The Mysteries of the Court of London — page 308: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE FOUR SIRENS 277 alas, that she should have fallen from virtue’s pinnacle and sunk into this degradation, gilded though it were! Linda, Armantine, Marion, and Hglantine were together in their sumptuous apartment, between nine and ten o’clock in the evening, and they were conversing on various topics, just as four ladies might do in their own drawing-room. Presently the mirror-contrived door opened; the four sirens turned their eyes slowly to see who was about to enter, when an individual who was a stranger to them all made his appearance. He was flashily dressed, but had a vulgar look; and as he took off his hat, he made a most ridiculous attempt at a bow to the young women, so that Armantine and Eglantine could not help laughing, while Linda and Marion so far exerted themselves in their luxurious indolence as to sit up and survey him with more attention. ‘“‘Good evening, ladies,’ said this individual, closing the mirror-door behind him, and advancing with an impudent leering smirk toward those whom he thus addressed. ‘‘ Don’t be alarmed. Perhaps you know me by name, and perhaps you don’t. So if the old lady ’— thus irreverently, as the girls thought, alluding to Madame Angelique — “ hasn’t done me the honour of mentioning me to you before, I may as well announce myself as Mr. Isaac Shadbolt. Honest Ike, as my friends Sir Richard Mayne and Colonel Rowan call me.”’ “Why, I do believe,” whispered Marion to her compan- ions, ‘‘ he alludes to the commissioners of police. When I lived with Lord Beltinge, I frequently heard those names mentioned.”’ ‘““Well, yes, miss,’ said Mr. Shadbolt, whose ears were uncommonly keen, and who had caught a portion of that whisper, ‘“‘ the gentlemen are the commissioners of police, and I have the honour to serve under them. Not one of your common vulgar policemen, you know, but a sort of subaltern, — what an ensign or lieutenant is in a regiment in comparison with the colonel.’’ It was tolerably easy to perceive that Mr. Shadbolt had been drinking, not merely because his countenance was flushed, his speech was rather thick, and his gait a trifle unsteady, but likewise because the hitherto delicately per- fumed atmosphere of the apartment had become impreg- nated, on this individual’s entrance, with an odour of rum, COMMICLOO© cS (CO)