THE SECOND SCENE.
SKELDERGATE, YORK.
CHAPTER I.
IN that part of the city of York which is situated on the western bank
of the Ouse there is a narrow street, called Skeldergate, running nearly
north and south, parallel with the course of the river. The postern by
which Skeldergate was formerly approached no longer exists; and the few
old houses left in the street are disguised in melancholy modern
costume of whitewash and cement. Shops of the smaller and poorer order, intermixed here and there with dingy warehouses and joyless private residences of red brick, compose the present a spect of Skeldergate. On the river-side the houses are separated at intervals by lanes running down to the water, and disclosing lonely little plots of open ground, with the masts of sailing-barges rising beyond. At its southward extremity the street ceases on a sudden, and the broad flow of the Ouse, the trees, the meadows, the public-walk on one bank and the towing-path on the other, open to view.
Here, where the street ends, and on the side of it furthest from the
river, a narrow little lane leads up to the paved footway surmounting
the ancient Walls of York. The one small row of buildings, which is all
that the lane possesses, is composed of cheap lodging-houses, with
an opposite view, at the distance of a few feet, of a portion of the
massive city wall. This place is called Rosemary Lane. Very little
light enters it; very few people live in it; the floating population of
Skeldergate passes it by; and visitors to the Walk on the Walls, who use
it as the way up or the way down, get out of the dreary little passage
as fast as they can.
The door of one of the houses in this lost corner of York opened softly
on the evening of the twenty-third of September, eighteen hundred and
forty-six; and a solitary individual of the male sex sauntered into
Skeldergate from the seclusion of Rosemary Lane.
Turning northward, this person directed his steps toward the bridge
over the Ouse and the busy center of the city. He bore the external
appearance of respectable poverty; he carried a gingham umbrella, preserved in an oilskin case; he picked his steps, with the neatest avoidance of all dirty places on the pavement; and he surveyed the scene around him with eyes of two different colors—a bilious brown eye on the lookout for employment, and a bilious green eye in a similar predicament. In plainer terms, the stranger from Rosemary Lane was no other than—Captain Wragge.
Outwardly speaking, the captain had not altered for the better since the
memorable spring day when he had presented himself to Miss Garth at the
lodge-gate at Combe-Raven. The railway mania of that famous year had
attacked even the wary Wragge; had withdrawn him from his customary
pursuits; and had left him prostrate in the end, like many a better
man. He had lost his clerical appearance—he had faded with the autumn
leaves. His crape hat-band had put itself in brown mourning for its own
bereavement of black. His dingy white collar and cravat had died
the death of old linen, and had gone to their long home at the
paper-maker's, to live again one day in quires at a stationer's shop. A gray shooting-jacket in the last stage of woolen atrophy replaced the black frockcoat of former times, and, like a faithful servant, kept the dark secret of its master's linen from the eyes of a prying world. From top to toe every square inch of the captain's clothing was altered for the worse; but the man himself remained unchanged—superior to all forms of moral mildew, impervious to the action of social rust. He was as courteous, as persuasive, as blandly dignified as ever. He carried his head as high without a shirt-collar as ever he had carried it with one. The threadbare black handkerchief round his neck was perfectly tied; his rotten old shoes were neatly blacked; he might have compared chins, in the matter of smooth shaving, with the highest church dignitary in York. Time, change, and poverty had all attacked the captain together, and had all failed alike to get him down on the ground. He paced the streets of York, a man superior to clothes and circumstances—his vagabond varnish as bright on him as ever.
