“Yes, Denis, to both your questions. We have come to an acute financial crisis—that is not new—and Mr. Eale, the solicitor, has been to call on Gran, and made himself most odious, and disagreeable. He threatens all sorts of things.”
“Eale is a ‘shark lawyer’—a rich rascal who gets his living by money-lending, taking up shady cases, and grinding the faces of the poor. Granny should not have anything to do with such a rotter—or let him inside her doors.”
“I know, and I cannot bear the sight of him,” replied Bridget. “As to Granny’s door, there is no real door in a tenement house; and he stalks down our passage, raps with his stick, and drops in about once a week. He brought Gran a basket of grapes the other day—we sold them!”
“Granny should have flung them at his head, and she would—if she knew as much about him as I do.”
“I’m pretty sure she knows something of him now; he came yesterday, and stayed over an hour. I kept away all the time, and after he had gone I found Gran crying. Denis,” and she hesitated for a moment, “it’s terrible to see an old person cry! Oh, look—here is Mr. Eale coming out of Mountjoy Square!”
“Talk of the devil—so he is! Ah, he funks meeting us. See, he has crossed the road, and is going into one of those houses.”
Mr. Eale was a short, thick-set individual of about fifty, with heavy brows and a square jaw; he looked well dressed and prosperous, and walked with a sort of swaggering strut. He glanced over his shoulder as he waited on the doorstep, and threw the young couple a baleful glare.
Old Mrs. Doyne had known a grave change of fortune; from mistress of a fine country place she had sunk by gradual but irresistible forces to two bare rooms, in what had once been the town house of the Doynes, and here she eked out a precarious livelihood with her wonderfully clever fingers. The slow descent had taken fifty years to accomplish; gradual and almost imperceptible at first; the latter phase a breathless rush. Sophia Doyne was a proud woman, and had taken extraordinary pains to hide her troubles and whereabouts from her few surviving friends, who had a vague impression that “Sophy Doyne and her granddaughter lived somewhere in England,” or even that the old lady was already dead!
The family mansion, which was situated in the neighbourhood of Mountjoy Square, had once upon a time been one of the finest houses on the north side. Who would think so, to behold it now! The rusty area railings were bent and broken, the areas littered with old hampers, tin cans, and broken crockery; the hall door stood wide, and half a dozen noisy children were playing hop-scotch in the great flagged vestibule. Beyond this, a pair of double doors had once opened into a smaller hall, but the doors of handsome mahogany were now in America. A great winding staircase with shallow stone steps led up to the drawing-rooms—from which now descended an overpowering odour of bad tobacco, and fried herrings. The walls of both halls and staircase were of stucco, very dirty and discoloured, but an exquisite frieze still survived, and gave an impression of processions of beautifully modelled classical figures—mostly in a condition of unassuming nudity!