restlessly away on its edge. “Will you take anything? A glass of sherry or a biscuit?”
The hand taps a little less feverishly, but there is no reply. Thoroughly disgusted, Mrs. Farthing bustles back into her kitchen, chivvies away the cat, which impetuous and foolhardy creature has taken possession of her rocking chair, seizes a taper and lights a pair of tall wax candles that very soon begin to gutter and fizz, and settles down to brood. There is a letter lying on the kitchen table with a scarlet seal on its reverse side, and Mrs. Farthing takes it up and reads for the thirtieth time the assurances of a certain legal gentleman that this day evening Mrs. F.’s services—for which his friend Mr. D. is very grateful—will be at an end. But what if Mr. D. don’t come? Mrs. Farthing wonders. What if nobody comes? These are disagreeable thoughts, and Mrs. Farthing doesn’t care to entertain them.
Outside in Tite Street the evening draws on. Lights go on in upstairs windows; smoke rises from the ancient chimneys to mingle with the darkening air. The faint melodious clatter of a pianoforte can be heard somewhere, as if to say “Why, d——, despite it all we can still be comfortable.” Cats begin to appear around the area steps and athwart the chimney pots, their eyes full of nocturnal purpose.Meek papas, thither conveyed from clerking offices in High Holborn and Fleet Street, are met at their front doors, relieved of their gloves and clerkly appurtenances, regaled with mutton chops brought in hot and hot and given babies to dandle while their supper beer is fetching. Such is the press of servant girls and stout matrons around the door of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium that Little Sills, the celebrated comic tenor, engaged that evening to delight the company with the ballad “Villikins and His Dinah,” and arriving early in a tall hat and a sateen waistcoat, grows suddenly sanguine of his prospects and imagines a roseate future in which he is summoned to Windsor, appears before the Lord Mayor’s banquet and can introduce Mrs. Sills (at present with the children in Hoxton) to, as he puts it, “the kind of society that a woman of her refinement, sir, demands.”
It turns colder, and a flake or two of snow—grey snow, soiled by the reek of a thousand chimneys, but snow nonetheless—drifts down over the street, where it is seen from out of the window of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium by Mr. Phelps as he descends to the kitchen to relay orders for beefsteaks and whisky-punch, and by the ancient proprietress of the milliner’s shop, now retired to a comfortable back bedroom with her hair done up in curl papers and a copy of the St. James’s Chronicle in her ancient hand, and by Mrs. Farthing, who, knowing that it means wet underfoot, and pattens and footbaths, and all manner of inconveniences which Mrs. Farthing isn’t prepared to countenance, drats it with all her heart.
The person concealed in Mrs. Farthing’s parlour sees it and twists her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and thinks—but who knows what she thinks?—of certain former passages in her life, in which predominate the figure of a pleasant-faced old gentleman wielding a quill pen above a sheet of paper quite as if he means to stab it through and through, until her thoughts altogether sail away with her, go running up the wallpaper of Mrs. Farthing’s parlour—which is all coy shepherdesses and their bucolic swains—to take sanctuary on the curtain pole.
It is at a late hour, unconscionably late for Tite Street—the meek papas, arrayed now in nightshirts and slippers, are yawning crosslyfor the candles while their wives wonder how it is that the winter nights do go on so; Little Sills, his engagement concluded and the landlord’s half sovereign clinking against the farthings in his breast pocket, is riding home to Hoxton on the top of a twopenny omnibus (it is a triumphal carriage in Little Sills’s imagination, with a
The hand taps a little less feverishly, but there is no reply. Thoroughly disgusted, Mrs. Farthing bustles back into her kitchen, chivvies away the cat, which impetuous and foolhardy creature has taken possession of her rocking chair, seizes a taper and lights a pair of tall wax candles that very soon begin to gutter and fizz, and settles down to brood. There is a letter lying on the kitchen table with a scarlet seal on its reverse side, and Mrs. Farthing takes it up and reads for the thirtieth time the assurances of a certain legal gentleman that this day evening Mrs. F.’s services—for which his friend Mr. D. is very grateful—will be at an end. But what if Mr. D. don’t come? Mrs. Farthing wonders. What if nobody comes? These are disagreeable thoughts, and Mrs. Farthing doesn’t care to entertain them.
Outside in Tite Street the evening draws on. Lights go on in upstairs windows; smoke rises from the ancient chimneys to mingle with the darkening air. The faint melodious clatter of a pianoforte can be heard somewhere, as if to say “Why, d——, despite it all we can still be comfortable.” Cats begin to appear around the area steps and athwart the chimney pots, their eyes full of nocturnal purpose.Meek papas, thither conveyed from clerking offices in High Holborn and Fleet Street, are met at their front doors, relieved of their gloves and clerkly appurtenances, regaled with mutton chops brought in hot and hot and given babies to dandle while their supper beer is fetching. Such is the press of servant girls and stout matrons around the door of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium that Little Sills, the celebrated comic tenor, engaged that evening to delight the company with the ballad “Villikins and His Dinah,” and arriving early in a tall hat and a sateen waistcoat, grows suddenly sanguine of his prospects and imagines a roseate future in which he is summoned to Windsor, appears before the Lord Mayor’s banquet and can introduce Mrs. Sills (at present with the children in Hoxton) to, as he puts it, “the kind of society that a woman of her refinement, sir, demands.”
It turns colder, and a flake or two of snow—grey snow, soiled by the reek of a thousand chimneys, but snow nonetheless—drifts down over the street, where it is seen from out of the window of the Tite Arms and Refreshment Emporium by Mr. Phelps as he descends to the kitchen to relay orders for beefsteaks and whisky-punch, and by the ancient proprietress of the milliner’s shop, now retired to a comfortable back bedroom with her hair done up in curl papers and a copy of the St. James’s Chronicle in her ancient hand, and by Mrs. Farthing, who, knowing that it means wet underfoot, and pattens and footbaths, and all manner of inconveniences which Mrs. Farthing isn’t prepared to countenance, drats it with all her heart.
The person concealed in Mrs. Farthing’s parlour sees it and twists her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and thinks—but who knows what she thinks?—of certain former passages in her life, in which predominate the figure of a pleasant-faced old gentleman wielding a quill pen above a sheet of paper quite as if he means to stab it through and through, until her thoughts altogether sail away with her, go running up the wallpaper of Mrs. Farthing’s parlour—which is all coy shepherdesses and their bucolic swains—to take sanctuary on the curtain pole.
It is at a late hour, unconscionably late for Tite Street—the meek papas, arrayed now in nightshirts and slippers, are yawning crosslyfor the candles while their wives wonder how it is that the winter nights do go on so; Little Sills, his engagement concluded and the landlord’s half sovereign clinking against the farthings in his breast pocket, is riding home to Hoxton on the top of a twopenny omnibus (it is a triumphal carriage in Little Sills’s imagination, with a
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