I told Mrs. D. the story, and we speculated as to the particular doorstep on which the outcasts sat. Mrs. D., who treats all facts more than fifty years old as fiction, said it was "very touchin'," and that she hoped the young man found Ann in the end and married her. I did not insist on the truth of the story or the sadness of the end. There are times when I envy Mrs. D.'s limitations, and this was one of them. I would give a good deal to know that De Quincey found Ann again. I picture him after his short absence from London, going at six o'clock to the bottom of Great Titchfield Street (the appointed place of rendezvous) in the sure expectation of meeting her. The minutes would pass and he would watch for the familiar form, at first with confidence, then with a disappointment which grew minute by minute, and was accompanied by foreboding conjectures as to the cause of her absence. When the last hope of her appearance had fled he would seek consolation in the thought that she who had never failed him in the past must have had some good reason for not keeping her tryst to-night. She would come to-morrow. But to-morrow night and all other to-morrows came without bringing Ann. "I sought her daily," he says, "and waited for her every night so long as I staid in London, at the corner of Titchfield Street.... But to this hour I have never heard a syllable about her...." "Some feelings," he records in another passage, "though not deeper or more passionate, are more tender than others, and often when I walk in Oxford Street by dreamy lamplight and hear those airs played on a barrel organ, which years ago solaced me and my dear companion, as I must always call her, I shed tears and muse with myself at the mysterious dispensation which so suddenly and so critically separated us for ever."
We went and looked at the house in Greek Street, on the front of which is a tablet stating that De Quincey lived there. One has a feeling of gratitude towards the Society of Arts which in such fashion strives to keep green the memory of those men and women who trod the streets of the great city, dreaming their dreams, and leaving for those who came after them great deeds to inspire, romance to allure, thoughts of beauty to refresh the mind, and visions of colour to delight the eyes.
Frith Street was noisy with the play of children just released from school, and there was a hint of the slackening of the day's activities. We left Frith Street for Old Compton Street, and from thence into New Compton Street, which has a dreary "end of the world" sort of atmosphere. Cheery Soho loses heart at this point, where it is about to take leave of you, and Church Passage, which terminates in a little flight of stone steps, and an iron gateway leading into the churchyard of St. Giles's in the Fields, has a Dickens'-like suggestion of "Joe" and "Bleak House".
When I told Mrs. D. that St. Giles was the patron saint of lepers, and that the present church stood not very far from the site of a hospital for lepers built by the wife of Henry I in 1118, she said she could well believe it. She was also not surprised to hear that the plague broke out in St. Giles's, and that the gallows named "Tyburn Tree" was set up near the aforesaid leper hospital.
I asked her if she had ever read the "Newgate Calendar". She replied with regret that she hadn't, admitting that if there was a book she would enjoy it was this particular one. In her estimation there was nothing like a good murder trial for taking you out of yourself.
The "Newgate Calendar" had occurred to me in connection with "Tyburn Tree" by reason of references in that gruesome volume to the "last drink," a glass of ale which used to be presented to the criminals on their way to the gallows when they passed the gate of the leper hospital. Yes, there really is some foundation for the eerie atmosphere of the churchyard of St. Giles. I always remember coming upon that gate at the end of Church Passage one autumn evening when twilight was merging into dusk. I had no idea where it led, and I mounted the steps and found myself in the old churchyard with something of the sensation which characterises the initial stage of a nightmare. The backs of squalid houses overlooked the place, and still figures, sunk in abysmal meditation, sat about on the benches. In the window of a studio-like building were some plaster casts of heads, and the white glimmering faces stared into the glimmering shades of evening which were stealing across the dingy burying-ground. I left the place without identifying it, and did not see it again for years. Then one day I stumbled on it unexpectedly, and discovered that my ghostly churchyard was St. Giles's in the Fields.
Even on this afternoon of sweet promise St. Giles's straggling graveyard was not a cheerful spot. I have, by the by, never seen so many cats congregated in any corner of London as I saw in St. Giles's Churchyard. A villainous-looking old tom, with torn ears, the hero of many a fray, was seated on a large tomb abutting on to the path, and the first line of the epitaph chiselled on the stone arrested my attention. "Hold, passenger!" it began peremptorily, and I barred Mrs. D.'s path whilst I read:—
"Hold, passenger, here's shrouded in his hearse,
Unparallel'd Pendrill through the universe."
"Pendrill," said I to myself—"who's he?" and, ashamed of my ignorance of a person so eulogised, I inquired of Mrs. D. if she knew anyone of that name. She said there was a man named Pennybill who used to sell Ostend rabbits in Shepherd's Market, but he hadn't been dead long enough for his tomb to have got so dirty. As she spoke, enlightenment came. Ostend, Holland, the battle of Worcester, Charles II, and yes, on the other side of the tomb was the inscription to Richard Pendrill, the preserver of the life of Charles II.
What an odd, unexpected link with the past that forgotten old tomb made, standing solitary amidst the sooty shrubs in the cat-haunted churchyard! The escape of Charles from Worcester to Shoreham, where he found a coal boat that carried him over to Normandy, might well be a page out of some romance for all one realises it, as a rule. There are times when I share Mrs. D.'s scepticism about the past, and Charles, Cromwell, Queen Elizabeth, Henry VIII and the Gunpowder Plot, wars, plagues, and fires are just so many incidents in a story book. Then I stumble on an ancient tombstone with such an inscription as this, almost obliterated by the winds and rains, the frosts and heats of centuries, or I open Pepys and read how, on 27th February, 1659, the old chap was "Up in the morning, and had some red herrings to our breakfast, while my boot-heel was a-mending, by the same token that the boy left the hole as it was before," and I say to myself with the shock of coming up bump against something solid where one had anticipated vacancy, "Then it was all true!"