Widdershins | Page 2

lean and shaven jaw; then,
with another glance at the board, he walked slowly across the square to
Number Six.
He knocked, and waited for two or three minutes, but, although the
door stood open, received no answer. He was knocking again when a
long-nosed man in shirt-sleeves appeared.
"I was arsking a blessing on our food," he said in severe explanation.
Oleron asked if he might have the key of the old house; and the
long-nosed man withdrew again.
Oleron waited for another five minutes on the step; then the man,
appearing again and masticating some of the food of which he had
spoken, announced that the key was lost.
"But you won't want it," he said. "The entrance door isn't closed, and a
push'll open any of the others. I'm a agent for it, if you're thinking of
taking it--"
Oleron recrossed the square, descended the two steps at the broken gate,
passed along the alley, and turned in at the old wide doorway. To the
right, immediately within the door, steps descended to the roomy
cellars, and the staircase before him had a carved rail, and was broad
and handsome and filthy. Oleron ascended it, avoiding contact with the
rail and wall, and stopped at the first landing. A door facing him had

been boarded up, but he pushed at that on his right hand, and an
insecure bolt or staple yielded. He entered the empty first floor.
He spent a quarter of an hour in the place, and then came out again.
Without mounting higher, he descended and recrossed the square to the
house of the man who had lost the key.
"Can you tell me how much the rent is?" he asked.
The man mentioned a figure, the comparative lowness of which seemed
accounted for by the character of the neighbourhood and the
abominable state of unrepair of the place.
"Would it be possible to rent a single floor?"
The long-nosed man did not know; they might....
"Who are they?"
The man gave Oleron the name of a firm of lawyers in Lincoln's Inn.
"You might mention my name--Barrett," he added.
Pressure of work prevented Oleron from going down to Lincoln's Inn
that afternoon, but he went on the morrow, and was instantly offered
the whole house as a purchase for fifty pounds down, the remainder of
the purchase-money to remain on mortgage. It took him half an hour to
disabuse the lawyer's mind of the idea that he wished anything more of
the place than to rent a single floor of it. This made certain hums and
haws of a difference, and the lawyer was by no means certain that it lay
within his power to do as Oleron suggested; but it was finally extracted
from him that, provided the notice-boards were allowed to remain up,
and that, provided it was agreed that in the event of the whole house
letting, the arrangement should terminate automatically without further
notice, something might be done. That the old place should suddenly
let over his head seemed to Oleron the slightest of risks to take, and he
promised a decision within a week. On the morrow he visited the house
again, went through it from top to bottom, and then went home to his

lodgings to take a bath.
He was immensely taken with that portion of the house he had already
determined should be his own. Scraped clean and repainted, and with
that old furniture of Oleron's grandmother's, it ought to be entirely
charming. He went to the storage warehouse to refresh his memory of
his half-forgotten belongings, and to take measurements; and thence he
went to a decorator's. He was very busy with his regular work, and
could have wished that the notice-board had caught his attention either
a few months earlier or else later in the year; but the quickest way
would be to suspend work entirely until after his removal....
A fortnight later his first floor was painted throughout in a tender,
elder-flower white, the paint was dry, and Oleron was in the middle of
his installation. He was animated, delighted; and he rubbed his hands as
he polished and made disposals of his grandmother's effects--the tall
lattice-paned china cupboard with its Derby and Mason and Spode, the
large folding Sheraton table, the long, low bookshelves (he had had two
of them "copied"), the chairs, the Sheffield candlesticks, the riveted
rose-bowls. These things he set against his newly painted elder-white
walls--walls of wood panelled in the happiest proportions, and moulded
and coffered to the low-seated window-recesses in a mood of gaiety
and rest that the builders of rooms no longer know. The ceilings were
lofty, and faintly painted with an old pattern of stars; even the tapering
mouldings of his iron fireplace were as delicately