"I want to tell you something, Mr. Peck--an experience of mine," she said
abruptly, and without trying to connect it obviously with what had gone
before, she told him the story of her ill-fated beneficence to the Savors.
He listened intently, and at the end he said: "I understand. But that is
sorrow you have caused, not evil; and what we intend in goodwill must not
rest a burden on the conscience, no matter how it turns out. Otherwise the
moral world is no better than a crazy dream, without plan or sequence. You
might as well rejoice in an evil deed because good happened to come of it."
"Oh, I _thank_ you!" she gasped. "You don't know what a load you have
lifted from me!"
Her words feebly expressed the sense of deliverance which overflowed her
heart. Her strength failed her like that of a person suddenly relieved from
some great physical stress or peril; but she felt that he had given her the
truth, and she held fast by it while she went on.
"If you knew, or if any one knew, how difficult it, is, what a
responsibility, to do the least thing for others! And once it seemed so
simple! And it seems all the more difficult, the more means you have for
doing good. The poor people seem to help one another without doing any
harm, but if _I_ try it--"
"Yes," said the minister, "it is difficult to help others when we cease
to need help ourselves. A" man begins poor, or his father or grandfather
before him--it doesn't matter how far back he begins--and then he is in
accord and full understanding with all the other poor in the world; but as
he prospers he withdraws from them and loses their point of view. Then when
he offers help, it is not as a brother of those who need it, but a patron,
an agent of the false state of things in which want is possible; and his
help is not an impulse of the love that ought to bind us all together, but
a compromise proposed by iniquitous social conditions, a peace-offering to
his own guilty consciousness of his share in the wrong."
"Yes," said Annie, too grateful for the comfort he had given her to
question words whose full purport had not perhaps reached her. "And I
assure you, Mr. Peck, I feel very differently about these things since I
first talked with you. And I wish to tell you, in justice to myself, that
I had no idea then that--that--you were speaking from your own experience
when you--you said how working people looked at things. I didn't know that
you had been--that is, that--"