One of them, coming
abreast of us as the turnkey led us off to a staircase on the left,
halted, drew himself up, stared at us for a moment with vacant eyes,
and hurried by; yet before we mounted the stairs I saw him reach the
farther wall, wheel, and come as hastily striding back.
The stairway led to a filthy corridor, pierced on the left with a row
of tiny windows looking on the first and empty courtyard; and on the
right with a close row of doors, the most of which stood open and
gave glimpses of foul disordered beds, broken meats, and barred
windows crusted with London grime. The smell was pestilential.
Our turnkey rapped on one of the closed doors, and half-flung,
half-kicked it open; for a box had been set against it on the inside.
"Visitors for the Baron!" he announced, and stood aside to let us
enter. My father had ordered Billy to wait below. We two passed in
together.
Now, my father, as I have said, was tall; yet it seemed to me that
the man who greeted us was taller, as he rose from the bed and stood
between us and the barred dirty window. By little and little I made
out that he wore an orange-coloured dressing-gown, and on his head a
Turk's fez; that he had pushed back a table at which, seated on the
bed, he had been writing; and that on the sill of the closed window
behind him stood a geranium-plant, dry with dust and withering in the
stagnant air of the room.
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