“Won’t you come in?” hesitated Jess, still holding the door. The rent was not due for a day or two, and he usually gave them a few days’ grace if they did not happen to have it right in the nick of time.
“I guess I will,” squeaked the landlord.
He was a little whiffet of a man—“looked like a figure on a New Year’s cake,” Bobby Hargrew said. His mouth was a mere slit in his gray, wrinkled face, and his eyes were so close together that the sharp bridge of his nose scarcely parted them.
Some landlords hire agents to attend to their property and to the collection of rents. Not so Mr. Chumley. He did not mind the trouble of collecting, and he could fight off repairs longer than any landlord in town. And the one-half of one per cent. collection fee was an item.
“Think I’ve come ahead of time, eh?” he cackled, rubbing his blue hands—as blue as a turkey’s foot, Jess thought—over the renewed fire. “It ain’t many days before rent’s due again. If ye have it handy ye can pay me now, Miss Josephine.”
“It isn’t handy, Mr. Chumley. We are shorter than usual just now,” said Jess, hating the phrase that comes so often to the lips of poverty.
“Well! well! Can’t expect money before it’s due, I s’pose,” said the old man, licking his thin lips. “And I’m afraid ye find it pretty hard to meet your bills at ’tis?” he added, his head on one side like a gray old stork.
Jess flushed and then paled. What had he heard? Had that Mrs. Brown, in the grocer’s shop, told him already that Mr. Closewick had refused to let her increase the bill? The girl looked at him without speaking, schooling her features to betray nothing of the fear that gripped her heart.
“Hey?” squeaked Mr. Chumley. “Don’t ye hear well?”
“I hear you, sir,” said Jess, glancing quickly to make sure that she had closed the door tightly between the kitchen and the room in which her mother was at work.