'If we were to throw down this partition, and open another window here,' said Harker to Mr Benjamin, 'it would make a comfortable apartment of it. There would be room, then, for a bed in the recess.'
Mr Benjamin, however, was at that moment engaged in the contemplation of an ill-painted portrait of a girl, that was attached by a pin over the chimney-piece. It was without a frame, for the respectable gilt one that had formerly encircled it, had been taken off, and sold to buy bread. Nothing could be coarser than the execution of the thing, but as is not unfrequently the case with such productions, the likeness was striking; and Mr Benjamin, being now in the habit of seeing Mary, who bought all the meal they used at his shop, recognised it at once.
'That's your daughter, is it?' he said.
'Yes, sir; she's often at your place for meal; and if it wasn't too great a liberty, I would ask you, sir, if you thought you could help her to some sort of employment that's better than sewing; for it's a hard life, sir, in this close place for a young creature that was brought up in the free country air: not that Mary minds work, but the worst is, there's so little to be got by the needle, and it's such close confinement.'
Mr Benjamin's mind, during this address of poor Glegg's, was running on his guinea. He felt a distrust of her honesty—or rather of the honesty of both father and daughter; and yet being far from a hard-hearted person, their evident distress and the man's sickness disposed him to make allowance for them. 'They couldn't know that the money belonged to me,' thought he; adding aloud: 'Have you no friends here in London?'
'No, sir, none. I was unfortunate in business in the country, and came here hoping for better luck; but sickness overtook us, and we've never been able to do any good. But, Mary, my daughter, doesn't want for education, sir; and a more honest girl never lived!'
'Honest, is she?' said Mr Benjamin, looking Glegg in the face.
'I'll answer for her, sir,' answered John, who thought the old gentleman was going to assist her to a situation. 'You'll excuse me mentioning it, sir; but perhaps it isn't everybody, distressed as we were, that would have carried back that money she found in the meal: but Mary would do it, even when I said that perhaps it wasn't yours, and that nobody might know whose it was; which was very wrong of me, no doubt; but one's mind gets weakened by illness and want, and I couldn't help thinking of the food it would buy us; but Mary wouldn't hear of it. I'm sure you might trust Mary with untold gold, sir; and it would be a real charity to help her to a situation, if you knew of such a thing.'
Little deemed Leah that morning, as she handed Mary her quart of meal and the change for her hard-earned shilling, that she had spoiled her own fortunes, and that she would, ere night, be called upon to abdicate her stool behind the counter in favour of that humble customer; and yet so it was. Mr Benjamin could not forgive her dereliction from honesty; and the more he had trusted her, the greater was the shock to his confidence. Moreover, his short-sighted views of human nature, and his incapacity for comprehending its infinite shades and varieties, caused him to extend his ill opinion farther than the delinquent merited. In spite of her protestations, he could not believe that this was her first misdemeanour; but concluded that, like many other people in the world, she had only been reputed honest because she had not been found out. Leah soon found herself in the very dilemma she had deprecated, and the apprehension of which had kept her so long practically honest—without a situation, and with a damaged character.
As Mary understood book-keeping, the duties of her new office were soon learned, and the only evil attending it was, that she could not take care of her father. But determined not to lose her, Mr Benjamin found means to reconcile the difficulty by giving them a room behind the shop, where they lived very comfortably, till Glegg, recovering some portion of health, was able to work a little at his trade.