The second event was less unexpected, though quite equally embarrassing under existing circumstances. Hardly more than a month before the end of the quarter, a little black-eyed baby daughter came to add to the prospective burdens of the Le Breton family. She was a wee, fat, round-faced, dimpled Devonshire lass to look at, as far surpassing every previous baby in personal appearance as each of those previous babies, by universal admission, had surpassed all their earlier predecessors—a fact which, as Mr. Sanders remarked, ought to be of most gratifying import both to evolutionists and to philanthropists in general, as proving the continuous and progressive amelioration of the human race: and Edie was very proud of her indeed, as she lay placidly in her very plain little white robes on the pillow of her simple wickerwork cradle. But Ernest, though he learned to love the tiny intruder dearly afterwards, had no heart just then to bear the conventional congratulations of his friends and fellow-masters. Another mouth to feed, another life dependent upon him, and little enough, as it seemed, for him to feed it with. When Edie asked him what they should name the baby—he had just received an adverse answer to his application for a vacant secretaryship—he crumpled up the envelope bitterly in his hand, and cried out in his misery, ‘Call her Pandora, Edie, call her Pandora; for we’ve got to the very bottom of the casket, and there is nothing at all left for us now but hope—and even of that very little!’
So they duly registered her name as Pandora; but her mother shortened it familiarly into Dot; and as little Dot she was practically known ever after.
Almost as soon as poor Edie was able to get about again, the time came when they would have to leave Pilbury Regis. The doctor’s search had been quite ineffectual, and he had heard of absolutely nothing that was at all likely to suit Ernest Le Breton. He had tried Government offices, Members of Parliament, colonial friends, every body he knew in any way who might possibly know of vacant posts or appointments, but each answer was only a fresh disappointment for him and for Ernest. In the end, he was fain to advise his peccant under-master, since nothing else remained for it, that he had better go up to London for the present, take lodgings, and engage in the precarious occupation known as ‘looking about for something to turn up.’ On the morning when Edie and he were to leave the town, Dr. Greatrex saw Ernest privately in his own study.
‘I wish very much I could have gone to the station to see you off, Le Breton,’ he said, pressing his hand warmly; ‘but it wouldn’t do, you know, it wouldn’t do, and Mrs. Greatrex wouldn’t like it. People would say I sympathised secretly with your political opinions, which might offend Sir Matthew Ogle and others of our governors. But I’m sorry to get rid of you, really and sincerely sorry, my dear fellow; and apart from personal feeling, I’m sure you’d have made a good master in most ways, if it weren’t for your most unfortunate socialistic notions. Get rid of them, Le Breton, I beg of you: do get rid of them. Well, the only thing I can advise you now is to try your hand, for the present only—till something turns up, you know—at literature and journalism. I shall be on the look-out for you still, and shall tell you at once of anything I may happen to hear of. But meanwhile, you must try to be earning something. And if at any time, my dear friend, you should be temporarily in want of money,’—the doctor said this in a shame-faced, hesitating sort of way, with not a little humming and hawing—‘in want of money for immediate necessities merely, if you’ll only be so kind as to write and tell me, I should consider it a pleasure and a privilege to lend you a ten pound note, you know—just for a short time, till you saw your way clear before you. Don’t hesitate to ask me now, be sure; and I may as well say, write to me at the school, Le Breton, not at the school-house, so that even Mrs. Greatrex need never know anything about it. In fact, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve put a small sum into this envelope—only twenty pounds—which may be of service to you, as a loan, as a loan merely; if you’ll take it—only till something turns up, you know—you’ll really be conferring a great favour upon me. There, there, my dear boy; now don’t be offended: I’ve borrowed money myself at times, when I was a young man like you, and I hadn’t a wife and family then as an excuse for it either. Put it in your pocket, there’s a good fellow; you’ll need it for Mrs. Le Breton and the baby, you see; now do please put it in your pocket.’
The tears rode fast and hot in Ernest’s eyes, and he grasped the doctor’s other hand with grateful fervour. ‘Dear Dr. Greatrex,’ he said as well as he was able, ‘it’s too kind of you, too kind of you altogether. But I really can’t take the money. Even after the expenses of Edie’s illness and of baby Dot’s wardrobe, we have a little sum, a very little sum laid by, that’ll help us to tide over the immediate present. It’s too good of you, too good of you altogether. I shall remember your kindness for ever with the most sincere and heartfelt gratitude.’
As Ernest looked into the doctor’s half-averted eyes, swimming and glistening just a little with sympathetic moisture, his heart smote him when he thought that he had ever described that good, kindly, generous man as an unmitigated humbug. ‘It shows how little one can trust the mere outside shell of human beings,’ he said to Edie, self-reproachfully, as they sat together in their hare third-class carriage an hour later. ‘The humbug’s just the conventional mask of his profession—necessary enough, I suppose, for people who are really going to live successfully in the world as we find it: the heart within him’s a thousand times warmer and truer and more unspoiled than one could ever have imagined from the outer covering. He offered me his twenty pounds so delicately and considerately that but for my father’s blood in me, Edie, for your sake, I believe I could almost have taken it.’
When they got to London, Ernest wished to leave Edie and Dot at Arthur Berkeley’s rooms (he knew nowhere else to leave them), while he went out by himself to look about for cheap lodgings. Edie was still too weak, he said, to carry her baby about the streets of London in search of apartments. But Edie wouldn’t hear of this arrangement; she didn’t quite like going to Arthur’s, and she felt sure she could bargain with the London landladies a great deal more effectually than a man like Ernest—which was an important matter in the present very reduced condition of the family finances. In the end it was agreed that they should both go out on the hunt together, but that Ernest should be permitted to relieve Edie by turns in taking care of the precious baby.
‘They’re dreadful people, I believe, London landladies,’ said Edie, in her most housewifely manner; ‘regular cheats and skinflints, I’ve always heard, who try to take you in on every conceivable point and item. We must be very careful not to let them get the better of us, Ernest, and to make full inquiries about all extras, and so forth, beforehand.’
They turned towards Holloway and the northern district, to look for cheap rooms, and they saw a great many, more or less dear, and more or less dirty and unsuitable, until their poor hearts really began to sink within them. At last, in despair, Edie turned up a small side street in Holloway, and stopped at a tiny house with a clean white curtain in its wee front bay window. ‘This is awfully small, Ernest,’ she said, despondently, ‘but perhaps, after all, it might really suit us.’
The door was opened for them by a tall, raw-boned, hard-faced woman, the very embodiment and personification of Edie’s ideal skinflint London landlady. Might they see the lodgings, Edie asked dubiously. Yes, they might, indeed, mum, answered the hard-faced woman. Edie glanced at Ernest significantly, as who should say that these would really never do.