The little girl was earning the living of her parents by performing at a variety theatre. To prevent the interference of the school authorities the parents kept her shut up all day in the bedroom, and only brought her oat of It to take her to the music-hall. There are secret chambers in London houses still, the mystery of which has yet to be revealed; some which may remain undiscovered, to be "mysteries" in the daily press fifty or a hundred years hence. The bricked-up cellar that thrills us in the pages of Edgar Allan Poe is playing its part in the criminal tragedies of the twentieth-century Babylon. CHAPTER XIV--THE ROMANCE OF POVERTY _Noblemen who live in mean streets--A peer on a pound a week--A princess out in service--Lodgekeeper where once mistress--A grave-digger with royal blood--From £100,000 to nothing_ |Poverty has so many romances, and they are so varied. Under the humblest roofs in this great city of ours men and women are daily writing in the book of life beautiful stories of tender love, of noble self-sacrifice, of deeds of heroic endurance. There are idylls of the slums and alleys as charming as ever poet penned; there are stories to be told of the dwellers in mean streets that lift our thoughts far above the sordid things of earth. But these are romances pure and simple, and in them is no element of mystery. The romances I have in my mind as I write are those in which the poverty conceals from the eyes of the world a truth it would be greatly interested to learn. When the London season is at its height the daily papers are filled with the gay or great doings of the aristocracy. Every movement is chronicled as being of surpassing interest to the general public. If my lord and my lady entertain their friends at home the details are considered as important as those of a battle in the Far East or a debate in the House of Commons. Even if my lord or my lady dine or sup at a restaurant the fact is duly chronicled. The untitled leaders of the smart set, our wealthy American visitors, the stars of the opera and the stage, share in the general publicity. Celebrities, whether of rank or wealth or talent, are standing items of "Fashionable Intelligence." All the world is made familiar with their features, and their diaries are compiled for them by the staff, male and female, of the popular periodicals. There are men and women of noble birth and ancient lineage, there are men and women who have been famous in their day in the world of fashion and of art, over whose lives a great silence has settled, who move about in our midst, their very identity unsuspected, who know sorrow and suffering, and sometimes even privation. These are the romances of poverty which are mysteries, because they are rarely fathomed. Now and again the veil is lifted in the hospital, in the parish infirmary, or at the coroner's inquest. But many of them remain hidden for ever by the shallow earth which covers a pauper's coffin.