She had tried to ease her mind by arranging and rearranging the furniture—regular lodging house furniture—table, six chairs, horse-hair sofa, a what not, and the chiffonnier, with a tea-caddy upon it, of which the respective keys had been solemnly presented to Miss Hilary. But still the parlor looked homeless and bare; and the yellowish paper on the walls, the large patterned, many colored Kidderminster on the floor, gave an involuntary sense of discomfort and dreariness. Besides, No. 15 was on the shady side of the street—cheap lodgings always are; and no one who has not lived in the like lodgings—not a house—can imagine what it is to inhabit perpetually one room where the sunshine just peeps in for an hour a day, and vanishes by eleven A. M.; leaving behind in winter a chill dampness, and in summer a heavy, dusty atmosphere, that weighs like lead on the spirits in spite of one's self. No wonder that, as is statistically known and proved, cholera stalks, fever rages, and the registrar's list is always swelled along the shady side of a London street.
Elizabeth felt this, though she had not the dimmest idea why. She stood watching the sunset light fade out of the topmost windows of the opposite house—ghostly reflection of some sunset over fields and trees far away; and she listened to the long monotonous cry melting away round the crescent, and beginning again at the other end of the street—"Straw-berries—straw-ber-ries!" Also, with an eye to tomorrow's Sunday dinner, she investigated the cart of the tired costermonger, who crawled along beside his equally tired donkey, reiterating at times, in tones hoarse with a day's bawling, his dreary "Cauli-flower! Cauli-flower!—Fine new pease, sixpence peck!"
But, alas! the pease were neither fine nor new; and the cauliflowers were regular Saturday night's cauliflowers. Besides, Elizabeth suddenly doubted whether she had any right, unordered, to buy these things which, from being common garden necessaries, had become luxuries. This thought, with some others that it occasioned, her unwonted state of Idleness and the dullness of every thing about her—what is so dull as a "quiet" London street on a summer evening?—actually made Elizabeth stand, motionless and meditative, for a quarter of an hour. Then she started to hear two cabs drive up to the door; the "family" had at length arrived.
Ascott was there too. Two new portmanteaus and a splendid hat-box east either ignominy or glory upon the poor Stowbury luggage; and—Elizabeth's sharp eye noticed—there was also his trunk which she had seen lying detained for rent in his Gower Street lodgings. But he looked quite easy and comfortable: handed out his Aunt Johanna, commanded the luggage about, and paid the cabmen with such a magnificent air, that they touched their bats to him, and winked at one another as much as to say. "That's a real gentleman!"
In which statement the landlady evidently coincided, and courtesied low when Miss Leaf introducing him as "my nephew," hoped that a room could be found for him. Which at last there was, by his appropriating Miss Leaf's, while she and Hilary took that at the top of the house. But they agreed, Ascott must have a good airy room to study in.
"You know, my dear boy," said his Aunt Johanna to him—and at her tender tone he looked a little downcast, as when he was a small fellow and had been forgiven something — "You know you will have to work very hard."
"All right, aunt! I'm your man for that! This will be a jolly room; and I can smoke up the chimney capitally!"
So they came down stairs quite cheerfully, and Ascott applied himself with the best of appetites to what he called a "hungry" tea. True, the ham, which Elizabeth had to fetch from an eating house some streets off, cost two shillings a pound, and the eggs, which caused her another war below over the relighting of a fire to boil them, were dismissed by the young gentleman as "horrid stale." Still, woman-like, when there is a man in the question, his aunts let him, have his why. It seemed as if they had resolved to try their utmost to make the new home to which he came, or rather was driven, a pleasant home, and to bind him to it with cords of love, the only cords worth any thing, though sometimes—Heaved knows why—even they fail, and are snapped and thrown aside like straws.
Whenever Elizabeth went in and out of the parlor she always heard lively talk going on among the family; Ascott making his jokes, telling about his college life, and planning his life to come as a surgeon in full practice, on the most extensive scale. And when she brought in the chamber candles, she saw him kiss his aunts affectionately, and even help his Aunt Johanna—who looked frightfully pale and tired, but smiling still—to her bed-room door.
"You'll not sit up long, my dear? No reading to night?" said she, anxiously.