“She’ll see Richard Gaskett, I’m sure,” I whispered through the crevice.
“Richard!”
An old, old snuffy beak, shining eyes, and a withered mouth agape showed in the crack; and there they dwelt for a full minute.
“What do you want of me?” she muttered at last.
“I want to ask you some things,” I said. “It might pay you to answer them.”
She lingered still a little; then I heard the chain grate stealthily in its socket, a lean talon shot out, and the next moment I was clawed into the passage, and the door slammed to behind me. A faint shout of laughter pursued me into the fastness.
It was close twilight within, filthy, noxious, indescribable. The narrow hall was bare of everything but stench and decay; the room into which the old horror motioned me was similarly furnished, but with first causes more in evidence. When, very cautiously, she had unbarred the window-shutters and let in a grudging thread of light, I was made conscious of the fact. There were a table here and a tattered chair or two, the stuffing of the latter rank from the contact of unclean generations. There were also piles of refuse, in the corners, under the rusty grate, dropping from a disembowelled cupboard, burst with its own noisome surfeit. The walls, hung with old daguerreotypes, old tinted lithographs, old records of a faded past—all in mouldering frames, and all, it appeared, illustrative of the one-time graces of a single simpering personality—were the cleanest places to be seen. Bugs were the élite of Number six Old Paradise Street.
I felt utterly stupefied—bowled over by the shock of my surroundings. For the moment I could only gasp and suffer, until a violent fit of sneezing came to my relief. The old woman, standing before me, softly pawed at my waistcoat during the paroxysm, peering up into my face. Water and she were long strangers; a mildewed cap she wore, tied under her chin, seemed to have grown on her like a fungus on a tree stump; her dress was of the complexion and savour of tobacco rag. She was a mignonne small-boned creature, and might even once—the Lord forgive me—have been pretty. Even now, old thread of fustiness as she was, there was an indescribable trick of jauntiness in her conduct of her creaking old body; and the frisky shuffle of her feet, in their mouldering slippers, seemed sometimes suggestive of a sort of St Vitus’s ballet dance.
She was taken with a rending fit of coughing while she held me. It seemed to rattle in her like the plaster inside crumbling walls where the rats are busy.
“So you’re Richard Gaskett, O the devil,” she said, when she could gasp out a word at length. “And you’ve come to look up your old grandma, eh?”