Hetty Wesley | Page 6

word that the Albemarle had entered the river. I
think you are well enough to walk to the Docks with me."
"Well enough? Of course I am. But why not take a waterman from the
stairs here?"

"'Twill cost less to walk and hire a boat at Blackwall, if necessary.
Your father could give me very little money, Charles. We seem to be as
poorly off as ever."
"And this uncle Annesley--" he began, but paused with a glance at his
mother, whose face had suddenly grown hot. "What sort of a man is
he?"
"My boy," she said with an effort, "I must not be ashamed to tell my
child what I am not ashamed to hope. He is rich: he once promised to
do much for Emmy and Sukey, and these promises came to nothing.
But now that his wife is dead and he comes home with neither chick
nor child, I see no harm in praying that his heart may be moved
towards his sister's children. At least I shall be frank with him and hide
not my hope, let him treat it as he will." She was silent for a moment.
"Are all women unscrupulous when they fight for their children? They
cannot all be certain, as I am, that their children were born for greatness:
and yet, I wonder sometimes--" She wound up with a smile which held
something of a playful irony, but more of sadness.
"Jacky could not come with you?"
"No, and he writes bitterly about it. He is tied to Oxford--by lack of
pence, again."
By this time Charles had slipped on his jacket, and the pair stepped out
into the streets and set their faces eastward. Mrs. Wesley was
cockney-bred and delighted in the stir and rush of life. She, the mother
of many children, kept a well-poised figure and walked with the elastic
step of a maid; and as she went she chatted, asking a score of shrewd
questions about Westminster--the masters, the food, the old dormitory
in which Charles slept, the new one then rising to replace it; breaking
off to recognise some famous building, or to pause and gaze after a
company of his Majesty's guards. Her own masterful carriage and
unembarrassed mode of speech--"as if all London belonged to her,"
Charles afterwards described it--drew the stares of the passers-by;
stares which she misinterpreted, for in the gut of the Strand, a few
paces beyond Somerset House, she suddenly twirled the lad about and

"Bless us, child, your eye's enough to frighten the town! 'Tis to be
hoped brother Sam has not turned Quaker in India; or that Sally the
cook-maid has a beefsteak handy."
Mr. Matthew Wesley, apothecary and by courtesy "surgeon," to whose
house in Johnson's Court, Fleet Street, they presently swerved aside,
had not returned from his morning's round of visits. He was a widower
and took his meals irregularly. But Sally had two covers laid, with a pot
of freshly drawn porter beside each; and here, after Charles's eye had
been attended to and the swelling reduced, they ate and drank and
rested for half an hour before resuming their walk.
So far, and until they reached the Tower, their road was familiar
enough; but from Smithfield onwards they had to halt and inquire their
way again and again in intervals of threading the traffic which poured
out of cross-streets and to and from the docks on their right--wagons
empty, wagons laden with hides, jute, scrap-iron, tallow, indigo,
woollen bales, ochre, sugar; trollies and pack-horses; here and there a
cordon of porters and warehousemen trundling barrels as nonchalantly
as a child his hoop. The business of piloting his mother through these
cross-tides left Charles little time for observation; but one incident of
that walk he never forgot.
They were passing Shadwell when they came on a knot of people and
two watchmen posted at the corner of a street across which a reek of
smoke mingled with clouds of gritty dust. Twice or thrice they heard a
crash or dull rumble of falling masonry. A distillery had been blazing
there all night and a gang of workmen was now clearing the ruins. But
as Charles and his mother came by the corner, the knot of people parted
and gave passage to a line of stretchers--six stretchers in all, and on
each a body, which the bearers had not taken the trouble to cover from
view. A bystander said that these were men who had run back into the
building to drink the flaming spirit, and had dropped insensible, and
been crushed when the walls fell in. The boy had never seen death
before; and at the sight of it thrust upon him in this brutal form, he put
out a hand towards his mother to