“I’m the last person to make mischief, Mr. Fane, but I don’t consider he has treated us fair.”
“Oh, really?”
“He’s got a woman here living with him. Now of course that’s a thing I should never allow, but seeing as you weren’t here and was paying the rent regular I thought to myself that I’ll just shut my eyes until you came back. It’s really disgusting, and we has to be so particular with the other lodgers. It’s quite upset me, it has; and Mis-ter Cleghorne has been intending to speak to him about it. Only his asthma’s been so bad lately—it really seems to have knocked all the heart out of him.”
This pity for her husband was very ominous, Michael thought. Evidently the landlady was defending herself against an abrupt forfeiture of rent for the ground floor. Michael tapped at the door of his old room: it was locked.
“I’ll get on down again to my oven,” said Mrs. Cleghorne with a ratlike glance at the closed door. “I’m just cooking a bit of fish for my old man’s dinner.”
She fixed him with her eyes that were beady like the head of the hatpin in her cap, and sweeping her hand upward over her nose, she vanished.
Michael rapped again and, as there was no answer, he went along the passage and tried the bedroom door. Barnes’ voice called out to know who was there. Michael shouted his name, and heard Barnes whispering to somebody inside. Presently he opened the sitting-room door and invited Michael to come in.
It was extraordinary to see how with a few additions the character of the room had changed since Michael left it. The furniture was still there; but what had seemed ascetic was now mean. Spangled picture-postcards were standing along the mantelpiece. The autotypes of St. George and the Knight in Armor were both askew: the shelves had novelettes interspersed among the books; a soiled petticoat of yellow moirette lay over Michael’s narrow bed, which he was surprised to see in the sitting-room: a gas-stove had been fixed in the fireplace, and the old steel grate had been turned into a deposit for dirty plates and dishes: but what struck Michael most were the heavy curtains over the folding-doors between the two rooms. He looked at Barnes, waiting for him to explain the alterations.
“Looks a bit more homelike than it did, doesn’t it?” said Barnes, blinking round him.
A deterioration was visible even in Barnes himself. This was not merely the result of being without a collar or a shave, Michael decided: it was as hard to define as the evidence of death in a man’s eyes; but there clung to him an aura of corruption, and it seemed as if at a touch he would dissolve into a vile deliquescence.