第28章 A MODEL FOR MR HOGARTH(1)

On a Sunday, the 5th of February, 1733, there came toddling into that narrow passage of the Temple known as Tanfield Court an elderly lady by the name of Mrs Love.It was just after one o'clock of the afternoon.The giants of St Dunstan's behind her had only a minute before rapped out the hour with their clubs.

Mrs Love's business was at once charitable and social.She was going, by appointment made on the previous Friday night, to eat dinner with a frail old lady named Mrs Duncomb, who lived in chambers on the third floor of one of the buildings that had entry from the court.Mrs Duncomb was the widow of a law stationer of the City.She had been a widow for a good number of years.The deceased law stationer, if he had not left her rich, at least had left her in fairly comfortable circumstances.It was said about the environs that she had some property, and this fact, combined with the other that she was obviously nearing the end of life's journey, made her an object of melancholy interest to the womenkind of the neighbourhood.

Mrs Duncomb was looked after by a couple of servants.One of them, Betty Harrison, had been the old lady's companion for a lifetime.Mrs Duncomb, described as old,'' was only sixty.Her weakness and bodily condition seem to have made her appear much older.Betty, then, also described as old,'' may have been of an age with her mistress, or even older.She was, at all events, not by much less frail.The other servant was a comparatively new addition to the establishment, a fresh little girl of about seventeen, Ann (or Nanny) Price by name.

According to one account.The Newgate Calendar (London 1773) gives Mrs Duncomb's age as eighty and that of the maid Betty as sixty.

Mrs Love climbed the three flights of stairs to the top landing.It surprised her, or disturbed her, but little that she found no signs of life onthe various floors, because it was, as we have seen, a Sunday.The occupants of the chambers of the staircase, mostly gentlemen connected in one way or another with the law, would be, she knew abroad for the eating of their Sunday dinners, either at their favourite taverns or at commons in the Temple itself.What did rather disturb kindly Mrs Love was the fact that she found Mrs Duncomb's outer door closed--an unwonted fact--and it faintly surprised her that no odour of cooking greeted her nostrils.

Mrs Love knocked.There was no reply.She knocked, indeed, at intervals over a period of some fifteen minutes, still obtaining no response.The disturbed sense of something being wrong became stronger and stronger in the mind of Mrs Love.

On the night of the previous Friday she had been calling upon Mrs Duncomb, and she had found the old lady very weak, very nervous, and very low in spirits.It had not been a very cheerful visit all round, because the old maidservant, Betty Harrison, had also been far from well.There had been a good deal of talk between the old women of dying, a subject to which their minds had been very prone to revert.Besides Mrs Love there were two other visitors, but they too failed to cheer the old couple up.One of the visitors, a laundress of the Temple called Mrs Oliphant, had done her best, poohpoohing such melancholy talk, and attributing the low spirits in which the old women found themselves to the bleakness of the February weather, and promising them that they would find a new lease of life with the advent of spring.But Mrs Betty especially had been hard to console.

My mistress,'' she had said to cheerful Mrs Oliphant, will talk of dying.And she would have me die with her.''

As she stood in considerable perturbation of mind on the cheerless third-floor landing that Sunday afternoon Mrs Love found small matter for comfort in her memory of the Friday evening.She remembered that old Mrs Duncomb had spoken complainingly of the lonesomeness which had come upon her floor by the vacation of the chambers opposite her on the landing.The tenant had gone a day or two before, leaving the rooms empty of furniture, and the key with a Mr Twysden.

Mrs.Love, turning to view the door opposite to that on which she hadbeen rapping so long and so ineffectively, had a shuddery feeling that she was alone on the top of the world.

She remembered how she had left Mrs Duncomb on the Friday night.Mrs Oliphant had departed first, accompanied by the second visitor, one Sarah Malcolm, a charwoman who had worked for Mrs Duncomb up to the previous Christmas, and who had called in to see how her former employer was faring.An odd, silent sort of young woman this Sarah, good-looking in a hardfeatured sort of way, she had taken but a very small part in the conversation, but had sat staring rather sullenly into the fire by the side of Betty Harrison, or else casting a flickering glance about the room.Mrs Love, before following the other two women downstairs, had helped the ailing Betty to get Mrs Duncomb settled for the night.In the dim candle-light and the faint glow of the fire that scarce illumined the wainscoted room the high tester-bed of the old lady, with its curtains, had seemed like a shadowed catafalque, an illusion nothing lessened by the frail old figure under the bedclothing.

It came to the mind of Mrs Love that the illness manifesting itself in Betty on the Friday night had worsened.Nanny, she imagined, must have gone abroad on some errand.The old servant, she thought, was too ill to come to the door, and her voice would be too weak to convey an answer to the knocking.Mrs Love, not without a shudder for the chill feeling of that top landing, betook herself downstairs again to make what inquiry she might.It happened that she met one of her fellow-visitors of the Friday night, Mrs Oliphant.

Mrs Oliphant was sympathetic, but could not give any information.She had seen no member of the old lady's establishment that day.She could only advise Mrs Love to go upstairs again and knock louder.