But Charley Chiswick was dead.
When Jim Preston got home that night he found a letter waiting for him. It was from the Sister-in-charge of a London Hospital, and told him that Bess Benson had died that morning after prematurely giving birth to a son. The girl had asked her to write to him and to beg him to find Charley Chiswick, and tell him that he was a father. After that she had sunk into unconsciousness, and had not known that her babe had passed away before her.
Jim Preston stood dazed with the letter in his hand. He remembered how he had offered to serve her that day when he had told her that he should not change, though he would trouble her no more. She had taken him at his word, she had trusted him, unwelcome lover though he had been; yes, she had trusted him—and him only. He was grateful to her.
He gazed at the message—the useless message from a dead mother and a dead child to the father who had followed them before it had reached him. Then he put the letter in his breast-pocket and buttoned his coat tightly across it.
A BROKEN TRYST
A BROKEN TRYST
“Lor’, yes, ’Melia be off to the ’op-pickin’ again, sure enough,” grumbled a shrivelled and careworn little woman, who stood bent over an ironing-board just inside of a poor cottage on the brow of the hill. “Though, as I says to ’er, it’d be more worth my while for ye to stay at ’ome to-day and help me with this washin’, for it be more than one pair of ’ands can do to get all them shirts ready to go ’ome to the Priory to-night.”
“Why, ye ought to make that girl mind ye better, Mrs. Shaw, indeed ye ought,” declared the neighbour to whom this feeble complaint was addressed, and who stood poised on the threshold, twisting the pinch of starch that she had come to borrow in a paper, and throwing back her advice as she prepared to descend the steps into the road.
“Well, it don’t seem much use talkin’ to girls now-a-days,” moaned the mother helplessly. “They be all so mighty sure they know all about it. In my time it weren’t considered respectable for a young woman to go ’op-pickin’ all by ’erself like that; but, Lor’, things be all changed since I were young.”
“Maybe they ain’t so much changed as you think for, ’Liza Shaw,” nodded the neighbour—Martha Jones by name—sententiously. “There be some as say she be too much with the men, be your daughter; there be some as says as she be too fond o’ feathers and fashions and sick-like; and there be some as can chaff her about them dark lanes of a summer night.”