‘Have you made up your mind?’ asked Mr.
Brownlow, in a low voice, of Monks.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘You—you—will
be secret with me?’
’I will. Remain here till I return.
It is your only hope of safety.’
They left the room, and the door was again locked.
‘What have you done?’ asked the doctor
in a whisper.
’All that I could hope to do, and even more.
Coupling the poor girl’s intelligence with
my previous knowledge, and the result of our good
friend’s inquiries on the spot, I left him no
loophole of escape, and laid bare the whole villainy
which by these lights became plain as day. Write
and appoint the evening after to-morrow, at seven,
for the meeting. We shall be down there, a few
hours before, but shall require rest: especially
the young lady, who may have greater need of
firmness than either you or I can quite foresee just
now. But my blood boils to avenge this poor
murdered creature. Which way have they taken?’
‘Drive straight to the office and you will be
in time,’ replied Mr. Losberne. ‘I
will remain here.’
The two gentlemen hastily separated; each in a fever
of excitement wholly uncontrollable.
THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE
Near to that part of the Thames on which the church
at Rotherhithe abuts, where the buildings on the banks
are dirtiest and the vessels on the river blackest
with the dust of colliers and the smoke of close-built
low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the
strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities
that are hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by
name, to the great mass of its inhabitants.
To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate
through a maze of close, narrow, and muddy streets,
thronged by the roughest and poorest of waterside
people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed
to occasion. The cheapest and least delicate
provisions are heaped in the shops; the coarsest and
commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at the
salesman’s door, and stream from the house-parapet
and windows. Jostling with unemployed labourers
of the lowest class, ballast-heavers, coal-whippers,
brazen women, ragged children, and the raff and refuse
of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along,
assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow
alleys which branch off on the right and left, and
deafened by the clash of ponderous waggons that bear
great piles of merchandise from the stacks of warehouses
that rise from every corner. Arriving, at length,
in streets remoter and less-frequented than those
through which he has passed, he walks beneath tottering
house-fronts projecting over the pavement, dismantled
walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys half
crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by
rusty iron bars that time and dirt have almost eaten
away, every imaginable sign of desolation and neglect.
