Page 121 of 135 CHAPTER XX--NO. 5 CHEYNE ROW - A Duet

It had evidently been an old-fashioned building when first they came to it. 1708 was the date at the corner of the street. Six or seven drab-coloured, flat-chested, dim-windowed houses stood in a line-- theirs wedged in the middle of them. A poor medallion with a profile head of him had been clumsily let into the wall. Several worn steps led to the thin high door with an old-fashioned fanlight above it. Frank rang the bell, and a buxom cheerful matron came at the call.

'Names in this book, sir--AND address, if you please,' said the cheery matron. 'One shilling each--thank you, sir. First door to the left, sir! This was the dining-room, sir--'

But Frank had come to a dead stop in the dim, dull, wood-panelled hall. In front of them rose the stairs with old-fashioned banisters, cracked, warped, and dusty.

'It's awful to think of, Maude--awful! To think that she ran up those stairs as a youngish woman--that he took them two at a time as an active man, and then that they hobbled and limped down them, old and weary and broken, and now both dead and gone for ever, and the stairs standing, the very rails, the very treads--I don't know that I ever felt so strongly what bubbles of the air we are, so fragile, so utterly dissolved when the prick comes.'

'How COULD they be happy in such a house?' said Maude. 'I can feel that there have been sorrow and trouble here. There is an atmosphere of gloom.'

The matron-attendant approved of emotion, but in its due order. One should be affected in the dining-room first, and then in the hall. And so at her summons they followed her into the long, low, quaint room in which this curious couple had lived their everyday life. Little of the furniture was left, and the walls were lined with collected pictures bearing upon the life of the Carlyles.

'There's the fireplace that he smoked his pipe up,' said Frank.

'Why up the fireplace?'

'She did not like the smell in the room. He often at night took his friends down into the kitchen.'

'Fancy my driving you into the kitchen.'

'Well, the habit of smoking was looked upon much less charitably at that time.'

'And besides, he smoked clay pipes,' said the matron. 'This is considered a good print of Mrs. Carlyle.'

It was a peaky eager face, with a great spirit looking out of it, and possibilities of passion both for good and evil in the keen, alert features. Just beside her was the dour, grim outline of her husband. Their life-histories were in those two portraits.

'Poor dear!' said Maude.

'Ay, you may say so,' said the matron, whose accent showed that she was from the north of the Tweed. 'He was gey ill to live wi'. His own mither said so. Now, what think you that room was for?'

It was little larger than a cupboard, without window or skylight, opening out of the end of the dining-room.

'I can't imagine.'

		I have nothing to declare except my genius. Oscar Wilde