“Not forsaken by me,” said Lucy, in a soothing voice.
“What noise is that below?” cried Mrs. Ludgate.
Lucy went downstairs to inquire, and found that, as Allen had foretold, the creditors were come to seize all they could find. Allen undertook to remain with them, and to bring them to some settlement, whilst Lucy had her unfortunate friend and the two children removed immediately to her own house.
As to Mr. Ludgate, there was no hope for him; the proofs of his guilt were manifest and incontrovertible. The forged note, which his wife had taken from his desk and given to the milliner, was one which had not gone through certain mysterious preparations. It was a bungling forgery. The plate would doubtless have been retouched, had not this bill been prematurely circulated by Mrs. Ludgate: thus her vanity led to a discovery of her husband’s guilt. All the associates in Lewis’s iniquitous confederacy suffered the just punishment of their crimes. Many applications were made to obtain a pardon for Leonard Ludgate: but the executive power preserved that firmness which has not, upon any similar occasion, ever been relaxed.
Lucy and Allen, those real friends, who would not encourage Mrs. Ludgate in extravagance, now, in the hour of adversity and repentance, treated her with the utmost tenderness and generosity. They were economical, and therefore could afford to be generous. All the wants of this destitute widow were supplied from the profits of their industry: they nursed her with daily humanity, bore with the peevishness of disease, and did all in their power to soothe the anguish of unavailing remorse.
Nothing could be saved from the wreck of Mr. Ludgate’s fortune for the widow; but Allen, in looking over old Ludgate’s books, had found and recovered some old debts, which Leonard, after his father’s death, thought not worth looking after. The sum amounted to about three hundred and twenty pounds. As the whole concern had been made over to him, he could lawfully have appropriated this money to his own use, but he reserved it for his friend’s children. He put it out to interest; and in the mean time he and Lucy not only clothed and fed, but educated these orphans, with their own children, in habits of economy and industry. The orphans repaid, by their affection and gratitude, the care that was bestowed upon them; and, when they grew up, they retrieved the credit of their family, by living according to their grandfather’s useful maxim—“Out of debt out of danger.”
Nov. 1801.