She stopped him an instant to say: “You never rest or spare yourself where help may be given”—and thereafter the look in her eyes alone haunted him.
He went like a soul exalted through some great renunciation; his flesh knew no tremors nor his spirit weakness. It was but a few minutes’ drive, at top speed, to his destination; it seemed to him a sparrow flight from kerb to kerb.
Big Ben was booming out eleven as he mounted three or four steps to a dingy door in the York Road. The house to which it belonged was of the typical low-London pattern. It was one of a row—one of a black, sooty wall of houses, so like its neighbours and its neighbours’ neighbours inside and out, that, if Cogia Hassan had come in the night and played general post with the numbers of them all, the life of the terrace would probably have continued with as little sense of dislocation as if number ten’s letters were not being delivered at number fourteen, or number twelve’s lodger had not come home at midnight to sup on number eight’s bread and cheese. Gilead looked down into the squalid area and up at the dirty fanlight over the door, where a card, warped and bleared with age, bent curiously to canvas the unlikely likelihood of his applying for the apartments it advertised; and he wondered if the mines, the docks, Princetown itself, were not preferable to existence in such a place, so dreary, so colourless, so uneventful.
He had time to consider, and was indeed beginning to judge his mission fruitless for that night, when the door opened suddenly, and a large man with a candle in his hand appeared standing in the opening.
“O!” said Gilead. “Good evening to you. Are you the landlord?”
At the acceptable word, the individual backed heavily, motioning him to enter. Gilead had been prepared for the typical lodging-house shrew, tart, hungry, aggressive; instead, he saw before him a substantial churchy gentleman, like a sanctimonious verger, with a moist lip and side-whiskers. His waistcoat and trousers were black; his coat was off, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up to the elbow.
“I have come,” said Gilead, “to enquire about a Miss Fleming. Does she live here?”
A certain tentative smile, oily and ineffable, left the man’s lips on the instant.
“Work?” said he. “It’s late to come on business.”
“It’s late, as you say. Is she up?”