South Audley Street

“ Yes, selfish, Robert Audley! You take home half-starved dogs, because you like half-starved dogs. You stoop down, and pat the head of every good-for-nothing cur in the village street, because you like good-for-nothing curs. You notice little children, and give them halfpence, because it amuses you to do so. But you lift your eyebrows a quarter of a yard when poor Sir Harry Towers tells a stupid story, and stare the poor fellow out of countenance with your lazy insolence. ”

“ When Carol had walked for thirty-two minutes she had completely covered the town, east and west, north and south; and she stood at the corner of Main Street and Washington Avenue and despaired.
Main Street with its two-story brick shops, its story-and-a-half wooden residences, its muddy expanse from concrete walk to walk, its huddle of Fords and lumber-wagons, was too small to absorb her. The broad, straight, unenticing gashes of the streets let in the grasping prairie on every side. She realized the vastness and the emptiness of the land. ”

“ The sly old benchers laughed at the pleasant fiction; but they all agreed that Robert Audley was a good fellow; a generous-hearted fellow; rather a curious fellow, too, with a fund of sly wit and quiet humor, under his listless, dawdling, indifferent, irresolute manner. A man who would never get on in the world; but who would not hurt a worm. Indeed, his chambers were converted into a perfect dog-kennel, by his habit of bringing home stray and benighted curs, who were attracted by his looks in the street, and followed him with abject fondness. ”

“ To those who really understand them, every one of the great, vital streets of the world has a soul as well as a body. The social invader from the West, the merchant whose establishment still found profit in Grand Street, the banker from Broad Street, or the ship's chandler from South, the club awakening to the fact that its quarters on Broadway or in one of the side streets near Irving Place was too far downtown, or in size inadequate to its growing membership—those were the agencies that wrought the Avenue's material development. ”

“ To one who knows South Street as merely a river-front street whose glory of other days has long since departed, where an antiquated horsecar now ambles slowly uptown, and trucks and carts all day long are in a perpetual jam, it is peculiarly uninteresting by day, and peculiarly deserted and vicious by night. ”

“ She dressed herself in her most gorgeous silk, a voluminous robe of silvery, shimmering blue, that made her look as if she had been arrayed in moonbeams. She shook out her hair into feathery showers of glittering gold, and, with a cloak of white cashmere about her shoulders, went down-stairs into the vestibule.
She opened the door of the library and looked in. Sir Michael Audley was asleep in his easy-chair. As my lady softly closed this door Alicia descended the stairs from her own room. The turret door was open, and the sun was shining upon the wet grass-plat in the quadrangle. ”

“ He lifted his hat, bowed to the little dressmaker, and turned back to the cab.
"I have beaten the baker, at any rate," he thought. "Now for the second stage, traveling backward, in my lady's life."
The drive from Brompton to the Peckham Road was a very long one, and between Crescent Villas and Acacia Cottage, Robert Audley had ample leisure for reflection. He thought of his uncle lying weak and ill in the oak-room at Audley Court. He thought of the beautiful blue eyes watching Sir Michael's slumbers; the soft, white hands tending on his waking moments ”

“ Faint shadows of green and crimson fell upon my lady's face from the painted escutcheons in the mullioned window by which she sat; but every trace of the natural color of that face had faded out, leaving it a ghastly ashen gray.
Sitting quietly in her chair, her head fallen back upon the amber damask cushions, and her little hands lying powerless in her lap, Lady Audley had fainted away.
"The radius grows narrower day by day," said Robert Audley. "George Talboys never reached Southampton." ”

“ She did not pause until she reached the vestibule upon the ground floor. Several doors opened out of the vestibule, which was octagon, like my lady's ante-chamber. One of these doors led into the library, and it was this door which Lady Audley opened softly and cautiously.
To have attempted to leave the house secretly by any of the principal outlets would have been simple madness, for the housekeeper herself superintended the barricading of the great doors, back and front. ”

“ Do you know Abingdon Square? It is a small, irregularly shaped triangle of asphalt situated on the lower West Side, and at the intersecting-point of Eighth Avenue and Hudson Street. The houses that front upon it have seen better days. Many of them are now the quarters of cheap political clubs or centres of foreign revolutionary propaganda. It is a neighborhood that has finally lost all semblance to gentility and has become frankly and unreservedly shabby. A square, mind you, and not a park, for there is neither blade of grass nor tree in all of its dreary expanse. ”

“ Robert Audley stared at his friend in silent amazement; and, after a pause of profound deliberation, said solemnly, "George Talboys, I could understand this if you had been eating heavy suppers. Cold pork, now, especially if underdone, might produce this sort of thing. You want change of air, my dear boy; you want the refreshing breezes of Figtree Court, and the soothing air of Fleet street. Or, stay," he added, suddenly, "I have it! You've been smoking our friend the landlord's cigars; that accounts for everything." ”

“ But in the evening after dinner, when the sun was low in the west, and Harcourt Talboys closeted in his library upon some judicial business with his lawyer and a tenant farmer, Mr. Audley grew a little more agreeable. He stood by Clara's side in one of the long windows of the drawing-room, watching the shadows deepening in the sky and the rosy light growing every moment rosier as the sun died out. He could not help enjoying that quiet tête-a-tête, though the shadow of the next morning's express which was to carry him away to London loomed darkly across the pathway of his joy. ”

“ Two years have passed since the May twilight in which Robert found his old friend; and Mr. Audley's dream of a fairy cottage has been realized between Teddington Locks and Hampton Bridge, where, amid a little forest of foliage, there is a fantastical dwelling place of rustic woodwork, whose latticed windows look out upon the river. Here, among the lilies and the rushes on the sloping bank, a brave boy of eight years old plays with a toddling baby, who peers wonderingly from his nurse's arms at that other baby in the purple depth of the quiet water. ”

“ Only the ugly dome of the City Hall, the church steeples, and the old shot tower held up their heads, and they had an almost terrifying sharpness of outline, of alertness, as if ready to spring.
In that far-off district known as "South of Market Street," which she had never entered save in a closed carriage on her way to the Southern Pacific Station or to pay a yearly call on some old family that still dwelt on that oasis, Rincon Hill—sole outpost of the social life of the sixties—infrequent thin lines of smoke rose from humble chimneys. ”

“ The little almshouses where we used to go to carry milk to the poor bedesmen and women are all swept away, and the ground mostly built over. What became of the old people I know not, but Sir Thomas Audley came into possession of the land, which he afterward gave to Maudlin College at Cambridge. There is not a religious foundation of any kind left in London, and St. Anthony and his pigs are equally to seek. ”

“ It will make a terrible hubbub to get a carriage ready; but yet I dare say one of the servants could manage the matter quietly for me."
"But why should you go to-night, my lady?" cried Phoebe Marks. "To-morrow will do quite as well. A week hence will do as well. Our landlord would take the man away if he had your promise to settle the debt."
Lady Audley took no notice of this interruption. She went hastily into the dressing-room, and flung off her bonnet and cloak, and then returned to the boudoir, in her simple dinner-costume, with her curls brushed carelessly away from her face. ”

“ South Street on a bright evening, its myriad barber shops gleaming with lathered dusky cheeks, wafting the essence of innumerable pomades and lotions, that were a Travel indeed. On South Street the veins of life run close to the surface.
We are no less human on our street, but it takes a bit more study to get at the secret. ”

“ The houses of the population which would spring up in connection with it were probably grouped on the slope by the northern enclosure wall of the nunnery, and were themselves bounded on the north by the road which afterwards became the High Street, and on the west by that which was afterwards named Southgate Street, then Fish Street, and is now known as S. Aldate’s. This road, giving access from Wessex to Mercia, was probably one of the direct lines from the north-west to London in the tenth century. ”

“ Lady Audley went from the garden to the library, a pleasant, oak-paneled, homely apartment in which Sir Michael liked to sit reading or writing, or arranging the business of his estate with his steward, a stalwart countryman, half agriculturalist, half lawyer, who rented a small farm a few miles from the Court. ”

“ Adderley Street and the avenue make one straight road a mile long, and at its end are “the Gardens,” as the suburbs built on the rising ground leading to Table Mountain are called. The avenue itself is fully half a mile long and is lined on either side with fine oak trees. In Adderley Street are the customs house and railway station, the Standard bank, the general post and telegraph offices, with a tower 120 ft. high, and the Dutch Reformed church. The church dates from 1699 and is the oldest church in South Africa. ”

“ While the young man stood with his hand upon the library door, still half-doubtful whether he should follow his uncle or re-enter the room in which he had left that more wretched creature whom it had been his business to unmask, Alicia Audley opened the dining-room door, and revealed to him the old-fashioned oak-paneled apartment, the long table covered with showy damask, and bright with a cheerful glitter of glass and silver.
"Is papa coming to dinner?" asked Miss Audley. "I'm so hungry; and poor Tomlins has sent up three times to say the fish will be spoiled. ”

“ The little fellow took the jeweled toy from his bosom and made for the door, proud of being possessed of a talisman, which he had seen so often made useful.
"There are wolves at Southampton," he said, with rather a triumphant nod to Robert Audley. "My gran'pa says when he takes my watch that he does it to keep the wolf from the door. Are there wolves where you live?"
The young barrister did not answer the child's question, but stopped him as he was dragging his grandfather toward the door. ”

“ The love that is not blind is perhaps only a spurious divinity after all; for when Cupid takes the fillet from his eyes it is a fatally certain indication that he is preparing to spread his wings for a flight. George never forgot the hour in which he had first become bewitched by Lieutenant Maldon's pretty daughter, and however she might have changed, the image which had charmed him then, unchanged and unchanging, represented her in his heart.
Robert Audley left Southampton by a train which started before daybreak, and reached Wareham station early in the day. ”

“ Then was the priory church and steeple proffered to whomsoever would take it down, and carry it from the ground, but no man would undertake the offer; whereupon Sir Thomas Audley was fain to be at more charges than could be made of the stones, timber, lead, iron, etc. For the workmen, with great labour, beginning at the top, loosed stone from stone, and threw them down, whereby the most part of them were broken, and few remained whole; and those were sold very cheap, for all the buildings then made about the city were of brick and timber. ”

“ They had been south of Market Street before, for Ila and Tiny lived on the aristocratic Rincon Hill; but their way had always lain down Second Street, which was old, but stately and respectable. Fourth Street, like Market Street by night, would be a new country; but after a few moments' eager attention Helena sniffed with disappointment. The narrow street and those branching from it were ill-lighted and deserted; there was nothing to be seen but low-browed shops. ”

“ There was more display here than in the streets up town.
"Sometimes," said Miss South, "I call this the Bowery of Boston. It is the chief shopping street of the North End, and on Saturday nights the poor people do most of their buying. I came here one evening with my brother. It was really very amusing."
They had been in the car but a few minutes when Miss South gave the signal for the car to stop.
"It will interest you," she said, "to see this quaint old street. It has an old-time name, too—'Salem Street.'"
Brenda and Nora glanced around them in surprise. ”

“ The Bishop of Winchester’s Palace, which was pulled down some years since, adjoined the gardens of Alston House, on the east, and on the site of which is now Oakley Street, and a terrace of well-built houses, fronting the river. The houses erected in Oakley Street are throughout of a superior class, and as the road is of considerable width, with a good pavement, it now forms the most respectable and important direct thoroughfare from the King’s Road to the centre of Cheyne Walk. ”