‘Never you mind, Mr Cockleboat; it is quite sufficient that I knew it. This is a proper sort of house to play hide-and-seek in, isn’t it?’
I was dispersing the table and chairs again with angry jerks as I spoke, fearful lest my attempted investigation of the occult mysteries should be discovered before I had removed its traces.
‘Still I can’t understand how you discovered that Mr Montmorency was myself, although naturally my night rehearsals must have disturbed you. But you told me you had no other lodgers,’ continued Julian Cockleboat reproachfully, to the Bizzeys.
‘And you said the same thing to me,’ I added, in similar tones.
‘Well, sir—well, Mr Montmorency, I’m very sorry it should have happened so,’ replied the landlord, turning from one to the other, ‘but it’s all my old woman’s fault, for I said to her—’
‘You did nothing of the sort,’ interrupted his better half; ‘for when I come to you and told you as a second gentleman wanted rooms here, it was you as said, “Let him have the little room upstairs, and no one will be ever the wiser if he takes his meals out of a day.”’
‘But we never thought—begging your pardon, Mr Montmorency—as you’d take such a liberty with the upper offices as to make noises in them as should disturb the whole house.’
‘Well, what was I to do?’ replied the young man, appealing to me. ‘They’ve given me three leading parts to get up at a fortnight’s notice, and if I don’t study them at night I have no chance of being ready in time.’
‘In fact,’ I said, oracularly, ‘you’ve been cheating each other all round. Mr Bizzey has cheated his employers by letting apartments to which he has no right; you have cheated the Bizzeys by using one which you never hired of them; and I have—’ ‘cheated myself,’ I might have added, but I stopped short and looked wise instead.