Reginald Cruden, Talbot Baines Reed [best black authors txt] 📗

Probably no London street ever rejoiced in a more expressive name than Dull Street. It was not a specially dirty street, or a specially disreputable street, or a specially dark street. The neighbourhood might a hundred years ago have been considered “genteel,” and the houses even fashionable, and some audacious antiquarians went so far as to assert that the street took its name not from its general appearance at all, but from a worthy London alderman, who in the reign of George the First had owned most of the neighbouring property.

Be that as it may, Dull Street was—and for all I know may still be—one of the dullest streets in London. A universal seediness pervaded its houses from roof to cellar; nothing was as it should be anywhere. The window sashes had to be made air-tight by wedges of wood or paper stuck into the frames; a bell in Dull Street rarely sounded after less than six pulls; there was scarcely a sitting-room but had a crack in its grimy ceiling, or a handle off its ill-hung door, or a strip of wall-paper peeling off its walls. There were more chairs in the furnished apartments of Dull Street with three legs than there were with four, and there was scarcely horsehair enough in the twenty-four sofas of its twenty-four parlours to suffice for an equal quantity of bolsters.

In short, Dull Street was the shabbiest genteel street in the metropolis, and nothing could make it otherwise.

A well-built, tastefully-furnished house in the middle of it would have been as incongruous as a new patch in an old garment, and no one dreamt of disturbing the traditional aspect of the place by any attempt to repair or beautify it.

Indeed, the people who lived in Dull Street were as much a part of its dulness as the houses they inhabited. They were for the most part retired tradesmen, or decayed milliners, or broken-down Government clerks, most of whom tried to eke out their little pensions by letting part of their lodgings to others as decayed and broken-down as themselves.

These interesting colonists, whose one bond of sympathy was a mutual seediness, amused themselves, for the most part, by doing nothing all day long, except perhaps staring out of the window, in the remote hope of catching sight of a distant cab passing the street corner, or watching to see how much milk their opposite neighbour took in, or reading the news of the week before last in a borrowed newspaper, or talking scandal of one neighbour to another.

“Jemima, my dear,” said a middle-aged lady, who, with her son and daughter, was the proud occupant of Number 4, Dull Street—“Jemima, my dear, I see to-day the bill is hout of the winder of number six.”

“Never!” replied Jemima, a sharp-looking young woman of twenty, who had once in her life spent a month at a ladies’ boarding-school, and was therefore decidedly genteel. “I wonder who’s coming.”

“A party of three, so I hear from Miss Moulden’s maid, which is niece to Mrs Grimley: a widow,”—here the speaker snuffled slightly—“and two childer—like me.”

“Go on!” said Jemima. “Any more about them, ma?”

“Well, my dear, I do hear as they ’ave come down a bit.”

“Oh, ah! lag!” put in the speaker’s son, a lawyer’s clerk in the receipt of two pounds a week, to whom this intelligence appeared particularly amusing; “we know all about that—never heard that sort of tale before, have we, ma? Oh no!” and the speaker emphasised the question by giving his widowed mother a smart dig in the ribs.

“For shame, Sam! don’t be vulgar!” cried the worthy lady; “how many times have I told you?”

“All right, ma,” replied the legal young gentleman; “but it is rather a wonner, you know. What were they before they came down?”

“Gentlefolk, so I’m told,” replied the lady, drawing herself up at the very mention of the name; “and I hintend, and I ’ope my children will do the same, to treat them as fellow-creatures with hevery consideration.”

“And how old is the babies, ma?” inquired Miss Jemima, whose gentility sometimes had the advantage of her grammar.

“The babies!” said the mother; “why, they’re young gentlemen, both of ’em—old enough to be your sweethearts!”

Sam laughed profusely.

“Then what did you say they was babies for?” demanded Jemima, pettishly.

“I never!”

“You did, ma, I heard you! Didn’t she, Sam?”

“So you did, ma. Come now, no crackers!” said Sam.

“I never; I said ‘childer,’” pleaded the mother.

“And ain’t babies childer?” thundered Miss Jemima.

“’Ad ’er there, Jim!” chuckled the dutiful Samuel, this time favouring his sister with a sympathetic nudge. “Better give in, and own you told a cracker, ma!”

“Shan’t!” said the lady, beginning to whimper. “Oh, I wish my poor ’Oward was here to protect me! He was a gentleman, and I’m glad he didn’t live to see what a pair of vulgar brats he’d left behind him, that I am!”

“There you go!” said Sam; “taking on at nothing, as per usual! No one was saying anything to hurt you, old girl. Simmer down, and you’ll be all the better for it. There now, dry your eyes; it’s all that Jim, she’s got such a tongue! Next time I catch you using language to ma, Jim, I’ll turn you out of the house! Come, cheer up, ma.”

“Yes, cheer up, ma,” chimed in Jemima; “no one supposes you meant to tell fibs; you couldn’t help it.”

Amid consolations such as these the poor flurried lady subsided, and regained her former tranquillity of spirit.

The Shucklefords—such was the name of this amiable family—were comparatively recent sojourners in Dull Street. They had come there six years previously, on the death of Mr Shuckleford, a respectable wharfinger, who had saved up money enough to leave his wife a small annuity. Shortly before his death he had been promoted to the command of one of the Thames steamboats plying between Chelsea and London Bridge, in virtue of which office he had taken to himself—or rather his wife had claimed for him—the title of “captain,” and with this patent of gentility had held up her head ever since. Her children, following her good example, were not slow to hold up their heads too, and were fully convinced of their own gentility. Samuel Shuckleford had, as his mother termed it, been “entered for the law” shortly after his father’s death, and Miss Jemima Shuckleford, after the month’s sojourn at a ladies’ boarding-school already referred to, had settled down to assist her mother in the housework and maintain the dignity of the family by living on her income.

Such were the new next-door neighbours of the Crudens when at last they arrived, sadly, and with the new world before them, at Number 6, Dull Street.

Mr Richmond, who, with all his unfortunate manner, had acted a friend’s part all along, had undertaken the task of clearing up affairs at Garden Vale, superintending the payment of Mr Cruden’s debts, the sale of his furniture, and the removal to Dull Street of what little remained to the family to remind them of their former comforts.

It might have been better if in this last respect the boys and their mother had acted for themselves, for Mr Richmond appeared to have hazy notions as to what the family would most value. The first sight which met the boys’ eyes as they arrived was their tennis-racquets in a corner of the room. A very small case of trinkets was on Mrs Cruden’s dressing-table, and not one of the twenty or thirty books arranged on the top of the sideboard was one which any member of the small household cared anything about.

But Mr Richmond had done his best, and being left entirely to his own devices, was not to be blamed for the few mistakes he had made. He was there to receive Mrs Cruden when she arrived, and after conducting the little party hurriedly through the three rooms destined for their accommodation, considerately retired.

Until the moment when they were left to themselves in the shabby little Dull Street parlour, not one of the Crudens had understood the change which had come over their lot. All had been so sudden, so exciting, so unlooked-for during the last few weeks, that all three of them had seemed to go through it as through a dream. But the awakening came now, and a rude and cruel one it was.

The little room, dignified by the name of a parlour, was a dingy, stuffy apartment of the true Dull Street type. The paper was faded and torn, the ceiling was discoloured, the furniture was decrepit, the carpet was threadbare, and the cheap engraving on the wall, with its title, “As Happy as a King,” seemed to brood over the scene like some mocking spirit.

They passed into Mrs Cruden’s bedroom, and the thought of the delightful snug little boudoir at Garden Vale sent a