I'd dressed up as a gentleman and begun to play the fool
in my old age. The money wasn't to be used in that way. I'd got my
ideas, and they grew clearer during the voyage home.

'You know how I found Jane. Not long after, I put an advertisement in
the papers, asking my son, if he saw it, to communicate with Mr.
Percival--that's the lawyer I was recommended to in London. There was
no answer; Joseph was in America at that time. I hadn't much reason to
like Mrs. Peckover and her daughter, but I kept up acquaintance with
them because I thought they might hear of Jo some day. And after a
while I sent Jane to learn a business. Do you know why I did that? Can
you think why I brought up the child as if I'd only had just enough to
keep us both, and never gave a sign that I could have made a rich lady
of her?'

In asking the question, he bent forward and laid his hand on Sidney's
shoulder. His eyes gleamed with that light which betrays the
enthusiast, the idealist. As he approached the explanation to which his
story had tended, the signs of age and weakness disappeared before the
intensity of his feeling. Sidney understood now why he had always been
conscious of something in the man's mind that was not revealed to him,
of a life-controlling purpose but vaguely indicated by the general
tenor of Michael's opinions. The latter's fervour affected him, and he
replied with emotion:

'You wish Jane to think of this money as you do yourself--not to regard
it as wealth, but as the means of bringing help to the miserable.'

'That is my thought, Sidney. It came to me in that form whilst I was
sitting by her bed, when she was ill at Mrs. Peckover's. I knew nothing
of her character then, and the idea I had might have come to nothing
through her turning out untrustworthy. But I thought to myself: Suppose
she grows up to be a good woman--suppose I can teach her to look at
things in the same way as I do myself, train her to feel that no
happiness could be greater than the power to put an end to ever so
little of the want and wretchedness about her--suppose when I die I
could have the certainty that all this money was going to be used for
the good of the poor by a woman who herself belonged to the poor? You
understand me? It would have been easy enough to leave it among
charities in the ordinary way; but my idea went beyond that. I might
have had Jane schooled and fashioned into a lady, and still have hoped
that she would use the money well;