Bishop. “I believe tea is ready.”
Afterwards further discussion on tithes, doctrine, and the Thirty-nine Articles, of which I forget the details.
My friend Teddy did not live at the bishopric with his parents, but in exceedingly well-appointed chambers near St. James Street. Here I met various other young gentlemen of fortune and promise, who discussed with me many questions of international interest—such as the price of champagne in foreign hotels, the status of the music-hall artiste at home and abroad, the best knot for the full-dress tie, and so forth.
Dick Shafthead did not often appear in this company.
“Can't afford their amusements, and can't be bothered with their conversation,” he explained to me. “Look in and have a pipe this evening if you're doing nothing else. If you want cigars, bring your own; I've run out.”
And, after all, learning to perform upon the briar-pipe in Dick's society under the old roof of the Temple, applauding or disapproving of our elders and our betters, had infinitely more charm to me than those intellectual conclaves at his cousin's, for six nights in the week at least. A different mood, a different friend. Sometimes one desires in a companion congenial depravity; at others, more points of contact.
This Temple where Dick lived is not a church, though there is a church within it. It is one of those surprising secrets that London keeps and shows you sometimes to reconcile you to her fogs. Out of the heart of the traffic and the noise you turn through an ancient archway into a rabbit warren of venerable and sober red buildings; each court and passage tidy, sedate, and, if I may say it of a personage of brick, thoughtful and kindly disposed to its inhabitants. This is the Temple, once the home of the Knight Templars, now of English law. In one court Dick shared with a friend an austerely furnished office where he received such work as the solicitors sent him, and was ready to receive more. But it was on the top flight of another staircase in another court-yard that he kept his household gods.
He had come there, as I have said before, during a period of financial depression, and there he had stayed ever since. I do not wonder at it; though, to be sure, I think I should find it rather solitary of an evening, when the offices emptied, silence fell upon the stairs and the quadrangles, and there were only left in the whole vast warren the sprinkling of permanent inhabitants who dwelt under the slates. Yet there was I know not quite what about those old rooms, an aroma of the past, a link with romance, that made them lovable. The panelled walls, the undulating floors, the odd angle which held the fireplace, the beam across the ceiling, the old furniture to match these, all had character; and to what but character do we link sentiment?
Also the prospect from the windows was delightful; an open court, a few trees, the angles of other ancient buildings, a glimpse of green turf in a garden, a peep of more stems and branches, with the Thames beyond. Yes, it was quite the neighborhood for a romantic episode to happen. And one day, as you shall hear in time, it happened.