“Orion,” he said quietly, “has been dead six months. He murdered his aunt and then jumped out of the window to evade the hangman. If you hadn’t been abroad you would have heard of it. We’ll have a look round the bedroom, if you like.”
Of course he wasn’t there. That is our ghost story. Several fellows have seen him since—so they say.
Dick Simpson came after Drummond. He said he saw Orion lots of times, and didn’t take the least notice. Rather resented sharing his rooms with another man who didn’t pay a penny rent, and who hadn’t the tact to make himself scarce when anybody dropped in—but that was all. Poor Dick wasn’t nervous or imaginative. Orion used to come in, shake his head at the dust, at torn leather paper on the walls and mangy ball fringe at the mantelshelf, then go quietly through into the bedroom. Dick told me the other day that he had just smashed the last of the rose-colored gas globes. He had the bits in a bag and was going to match it in the City. If he didn’t, Orion would be bound to look in to-night; he was beginning to be a bit of a bore.
Simpson was an insurance clerk, most commonplace, most steady. He was always having his top hat ironed, and recommending one to buy a pair of trouser stretchers. He went to the theater every Saturday night, and stopped in bed late on Sunday. He was quite content and prosperous on his sixty-five shillings a week, yet, because he had the set at 7 on the third floor, we all waited without saying anything, to him or to each other, for something extraordinary to happen. In his case we thought it might be just vulgar embezzlement—but you can never be sure, it is always the most unlikely thing that happens to the tenant of that third-floor set. When once it gets hold of a man it never lets him go. It never gives him up. More often than not it hands him over to the undertaker. And you know what happened to Dick.
There was a story of Bob and Barbara Piety. You’ll like that. If I were writing the story, instead of just gossiping it to you in the dusk, I should call it “The Play’s the Thing.” It is Hamlet—in an Inn of Court.
*****
Bob Piety lived in the Inn as a bachelor. He married a nice girl—Miss Martin—and took a villa at Norwood. A few months before he married he lent Murphy twenty pounds. We all warned him; Murphy never paid, and made a boast of never paying, but these Irishmen are wheedling, and Bob was pretty flush just then. On this unlucky twenty pounds the whole story hangs.
Barbara had babies very quickly; servants’ wages rose each time she changed—and she was always changing. The beer barrel constantly gave out, and it was generally quarter day. Bob had a good post, as the City goes. But four hundred a year, though ample in the Inn, is only a pittance at Norwood, with an extravagant, prolific wife, a seventy-pound villa, and two maids, with a boy to clean the knives.
One morning, as Barbara was flicking at Bob’s coat with the clothes brush before he went to the City, she asked him timidly for a new gown.
“It won’t cost five pounds,” she said, pulling his coat down at the back. “You don’t like me to look shabby, dear, do you? And, Bob, while I think of it, just leave me Maria’s wages. I’ve had to give her a rise. You can’t get a really decent cook general for less than twenty pounds a year. And we want some new linoleum for the nursery—I’d better order it to——”