The Uninhabited House | Page 2

unprofitable
client into the scales, if he had not been very good he must have
washed his hands of Miss Blake and her niece's house long before the
period at which this story opens.
The house did not belong to Miss Blake. It was the property of her
niece, a certain Miss Helena Elmsdale, of whom Mr. Craven always
spoke as that "poor child."
She was not of age, and Miss Blake managed her few pecuniary affairs.
Besides the "desirable residence, suitable," etcetera, aunt and niece had

property producing about sixty-five pounds a year. When we could let
the desirable residence, handsomely furnished, and with every
convenience that could be named in the space of a half-guinea
advertisement, to a family from the country, or an officer just returned
from India, or to an invalid who desired a beautiful and quiet abode
within an easy drive of the West End--when we could do this, I say, the
income of aunt and niece rose to two hundred and sixty-five pounds a
year, which made a very material difference to Miss Blake.
When we could not let the house, or when the payment of the rent was
in dispute, Mr. Craven advanced the lady various five and ten pound
notes, which, it is to be hoped, were entered duly to his credit in the
Eternal Books. In the mundane records kept in our offices, they always
appeared as debits to William Craven's private account.
As for the young men about our establishment, of whom I was one, we
anathematised that house. I do not intend to reproduce the language we
used concerning it at one period of our experience, because eventually
the evil wore itself out, as most evils do, and at last we came to look
upon the desirable residence as an institution of our firm--as a sort of
_cause célèbre_, with which it was creditable to be associated--as a
species of remarkable criminal always on its trial, and always certain to
be defended by Messrs. Craven and Son.
In fact, the Uninhabited House--for uninhabited it usually was, whether
anyone was answerable for the rent or not--finally became an object of
as keen interest to all Mr. Craven's clerks as it became a source of
annoyance to him.
So the beam goes up and down. While Mr. Craven pooh-poohed the
complaints of tenants, and laughed at the idea of a man being afraid of
a ghost, we did not laugh, but swore. When, however, Mr. Craven
began to look serious about the matter, and hoped some evil-disposed
persons were not trying to keep the place tenantless, our interest in the
old house became absorbing. And as our interest in the residence grew,
so, likewise, did our appreciation of Miss Blake.
We missed her when she went abroad--which she always did the day a
fresh agreement was signed--and we welcomed her return to England
and our offices with effusion. Safely I can say no millionaire ever
received such an ovation as fell to the lot of Miss Blake when, after a
foreign tour, she returned to those lodgings near Brunswick Square,

which her residence ought, I think, to have rendered classic.
She never lost an hour in coming to us. With the dust of travel upon her,
with the heat and burden of quarrels with railway porters, and
encounters with cabmen, visible to anyone who chose to read the signs
of the times, Miss Blake came pounding up our stairs, wanting to see
Mr. Craven.
If that gentleman was engaged, she would sit down in the general office,
and relate her latest grievance to a posse of sympathising clerks.
"And he says he won't pay the rent," was always the refrain of these
lamentations.
"It is in Ireland he thinks he is, poor soul!" she was wont to declare.
"We'll teach him different, Miss Blake," the spokesman of the party
would declare; whilst another ostentatiously mended a pen, and a third
brought down a ream of foolscap and laid it with a thump before him
on the desk.
"And, indeed, you're all decent lads, though full of your tricks," Miss
Blake would sometimes remark, in a tone of gentle reproof. "But if you
had a niece just dying with grief, and a house nobody will live in on
your hands, you would not have as much heart for fun, I can tell you
that."
Hearing which, the young rascals tried to look sorrowful, and failed.
In the way of my profession I have met with many singular persons, but
I can safely declare I never met with any person so singular as Miss
Blake.
She was--I speak of her in the past tense, not because she is dead, but
because times and circumstances have changed since the period when
we both had to do