So saying, with a smile of anticipated triumph in his face, Learmont left the room.
CHAPTER IX.
London in 1742.—Gray’s Home.—The Child.—The Voice of Conscience.—A Visit.
The course of our narrative compels us now to leave the little village of Learmont and all its mysteries to direct the reader’s attention to the great metropolis, not as it is now, crowded with costly buildings, and its shops vying with palaces in splendour, but as it was a hundred years since, before Regent-street was thought of, and when we were still enjoying that piece of wisdom of our dear ancestors which induced them to make every street as narrow as possible, every house as dark as possible, and everything as inconvenient as possible.
In a long narrow street, which began somewhere about where the County Fire Office now stands, and terminated Heaven knows where, inasmuch as it branched off into a thousand intricacies of lanes, courts, and alleys, there stood one house in particular, to which we wish to call attention. It was a narrow, gloomy-looking habitation, and stood wedged in between two shops of very questionable character.
The person who rented this house was a Mistress Bridget Strangeways, and she did not belie her name, for her ways were strange indeed. This lady (from courtesy) professed to be a widow and she gained a very comfortable subsistence by letting to anybody and everybody the various furnished apartments in her house. With the curious collection of lodgers which Mrs. Strangeways had in her house on the occasion to which we refer—namely, the winter of 1742—we have little or nothing to do. The only one of her lodgers to whom we shall at present introduce the reader, was sitting alone in a back room boasting but of few comforts, and the walls of which were of a deep brown colour from age.
Still, if the furniture and appointments of the room were few, mean, and scanty, everything was arranged with great neatness and order. The hearth was cleanly swept, the little fire that blazed in the small grate was carefully tended, the windows were scrupulously clean, and it was clear that the most had been made of the scanty means of comfort which the place afforded.
Seated in a high-backed, ancient-looking chair, was a boy reading. His face was inclined towards his book, and a mass of raven curls, which he held from covering his face with his hand, fell, however, sufficiently over his countenance to hide it from observation. His figure was slight in the extreme, and the long tapered fingers which held back the tresses of his hair, were exquisitely white and delicate. The dress of the period was ill-suited to set off the figure to advantage, but still cumbrous and ungraceful, as was the long-flapped waistcoat, broad-skirted coat, and heavy shoe-buckles, no one could look for a moment upon that young boy without confessing him to be eminently handsome.
He was most intently engaged upon his book, and he moved neither hand nor foot for many minutes, so absorbed was he in the narrative he was reading. Suddenly, however, he lifted his head, and shaking back from his brow the clustering hair, he cried in a voice of enthusiasm,—
“Oh, what a dear romance! How these treasures of books cheat the hours of their weariness.”