Reginald Cruden | Page 9

precious boy!" exclaimed the widow; "you will
break my heart if you talk like that! Think how many there are to whom
this little sum would seem a fortune. Why, it may keep a roof over our
heads, at any rate, or help you into situations."

"Or bury us!" groaned Reginald.
The mother looked at her eldest son, half in pity, half in reproach, and
then burst into tears.
Reginald sprang to her side in an instant.
"What a beast I am!" he exclaimed. "Oh, mother, do forgive me! I
really didn't think what I was saying."
"No, dear Reggie, I know you didn't," said Mrs Cruden, recovering
herself with a desperate effort. "You mustn't mind me, I--I scarcely--
know--I--"
It was no use trying. The poor mother broke down completely, and on
that evening it was impossible to talk more about the future.
Next morning, however, all three were in a calmer mood, and Horace
said at breakfast, "We can't do any good here, mother. Hadn't we better
go to London?"
"I think so; and Parker here knows of a small furnished lodging in Dull
Street, which she says is cheap. We might try there to begin with. Eh,
Reg?"
Reginald winced, and then replied, "Oh, certainly; the sooner we get
down to our right level the better."
That evening the three Crudens arrived in London.
CHAPTER THREE.
NUMBER SIX, DULL STREET.
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