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Page 5
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.
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