But should she tell Colin anything about it? Could she bear to tell him?
Let him go away from her across the sea to that dim far Italy of his own
accord, if he liked; it was his fortune, his chance in life, his
natural place; she knew it; but why should she, Minna Wroe, the London
pupil-teacher, the Wootton fisherman's daughter--why should she go
out of her way to send him so far from her, to banish herself from his
presence, to run the risk of finally losing him altogether? 'After all,'
she thought, 'perhaps I oughtn't to tell him. He might be angry at it.
He might think I shouldn't have looked upon such a place as at all
good enough for him. He's a sculptor, not a servant; and I got to be
a schoolmistress myself on purpose so as to make myself something like
equal to him. It wouldn't be right of me to go proposing to him that he
should take now to brushing coats and laying out shirt studs again, when
he ought to be sculpturing a statue a great deal more beautiful than
those great stupid, bloated, thick-legged Michael Angelos. I dare say
the wisest thing for me to do would be to say nothing at all to him
about it.'
'Miss Wroe,' a small red-haired pupil called out, popping her shock
head through the half-open doorway, and shouting out her message in her
loudest London accent, 'if yer please, ye're ten minutes late for the
fourth junerer, and Miss Woollacott, she says, will yer please come at
once, and not keep the third junerer waitin' any longer.'
Minna ran off hurriedly to her class, and tried to forget her troubles
about Colin forthwith in the occult mysteries of the agreement of a
relative with its antecedent.
But when she got back to Miss Woollacott's lodgings at Kentish Town that
evening, and had had her usual supper of bread and cheese and a glass of
water--Miss Woollacott took beer, but Minna as a minor was restricted to
the beverage of nature--and had heard prayers read, and had gone up
by herself to her small bare bedroom, she sat down on the bedside all
alone, and cried a little, and thought it all out, and tried hard to
come to the right decision. It would be very sad indeed to lose Colin;
she could scarcely bear that; and yet she knew that it was for Colin's
good; and what was for Colin's good was surely for her own good too in
the long-run. Well, was it? that was the question. Of course, she would
dearly love for Colin to go to Rome, and learn to be a real sculptor,
and get fame and glory, and come back a greater man than the vicar
himself--almost as great, indeed, as the Earl of Beaminster. But there
were dangers in it, too. Out of sight, out of mind; and it was a long
way to Italy. Perhaps when Colin got there he would see some pretty
Italian girl or some grand fine lady, and fall in love with her, and
forget at once all about his poor little Minna. Ah, no, it wasn't
altogether for Minna's good, perhaps, that Colin should go to Italy.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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