IV
When Oscar received his mother's letter he was living in a slum in Westminster. It was called Short Street, and it was a typical example of the mean streets which nearly always, and in all countries, lie near to a great minster, like sea-wrack at the foot of a rock.
Short Street was a cul-de-sac, whereof one end was a gin-palace and the other an archway to the railway depot of a suburban necropolis. Late at night the inhabitants were kept from sleep by the quarreling of tipsy men who had been turned out of the public-house, and early in the morning they were awakened by the rumbling of the hearses that rattled the corpses over the cobbles of the street.
Oscar's home in Short Street was at Number One, a grimy house with a soiled card in the fanlight above the door, saying, "Lodgings for single men." Besides himself, there were four lodgers, three of them being porters at the funeral depot and the fourth head barman at the public-house. The bar-man had the parlor floor, and he generally brought home a number of noisy companions at closing time to play cards and drink beer.
Oscar's bedroom in this house was not so much a room as a stifling closet of miserable aspect, in which the refuse furniture seemed to make an effort to range itself in order--a threadbare carpet, an iron bedstead without foot or head, a painted washstand, a broken-lipped water ewer, two or three rickety chairs, a table that was safest when it rested against the wall, a few pictures of race-horses on the remains of a dirty wall-paper, and a looking-glass blotched by damp, like a sheet of ice spotted and scabbed by thaw.
His landlady lived in the basement and was never seen except on Monday mornings, when she went round for her lodgers' rent some two or three hours before the collector called for her own. The only person whom Oscar saw constantly was the landlady's servant, Jenny, a typical cockney girl of the humblest class, untidy and unclean, but as bright as a London street sparrow, and with a big soft heart in her vulgar little breast.
Jenny had conceived a certain affection for Oscar, based on no grounds more personal than that he did not shout at her down the pairs of stairs, or take liberties, or use bad language, and that he always raised his hat when he passed her in the street.
The only effect of this sentimental attitude on Jenny's part was that she always dressed in her clean "print" on the days when Oscar happened to be at home to tea, and it was on one of these afternoons that she came knocking at the door of his bankrupt garret and said, "Letter for you, sir."
It was so long since Oscar had received a letter of any kind that he leaped up with a kind of fear, and on taking the envelope out of Jenny's hand and seeing it was addressed in Magnus's writing, and had been sent on from his former lodging, he turned pale and trembled.
"Is it bad news, sir?" said Jenny. "I wouldn't 'a' brought it up on no account if I'd knowed."