“Oh, we sha’n’t take any notice, sir. We hope you’ll do just as you like here, and if there’s anything you want, tell us, so that we can get it for you.”
He turned quite nice after that, and began chatting with me so pleasantly, you’d think he was the most agreeable gentleman in the world if you didn’t know him. He asked about the house and the customers, and all about the people who lived in the neighbourhood, and, thinking to amuse him, I told him a lot of queer things about the people who came to the house, and were characters, being quite taken off my guard, till I saw him jotting down something on the blotting-pad, and then I saw what a stupid girl I’d been. He was taking notes, and I knew he’d go and use up all my characters and make stories of them. So I stopped short all at once, and pretended I’d left somebody downstairs waiting for me.
It was a narrow escape, and I only just remembered his old tricks in time, and what a dreadful man he was for putting everybody into his stories. I knew he’d put his own pa and ma and all his brothers and sisters and all his relations in stories, and nobody ever told their experience about anything, or an adventure that had happened to them, but he’d have it all in his note-book before you could say Jack Robinson.
I remember what he did once, when I was in his service. He went down to stay with his ma at Cheltenham at a boarding-house for a day or two, and his ma told him a lot of things about the people in the house, and the queer characters they were, and what they said and did, never dreaming of any harm; and the very next week if he didn’t write a paper about “Life in a boarding-house,” and put all these people in, only making them a good deal worse than they were, because he couldn’t help exaggerating if he was to be killed the next minute for it.
His pa, it seems, who came down to the boarding-house too, had let out to several people that it was his son who was the Mr. Saxon who wrote for the newspapers, and had persuaded a lot of the people to read what he wrote; and the Monday after, when the paper on boarding-houses came out, a lot of the people staying at the same boarding-house as his ma bought it, and saw themselves in it, and things that only the landlady could know—it was the landlady who had told his ma—and they were so indignant they all gave notice and left, except some that didn’t care and stopped, and were so nasty his ma had to leave. I heard him tell the story, and that’s how I knew, and it was remembering that that made me drop the conversation before I put my foot in it in the same way.
When I got downstairs, the Swedish gentleman was talking to Harry, and telling him some of the wonderful adventures he and Mr. Saxon had had abroad, and we sat talking till it was closing time. Then the Swedish gentleman said, “I must go upstairs to the governor and get all his medicines out.”
“All his medicines!” I said. “Why, how many does he take?”
“Oh, it’s awful!” said the Swedish gentleman. “We have to carry a whole portmanteau full everywhere. There’s the medicine for his dyspepsia, and the medicine for his liver, and the embrocation for his rheumatics, and the wash for his hair, and three different sorts of pills, and a tonic, and now he takes powdered charcoal, and we have to carry a great bottle full of that—and I have to put them all out, so that he can find them directly he wants them—and then there are his clothes to unpack and his books. I tell you we shall want a furniture-van to take us about soon.”
The Swedish gentleman went upstairs, and presently he came down again looking as white as death.
“Oh, Mrs. Beckett,” he said, “whatever shall I do? Look here.” He held up a lot of underclothing all smothered with black patches.