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Lessways. Mrs. Grant's pressing duties necessitated her immediate departure. Mrs. Lessways ceremoniously insisted on her leaving by the front door. "I don't know where you'll find another rent-collector that's worth his salt in this town," observed Mrs. Grant, on the doorstep. "I can't think what you'll do, Mrs. Lessways!" "I shall collect my rents myself," was the answer. When Mrs.
"The gent who owns this joint." "Who is he?" Suspicion crept into the protruding eyes of the rent-collector. "Say!" he demanded. "Who are you anyway, and what do you think you're doing here? That's what I'd like to know. What do you want with the name of the owner of this place? What business is it of yours?" "I'm a newspaper man." "I guessed you were," said Mr. Gooch with triumph.
It is as though the tenants of a New York apartment house had the heads of the landlord and the rent-collector and the janitor swinging over the front entrance.
Clodd admiringly, as he pocketed the six half-crowns that the lady handed up to him. "If only they were all like you, Mrs. Postwhistle!" "Wouldn't be no need of chaps like you to worry 'em," pointed out Mrs. Postwhistle. "It's an irony of fate, my being a rent-collector, when you come to think of it," remarked Mr. Clodd, writing out the receipt.
He had bought it off a farmer whose wife "stood" St Luke's Market. His excuse was that he needed help in getting about the Five Towns in pursuit of cottage rents, for his business of a rent-collector had grown. But for this purpose a bicycle would have served equally well, and would not have cost a shilling a day to feed, as the mule did, nor have shied at policemen, as the mule nearly always did.
But he was a law unto himself, though sometimes a bad, fierce law; and he resolved to give the rent-collector notice, and look out for a cheaper abode, and tell Mary they must flit. Poor Mary! she loved the house, too. It was wrenching up her natural feelings of home, for it would be long before the fibres of her heart would gather themselves about another place. This trial was spared.
"This afternoon? Yes, why were you there? What were you doing?" "I was interviewing the collector of rents and trying to dig his employer's name out of him. It was Smith's idea. Smith's theory was that the owner of the tenements must have some special private reason for lying low, and that he would employ some special fellow, whom he could trust, as a rent-collector.
"Condy RIVERS!" she exclaimed, her cheeks flaming, "those are our neighbors. They heard every word. What do you suppose they think?" "Huh! I'd rather have 'em think I was a rent-collector than a book-agent. You began it. 'Evenin', Miss Lady." "'Evenin', Mister Man." But Condy's visit, begun thus gayly, soon developed along much more serious lines.
We will combine business with pleasure, paying the stripling's rent and corralling the rent-collector at the same time. What is today? How long before the end of the month? Another week! A murrain on it, Comrade Windsor. Two murrains. This delay may undo us." But the days went by without any further movement on the part of the enemy. A strange quiet seemed to be brooding over the other camp.
"Then the simplest thing will be for me to send round a bailiff to-morrow morning, early." He might have been saying: "The simplest thing will be for me to send round a bunch of orchids." Another man would have felt emotion, and probably expressed it. But not Denry, the rent-collector and manager of estates large and small.
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