Old Maids.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1056, 26 May 1892, Page 4

Old Maids.

By Mrs Lynn Lynton, in Chambers’ J OURNAL. The changes which have taken place throughout all oar social life have touched, inter alia, our estimate of Old Maids, and we are leading back to sentiments much older than ourselves. Until quite lately old maids were the recognised butt for all those smart wits who can say a sharp thing on a well worn theme and send an arrow through a space already cleared. Like the traditional step-mother and the typical mother-in law, the old maid was a kind of moral Aunt Sally against whom any one might have a shy—with the greatest applause given to him who most successfully battered the dishonoured old face. All the evil-speaking, lying, and slandering—all the malice and uncharitableness of society—was humped on to the shoulders of the old maid ; and Utopia was nothing to the Arcadian peace that would abound were she out of the way. As Miss Prue or Mis 3 Tabitha she was credited with casting sheep’s eyes at the curate on her own account, while she flounced out against Miss Julia or Miss Maria for attracting the attention she coveted. She was supposed to be an old maid by the mishap of fortune and the necessity of fate—not of her own deliberate will; and to be ever awearying for the husband who had evaded her clutches. All the respect paid to the Vestal Virgins of old time and to the Spouses of Christ in Catholic countries, was like so much water run into sand when dealing with the old maid of a generation or two back. A nuisance to her family, whose children she frightened by her severity, whose young wives she bullied and at whose young men she sniffed, with her nose in the air and her eyelids over her eyes—she ;vas sure to be ill provided in this world’s goods, and on the hands of the more generous, to be helped along the thorny path of impecuniosity. But she was also just as sure to tell her intimates queer tangled tales of ‘ undue influence,’ if not darker things still, by which it came about that the stream of the family Pactolus had been diverted from her holding in favour of those others, and that if all came to their rights, it is not she who would be the worse off ! For this kind of old maid, as fancy painted her and shallow smartness repeated, had no more gratitude than she had charm ; and it was one of her most striking characteristics to bite the hand that fed her, and to speak evil of those who did her most good. An encumbrance to her family, she was a stumbling block to society—a nuisance and a danger. She made up all manner of evil stories, and then propagated them as ‘ reports.’ She saw harm in the most innocent matters, and allowed no one to be beyond or above censure. But her enemies were even with her here. To them her propriety was pruriency, her modesties were pruderies ; she made evil where none existed, because her own mind was always dwelling upon undesirable things, and it was an insult to virtue to call her thoughts by that name. The fountain-head of all mischief, she not only slandered her own sex and vilified the other, but Bhe was the originator of all the quarrels that divided society, as society always is divided in country places, To her, and to her malevolent gossip, could be traced the starting-point of the bitter stream that swelled and flowed till it parted kinsmen and friends never to be reunited. So at least they said who drew her portrait on the lines wa have indicated, and who found that the old maid was the cause of all that went wrong, as sure as that Tenterden steeple is the cause of Goodwin sands ! Nursing her cat, over whose sleeping back she every nojf and then caressingly bends her lean form and lank ringlets—knitting some gray or mustard-coloured abomination which would make an artist despair of her salvation—sitting by the little side window whence she can see all that comes up and down the street, and taking note of all she sees with a view to future reproduction, she was the hateful being of literature and romance—the living representative of the wicked fairy of the nursery come back as an Englishwoman in the

twenties and thirties. Yet she was the direct descendant of the Vestal Virgins to wlmm men could not pay too great honour —the human presentment of the shieldbearing Pallas Athene, and of the silverbowed huntress, to whom sweet young Athenian maids were wont to dedicate themselves till the day came when they made oblation and carried sacrifice to the still dearer altar of Anadyomene the Foam-born. This was the old maid of fifty or sixty years ago. And now the thaumatrope has spun round the contrary way, and for that picture we have this.

By the grace of Providence released from that close attendance on husband and children to which her duties bind the wife and mother, the unmarried woman —we do not call her old maid in these days—has all her time to devote to the good of mankind in general and the fit conduct of parochial affairs in particular. In these last indeed she is the clergyman’s right hand, and simply invaluable, bearing the heavy end of all those sticks by which the spirit of evil is to be beaten out of bounds, and poverty and vice are to be fenced off from the lots. It is she who looks after the various clubs wherein women put their pence to draw out shillings in the shape of coals, boots, and blankets. It is she who takes the management of the ‘baby’s basket’ which goes the round of the poorer sort of mothers as a loan for the first month’s existence of the ‘little stranger.’ When the Christmas decorations of the Church are on hand, she takes the most important parts, and works out the panels with as much taste as nature has bestowed on her; and when the harvest-dress is needed, her flowers are the most lavish and her apples have the ruddiest cheeks. Probably, not what the world calls rich, she always secures a margin for benevolences, and on her modest pittance does more in bulk—how much more in proportion ! than those who count pounds to her shillings. How she manages these generosities is her own secret, for she never looks shabby, and in none of her surroundings is there the faintest mark of sordid poverty. To be sure, her scale i 3 to the last degree circumscribed, but on the basis of that scale she does well. She lives in a small cottage like to that which the Squire’s coachman and his wife have taken ; but how different the one is from the other ! Miss Anna’s is neat as a new pin and as bright as silver all through ; and what with the pretty trifles she has made with her own hands, the curtains she has embroidered, the dainty bits of fancy-work she has elaborated, her judicious admixture of colour, and here and there a more solidly valuable relic, preserved from the general dispersion of the family goods, her house has all that appearance of care and taste and neatness which goes to make ‘a lady’s house.’ The coachman’s, on the contrary, is just a working man’s cottage, no more, and no one would believe the two to have been built on identically the same plan. The unmarried woman on a higher rung of the social ladder, and living in a wider world, is just as useful in her own way as her self-sacrificing but more circumscribed sister of the village. She is a kind of supplementary mother, always to be relied on by her friends when they have a cold, a headache, or are only lazy, and their daughters want to go to this ball or that theatre, and have no chaperon to take them. Then that goodnatured Miss Mater is only too happy to be of use ; and, placidly renouncing her own fireside, bravely faces frost and fog, snow and wind, that her young friends may dance themselves tired and footsore, or cry their pretty eyes out over some fictitious sorrow on the stage, of which the heroine forgets the strain of her personation in a solid supper of beefsteak and porter. Miss Mater, indeed, is a very godsend to her young friends all through. They will confide to her what they dare not tell their own mother; and she has the threads of more little dramas than one in her kind and capable hands. It was she who prevented young Frank from making a fool of himself about that silly Laura Fourstars, who was at the least ten years his senior and in no way his fit match. Past thirty, the standing toast and passes belle of a garrison town, with not a single sixpence of dowry, and he a young fellow with all his life before him and his profession yet to choose—what kind of millstone was that which he wanted to tie round his neck, and would, but for the judicious conduct of Miss Mater!—far more judicious than his own mother’s would have been ! For she would fiave taken the thing too much ‘ on the cross and in all probability by her very efforts to detach her boy’s affections would have riveted them all the closer to this very urn desirable person, whom she would have vilified beyond reason. By this unreasonable vilification she would have set Master Frank’s callow chivalry in arms, and made hi 3 folly a tost of his high-minded-ness. But Mbs Mater went to work much more wisely as well as warily. She might have been a descendant of that ‘ Mitchell Wylie,’ who in truth seemed less cf a Sco'chman in intelligence than the Machiavelli of whom this was the perverted name. She made no overt opposition—though she demurred a little at Laura’s age, which Frank averred to be only two years beyond hi 3 own, and that you know is a mere nothing—but which she brought irrefragable proof to show was ten years over his. She asked the two turtle-doves to dinner ; but she asked at the same time that hideous little cad Brown Jones, who had more money

than he knew what to do with, and less brains than falls to the lot of most on the outer side of Earlsviood. Him she had already primed with artful praises of Miss Laura Fourstars —Miss Laura herself she had yet more artfully primed with assurances of Brown Jones’ admiration. The bait was too tempting. Laura rose to it, and swam away with it in her mouth ; and that poor deserted fish, Master Frank, was saved from what else might have been his ruin, and would in any case have been his obstruction. He was quit of his millstone for a week’s mooning and a violent headache ; and Brown Jones deserved nothing better than what he got. So with the girls. She sees all that goes on more clearly than the mother herself ; and advises, encourages, or puts a stop to these nascent affairs—as she knows so well how to do, and as sli9 does so well ! When under her wing nothing undesirable goes on, and the detrimentals, however fascinating, are firmly discouraged. She has no illusions for her own part, and she knows that those which the girls may have will wear themselves out by time and use, till only the coarse texture of the groundwork will be seen. Love in a cottage appears to be more than delicious ! The roses and honeysuckles and the nightingales in the trees all sound paradisiacal. - But when the real prose of the thing has to be reckoned with—the washing done at home—the scanty service—the anxious contrivances how to make the remains of that leg of mutton last yet another day—the calculations of whether this pudding costs more than that, and the tremendous importance given to an extra couple of eggs—and all that for a girl with carriages and horses and men-servants and maid-servants at command, and never the need of considering expense. No ! the unmarried woman, clever, shrewd, and kindly Miss Mater discounts it all, and the detrimental with the power of nightingales is, as has been said, politely but firmly discouraged. Hence the mother proper has no need to fear when she confides her girls to the care of this mother vicarious ; and no one comes to grief through her negligence or weakness. As the unmarried sister of a family how ineffably useful is she whom it was once the fashion to sneer at as an old maid ! Whenever she is wanted, there she is, and her married sisters and brothers often say they do not know what they would do without her. She is at the bedside of the sick, and she takes the place of the governess when this young lady goes home for her holidays. When the parents of any of any of these young broods wish to go abroad together, and thu3 renew their love-time by a second honeymoon, the unmarried sister goe3 down to their place to keep house and look after the children till they return. She passes her blameless life in active service, now of one kind, now of another. Friend, helper, and adviser of so many others, she has no time to brood over the disappointments which may have desolated her own youth; and leas inclination to find a bitter solace to her pain in ill-feeling or ill words against the more fortunate and the younger. She does not slander and she does not gossip ; she invents no malevolent stories, and propagates no cruel reports. Free from the bonds of duty, she is all the more tied to those of affection, and voluntarily gives what she is not bound to bestow. She is a grand and lovely feature in modern society and the home—and what, pray, would become of the aged father and mother without this old maiden daughter to care for them and watch over them ?