“We have had some very queer customers lately, I must say,” Tom went on in his blunt boyish way. “Young Hinton—that’s the other fellow who stays at Mrs. Mott’s—happened to have a good deal of note-paper and some hundreds of envelopes marked with a handsome H. Well, he never could understand how that paper went off so quickly. He would take out a packet, and write a few letters, and then the next time he went to write he would find the packet almost empty. He used to say it was bewitched! Well, Mrs. Mott caught that servant in the act of stealing something—I think it was taking out coal in the big basket she carried to fetch potatoes. When Mrs. Mott counted over her other things she found some towels missing. So she told the girl she had better open her box and show what else she had, and there, along with the towels, were heaps of Hinton’s paper and envelopes, and what was funniest of all, an old album of his with a lot of half-faded photos of his aunts and cousins. Now what could she have wanted with that? The paper, of course, she meant to use, because her name was Hannah—an H, you see.”
“The stolen photographs make the story look like a genuine case of kleptomania,” observed Lucy; “yet it may have had some object which does not readily occur to us. She may have wished to lay claim to relationship with some nice respectable-looking people, such as Mr. Hinton’s friends doubtless were.”
“That was what Hinton said,” Tom returned. “He found out Hannah had been a workhouse child, and didn’t know of anybody belonging to her. It did seem pathetic in a way. Hinton thought so. He wrote to his grandmother in the country and got her to take the girl and give her another chance. But she soon ran away. Some gipsy show-people had been in the town, and the police said she went off with them. They had seen her among them.”
“Ah,” thought Lucy, “and who knows what thread of hereditary lawlessness and vagabondage had been in this poor girl, whose childhood nobody had been at pains to understand and to discipline? And yet how impossible it is that such a one could be harboured in a house like Mrs. Mott’s—nay, it would be wrong, for nobody must voluntarily assume responsibilities which clash with duties.”
“What decided Mrs. Mott, though,” Tom went on, “was when her last girl calmly took a candle to see where the gas was escaping. Mrs. Mott just stepped out of the parlour in time to see her coming with it, alight, out of the pantry. The gas escape was in the kitchen, and she was on her way downstairs. If Mrs. Mott had stayed in the parlour, we should have been all blown up together, for I was in the room overhead. Mrs. Mott was dreadfully upset; she set open every door and window and then called me. I turned off the gas, and soon found the leakage. Mrs. Mott was quite ill with the shock of knowing what might have happened. She said to me, at once, that she couldn’t stand it any more, she could not bear the responsibilities that the irresponsible might bring down on her head at any moment. I thought the feeling might pass off with the fright; but she’s stuck to it—more’s the pity for me.”
“One wonders at city girls not having yet learned the truth about gas,” said Lucy. “Certainly I have heard curious stories about country people coming into town and ‘blowing out’ the light, and wondering much at the ‘nasty smell’ which ensued, compelling them to open the window, though there might be frost and snow outside. Did this girl come from the country?”
“Not she,” said Tom; “she belongs to a mews quite close to our place. And what is more, on our kitchen wall there is a printed placard giving full instructions about such household matters as breaking pipes, escaping gas, or street doors left ajar.”
“Everybody can read nowadays,” observed Lucy, “but every now and then one comes across a person who does not seem to read with any ease or facility; perhaps she was one of these.”
Tom shook his head. “No,” he said. “Mrs. Mott told me that till that day she had never had much fault to find with her (she’d only been with us for about three weeks), but that she had been sorry to see that she spent all her leisure in reading penny papers, with stories and pictures of men in evening dress and women with trailing robes, all dukes and viscountesses, and pretty girls in shops. She must have spent threepence or fourpence a week on these, Mrs. Mott says, and when she had read them, she tore them up or burnt them. Mrs. Mott had told her she ought to settle to one good magazine and collect a nice stock for bound volumes.
“I don’t wonder Mrs. Mott is rather sick of it,” Tom went on, “only I wish she didn’t give up out of feeling so responsible for us. All that we shall gain, as it seems to me, is, most likely, girls quite as irresponsible, and a landlady equally so. Mrs. Mott’s charges have been very moderate—I did not realise how moderate—till I have gone about and seen what is offered for the same money.”