A Woman Martyr

								

How dare I--love--care for--any good man, saddle any one’s life with my
miserable folly, confess to any honest person my--my--association with
him?  Why, I blush and groan and grovel and tear my hair when I think
of it, and if my uncle knew--  Heavens! he might curse me and turn me
out of doors and leave me to starve!  He does not love me as if I were
his own child, I know that--how can he when he was at daggers drawn with
my father all those years?  And auntie, kind though she is, she is only
his wife--she is good to me because he wishes her to be!  They are only
pleased with me because I please in society--people like me, like my
looks--if they knew--if they knew--oh! my God!"
She clasped her hands over her face, and writhed.  The old woman’s
features worked, but her brilliant, unearthly eyes were riveted firmly
on her darling.
"You were once a great fool, dearie!  But don’t ’ee be a fool now, never
no more," she said, sonorously, solemnly.  "There was summat you once
used to say, poetry, when you was home from school--it did go right down
into my heart like a bullet dropped into a well--summat like ’a dead
past oughter bury its dead.’  Can your uncle, or your aunt, or this lord
who loves you, or you, or me, or the finest parson or king or pope or
anything or body in this world, bring back one single blessed minnit,
let alone hours or days? That’s where common sense comes in, as your
dear dead par used to say to me often and often!  No, you can’t bring it
back, nor he can’t!  It’s dead!  He’s dead--that brute--and if he ain’t
dead to you, he can’t worry or annoy you, bein’ in prison if he’s alive,
as a fellow of his sort is safe as sure to be----"
"Hush!  For Heaven’s sake, Nana, don’t talk like that!"  Joan trembled,
and glanced a despairing, furtive glance out of the window--above the
pots of arums, and prickly cactus, and geranium cuttings, where the
long, attenuated tendrils of the "mother of thousands" in the wire
basket dangled in the draught.  Much and often as she thought of her
past, that secret past which only this faithful old soul really knew the
facts of, she felt as if she could not bear it put into words.
"Who’s to hear?  The girl’s out!" exclaimed the old woman, who was
roused, excited.  Her nursling’s troubles, the obstacles to her becoming
a great lady, were to her the worst trials of her suffering, lonely
life.
"I tell you this, dearie, if you won’t have anything to do with that
splendid lord who loves you, and you say you like, I shall think you
hanker after him--that viper who ain’t fit to live, let alone to black
that noble gentleman’s boots!  What--you don’t?  Then what should stand
between you and him as loves you?  That--that nonsense of that fellow’s?
What do it matter if he’s dead, or in prison?  It’s four years ago,
ain’t it?  If you are so partickler, you could wait another three, and