LESS BLACK THAN WE'RE PAINTED. CHAPTER I. . A SERIOUS DINNER. THERE is a Gresham Street in the West End of London as well as in the East, but of a very different type. It must have been named after some person who had no connection, however indirect, with commerce; for it is aristocratic to its very scrapers. The houses are huge, but gloomy; their windows (far from large, and rarely of plate glass) have probably never beheld an omnibus. The walls are black with age and soot, for nothing is VOL. I. I ever done to them in the way of painting; only from time to time some men come with a ladder and affix, with as little noise as possible, a hatchment to the front of them. I don't know the time that hatchments ought to 'hang' (as the cooks say), but those in Gresham Street remain a very long time, so much so that to an irreverent mind the neighbourhood often resembles a congeries of public-houses, with Death for their signboards. In front of them still project the iron 'quenchers,' formerly used for extinguishing the flambeaux of the footmen. There is gas in the street, of course, but in the mansions themselves one would as soon expect to find petroleum in domestic use. The wave of fashion has retired from the place and left it stranded; but it has a dignity of its own that rises above all frivolous change and contemns it. Even in summer the doors do not stand open as in Belgravia, affording to the ravished eye the spectacle of powdered minions in splendid apparel; they swing noiselessly back as some ancient chariot with far-spreading hammer-cloth stops to discharge its stately burthen-generally a dowager-and having swallowed her, they close again. The process is very similar to what will happen when she pays her last visit to her ancestral mausoleum. -No house agent can appraise these tenements, for they are never sold. Such a sacrilege as a sale by auction, at all events, has never been heard of in connection with them. If they are disposed of it is by private contract,' which is kept as dead a secret as the existence of the family spectre of which there are, no doubt, many specimens in this locality. The mansions are all freehold. A ninety-nine years' lease would be looked upon in Gresham Street as evanescent an arrangement as is taking lodgings by the week in Piccadilly. The furniture is solid, ponderous, and would be invaluable in Paris-for barricades; otherwise it has nothing Parisian about it. The mirrors, though not numer ous, are very large, and they intensify the gloom by multiplying it. In the drawing-room of No. 80, which would with ease accommodate two hundred persons-and if fashion held sway there would doubtless be made, at what is very literally termed 'a pinch,' to hold five hundred-there are, on the evening on which our story opens, but three individuals. An old lady, with snow-white hair and venerable appearance, but whose attitude, as she sits in her stiff-backed chair, still shows strength and vigour, is engaged upon some fancy work-an occupation, one would imagine, fitter for younger eyes. Her dress is handsome, but old-fashioned -though in a year or two it will be once more the rage, for it is made up of those recurrent materials, silk and lace. Lace on her shoulders, lace on the high collar round her neck, and a lace cap that looks yellower than even time has made it, by contrast with her silver hair. Though dignified looking, her face has an air at |
