“Then there’s Mrs Fiddison, sir, nearly opposite. Very clean and respectable. Bedroom and sitting-room, where a young gentleman left only about a week ago. He played a long brass thing, sir, at one of the theatres, and used to practise it at home; and that’s why he left.”
“That will do, I daresay,” exclaimed Richard, who, in the first blush of his determination, was stern as an ascetic, and would have said Yes to the lodgings if Mrs Jenkles had proposed a couple of neatly furnished cellars.
The result was that the cabman’s wife went over with him to Mrs Fiddison’s, and introduced him to that lady, who was dressed in sombre black, held a widow’s cap in her hand, and was evidently determined to keep up the supply, for there were at least six arranged about the little parlour into which she led the way.
Not Musical.
Mrs Fiddison was a tall, thin lady, who was supposed to be a widow from her display of caps; but the fact was that she had no right to the matronly prefix, she being a blighted flower—a faded rosebud, on whom the sun of love had never shone; and the consequence was that her head drooped upon its stalk, hung over weakly on one shoulder, while a dewdrop-like tear stood in one eye; and, like carbonic acid gas concealed in soda-water, she always had an indefinite number of sighs waiting to escape from her lips.
She smiled sadly at Richard, and waved him to a chair, to have taken which would have caused the immolation of a widow’s cap—which, however, Mrs Fiddison rescued, and perched awry upon her head, to be out of the way.
“This gentleman wants apartments, Mrs F.,” said Mrs Jenkles.
“Mine are to let,” said Mrs Fiddison, sadly; “but does the gentleman play anything brass?”
Richard stared, and then remembered about the last lodger.