"Look here, sir," I interrupted. "I know all about the finances of the establishment, and if I take this money I shall be taking nearly the last penny you have. You just let it stand over. Any time will do for settling with me."
"Good of you."
"And as regards future arrangements, I'm going to live on the top floor, and I shall be in and about in a friendly sort of way whenever I'm wanted. The mistress and the young ladies have been used to plenty of help and attention, and I don't wish all that cut off suddenly at the main, so to speak. My wages stop from to-day, and when matters get brighter—and that may not be long ahead—why they can start again."
"Weston," he declared, "the State ought to be making you, just now, a generous allowance. You should be put in charge of the ray of sunshine department. You are a mascot. You're a sheet anchor. So long as you are with us, we shall feel ourselves safe. God bless you!"
In the morning, I went down early to answer the milkman's knock. Content to gain new customers, he told me an important item of information which had come to him direct from no less an authority than the pier-master at the end of King William Street. Russian troops, in enormous numbers, were on the way via Archangel, and would shortly pass through England on the way to France. The pier-master's idea was that this would settle the war in less than no time.
"But don't give it away, miss," begged the milkman, urgently. "Don't mention it to anyone, because it's a secret, and only a few of us, who can be depended upon to keep it dark, are supposed to know anything about it."
We were all of us to blame, more or less, for the circulation of rumours, but the chief responsibility in my own immediate district had to be placed upon Arthur. Arthur was—it sounds like an extract from a French lesson book—the brother of our greengrocer's wife; the lady professed to be suffering from nerves in consequence of the war (she had no relatives engaged in the struggle, and felt, I think, that it was necessary for her to take up a distinguished attitude in order to avoid the pain of being reckoned of no account) and Arthur had previously been spoken of by her as a West End club-man, one who mixed with the aristocrats, not so much on equal terms as on terms of high superiority.
"Great shock to him when I went and married a tradesman," she confided to me. "I recollect so well the words he said to me at the time. 'Julia,' he said, 'promise that you'll never on any account do a hand's stroke of work in the shop.' And," triumphantly, "I've kept my word, even on Saturday nights." Her husband, instead of being annoyed, and rating her for indolence, took great pride in the aloof attitude thus taken up; he was in the habit of referring to her, in conversation, as his little Queen of Sheba.
It appeared—when a doctor had been sent for and admitted, after he had cross-examined and investigated, that he could not give a name to her ailment (the greengrocer's wife was enormously conceited over this, counting it as a victory for herself), and when the oft-mentioned brother called and asked me to keep an eye on her—that the description of West End club-man was exact, but not complete. He was, in point of fact, a hall porter at a club, where he described himself as second in command, and his hours were from eight o'clock in the evening until three in the morning or earlier if there happened to be no member remaining in the establishment.