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In 1834, after six years at Craigenputtock, the Carlyles moved to London, and took up their home in Cheyne Row, Chelsea, a far from fashionable retreat, but one in which the comforts of life could be more readily secured. It was there that Thomas Carlyle wrote what must seem to us the most vivid of all his books, the History of the French Revolution.
On the first floor was a remarkably fine fireplace, which has been transferred bodily to one of the modern houses in Cheyne Walk. At the back of Radnor House were large nursery-gardens known as "Mr. Watt's gardens" from the time of Hamilton until far into the present century.
There was, he recollected, a verandah below his windows, and he wondered whether Miss Cheyne received her visitors there in the cool of the afternoon. He listened half-sleepily, and heard the horse depart, led away by a servant. There followed the murmur of a conversation, between two persons only, below his window.
It was on a bright sunshiny April afternoon that Malcolm at last paid his long-deferred visit to Staplegrove. Cedric had been at home for nearly a week then, but he and Malcolm had already met. Cedric had spent a night at Cheyne Walk before going down to the Wood House, and had extracted from his friend a reluctant promise that he would come down as early in the week as possible.
Being much cleverer than Lady Ashburton, she seemed to dispute a supremacy which had not hitherto been challenged, and the relations of the two women were strained. Carlyle, on the other hand, had become, so Froude discovered from his wife's journal, romantically, though quite innocently, attached to Lady Ashburton, and this was one cause of dissension at Cheyne Row.
"It is a regular November evening," she observed, with a little shiver. "It is the month I like least the month of decay and " then she checked herself abruptly. "Mr. Herrick, there is a question I wanted to ask, and that I did not wish Dinah to hear. You are going back to town this evening, are you not, because you expect that Cedric will come to Cheyne Walk?"
Cheyne, who, with the desire inherent in mathematicians to reduce every thing to mathematical images, considers all existence as a cone; allows that the basis is at an infinite distance from the body; and in this distance between finite and infinite, there will be room, for ever, for an infinite series of indefinable existence.
Disappointed, he crossed the river, lingered a little in Battersea Park, came back again over the bridge, and, with a sudden leap of the heart, which all but made his whole body spring forward, saw a slim figure in grey moving by the parapet in front of Cheyne Walk. They shook hands without speaking, very much as though they had met by appointment.
The Kestons had decided to return to Cheyne Walk in another three weeks or so, and of course he must accompany them; his mother and Anna would be back in town by that time, and his presence would be needed in Lincoln's Inn. "The shadows of the prison-house," as he called it, began to haunt him, and he counted up his days as jealously as a miser counts his gold.
He went into the house from which all the doors and windows being open came the sound of his conversation with Juanita, while he prepared the coffee. It was quite a frank and open conversation, having Miss Cheyne for its object, and stating that she had not only found the omelette good, but had eaten it all. Presently he returned with the coffee-pot, two cups, and a small jug of cream on a tray.
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