"Then, sir, I have a very comfortable bedroom," answered the widow. "How long will she be wanting it for?"
"She shall engage it by the week," he answered, and walked to the door of the cab. "Tumble down, my lad, off that perch of yours," he shouted to the cabman, who seemed to have fallen asleep, "and carry that trunk into the house."
Both pavements were filled with people, walking the everlasting walk of the London streets. Numbers had the appearance of seamen, some of them lurched in liquor; there were numerous black and chocolate faces, here and there a turban; grimy women flitted past in old shawls and rakishly-perched bonnets; roistering young wenches flaunted past with feathers in their hats, with cheeks deeply coloured, with yellow brows adorned with jet-like love-locks; and chill as it was, children went by with naked feet, and the shuddering flesh of their backs showed through their rags, filthy-eyed, hatless, and all the glory they had trailed from their God had died out in the atmosphere of fog, which added bulk to the thunderous omnibus, and made the fleet hansom a shadow down the road.
"The landlady," said Hardy, putting his head into the cab, "has a comfortable bedroom at your disposal. We cannot do better. She is a thoroughly respectable woman, the widow of a master-mariner, who commanded brigs, and so on."
He opened the door, and Julia jumped out, and they went together into the narrow passage with the cabman and the trunk following them.
The landlady, curtseying her greeting to Julia, admitted them into her own private room, which was, in short, the front parlour. The cabman was paid, and went away looking at the shillings in the palm of his hand. In a very short time it was settled that Julia was to have the use of this parlour for her meals, and there would be no extra charge. The only other lodgers in the house were a sea captain and his wife.
The parlour was worth a pause and a look round. No apartment was ever more nautically equipped. The very clock was a dial fitted into the mainsail of a brass ship; the candlesticks on the mantelpiece represented mermaids; the walls were embellished with pictures of ships and those carvings which sailors delight in: ships on a wind, half their ghastly white canvas showing against the board, and the water very sloppy and fearfully blue; there were models of ships, and an old galleon in ivory stood under glass on a table in the window. A boy's heart would have beat high in this room. It was full of curiosities; artful carvings by whalemen, out of the bone or teeth of the mammoth of the sea; queer findings along shore under the Southern Cross, weapons of cannibals, heathenish jars, earthen vessels which had been the sepulchres of the remains of broiled whites.
After a little talk Mrs. Brierley took Julia up-stairs to her bedroom. Hardy, who had often before viewed the curiosities, wandered again round the room, but his mind was musing over other things, and soon he came to a stand at the window. The lookout was gloomy and grimy; opposite were a tobacconist, a house in which a stevedore lived, two lodging-houses, a pastry-cook, and a public-house. There was a great deal of mud in the road, the sky hung down sallow and dingy, and so close that the crooked black smoke, working out of a hundred shapes of chimney-pots, seemed to pierce it and vanish. A change indeed from the autumn glories of the country which the couple were newly from, where the hillsides, still thick with the leaves of the summer, were gashed with the red fires of the coming ruining winter; where the clear pale blue sky sank with its faint splendour of sunshine to the sharp, dark, terrace-like heights, which in their red breaks and scars of autumn overlooked the valley and the sheltered houses, and the quiet breast of river floating under the arch of the reflected bridge.
A man, thought Hardy, accepts a large obligation when he undertakes to look after a girl. But what a beautiful figure she has, and her face appeals to me. I cannot meet her eyes without feeling that I am in love with her. Shall I be able to get her a berth before I sail? If I cannot, ought I to leave her alone in London with about seven pounds ten in her pocket?
His brow contracted, and he hissed a tune through his teeth whilst he pondered. That thoughtless devil, her father, he mused, never came near Bax's farm. What is it to him that his daughter has bolted from her brutal home, and gone away with a young fellow who, for all the beggar cares, may leave her behind him in London in shame and destitution? 'Tis rather a tight corner, though. And he would have gone on meditating but for being interrupted by the entrance of Julia, followed in a respectful way by the widow.