THE THREATENING EYE.
CHAPTER I.
THE EDUCATION OF MARY GRIMM.
A street in Brixton—one of those dreary streets of what the house-agent calls eligible eight-roomed residences, in which all the houses are as like each other as so many peas out of one pod: each two-storied; each looking out on the street through six windows; each with its little flight of stone steps leading up to the front door; each with its garden just six yards square; each with its severe respectability of expression. For houses, like men, have their expressions which reflect the characters of their inmates. There is the prim Puritanical house; the dissipated villa with its neglected gate; the ostentatious nouveau riche mansion, turning up its nose at its neighbours; the well-kept pretty cottage, looking contented with itself and all the world, containing as it does the newly-married couple; the cynical abode of crusty old bachelorhood surrounded by whims and fads; and so on, each from palace to slum with a face the meaning of which he who knows how may read.
Now the houses of this Brixton Street were of the respectable-genteel class of houses, not over-wealthy, but very respectable; possibly come down in the world some of them, but all essentially genteel.
Married clerks in banks and merchants' offices, with small salaries and large families, formed the bulk of the occupants of these dwellings. Besides these there were generally one or two retired military men in the street; they also with encumbrances, wives and families, that were rather slip-shod, whereas the military men themselves preserved a certain amount of fashion in their attire. These gallant officers and their belongings were wont, however, to encamp for a while only as it were in the street. They never stayed long, but would vanish unostentatiously without fuss of any kind, leaving behind painful regrets in the memories of sundry rate-collectors and tradesmen. These nomadic warriors alone of all that street's inhabitants were not quite respectable, though distinctly genteel.
It was, in short, a dull Brixton street such as our London suburbs have hundreds of, leading from nowhere in particular to nowhere at all, for it terminated at its further end in a wilderness of "eligible building land," a desert of mud and broken crockery that was only awaiting the advent of the speculative builder to become yet one more excrescence of this swollen metropolis.
Of all the respectable houses of this highly respectable street none were more respectable than No. 22. No grocer hesitated before he permitted Mrs. Grimm to run up a three months' account at his shop; for was not Mr. Grimm known to be a man of substance? He was a lawyer in the city, a solicitor in fair but not clean practice: a Perpetual Commissioner of Oaths too, it was whispered, and to the outside world such a title could not but imply more than respectability, it even savoured of dignity. Again he was wont to come punctually home to his dinner every evening at seven; he had been five years at No. 22, and had always paid his way; and finally, what established his credit more than all else, he was known to own no less than three houses in the street, bringing him in some thirty pounds a year each.