Tom had got to leave his lodgings. He had been placed, on his first arrival in London, with the elderly widow of a clerk in Mr. Challoner’s firm. She had a neat little seven-roomed house somewhere in Barnsbury, and she let two of her bedrooms and one parlour to Tom Black and another young man. It was a quiet and comfortable though unpretentious home, wherein a youth who was inclined to good habits found every influence to help his perseverance therein. Youths who were not inclined to good habits were not allowed to linger there. In her earlier and more vigorous days the worthy landlady had wrestled hard with sundry ill-doers, and not without a certain sort of success, though she herself was more inclined to regard the results with cynicism and suspicion than with self-satisfaction. When neighbours would say to her how proud she must be that So-and-so had profited by her warnings, disciplines, and encouragements, she was wont to say “that he was different from what he once was, but she wasn’t so sure that he was any better.” Being a Scots woman herself she would tell the story of the Scots minister who was of the opinion that the sight of one’s “converts” was generally calculated “to keep one humble.”
Of late years, however, she had ceased to struggle with those who inclined to do evil, and had reserved herself for the upholding of those who meant to do well.
“I’ve had my time of keeping a reformatory,” she had said in her quaint way, “now somebody else must take a turn!”
“Mrs. Mott is giving up housekeeping altogether now, Mrs. Challoner,” Tom explained with a rueful countenance. “She’s got a tenant for the whole house, and she’s going to live in the country in some little place which she can manage alone. She says she is ‘weary of her life because of those daughters of Heth’—meaning the servant girls. You know the way she speaks, Mrs. Challoner.”
Lucy laughed. She knew Mrs. Mott very well, and she was beginning to realise the difficulties which must beset such a person.
“I sympathise with her,” she said. “But surely many of her servants must have been models! I thought the house always looked so bright and pleasant.”
“She says that’s because she put herself into it,” explained Tom. “Just whatever they left undone, she says, she did, and she did it all, when they ran away or gave her notice and went off before she had got another. Now she says she can’t do so any more; she’s near sixty, and her feet are weak, and she can’t manage the stairs, and she won’t keep people in her house if it can’t be kept as it should be. I’m sure she might let her place go very different from what it is, and yet it would be a palace of neatness compared with the houses which I’ve seen since I’ve been looking for lodgings,” added poor Tom ruefully.
“Has she had any special trouble lately?” asked Lucy.
“She says that for the last three years she has only had one girl who was respectable and willing to learn, and she attended some class or guild where the ladies told her she was ‘too good for domestic service’ and took her off to be trained as a hospital nurse,” answered Tom.
“Oh, dear, dear!” said Lucy, “as if the work of prevention is not far better and more honourable than that of mere cure. And it ought to be more honoured!”