Johnny Ludlow Third Series Part 76

"Well, you see, the object of this benevolent a.s.sociation 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 a.s.sociation intends, not inquiry. Why is this erroneous impression not set to rights?"

"Oh, but our system is, I a.s.sure 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 pa.s.sing 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 gla.s.s, 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 G.o.d 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 G.o.d. 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, G.o.d 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 a.s.suring 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 pa.s.sed quietly away with a sigh as we stood looking at her; pa.s.sed 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.

LADY JENKINS.

MINA.

I.

"Had I better go? I should like to."

"Go! why of course you had better go," answered the Squire, putting down the letter.

"It will be the very thing for you, Johnny," added Mrs. Todhetley. "We were saying yesterday that you ought to have a change."

I had not been well for some time; not strong. My old headaches stuck to me worse than usual; Duffham complained that the pulse was feeble.

Therefore a letter from Dr. Knox of Lefford, pressing me to go and stay with them, seemed to have come on purpose. Janet had added a postscript: "You _must_ come, Johnny Ludlow, if it is only to see my two babies, and you must not think of staying less than a month." Tod was from home, visiting in Leicestershire.

Three days, and I was off, bag and baggage. To Worcester first, and then onwards again, direct for Lefford. The very journey seemed to do me good. It was a lovely spring day: the hedges were bursting into bud; primroses and violets nestled in the mossy banks.

You have not forgotten, I dare say, how poor Janet Carey's hard life, her troubles, and the sickness those troubles brought, culminated in a brave ending when Arnold Knox, of Lefford, made her his wife. Some five years had elapsed since then, and we were all of us that much older.

They had asked me to visit them over and over again, but until now I had not done it. Mr. Tamlyn, Arnold's former master and present partner, with whom they lived, was growing old; he only attended to a few of the old patients now.

It was a cross-grained kind of route, and much longer than it need have been could we have gone straight as a bird flies. The train made all sorts of detours, and I had to change no less than three times.