La vieille grandmère, who had wandered by chance into her life, wandered out of it as casually, or so Clémentine said as an argument to induce me to receive that odious little boy into my kitchen during her hours of work; she had nobody to take care of him, she could not leave him alone. Here, happily for myself, I had the strength to draw the line. But when this argument failed, she found another far more harrowing. She took the opportunity of my stumbling across her in our little hall one day at noon to tell me that, as I would not let her bring him with her, she left him every day, carefully locked up out of harm's way, alone in her rooms. A child of seven, as he was then, locked up to get into any mischief he could invent, and, moreover, a child with a talent for mischief! that was too much, and I sent her flying home without giving her time to eat her lunch or linger before the glass, and I was haunted for the rest of the day with the thought of all the terrible things that might have happened to him. Naturally nothing did happen, nothing ever does happen to children like the little Ernest, and Clémentine, dismayed by the loss of her lunch and the interference with her toilet, never ventured upon this argument a second time. But she found another almost as bad, for she informed me that, thanks to my interference, she was compelled to leave him again to run the streets as he would, and she hinted only too plainly that for whatever evil might befall him, I was responsible. Our relations were at this pleasant stage, and her little Ernest was fast developing into a monstrous Frankenstein wholly of my own raising, when one day she arrived with a new air of importance and announced her approaching marriage.
I was enchanted. I had not permitted myself to feel the full weight of the burden Clémentine was heaping upon my shoulders until now it seemed on the point of slipping from them, and never were congratulations more sincere than mine. As she spared me none of her confidence, every detail of her courtship and her prospects was soon at my disposal. In the course of her regular round of the kitchen doors of the Quartier she had picked up an Englishman who washed dishes in a restaurant. He was not much over twenty, he earned no less than eighteen shillings a week, and he had asked her to marry him. She accepted him, as she had accepted the Italian, because he would pay the rent; the only difference was that her new admirer proposed the form of companionship which is not lightly broken. "Cette fois je crois que cela sera vrai—que l'affaire ne tombera pas dans l'eau," she said, remembering the deep waters which, in her recent affair, had gone over her head. "Mon petit Anglais"—her name for him—figured in her account as a model of propriety. He had a strict regard for morals. He objected to her working chez les femmes, and expressed his desire that she should remain in our service, despite the loss to their income. He condoned her previous indiscretions, and was prepared to play a father's part to her little Ernest.
Altogether the situation was fast growing idyllic, and with Clémentine in her new rôle of fiancée, we thought that peace for us all was in sight. She set about her preparations at once, and did not hesitate to let me know that an agreeable wedding present would be house linen, however old and ragged, and a new hat for the wedding. I had looked for some preliminary begging as a matter of course, and I was already going through my linen closet to see what I could spare, when I caught Clémentine collecting wedding presents from me for which I had not been asked.
Until then I believed that, whatever crimes and vices might be laid at her door, dishonesty was not to be counted among them. I even boasted of her honesty as an excuse for my keeping her, nuisance as she was. I think I should have doubted her guilt if the report of it only had reached me. But I could not doubt the testimony of my own eyes when there was discovered, carefully packed in the capacious bag she always carried, one of my best napkins, a brand-new tea-cloth, and a few kitchen knives and forks that could not have strayed there of themselves. I could see in the articles selected her tender concern for the comfort of her petit Anglais and her practical wish to prepare her establishment for his coming, and probably it showed her consideration for me that she had been content with such simple preparations. But the value of the things themselves and her object in appropriating them had nothing to do with the main fact that, after all we had done and endured, she was stealing from us. "We should wipe two words from our vocabulary: gratitude and charity," Stevenson once wrote. Clémentine wiped out the one so successfully that she left me with no use for the other. I told her she must go, and this time I was in good earnest.
To Clémentine, however, nothing could have seemed less possible. She could not understand that a petty theft would make her less indispensable, or that I would strain at a gnat after swallowing so many camels. Within a week she was knocking at our door and expressing her willingness to resume her place in our chambers. She was not discouraged by the refusal to admit her, but a few days later, this time by letter, she again assured me that she waited to be recalled, and she referred to the desire of her petit Anglais in the matter. She affected penitence, admitting that she had committed une "Bêtisse"—the spelling is hers—and adding: "avoir âgit ainsi avec des maîtres aussi bons, ce n'est pas pardonable. Je vous assure que si un jour je devien riche, ou peut être plus pauvre, que dans ma richesse, comme dans ma plus grande misère, je ne pourrais jamais oublier les bons maîtres Monsieur et Madame, car jamais dans ma vie d'orpheline, je n'aie jamais rencontré d'aussi bons maîtres." She also reminded me that she lived in the hope that Madame would not forget the promised present of linen and a hat. I made no answer. Another letter followed, penitence now exchanged for reproaches. She expostulated with me for taking the bread out of the mouth of her petit innocent—Ernest—the little innocent whom the slums had nothing more to teach. This second letter met the same fate as the first, but her resources were not exhausted. In a third she tried the dignity of sorrow: "Ma faute m'a rendu l'âme si triste" and, as this had no effect, she used in a fourth the one genuine argument of them all, her hunger: "Enfin il faut que je tâche d'oublier, mais en attendant je m'en mordrais peut être les poings plus d'une fois." I was unmoved. I had spent too much emotion already upon Clémentine; also a neat little French girl had replaced her.
She gave up when she found me proof against an argument that had hitherto always disarmed me. This was the last time she put herself at my service; though once afterwards she gave me the pleasure of hearing from her. Not many weeks had passed when I received a pictorial post-card that almost reconciled me to a fashion I deplore. The picture that adorned it was a photograph of an ordinary three-storey London house, the windows draped with lace curtains of a quality and design not common in the Lower Marsh. But the extraordinary thing about it was that in the open doorway—apronless, her arms akimbo, the wave of hair low on her forehead—stood Clémentine, giggling in triumph. A few words accompanied this astonishing vision. "Je n'oublierais jamais la bonne maison de Madame" and the kind message was signed "Mrs. Johnson." Whether the eighteen shillings of her petit Anglais ran to so imposing a home, or to what she owed the post-card prominence usually reserved for the monuments of London, she did not condescend to explain. Probably she only wanted to show that, though she had achieved this distinction, she could be magnanimous enough to forget the past and think of us kindly.
That was the last I ever heard from Clémentine, the last I hope I ever shall hear. The pictorial post-card told me the one thing I cared to know. She did not leave me for a bed on the Embankment by night and a round of the soup-kitchens by day. If ever she does see life in this way and so completes her experience, the responsibility will not be mine for having driven her to it.