The habit of working for another is so fixed in the lives of poor women,
that the interruption of it becomes a kind of second death, almost as
difficult to bear as the death of the affection which is itself almost a
kind of habit. When Anne returned from market, and sat down, her house
seemed to have become a little emptier, because the girl whose welfare
she had carried with her for so many months was beyond her reach. She
took down her Bible to read it, and find relief for her trouble. She was
a woman who had had "experience"--that experience which comes to each as
a kind of special revelation, a thing so surprising, that it appears
impossible to think of its having happened before, or to withhold the
telling; the cynicism, which declares this to be an overwhelming
interest in one's internal self, being only partially right, it being
rather the excited and surprised mental condition which is the deep well
from which all art, all expression, breaks forth. She read slowly,
trying to find meaning in each phrase, when suddenly a verse struck her
in its entirety before her lips had finished reading.
"Pure religion, and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to
visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself
unspotted from the world."
She saw exactly what she would do. There was the child, motherless, and
worse than fatherless. She would take him and bring him up unspotted
from the world. It was clearly a leading for her. She had not been
permitted to save the girl, but she might take and protect the boy. She
remembered even the commonsense of Mrs Hankworth. "It's soonest
forgotten about if it's a boy." She was not so much an old maid as a
woman shut up from issue, and she had no fear of a child. And in the
midst of her bewilderment about the girl, about death and the hereafter,
she could see an earthly duty clearly, and pure religion for herself.
She began to sing:
"Who points the clouds their course,
Whom winds and storms obey,
He shall direct thy wandering feet,
He shall point out thy way."
She opened a drawer which held what was left of her father's clothes
without any feeling of incongruity. There were four shirts of checked
oxford shirting, two pairs of long stockings, a corduroy jacket, and his
best suit of black serge bound with braid round the coat. There was a
revolver, too, a clasp knife, a unused church-warden, an old wide-awake
hat. To-morrow she would write to the Union, and offer to bring up the
child when he was weaned.