In that fine summer weather, the one fire in the house was the kitchen fire. He went downstairs for the boiling water, with his teapot in his hand.
Nobody but the landlady was in the kitchen. She was one of the many English matrons whose path through this world is a path of thorns; and who take a dismal pleasure, whenever the opportunity is afforded them, in inspecting the scratched and bleeding feet of other people in a like condition with themselves. Her one vice was of the lighter sort--the vice of curiosity; and among the many counterbalancing virtues she possessed was the virtue of greatly respecting Mr. Bashwood, as a lodger whose rent was regularly paid, and whose ways were always quiet and civil from one year's end to another.
"What did you please to want, sir?" asked the landlady. "Boiling water, is it? Did you ever know the water boil, Mr. Bashwood, when you wanted it? Did you ever see a sulkier fire than that? I'll put a stick or two in, if you'll wait a little, and give me the chance. Dear, dear me, you'll excuse my mentioning it, sir, but how poorly you do look to-day!"
The strain on Mr. Bashwood's mind was beginning to tell. Something of the helplessness which he had shown at the station appeared again in his face and manner as he put his teapot on the kitchen table and sat down.
"I'm in trouble, ma'am," he said, quietly; "and I find trouble gets harder to bear than it used to be."
"Ah, you may well say that!" groaned the landlady. "I'm ready for the undertaker, Mr. Bashwood, when my time comes, whatever you may be. You're too lonely, sir. When you're in trouble, it's some help--though not much--to shift a share of it off on another person's shoulders. If your good lady had only been alive now, sir, what a comfort you would have found her, wouldn't you?"
A momentary spasm of pain passed across Mr. Bashwood's face. The landlady had ignorantly recalled him to the misfortunes of his married life. He had been long since forced to quiet her curiosity about his family affairs by telling her that he was a widower, and that his domestic circumstances had not been happy ones; but he had taken her no further into his confidence than this. The sad story which he had related to Midwinter, of his drunken wife who had ended her miserable life in a lunatic asylum, was a story which he had shrunk from confiding to the talkative woman, who would have confided it in her turn to every one else in the house.