"Martia."
Much moved and excited, Barty looked in the glass and did as he was bid, and the north left him; and Johanna brought him his breakfast, and he started for Riffrath.
All through this winter that was so happily spent by Barty in Düsseldorf things did not go very happily in London for the Gibsons. Mr. Gibson was not meant for business; nature intended him as a rival to Keeley or Buckstone.
He was extravagant, and so was his wife; they were both given to frequent and most expensive hospitalities; and he to cards, and she to dressing herself and her daughter more beautifully than quite became their position in life. The handsome and prosperous shop in Cheapside—the "emporium," as he loved to call it—was not enough to provide for all these luxuries; so he took another in Conduit Street, and decorated it and stocked it at immense expense, and called it the "Universal Fur Company," and himself the "Head of a West End firm."
Then he speculated, and was not successful, and his affairs got into tangle.
And a day came when he found he could not keep up these two shops and his private house in Tavistock Square as well; the carriage was put down first—a great distress to Mrs. Gibson; and finally, to her intense grief, it became necessary to give up the pretty house itself.
It was decided that their home in future must be over the new emporium in Conduit Street; Mrs. Gibson had a properly constituted English shopkeeper's wife's horror of living over her husband's shop—the idea almost broke her heart; and as a little consolation, while the necessary changes were being wrought for their altered mode of life, Mr. Gibson treated her and Leah and my sister to a trip up the Rhine—and Mrs. Bletchley, the splendid old Jewess (Leah's grandmother), who suffered, or fancied she suffered, in her eyesight, took it into her head that she would like to see the famous Dr. Hasenclever in Riffrath, and elected to journey with them—at all events as far as Düsseldorf. I would have escorted them, but that my father was ill, and I had to replace him in Barge Yard; besides, I was not yet quite cured of my unhappy passion, though in an advanced stage of convalescence; and I did not wish to put myself under conditions that might retard my complete recovery, or even bring on a relapse. I wished to love Leah as a sister; in time I succeeded in doing so; she has been fortunate in her brother, though I say it who shouldn't—and, O heavens! haven't I been fortunate in my sister Leah?
My own sister Ida wrote to Barty to find rooms and meet them at the station, and fixed the day and hour of their arrival; and commissioned him to take seats for Gluck's Iphigenia.