Opposite the soup kitchen the pair stopped for a moment and looked at the pitiful spectacle. Suddenly the woman gave a little cry of distress. "Oh! come along," she exclaimed--"Jack's there." They passed rapidly along, and I stayed and watched the poor wretches shivering in the blizzard, and waiting for the food that charity had made possible for them. Presently I saw the military man come back. He crossed the road, and, going up to a man of about forty--refined-looking even in his rags--he slipped a sovereign into his hand and then walked rapidly away. The well-dressed man was an officer in the Army. He was engaged to the lady with whom he was walking. The ragged outcast waiting at the soup kitchen was the lady's husband, from whom she had been divorced some years previously. She was an actress well known in musical comedy. Some little time ago she left the stage, and her marriage with Captain ---------- was announced. When I saw the announcement I remembered the soup kitchen in the Euston Road and the ragged outcast to whom his wife sent a sovereign by the man she was about to marry. The contrasts of life in the great city meet us at every turn. Those that are sharply defined--the wealth and the poverty, the happiness and the misery--we look upon and understand; but the greatest contrasts of all are those which fail to appeal to us because we cannot see beneath the surface of things as they are. CHAPTER XXIII.--AT DEAD OF NIGHT _Flotsam and Jetsam--The midnight coffee-stall--A sense of "life going on"--A long row of three-storey houses--Sleeping on a staircase--The burglar's business hours_ |FROM the moment that Big Ben booms the hour of midnight over the great City the sounds of its ceaseless life begin to diminish in volume. Silence comes to her never, but over vast spaces between the midnight and the dawn there reign a peace and a quietude unfamiliar to the ears of day. But even in the shadows and silent places lurk the mysteries of humanity. The lords of life and death look down upon a drama that is played. The sentinel stars keep watch over a battlefield strewn with the victims of the human conflict. The palatial hostelries of wealth that glow with lights far into the night are divided but by a few yards from the silent river, on which gleam here and there the dull red lamps of black barges and vessels moored at the wharves or anchored in the stream. But between the gilded guest-houses of the wealthy and the river freighted with the world's wealth there lie scattered heaps of human wreckage. Walk along the Embankment in the dead of night, and you will see the outcasts lying huddled together in corners of the stonework, sometimes reaching in lines of misery almost to the last step by the water's edge.