Page:When It Was Dark.djvu/162

142 One Wednesday — he remembered the day afterwards — Spence awoke about mid-day. He had been late at the office the night before and afterwards had gone to a club, not going to bed till after four.

He heard the laundress moving about the chambers preparing his breakfast. He shouted to her, and in a minute or two she came in with his letters and a cup of tea. She went to the window and pulled up the blind, letting a dreary grey-yellow December light into the room.

"Nasty day, Mrs. Buscall," he said, sipping his tea. "It is so, sir," the woman said, a lean, kindly-faced London drudge from a court in Drury Lane. "Gives me a frog in my throat all the time, this fog does. You'd better let me pour a drop of hot water in your bath, sir. I've got the kettle on the gas stove."

The laundress had an objection to baths, deep-rooted and a matter of principle. The daily cold tub she regarded as suicidal, and when Gortre had arrived, her pained surprise at finding him also — a clergyman too! — addicted to such adventurous and injudicious habits had been as extreme as her disappointment. Spence agreed to humour her, and she began to prepare the bath.

"Letter from Mr. Cyril, I see, sir," she remarked. Mrs. Buscall loved the archaeologist with more strenuousness than her other two charges. The unusual and mysterious has a real fascination for a certain type of uneducated Cockney brain. Hands's rare sojourns at the chambers, the Eastern dresses and pictures in his room, his strange and perilous life — as she considered it — in the veritable Bible land, where Satan actually roamed the desert in the form of a lion seeking whom he might devour, all these stimulated her crude imagination and brought colour into the dreary purlieus of Drury Lane.