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The landlord's chief interest is the sale of liquor. Under his roof you may, if you choose, eat and sleep, but what you are expected to do is to drink. Yet, even for drinking, there is no decent accommodation. You will find what is called a bar-parlour, a stuffy and dirty room, with crazy chairs, where only the sodden dram- gulper could imagine himself at ease.
"Now here's summat like a man!" said Prudy, and went out obediently to fetch them. Until she returned there was dead silence in the bar-parlour. The men puffed uneasily at their pipes, not one of which was alight, and avoided the stranger's eye, which rested on each in turn with a sardonic humour.
He sat down again rather heavily, and I stood looking from him to the landlady, and wondering what I should do. The matter was decided for me, however, in a way which I could never have foreseen. For, hearing a light footfall upon the step which led up to the bar-parlour, I turned and there almost beside me stood a wrinkled little Chinaman!
Squinny, red-cheeked little old party, he was; thin as a herring, and chilly, always chilly, sitting over the fire in the bar-parlour winter and summer too small squeaky voice he had minding any one of a penny whistle. But a warm man and a close one oh! very secret. Anybody must breakfast overnight and hurry at that eat with their loins girded, as you may say, to get upsides with old Lemuel."
As sure 's deith he's efter her. Whaur cud he hae heard tell o' her? Lord Rothie came, a moment after, sauntering into the bar-parlour, where Lizzie, the third Miss Napier, a red-haired, round-eyed, white-toothed woman of forty, was making entries in a book. 'She's a bonnie lassie that, that came in the coach to-night, they say, Miss Lizzie. 'As ugly 's sin, my lord, answered Lizzie.
At any rate, Percy's eyes, before they began to swim in a manner that prevented steady reading, caught the words "Job Roberts had always been a hard-drinking man, but one day, as he was coming out of the bar-parlour . . ." He was about to hurl it from him, when he met the other's eye and desisted. Rarely had Lord Belpher encountered a man with a more speaking eye.
As he lifted her splendid form there came from behind him an exclamation, an agitated scuffling. In heart-stopping panic George dropped the cat, jumped around. The red-headed Pinner boy, whom that morning he had seen in the bar-parlour, was scrambling from beneath the sofa, arms and legs thrusting his flaming pate at full-speed for the door. "Stop!" George cried, rooted in alarm.
The gooseherd, a shabby middle-aged man, looked as though he had recently lost the Battle of Marathon, and was asking himself whether the path of his retreat might not lie through the bar-parlour of the Tiger. 'Business pretty good? Mr. Curtenty inquired of him cheerfully. In the Five Towns business takes the place of weather as a topic of salutation. 'Business! echoed the gooseherd.
To-morrow he might venture to visit Mrs Pengelly and purchase a new and more capacious pair of trousers to-morrow, or perhaps the day after. Caution was necessary. He had already astonished Mr Gedye, the ironmonger, with his affluence: and just now again, like a fool, he had been dropping sovereigns about Latter's bar-parlour. That had been an awkward moment.
"You forget that I've got to look in at the Pompadour last thing to see if those two are there as usual," remarked Appleyard. "But that'll only take a few minutes I can call there on our way to the rendezvous. All right no more of it until half-past eleven, then." Albert Gaffney was already in a quiet corner of the bar-parlour of the appointed meeting-place when the other three arrived there.
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