'I suppose,' said the house agent, 'that my respectable tenant has not done anything bad?'
'N-no—not to my knowledge. His name occurs in rather a disagreeable case. Would you be so very kind as to let him know, in case you should meet him—but of course we shall write to him—that we are most anxious to see him?'
This the landlord readily promised. 'There is another person,' he said, 'who can tell you a great deal more than anybody else. That is his laundress. I don't know who looks after him, but you can find out at the Inn. The policeman will know. Go and ask him.'
In the game of battledore and shuttlecock, the latter has no chance except to take the thing coolly, without temper. George was the shuttlecock. He was hit back into Gray's Inn—this time into the arms of the policeman.
'Well, sir,' said the guardian of the peace, 'I do not know anything about the gentleman myself. If he was one of the noisy ones, I should know him. But he isn't, and therefore I have never heard of him. But if he lives at No. 22, I can tell you who does his rooms; and it's old Mrs. Cripps, and she lives in Leather Lane.'
This street, which is now, comparatively speaking, purged and cleansed, is not yet quite the ideal spot for one who would have pure air and cleanliness combined with godliness of conversation. However, individual liberty is nowhere more absolutely free and uncontrolled than in Leather Lane.
Mrs. Cripps lived on the top floor, nearest to Heaven, of which she ought to be thinking because she was now old and near her end. She was so old that she was quite past her work, and only kept on Mr. Gray's rooms because he never slept there, and they gave her no trouble except to go to them in the morning with a duster and to drop asleep for an hour or so. What her one gentleman gave her, moreover, was all she had to live upon.
Though the morning was warm, she was sitting over the fire watching a small pan, in which she was stewing a savoury mess, consisting of a 'block ornament' with onions, carrots, and turnips. Perhaps she was thinking—the poor old soul—of the days gone by—gone by for fifty years—when she was young and wore a feather in her hat. Old ladies of her class do not think much about vanished beauty, but they think a good deal about vanished feathers and vanished hats: they remember the old free carriage in the streets with the young friends, and the careless laugh, and the ready jest. It is the ancient gentlewoman who remembers the vanished beauty, and thinks of what she was fifty years ago.
Mrs. Cripps heard a step on the narrow stair leading to her room—a manly step. It mounted higher and more slowly, because the stairs were dark as well as narrow. Then the visitor's hat knocked against the door. He opened it, and stood there looking in. A gentleman! Not a District Visitor or a Sister trying to persuade her to early Church—nor yet the clergyman—a young gentleman.
'You are Mrs. Cripps?' he asked. 'The policeman at Gray's Inn directed me here. You are laundress, I believe, to Mr. Edmund Gray of No. 22?'