Page:What Will He Do With It? - Routledge - Volume 1.djvu/391

 broad thoroughfare continued where once it had vanished abrupt in a labyrinth of courts and alleys. But the way was not hard to find. He turned a little towards the left, recognizing, with admiring interest, in the gay, white, would-be Grecian edifice, with its French grille, bronzed, gilded, the transformed Museum, in the still libraries of which he had sometimes snatched a brief and ghostly respite from books of law. Onwards yet through lifeless Bloomsbury, not so far towards the last bounds of Atlas as the desolation of Podden Place, but the solitude deepening as he passed. There it is, a quiet street indeed! not a soul on its gloomy pavements, not even a policeman's soul. Nought stirring save a stealthy, profligate, good-for-nothing cat, flitting fine through yon area bars. Down that street had he come, I trove, with a livelier, quicker step the day when, by the strange good-luck which had uniformly attended his worldly career of honours, he had been suddenly called upon to supply the place of an absent senior, and in almost his earliest brief the Courts of Westminster had recognized a master, come, I trove, with a livelier step, knocked at that very door whereat he is halting now; entered the room where the young wife sat, and at sight of her querulous peevish face, and at sound of her unsympathizing languid voice, fled into his cupboard-like back parlour, and muttered "Courage! Courage!" to endure the home he had entered longing for a voice which should invite and respond to a cry of joy.

How closed up, dumb, and blind looked the small mean house, with its small mean door, its small mean rayless windows! Yet a FAME had been born there! Who are the residents now? Buried in slumber, have they any "golden dreams"? Works therein any struggling brain, to which the prosperous man might whisper "Courage!" or beats, there, any troubled heart to which faithful woman should murmur "Joy"? Who knows? London is a wondrous poem, but each page of it is written in a different language,—no lexicon yet composed for any.

Back through the street, under the gaslights, under the stars, went Guy Darrell, more slow and more thoughtful. Did the comparison between what he had been, what he was, the mean home just revisited, the stately home to which he would return, suggest thoughts of natural pride? It would not seem so; no pride in those close-shut lips, in that melancholy stoop.

He came into a quiet square,—still Bloomsbury,—and right