Part 10

He sidled out at the oak gate stealthily. He was so afraid that he would be seen, that someone else would find that walk; someone tainted with the horrible modern idea of Progress; someone who would build and bring machinery. He took the first tram home. The people who also rode on it had never seemed more cadaverous, more fusty. They exhaled an odor of wardrobe shops.

I met him in the square almost at his own doorway. The deep hollows in his face were filled with red. His long hands were quivering with excitement.

“Come up to my rooms,” he said hastily. “I’ve something to tell you, I’ve had a most wonderful experience.”

We went up. He opened the door with his key. Minnie was cooking the dinner, her bit of beefsteak fizzled and sputtered savagely in the pan. Her pretty little pinched face was like a thundercloud.

“Never mind the dinner,” Chaytor said, going up to the fire and kissing her effusively. “My darling! I’ve had such a find. We might go and live there; rent would be next to nothing. My articles would keep the pot boiling. I should insist on your selling your typewriter--no cursed machinery there! I should have to be careful going in and out of the gray gate--that is all. If anyone else spotted it we should be ruined.”

He sat down in the first chair, panting a little. Minnie said impatiently:

“What on earth does he mean?”

She dished up her steak and pressed me none too graciously to have some with them. So we three sat round the little table, and Chaytor told us all he had seen. He told it so vividly--I have repeated it to you almost word for word--that he really flung a glamour over this mean little London room. He sat just there, with his back to the cupboard where they kept their bundles of wood--where I still keep mine. Poor Chaytor! The smell of the country seemed to blow over us all. Even Minnie grew faintly excited.

“But it is impossible,” she said. “Why, I know Stamford Hill; an aunt of mine lived there once. She had a house standing in its own grounds.” She glanced at me to see if this fact impressed me. “But there is no country there. I’m certain of it. I used to spend my Sundays with Aunt Jane. The last old house was pulled down years ago. Six streets of villas stand on the site. I’ve seen them.”

But Chaytor babbled on of his lilac woman.

“It’s all nonsense,” Minnie said more clinchingly. “You dreamt it--I believe you’re asleep more than half your time. And even if you weren’t asleep, everyone knows that consumptives have queer fancies. It’s no good wriggling on your chair like that when you know very well that the doctor told you ever so long ago that you had only one lung.”

“It was real,” he insisted, flinching a little at her candor. “So real that I seemed to have been there before.”

“I know,” I said soothingly. “We all have that feeling sometimes. Bloater paste serves me like that; makes me think of a red-haired fellow in a punt. These things are odd. Murphy used to feel the same over ripe plums--only _his_ was an empty barn and a thunderstorm.”

I’ve always tried hard to be practical, you know. I’m convinced that money is the secret of all happiness--though I’ve never had the peculiar quality that makes it. For once I thought that I’d be business-like.

“If you should be right,” I said to Chaytor, “there is a fortune in it. I think I know a man who would finance us. By what you say the land is ripe for development; we could cut it up into estates--plant shrubs and rows of horse chestnuts--you know the sort of thing. We’d call it the Marlowe estate, after the Inn.”

Chaytor flinched; then he said with a droll smile:

“If I thought you meant that I would cut my throat rather than take you there. But you never were a money-grubber, old fellow. Come and see for yourself. Everything will be as I have told you--the bridge, the empty house, the little wood. And the woman at the dairy--we’ll get her to give us some milk.”

Minnie was staring at him with round, cold eyes. Her elbows were on the table.

He touched her hand.

“Come on,” he said tenderly.

She got up, looked at her machine, hesitated, and then said, “It’s a fine afternoon and a blow will do me good. I’ve finished that MS. We may as well.”

She put on her best blouse and a pair of new gloves. It was a beautiful afternoon, and we were all gay as we trundled along on the roof of the tram.

Chaytor led us to the row of semi-detached villas. Minnie eyed them admiringly.

“That is the sort of house I should like,” she said with a sigh. “There is every convenience.”

Chaytor was going along very slowly, looking intently at the mouth of every passage. He went to the very end of the row. We followed, feeling half excited and half foolish. I said with sudden suspicion to Minnie:

“It isn’t the first of April, is it?”

She returned with dangerous brevity:

“No. The sixth.”

She was eying Chaytor with a look that boded a row. He suddenly wheeled round sharply; even she was startled, I think, by the change in his face--it was gray, like the gate of which he talked.

“It isn’t here,” he said in a quavering voice. “It’s gone--the gray gate. Gone!”

He looked at us with panic-stricken eyes. Then he started eagerly back, peering into every passage. When he reached the last he turned again.

“It’s gone,” he repeated. “Oh, my God! it’s gone. I’ve lost it!”

He let his head drop, and leaned helplessly against the railings of the next house. Minnie glanced at me eloquently, raising her nose and brows and shoulders.

“Let’s get him home,” she said in an agony for appearances. “There is a tram at the corner. Hurry up. Don’t be such a fool, Nat. I never was so ashamed in my life. There was nothing--I never expected there would be. Just see how that woman across the way is staring. Well she may! I knew there would not be anything. How could there be? You can see the back-garden palings and the dust hole at the end of every one.”

We had reached the tram. She bundled Chaytor up the steps and followed him, not seeming to care whether I came or not.

He was never the same afterward. He never wrote an article. He talked of nothing but the gray gate. He used to beg Minnie piteously for his tram fare. Sometimes she gave the coppers just to be rid of him.

“He’s going ‘dotty,’” she said fiercely to me, beating the inanimate type with her quick fingers.

Sometimes he would wake up in the morning and sing as he dressed--putting on his clothes with feverish, jerking hands, she used to come and tell me. He said he had made a mistake in the row--those cursed villas were so much alike. Would she come too? He was sure of finding it this time. He wouldn’t bother her for any more tram fares. He was very sorry.

When he walked he used to put out his hand like a blind man and grope with his long fingers--as if he hoped to feel something that he was not permitted to see. He was feeling for wood--for the gray gate. I met him once and took his arm and carried him off to have a drink.

He said to me quite seriously, as we stood at the bar:

“These bricks are killing me. Why the devil can’t people keep still? It is nothing but pulling down houses and putting up taller ones all over Bloomsbury. I tell you frankly, old fellow, I can’t breathe. My throat burns--as if they were stuffing their lime down it. Every scaffold pole knocks at my heart. It’s killing me. You haven’t any coppers about you, I suppose? The tram fare isn’t much. I could get down to Stamford Hill and back again before dusk.”

One night I saw Minnie run bareheaded across the square toward my door. I had the second floor at No. 7 in those days. She looked a little wild and frightened, but she was self-possessed enough to throw a look of stone at Sophia Dominy, who was going toward Kinsman’s set.

Presently I heard her on my stairs and went out.

“Come over to Nat,” she panted. “I think he is dying. The doctor told me that bit of lung he had would last for years, but it isn’t going to.”

He was lying in the bed. It stood under the window then. Near to his hand was a pile of those hateful long envelopes. The editorial regrets that had helped to break his heart peeped out from the open ends.

“I’ve been looking over some of these things,” he panted, touching the articles and smiling at me in the old droll, half-scornful way. “Some of them were bad and vulgar enough--Heaven knows. Yet they did not get accepted. ‘Does Cold Mutton Cause Gumboil?’--I thought that would be sure to go. ‘The Woman with the White Shoe Strings’--it is a most sensational detective story--and yet, one after the other, they threw my stuff back at me. I’ve written the title pages afresh ever so many times, so that the MS. should not look as if it had been hawked about.”

It was a very hot July night, the windows were open top and bottom. Jimmy, across the way, was singing the latest song from the “halls” in his feeble voice.

Poor Nat was quiet for a little. Then he turned his head suddenly and looked at Minnie. I’ve seen him look like that at her when they were courting. No doubt she remembered, for she bent down and softly shook up his pillows.

“It’s no good your going for the doctor,” she whispered huskily back in answer to my question. “He was here this morning. He told me he could do nothing. I can’t afford to throw away money for nothing, can I?”

There were tears in her eyes, like shining splinters of glass. We heard footsteps on the pavement below, and men’s voices came up to the open window. The fellows had come home from the City. Nat did not seem to hear; he was devouring Minnie’s face line by line, looking at her in a dazed, silly way.

“It is good of you to come,” he said at last, very simply and gratefully. “How did you find it? So few people--country people, you know--have heard of the Inn. It must seem a noisy, dirty place to you--there are blacks all down your nice white apron. But we won’t stay. You will show me the way back. It was very curious about that gate.”

* * * * *

Minnie looked very well in widows’ weeds--those fair, neat little women generally do. I always tried very hard to like Minnie. I admired her practical spirit. Practicality means money, and money means ease. She came knocking at my door three days after the funeral, and said beseechingly:

“Come down with me on the tram to Stamford Hill.”

We went. The trams were crowded, it was Saturday afternoon. We walked slowly along the row of villas in the blazing sun--the row where Nat had sworn he found the gray gate.

“Poor old chap,” I said. “He wasn’t fit for this world. But what a gold mine there would have been in it!”

“It was at this house he seemed to stop most,” she said. “I remember the India-rubber plant in the front window.”

We stopped. There was an old, palsied sort of fellow tidying up the rockery. I spoke to him--don’t know why.

“I suppose you remember this neighborhood before it was built on?”

“When it was a one-eyed country place,” elaborated Minnie.

He straightened his body on his spade, and looked at us, cunningly, like old people often do. An eager light came into his bleared eyes. It seemed to me the light of youth breaking uncannily through the crust of seventy years. He remembered--sure he did. He became suddenly voluble--talking more to himself than to us.

“It’s a good many year since this ’ere part was open country. Ah! there was a gate on the common--hereabouts, as near as I can mind. A bit on was a bridge, stone one side and iron t’other. A man had to keep a sharp lookout if he come home full o’ liquor nights. The rail runs there now--they built a new ’un. There was a copse--Shannonses copse, I think they called it, but my memory aint what it was. You went over a stile. That was a rare place for coortin’”--he grinned, showing a toothless cavern, and he spluttered with merry memories as he rocked on the spade.

“There was a cottage near by--my father had it. I jest call to mind _his_ father plantin’ the orchard--a very old man as couldn’t expect to see the fruit. A fine orchard it wur--Blenum orringe trees and Tom Spuds and all sorts. Dickson’s tannery stands there now. If you went on, through the fields and across the road, you come to Hillyar’s farm--that’s Stern & Carson’s brewery. Hillyar’s pears was wonderful for keepin’. I mind Loo Hillyar--sich arms;” he leered at Minnie, whose face was chalky under her black bonnet. “You don’t see young women like that these times. Sich a hand at butter-making. It must be fifty--forty year ago or more since me an’ her drove geese over the common. It couldn’t ha’ been so fur from where we stands, neither. Here, as you may say, or thereabouts--but the face of the earth do change so.”

He spat on his hands and bent his back to the weary task of tidying the melancholy mound of clinkers and starved ferns. I gave him sixpence and I gave Minnie my arm. She clutched it wildly. There was a shadow on her pretty, common face--the shadow of the unexplainable.

What did it mean? I don’t pretend to say. Odd, wasn’t it? But then the world is odd. We just skim it and fancy we have proved all.

Minnie? She went back to a City office as typist, and she married the principal in less than a year. She was always the sort of girl to do well for herself--her marriage with Chaytor was an aberration. She lives in a very swagger house at East Croydon, wears rather loud dresses, and talks persistently of “my cook.”

THE SET AT SEVEN.

SHALL I tell you about the set at 7? It is quite a proper story. You might call it dramatic. If poor Nat Chaytor were alive he would turn it into one of his thrilling tales for the penny papers--and get it rejected because it wasn’t probable. In popular tales you must be probable, and you must be proper. You may cut as many throats and embezzle as much money as you please--always remembering to do it in a thoroughly respectable manner.

Orchard lived at 7--the left-hand set on the third floor. His was the most extraordinary affair. Poor Jimmy died there. Orion had the set--has it still, so they say. He comes back. We have a real, if rather foolish, ghost in the Inn.

The man who took that set after the Great Ormond Street murder--his name slips me, but he went down in the _Drummond Castle_--had never seen Orion. I forget his name, but we’ll call him Drummond.

Pearson went to see him one night. He happened to be just going out; he said he wouldn’t be more than half an hour, and he made Pearson comfortable with some whisky and the current _Fortnightly._ When he came back Pearson said, with annoyance, looking a little disgusted and jerking his head toward the bedroom door:

“Didn’t know you were so intimate with Orion.”

“Orion! Never heard the name. Yet--let me see. He had these rooms. I took them over with the furniture.”

“Never heard the name! Why, he’s in your bedroom at this moment. Walked about very much as if he were at home. Came strolling in with his old confounded jaunty air. I haven’t seen him for nearly three years, but he hasn’t altered a bit. You must have left the outer door ajar, or else he’s kept a key. That would be just one of Orion’s mean dodges. He walked about with his hands in his trousers’ pockets, just as usual. I didn’t speak; we had a row once. There was a bill; he wouldn’t pay his share. And one night when I was a bit on I broke the glass of the sideboard--threw a tumbler at it. He couldn’t stand that.

“Yet, why didn’t I speak? What made me keep so quiet? Why didn’t I ask him what the devil he meant by prying about another man’s rooms?

“He went and tinkered with the ornaments, scowled at the dust, picked up a match from the carpet--I could have sworn he picked it up, but it’s there still, just near your foot--and then went into the bedroom. He’s in there still. Confound it!” starting to his feet; “what was I doing to let him go in like that?”

Drummond was looking very queer.

“Orion,” he said quietly, “has been dead six months. He murdered his aunt and then jumped out of the window to evade the hangman. If you hadn’t been abroad you would have heard of it. We’ll have a look round the bedroom, if you like.”

Of course he wasn’t there. That is our ghost story. Several fellows have seen him since--so they say.

Dick Simpson came after Drummond. He said he saw Orion lots of times, and didn’t take the least notice. Rather resented sharing his rooms with another man who didn’t pay a penny rent, and who hadn’t the tact to make himself scarce when anybody dropped in--but that was all. Poor Dick wasn’t nervous or imaginative. Orion used to come in, shake his head at the dust, at torn leather paper on the walls and mangy ball fringe at the mantelshelf, then go quietly through into the bedroom. Dick told me the other day that he had just smashed the last of the rose-colored gas globes. He had the bits in a bag and was going to match it in the City. If he didn’t, Orion would be bound to look in to-night; he was beginning to be a bit of a bore.

Simpson was an insurance clerk, most commonplace, most steady. He was always having his top hat ironed, and recommending one to buy a pair of trouser stretchers. He went to the theater every Saturday night, and stopped in bed late on Sunday. He was quite content and prosperous on his sixty-five shillings a week, yet, because he had the set at 7 on the third floor, we all waited without saying anything, to him or to each other, for something extraordinary to happen. In his case we thought it might be just vulgar embezzlement--but you can never be sure, it is always the most unlikely thing that happens to the tenant of that third-floor set. When once it gets hold of a man it never lets him go. It never gives him up. More often than not it hands him over to the undertaker. And you know what happened to Dick.

There was a story of Bob and Barbara Piety. You’ll like that. If I were writing the story, instead of just gossiping it to you in the dusk, I should call it “The Play’s the Thing.” It is Hamlet--in an Inn of Court.

* * * * *

Bob Piety lived in the Inn as a bachelor. He married a nice girl--Miss Martin--and took a villa at Norwood. A few months before he married he lent Murphy twenty pounds. We all warned him; Murphy never paid, and made a boast of never paying, but these Irishmen are wheedling, and Bob was pretty flush just then. On this unlucky twenty pounds the whole story hangs.

Barbara had babies very quickly; servants’ wages rose each time she changed--and she was always changing. The beer barrel constantly gave out, and it was generally quarter day. Bob had a good post, as the City goes. But four hundred a year, though ample in the Inn, is only a pittance at Norwood, with an extravagant, prolific wife, a seventy-pound villa, and two maids, with a boy to clean the knives.

One morning, as Barbara was flicking at Bob’s coat with the clothes brush before he went to the City, she asked him timidly for a new gown.

“It won’t cost five pounds,” she said, pulling his coat down at the back. “You don’t like me to look shabby, dear, do you? And, Bob, while I think of it, just leave me Maria’s wages. I’ve had to give her a rise. You can’t get a really decent cook general for less than twenty pounds a year. And we want some new linoleum for the nursery--I’d better order it to----”

“I can’t really run to it all, Barbara”--he never called her Barbara except in a crisis, and when they were first married it usually made her cry. “There are the taxes, and I ought to have a new overcoat. And there is Pillew’s bill for the whooping cough. The kids must do without linoleum. Wear anything at the party--or we’ll stop at home. I’m hanged if I know where all the things are coming from. Twenty pounds for one girl--it’s preposterous.”

“Twenty pounds! Why, you lent some horrid bachelor that. It would pay Maria for a year. Go and get it out of him.”

“It is a bad debt.”

“You must make him pay. Now do, Bob, dear. It breaks my heart to see you worried.”

“I will make him,” Bob said after a minute’s pause, and added savagely, his nerves racked by wife, babies, and bills, “I’ll get it out of him by fair means or foul.”

Barbara cried out, before she kissed him and gave the final pull to his coat at the back:

“How can you talk in that dreadful way? One would think you meant to murder the man.”

At that moment Maria came out of the dining room with the breakfast tray.

Well, in the evening Bob went to the Inn and found Murphy at home. He asked him bluntly to pay back the twenty pounds, and Murphy said airily that it was ridiculous--a joke on Bob’s part--he hadn’t twenty pence in the world. This led to words. In the thick of the row there was a knock at Murphy’s door and he left the room to open it. Piety heard the murmur of voices--Murphy’s and another which he did not recognize. Then he heard a movement like a sharp scuffle of feet on the boards, heard a piercing cry and a heavy fall, and the quick, frightened patter of feet on the stairs. That was all. When he rushed into the little passage both of the outer doors were open, and Murphy was lying stone-dead just inside the “set.” There was the handle of a queer-looking knife sticking up from his waistcoat, and his blood had poured out in a great dark pool in which the Syrian curtains that draped the archway of the passage were dabbled.

Bob tried to raise the body. But the Irishman had been a burly fellow, and he only succeeded in spattering himself with blood. We all heard that fearful scream of poor Murphy’s; it even pierced the oak, for Kinsman, who had been shut away in his rooms with Sophia Dominy, came rushing upstairs, followed by the girl. I had the set opposite Murphy’s on the second floor, so I was first on the spot.

Sophia gave a yell when she saw the dead man. Kinsman bade her pull herself together, and in a minute or so she flew away down the stairs, saying she would find a policeman. By this time the whole square was roused. There were lights at most of the windows, sashes were flung up, men ran out in their slippers and with their pipes still stuck in the corner of their mouths, asking what was up. Kinsman and I ran down too. Piety didn’t move. He might have got away easily, but he stood dazed, staring at the heavy body of the dead Irishman; stood and stared sluggishly, with the splashed blood drying on his face and hands, just where it had spurted, and dropping heavily from his limp red cuff, the corner of which was soaked. Of course, everybody said that he had murdered Murphy in a fit of temper, because he couldn’t get his twenty pounds back. I knew they had been rowing, heard their angry voices across the passage when I went to my door to admit a visitor. It looked bad for Bob. Yet I didn’t believe that he had done it. All the other fellows pooh-poohed his lame explanation, and some said that Murphy, who was a thorough bad lot, was well out of the way, and others, who had known Mrs. Bob as Miss Martin, were full of sympathy for the poor little woman.

It was a wet night. Warm rain fell straight from the sky to the square. The light of each lamp above the hooded doors was reflected on the pavements. The stair leading to the second floor at 7 was crowded--with men in slippers and girls without any hats. One of the girls went into hysterics. Another one propped her up against the wall and undid her collar and called out shrilly for cold water and smelling salts. And then, after what seemed an interminable time, Sophia brought a policeman--he had been off the beat, of course--and Bob was arrested.

I went with him to the station, and after that I went down to Norwood and broke the news to Barbara.