How was that to be got at? How, at present, could she obtain more than came in at her window? She had no clothes; all had been destroyed at the fire, everything had been consumed, including the very little money she had. Her very first impulse had been, on coming to a sense of her position, to send for her brother Charley; but, alas! a fellow-clerk had embezzled upwards of a thousand pounds from the firm to which they both belonged, and had absconded. Charley had been at once charged to accompany a detective, engaged to pursue him, to America, and he had started on the very night of the fire. He was already on the Atlantic, leaving the shores of England at the rate of three hundred miles per day. He had despatched a hasty note to Lotte, informing her of the mission upon which he had been despatched, and directing her, should she require a little pecuniary assistance during his absence, to apply in his name to his firm, and it would be readily afforded her.
This letter she never got. Charley had slipped it into the letter-box of a post-office, on his way to the Euston station, and it was conveyed to its destination by the postman on the following morning. But as he was not able to deliver it, he returned to the Dead Letter Office, first carefully writing upon it, “House burnt down; gone away, not known where.”
Mr. Bantom was, however, employed by Lotte as a messenger to her brother, to inform him of her sad misfortune, but he pursued his inquiries for Charley in a manner so mysterious, that he raised in the mind, of the Clerk whom he addressed a strong impression that Charley Clinton was deeply his debtor, for coals and greengrocery. Now, Charley’s fellow-clerk was never out of debt, and had an intense loathing for all creditors; they were, he used to say, so offensively pertinacious even when they had got an answer, therefore he replied to Mr. Bantom’s questions with curt brevity. All Mr. Bantom could gather was, that Charles Clinton had sailed for America, and his return was a question involved in obscurity. And the clerk facetiously added, “It might not be for years, and it might not be for never.”
This intelligence was a sad blow to Lotte; what to do she could not tell. The honest people who had taken her in to their humble house lived too closely from hand to mouth to aid her; indeed, she was already a burden to them; they could ill--nay, could not--afford to keep her; this she was at no loss to comprehend by what she heard and saw.