once heard this room spoken of by an old friend of mine, one
Mr. Gresham of Greshamsbury, the father of Frank Gresham, who was
now about to purchase that part of the Chace of Chaldicotes which
belonged to the Crown. He also had had evil days, though now happily
they were past and gone; and he, too, had sat in that room, and
listened to the voice of men who were powerful over his property,
and intended to use that power. The idea which he left on my mind
was much the same as that which I had entertained, when a boy, of
a certain room in the castle of Udolpho. There was a chair in that
Udolpho room in which those who sat were dragged out limb by limb,
the head one way and the legs another; the fingers were dragged off
from the hands, and the teeth out from the jaws, and the hair off
the head, and the flesh from the bones, and the joints from their
sockets, till there was nothing left but a lifeless trunk seated in
the chair. Mr. Gresham, as he told me, always sat in the same seat,
and the tortures he suffered when so seated, the dislocations of his
property which he was forced to discuss, the operations on his very
self which he was forced to witness, made me regard that room as
worse than the chamber of Udolpho. He, luckily--a rare instance of
good fortune--had lived to see all his bones and joints put together
again, and flourishing soundly; but he never could speak of the room
without horror. "No consideration on earth," he once said to me, very
solemnly,--"I say none, should make me again enter that room." And
indeed this feeling was so strong with him, that from the day when
his affairs took a turn he would never even walk down South Audley
Street. On the morning in question into this torture-chamber Mr.
Sowerby went, and there, after some two or three minutes, he was
joined by Mr. Fothergill.

Mr. Fothergill was, in one respect, like to his friend Sowerby. He
enacted two altogether different persons on occasions which were
altogether different. Generally speaking, with the world at large,
he was a jolly, rollicking, popular man, fond of eating and drinking,
known to be devoted to the duke's interests, and supposed to be
somewhat unscrupulous, or at any rate hard, when they were concerned;
but in other respects a good-natured fellow: and there was a report
about that he had once lent somebody money, without charging him
interest or taking security. On the present occasion Sowerby saw
at a glance that he had come thi