Not, however, that the physical substance of Fauntleroy had literally
melted into vapor. He had fled northward to the New England
metropolis, and had taken up his abode, under another name, in a
squalid street or court of the older portion of the city. There he
dwelt among poverty-stricken wretches, sinners, and forlorn good
people, Irish, and whomsoever else were neediest. Many families were
clustered in each house together, above stairs and below, in the little
peaked garrets, and even in the dusky cellars. The house where
Fauntleroy paid weekly rent for a chamber and a closet had been a
stately habitation in its day. An old colonial governor had built it,
and lived there, long ago, and held his levees in a great room where
now slept twenty Irish bedfellows; and died in Fauntleroy's chamber,
which his embroidered and white-wigged ghost still haunted.
Tattered hangings, a marble hearth, traversed with many cracks and fissures, a
richly carved oaken mantelpiece, partly hacked away for kindling-stuff,
a stuccoed ceiling, defaced with great, unsightly patches of the naked
laths,--such was the chamber's aspect, as if, with its splinters and
rags of dirty splendor, it were a kind of practical gibe at this poor,
ruined man of show.
At first, and at irregular intervals, his relatives allowed Fauntleroy
a little pittance to sustain life; not from any love, perhaps, but lest
poverty should compel him, by new offences, to add more shame to that
with which he had already stained them. But he showed no tendency to
further guilt. His character appeared to have been radically changed
(as, indeed, from its shallowness, it well might) by his miserable
fate; or, it may be, the traits now seen in him were portions of the
same character, presenting itself in another phase. Instead of any
longer seeking to live in the sight of the world, his impulse was to
shrink into the nearest obscurity, and to be unseen of men, were it
possible, even while standing before their eyes. He had no pride; it
was all trodden in the dust. No ostentation; for how could it survive,
when there was nothing left of Fauntleroy, save penury and shame!
His very gait demonstrated that he would gladly have faded out of view, and
have crept about invisibly, for the sake of sheltering himself from the
irksomeness of a human glance. Hardly, it was averred, within the
memory of those who knew him now, had he the hardihood to show his full
front to the world. He skulked in corners, and crept about in a sort
of noonday twilight, making himself gray and misty, at all hours, with
his morbid intolerance of sunshine.