"How long was the little one with you?"
"Between nine and ten months. I kept her as long as I could, but my poor husband was living at that time, and he was a man of his word. Mr. Chumleigh was to pay me three-and-sixpence a week for the child, and he owed me over three pounds, when my good man lost patience, and threatened to throw the child into the street if I didn't get rid of it civilly. I was to deliver it back to its father, or take it to the constable. So I had no help but to tell Mr. Chumleigh he must fetch the child away, and I told him so point-blank the next time he came to see the little one. He was shabbier than ever, poor soul, and he looked pinched and hungry. I'd rather have offered him a dinner than flung his child upon his hands, but my good man was sitting in the parlour there, listening to every word I said; so I just told Mr. Chumleigh I could hold out no longer, he must just take the child and go about his business. He looked very sorrowful, and then he seemed to recover himself in a minute, and threw up his head with a proud air, as if he had been a nobleman. 'Very well, Mrs. Wagstaff,' he said: 'I grant you have been ill-treated, but it might have been better if you'd had more patience with me. Fortune must turn at last for the most miserable of us. I've a rich relation in the country. I must plod down to him and ask for a home for my motherless one. Sure he can't resist these sweet eyes.' I was almost crying when he shook hands and bade me good-bye, though I tried to be hard with him. 'If ever I can pay you my debt, madam, be sure I will,' says he; and so he went out at that door, with the child cooing in his arms, and I never saw more of him from that day to this."
"And never will, madam, on this side of Eternity," said Herrick gravely; "the poor creature sank upon that cruel journey on which your husband sent him."
"O sir, don't blame my husband! Remember, the poor gentleman owed us over three guineas. 'Tis a good deal for people in our station."
"Yet I'll warrant you had a few guineas in a stocking somewhere. 'Twould not have broken you if you had kept the child a little longer."
"No, sir, I don't say that it would have broken us—"
"Then it must go hard with you to remember how cruelly you dealt with an unfortunate gentleman. But I am not here to reproach you, madam. I came for information, and I thank you for having given it me so freely."
He tried to learn more of Chumleigh's character and circumstances, but here Mrs. Wagstaff's information was of the most limited order. The broken-down gentleman had been singularly silent about his past life. Mrs. Wagstaff only knew that he was a gentleman, and this knowledge she had by intuition, not being versed in the ways of gentlefolks, but finding in this one something that was not in the commonality.
Herrick went back to London feeling very well satisfied with his morning's work, though it would not seem that he had learnt much from nurse Wagstaff.
"There is at any rate the means of settling one doubt," he told himself, as he walked back by the Five Fields, a place of unhappy notoriety as a favourite duelling-ground; and duelling was still a prevailing fashion, though Steele and Addison had done their best to write it down in the Tatler, and though the mutual murder of the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun in Hyde Park had not long ago given a shock to polite society.