“Bless you, that’s the West End, that is--it’s miles and miles away.”
Kirsteen’s heart sank so that she could have cried--miles and miles!--after her long jolting in the coach. The tears came to her eyes. But after a moment she recovered herself, feeling the utter futility of yielding to any weakness now. “Could you direct me the way to go?” she said, “for I’m a stranger in London.” To see her standing there, with her bundle in her hand and her cloak on her arm, making this very unnecessary explanation was a pathetic sight. The decent-like man was touched--perhaps he had daughters of his own.
“I might find the way,” he said, “for I’m a Londoner born, but a stranger like you, fresh from the country, as anybody can see, and ready to believe whatever is told you--no, no! The thing you’ve got to do, miss, is to take a coach--”
“A coach!” said Kirsteen in horror. “Is London such a big place, then, that it wants a coach to go from one part to another?”
“It’s a hackney coach, if you have ever heard of such a thing,” said the man. “I’ll call one for you if you please. It is the best thing to do. You could never find your way by night even though you might in the day.”
Kirsteen hesitated for a moment. “It will cost a great deal,” she said, looking wistfully from the yard into the crowded street, with its flaring lamps, and the hoarse cries that came from it. She shrank back to the side of her new friend as she gazed, feeling more than ever like a shipwrecked mariner, not knowing among what kind of savages she might fall. “Oh, will ye tell me what to do?” she said, with a quite unjustifiable faith in the decent-like man.
However, it is sometimes good to trust, and the result of Kirsteen’s confidence was that she soon found herself in a hackney coach, driving, a very forlorn wayfarer indeed, through what seemed to be an endless succession of streets. She had asked her friend humbly whether he would take it amiss if she offered him a shilling for his kindness, and he had taken a load off her mind by accepting the coin with much readiness, but in return had filled her with confusion by asking where was her luggage? “Oh, it will be quite right when I get there,” Kirsteen had said, deeply blushing, and feeling that both the coachman and her acquaintance of the yard must think very poorly of her. And then that long drive began. Every corner that was turned, and there were she thought a hundred, Kirsteen felt that now at last she must have reached her journey’s end; and on each such occasion her heart gave a wild throb, for how could she tell how Miss Jean would receive her, or if there would be rest for her at last? And then there would come a respite, another long ramble between lines of dark houses with muffled lights in the windows, and then another corner and another leap of her pulses. She thought hours must have elapsed before at last, with a jar that shook her from head to foot, the lumbering vehicle came to a stop. Kirsteen stepped out almost speechless with excitement and gave something, she could scarcely tell what, to the coachman; and then even this conductor of a moment, whose face she could scarcely see in the dark, clambered up on his box and trotted away, leaving her alone. She thought, with a pang, that he might have waited just a moment to see whether they would let her in. It would only have been kind--and what could she do in that dreadful case if they did not? And what was she to Miss Jean Brown that they should let her in? Her loneliness and helplessness, and the very little thread of possibility that there was between her and despair, came over Kirsteen like a sudden blight as she stood outside the unknown door in the dark street. She began to tremble and shiver, though she tried with all her might to subdue herself. But she was very tired--she had eaten scarcely anything for two days. And this great gloomy town which had swallowed her little existence seemed so dark and terrible. There was no light to show either knocker or bell, and she stood groping, almost ready to give up the attempt and sit down upon the steps and be found dead there, as she had heard poor girls often were in London. She had come to this pitch of desperation when her hand suddenly touched something that proved to be a bell. Immediately her heart stood still, with a new and keener excitement. She waited clinging to the railing, holding her breath.