After that day, I took to haunt the precincts of the Bell-and-Clapper, believing it to be my only chance of finding Bevere. Scott had a brief note from him, no address to it, stating that he was not yet well enough to resume his duties; and this note Scott forwarded to me. A letter also came to me; from Lady Bevere asking what the matter was that I did not write, and whether Roger was worse. How could I write, unless I found him?
So, all the leisure time that I could improvise I spent round about the Bell-and-Clapper. Not inside the room, amid its manifold attractions: Circe was a wily woman, remember, and pretty bottles are insidious. That particular Circe, also, Miss Panken, might have objected to my company and ordered me out of it.
Up one road, down another, before this row of houses and that, I hovered for ever like a walking ghost. But I saw nothing of Bevere.
Luck favoured me at last. One afternoon towards the end of the week, I was standing opposite the church, watching the half-dozen worshippers straggling into it, for one of its many services, listening to the irritating ding-dong of its bell, and wondering the noise was put up with, when suddenly Richard Scott came running up from the city train. Looking neither to the right nor the left, or he must inevitably have seen me, he made straight for a cross-road, then another, and presently entered one of a row of small houses whose lower rooms were on a level with the ground and the yard or two of square garden that fronted them. “Paradise Place.” I followed Scott at a cautious distance.
“Bevere lives there!” quoth I, mentally.
Should I go in at once boldly, and beard him? While deliberating—for somehow it goes against my nature to beard anybody—Scott came striding out and turned off the other way: which led to the shops. I crossed over and went in quietly at the open door.
The parlour, small and shabby as was Mrs. Mapping’s in Gibraltar Terrace, was on the left, its door likewise open. Seated at a table, taking his tea, was Roger Bevere; opposite to him, presiding over the ceremonies, sat a lady who must unquestionably have been first-cousin to those damsels at the Bell-and-Clapper, if one might judge by the hair.
“Roger!” I exclaimed. “What a dance you have led us!”
He started up with a scarlet face, his manner strangely confused, his tongue for the moment lost. And then I saw that he was without his coat, and his arm was bandaged.
“I was going to write to you,” he said—an excuse invented on the spur of the moment, “I thought to be about before now, but my arm got bad again.”