Chapter 46

A MYSTERIOUS NIGHT IN LONDON

"No time to lose," said Harry, "come along."

He called a cab: in an undertone mentioned the number of a house in some
street to the driver; we jumped in, and were off.

As we rattled over the boisterous pavements, past splendid squares,
churches, and shops, our cabman turning corners like a skater on the
ice, and all the roar of London in my ears, and no end to the walls of
brick and mortar; I thought New York a hamlet, and Liverpool a
coal-hole, and myself somebody else: so unreal seemed every thing about
me. My head was spinning round like a top, and my eyes ached with much
gazing; particularly about the comers, owing to my darting them so
rapidly, first this side, and then that, so as not to miss any thing;
though, in truth, I missed much.

"Stop," cried Harry, after a long while, putting his head out of the
window, all at once--"stop! do you hear, you deaf man? you have passed
the house--No. 40 I told you--that's it--the high steps there, with the
purple light!"

The cabman being paid, Harry adjusting his whiskers and mustache, and
bidding me assume a lounging look, pushed his hat a little to one side,
and then locking arms, we sauntered into the house; myself feeling not a
little abashed; it was so long since I had been in any courtly society.

It was some semi-public place of opulent entertainment; and far
surpassed any thing of the kind I had ever seen before.

The floor was tesselated with snow-white, and russet-hued marbles; and
echoed to the tread, as if all the Paris catacombs were underneath. I
started with misgivings at that hollow, boding sound, which seemed
sighing with a subterraneous despair, through all the magnificent
spectacle around me; mocking it, where most it glared.

The walk were painted so as to deceive the eye with interminable
colonnades; and groups of columns of the finest Scagliola work of
variegated marbles--emerald-green and gold, St. Pons veined with silver,
Sienna with porphyry--supported a resplendent fresco ceiling, arched like
a bower, and thickly clustering with mimic grapes. Through all the East
of this foliage, you spied in a crimson dawn, Guide's ever youthful
Apollo, driving forth the horses of the sun. From sculptured stalactites
of vine-boughs, here and there pendent hung galaxies of gas lights,
whose vivid glare was softened by pale, cream-colored, porcelain
spheres, shedding over the place a serene, silver flood; as if every
porcelain sphere were a moon; and this superb apartment was the moon-lit
garden of Portia at Belmont; and the gentle lovers, Lorenzo and Jessica,
lurked somewhere among the vines.

At numerous Moorish looking tables, supported by