Mad: A Story of Dust and Ashes. Fenn George Manville

crooked tumbledown houses in dismal fever-breeding lanes, which led you into the far-famed region of Lincoln’s-inn, where law stared you in the face at every turn. It will doubtless behave in as barefaced a manner to you at the present day; but you will have to approach it by a different route, for the auctioneer’s hammer has given those preliminary taps that herald the knocking-down of a vast collection of the houses of old London; and perhaps ere these sheets are in the press, first stones will be laid of the buildings to occupy the site as law-courts. But take we the region as it was, with its frowsy abodes and their tenants. They are clipped away now; but in every direction, crowding in upon the great inns of court, were dilapidated houses pressing upon it like miserable suitors asking for their rights, or like rags of the great legal gown. But it is a rare place is Lincoln’s-inn – a place where the law is rampant, and the names of its disciples are piled in monuments upon the door-posts – a place where you may pick your legal adviser according to the length of your purse. The doors stand open, and the halls are cold, cheerless, and echoing, while the large carven keystone looks down at the entering client with its stony eyes, which seem to wink and ogle as the sly, sneering, tongue-thrusting image apparently chuckles at the folly of man. The cold shivers are always out in Lincoln’s-inn, and they attack you the moment you enter the precincts; probably they are spirits of past-and-gone suitors, in past-and-gone suits, wandering to avenge themselves upon the legal fraternity by freezing the courage of litigants and turning them back when about to perform that wholesale shovelling of an estate into the legal dust-cart known as “throwing it into Chancery.” Cold stone posts stand at intervals along the sides of the square, looking, in their grey, bleak misery, like to stripped and bare clients waiting for redress at their legal advisers’ doors. A dreary place for an assignation, if your friend possesses not the virtue of punctuality; for the eye wanders in vain for some pleasant oasis where it may rest. You have not here in autumn those melancholy, washed-out flowers – the chrysanthemums of the Temple, but you may gaze through prison-like bars at soot-dusted grass – verdure apparently splashed with ink from the surrounding offices; at the trees, adapted by nature to the circumstances of their fate; for, as in the arctic zone the thinly-clad animals grow furry as a protection from the cold, so here, in this region of law costs and voluminous writing, the trees put forth twigs and sprays of a sharp spiky nature, a compromise between porcupine penholders and a chevaux de frise, to enable them to set attack at defiance.

      Enter one house here, and you would have found upon the ground-floor your QC or Serjeant – Brother So-and-so as he is so affectionately called by the judge; upon the first-floor, your substantial firms of family solicitors, deep in title, lease, covenant, and tenancy in every form or shape – men who set such store by their knowledge that they dole it out to you at so much per dozen words – words adulterated with obsolete expressions repeated ad nauseam; while upon the second-floor you would probably find firms of sharp practitioners, ready for business in any shape; and, as elsewhere through the house, the names of the occupants were painted upon the doors – black letters upon a parchment ground.

      But the house in question was not entirely legal in its occupants, for if you had been ascending the stairs, before you had gone far, a loud sniff would have made you raise your head sharply towards the skylight, beneath which, sitting, or rather perched, upon the top balustrade, would have been visible the doughy, big, baby-like face of Mrs Sims, strongly resembling, with the white-muslin wings on either side, a fat-cheeked cherub, freshly settled after some ethereal flight.

      Mrs Sims was the lady who did for those gentlemen of the house who wanted doing for, took in parcels, answered bells, and was also well-known in the neighbourhood as a convenient party in times of sickness, being willing to nurse a bachelor gentleman of the legal profession, or one of the poor fraternity of the rags around. She had stood at many a bedside had Mrs Sims, and seen the long sleep come to many a weary, broken-hearted suitor, and she had sniffed and sobbed at the recital of their miseries, offering the while such consolation as she could from the depths of a very simple but very honest heart.

      After another loud sniff, and a curtsey performed invisibly, except that the cherubic head was seen to bob out of sight, and then apparently re-perch itself upon the balustrade, Mrs Sims would say “At home,” or “Not at home,” as the case might be. Then, as you left the staircase, the head would disappear, and, summer or winter, Mrs Sims might be heard refreshing herself with a blow at the fire by means of a very creaky, asthmatic pair of bellows.

      Mrs Sims was busy, and had made visible the whole of her person, as standing at the door she pointed out into the square, calling the attention of one of her lodgers, as she termed them, to a passer-by.

      “Here, you sir; fetch a cab – a four-wheeler,” shouted the lodger. “No; confound your bird – I don’t want birds, I want a cab.”

      The person addressed was the inhabitant of Bennett’s-rents – the big, slouchy, large-jawed gentleman, in a fur cap and a sleeved-waistcoat, already known to the reader. He carried a small birdcage, tied in a cotton handkerchief, beneath his arm, while another spotted handkerchief wrapped his bull-neck, where it was pinned with a silver-mounted Stanhope lens, which was apparently regarded as a rare jewel. Upon being first called, he commenced expatiating upon the qualities of the bird, whose cage-envelope he began to unfasten, until so unceremoniously checked by the gentleman who summoned him.

      “You’re a fine sort, you are,” growled the man as he went off in search of the cab; “and if I warn’t as dry as sorduss, I’d see you furder afore I’d fetch your gallus cab, so now, then. My name’s Jarker, chrissen William, that’s about what my name is, stand or fall by it – come, now.”

      As nobody seemed disposed to “come, now,” Mr Jarker hastened his steps, and soon returned with the cab, placed his cage behind the hall-door, and then, under the direction of Mrs Sims, fetched down portmanteau and bags groaning and sighing beneath their weight, and raising up a smile of contempt upon his employer’s face as he watched the fellow’s actions, and scanned his powerful development and the idleness written so plainly upon his countenance. But soon the task was ended, the cab-door banged, Mrs Sims had turned on a little more of her laughing-gas to brighten her features by way of valediction to the departing lodger, and then, as she sniffed loudly, the cab drove off, leaving Mr Jarker spitting upon that curiosity, an honestly-earned sixpence in his hand.

      “How’s the missus? why, she’s okkard, and I don’t s’pose you a-coming would do her any good, and she’s a-going to spend a shillin’ in ankerchers for someone as has a cold in her head, that’s what she’s a-goin’ to do,” said Mr Jarker, with a grin at Mrs Sims, and then he watched the affronted dame as she sniffed her way upstairs; but before she had reached the second flight, Mr Jarker had grinned again, drawing his lips back from his white teeth with a smile that more resembled a snarl.

      Mr William Jarker, birdcatcher, fancier of pigeons, and of anything else which came to his net, stood listening to the sniffs and receding footsteps of Mrs Sims, placed the sixpence he had earned in the pocket of his tight corduroys, pulled off his large, flat, fur cap, and gave his head a scratch, thereby displaying a crop of hair which it would have been useless to attempt to brush or part, for it was decidedly short, and the barber who had last operated had not been careful, but left the said hair nicky and notchy in places. However, the style gave due prominence to the peculiar phrenological development of Mr Jarker’s bumps, while his ears stood out largely, and with an air that suggested cropping as an improvement to them as well, more especially since there was a great deal of the bull-dog in his appearance.

      Mr Jarker replaced his cap, took his little birdcage from behind the door, and was just moving off, when a barrister came out of one of the lower rooms in full legal costume, muttering loudly, and evidently reciting a part of the performance he was about to go through.

      Upon hearing the door open, Mr Jarker turned his head, and then gave an involuntary shudder as he moved off, while the counsel followed closely behind, wrapped in his brief, and at times talking loudly:

      “Instead, m’lud, of the case being tried in this honourable court, m’lud, devoted as it is to civil causes, the defendant should be occupying the felon’s dock at the Old Bailey, m’lud; for a more shameful case of robbery – ”

      “I’m gallussed!” muttered Mr Jarker, quickening his