When a man has been living for many weeks on insufficient food: when he has been turned away at every application, he may be forgiven if he loses, on small provocation, his self-control. I am not ashamed to say that her kind words and her kind looks were too much for me in my weak condition. I burst into tears.
She laid her hand on my arm, 'Will,' she said, as if she were a sister, 'you shall tell me all—but you shall go home with me and we will talk.'
I observed that the coachman drove up St. Martin's Lane and through a collection of streets which I had never seen before. It was the part called St. Giles's; a place which is a kind of laystall into which are shot every day quantities of the scum, dirt, and refuse of this huge and overgrown city. I looked out of the window upon a crowd of faces more villainous than one could conceive possible, stamped with the brand of Cain. They were lying about in the doorways, at the open windows, for it was the month of September and a warm day and on the doorsteps and in the unpaved, unlit, squalid streets. Never did I see so many ragged and naked brats; never did I see so many cripples, so many hunchbacks, so many deformed people: they were of all kinds—bandy-legged, knock-kneed, those whose shins curve outward like a bow, round-backed, one-eyed, blind, lame.
'They are the beggars,' said my companion. 'Their deformities mean drink: they mean the mothers who drink and drop the babies about. Beggars and thieves—they are the people of St. Giles's.'
'I wonder you come this way. Are you not afraid?'
'They will not hurt me. I wish they would,' she added with a sigh.
A strange wish. I was soon, however, to understand what she meant.
Certainly, no one molested us, or stopped the coach: we passed through these streets into High Street, Holborn, and to St. Giles's Church where the criminal on his way to Tyburn receives his last drink. Then, by another turn, into a noble square with a garden surrounded by great houses, of which the greatest was built for the unfortunate Duke of Monmouth. The coachman stopped before one of these houses on the East side of the Square. It was a very fine and noble mansion indeed.
I threw open the door of the coach and handed Madame down the steps.
'This is my house,' she said. 'Will you come in with me?'