“Appears to me,” remarked Helen, “some one is going to have the responsibility of looking after you.”
“I wish you’d marry me.”
“That will be about the best plan,” she agreed.
Ernest Rollinson died in ’64, and soon after the old people went. Young Mrs. Rollinson, putting her baby boy away with some working people in Clerkenwell, entered service again.
A Home for Indigent Bookmakers found itself benefited by the terms of the Bloomsbury Square will; nothing was left to the son’s family, in spite of the device used in christening the baby. Helen worked hard in her good situation and saved money, paying the folk in Corporation Lane weekly, and now and again snatching an hour off to see her boy. She was there one afternoon in December watching with amusement his celebrated impersonation of a policeman on the track of a Fenian (he had some new piece of cleverness each time she paid her furtive visits) when a tremendous clatter came from the wall of the prison opposite, the house trembled, plaster of the ceiling fell in a thick white shower, and then the place collapsed. Helen Rollinson found herself pulled out of the débris and screamed loudly for her George; they brought to her a maimed child, and she, almost demented, was nursing the poor thing in the confusion of the street, and begging it not to die, when Master George himself trotted up, safe and sound, demanding of his mother whether she had noticed the splendid fireworks. She placed the injured child in the hands of one of the doctors, heard that the woman of the house was not expected to recover, and rushed away with her boy from the disastrous scene.
“Well for you, Helen,” said her excellent mistress, “that you are able to show me your marriage lines, otherwise it would be my duty, as a strict Churchwoman, to turn you out of the house, neck and crop. As it is, you have practised deceit on me, and I am afraid we must look upon this dreadful affair at Clerkenwell as a judgment for your sin.”
“They seemed to suspect some Irish people, ma’am.”
“Heaven has its own way of punishing evil-doers,” declared the lady, “and it isn’t for us to question its methods. You cannot stay here any longer.”
“I must find another situation, I s’pose, ma’am. But I shan’t get such a good one as this.”
“Deceit,” insisted the other, “is one of the things that must, on no account, be encouraged. What is your boy like?”