“To pay? Ah, money! It is what you call it, tight. No, I have not come money to pay.”
“And ’ow am I to pay my rent, I should like to know, if you don’t pay yours? Can you tell me that, young man?”
“I cannot—a—tell you. I am not a weezard.”
Although Mrs. Preedy had fully regained her courage she could not think of a fitting rejoinder to this remark; so for a moment she held her tongue.
She had occupied her house for thirty years, living, until a short time since, in tolerable comfort upon the difference between the rent she received from her lodgers and the rent she paid to the agent of the estate upon which Great Porter Square was situated. It was a great and wealthy estate. Mrs. Preedy had never seen her aristocratic landlord, who owned not only Great Porter Square but a hundred squares and streets in the vicinity, in addition to lovely tracts of woodland and grand mansions in the country. The income of this to-be-envied lord was said to be a sovereign a minute. London, in whose cellars and garrets hundreds of poor wretches yearly die of starvation, contains many such princes.
Richard Manx rented a room in the garret of Mrs. Preedy’s house, for which he had to pay three shillings a week. It was furnished, and the rent could not be considered unreasonable. Certainly there was in the room nothing superfluous. There were a truckle bed, with a few worn-out bed clothes, a japanned chest of drawers, so ricketty that it had to be propped up with bits of paper under two of its corners, a wreck of a chair, an irregular piece of looking-glass hooked on to the wall, an old fender before the tiniest fire-place that ever was seen, a bent bit of iron for a poker, an almost bottomless coal scuttle, a very small trunk containing Richard Manx’s personal belongings, a ragged towel, and a lame washstand with toilet service, every piece of which was chipped and broken. In an auction the lot might have brought five shillings; no broker in his senses would have bid higher for the rubbish.
“If you ’aven’t come to pay your rent,” demanded Mrs. Preedy, “what ’ave you come for?”
Richard Manx craned his neck forward till his face was at least six inches in advance of his body, and replied in a hoarse whisper:
“I have—a—heard it once more again!”