FROM the outside I didn't think much of Mrs. Portheris's house. It was
very tall, and very plain, and very narrow, and quite expressionless,
except that it wore a sort of dirty brown frown. Like its neighbours, it
had a well in front of it, and steps leading down into the well, and
an iron fence round the steps, and a brass bell-handle lettered
'Tradesmen.' Like its neighbours, too, it wore boxes of spotty black
greenery on the window-sills--in fact, it was very like its neighbours,
except that it had one or two solemn little black balconies that looked
as if nobody ever sat in them running across the face of it, and a tall,
shallow porch, with two or three extremely white stone steps before the
front door. Half-Moon Street, to me, looked like a family of houses--a
family differing in heights and complexions and the colour of its hair,
but sharing all the characteristics of a family--of an old family. A
person draws a great many conclusions from the outside of a house,
and my conclusion from the outside of my relation's house was that she
couldn't be very well off to be obliged to live in such a plain and
gloomy locality, with 'Tradesmen' on the ground-floor; and I hoped they
were not any noisy kind of tradesmen, such as shoemakers or carpenters,
who would disturb her early in the morning. The clean-scrubbed stone
steps reflected very favourably, I thought, upon Mrs. Portheris,
and gave the house, in spite of its grimy, old-fashioned, cramped
appearance, a look of respectability which redeemed it. But I did not
see at any window, behind the spotty evergreens, the sweet, sad face of
my relation, though there were a hand-organ and a monkey and a German
band all operating within twenty yards of the house.
I rang the bell. The door opened a great deal more quickly than you
might imagine from the time I am taking to tell about it, and I was
confronted by my first surprise in London. It was a man--a neat, smooth,
pale, round-faced man in livery, rather fat and very sad. It was also
Mrs. Portheris's interior. This was very dark and very quiet, but what
light there was fell richly, through a square, stained-glass window at
the end of the hall, upon the red and blue of some old china above
a door, and a collection of Indian spears, and a twisting old oak
staircase that glowed with colour. Mrs. Portheris's exterior had
prepared me for something different. I did not know then that in London
everything is a matter of the inside--I had not seen a Duchess living
crowded up to her ears with other people's windows. With us the outside
counts so tremendously. An American duchess, if you can imagine such
a person, would consider it only due to the fitness of things that she
should have an imposing front yard, and at least room enough at the back
for the clothes-lines. But this has nothing to do with Half-Moon Street.
'Does Mrs. Portheris live here?' I asked, thinking it was just possible
she might have moved.
'Yes, miss,' said the footman, with a subdued note of interrogation.