finished reading it. She little knew how much this offer of marriage had lowered her in Mr. Wortleby’s estimation.
But breakfast however, lengthened out by human caprice or ingenuity, will not last for ever, and after Miss Letitia had waited patiently for the greater part of an hour, Mr. Wortleby descended to his room. The clerk had placed a chair for her opposite to the one invariably occupied by Mr. Wortleby, which stood with its back towards the window. Why does the light always fall on the client’s face, and never on his counsellor’s? No matter what the standing of a solicitor is, the characteristics of his private room never materially vary. The man who makes ten or twelve thousand a-year is not more daintily lodged during his business hours than the small attorney who makes five hundred; the wooden boxes may have titled names painted on them instead of plebeian ones, but the difference goes no further. Mr. Wortleby did not shake hands with Miss Nevil; it would have been an unnecessary familiarity. He sat down, and waited stiffly for her to state her business. She did so in brief words.
“Reuben Bates was taken before the magistrates yesterday for poaching, Mr. Wortleby, and he has been sent to be tried at the assizes. I understand they begin next week. I have come to beg you to let some one from your office go to watch his case, and to ask you if the expense of engaging counsel will be beyond my means.”
She laid two sovereigns down on the table as she spoke, and seemed to wait for his answer with some anxiety. Mr. Wortleby looked at her suspiciously.
“It is not the first time,” he said, “that you have appealed to me in behalf of this man. Of course I am not aware what claim he can have upon you. As regards myself, I am bound to prosecute him, as representative of the owner of the land on which the offence was committed.”
“Tell me, then, to whom I can apply—what course I can take, so that he may not be utterly friendless when his trial comes on,” she said, earnestly “What is to become of his wife and children? If you could see their distress I am sure you would have pity on him.”
“Mr. Colley of Braxelford will transact any business for you, I have no doubt, Miss Nevil,” replied Mr. Wortleby, coldly. “Did you lay something down on the table?”
She looked in his face, and saw that farther entreaty would be in vain. She went out hopelessly. Mr. Colley of Braxelford was a practitioner of evil report: to him it was impossible for her to apply. She had not gone far in the direction of Beauchamp when she met Tom Morland, who was struck by the unusually anxious look in her face.
“You cannot help me,” she said, when, in answer to his inquiries, she had detailed the case. “In your position, it would be almost an encouragement to crime to attempt to screen a poacher from the justice of the laws, and you do not know, as I do, what his temptation has been.”
“You have helped me too often to make me hesitate on such a point,” replied Tom. “I will see that he is properly defended. At all events, we may be able to save him from a long sentence.”
“Oh! thank you, thank you, Mr. Morland,” she said, eagerly. “But it is my work—a part of my mission here—and I can well afford the expense,” she added, trying to smile as Tom looked disquieted at the suggestion. In his heart he doubted the fact.
He had been nearly a year in Beauchamp. Every month had served to concentrate his interest more completely on his parish, which, like most agricultural districts, was devoid of any striking feature. His life was not likely to provoke any man to write a biographical account of it—surely the meanest injury that one human being can inflict on another, when the grave can give forth no denial, no justification, no contempt even for ill-deserved or wrongly-placed praise. He had laboured hard, and had effected much. By dint of urgent representations to the landlords, drains had been made where mud was once rampant; by force of earnest counsel at least a third of the swaggering haunters of the beer-houses were adopting habits of semi-sobriety. To influence a man so far as to induce him to give up getting drunk more than two or three times a-year was to go far towards saving soul and body also. All this Tom had done: but a woman had done more. “Miss Letitia,” as she was called,—and Tom had acquired the habit of addressing her in the same fashion,—had passed nearly sixteen years in acts of mercy and charity. She had kept many a poor family together: she had saved husband and wife, mother and young children, from the separation entailed by the Union, by help given liberally, given regularly, and how hardly earned! as Tom used to think, with something like anguish, as he learnt from time to time what she had done before he came to the parish. She had watched by sick beds: she had taught in the schools. It was her influence alone that had prevented Beauchamp from sinking irremediably into vice at the period when the culpable inactivity of Mr. Nugent had left his flock uncared for. To all who had been connected with his family she devoted herself unceasingly. The man who had been charged with poaching had been groom to Mr. Nugent’s son; his companion, it was said, in many wild frolics. It was not the first time he had been in trouble; on each occasion Miss Letitia had held out a helping hand to him when he came back with a sullen face and a lagging step from his six weeks’ imprisonment. How did she find the means to do so much? Sometimes Tom, on going to the cottage of the old widow with whom she lived, observed books of German fairy tales, a dictionary, and a heap of manuscripts by the side of them. He had seen packets at the post-office directed in Miss Letitia’s handwriting to a publisher of children’s books in London. From these circumstances he concluded that she helped to eke out her livelihood by the work of translation. Did he care how she earned bread for herself and others? In his long solitary walks across the common, and by the side of the little river that mirrored the hard wintry boughs which overhung it; in the evenings when, pile