Martha Peake Read Online Free PDF

from the high road, and a cocked hat pulled low over his eyes. He is pushing a wheelbarrow in which a red-headed eight-year-old sits atop a battered cabin trunk, gazing about her in wonder at the sheer confusion of it all. An endless stream of carts and carriages and wagons, and so many people! Crowds of people, crowds upon crowds, all in motion, all with something to sell, arguing, shouting, weeping, singing. Begging, gambling, drinking, whoring. Men stripped to the waist, fighting bare-fisted for the amusement of the crowd. Bonfires burning in the streets, effigies strung up on inn-signs, animals everywhere, pigs, dogs, monkeys, sheep, everywhere poverty, vice, squalor, corruption—oh, I am filled with horror at the very thought of London in those days—the place is bad enough now, but by God it was worse then, and these two, fresh from the distant shores of Cornwall, had never seen anything like it.
    As they got closer to the river the streets through which they passed became no better than open sewers, running with filth of all horrid varieties. No fresh breeze of air penetrated those wretched courts and alleys, where the great part of the people were crowded together in dark dilapidated tenements under a poisonous haze of sea-coal fumes, and sickness everywhere flourished like the weeds of the graveyard. Typhus. Rickets. Scurvy. Syphilis. Various fevers, scarlet, bilious, and putrid. Smallpox, confluent and otherwise. Gin lunacy. Dropsy. Gout and gravel. Asthenic defluctions. Palsy, cholera, the plague. Harry must have thought he had arrived in a suburb of Hell.
    But then Hell was where he wanted to be. My uncle confessed he did not know much about those early days in the capital, but we may imagine they were grim. Harry had brought away with him a little money only, they had no friends in the town, but somehow they found their way to the docks, and there Harry took lodgings in thegarret of a small dark house close to the Thames. That first night I see them settled in a bare room with warped floorboards and the plaster crumbling off the laths. There is a musty bed in the corner and a small table with a broken leg. The smoky stub of a candle throws out a small pool of dim yellow light. Harry stands at the window, his head bowed, for the ceiling is low, his spine, for once, quiescent, and gazes at the masts of the ships where they rise over the rooftops, and the moon sheds a pale gleam on the river. He is filled with sudden longing for the cliffs and coves of Cornwall, and for his wife. Strange cries reach him from the street below, and in the room the scratching of the rats behind the wainscotting grows so intolerable he flings his shoe at the wall.
    He sinks onto a chair and covers his face with his hands. After some minutes he turns to look at Martha where she lies peacefully asleep on the bed. The night is close and sultry and she has kicked off the sheet, which now lies tangled in her legs. No childish snuggling for this little girl, no curling up into a ball with a thumb in her mouth, Martha sprawls there in her nightshirt with her arms and legs flung wide!—and all at once Harry thinks of how this child of his met each new situation on the road, how she faced down barking dogs, drunkards, thunderstorms, jittery horses, and once, a sad old dancing bear in a rusty muzzle. Several times she was hoisted bodily aloft by some jovial fellow enchanted by her dogged, serious little face, and her great untidy mane of hair, and always she detached herself without panic, and without recourse to her father. Only eight years old, but she displayed all the qualities that Harry had loved in her mother. She was curious, and she was unafraid; and she had her mother’s hair, fanned out now across the bolster, long thick tresses the color of old bricks.
    Suddenly Harry Peake’s love for his daughter wells up within him with such intensity that he feels the tears starting in his eyes. He heaves a great sigh. It is good, he thinks,