The Three Clerks eBook

son in and do for him’; and Mrs. Richards, as her first compliance with these requests, had kept the latch-key in her own pocket.  So matters went on for a week; but when Mrs. Richards found that her maidservant was never woken by Mr. Charley’s raps after midnight, and that she herself was obliged to descend in her dressing-gown, she changed her mind, declared to herself that it was useless to attempt to keep a grown gentleman in leading-strings, and put the key on the table on the second Monday morning.

As none of the three men ever dined at home, Alaric and Norman having clubs which they frequented, and Charley eating his dinner at some neighbouring dining-house, it may be imagined that this change of residence did our poor navvy but little good.  It had, however, a salutary effect on him, at any rate at first.  He became shamed into a quieter and perhaps cleaner mode of dressing himself; he constrained himself to sit down to breakfast with his monitors at half-past eight, and was at any rate so far regardful of Mrs. Richards as not to smoke in his bedroom, and to come home sober enough to walk upstairs without assistance every night for the first month.

But perhaps the most salutary effect made by this change on young Tudor was this, that he was taken by his cousin one Sunday to the Woodwards.  Poor Charley had had but small opportunity of learning what are the pleasures of decent society.  He had gone headlong among the infernal navvies too quickly to allow of that slow and gradual formation of decent alliances which is all in all to a young man entering life.  A boy is turned loose into London, and desired to choose the good and eschew the bad.  Boy as he is, he might probably do so if the opportunity came in his way.  But no such chance is afforded him.  To eschew the bad is certainly possible for him; but as to the good, he must wait till he be chosen.  This it is, that is too much for him.  He cannot live without society, and so he falls.

Society, an ample allowance of society, this is the first requisite which a mother should seek in sending her son to live alone in London; balls, routs, picnics, parties; women, pretty, well-dressed, witty, easy-mannered; good pictures, elegant drawing rooms, well got-up books, Majolica and Dresden china—­ these are the truest guards to protect a youth from dissipation and immorality.

  These are the books, the arts, the academes
  That show, contain, and nourish all the world,

if only a youth could have them at his disposal.  Some of these things, though by no means all, Charley Tudor encountered at the Woodwards.

CHAPTER III

THE WOODWARDS

It is very difficult nowadays to say where the suburbs of London come to an end, and where the country begins.  The railways, instead of enabling Londoners to live in the country, have turned the country into a city.  London will soon assume the shape of a great starfish.  The old town, extending from Poplar to Hammersmith, will be the nucleus, and the various railway lines will be the projecting rays.