“You might chance to hit upon lodgings where you wouldn’t be any more comfortable, Lewis. And they’d be very dull for you.”
“There’s Lake’s boarding-house,” put in old Coney, whilst the doctor was looking blank and helpless.
“A boarding-house? Ay, that might do, if it’s not a noisy one.”
“It’s not noisy at all,” cried the Squire. “It’s uncommonly well conducted: sometimes there are not three visitors in the house. You and Miss Lewis would be comfortable there.”
And for Lake’s boarding-house Dr. Lewis and Anne took their departure on the very next day. If they had only foreseen the trouble their stay at it would lead to!
Lake’s boarding-house stood near the cathedral. A roomy house, with rather shabby furniture in it: but in boarding-houses and lodgings people don’t, as a rule, look for gilded chairs and tables. Some years before, Mrs. Lake, the wife of a professional man, and a gentlewoman, was suddenly left a widow with four infant children, boys, and nothing to keep them upon. What to do she did not know. And it often puzzles me to think what such poor ladies do do, left in similar straits.
She had her furniture; and that was about all. Friends suggested that she should take a house in a likely situation, and try for some lady boarders; or perhaps for some of the college boys, whose homes lay at a distance. Not to make too long a story of it, it was what she did do. And she had been in the house ever since, struggling on (for these houses mostly do entail a struggle), sometimes flourishing in numbers, sometimes down in the dumps with empty rooms. But she had managed to bring the children up: the two elder ones were out in the world, the two younger were still in the college school. Mrs. Lake was a meek little woman, ever distracted with practical cares, especially as to stews and gravies: Miss Dinah Lake (her late husband’s sister, and a majestic lady of middle age), who lived with her, chiefly saw to the company.
But now, would any one believe that Dr. Lewis was “that shy,” as their maid, Sally, expressed it—or perhaps you would rather call it helpless—that he begged the Squire to let me go with him to Lake’s. Otherwise he should be lost, he said; and Anne, accustomed to French ways and habits, could not be of much use to him in a strange boarding-house: Johnny knew the house, and would feel at home there.
When Captain Sanker and his wife (if you have not forgotten them) first came to Worcester, they stayed at Lake’s while fixing on a residence, and that’s how we became tolerably well acquainted with the Lakes. This year that I am now writing about was the one that preceded the accident to King Sanker, told of earlier in the volume. And, in point of rotation, this paper ought to have appeared first.