← catalogue

The Lodger

by Marie Belloc Lowndes · English · Gutenberg #2014 · 451,722 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Lodger
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: The Lodger

Author: Marie Belloc Lowndes


        
Release date: March 13, 2005 [eBook #2014]
                Most recently updated: April 22, 2021

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2014

Credits: an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LODGER ***




The Lodger

by Marie Belloc Lowndes


Contents

 CHAPTER I.
 CHAPTER II.
 CHAPTER III.
 CHAPTER IV.
 CHAPTER V.
 CHAPTER VI.
 CHAPTER VII.
 CHAPTER VIII.
 CHAPTER IX.
 CHAPTER X.
 CHAPTER XI.
 CHAPTER XII.
 CHAPTER XIII.
 CHAPTER XIV.
 CHAPTER XV.
 CHAPTER XVI.
 CHAPTER XVII.
 CHAPTER XVIII.
 CHAPTER XIX.
 CHAPTER XX.
 CHAPTER XXI.
 CHAPTER XXII.
 CHAPTER XXIII.
 CHAPTER XXIV.
 CHAPTER XXV.
 CHAPTER XXVI.
 CHAPTER XXVII.




“Lover and friend hast thou put far from me, and mine acquaintance into
darkness.”
PSALM lxxxviii. 18




CHAPTER I.


Robert Bunting and Ellen his wife sat before their dully burning,
carefully-banked-up fire.

The room, especially when it be known that it was part of a house
standing in a grimy, if not exactly sordid, London thoroughfare, was
exceptionally clean and well-cared-for. A casual stranger, more
particularly one of a Superior class to their own, on suddenly opening
the door of that sitting-room; would have thought that Mr. and Mrs.
Bunting presented a very pleasant cosy picture of comfortable married
life. Bunting, who was leaning back in a deep leather arm-chair, was
clean-shaven and dapper, still in appearance what he had been for many
years of his life—a self-respecting man-servant.

On his wife, now sitting up in an uncomfortable straight-backed chair,
the marks of past servitude were less apparent; but they were there all
the same—in her neat black stuff dress, and in her scrupulously clean,
plain collar and cuffs. Mrs. Bunting, as a single woman, had been what
is known as a useful maid.

But peculiarly true of average English life is the time-worn English
proverb as to appearances being deceitful. Mr. and Mrs. Bunting were
sitting in a very nice room and in their time—how long ago it now
seemed!—both husband and wife had been proud of their carefully chosen
belongings. Everything in the room was strong and substantial, and each
article of furniture had been bought at a well-conducted auction held
in a private house.

Thus the red damask curtains which now shut out the fog-laden,
drizzling atmosphere of the Marylebone Road, had cost a mere song, and
yet they might have been warranted to last another thirty years. A
great bargain also had been the excellent Axminster carpet which
covered the floor; as, again, the arm-chair in which Bunting now sat
forward, staring into the dull, small fire. In fact, that arm-chair had
been an extravagance of Mrs. Bunting. She had wanted her husband to be
comfortable after the day’s work was done, and she had paid
thirty-seven shillings for the chair. Only yesterday Bunting had tried
to find a purchaser for it, but the man who had come to look at it,
guessing their cruel necessities, had only offered them twelve
shillings and sixpence for it; so for the present they were keeping
their arm-chair.

But man and woman want something more than mere material comfort, much
as that is valued by the Buntings of this world. So, on the walls of
the sitting-room, hung neatly framed if now rather faded
photographs—photographs of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting’s various former
employers, and of the pretty country houses in which they had
separately lived during the long years they had spent in a not unhappy
servitude.

But appearances were not only deceitful, they were more than usually
deceitful with regard to these unfortunate people. In spite of their
good furniture—that substantial outward sign of respectability which is
the last thing which wise folk who fall into trouble try to dispose
of—they were almost at the end of their tether. Already they had learnt
to go hungry, and they were beginning to learn to go cold. Tobacco, the
last thing the sober man foregoes among his comforts, had been given up
some time ago by Bunting. And even Mrs. Bunting—prim, prudent, careful
woman as she was in her way—had realised what this must mean to him. So
well, indeed, had she understood that some days back she had crept out
and bought him a packet of Virginia.

Bunting had been touched—touched as he had not been for years by any
woman’s thought and love for him. Painful tears had forced themselves
into his eyes, and husband and wife had both felt in their odd,
unemotional way, moved to the heart.

Fortunately he never guessed—how could he have guessed, with his slow,
normal, rather dull mind?—that his poor Ellen had since more than once
bitterly regretted that fourpence-ha’penny, for they were now very near
the soundless depths which divide those who dwell on the safe tableland
of security—those, that is, who are sure of making a respectable, if
not a happy, living—and the submerged multitude who, through some lack
in themselves, or owing to the conditions under which our strange
civilisation has become organised, struggle rudderless till they die in
workhouse, hospital, or prison.

Had the Buntings been in a class lower than their own, had they
belonged to the great company of human beings technically known to so
many of us as the poor, there would have been friendly neighbours ready
to help them, and the same would have been the case had they belonged
to the class of smug, well-meaning, if unimaginative, folk whom they
had spent so much of their lives in serving.

There was only one person in the world who might possibly be brought to
help them. That was an aunt of Bunting’s first wife. With this woman,
the widow of a man who had been well-to-do, lived Daisy, Bunting’s only
child by his first wife, and during the last long two days he had been
trying to make up his mind to write to the old lady, and that though he
suspected that she would almost certainly retort with a cruel, sharp
rebuff.

As to their few acquaintances, former fellow-servants, and so on, they
had gradually fallen out of touch with them. There was but one friend
who often came to see them in their deep trouble. This was a young
fellow named Chandler, under whose grandfather Bunting had been footman
years and years ago. Joe Chandler had never gone into service; he was
attached to the police; in fact not to put too fine a point upon it,
young Chandler was a detective.

When they had first taken the house which had brought them, so they
both thought, such bad luck, Bunting had encouraged the young chap to
come often, for his tales were well worth listening to—quite exciting
at times. But now poor Bunting didn’t want to hear that sort of
stories—stories of people being cleverly “nabbed,” or stupidly allowed
to escape the fate they always, from Chandler’s point of view, richly
deserved.

But Joe still came very faithfully once or twice a week, so timing his
calls that neither host nor hostess need press food upon him—nay, more,
he had done that which showed him to have a good and feeling heart. He
had offered his father’s old acquaintance a loan, and Bunting, at last,
had taken 30s. Very little of that money now remained: Bunting still
could jingle a few coppers in his pocket; and Mrs. Bunting had 2s. 9d.;
that and the rent they would have to pay in five weeks, was all they
had left. Everything of the light, portable sort that would fetch money
had been sold. Mrs. Bunting had a fierce horror of the pawnshop. She
had never put her feet in such a place, and she declared she never
would—she would rather starve first.

But she had said nothing when there had occurred the gradual
disappearance of various little possessions she knew that Bunting
valued, notably of the old-fashioned gold watch-chain which had been
given to him after the death of his first master, a master he had
nursed faithfully and kindly through a long and terrible illness. There
had also vanished a twisted gold tie-pin, and a large mourning ring,
both gifts of former employers.

When people are living near that deep pit which divides the secure from
the insecure—when they see themselves creeping closer and closer to its
dread edge—they are apt, however loquacious by nature, to fall into
long silences. Bunting had always been a talker, but now he talked no
more. Neither did Mrs. Bunting, but then she had always been a silent
woman, and that was perhaps one reason why Bunting had felt drawn to
her from the very first moment he had seen her.

It had fallen out in this way. A lady had just engaged him as butler,
and he had been shown, by the man whose place he was to take, into the
dining-room. There, to use his own expression, he had discovered Ellen
Green, carefully pouring out the glass of port wine which her then
mistress always drank at 11.30 every morning. And as he, the new
butler, had seen her engaged in this task, as he had watched her
carefully stopper the decanter and put it back into the old
wine-cooler, he had said to himself, “That is the woman for me!”

But now her stillness, her—her dumbness, had got on the unfortunate
man’s nerves. He no longer felt like going into the various little
shops, close by, patronised by him in more prosperous days, and Mrs.
Bunting also went afield to make the slender purchases which still had
to be made every day or two, if they were to be saved from actually
starving to death.

Suddenly, across the stillness of the dark November evening there came
the muffled sounds of hurrying feet and of loud, shrill shouting
outside—boys crying the late afternoon editions of the evening papers.

Bunting turned uneasily in his chair. The giving up of a daily paper
had been, after his tobacco, his bitterest deprivation. And the paper
was an older habit than the tobacco, for servants are great readers of
newspapers.

As the shouts came through the closed windows and the thick damask
curtains, Bunting felt a sudden sense of mind hunger fall upon him.

It was a shame—a damned shame—that he shouldn’t know what was happening
in the world outside! Only criminals are kept from hearing news of what
is going on beyond their prison walls. And those shouts, those hoarse,
sharp cries must portend that something really exciting had happened,
something warranted to make a man forget for the moment his own
intimate, gnawing troubles.

He got up, and going towards the nearest window strained his ears to
listen. There fell on them, emerging now and again from the confused
babel of hoarse shouts, the one clear word “Murder!”

Slowly Bunting’s brain pieced the loud, indistinct cries into some sort
of connected order. Yes, that was it—“Horrible Murder! Murder at St.
Pancras!” Bunting remembered vaguely another murder which had been
committed near St. Pancras—that of an old lady by her servant-maid. It
had happened a great many years ago, but was still vividly remembered,
as of special and natural interest, among the class to which he had
belonged.

The newsboys—for there were more than one of them, a rather unusual
thing in the Marylebone Road—were coming nearer and nearer; now they
had adopted another cry, but he could not quite catch what they were
crying. They were still shouting hoarsely, excitedly, but he could only
hear a word or two now and then. Suddenly “The Avenger! The Avenger at
his work again!” broke on his ear.

During the last fortnight four very curious and brutal murders had been
committed in London and within a comparatively small area.

The first had aroused no special interest—even the second had only been
awarded, in the paper Bunting was still then taking in, quite a small
paragraph.

Then had come the third—and with that a wave of keen excitement, for
pinned to the dress of the victim—a drunken woman—had been found a
three-cornered piece of paper, on which was written, in red ink, and in
printed characters, the words,

“THE AVENGER”


It was then realised, not only by those whose business it is to
investigate such terrible happenings, but also by the vast world of men
and women who take an intelligent interest in such sinister mysteries,
that the same miscreant had committed all three crimes; and before that
extraordinary fact had had time to soak well into the public mind there
took place yet another murder, and again the murderer had been to
special pains to make it clear that some obscure and terrible lust for
vengeance possessed him.

Now everyone was talking of The Avenger and his crimes! Even the man
who left their ha’porth of milk at the door each morning had spoken to
Bunting about them that very day.

Bunting came back to the fire and looked down at his wife with mild
excitement. Then, seeing her pale, apathetic face, her look of weary,
mournful absorption, a wave of irritation swept through him. He felt he
could have shaken her!

Ellen had hardly taken the trouble to listen when he, Bunting, had come
back to bed that morning, and told her what the milkman had said. In
fact, she had been quite nasty about it, intimating that she didn’t
like hearing about such horrid things.

It was a curious fact that though Mrs. Bunting enjoyed tales of pathos
and sentiment, and would listen with frigid amusement to the details of
a breach of promise action, she shrank from stories of immorality or of
physical violence. In the old, happy days, when they could afford to
buy a paper, aye, and more than one paper daily, Bunting had often had
to choke down his interest in some exciting “case” or “mystery” which
was affording him pleasant mental relaxation, because any allusion to
it sharply angered Ellen.

But now he was at once too dull and too miserable to care how she felt.

Walking away from the window he took a slow, uncertain step towards the
door; when there he turned half round, and there came over his
close-shaven, round face the rather sly, pleading look with which a
child about to do something naughty glances at its parent.

But Mrs. Bunting remained quite still; her thin, narrow shoulders just
showed above the back of the chair on which she was sitting, bolt
upright, staring before her as if into vacancy.

Bunting turned round, opened the door, and quickly he went out into the
dark hall—they had given up lighting the gas there some time ago—and
opened the front door.

Walking down the small flagged path outside, he flung open the iron
gate which gave on to the damp pavement. But there he hesitated. The
coppers in his pocket seemed to have shrunk in number, and he
remembered ruefully how far Ellen could make even four pennies go.

Then a boy ran up to him with a sheaf of evening papers, and Bunting,
being sorely tempted—fell. “Give me a _Sun_,” he said roughly, “_Sun_
or _Echo!_”

But the boy, scarcely stopping to take breath, shook his head. “Only
penny papers left,” he gasped. “What’ll yer ’ave, sir?”

With an eagerness which was mingled with shame, Bunting drew a penny
out of his pocket and took a paper—it was the _Evening Standard_—from
the boy’s hand.

Then, very slowly, he shut the gate and walked back through the raw,
cold air, up the flagged path, shivering yet full of eager, joyful
anticipation.

Thanks to that penny he had just spent so recklessly he would pass a
happy hour, taken, for once, out of his anxious, despondent, miserable
self. It irritated him shrewdly to know that these moments of respite
from carking care would not be shared with his poor wife, with
careworn, troubled Ellen.

A hot wave of unease, almost of remorse, swept over Bunting. Ellen
would never have spent that penny on herself—he knew that well
enough—and if it hadn’t been so cold, so foggy, so—so drizzly, he would
have gone out again through the gate and stood under the street lamp to
take his pleasure. He dreaded with a nervous dread the glance of
Ellen’s cold, reproving light-blue eye. That glance would tell him that
he had had no business to waste a penny on a paper, and that well he
knew it!

Suddenly the door in front of him opened, and he heard a familiar voice
saying crossly, yet anxiously, “What on earth are you doing out there,
Bunting? Come in—do! You’ll catch your death of cold! I don’t want to
have you ill on my hands as well as everything else!” Mrs. Bunting
rarely uttered so many words at once nowadays.

He walked in through the front door of his cheerless house. “I went out
to get a paper,” he said sullenly.

After all, he was master. He had as much right to spend the money as
she had; for the matter of that the money on which they were now both
living had been lent, nay, pressed on him—not on Ellen—by that decent
young chap, Joe Chandler. And he, Bunting, had done all he could; he
had pawned everything he could pawn, while Ellen, so he resentfully
noticed, still wore her wedding ring.

He stepped past her heavily, and though she said nothing, he knew she
grudged him his coming joy. Then, full of rage with her and contempt
for himself, and giving himself the luxury of a mild, a very mild,
oath—Ellen had very early made it clear she would have no swearing in
her presence—he lit the hall gas full-flare.

“How can we hope to get lodgers if they can’t even see the card?” he
shouted angrily.

And there was truth in what he said, for now that he had lit the gas,
the oblong card, though not the word “Apartments” printed on it, could
be plainly seen out-lined against the old-fashioned fanlight above the
front door.

Bunting went into the sitting-room, silently followed by his wife, and
then, sitting down in his nice arm-chair, he poked the little banked-up
fire. It was the first time Bunting had poked the fire for many a long
day, and this exertion of marital authority made him feel better. A man
has to assert himself sometimes, and he, Bunting, had not asserted
himself enough lately.

A little colour came into Mrs. Bunting’s pale face. She was not used to
be flouted in this way. For Bunting, when not thoroughly upset, was the
mildest of men.

She began moving about the room, flicking off an imperceptible touch of
dust here, straightening a piece of furniture there.

But her hands trembled—they trembled with excitement, with self-pity,
with anger. A penny? It was dreadful—dreadful to have to worry about a
penny! But they had come to the point when one has to worry about
pennies. Strange that her husband didn’t realise that.

Bunting looked round once or twice; he would have liked to ask Ellen to
leave off fidgeting, but he was fond of peace, and perhaps, by now, a
little bit ashamed of himself, so he refrained from remark, and she
soon gave over what irritated him of her own accord.

But Mrs. Bunting did not come and sit down as her husband would have
liked her to do. The sight of him, absorbed in his paper as he was,
irritated her, and made her long to get away from him. Opening the door
which separated the sitting-room from the bedroom behind, and—shutting
out the aggravating vision of Bunting sitting comfortably by the now
brightly burning fire, with the _Evening Standard_ spread out before
him—she sat down in the cold darkness, and pressed her hands against
her temples.

Never, never had she felt so hopeless, so—so broken as now. Where was
the good of having been an upright, conscientious, self-respecting
woman all her life long, if it only led to this utter, degrading
poverty and wretchedness? She and Bunting were just past the age which
gentlefolk think proper in a married couple seeking to enter service
together, unless, that is, the wife happens to be a professed cook. A
cook and a butler can always get a nice situation. But Mrs. Bunting was
no cook. She could do all right the simple things any lodger she might
get would require, but that was all.

Lodgers? How foolish she had been to think of taking lodgers! For it
had been her doing. Bunting had been like butter in her hands.

Yet they had begun well, with a lodging-house in a seaside place. There
they had prospered, not as they had hoped to do, but still pretty well;
and then had come an epidemic of scarlet fever, and that had meant ruin
for them, and for dozens, nay, hundreds, of other luckless people. Then
had followed a business experiment which had proved even more
disastrous, and which had left them in debt—in debt to an extent they
could never hope to repay, to a good-natured former employer.

After that, instead of going back to service, as they might have done,
perhaps, either together or separately, they had made up their minds to
make one last effort, and they had taken over, with the trifle of money
that remained to them, the lease of this house in the Marylebone Road.

In former days, when they had each been leading the sheltered,
impersonal, and, above all, financially easy existence which is the
compensation life offers to those men and women who deliberately take
upon themselves the yoke of domestic service, they had both lived in
houses overlooking Regent’s Park. It had seemed a wise plan to settle
in the same neighbourhood, the more so that Bunting, who had a good
appearance, had retained the kind of connection which enables a man to
get a job now and again as waiter at private parties.

But life moves quickly, jaggedly, for people like the Buntings. Two of
his former masters had moved to another part of London, and a caterer
in Baker Street whom he had known went bankrupt.

And now? Well, just now Bunting could not have taken a job had one been
offered him, for he had pawned his dress clothes. He had not asked his
wife’s permission to do this, as so good a husband ought to have done.
He had just gone out and done it. And she had not had the heart to say
anything; nay, it was with part of the money that he had handed her
silently the evening he did it that she had bought that last packet of
tobacco.

And then, as Mrs. Bunting sat there thinking these painful thoughts,
there suddenly came to the front door the sound of a loud, tremulous,
uncertain double knock.




CHAPTER II.


Mr. Bunting jumped nervously to her feet. She stood for a moment
listening in the darkness, a darkness made the blacker by the line of
light under the door behind which sat Bunting reading his paper.

And then it came again, that loud, tremulous, uncertain double knock;
not a knock, so the listener told herself, that boded any good.
Would-be lodgers gave sharp, quick, bold, confident raps. No; this must
be some kind of beggar. The queerest people came at all hours, and
asked—whining or threatening—for money.

Mrs. Bunting had had some sinister experiences with men and
women—especially women—drawn from that nameless, mysterious class made
up of the human flotsam and jetsam which drifts about every great city.
But since she had taken to leaving the gas in the passage unlit at
night she had been very little troubled with that kind of visitors,
those human bats which are attracted by any kind of light but leave
alone those who live in darkness.

She opened the door of the sitting-room. It was Bunting’s place to go
to the front door, but she knew far better than he did how to deal with
difficult or obtrusive callers. Still, somehow, she would have liked
him to go to-night. But Bunting sat on, absorbed in his newspaper; all
he did at the sound of the bedroom door opening was to look up and say,
“Didn’t you hear a knock?”

Without answering his question she went out into the hall.

Slowly she opened the front door.

On the top of the three steps which led up to the door, there stood the
long, lanky figure of a man, clad in an Inverness cape and an
old-fashioned top hat. He waited for a few seconds blinking at her,
perhaps dazzled by the light of the gas in the passage. Mrs. Bunting’s
trained perception told her at once that this man, odd as he looked,
was a gentleman, belonging by birth to the class with whom her former
employment had brought her in contact.

“Is it not a fact that you let lodgings?” he asked, and there was
something shrill, unbalanced, hesitating, in his voice.

“Yes, sir,” she said uncertainly—it was a long, long time since anyone
had come after their lodgings, anyone, that is, that they could think
of taking into their respectable house.

Instinctively she stepped a little to one side, and the stranger walked
past her, and so into the hall.

And then, for the first time, Mrs. Bunting noticed that he held a
narrow bag in his left hand. It was quite a new bag, made of strong
brown leather.

“I am looking for some quiet rooms,” he said; then he repeated the
words, “quiet rooms,” in a dreamy, absent way, and as he uttered them
he looked nervously round him.

Then his sallow face brightened, for the hall had been carefully
furnished, and was very clean.

There was a neat hat-and-umbrella stand, and the stranger’s weary feet
fell soft on a good, serviceable dark-red drugget, which matched in
colour the flock-paper on the walls.

A very superior lodging-house this, and evidently a superior
lodging-house keeper.

“You’d find my rooms quite quiet, sir,” she said gently. “And just now
I have four to let. The house is empty, save for my husband and me,
sir.”

Mrs. Bunting spoke in a civil, passionless voice. It seemed too good to
be true, this sudden coming of a possible lodger, and of a lodger who
spoke in the pleasant, courteous way and voice which recalled to the
poor woman her happy, far-off days of youth and of security.

“That sounds very suitable,” he said. “Four rooms? Well, perhaps I
ought only to take two rooms, but, still, I should like to see all four
before I make my choice.”

How fortunate, how very fortunate it was that Bunting had lit the gas!
But for that circumstance this gentleman would have passed them by.

She turned towards the staircase, quite forgetting in her agitation
that the front door was still open; and it was the stranger whom she
already in her mind described as “the lodger,” who turned and rather
quickly walked down the passage and shut it.

“Oh, thank you, sir!” she exclaimed. “I’m sorry you should have had the
trouble.”

For a moment their eyes met. “It’s not safe to leave a front door open
in London,” he said, rather sharply. “I hope you do not often do that.
It would be so easy for anyone to slip in.”

Mrs. Bunting felt rather upset. The stranger had still spoken
courteously, but he was evidently very much put out.

“I assure you, sir, I never leave my front door open,” she answered
hastily. “You needn’t be at all afraid of that!”

And then, through the closed door of the sitting-room, came the sound
of Bunting coughing—it was just a little, hard cough, but Mrs.
Bunting’s future lodger started violently.

“Who’s that?” he said, putting out a hand and clutching her arm.
“Whatever was that?”

“Only my husband, sir. He went out to buy a paper a few minutes ago,
and the cold just caught him, I suppose.”

“Your husband—?” he looked at her intently, suspiciously. “What—what,
may I ask, is your husband’s occupation?”

Mrs. Bunting drew herself up. The question as to Bunting’s occupation
was no one’s business but theirs. Still, it wouldn’t do for her to show
offence. “He goes out waiting,” she said stiffly. “He was a gentleman’s
servant, sir. He could, of course, valet you should you require him to
do so.”

And then she turned and led the way up the steep, narrow staircase.

At the top of the first flight of stairs was what Mrs. Bunting, to
herself, called the drawing-room floor. It consisted of a sitting-room
in front, and a bedroom behind. She opened the door of the sitting-room
and quickly lit the chandelier.

This front room was pleasant enough, though perhaps a little
over-encumbered with furniture. Covering the floor was a green carpet
simulating moss; four chairs were placed round the table which occupied
the exact middle of the apartment, and in the corner, opposite the door
giving on to the landing, was a roomy, old-fashioned chiffonnier.

On the dark-green walls hung a series of eight engravings, portraits of
early Victorian belles, clad in lace and tarletan ball dresses, clipped
from an old Book of Beauty. Mrs. Bunting was very fond of these
pictures; she thought they gave the drawing-room a note of elegance and
refinement.

As she hurriedly turned up the gas she was glad, glad indeed, that she
had summoned up sufficient energy, two days ago, to give the room a
thorough turn-out.

It had remained for a long time in the state in which it had been left
by its last dishonest, dirty occupants when they had been scared into
going away by Bunting’s rough threats of the police. But now it was in
apple-pie order, with one paramount exception, of which Mrs. Bunting
was painfully aware. There were no white curtains to the windows, but
that omission could soon be remedied if this gentleman really took the
lodgings.

But what was this—? The stranger was looking round him rather
dubiously. “This is rather—rather too grand for me,” he said at last “I
should like to see your other rooms, Mrs. er—”

“—Bunting,” she said softly. “Bunting, sir.”

And as she spoke the dark, heavy load of care again came down and
settled on her sad, burdened heart. Perhaps she had been mistaken,
after all—or rather, she had not been mistaken in one sense, but
perhaps this gentleman was a poor gentleman—too poor, that is, to
afford the rent of more than one room, say eight or ten shillings a
week; eight or ten shillings a week would be very little use to her and
Bunting, though better than nothing at all.

“Will you just look at the bedroom, sir?”

“No,” he said, “no. I think I should like to see what you have farther
up the house, Mrs.—,” and then, as if making a prodigious mental
effort, he brought out her name, “Bunting,” with a kind of gasp.

The two top rooms were, of course, immediately above the drawing-room
floor. But they looked poor and mean, owing to the fact that they were
bare of any kind of ornament. Very little trouble had been taken over
their arrangement; in fact, they had been left in much the same
condition as that in which the Buntings had found them.

For the matter of that, it is difficult to make a nice, genteel
sitting-room out of an apartment of which the principal features are a
sink and a big gas stove. The gas stove, of an obsolete pattern, was
fed by a tiresome, shilling-in-the-slot arrangement. It had been the
property of the people from whom the Buntings had taken over the lease
of the house, who, knowing it to be of no monetary value, had thrown it
in among the humble fittings they had left behind.

What furniture there was in the room was substantial and clean, as
everything belonging to Mrs. Bunting was bound to be, but it was a
bare, uncomfortable-looking place, and the landlady now felt sorry that
she had done nothing to make it appear more attractive.

To her surprise, however, her companion’s dark, sensitive,
hatchet-shaped face became irradiated with satisfaction. “Capital!
Capital!” he exclaimed, for the first time putting down the bag he held
at his feet, and rubbing his long, thin hands together with a quick,
nervous movement.

“This is just what I have been looking for.” He walked with long, eager
strides towards the gas stove. “First-rate—quite first-rate! Exactly
what I wanted to find! You must understand, Mrs.—er—Bunting, that I am
a man of science. I make, that is, all sorts of experiments, and I
often require the—ah, well, the presence of great heat.”

He shot out a hand, which she noticed shook a little, towards the
stove. “This, too, will be useful—exceedingly useful, to me,” and he
touched the edge of the stone sink with a lingering, caressing touch.

He threw his head back and passed his hand over his high, bare
forehead; then, moving towards a chair, he sat down—wearily. “I’m
tired,” he muttered in a low voice, “tired—tired! I’ve been walking
about all day, Mrs. Bunting, and I could find nothing to sit down upon.
They do not put benches for tired men in the London streets. They do so
on the Continent. In some ways they are far more humane on the
Continent than they are in England, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Indeed, sir,” she said civilly; and then, after a nervous glance, she
asked the question of which the answer would mean so much to her, “Then
you mean to take my rooms, sir?”

“This room, certainly,” he said, looking round. “This room is exactly
what I have been looking for, and longing for, the last few days;” and
then hastily he added, “I mean this kind of place is what I have always
wanted to possess, Mrs. Bunting. You would be surprised if you knew how
difficult it is to get anything of the sort. But now my weary search
has ended, and that is a relief—a very, very great relief to me!”

He stood up and looked round him with a dreamy, abstracted air. And
then, “Where’s my bag?” he asked suddenly, and there came a note of
sharp, angry fear in his voice. He glared at the quiet woman standing
before him, and for a moment Mrs. Bunting felt a tremor of fright shoot
through her. It seemed a pity that Bunting was so far away, right down
the house.

But Mrs. Bunting was aware that eccentricity has always been a
perquisite, as it were the special luxury, of the well-born and of the
well-educated. Scholars, as she well knew, are never quite like other
people, and her new lodger was undoubtedly a scholar. “Surely I had a
bag when I came in?” he said in a scared, troubled voice.

“Here it is, sir,” she said soothingly, and, stooping, picked it up and
handed it to him. And as she did so she noticed that the bag was not at
all heavy; it was evidently by no means full.

He took it eagerly from her. “I beg your pardon,” he muttered. “But
there is something in that bag which is very precious to me—something I
procured with infinite difficulty, and which I could never get again
without running into great danger, Mrs. Bunting. That must be the
excuse for my late agitation.”

“About terms, sir?” she said a little timidly, returning to the subject
which meant so much, so very much to her.

“About terms?” he echoed. And then there came a pause. “My name is
Sleuth,” he said suddenly,—“S-l-e-u-t-h. Think of a hound, Mrs.
Bunting, and you’ll never forget my name. I could provide you with a
reference—” (he gave her what she described to herself as a funny,
sideways look), “but I should prefer you to dispense with that, if you
don’t mind. I am quite willing to pay you—well, shall we say a month in
advance?”

A spot of red shot into Mrs. Bunting’s cheeks. She felt sick with
relief—nay, with a joy which was almost pain. She had not known till
that moment how hungry she was—how eager for—a good meal. “That would
be all right, sir,” she murmured.

“And what are you going to charge me?” There had come a kindly, almost
a friendly note into his voice. “With attendance, mind! I shall expect
you to give me attendance, and I need hardly ask if you can cook, Mrs.
Bunting?”

“Oh, yes, sir,” she said. “I am a plain cook. What would you say to
twenty-five shillings a week, sir?” She looked at him deprecatingly,
and as he did not answer she went on falteringly, “You see, sir, it may
seem a good deal, but you would have the best of attendance and careful
cooking—and my husband, sir—he would be pleased to valet you.”

“I shouldn’t want anything of that sort done for me,” said Mr. Sleuth
hastily. “I prefer looking after my own clothes. I am used to waiting
on myself. But, Mrs. Bunting, I have a great dislike to sharing
lodgings—”

She interrupted eagerly, “I could let you have the use of the two
floors for the same price—that is, until we get another lodger. I
shouldn’t like you to sleep in the back room up here, sir. It’s such a
poor little room. You could do as you say, sir—do your work and your
experiments up here, and then have your meals in the drawing-room.”

“Yes,” he said hesitatingly, “that sounds a good plan. And if I offered
you two pounds, or two guineas? Might I then rely on your not taking
another lodger?”

“Yes,” she said quietly. “I’d be very glad only to have you to wait on,
sir.”

“I suppose you have a key to the door of this room, Mrs. Bunting? I
don’t like to be disturbed while I’m working.”

He waited a moment, and then said again, rather urgently, “I suppose
you have a key to this door, Mrs. Bunting?”

“Oh, yes, sir, there’s a key—a very nice little key. The people who
lived here before had a new kind of lock put on to the door.” She went
over, and throwing the door open, showed him that a round disk had been
fitted above the old keyhole.

He nodded his head, and then, after standing silent a little, as if
absorbed in thought, “Forty-two shillings a week? Yes, that will suit
me perfectly. And I’ll begin now by paying my first month’s rent in
advance. Now, four times forty-two shillings is”—he jerked his head
back and stared at his new landlady; for the first time he smiled, a
queer, wry smile—“why, just eight pounds eight shillings, Mrs.
Bunting!”

He thrust his hand through into an inner pocket of his long cape-like
coat and took out a handful of sovereigns. Then he began putting these
down in a row on the bare wooden table which stood in the centre of the
room. “Here’s five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten pounds. You’d better keep
the odd change, Mrs. Bunting, for I shall want you to do some shopping
for me to-morrow morning. I met with a misfortune to-day.” But the new
lodger did not speak as if his misfortune, whatever it was, weighed on
his spirits.

“Indeed, sir. I’m sorry to hear that.” Mrs. Bunting’s heart was going
thump—thump—thump. She felt extraordinarily moved, dizzy with relief
and joy.

“Yes, a very great misfortune! I lost my luggage, the few things I
managed to bring away with me.” His voice dropped suddenly. “I
shouldn’t have said that,” he muttered. “I was a fool to say that!”
Then, more loudly, “Someone said to me, ‘You can’t go into a
lodging-house without any luggage. They wouldn’t take you in.’ But
_you_ have taken me in, Mrs. Bunting, and I’m grateful for—for the kind
way you have met me—” He looked at her feelingly, appealingly, and Mrs.
Bunting was touched. She was beginning to feel very kindly towards her
new lodger.

“I hope I know a gentleman when I see one,” she said, with a break in
her staid voice.

“I shall have to see about getting some clothes to-morrow, Mrs.
Bunting.” Again he looked at her appealingly.

“I expect you’d like to wash your hands now, sir. And would you tell me
what you’d like for supper? We haven’t much in the house.”

“Oh, anything’ll do,” he said hastily. “I don’t want you to go out for
me. It’s a cold, foggy, wet night, Mrs. Bunting. If you have a little
bread-and-butter and a cup of milk I shall be quite satisfied.”

“I have a nice sausage,” she said hesitatingly.

It was a very nice sausage, and she had bought it that same morning for
Bunting’s supper; as to herself, she had been going to content herself
with a little bread and cheese. But now—wonderful, almost, intoxicating
thought—she could send Bunting out to get anything they both liked. The
ten sovereigns lay in her hand full of comfort and good cheer.

“A sausage? No, I fear that will hardly do. I never touch flesh meat,”
he said; “it is a long, long time since I tasted a sausage, Mrs.
Bunting.”

“Is it indeed, sir?” She hesitated a moment, then asked stiffly, “And
will you be requiring any beer, or wine, sir?”

A strange, wild look of lowering wrath suddenly filled Mr. Sleuth’s
pale face.

“Certainly not. I thought I had made that quite clear, Mrs. Bunting. I
had hoped to hear that you were an abstainer—”

“So I am, sir, lifelong. And so’s Bunting been since we married.” She
might have said, had she been a woman given to make such confidences,
that she had made Bunting abstain very early in their acquaintance.
That he had given in about that had been the thing that first made her
believe, that he was sincere in all the nonsense that he talked to her,
in those far-away days of his courting. Glad she was now that he had
taken the pledge as a younger man; but for that nothing would have kept
him from the drink during the bad times they had gone through.

And then, going downstairs, she showed Mr. Sleuth the nice bedroom
which opened out of the drawing-room. It was a replica of Mrs.
Bunting’s own room just underneath, excepting that everything up here
had cost just a little more, and was therefore rather better in
quality.

The new lodger looked round him with such a strange expression of
content and peace stealing over his worn face. “A haven of rest,” he
muttered; and then, “‘He bringeth them to their desired haven.’
Beautiful words, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mrs. Bunting felt a little startled. It was the first time anyone had
quoted the Bible to her for many a long day. But it seemed to set the
seal, as it were, on Mr. Sleuth’s respectability.

What a comfort it was, too, that she had to deal with only one lodger,
and that a gentleman, instead of with a married couple! Very peculiar
married couples had drifted in and out of Mr. and Mrs. Bunting’s
lodgings, not only here, in London, but at the seaside.

How unlucky they had been, to be sure! Since they had come to London
not a single pair of lodgers had been even moderately respectable and
kindly. The last lot had belonged to that horrible underworld of men
and women who, having, as the phrase goes, seen better days, now only
keep their heads above water with the help of petty fraud.

“I’ll bring you up some hot water in a minute, sir, and some clean
towels,” she said, going to the door.

And then Mr. Sleuth turned quickly round. “Mrs. Bunting”—and as he
spoke he stammered a little—“I—I don’t want you to interpret the word
attendance too liberally. You need not run yourself off your feet for
me. I’m accustomed to look after myself.”

And, queerly, uncomfortably, she felt herself dismissed—even a little
snubbed. “All right, sir,” she said. “I’ll only just let you know when
I’ve your supper ready.”




CHAPTER III.


But what was a little snub compared with the intense relief and joy of
going down and telling Bunting of the great piece of good fortune which
had fallen their way?

Staid Mrs. Bunting seemed to make but one leap down the steep stairs.
In the hall, however, she pulled herself together, and tried to still
her agitation. She had always disliked and despised any show of
emotion; she called such betrayal of feeling “making a fuss.”

Opening the door of their sitting-room, she stood for a moment looking
at her husband’s bent back, and she realised, with a pang of pain, how
the last few weeks had aged him.

Bunting suddenly looked round, and, seeing his wife, stood up. He put
the paper he had been holding down on to the table: “Well,” he said,
“well, who was it, then?”

He felt rather ashamed of himself; it was he who ought to have answered
the door and done all that parleying of which he had heard murmurs.

And then in a moment his wife’s hand shot out, and the ten sovereigns
fell in a little clinking heap on the table.

“Look there!” she whispered, with an excited, tearful quiver in her
voice. “Look there, Bunting!”

And Bunting did look there, but with a troubled, frowning gaze.

He was not quick-witted, but at once he jumped to the conclusion that
his wife had just had in a furniture dealer, and that this ten pounds
represented all their nice furniture upstairs. If that were so, then it
was the beginning of the end. That furniture in the first-floor front
had cost—Ellen had reminded him of the fact bitterly only
yesterday—seventeen pounds nine shillings, and every single item had
been a bargain. It was too bad that she had only got ten pounds for it.

Yet he hadn’t the heart to reproach her.

He did not speak as he looked across at her, and meeting that troubled,
rebuking glance, she guessed what it was that he thought had happened.

“We’ve a new lodger!” she cried. “And—and, Bunting? He’s quite the
gentleman! He actually offered to pay four weeks in advance, at two
guineas a week.”

“No, never!”

Bunting moved quickly round the table, and together they stood there,
fascinated by the little heap of gold. “But there’s ten sovereigns
here,” he said suddenly.

“Yes, the gentleman said I’d have to buy some things for him to-morrow.
And, oh, Bunting, he’s so well spoken, I really felt that—I really felt
that—” and then Mrs. Bunting, taking a step or two sideways, sat down,
and throwing her little black apron over her face burst into gasping
sobs.

Bunting patted her back timidly. “Ellen?” he said, much moved by her
agitation, “Ellen? Don’t take on so, my dear—”

“I won’t,” she sobbed, “I—I won’t! I’m a fool—I know I am! But, oh, I
didn’t think we was ever going to have any luck again!”

And then she told him—or rather tried to tell him—what the lodger was
like. Mrs. Bunting was no hand at talking, but one thing she did
impress on her husband’s mind, namely, that Mr. Sleuth was eccentric,
as so many clever people are eccentric—that is, in a harmless way—and
that he must be humoured.

“He says he doesn’t want to be waited on much,” she said at last wiping
her eyes, “but I can see he will want a good bit of looking after, all
the same, poor gentleman.”

And just as the words left her mouth there came the unfamiliar sound of
a loud ring. It was that of the drawing-room bell being pulled again
and again.

Bunting looked at his wife eagerly. “I think I’d better go up, eh,
Ellen?” he said. He felt quite anxious to see their new lodger. For the
matter of that, it would be a relief to be doing something again.

“Yes,” she answered, “you go up! Don’t keep him waiting! I wonder what
it is he wants? I said I’d let him know when his supper was ready.”

A moment later Bunting came down again. There was an odd smile on his
face. “Whatever d’you think he wanted?” he whispered mysteriously. And
as she said nothing, he went on, “He’s asked me for the loan of a
Bible!”

“Well, I don’t see anything so out of the way in that,” she said
hastily, “’specially if he don’t feel well. I’ll take it up to him.”

And then going to a small table which stood between the two windows,
Mrs. Bunting took off it a large Bible, which had been given to her as
a wedding present by a married lady with whose mother she had lived for
several years.

“He said it would do quite well when you take up his supper,” said
Bunting; and, then, “Ellen? He’s a queer-looking cove—not like any
gentleman I ever had to do with.”

“He is a gentleman,” said Mrs. Bunting rather fiercely.

“Oh, yes, that’s all right.” But still he looked at her doubtfully. “I
asked him if he’d like me to just put away his clothes. But, Ellen, he
said he hadn’t got any clothes!”

“No more he hasn’t;” she spoke quickly, defensively. “He had the
misfortune to lose his luggage. He’s one dishonest folk ’ud take
advantage of.”

“Yes, one can see that with half an eye,” Bunting agreed.

And then there was silence for a few moments, while Mrs. Bunting put
down on a little bit of paper the things she wanted her husband to go
out and buy for her. She handed him the list, together with a
sovereign. “Be as quick as you can,” she said, “for I feel a bit
hungry. I’ll be going down now to see about Mr. Sleuth’s supper. He
only wants a glass of milk and two eggs. I’m glad I’ve never fallen to
bad eggs!”

“Sleuth,” echoed Bunting, staring at her. “What a queer name! How d’you
spell it—S-l-u-t-h?”

“No,” she shot out, “S-l-e—u—t—h.”

“Oh,” he said doubtfully.

“He said, ‘Think of a hound and you’ll never forget my name,’” and Mrs.
Bunting smiled.

When he got to the door, Bunting turned round: “We’ll now be able to
pay young Chandler back some o’ that thirty shillings. I am glad.” She
nodded; her heart, as the saying is, too full for words.

And then each went about his and her business—Bunting out into the
drenching fog, his wife down to her cold kitchen.

The lodger’s tray was soon ready; everything upon it nicely and
daintily arranged. Mrs. Bunting knew how to wait upon a gentleman.

Just as the landlady was going up the kitchen stair, she suddenly
remembered Mr. Sleuth’s request for a Bible. Putting the tray down in
the hall, she went into her sitting-room and took up the Book; but when
back in the hall she hesitated a moment as to whether it was worth
while to make two journeys. But, no, she thought she could manage;
clasping the large, heavy volume under her arm, and taking up the tray,
she walked slowly up the staircase.

But a great surprise awaited her; in fact, when Mr. Sleuth’s landlady
opened the door of the drawing-room she very nearly dropped the tray.
She actually did drop the Bible, and it fell with a heavy thud to the
ground.

The new lodger had turned all those nice framed engravings of the early
Victorian beauties, of which Mrs. Bunting had been so proud, with their
faces to the wall!

For a moment she was really too surprised to speak. Putting the tray
down on the table, she stooped and picked up the Book. It troubled her
that the Book should have fallen to the ground; but really she hadn’t
been able to help it—it was mercy that the tray hadn’t fallen, too.

Mr. Sleuth got up. “I—I have taken the liberty to arrange the room as I
should wish it to be,” he said awkwardly. “You see, Mrs.—er—Bunting, I
felt as I sat here that these women’s eyes followed me about. It was a
most unpleasant sensation, and gave me quite an eerie feeling.”

The landlady was now laying a small tablecloth over half of the table.
She made no answer to her lodger’s remark, for the good reason that she
did not know what to say.

Her silence seemed to distress Mr. Sleuth. After what seemed a long
pause, he spoke again.

“I prefer bare walls, Mrs. Bunting,” he spoke with some agitation. “As
a matter of fact, I have been used to seeing bare walls about me for a
long time.” And then, at last his landlady answered him, in a composed,
soothing voice, which somehow did him good to hear. “I quite
understand, sir. And when Bunting comes in he shall take the pictures
all down. We have plenty of space in our own rooms for them.”

“Thank you—thank you very much.”

Mr. Sleuth appeared greatly relieved.

“And I have brought you up my Bible, sir. I understood you wanted the
loan of it?”

Mr. Sleuth stared at her as if dazed for a moment; and then, rousing
himself, he said, “Yes, yes, I do. There is no reading like the Book.
There is something there which suits every state of mind, aye, and of
body too—”

“Very true, sir.” And then Mrs. Bunting, having laid out what really
looked a very appetising little meal, turned round and quietly shut the
door.

She went down straight into her sitting-room and waited there for
Bunting, instead of going to the kitchen to clear up. And as she did so
there came to her a comfortable recollection, an incident of her
long-past youth, in the days when she, then Ellen Green, had maided a
dear old lady.

The old lady had a favourite nephew—a bright, jolly young gentleman,
who was learning to paint animals in Paris. And one morning Mr.
Algernon—that was his rather peculiar Christian name—had had the
impudence to turn to the wall six beautiful engravings of paintings
done by the famous Mr. Landseer!

Mrs. Bunting remembered all the circumstances as if they had only
occurred yesterday, and yet she had not thought of them for years.

It was quite early; she had come down—for in those days maids weren’t
thought so much of as they are now, and she slept with the upper
housemaid, and it was the upper housemaid’s duty to be down very
early—and, there, in the dining-room, she had found Mr. Algernon
engaged in turning each engraving to the wall! Now, his aunt thought
all the world of those pictures, and Ellen had felt quite concerned,
for it doesn’t do for a young gentleman to put himself wrong with a
kind aunt.

“Oh, sir,” she had exclaimed in dismay, “whatever are you doing?” And
even now she could almost hear his merry voice, as he had answered, “I
am doing my duty, fair Helen”—he had always called her “fair Helen”
when no one was listening. “How can I draw ordinary animals when I see
these half-human monsters staring at me all the time I am having my
breakfast, my lunch, and my dinner?” That was what Mr. Algernon had
said in his own saucy way, and that was what he repeated in a more
serious, respectful manner to his aunt, when that dear old lady had
come downstairs. In fact he had declared, quite soberly, that the
beautiful animals painted by Mr. Landseer put his eye out!

But his aunt had been very much annoyed—in fact, she had made him turn
the pictures all back again; and as long as he stayed there he just had
to put up with what he called “those half-human monsters.” Mrs.
Bunting, sitting there, thinking the matter of Mr. Sleuth’s odd
behaviour over, was glad to recall that funny incident of her long-gone
youth. It seemed to prove that her new lodger was not so strange as he
appeared to be. Still, when Bunting came in, she did not tell him the
queer thing which had happened. She told herself that she would be
quite able to manage the taking down of the pictures in the
drawing-room herself.

But before getting ready their own supper, Mr. Sleuth’s landlady went
upstairs to clear away, and when on the staircase she heard the sound
of—was it talking, in the drawing-room? Startled, she waited a moment
on the landing outside the drawing-room door, then she realised that it
was only the lodger reading aloud to himself. There was something very
awful in the words which rose and fell on her listening ears:

“A strange woman is a narrow gate. She also lieth in wait as for a
prey, and increaseth the transgressors among men.”

She remained where she was, her hand on the handle of the door, and
again there broke on her shrinking ears that curious, high, sing-song
voice, “Her house is the way to hell, going down to the chambers of
death.”

It made the listener feel quite queer. But at last she summoned up
courage, knocked, and walked in.

“I’d better clear away, sir, had I not?” she said. And Mr. Sleuth
nodded.

Then he got up and closed the Book. “I think I’ll go to bed now,” he
said. “I am very, very tired. I’ve had a long and a very weary day,
Mrs. Bunting.”

After he had disappeared into the back room, Mrs. Bunting climbed up on
a chair and unhooked the pictures which had so offended Mr. Sleuth.
Each left an unsightly mark on the wall—but that, after all, could not
be helped.

Treading softly, so that Bunting should not hear her, she carried them
down, two by two, and stood them behind her bed.




CHAPTER IV.


Mrs. Bunting woke up the next morning feeling happier than she had felt
for a very, very long time.

For just one moment she could not think why she felt so different—and
then she suddenly remembered.

How comfortable it was to know that upstairs, just over her head, lay,
in the well-found bed she had bought with such satisfaction at an
auction held in a Baker Street house, a lodger who was paying two
guineas a week! Something seemed to tell her that Mr. Sleuth would be
“a permanency.” In any case, it wouldn’t be her fault if he wasn’t. As
to his—his queerness, well, there’s always something funny in
everybody. But after she had got up, and as the morning wore itself
away, Mrs. Bunting grew a little anxious, for there came no sound at
all from the new lodger’s rooms. At twelve, however, the drawing-room
bell rang. Mrs. Bunting hurried upstairs. She was painfully anxious to
please and satisfy Mr. Sleuth. His coming had only been in the nick of
time to save them from terrible disaster.

She found her lodger up, and fully dressed. He was sitting at the round
table which occupied the middle of the sitting-room, and his landlady’s
large Bible lay open before him.

As Mrs. Bunting came in, he looked up, and she was troubled to see how
tired and worn he seemed.

“You did not happen,” he asked, “to have a Concordance, Mrs. Bunting?”

She shook her head; she had no idea what a Concordance could be, but
she was quite sure that she had nothing of the sort about.

And then her new lodger proceeded to tell her what it was he desired
her to buy for him. She had supposed the bag he had brought with him to
contain certain little necessaries of civilised life—such articles, for
instance, as a comb and brush, a set of razors, a toothbrush, to say
nothing of a couple of nightshirts—but no, that was evidently not so,
for Mr. Sleuth required all these things to be bought now.

After having cooked him a nice breakfast Mrs. Bunting hurried out to
purchase the things of which he was in urgent need.

How pleasant it was to feel that there was money in her purse again—not
only someone else’s money, but money she was now in the very act of
earning so agreeably.

Mrs. Bunting first made her way to a little barber’s shop close by. It
was there she purchased the brush and comb and the razors. It was a
funny, rather smelly little place, and she hurried as much as she
could, the more so that the foreigner who served her insisted on
telling her some of the strange, peculiar details of this Avenger
murder which had taken place forty-eight hours before, and in which
Bunting took such a morbid interest.

The conversation upset Mrs. Bunting. She didn’t want to think of
anything painful or disagreeable on such a day as this.

Then she came back and showed the lodger her various purchases. Mr.
Sleuth was pleased with everything, and thanked her most courteously.
But when she suggested doing his bedroom he frowned, and looked quite
put out.

“Please wait till this evening,” he said hastily. “It is my custom to
stay at home all day. I only care to walk about the streets when the
lights are lit. You must bear with me, Mrs. Bunting, if I seem a
little, just a little, unlike the lodgers you have been accustomed to.
And I must ask you to understand that I must not be disturbed when
thinking out my problems—” He broke off short, sighed, then added
solemnly, “for mine are the great problems of life and death.”

And Mrs. Bunting willingly fell in with his wishes. In spite of her
prim manner and love of order, Mr. Sleuth’s landlady was a true
woman—she had, that is, an infinite patience with masculine vagaries
and oddities.

When she was downstairs again, Mr. Sleuth’s landlady met with a
surprise; but it was quite a pleasant surprise. While she had been
upstairs, talking to the lodger, Bunting’s young friend, Joe Chandler,
the detective, had come in, and as she walked into the sitting-room she
saw that her husband was pushing half a sovereign across the table
towards Joe.

Joe Chandler’s fair, good-natured face was full of satisfaction: not at
seeing his money again, mark you, but at the news Bunting had evidently
been telling him—that news of the sudden wonderful change in their
fortunes, the coming of an ideal lodger.

“Mr. Sleuth don’t want me to do his bedroom till he’s gone out!” she
exclaimed. And then she sat down for a bit of a rest.

It was a comfort to know that the lodger was eating his good breakfast,
and there was no need to think of him for the present. In a few minutes
she would be going down to make her own and Bunting’s dinner, and she
told Joe Chandler that he might as well stop and have a bite with them.

Her heart warmed to the young man, for Mrs. Bunting was in a mood which
seldom surprised her—a mood to be pleased with anything and everything.
Nay, more. When Bunting began to ask Joe Chandler about the last of
those awful Avenger murders, she even listened with a certain languid
interest to all he had to say.

In the morning paper which Bunting had begun taking again that very day
three columns were devoted to the extraordinary mystery which was now
beginning to be the one topic of talk all over London, West and East,
North and South. Bunting had read out little bits about it while they
ate their breakfast, and in spite of herself Mrs. Bunting had felt
thrilled and excited.

“They do say,” observed Bunting cautiously, “They do say, Joe, that the
police have a clue they won’t say nothing about?” He looked expectantly
at his visitor. To Bunting the fact that Chandler was attached to the
detective section of the Metropolitan Police invested the young man
with a kind of sinister glory—especially just now, when these awful and
mysterious crimes were amazing and terrifying the town.

“Them who says that says wrong,” answered Chandler slowly, and a look
of unease, of resentment came over his fair, stolid face. “’Twould make
a good bit of difference to me if the Yard had a clue.”

And then Mrs. Bunting interposed. “Why that, Joe?” she said, smiling
indulgently; the young man’s keenness about his work pleased her. And
in his slow, sure way Joe Chandler was very keen, and took his job very
seriously. He put his whole heart and mind into it.

“Well, ’tis this way,” he explained. “From to-day I’m on this business
myself. You see, Mrs. Bunting, the Yard’s nettled—that’s what it is,
and we’re all on our mettle—that we are. I was right down sorry for the
poor chap who was on point duty in the street where the last one
happened—”

“No!” said Bunting incredulously. “You don’t mean there was a policeman
there, within a few yards?”

That fact hadn’t been recorded in his newspaper.

Chandler nodded. “That’s exactly what I do mean, Mr. Bunting! The man
is near off his head, so I’m told. He did hear a yell, so he says, but
he took no notice—there are a good few yells in that part o’ London, as
you can guess. People always quarrelling and rowing at one another in
such low parts.”

“Have you seen the bits of grey paper on which the monster writes his
name?” inquired Bunting eagerly.

Public imagination had been much stirred by the account of those
three-cornered pieces of grey paper, pinned to the victims’ skirts, on
which was roughly written in red ink and in printed characters the
words “The Avenger.”

His round, fat face was full of questioning eagerness. He put his
elbows on the table, and stared across expectantly at the young man.

“Yes, I have,” said Joe briefly.

“A funny kind of visiting card, eh!” Bunting laughed; the notion struck
him as downright comic.

But Mrs. Bunting coloured. “It isn’t a thing to make a joke about,” she
said reprovingly.

And Chandler backed her up. “No, indeed,” he said feelingly. “I’ll
never forget what I’ve been made to see over this job. And as for that
grey bit of paper, Mr. Bunting—or, rather, those grey bits of paper”—he
corrected himself hastily—“you know they’ve three of them now at the
Yard—well, they gives me the horrors!”

And then he jumped up. “That reminds me that I oughtn’t to be wasting
my time in pleasant company—”

“Won’t you stay and have a bit of dinner?” said Mrs. Bunting
solicitously.

But the detective shook his head. “No,” he said, “I had a bite before I
came out. Our job’s a queer kind of job, as you know. A lot’s left to
our discretion, so to speak, but it don’t leave us much time for lazing
about, I can tell you.”

When he reached the door he turned round, and with elaborate
carelessness he inquired, “Any chance of Miss Daisy coming to London
again soon?”

Bunting shook his head, but his face brightened. He was very, very fond
of his only child; the pity was he saw her so seldom. “No,” he said,
“I’m afraid not Joe. Old Aunt, as we calls the old lady, keeps Daisy
pretty tightly tied to her apron-string. She was quite put about that
week the child was up with us last June.”

“Indeed? Well, so long!”

After his wife had let their friend out, Bunting said cheerfully, “Joe
seems to like our Daisy, eh, Ellen?”

But Mrs. Bunting shook her head scornfully. She did not exactly dislike
the girl, though she did not hold with the way Bunting’s daughter was
being managed by that old aunt of hers—an idle, good-for-nothing way,
very different from the fashion in which she herself had been trained
at the Foundling, for Mrs. Bunting as a little child had known no other
home, no other family than those provided by good Captain Coram.

“Joe Chandler’s too sensible a young chap to be thinking of girls yet
awhile,” she said tartly.

“No doubt you’re right,” Bunting agreed. “Times be changed. In my young
days chaps always had time for that. ’Twas just a notion that came into
my head, hearing him asking, anxious-like, after her.”

About five o’clock, after the street lamps were well alight, Mr. Sleuth
went out, and that same evening there came two parcels addressed to his
landlady. These parcels contained clothes. But it was quite clear to
Mrs. Bunting’s eyes that they were not new clothes. In fact, they had
evidently been bought in some good second-hand clothes-shop. A funny
thing for a real gentleman like Mr. Sleuth to do! It proved that he had
given up all hope of getting back his lost luggage.

When the lodger had gone out he had not taken his bag with him, of that
Mrs. Bunting was positive. And yet, though she searched high and low
for it, she could not find the place where Mr. Sleuth kept it. And at
last, had it not been that she was a very clear-headed woman, with a
good memory, she would have been disposed to think that the bag had
never existed, save in her imagination.

But no, she could not tell herself that! She remembered exactly how it
had looked when Mr. Sleuth had first stood, a strange, queer-looking
figure of a man, on her doorstep.

She further remembered how he had put the bag down on the floor of the
top front room, and then, forgetting what he had done, how he had asked
her eagerly, in a tone of angry fear, where the bag was—only to find it
safely lodged at his feet!

As time went on Mrs. Bunting thought a great deal about that bag, for,
strange and amazing fact, she never saw Mr. Sleuth’s bag again. But, of
course, she soon formed a theory as to its whereabouts. The brown
leather bag which had formed Mr. Sleuth’s only luggage the afternoon of
his arrival was almost certainly locked up in the lower part of the
drawing-room chiffonnier. Mr. Sleuth evidently always carried the key
of the little corner cupboard about his person; Mrs. Bunting had also
had a good hunt for that key, but, as was the case with the bag, the
key disappeared, and she never saw either the one or the other again.




CHAPTER V.


How quietly, how uneventfully, how pleasantly, sped the next few days.
Already life was settling down into a groove. Waiting on Mr. Sleuth was
just what Mrs. Bunting could manage to do easily, and without tiring
herself.

It had at once become clear that the lodger preferred to be waited on
only by one person, and that person his landlady. He gave her very
little trouble. Indeed, it did her good having to wait on the lodger;
it even did her good that he was not like other gentlemen; for the fact
occupied her mind, and in a way it amused her. The more so that
whatever his oddities Mr. Sleuth had none of those tiresome,
disagreeable ways with which landladies are only too familiar, and
which seem peculiar only to those human beings who also happen to be
lodgers. To take but one point: Mr. Sleuth did not ask to be called
unduly early. Bunting and his Ellen had fallen into the way of lying
rather late in the morning, and it was a great comfort not to have to
turn out to make the lodger a cup of tea at seven, or even half-past
seven. Mr. Sleuth seldom required anything before eleven.

But odd he certainly was.

The second evening he had been with them Mr. Sleuth had brought in a
book of which the queer name was Cruden’s Concordance. That and the
Bible—Mrs. Bunting had soon discovered that there was a relation
between the two books—seemed to be the lodger’s only reading. He spent
hours each day, generally after he had eaten the breakfast which also
served for luncheon, poring over the Old Testament and over that
strange kind of index to the Book.

As for the delicate and yet the all-important question of money, Mr.
Sleuth was everything—everything that the most exacting landlady could
have wished. Never had there been a more confiding or trusting
gentleman. On the very first day he had been with them he had allowed
his money—the considerable sum of one hundred and eighty-four
sovereigns—to lie about wrapped up in little pieces of rather dirty
newspaper on his dressing-table. That had quite upset Mrs. Bunting. She
had allowed herself respectfully to point out to him that what he was
doing was foolish, indeed wrong. But as only answer he had laughed, and
she had been startled when the loud, unusual and discordant sound had
issued from his thin lips.

“I know those I can trust,” he had answered, stuttering rather, as was
his way when moved. “And—and I assure you, Mrs. Bunting, that I hardly
have to speak to a human being—especially to a woman” (and he had drawn
in his breath with a hissing sound) “before I know exactly what manner
of person is before me.”

It hadn’t taken the landlady very long to find out that her lodger had
a queer kind of fear and dislike of women. When she was doing the
staircase and landings she would often hear Mr. Sleuth reading aloud to
himself passages in the Bible that were very uncomplimentary to her
sex. But Mrs. Bunting had no very great opinion of her sister woman, so
that didn’t put her out. Besides, where one’s lodger is concerned, a
dislike of women is better than—well, than the other thing.

In any case, where would have been the good of worrying about the
lodger’s funny ways? Of course, Mr. Sleuth was eccentric. If he hadn’t
been, as Bunting funnily styled it, “just a leetle touched upstairs,”
he wouldn’t be here, living this strange, solitary life in lodgings. He
would be living in quite a different sort of way with some of his
relatives, or with a friend of his own class.

There came a time when Mrs. Bunting, looking back—as even the least
imaginative of us are apt to look back to any part of our own past
lives which becomes for any reason poignantly memorable—wondered how
soon it was that she had discovered that her lodger was given to
creeping out of the house at a time when almost all living things
prefer to sleep.

She brought herself to believe—but I am inclined to doubt whether she
was right in so believing—that the first time she became aware of this
strange nocturnal habit of Mr. Sleuth’s happened to be during the night
which preceded the day on which she had observed a very curious
circumstance. This very curious circumstance was the complete
disappearance of one of Mr. Sleuth’s three suits of clothes.

It always passes my comprehension how people can remember, over any
length of time, not every moment of certain happenings, for that is
natural enough, but the day, the hour, the minute when these happenings
took place! Much as she thought about it afterwards, even Mrs. Bunting
never quite made up her mind whether it was during the fifth or the
sixth night of Mr. Sleuth’s stay under her roof that she became aware
that he had gone out at two in the morning and had only come in at
five.

But that there did come such a night is certain—as certain as is the
fact that her discovery coincided with various occurrences which were
destined to remain retrospectively memorable.

It was intensely dark, intensely quiet—the darkest quietest hour of the
night, when suddenly Mrs. Bunting was awakened from a deep, dreamless
sleep by sounds at once unexpected and familiar. She knew at once what
those sounds were. They were those made by Mr. Sleuth, first coming
down the stairs, and walking on tiptoe—she was sure it was on
tiptoe—past her door, and finally softly shutting the front door behind
him.

Try as she would, Mrs. Bunting found it quite impossible to go to sleep
again. There she lay wide awake, afraid to move lest Bunting should
waken up too, till she heard Mr. Sleuth, three hours later, creep back
into the house and so up to bed.

Then, and not till then, she slept again. But in the morning she felt
very tired, so tired indeed, that she had been very glad when Bunting
good-naturedly suggested that he should go out and do their little bit
of marketing.

The worthy couple had very soon discovered that in the matter of
catering it was not altogether an easy matter to satisfy Mr. Sleuth,
and that though he always tried to appear pleased. This perfect lodger
had one serious fault from the point of view of those who keep
lodgings. Strange to say, he was a vegetarian. He would not eat meat in
any form. He sometimes, however, condescended to a chicken, and when he
did so condescend he generously intimated that Mr. and Mrs. Bunting
were welcome to a share in it.

Now to-day—this day of which the happenings were to linger in Mrs.
Bunting’s mind so very long, and to remain so very vivid, it had been
arranged that Mr. Sleuth was to have some fish for his lunch, while
what he left was to be “done up” to serve for his simple supper.

Knowing that Bunting would be out for at least an hour, for he was a
gregarious soul, and liked to have a gossip in the shops he frequented,
Mrs. Bunting rose and dressed in a leisurely manner; then she went and
“did” her front sitting-room.

She felt languid and dull, as one is apt to feel after a broken night,
and it was a comfort to her to know that Mr. Sleuth was not likely to
ring before twelve.

But long before twelve a loud ring suddenly clanged through the quiet
house. She knew it for the front door bell.

Mrs. Bunting frowned. No doubt the ring betokened one of those tiresome
people who come round for old bottles and such-like fal-lals.

She went slowly, reluctantly to the door. And then her face cleared,
for it was that good young chap, Joe Chandler, who stood waiting
outside.

He was breathing a little hard, as if he had walked over-quickly
through the moist, foggy air.

“Why, Joe?” said Mrs. Bunting wonderingly. “Come in—do! Bunting’s out,
but he won’t be very long now. You’ve been quite a stranger these last
few days.”

“Well, you know why, Mrs. Bunting—”

She stared at him for a moment, wondering what he could mean. Then,
suddenly she remembered. Why, of course, Joe was on a big job just
now—the job of trying to catch The Avenger! Her husband had alluded to
the fact again and again when reading out to her little bits from the
halfpenny evening paper he was taking again.

She led the way to the sitting-room. It was a good thing Bunting had
insisted on lighting the fire before he went out, for now the room was
nice and warm—and it was just horrible outside. She had felt a chill go
right through her as she had stood, even for that second, at the front
door.

And she hadn’t been alone to feel it, for, “I say, it is jolly to be in
here, out of that awful cold!” exclaimed Chandler, sitting down heavily
in Bunting’s easy chair.

And then Mrs. Bunting bethought herself that the young man was tired,
as well as cold. He was pale, almost pallid under his usual healthy,
tanned complexion—the complexion of the man who lives much out of
doors.

“Wouldn’t you like me just to make you a cup of tea?” she said
solicitously.

“Well, to tell truth, I should be right down thankful for one, Mrs.
Bunting!” Then he looked round, and again he said her name, “Mrs.
Bunting—?”

He spoke in so odd, so thick a tone that she turned quickly. “Yes, what
is it, Joe?” she asked. And then, in sudden terror, “You’ve never come
to tell me that anything’s happened to Bunting? He’s not had an
accident?”

“Goodness, no! Whatever made you think that? But—but, Mrs. Bunting,
there’s been another of them!”

His voice dropped almost to a whisper. He was staring at her with
unhappy, it seemed to her terror-filled, eyes.

“Another of them?” She looked at him, bewildered—at a loss. And then
what he meant flashed across her—“another of them” meant another of
these strange, mysterious, awful murders.

But her relief for the moment was so great—for she really had thought
for a second that he had come to give her ill news of Bunting—that the
feeling that she did experience on hearing this piece of news was
actually pleasurable, though she would have been much shocked had that
fact been brought to her notice.

Almost in spite of herself, Mrs. Bunting had become keenly interested
in the amazing series of crimes which was occupying the imagination of
the whole of London’s nether-world. Even her refined mind had busied
itself for the last two or three days with the strange problem so
frequently presented to it by Bunting—for Bunting, now that they were
no longer worried, took an open, unashamed, intense interest in “The
Avenger” and his doings.

She took the kettle off the gas-ring. “It’s a pity Bunting isn’t here,”
she said, drawing in her breath. “He’d a-liked so much to hear you tell
all about it, Joe.”

As she spoke she was pouring boiling water into a little teapot.

But Chandler said nothing, and she turned and glanced at him. “Why, you
do look bad!” she exclaimed.

And, indeed, the young fellow did look bad—very bad indeed.

“I can’t help it,” he said, with a kind of gasp. “It was your saying
that about my telling you all about it that made me turn queer. You
see, this time I was one of the first there, and it fairly turned me
sick—that it did. Oh, it was too awful, Mrs. Bunting! Don’t talk of
it.”

He began gulping down the hot tea before it was well made.

She looked at him with sympathetic interest. “Why, Joe,” she said, “I
never would have thought, with all the horrible sights you see, that
anything could upset you like that.”

“This isn’t like anything there’s ever been before,” he said. “And
then—then—oh, Mrs. Bunting, ’twas I that discovered the piece of paper
this time.”

“Then it _is_ true,” she cried eagerly. “It _is_ The Avenger’s bit of
paper! Bunting always said it was. He never believed in that practical
joker.”

“I did,” said Chandler reluctantly. “You see, there are some queer
fellows even—even—” (he lowered his voice, and looked round him as if
the walls had ears)—“even in the Force, Mrs. Bunting, and these murders
have fair got on our nerves.”

“No, never!” she said. “D’you think that a Bobby might do a thing like
that?”

He nodded impatiently, as if the question wasn’t worth answering. Then,
“It was all along of that bit of paper and my finding it while the poor
soul was still warm,”—he shuddered—“that brought me out West this
morning. One of our bosses lives close by, in Prince Albert Terrace,
and I had to go and tell him all about it. They never offered me a bit
or a sup—I think they might have done that, don’t you, Mrs. Bunting?”

“Yes,” she said absently. “Yes, I do think so.”

“But, there, I don’t know that I ought to say that,” went on Chandler.
“He had me up in his dressing-room, and was very considerate-like to me
while I was telling him.”

“Have a bit of something now?” she said suddenly.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t eat anything,” he said hastily. “I don’t feel as if
I could ever eat anything any more.”

“That’ll only make you ill.” Mrs. Bunting spoke rather crossly, for she
was a sensible woman. And to please her he took a bite out of the slice
of bread-and-butter she had cut for him.

“I expect you’re right,” he said. “And I’ve a goodish heavy day in
front of me. Been up since four, too—”

“Four?” she said. “Was it then they found—” she hesitated a moment, and
then said, “it?”

He nodded. “It was just a chance I was near by. If I’d been half a
minute sooner either I or the officer who found her must have knocked
up against that—that monster. But two or three people do think they saw
him slinking away.”

“What was he like?” she asked curiously.

“Well, that’s hard to answer. You see, there was such an awful fog. But
there’s one thing they all agree about. He was carrying a bag—”

“A bag?” repeated Mrs. Bunting, in a low voice. “Whatever sort of bag
might it have been, Joe?”

There had come across her—just right in her middle, like—such a strange
sensation, a curious kind of tremor, or fluttering.

She was at a loss to account for it.

“Just a hand-bag,” said Joe Chandler vaguely. “A woman I spoke
to—cross-examining her, like—who was positive she had seen him, said,
‘Just a tall, thin shadow—that’s what he was, a tall, thin shadow of a
man—with a bag.’”

“With a bag?” repeated Mrs. Bunting absently. “How very strange and
peculiar—”

“Why, no, not strange at all. He has to carry the thing he does the
deed with in something, Mrs. Bunting. We’ve always wondered how he hid
it. They generally throws the knife or fire-arms away, you know.”

“Do they, indeed?” Mrs. Bunting still spoke in that absent, wondering
way. She was thinking that she really must try and see what the lodger
had done with his bag. It was possible—in fact, when one came to think
of it, it was very probable—that he had just lost it, being so
forgetful a gentleman, on one of the days he had gone out, as she knew
he was fond of doing, into the Regent’s Park.

“There’ll be a description circulated in an hour or two,” went on
Chandler. “Perhaps that’ll help catch him. There isn’t a London man or
woman, I don’t suppose, who wouldn’t give a good bit to lay that chap
by the heels. Well, I suppose I must be going now.”

“Won’t you wait a bit longer for Bunting?” she said hesitatingly.

“No, I can’t do that. But I’ll come in, maybe, either this evening or
to-morrow, and tell you any more that’s happened. Thanks kindly for the
tea. It’s made a man of me, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Well, you’ve had enough to unman you, Joe.”

“Aye, that I have,” he said heavily.

A few minutes later Bunting did come in, and he and his wife had quite
a little tiff—the first tiff they had had since Mr. Sleuth became their
lodger.

It fell out this way. When he heard who had been there, Bunting was
angry that Mrs. Bunting hadn’t got more details of the horrible
occurrence which had taken place that morning, out of Chandler.

“You don’t mean to say, Ellen, that you can’t even tell me where it
happened?” he said indignantly. “I suppose you put Chandler off—that’s
what you did! Why, whatever did he come here for, excepting to tell us
all about it?”

“He came to have something to eat and drink,” snapped out Mrs. Bunting.
“That’s what the poor lad came for, if you wants to know. He could
hardly speak of it at all—he felt so bad. In fact, he didn’t say a word
about it until he’d come right into the room and sat down. He told me
quite enough!”

“Didn’t he tell you if the piece of paper on which the murderer had
written his name was square or three-cornered?” demanded Bunting.

“No; he did not. And that isn’t the sort of thing I should have cared
to ask him.”

“The more fool you!” And then he stopped abruptly. The newsboys were
coming down the Marylebone Road, shouting out the awful discovery which
had been made that morning—that of The Avenger’s fifth murder. Bunting
went out to buy a paper, and his wife took the things he had brought in
down to the kitchen.

The noise the newspaper-sellers made outside had evidently wakened Mr.
Sleuth, for his landlady hadn’t been in the kitchen ten minutes before
his bell rang.




CHAPTER VI.


Mr. Sleuth’s bell rang again.

Mr. Sleuth’s breakfast was quite ready, but for the first time since he
had been her lodger Mrs. Bunting did not answer the summons at once.
But when there came the second imperative tinkle—for electric bells had
not been fitted into that old-fashioned house—she made up her mind to
go upstairs.

As she emerged into the hall from the kitchen stairway, Bunting,
sitting comfortably in their parlour, heard his wife stepping heavily
under the load of the well-laden tray.

“Wait a minute!” he called out. “I’ll help you, Ellen,” and he came out
and took the tray from her.

She said nothing, and together they proceeded up to the drawing-room
floor landing.

There she stopped him. “Here,” she whispered quickly, “you give me
that, Bunting. The lodger won’t like your going in to him.” And then,
as he obeyed her, and was about to turn downstairs again, she added in
a rather acid tone, “You might open the door for me, at any rate! How
can I manage to do it with this here heavy tray on my hands?”

She spoke in a queer, jerky way, and Bunting felt surprised—rather put
out. Ellen wasn’t exactly what you’d call a lively, jolly woman, but
when things were going well—as now—she was generally equable enough. He
supposed she was still resentful of the way he had spoken to her about
young Chandler and the new Avenger murder.

However, he was always for peace, so he opened the drawing-room door,
and as soon as he had started going downstairs Mrs. Bunting walked into
the room.

And then at once there came over her the queerest feeling of relief, of
lightness of heart.

As usual, the lodger was sitting at his old place, reading the Bible.

Somehow—she could not have told you why, she would not willingly have
told herself—she had expected to see Mr. Sleuth _looking different_.
But no, he appeared to be exactly the same—in fact, as he glanced up at
her a pleasanter smile than usual lighted up his thin, pallid face.

“Well, Mrs. Bunting,” he said genially, “I overslept myself this
morning, but I feel all the better for the rest.”

“I’m glad of that, sir,” she answered, in a low voice. “One of the
ladies I once lived with used to say, ‘Rest is an old-fashioned remedy,
but it’s the best remedy of all.’”

Mr. Sleuth himself removed the Bible and Cruden’s Concordance off the
table out of her way, and then he stood watching his landlady laying
the cloth.

Suddenly he spoke again. He was not often so talkative in the morning.
“I think, Mrs. Bunting, that there was someone with you outside the
door just now?”

“Yes, sir. Bunting helped me up with the tray.”

“I’m afraid I give you a good deal of trouble,” he said hesitatingly.

But she answered quickly, “Oh, no, sir! Not at all, sir! I was only
saying yesterday that we’ve never had a lodger that gave us as little
trouble as you do, sir.”

“I’m glad of that. I am aware that my habits are somewhat peculiar.”

He looked at her fixedly, as if expecting her to give some sort of
denial to this observation. But Mrs. Bunting was an honest and truthful
woman. It never occurred to her to question his statement. Mr. Sleuth’s
habits were somewhat peculiar. Take that going out at night, or rather
in the early morning, for instance? So she remained silent.

After she had laid the lodger’s breakfast on the table she prepared to
leave the room. “I suppose I’m not to do your room till you goes out,
sir?”

And Mr. Sleuth looked up sharply. “No, no!” he said. “I never want my
room done when I am engaged in studying the Scriptures, Mrs. Bunting.
But I am not going out to-day. I shall be carrying out a somewhat
elaborate experiment—upstairs. If I go out at all” he waited a moment,
and again he looked at her fixedly “—I shall wait till night-time to do
so.” And then, coming back to the matter in hand, he added hastily,
“Perhaps you could do my room when I go upstairs, about five o’clock—if
that time is convenient to you, that is?”

“Oh, yes, sir! That’ll do nicely!”

Mrs. Bunting went downstairs, and as she did so she took herself
wordlessly, ruthlessly to task, but she did not face—even in her inmost
heart—the strange tenors and tremors which had so shaken her. She only
repeated to herself again and again, “I’ve got upset—that’s what I’ve
done,” and then she spoke aloud, “I must get myself a dose at the
chemist’s next time I’m out. That’s what I must do.”

And just as she murmured the word “do,” there came a loud double knock
on the front door.

It was only the postman’s knock, but the postman was an unfamiliar
visitor in that house, and Mrs. Bunting started violently. She was
nervous, that’s what was the matter with her,—so she told herself
angrily. No doubt this was a letter for Mr. Sleuth; the lodger must
have relations and acquaintances somewhere in the world. All gentlefolk
have. But when she picked the small envelope off the hall floor, she
saw it was a letter from Daisy, her husband’s daughter.

“Bunting!” she called out sharply. “Here’s a letter for you.”

She opened the door of their sitting-room and looked in. Yes, there was
her husband, sitting back comfortably in his easy chair, reading a
paper. And as she saw his broad, rather rounded back, Mrs. Bunting felt
a sudden thrill of sharp irritation. There he was, doing nothing—in
fact, doing worse than nothing—wasting his time reading all about those
horrid crimes.

She sighed—a long, unconscious sigh. Bunting was getting into idle
ways, bad ways for a man of his years. But how could she prevent it? He
had been such an active, conscientious sort of man when they had first
made acquaintance. . .

She also could remember, even more clearly than Bunting did himself,
that first meeting of theirs in the dining-room of No. 90 Cumberland
Terrace. As she had stood there, pouring out her mistress’s glass of
port wine, she had not been too much absorbed in her task to have a
good out-of-her-eye look at the spruce, nice, respectable-looking
fellow who was standing over by the window. How superior he had
appeared even then to the man she already hoped he would succeed as
butler!

To-day, perhaps because she was not feeling quite herself, the past
rose before her very vividly, and a lump came into her throat.

Putting the letter addressed to her husband on the table, she closed
the door softly, and went down into the kitchen; there were various
little things to put away and clean up, as well as their dinner to
cook. And all the time she was down there she fixed her mind
obstinately, determinedly on Bunting and on the problem of Bunting. She
wondered what she’d better do to get him into good ways again.

Thanks to Mr. Sleuth, their outlook was now moderately bright. A week
ago everything had seemed utterly hopeless. It seemed as if nothing
could save them from disaster. But everything was now changed!

Perhaps it would be well for her to go and see the new proprietor of
that registry office, in Baker Street, which had lately changed hands.
It would be a good thing for Bunting to get even an occasional job—for
the matter of that he could now take up a fairly regular thing in the
way of waiting. Mrs. Bunting knew that it isn’t easy to get a man out
of idle ways once he has acquired those ways.

When, at last, she went upstairs again she felt a little ashamed of
what she had been thinking, for Bunting had laid the cloth, and laid it
very nicely, too, and brought up the two chairs to the table.

“Ellen?” he cried eagerly, “here’s news! Daisy’s coming to-morrow!
There’s scarlet fever in their house. Old Aunt thinks she’d better come
away for a few days. So, you see, she’ll be here for her birthday.
Eighteen, that’s what she be on the nineteenth! It do make me feel
old—that it do!”

Mrs. Bunting put down the tray. “I can’t have the girl here just now,”
she said shortly. “I’ve just as much to do as I can manage. The lodger
gives me more trouble than you seem to think for.”

“Rubbish!” he said sharply. “I’ll help you with the lodger. It’s your
own fault you haven’t had help with him before. Of course, Daisy must
come here. Whatever other place could the girl go to?”

Bunting felt pugnacious—so cheerful as to be almost light-hearted. But
as he looked across at his wife his feeling of satisfaction vanished.
Ellen’s face was pinched and drawn to-day; she looked ill—ill and
horribly tired. It was very aggravating of her to go and behave like
this—just when they were beginning to get on nicely again.

“For the matter of that,” he said suddenly, “Daisy’ll be able to help
you with the work, Ellen, and she’ll brisk us both up a bit.”

Mrs. Bunting made no answer. She sat down heavily at the table. And
then she said languidly, “You might as well show me the girl’s letter.”

He handed it across to her, and she read it slowly to herself.

“DEAR FATHER (it ran)—I hope this finds you as well at it leaves me.
Mrs. Puddle’s youngest has got scarlet fever, and Aunt thinks I had
better come away at once, just to stay with you for a few days. Please
tell Ellen I won’t give her no trouble. I’ll start at ten if I don’t
hear nothing.—Your loving daughter,


“DAISY.”


“Yes, I suppose Daisy will have to come here,” Mrs. Bunting slowly.
“It’ll do her good to have a bit of work to do for once in her life.”

And with that ungraciously worded permission Bunting had to content
himself.

Quietly the rest of that eventful day sped by. When dusk fell Mr.
Sleuth’s landlady heard him go upstairs to the top floor. She
remembered that this was the signal for her to go and do his room.

He was a tidy man, was the lodger; he did not throw his things about as
so many gentlemen do, leaving them all over the place. No, he kept
everything scrupulously tidy. His clothes, and the various articles
Mrs. Bunting had bought for him during the first two days he had been
there, were carefully arranged in the chest of drawers. He had lately
purchased a pair of boots. Those he had arrived in were
peculiar-looking footgear, buff leather shoes with rubber soles, and he
had told his landlady on that very first day that he never wished them
to go down to be cleaned.

A funny idea—a funny habit that, of going out for a walk after midnight
in weather so cold and foggy that all other folk were glad to be at
home, snug in bed. But then Mr. Sleuth himself admitted that he was a
funny sort of gentleman.

After she had done his bedroom the landlady went into the sitting-room
and gave it a good dusting. This room was not kept quite as nice as she
would have liked it to be. Mrs. Bunting longed to give the drawing-room
something of a good turn out; but Mr. Sleuth disliked her to be moving
about in it when he himself was in his bedroom; and when up he sat
there almost all the time. Delighted as he had seemed to be with the
top room, he only used it when making his mysterious experiments, and
never during the day-time.

And now, this afternoon, she looked at the rosewood chiffonnier with
longing eyes—she even gave that pretty little piece of furniture a
slight shake. If only the doors would fly open, as the locked doors of
old cupboards sometimes do, even after they have been securely
fastened, how pleased she would be, how much more comfortable somehow
she would feel!

But the chiffonnier refused to give up its secret.

About eight o’clock on that same evening Joe Chandler came in, just for
a few minutes’ chat. He had recovered from his agitation of the
morning, but he was full of eager excitement, and Mrs. Bunting listened
in silence, intensely interested in spite of herself, while he and
Bunting talked.

“Yes,” he said, “I’m as right as a trivet now! I’ve had a good
rest—laid down all this afternoon. You see, the Yard thinks there’s
going to be something on to-night. He’s always done them in pairs.”

“So he has,” exclaimed Bunting wonderingly. “So he has! Now, I never
thought o’ that. Then you think, Joe, that the monster’ll be on the job
again to-night?”

Chandler nodded. “Yes. And I think there’s a very good chance of his
being caught too—”

“I suppose there’ll be a lot on the watch to-night, eh?”

“I should think there will be! How many of our men d’you think there’ll
be on night duty to-night, Mr. Bunting?”

Bunting shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said helplessly.

“I mean extra,” suggested Chandler, in an encouraging voice.

“A thousand?” ventured Bunting.

“Five thousand, Mr. Bunting.”

“Never!” exclaimed Bunting, amazed.

And even Mrs. Bunting echoed “Never!” incredulously.

“Yes, that there will. You see, the Boss has got his monkey up!”
Chandler drew a folded-up newspaper out of his coat pocket. “Just
listen to this:

“‘The police have reluctantly to admit that they have no clue to the
perpetrators of these horrible crimes, and we cannot feel any surprise
at the information that a popular attack has been organised on the
Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. There is even talk of an
indignation mass meeting.’


“What d’you think of that? That’s not a pleasant thing for a gentleman
as is doing his best to read, eh?”

“Well, it does seem queer that the police can’t catch him, now doesn’t
it?” said Bunting argumentatively.

“I don’t think it’s queer at all,” said young Chandler crossly. “Now
you just listen again! Here’s a bit of the truth for once—in a
newspaper.” And slowly he read out:

“‘The detection of crime in London now resembles a game of blind man’s
buff, in which the detective has his hands tied and his eyes bandaged.
Thus is he turned loose to hunt the murderer through the slums of a
great city.’”


“Whatever does that mean?” said Bunting. “Your hands aren’t tied, and
your eyes aren’t bandaged, Joe?”

“It’s metaphorical-like that it’s intended, Mr. Bunting. We haven’t got
the same facilities—no, not a quarter of them—that the French ’tecs
have.”

And then, for the first time, Mrs. Bunting spoke: “What was that word,
Joe—‘perpetrators’? I mean that first bit you read out.”

“Yes,” he said, turning to her eagerly.

“Then do they think there’s more than one of them?” she said, and a
look of relief came over her thin face.

“There’s some of our chaps thinks it’s a gang,” said Chandler. “They
say it can’t be the work of one man.”

“What do _you_ think, Joe?”

“Well, Mrs. Bunting, I don’t know what to think. I’m fair puzzled.”

He got up. “Don’t you come to the door. I’ll shut it all right. So
long! See you to-morrow, perhaps.” As he had done the other evening,
Mr. and Mrs. Bunting’s visitor stopped at the door. “Any news of Miss
Daisy?” he asked casually.

“Yes; she’s coming to-morrow,” said her father. “They’ve got scarlet
fever at her place. So Old Aunt thinks she’d better clear out.”

The husband and wife went to bed early that night, but Mrs. Bunting
found she could not sleep. She lay wide awake, hearing the hours, the
half-hours, the quarters chime out from the belfry of the old church
close by.

And then, just as she was dozing off—it must have been about one
o’clock—she heard the sound she had half unconsciously been expecting
to hear, that of the lodger’s stealthy footsteps coming down the stairs
just outside her room.

He crept along the passage and let himself out very, very quietly.

But though she tried to keep awake, Mrs. Bunting did not hear him come
in again, for she soon fell into a heavy sleep.

Oddly enough, she was the first to wake the next morning; odder still,
it was she, not Bunting, who jumped out of bed, and going out into the
passage, picked up the newspaper which had just been pushed through the
letter-box.

But having picked it up, Mrs. Bunting did not go back at once into her
bedroom. Instead she lit the gas in the passage, and leaning up against
the wall to steady herself, for she was trembling with cold and
fatigue, she opened the paper.

Yes, there was the heading she sought:

“THE AVENGER MURDERS”


But, oh, how glad she was to see the words that followed:

“Up to the time of going to press there is little new to report
concerning the extraordinary series of crimes which are amazing, and,
indeed, staggering not only London, but the whole civilised world, and
which would seem to be the work of some woman-hating teetotal fanatic.
Since yesterday morning, when the last of these dastardly murders was
committed, no reliable clue to the perpetrator, or perpetrators, has
been obtained, though several arrests were made in the course of the
day. In every case, however, those arrested were able to prove a
satisfactory alibi.”


And then, a little lower down:

“The excitement grows and grows. It is not too much to say that even a
stranger to London would know that something very unusual was in the
air. As for the place where the murder was committed last night—”


“Last night!” thought Mrs. Bunting, startled; and then she realised
that “last night,” in this connection, meant the night before last.

She began the sentence again:

“As for the place where the murder was committed last night, all
approaches to it were still blocked up to a late hour by hundreds of
onlookers, though, of course, nothing now remains in the way of traces
of the tragedy.”


Slowly and carefully Mrs. Bunting folded the paper up again in its
original creases, and then she stooped and put it back down on the mat
where she had found it. She then turned out the gas, and going back
into bed she lay down by her still sleeping husband.

“Anything the matter?” Bunting murmured, and stirred uneasily.
“Anything the matter, Ellen?”

She answered in a whisper, a whisper thrilling with a strange gladness,
“No, nothing, Bunting—nothing the matter! Go to sleep again, my dear.”

They got up an hour later, both in a happy, cheerful mood. Bunting
rejoiced at the thought of his daughter’s coming, and even Daisy’s
stepmother told herself that it would be pleasant having the girl about
the house to help her a bit.

About ten o’clock Bunting went out to do some shopping. He brought back
with him a nice little bit of pork for Daisy’s dinner, and three
mince-pies. He even remembered to get some apples for the sauce.




CHAPTER VII.


Just as twelve was striking a four-wheeler drew up to the gate.

It brought Daisy—pink-cheeked, excited, laughing-eyed Daisy—a sight to
gladden any father’s heart.

“Old Aunt said I was to have a cab if the weather was bad,” she cried
out joyously.

There was a bit of a wrangle over the fare. King’s Cross, as all the
world knows, is nothing like two miles from the Marylebone Road, but
the man clamoured for one and sixpence, and hinted darkly that he had
done the young lady a favour in bringing her at all.

While he and Bunting were having words, Daisy, leaving them to it,
walked up the flagged path to the door where her stepmother was
awaiting her.

As they were exchanging a rather frigid kiss, indeed, ’twas a mere peck
on Mrs. Bunting’s part, there fell, with startling suddenness, loud
cries on the still, cold air. Long-drawn and wailing, they sounded
strangely sad as they rose and fell across the distant roar of traffic
in the Edgware Road.

“What’s that?” exclaimed Bunting wonderingly. “Why, whatever’s that?”

The cabman lowered his voice. “Them’s ’a-crying out that ’orrible
affair at King’s Cross. He’s done for two of ’em this time! That’s what
I meant when I said I might ’a got a better fare. I wouldn’t say
nothink before little missy there, but folk ’ave been coming from all
over London the last five or six hours; plenty of toffs, too—but there,
there’s nothing to see now!”

“What? Another woman murdered last night?”

Bunting felt tremendously thrilled. What had the five thousand
constables been about to let such a dreadful thing happen?

The cabman stared at him, surprised. “Two of ’em, I tell yer—within a
few yards of one another. He ’ave—got a nerve—But, of course, they was
drunk. He are got a down on the drink!”

“Have they caught him?” asked Bunting perfunctorily.

“Lord, no! They’ll never catch ’im! It must ’ave happened hours and
hours ago—they was both stone cold. One each end of a little passage
what ain’t used no more. That’s why they didn’t find ’em before.”

The hoarse cries were coming nearer and nearer—two news vendors trying
to outshout each other.

“’Orrible discovery near King’s Cross!” they yelled exultingly. “The
Avenger again!”

And Bunting, with his daughter’s large straw hold-all in his hand, ran
forward into the roadway and recklessly gave a boy a penny for a
halfpenny paper.

He felt very much moved and excited. Somehow his acquaintance with
young Joe Chandler made these murders seem a personal affair. He hoped
that Chandler would come in soon and tell them all about it, as he had
done yesterday morning when he, Bunting, had unluckily been out.

As he walked back into the little hall, he heard Daisy’s voice—high,
voluble, excited—giving her stepmother a long account of the scarlet
fever case, and how at first Old Aunt’s neighbours had thought it was
not scarlet fever at all, but just nettlerash.

But as Bunting pushed open the door of the sitting-room, there came a
note of sharp alarm in his daughter’s voice, and he heard her cry,
“Why, Ellen, whatever is the matter? You _do_ look bad!” and his wife’s
muffled answer, “Open the window—do.”

“’Orrible discovery near King’s Cross—a clue at last!” yelled the
newspaper-boys triumphantly.

And then, helplessly, Mrs. Bunting began to laugh. She laughed, and
laughed, and laughed, rocking herself to and fro as if in an ecstasy of
mirth.

“Why, father, whatever’s the matter with her?”

Daisy looked quite scared.

“She’s in ’sterics—that’s what it is,” he said shortly. “I’ll just get
the water-jug. Wait a minute!”

Bunting felt very put out. Ellen was ridiculous—that’s what she was, to
be so easily upset.

The lodger’s bell suddenly pealed through the quiet house. Either that
sound, or maybe the threat of the water-jug, had a magical effect on
Mrs. Bunting. She rose to her feet, still shaking all over, but
mentally composed.

“I’ll go up,” she said a little chokingly. “As for you, child, just run
down into the kitchen. You’ll find a piece of pork roasting in the
oven. You might start paring the apples for the sauce.”

As Mrs. Bunting went upstairs her legs felt as if they were made of
cotton wool. She put out a trembling hand, and clutched at the banister
for support. But soon, making a great effort over herself, she began to
feel more steady; and after waiting for a few moments on the landing,
she knocked at the door of the drawing-room.

Mr. Sleuth’s voice answered her from the bedroom. “I’m not well,” he
called out querulously; “I think I’ve caught a chill. I should be
obliged if you would kindly bring me up a cup of tea, and put it
outside my door, Mrs. Bunting.”

“Very well, sir.”

Mrs. Bunting turned and went downstairs. She still felt queer and
giddy, so instead of going into the kitchen, she made the lodger his
cup of tea over her sitting-room gas-ring.

During their midday dinner the husband and wife had a little discussion
as to where Daisy should sleep. It had been settled that a bed should
be made up for her in the top back room, but Mrs. Bunting saw reason to
change this plan. “I think ’twould be better if Daisy were to sleep
with me, Bunting, and you was to sleep upstairs.”

Bunting felt and looked rather surprised, but he acquiesced. Ellen was
probably right; the girl would be rather lonely up there, and, after
all, they didn’t know much about the lodger, though he seemed a
respectable gentleman enough.

Daisy was a good-natured girl; she liked London, and wanted to make
herself useful to her stepmother. “I’ll wash up; don’t you bother to
come downstairs,” she said cheerfully.

Bunting began to walk up and down the room. His wife gave him a furtive
glance; she wondered what he was thinking about.

“Didn’t you get a paper?” she said at last.

“Yes, of course I did,” he answered hastily. “But I’ve put it away. I
thought you’d rather not look at it, as you’re that nervous.”

Again she glanced at him quickly, furtively, but he seemed just as
usual—he evidently meant just what he said and no more.

“I thought they was shouting something in the street—I mean just before
I was took bad.”

It was now Bunting’s turn to stare at his wife quickly and rather
furtively. He had felt sure that her sudden attack of queerness, of
hysterics—call it what you might—had been due to the shouting outside.
She was not the only woman in London who had got the Avenger murders on
her nerves. His morning paper said quite a lot of women were afraid to
go out alone. Was it possible that the curious way she had been taken
just now had had nothing to do with the shouts and excitement outside?

“Don’t you know what it was they were calling out?” he asked slowly.

Mrs. Bunting looked across at him. She would have given a very great
deal to be able to lie, to pretend that she did not know what those
dreadful cries had portended. But when it came to the point she found
she could not do so.

“Yes,” she said dully. “I heard a word here and there. There’s been
another murder, hasn’t there?”

“Two other murders,” he said soberly.

“Two? That’s worse news!” She turned so pale—a sallow
greenish-white—that Bunting thought she was again going queer.

“Ellen?” he said warningly, “Ellen, now do have a care! I can’t think
what’s come over you about these murders. Turn your mind away from
them, do! We needn’t talk about them—not so much, that is—”

“But I wants to talk about them,” cried Mrs. Bunting hysterically.

The husband and wife were standing, one each side of the table, the man
with his back to the fire, the woman with her back to the door.

Bunting, staring across at his wife, felt sadly perplexed and
disturbed. She really did seem ill; even her slight, spare figure
looked shrunk. For the first time, so he told himself ruefully, Ellen
was beginning to look her full age. Her slender hands—she had kept the
pretty, soft white hands of the woman who has never done rough
work—grasped the edge of the table with a convulsive movement.

Bunting didn’t at all like the look of her. “Oh, dear,” he said to
himself, “I do hope Ellen isn’t going to be ill! That would be a to-do
just now.”

“Tell me about it,” she commanded, in a low voice. “Can’t you see I’m
waiting to hear? Be quick now, Bunting!”

“There isn’t very much to tell,” he said reluctantly. “There’s precious
little in this paper, anyway. But the cabman what brought Daisy told
me—”

“Well?”

“What I said just now. There’s two of ’em this time, and they’d both
been drinking heavily, poor creatures.”

“Was it where the others was done?” she asked looking at her husband
fearfully.

“No,” he said awkwardly. “No, it wasn’t, Ellen. It was a good bit
farther West—in fact, not so very far from here. Near King’s
Cross—that’s how the cabman knew about it, you see. They seems to have
been done in a passage which isn’t used no more.” And then, as he
thought his wife’s eyes were beginning to look rather funny, he added
hastily. “There, that’s enough for the present! We shall soon be
hearing a lot more about it from Joe Chandler. He’s pretty sure to come
in some time to-day.”

“Then the five thousand constables weren’t no use?” said Mrs. Bunting
slowly.

She had relaxed her grip of the table, and was standing more upright.

“No use at all,” said Bunting briefly. “He is artful and no mistake
about it. But wait a minute—” he turned and took up the paper which he
had laid aside, on a chair. “Yes they says here that they has a clue.”

“A clue, Bunting?” Mrs. Bunting spoke in a soft, weak, die-away voice,
and again, stooping somewhat, she grasped the edge of the table.

But her husband was not noticing her now. He was holding the paper
close up to his eyes, and he read from it, in a tone of considerable
satisfaction:

“‘It is gratifying to be able to state that the police at last believe
they are in possession of a clue which will lead to the arrest of
the—’”


and then Bunting dropped the paper and rushed round the table.

His wife, with a curious sighing moan, had slipped down on to the
floor, taking with her the tablecloth as she went. She lay there in
what appeared to be a dead faint. And Bunting, scared out of his wits,
opened the door and screamed out, “Daisy! Daisy! Come up, child.
Ellen’s took bad again.”

And Daisy, hurrying in, showed an amount of sense and resource which
even at this anxious moment roused her fond father’s admiration.

“Get a wet sponge, Dad—quick!” she cried, “a sponge,—and, if you’ve got
such a thing, a drop o’ brandy. I’ll see after her!” And then, after he
had got the little medicine flask, “I can’t think what’s wrong with
Ellen,” said Daisy wonderingly. “She seemed quite all right when I
first came in. She was listening, interested-like, to what I was
telling her, and then, suddenly—well, you saw how she was took, father?
’Tain’t like Ellen this, is it now?”

“No,” he whispered. “No, ’tain’t. But you see, child, we’ve been going
through a pretty bad time—worse nor I should ever have let you know of,
my dear. Ellen’s just feeling it now—that’s what it is. She didn’t say
nothing, for Ellen’s a good plucked one, but it’s told on her—it’s told
on her!”

And then Mrs. Bunting, sitting up, slowly opened her eyes, and
instinctively put her hand up to her head to see if her hair was all
right.

She hadn’t really been quite “off.” It would have been better for her
if she had. She had simply had an awful feeling that she couldn’t stand
up—more, that she must fall down. Bunting’s words touched a most
unwonted chord in the poor woman’s heart, and the eyes which she opened
were full of tears. She had not thought her husband knew how she had
suffered during those weeks of starving and waiting.

But she had a morbid dislike of any betrayal of sentiment. To her such
betrayal betokened “foolishness,” and so all she said was, “There’s no
need to make a fuss! I only turned over a little queer. I never was
right off, Daisy.”

Pettishly she pushed away the glass in which Bunting had hurriedly
poured a little brandy. “I wouldn’t touch such stuff—no, not if I was
dying!” she exclaimed.

Putting out a languid hand, she pulled herself up, with the help of the
table, on to her feet. “Go down again to the kitchen, child”; but there
was a sob, a kind of tremor in her voice.

“You haven’t been eating properly, Ellen—that’s what’s the matter with
you,” said Bunting suddenly. “Now I come to think of it, you haven’t
eat half enough these last two days. I always did say—in old days many
a time I telled you—that a woman couldn’t live on air. But there, you
never believed me!”

Daisy stood looking from one to the other, a shadow over her bright,
pretty face. “I’d no idea you’d had such a bad time, father,” she said
feelingly. “Why didn’t you let me know about it? I might have got
something out of Old Aunt.”

“We didn’t want anything of that sort,” said her stepmother hastily.
“But of course—well, I expect I’m still feeling the worry now. I don’t
seem able to forget it. Those days of waiting, of—of—” she restrained
herself; another moment and the word “starving” would have left her
lips.

“But everything’s all right now,” said Bunting eagerly, “all right,
thanks to Mr. Sleuth, that is.”

“Yes,” repeated his wife, in a low, strange tone of voice. “Yes, we’re
all right now, and as you say, Bunting, it’s all along of Mr. Sleuth.”

She walked across to a chair and sat down on it. “I’m just a little
tottery still,” she muttered.

And Daisy, looking at her, turned to her father and said in a whisper,
but not so low but that Mrs. Bunting heard her, “Don’t you think Ellen
ought to see a doctor, father? He might give her something that would
pull her round.”

“I won’t see no doctor!” said Mrs. Bunting with sudden emphasis. “I saw
enough of doctors in my last place. Thirty-eight doctors in ten months
did my poor missis have. Just determined on having ’em she was! Did
they save her? No! She died just the same! Maybe a bit sooner.”

“She was a freak, was your last mistress, Ellen,” began Bunting
aggressively.

Ellen had insisted on staying on in that place till her poor mistress
died. They might have been married some months before they were married
but for that fact. Bunting had always resented it.

His wife smile wanly. “We won’t have no words about that,” she said,
and again she spoke in a softer, kindlier tone than usual. “Daisy? If
you won’t go down to the kitchen again, then I must”—she turned to her
stepdaughter, and the girl flew out of the room.

“I think the child grows prettier every minute,” said Bunting fondly.

“Folks are too apt to forget that beauty is but skin deep,” said his
wife. She was beginning to feel better. “But still, I do agree,
Bunting, that Daisy’s well enough. And she seems more willing, too.”

“I say, we mustn’t forget the lodger’s dinner,” Bunting spoke uneasily.
“It’s a bit of fish to-day, isn’t it? Hadn’t I better just tell Daisy
to see to it, and then I can take it up to him, as you’re not feeling
quite the thing, Ellen?”

“I’m quite well enough to take up Mr. Sleuth’s luncheon,” she said
quickly. It irritated her to hear her husband speak of the lodger’s
dinner. They had dinner in the middle of the day, but Mr. Sleuth had
luncheon. However odd he might be, Mrs. Bunting never forgot her lodger
was a gentleman.

“After all, he likes me to wait on him, doesn’t he? I can manage all
right. Don’t you worry,” she added after a long pause.




CHAPTER VIII.


Perhaps because his luncheon was served to him a good deal later than
usual, Mr. Sleuth ate his nice piece of steamed sole upstairs with far
heartier an appetite than his landlady had eaten her nice slice of
roast pork downstairs.

“I hope you’re feeling a little better, sir,” Mrs. Bunting had forced
herself to say when she first took in his tray.

And he had answered plaintively, querulously, “No, I can’t say I feel
well to-day, Mrs. Bunting. I am tired—very tired. And as I lay in bed I
seemed to hear so many sounds—so much crying and shouting. I trust the
Marylebone Road is not going to become a noisy thoroughfare, Mrs.
Bunting?”

“Oh, no, sir, I don’t think that. We’re generally reckoned very quiet
indeed, sir.”

She waited a moment—try as she would, she could not allude to what
those unwonted shouts and noises had betokened. “I expect you’ve got a
chill, sir,” she said suddenly. “If I was you, I shouldn’t go out this
afternoon; I’d just stay quietly indoors. There’s a lot of rough people
about—” Perhaps there was an undercurrent of warning, of painful
pleading, in her toneless voice which penetrated in some way to the
brain of the lodger, for Mr. Sleuth looked up, and an uneasy, watchful
look came into his luminous grey eyes.

“I’m sorry to hear that, Mrs. Bunting. But I think I’ll take your
advice. That is, I will stay quietly at home, I am never at a loss to
know what to do with myself so long as I can study the Book of Books.”

“Then you’re not afraid about your eyes, sir?” said Mrs. Bunting
curiously. Somehow she was beginning to feel better. It comforted her
to be up here, talking to Mr. Sleuth, instead of thinking about him
downstairs. It seemed to banish the terror which filled her soul—aye,
and her body, too—at other times. When she was with him Mr. Sleuth was
so gentle, so reasonable, so—so grateful.

Poor kindly, solitary Mr. Sleuth! This kind of gentleman surely
wouldn’t hurt a fly, let alone a human being. Eccentric—so much must be
admitted. But Mrs. Bunting had seen a good deal of eccentric folk,
eccentric women rather than eccentric men, in her long career as useful
maid.

Being at ordinary times an exceptionally sensible, well-balanced woman,
she had never, in old days, allowed her mind to dwell on certain things
she had learnt as to the aberrations of which human nature is
capable—even well-born, well-nurtured, gentle human nature—as
exemplified in some of the households where she had served. It would,
indeed, be unfortunate if she now became morbid or—or hysterical.

So it was in a sharp, cheerful voice, almost the voice in which she had
talked during the first few days of Mr. Sleuth’s stay in her house,
that she exclaimed, “Well, sir, I’ll be up again to clear away in about
half an hour. And if you’ll forgive me for saying so, I hope you will
stay in and have a rest to-day. Nasty, muggy weather—that’s what it is!
If there’s any little thing you want, me or Bunting can go out and get
it.”

It must have been about four o’clock when there came a ring at the
front door.

The three were sitting chatting together, for Daisy had washed up—she
really was saving her stepmother a good bit of trouble—and the girl was
now amusing her elders by a funny account of Old Aunt’s pernickety
ways.

“Whoever can that be?” said Bunting, looking up. “It’s too early for
Joe Chandler, surely.”

“I’ll go,” said his wife, hurriedly jumping up from her chair. “I’ll
go! We don’t want no strangers in here.”

And as she stepped down the short bit of passage she said to herself,
“A clue? What clue?”

But when she opened the front door a glad sigh of relief broke from
her. “Why, Joe? We never thought ’twas you! But you’re very welcome,
I’m sure. Come in.”

And Chandler came in, a rather sheepish look on his good-looking, fair
young face.

“I thought maybe that Mr. Bunting would like to know—” he began, in a
loud, cheerful voice, and Mrs. Bunting hurriedly checked him. She
didn’t want the lodger upstairs to hear what young Chandler might be
going to say.

“Don’t talk so loud,” she said a little sharply. “The lodger is not
very well to-day. He’s had a cold,” she added hastily, “and during the
last two or three days he hasn’t been able to go out.”

She wondered at her temerity, her—her hypocrisy, and that moment, those
few words, marked an epoch in Ellen Bunting’s life. It was the first
time she had told a bold and deliberate lie. She was one of those
women—there are many, many such—to whom there is a whole world of
difference between the suppression of the truth and the utterance of an
untruth.

But Chandler paid no heed to her remarks. “Has Miss Daisy arrived?” he
asked, in a lower voice.

She nodded. And then he went through into the room where the father and
daughter were sitting.

“Well?” said Bunting, starting up. “Well, Joe? Now you can tell us all
about that mysterious clue. I suppose it’d be too good news to expect
you to tell us they’ve caught him?”

“No fear of such good news as that yet awhile. If they’d caught him,”
said Joe ruefully, “well, I don’t suppose I should be here, Mr.
Bunting. But the Yard are circulating a description at last. And—well,
they’ve found his weapon!”

“No?” cried Bunting excitedly. “You don’t say so! Whatever sort of a
thing is it? And are they sure ’tis his?”

“Well, ’tain’t sure, but it seems to be likely.”

Mrs. Bunting had slipped into the room and shut the door behind her.
But she was still standing with her back against the door, looking at
the group in front of her. None of them were thinking of her—she
thanked God for that! She could hear everything that was said without
joining in the talk and excitement.

“Listen to this!” cried Joe Chandler exultantly. “’Tain’t given out
yet—not for the public, that is—but we was all given it by eight
o’clock this morning. Quick work that, eh?” He read out:

“WANTED


“A man, of age approximately 28, slight in figure, height approximately
5 ft. 8 in. Complexion dark. No beard or whiskers. Wearing a black
diagonal coat, hard felt hat, high white collar, and tie. Carried a
newspaper parcel. Very respectable appearance.”


Mrs. Bunting walked forward. She gave a long, fluttering sigh of
unutterable relief.

“There’s the chap!” said Joe Chandler triumphantly. “And now, Miss
Daisy”—he turned to her jokingly, but there was a funny little tremor
in his frank, cheerful-sounding voice—“if you knows of any nice, likely
young fellow that answers to that description—well, you’ve only got to
walk in and earn your reward of five hundred pounds.”

“Five hundred pounds!” cried Daisy and her father simultaneously.

“Yes. That’s what the Lord Mayor offered yesterday. Some private
bloke—nothing official about it. But we of the Yard is barred from
taking that reward, worse luck. And it’s too bad, for we has all the
trouble, after all.”

“Just hand that bit of paper over, will you?” said Bunting. “I’d like
to con it over to myself.”

Chandler threw over the bit of flimsy.

A moment later Bunting looked up and handed it back. “Well, it’s clear
enough, isn’t it?”

“Yes. And there’s hundreds—nay, thousands—of young fellows that might
be a description of,” said Chandler sarcastically. “As a pal of mine
said this morning, ‘There isn’t a chap will like to carry a newspaper
parcel after this.’ And it won’t do to have a respectable
appearance—eh?”

Daisy’s voice rang out in merry, pealing laughter. She greatly
appreciated Mr. Chandler’s witticism.

“Why on earth didn’t the people who saw him try and catch him?” asked
Bunting suddenly.

And Mrs. Bunting broke in, in a lower voice, “Yes, Joe—that seems odd,
don’t it?”

Joe Chandler coughed. “Well, it’s this way,” he said. “No one person
did see all that. The man who’s described here is just made up from the
description of two different folk who _think_ they saw him. You see,
the murders must have taken place—well, now, let me see—perhaps at two
o’clock this last time. Two o’clock—that’s the idea. Well, at such a
time as that not many people are about, especially on a foggy night.
Yes, one woman declares she saw a young chap walking away from the spot
where ’twas done; and another one—but that was a good bit later—says
The Avenger passed by her. It’s mostly her they’re following in this
’ere description. And then the boss who has charge of that sort of
thing looked up what other people had said—I mean when the other crimes
was committed. That’s how he made up this ‘Wanted.’”

“Then The Avenger may be quite a different sort of man?” said Bunting
slowly, disappointedly.

“Well, of course he may be. But, no; I think that description fits him
all right,” said Chandler; but he also spoke in a hesitating voice.

“You was saying, Joe, that they found a weapon?” observed Bunting
insinuatingly.

He was glad that Ellen allowed the discussion to go on—in fact, that
she even seemed to take an intelligent interest in it. She had come up
close to them, and now looked quite her old self again.

“Yes. They believe they’ve found the weapon what he does his awful
deeds with,” said Chandler. “At any rate, within a hundred yards of
that little dark passage where they found the bodies—one at each end,
that was—there was discovered this morning a very peculiar kind o’
knife—‘keen as a razor, pointed as a dagger’—that’s the exact words the
boss used when he was describing it to a lot of us. He seemed to think
a lot more of that clue than of the other—I mean than of the
description people gave of the chap who walked quickly by with a
newspaper parcel. But now there’s a pretty job in front of us. Every
shop where they sell or might a’ sold, such a thing as that knife,
including every eating-house in the East End, has got to be called at!”

“Whatever for?” asked Daisy.

“Why, with an idea of finding out if anyone saw such a knife fooling
about there any time, and, if so, in whose possession it was at the
time. But, Mr. Bunting”—Chandler’s voice changed; it became
businesslike, official—“they’re not going to say anything about
that—not in newspapers—till to-morrow, so don’t you go and tell
anybody. You see, we don’t want to frighten the fellow off. If he knew
they’d got his knife—well, he might just make himself scarce, and they
don’t want that! If it’s discovered that any knife of that kind was
sold, say a month ago, to some customer whose ways are known,
then—then—”

“What’ll happen then?” said Mrs. Bunting, coming nearer.

“Well, then, nothing’ll be put about it in the papers at all,” said
Chandler deliberately. “The only objec’ of letting the public know
about it would be if nothink was found—I mean if the search of the
shops, and so on, was no good. Then, of course, we must try and find
out someone—some private person-like, who’s watched that knife in the
criminal’s possession. It’s there the reward—the five hundred pounds
will come in.”

“Oh, I’d give anything to see that knife!” exclaimed Daisy, clasping
her hands together.

“You cruel, bloodthirsty, girl!” cried her stepmother passionately.

They all looked round at her, surprised.

“Come, come, Ellen!” said Bunting reprovingly.

“Well, it _is_ a horrible idea!” said his wife sullenly. “To go and
sell a fellow-being for five hundred pounds.”

But Daisy was offended. “Of course I’d like to see it!” she cried
defiantly. “I never said nothing about the reward. That was Mr.
Chandler said that! I only said I’d like to see the knife.”

Chandler looked at her soothingly. “Well, the day may come when you
_will_ see it,” he said slowly.

A great idea had come into his mind.

“No! What makes you think that?”

“If they catches him, and if you comes along with me to see our Black
Museum at the Yard, you’ll certainly see the knife, Miss Daisy. They
keeps all them kind of things there. So if, as I say, this weapon
_should_ lead to the conviction of The Avenger—well, then, that knife
’ull be there, and you’ll see it!”

“The Black Museum? Why, whatever do they have a museum in your place
for?” asked Daisy wonderingly. “I thought there was only the British
Museum—”

And then even Mrs. Bunting, as well as Bunting and Chandler, laughed
aloud.

“You are a goosey girl!” said her father fondly. “Why, there’s a lot of
museums in London; the town’s thick with ’em. Ask Ellen there. She and
me used to go to them kind of places when we was courting—if the
weather was bad.”

“But our museum’s the one that would interest Miss Daisy,” broke in
Chandler eagerly. “It’s a regular Chamber of ’Orrors!”

“Why, Joe, you never told us about that place before,” said Bunting
excitedly. “D’you really mean that there’s a museum where they keeps
all sorts of things connected with crimes? Things like knives murders
have been committed with?”

“Knives?” cried Joe, pleased at having become the centre of attention,
for Daisy had also fixed her blue eyes on him, and even Mrs. Bunting
looked at him expectantly. “Much more than knives, Mr. Bunting! Why,
they’ve got there, in little bottles, the real poison what people have
been done away with.”

“And can you go there whenever you like?” asked Daisy wonderingly. She
had not realised before what extraordinary and agreeable privileges are
attached to the position of a detective member of the London Police
Force.

“Well, I suppose I _could_—” Joe smiled. “Anyway I can certainly get
leave to take a friend there.” He looked meaningly at Daisy, and Daisy
looked eagerly at him.

But would Ellen ever let her go out by herself with Mr. Chandler? Ellen
was so prim, so—so irritatingly proper. But what was this father was
saying? “D’you really mean that, Joe?”

“Yes, of course I do!”

“Well, then, look here! If it isn’t asking too much of a favour, I
should like to go along there with you very much one day. I don’t want
to wait till The Avenger’s caught”—Bunting smiled broadly. “I’d be
quite content as it is with what there is in that museum o’ yours.
Ellen, there,”—he looked across at his wife—“don’t agree with me about
such things. Yet I don’t think I’m a bloodthirsty man! But I’m just
terribly interested in all that sort of thing—always have been. I used
to positively envy the butler in that Balham Mystery!”

Again a look passed between Daisy and the young man—it was a look which
contained and carried a great many things backwards and forwards, such
as—“Now, isn’t it funny that your father should want to go to such a
place? But still, I can’t help it if he does want to go, so we must put
up with his company, though it would have been much nicer for us to go
just by our two selves.” And then Daisy’s look answered quite as
plainly, though perhaps Joe didn’t read her glance quite as clearly as
she had read his: “Yes, it is tiresome. But father means well; and
’twill be very pleasant going there, even if he does come too.”

“Well, what d’you say to the day after to-morrow, Mr. Bunting? I’d call
for you here about—shall we say half-past two?—and just take you and
Miss Daisy down to the Yard. ’Twouldn’t take very long; we could go all
the way by bus, right down to Westminster Bridge.” He looked round at
his hostess: “Wouldn’t you join us, Mrs. Bunting? ’Tis truly a
wonderful interesting place.”

But his hostess shook her head decidedly. “’Twould turn me sick,” she
exclaimed, “to see the bottle of poison what had done away with the
life of some poor creature!

“And as for knives—!” a look of real horror, of startled fear, crept
over her pale face.

“There, there!” said Bunting hastily. “Live and let live—that’s what I
always say. Ellen ain’t on in this turn. She can just stay at home and
mind the cat—I beg his pardon, I mean the lodger!”

“I won’t have Mr. Sleuth laughed at,” said Mrs. Bunting darkly. “But
there! I’m sure it’s very kind of you, Joe, to think of giving Bunting
and Daisy such a rare treat”—she spoke sarcastically, but none of the
three who heard her understood that.




CHAPTER IX.


The moment she passed though the great arched door which admits the
stranger to that portion of New Scotland Yard where throbs the heart of
that great organism which fights the forces of civilised crime, Daisy
Bunting felt that she had indeed become free of the Kingdom of Romance.
Even the lift in which the three of them were whirled up to one of the
upper floors of the huge building was to the girl a new and delightful
experience. Daisy had always lived a simple, quiet life in the little
country town where dwelt Old Aunt and this was the first time a lift
had come her way.

With a touch of personal pride in the vast building, Joe Chandler
marched his friends down a wide, airy corridor.

Daisy clung to her father’s arm, a little bewildered, a little
oppressed by her good fortune. Her happy young voice was stilled by the
awe she felt at the wonderful place where she found herself, and by the
glimpses she caught of great rooms full of busy, silent men engaged in
unravelling—or so she supposed—the mysteries of crime.

They were passing a half-open door when Chandler suddenly stopped
short. “Look in there,” he said, in a low voice, addressing the father
rather than the daughter, “that’s the Finger-Print Room. We’ve records
here of over two hundred thousand men’s and women’s finger-tips! I
expect you know, Mr. Bunting, as how, once we’ve got the print of a
man’s five finger-tips, well, he’s done for—if he ever does anything
else, that is. Once we’ve got that bit of him registered he can’t never
escape us—no, not if he tries ever so. But though there’s nigh on a
quarter of a million records in there, yet it don’t take—well, not half
an hour, for them to tell whether any particular man has ever been
convicted before! Wonderful thought, ain’t it?”

“Wonderful!” said Bunting, drawing a deep breath. And then a troubled
look came over his stolid face. “Wonderful, but also a very fearful
thought for the poor wretches as has got their finger-prints in, Joe.”

Joe laughed. “Agreed!” he said. “And the cleverer ones knows that only
too well. Why, not long ago, one man who knew his record was here safe,
managed to slash about his fingers something awful, just so as to make
a blurred impression—you takes my meaning? But there, at the end of six
weeks the skin grew all right again, and in exactly the same little
creases as before!”

“Poor devil!” said Bunting under his breath, and a cloud even came over
Daisy’s bright eager face.

They were now going along a narrower passage, and then again they came
to a half-open door, leading into a room far smaller than that of the
Finger-Print Identification Room.

“If you’ll glance in there,” said Joe briefly, “you’ll see how we finds
out all about any man whose finger-tips has given him away, so to
speak. It’s here we keeps an account of what he’s done, his previous
convictions, and so on. His finger-tips are where I told you, and his
record in there—just connected by a number.”

“Wonderful!” said Bunting, drawing in his breath. But Daisy was longing
to get on—to get to the Black Museum. All this that Joe and her father
were saying was quite unreal to her, and, for the matter of that not
worth taking the trouble to understand. However, she had not long to
wait.

A broad-shouldered, pleasant-looking young fellow, who seemed on very
friendly terms with Joe Chandler, came forward suddenly, and, unlocking
a common-place-looking door, ushered the little party of three through
into the Black Museum.

For a moment there came across Daisy a feeling of keen disappointment
and surprise. This big, light room simply reminded her of what they
called the Science Room in the public library of the town where she
lived with Old Aunt. Here, as there, the centre was taken up with plain
glass cases fixed at a height from the floor which enabled their
contents to be looked at closely.

She walked forward and peered into the case nearest the door. The
exhibits shown there were mostly small, shabby-looking little things,
the sort of things one might turn out of an old rubbish cupboard in an
untidy house—old medicine bottles, a soiled neckerchief, what looked
like a child’s broken lantern, even a box of pills. . .

As for the walls, they were covered with the queerest-looking objects;
bits of old iron, odd-looking things made of wood and leather, and so
on.

It was really rather disappointing.

Then Daisy Bunting gradually became aware that standing on a shelf just
below the first of the broad, spacious windows which made the great
room look so light and shadowless, was a row of life-size white plaster
heads, each head slightly inclined to the right. There were about a
dozen of these, not more—and they had such odd, staring, helpless,
_real_-looking faces.

“Whatever’s those?” asked Bunting in a low voice.

Daisy clung a thought closer to her father’s arm. Even she guessed that
these strange, pathetic, staring faces were the death-masks of those
men and women who had fulfilled the awful law which ordains that the
murderer shall be, in his turn, done to death.

“All hanged!” said the guardian of the Black Museum briefly. “Casts
taken after death.”

Bunting smiled nervously. “They don’t look dead somehow. They looks
more as if they were listening,” he said.

“That’s the fault of Jack Ketch,” said the man facetiously. “It’s his
idea—that of knotting his patient’s necktie under the left ear! That’s
what he does to each of the gentlemen to whom he has to act valet on
just one occasion only. It makes them lean just a bit to one side. You
look here—?”

Daisy and her father came a little closer, and the speaker pointed with
his finger to a little dent imprinted on the left side of each neck;
running from this indentation was a curious little furrow, well ridged
above, showing how tightly Jack Ketch’s necktie had been drawn when its
wearer was hurried through the gates of eternity.

“They looks foolish-like, rather than terrified, or—or hurt,” said
Bunting wonderingly.

He was extraordinarily moved and fascinated by those dumb, staring
faces.

But young Chandler exclaimed in a cheerful, matter-of-fact voice,
“Well, a man would look foolish at such a time as that, with all his
plans brought to naught—and knowing he’s only got a second to live—now
wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, I suppose he would,” said Bunting slowly.

Daisy had gone a little pale. The sinister, breathless atmosphere of
the place was beginning to tell on her. She now began to understand
that the shabby little objects lying there in the glass case close to
her were each and all links in the chain of evidence which, in almost
every case, had brought some guilty man or woman to the gallows.

“We had a yellow gentleman here the other day,” observed the guardian
suddenly; “one of those Brahmins—so they calls themselves. Well, you’d
a been quite surprised to see how that heathen took on! He
declared—what was the word he used?”—he turned to Chandler.

“He said that each of these things, with the exception of the casts,
mind you—queer to say, he left them out—exuded evil, that was the word
he used! Exuded—squeezed out it means. He said that being here made him
feel very bad. And twasn’t all nonsense either. He turned quite green
under his yellow skin, and we had to shove him out quick. He didn’t
feel better till he’d got right to the other end of the passage!”

“There now! Who’d ever think of that?” said Bunting. “I should say that
man ’ud got something on his conscience, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, I needn’t stay now,” said Joe’s good-natured friend. “You show
your friends round, Chandler. You knows the place nearly as well as I
do, don’t you?”

He smiled at Joe’s visitors, as if to say good-bye, but it seemed that
he could not tear himself away after all.

“Look here,” he said to Bunting. “In this here little case are the
tools of Charles Peace. I expect you’ve heard of him.”

“I should think I have!” cried Bunting eagerly.

“Many gents as comes here thinks this case the most interesting of all.
Peace was such a wonderful man! A great inventor they say he would have
been, had he been put in the way of it. Here’s his ladder; you see it
folds up quite compactly, and makes a nice little bundle—just like a
bundle of old sticks any man might have been seen carrying about London
in those days without attracting any attention. Why, it probably helped
him to look like an honest working man time and time again, for on
being arrested he declared most solemnly he’d always carried that
ladder openly under his arm.”

“The daring of that!” cried Bunting.

“Yes, and when the ladder was opened out it could reach from the ground
to the second storey of any old house. And, oh! how clever he was! Just
open one section, and you see the other sections open automatically; so
Peace could stand on the ground and force the thing quietly up to any
window he wished to reach. Then he’d go away again, having done his
job, with a mere bundle of old wood under his arm! My word, he was
artful! I wonder if you’ve heard the tale of how Peace once lost a
finger. Well, he guessed the constables were instructed to look out for
a man missing a finger; so what did he do?”

“Put on a false finger,” suggested Bunting.

“No, indeed! Peace made up his mind just to do without a hand
altogether. Here’s his false stump: you see, it’s made of wood—wood and
black felt? Well, that just held his hand nicely. Why, we considers
that one of the most ingenious contrivances in the whole museum.”

Meanwhile, Daisy had let go her hold of her father. With Chandler in
delighted attendance, she had moved away to the farther end of the
great room, and now she was bending over yet another glass case.
“Whatever are those little bottles for?” she asked wonderingly.

There were five small phials, filled with varying quantities of cloudy
liquids.

“They’re full of poison, Miss Daisy, that’s what they are. There’s
enough arsenic in that little whack o’ brandy to do for you and me—aye,
and for your father as well, I should say.”

“Then chemists shouldn’t sell such stuff,” said Daisy, smiling. Poison
was so remote from herself, that the sight of these little bottles only
brought a pleasant thrill.

“No more they don’t. That was sneaked out of a flypaper, that was. Lady
said she wanted a cosmetic for her complexion, but what she was really
going for was flypapers for to do away with her husband. She’d got a
bit tired of him, I suspect.”

“Perhaps he was a horrid man, and deserved to be done away with,” said
Daisy. The idea struck them both as so very comic that they began to
laugh aloud in unison.

“Did you ever hear what a certain Mrs. Pearce did?” asked Chandler,
becoming suddenly serious.

“Oh, yes,” said Daisy, and she shuddered a little. “That was the
wicked, wicked woman what killed a pretty little baby and its mother.
They’ve got her in Madame Tussaud’s. But Ellen, she won’t let me go to
the Chamber of Horrors. She wouldn’t let father take me there last time
I was in London. Cruel of her, I called it. But somehow I don’t feel as
if I wanted to go there now, after having been here!”

“Well,” said Chandler slowly, “we’ve a case full of relics of Mrs.
Pearce. But the pram the bodies were found in, that’s at Madame
Tussaud’s—at least so they claim, I can’t say. Now here’s something
just as curious, and not near so dreadful. See that man’s jacket
there?”

“Yes,” said Daisy falteringly. She was beginning to feel oppressed,
frightened. She no longer wondered that the Indian gentleman had been
taken queer.

“A burglar shot a man dead who’d disturbed him, and by mistake he went
and left that jacket behind him. Our people noticed that one of the
buttons was broken in two. Well, that don’t seem much of a clue, does
it, Miss Daisy? Will you believe me when I tells you that that other
bit of button was discovered, and that it hanged the fellow? And ’twas
the more wonderful because all three buttons was different!”

Daisy stared wonderingly, down at the little broken button which had
hung a man. “And whatever’s that!” she asked, pointing to a piece of
dirty-looking stuff.

“Well,” said Chandler reluctantly, “that’s rather a horrible thing—that
is. That’s a bit o’ shirt that was buried with a woman—buried in the
ground, I mean—after her husband had cut her up and tried to burn her.
’Twas that bit o’ shirt that brought him to the gallows.”

“I considers your museum’s a very horrid place!” said Daisy pettishly,
turning away.

She longed to be out in the passage again, away from this brightly
lighted, cheerful-looking, sinister room.

But her father was now absorbed in the case containing various types of
infernal machines. “Beautiful little works of art some of them are,”
said his guide eagerly, and Bunting could not but agree.

“Come along—do, father!” said Daisy quickly. “I’ve seen about enough
now. If I was to stay in here much longer it ’ud give me the horrors. I
don’t want to have no nightmares to-night. It’s dreadful to think there
are so many wicked people in the world. Why, we might knock up against
some murderer any minute without knowing it, mightn’t we?”

“Not you, Miss Daisy,” said Chandler smilingly. “I don’t suppose you’ll
ever come across even a common swindler, let alone anyone who’s
committed a murder—not one in a million does that. Why, even I have
never had anything to do with a proper murder case!”

But Bunting was in no hurry. He was thoroughly enjoying every moment of
the time. Just now he was studying intently the various photographs
which hung on the walls of the Black Museum; especially was he pleased
to see those connected with a famous and still mysterious case which
had taken place not long before in Scotland, and in which the servant
of the man who died had played a considerable part—not in elucidating,
but in obscuring, the mystery.

“I suppose a good many murderers get off?” he said musingly.

And Joe Chandler’s friend nodded. “I should think they did!” he
exclaimed. “There’s no such thing as justice here in England. ’Tis odds
on the murderer every time. ’Tisn’t one in ten that come to the end he
should do—to the gallows, that is.”

“And what d’you think about what’s going on now—I mean about those
Avenger murders?”

Bunting lowered his voice, but Daisy and Chandler were already moving
towards the door.

“I don’t believe he’ll ever be caught,” said the other confidentially.
“In some ways ’tis a lot more of a job to catch a madman than ’tis to
run down just an ordinary criminal. And, of course—leastways to my
thinking—The Avenger _is_ a madman—one of the cunning, quiet sort. Have
you heard about the letter?” his voice dropped lower.

“No,” said Bunting, staring eagerly at him. “What letter d’you mean?”

“Well, there’s a letter—it’ll be in this museum some day—which came
just before that last double event. ’Twas signed ‘The Avenger,’ in just
the same printed characters as on that bit of paper he always leaves
behind him. Mind you, it don’t follow that it actually was The Avenger
what sent that letter here, but it looks uncommonly like it, and I know
that the Boss attaches quite a lot of importance to it.”

“And where was it posted?” asked Bunting. “That might be a bit of a
clue, you know.”

“Oh, no,” said the other. “They always goes a very long way to post
anything—criminals do. It stands to reason they would. But this
particular one was put in the Edgware Road Post Office.”

“What? Close to us?” said Bunting. “Goodness! dreadful!”

“Any of us might knock up against him any minute. I don’t suppose The
Avenger’s in any way peculiar-looking—in fact we know he ain’t.”

“Then you think that woman as says she saw him did see him?” asked
Bunting hesitatingly.

“Our description was made up from what she said,” answered the other
cautiously. “But, there, you can’t tell! In a case like that it’s
groping—groping in the dark all the time—and it’s just a lucky accident
if it comes out right in the end. Of course, it’s upsetting us all very
much here. You can’t wonder at that!”

“No, indeed,” said Bunting quickly. “I give you my word, I’ve hardly
thought of anything else for the last month.”

Daisy had disappeared, and when her father joined her in the passage
she was listening, with downcast eyes, to what Joe Chandler was saying.

He was telling her about his real home, of the place where his mother
lived, at Richmond—that it was a nice little house, close to the park.
He was asking her whether she could manage to come out there one
afternoon, explaining that his mother would give them tea, and how nice
it would be.

“I don’t see why Ellen shouldn’t let me,” the girl said rebelliously.
“But she’s that old-fashioned and pernickety is Ellen—a regular old
maid! And, you see, Mr. Chandler, when I’m staying with them, father
don’t like for me to do anything that Ellen don’t approve of. But she’s
got quite fond of you, so perhaps if you ask her—?” She looked at him,
and he nodded sagely.

“Don’t you be afraid,” he said confidently. “I’ll get round Mrs.
Bunting. But, Miss Daisy”—he grew very red—“I’d just like to ask you a
question—no offence meant—”

“Yes?” said Daisy a little breathlessly. “There’s father close to us,
Mr. Chandler. Tell me quick; what is it?”

“Well, I take it, by what you said just now, that you’ve never walked
out with any young fellow?”

Daisy hesitated a moment; then a very pretty dimple came into her
cheek. “No,” she said sadly. “No, Mr. Chandler, that I have not.” In a
burst of candour she added, “You see, I never had the chance!”

And Joe Chandler smiled, well pleased.




CHAPTER X.


By what she regarded as a fortunate chance, Mrs. Bunting found herself
for close on an hour quite alone in the house during her husband’s and
Daisy’s jaunt with young Chandler.

Mr. Sleuth did not often go out in the daytime, but on this particular
afternoon, after he had finished his tea, when dusk was falling, he
suddenly observed that he wanted a new suit of clothes, and his
landlady eagerly acquiesced in his going out to purchase it.

As soon as he had left the house, she went quickly up to the
drawing-room floor. Now had come her opportunity of giving the two
rooms a good dusting; but Mrs. Bunting knew well, deep in her heart,
that it was not so much the dusting of Mr. Sleuth’s sitting-room she
wanted to do—as to engage in a vague search for—she hardly knew for
what.

During the years she had been in service Mrs. Bunting had always had a
deep, wordless contempt for those of her fellow-servants who read their
employers’ private letters, and who furtively peeped into desks and
cupboards in the hope, more vague than positive, of discovering family
skeletons.

But now, with regard to Mr. Sleuth, she was ready, aye, eager, to do
herself what she had once so scorned others for doing.

Beginning with the bedroom, she started on a methodical search. He was
a very tidy gentleman was the lodger, and his few things,
under-garments, and so on, were in apple-pie order. She had early
undertaken, much to his satisfaction, to do the very little bit of
washing he required done, with her own and Bunting’s. Luckily he wore
soft shirts.

At one time Mrs. Bunting had always had a woman in to help her with
this tiresome weekly job, but lately she had grown quite clever at it
herself. The only things she had to send out were Bunting’s shirts.
Everything else she managed to do herself.

From the chest of drawers she now turned her attention to the
dressing-table.

Mr. Sleuth did not take his money with him when he went out, he
generally left it in one of the drawers below the old-fashioned
looking-glass. And now, in a perfunctory way, his landlady pulled out
the little drawer, but she did not touch what was lying there; she only
glanced at the heap of sovereigns and a few bits of silver. The lodger
had taken just enough money with him to buy the clothes he required. He
had consulted her as to how much they would cost, making no secret of
why he was going out, and the fact had vaguely comforted Mrs. Bunting.

Now she lifted the toilet-cover, and even rolled up the carpet a little
way, but no, there was nothing there, not so much as a scrap of paper.
And at last, when more or less giving up the search, as she came and
went between the two rooms, leaving the connecting door wide open, her
mind became full of uneasy speculation and wonder as to the lodger’s
past life.

Odd Mr. Sleuth must surely always have been, but odd in a sensible sort
of way, having on the whole the same moral ideals of conduct as have
other people of his class. He was queer about the drink—one might say
almost crazy on the subject—but there, as to that, he wasn’t the only
one! She, Ellen Bunting, had once lived with a lady who was just like
that, who was quite crazed, that is, on the question of drink and
drunkards—She looked round the neat drawing-room with vague
dissatisfaction. There was only one place where anything could be kept
concealed—that place was the substantial if small mahogany chiffonnier.
And then an idea suddenly came to Mrs. Bunting, one she had never
thought of before.

After listening intently for a moment, lest something should suddenly
bring Mr. Sleuth home earlier than she expected, she went to the corner
where the chiffonnier stood, and, exerting the whole of her not very
great physical strength, she tipped forward the heavy piece of
furniture.

As she did so, she heard a queer rumbling sound,—something rolling
about on the second shelf, something which had not been there before
Mr. Sleuth’s arrival. Slowly, laboriously, she tipped the chiffonnier
backwards and forwards—once, twice, thrice—satisfied, yet strangely
troubled in her mind, for she now felt sure that the bag of which the
disappearance had so surprised her was there, safely locked away by its
owner.

Suddenly a very uncomfortable thought came to Mrs. Bunting’s mind. She
hoped Mr. Sleuth would not notice that his bag had shifted inside the
cupboard. A moment later, with sharp dismay, Mr. Sleuth’s landlady
realised that the fact that she had moved the chiffonnier must become
known to her lodger, for a thin trickle of some dark-coloured liquid
was oozing out though the bottom of the little cupboard door.

She stooped down and touched the stuff. It showed red, bright red, on
her finger.

Mrs. Bunting grew chalky white, then recovered herself quickly. In fact
the colour rushed into her face, and she grew hot all over.

It was only a bottle of red ink she had upset—that was all! How could
she have thought it was anything else?

It was the more silly of her—so she told herself in scornful
condemnation—because she knew that the lodger used red ink. Certain
pages of Cruden’s Concordance were covered with notes written in Mr.
Sleuth’s peculiar upright handwriting. In fact in some places you
couldn’t see the margin, so closely covered was it with remarks and
notes of interrogation.

Mr. Sleuth had foolishly placed his bottle of red ink in the
chiffonnier—that was what her poor, foolish gentleman had done; and it
was owing to her inquisitiveness, her restless wish to know things she
would be none the better, none the happier, for knowing, that this
accident had taken place.

She mopped up with her duster the few drops of ink which had fallen on
the green carpet and then, still feeling, as she angrily told herself,
foolishly upset she went once more into the back room.

It was curious that Mr. Sleuth possessed no notepaper. She would have
expected him to have made that one of his first purchases—the more so
that paper is so very cheap, especially that rather dirty-looking grey
Silurian paper. Mrs. Bunting had once lived with a lady who always used
two kinds of notepaper, white for her friends and equals, grey for
those whom she called “common people.” She, Ellen Green, as she then
was, had always resented the fact. Strange she should remember it now,
stranger in a way because that employer of her’s had not been a real
lady, and Mr. Sleuth, whatever his peculiarities, was, in every sense
of the word, a real gentleman. Somehow Mrs. Bunting felt sure that if
he had bought any notepaper it would have been white—white and probably
cream-laid—not grey and cheap.

Again she opened the drawer of the old-fashioned wardrobe and lifted up
the few pieces of underclothing Mr. Sleuth now possessed.

But there was nothing there—nothing, that is, hidden away. When one
came to think of it there seemed something strange in the notion of
leaving all one’s money where anyone could take it, and in locking up
such a valueless thing as a cheap sham leather bag, to say nothing of a
bottle of ink.

Mrs. Bunting once more opened out each of the tiny drawers below the
looking-glass, each delicately fashioned of fine old mahogany. Mr.
Sleuth kept his money in the centre drawer.

The glass had only cost seven-and-sixpence, and, after the auction a
dealer had come and offered her first fifteen shillings, and then a
guinea for it. Not long ago, in Baker Street, she had seen a
looking-glass which was the very spit of this one, labeled
“Chippendale, Antique. £21 5s 0d.”

There lay Mr. Sleuth’s money—the sovereigns, as the landlady well knew,
would each and all gradually pass into her’s and Bunting’s possession,
honestly earned by them no doubt but unattainable—in act
unearnable—excepting in connection with the present owner of those
dully shining gold sovereigns.

At last she went downstairs to await Mr. Sleuth’s return.

When she heard the key turn in the door, she came out into the passage.

“I’m sorry to say I’ve had an accident, sir,” she said a little
breathlessly. “Taking advantage of your being out I went up to dust the
drawing-room, and while I was trying to get behind the chiffonnier it
tilted. I’m afraid, sir, that a bottle of ink that was inside may have
got broken, for just a few drops oozed out, sir. But I hope there’s no
harm done. I wiped it up as well as I could, seeing that the doors of
the chiffonnier are locked.”

Mr. Sleuth stared at her with a wild, almost a terrified glance. But
Mrs. Bunting stood her ground. She felt far less afraid now than she
had felt before he came in. Then she had been so frightened that she
had nearly gone out of the house, on to the pavement, for company.

“Of course I had no idea, sir, that you kept any ink in there.”

She spoke as if she were on the defensive, and the lodger’s brow
cleared.

“I was aware you used ink, sir,” Mrs. Bunting went on, “for I have seen
you marking that book of yours—I mean the book you read together with
the Bible. Would you like me to go out and get you another bottle,
sir?”

“No,” said Mr. Sleuth. “No, I thank you. I will at once proceed
upstairs and see what damage has been done. When I require you I shall
ring.”

He shuffled past her, and five minutes later the drawing-room bell did
ring.

At once, from the door, Mrs. Bunting saw that the chiffonnier was wide
open, and that the shelves were empty save for the bottle of red ink
which had turned over and now lay in a red pool of its own making on
the lower shelf.

“I’m afraid it will have stained the wood, Mrs. Bunting. Perhaps I was
ill-advised to keep my ink in there.”

“Oh, no, sir! That doesn’t matter at all. Only a drop or two fell out
on to the carpet, and they don’t show, as you see, sir, for it’s a dark
corner. Shall I take the bottle away? I may as well.”

Mr. Sleuth hesitated. “No,” he said, after a long pause, “I think not,
Mrs. Bunting. For the very little I require it the ink remaining in the
bottle will do quite well, especially if I add a little water, or
better still, a little tea, to what already remains in the bottle. I
only require it to mark up passages which happen to be of peculiar
interest in my Concordance—a work, Mrs. Bunting, which I should have
taken great pleasure in compiling myself had not this—ah—this gentleman
called Cruden, been before.”

Not only Bunting, but Daisy also, thought Ellen far pleasanter in her
manner than usual that evening. She listened to all they had to say
about their interesting visit to the Black Museum, and did not snub
either of them—no, not even when Bunting told of the dreadful,
haunting, silly-looking death-masks taken from the hanged.

But a few minutes after that, when her husband suddenly asked her a
question, Mrs. Bunting answered at random. It was clear she had not
heard the last few words he had been saying.

“A penny for your thoughts!” he said jocularly. But she shook her head.

Daisy slipped out of the room, and, five minutes later, came back
dressed up in a blue-and-white check silk gown.

“My!” said her father. “You do look fine, Daisy. I’ve never seen you
wearing that before.”

“And a rare figure of fun she looks in it!” observed Mrs. Bunting
sarcastically. And then, “I suppose this dressing up means that you’re
expecting someone. I should have thought both of you must have seen
enough of young Chandler for one day. I wonder when that young chap
does his work—that I do! He never seems too busy to come and waste an
hour or two here.”

But that was the only nasty thing Ellen said all that evening. And even
Daisy noticed that her stepmother seemed dazed and unlike herself. She
went about her cooking and the various little things she had to do even
more silently than was her wont.

Yet under that still, almost sullen, manner, how fierce was the storm
of dread, of sombre anguish, and, yes, of sick suspense, which shook
her soul, and which so far affected her poor, ailing body that often
she felt as if she could not force herself to accomplish her simple
round of daily work.

After they had finished supper Bunting went out and bought a penny
evening paper, but as he came in he announced, with a rather rueful
smile, that he had read so much of that nasty little print this last
week or two that his eyes hurt him.

“Let me read aloud a bit to you, father,” said Daisy eagerly, and he
handed her the paper.

Scarcely had Daisy opened her lips when a loud ring and a knock echoed
through the house.




CHAPTER XI.


It was only Joe. Somehow, even Bunting called him “Joe” now, and no
longer “Chandler,” as he had mostly used to do.

Mrs. Bunting had opened the front door only a very little way. She
wasn’t going to have any strangers pushing in past her.

To her sharpened, suffering senses her house had become a citadel which
must be defended; aye, even if the besiegers were a mighty horde _with
right on their side_. And she was always expecting that first single
spy who would herald the battalion against whom her only weapon would
be her woman’s wit and cunning.

But when she saw who stood there smiling at her, the muscles of her
face relaxed, and it lost the tense, anxious, almost agonised look it
assumed the moment she turned her back on her husband and stepdaughter.

“Why, Joe,” she whispered, for she had left the door open behind her,
and Daisy had already begun to read aloud, as her father had bidden
her. “Come in, do! It’s fairly cold to-night.”

A glance at his face had shown her that there was no fresh news.

Joe Chandler walked in, past her, into the little hall. Cold? Well, he
didn’t feel cold, for he had walked quickly to be the sooner where he
was now.

Nine days had gone by since that last terrible occurrence, the double
murder which had been committed early in the morning of the day Daisy
had arrived in London. And though the thousands of men belonging to the
Metropolitan Police—to say nothing of the smaller, more alert body of
detectives attached to the Force—were keenly on the alert, not one but
had begun to feel that there was nothing to be alert about.
Familiarity, even with horror, breeds contempt.

But with the public it was far otherwise. Each day something happened
to revive and keep alive the mingled horror and interest this strange,
enigmatic series of crimes had evoked. Even the more sober organs of
the Press went on attacking, with gathering severity and indignation,
the Commissioner of Police; and at the huge demonstration held in
Victoria Park two days before violent speeches had also been made
against the Home Secretary.

But just now Joe Chandler wanted to forget all that. The little house
in the Marylebone Road had become to him an enchanted isle of dreams,
to which his thoughts were ever turning when he had a moment to spare
from what had grown to be a wearisome, because an unsatisfactory, job.
He secretly agreed with one of his pals who had exclaimed, and that
within twenty-four hours of the last double crime, “Why, ’twould be
easier to find a needle in a rick o’ hay than this—bloke!”

And if that had been true then, how much truer it was now—after nine
long, empty days had gone by?

Quickly he divested himself of his great-coat, muffler, and low hat.
Then he put his finger on his lip, and motioned smilingly to Mrs.
Bunting to wait a moment. From where he stood in the hall the father
and daughter made a pleasant little picture of contented domesticity.
Joe Chandler’s honest heart swelled at the sight.

Daisy, wearing the blue-and-white check silk dress about which her
stepmother and she had had words, sat on a low stool on the left side
of the fire, while Bunting, leaning back in his own comfortable
arm-chair, was listening, his hand to his ear, in an attitude—as it was
the first time she had caught him doing it, the fact brought a pang to
Mrs. Bunting—which showed that age was beginning to creep over the
listener.

One of Daisy’s duties as companion to her great-aunt was that of
reading the newspaper aloud, and she prided herself on her
accomplishment.

Just as Joe had put his finger on his lip Daisy had been asking, “Shall
I read this, father?” And Bunting had answered quickly, “Aye, do, my
dear.”

He was absorbed in what he was hearing, and, on seeing Joe at the door,
he had only just nodded his head. The young man was becoming so
frequent a visitor as to be almost one of themselves.

Daisy read out:

“THE AVENGER: A—”


And then she stopped short, for the next word puzzled her greatly.
Bravely, however, she went on. “A the-o-ry.”

“Go in—do!” whispered Mrs. Bunting to her visitor. “Why should we stay
out here in the cold? It’s ridiculous.”

“I don’t want to interrupt Miss Daisy,” whispered Chandler back, rather
hoarsely.

“Well, you’ll hear it all the better in the room. Don’t think she’ll
stop because of you, bless you! There’s nothing shy about our Daisy!”

The young man resented the tart, short tone. “Poor little girl!” he
said to himself tenderly. “That’s what it is having a stepmother,
instead of a proper mother.” But he obeyed Mrs. Bunting, and then he
was pleased he had done so, for Daisy looked up, and a bright blush
came over her pretty face.

“Joe begs you won’t stop yet awhile. Go on with your reading,”
commanded Mrs. Bunting quickly. “Now, Joe, you can go and sit over
there, close to Daisy, and then you won’t miss a word.”

There was a sarcastic inflection in her voice, even Chandler noticed
that, but he obeyed her with alacrity, and crossing the room he went
and sat on a chair just behind Daisy. From there he could note with
reverent delight the charming way her fair hair grew upwards from the
nape of her slender neck.

“THE AVENGER: A THE-O-RY”


began Daisy again, clearing her throat.

“DEAR SIR—I have a suggestion to put forward for which I think there is
a great deal to be said. It seems to me very probable that The
Avenger—to give him the name by which he apparently wishes to be
known—comprises in his own person the peculiarities of Jekyll and Hyde,
Mr. Louis Stevenson’s now famous hero.
    “The culprit, according to my point of view, is a quiet,
    pleasant-looking gentleman who lives somewhere in the West End of
    London. He has, however, a tragedy in his past life. He is the
    husband of a dipsomaniac wife. She is, of course, under care, and
    is never mentioned in the house where he lives, maybe with his
    widowed mother and perhaps a maiden sister. They notice that he has
    become gloomy and brooding of late, but he lives his usual life,
    occupying himself each day with some harmless hobby. On foggy
    nights, once the quiet household is plunged in sleep, he creeps out
    of the house, maybe between one and two o’clock, and swiftly makes
    his way straight to what has become The Avenger’s murder area.
    Picking out a likely victim, he approaches her with Judas-like
    gentleness, and having committed his awful crime, goes quietly home
    again. After a good bath and breakfast, he turns up happy, once
    more the quiet individual who is an excellent son, a kind brother,
    esteemed and even beloved by a large circle of friends and
    acquaintances. Meantime, the police are searching about the scene
    of the tragedy for what they regard as the usual type of criminal
    lunatic.
    “I give this theory, Sir, for what it is worth, but I confess that
    I am amazed the police have so wholly confined their inquiries to
    the part of London where these murders have been actually
    committed. I am quite sure from all that has come out—and we must
    remember that full information is never given to the newspapers—The
    Avenger should be sought for in the West and not in the East End of
    London—Believe me to remain, Sir, yours very truly—”


Again Daisy hesitated, and then with an effort she brought out the word
“Gab-o-ri-you,” said she.

“What a funny name!” said Bunting wonderingly.

And then Joe broke in: “That’s the name of a French chap what wrote
detective stories,” he said. “Pretty good, some of them are, too!”

“Then this Gaboriyou has come over to study these Avenger murders, I
take it?” said Bunting.

“Oh, no,” Joe spoke with confidence. “Whoever’s written that silly
letter just signed that name for fun.”

“It is a silly letter,” Mrs. Bunting had broken in resentfully. “I
wonder a respectable paper prints such rubbish.”

“Fancy if The Avenger did turn out to be a gentleman!” cried Daisy, in
an awe-struck voice. “There’d be a how-to-do!”

“There may be something in the notion,” said her father thoughtfully.
“After all, the monster must be somewhere. This very minute he must be
somewhere a-hiding of himself.”

“Of course he’s somewhere,” said Mrs. Bunting scornfully.

She had just heard Mr. Sleuth moving overhead. ’Twould soon be time for
the lodger’s supper.

She hurried on: “But what I do say is that—that—he has nothing to do
with the West End. Why, they say it’s a sailor from the Docks—that’s a
good bit more likely, I take it. But there, I’m fair sick of the whole
subject! We talk of nothing else in this house. The Avenger this—The
Avenger that—”

“I expect Joe has something to tell us new to-night,” said Bunting
cheerfully. “Well, Joe, is there anything new?”

“I say, father, just listen to this!” Daisy broke in excitedly. She
read out:

“BLOODHOUNDS TO BE SERIOUSLY CONSIDERED”


“Bloodhounds?” repeated Mrs. Bunting, and there was terror in her tone.
“Why bloodhounds? That do seem to me a most horrible idea!”

Bunting looked across at her, mildly astonished. “Why, ’twould be a
very good idea, if ’twas possible to have bloodhounds in a town. But,
there, how can that be done in London, full of butchers’ shops, to say
nothing of slaughter-yards and other places o’ that sort?”

But Daisy went on, and to her stepmother’s shrinking ear there seemed a
horrible thrill of delight; of gloating pleasure, in her fresh young
voice.

“Hark to this,” she said:

“A man who had committed a murder in a lonely wood near Blackburn was
traced by the help of a bloodhound, and thanks to the sagacious
instincts of the animal, the miscreant was finally convicted and
hanged.”


“La, now! Who’d ever have thought of such a thing?” Bunting exclaimed,
in admiration. “The newspapers do have some useful hints in sometimes,
Joe.”

But young Chandler shook his head. “Bloodhounds ain’t no use,” he said;
“no use at all! If the Yard was to listen to all the suggestions that
the last few days have brought in—well, all I can say is our work would
be cut out for us—not but what it’s cut out for us now, if it comes to
that!” He sighed ruefully. He was beginning to feel very tired; if only
he could stay in this pleasant, cosy room listening to Daisy Bunting
reading on and on for ever, instead of having to go out, as he would
presently have to do, into the cold and foggy night!

Joe Chandler was fast becoming very sick of his new job. There was a
lot of unpleasantness attached to the business, too. Why, even in the
house where he lived, and in the little cook-shop where he habitually
took his meals, the people round him had taken to taunt him with the
remissness of the police. More than that one of his pals, a man he’d
always looked up to, because the young fellow had the gift of the gab,
had actually been among those who had spoken at the big demonstration
in Victoria Park, making a violent speech, not only against the
Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, but also against the Home
Secretary.

But Daisy, like most people who believe themselves blessed with the
possession of an accomplishment, had no mind to leave off reading just
yet.

“Here’s another notion!” she exclaimed. “Another letter, father!”

“PARDON TO ACCOMPLICES.


“DEAR SIR—During the last day or two several of the more Intelligent of
my acquaintances have suggested that The Avenger, whoever he may be,
must be known to a certain number of persons. It is impossible that the
perpetrator of such deeds, however nomad he may be in his habits—”


“Now I wonder what ‘nomad’ can be?” Daisy interrupted herself, and
looked round at her little audience.

“I’ve always declared the fellow had all his senses about him,”
observed Bunting confidently.

Daisy went on, quite satisfied:

“—however nomad he may be in his habit; must have some habitat where
his ways are known to at least one person. Now the person who knows the
terrible secret is evidently withholding information in expectation of
a reward, or maybe because, being an accessory after the fact, he or
she is now afraid of the consequences. My suggestion, Sir, is that the
Home Secretary promise a free pardon. The more so that only thus can
this miscreant be brought to justice. Unless he was caught red-handed
in the act, it will be exceedingly difficult to trace the crime
committed to any individual, for English law looks very askance at
circumstantial evidence.”


“There’s something worth listening to in that letter,” said Joe,
leaning forward.

Now he was almost touching Daisy, and he smiled involuntarily as she
turned her gay, pretty little face the better to hear what he was
saying.

“Yes, Mr. Chandler?” she said interrogatively.

“Well, d’you remember that fellow what killed an old gentleman in a
railway carriage? He took refuge with someone—a woman his mother had
known, and she kept him hidden for quite a long time. But at last she
gave him up, and she got a big reward, too!”

“I don’t think I’d like to give anybody up for a reward,” said Bunting,
in his slow, dogmatic way.

“Oh, yes, you would, Mr. Bunting,” said Chandler confidently. “You’d
only be doing what it’s the plain duty of everyone—everyone, that is,
who’s a good citizen. And you’d be getting something for doing it,
which is more than most people gets as does their duty.”

“A man as gives up someone for a reward is no better than a common
informer,” went on Bunting obstinately. “And no man ’ud care to be
called that! It’s different for you, Joe,” he added hastily. “It’s your
job to catch those who’ve done anything wrong. And a man’d be a fool
who’d take refuge—like with you. He’d be walking into the lion’s
mouth—” Bunting laughed.

And then Daisy broke in coquettishly: “If I’d done anything I wouldn’t
mind going for help to Mr. Chandler,” she said.

And Joe, with eyes kindling, cried, “No. And if you did you needn’t be
afraid I’d give you up, Miss Daisy!”

And then, to their amazement, there suddenly broke from Mrs. Bunting,
sitting with bowed head over the table, an exclamation of impatience
and anger, and, it seemed to those listening, of pain.

“Why, Ellen, don’t you feel well?” asked Bunting quickly.

“Just a spasm, a sharp stitch in my side, like,” answered the poor
woman heavily. “It’s over now. Don’t mind me.”

“But I don’t believe—no, that I don’t—that there’s anybody in the world
who knows who The Avenger is,” went on Chandler quickly. “It stands to
reason that anybody’d give him up—in their own interest, if not in
anyone else’s. Who’d shelter such a creature? Why, ’twould be dangerous
to have him in the house along with one!”

“Then it’s your idea that he’s not responsible for the wicked things he
does?” Mrs. Bunting raised her head, and looked over at Chandler with
eager, anxious eyes.

“I’d be sorry to think he wasn’t responsible enough to hang!” said
Chandler deliberately. “After all the trouble he’s been giving us,
too!”

“Hanging’d be too good for that chap,” said Bunting.

“Not if he’s not responsible,” said his wife sharply. “I never heard of
anything so cruel—that I never did! If the man’s a madman, he ought to
be in an asylum—that’s where he ought to be.”

“Hark to her now!” Bunting looked at his Ellen with amusement.
“Contrary isn’t the word for her! But there, I’ve noticed the last few
days that she seemed to be taking that monster’s part. That’s what
comes of being a born total abstainer.”

Mrs. Bunting had got up from her chair. “What nonsense you do talk!”
she said angrily. “Not but what it’s a good thing if these murders have
emptied the public-houses of women for a bit. England’s drink is
England’s shame—I’ll never depart from that! Now, Daisy, child, get up,
do! Put down that paper. We’ve heard quite enough. You can be laying
the cloth while I goes down the kitchen.”

“Yes, you mustn’t be forgetting the lodger’s supper,” called out
Bunting. “Mr. Sleuth don’t always ring—” he turned to Chandler. “For
one thing, he’s often out about this time.”

“Not often—just now and again, when he wants to buy something,” snapped
out Mrs. Bunting. “But I hadn’t forgot his supper. He never do want it
before eight o’clock.”

“Let me take up the lodger’s supper, Ellen,” Daisy’s eager voice broke
in. She had got up in obedience to her stepmother, and was now laying
the cloth.

“Certainly not! I told you he only wanted me to wait on him. You have
your work cut out looking after things down here—that’s where I wants
you to help me.”

Chandler also got up. Somehow he didn’t like to be doing nothing while
Daisy was so busy. “Yes,” he said, looking across at Mrs. Bunting, “I’d
forgotten about your lodger. Going on all right, eh?”

“Never knew so quiet and well-behaved a gentleman,” said Bunting. “He
turned our luck, did Mr. Sleuth.”

His wife left the room, and after she had gone Daisy laughed. “You’ll
hardly believe it, Mr. Chandler, but I’ve never seen this wonderful
lodger. Ellen keeps him to herself, that she does! If I was father I’d
be jealous!”

Both men laughed. Ellen? No, the idea was too funny.




CHAPTER XII.


“All I can say is, I think Daisy ought to go. One can’t always do just
what one wants to do—not in this world, at any rate!”

Mrs. Bunting did not seem to be addressing anyone in particular, though
both her husband and her stepdaughter were in the room. She was
standing by the table, staring straight before her, and as she spoke
she avoided looking at either Bunting or Daisy. There was in her voice
a tone of cross decision, of thin finality, with which they were both
acquainted, and to which each listener knew the other would have to
bow.

There was silence for a moment, then Daisy broke out passionately, “I
don’t see why I should go if I don’t want to!” she cried. “You’ll allow
I’ve been useful to you, Ellen? ’Tisn’t even as if you was quite well.”

“I am quite well—perfectly well!” snapped out Mrs. Bunting, and she
turned her pale, drawn face, and looked angrily at her stepdaughter.

“’Tain’t often I has a chance of being with you and father.” There were
tears in Daisy’s voice, and Bunting glanced deprecatingly at his wife.

An invitation had come to Daisy—an invitation from her own dead
mother’s sister, who was housekeeper in a big house in Belgrave Square.
“The family” had gone away for the Christmas holidays, and Aunt
Margaret—Daisy was her godchild—had begged that her niece might come
and spend two or three days with her.

But the girl had already had more than one taste of what life was like
in the great gloomy basement of 100 Belgrave Square. Aunt Margaret was
one of those old-fashioned servants for whom the modern employer is
always sighing. While “the family” were away it was her joy—she
regarded it as a privilege—to wash sixty-seven pieces of very valuable
china contained in two cabinets in the drawing-room; she also slept in
every bed by turns, to keep them all well aired. These were the two
duties with which she intended her young niece to assist her, and
Daisy’s soul sickened at the prospect.

But the matter had to be settled at once. The letter had come an hour
ago, containing a stamped telegraph form, and Aunt Margaret was not one
to be trifled with.

Since breakfast the three had talked of nothing else, and from the very
first Mrs. Bunting had said that Daisy ought to go—that there was no
doubt about it, that it did not admit of discussion. But discuss it
they all did, and for once Bunting stood up to his wife. But that, as
was natural, only made his Ellen harder and more set on her own view.

“What the child says is true,” he observed. “It isn’t as if you was
quite well. You’ve been took bad twice in the last few days—you can’t
deny of it, Ellen. Why shouldn’t I just take a bus and go over and see
Margaret? I’d tell her just how it is. She’d understand, bless you!”

“I won’t have you doing nothing of the sort!” cried Mrs. Bunting,
speaking almost as passionately as her stepdaughter had done. “Haven’t
I a right to be ill, haven’t I a right to be took bad, aye, and to feel
all right again—same as other people?”

Daisy turned round and clasped her hands. “Oh, Ellen!” she cried; “do
say that you can’t spare me! I don’t want to go across to that horrid
old dungeon of a place.”

“Do as you like,” said Mrs. Bunting sullenly. “I’m fair tired of you
both! There’ll come a day, Daisy, when you’ll know, like me, that money
is the main thing that matters in this world; and when your Aunt
Margaret’s left her savings to somebody else just because you wouldn’t
spend a few days with her this Christmas, then you’ll know what it’s
like to go without—you’ll know what a fool you were, and that nothing
can’t alter it any more!”

And then, with victory actually in her grasp, poor Daisy saw it
snatched from her.

“Ellen is right,” Bunting said heavily. “Money does matter—a terrible
deal—though I never thought to hear Ellen say ’twas the only thing that
mattered. But ’twould be foolish—very, very foolish, my girl, to offend
your Aunt Margaret. It’ll only be two days after all—two days isn’t a
very long time.”

But Daisy did not hear her father’s last words. She had already rushed
from the room, and gone down to the kitchen to hide her childish tears
of disappointment—the childish tears which came because she was
beginning to be a woman, with a woman’s natural instinct for building
her own human nest.

Aunt Margaret was not one to tolerate the comings of any strange young
man, and she had a peculiar dislike to the police.

“Who’d ever have thought she’d have minded as much as that!” Bunting
looked across at Ellen deprecatingly; already his heart was misgiving
him.

“It’s plain enough why she’s become so fond of us all of a sudden,”
said Mrs. Bunting sarcastically. And as her husband stared at her
uncomprehendingly, she added, in a tantalising tone, “as plain as the
nose on your face, my man.”

“What d’you mean?” he said. “I daresay I’m a bit slow, Ellen, but I
really don’t know what you’d be at?”

“Don’t you remember telling me before Daisy came here that Joe Chandler
had become sweet on her last summer? I thought it only foolishness
then, but I’ve come round to your view—that’s all.”

Bunting nodded his head slowly. Yes, Joe had got into the way of coming
very often, and there had been the expedition to that gruesome Scotland
Yard museum, but somehow he, Bunting, had been so interested in the
Avenger murders that he hadn’t thought of Joe in any other
connection—not this time, at any rate.

“And do you think Daisy likes him?” There was an unwonted tone of
excitement, of tenderness, in Bunting’s voice.

His wife looked over at him; and a thin smile, not an unkindly smile by
any means, lit up her pale face. “I’ve never been one to prophesy,” she
answered deliberately. “But this I don’t mind telling you,
Bunting—Daisy’ll have plenty o’ time to get tired of Joe Chandler
before they two are dead. Mark my words!”

“Well, she might do worse,” said Bunting ruminatingly. “He’s as steady
as God makes them, and he’s already earning thirty-two shillings a
week. But I wonder how Old Aunt’d like the notion? I don’t see her
parting with Daisy before she must.”

“I wouldn’t let no old aunt interfere with me about such a thing as
that!” cried Mrs. Bunting. “No, not for millions of gold!” And Bunting
looked at her in silent wonder. Ellen was singing a very different tune
now to what she’d sung a few minutes ago, when she was so keen about
the girl going to Belgrave Square.

“If she still seems upset while she’s having her dinner,” said his wife
suddenly, “well, you just wait till I’ve gone out for something, and
then you just say to her, ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder’—just
that, and nothing more! She’ll take it from you. And I shouldn’t be
surprised if it comforted her quite a lot.”

“For the matter of that, there’s no reason why Joe Chandler shouldn’t
go over and see her there,” said Bunting hesitatingly.

“Oh, yes, there is,” said Mrs. Bunting, smiling shrewdly. “Plenty of
reason. Daisy’ll be a very foolish girl if she allows her aunt to know
any of her secrets. I’ve only seen that woman once, but I know exactly
the sort Margaret is. She’s just waiting for Old Aunt to drop off and
then she’ll want to have Daisy herself—to wait on her, like. She’d turn
quite nasty if she thought there was a young fellow what stood in her
way.”

She glanced at the clock, the pretty little eight-day clock which had
been a wedding present from a kind friend of her last mistress. It had
mysteriously disappeared during their time of trouble, and had as
mysteriously reappeared three or four days after Mr. Sleuth’s arrival.

“I’ve time to go out with that telegram,” she said briskly—somehow she
felt better, different to what she had done the last few days—“and then
it’ll be done. It’s no good having more words about it, and I expect we
should have plenty more words if I wait till the child comes upstairs
again.”

She did not speak unkindly, and Bunting looked at her rather
wonderingly. Ellen very seldom spoke of Daisy as “the child”—in fact,
he could only remember her having done so once before, and that was a
long time ago. They had been talking over their future life together,
and she had said, very solemnly, “Bunting, I promise I will do my
duty—as much as lies in my power, that is—by the child.”

But Ellen had not had much opportunity of doing her duty by Daisy. As
not infrequently happens with the duties that we are willing to do,
that particular duty had been taken over by someone else who had no
mind to let it go.

“What shall I do if Mr. Sleuth rings?” asked Bunting, rather nervously.
It was the first time since the lodger had come to them that Ellen had
offered to go out in the morning.

She hesitated. In her anxiety to have the matter of Daisy settled, she
had forgotten Mr. Sleuth. Strange that she should have done so—strange,
and, to herself, very comfortable and pleasant.

“Oh, well, you can just go up and knock at the door and say I’ll be
back in a few minutes—that I had to go out with a message. He’s quite a
reasonable gentleman.” She went into the back room to put on her bonnet
and thick jacket for it was very cold—getting colder every minute.

As she stood, buttoning her gloves—she wouldn’t have gone out untidy
for the world—Bunting suddenly came across to her. “Give us a kiss, old
girl,” he said. And his wife turned up her face.

“One ’ud think it was catching!” she said, but there was a lilt in her
voice.

“So it is,” Bunting briefly answered. “Didn’t that old cook get married
just after us? She’d never ’a thought of it if it hadn’t been for you!”

But once she was out, walking along the damp, uneven pavement, Mr.
Sleuth revenged himself for his landlady’s temporary forgetfulness.

During the last two days the lodger had been queer, odder than usual,
unlike himself, or, rather, very much as he had been some ten days ago,
just before that double murder had taken place.

The night before, while Daisy was telling all about the dreadful place
to which Joe Chandler had taken her and her father, Mrs. Bunting had
heard Mr. Sleuth moving about overhead, restlessly walking up and down
his sitting-room. And later, when she took up his supper, she had
listened a moment outside the door, while he read aloud some of the
texts his soul delighted in—terrible texts telling of the grim joys
attendant on revenge.

Mrs. Bunting was so absorbed in her thoughts, so possessed with the
curious personality of her lodger, that she did not look where she was
going, and suddenly a young woman bumped up against her.

She started violently and looked round, dazed, as the young person
muttered a word of apology;—then she again fell into deep thought.

It was a good thing Daisy was going away for a few days; it made the
problem of Mr. Sleuth and his queer ways less disturbing. She, Ellen,
was sorry she had spoken so sharp-like to the girl, but after all it
wasn’t wonderful that she had been snappy. This last night she had
hardly slept at all. Instead, she had lain awake listening—and there is
nothing so tiring as to lie awake listening for a sound that never
comes.

The house had remained so still you could have heard a pin drop. Mr.
Sleuth, lying snug in his nice warm bed upstairs, had not stirred. Had
he stirred his landlady was bound to have heard him, for his bed was,
as we know, just above hers. No, during those long hours of darkness
Daisy’s light, regular breathing was all that had fallen on Mrs.
Bunting’s ears.

And then her mind switched off Mr. Sleuth. She made a determined effort
to expel him, to toss him, as it were, out of her thoughts.

It seemed strange that The Avenger had stayed his hand, for, as Joe had
said only last evening, it was full time that he should again turn that
awful, mysterious searchlight of his on himself. Mrs. Bunting always
visioned The Avenger as a black shadow in the centre a bright blinding
light—but the shadow had no form or definite substance. Sometimes he
looked like one thing, sometimes like another . . .

Mrs. Bunting had now come to the corner which led up the street where
there was a Post Office. But instead of turning sharp to the left she
stopped short for a minute.

There had suddenly come over her a feeling of horrible self-rebuke and
even self-loathing. It was dreadful that she, of all women, should have
longed to hear that another murder had been committed last night!

Yet such was the shameful fact. She had listened all through breakfast
hoping to hear the dread news being shouted outside; yes, and more or
less during the long discussion which had followed on the receipt of
Margaret’s letter she had been hoping—hoping against hope—that those
dreadful triumphant shouts of the newspaper-sellers still might come
echoing down the Marylebone Road. And yet hypocrite that she was, she
had reproved Bunting when he had expressed, not disappointment
exactly—but, well, surprise, that nothing had happened last night.

Now her mind switched off to Joe Chandler. Strange to think how afraid
she had been of that young man! She was no longer afraid of him, or
hardly at all. He was dotty—that’s what was the matter with him, dotty
with love for rosy-cheeked, blue-eyed little Daisy. Anything might now
go on, right under Joe Chandler’s very nose—but, bless you, he’d never
see it! Last summer, when this affair, this nonsense of young Chandler
and Daisy had begun, she had had very little patience with it all. In
fact, the memory of the way Joe had gone on then, the tiresome way he
would be always dropping in, had been one reason (though not the most
important reason of all) why she had felt so terribly put about at the
idea of the girl coming again. But now? Well, now she had become quite
tolerant, quite kindly—at any rate as far as Joe Chandler was
concerned.

She wondered why.

Still, ’twouldn’t do Joe a bit of harm not to see the girl for a couple
of days. In fact ’twould be a very good thing, for then he’d think of
Daisy—think of her to the exclusion of all else. Absence does make the
heart grow fonder—at first, at any rate. Mrs. Bunting was well aware of
that. During the long course of hers and Bunting’s mild courting,
they’d been separated for about three months, and it was that three
months which had made up her mind for her. She had got so used to
Bunting that she couldn’t do without him, and she had felt—oddest fact
of all—acutely, miserably jealous. But she hadn’t let him know that—no
fear!

Of course, Joe mustn’t neglect his job—that would never do. But what a
good thing it was, after all, that he wasn’t like some of those
detective chaps that are written about in stories—the sort of chaps
that know everything, see everything, guess everything—even where there
isn’t anything to see, or know, or guess!

Why, to take only one little fact—Joe Chandler had never shown the
slightest curiosity about their lodger. . . .

Mrs. Bunting pulled herself together with a start, and hurried quickly
on. Bunting would begin to wonder what had happened to her.

She went into the Post Office and handed the form to the young woman
without a word. Margaret, a sensible woman, who was accustomed to
manage other people’s affairs, had even written out the words: “Will be
with you to tea.—DAISY.”

It was a comfort to have the thing settled once for all. If anything
horrible was going to happen in the next two or three days—it was just
as well Daisy shouldn’t be at home. Not that there was any _real_
danger that anything would happen,—Mrs. Bunting felt sure of that.

By this time she was out in the street again, and she began mentally
counting up the number of murders The Avenger had committed. Nine, or
was it ten? Surely by now The Avenger must be avenged? Surely by now,
if—as that writer in the newspaper had suggested—he was a quiet,
blameless gentleman living in the West End, whatever vengeance he had
to wreak, must be satisfied?

She began hurrying homewards; it wouldn’t do for the lodger to ring
before she had got back. Bunting would never know how to manage Mr.
Sleuth, especially if Mr. Sleuth was in one of his queer moods.

Mrs. Bunting put the key into the front door lock and passed into the
house. Then her heart stood still with fear and terror. There came the
sound of voices—of voices she thought she did not know—in the
sitting-room.

She opened the door, and then drew a long breath. It was only Joe
Chandler—Joe, Daisy, and Bunting, talking together. They stopped rather
guiltily as she came in, but not before she had heard Chandler utter
the words: “That don’t mean nothing! I’ll just run out and send another
saying you won’t come, Miss Daisy.”

And then the strangest smile came over Mrs. Bunting’s face. There had
fallen on her ear the still distant, but unmistakable, shouts which
betokened that something _had_ happened last night—something which made
it worth while for the newspaper-sellers to come crying down the
Marylebone Road.

“Well?” she said a little breathlessly. “Well, Joe? I suppose you’ve
brought us news? I suppose there’s been another?”

He looked at her, surprised. “No, that there hasn’t, Mrs. Bunting—not
as far as I know, that is. Oh, you’re thinking of those newspaper
chaps? They’ve got to cry out something,” he grinned. “You wouldn’t ’a
thought folk was so bloodthirsty. They’re just shouting out that
there’s been an arrest; but we don’t take no stock of that. It’s a
Scotchman what gave himself up last night at Dorking. He’d been
drinking, and was a-pitying of himself. Why, since this business began,
there’s been about twenty arrests, but they’ve all come to nothing.”

“Why, Ellen, you looks quite sad, quite disappointed,” said Bunting
jokingly. “Come to think of it, it’s high time The Avenger was at work
again.” He laughed as he made his grim joke. Then turned to young
Chandler: “Well, _you’ll_ be glad when its all over, my lad.”

“Glad in a way,” said Chandler unwillingly. “But one ’ud have liked to
have caught him. One doesn’t like to know such a creature’s at large,
now, does one?”

Mrs. Bunting had taken off her bonnet and jacket. “I must just go and
see about Mr. Sleuth’s breakfast,” she said in a weary, dispirited
voice, and left them there.

She felt disappointed, and very, very depressed. As to the plot which
had been hatching when she came in, that had no chance of success;
Bunting would never dare let Daisy send out another telegram
contradicting the first. Besides, Daisy’s stepmother shrewdly suspected
that by now the girl herself wouldn’t care to do such a thing. Daisy
had plenty of sense tucked away somewhere in her pretty little head. If
it ever became her fate to live as a married woman in London, it would
be best to stay on the right side of Aunt Margaret.

And when she came into her kitchen the stepmother’s heart became very
soft, for Daisy had got everything beautifully ready. In fact, there
was nothing to do but to boil Mr. Sleuth’s two eggs. Feeling suddenly
more cheerful than she had felt of late, Mrs. Bunting took the tray
upstairs.

“As it was rather late, I didn’t wait for you to ring, sir,” she said.

And the lodger looked up from the table where, as usual, he was
studying with painful, almost agonising intentness, the Book. “Quite
right, Mrs. Bunting—quite right! I have been pondering over the
command, ‘Work while it is yet light.’”

“Yes, sir?” she said, and a queer, cold feeling stole over her heart.
“Yes, sir?”

“‘The spirit is willing, but the flesh—the flesh is weak,’” said Mr.
Sleuth, with a heavy sigh.

“You studies too hard, and too long—that’s what’s ailing you, sir,”
said Mr. Sleuth’s landlady suddenly.

When Mrs. Bunting went down again she found that a great deal had been
settled in her absence; among other things, that Joe Chandler was going
to escort Miss Daisy across to Belgrave Square. He could carry Daisy’s
modest bag, and if they wanted to ride instead of walk, why, they could
take the bus from Baker Street Station to Victoria—that would land them
very near Belgrave Square.

But Daisy seemed quite willing to walk; she hadn’t had a walk, she
declared, for a long, long time—and then she blushed rosy red, and even
her stepmother had to admit to herself that Daisy was very nice
looking, not at all the sort of girl who ought to be allowed to go
about the London streets by herself.




CHAPTER XIII.


Daisy’s father and stepmother stood side by side at the front door,
watching the girl and young Chandler walk off into the darkness.

A yellow pall of fog had suddenly descended on London, and Joe had come
a full half-hour before they expected him, explaining, rather lamely,
that it was the fog which had brought him so soon.

“If we was to have waited much longer, perhaps, ’twouldn’t have been
possible to walk a yard,” he explained, and they had accepted,
silently, his explanation.

“I hope it’s quite safe sending her off like that?” Bunting looked
deprecatingly at his wife. She 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/2014