Johnny Ludlow Third Series Part 74

"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 ap.r.o.n.

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 pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 advertis.e.m.e.nt, 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 a.s.sented 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?"