Being a man advanced in years, and not being able to afford more than one curate, Dr. Coles was glad to avail himself of the services of helpers from outside the parish. Most of these were women of wealth and position, who came from their homes in the fashionable quarter to minister to the dwellers in the back streets of Lambeth. The reader of the society paragraphs in the daily press sometimes little suspected that the women whose names he saw in the list of guests at a grand dinner-party or dance the night before had spent their morning going about the slums of St. Jermyn’s.
The Duchess of Trent and Colonsay went to work without fuss, calling herself at the homes of the poor, and winning an easy entrance by her own kindly and modest demeanour. The sullen drudges of these dark precincts soon learned to look for her coming, not as that of a patroness, but as that of a dear friend, who was interested in the small details of their daily lives, and ever ready to sympathize if a drunken husband overnight had left a black bruise on the poor thin arm, or a ne’er-do-well son had been sent to the cells for fighting in the streets. They never knew how closely their own stories often tallied with the experience of the lady who listened to them so wistfully, and who found in soothing their sorrows the means of living down her own.
It was to this district that the Duchess took her way on the morning after she had seen her son.
The carriage set her down at the corner of a small street, called, as if in mockery of a more splendid region, Little Bond Street. Walking down this street, where she was well known, and nodding pleasantly to those of its inmates who were at their doors, the Duchess presently came to a small court or yard, which bore on the wall of the archway opening out of the street the legend “Beers Cooperage.”
Beers Cooperage no longer retained any trace of the manufacture of casks and barrels which some departed cooper had doubtless carried on there in bygone days. It consisted of a row of half a dozen very small cottages, with still smaller enclosures in front, which looked as though they might once have been meant for gardens. A last reminder of the time when Beers Cooperage had considered itself to be in a rural neighbourhood lingered on the window-sills of some of these cottages, which were ornamented with miniature wooden railings and five-barred gates, a touch of rustic fancy of which the modern Londoner has become incapable. Yet though the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage could not have originated these quaint decorations, and had probably never seen the country sights they were meant to recall, they took a pathetic pride in possessing them, and as soon as one of the railings or gates showed signs of decay it was carefully repaired.
Who knows what influence such trifles have over all of us? It is certain that the dwellers in Beers Cooperage were generally quieter and more decent in their lives than most of their neighbours. One or two of them kept singing-birds, instead of terriers to kill rats with. The inmate of one house, a poor cripple, had even set himself resolutely to make his front garden a reality instead of a name, by planting a row of wallflowers, bought full-grown from a coster-monger, in what he evidently considered a bed. These plants, which perished periodically, and were regularly renewed, were regarded with reverence by the neighbours, and attracted pilgrims to view them from two or three streets away. But on the rare occasions when they burst into bloom of their own accord, no profane hand was allowed to come too near them. After being reverently smelled at a distance by the dwellers in the Cooperage, the blossoms were culled with anxious pride by their proprietor, and made into a nosegay for the Duchess, who carried them home with her, and set them on the table of her oratory. They were the only flowers ever seen on that simple altar.
There was one house in Beers Cooperage, however, which differed strikingly from the rest. This was the hovel at the upper end, where the yard terminated in a high blank wall. There were no five-barred gates on the window-sills here; nothing but fragments, which hung rotting over the edge. Half the panes in the window were broken, and stuffed with dirty scraps of paper. The paling before the house was also fast disappearing, and the space in front was littered with broken tins and refuse not sufficiently noisome to attract the notice of the sanitary inspector. In the corner stood a kennel tenanted by a mongrel bulldog, the terror of the small children in the Cooperage. The door of this cottage generally stood half open, and through it came all day and night long sounds of angry scolding, or of oaths and drunken yells. The inside of the place matched with its outside. The floors and stairs looked as if they were never washed; the germs of a dozen fevers might have lurked in the dirt which was thickly piled everywhere. The miserable crockery and kitchen stuff was in as deplorable a condition as the windows. The bedding chiefly consisted of heaps of unwashed rags.
This was the one house in Beers Cooperage into which the Duchess had never yet ventured to go. It was tenanted by an Irishman, who had threatened to wring the neck of any —— Protestant who came meddling inside his doors.
For the last fortnight the Cooperage had enjoyed a blessed spell of relief from the presence of this man, whose formidable strength, added to his choleric temper, rendered him the terror of his neighbours. He had been taken in the act of kicking an old man whom he had first knocked down. The magistrate before whom he was brought, who had just previously imposed a sentence of six months on a boy for the theft of a pair of boots, desirous, perhaps, to show that he could be merciful on occasion, sent the hooligan to prison for fourteen days, thereby releasing the rest of the inhabitants of Beers Cooperage for that exact length of time.
On this morning, as soon as the Duchess came out from under the archway which formed the entrance to the Cooperage, she saw that something was amiss.