexpectedly shown in her,
who usually met with only coldness and ridicule, by replying to her
candidly. Communicative on her own affairs she usually was not, because
no one cared to listen to her; but to-day she became so, and her
confidante shed tears as she heard her speak, for she told of cruel,
slow-wasting, obstinate sufferings. Well might she be corpse-like; well
might she look grim, and never smile; well might she wish to avoid
excitement, to gain and retain composure! Caroline, when she knew all,
acknowledged that Miss Mann was rather to be admired for fortitude than
blamed for moroseness. Reader! when you behold an aspect for whose
constant gloom and frown you cannot account, whose unvarying cloud
exasperates you by its apparent causelessness, be sure that there is a
canker somewhere, and a canker not the less deeply corroding because
concealed.
Miss Mann felt that she was understood partly, and wished to be
understood further; for, however old, plain, humble, desolate, afflicted
we may be, so long as our hearts preserve the feeblest spark of life,
they preserve also, shivering near that pale ember, a starved, ghostly
longing for appreciation and affection. To this extenuated spectre,
perhaps, a crumb is not thrown once a year, but when ahungered and
athirst to famine--when all humanity has forgotten the dying tenant of a
decaying house--Divine mercy remembers the mourner, and a shower of
manna falls for lips that earthly nutriment is to pass no more. Biblical
promises, heard first in health, but then unheeded, come whispering to
the couch of sickness; it is felt that a pitying God watches what all
mankind have forsaken. The tender compassion of Jesus is recalled and
relied on; the faded eye, gazing beyond time, sees a home, a friend, a
refuge in eternity.
Miss Mann, drawn on by the still attention of her listener, proceeded to
allude to circumstances in her past life. She spoke like one who tells
the truth--simply, and with a certain reserve; she did not boast, nor
did she exaggerate. Caroline found that the old maid had been a most
devoted daughter and sister, an unwearied watcher by lingering
deathbeds; that to prolonged and unrelaxing attendance on the sick the
malady that now poisoned her own life owed its origin; that to one
wretched relative she had been a support and succour in the depths of
self-earned degradation, and that it was still her hand which kept him
from utter destitution. Miss Helstone stayed the whole evening, omitting
to pay her other intended visit; and when she left Miss Mann it was with