The Blithedale Romance - Page 126/170

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.