'Where did you get this?' he asked the child.
'Mrs. 'Alliss give it me,' the little one answered, beginning to
cry.
Arthur ran lightly down the steps again, and knocked at the door of
Mrs. Halliss's kitchen, with the tell-tale bracelet in his hand.
Mrs. Halliss opened the dcor to him respectfully, and after a faint
attempt at innocent prevarication, felt bound to let out all the
pitiful little secret without further preamble. So Arthur, good,
kind-hearted, delicate-souled Arthur, took his seat sadly upon one
of the hard wooden kitchen chairs, and waited patiently while Mrs.
Halliss and honest John, in their roundabout inarticulate fashion,
slowly unfolded the story how them two pore young creechurs upstairs
had been druv that low through want of funs that Mrs. Le Breting,
God bless 'er 'eart, 'ad 'ad to pawn her poor little bits of
jewelry and such like: and how they 'adn't 'ad the face to go an'
pawn it for her, and so 'ad locked it up in their drawers, and
waited hopefully for better times. Arthur listened to all this with
an aching heart, and went home alone to ponder on the best way of
still further assisting them.
The only thing that occurred to him was a plan for giving Edie,
too, a little relief, in the way of what she might suppose to be
money-getting occupation. She used to paint a little in water-colours,
he remembered, in the old days; so he put an advertisement in a
morning paper, which he got Mrs. Halliss to show Edie, asking for
drawings of orchids, the flowers to be supplied and accurately copied
by an amateur at a reasonable price. Edie fell into the harmless
friendly trap readily enough, and was duly supplied with orchids by
a florist in Regent Street, who professed to receive his instructions
from the advertiser. The pictures were all produced in due time,
and were sent to a fixed address, where a gentleman in a hansom used
to call for them at regular intervals. Arthur Berkeley kept those
poor little water-colours long afterwards locked up in a certain
drawer all by themselves: they were sacred mementoes to him of that
old hopeless love for the little Miss Butterfly of his Oxford days.
With the very first three guineas that Edie earned, carefully
saved and hoarded out of her payments for the water-colours, she
insisted in the pride of her heart that Ernest should go and visit
a great London consulting physician. Sir Antony Wraxall was the
best specialist in town on the subject of consumption, she had heard,
and she was quite sure so clever a man must do Ernest a great deal
of good, if he didn't even permanently cure him.
'It's no use, Edie darling,' Ernest said to her imploringly. 'You'll
only be wasting your hard-earned money. What I want is not advice
or medicine; I want what no doctor on earth can possibly give
me--relief from this terrible crushing responsibility.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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