A month or two later I remembered those words. Nothing too terrible if only she could escape from them!
CHAPTER VI
A WARNING AND ANOTHER OFFER
As soon as we had once more found the means of keeping ourselves we went back to our former abode under the shadow of Lambeth Church on the Bank looking over the river on one side and over the meadows and orchards of Lambeth Marsh on the other. The air which sweeps up the river with every tide is fresh and strong and pure; good for the child, not to speak of the child's mother, while the people, few in number, are generally honest though humble: for the most part they are fishermen.
Here I should have been happy but for the thought, suggested by Jenny, that my cousin and his attorney Probus were perhaps devising some new means of persecution, and that the man Merridew, who had perjured himself concerning me already, whose sinister face I had gazed upon with terror, so visibly was the mark of Cain stamped upon it, was but a tool of the attorney.
Yet what could they devise? If they swore between them another debt, my patron Jenny promised to provide me with the help of a lawyer. What else could they do? It is a most miserable feeling that someone in the world is plotting your destruction, you know not how.
However, on Sunday afternoon—it was in November, when the days are already short, we had a visit from my father's old clerk, Ramage.
He was restless in his manner: he was evidently in some anxiety of mind. After a few words he began:
'Mr. Will,' he said, 'I have much to say. I have come, I fear, to tell you something that will make you uneasy.'