n this hour of domestic desertion, Miss Latimer, remembering Mrs. Grant’s injunction, allowed Lucy to do most of the necessary housework, while she herself undertook the outdoor errands and the function of “answering” the door bell.
A letter duly arrived from Clementina’s relatives at Hull. It said little more than the telegram, save that she had come there very “worn out and ill,” having found her place “too trying” for her. She would have to take “a long rest.” It was requested that her box should be packed up and forwarded “along with the month’s wage due to her.”
Clementina had taken her departure when only twenty days of that “month” had elapsed. But Lucy resolved to take no notice of that fact, but to send the full sum. She herself packed the box and despatched it. She found therein about half a packet of mourning envelopes of such singular width of border that she showed them to Miss Latimer and Mr. Somerset, who, however, kept their own counsel on this head. Lucy did not accept Mr. Somerset’s advice about the letter in which she enclosed her postal order. He wished her to ignore all that had been discovered since Clementina’s departure and to let the whole matter drop. Lucy could not accept this as her duty. As soon as she knew of Clementina’s safety and whereabouts, she had telegraphed to Mrs. Bray’s Rachel, that her mind too might be set at ease about her old acquaintance. In return she had received a very simple, straightforward letter from Rachel, expressing sincere regret that all this trouble had been caused to Mrs. Challoner through one whom she had introduced. She reiterated the perfect respectability of the Gillespies and the high esteem in which they had been held in their own neighbourhood. Rachel was naturally deeply concerned about Clementina herself. “People can’t help going out of their mind,” she wrote, “but then it ought to be somebody’s duty to keep them from troubling others or disgracing themselves.”
The same point impressed Lucy. She felt herself bound to tell the plain truth to those who were now harbouring Clementina, and whose actions might decide that unhappy woman’s future course. Tom was inclined to say, “Let them find her out for themselves, as we had to do”—a blunt egotism which didn’t influence Lucy for a moment. Mr. Somerset gave counsels of reticence, but did not support them by any moral reasons. In fact he candidly admitted, “I am thinking chiefly of you, Mrs. Challoner, and advising you for your own sake. I don’t want you to have any more trouble. I know how—in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred—such a warning as you wish to give will be received.”
That decided Lucy. If something was right to do, then she was not to be withheld by any self-consideration from doing it.
“How should I feel,” she asked, “if some morning I open the newspaper and find that Clementina has taken another situation and has perhaps killed a baby or set a house on fire? It would be bad enough if she only made others suffer as we have done; but of merely that, of course, we should never hear.”
“‘To care for others that they may not suffer
As we have suffered is divine well-doing,
The noblest vote of thanks for all our sorrows,’”