Kingston started and colored. She was a woman of more than thirty years of age--pale, thin, flat-chested, not very tall; she had fairly good features and dark, expressive eyes; but she was not attractive-looking.
Her lips were too pale and her dark eyes too sunken for beauty. There was a gentleness in her manner, however, a patience in her low voice, which Lesley had always liked. It reminded her, in some undefined way, of her old friend, Sister Rose.
"I"ve lived among the poor all my life, ma"am," Kingston said.
"Do they suffer very much?" Lesley asked.
Kingston looked slightly puzzled. "Suffer, ma"am?"
"Yes--from hunger and cold, I mean: I have been reading about poor people in this book--and----"
Kingston cast a rapid glance at the volume. Her face kindled at once.
"Oh," she said, "I"ve read that book, ma"am, and what a beautiful book it is!"
"Do you know it?" Lesley asked, amazed. Then, moved by a sudden impulse, "And you know it was written by my father?"
Who would have thought that she could say the last two words with such an accent of tender pride?
"No, ma"am, I did not know. Is it really _this_ Mr. Brooke? The name, you see, is not so uncommon as some, and I did not think----"
"I know, I know," said Lesley, hurriedly. "But just tell me this--is it true? Do the poor people suffer as much in England as he says they do?"
"Oh yes, ma"am, I"m afraid so, at least. I"ve seen a good deal of suffering in my day."
Lesley was quiet for a little while, and the woman brushed out her shining hair. "Tell me," she said, "what is the worst suffering of all--will you? I mean, a suffering caused by being poor--nothing to do with your own life, of course. Is it the being hungry, or cold--or what?"
Kingston considered for a moment. "I think," she said at last, "it isn"t the being cold or hungry yourself that matters so much as seeing those that belong to you cold and hungry. That"s the worst. If you have children, it does go to your heart to hear them ask you for something to eat, and you have nothing to give them."
"Yes," said Lesley, softly, "I should think that is the worst."
"But I don"t know," said Kingston, in a perfectly unmoved and stolid tone, "whether it"s worse than having no candles."
Lesley looked up in astonishment.
"It"s when any one"s ill that you feel that," the woman went on, in the same level tones. "In winter it"s dark, maybe, at four o"clock, and not light again till nearly nine in the morning. It doesn"t matter so much if you can go out. But if you have to sit by some one who"s ill, and you can"t see their faces, and if they leave off moaning you think they"re dead--and perhaps when the early morning light comes it"s only a dead face you have to look upon, and you never saw them draw their last breath--why, then, you feel mad-like to think of the candles that are wasted in big houses and of the bread that"s thrown away."
Lesley listened, appalled. A homely detail of this kind impressed her more than any appeal to her higher imagination. The woes of the poor had suddenly become real.
"I hope you never had to go through all that, Kingston," she said, very gently.
"Yes, ma"am, twice," said Kingston. "Once with my mother, and once with my little boy. They were both dead in the morning, but I didn"t see "em die."
"But where was your husband? Was he dead?" said Lesley, quickly.
"Oh, no, ma"am. But he was amusing himself. He was a gentleman, you see--more shame to me, perhaps you"ll say. I couldn"t expect him to think of things like candles."
"Oh!--And is he--is he dead?"
"No ma"am, he isn"t dead," said Kingston. And from the shortness of her tone and the steadiness with which she averted her face Lesley came to the conclusion that she did not want to be questioned any more.
Lesley went down to dinner feeling that she had made some new and extraordinary discoveries. She noticed that her father and her aunt made several allusions which would have seemed mysterious and repellant to her the day before, but which now possessed an almost tragic interest.
When before had she heard her aunt speak casually of a Mothers" Meeting and a Lending Library? These were common-place matters to the ordinary English girl; but to Lesley they possessed the elements of a romance.
For was it not by means of hackneyed, common-place machinery of this kind that cultured men and women put themselves into relation with the great, suffering, coa.r.s.e, uncultured, human-hearted poor?
CHAPTER XIII.
LESLEY SEEKS ADVICE.
Added to Lesley"s new views of life, there was also a new feeling for her father. In the first rush of enthusiastic admiration for his book, she forgot all that she had heard against him, and believed--for the moment--that he was all Maurice Kenyon represented him to be. But naturally this state of mind could not last. The long years of her mother"s influence told against any claim to love or respect on the father"s part. Lesley remembered how bitterly Lady Alice spoke of him.
She could not think that her mother had been wrong.
It is a terrible position for a son or daughter--to have to judge between father and mother. It is a wrong position, and one in which Lesley felt instinctively that she ought never to have been placed. Of course it was impossible for her to help it. Father and mother had virtually made her their judge. They said to her, "Live for a year with each of us, and choose which you prefer. You cannot have us both." And as the only true and natural position for a child is that in which he or she can have both, Lesley Brooke was in a very trying situation. She had begun life in her father"s house as her mother"s ardent partisan; and she was her mother"s partisan still. Only she was not quite sure whether she was not going to find that she could love her father too. And in that case, Lesley was tremulously certain that Lady Alice would accuse her of unfaithfulness to _her_.
She turned with a sigh from the contemplation of her position to her new views of London and modern life. The poverty and ignorance of which she read had seemed hateful to her. But her impulse--always the impulse of generous souls--was not to shrink away from this newly-discovered misery, but to go down into the midst of it and help to cure the evil.
Still blindly ignorant of what was already done, or doing, she hardly knew in which way to begin a work that was so new to her. Indeed, she hardly estimated its difficulties. All the poor that she had ever seen were the blue-bloused peasants, or brown-faced crones, and quaint little maidens with pigtails, who had visited the convent at Fontainebleau. She was quite sure that English poor people were not like these. Her father knew a great deal about them, but she could not ask him. The very way in which he spoke to her--lightly always, and jestingly--made serious questioning impossible. To whom then should she apply? The answer presented itself almost immediately, and with extraordinary readiness--to Mr. Oliver Trent.
This decision was not so remarkable as it at first may seem. Lesley had run over in her mind a list of the persons whom she could not or would not ask. Her father and Miss Brooke?--impossible. Mrs.
Romaine?--certainly not. Ethel?--Lesley did not believe that she knew anything about the poor. Maurice Kenyon?--not for worlds. The neighboring clergy?--Mr. Brooke had said that he did not want "the Blacks" about his house. The other men and women whom Lesley had seen were mere casual acquaintances; not friends of the family, like Oliver Trent.
At least, she _supposed_ that Oliver was a friend of the family. He was Mrs. Romaine"s brother; and Mrs. Romaine was a good deal at the house.
In her own mind Lesley put him on the same footing as Mr. Kenyon--which estimate would have made Caspar Brooke exceedingly indignant, could he have known it. For though he did not exactly dislike Oliver Trent, he would never have thought of cla.s.sing him with his friend, Maurice Kenyon.
But Oliver had already called twice on some pretext or other, since Lesley had come home: and on the latter of these occasions he had sat for a full hour with her in the drawing-room, talking chiefly of France and Italy--in low and softly modulated tones. Lesley was losing all her horror of interviews with young men. If the nuns had seen her now they would indeed have thought her lost to all sense of propriety. For one of Miss Brooke"s chief theories was that no self-respecting young woman needs a chaperon. And she had flatly refused to chaperone Lesley except on inevitable or really desirable occasions. "The girl must learn to go about the world by herself," she had said. "And I will say this for Lesley, she is not naturally timid or helpless--it is only training that makes her so." And under this tuition Lesley soon acquired the self-possession in which she had been somewhat wanting when she came, newly-fledged, from her convent.
So when Oliver called again--it was on a message from his sister, and it had not yet recurred to Lesley to wonder at the readiness shown by English brothers to run on messages to their sisters" friends--he found Lesley alone, as usual, in the drawing-room, and she welcomed him with considerable warmth--a warmth that took him by surprise.
"I am so glad to see you, Mr. Trent: I wanted to ask you something," she said, at once.
"Ask me anything--command me in anything," he replied.
He sank into a low chair at her right hand, and looked quite devotionally into her face. Lesley felt a trifle disturbed. She could not forget that Oliver was Ethel"s lover, and she did not think that he ought to look at her so--_eagerly_--she did not know what else to call it. It was a look that made her uncomfortable. n.o.body had ever looked at her in that way before. They did not look like that in the convent.
"It is nothing very particular," she said, shrinking back a little.
"Only I have n.o.body to ask."
"I know--I understand," said Oliver, in his softest tones. Somehow his sympathy did not offend her, as Mr. Kenyon"s had done.
"It is very stupid of me," Lesley went on, trying to smile, "not to ask my father or Aunt Sophy; but I am afraid they would only laugh at me."
"I shall not laugh at you," said Oliver, marvelling inwardly.
"Won"t you? You are sure? It is only a little, stupid, ordinary question. Do you know anything about Macclesfield Buildings?"