Kitabı oku: «Johnny Ludlow, Third Series», sayfa 26

II

It was ever so long afterwards, and the time had gone on by years, when we again fell into the thread of Dorothy Grape’s life. The Squire was in London for a few days upon some law business, and had brought me with him.

“I should like to see how that poor woman’s getting on, Johnny,” he said to me one morning. “Suppose we go down to Gibraltar Terrace?”

It was a dull, damp, misty day at the close of autumn; and when the Squire turned in at No. 60, after dismissing the cab, he stood still and stared, instead of knocking. A plate was on the door, “James Noak, carpenter and joiner.”

“Has she left, do you think, Johnny?”

“Well, sir, we can ask. Perhaps the carpenter is only lodging here?”

A tidy young woman, with a baby in her arms, answered the knock. “Does Mrs. Mapping live here still?” asked the Squire.

“No, sir,” she answered. “I don’t know the name.”

“Not know the name!” retorted he, turning crusty; for he disliked, of all things, to be puzzled or thwarted. “Mrs. Mapping lived here for ten or a dozen years, anyhow.”

“Oh, stay, sir,” she said, “I remember the name now. Mapping; yes, that was it. She lived here before we came in.”

“Is she dead?”

“No, sir. She was sold up.”

“Sold up?”

“Yes, sir. Her lodging-letting fell off—this neighbourhood’s not what it was: people like to get further up, Islington way—and she was badly off for a long while, could not pay her rent, or anything; so at last the landlord was obliged to sell her up. At least, that’s what we heard after we came here, but the house lay empty for some months between. I did not hear what became of her.”

The people at the next house could not tell anything; they were fresh-comers also; and the Squire stood in a quandary. I thought of Pitt the surgeon; he was sure to know; and ran off to his surgery in the next street.

Changes seemed to be everywhere. Pitt’s small surgery had given place to a chemist’s shop. The chemist stood behind his counter in a white apron. Pitt? Oh, Pitt had taken to a practice further off, and drove his brougham. “Mrs. Mapping?” added the chemist, in further answer to me. “Oh yes, she lives still in the same terrace. She came to grief at No. 60, poor woman, and lodges now at No. 32. Same side of the way; this end.”

No. 32 had a plate on the door: “Miss Kester, dressmaker,” and Miss Kester herself—a neat little woman, with a reserved, not to say sour, face and manner, and a cloud of pins sticking out of her brown waistband—answered the knock. She sent us up to a small back-room at the top of the house.

Mrs. Mapping sat sewing near a fireless grate, her bed in one corner; she looked very ill. I had thought her thin enough before; she was a shadow now. The blue eyes had a piteous look in them, the cheeks a hectic.

“Yes,” she said, in answer to the Squire, her voice faint and her cough catching her every other minute, “it was a sad misfortune for me to be turned out of my house; it nearly broke my heart. The world is full of trouble, sir.”

“How long is it since?”

“Nearly eighteen months, sir. Miss Kester had this room to let, and I came into it. It is quiet and cheap: only half-a-crown a-week.”

“And how do you get the half-crown?” questioned the Squire. “And your dinner and breakfast—how do you get that?”

Mrs. Mapping passed her trembling fingers across her brow before she answered—

“I’m sorry to have to tell of these things, sir. I’m sorry you have found me out in my poverty. When I think of the old days at home, the happy and plentiful days when poor mother was living, and what a different life mine might have been but for the dreadful marriage I made, I—I can hardly bear up against it. I’m sure I beg your pardon, gentlemen, for giving way.”

For the tears were streaming down her thin cheeks. The Squire set up a cough on his own account; I went to the window and looked down at some grimy back-gardens.

“When I am a little stronger, and able to do a full day’s work again, I shall get on, sir, but I’ve been ill lately through going out in the wet and catching cold,” she said, mastering the tears. “Miss Kester is very good in supplying me with as much as I can do.”

“A grand ‘getting on,’” cried the Squire. “You’d be all the better for some fire in that grate.”

“I might be worse off than I am,” she answered meekly. “If it is but little that I have, I am thankful for it.”

The Squire talked a while longer; then he put a sovereign into her hand, and came away with a gloomy look.

“She wants a bit of regular help,” said he. “A few shillings paid to her weekly while she gets up her strength might set her going again. I wonder if we could find any one to undertake it?”

“You would not leave it with herself in a lump, sir?”

“Why, no, I think not; she may have back debts, you see, Johnny, and be tempted to pay them with it; if so, practically it would be no good to her. Wish Pitt lived here still! Wonder if that Miss Kester might be trusted to– There’s a cab, lad! Hail it.”

The next morning, when we were at breakfast at the hotel—which was not the Tavistock this time—the Squire burst into a state of excitement over his newspaper.

“Goodness me, Johnny! here’s the very thing.”

I wondered what had taken him, and what he meant; and for some time did not clearly understand. The Squire’s eyes had fallen upon an advertisement, and also a leading article, treating of some great philanthropic movement that had recently set itself up in London. Reading the articles, I gathered that it had for its object the distribution of alms on an extensive scale and the comprehensive relieving of the distressed. Some benevolent gentlemen (so far as we could understand the newspaper) had formed themselves into a band for taking the general welfare of the needy into their hands, and devoted their lives to looking after their poverty-stricken brothers and sisters. A sort of universal, benevolent, set-the-world-to-rights invention.

The Squire was in raptures. “If we had but a few more such good men in the world, Johnny! I’ll go down at once and shake their hands. If I lived in London, I’d join them.”

I could only laugh. Fancy the Squire going about from house to house with a bag of silver to relieve the needy!

Taking note of the office occupied by these good men, we made our way to it. Only two of them were present that morning: a man who looked like a clerk, for he had books and papers before him; and a thin gentleman in spectacles.

The Squire shook him by the hand at once, breaking into an ovation at the good deeds of the benevolent brotherhood, that should have made the spectacles before us, as belonging to a member of it, blush.

“Yes,” he said, his cool, calm tones contrasting with the Squire’s hot ones, “we intend to effect a work that has never yet been attempted. Why, sir, by our exertions three parts of the complaints of hunger, and what not, will be done away with.”

The Squire folded his hands in an ecstasy of reverence. “That is, you will relieve it,” he remarked. “Bountiful Samaritans!”

“Relieve it, certainly—where the recipients are found to be deserving,” returned the other. “But non-deserving cases—impostors, ill-doers, and the like—will get punishment instead of relief, if we can procure it for them.”

“Quite right, too,” warmly assented the Squire. “Allow me to shake your hand again, sir. And you gentlemen are out every day upon this good work! Visiting from house to house!”

“Some of us are out every day; we devote our time to it.”

“And your money, too, of course!” exclaimed the Squire. “Listen, Johnny Ludlow,” he cried, turning to me, his red face glowing more and more with every word, “I hope you’ll take a lesson from this, my lad! Their time, and their money too!”

The thin gentleman cleared his throat. “Of course we cannot do all in the way of money ourselves,” he said; “some of us, indeed, cannot do anything in that way. Our operations are very large: a great deal is needed, and we have to depend upon a generous public for help.”

“By their making subscriptions to it?” cried the Squire.

“Undoubtedly.”

The Squire tugged at an inner pocket. “Here, Johnny, help me to get out my cheque-book.” And when it was out, he drew a cheque for ten pounds there and then, and laid it on the table.

“Accept this, sir,” he said, “and my praises with it. And now I should like to recommend to your notice a case myself—a most deserving one. Will you take it in hand?”

“Certainly.”

The Squire gave Mrs. Mapping’s address, telling briefly of her present distress and weakly state, and intimated that the best mode of relief would be to allow her a few shillings weekly. “You will be sure to see to her?” was his parting injunction. “She may starve if you do not.”

“Have no fear: it is our business to do so,” repeated the thin gentleman. “Good-day.”

“Johnny,” said the Squire, going up the street sideways in his excitement, “it is refreshing to hear of these self-denying deeds. These good men must be going on straight for heaven!”

“Take care, sir! Look where you are going.”

The Squire had not been going on straight himself just then, and had bumped up against a foot-passenger who was hurrying along. It was Pitt, the surgeon. After a few words of greeting, the Squire excused his flurry by telling him where he had come from.

“Been there!” exclaimed Pitt, bursting into a laugh. “Wish you joy, sir! We call it Benevolence Hall.”

“And a very good name, too,” said the Squire. “Such men ought to be canonized, Pitt.”

“Hope they will be?” answered Pitt in a curious kind of tone. “I can’t stop now, Mr. Todhetley; am on my way to a consultation.”

“He slips from one like an eel,” cried the Squire, looking after the doctor as he hurried onwards: “I might have spoken to him about Mrs. Mapping. But my mind is at ease with regard to her, Johnny, now that these charitable men have the case in hand: and we shall be up again in a few weeks.”

III

It was nearly two months before we were again in London, and winter weather: the same business, connected with a lawsuit, calling the Squire up.

“And now for Mrs. Mapping,” he said to me during the afternoon of the second day. So we went to Gibraltar Terrace.

“Yes, she is in her room,” said Miss Kester in a resentful tone, when she admitted us. “It is a good thing somebody’s come at last to see after her! I don’t care to have her alone here on my hands to die.”

“To die!” cried the Squire sharply, supposing the dressmaker spoke only in temper. “What is she dying of?”

“Starvation,” answered Miss Kester.

“Why, what on earth do you mean, ma’am?” demanded he. “Starvation!”

“I’ve done what I could for her, so far as a cup of tea might go, and a bit of bread-and-butter once a day, or perhaps a drop of broth,” ran on Miss Kester in the same aggrieved tone. “But it has been hard times with myself lately, and I have my old mother to keep and a bedridden sister. What she has wanted is a supply of nourishing food; and she has had as good as none of any sort since you were here, sir, being too weak to work: and so, rapid consumption set in.”

She whisked upstairs with the candle, for the short winter day was already closing, and we followed her. Mrs. Mapping sat in an old easy-chair, over a handful of fire, her thin cotton shawl folded round her: white, panting, attenuated, starved; and—there could not be much mistake about it—dying.

“Starved? dying? dear, dear!” ejaculated the Squire, backing to the other chair and sitting down in a sort of terror. “What has become of the good people at Benevolence Hall?”

“They!” cried Miss Kester contemptuously. “You don’t suppose those people would spend money to keep a poor woman from dying, do you, sir?”

“Why, it is their business to do it,” said the Squire. “I put Mrs. Mapping’s case into their hands, and they undertook to see to it.”

“To see to it, perhaps, sir, but not to relieve it; I should be surprised if they did that. One of them called here ever so many weeks ago and frightened Mrs. Mapping with his harsh questions; but he gave her nothing.”

“I don’t understand all this,” cried the Squire, rumpling his hair. “Was it a gentleman?”—turning to Mrs. Mapping.

“He was dressed as one,” she said, “but he was loud and dictatorial, almost as though he thought me a criminal instead of a poor sick woman. He asked me all kinds of questions about my past life, where I had lived and what I had done, and wrote down the answers.”

“Go on,” said the Squire, as she paused for breath.

“As they sent me no relief and did not come again, Miss Kester, after two or three weeks had gone by, was good enough to send a messenger to the place: her nephew. He saw the gentlemen there and told them I was getting weaker daily and was in dreadful need, if they would please to give me a trifle; he said he should never have thought of applying to them but for their having come to see after me. The gentlemen answered unfavourably; inquiries had been made, they sternly told him, and the case was found to be one not suitable for relief, that I did not deserve it. I—I—have never done anything wrong willingly,” sobbed the poor woman, breaking down.

“I don’t think she has, sir; she don’t seem like it; and I’m sure she struggled hard enough to get a living at No. 60,” said Miss Kester. “Any way, they did nothing for her—they’ve just left her to starve and die.”

I had seen the Squire in many a temper, but never in a worse than now. He flung out of the room, calling upon me to follow him, and climbed into the hansom that waited for us outside.

“To Benevolence Hall,” roared he, “and drive like the deuce.”

“Yes, sir,” said the man. “Where is Benevolence Hall?”

I gave him the address, and the man whirled us to Benevolence Hall in a very short time. The Squire leaped out and indoors, primed. In the office stood a young man, going over some accounts by gaslight. His flaxen hair was parted down the middle, and he looked uncommonly simple. The rest of the benevolent gentlemen had left for the day.

What the Squire said at first, I hardly know: I don’t think he knew himself. His words came tumbling out in a way that astonished the clerk.

“Mrs. Mapping,” cried the young man, when he could understand a little what the anger was about. “Your ten pounds?—meant for her, you say–”

“Yes, my ten pounds,” wrathfully broke in the Squire; “my ten-pound cheque that I paid down here on this very table. What have you done with it?”

“Oh, that ten pounds has been spent, partly so, at least, in making inquiries about the woman, looking-up her back history and all that. Looking-up the back lives of people takes a lot of money, you see.”

“But why did you not relieve her with it, or a portion of it? That is the question I’ve come to ask, young man, and I intend to have it answered.”

The young man looked all surprise. “Why, what an idea!” lisped he. “Our association does not profess to help sinners. That would be a go!”

“Sinners!”

“We can’t be expected to take up a sinner, you know—and she’s a topping one,” continued he, keeping just as cool as the Squire was hot. “We found out all sorts of dreadful things against the woman. The name, Mapping, is not hers, to begin with. She went to church with a man who had a living wife–”

“She didn’t,” burst in the Squire. “It was the man who went to church with her. And I hope with all my heart he came to be hanged!”

The clerk considered. “It comes to the same, doesn’t it?” said he, vaguely. “She did go to church with him; and it was ever so long before his proper wife found it out; and she has gone on calling herself Mapping ever since! And she managed so badly in a lodging-house she set up, that she was sold out of it for rent. Consider that! Oh, indeed, then, it is not on such people as these that our good gentlemen would waste their money.”

“What do they waste it on?” demanded the Squire.

“Oh, come now! They don’t waste it. They spend it.”

“What on? The sick and needy?”

“Well, you see, the object of this benevolent association is to discover who is deserving and who is not. When an applicant comes or sends for relief, representing that he is sick and starving, and all the rest of it, we begin by searching out his back sins and misfortunes. The chances are that a whole lot of ill turns up. If the case be really deserving, and—and white, you know, instead of black—we relieve it.”

“That is, you relieve about one case in a hundred, I expect?” stormed the Squire.

“Oh, now you can’t want me to go into figures,” said the clerk, in his simple way. “Anybody might know, if they’ve some knowledge of the world, that an out-and-out deserving case does not turn up often. Besides, our business is not relief but inquiry. We do relieve sometimes, but we chiefly inquire.”

“Now look you here,” retorted the Squire. “Your object, inquiring into cases, may be a good one in the main and do some excellent service; I say nothing against it; but the public hold the impression that it is relief your association intends, not inquiry. Why is this erroneous impression not set to rights?”

“Oh, but our system is, I assure you, a grand one,” cried the young fellow. “It accomplishes an immense good.”

“And how much harm does it accomplish? Hold your tongue, young man! Put it that an applicant is sick, starving, dying, for want of a bit of aid in the shape of food, does your system give that bit of aid, just to keep body and soul together while it makes its inquiries—say only to the value of a few pence?”

The young fellow stared. “What a notion!” cried he. “Give help before finding out whether it ought to be given or not? That would be quite a Utopian way of fixing up the poor, that would.”

“And do you suppose I should have given my ten pounds, but for being misled, for being allowed to infer that it would be expended on the distressed?” stamped the Squire. “Not a shilling of it. No money of mine shall aid in turning poor helpless creatures inside out to expose their sins, as you call it. That’s not charity. What the sick and the famished want is a little kindly help—and the Bible enjoins us to give it.”

“But most of them are such a bad lot, you know,” remonstrated the young man.

“All the more need they should be helped,” returned the Squire; “they have bodies and souls to be saved, I suppose. Hold your silly tongue, I tell you. I should have seen to this poor sick woman myself, who is just as worthy as you are and your masters, but for their taking the case in hand. As it is she has been left to starve and die. Come along, Johnny! Benevolence Hall, indeed!”

Back to Gibraltar Terrace now, the Squire fretting and fuming. He was hot and hasty, as the world knows, given to saying anything that came uppermost, justifiable or the contrary: but in this affair it did seem that something or somebody must be wrong.

“Johnny,” said the Squire, as the cab bowled along, waking up out of a brown study, “it seems to me that this is a serious matter of conscience. It was last Sunday evening, wasn’t it, that you read the chapter in St. Matthew which tells of the last judgment?”

“Tod read it, sir. I read the one that followed it.”

“Any way, it was one of you. In that chapter Christ charges us to relieve the poor if we would be saved—the hungry and thirsty, the sick, the naked. Now, see here, lad: if I give my alms to this new society that has sprung up, and never a stiver of it to relieve the distress that lies around me, would the blame, rest on me, I wonder? Should I have to answer for it?”

It was too complicated a question for me. But just then we drew up at Miss Kester’s door.

Mrs. Mapping had changed in that short time. I thought she was dying, thought so as I looked at her. There was a death-shade on the wan face, never seen but when the world is passing away. The Squire saw it also.

“Yes,” said Miss Kester, gravely, in answer to his whisper. “I fear it is the end.”

“Goodness bless me!” gasped the Squire. And he was for ordering in pretty nearly every known restorative the shops keep, from turtle-soup to calves’-foot jelly. Miss Kester shook her head.

“Too late, sir; too late. A month ago it would have saved her. Now, unless I am very much mistaken, the end is at hand.”

Well, he was in a way. If gold and silver could revive the dying, she’d have had it. He sent me out to buy a bottle of port wine, and got Miss Kester’s little apprentice to run for the nearest doctor.

“Not rally again at all, you say! all stuff and nonsense,” he was retorting on Miss Kester when I returned. “Here’s the wine, at last! Now for a glass, Johnny.”

She sipped about a teaspoonful by degrees. The shade on her face was getting darker. Her poor thin fingers kept plucking at the cotton shawl.

“I have never done any harm that I knew of: at least, not wilfully,” she slowly panted, looking piteously at the Squire, evidently dwelling upon the accusation made by Benevolence Hall: and it had, Miss Kester said, troubled her frightfully. “I was only silly—and inexperienced—and—and believed in everybody. Oh, sir, it was hard!”

“I’d prosecute them if I could,” cried the Squire, fiercely. “There, there; don’t think about it any more; it’s all over.”

“Yes, it is over,” she sighed, giving the words a different meaning from his. “Over; over: the struggles and the disappointments, the privations and the pain. Only God sees what mine have been, and how I’ve tried to bear up in patience. Well, well; He knows best: and I think—I do think, sir—He will make it up to us in heaven. My poor mother thought the same when she was dying.”

“To be sure,” answered the Squire, soothingly. “One must be a heathen not to know that. Hang that set-the-world-to-rights company!” he muttered in a whisper.

“The bitterness of it all has left me,” she whispered, with pauses between the words for want of breath; “this world is fading from my sight, the world to come opening. Only this morning, falling asleep in the chair here, after the fatigue of getting up—and putting on my things—and coughing—I dreamt I saw the Saviour holding out His hand to welcome me, and I knew He was waiting to take me up to God. The clouds round about Him were rose colour; a light, as of gold, lay in the distance. Oh, how lovely it was! nothing but peace. Yes, yes, God will forgive all our trials and our shortcomings, and make it up to us there.”

The room had a curious hush upon it. It hardly seemed to be a living person speaking. Any way, she would not be living long.

“Another teaspoonful of wine, Johnny,” whispered the Squire. “Dear, dear! Where on earth can that doctor be?”

I don’t believe a drop of it went down her throat. Miss Kester wiped away the damp from her brow. A cough took her; and afterwards she lay back again in the chair.

“Do you remember the yellow roses in the porch,” she murmured, speaking, as must be supposed, to the Squire, but her eyes were closed: “how the dew on them used to glisten again in the sun on a summer’s morning? I was picking such a handful of them last night—beautiful roses, they were; sweet and beautiful as the flowers we shall pick in heaven.”

The doctor came upstairs, his shoes creaking. It was Pitt. Pitt! The girl had met him by chance, and told him what was amiss.

“Ah,” said he, bending over the chair, “you have called me too late. I should have been here a month or two ago.”

“She is dying of starvation,” whispered the Squire. “All that money—ten pounds—which I handed over to that blessed fraternity, and they never gave her a sixpence of it—after assuring me they’d see to her!”

“Ah,” said Pitt, his mouth taking a comical twist. “They meant they’d see after her antecedents, I take it, not her needs. Quite a blessed fraternity, I’m sure, as you say, Squire.”

He turned away to Mrs. Mapping. But nothing could be done for her; even the Squire, with all his impetuosity, saw that. Never another word did she speak, never another recognizing gaze did she give. She just passed quietly away with a sigh as we stood looking at her; passed to that blissful realm we are all travelling to, and which had been the last word upon her lips—Heaven.

And that is the true story of Dorothy Grape.