CHAPTER 47 MARTHA

　　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.