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.