Free Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin Page A

think Master is in his laboratory, not to be disturbed, is he perhaps not there at all?
    I stood still, listening, but there were no sounds, then a fine rain began to fall and the sound of it seemed to fill up my head so that I couldn’t move. I hoped Master had remembered to take his umbrella—a foolish thought, but it seemed important and I went over it a few times as if thinking on it could put the umbrella in his hands. And I was getting wet myself but didn’t care. I looked down at my hands, which no matter how I scrub them are always lined with blacking and lately, because of the odd weather, have been full of twinges and pains that feel like hearts throbbing. I remembered what seemed like so long ago, when Master took my hands in his own and looked at them in the lamplight, of how shy and embarrassed I felt, but yet, I cannot deny it, pleased as well to be noticed by him, to feel I was of interest to him. As I was having these sad thoughts Mr. Poole put his head out the kitchen door and called to me. “Mary,” he said. “Have you no more sense than to stand there dreaming in the rain?” I went in, thinking how I must seem to Mr. Poole, who knows nothing of me, and less of Master than he could ever suspect, I’ve no doubt.
    T his morning I was polishing the tables in the drawing room, in fact on my knees on the floor to do the legs which stand on great carved animal feet I like to think is lion’s feet, when Master come in suddenly and seeming in a hurry, threw himself down on the settee so that his long legs stretched out before him on the carpet, and heaved a great sigh as if he was at the end of a struggle. Then he saw me, or rather saw the back of me and said, “Mary, good. You are the person who should hear of this.”
    So I had to back out from under the table and turn myself around to him on my knees. Then I thought it wouldn’t do to stand, as he was nearly lying down, so I sat back on my heels and said, “Yes, sir.”
    “It’s inconceivable to me,” he went on. “They want to close my school.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” I said.
    “The commissioners are of the opinion that educating the poor is a dangerous pastime.”
    “I can’t see how that could be,” I said.
    “It seems two of our scholars haven’t done very well, though we can’t say they didn’t profit, for they got themselves up to be assistants at the school and then disappeared with all the funds they could lay their hands upon.” Here Master laughed abruptly, rolling his eyes upward as if he’d never heard of anything so ridiculous.
    “That’s a pity, sir,” I said, “if it makes your friends feel their good effort has come to a bad end.”
    “They say we’ve only taught pickpockets to be embezzlers.”
    “Surely sir,” I said, “they must expect something like that now and then.”
    “Exactly what I told them. Naturally we must lose a few along the way, but why does that lead to the conclusion that we should give up the whole enterprise? And I brought you up, Mary, as an example of one who has come through our school with her moral capabilities intact. I told them my housemaid can read and write as well as any of you, and I’ve no doubt is a far better critic of reason and morality than any of you seem to be.”
    This made me blush and I could only stammer, “You flatter me, sir.”
    “No, Mary, I don’t, and you’d agree with me if you had five minutes of conversation with these fools. Littleton, whose name is surely a description of the size and density of his brain, said he for one wouldn’t care to have a housemaid with any moral sense at all—and the whole group of asses brayed out loud over that for a full minute.”
    “I’m sorry to hear that, sir,” I said.
    “I’m not so naïve as to think we can solve the world’s problems by having a school, but surely we’ve an obligation to relieve suffering when we can. And ignorance
is
suffering, though the poor brutes who are driven to our