BY MRS. HENRY DUDENEY

FOLLY CORNER

3d Impression 12mo $1.25

A STORY OF SUSSEX TO-DAY

“A work of art which is not only permeated with an extraordinarily sympathetic understanding of the human heart, but displays also from beginning to end the sort of vigor and sanity that can employ the most delicate instruments and the subtlest methods without becoming intellectually nearsighted and without losing even for a moment a sense of true proportion.... Mrs. Dudeney is the equal of Thomas Hardy, as she is his literary congener.”—Professor Harry Thurston Peck in the Bookman.

“It shows the same deep insight into the complications of the human soul [as did the author’s earlier novel].... This story from the opening page is tense with sustained power and is surely destined to be one of the most important contributions to this season’s fiction.”—N. Y. Commercial Advertiser.

MEN OF MARLOWE’S

12mo $1.25

CONTENTS.—Introductory—The One in Red—Arnold’s Laundress—Why?—Jimmy—Game Feathers—An Interlude—Mortgaged—A Political Woman—Beyond the Gray Gate—The Set at Seven—Hopkins.

These stories of residents in one of the English “Inns,” like those of “The Temple,” are so interrelated as almost to constitute a continuous novel. They show more humor than anything the author has done, and a variety of powers hardly foreshadowed even in “Folly Corner.”

HENRY HOLT & CO. NEW YORK

MEN OF MARLOWE’S

BY

MRS. HENRY DUDENEY

AUTHOR OF “FOLLY CORNER,” ETC.

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

1900

COPYRIGHT, 1900,
BY
HENRY HOLT & CO.

THE MERSHON COMPANY PRESS
RAHWAY, N. J.

CONTENTS.

MEN OF MARLOWE’S.

[INTRODUCTORY.]

“AS a woman in search of sensation, you should not have come to me. I can tell you tales, but they are not exactly sensational—hardly a detective in them.”

“The detective is a slur on any story. He is merely the author’s fool.”

“But they are not even love stories of the kind you’re accustomed to.”

“Of course not. Here in an Inn of Court you have no opportunities—no conservatory, no ballroom, no garden parties. Gerald proposed to me on the Underground Railway—and deserved to be refused. But he had the grace to apologize.”

“Well, I’ll tell you all I know—or nearly. Some very droll things that I could tell would not interest you.”

“I don’t mind being startled. You promised not to irritate me by being chivalrous. Chivalry! That subtle grip of the Middle Ages on my sex.”

“But a woman—don’t interrupt; I use the word in a superior sense—can never appreciate the fine humor of a tipsy man. She expects him to be obvious: to fall in the gutter, to be towed home by the policeman, or fined for being disorderly. Tales of buoyancy, funny from the man’s point of view, would bore you.”

“Humph!”

“There are other tales—quite of the feudal period—which Gerald would rather I did not tell. Merry tales, with an undercurrent of sadness: the most perfect form of humor.”

“I hope you don’t tax me with immodest prudery.”

“I tax your husband. Some of the tales may be rather mad.”

“Lunatics are the salt of the earth. Come and dine with us once a week. Tell me a story after dinner—Gerald goes to sleep.”

“I must tell them in the Inn or they’d lose their flavor.”

“Here! Once a week—that is settled. I’ll come. Marlowe’s Inn is charming. These quiet squares, just off Holborn; these sedate houses, with their old staircases and sets of chambers, each with its stout black door, appeal to me. I like the archway, the porter at the gate. I never saw such a green garden. I love rooks. Everything is gay, cool, monastic; a most fascinating place. And such queer people! I met a man with the face of a mystic——”

“Probably Guy Blockley, the comedian.”

“There was another man with a striped waistcoat, closely cropped hair, and a bulldog jaw. He looked like a prizefighter.”

“That’s Paradale, the poet.”

“Good Heavens! Then I met a woman, very fat. She carried a pail of dirty water. No doubt she was a political hostess, famous for her parties, or a popular lady novelist.”

“She was only a charwoman—laundresses we call them in the Inn. She has probably ‘seen better days.’”

“Well—about the tales?”

“Sad tales, remember—partly sad. But you’ll get a laugh out of them.”

“I prefer sad tales; there is more strength in a sob than in a giggle. Anything, so long as they are not commonplace. So long as the people don’t marry in the last chapter. I’m so sick of sane, respectable people who do exactly what they ought to do. Gerald has a regular income—that blight on originality. I was doomed to middle-class ease from my very cradle.”

“I wonder if you really are broad-minded. I wonder! You are not very young——”

“Nowadays a woman only comes of age at thirty.”

“After thirty she is often a prude.”

“But I am not so very much after. Why waste time in parrying? Tell me a story at once. Let this be the first sitting.”

*****

“It was very stupid of me to clutch your arm like that—to scream. A scream is the admission of small intellect, of nerves, of everything that went out with smelling-bottles. But that noise startled me—it was the prologue to your tale—too realistic. What was it? I think it came from that house across the way, from that open window on the third floor, with the blue window box.”

“From No. 7. Yes; of course.”

“How somber you look!”

“I must go and see what is up. Promise me to keep quite still. Don’t even look out of the window.”

“I promise. I’ll look at the album instead. That is a most harmless, a most creditable thing to do. My heart thumps still. Do you think it’s a suicide? I’d like a smelling-bottle, if you had one. But a drop of whisky is the modern substitute. Thank you. And in this little cup. How pretty!”

“It belonged to Kinsman. You will hear about him later. Here is the album. There are portraits of Adeline Pray and Minnie Chaytor—women whose acquaintance you’ll make. I won’t be long.”

*****

“What was it? Here, take the rest of the whisky; you look as if you wanted it.”

“It was Dick Simpson. He’s shot himself. Let me take you out and put you in a hansom. This is our first installment; a melodramatic one.”

“Why did he shoot himself? How shocking! Love? There’s a girl going in at the door now.”

“Why? You will understand when I tell you about that set of chambers in which he lived. Poor Dick! He’s left a note, just saying that all his accounts are in order. He was in the City; some of the men of Marlowe’s are. The odd thing is—there is always a quip in our tragedies—that he had dressed for the occasion. Frock coat, flower in his buttonhole, new tie—he only bought it last night; showed it to me; asked if I admired the pattern. They’ll never let that set again; it is the most extraordinary thing—that’s the fifth man that I know of, counting Drummond and Jimmy.

“He was such a thrifty, cautious little chap, too! No debts, no difficult position. He wasn’t hard up—as most of us are. He lived within his income.”

“He seems to have been a commonplace person.”

“Poor Dick! Here you are. Where shall I tell the man to drive to?”

“To the Circus. Good-by. I’ll come again, about this time this day week. Poor man! How shocking!”

[THE ONE IN RED.]

ORION was mean. He gave a party once. The whisky was watered. He came to me confidentially in the course of the evening and whispered angrily:

“You see that fellow Pearson? My word! how he’s helping himself to whisky. He’s drinking it neat. I’ve watched him. Don’t you call that confounded impudence?”

He was also one of those men whose brains never seem to develop; a weak-minded chap who, when he had his hair cut, allowed the barber to wheedle him into buying a bottle of hair wash—half a crown the small size, but only four-and-sixpence for one containing more than double. Brains! Men like that have only just enough to grub along with—just enough to see that they get their proper change across the counter, and are given the right brand of tobacco.

I knew a barmaid—a nice girl, without the least harm in her. I gave her flowers—a bangle once. For some years she has been the mistress of a flourishing public-house off New Oxford Street; married a barman who had dropped in for a legacy. Doubtless by now she is the mother of an appallingly large family. Yet, whenever I met Orion, he used to snigger, bob his silly face forward, and chuckle:

“Well, old man, seen anything of Rosey lately? Fine girl, Rosey!”

I should have forgotten the girl’s very name, but Orion would not let me. He always said the same thing.

One Christmas Eve I took her to his rooms—it was the only time he ever met her. He was sitting by a tremendous fire cooking a fine turkey. The table was set out most elaborately, with flowers, crackers, serviettes folded into shape.

We sat and chatted; he basting the bird, Rosey dimpling about with appetite. He told us how much he had paid for that turkey in Smithfield market, he showed us the sausages that were to be eaten with it. He went to the cupboard and brought out a very dainty tin of fancy biscuits. Rosey half put out her plump hand and then drew it back awkwardly. He lifted the rice paper so that we might admire the sugar on the top row. He pointed out bottles of ginger wine, boxes of preserved fruit—all sorts of things. They made poor Rosey’s blue eyes glisten. But he never offered her so much as a fig. What is more, I ascertained afterward, as a positive fact, that he never had a soul to dine with him that Christmas. That’s the sort of fellow Orion was.

He had the third floor set at No. 7. We all wondered why he lived in the Inn at all. It held no advantages for him. His oak was never sported, except when he was out.

Perhaps you see nothing so very important, nothing, certainly, that is romantic, about that heavy black door on which my name stands white. But a man’s oak guards faithfully the secrets of his life. Generations of secrets, of sins, of sorrows are held by those stout doors—black and inscrutable, two by two on every landing. The oak shuts out duns; shuts in a pretty woman. The stories those black doors could tell! I wonder they never crack—with laughter or great, splitting sobs.

The oak knows everything. It is like a fashionable woman’s toilet. I love to hear them clang to somberly at night; when a man goes out, when he creeps in late. The oak is the bachelor’s discreet parlor-maid. It says “not at home.” When we sport it—which is simply shutting it—we defy the world.

Yet Orion only used this potential thing, this sacred and confidential black door, to protect his electro plate. He had no debts, no compromising visitors, no delicate difficulties. What a man! What a mean, drab life!

We all chaffed him about his electro plate; the box in which he kept macaroons, the fish slice, the sugar tongs—all the useless things. He really ought to have lived in a neat villa. No doubt he would have done if his aunt had not happened to live in Great Ormond Street, close by.

He took me to dine with her once. It was a wet Sunday. The aunt, Mrs. Grigg, was a terrible woman of seventy or so. She was dressed in the height of fashion—as it had been in the fifties. No doubt you have seen mold-spotted fashion plates of the period. She had a muslin chemisette, muslin under-sleeves, a wide skirt of some blinding, bright red stuff. Great rings stretched the lobes of her ears. On her neck she wore string after string of jet and on her bony wrist a hair bracelet. Her brooch was set with braids of sandy hair. I suppose it was Grigg’s.

How that ancient woman leered and bridled at me all through dinner! We had cold mutton and mint sauce, gooseberry tart and tapioca—cold water to drink. That leering, mincing meal! Those vapid gulps of plain water! There is nothing in this world more ghastly than the labored archness of an old coquette. For days afterward I never looked at a woman, except at my laundress—and they are hardly women.

Orion apologized for the water as we walked home.

“The old girl’s stingy,” he said with satisfaction. “But it suits me, my boy. When she kicks the bucket, I’m in for a good thing. And it can’t be long, can it? What did you make of her? I don’t like the way she wags her head about—paralysis. She’ll go off like a champagne cork some day.”

“I suppose she will,” I said wearily.

“Of course she will. She can’t last long. She’s over seventy, and she was a beauty once; you wouldn’t think it.”

I groaned, remembering those old eyes with red, lashless lids; that mouth with the infantile, pearly false teeth.

We crossed Lamb’s Conduit Street. In Chapel Street, Wood, who was a decentish fellow and always in low water, had two back rooms on the second floor at No. 8.

“I’m going in here to get a whisky,” I said, none too graciously, to Orion.

He put out his hand. His face, with the weak mouth and watery eyes, looked quite haggard in the moonlight which speared down into the narrow street. He bore a horrible family likeness to Mrs. Grigg.

Did I mention that he was a thin fellow? He had a straggling, straw-colored mustache and his skin matched it. Everything about him was ill-hung and undecided. With his yellow face, yellow hair, fawn-colored overcoat and soft hat, he looked as if he had been just flipped into a weak solution of saffron and drawn out again. Why will fair men persist in wearing fawn?

“When she dies,” he went on, “that house in Great Ormond Street will be mine; that and a snug bit—the old girl banks at Barclay’s. She hasn’t got a relation in the world but me. Some sort of second cousin of Grigg’s used to live with her, but they rowed; she’d row with an archangel. I don’t know where Clara Citron—that was the cousin’s name—is now.”

“Well, good-night, old fellow,” I said.

“Wait a bit. You see property’s going up at such a devil of a rate in Bloomsbury. The house alone will bring in a tidy income, let out in flats. I shall do it up and charge good rents and keep it select. Everything on the square, you know.”

He gave his suggestive grin and dropped my hand. I wiped it mechanically as I pulled Wood’s bell, and drummed on his knocker. The landlady kept me waiting; it was a trick she had. When at last she opened the door she asked me acrimoniously:

“Aint the bell enough, but you must go playin’ on the knocker and bringing a person’s ’art into their mouths?”

A week later Orion came to my rooms. It was about nine in the evening—Saturday evening. I was just off to the “Oxford,” and told him so. But he caught me by the sleeve and said feverishly:

“Haven’t you heard?”

“What?”

“My aunt—Mrs. Grigg, you know. She—she’s murdered.”

He sat down in the saddlebag chair by the fire. Yes, the same saddlebag. That shabby old thing you are sitting in, with the fallen springs and the shiny mark of many fingers on the arms. Don’t get up. I brought out the bottle and gave him a nip of whisky. He was shaking all over like a little clay-tinted marionette.

“Murdered!” I said, the vivid image of the old woman coming back. “Murdered!”

“Yes; just now.” He made a gesture for more whisky.

The glass he held was dancing a jig in his hand. I noticed—it seemed an odd thing to notice at such a time—how clean his hands were. One does notice unimportant things.

“The old woman—her servant—has just come round to tell me,” he continued. “Haven’t you heard?”

“Heard! How could I?”

“I forgot. Of course you couldn’t. It’s enough to confuse a fellow, isn’t it? Murdered!”

“Yes. But how?”

“I’m going to tell you. Is there any more whisky? Thanks. It is Saturday night and the servant had gone out to shop. She always shops late on Saturday—when she doesn’t do it on Sunday morning. On Sunday morning in the Lane you can get a very decent fowl cheap. My aunt was left alone in Great Ormond Street. Am I making myself quite clear? She must have been cooking some mess over the dining-room fire; a pot had boiled over on the hob. She was stabbed—just above the heart. Isn’t it awful? Thanks, old man. It—it pulls me together. Come up to my place. The old woman’s waiting. I don’t know what to do first. She came straight to me. She—the other one, my aunt—is lying on the dining-room hearthrug. Well—thanks.”

I followed him upstairs. Late as it was, one of the Inn laundresses—those travesties of women, all flesh, sacking apron, and dusty hair—was scrubbing the third floor flight. Saturday is the great day for stair scrubbing. She moved her pail for us to pass and looked at Orion’s face curiously. As we went up we were followed by the rasping swish of her brush.

Mrs. Grigg’s servant was waiting in the sitting room. She had seated herself. Orion did not seem to like this.

It was such a swell room—all varnish, gewgaws, and rose-colored lights. He had stuck squares of leather paper on the panels of the walls and put white porcelain finger plates painted with roses on the doors. He burned gas in the grate instead of coal—it was cleaner. It looked like an old maid’s room. I believe that he helped his laundress to clean it. She was a rather clean woman herself, who always wore a stiff bow of white muslin tied under her chin.

There was a shiny sideboard, on top of which was set out the electro plate. The looking-glass above the sideboard was cracked. Pearson, his nerves strung by the respectability and smugness of that room, had flung his glass at it on the night of the party—as a graceful return for watered whisky. Emily Higgins, a girl that Orion knew—she served in a fancy shop in Hampstead Road—had skillfully painted a cobweb and a trail of flowers across the crack. Orion never spoke to Pearson afterward.

“A fellow who will come into one’s rooms and do a thing like that is a dirty cad,” he would say in his thin, piping voice.

He was always saying it. He never said more than three things at the same period. He had attacks of sentences and worked them off. He said it every time you went to his set. He said it to all new acquaintances. He took them in to look at the sideboard, and while they looked he enlarged on the rank villainy of Pearson. I actually waited for him to say it on that Saturday night. But he didn’t. He only lifted the old woman’s leg of mutton from the center table where she had set it. It was foreign meat and the blood had run out freely, pulping the newspaper and making a patch on the tablecloth. He carried it, with an air of reproof, to the cupboard and set it carefully on a dish.

The woman looked at him and then she looked at me. There was defiance and self-vindication and a lurking terror on her face. It was a long, horselike face, I remember. People of her class always look like that when anything suspicious occurs. She seemed to be saying in a terrified, insolent way:

“Don’t you think I did it, because I didn’t.”

It is pathetic; this perpetual assertion of innocence—before they are accused—of such people.

“It give me such a orful turn!” she burst out at last, addressing herself to me, as Orion remained half in the cupboard, carefully putting a wire cover over the joint. “I’ve never been mixed up in no sich thing before. I’ve never been to prison. Not me! Nor any of my relations. It’s made my ’eart that bad—I suffers with the palpitations.”

Orion remained in the cupboard, deaf to the hint.

“I come straight off to Mr. Rine,” she went on. “I didn’t even think to take the joint from under my arm. I’d only bin gone ’arf an hour down Tibbalds Row marketin’ with another lady—’er as is ’ousekeeper in Chapel Street, where Mr. Wood lives. She could tell you the same. I’ll take my Bible oath I wasn’t more’n ’arf an hour. The larst place I was in was the fish shop at the corner of Devonshire Street.”

“We’d better go to Great Ormond Street,” I said to Orion.

The servant stood up, pulling her gray and black shawl closer round her throat. She gave a critical glance round the room before she left, and paid it her feminine tribute.

“You’ll excuse me,” she said, “but what a pretty room this is. Quite a doll’s ’ouse, to be sure. I never see but one like it, and that was Mrs. Abraham’s in North Street—’er whose ’usband was in the ready-made line.”

It wouldn’t interest you to hear the rest, but I have all the newspapers put aside if you would like to read the reports some day. The murder of Mrs. Grigg was one of London’s many mysteries. There was no clew. The servant was able to clear herself conclusively of all suspicion. Scotland Yard was baffled. Ambitious journalists, with a taste for intrigue and interviewing, started wild theories, and there ended. Great Ormond Street was blocked with the crowd that gaped stolidly all day at the shabby house with the drawn blinds opposite the hospital.

Orion didn’t go to the City. He was junior partner—so he said—in a shipping-house near London Bridge. He stayed at home in the jaunty room with the pink-tinted gas globes and drank all day. Orion was in a bad way. You might guess that when he drank whisky at three and something a bottle as if it had been water.

We’ll skip the inquest and so on, and pass to the funeral.

Orion begged me to go, and I went. One couldn’t refuse a poor, invertebrate, pleading fool like that. His aunt’s death had absolutely doubled him up.

There was the uncomfortable atmosphere of death about the place when we got there. I’ll show you the particular house next time we are in Great Ormond Street. There is a narrow passage paneled to the ceiling with wood that is painted stone color. There is a sitting room to your left as you go in, and a flight of stairs ready to your feet at the end of the passage.

We went into the sitting room. There was a smeary decanter half full of thick port on the table. There were wine glasses and an uncut cake. Orion sat down. By and by we heard deprecating, creaking shoes coming downstairs, heard unctuous words of sympathy in the passage. Then we heard a woman’s shrill voice—a sharp, short voice, like the keen snap of ice. Orion started.

“That’s Clara Citron,” he said in a frightened way.

She came in, a little middle-aged, shrewish-looking woman. She gave Orion her hand—it was thin and red and knuckly.

“I saw it in the papers,” she said, without any circumlocution. “I came up from Southsea at once.”

“I didn’t know your address,” he stammered feebly.

Mrs. Citron looked at him in a meaning way. She solemnly poured out three glasses of muddy port and cut three slices of cake.

“We must leave enough for the undertaker and his men,” she said, measuring the bottle with her little alert eye. “Yes, I came at once. It was my duty. She was my relation, too, by marriage. And all the money was my cousin Grigg’s.”

The hearse and the one coach drew in at the curb. They threw an added shadow across the room where those two sat solemnly munching and sipping—the small, prim room with the putty-colored walls and the bits of fancywork, a sampler, mats, a beaded footstool—worked, no doubt, by Mrs. Grigg herself half a century before.

Clara Citron bustled up.

“The undertaker is such a very sympathetic man,” she said, wiping the loose crumbs of cake from her pale lips. “His wife’s great-uncle, or his sister-in-law’s great-uncle—I really forget which—was murdered in a similar way. He said he quite understood my feelings.”

“The undertaker has always got somebody who died in a similar way,” I said, with involuntary flippancy. “It is one of the business trappings; he brings it with the pall.”

Clara Citron gave me a stony glance, and Orion stared at me entreatingly. He seemed afraid of offending her; he was afraid of everything and everyone.

“I don’t know how we are going to get her downstairs,” the business-like little woman said. “It is such an awkward turn on the landing. We could lower her out of the window, but there is such a crowd.”

She peeped through the brown wire blind before she hurried away. Orion poured himself out a second glass of that deplorable port directly the door was shut on her and he dared. Every time there was a scrooping sound overhead he shook from head to foot. It seemed a long time before we heard the cautious, thumping tread of men bearing a heavy load. At the ominous resting of those feet we both knew, although we said nothing, although we did not even look at each other, that they were maneuvering the turn at the landing. We both drew a breath of relief when the steady stumping went on again, came nearer, passed the door, went down the steps. A faint murmur floated up from the crowd. Orion had his third glass of port.

Clara Citron came in, a little flushed and triumphant. She poured out more wine in clean glasses, cut more cake, and beckoned the men in. When they were ready she coaxed on new black kid gloves.

“Come on,” she said to us. “We are late as it is. Such a squeeze with that coffin at the head of the stairs! She was a fine woman. I want, if I can, to catch a late train back to Southsea. There are my lodgers to look after. I’ve only left the girl in charge.”

“Do you keep a lodging house?” Orion asked mechanically, snatching up his hat with the deep black band.

“Yes,” she said shortly; “I must do something.”

We all three wedged into the passage. Orion was last. Clara Citron marched out, a compact, trim figure in cheap black, between the thin line of sickly London faces. She wore a solemn, festival sort of air. I followed, feeling very awkward and uncomfortable in the frock-coat I had borrowed from Wood: he got it out of pawn for the occasion. I never owned a frock coat in my life, and hope I never shall. It is one of those respectable, stultifying possessions that I refrain from on principle.

I looked back for Orion. He was wavering on the step, as if he felt afraid to walk between those lines of white faces which stretched from the door to the coach. Then I saw him give a hasty look into the house, at the passage, the stairs, muddy with so many feet. Then he seemed to come headlong to the coach. I thought he had slipped on something. He jumped in and banged the door furiously. The crowd gave a soft, sympathetic “boo” at the sight of his ghastly face. Clara Citron, who held a new handkerchief with a very wide border to her dry eyes, looked over the hem.

That terrible long drive to Finchley! That shimmering line of faces all the way! I went to Jimmy’s funeral, I went to Chaytor’s, and I went to Mrs. Grigg’s—under protest. I will never go to another, unless it is my own—that will be unavoidable.

The Great Ormond Street murder made a tremendous sensation. I think Clara Citron thoroughly enjoyed herself. She seemed to regard the crowd in the light of a personal ovation.

Did I tell you that it was May?—a wet, warm May morning. At Finchley, away from the houses, the rain seemed to fall more softly. In the cemetery all sorts of pink and white and purple bushes were in bloom. They reminded me of my childhood; I was born in the country. The great, intensely green stretches of grass were hideously humped with graves. The soft, rushing rain seemed to make them greener every moment.

I forgot to mention that Clara Citron coolly took the whole of the seat facing the horses. It was the best position for seeing the people, and it allowed the people to have a good view of her. She spread her skirt out carefully and kept the handkerchief to her eyes, peering furtively all the time. Orion and I sat as far back as we could on the cushions—those dusty, pluffy cushions which reeked of a thousand stale griefs. We tried to get beyond the range of those gimlet-like eyes which pointed in their hundreds, from the pavements. Once Orion said, in a queer, strained voice:

“For God’s sake let me get out and walk.”

A moment later, before Clara Citron could make any scandalized protest, he bent forward, pounced forward, in a quick, cunning way, as you would on an animal you wished to catch, and brought his hand down heavily on the cushions of the opposite seat. A cloud of dust rose up and choked our companion. When she had done spluttering, she asked him angrily why on earth he did it. He didn’t answer. He only sat and stared, with dazed eyes, at the seat where she sat. Once he moaned and shivered. He was not looking at Clara Citron. He was looking past her, through her. He was like an imbecile. But what could one expect of a man who had drunk whisky as if it had been water for a week, and had wound up with funeral port from the grocer’s?

The service was a trial to everyone but Clara Citron. She reveled in the crowd. I was never in such a rage in my life. Every slatternly woman was pointing and whispering. Orion’s face was clammy and yellow, like the clay into which they lowered Mrs. Grigg. I watched them drop earth onto her coffin; watched them put away for ever that leer of hers, those old coquetries.

When everything was over we went quickly across the sodden, exquisitely green turf to the gravel. The crowd seemed to melt away; softly, with a gentle rustle, like the gurgling May rain. We were almost alone.

A warm, wet day in spring is perfect. The rain came finer and thicker every moment. It made a mysterious veil of gauze which dropped over the graveyard.

Halfway down the path Orion clutched my arm. It was the despairing mad clutch of a doomed man. He clutched my arm and looked hurriedly behind him.

We had reached the coach. The undertaker’s men climbed to their box with an air of business. Some sat on the roof of the hearse, their legs dangling jovially.

“We shall get back faster than we came,” Clara Citron said, getting in and looking round, half in disappointment, because there was no longer such a crowd. “I’m dying for a cup of tea.”

Orion leaped in and rattled to the door. I was beginning to be really anxious about him. We started off at a brisk trot, but the iron gates of the cemetery were hardly out of sight before he stumbled up with a fearful cry. The cemetery, I say, was hardly out of sight; we might still have seen the grave which held Mrs. Grigg and the mystery of her death. He gave that cry and put out his trembling hands to the door.

He saw what we could not see. He saw the door of the coach open easily, and saw the fourth mourner come in. She brushed by him silently—the one in red—to the vacant seat.

“I can’t stay. I tell you I won’t stay,” he shrieked, and the sharp rattle of wheels and hoofs dulled the agony in his voice. “Don’t you see her on the seat?”—he was speaking to Clara Citron. “She has hardly left you room to sit. Those confounded crinolines take up so much room.”

The lodging-house keeper gripped him firmly by the wrists, and forced him back to his seat. Her hands were strong with years of housework.

“I’m used to this sort of thing,” she said aside to me; “my first-floor lodger has had D. T. twice. My lady in the parlors takes her drop. Her husband pays me well to look after her—but they get it at the grocer’s as soap or candles, at the confectioner’s and call it tea, at the draper’s when they go shopping, and have it put on the bill as extras.”

Orion rambled on.

“She is sitting next you. She followed us out of the house. I saw her come down the stairs. She rode with us all the way. She stood by her own grave—followed her own funeral. She looked across and grinned at me, the old witch, when they threw earth on the coffin. She has followed us back. She jostled me just now on the cemetery path, d——n her! She’d have had me down if I hadn’t caught hold of Groome. She wanted to seal me up in that dirty yellow grave, as we tried to seal her. But I could bear it. I wasn’t going to let her frighten me. I bore everything until she came away from her own grave—then I knew it was all up with me. She is filling the coach. Can’t you see her red dress puffing out? I never saw a woman swell so. The red dress, Groome; the dress she wore at dinner on Sunday week! The one she always wore in the evening, the one she died in. Oh! can’t you two see her? Can’t you turn her out? The coach is all growing red.”

“Do you mean Mrs. Grigg?” Clara Citron asked crisply. “I can’t see anything.” She bounced to the other side as if to convince him. “But then,” she added significantly, “I didn’t murder her.”

“You see, I did,” Orion returned with a foolish smile and the tremendous simple relief of a child who gets something off his mind.

He did not seem to realize what the admission involved. He was evidently indifferent to everything but the one in red; the dead old woman in the blood-colored gown, who was slowly, slowly, but very surely, filling up the coach.

“I got so tired of waiting,” he continued in a confidential way, and we both bent close to catch every word, closing him in, as it seemed.

“She wouldn’t part with a penny and she wouldn’t die,” he went on piteously. “What are you to do with a woman like that? I was on my beam ends. It is all the accursed City. I was afraid of getting out of a berth. When you get out of a berth you’re done. I’ve been with the same firm fifteen years, and yet they were going to turn me off like a dog—the bookkeeper told me so.”

He was laying himself quite bare. He dropped the flimsy lie of his daily life. He did not hold to the junior-partner fiction any longer.

“It was very easy,” he added, with a certain workman-like pride in the affair. “I knew when the servant went out marketing; knew how long she’d be, and where she hid the street-door key—on a ledge near the coal cellar by the area steps. It was the easiest matter in the world. The old woman—keep her back, can’t you? She doesn’t want to hear—she knows. She was stooping over the fire—weren’t you? She had been cutting up meat; the stew was on the hob and the carving knife was on the table. I gave her one certain blow. She gave me one look—I might have known what that look meant.

“But I did it beautifully. I went back to my rooms and washed my hands and changed my cuffs, so as to be sure,” he sniggered. “I had only just finished when the servant came round. It was a close shave. And then I went and told Groome. No one need ever have known. But you can’t fight with a woman who comes out of her grave!

“She takes up so much room that I can’t breathe. Let her out, shove her into the road. She’ll never be able to catch us up. Let the wheels go over her.”

Clara Citron, who had held his wrists firmly all the time, dropped them and cautiously opened the door of the coach a very little way. I twitched her skirt.

“What are you doing?”

“I’m going to tell them to drive to the Old Bailey—that’s Newgate, isn’t it?” she returned viciously. Evidently she owed Orion some deep grudge.

“Pooh! We don’t do it that way. Sit down. Take up all the seat—try to convince him, to keep him quiet. I’ll look after him to-night.”

She sat down looking slightly sulky.

“I trust you to look after my interests,” she said plaintively, after a pause. “I’m a hard-working woman and all the money was on my side of the family. Here’s my card.” She pulled out a thickly-lettered squab of cardboard. “‘Citron, The Parade, Southsea.’ If you ever want a blow of sea air, I can always let you have bed and breakfast on reasonable terms.”

The coach swung merrily on. I rather fancy that the men on the box were singing. Orion kept on saying piteously that Mrs. Grigg, in the red dress, was taking up all the room—more and more room—that she was slowly strangling him. In this fashion we rattled back to Bloomsbury, where it was getting dusk and where rain fell more heavily than it had done in the morning.

I watched him all that night. In the morning the sun came fiercely in. The hot, golden air seemed all Sunday frocks, church bells, and the weighty caw of rooks.

There was a pane of glass above Orion’s bedroom door. He said, quite quietly,—it was the first time he had spoken:

“She keeps on looking through that glass. There’s a confounded red bonnet on her head now—never knew such a woman for red. Can’t you do something? Can’t you rig up a curtain, old chap?”

There was a crafty look on his silly face. I remembered that afterward. I turned aside to find something, and the next thing I knew was a “ploomp” on the stones underneath and a loud, ringing shriek.

Orion had flung himself out. It was really the best finish he could have made. Adeline saw him do it and shrieked. She was standing at Murphy’s window; Orion, in his fluttering shirt, dropped past her startled eyes. I must tell you Adeline’s story some day.

The money? That was the one funny touch in the whole affair. Mrs. Grigg actually left the house and every penny she had in the world to the man who brought her round two hundredweight of coal once a week, from the greengrocer’s shop in Red Lion Street. He was a handsome sort of chap—that seemed the only reason. He sold the house. I heard the other day that he was drinking himself to death.

Clara Citron? She went back to the lodging-house at Southsea; is there now, I suppose. But she was one of those women without attributes; not the sort of person you would have the least interest in investigating.

Hard on Orion, wasn’t it? Quite superfluous, you see. I never liked him. Yet, looking back, I’m sorry for the mean little humbug. That cursed City grinds men down to any pettiness. I’d rather starve in Piccadilly than eat turtle in an Alderman’s robe at Guildhall.

[ARNOLD’S LAUNDRESS.]

THE laundress, as an institution, is dying out. Men are getting particular about their rooms; one across the way, that set where the cork window-boxes are, bought a feather broom last week. There is a very reprehensible feeling of respectability and decorum about. Most of the fellows have smart young women to clean their rooms. I see them tripping gingerly across the square in the mornings, with loose cotton blouses, curly hair, and artificial flowers in their big hats.

But the good old laundress, all fat and dirt and impudence, contents me. She has a draggled skirt with a deep hem of dried mud, a flat pancake of a bonnet, all melancholy jet and brown ribbon that once was black. She wobbles when she moves; she is a half-set jelly in a greasy bag. I like her; to me she recalls my youth, the old wild days when I and the others were young. With a few exceptions she is only employed to clean offices now.

She is a professional woman. For many years the care of certain sets descended quite naturally from mother to daughter. They were pocket boroughs—hereditary pickings. The tenant was a mere incident, to be borne with up to a certain point.

I remember that Arnold was always squabbling with his laundress. He was an assertive little chap, and understood nothing in the world but dogs. He had no sense of humor; resented Mrs. Neaves and asked me to mediate. I suggested an apology.

Mrs. Neaves was blue-eyed. She had a singularly flat, red nose.

“Me apologize to the likes of ’im!” she cried out in a pained voice. “Me! As ’ave cleaned that set for years. Why, I treats ’im worse than the dirt under my feet. Do you know what he did? ’E threatened to punch my nose.”

“Come, come! Did he do it?”

“Did ’e do it! It ’ud a bin Gawd ’elp ’im if ’e ’ad. I’d a summonsed ’im,” she cried as she flounced off.

After this Arnold went through many vicissitudes; a new laundress every week. He was like a woman; took these things to heart. I shall never forget how pleased he was when he came to tell me that he’d got a treasure at last.

She was very smart; a rather supercilious young married woman, with long earrings and a pert, white face. She came to the Inn wearing black kid gloves and a silver locket and chain; she carried a little reticule with her apron rolled up tightly inside. Things went very well for a week. She kept the place spotless. But when Arnold paid her on Saturday afternoon, she asked him civilly to “suit himself.”

“The work’s far too heavy,” she said mincingly, “and the rooms is invested with beadles to an awful extent. It’s not as if I was obliged to work, you see, sir. I only do it to occupy my time—not having any children—and to help pay back the money my husband’s mother lent him. There’s no hurry for that. She’s in a good position. Got her own laundry, paid seven hundred down for it. My husband was in the army, and she bought him out before we were married. I couldn’t think of marrying a soldier—all the refuge goes into the army. If only you could get a girl to come in and do the rough work for a hour every morning, my husband wouldn’t object to me obliging you.”

“What’s a man to do?” Arnold asked dejectedly of me in the evening. “I’m half inclined to chuck the Inn and go back to diggings; the Common was good for the dog to run on. But then there’s the landlady—she always objects to dogs. And some of them have principles—I call all principle prejudice—about the latch key.”

“You’d better take back Mrs. Neaves. Give her a shilling a week more; that’s all she was trying for. You’d save in the end. How many have you had altogether?”

He began to count on his fingers.

“There was Stubbs. She was right enough, but it makes me sick to look at a scarecrow. And old mother Morey who always turned up with bruises on Monday morning. And Mrs.—What’s-her-name—the woman who brought a perambulator full of babies. By the way, have you heard about Wood? He’s frightfully down on his luck. The last thing he did was to steal the landlady’s perambulator. When he got to the pawnbroker’s the blessed thing wouldn’t go through the door, so he had to wheel it back. And the Cox woman—oh! I forget their confounded names. They are all alike. Stay as long as it suits them. Rob you right and left. They take their money some Saturday and you never see them again. If they can swindle you out of sixpence or a shilling by pretending to have no change, but promising to bring it on Monday, they will. The last one—before this woman—had me that way. I was fool enough to give her half a sovereign. That was four bob to the bad, for her money was only six. Said she lived in Hand Court, over the old clothes shop. I’ve been down there and no one has ever heard of her. I went with Wood. He was going to sell some old trousers, but they only offered eighteenpence for two pairs, so he’s pawned them and sold the ticket—it’s a much better plan.

“There was the woman Sol flew at. He is the gentlest dog in the whole world. But you mustn’t shake your fist at a deerhound; it puts their blood up sooner than anything. I warned her, but she would do it. The husband came round half drunk and bullied. I gave him five shillings to get rid of him. They all object to the dog. It was because of the dog that I left my lodgings in Wilkinson Street, Tooting. And I’d rather throw stones at my grandmother than part with Sol. He saved my life. Did I ever tell you? It was when I was on a walking tour. I was alone on Dartmoor, except for Sol——”

“You’ve told me lots of times. Now, take my advice and have Mrs. Neaves back. She wasn’t a bad sort.”

“She was very kind to Sol; used to bring him an apron full of bones,” he said reflectively.

When he said that, I knew the thing was settled and that Mrs. Neaves would be reinstated. He was devoted to Sol, who was a beautiful, pure-bred deerhound, with the long, melancholy face and almost human eyes which these dogs have.

Poor Arnold! I don’t know what has become of him. But I can make a good guess. He’s living somewhere in the suburbs, very near the Common—for Sol’s sake. He was a dapper little fellow. One of those men with a rather big head, neat calves, and a chain with a big seal. He wore loud check suits—four checks to the suit—when he went away on a holiday, and when he was at home he had an incorrigible habit of wasting his time at bars and chaffing the barmaid. That is nothing; every man is bachelor to the barmaid. But it led Arnold into complications.

Clarissa was an extraordinarily pretty girl. She had blue eyes set very far apart, and a striking profile. With her loose knot of hair, her delicate nose, and her short upper lip, she looked like a cameo—one of those pure, classic faces which middle-aged ladies used to wear in a brooch. Of course she was powdered, and she laced tightly and puffed her lovely hair out into one of those exaggerated erections which is the professional headgear of the barmaid. You never see such an arrangement anywhere else; perhaps the management provides it. But she was very lovely and demure. Also, she had the sense to be silent: an unusually pretty woman should never talk.

Arnold, who dropped into the “Worcester Arms” nightly, began to regard her as a woman—not merely a barmaid. Men sometimes talk dubiously to the barmaid, and she—figuratively speaking—ducks her head and lets the stream of insinuation flow over her. She is never affronted; takes it as a matter of course; customers pay for this privilege with their drinks.

Clarissa was lonely. She lived in a barracks somewhere off Greek Street, clubbing together with a lot of other young women. She never spoke of her relations. Arnold assumed that she was like so many other girls, alone in London—to sink or swim, according to her luck. He took her out and gave her harmless little treats whenever she could get away from the bar. But he never asked her to his rooms. He had a sort of reverence for her. He didn’t wish to compromise her, and he took to glaring fiercely at any harmless simpleton who strolled into the “Worcester Arms” and chaffed Clarissa in the usual way.

He introduced her to Sol, telling her how the dog had saved his life on Dartmoor and adding that nothing on this earth would induce him to part with the animal.

“He’s a pure-bred blue deerhound,” he wound up enthusiastically. “I’ve got his pedigree for seven generations.”

Clarissa said “really” in her demure way, and she stroked the thing’s wiry coat and said what beautiful eyes he had, and that she supposed he must be worth a lot of money.

“Twenty pounds—I’ve been offered that,” Arnold told her concisely. “It was a fellow who shows these dogs. He’s got a whole kennel of them at his place in the country. I went down there; you never saw a more beautiful sight.”

“Twenty pounds!” said Clarissa, drawing in her breath softly.

Things went on for a month or two. Then Arnold became more infatuated than ever. He asked Clarissa to marry him. Of course she jumped at it. The great ambition of these girls is to marry a gentleman. And Arnold would pass—with a barmaid. He was fairly well off, too, making, so he said, about six hundred a year on the Stock Exchange; it is always these stupid men who make money. It was a catch for Clarissa.

He took her away from the “Worcester Arms” and boarded her out with a decayed widowed lady at Clapham. He made an arrangement for Sol to board there too, and Clarissa promised to take the dog for long rambles on the Common while his master was in the City.

After this the Inn did not see very much of Arnold. He used to go straight from the City to the suburbs—rushing to catch a particular train and joining the general exodus at Clapham Junction. Thousands of fellows do that; it would kill me. But he really liked it. He was always hankering after the suburbs; said the air was pure; told you vaingloriously that no one could ever build on the Common—it was sacred to the people. You know the way these people talk; the people who live in smart houses all red and white—the ideas of the suburban builder never go beyond a colored peppermint stick—fellows who work and sweat in back gardens the size of a tablecloth and go to the local theater.

Arnold used to have supper with Clarissa and the widowed lady—his ideas with regard to the girl were ludicrously proper ones. After supper he and she would be alone more or less for an hour or two, with Sol spread at their feet. Arnold would talk dogs, and Clarissa would look lovely and throw in a simper now and then. At ten he left: the widow lady liked to be in bed by half-past.

It was about this time that he took to criticising Mrs. Neaves. He found himself constantly watching her, speculating on her. Once, when he went into the kitchen on a Saturday afternoon to wash out an ink pot, he noticed how white her fat neck was. She was cleaning the lid of a tin saucepan with a bit of emery paper. Her head was bent and her fist circled energetically. Her face was streaming with perspiration and her flat toper’s nose glowed like a poppy. Her bodice was open at the throat, and he saw that her neck, beneath the line of exposure, was delicately fine. It reminded him of Clarissa’s milky skin. He stood swilling out the ink pot, taking more pains than was necessary and staring at fat, frowsy Mrs. Neaves and wondering how she would look with a finely-chiseled nose in place of the comical, red, flat one, which seemed to have been roughly trodden into her face by a careless foot. She looked up at him rather curiously, rather resentfully—evidently suspecting that he was spying on her. He noticed that her blue eyes were pensive, not twinkling. It was absurd to think of Clarissa in connection with that dirty, gin-drinking woman—her face all coarse rolls of flesh, her dress gaping, and her greasy bonnet-strings streaming back from her triple chin. Yet, when he went to Clapham that night, he amused himself by trying to fit Clarissa with a flat, blossom-like nose. And he was prepared to swear that her blue eyes were twin eyes to those pensive ones which were set in the laundress’ head.

He couldn’t for the life of him help watching Mrs. Neaves—in every attitude. He watched her as she rubbed the brush across his boots, swinging her big arm easily from the shoulder; as she knelt on the rug to coax the fire, her great, spread body bunched out and her pouch-like cheeks inflated. And in the evening when he sat in the widow’s house he used to compare her with that porcelain slip of a girl Clarissa. At fifty—Mrs. Neaves couldn’t be more—would Clarissa have such haunches, such pendulous cheeks!

He idealized the laundress—quite unconsciously; he was the most matter-of-fact little chap in the world. Yet, in spite of himself, he became imaginative, degenerate. He took to engaging Mrs. Neaves in long conversations—about the lady at the cats’-meat shop in Red Lion Passage, who had just given birth to twins, and whose husband was doing three months for stamping on her (“a nice beast,” as Mrs. Neaves said righteously); about the other lady who got mad drunk regularly every Saturday night and threw all the household china out of the window—about anything, or anyone, for the mere sake of seeing her talk, of watching the changes on her coarse face, and the quick movement of her mouth, which could only boast three front teeth.

Every wrinkle, every deeply-scored line on that woman’s face, every watery light in her blue eyes, meant to Arnold the track of some youthful charm. Was Mrs. Neaves like Clarissa at eighteen? Would Clarissa be like Mrs. Neaves at fifty? I really think that he would have ended by marrying Mrs. Neaves, out of pure, involuntary fascination, if Clarissa had not been a woman and inquisitive.

She kept bothering him to take her to see his rooms. He was to leave them very soon, had sublet them to another man. He had taken a house at Clapham, a stone’s throw from the Common, and with a back garden a little bigger than usual—but only for Sol’s sake, Clarissa said. It was the first time she had shown a tinge of rebellion.

“A great dog like that will make an awful mess in a nice house with his dirty feet. Can’t you keep him chained up?”

“Chain a deerhound!” cried Arnold, in holy horror. Sol was a religion to him. “You’d spoil his legs.”

He arranged to bring Clarissa up to the Inn some Saturday afternoon. She was to have tea with him in his rooms, and go out to dine somewhere afterward. He gave Mrs. Neaves an extra shilling to stay late and get the tea. At least, he said it was to get tea; he tried to persuade himself that it was to get tea; but I’m certain that his real reason for keeping her was his odd desire to see those two together, to compare notes. He said to her with deprecating apology—she was the sort of voluble, violent woman to compel respect from a man of his character:

“I’ve a young lady coming here this afternoon to tea; the young lady—hum, hum—that I am going to marry. Can you stay a couple of hours later? I’ll make it worth your while.”

Mrs. Neaves said condescendingly that she’d come back in time to get the tray ready, after she’d “done for the gent at 6.” As for Arnold’s remark about marrying the young lady visitor, no doubt she put her own valuation on it—being seasoned to remarks of that sort from giddy tenants. The laundress is a true skeptic. She does not believe in married couples in the Inn—this land of ephemeral affections—doesn’t approve of them. I knew a sensitive fellow who had his marriage certificate framed and hung up in the sitting room.

At four o’clock Arnold and Clarissa came in. Mrs. Neaves had just arrived. She was in a state of much disorder, as a protest against Clarissa. There was a warm, sour smell of dishwater; a dustpan half full of flue tripped Arnold up on the threshold.

“This is my bedroom,” he said to Clarissa. “And that is my sitting room. And here’s a little den for Sol—he’s allowed to have bones there—and there’s the kitchen.”

“Oh! that’s the kitchen.”

Clarissa looked in and Mrs. Neaves looked up.

“I’ll go and take my hat off,” the girl said suddenly, slipping in at the open bedroom door—it was exactly opposite the kitchen.

Arnold went into the sitting room at the end of the passage. There was a cupboard. He used it as a hanging closet. At the back of this cupboard there was a tiny window which looked into the kitchen. The sets are full of oddities, surprises like that; windows, ledges, steps, in the most unlikely places.

Some sets have a dunscope. It is a little grating, opening out of a cupboard in the passage. You steal into the cupboard, shut the door, and peep onto the staircase. The same idea is carried out in places where polite people live. In that case it is a looking-glass which reflects into the dining room the figure of the caller on the door-step. When people have a good balance at the bank, and no particular skeleton, the idea is snobbish; when a man in the Inn hasn’t a penny it is pathetic. He looks out, sees his washerwoman, the tax collector, the man who lent him a fiver—and keeps the oak rigorously sported.

The dunscope was often used by industrious students, who looked out to see if the visitor would be helpful to their studies or the reverse.

No doubt the man who put in that little window at the back of Arnold’s cupboard chuckled as he did it—recognizing that it also had dramatic possibilities.

Where was I? Oh! Arnold was changing his coat. As he felt for the loop at the neck, he heard someone say softly—it was a whisper of terrified recognition:

“Mother!”

Then he heard another voice, which seemed to come thickly through layers of flesh.

“Law! Then it reely is you, Clara.”

That was all. But you’ll admit that the square, dusty window at the back of the cupboard had justified its existence—doubtless not for the first time, if the paneled walls had been capable of crying out.

Arnold put his eye cautiously to that dim pane of glass. He saw Clarissa in her spring finery; dainty, fresh, from the jaunty little lace hat, with the trembling cornflowers, which was perched on her elaborately dressed hair, to the pointed, shiny shoe sticking out from the frill of her skirt. He saw her beautiful, classic face; her blue eyes, a trifle frightened and guilty and disgusted, but not in the least affectionate. He saw her frown and make a warning movement with her gloved fingers and jerk her head toward the sitting room.

Mrs. Neaves had her dirty hands on her spread hips; her dreadful working dress of brownish-gray wool was slopped with dish water and patched with grease. It had parted from its lining under the arms, at the waist, at the back—everywhere, as her exuberant rolls of flesh broke through. She wasn’t a woman; she was an unsavory bundle of rags which you would take gingerly by one corner and pitch onto a dust heap. And she was Clarissa’s mother. The likeness was unmistakable, even if he had not heard the girl’s quick, frightened word, which gave away the situation. He understood now the uncanny attraction which had lately impelled him to observe Mrs. Neaves. The two pairs of blue eyes, one looking out from a delicate frame of chalk, the other from a shiny band of perspiration, were the same. One pair a little bleared by gin, by labor and years—but that was the only difference.

He didn’t catch the rest of their conversation; he did not want to. He watched them; their gestures (Clarissa’s tragic, the mother’s amazed) were enough. He sneaked away from the cupboard at last and sat down by the window. Sol, understanding, put his damp nose into his master’s loosely doubled palm. His brown eyes said wistfully, “I could have told you so. Why want a woman? Isn’t my devotion enough?”

Arnold wasn’t angry with Clarissa, wasn’t contemptuous of her. He didn’t see the humor of the situation, nor the degradation of it. He didn’t want to put on his hat and get out of the place, leaving the women to squabble over him as they liked. He had none of the sensations that I should have had, that you would have had if you were a man. I know your womanly sensations; boiling wrath and contempt for Clarissa, mingled with intense sympathy and a little irritation with her for being fool enough to give away everything by that one nervous word.

He felt, as every sensible man would, that it was not her fault; the poor girl could not help having a dirty trull of a mother. He rather admired her for her independence. He saw the whole thing; the natural transition from Clara Neaves to Clarissa Eve, the genteel tastes instilled by the board school and kept up by the dainty dressing insisted on by the bar. Two rooms in North Street off Theobalds Road, gin and onions for supper, fist fights with other lady lodgers on the smallest pretext, frequent black eyes, noisy troops of dirty children—all the things which were part of her mother’s daily life—would speedily become intolerable to the daughter. He thought it very creditable in Clarissa to have thrown the old woman overboard. And he sat and waited patiently for Clarissa to come in, stroking the deerhound’s long head and giving affectionate looks back to those sad, brown eyes. Clarissa entered. Almost immediately behind her came Mrs. Neaves with the tray. Arnold pulled the deerhound’s ears rather nervously and looked at the two women. Clarissa was as cool as an ice pail; she seemed to sit a little more upright than usual, seemed to display her left hand with the engagement ring blazing on it—nothing more. The way in which she said:

“Thank you. I shall want a little more milk,” to her mother, was superb.

Mrs. Neaves had made no attempt to dress for the occasion; she hadn’t even taken off the sacking apron which was strained tightly across her big waist; her down-at-heel shoes went flip-flap as she crossed the room. Both Arnold and Clarissa could see, as the hem of the skirt kicked up, a circle of discolored skin where the stocking was torn. But Clarissa’s face remained cold and unmoved, like the cameo, as usual. Her expression rarely altered. She was the most apathetic, the most impenetrable-looking girl in the world. Her cheeks had never flushed and her eye had never faltered when men in the bar made doubtful remarks; she never flushed nor faltered now, with her poor, degraded old mother’s bare heel under her eyes.

“You needn’t wait, Mrs. Neaves,” said Arnold, as Clarissa, with a charming young-matron air, began to pour out tea.

Then he remembered that he hadn’t paid her, and feeling very uncomfortable he put his hand in his pocket, brought out a loose heap of gold and silver, and dropped eight shillings in the moist palm. He hated to pay her before her daughter. But he hesitated at going outside the door with her and doing it there, for fear Clarissa should take fright and think he had found out. But Clarissa never lifted her white lids. She only said, with an airy laugh and the milk jug poised affectedly from her dainty wrist with the jangling bangle, “Milk?”

“Thank you, sir.”

Mrs. Neaves bent her head to count the shillings and he saw again the line of pure, fair flesh below the collar of her bodice.

“Good-afternoon, sir. Good-afternoon, miss.”

She scuttled away. Clarissa mumbled a very haughty and patronizing “Good-afternoon.”

Of course Arnold knew that he must do something. He couldn’t have his wife’s mother working in the Inn. She must be provided for. He thought of many things; a cottage in the country, a little business—something genteel in the sweetstuff and tobacco way, an almshouse, a home for incurables.

“For she is incurable,” he remarked next day. “She was as drunk as Chloe for three days running last week. I wouldn’t have Clarissa know I knew for a fortune. I wouldn’t hurt a fly if I could help it, Groome. But if someone would take Mrs. Neaves out in a pleasure boat on Sunday, or for an excursion down to Southend, or—you know accidents do happen. Don’t you think you might take her down to Epping Forest and lose her? Or Regent’s Canal with a brick round her——”

“Don’t be a fool. There’s only one way out, and that is to give up Clarissa. A girl who would treat her mother like that——”

“If I had a mother like that I’d choke her,” he said violently.

Then, cooling down, he added, digging the ash out of his pipe with a scrooping scrape of the pocket knife:

“The thing would be a country cottage. When people get old, nature is soothing to them. She could keep a pig and a few hens.”

“She wouldn’t stay there a week. You are making a tremendous trouble out of a trifle. Ask her. Find out what she wants and give it her.”

“That’s not a bad idea. I never thought of it.”

He went back to his set. Mrs. Neaves was making his bed. She was looking very heavy after her three-days’ indulgence. Her black eye had reached the green-and-purple stage. It was a lovely color study. Arnold, who was a kind-hearted little chap, felt sorry for her. Perhaps it was grief that had made her get drunk. He sat down on the window ledge and stared at her thoughtfully as she doubled down to tuck in the blanket.

“What do you think of doing when you get old?” he asked carelessly. “Charring is hard work, I should say.”

She stopped bed-making, put her hands on her hips,—it was her favorite conversational attitude,—and looked at him plaintively.

“The workus, I s’pose,” she said tersely. “Now, if I could get that five ’underd pound the perlice is offerin’, it’s visitin’ yer I’d be, an’ not doin’ yer dirty work.”

“Five hundred pounds?”

“Five ’underd pound. Arf that ’ud make a lady of me. I was a lady born and bred; my father ’ad a jeweler’s business in the Strand. But we none of us knows what we may come to. Five ’underd pound for information as ’ull lead to the conviction of——”

“Oh, yes, I know. The Hackney Wick murderer. But you’ll never get him. He committed suicide, there’s very little doubt about that.”

“Aint there, now? The mean ’ound! And five ’underd pound ’angin’ on it—which would ’a’ bin a godsend to many a poor person. To think of ’im a-skulkin’ off in that ’ole-and-corner way, with five ’underd pound on ’im.”

“What would you like to set you up in life, supposing you had the chance of choosing?” Arnold persisted.

She thought a little. Then she said longingly:

“There’s a nice shirt-and-collar business goin’ cheap in the Lane—Leather Lane. The laidy’s got a young family and can’t see to the laundry. Fifty pound ’ud buy it. An’ I’m used to clear starchin’.”

Arnold was delighted at being let off so lightly. He said, trying hard to smooth the complacent grin from his face, and lying glibly, as we all can in emergency:

“I’ve always had a great regard for you, Mrs. Neaves. You’ve done my work well, and you’ve been very good to Sol. I’m going to be married shortly, as I told you——”

“Yes, sir. And how’s the young lady, sir? if I make so bold.”

“The young lady is very well, thank you,” he returned with hurried stiffness. “I should like to see you settled in a comfortable little business of your own before I leave the Inn. And if fifty pounds will buy the shirt-and-collar business, I shall be very pleased to make you a present of it.”

When she had a little recovered from her astonishment, she gasped out:

“Thank you, sir, thank you kindly, I’m sure. I’ll do the same for you some day; one good turn deserves another, don’t it? An’ I’ll be proud to do your collars and cuffs for sixpence a dozen; the usual price bein’ a shillin’.”

That night Arnold went down to Clapham in the best of spirits. As he put it to himself triumphantly, he had saved a couple of hundred pounds and more, for he had quite reckoned on ten shillings a week at least, and these drunken old women live forever. Clarissa was on the platform. She ran up to him, through the hustle of weary-looking City men with tall hats and evening newspapers.

“Sol’s gone!” she burst out hysterically. “I took him for a run on the Common. I let him off the lead when we got to the water—you always told me to. And I—I missed him. They run so fast, those deerhounds, don’t they? There were a couple of roughs a little way back. I heard them say what a beauty he was.”

You may imagine what a blow this was to Arnold; Sol was a great deal more to him than Clarissa was. Clarissa had never been a woman; she was a barmaid at first and a pretty face afterward. But Sol had been his companion for ten years. Sol had saved his life. All the salt was off his palate; his daily life was dull, without savor.

He left off going to Clapham; Clarissa must have had a dull time. Whenever she hinted at marriage, he put her off peevishly.

“She never cared for Sol,” he said sadly. “She wanted to chain him up. Women haven’t got brains enough to appreciate a good dog.”

He was very miserable. He hadn’t even got Mrs. Neaves to bully and to study. She was settled in the Lane and deep in the shirt-and-collar business. His new laundress helped herself to the whisky and took away his loaves of bread and his rolls of fresh butter.