It was now well into August, and I had to leave London for a few weeks. The first day of my return I went to see him, but his final sleep had come, for he was dead and buried. On inquiry, the landlady told me that he had given her, just before he died, enough money to pay for his funeral; so the race had been run and the pauper’s funeral had been avoided. She gave me a scrap of paper with some writing on it in pencil--I have it by me now. I never knew his name, he never knew mine--what did they matter? But this is what the paper says: ‘Tell the kind gentleman I am not ungrateful; I hope he will forgive me, for I think God will. I cannot bear it any longer and am going to end it. He will not see me again.’ I was told that after my last visit he again became sleepless, and that one day he got up and put on his clothes and wandered tremblingly into the street, making, as it seemed, for a canal close by. He told no one his errand; slowly, step by step, he went, till his weakened limbs could carry him no farther, for he fell exhausted close to the canal, but closer still to death; for he was carried to his little room, and God had mercy upon him. He left no debts unpaid; the rent of his little room had been discharged, all his landlady’s claims had been satisfied, and his account balanced--no assets, no liabilities.
And the simple annals of the poor in the sordid misery and dirt of our slums furnish many an instance of stern independence and unfailing industry. But heroes are of no sex, and so I want to tell the story of the poor widow who lived but six doors from my unnamed friend. I had been visiting her when I came in contact with him. I met her at the police court; she had been dragged from the Lea and charged with attempted suicide. Her garments, few and old, clung to her like cerements. Her hollow cough told its tale, and her face spoke of a pathetic hopelessness. She was a match-box maker, and, as I said, a widow. Her husband had been a wood-carver and a worker in the Ragged School. It was the fourth anniversary of his death. ‘Promise me, Mary,’ he had said, just before his death, ‘that you will not let the children go into the workhouse.’ She had willingly promised, and to her that promise was sacred. But it cost something to keep it.