The establishment of Miss Louisa Grison was by no means aristocratic as her house was not situated in a fashionable quarter of London and she charged extremely moderate prices for board and lodging. Petty clerks and shop-girls formed the greater portion of those who dwelt under her humble roof, but occasionally people in better circumstances came to the place. Young men learning to become lawyers, students in various metropolitan colleges, actresses in or out of employment, reduced ladies, who had just sufficient income to keep body and soul together, literary aspirants and adventurers down in their luck, were to be found at 2Z Thimble Square, Bloomsbury. It was a fluctuating population which came and went throughout the year. Sometimes the house would be full, at other times it was almost empty but in one way and another Miss Grison always contrived to satisfy her landlord and pay her taxes. She never complained of her lot, or lamented her poverty, but met everything, good, bad and indifferent, in her hard way, without emotion of any kind. Misery seemed to have turned her into stone.
The house was a large corner one, with a vast drawing-room, a vast dining-room, and a sitting-room for Miss Grison on the ground floor, together with a kitchen of no great size and servants’ cubicles in the basement. All the rest of the building was given over to bedrooms, so small and so many that they resembled the cells of bees. And the lodgers were exactly like bees, for the greater part of them swarmed out to their various employments in the early morning and swarmed back again late in the evening. Sometimes they had spare money for amusements, but more often they had not, and seemed to be incessantly working like the bees aforesaid to gather honey for other people. Yet as they were generally young and hopeful and healthy, on the whole they contrived to enjoy themselves in a meagre way, their standard of pleasure not being very high. Sometimes the men made love to the women, or the girls flirted with the boys, and so long as these philanderings were innocent Miss Grison did not forbid them. But in her hard way, she was rigorously moral, and any boarder, male or female, who overstepped the line was banished from this penny Eden. However, the inmates of the Establishment—as Miss Grison called it—behaved very well and she rarely had cause for complaint. They were all a trifle afraid of the landlady with her hard blue eyes and stiff manners, and she ruled them after the manner of a schoolmistress, making allowance for youthful spirits yet keeping them in strict order. Some objected to these limitations, but the food was so good and the bedrooms so comfortable and the price of both so moderate that they put up with the lesser evil to enjoy the greater good.
In her reply to Fuller, bidding him come to dinner on a certain day, Miss Grison mentioned that evening dress was unnecessary, an observation which seemed rather superfluous to the young man when he learned the quality of the establishment. He entered the large drawing-room to find the men in their workaday clothes, although the ladies had certainly done their best to smarten themselves for the evening function. Miss Grison, for instance, received him in a worn black silk dress, trimmed sparsely with jet and set off with cheap lace. She still looked as though carved out of wood and still stared with an unwinking gaze which somewhat confused the young man. There is nothing so embarrassing to even a tired man or woman of the world as a steady look, and although Alan was conscious of being a perfectly proper person he yet winced at Miss Grison’s hard greeting.
The visitor’s good looks and unusually smart clothes—although he simply wore a suit of blue serge—caused quite a sensation. Girls in cheap blouses, cheap skirts and still cheaper jewellery giggled and blushed when he was presented to them, and elderly dames with careworn faces and of antiquated garb, straightened themselves with conscious dignity. There was something pathetic in their assumption of society manners, considering the dire poverty to which they were condemned. The men—they were an ordinary lot as regards looks and brains—were disposed to be hostile as they thought that the female portion of the establishment paid too much attention to the newcomer. But they were civil on the whole and the dull quarter of an hour before the seven o’clock meal was announced by a seedy man-servant—termed grandiloquently the butler—passed off fairly well. Fuller was quiet and observant, and chatted mostly to his hostess, although for politeness’ sake he had to address a few observations on safe topics to ladies, old and young and middle-aged.
The dinner was plentiful and nourishing, if not particularly dainty, consisting of Scotch broth, Irish stew, rice pudding with tinned apricots and American cheese. The boarders provided their own liquid refreshments, as Miss Grison merely supplied water in large glass jugs. Consequently there were many private bottles on the table, ranging as to their contents from pale ale to whisky: some of the better-off lodgers even indulging in cheap claret. Miss Grison drank water, and her guest, since she offered him nothing better, followed suit.
“I would banish alcohol of every description from my table,” she whispered, with stern apology, “for it was my dear dead brother’s curse. But if I kept a temperance hotel I doubt if the business would pay so well.”
“Then it does pay,” remarked Fuller with a side-glance at her worn dress.
“Oh, yes,” she responded indifferently, “I manage to keep my head above water and to save a trifle against rainy days, and old age. Ah, there is our usual late comer, Mr. Bakche. Now his soup will have to be brought back, which puts the servants out. These Orientals have no idea of time, Mr. Fuller.”
Alan politely agreed and glanced carelessly at the newcomer, only to give a more earnest look later on, for Mr. Bakche was decidedly out of place amongst that shabby assemblage. He was perfectly arrayed in a well-cut evening dress, with pearl studs and patent leather shoes. Tall and slim, he was yet sinewy in his looks and possessed an admirable figure, which the close-fitting clothes set off to great advantage. He had clearly-cut features, a dark complexion, as became an Eastern, and wore a small black mustache, well twisted over very red lips and very white teeth. On the whole he was a handsome fellow and his air was somewhat haughty and reserved. As Alan observed, he ate only plain boiled rice, uncooked fruit, and drank water; just as if he were an anchorite. The looks of the man and the abstinence of the man aroused Fuller’s curiosity, and he thought that he would like to talk to Mr. Bakche as well as to Miss Grison. Meanwhile he asked for information.
“He is an Indian prince, so he says,” replied Miss Grison in a whisper. “I understand that his full name is Mr. Morad-Bakche, which he told me means, in his own language, ‘Desire accomplished.’ He is only in England for a few months on some mission connected with the recovery of his family property lost during the Mutiny, and my house was recommended to him by a former boarder who went out to Ceylon.”