CHAPTER III
CONCERNING NUMBER FOUR AND WHO LIVED IN IT
Chapter III headpiece
If I had had to give an account of Number Four even six months before this story opens I should have been forced to admit it was a blot on the Walk. The people who occupied it had left without paying their rent, which was in itself a thing likely to cast discredit on the whole Walk. But they did worse than that. Just before leaving, they managed, on one plausible pretext or another, to wheedle sums of varying amounts out of almost all their neighbours. Out of every one of them, in fact, except the Reverend Jacob Sternroyd, D.D., who lived all alone in the sixth and last house, and about whom I shall have more to say by-and-by. For weeks the Walk remained hopeful of seeing its money back. Then came doubt, and lastly, a period of very bad temper during which everybody told everybody else they had said so all along, and if people had only listened to them—! The owner of the house, a very fat brewer at Brentford, put in a dreadful old Irishwoman as caretaker, and she would sit on the front door-steps—the actual door-steps, in the open, where the whole Walk could not avoid seeing her—and smoke a filthy short black pipe: a sight terrible to behold.
When remonstrated with, she retorted volubly in incomprehensible Milesian. The Admiral himself had attacked her.
"Now, my good woman, we can't have you smoking here."
The old woman looked up at him with bleary eyes, and puffed in his face.
"Did you hear what I said?"
"What for should I not hear, darlint?"