III.
One Woman’s History out of Many.
“Sister Faithful” she was called by the Edgecombe people. Her name was really Faithful Farrington, but no one ever said “Miss Farrington.” She had been born in the old Manor House, where for fifty years she had spent the most of her time. Her father, old Nathan Farrington, had been content to live the life of a recluse after his wife’s death, finding his greatest happiness among his books, and in directing the education of his two children. Francis Farrington, the son, had gone out to India in early life, and had risen high in the Civil Service. He had lost his young wife, and after many years of valuable work had returned, an invalid, to Edgecombe, where he found in his sister the most tender and sympathetic of companions. He was content enough to allow the whole responsibility of the estate to rest upon her patient shoulders. She, for her part, grew up to know a great deal about science and literature, but absolutely nothing of society or the world. When she was thirty her father died, and, besides her brother out in India, and a distant cousin, who was a Professor in some London college, she had no one nearer than the old nurse who had tried to fill the place of a mother to her.
Having a considerable fortune, she lived on in her old home, attended by the same faithful servants, exactly as she had always done, except that when the long winter evenings became tedious, and books failed her, she invited some of her townswomen in to tea and played a rubber of whist. Her days were filled with good works; every cottager in the neighbourhood knew her, and she knew them and sympathized with all their sorrows. Wise in her charities, she was the vicar’s most invaluable assistant, and it is to be doubted whether he, in his rôle of spiritual adviser, was as much loved and revered as “Sister Faithful,” whose tireless hands constructed wonderful garments for the babies, and whose name was borne by half the children in consequence.
No breath from the outside world had ever touched this woman. Once she had gone to Paris with her father, but it remained in her mind simply a lovely picture, a little larger and more daring in colour than the pictures she had seen at the Louvre. She had been up to London several times, but that was to make notes at the British Museum. Her life was in no way different from that of most of the women she had known.
Once she had seen an item in a journal that struck her forcibly; it mentioned that there were eight hundred thousand more women than men in Great Britain, and that a good proportion of them were matrimonially eligible women as regarded property and accomplishments, but that they were of the middle classes, where marriage was most infrequent. Sister Faithful had remarked then that she knew a great many attractive women who were not liable to marry. She wondered why, for her education had made her logical. And then she reviewed her own life. All the male members of the families of her friends had gone to larger towns as soon as they were old enough; the girls, after a touch of boarding-school, had come home to assume simple household duties, and, an occasional curate excepted, they did not often meet young men.
“Sister Faithful,” having for her constant companion a man who lived in books, had rather a better-trained mind than most women. It had not been allowed to wander, and her greatest weakness was her way of bestowing charity. She did not like to account to anyone for it, and so tired mothers, who sent their offspring to her for a holiday, were apt to have them returned in new and wholesome garments, which showed that a heart calculated by nature to be a motherly one was bestowing its bounty quietly on other women’s children. Strange to say, Sister Faithful had not given any thought to marriage for herself. That she should ever leave her father, marry, and have children of her own seemed impossible. She was quite content to accept life as she found it, and improve the morals and manners of the children of the lower classes about her. And now she was fifty, and until her brother’s return she had lived alone.
She had remembered yesterday that it was her birthday and had celebrated it by inviting the school children to tea in her garden, which was in its loveliest summer dress. In the evening she had received a letter from her distant and unknown cousin, the Professor, whom she had only met in those long ago excursions to London, saying he was “tired”—“worn out,” his doctor said—and he had written to see if his cousin would take him in for a few weeks’ vacation. “I shall live out-of-doors,” he wrote, “and I promise in no way to disturb your life. I want only my books, and to wander about over your beautiful country.” She wondered if she had been hasty when she wrote back to bid “welcome to our nearest of kin and our father’s friend.” She remembered that after all he was really a cousin once removed, and a little younger than herself, and that when her father had liked him he was very young indeed. A glance at the mirror re-assured her. She was very free from vanity, and she realized she was no longer young. The villagers called her beautiful, but perhaps their sensibilities, sharpened by the lack of beauty about them, were keener in detecting their benefactress’ fine points.
Thanks to her healthy, regular life, Sister Faithful at fifty was very good to look upon. The soft hair, worn lightly back from the low, well-shaped forehead, was only faintly tinged with grey, and her skin was as smooth and fresh as that of a woman of half her age. It was not the firm, quiet mouth, nor even the gentle, sweet brown eyes that attracted one most; it was the unconsciousness of the woman, the very annihilation of self, as it were, without affectation, that made one long to know why she was constantly giving without any question of return. No man had ever told her she was beautiful; her father’s friends had approved of her, but then she ministered to their comfort, when they came to stay at Edgecombe. She attended to everyone’s wants, and seemed to have gone through life without dreaming that in some larger sphere she would have been considered a very attractive woman. Not that she was perfect; she had her idiosyncrasies—as who has not? but she had a disciplined, well-trained, unselfish nature, that overbalanced any faults. Even now her one consideration was for Cousin Emerson, who was to arrive the following day. Would he be comfortable in Edgecombe? Would he not be lonely with her and only an invalid host to look after him? These, and other doubts crossed her mind, and, as a relief, she spent the entire day overlooking the sweeping and dusting of the already clean house.
Next day, the evening train brought Cousin Emerson. As he alighted from the carriage, Sister Faithful thought him only an older edition of the intellectual-looking man she had met in London. He was evidently still ill, and looked as if he had burned too much midnight oil. Her practical mind immediately swept over the entire list of nourishing dishes that she might concoct for him. He, half-an-hour later, glanced over his well-appointed room, and thanked fortune that it had occurred to him to stay with his good cousins.
After dinner this occurred to him again as he stretched himself on the comfortable library lounge, and let the smoke of his cigar curl up in slow, bewitching rings about his head, while Cousin Faithful read aloud in that well-modulated voice of hers.
And so the days went on, bringing health and strength to Cousin Emerson, and great, unspeakable content to “Sister Faithful,” as he too called her.
“Somehow,” he said, after he had been at Edgecombe for several weeks, “it seems as if we were more than cousins. I shall reverse your name; you shall be my Faithful Sister, as you have been nurse and friend.”
At first he had accompanied her in her long afternoon walks, when she visited her cottage people, but after a while he persuaded her to take all sorts of short excursions on foot, or again they would drive over the hills about the estate.
The evenings were perhaps the sweetest of all to Sister Faithful, for then her interests in the outer world ceased, and, until her cousin came, she had often felt very lonely. Now, they read aloud, played a friendly game of cribbage, or strolled about the garden when the nights were fine. Autumn was drawing near. Cousin Emerson’s visit had lengthened to two months, and still he said nothing about going. He was quite strong again, and seemed to have lost the melancholy that at first overshadowed him. Faithful’s heart rejoiced as she looked at him, and she did not allow herself to think that it might end.
One morning, in early September, the post brought several letters. They were breakfasting. Faithful remembered every detail afterwards. The pungent odour of chrysanthemums always carried her back to that morning. Cousin Emerson had gathered for the breakfast-table the splendid bunch that adorned it.
Suddenly a look of intense happiness lighted up his face. “Faithful Sister,” he said, looking across at her, “I want you to be the first to congratulate me. At last the woman whom I adore, for love of whom I have been so miserable, has consented to marry me. I doubt whether, if I had not fallen into your dear hospitable hands, I could have struggled so well to recover.”
In his excitement, Cousin Emerson did not notice the pallor that swept over Faithful’s face. Her voice was steady as she said, “Why have you not let us sympathize with you all along?”
“Oh, it all seemed so hopeless,” he said, “and I could not bear to open the old wound; but I am to go up to London at once, and I shall bring my bride straight to Edgecombe, if I may.”
That night he left, after many cordial expressions of gratitude, and Sister Faithful, apparently unmoved, saw him go; but afterward she had no mind to wander about the garden, or read a favourite book. She went quietly to her room, and, for the first time, wept.
She knew she had been companionable to this man; that in her society he had found peace and content. And yet—in a moment—he had forgotten it all; he had gone to win some other woman, impelled by what he called love. Was it love she felt for him? Even then, in her loneliness, with a grey-skyed future before her, and no prospect of change, she felt only her own inconsistency. “He was my kinsman and guest; he never asked me to love him, and he never knew my feeling for him,” she argued, and so the night passed, a night of unselfish sorrow for the lonely woman, while the man was being whirled towards the one being who engrossed his thoughts.
Afterward, when Cousin Emerson and his wife came to Edgecombe to visit, he remarked, in the privacy of their room, that Cousin Faithful had aged terribly; but to the poor people she seemed more saintly than ever, for after that one happy summer—the only time she had ever allowed herself any personal happiness—she had returned to her charities as if she wished to make up for some neglect. And when the villagers called her “Sister Faithful,” she felt it almost as a reproach that she had dared hope for any other name.