“Take my child!” cried the woman, hardly able to speak from a faintness which had seized her. “Let us run out into the street!”
It was following a natural impulse which had brought every one of the inmates from their beds, and hurried them into the street too. Lotte, still holding the woman’s child, found time to snatch up her mantle and bonnet, before she followed the example of the young woman.
A large number of persons had already assembled. Bricklayers were speedily at hand, a strong body of police were soon on the spot, and efforts were at once commenced to clear away the débris of the fallen house, under which many poor creatures were presumed to be buried.
The house in which Lotte had resided, and from which she had just escaped, was one of a block of eight. Erected before the Building Act came into operation, the wonder was, not that they should now have come down, but that they had not fallen before. The corner house, in its descent, dragged two others with it, leaving the rest in so tottering a condition, that none of the residents were allowed to return to them; men were however, appointed, under the police surveyor, to remove the most dangerous portions of the quivering walls, and the furniture in the dwellings, as soon as they were sufficiently supported to admit of men entering them with safety.
Lotte was thus once more thrown upon the world, under trying and painful circumstances. Worn out as she was, she did not, however, give way to helpless despair, but nerved herself for the task she saw she should have to undergo.
She returned to the young woman, and recovered Helen’s child, which she pressed to her own gentle bosom, and covered it carefully with her mantle. She then made her way to the police station, gave a general description of her little property to the inspector, told him she would send a person to fetch it, and then made her way at once whither she knew she should be befriended, and where she could obtain all assistance in rearing Helen’s child, until Helen came forward to claim it—if she ever came at all.
Lotte believed that she knew Helen’s true nature; and to know this was to make her convinced that scarcely anything short of death would have detained her from her child—that child born under such strange, mysterious, and unhappy circumstances.
Lotte, it need hardly be said, directed her footsteps to the residence of Mr. Bantom, or that she was there warmly welcomed; but after the first few words of greeting, she suddenly alighted upon a full comprehension of a startling difficulty in her position.
Helen had obtained from her a solemn promise not to disclose that she had become the mother of a child, unless with her sanction.
When Mrs. Bantom, in her fussiness and gladness at seeing Lotte, drew aside her mantle to take it off, she discovered the child.