The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes (color ebook reader txt) 📕

All afternoon it went on snowing; and the three of them sat there, listening and waiting—Bunting and his wife hardly knew for what; Daisy for the knock which would herald Joe Chandler.

And about four there came the now familiar sound.

Mrs. Bunting hurried out into the passage, and as she opened the front door she whispered, “We haven’t said anything to Daisy yet. Young girls can’t keep secrets.”

Chandler nodded comprehendingly. He now looked the low character he had assumed to the life, for he was blue with cold, disheartened, and tired out.

Daisy gave a little cry of shocked surprise, of amusement, of welcome, when she saw how cleverly he was disguised.

“I never!” she exclaimed. “What a difference it do make, to be sure! Why, you looks quite horrid, Mr. Chandler.”

And, somehow, that little speech of hers amused her father so much that he quite cheered up. Bunting had been very dull and quiet all that afternoon.

“It won’t take me ten minutes to make myself respectable again,” said the young man rather ruefully.

His host and hostess, looking at him eagerly, furtively, both came to the conclusion that he had been unsuccessful—that he had failed, that is, in getting any information worth having. And though, in a sense, they all had a pleasant tea together, there was an air of constraint, even of discomfort, over the little party.

Bunting felt it hard that he couldn’t ask the questions that were trembling on his lips; he would have felt it hard any time during the last month to refrain from knowing anything Joe could tell him, but now it seemed almost intolerable to be in this queer kind of half suspense. There was one important fact he longed to know, and at last came his opportunity of doing so, for Joe Chandler rose to leave, and this time it was Bunting who followed him out into the hall.

“Where did it happen?” he whispered. “Just tell me that, Joe?”

“Primrose Hill,” said the other briefly. “You’ll know all about it in a minute or two, for it’ll be all in the last editions of the evening papers. That’s what’s been arranged.”

“No arrest I suppose?”

Chandler shook his head despondently. “No,” he said, “I’m inclined to think the Yard was on a wrong tack altogether this time. But one can only do one’s best. I don’t know if Mrs. Bunting told you I’d got to question a barmaid about a man who was in her place just before closing-time. Well, she’s said all she knew, and it’s as clear as daylight to me that the eccentric old gent she talks about was only a harmless luny. He gave her a sovereign just because she told him she was a teetotaller!” He laughed ruefully.

Even Bunting was diverted at the notion. “Well, that’s a queer thing for a barmaid to be!” he exclaimed. “She’s niece to the people what keeps the public,” explained Chandler; and then he went out of the front door with a cheerful “So long!”

When Bunting went back into the sitting-room Daisy had disappeared. She had gone downstairs with the tray. “Where’s my girl?” he said irritably.

“She’s just taken the tray downstairs.”

He went out to the top of the kitchen stairs, and called out sharply, “Daisy! Daisy, child! Are you down there?”

“Yes, father,” came her eager, happy voice.

“Better come up out of that cold kitchen.”

He turned and came back to his wife. “Ellen, is the lodger in? I haven’t heard him moving about. Now mind what I says, please! I don’t want Daisy to be mixed up with him.”

“Mr. Sleuth don’t seem very well to-day,” answered Mrs. Bunting quietly. “‘Tain’t likely I should let Daisy have anything to do with him. Why, she’s never even seen him. ‘Tain’t likely I should allow her to begin waiting on him now.”

But though she was surprised and a little irritated by the tone in which Bunting had spoken, no glimmer of the truth illumined her mind. So accustomed had she become to bearing alone the burden of her awful secret, that it would have required far more than a cross word or two, far more than the fact that Bunting looked ill and tired, for her to have come to suspect that her secret was now shared by another, and that other her husband.

Again and again the poor soul had agonised and trembled at the thought of her house being invaded by the police, but that was only because she had always credited the police with supernatural powers of detection. That they should come to know the awful fact she kept hidden in her breast would have seemed to her, on the whole, a natural thing, but that Bunting should even dimly suspect it appeared beyond the range of possibility.

And yet even Daisy noticed a change in her father. He sat cowering over the fire—saying nothing, doing nothing.

“Why, father, ain’t you well?” the girl asked more than once.

And, looking up, he would answer, “Yes, I’m well enough, my girl, but I feels cold. It’s awful cold. I never did feel anything like the cold we’ve got just now.”

*

At eight the now familiar shouts and cries began again outside.

“The Avenger again!” “Another horrible crime!” “Extra speshul edition!”—such were the shouts, the exultant yells, hurled through the clear, cold air. They fell, like bombs into the quiet room.

Both Bunting and his wife remained silent, but Daisy’s cheeks grew pink with excitement, and her eye sparkled.

“Hark, father! Hark, Ellen! D’you hear that?” she exclaimed childishly, and even clapped her hands. “I do wish Mr. Chandler had been here. He would ‘a been startled!”

“Don’t, Daisy!” and Bunting frowned.

Then, getting up, he stretched himself. “It’s fair getting on my mind,” he said, “these horrible things happening. I’d like to get right away from London, just as far as I could—that I would!”

“Up to John-o’-Groat’s?” said Daisy, laughing. And then, “Why, father, ain’t you going out to get a paper?”

“Yes, I suppose I must.”

Slowly he went out of the room, and, lingering a moment in the hall, he put on his greatcoat and hat. Then he opened the front door, and walked down the flagged path. Opening the iron gate, he stepped out on the pavement, then crossed the road to where the newspaper-boys now stood.

The boy nearest to him only had the Sun—a late edition of the paper he had already read. It annoyed Bunting to give a penny for a ha’penny rag of which he already knew the main contents. But there was nothing else to do.

Standing under a lamp-post, he opened out the newspaper. It was bitingly cold; that, perhaps, was why his hand shook as he looked down at the big headlines. For Bunting had been very unfair to the enterprise of the editor of his favourite evening paper. This special edition was full of new matter—new matter concerning The Avenger.

First, in huge type right across the page, was the brief statement that The Avenger had now committed his ninth crime, and that he had chosen quite a new locality, namely, the lonely stretch of rising ground known to Londoners as Primrose Hill.

“The police,” so Bunting read, “are very reserved as to the circumstances which led to the finding of the body of The Avenger’s latest victim. But we have reason to believe that they possess several really important clues, and that one of them is concerned with the half-worn rubber sole of which we are the first to reproduce an outline to-day. (See over page.)”

And Bunting, turning the sheet round about, saw the irregular outline he had already seen in the early edition of the Sun, that purporting to be a facsimile of the imprint left by The Avenger’s rubber sole.

He stared down at the rough outline which took up so much of the space which should have been devoted to reading matter with a queer, sinking feeling of terrified alarm. Again and again criminals had been tracked by the marks their boots or shoes had made at or near the scenes of their misdoings.

Practically the only job Bunting did in his own house of a menial kind was the cleaning of the boots and shoes. He had already visualised early this very afternoon the little row with which he dealt each morning—first came his wife’s strong, serviceable boots, then his own two pairs, a good deal patched and mended, and next to his own Mr. Sleuth’s strong, hardly worn, and expensive buttoned boots. Of late a dear little coquettish high-heeled pair of outdoor shoes with thin, paperlike soles, bought by Daisy for her trip to London, had ended the row. The girl had worn these thin shoes persistently, in defiance of Ellen’s reproof and advice, and he, Bunting, had only once had to clean her more sensible country pair, and that only because the others had become wet though the day he and she had accompanied young Chandler to Scotland Yard.

Slowly he returned across the road. Somehow the thought of going in again, of hearing his wife’s sarcastic comments, of parrying Daisy’s eager questions, had become intolerable. So he walked slowly, trying to put off the evil moment when he would have to tell them what was in his paper.

The lamp under which he had stood reading was not exactly opposite the house. It was rather to the right of it. And when, having crossed over the roadway, he walked along the pavement towards his own gate, he heard odd, shuffling sounds coming from the inner side of the low wall which shut off his little courtyard from the pavement.

Now, under ordinary circumstances Bunting would have rushed forward to drive out whoever was there. He