Having so far arranged the matters which they had met to discuss, the aristocratic villain and the low miscreant separated.
Vernon returned to his lodging in Stamford Street; and the Resurrection Man proceeded into the Westminster Road, where he took a cab, saying to the driver, "Golden Lane, Saint Luke's."
CHAPTER CXCVI.
THE OLD HAG AND THE RESURRECTION MAN.
The Old Hag, who has so frequently figured in former portions of our narrative, had latterly become more prosperous, if not more respectable, than when we first introduced her to our readers.
From having been the occupant of only one room in the house in the court leading from Golden Lane, she had become the lessee of the entire dwelling. The commencement of this success was owing to her connexion with Lady Cecilia Harborough in the intrigue of the "living statue;" and from that moment affairs seemed to have taken a new turn with her. At all events her "business" increased; and the sphere of her infamy became enlarged.
She would have taken another and better house, in some fashionable quarter, and re-commenced the avocation of a first-rate brothel-keeper—the pursuit of the middle period of her life;—but she reasoned that she was known to a select few where she was—that the obscurity of her dwelling was favourable to many of the nefarious projects in which her aid was required—and that she was too old to dream of forming a new connexion elsewhere.
It would be impossible to conceive a soul more diabolically hardened, more inveterately depraved, than that of this old hag.
In order to increase her resources, and occupy, as she said, "her leisure time," she had hired or bought some half-dozen young girls, about ten or twelve years old;—hired or bought them, whichever the reader pleases, of their parents, a "consideration" having been given for each, and the said parents comforting themselves with the idea that their children were well provided for!
These children of tender age were duly initiated by the old hag in all the arts and pursuits of prostitution. They were sent in pairs to parade Aldersgate Street, Fleet Street, and Cheapside; and their special instructions were to practise their allurements upon elderly men, whose tastes might be deemed more vitiated and eccentric than those of the younger loungers of the great thoroughfares where prostitution most thrives.
A favourite scheme of the old woman's was this:—One of her juvenile emissaries succeeded, we will suppose, in alluring to the den in Golden Lane an elderly man whose outward respectability denoted a well-filled purse, and ought to have been associated with better morals. When the wickedness was consummated, and the elderly gentleman was about to depart, the old hag would meet him and the young girl on the stairs, and, affecting to treat the latter as a stranger who had merely used her house as a common place of such resort, would seem stupefied at the idea "of so youthful a creature having been brought to her abode for such a purpose." She would then question the girl concerning her age; and the reply would be "under twelve" of course. Thus the elderly voluptuary would suddenly find himself liable to punishment for a misdemeanour, for intriguing with a girl beneath the age of twelve; and the virtuous indignation of the old hag would be vented in assertions that though she kept a house of accommodation for grown-up persons, she abhorred the encouragement of juvenile profligacy. The result would be that the hoary old sinner found himself compelled to pay a considerable sum as hush-money.