Bommaney walked to a chair, and, sitting down there, lifted up his voice and wept. ‘I’ve been an honest man, by God! all my life long; and now I’m not merely ruined, but I shall be taken for a thief.’ He cried bitterly after this outburst, with his head between his hands. His hat fell off, and his walking-stick tumbled noisily to the floor. Mr. Barter picked them up, and, having set them on the table, looked at the shaking shoulders, and listened to the ruined man’s sobs and wailings. It was a pity—of course it was a pity—but young Mr. Barter really did not see how it was in his power to help it.
III
On a chill spring evening the sunset over London gave a brief radiance of colour to the dull gray roof and smoke-stained chimneys of many thoroughfares. Shadows thickened in the eastern skies as if fold after fold of finest crape were drawn over the field of watery and opalescent light the fallen sun had left behind it. In one great thoroughfare running east and west the sky-line of the houses stood distinct, and bathed in light of many colours; whilst down below there was a wall of shadow. Two parallel walls of shadow rose from a shadowy level, and the dusk had a thousand indistinguishable voices.
The shadowy lines became accented by twin rows of flickering fire, the rear jets seen with a blurred halo of mist round each of them, the halo crawling feebly within itself, tormented by a feeble wind. The long vista of pavement became chequered like a chessboard, with patches of light from shop windows. Gable Inn, staring at the growing darkness with a single fiery eye, looked like a Rip Van Winkle. It had been old when Chaucer and the knights and ladies of whom he sang were young; and its hoary stunted angles and squat chimney cowls had the grave and impassive aspect proper to great age. It has stood there now for over seven hundred years hoarding a growing store of secrets. It is roughly picturesque in every detail, and its every chamber is a triumph of narrowness, obscurity, and inconvenience.
In the quadrangle the shadows climbed the sturdy walls as if they were an exhalation from the paving-stones. The dim staircase sent down all manner of muffled and echoing voices. Footsteps sounded, and the clang of doors, and the shriek of unwilling keys in rusty locks, and the hurrying traffic of the street without, softened by the moist atmosphere, was like the fading echo of following feet upon the stairs.
Lights sprang up in the basement windows, telling of protractive legal labours. Lights twinkled in the garrets, telling of lonely study or noisy conviviality in the coming hours of darkness. At length one side of the quadrangle viewed by a solitary watcher from a third-floor window of the opposing side, winked with a hundred windows through the wet air and deepening shadow like a blear-eyed Argus.
This watcher, lounging at his own window, was Mr. Philip Bommaney, recently self-entitled the ‘Solitary of Gable Inn.’ He was eight-and-twenty years of age or thereabouts, a broad-shouldered, deep-chested, manly-looking fellow, with curling brown hair, and a face expressive of pugnacity, good-humour, and many capacities. He was a little weary now, after a long day of satisfactory work. He watched the mounting shadows, and listened to the weird gamut of the wind among the telegraph lines, until the outer voices made his own dull room seem homely. One ruddy tongue of flame from the expiring fire in the grate played on the narrow walls and low ceiling, and woke twinkling reflections in the spare and battered furniture. A man’s dwelling-place is always an index to his character when its arrangement depends upon himself; and signs of Philip Bommaney’s nature and pursuits were visible in plenty here. There were symmetrical rows of books on the shelves flanking the fire-place. An orderly stack of newspapers occupied one corner of the room, and a set of boxing-gloves lay on top of the pile, and a pair of dumb-bells beside it. A shaded reading-lamp stood upon the table in the midst of a great litter of papers. The barrels of a huge elephant gun flashed dimly from the wall as the firelight played upon them, and two or three lighter weapons were ranged together lower down.
He turned from the window and lit the lamp, and, wheeling round, held up the light to a photograph, and studied it with a pleased face. It was the portrait of a pretty girl, very sweetly grave, and looking as if it could be very sweetly vivacious. When he had looked at it for a longish time he nodded and smiled, as if the pictured lips had actually spoken to him. There was a tumbler standing beside the photograph with a bunch of hothouse flowers in it, the one bright spot of colour in the dingy chamber. He took this in his disengaged hand, and nodding and smiling anew at the pretty girl’s portrait, he turned about again, and walked into a bedroom beyond a narrow and inconvenient little window. The strident voice of the clock over the entrance of the old Hall, answered or anticipated from multitudinous spires in the City far and near, sounded as Philip entered his bedroom. He stood and listened, counting six jarring strokes. The bedroom was a microscopic apartment, with as many corners in it as any room of its size in London, and the bed itself was a perfect triumph of littleness, so tucked under the sloping roof, and so surrounded by projecting corners, as to make the entry to it or the exit from it a gymnastic performance of considerable merit. The room was not over-light at the best of times, the fourth part of the space of one small window in the sloping wall was filled by its own heavy framework, and for half its height it was shielded by a parapet, which had at least its uses in hiding the occupant of the room from the too-curious observation of those who dwelt in the upper stories of the houses opposite. These houses opposite, compared with Gable Inn, are of a mushroom modernness, and yet are old enough (having begun with a debauched and sickly constitution) to have fallen into an almost complete decrepitude. Their stately neighbour seems to be less grimy with the London smoke than they are, has always been less susceptible to outside evil influences, even of that unescapable sort, and drives them to an added shabbiness of senility by contrast with its own hale old age. The bedroom window was already open for the admission of such fresh air as, disguised in London blacks, the exhalations of moist spring pavements, and the reeking odours of the cuisine of Fleeter’s Rents, might choose to wander thither. Philip, with the lamp in one hand and the tumbler of flowers in the other, put out his head and looked into the squalid depths below him, and having gazed there a while absently and with no object, drew back with a vague touch of pity upon him for the people who dwelt in so much squalor so near to healthy effort and reasonable competence. He could hardly have told as much, perhaps, but one pallid countenance, shining very dimly at an open window, was very much answerable for that vague touch of pity. The face in the darkness started away from the window as he looked at it, as if his own robust health and the light that dwelt about him startled its pinched shabbiness into solitude. He set the tumbler of flowers upon the window-ledge, and closing the window, made his toilet and returned to the sitting-room. Then, having banked up the fire, and set the matches in such a position that he could easily find them, he blew out the lamp, left his chambers, and ran down the tortuous stairs. As he turned the last corner a door clanged noisily, and the next thing of which he was conscious was that he was struggling in the embrace of a stranger whom he had doubled up in an angle of the wall.
‘I beg your pardon,’ he said gaspingly; ‘I stumbled.’