The New Magdalen | Page 6

guessed you to be some great lady in disguise?"
Mercy laughed to herself--low and bitterly. "I a great lady!" she said, contemptuously. "For Heaven's sake, let us talk of something else!"
Grace's curiosity was thoroughly roused. She persisted. "Once more," she whispered, persuasively, "let us be friends." She gently laid her hand as she spoke on Mercy's shoulder. Mercy roughly shook it off. There was a rudeness in the action which would have offended the most patient woman living. Grace drew back indignantly. "Ah!" she cried, "you are cruel."
"I am kind," answered the nurse, speaking more sternly than ever.
"Is it kind to keep me at a distance? I have told you my story."
The nurse's voice rose excitedly. "Don't tempt me to speak out," she said; "you will regret it."
Grace declined to accept the warning. "I have placed confidence in you," she went on. "It is ungenerous to lay me under an obligation, and then to shut me out of your confidence in return."
"You will have it?" said Mercy Merrick. "You shall have it! Sit down again." Grace's heart began to quicken its beat in expectation of the disclosure that was to come. She drew her chair closer to the chest on which the nurse was sitting. With a firm hand Mercy put the chair back to a distance from her. "Not so near me!" she said, harshly.
"Why not?"
"Not so near," repeated the sternly resolute voice. "Wait till you have heard what I have to say."
Grace obeyed without a word more. There was a momentary silence. A faint flash of light leaped up from the expiring candle, and showed Mercy crouching on the chest, with her elbows on her knees, and her face hidden in her hands. The next instant the room was buried in obscurity. As the darkness fell on the two women the nurse spoke.
CHAPTER II.
MAGDALEN--IN MODERN TIMES.
"WHEN your mother was alive were you ever out with her after nightfall in the streets of a great city?"
In those extraordinary terms Mercy Merrick opened the confidential interview which Grace Roseberry had forced on her. Grace answered, simply, "I don't understand you."
"I will put it in another way," said the nurse. Its unnatural hardness and sternness of tone passed away from her voice, and its native gentleness and sadness returned, as she made that reply. "You read the newspapers like the rest of the world," she went on; "have you ever read of your unhappy fellow- creatures (the starving outcasts of the population) whom Want has driven into Sin?"
Still wondering, Grace answered that she had read of such things often, in newspapers and in books.
"Have you heard--when those starving and sinning fellow-creatures happened to be women--of Refuges established to protect and reclaim them?"
The wonder in Grace 's mind passed away, and a vague suspicion of something painful to come took its place. "These are extraordinary questions," she said, nervously. "What do you mean?"
"Answer me," the nurse insisted. "Have you heard of the Refuges? Have you heard of the Women?"
"Yes."
"Move your chair a little further away from me." She paused. Her voice, without losing its steadiness, fell to its lowest tones." I was once of those women," she said, quietly.
Grace sprang to her feet with a faint cry. She stood petrified--incapable of uttering a word.
"I have been in a Refuge," pursued the sweet, sad voice of the other woman." I have been in a Prison. Do you still wish to be my friend? Do you still insist on sitting close by me and taking my hand?" She waited for a reply, and no reply came. "You see you were wrong," she went on, gently, "when you called me cruel--and I was right when I told you I was kind."
At that appeal Grace composed herself, and spoke. "I don't wish to offend you--" she began, confusedly.
Mercy Merrick stopped her there.
"You don't offend me," she said, without the faintest note of displeasure in her tone. "I am accustomed to stand in the pillory of my own past life. I sometimes ask myself if it was all my fault. I sometimes wonder if Society had no duties toward me when I was a child selling matches in the street--when I was a hard-working girl fainting at my needle for want of food." Her voice faltered a little for the first time as it pronounced those words; she waited a moment, and recovered herself. "It's too late to dwell on these things now," she said, resignedly. "Society can subscribe to reclaim me; but Society can't take me back. You see me here in a place of trust--patiently, humbly, doing all the good I can. It doesn't matter! Here, or elsewhere, what I am can never alter what I was. For three years past all that a sincerely penitent woman can do I have done. It doesn't matter! Once