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The back drawing-room, which looked out upon the gravel walk and house-backs beyond, was papered with broad scarlet and green stripes in honour of the Surrey Hunt uniform, and was set out with a green-covered library table in the centre, with a red morocco hunting-chair between it and the window, and several good strong hair-bottomed mahogany chairs around the walls.
The back windows of the house looked on to other house-backs that formed a square well, wherein smaller, much lower roofs and flat expanses of ribbed leads and stable yards all huddled together in soft blue shadow.
FitzGerald tells a story of how he went to see Thomas Carlyle in London, and sate with him in a room at the top of his house, with a wide prospect of house-backs and chimney-pots; and how the sage reviled and vituperated the horrors of city life, and yet left on FitzGerald's mind the impression that perhaps after all he did not really wish to leave it.
Alas! there are victims enough and to spare beside them, too ready for the sacrifice, and up the main street he goes unabashed, springing in at one door and at another, on either side of the street, but fondest of the western side, where the hill slopes steeply down to the house-backs. He fleshes his teeth on every kind of prey.
Only an occasional chimney-pot, higher than its fellows, made a note of glowing orange where it pierced the slant of the evening sun: To Blanche's left there showed a pale gleam from the Thames between the house-backs of brownish-grey brick; to her right roof-tops and fantastic cowls were patterned in a flat purple tone against the luminous sky.
Will you come up?" Larcher assented readily. A minute later, while his host was seeking matches, he looked down from the dark chamber, and saw that the transformation wrought in the rectangular space of back yards had not been exaggerated. The shrubbery by the fences might have sheltered fairies. The boughs of the trees, now leafless, gently stirred. Even the plain house-backs were clad in beauty.
The light of the policeman's lantern glared over the ghastly scene along the double row of miserable house-backs, which lined the sides of the open tidal ditch over strange rambling jetties, and balconies, and sleeping-sheds, which hung on rotting piles over the black waters, with phosphorescent scraps of rotten fish gleaming and twinkling out of the dark hollows, like devilish grave-lights over bubbles of poisonous gas, and bloated carcases of dogs, and lumps of offal, floating on the stagnant olive-green hell-broth over the slow sullen rows of oily ripple which were dying away into the darkness far beyond, sending up, as they stirred, hot breaths of miasma the only sign that a spark of humanity, after years of foul life, had quenched itself at last in that foul death.
'I promised Fanny to take her to-morrow night, he began awkwardly. 'Oh, you have? 'And we're going together in the morning, you know. 'I know now. I didn't before, Nancy replied. 'Of course we can make a party in the evening. 'Of course. Horace looked up at the ugly house-backs, and hesitated before proceeding. 'That isn't what I wanted to talk about, he said at length.
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