"Wilkie Collins - The New Magdalen" - читать интересную книгу автора (Collins Wilkie)

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