The Lodger by Marie Belloc Lowndes Read Free Book Online

being managed by that old aunt of hers - an
idle, good-for-nothing way, very different from the fashion in
which she herself had been trained at the Foundling, for Mrs.
Bunting as a little child bad known no other home, no other family
than those provided by good Captain Coram.
      "Joe Chandler's too sensible a young chap to be
thinking of girls yet awhile," she said tartly.
      "No doubt you're right," Bunting agreed. "Times be
changed. In my young days chaps always had time for that. 'Twas
just a notion that came into my head, hearing him asking,
anxious-like, after her."
    ***
      About five o'clock, after the street lamps were well
alight, Mr. Sleuth went out, and that same evening there came two
parcels addressed to his landlady. These parcels contained clothes.
But it was quite clear to Mrs. Bunting's eyes that they were not
new clothes. In fact, they had evidently been bought in some good
second-hand clothes-shop. A funny thing for a real gentleman like
Mr. Sleuth to do! It proved that he had given up all hope of
getting back his lost luggage.
      When the lodger had gone out he had not taken his
bag with him, of that Mrs. Bunting was positive. And yet, though
she searched high and low for it, she could not find the place
where Mr. Sleuth kept it. And at last, had it not been that she was
a very clear-headed woman, with a good memory, she would have been
disposed to think that the bag had never existed, save in her
imagination.
      But no, she could not tell herself that! She
remembered exactly how it had looked when Mr. Sleuth had first
stood, a strange, queer-looking figure of a man, on her
doorstep.
      She further remembered how he had put the bag down
on the floor of the top front room, and then, forgetting what he
had done, how he had asked her eagerly, in a tone of angry fear,
where the bag was - only to find it safely lodged at his feet!
      As time went on Mrs. Bunting thought a great deal
about that bag, for, strange and amazing fact, she never saw Mr.
Sleuth's bag again. But, of course, she soon formed a theory as to
its whereabouts. The brown leather bag which had formed Mr.
Sleuth's only luggage the afternoon of his arrival was almost
certainly locked up in the lower part of the drawing-room
chiffonnier. Mr. Sleuth evidently always carried the key of the
little corner cupboard about his person; Mrs. Bunting had also had
a good hunt for that key, but, as was the case with the bag, the
key disappeared, and she never saw either the one or the other
again.

CHAPTER V
       H ow 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