Chapter 12

CHAPTER 12

Bleeding Heart Yard

In London itself, though in the old rustic road towards a suburb of
note where in the days of William Shakespeare, author and stage-
player, there were Royal hunting-seats--howbeit no sport is left
there now but for hunters of men--Bleeding Heart Yard was to be
found; a place much changed in feature and in fortune, yet with
some relish of ancient greatness about it. Two or three mighty
stacks of chimneys, and a few large dark rooms which had escaped
being walled and subdivided out of the recognition of their old
proportions, gave the Yard a character. It was inhabited by poor
people, who set up their rest among its faded glories, as Arabs of
the desert pitch their tents among the fallen stones of the
Pyramids; but there was a family sentimental feeling prevalent in
the Yard, that it had a character.

As if the aspiring city had become puffed up in the very ground on
which it stood, the ground had so risen about Bleeding Heart Yard
that you got into it down a flight of steps which formed no part of
the original approach, and got out of it by a low gateway into a
maze of shabby streets, which went about and about, tortuously
ascending to the level again. At this end of the Yard and over the
gateway, was the factory of Daniel Doyce, often heavily beating
like a bleeding heart of iron, with the clink of metal upon metal.
The opinion of the Yard was divided respecting the derivation of
its name. The more practical of its inmates abided by the
tradition of a murder; the gentler and more imaginative
inhabitants, including the whole of the tender sex, were loyal to
the legend of a young lady of former times closely imprisoned in
her chamber by a cruel father for remaining true to her own true
love, and refusing to marry the suitor he chose for her. The
legend related how that the young lady used to be seen up at her
window behind the bars, murmuring a love-lorn song of which the
burden was, 'Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart, bleeding away,' until
she died. It was objected by the murderous party that this Refrain
was notoriously the invention of a tambour-worker, a spinster and
romantic, still lodging in the Yard. But, forasmuch as all
favourite legends must be associated with the affections, and as
many more people fall in love than commit murder--which it may be
hoped, howsoever bad we are, will continue until the end of the
world to be the dispensation under which we shall live--the
Bleeding Heart, Bleeding Heart, bleeding away story, carried the
day by a great majority. Neither party would listen to the
antiquaries who delivered learned lectures in the neighbourhood,
showing the Bleeding Heart to have been the heraldic cognisance of
the old family