But this model portress did not preside over the house inhabited by Austin
Lovel. There Clarissa found only a little deaf old man, who grinned and
shook his head helplessly when she questioned him, and shrugged his
shoulders and pointed to the staircase--a cavernous stone staircase, with
an odour as of newly opened graves. She went up to the first-floor, past
the _entresol_, where the earthy odour was subjugated by a powerful smell
of cooking, in which garlic was the prevailing feature. One tall door
on the first-floor was painted a pale pink, and had still some dingy
indications of former gilding upon its mouldings. On this pink door was
inscribed the name of Mr. Austin, Painter.
Clarissa rang a bell, and a tawdry-looking French servant, with big
earrings and a dirty muslin cap, came to answer her summons. Mr. Austin
was at home; would madame please to enter. Madame, having replied in
the affirmative, was shown into a small sitting-room, furnished with a
heterogeneous collection of cabinets, tables, and sofas, every one of which
bore the stamp of the broker's shop--things which had been graceful and
pretty in their day, but from which the ormolu-moulding had been knocked
off here, and the inlaid-wood chipped away there, and the tortoiseshell
cracked in another place, until they seemed the very emblems of decay. It
was as if they had been set up as perpetual monitors--monuments of man's
fragility.
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