It was a blowing, moon-lit night.The gaslights flickered and wavered in the gusts of wind.It was cold, very cold for the season.Even Falconer buttoned his coat over his chest.He got a few paces in advance of me sometimes, when I saw him towering black and tall and somewhat gaunt, like a walking shadow.The wind increased in violence.It was a north-easter, laden with dust, and a sense of frozen Siberian steppes.We had to stoop and head it at the corners of streets.Not many people were out, and those who were, seemed to be hurrying home.A few little provision-shops, and a few inferior butchers' stalls were still open.Their great jets of gas, which looked as if they must poison the meat, were flaming fierce and horizontal, roaring like fiery flags, and anon dying into a blue hiss.Discordant singing, more like the howling of wild beasts, came from the corner houses, which blazed like the gates of hell.Their doors were ever on the swing, and the hot odours of death rushed out, and the cold blast of life rushed in.We paused a little before one of them--over the door, upon the sign, was in very deed the name Death.There were ragged women within who took their half-dead babies from their bare, cold, cheerless bosoms, and gave them of the poison of which they themselves drank renewed despair in the name of comfort.They say that most of the gin consumed in London is drunk by women.And the little clay-coloured baby-faces made a grimace or two, and sank to sleep on the thin tawny breasts of the mothers, who having gathered courage from the essence of despair, faced the scowling night once more, and with bare necks and hopeless hearts went--whither? Where do they all go when the gin-hells close their yawning jaws? Where do they lie down at night? They vanish like unlawfully risen corpses in the graves of cellars and garrets, in the charnel-vaults of pestiferously-crowded lodging-houses, in the prisons of police-stations, under dry arches, within hoardings; or they make vain attempts to rest the night out upon door-steps or curbstones.All their life long man denies them the one right in the soil which yet is so much theirs, that once that life is over, he can no longer deny it--the right of room to lie down.Space itself is not allowed to be theirs by any right of existence: the voice of the night-guardian commanding them to move on, is as the howling of a death-hound hunting them out of the air into their graves.
In St.James's we came upon a group around the gates of a great house.Visitors were coming and going, and it was a show to be had for nothing by those who had nothing to pay.Oh! the children with clothes too ragged to hold pockets for their chilled hands, that stared at the childless duchess descending from her lordly carriage!
Oh! the wan faces, once lovely as theirs, it may be, that gazed meagre and pinched and hungry on the young maidens in rose-colour and blue, tripping lightly through the avenue of their eager eyes--not yet too envious of unattainable felicity to gaze with admiring sympathy on those who seemed to them the angels, the goddesses of their kind.'O God!' I thought, but dared not speak, 'and thou couldst make all these girls so lovely! Thou couldst give them all the gracious garments of rose and blue and white if thou wouldst! Why should these not be like those? They are hungry even, and wan and torn.These too are thy children.There is wealth enough in thy mines and in thy green fields, room enough in thy starry spaces, O God!' But a voice--the echo of Falconer's teaching, awoke in my heart--'Because I would have these more blessed than those, and those more blessed with them, for they are all my children.'
By the Mall we came into Whitehall, and so to Westminster Bridge.
Falconer had changed his mind, and would cross at once.The present bridge was not then finished, and the old bridge alongside of it was still in use for pedestrians.We went upon it to reach the other side.Its centre rose high above the other, for the line of the new bridge ran like a chord across the arc of the old.
Through chance gaps in the boarding between, we looked down on the new portion which was as yet used by carriages alone.The moon had, throughout the evening, alternately shone in brilliance from amidst a lake of blue sky, and been overwhelmed in billowy heaps of wind-tormented clouds.As we stood on the apex of the bridge, looking at the night, the dark river, and the mass of human effort about us, the clouds gathered and closed and tumbled upon her in crowded layers.The wind howled through the arches beneath, swept along the boarded fences, and whistled in their holes.The gas-lights blew hither and thither, and were perplexed to live at all.
We were standing at a spot where some shorter pieces had been used in the hoarding; and, although I could not see over them, Falconer, whose head rose more than half a foot above mine, was looking on the other bridge below.Suddenly he grasped the top with his great hands, and his huge frame was over it in an instant.I was on the top of the hoarding the same moment, and saw him prostrate some twelve feet below.He was up the next instant, and running with huge paces diagonally towards the Surrey side.He had seen the figure of a woman come flying along from the Westminster side, without bonnet or shawl.When she came under the spot where we stood, she had turned across at an obtuse angle towards the other side of the bridge, and Falconer, convinced that she meant to throw herself into the river, went over as I have related.She had all but scrambled over the fence--for there was no parapet yet--by the help of the great beam that ran along to support it, when he caught her by her garments.So poor and thin were those garments, that if she had not been poor and thin too, she would have dropped from them into the darkness below.He took her in his arms, lifted her down upon the bridge, and stood as if protecting her from a pursuing death.I had managed to find an easier mode of descent, and now stood a little way from them.