We heard—well, we heard him kiss her—and then we heard her whisk away into the bedroom to bathe her eyes, and Gully came in with a wide grin to dismiss us. As we went through the passage we heard the vigorous splash of water in the basin.
Gully let us out. We went down the stone stairs, with stealthy handshakes and smothered chuckles, leaving him alone with Lucinda, and master once more.
[BEYOND THE GRAY GATE.]
POOR Nat Chaytor had this set once. It is very inconvenient—just two rooms and a nest of cupboards called a kitchen. You never saw such cupboards, such idiotic waste of space! Probably not. Every set is different. The old fellows who designed the place were freakish. It is small and inconvenient, but the best I can afford. I’m three quarters in arrears with the rent, as it is. Some day I shall have to shoot the moon and get the boys in the other sets to help me do it. We all hang together in adversity.
When Chaytor took it he was a clerk in the City at one hundred and eighty pounds a year. On one hundred and eighty pounds a year he married Minnie, who was the lady typewriting clerk in the same office. They lived here—just for a bit, as he always explained—until their ship came home. He was a most hopeful fellow. They pegged on pretty comfortably for a time. Minnie smartened up the rooms—that plush bracket on the wall above your head was hers. She turned up her nose pretty considerably at other ladies in the Inn. She routed Chaytor’s laundress. The poor old soul came and poured out her woes to me. She had everything her own way so long as Chaytor was a bachelor. I remember that he came home from the City one day in his lunch hour—which he usually stretched into two—and found her asleep on his bed. She had not even troubled to take off her battered black bonnet or the sacking apron whose narrow string kept her together at the waist. But Minnie, as she rather snappishly said, was not going to “put up with such ways. She would rather do the work herself.” So Mrs. Percival got a week’s notice.
“I’ve done for dozens of gentlemen in the Inn, as you knows, sir,” she said pathetically to me; “and then to be sacked by a hussy like her. An’ me the widow of a solicitor myself, and a lady by birth.”
Things went on well enough with the Chaytors for a few months. We did not see much of Nat; Minnie had a freezing, fine-lady manner with old bachelor friends, and liked her husband to go to bed when she did—punctually at eleven. Things went on well enough until he got discharged from his berth in the City. It was the usual story—business bad, reducing the staff, and so on. But I rather fancy that Nat’s easy hours had something to do with it. He always turned up half an hour late in the morning, took two hours for his lunch, another hour for afternoon tea, and went off at six every night, very often leaving the members of the firm at their desks. He had that fierce, sick hatred of City life which so many fellows have—nearly all the fellows who are good for anything. The dozens that I have seen chuck the accursed City! Some of these go up and some go under. But whichever way it is, they live—or die—free men.
He lost his berth. He was rather relieved than otherwise. He had been expecting it for a long time. A City clerk’s is a grim calling. He is never safe, and he knows that once out of a situation the chances are ten to one against his getting another. It is like losing your footing in a crowd—there is small chance of getting up again. Orion knew that; it egged him on to murder the old woman in Great Ormond Street.
No doubt Nat had a hot time with Minnie when he told her the news. She was one of those small, sharp-featured, rasping-voiced girls, with an ineffaceable sneer on her lips. Her creed was getting on in the world. She had been hoping that Nat would have a rise—two hundred a year, so that they might have a house all to themselves in the suburbs, and a little maidservant with a cap and apron. She said that the Inn wasn’t a fit place for a respectable young woman, and very likely she was right.