第14章

How quietly, how uneventfully, how pleasantly, sped the next few days.Already life was settling down into a groove.Waiting on Mr.Sleuth was just what Mrs.Bunting could manage to do easily, and without tiring herself.

It had at once become clear that the lodger preferred to be waited on only by one person, and that person his landlady.He gave her very little trouble.Indeed, it did her good having to wait on the lodger; it even did her good that he was not like other gentlemen;for the fact occupied her mind, and in a way it amused her.The more so that whatever his oddities Mr.Sleuth had none of those tiresome, disagreeable ways with which landladies are only too familiar, and which seem peculiar only to those human beings who also happen to be lodgers.To take but one point: Mr.Sleuth did not ask to be called unduly early.Bunting and his Ellen had fallen into the way of lying rather late in the morning, and it was a great comfort not to have to turn out to make the lodger a cup of tea at seven, or even half-past seven.Mr.Sleuth seldom required anything before eleven.

But odd he certainly was.

The second evening he had been with them Mr.Sleuth had brought in a book of which the queer name was Cruden's Concordance.That and the Bible - Mrs.Bunting had soon discovered that there was a relation between the two books - seemed to be the lodger's only reading.He spent hours each day, generally after he had eaten the breakfast which also served for luncheon, poring over the Old Testament and over that, strange kind of index to the Book.

As for the delicate and yet the all-important question of money, Mr.Sleuth was everything - everything that the most exacting landlady could have wished.Never had there been a more confiding or trusting gentleman.On the very first day he had been with them he had allowed his money - the considerable sum of one hundred and eighty-four sovereigns - to lie about wrapped up in little pieces of rather dirty newspaper on his dressing-table.That had quite upset Mrs.Bunting.She had allowed herself respectfully to point out to him that what he was doing was foolish, indeed wrong.But as only answer he had laughed, and she had been startled when the loud, unusual and discordant sound had issued from his thin lips.

"I know those I can trust," he had answered, stuttering rather, as was his way when moved."And - and I assure you, Mrs.Bunting, that I hardly have to speak to a human being - especially to a woman"(and he had drawn in his breath with a hissing sound) "before Iknow exactly what manner of person is before me."It hadn't taken the landlady very long to find out that her lodger had a queer kind of fear and dislike of women.When she was doing the staircase and landings she would often hear Mr.Sleuth reading aloud to himself passages in the Bible that were very uncomplimentary to her sex.But Mrs.Bunting had no very great opinion of her sister woman, so that didn't put her out.Besides, where one's lodger is concerned, a dislike of women is better than - well, than the other thing.

In any case, where would have been the good of worrying about the lodger's funny ways? Of course, Mr.Sleuth was eccentric.If he hadn't been, as Bunting funnily styled it, "just a leetle touched upstairs," he wouldn't be here, living this strange, solitary life in lodgings.He would be living in quite a different sort of way with some of his relatives, or with a friend of his own class.

There came a time when Mrs.Bunting, looking back - as even the least imaginative of us are apt to look back to any part of our own past lives which becomes for any reason poignantly memorable - wondered how soon it was that she had discovered that her lodger was given to creeping out of the house at a time when almost all living things prefer to sleep.

She brought herself to believe - but I am inclined to doubt whether she was right in so believing - that the first time she became aware of this strange nocturnal habit of Mr.Sleuth's happened to be during the night which preceded the day on which she had observed a very curious circumstance.This very curious circumstance was the complete disappearance of one of Mr.Sleuth's three suits of clothes.

It always passes my comprehension how people can remember, over any length of time, not every moment of certain happenings, for that is natural enough, but the day, the hour, the minute when these happenings took place! Much as she thought about it afterwards, even Mrs.Bunting never quite made up her mind whether it was during the fifth or the sixth night of Mr.Sleuth's stay under her roof that she became aware that he had gone out at two in the morning and had only come in at five.

But that there did come such a night is certain - as certain as is the fact that her discovery coincided with various occurrences which were destined to remain retrospectively memorable.

******

It was intensely dark, intensely quiet - the darkest quietest hour of the night, when suddenly Mrs.Bunting was awakened from a deep, dreamless sleep by sounds at once unexpected and familiar.She knew at once what those sounds were.They were those made by Mr.

Sleuth, first coming down the stairs, and walking on tiptoe - she was sure it was.on tiptoe - past her door, and finally softly shutting the front door behind him.

Try as she would, Mrs.Bunting found it quite impossible to go to sleep again.There she lay wide awake, afraid to move lest Bunting should waken up too, till she heard Mr.Sleuth, three hours later, creep back into the house and so up to bed.

Then, and not till then, she slept again.But in the morning she felt very tired, so tired indeed, that she had been very glad when Bunting good-naturedly suggested that he should go out and do their little bit of marketing.