'He told me he lived in Marlborough Street, I'm sure,' said Mr.
Hale, with a much perplexed air.
'Perhaps it is one of the economies he still practises, to live
in a very small house. But here are plenty of people about; let
me ask.' She accordingly inquired of a passer-by, and was informed that
Mr. Thornton lived close to the mill, and had the factory
lodge-door pointed out to her, at the end of the long dead wall
they had noticed.
The lodge-door was like a common garden-door; on one side of it
were great closed gates for the ingress and egress of lurries and
wagons. The lodge-keeper admitted them into a great oblong yard,
on one side of which were offices for the transaction of
business; on the opposite, an immense many-windowed mill, whence
proceeded the continual clank of machinery and the long groaning
roar of the steam-engine, enough to deafen those who lived within
the enclosure. Opposite to the wall, along which the street ran,
on one of the narrow sides of the oblong, was a handsome
stone-coped house,--blackened, to be sure, by the smoke, but with
paint, windows, and steps kept scrupulously clean. It was
evidently a house which had been built some fifty or sixty years.
The stone facings--the long, narrow windows, and the number of
them--the flights of steps up to the front door, ascending from
either side, and guarded by railing--all witnessed to its age.
Margaret only wondered why people who could afford to live in so
good a house, and keep it in such perfect order, did not prefer a
much smaller dwelling in the country, or even some suburb; not in
the continual whirl and din of the factory. Her unaccustomed ears
could hardly catch her father's voice, as they stood on the steps
awaiting the opening of the door. The yard, too, with the great
doors in the dead wall as a boundary, was but a dismal look-out
for the sitting-rooms of the house--as Margaret found when they
had mounted the old-fashioned stairs, and been ushered into the
drawing-room, the three windows of which went over the front door
and the room on the right-hand side of the entrance. There was no
one in the drawing-room. It seemed as though no one had been in
it since the day when the furniture was bagged up with as much
care as if the house was to be overwhelmed with lava, and
discovered a thousand years hence. The walls were pink and gold;
the pattern on the carpet represented bunches of flowers on a
light ground, but it was carefully covered up in the centre by a
linen drugget, glazed and colourless. The window-curtains were
lace; each chair and sofa had its own particular veil of netting,
or knitting. Great alabaster groups occupied every flat surface,
safe from dust under their glass shades. In the middle of the
room, right under the bagged-up chandelier, was a large circular
table, with smartly-bound books arranged at regular intervals
round the circumference of its polished surface, like
gaily-coloured spokes of a wheel. Everything reflected light,
nothing absorbed it. The whole room had a painfully spotted,
spangled, speckled look about it, which impressed Margaret so
unpleasantly that she was hardly conscious of the peculiar
cleanliness required to keep everything so white and pure in such
an atmosphere, or of the trouble that must be willingly expended
to secure that effect of icy, snowy discomfort. Wherever she
looked there was evidence of care and labour, but not care and
labour to procure ease, to help on habits of tranquil home
employment; solely to ornament, and then to preserve ornament
from dirt or destruction.