Which last was intended as a side blow to be carried by Mrs. Mortomley to her husband. Mr. Hankins folded up his samples, took his keys, said, "Evening, sir," "Good evening, ma'am," touched the brim of his hat, and sauntered leisurely across the yard leaving his visitors alone.
"I wanted you to hear, Dolly," said Rupert, "but I fear in my wisdom I have been a brute."
She did not answer, but she walked back steadily to the house. She dressed for dinner; and when that meal was served, they all sat down as people might the evening before an execution.
So far this narrative has been preliminary and introductory. In the next chapter the real story of Mortomley's Estate begins.
The stores, warehouses, and offices of the General Chemical Company (Limited), are situated, as all City folks know, on St. Vedast Wharf, Vedast Lane, Upper Thames Street.
Landing stages and railway bridges, which have altered the aspect of so many other places of business, have left St. Vedast Wharf untouched. And the curious inquirer will find it still presenting precisely the same appearance as it did in those early summer days of a few years back when it was still optional with Mortomley to do what he liked under certain conditions with his own estate.
Excepting Lower Thames Street, there is not probably in the city a thoroughfare so utterly given over to business and business doing, as Thames Street above bridge.
What Hyde Park is for carriages, it is for vans and carts. If timid people elect to walk along it, they must do so crossing from side to side, under the heads of great cart-horses to avoid the bales of goods, the reams of paper, the huge barrels, the heavy castings that come swinging down from the loop-holes of third and fourth stories, indifferent as to whether any-body or nobody is passing beneath.
All the lanes leading from it to the river are narrow and dingy and sunless, and Vedast Lane seems probably narrower and dirtier than most of its fellows, because many carts and waggons pass down it on their way to various huge warehouses, occupied by persons following different trades.
During all the working hours of the day, shouting and swearing and the lumbering of vans, and the trampling and slipping about of horses, cease not for one single instant; and it is notorious that the traffic of the whole lane was once stopped for four hours by a jibbing horse, who would probably have remained there until now, had a passer-by not suggested throwing a truss of straw under him and then setting fire to it, which produced such celerity of movement that the driver found himself in Bridge Street, having threaded the vehicles crowded together by the way, without let or hindrance, before he had sufficiently recovered his presence of mind to search about for his whip.