Alban crossed St. James' Street furtively, and climbed, as an athlete should climb, the boarding which defended the entrance to this amazing habitation. A contented watchman, dozing by a comfortable fire, cared little who came or went and rarely bestirred himself to ask the question. There were two entrances to the caves: one cramped and difficult, the other broad and open; and you took your choice of them according to the position of the policeman on the beat. This night, or rather this morning, of the day following upon the meeting in Union Street, discovered Alban driven to the more hazardous way. His quick eye had detected, on the far side of the enclosure, an amiable flirtation between a man of law and a lady of the dusters; and avoiding both discreetly, he slipped into a trench of the newly made foundations and crawled as swiftly through an aperture which this descent revealed.
Here, laid bare by the picks and shovels of twentieth-century Trade Unionism, was a veritable Gothic arch, bricked up to the height of a tall man's waist, but open at the tympanum. Alban hoisted himself to the aperture and, slipping through, his feet discovered the reeking floor of a dank and dripping subway; and guiding himself now by hands outstretched and fingers touching the fungi of the walls, he went on with confidence until the roof lifted above him and the watch-fires of the confraternity were disclosed. He had come by now into a vast cellar not very far from the Carlton Hotel itself. There were offshoots everywhere, passages more remote, the arches as of crypts, smaller apartments, odd corners which had guarded the casks five hundred years ago. Each of these could show you its little company safe harbored for the night; each had some face from which Master Timidity might well avert his eyes. But Alban went in amongst them as though he had been their friend. They knew his very footstep, the older "lags" would declare.
"All well, Jack?"
"All well, old cove."
"The Panorama come along?"
"Straight art of the coffee shawp, s'help me blind."
"Ship come in?"
"Two tharsand next Toosday—same as usual."
A lanky hawker, lying full length upon a sack, his pipe glowing in the darkness, exchanged these pleasantries with Alban at the entrance. There were fires by here and there in these depths and the smoke was often suffocating. The huddled groups declared all grades of ill-fortune and of crime; from that of the "pauper parson" to the hoariest house-breaker "resting" for a season. Alban's little set, so far as he had a "set" at all, consisted of the sometime curate of a fashionable West End Church, known to the company as the Archbishop of Bloomsbury; the Lady Sarah, a blooming, red-cheeked girl who sold flowers in Regent Street, "the Panorama," an old showman's son who had not a sixpenny piece in his pocket, but whose schemes were invariably about to bring him in "two thousand next Tuesday morning"; and "Betty," a pretty, fair-haired lad, thrown on the streets God knows how or by what callous act of indifferent parentage. Regularly as the clock struck, this quartette would gather in a tiny "chapel" of the cellars and sleep about a fire kindled in a grate which might have baked meats for the Tudors. They spoke of the events of the day with moderation and wise philosophy. It would be different to-morrow. Such was ever their text.
"My lord the Duke is late. Does aught of fortune keep your nobility?"