“Yes, sir, if you’d be so kind. I know its awfully late; but, as you’ve been out, perhaps you wouldn’t mind running round to our house. It’s quite close, and I’ll take you there.” She spoke with the peculiar drawl and dropped her “h’s” in the manner of the true London-bred girl.
“I’ll come if you’ll wait a minute,” I said, and then, leaving her outside, I entered the house and obtained my thermometer and stethoscope.
When I rejoined her and closed the door I made some inquiries about the sufferer’s symptoms, but the description she gave me was so utterly vague and contradictory that I could make nothing out of it. Her muddled idea of his illness I put down to her fear and anxiety for his welfare.
She had no mother, she told me; and her father had, of late, given way just a little to drink. He “used” the Haycock, in Edgware Road; and she feared that he had fallen among a hard-drinking set. He was a pianoforte-maker, and had been employed at Brinsmead’s for eighteen years. Since her mother died, six years ago, however, he had never been the same.
“It was then that he took to drink?” I hazarded.
“Yes,” she responded. “He was devoted to her. They never had a wry word.”
“What has he been complaining of? Pains in the head—or what?”
“Oh, he’s seemed thoroughly out of sorts,” she answered after some slight hesitation, which struck me as peculiar. She was greatly agitated regarding his illness, yet she could not describe one single symptom clearly. The only direct statement she made was that her father had certainly not been drinking on the previous night, for he had remained indoors ever since he came home from the works, as usual, at seven o’clock.
As she led me along the Marylebone Road, in the same direction as that I had just traversed—which somewhat astonished me—I glanced surreptitiously at her, just at the moment when we were approaching a street lamp, and saw to my surprise that she was a sad-faced girl whose features were familiar. I recognised her in a moment as the girl who had been my fellow passenger from Brighton on that Sunday night. Her hair, however, was dishevelled, as though she had turned out from her bed in too great alarm to think of tidying it. I was rather surprised, but did not claim acquaintance with her. She led me past Madame Tussaud’s, around Baker Street Station, and then into the maze of those small cross-streets that lie between Upper Baker Street and Lisson Grove until she stopped before a small, rather respectable-looking house, half-way along a short side-street, entering with a latch-key.
In the narrow hall it was quite dark, but she struck a match and lit a cheap paraffin lamp which stood there in readiness, then led me upstairs to a small sitting-room on the first floor, a dingy, stuffy little place of a character which showed me that she and her father lived in lodgings. Having set the lamp on the table, and saying that she would go and acquaint the invalid with my arrival, she went out, closing the door quietly after her. The room was evidently the home of a studious, if poor, man, for in a small deal bookcase I noticed, well-kept and well-arranged, a number of standard works on science and theology, as well as various volumes which told me mutely that their owner was a student, while upon the table lay a couple of critical reviews, the “Saturday” and “Spectator.”