第 107 页

way in which he looked out to sea, and spoke about “the end of it”?’

‘Sure I do!’ said he.

‘What do you suppose he meant?’

‘Mas’r Davy,’ he replied, ‘I’ve put the question to myself a mort o’

times, and never found no answer. And theer’s one curious thing--that,

though he is so pleasant, I wouldn’t fare to feel comfortable to try and

get his mind upon ‘t. He never said a wured to me as warn’t as dootiful

as dootiful could be, and it ain’t likely as he’d begin to speak any

other ways now; but it’s fur from being fleet water in his mind, where

them thowts lays. It’s deep, sir, and I can’t see down.’

‘You are right,’ said I, ‘and that has sometimes made me anxious.’

‘And me too, Mas’r Davy,’ he rejoined. ‘Even more so, I do assure you,

than his ventersome ways, though both belongs to the alteration in him.

I doen’t know as he’d do violence under any circumstances, but I hope as

them two may be kep asunders.’

We had come, through Temple Bar, into the city. Conversing no more now,

and walking at my side, he yielded himself up to the one aim of his

devoted life, and went on, with that hushed concentration of his

faculties which would have made his figure solitary in a multitude.

We were not far from Blackfriars Bridge, when he turned his head and

pointed to a solitary female figure flitting along the opposite side of

the street. I knew it, readily, to be the figure that we sought.

We crossed the road, and were pressing on towards her, when it occurred

to me that she might be more disposed to feel a woman’s interest in the

lost girl, if we spoke to her in a quieter place, aloof from the crowd,

and where we should be less observed. I advised my companion, therefore,

that we should not address her yet, but follow her; consulting in this,

likewise, an indistinct desire I had, to know where she went.

He acquiescing, we followed at a distance: never losing sight of her,

but never caring to come very near, as she frequently looked about.

Once, she stopped to listen to a band of music; and then we stopped too.

She went on a long way. Still we went on. It was evident, from the

manner in which she held her course, that she was going to some fixed

destination; and this, and her keeping in the busy streets, and I

suppose the strange fascination in the secrecy and mystery of so

following anyone, made me adhere to my first purpose. At length she

turned into a dull, dark street, where the noise and crowd were lost;

and I said, ‘We may speak to her now’; and, mending our pace, we went

after her.

CHAPTER 47. MARTHA

We were now down in Westminster. We had turned back to follow her,

having encountered her coming towards us; and Westminster Abbey was

the point at which she passed from the lights and noise of the leading

streets. She proceeded so quickly, when she got free of the two currents

of passengers setting towards and from the bridge, that, between this

and the advance she had of us when she struck off, we were in the narrow

water-side street by Millbank before we came up with her. At that moment

she crossed the road, as if to avoid the footsteps that she heard so

close behind; and, without looking back, passed on even more rapidly.

A glimpse of the river through a dull gateway, where some waggons were

housed for the night, seemed to arrest my feet. I touched my companion

without speaking, and we both forbore to cross after her, and both

followed on that opposite side of the way; keeping as quietly as we

could in the shadow of the houses, but keeping very near her.

There was, and is when I write, at the end of that low-lying street,

a dilapidated little wooden building, probably an obsolete old

ferry-house. Its position is just at that point where the street ceases,

and the road begins to lie between a row of houses and the river. As

soon as she came here, and saw the water, she stopped as if she had come

to her destination; and presently went slowly along by the brink of the

river, looking intently at it.

All the way here, I had supposed that she was going to some house;

indeed, I had vaguely entertained the hope that the house might be in

some way associated with the lost girl. But that one dark glimpse of the

river, through the gateway, had instinctively prepared me for her going

no farther.

The neighbourhood was a dreary one at that time; as oppressive, sad, and

solitary by night, as any about London. There were neither wharves nor

houses on the melancholy waste of road near the great blank Prison. A

sluggish ditch deposited its mud at the prison walls. Coarse grass and

rank weeds straggled over all the marshy land in the vicinity. In one

part, carcases of houses, inauspiciously begun and never finished,

rotted away. In another, the ground was cumbered with rusty iron

monsters of steam-boilers, wheels, cranks, pipes, furnaces, paddles,

anchors, diving-bells, windmill-sails, and I know not what strange

objects, accumulated by some speculator, and grovelling in the dust,

underneath which--having sunk into the soil of their own weight in wet

weather--they had the appearance of vainly trying to hide themselves.

The clash and glare of sundry fiery Works upon the river-side, arose

by night to disturb everything except the heavy and unbroken smoke that

poured out of their chimneys. Slimy gaps and causeways, winding among

old wooden piles, with a sickly substance clinging to the latter, like

green hair, and the rags of last year’s handbills offering rewards for

drowned men fluttering above high-water mark, led down through the ooze

and slush to the ebb-tide. There was a story that one of the pits

dug for the dead in the time of the Great Plague was hereabout; and

a blighting influence seemed to have proceeded from it over the whole

place. Or else it looked as if it had gradually decomposed into that

nightmare condition, out of the overflowings of the polluted stream.

As if she were a part of the refuse it had cast out, and left to

corruption and decay, the girl we had followed strayed down to the

river’s brink, and stood in the midst of this night-picture, lonely and

still, looking at the water.

There were some boats and barges astrand in the mud, and these enabled

us to come within a few yards of her without being seen. I then signed

to Mr. Peggotty to remain where he was, and emerged from their shade to

speak to her. I did not approach her solitary figure without trembling;

for this gloomy end to her determined walk, and the way in which she

stood, almost within the cavernous shadow of the iron bridge, looking

at the lights crookedly reflected in the strong tide, inspired a dread

within me.

I think she was talking to herself. I am sure, although absorbed in

gazing at the water, that her shawl was off her shoulders, and that she

was muffling her hands in it, in an unsettled and bewildered way, more

like the action of a sleep-walker than a waking person. I know, and

never can forget, that there was that in her wild manner which gave me

no assurance but that she would sink before my eyes, until I had her arm

within my grasp.

At the same moment I said ‘Martha!’

She uttered a terrified scream, and struggled with me with such strength

that I doubt if I could have held her alone. But a stronger hand than

mine was laid upon her; and when she raised her frightened eyes and saw

whose it was, she made but one more effort and dropped down between us.

We carried her away from the water to where there were some dry stones,

and there laid her down, crying and moaning. In a little while she sat

among the stones, holding her wretched head with both her hands.

‘Oh, the river!’ she cried passionately. ‘Oh, the river!’

‘Hush, hush!’ said I. ‘Calm yourself.’

But she still repeated the same words, continually exclaiming, ‘Oh, the

river!’ over and over again.

‘I know it’s like me!’ she exclaimed. ‘I know that I belong to it.

I know that it’s the natural company of such as I am! It comes from

country places, where there was once no harm in it--and it creeps

through the dismal streets, defiled and miserable--and it goes away,

like my life, to a great sea, that is always troubled--and I feel that

I must go with it!’ I have never known what despair was, except in the

tone of those words.

‘I can’t keep away from it. I can’t forget it. It haunts me day and

night. It’s the only thing in all the world that I am fit for, or that’s

fit for me. Oh, the dreadful river!’

The thought passed through my mind that in the face of my companion,

as he looked upon her without speech or motion, I might have read his

niece’s history, if I had known nothing of it. I never saw, in any

painting or reality, horror and compassion so impressively blended. He

shook as if he would have fallen; and his hand--I touched it with my

own, for his appearance alarmed me--was deadly cold.

‘She is in a state of frenzy,’ I whispered to him. ‘She will speak

differently in a little time.’

I don’t know what he would have said in answer. He made some motion with

his mouth, and seemed to think he had spoken; but he had only pointed to

her with his outstretched hand.

A new burst of crying came upon her now, in which she once more hid

her face among the stones, and lay before us, a prostrate image of

humiliation and ruin. Knowing that this state must pass, before we could

speak to her with any hope, I ventured to restrain him when he would

have raised her, and we stood by in silence until she became more

tranquil.

‘Martha,’ said I then, leaning down, and helping her to rise--she seemed

to want to rise as if with the intention of going away, but she was

weak, and leaned against a boat. ‘Do you know who this is, who is with

me?’

She said faintly, ‘Yes.’

‘Do you know that we have followed you a long way tonight?’

She shook her head. She looked neither at him nor at me, but stood in

a humble attitude, holding her bonnet and shawl in one hand, without

appearing conscious of them, and pressing the other, clenched, against

her forehead.

‘Are you composed enough,’ said I, ‘to speak on the subject which so

interested you--I hope Heaven may remember it!--that snowy night?’

Her sobs broke out afresh, and she murmured some inarticulate thanks to

me for not having driven her away from the door.

‘I want to say nothing for myself,’ she said, after a few moments. ‘I

am bad, I am lost. I have no hope at all. But tell him, sir,’ she had

shrunk away from him, ‘if you don’t feel too hard to me to do it, that

I never was in any way the cause of his misfortune.’ ‘It has never been

attributed to you,’ I returned, earnestly responding to her earnestness.

‘It was you, if I don’t deceive myself,’ she said, in a broken voice,

‘that came into the kitchen, the night she took such pity on me; was so

gentle to me; didn’t shrink away from me like all the rest, and gave me

such kind help! Was it you, sir?’

‘It was,’ said I.

‘I should have been in the river long ago,’ she said, glancing at it

with a terrible expression, ‘if any wrong to her had been upon my mind.

I never could have kept out of it a single winter’s night, if I had not

been free of any share in that!’

‘The cause of her flight is too well understood,’ I said. ‘You are

innocent of any part in it, we thoroughly believe,--we know.’

‘Oh, I might have been much the better for her, if I had had a better

heart!’ exclaimed the girl, with most forlorn regret; ‘for she was

always good to me! She never spoke a word to me but what was pleasant

and right. Is it likely I would try to make her what I am myself,

knowing what I am myself, so well? When I lost everything that makes

life dear, the worst of all my thoughts was that I was parted for ever

from her!’

Mr. Peggotty, standing with one hand on the gunwale of the boat, and his

eyes cast down, put his disengaged hand before his face.

‘And when I heard what had happened before that snowy night, from some

belonging to our town,’ cried Martha, ‘the bitterest thought in all my

mind was, that the people would remember she once kept company with me,

and would say I had corrupted her! When, Heaven knows, I would have died

to have brought back her good name!’

Long unused to any self-control, the piercing agony of her remorse and

grief was terrible.

‘To have died, would not have been much--what can I say?---I would

have lived!’ she cried. ‘I would have lived to be old, in the wretched

streets--and to wander about, avoided, in the dark--and to see the day

break on the ghastly line of houses, and remember how the same sun used

to shine into my room, and wake me once--I would have done even that, to

save her!’

Sinking on the stones, she took some in each hand, and clenched them

up, as if she would have ground them. She writhed into some new posture

constantly: stiffening her arms, twisting them before her face, as

though to shut out from her eyes the little light there was, and

drooping her head, as if it were heavy with insupportable recollections.

‘What shall I ever do!’ she said, fighting thus with her despair. ‘How

can I go on as I am, a solitary curse to myself, a living disgrace to

everyone I come near!’ Suddenly she turned to my companion. ‘Stamp upon

me, kill me! When she was your pride, you would have thought I had

done her harm if I had brushed against her in the street. You can’t

believe--why should you?---a syllable that comes out of my lips. It

would be a burning shame upon you, even now, if she and I exchanged a

word. I don’t complain. I don’t say she and I are alike--I know there

is a long, long way between us. I only say, with all my guilt and

wretchedness upon my head, that I am grateful to her from my soul, and

love her. Oh, don’t think that all the power I had of loving anything is

quite worn out! Throw me away, as all the world does. Kill me for being

what I am, and having ever known her; but don’t think that of me!’

He looked upon her, while she made this supplication, in a wild

distracted manner; and, when she was silent, gently raised her.

‘Martha,’ said Mr. Peggotty, ‘God forbid as I should judge you. Forbid

as I, of all men, should do that, my girl! You doen’t know half the