He had eaten, for he was hungry, and ham and bread and butter are not to be despised when nothing better is to be had. Even, which was curious to his state of mind, he had eaten largely, putting up before him the railway book which he had not read on his journey, and going on unconsciously with his vigorous, youthful appetite. This, the first act of his solitude, was by no means so disagreeable as he had feared. It increased his personal comfort, for he had eaten scarcely anything all day, and the increase of personal comfort ameliorates everything. When he had finished, he carried one of his candles to a small table near the window, and sat down there and read on, finishing his book, which had interested him. When he had closed it, and laid it on the table, the realisation of all the circumstances, which returned to his mind, was not so heavy as the first time. His heart began to spring up again, after being crushed under the foot of fate. It began to throb and tingle with the thought that he was in London, on the border of everything that was most living and desirable. The little fumes of interest of his story increased the effect by soothing away his personal misery. And now, as he sat in the small, silent room, something came to him which he had been conscious of all along, without knowing what it was, a sound continuous, like the far-off sound of the sea or of the wind, but subdued, as though the storm was far off, a sound which, now that he was free from those claims made by his lowered bodily condition upon his mind, became more and more apparent, filling the air with an uninterrupted murmur. What was it?

He sat up and listened, and then, with an excitement which made his heart jump, he recognised what it was. It was London! Had he not read in many a book of that great, low volume of sound, which some people described as the sound of many waters, and some as the distant roar of a tempest. It was soft here in his little hermitage, amid the strange solitude and silence, but rolled and murmured continuous, never ending. He perceived now that he had noticed it from the first moment, that all along he had wondered when it would stop, vaguely disquieted by it without knowing what it was; and now he knew that it would never stop, that it was the breath of the great multitude, the hum of their endless going on and on. John sat and listened to it till it went to his head, exciting him like wine. He could not rest. The contrast of this little prison-chamber in which he sat, and all that was implied in that low, continuous roar and hum of men, stirred his imagination more and more. He got up and opened the window, and looked out. Opposite to him was the great mass of building dark against the sky, which seemed to oppress and stifle the neighbourhood, taking away the air; but outside of that, away across the river where the world was, the hum, the roar, the continuous roll of sound came stronger and stronger. It called upon the young soul which stood and throbbed and listened. He had the habits of his youth and innocence strong upon him—a sort of unspoken sense of duty that restrained him and kept him from following his own impulses. It was not till some time had elapsed that he began to think it possible to obey that call—to go out and see what it was which gave forth that mighty voice. When the thought entered his mind it filled all his veins with excitement. Should he go? Why should he not go? No word had been said to him to bind him to remain where he was. It was not to waste day and night shut up in a dreary little room that he had come to London. He looked round upon the blank, grey walls, and found their bondage intolerable. It was like a box in which he was shut up. His brain and his veins seemed to be swelling, bursting with life that must have an outlet somehow. No, certainly, he could not stay there. He must have air and room to breathe; he must see for himself what was meant by London. But John, even in his excitement, was prudent. He put away his watch—which was not the one Mrs. Egerton had given him, but the old, dear silver one, the one that had no value at all and yet so great a value. He was aware that in London the natural thing was to rob a countryman, to take his watch from him. He would not expose his treasure to such a risk; but when he had laid that away he felt, with confidence, that there was nothing else to lose. They might hustle or knock him down, if they could, but there was nothing else they could do to him. Nevertheless, it was with something of that warlike exhilaration, with which a struggle is foreseen at his age, that John buttoned his coat and took his hat. He felt that ‘they’ (though he had not the least notion who they might be) would not have an easy bargain of him.

He went out without even being remarked. No ‘Where are you going?’ ‘When will you come back?’ to impede his liberty. That fact also went to his heart a little. He had felt his loneliness very forlorn—now he felt it exciting, exhilarating. He set his hat firmly on his head, and drew a long breath when he felt the fresh air of the night, so different from that of any parlour, encircle him with its coolness and vastness. That, too, has an intoxication in it which everything that is young acknowledges. The air may be sober in the morning—it is like wine at night. The darkness has a mystery, a magic in it—the lights twinkling through it—the world made into something ideal, in which miracles are. John stood still for a moment at the door, realising that he was there, that he was unshackled—his own master—and then, drawn by the great voice that called and called him, he turned his face towards the distant blazing of the lights, and set out—to discover that new world.

To discover London! how many do it every day, with hearts beating high, with hopes immeasurable, which so often collapse and come to nothing; but this is not the time for moralising. John set out. His way began in the darkness of this little street, with its little houses, faced by the great sombre shadow of the hospital, which shut out the air from it and the sky. He plunged into the darkness at first, making his way between rows of insignificant buildings, with a feeble shop here and there flashing its faint illumination, and then, with a great sweep of fresh air seizing him, came out upon the bridge. The sky was full of the clearness of spring, though there was no moon. The river flowed dark and silent below, faintly visible further up the stream in pale streaks of reflection, across which would rise a dark and ghostly shadow of something floating, a barge, a heavy blackness in the middle of the faint light; but lamps blazing overhead, the glare of gas, and here and there the chill contradictory artificial moon of the electric light ‘swearing’ horribly, as the French say, with all the yellow lamps around. The murmur of sound grew and grew as the boy went on; it was a rhythmic roar as of waves beating against a shore, or the rush of a prodigious waterfall, a great moral Niagara, bigger than any physical falls, however gigantic. It was made up of the sounds of carriages of every description, of voices, the hum of the crowd constantly broken by some shrill interruption of a cry or shout, which gave emphasis to the general continual, unfailing current of sound. He hurried along, quickening his pace, led by it as if it had been a syren’s song.

On the other side of the river a noble mass of walls and towers rose against the night. He guessed what it was, and his heart beat high. Then suddenly he was over the bridge, he was in it, in the very crowd itself, among the thunder of the carriages, the perpetual movement of the passengers, the very heart of London—he thought even, in awe, holding his breath—of the world. Was that Parliament? He got as near as he could and watched the carriages, the heads appearing at the windows, men in whose hands was the fate of the world. John felt as if he had some hand in it all as he watched them dashing up to the doorway, sometimes cheered, with a running fire of remark volleying about from the voices of the crowd. It was all so unusual, that he could scarcely make out at first what the people about him said; and, when he understood the words, he did not understand the allusions, not knowing who the members were or anything but that they were members, and therefore surrounded with a halo of wonder and interest. Presently one of the men standing near began to perceive his ignorance and curiosity, and to offer explanations. But John was not so simple as that, he said to himself. He knew that the danger of London was to listen to people who expressed themselves benevolently towards you, and wanted to give you information. He withdrew accordingly from that spot, and by-and-by, feeling that there were still other worlds beyond, left this scene of overwhelming interest altogether, promising himself that he would look up all the prints in the shop windows, and so learn to identify the members of parliament himself.

The dark shadow to his right hand was that of the Abbey. He held his breath with awe, but he was in no mood for the silence and darkness. He followed the roar and crush of the crowd through a dark, broad, vacant street or two until he emerged into another kind of blaze and din, into the tumult and bustle and noise and commotion of the Strand. Here the shops, the lights, the wild confusion of traffic, the hoarse cries, the flare and glare and riot, the wild medley of life, the wretched figures in squalid groups, the gentlemen passing with evening dress under their overcoats, the ragged and shouting vendors of the newspapers, the crowds rushing to the theatres, the other crowds that hung upon their steps and importuned them with unnecessary services, ended in turning altogether John’s young and unaccustomed brain. He was hustled by the ceaseless stream of people rushing past him in both ways, coming and going, and after a while felt himself like a straw upon a river, carried along without knowing where he was going, tossed into a corner, seized again by the stream, swept away breathless, with a strange pleasure and wonder and disgust and incomprehension. He was doing nothing but gazing, looking on wondering where they were all going, what they all meant, what need there was to hurry so, to shout so; and yet he felt as if he too were living, as he never before had lived all his life.

Strange illusion; an older man perhaps would have concluded that here was no real life at all, but only a fantastic, half-conscious dream. Half the people streaming along were doing it by no will of their own, but only because of the treadmill action of habit, which made them fancy this way of spending the evening the natural thing to do—and that to go somewhere, to do something, as they said—that is to frequent noisy places in which the depth of dulness was touched, yet where rampant folly extracted a strained laugh—or to bustle out and in of swinging doors, and exchange jests at bars, and rub shoulders with crowds, coming and going—was life. It was life indeed for the poor hangers-on greedy for pence or sixpences, to the poor hawkers of miserable merchandises, to the servants of the crowd. To them it was fatigue, cold, disappointment, weary waiting, miserable snatches at recompense, eager greed, and accumulation and gain; bread, perhaps to poor little children in squalid rooms somewhere about, or whisky at the street corners—at all events, a real yet possible existence, the only one of which they were conscious or capable. The more wretched in such scenes have the advantage of the less. The newspaper boy, the girl with her poor basket of faded flowers, the hundred other vassals of the crowd are real in their poor work and competition. It is their masters, the lords of unrule, who are the ghosts.

John, driven hither and thither by the currents of passengers, happily was as unaware as a woman of the darker and more horrible dangers of the streets. No squalid siren smiled for him; he did not understand these profounder depths. But the confusion and the noise, and the strange contrast of pleasure and wretchedness, the carriages passing, with pretty glimpses of white figures bound for the theatres, the groups of the ragged and miserable on the pavement, the whole resounding, conflicting, moving world gave him a sort of intoxication, so that he scarcely knew what he was about, or where he was.

He had got in front of one of the theatres in the midst of a crowd more noisy than usual, the pavement encumbered with poor and squalid spectators, with men shrieking their wares to sell, and pushing books of words into the carriage windows, the confusion of cabs and carriages greater than ever, when John was suddenly roused out of all this phantasmagoria to something real. As he stood gazing, his eyes suddenly fell upon a group at the entrance of the theatre, a man with a tall, shiny hat, and coat buttoned up to his throat, with a woman somewhat fantastically but poorly dressed, on his arm. They were standing to see the people get out of their carriages, with looks somewhat wistful, as if envious of the pleasure the others were about to enjoy. The man, who was tall, inspected the ladies with a smile half patronising, half satirical. But the wife looked pathetically, wistfully, with an envy which was not bitter, nor bore any trace of unkindness. They were standing close together, rapt in that sight. At the woman’s feet was a child, holding fast by her skirts. While the parents gazed, something caught the eye of the little girl, a flower which somebody had dropped out of the window of a carriage. The little thing made one spring, while the absorbed attention of her parents was fixed upon the play-goers, and secured the prize out of the mud of the street, but not before the prancing horse of a hansom, drawn back suddenly upon its haunches, was dashing its hoofs into the air over her head. There was a universal shriek and commotion, in the midst of which the mother put down her hand instinctively but tranquilly to grasp the child. Then, finding it absent, she gave a wild cry, and turned round with arms wildly waving, facing the crowd. John took no time to think. He was the nearest, or thought himself so, and he was pushed forward by the shrieking crowd. He flung himself on the child, caught it, tossed it back to some one, he could not tell whom—but fell forward with the impetus. He felt a sharp touch on his head like a knife, and then no more—till he came to himself with the sensation of a crowd round him, and of cool applications applied to his head, which seemed to burn under the hands of some one who was leaning over him.

‘It will be nothing, it will be nothing,’ he heard some one say; and then, ‘A wonderful escape,’ ‘It might have killed him,’ in different tones. It seemed to John at first to be but another scene in that bewildering phantasmagoria through which he had been walking. When he opened his eyes he found that he was in an apothecary’s shop, which was crowded with people, faces everywhere filling up the window outside, piled one upon another. Close to him stood the man in the tall and very shiny hat. John caught in it the reflection of the great blue and red bottles in the window, and burst into a feeble laugh.

‘Gently, gently, you’re all right: but there’s nothing to laugh about,’ some one said.

‘Where am I?’ said John, still fascinated by the reflection.

‘Me dear young gentleman, ye have done a heroic action. Ye’ve behaved like a hero. Ye’ve saved me child,’ said the man in the hat.

‘Now stand back. Let him have plenty of air. Try if you can stand,’ said another voice.

John stood up, but felt faint and giddy. It seemed ridiculous in a few minutes to change from the robust village youth who feared nothing to a creature whose head seemed to swim independent of him, and who could not steady himself. He caught at the arm of the tall man to support himself.

‘That’s right, that’s right, me noble boy. I’ll take him home with me. The child is unhurt, me young hero. She’s waiting out o’ doors with her mother, who’s longing to embrace ye and bless ye. Come, it’s but a step to me humble door.’

John was not quite clear about this address, but he was glad of the tall man’s arm, on which he could lean, and allowed himself to be led away in a dazed condition through the crowd, followed by the woman and the child, who was still crying with fright and excitement. The mother, happily, neither embraced nor blessed him, but he was so dazed that he scarcely knew what happened, except that she looked at him anxiously, with troubled eyes. He was glad of the support of the man, who guided him very kindly for a little way through the crowded street, then suddenly turned down a quiet one. Here the waft of a purer, colder air upon John’s face brought him to himself, and he would have drawn his arm from that of his guide.

‘I can go now,’ he said, ‘thank you. I’m myself, now——’

‘What, let you go like this—the saviour of me child’s life—when we’re close to our humble door? Never!’ said his new friend. ‘Maria, go first and light a candle—you’ve got the key——’

And presently John found himself, after stumbling up several flights of stairs, in a room high up, very shabbily and sparely furnished, where there was a glimmer of fire, and where he was not unwilling to sit down and rest, though his senses had come back to him, and he began to recover from the shock. While he sat looking round him, vaguely wondering with his still slightly clouded faculties where he was, and if, perhaps, he might have fallen into some of the traps he had read of, the couple talked a little in whispers behind him. Was it of him they were talking? Were they consulting together what to do with him? He smiled to himself even while he half entertained this thought. Then one innocent word came to his ears which made him laugh to himself. It was ‘sausages.’ John, in his most suspicious mood, in the deepest alarms of the country lad, could not suppose that they meant to make sausages of him. The sound of his laugh startled both himself and the little group behind him. The woman hurried away, and the man came forward with the grand air which sat so strangely on his evident poverty.

‘Ye laugh, me young friend,’ he said. ‘Perhaps ye overheard our consultations how to receive ye, our young benefactor. It is not much at present that is in Montressor’s power, but what we have is at your service to the last sou. I am not an ungrateful, though ye see in me a fallen man. Did ye see the crowds at that theatre door? Young sir, a few years ago it was to see Montressor those crowds—and there were more, more! than are ever drawn now—that those crowds flowed in to boxes, pit, and gallery, and not a scrap of paper, but all solid money throughout the house.’

John but dimly understood, but yet had a glimmering of what was meant.

‘Are you Montressor?’ he said.

Montressor lifted his hands, in one of which was still the shiny hat, to heaven—or rather to the low, smoke-darkened ceiling which was its substitute.

‘Me downfall is indeed proved,’ he said, ‘me young friend, when ye have to ask that question. Me portrait was once in all the shop windows: but now——’ The arms were raised again, and then Montressor put down his hat and drew a chair towards the waning fire, which he poked gently and with precaution. ‘If she’s to cook ’em when she comes in, we must mind the fire,’ he said, falling into a more familiar tone, and raking together the embers with a careful and experienced hand. ‘Ye find me, young gentleman, in a small apartment that is kitchen and chamber and hall, as the song says. What does it matter to a lofty mind, s’longs ye find honour and a warm heart of gratitude there?’

‘But, indeed, I think I must go,’ said John, with the timidity of his age. ‘I feel all right now. It was only just for a moment. I feel quite steady, and I think I must go.’

‘Not before ye have tasted such hospitality as I have to give ye, me heroic boy. The saviour of me child must not go from me doors without a sign of me appreciation—without a bit of supper, at least. Maria! are ye come at last? And here is our honoured guest that says he must go. Come, child, and bid ye’r deliverer stay.’

‘Wait and take some supper,’ said the woman, with her pathetic look; ‘it will be a pleasure to us both. It’s not late, and you needn’t fear; you’ll get no harm.’

‘Harm!’ said her husband, ‘from you, me love, or from Montressor? No, he will get no harm, whatever a brutal manager or designing critics may say. Thank God, Maria, corrupting the young was never laid to your husband’s charge, me dear. He shall see that conscious virtue is not ashamed of humble offices. I will prepare the table while she makes ready our food. There is nothing derogatory in that, me young friend. Look at Mrs. Montreseor if you would see one that is superior to every fortune. She has had her cooks, her housemaids, her grooms; she has driven in her own carriages, and worn silks and satins. And now ye see her preparing to fry the sausages. And which is the finest office?—the last, sir!—for she’s always a lady—a perfect lady—whatever her occupation may be.’

John did not feel called upon to make any answer to this. He sat in a half dream of wonderment, while all these domestic arrangements went on in this strange little interior, where all was so new and extraordinary to him. How had he got there? What sort of place was it? What kind of people were these? The curious serio-comic character of the episode did not strike him so much as it might have done an older spectator; but the hissing of the sausages on the fire, before which this unknown woman stood, her wistful eyes fixed upon the frying-pan, while her husband, with his fine language and fine sentiments, laid the cloth upon the table behind, were too strange, too peculiar, too ridiculous, even—for he was hungry again, and there was a sort of warm friendliness in the air that comforted his young, childish soul—too comfortable, not to affect the boy. He felt a sort of pleasurable disquietude and alarm and embarrassment. He ought to go, he felt, but he was shy and they were kind, and he did not know how to get himself away. Presently the child who was the occasion of it all, and who had clung to her mother’s skirts all the time, pulled a stool towards John’s feet, and sitting down by him began to pat his leg with soft little touches.

‘Did it hurt much,’ she said, ‘that big horse’s foot? I called mamma and it was you. What made you get hurt for a poor little girl like me?’

‘What made him? It was God, Edie, to save you to mother: and God bless him for it,’ said the woman, turning round.

‘It was a heroic action,’ said Montressor, ‘it was the act of a hero, me chyild. Your saviour will always be to us a noble youth. Me young benefactor, as yet we do not know your honoured name.’

John paused for a moment. He never could tell what curious impulse possessed him. Perhaps it was because he was in a new world of his own discovery, with which no one else had anything to do. He said, with the blood rushing to his face,

‘My name is John May.’

When he heard his own voice, his heart gave a great leap and throb; but whether it was the feeling of one who takes a false name, or of one who for the first time claims a true one, he could not tell. The act, which was almost involuntary, filled him with an excitement which he could not explain.

‘May!’ cried Montressor—‘Maria! what did I say? that there was something in the countenance of this noble youth not unfamiliar. I knew a May once—I have not forgotten him. Me young friend, ye are like that companion of me youth—yes, ye are like him. I felt it from the first. He was the kindest, the dearest—but misfortune fell upon him. Ah! may it be that the blood of our friend runs in your veins.’

‘Montressor,’ said his wife, hurriedly, ‘this young gentleman can have nothing to do with the May you once knew. It is not a thing to be talked about, that connection. You know what I mean. There is not the slightest likeness, nor the least possibility: for goodness sake keep your ideas to yourself, and think how impossible—The supper is ready,’ she added, in a lighter tone. ‘Come, Mr. May, a little food will do you good, though it is neither rich nor rare.’