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.
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