The Lodger

  
R
obert 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 un-fortunate
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 said. 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.

  kept, looked as if it could, aye, and would, keep
any se-

  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 eats to listen. There fell on them, emerging now and
again from the confused babe1 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.