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ON HIS WAY THROUGH THE WORLD 575
CHAPTER XXXVIII
THE BEARER OF THE BOWSTRING
THE poor Little Sister trudged away from Milman Street
exasperated with Philip, with Philip's wife, and with the
determination of the pair to accept the hopeless ruin impending
over them. " Three hundred and eighty-six pounds four and
threepence," she thought, " to pay for that wicked old villain ! It is
more than poor Philip is worth, with all his savings and his little
sticks of furniture. I know what he will do : he will borrow of the
money-lenders, and give those bills, and renew them, and end by ruin.
When he have paid this bill, that old villain will forge another,
and that precious wife of his will tell him to pay that, I suppose ;
and those little darlings will be begging for bread, unless they
come and eat mine, to which—God bless them !—they are always
welcome." She calculated—it was a sum not difficult to reckon—
the amount of her own little store of saved ready money. To
pay four hundred pounds out of such an income as Philip's, she
felt, was an attempt vain and impossible. " And he mustn't have
my poor little stocking now," she argued ; " they will want that
presently when their pride is broken down, as it will be, and my
darlings are hungering for their dinner!" Revolving this dismal
matter in her mind, and scarce knowing where to go for comfort
and counsel, she made her way to her good friend, Dr. Goodenough,
and found that worthy man, who had always a welcome
for his Little Sister.
She found Goodenough alone in his great dining-room, taking a
very slender meal, after visiting his hospital and his fifty patients,
among whom I think there were more poor than rich : and the good
sleepy Doctor woke up with a vengeance, when he heard his little
nurse's news, and fired off a volley of angry language against Philip
and his scoundrel of a father ; " which it was a comfort to hear
him," little Brandon told us afterwards. Then Goodenough trotted
out of the dining-room into the adjoining library and consultingroom,
whither his old friend followed him. Then he pulled out a
bunch of keys and opened a secretaire, from which he took a
parchment-covered volume, on which F. Goodenough, Esq., M.D.,