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A CHRISTMAS CAROL

IN PROSE
BEING
A Ghost Story of Christmas

by Charles Dickens



PREFACE

I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book,
to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my
readers out of humour with themselves, with each other,
with the season, or with me.  May it haunt their houses
pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.

Their faithful Friend and Servant,
                                   C. D.
December, 1843.



CONTENTS

Stave   I: Marley's Ghost
Stave  II: The First of the Three Spirits
Stave III: The Second of the Three Spirits
Stave  IV: The Last of the Spirits
Stave   V: The End of It



STAVE I:  MARLEY'S GHOST

MARLEY was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt
whatever about that. The register of his burial was
signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker,
and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and
Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he
chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a
door-nail.

Mind! I don't mean to say that I know, of my
own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about
a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to
regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery
in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors
is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands
shall not disturb it, or the Country's done for. You
will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that
Marley was as dead as a door-nail.

Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did.
How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were
partners for I don't know how many years. Scrooge
was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole
assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and
sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully
cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent
man of business on the very day of the funeral,
and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.

The mention of Marley's funeral brings me back to
the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley
was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or
nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going
to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that
Hamlet's Father died before the play began, there
would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a
stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts,
than there would be in any other middle-aged
gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy
spot--say Saint Paul's Churchyard for instance--
literally to astonish his son's weak mind.

Scrooge never painted out Old Marley's name.
There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse
door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as
Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the
business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley,
but he answered to both names. It was all the
same to him.

Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grind-stone,
Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping,
clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint,
from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire;
secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The
cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed
nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his
eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his
grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his
eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low
temperature always about with him; he iced his office in
the dog-days; and didn't thaw it one degree at Christmas.

External heat and cold had little influence on
Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather
chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he,
no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no
pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn't
know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and
snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage
over him in only one respect. They often "came down"
handsomely, and Scrooge never did.

Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with
gladsome looks, "My dear Scrooge, how are you?
When will you come to see me?" No beggars implored
him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him
what it was o'clock, no man or woman ever once in all
his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of
Scrooge. Even the blind men's dogs appeared to
know him; and when they saw him coming on, would
tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and
then would wag their tails as though they said, "No
eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!"

But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing
he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths
of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance,
was what the knowing ones call "nuts" to Scrooge.

Once upon a time--of all the good days in the year,
on Christmas Eve--old Scrooge sat busy in his
counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy
withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside,
go wheezing up and down, beating their hands
upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the
pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had
only just gone three, but it was quite dark already--
it had not been light all day--and candles were flaring
in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like
ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog
came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was
so dense without, that although the court was of the
narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms.
To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring
everything, one might have thought that Nature
lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.

The door of Scrooge's counting-house was open
that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a
dismal little cell beyond, a sort of tank, was copying
letters. Scrooge had a very small fire, but the clerk's
fire was so very much smaller that it looked like one
coal. But he couldn't replenish it, for Scrooge kept
the coal-box in his own room; and so surely as the
clerk came in with the shovel, the master predicted
that it would be necessary for them to part. Wherefore
the clerk put on his white comforter, and tried to
warm himself at the candle; in which effort, not being
a man of a strong imagination, he failed.

"A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!" cried
a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge's
nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was
the first intimation he had of his approach.

"Bah!" said Scrooge, "Humbug!"

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the
fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge's, that he was
all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his
eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

"Christmas a humbug, uncle!" said Scrooge's
nephew. "You don't mean that, I am sure?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "Merry Christmas! What
right have you to be merry? What reason have you
to be merry? You're poor enough."

"Come, then," returned the nephew gaily. "What
right have you to be dismal? What reason have you
to be morose? You're rich enough."

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur
of the moment, said, "Bah!" again; and followed it up
with "Humbug."

"Don't be cross, uncle!" said the nephew.

"What else can I be," returned the uncle, "when I
live in such a world of fools as this? Merry Christmas!
Out upon merry Christmas! What's Christmas
time to you but a time for paying bills without
money; a time for finding yourself a year older, but
not an hour richer; a time for balancing your books
and having every item in 'em through a round dozen
of months presented dead against you? If I could
work my will," said Scrooge indignantly, "every idiot
who goes about with 'Merry Christmas' on his lips,
should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried
with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!"

"Uncle!" pleaded the nephew.

"Nephew!" returned the uncle sternly, "keep Christmas
in your own way, and let me keep it in mine."

"Keep it!" repeated Scrooge's nephew. "But you
don't keep it."

"Let me leave it alone, then," said Scrooge. "Much
good may it do you! Much good it has ever done
you!"

"There are many things from which I might have
derived good, by which I have not profited, I dare
say," returned the nephew. "Christmas among the
rest. But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas
time, when it has come round--apart from the
veneration due to its sacred name and origin, if anything
belonging to it can be apart from that--as a
good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant
time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar
of the year, when men and women seem by one consent
to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think
of people below them as if they really were
fellow-passengers to the grave, and not another race
of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore,
uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or
silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me
good, and will do me good; and I say, God bless it!"

The clerk in the Tank involuntarily applauded.
Becoming immediately sensible of the impropriety,
he poked the fire, and extinguished the last frail spark
for ever.

"Let me hear another sound from you," said
Scrooge, "and you'll keep your Christmas by losing
your situation! You're quite a powerful speaker,
sir," he added, turning to his nephew. "I wonder you
don't go into Parliament."

"Don't be angry, uncle. Come! Dine with us to-morrow."

Scrooge said that he would see him--yes, indeed he
did. He went the whole length of the expression,
and said that he would see him in that extremity first.

"But why?" cried Scrooge's nephew. "Why?"

"Why did you get married?" said Scrooge.

"Because I fell in love."

"Because you fell in love!" growled Scrooge, as if
that were the only one thing in the world more ridiculous
than a merry Christmas. "Good afternoon!"

"Nay, uncle, but you never came to see me before
that happened. Why give it as a reason for not
coming now?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I want nothing from you; I ask nothing of you;
why cannot we be friends?"

"Good afternoon," said Scrooge.

"I am sorry, with all my heart, to find you so
resolute. We have never had any quarrel, to which I
have been a party. But I have made the trial in
homage to Christmas, and I'll keep my Christmas
humour to the last. So A Merry Christmas, uncle!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

"And A Happy New Year!"

"Good afternoon!" said Scrooge.

His nephew left the room without an angry word,
notwithstanding. He stopped at the outer door to
bestow the greetings of the season on the clerk, who,
cold as he was, was warmer than Scrooge; for he returned
them cordially.

"There's another fellow," muttered Scrooge; who
overheard him: "my clerk, with fifteen shillings a
week, and a wife and family, talking about a merry
Christmas. I'll retire to Bedlam."

This lunatic, in letting Scrooge's nephew out, had
let two other people in. They were portly gentlemen,
pleasant to behold, and now stood, with their hats off,
in Scrooge's office. They had books and papers in
their hands, and bowed to him.

"Scrooge and Marley's, I believe," said one of the
gentlemen, referring to his list. "Have I the pleasure
of addressing Mr. Scrooge, or Mr. Marley?"

"Mr. Marley has been dead these seven years,"
Scrooge replied. "He died seven years ago, this very
night."

"We have no doubt his liberality is well represented
by his surviving partner," said the gentleman, presenting
his credentials.

It certainly was; for they had been two kindred
spirits. At the ominous word "liberality," Scrooge
frowned, and shook his head, and handed the credentials
back.

"At this festive season of the year, Mr. Scrooge,"
said the gentleman, taking up a pen, "it is more than
usually desirable that we should make some slight
provision for the Poor and destitute, who suffer
greatly at the present time. Many thousands are in
want of common necessaries; hundreds of thousands
are in want of common comforts, sir."

"Are there no prisons?" asked Scrooge.

"Plenty of prisons," said the gentleman, laying down
the pen again.

"And the Union workhouses?" demanded Scrooge.
"Are they still in operation?"

"They are. Still," returned the gentleman, "I wish
I could say they were not."

"The Treadmill and the Poor Law are in full vigour,
then?" said Scrooge.

"Both very busy, sir."

"Oh! I was afraid, from what you said at first,
that something had occurred to stop them in their
useful course," said Scrooge. "I'm very glad to
hear it."

"Under the impression that they scarcely furnish
Christian cheer of mind or body to the multitude,"
returned the gentleman, "a few of us are endeavouring
to raise a fund to buy the Poor some meat and drink,
and means of warmth. We choose this time, because
it is a time, of all others, when Want is keenly felt,
and Abundance rejoices. What shall I put you down
for?"

"Nothing!" Scrooge replied.

"You wish to be anonymous?"

"I wish to be left alone," said Scrooge. "Since you
ask me what I wish, gentlemen, that is my answer.
I don't make merry myself at Christmas and I can't
afford to make idle people merry. I help to support
the establishments I have mentioned--they cost
enough; and those who are badly off must go there."

"Many can't go there; and many would rather die."

"If they would rather die," said Scrooge, "they had
better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
Besides--excuse me--I don't know that."

"But you might know it," observed the gentleman.

"It's not my business," Scrooge returned. "It's
enough for a man to understand his own business, and
not to interfere with other people's. Mine occupies
me constantly. Good afternoon, gentlemen!"

Seeing clearly that it would be useless to pursue
their point, the gentlemen withdrew. Scrooge resumed
his labours with an improved opinion of himself,
and in a more facetious temper than was usual
with him.

Meanwhile the fog and darkness thickened so, that
people ran about with flaring links, proffering their
services to go before horses in carriages, and conduct
them on their way. The ancient tower of a church,
whose gruff old bell was always peeping slily down
at Scrooge out of a Gothic window in the wall, became
invisible, and struck the hours and quarters in the
clouds, with tremulous vibrations afterwards as if
its teeth were chattering in its frozen head up there.
The cold became intense. In the main street, at the
corner of the court, some labourers were repairing
the gas-pipes, and had lighted a great fire in a brazier,
round which a party of ragged men and boys were
gathered: warming their hands and winking their
eyes before the blaze in rapture. The water-plug
being left in solitude, its overflowings sullenly congealed,
and turned to misanthropic ice. The brightness
of the shops where holly sprigs and berries
crackled in the lamp heat of the windows, made pale
faces ruddy as they passed. Poulterers' and grocers'
trades became a splendid joke: a glorious pageant,
with which it was next to impossible to believe that
such dull principles as bargain and sale had anything
to do. The Lord Mayor, in the stronghold of the
mighty Mansion House, gave orders to his fifty cooks
and butlers to keep Christmas as a Lord Mayor's
household should; and even the little tailor, whom he
had fined five shillings on the previous Monday for
being drunk and bloodthirsty in the streets, stirred up
to-morrow's pudding in his garret, while his lean
wife and the baby sallied out to buy the beef.

Foggier yet, and colder. Piercing, searching, biting
cold. If the good Saint Dunstan had but nipped
the Evil Spirit's nose with a touch of such weather
as that, instead of using his familiar weapons, then
indeed he would have roared to lusty purpose. The
owner of one scant young nose, gnawed and mumbled
by the hungry cold as bones are gnawed by dogs,
stooped down at Scrooge's keyhole to regale him with
a Christmas carol: but at the first sound of

        "God bless you, merry gentleman!
         May nothing you dismay!"

Scrooge seized the ruler with such energy of action,
that the singer fled in terror, leaving the keyhole to
the fog and even more congenial frost.

At length the hour of shutting up the counting-house
arrived. With an ill-will Scrooge dismounted from his
stool, and tacitly admitted the fact to the expectant
clerk in the Tank, who instantly snuffed his candle out,
and put on his hat.

"You'll want all day to-morrow, I suppose?" said
Scrooge.

"If quite convenient, sir."

"It's not convenient," said Scrooge, "and it's not
fair. If I was to stop half-a-crown for it, you'd
think yourself ill-used, I'll be bound?"

The clerk smiled faintly.

"And yet," said Scrooge, "you don't think me ill-used,
when I pay a day's wages for no work."

The clerk observed that it was only once a year.

"A poor excuse for picking a man's pocket every
twenty-fifth of December!" said Scrooge, buttoning
his great-coat to the chin. "But I suppose you must
have the whole day. Be here all the earlier next
morning."

The clerk promised that he would; and Scrooge
walked out with a growl. The office was closed in a
twinkling, and the clerk, with the long ends of his
white comforter dangling below his waist (for he
boasted no great-coat), went down a slide on Cornhill,
at the end of a lane of boys, twenty times, in
honour of its being Christmas Eve, and then ran home
to Camden Town as hard as he could pelt, to play
at blindman's-buff.

Scrooge took his melancholy dinner in his usual
melancholy tavern; and having read all the newspapers, and
beguiled the rest of the evening with his
banker's-book, went home to bed. He lived in
chambers which had once belonged to his deceased
partner. They were a gloomy suite of rooms, in a
lowering pile of building up a yard, where it had so
little business to be, that one could scarcely help
fancying it must have run there when it was a young
house, playing at hide-and-seek with other houses,
and forgotten the way out again. It was old enough
now, and dreary enough, for nobody lived in it but
Scrooge, the other rooms being all let out as offices.
The yard was so dark that even Scrooge, who knew
its every stone, was fain to grope with his hands.
The fog and frost so hung about the black old gateway
of the house, that it seemed as if the Genius of
the Weather sat in mournful meditation on the
threshold.

Now, it is a fact, that there was nothing at all
particular about the knocker on the door, except that it
was very large. It is also a fact, that Scrooge had
seen it, night and morning, during his whole residence
in that place; also that Scrooge had as little of what
is called fancy about him as any man in the city of
London, even including--which is a bold word--the
corporation, aldermen, and livery. Let it also be
borne in mind that Scrooge had not bestowed one
thought on Marley, since his last mention of his
seven years' dead partner that afternoon. And then
let any man explain to me, if he can, how it happened
that Scrooge, having his key in the lock of the door,
saw in the knocker, without its undergoing any intermediate
process of change--not a knocker, but Marley's face.

Marley's face. It was not in impenetrable shadow
as the other objects in the yard were, but had a
dismal light about it, like a bad lobster in a dark
cellar. It was not angry or ferocious, but looked
at Scrooge as Marley used to look: with ghostly
spectacles turned up on its ghostly forehead. The
hair was curiously stirred, as if by breath or hot air;
and, though the eyes were wide open, they were perfectly
motionless. That, and its livid colour, made it
horrible; but its horror seemed to be in spite of the
face and beyond its control, rather than a part of
its own expression.

As Scrooge looked fixedly at this phenomenon, it
was a knocker again.

To say that he was not startled, or that his blood
was not conscious of a terrible sensation to which it
had been a stranger from infancy, would be untrue.
But he put his hand upon the key he had relinquished,
turned it sturdily, walked in, and lighted his candle.

He did pause, with a moment's irresolution, before
he shut the door; and he did look cautiously behind
it first, as if he half expected to be terrified with the
sight of Marley's pigtail sticking out into the hall.
But there was nothing on the back of the door, except
the screws and nuts that held the knocker on, so he
said "Pooh, pooh!" and closed it with a bang.

The sound resounded through the house like thunder.
Every room above, and every cask in the wine-merchant's
cellars below, appeared to have a separate peal
of echoes of its own. Scrooge was not a man to
be frightened by echoes. He fastened the door, and
walked across the hall, and up the stairs; slowly too:
trimming his candle as he went.

You may talk vaguely about driving a coach-and-six
up a good old flight of stairs, or through a bad
young Act of Parliament; but I mean to say you
might have got a hearse up that staircase, and taken
it broadwise, with the splinter-bar towards the wall
and the door towards the balustrades: and done it
easy. There was plenty of width for that, and room
to spare; which is perhaps the reason why Scrooge
thought he saw a locomotive hearse going on before
him in the gloom. Half-a-dozen gas-lamps out of
the street wouldn't have lighted the entry too well,
so you may suppose that it was pretty dark with
Scrooge's dip.

Up Scrooge went, not caring a button for that.
Darkness is cheap, and Scrooge liked it. But before
he shut his heavy door, he walked through his rooms
to see that all was right. He had just enough recollection
of the face to desire to do that.

Sitting-room, bedroom, lumber-room. All as they
should be. Nobody under the table, nobody under
the sofa; a small fire in the grate; spoon and basin
ready; and the little saucepan of gruel (Scrooge had
a cold in his head) upon the hob. Nobody under the
bed; nobody in the closet; nobody in his dressing-gown,
which was hanging up in a suspicious attitude
against the wall. Lumber-room as usual. Old fire-guard,
old shoes, two fish-baskets, washing-stand on three
legs, and a poker.

Quite satisfied, he closed his door, and locked
himself in; double-locked himself in, which was not his
custom. Thus secured against surprise, he took off
his cravat; put on his dressing-gown and slippers, and
his nightcap; and sat down before the fire to take
his gruel.

It was a very low fire indeed; nothing on such a
bitter night. He was obliged to sit close to it, and
brood over it, before he could extract the least
sensation of warmth from such a handful of fuel.
The fireplace was an old one, built by some Dutch
merchant long ago, and paved all round with quaint
Dutch tiles, designed to illustrate the Scriptures.
There were Cains and Abels, Pharaoh's daughters;
Queens of Sheba, Angelic messengers descending
through the air on clouds like feather-beds, Abrahams,
Belshazzars, Apostles putting off to sea in butter-boats,
hundreds of figures to attract his thoughts;
and yet that face of Marley, seven years dead, came
like the ancient Prophet's rod, and swallowed up the
whole. If each smooth tile had been a blank at first,
with power to shape some picture on its surface from
the disjointed fragments of his thoughts, there would
have been a copy of old Marley's head on every one.

"Humbug!" said Scrooge; and walked across the
room.

After several turns, he sat down again. As he
threw his head back in the chair, his glance happened
to rest upon a bell, a disused bell, that hung in the
room, and communicated for some purpose now forgotten
with a chamber in the highest story of the
building. It was with great astonishment, and with
a strange, inexplicable dread, that as he looked, he
saw this bell begin to swing. It swung so softly in
the outset that it scarcely made a sound; but soon it
rang out loudly, and so did every bell in the house.

This might have lasted half a minute, or a minute,
but it seemed an hour. The bells ceased as they had
begun, together. They were succeeded by a clanking
noise, deep down below; as if some person were
dragging a heavy chain over the casks in the
wine-merchant's cellar. Scrooge then remembered to have
heard that ghosts in haunted houses were described as
dragging chains.

The cellar-door flew open with a booming sound,
and then he heard the noise much louder, on the floors
below; then coming up the stairs; then coming straight
towards his door.

"It's humbug still!" said Scrooge. "I won't believe it."

His colour changed though, when, without a pause,
it came on through the heavy door, and passed into
the room before his eyes. Upon its coming in, the
dying flame leaped up, as though it cried, "I know
him; Marley's Ghost!" and fell again.

The same face: the very same. Marley in his pigtail,
usual waistcoat, tights and boots; the tassels on
the latter bristling, like his pigtail, and his coat-skirts,
and the hair upon his head. The chain he drew was
clasped about his middle. It was long, and wound
about him like a tail; and it was made (for Scrooge
observed it closely) of cash-boxes, keys, padlocks,
ledgers, deeds, and heavy purses wrought in steel.
His body was transparent; so that Scrooge, observing him,
and looking through his waistcoat, could see
the two buttons on his coat behind.

Scrooge had often heard it said that Marley had no
bowels, but he had never believed it until now.

No, nor did he believe it even now. Though he
looked the phantom through and through, and saw
it standing before him; though he felt the chilling
influence of its death-cold eyes; and marked the very
texture of the folded kerchief bound about its head
and chin, which wrapper he had not observed before;
he was still incredulous, and fought against his senses.

"How now!" said Scrooge, caustic and cold as ever.
"What do you want with me?"

"Much!"--Marley's voice, no doubt about it.

"Who are you?"

"Ask me who I was."

"Who were you then?" said Scrooge, raising his
voice. "You're particular, for a shade." He was going
to say "to a shade," but substituted this, as more
appropriate.

"In life I was your partner, Jacob Marley."

"Can you--can you sit down?" asked Scrooge, looking
doubtfully at him.

"I can."

"Do it, then."

Scrooge asked the question, because he didn't know
whether a ghost so transparent might find himself in
a condition to take a chair; and felt that in the event
of its being impossible, it might involve the necessity
of an embarrassing explanation. But the ghost sat
down on the opposite side of the fireplace, as if he
were quite used to it.

"You don't believe in me," observed the Ghost.

"I don't," said Scrooge.

"What evidence would you have of my reality beyond that of
your senses?"

"I don't know," said Scrooge.

"Why do you doubt your senses?"

"Because," said Scrooge, "a little thing affects them.
A slight disorder of the stomach makes them cheats. You may
be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of
cheese, a fragment of an underdone potato. There's more of
gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!"

Scrooge was not much in the habit of cracking
jokes, nor did he feel, in his heart, by any means
waggish then. The truth is, that he tried to be
smart, as a means of distracting his own attention,
and keeping down his terror; for the spectre's voice
disturbed the very marrow in his bones.

To sit, staring at those fixed glazed eyes, in silence
for a moment, would play, Scrooge felt, the very
deuce with him. There was something very awful,
too, in the spectre's being provided with an infernal
atmosphere of its own. Scrooge could not feel it
himself, but this was clearly the case; for though the
Ghost sat perfectly motionless, its hair, and skirts,
and tassels, were still agitated as by the hot vapour
from an oven.

"You see this toothpick?" said Scrooge, returning
quickly to the charge, for the reason just assigned;
and wishing, though it were only for a second, to
divert the vision's stony gaze from himself.

"I do," replied the Ghost.

"You are not looking at it," said Scrooge.

"But I see it," said the Ghost, "notwithstanding."

"Well!" returned Scrooge, "I have but to swallow
this, and be for the rest of my days persecuted by a
legion of goblins, all of my own creation. Humbug,
I tell you! humbug!"

At this the spirit raised a frightful cry, and shook
its chain with such a dismal and appalling noise, that
Scrooge held on tight to his chair, to save himself
from falling in a swoon. But how much greater was
his horror, when the phantom taking off the bandage
round its head, as if it were too warm to wear indoors,
its lower jaw dropped down upon its breast!

Scrooge fell upon his knees, and clasped his hands
before his face.

"Mercy!" he said. "Dreadful apparition, why do
you trouble me?"

"Man of the worldly mind!" replied the Ghost, "do
you believe in me or not?"

"I do," said Scrooge. "I must. But why do spirits
walk the earth, and why do they come to me?"

"It is required of every man," the Ghost returned,
"that the spirit within him should walk abroad among
his fellowmen, and travel far and wide; and if that
spirit goes not forth in life, it is condemned to do so
after death. It is doomed to wander through the
world--oh, woe is me!--and witness what it cannot
share, but might have shared on earth, and turned to
happiness!"

Again the spectre raised a cry, and shook its chain
and wrung its shadowy hands.

"You are fettered," said Scrooge, trembling. "Tell
me why?"

"I wear the chain I forged in life," replied the Ghost.
"I made it link by link, and yard by yard; I girded
it on of my own free will, and of my own free will I
wore it. Is its pattern strange to you?"

Scrooge trembled more and more.

"Or would you know," pursued the Ghost, "the
weight and length of the strong coil you bear yourself?
It was full as heavy and as long as this, seven
Christmas Eves ago. You have laboured on it, since.
It is a ponderous chain!"

Scrooge glanced about him on the floor, in the
expectation of finding himself surrounded by some fifty
or sixty fathoms of iron cable: but he could see
nothing.

"Jacob," he said, imploringly. "Old Jacob Marley,
tell me more. Speak comfort to me, Jacob!"

"I have none to give," the Ghost replied. "It comes
from other regions, Ebenezer Scrooge, and is conveyed
by other ministers, to other kinds of men. Nor
can I tell you what I would. A very little more is
all permitted to me. I cannot rest, I cannot stay, I
cannot linger anywhere. My spirit never walked
beyond our counting-house--mark me!--in life my
spirit never roved beyond the narrow limits of our
money-changing hole; and weary journeys lie before
me!"

It was a habit with Scrooge, whenever he became
thoughtful, to put his hands in his breeches pockets.
Pondering on what the Ghost had said, he did so now,
but without lifting up his eyes, or getting off his
knees.

"You must have been very slow about it, Jacob,"
Scrooge observed, in a business-like manner, though
with humility and deference.

"Slow!" the Ghost repeated.

"Seven years dead," mused Scrooge. "And travelling
all the time!"

"The whole time," said the Ghost. "No rest, no
peace. Incessant torture of remorse."

"You travel fast?" said Scrooge.

"On the wings of the wind," replied the Ghost.

"You might have got over a great quantity of
ground in seven years," said Scrooge.

The Ghost, on hearing this, set up another cry, and
clanked its chain so hideously in the dead silence of
the night, that the Ward would have been justified in
indicting it for a nuisance.

"Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed," cried the
phantom, "not to know, that ages of incessant labour
by immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into
eternity before the good of which it is susceptible is
all developed. Not to know that any Christian spirit
working kindly in its little sphere, whatever it may
be, will find its mortal life too short for its vast
means of usefulness. Not to know that no space of
regret can make amends for one life's opportunity
misused! Yet such was I! Oh! such was I!"

"But you were always a good man of business,
Jacob," faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this
to himself.

"Business!" cried the Ghost, wringing its hands
again. "Mankind was my business. The common
welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance,
and benevolence, were, all, my business. The dealings
of my trade were but a drop of water in the
comprehensive ocean of my business!"

It held up its chain at arm's length, as if that were
the cause of all its unavailing grief, and flung it
heavily upon the ground again.

"At this time of the rolling year," the spectre said,
"I suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of
fellow-beings with my eyes turned down, and never
raise them to that blessed Star which led the Wise
Men to a poor abode! Were there no poor homes to
which its light would have conducted me!"

Scrooge was very much dismayed to hear the
spectre going on at this rate, and began to quake
exceedingly.

"Hear me!" cried the Ghost. "My time is nearly
gone."

"I will," said Scrooge. "But don't be hard upon
me! Don't be flowery, Jacob! Pray!"

"How it is that I appear before you in a shape that
you can see, I may not tell. I have sat invisible
beside you many and many a day."

It was not an agreeable idea. Scrooge shivered,
and wiped the perspiration from his brow.

"That is no light part of my penance," pursued
the Ghost. "I am here to-night to warn you, that you
have yet a chance and hope of escaping my fate. A
chance and hope of my procuring, Ebenezer."

"You were always a good friend to me," said
Scrooge. "Thank'ee!"

"You will be haunted," resumed the Ghost, "by
Three Spirits."

Scrooge's countenance fell almost as low as the
Ghost's had done.

"Is that the chance and hope you mentioned,
Jacob?" he demanded, in a faltering voice.

"It is."

"I--I think I'd rather not," said Scrooge.

"Without their visits," said the Ghost, "you cannot
hope to shun the path I tread. Expect the first to-morrow,
when the bell tolls One."

"Couldn't I take 'em all at once, and have it over,
Jacob?" hinted Scrooge.

"Expect the second on the next night at the same
hour. The third upon the next night when the last
stroke of Twelve has ceased to vibrate. Look to see
me no more; and look that, for your own sake, you
remember what has passed between us!"

When it had said these words, the spectre took its
wrapper from the table, and bound it round its head,
as before. Scrooge knew this, by the smart sound its
teeth made, when the jaws were brought together
by the bandage. He ventured to raise his eyes again,
and found his supernatural visitor confronting him
in an erect attitude, with its chain wound over and
about its arm.

The apparition walked backward from him; and at
every step it took, the window raised itself a little,
so that when the spectre reached it, it was wide open.

It beckoned Scrooge to approach, which he did.
When they were within two paces of each other,
Marley's Ghost held up its hand, warning him to
come no nearer. Scrooge stopped.

Not so much in obedience, as in surprise and fear:
for on the raising of the hand, he became sensible
of confused noises in the air; incoherent sounds of
lamentation and regret; wailings inexpressibly sorrowful and
self-accusatory. The spectre, after listening for a moment,
joined in the mournful dirge; and floated out upon the
bleak, dark night.

Scrooge followed to the window: desperate in his
curiosity. He looked out.

The air was filled with phantoms, wandering hither
and thither in restless haste, and moaning as they
went. Every one of them wore chains like Marley's
Ghost; some few (they might be guilty governments)
were linked together; none were free. Many had
been personally known to Scrooge in their lives. He
had been quite familiar with one old ghost, in a white
waistcoat, with a monstrous iron safe attached to
its ankle, who cried piteously at being unable to assist
a wretched woman with an infant, whom it saw below,
upon a door-step. The misery with them all was,
clearly, that they sought to interfere, for good, in
human matters, and had lost the power for ever.

Whether these creatures faded into mist, or mist
enshrouded them, he could not tell. But they and
their spirit voices faded together; and the night became
as it had been when he walked home.

Scrooge closed the window, and examined the door
by which the Ghost had entered. It was double-locked,
as he had locked it with his own hands, and
the bolts were undisturbed. He tried to say "Humbug!"
but stopped at the first syllable. And being,
from the emotion he had undergone, or the fatigues
of the day, or his glimpse of the Invisible World, or
the dull conversation of the Ghost, or the lateness of
the hour, much in need of repose; went straight to
bed, without undressing, and fell asleep upon the
instant.


STAVE II:  THE FIRST OF THE THREE SPIRITS

WHEN Scrooge awoke, it was so dark, that looking out of bed,
he could scarcely distinguish the transparent window from
the opaque walls of his chamber. He was endeavouring to
pierce the darkness with his ferret eyes, when the chimes of a
neighbouring church struck the four quarters. So he listened
for the hour.

To his great astonishment the heavy bell went on from
six to seven, and from seven to eight, and regularly up to
twelve; then stopped. Twelve! It was past two when he
went to bed. The clock was wrong. An icicle must have
got into the works. Twelve!

He touched the spring of his repeater, to correct this most
preposterous clock. Its rapid little pulse beat twelve:
and stopped.

"Why, it isn't possible," said Scrooge, "that I can have
slept through a whole day and far into another night. It
isn't possible that anything has happened to the sun, and
this is twelve at noon!"

The idea being an alarming one, he scrambled out of bed,
and groped his way to the window. He was obliged to rub
the frost off with the sleeve of his dressing-gown before he
could see anything; and could see very little then. All he
could make out was, that it was still very foggy and extremely
cold, and that there was no noise of people running to and fro,
and making a great stir, as there unquestionably would have been
if night had beaten off bright day, and taken possession of the
world.  This was a great relief, because "three days after sight
of this First of Exchange pay to Mr. Ebenezer Scrooge or his
order," and so forth, would have become a mere United States'
security if there were no days to count by.

Scrooge went to bed again, and thought, and thought, and thought
it over and over and over, and could make nothing of it.  The more he
thought, the more perplexed he was; and the more he endeavoured
not to think, the more he thought.

Marley's Ghost bothered him exceedingly. Every time he resolved
within himself, after mature inquiry, that it was all a dream, his
mind flew back again, like a strong spring released, to its first
position, and presented the same problem to be worked all through,
"Was it a dream or not?"

Scrooge lay in this state until the chime had gone three quarters
more, when he remembered, on a sudden, that the Ghost had warned
him of a visitation when the bell tolled one.  He resolved to lie
awake until the hour was passed; and, considering that he could
no more go to sleep than go to Heaven, this was perhaps the
wisest resolution in his power.

The quarter was so long, that he was more than once convinced he
must have sunk into a doze unconsciously, and missed the clock.
At length it broke upon his listening ear.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter past," said Scrooge, counting.

"Ding, dong!"

"Half-past!" said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"A quarter to it," said Scrooge.

"Ding, dong!"

"The hour itself," said Scrooge, triumphantly, "and nothing else!"

He spoke before the hour bell sounded, which it now did with a
deep, dull, hollow, melancholy ONE.  Light flashed up in the room
upon the instant, and the curtains of his bed were drawn.

The curtains of his bed were drawn aside, I tell you, by a
hand. Not the curtains at his feet, nor the curtains at his
back, but those to which his face was addressed. The curtains
of his bed were drawn aside; and Scrooge, starting up into a
half-recumbent attitude, found himself face to face with the
unearthly visitor who drew them: as close to it as I am now
to you, and I am standing in the spirit at your elbow.

It was a strange figure--like a child: yet not so like a
child as like an old man, viewed through some supernatural
medium, which gave him the appearance of having receded
from the view, and being diminished to a child's proportions.
Its hair, which hung about its neck and down its back, was
white as if with age; and yet the face had not a wrinkle in
it, and the tenderest bloom was on the skin. The arms were
very long and muscular; the hands the same, as if its hold
were of uncommon strength. Its legs and feet, most delicately
formed, were, like those upper members, bare. It wore a tunic
of the purest white; and round its waist was bound
a lustrous belt, the sheen of which was beautiful. It held
a branch of fresh green holly in its hand; and, in singular
contradiction of that wintry emblem, had its dress trimmed
with summer flowers. But the strangest thing about it was,
that from the crown of its head there sprung a bright clear
jet of light, by which all this was visible; and which was
doubtless the occasion of its using, in its duller moments, a
great extinguisher for a cap, which it now held under its arm.

Even this, though, when Scrooge looked at it with increasing
steadiness, was not its strangest quality. For as its belt
sparkled and glittered now in one part and now in another,
and what was light one instant, at another time was dark, so
the figure itself fluctuated in its distinctness: being now a
thing with one arm, now with one leg, now with twenty legs,
now a pair of legs without a head, now a head without a
body: of which dissolving parts, no outline would be visible
in the dense gloom wherein they melted away. And in the
very wonder of this, it would be itself again; distinct and
clear as ever.

"Are you the Spirit, sir, whose coming was foretold to
me?" asked Scrooge.

"I am!"

The voice was soft and gentle. Singularly low, as if
instead of being so close beside him, it were at a distance.

"Who, and what are you?" Scrooge demanded.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Past."

"Long Past?" inquired Scrooge: observant of its dwarfish
stature.

"No. Your past."

Perhaps, Scrooge could not have told anybody why, if
anybody could have asked him; but he had a special desire
to see the Spirit in his cap; and begged him to be covered.

"What!" exclaimed the Ghost, "would you so soon put out,
with worldly hands, the light I give? Is it not enough
that you are one of those whose passions made this cap, and
force me through whole trains of years to wear it low upon
my brow!"

Scrooge reverently disclaimed all intention to offend
or any knowledge of having wilfully "bonneted" the Spirit at
any period of his life. He then made bold to inquire what
business brought him there.

"Your welfare!" said the Ghost.

Scrooge expressed himself much obliged, but could not
help thinking that a night of unbroken rest would have been
more conducive to that end. The Spirit must have heard
him thinking, for it said immediately:

"Your reclamation, then. Take heed!"

It put out its strong hand as it spoke, and clasped him
gently by the arm.

"Rise! and walk with me!"

It would have been in vain for Scrooge to plead that the
weather and the hour were not adapted to pedestrian purposes;
that bed was warm, and the thermometer a long way below
freezing; that he was clad but lightly in his slippers,
dressing-gown, and nightcap; and that he had a cold upon him at
that time. The grasp, though gentle as a woman's hand,
was not to be resisted. He rose: but finding that the Spirit
made towards the window, clasped his robe in supplication.

"I am a mortal," Scrooge remonstrated, "and liable to fall."

"Bear but a touch of my hand there," said the Spirit,
laying it upon his heart, "and you shall be upheld in more
than this!"

As the words were spoken, they passed through the wall,
and stood upon an open country road, with fields on either
hand. The city had entirely vanished. Not a vestige of it
was to be seen. The darkness and the mist had vanished
with it, for it was a clear, cold, winter day, with snow upon
the ground.

"Good Heaven!" said Scrooge, clasping his hands together,
as he looked about him. "I was bred in this place. I was
a boy here!"

The Spirit gazed upon him mildly. Its gentle touch,
though it had been light and instantaneous, appeared still
present to the old man's sense of feeling. He was conscious
of a thousand odours floating in the air, each one connected
with a thousand thoughts, and hopes, and joys, and cares
long, long, forgotten!

"Your lip is trembling," said the Ghost. "And what is
that upon your cheek?"

Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice,
that it was a pimple; and begged the Ghost to lead him
where he would.

"You recollect the way?" inquired the Spirit.

"Remember it!" cried Scrooge with fervour; "I could
walk it blindfold."

"Strange to have forgotten it for so many years!" observed
the Ghost. "Let us go on."

They walked along the road, Scrooge recognising every
gate, and post, and tree; until a little market-town appeared
in the distance, with its bridge, its church, and winding river.
Some shaggy ponies now were seen trotting towards them
with boys upon their backs, who called to other boys in
country gigs and carts, driven by farmers. All these boys
were in great spirits, and shouted to each other, until the
broad fields were so full of merry music, that the crisp air
laughed to hear it!

"These are but shadows of the things that have been," said
the Ghost. "They have no consciousness of us."

The jocund travellers came on; and as they came, Scrooge
knew and named them every one. Why was he rejoiced beyond
all bounds to see them! Why did his cold eye glisten, and
his heart leap up as they went past! Why was he filled
with gladness when he heard them give each other Merry
Christmas, as they parted at cross-roads and bye-ways, for
their several homes! What was merry Christmas to Scrooge?
Out upon merry Christmas! What good had it ever done
to him?

"The school is not quite deserted," said the Ghost. "A
solitary child, neglected by his friends, is left there still."

Scrooge said he knew it. And he sobbed.

They left the high-road, by a well-remembered lane, and
soon approached a mansion of dull red brick, with a little
weathercock-surmounted cupola, on the roof, and a bell
hanging in it. It was a large house, but one of broken
fortunes; for the spacious offices were little used, their walls
were damp and mossy, their windows broken, and their
gates decayed. Fowls clucked and strutted in the stables;
and the coach-houses and sheds were over-run with grass.
Nor was it more retentive of its ancient state, within; for
entering the dreary hall, and glancing through the open
doors of many rooms, they found them poorly furnished,
cold, and vast. There was an earthy savour in the air, a
chilly bareness in the place, which associated itself somehow
with too much getting up by candle-light, and not too
much to eat.

They went, the Ghost and Scrooge, across the hall, to a
door at the back of the house. It opened before them, and
disclosed a long, bare, melancholy room, made barer still by
lines of plain deal forms and desks. At one of these a lonely
boy was reading near a feeble fire; and Scrooge sat down
upon a form, and wept to see his poor forgotten self as he
used to be.

Not a latent echo in the house, not a squeak and scuffle
from the mice behind the panelling, not a drip from the
half-thawed water-spout in the dull yard behind, not a sigh among
the leafless boughs of one despondent poplar, not the idle
swinging of an empty store-house door, no, not a clicking in
the fire, but fell upon the heart of Scrooge with a softening
influence, and gave a freer passage to his tears.

The Spirit touched him on the arm, and pointed to his
younger self, intent upon his reading. Suddenly a man, in
foreign garments: wonderfully real and distinct to look at:
stood outside the window, with an axe stuck in his belt, and
leading by the bridle an ass laden with wood.

"Why, it's Ali Baba!" Scrooge exclaimed in ecstasy. "It's
dear old honest Ali Baba! Yes, yes, I know! One Christmas
time, when yonder solitary child was left here all alone,
he did come, for the first time, just like that. Poor boy! And
Valentine," said Scrooge, "and his wild brother, Orson; there
they go! And what's his name, who was put down in his
drawers, asleep, at the Gate of Damascus; don't you see him!
And the Sultan's Groom turned upside down by the Genii;
there he is upon his head! Serve him right. I'm glad of it.
What business had he to be married to the Princess!"

To hear Scrooge expending all the earnestness of his nature
on such subjects, in a most extraordinary voice between
laughing and crying; and to see his heightened and excited
face; would have been a surprise to his business friends in
the city, indeed.

"There's the Parrot!" cried Scrooge. "Green body and
yellow tail, with a thing like a lettuce growing out of the
top of his head; there he is! Poor Robin Crusoe, he called
him, when he came home again after sailing round the
island. 'Poor Robin Crusoe, where have you been, Robin
Crusoe?'  The man thought he was dreaming, but he wasn't.
It was the Parrot, you know. There goes Friday, running
for his life to the little creek! Halloa! Hoop! Halloo!"

Then, with a rapidity of transition very foreign to his
usual character, he said, in pity for his former self, "Poor
boy!" and cried again.

"I wish," Scrooge muttered, putting his hand in his
pocket, and looking about him, after drying his eyes with his
cuff: "but it's too late now."

"What is the matter?" asked the Spirit.

"Nothing," said Scrooge. "Nothing. There was a boy
singing a Christmas Carol at my door last night. I should
like to have given him something: that's all."

The Ghost smiled thoughtfully, and waved its hand:
saying as it did so, "Let us see another Christmas!"

Scrooge's former self grew larger at the words, and the
room became a little darker and more dirty. The panels shrunk,
the windows cracked; fragments of plaster fell out of the
ceiling, and the naked laths were shown instead; but how
all this was brought about, Scrooge knew no more than you
do. He only knew that it was quite correct; that everything
had happened so; that there he was, alone again, when all
the other boys had gone home for the jolly holidays.

He was not reading now, but walking up and down despairingly.
Scrooge looked at the Ghost, and with a mournful shaking of
his head, glanced anxiously towards the door.

It opened; and a little girl, much younger than the boy,
came darting in, and putting her arms about his neck, and
often kissing him, addressed him as her "Dear, dear
brother."

"I have come to bring you home, dear brother!" said the
child, clapping her tiny hands, and bending down to laugh.
"To bring you home, home, home!"

"Home, little Fan?" returned the boy.

"Yes!" said the child, brimful of glee. "Home, for good
and all. Home, for ever and ever. Father is so much kinder
than he used to be, that home's like Heaven! He spoke so
gently to me one dear night when I was going to bed, that
I was not afraid to ask him once more if you might come
home; and he said Yes, you should; and sent me in a coach
to bring you. And you're to be a man!" said the child,
opening her eyes, "and are never to come back here; but
first, we're to be together all the Christmas long, and have
the merriest time in all the world."

"You are quite a woman, little Fan!" exclaimed the boy.

She clapped her hands and laughed, and tried to touch his
head; but being too little, laughed again, and stood on
tiptoe to embrace him. Then she began to drag him, in her
childish eagerness, towards the door; and he, nothing loth to
go, accompanied her.

A terrible voice in the hall cried, "Bring down Master
Scrooge's box, there!" and in the hall appeared the schoolmaster
himself, who glared on Master Scrooge with a ferocious
condescension, and threw him into a dreadful state of mind
by shaking hands with him. He then conveyed him and his
sister into the veriest old well of a shivering best-parlour that
ever was seen, where the maps upon the wall, and the celestial
and terrestrial globes in the windows, were waxy with cold.
Here he produced a decanter of curiously light wine, and a
block of curiously heavy cake, and administered instalments
of those dainties to the young people: at the same time,
sending out a meagre servant to offer a glass of "something"
to the postboy, who answered that he thanked the gentleman,
but if it was the same tap as he had tasted before, he had
rather not. Master Scrooge's trunk being by this time tied
on to the top of the chaise, the children bade the schoolmaster
good-bye right willingly; and getting into it, drove
gaily down the garden-sweep: the quick wheels dashing the
hoar-frost and snow from off the dark leaves of the evergreens
like spray.

"Always a delicate creature, whom a breath might have
withered," said the Ghost. "But she had a large heart!"

"So she had," cried Scrooge. "You're right. I will not
gainsay it, Spirit. God forbid!"

"She died a woman," said the Ghost, "and had, as I think,
children."

"One child," Scrooge returned.

"True," said the Ghost. "Your nephew!"

Scrooge seemed uneasy in his mind; and answered briefly,
"Yes."

Although they had but that moment left the school behind
them, they were now in the busy thoroughfares of a city,
where shadowy passengers passed and repassed; where shadowy
carts and coaches battled for the way, and all the strife and
tumult of a real city were. It was made plain enough, by
the dressing of the shops, that here too it was Christmas
time again; but it was evening, and the streets were
lighted up.

The Ghost stopped at a certain warehouse door, and asked
Scrooge if he knew it.

"Know it!" said Scrooge. "Was I apprenticed here!"

They went in. At sight of an old gentleman in a Welsh
wig, sitting behind such a high desk, that if he had been two
inches taller he must have knocked his head against the
ceiling, Scrooge cried in great excitement:

"Why, it's old Fezziwig! Bless his heart; it's Fezziwig
alive again!"

Old Fezziwig laid down his pen, and looked up at the
clock, which pointed to the hour of seven. He rubbed his
hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over
himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and
called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice:

"Yo ho, there! Ebenezer! Dick!"

Scrooge's former self, now grown a young man, came briskly
in, accompanied by his fellow-'prentice.

"Dick Wilkins, to be sure!" said Scrooge to the Ghost.
"Bless me, yes. There he is. He was very much attached
to me, was Dick. Poor Dick! Dear, dear!"

"Yo ho, my boys!" said Fezziwig. "No more work to-night.
Christmas Eve, Dick. Christmas, Ebenezer! Let's
have the shutters up," cried old Fezziwig, with a sharp clap
of his hands, "before a man can say Jack Robinson!"

You wouldn't believe how those two fellows went at it!
They charged into the street with the shutters--one, two,
three--had 'em up in their places--four, five, six--barred
'em and pinned 'em--seven, eight, nine--and came back
before you could have got to twelve, panting like race-horses.

"Hilli-ho!" cried old Fezziwig, skipping down from the
high desk, with wonderful agility. "Clear away, my lads,
and let's have lots of room here! Hilli-ho, Dick! Chirrup,
Ebenezer!"

Clear away! There was nothing they wouldn't have cleared
away, or couldn't have cleared away, with old Fezziwig looking
on. It was done in a minute. Every movable was packed off, as if
it were dismissed from public life for evermore; the floor was
swept and watered, the lamps were trimmed, fuel was heaped upon
the fire; and the warehouse was as snug, and warm, and dry, and
bright a ball-room, as you would desire to see upon a winter's
night.

In came a fiddler with a music-book, and went up to the
lofty desk, and made an orchestra of it, and tuned like fifty
stomach-aches. In came Mrs. Fezziwig, one vast substantial
smile. In came the three Miss Fezziwigs, beaming and
lovable. In came the six young followers whose hearts they
broke. In came all the young men and women employed in
the business. In came the housemaid, with her cousin, the
baker. In came the cook, with her brother's particular friend,
the milkman. In came the boy from over the way, who was
suspected of not having board enough from his master; trying
to hide himself behind the girl from next door but one, who
was proved to have had her ears pulled by her mistress.
In they all came, one after another; some shyly, some boldly,
some gracefully, some awkwardly, some pushing, some pulling;
in they all came, anyhow and everyhow. Away they all went,
twenty couple at once; hands half round and back again
the other way; down the middle and up again; round
and round in various stages of affectionate grouping; old
top couple always turning up in the wrong place; new top
couple starting off again, as soon as they got there; all top
couples at last, and not a bottom one to help them! When
this result was brought about, old Fezziwig, clapping his
hands to stop the dance, cried out, "Well done!" and the
fiddler plunged his hot face into a pot of porter, especially
provided for that purpose. But scorning rest, upon his
reappearance, he instantly began again, though there were no
dancers yet, as if the other fiddler had been carried home,
exhausted, on a shutter, and he were a bran-new man
resolved to beat him out of sight, or perish.

There were more dances, and there were forfeits, and more
dances, and there was cake, and there was negus, and there
was a great piece of Cold Roast, and there was a great piece
of Cold Boiled, and there were mince-pies, and plenty of beer.
But the great effect of the evening came after the Roast
and Boiled, when the fiddler (an artful dog, mind! The sort
of man who knew his business better than you or I could
have told it him!) struck up "Sir Roger de Coverley."  Then
old Fezziwig stood out to dance with Mrs. Fezziwig. Top
couple, too; with a good stiff piece of work cut out for them;
three or four and twenty pair of partners; people who were
not to be trifled with; people who would dance, and had no
notion of walking.

But if they had been twice as many--ah, four times--old
Fezziwig would have been a match for them, and so would
Mrs. Fezziwig. As to her, she was worthy to be his partner
in every sense of the term. If that's not high praise, tell me
higher, and I'll use it. A positive light appeared to issue
from Fezziwig's calves. They shone in every part of the
dance like moons. You couldn't have predicted, at any given
time, what would have become of them next. And when old
Fezziwig and Mrs. Fezziwig had gone all through the dance;
advance and retire, both hands to your partner, bow and
curtsey, corkscrew, thread-the-needle, and back again to
your place; Fezziwig "cut"--cut so deftly, that he appeared
to wink with his legs, and came upon his feet again without
a stagger.

When the clock struck eleven, this domestic ball broke up.
Mr. and Mrs. Fezziwig took their stations, one on either side
of the door, and shaking hands with every person individually
as he or she went out, wished him or her a Merry Christmas.
When everybody had retired but the two 'prentices, they did
the same to them; and thus the cheerful voices died away,
and the lads were left to their beds; which were under a
counter in the back-shop.

During the whole of this time, Scrooge had acted like a
man out of his wits. His heart and soul were in the scene,
and with his former self. He corroborated everything,
remembered everything, enjoyed everything, and underwent
the strangest agitation. It was not until now, when the
bright faces of his former self and Dick were turned from
them, that he remembered the Ghost, and became conscious
that it was looking full upon him, while the light upon its
head burnt very clear.

"A small matter," said the Ghost, "to make these silly
folks so full of gratitude."

"Small!" echoed Scrooge.

The Spirit signed to him to listen to the two apprentices,
who were pouring out their hearts in praise of Fezziwig:
and when he had done so, said,

"Why! Is it not? He has spent but a few pounds of
your mortal money: three or four perhaps. Is that so
much that he deserves this praise?"

"It isn't that," said Scrooge, heated by the remark, and
speaking unconsciously like his former, not his latter, self.
"It isn't that, Spirit. He has the power to render us happy
or unhappy; to make our service light or burdensome; a
pleasure or a toil. Say that his power lies in words and
looks; in things so slight and insignificant that it is
impossible to add and count 'em up: what then? The happiness
he gives, is quite as great as if it cost a fortune."

He felt the Spirit's glance, and stopped.

"What is the matter?" asked the Ghost.

"Nothing particular," said Scrooge.

"Something, I think?" the Ghost insisted.

"No," said Scrooge, "No. I should like to be able to say
a word or two to my clerk just now. That's all."

His former self turned down the lamps as he gave utterance
to the wish; and Scrooge and the Ghost again stood side by
side in the open air.

"My time grows short," observed the Spirit. "Quick!"

This was not addressed to Scrooge, or to any one whom he
could see, but it produced an immediate effect. For again
Scrooge saw himself. He was older now; a man in the prime
of life. His face had not the harsh and rigid lines of later
years; but it had begun to wear the signs of care and avarice.
There was an eager, greedy, restless motion in the eye, which
showed the passion that had taken root, and where the
shadow of the growing tree would fall.

He was not alone, but sat by the side of a fair young
girl in a mourning-dress: in whose eyes there were tears,
which sparkled in the light that shone out of the Ghost of
Christmas Past.

"It matters little," she said, softly. "To you, very little.
Another idol has displaced me; and if it can cheer and comfort
you in time to come, as I would have tried to do, I have
no just cause to grieve."

"What Idol has displaced you?" he rejoined.

"A golden one."

"This is the even-handed dealing of the world!" he said.
"There is nothing on which it is so hard as poverty; and
there is nothing it professes to condemn with such severity
as the pursuit of wealth!"

"You fear the world too much," she answered, gently.
"All your other hopes have merged into the hope of being
beyond the chance of its sordid reproach. I have seen your
nobler aspirations fall off one by one, until the master-passion,
Gain, engrosses you. Have I not?"

"What then?" he retorted. "Even if I have grown so
much wiser, what then? I am not changed towards you."

She shook her head.

"Am I?"

"Our contract is an old one. It was made when we were
both poor and content to be so, until, in good season, we could
improve our worldly fortune by our patient industry. You
are changed. When it was made, you were another man."

"I was a boy," he said impatiently.

"Your own feeling tells you that you were not what you
are," she returned. "I am. That which promised happiness
when we were one in heart, is fraught with misery now that
we are two. How often and how keenly I have thought of
this, I will not say. It is enough that I have thought of it,
and can release you."

"Have I ever sought release?"

"In words. No. Never."

"In what, then?"

"In a changed nature; in an altered spirit; in another
atmosphere of life; another Hope as its great end. In
everything that made my love of any worth or value in your
sight. If this had never been between us," said the girl,
looking mildly, but with steadiness, upon him; "tell me,
would you seek me out and try to win me now? Ah, no!"

He seemed to yield to the justice of this supposition, in
spite of himself. But he said with a struggle, "You think
not."

"I would gladly think otherwise if I could," she answered,
"Heaven knows! When I have learned a Truth like this,
I know how strong and irresistible it must be. But if you
were free to-day, to-morrow, yesterday, can even I believe
that you would choose a dowerless girl--you who, in your
very confidence with her, weigh everything by Gain: or,
choosing her, if for a moment you were false enough to your
one guiding principle to do so, do I not know that your
repentance and regret would surely follow? I do; and I
release you. With a full heart, for the love of him you
once were."

He was about to speak; but with her head turned from
him, she resumed.

"You may--the memory of what is past half makes me
hope you will--have pain in this. A very, very brief time,
and you will dismiss the recollection of it, gladly, as an
unprofitable dream, from which it happened well that you
awoke. May you be happy in the life you have chosen!"

She left him, and they parted.

"Spirit!" said Scrooge, "show me no more! Conduct
me home. Why do you delight to torture me?"

"One shadow more!" exclaimed the Ghost.

"No more!" cried Scrooge. "No more. I don't wish to
see it. Show me no more!"

But the relentless Ghost pinioned him in both his arms,
and forced him to observe what happened next.

They were in another scene and place; a room, not very
large or handsome, but full of comfort. Near to the winter
fire sat a beautiful young girl, so like that last that Scrooge
believed it was the same, until he saw her, now a comely
matron, sitting opposite her daughter. The noise in this
room was perfectly tumultuous, for there were more children
there, than Scrooge in his agitated state of mind could count;
and, unlike the celebrated herd in the poem, they were not
forty children conducting themselves like one, but every
child was conducting itself like forty. The consequences
were uproarious beyond belief; but no one seemed to care;
on the contrary, the mother and daughter laughed heartily,
and enjoyed it very much; and the latter, soon beginning to
mingle in the sports, got pillaged by the young brigands
most ruthlessly. What would I not have given to be one of
them! Though I never could have been so rude, no, no! I
wouldn't for the wealth of all the world have crushed that
braided hair, and torn it down; and for the precious little
shoe, I wouldn't have plucked it off, God bless my soul! to
save my life. As to measuring her waist in sport, as they
did, bold young brood, I couldn't have done it; I should
have expected my arm to have grown round it for a punishment,
and never come straight again. And yet I should
have dearly liked, I own, to have touched her lips; to have
questioned her, that she might have opened them; to have
looked upon the lashes of her downcast eyes, and never
raised a blush; to have let loose waves of hair, an inch of
which would be a keepsake beyond price: in short, I should
have liked, I do confess, to have had the lightest licence
of a child, and yet to have been man enough to know its
value.

But now a knocking at the door was heard, and such a
rush immediately ensued that she with laughing face and
plundered dress was borne towards it the centre of a flushed
and boisterous group, just in time to greet the father, who
came home attended by a man laden with Christmas toys
and presents. Then the shouting and the struggling, and
the onslaught that was made on the defenceless porter!
The scaling him with chairs for ladders to dive into his
pockets, despoil him of brown-paper parcels, hold on tight
by his cravat, hug him round his neck, pommel his back,
and kick his legs in irrepressible affection! The shouts of
wonder and delight with which the development of every
package was received! The terrible announcement that the
baby had been taken in the act of putting a doll's frying-pan
into his mouth, and was more than suspected of having
swallowed a fictitious turkey, glued on a wooden platter!
The immense relief of finding this a false alarm! The joy,
and gratitude, and ecstasy! They are all indescribable alike.
It is enough that by degrees the children and their emotions
got out of the parlour, and by one stair at a time, up to the
top of the house; where they went to bed, and so subsided.

And now Scrooge looked on more attentively than ever,
when the master of the house, having his daughter leaning
fondly on him, sat down with her and her mother at his
own fireside; and when he thought that such another
creature, quite as graceful and as full of promise, might
have called him father, and been a spring-time in the
haggard winter of his life, his sight grew very dim indeed.

"Belle," said the husband, turning to his wife with a
smile, "I saw an old friend of yours this afternoon."

"Who was it?"

"Guess!"

"How can I? Tut, don't I know?" she added in the
same breath, laughing as he laughed. "Mr. Scrooge."

"Mr. Scrooge it was. I passed his office window; and as
it was not shut up, and he had a candle inside, I could
scarcely help seeing him. His partner lies upon the point
of death, I hear; and there he sat alone. Quite alone in
the world, I do believe."

"Spirit!" said Scrooge in a broken voice, "remove me
from this place."

"I told you these were shadows of the things that have
been," said the Ghost. "That they are what they are, do
not blame me!"

"Remove me!" Scrooge exclaimed, "I cannot bear it!"

He turned upon the Ghost, and seeing that it looked upon
him with a face, in which in some strange way there were
fragments of all the faces it had shown him, wrestled with it.

"Leave me! Take me back. Haunt me no longer!"

In the struggle, if that can be called a struggle in which
the Ghost with no visible resistance on its own part was
undisturbed by any effort of its adversary, Scrooge observed
that its light was burning high and bright; and dimly
connecting that with its influence over him, he seized the
extinguisher-cap, and by a sudden action pressed it down
upon its head.

The Spirit dropped beneath it, so that the extinguisher
covered its whole form; but though Scrooge pressed it down
with all his force, he could not hide the light: which streamed
from under it, in an unbroken flood upon the ground.

He was conscious of being exhausted, and overcome by an
irresistible drowsiness; and, further, of being in his own
bedroom.  He gave the cap a parting squeeze, in which his hand
relaxed; and had barely time to reel to bed, before he sank
into a heavy sleep.


STAVE III:  THE SECOND OF THE THREE SPIRITS

AWAKING in the middle of a prodigiously tough snore, and
sitting up in bed to get his thoughts together, Scrooge had
no occasion to be told that the bell was again upon the
stroke of One. He felt that he was restored to consciousness
in the right nick of time, for the especial purpose of holding
a conference with the second messenger despatched to him
through Jacob Marley's intervention. But finding that he
turned uncomfortably cold when he began to wonder which
of his curtains this new spectre would draw back, he put
them every one aside with his own hands; and lying down
again, established a sharp look-out all round the bed. For
he wished to challenge the Spirit on the moment of its
appearance, and did not wish to be taken by surprise, and
made nervous.

Gentlemen of the free-and-easy sort, who plume themselves
on being acquainted with a move or two, and being usually
equal to the time-of-day, express the wide range of their
capacity for adventure by observing that they are good for
anything from pitch-and-toss to manslaughter; between which
opposite extremes, no doubt, there lies a tolerably wide and
comprehensive range of subjects. Without venturing for
Scrooge quite as hardily as this, I don't mind calling on you
to believe that he was ready for a good broad field of
strange appearances, and that nothing between a baby and
rhinoceros would have astonished him very much.

Now, being prepared for almost anything, he was not by
any means prepared for nothing; and, consequently, when the
Bell struck One, and no shape appeared, he was taken with a
violent fit of trembling. Five minutes, ten minutes, a quarter
of an hour went by, yet nothing came. All this time, he lay
upon his bed, the very core and centre of a blaze of ruddy
light, which streamed upon it when the clock proclaimed the
hour; and which, being only light, was more alarming than
a dozen ghosts, as he was powerless to make out what it
meant, or would be at; and was sometimes apprehensive
that he might be at that very moment an interesting case of
spontaneous combustion, without having the consolation of
knowing it. At last, however, he began to think--as you or
I would have thought at first; for it is always the person not
in the predicament who knows what ought to have been done
in it, and would unquestionably have done it too--at last, I
say, he began to think that the source and secret of this
ghostly light might be in the adjoining room, from whence,
on further tracing it, it seemed to shine. This idea taking
full possession of his mind, he got up softly and shuffled in
his slippers to the door.

The moment Scrooge's hand was on the lock, a strange
voice called him by his name, and bade him enter. He
obeyed.

It was his own room. There was no doubt about that.
But it had undergone a surprising transformation. The walls
and ceiling were so hung with living green, that it looked a
perfect grove; from every part of which, bright gleaming
berries glistened. The crisp leaves of holly, mistletoe, and
ivy reflected back the light, as if so many little mirrors had
been scattered there; and such a mighty blaze went roaring
up the chimney, as that dull petrification of a hearth had
never known in Scrooge's time, or Marley's, or for many and
many a winter season gone. Heaped up on the floor, to form
a kind of throne, were turkeys, geese, game, poultry, brawn,
great joints of meat, sucking-pigs, long wreaths of sausages,
mince-pies, plum-puddings, barrels of oysters, red-hot chestnuts,
cherry-cheeked apples, juicy oranges, luscious pears,
immense twelfth-cakes, and seething bowls of punch, that
made the chamber dim with their delicious steam. In easy
state upon this couch, there sat a jolly Giant, glorious to
see; who bore a glowing torch, in shape not unlike Plenty's
horn, and held it up, high up, to shed its light on Scrooge,
as he came peeping round the door.

"Come in!" exclaimed the Ghost. "Come in! and know
me better, man!"

Scrooge entered timidly, and hung his head before this
Spirit. He was not the dogged Scrooge he had been; and
though the Spirit's eyes were clear and kind, he did not like
to meet them.

"I am the Ghost of Christmas Present," said the Spirit.
"Look upon me!"

Scrooge reverently did so. It was clothed in one simple
green robe, or mantle, bordered with white fur. This garment
hung so loosely on the figure, that its capacious breast was
bare, as if disdaining to be warded or concealed by any
artifice. Its feet, observable beneath the ample folds of the
garment, were also bare; and on its head it wore no other
covering than a holly wreath, set here and there with shining
icicles. Its dark brown curls were long and free; free as its
genial face, its sparkling eye, its open hand, its cheery voice,
its unconstrained demeanour, and its joyful air. Girded
round its middle was an antique scabbard; but no sword
was in it, and the ancient sheath was eaten up with rust.

"You have never seen the like of me before!" exclaimed
the Spirit.

"Never," Scrooge made answer to it.

"Have never walked forth with the younger members of
my family; meaning (for I am very young) my elder brothers
born in these later years?" pursued the Phantom.

"I don't think I have," said Scrooge. "I am afraid I have
not. Have you had many brothers, Spirit?"

"More than eighteen hundred," said the Ghost.

"A tremendous family to provide for!" muttered Scrooge.

The Ghost of Christmas Present rose.

"Spirit," said Scrooge submissively, "conduct me where
you will. I went forth last night on compulsion, and I learnt
a lesson which is working now. To-night, if you have aught
to teach me, let me profit by it."

"Touch my robe!"

Scrooge did as he was told, and held it fast.

Holly, mistletoe, red berries, ivy, turkeys, geese, game,
poultry, brawn, meat, pigs, sausages, oysters, pies, puddings,
fruit, and punch, all vanished instantly. So did the room,
the fire, the ruddy glow, the hour of night, and they stood
in the city streets on Christmas morning, where (for the
weather was severe) the people made a rough, but brisk and
not unpleasant kind of music, in scraping the snow from the
pavement in front of their dwellings, and from the tops of
their houses, whence it was mad delight to the boys to see
it come plumping down into the road below, and splitting
into artificial little snow-storms.

The house fronts looked black enough, and the windows
blacker, contrasting with the smooth white sheet of snow
upon the roofs, and with the dirtier snow upon the ground;
which last deposit had been ploughed up in deep furrows by
the heavy wheels of carts and waggons; furrows that crossed
and re-crossed each other hundreds of times where the great
streets branched off; and made intricate channels, hard to trace
in the thick yellow mud and icy water. The sky was gloomy,
and the shortest streets were choked up with a dingy mist,
half thawed, half frozen, whose heavier particles descended
in a shower of sooty atoms, as if all the chimneys in Great
Britain had, by one consent, caught fire, and were blazing away
to their dear hearts' content. There was nothing very cheerful
in the climate or the town, and yet was there an air of
cheerfulness abroad that the clearest summer air and brightest
summer sun might have endeavoured to diffuse in vain.

For, the people who were shovelling away on the housetops
were jovial and full of glee; calling out to one another
from the parapets, and now and then exchanging a facetious
snowball--better-natured missile far than many a wordy jest--
laughing heartily if it went right and not less heartily if it
went wrong. The poulterers' shops were still half open, and the
fruiterers' were radiant in their glory. There were great, round,
pot-bellied baskets of chestnuts, shaped like the waistcoats
of jolly old gentlemen, lolling at the doors, and tumbling out
into the street in their apoplectic opulence. There were
ruddy, brown-faced, broad-girthed Spanish Onions, shining in
the fatness of their growth like Spanish Friars, and winking
from their shelves in wanton slyness at the girls as they went
by, and glanced demurely at the hung-up mistletoe. There were
pears and apples, clustered high in blooming pyramids; there
were bunches of grapes, made, in the shopkeepers' benevolence
to dangle from conspicuous hooks, that people's mouths might
water gratis as they passed; there were piles of filberts, mossy
and brown, recalling, in their fragrance, ancient walks among
the woods, and pleasant shufflings ankle deep through withered
leaves; there were Norfolk Biffins, squat and swarthy, setting
off the yellow of the oranges and lemons, and, in the great
compactness of their juicy persons, urgently entreating and
beseeching to be carried home in paper bags and eaten after
dinner. The very gold and silver fish, set forth among
these choice fruits in a bowl, though members of a dull and
stagnant-blooded race, appeared to know that there was
something going on; and, to a fish, went gasping round and
round their little world in slow and passionless excitement.

The Grocers'! oh, the Grocers'! nearly closed, with perhaps
two shutters down, or one; but through those gaps such
glimpses! It was not alone that the scales descending on the
counter made a merry sound, or that the twine and roller
parted company so briskly, or that the canisters were rattled
up and down like juggling tricks, or even that the blended
scents of tea and coffee were so grateful to the nose, or even
that the raisins were so plentiful and rare, the almonds so
extremely white, the sticks of cinnamon so long and straight,
the other spices so delicious, the candied fruits so caked and
spotted with molten sugar as to make the coldest lookers-on
feel faint and subsequently bilious. Nor was it that the figs
were moist and pulpy, or that the French plums blushed in
modest tartness from their highly-decorated boxes, or that
everything was good to eat and in its Christmas dress; but
the customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful
promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other
at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left
their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to
fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in
the best humour possible; while the Grocer and his people
were so frank and fresh that the polished hearts with which
they fastened their aprons behind might have been their own,
worn outside for general inspection, and for Christmas daws
to peck at if they chose.

But soon the steeples called good people all, to church and
chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in
their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. And at the
same time there emerged from scores of bye-streets, lanes, and
nameless turnings, innumerable people, carrying their dinners
to the bakers' shops. The sight of these poor revellers
appeared to interest the Spirit very much, for he stood with
Scrooge beside him in a baker's doorway, and taking off the
covers as their bearers passed, sprinkled incense on their
dinners from his torch. And it was a very uncommon kind
of torch, for once or twice when there were angry words
between some dinner-carriers who had jostled each other, he
shed a few drops of water on them from it, and their good
humour was restored directly. For they said, it was a shame
to quarrel upon Christmas Day. And so it was! God love
it, so it was!

In time the bells ceased, and the bakers were shut up; and
yet there was a genial shadowing forth of all these dinners
and the progress of their cooking, in the thawed blotch of
wet above each baker's oven; where the pavement smoked as
if its stones were cooking too.

"Is there a peculiar flavour in what you sprinkle from
your torch?" asked Scrooge.

"There is. My own."

"Would it apply to any kind of dinner on this day?"
asked Scrooge.

"To any kindly given. To a poor one most."

"Why to a poor one most?" asked Scrooge.

"Because it needs it most."

"Spirit," said Scrooge, after a moment's thought, "I wonder
you, of all the beings in the many worlds about us, should
desire to cramp these people's opportunities of innocent
enjoyment."

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You would deprive them of their means of dining every
seventh day, often the only day on which they can be said
to dine at all," said Scrooge. "Wouldn't you?"

"I!" cried the Spirit.

"You seek to close these places on the Seventh Day?" said
Scrooge. "And it comes to the same thing."

"I seek!" exclaimed the Spirit.

"Forgive me if I am wrong. It has been done in your
name, or at least in that of your family," said Scrooge.

"There are some upon this earth of yours," returned the Spirit,
"who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion,
pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness
in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and
kin, as if they had never lived. Remember that, and charge
their doings on themselves, not us."

Scrooge promised that he would; and they went on,
invisible, as they had been before, into the suburbs of the
town. It was a remarkable quality of the Ghost (which
Scrooge had observed at the baker's), that notwithstanding
his gigantic size, he could accommodate himself to any place
with ease; and that he stood beneath a low roof quite as
gracefully and like a supernatural creature, as it was possible
he could have done in any lofty hall.

And perhaps it was the pleasure the good Spirit had in
showing off this power of his, or else it was his own kind,
generous, hearty nature, and his sympathy with all poor
men, that led him straight to Scrooge's clerk's; for there he
went, and took Scrooge with him, holding to his robe; and
on the threshold of the door the Spirit smiled, and stopped
to bless Bob Cratchit's dwelling with the sprinkling of his
torch. Think of that! Bob had but fifteen "Bob" a-week
himself; he pocketed on Saturdays but fifteen copies of his
Christian name; and yet the Ghost of Christmas Present
blessed his four-roomed house!

Then up rose Mrs. Cratchit, Cratchit's wife, dressed out
but poorly in a twice-turned gown, but brave in ribbons,
which are cheap and make a goodly show for sixpence; and
she laid the cloth, assisted by Belinda Cratchit, second of
her daughters, also brave in ribbons; while Master Peter
Cratchit plunged a fork into the saucepan of potatoes, and
getting the corners of his monstrous shirt collar (Bob's private
property, conferred upon his son and heir in honour of the
day) into his mouth, rejoiced to find himself so gallantly
attired, and yearned to show his linen in the fashionable Parks.
And now two smaller Cratchits, boy and girl, came tearing
in, screaming that outside the baker's they had smelt the
goose, and known it for their own; and basking in luxurious
thoughts of sage and onion, these young Cratchits danced
about the table, and exalted Master Peter Cratchit to the
skies, while he (not proud, although his collars nearly choked
him) blew the fire, until the slow potatoes bubbling up,
knocked loudly at the saucepan-lid to be let out and
peeled.

"What has ever got your precious father then?" said Mrs.
Cratchit. "And your brother, Tiny Tim! And Martha
warn't as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour?"

"Here's Martha, mother!" said a girl, appearing as she
spoke.

"Here's Martha, mother!" cried the two young Cratchits.
"Hurrah! There's such a goose, Martha!"

"Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!"
said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off
her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal.

"We'd a deal of work to finish up last night," replied the
girl, "and had to clear away this morning, mother!"

"Well! Never mind so long as you are come," said Mrs.
Cratchit. "Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have
a warm, Lord bless ye!"

"No, no! There's father coming," cried the two young
Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. "Hide, Martha,
hide!"

So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father,
with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe,
hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned
up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his
shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and
had his limbs supported by an iron frame!

"Why, where's our Martha?" cried Bob Cratchit, looking
round.

"Not coming," said Mrs. Cratchit.

"Not coming!" said Bob, with a sudden declension in his
high spirits; for he had been Tim's blood horse all the way
from church, and had come home rampant. "Not coming
upon Christmas Day!"

Martha didn't like to see him disappointed, if it were only
in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet
door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits
hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house,
that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper.

"And how did little Tim behave?" asked Mrs. Cratchit,
when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had
hugged his daughter to his heart's content.

"As good as gold," said Bob, "and better. Somehow he
gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the
strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home,
that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he
was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember
upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind
men see."

Bob's voice was tremulous when he told them this, and
trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing
strong and hearty.

His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back
came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by
his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while
Bob, turning up his cuffs--as if, poor fellow, they were
capable of being made more shabby--compounded some hot
mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round
and round and put it on the hob to simmer; Master Peter,
and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the
goose, with which they soon returned in high procession.

Such a bustle ensued that you might have thought a goose
the rarest of all birds; a feathered phenomenon, to which a
black swan was a matter of course--and in truth it was
something very like it in that house. Mrs. Cratchit made
the gravy (ready beforehand in a little saucepan) hissing hot;
Master Peter mashed the potatoes with incredible vigour;
Miss Belinda sweetened up the apple-sauce; Martha dusted
the hot plates; Bob took Tiny Tim beside him in a tiny
corner at the table; the two young Cratchits set chairs for
everybody, not forgetting themselves, and mounting guard
upon their posts, crammed spoons into their mouths, lest
they should shriek for goose before their turn came to be
helped. At last the dishes were set on, and grace was
said. It was succeeded by a breathless pause, as Mrs.
Cratchit, looking slowly all along the carving-knife, prepared
to plunge it in the breast; but when she did, and when the
long expected gush of stuffing issued forth, one murmur of
delight arose all round the board, and even Tiny Tim,
excited by the two young Cratchits, beat on the table with
the handle of his knife, and feebly cried Hurrah!

There never was such a goose. Bob said he didn't believe
there ever was such a goose cooked. Its tenderness and
flavour, size and cheapness, were the themes of universal
admiration. Eked out by apple-sauce and mashed potatoes,
it was a sufficient dinner for the whole family; indeed, as
Mrs. Cratchit said with great delight (surveying one small
atom of a bone upon the dish), they hadn't ate it all at
last! Yet every one had had enough, and the youngest
Cratchits in particular, were steeped in sage and onion to
the eyebrows! But now, the plates being changed by Miss
Belinda, Mrs. Cratchit left the room alone--too nervous to
bear witnesses--to take the pudding up and bring it in.

Suppose it should not be done enough! Suppose it should
break in turning out! Suppose somebody should have got
over the wall of the back-yard, and stolen it, while they
were merry with the goose--a supposition at which the two
young Cratchits became livid! All sorts of horrors were
supposed.

Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of
the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the
cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastrycook's next
door to each other, with a laundress's next door to that!
That was the pudding! In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit
entered--flushed, but smiling proudly--with the pudding,
like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half
of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with
Christmas holly stuck into the top.

Oh, a wonderful pudding! Bob Cratchit said, and calmly
too, that he regarded it as the greatest success achieved by
Mrs. Cratchit since their marriage. Mrs. Cratchit said that
now the weight was off her mind, she would confess she had
had her doubts about the quantity of flour. Everybody had
something to say about it, but nobody said or thought it
was at all a small pudding for a large family. It would have
been flat heresy to do so. Any Cratchit would have blushed
to hint at such a thing.

At last the dinner was all done, the cloth was cleared, the
hearth swept, and the fire made up. The compound in the
jug being tasted, and considered perfect, apples and oranges
were put upon the table, and a shovel-full of chestnuts on the
fire. Then all the Cratchit family drew round the hearth, in
what Bob Cratchit called a circle, meaning half a one; and
at Bob Cratchit's elbow stood the family display of glass.
Two tumblers, and a custard-cup without a handle.

These held the hot stuff from the jug, however, as well as
golden goblets would have done; and Bob served it out with
beaming looks, while the chestnuts on the fire sputtered and
cracked noisily. Then Bob proposed:

"A Merry Christmas to us all, my dears. God bless us!"

Which all the family re-echoed.

"God bless us every one!" said Tiny Tim, the last of all.

He sat very close to his father's side upon his little
stool. Bob held his withered little hand in his, as if he
loved the child, and wished to keep him by his side, and
dreaded that he might be taken from him.

"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt
before, "tell me if Tiny Tim will live."

"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor
chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully
preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future,
the child will die."

"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say he
will be spared."

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none
other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here.
What then? If he be like to die, he had better do it, and
decrease the surplus population."

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by
the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief.

"Man," said the Ghost, "if man you be in heart, not
adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered
What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what
men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the
sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live
than millions like this poor man's child. Oh God! to hear
the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life
among his hungry brothers in the dust!"

Scrooge bent before the Ghost's rebuke, and trembling cast
his eyes upon the ground. But he raised them speedily, on
hearing his own name.

"Mr. Scrooge!" said Bob; "I'll give you Mr. Scrooge, the
Founder of the Feast!"

"The Founder of the Feast indeed!" cried Mrs. Cratchit,
reddening. "I wish I had him here. I'd give him a piece
of my mind to feast upon, and I hope he'd have a good
appetite for it."

"My dear," said Bob, "the children! Christmas Day."

"It should be Christmas Day, I am sure," said she, "on
which one drinks the health of such an odious, stingy, hard,
unfeeling man as Mr. Scrooge. You know he is, Robert!
Nobody knows it better than you do, poor fellow!"

"My dear," was Bob's mild answer, "Christmas Day."

"I'll drink his health for your sake and the Day's," said
Mrs. Cratchit, "not for his. Long life to him! A merry
Christmas and a happy new year! He'll be very merry and
very happy, I have no doubt!"

The children drank the toast after her. It was the first of
their proceedings which had no heartiness. Tiny Tim drank
it last of all, but he didn't care twopence for it. Scrooge
was the Ogre of the family. The mention of his name cast
a dark shadow on the party, which was not dispelled for full
five minutes.

After it had passed away, they were ten times merrier than
before, from the mere relief of Scrooge the Baleful being done
with. Bob Cratchit told them how he had a situation in his
eye for Master Peter, which would bring in, if obtained, full
five-and-sixpence weekly. The two young Cratchits laughed
tremendously at the idea of Peter's being a man of business;
and Peter himself looked thoughtfully at the fire from
between his collars, as if he were deliberating what particular
investments he should favour when he came into the receipt
of that bewildering income. Martha, who was a poor
apprentice at a milliner's, then told them what kind of work
she had to do, and how many hours she worked at a stretch,
and how she meant to lie abed to-morrow morning for a
good long rest; to-morrow being a holiday she passed at
home. Also how she had seen a countess and a lord some
days before, and how the lord "was much about as tall as
Peter;" at which Peter pulled up his collars so high that you
couldn't have seen his head if you had been there. All this
time the chestnuts and the jug went round and round; and
by-and-bye they had a song, about a lost child travelling in
the snow, from Tiny Tim, who had a plaintive little voice,
and sang it very well indeed.

There was nothing of high mark in this. They were not
a handsome family; they were not well dressed; their shoes
were far from being water-proof; their clothes were scanty;
and Peter might have known, and very likely did, the inside
of a pawnbroker's. But, they were happy, grateful, pleased
with one another, and contented with the time; and when
they faded, and looked happier yet in the bright sprinklings
of the Spirit's torch at parting, Scrooge had his eye upon
them, and especially on Tiny Tim, until the last.

By this time it was getting dark, and snowing pretty
heavily; and as Scrooge and the Spirit went along the streets,
the brightness of the roaring fires in kitchens, parlours, and
all sorts of rooms, was wonderful. Here, the flickering of
the blaze showed preparations for a cosy dinner, with hot
plates baking through and through before the fire, and deep
red curtains, ready to be drawn to shut out cold and darkness.
There all the children of the house were running out
into the snow to meet their married sisters, brothers, cousins,
uncles, aunts, and be the first to greet them. Here, again,
were shadows on the window-blind of guests assembling; and
there a group of handsome girls, all hooded and fur-booted,
and all chattering at once, tripped lightly off to some near
neighbour's house; where, woe upon the single man who saw
them enter--artful witches, well they knew it--in a glow!

But, if you had judged from the numbers of people on
their way to friendly gatherings, you might have thought
that no one was at home to give them welcome when they
got there, instead of every house expecting company, and
piling up its fires half-chimney high. Blessings on it, how
the Ghost exulted! How it bared its breadth of breast, and
opened its capacious palm, and floated on, outpouring, with
a generous hand, its bright and harmless mirth on everything
within its reach! The very lamplighter, who ran on before,
dotting the dusky street with specks of light, and who was
dressed to spend the evening somewhere, laughed out loudly
as the Spirit passed, though little kenned the lamplighter
that he had any company but Christmas!

And now, without a word of warning from the Ghost, they
stood upon a bleak and desert moor, where monstrous masses
of rude stone were cast about, as though it were the burial-place
of giants; and water spread itself wheresoever it listed,
or would have done so, but for the frost that held it prisoner;
and nothing grew but moss and furze, and coarse rank grass.
Down in the west the setting sun had left a streak of fiery
red, which glared upon the desolation for an instant, like a
sullen eye, and frowning lower, lower, lower yet, was lost in
the thick gloom of darkest night.

"What place is this?" asked Scrooge.

"A place where Miners live, who labour in the bowels of
the earth," returned the Spirit. "But they know me. See!"

A light shone from the window of a hut, and swiftly they
advanced towards it. Passing through the wall of mud and
stone, they found a cheerful company assembled round a
glowing fire. An old, old man and woman, with their
children and their children's children, and another generation
beyond that, all decked out gaily in their holiday attire.
The old man, in a voice that seldom rose above the howling
of the wind upon the barren waste, was singing them a
Christmas song--it had been a very old song when he was a
boy--and from time to time they all joined in the chorus.
So surely as they raised their voices, the old man got quite
blithe and loud; and so surely as they stopped, his vigour
sank again.

The Spirit did not tarry here, but bade Scrooge hold his
robe, and passing on above the moor, sped--whither? Not
to sea? To sea. To Scrooge's horror, looking back, he saw
the last of the land, a frightful range of rocks, behind them;
and his ears were deafened by the thundering of water, as it
rolled and roared, and raged among the dreadful caverns it
had worn, and fiercely tried to undermine the earth.

Built upon a dismal reef of sunken rocks, some league
or so from shore, on which the waters chafed and dashed,
the wild year through, there stood a solitary lighthouse.
Great heaps of sea-weed clung to its base, and storm-birds
--born of the wind one might suppose, as sea-weed of the
water--rose and fell about it, like the waves they skimmed.

But even here, two men who watched the light had made
a fire, that through the loophole in the thick stone wall shed
out a ray of brightness on the awful sea. Joining their
horny hands over the rough table at which they sat, they
wished each other Merry Christmas in their can of grog; and
one of them: the elder, too, with his face all damaged and
scarred with hard weather, as the figure-head of an old ship
might be: struck up a sturdy song that was like a Gale in
itself.

Again the Ghost sped on, above the black and heaving sea
--on, on--until, being far away, as he told Scrooge, from any
shore, they lighted on a ship. They stood beside the helmsman
at the wheel, the look-out in the bow, the officers who
had the watch; dark, ghostly figures in their several stations;
but every man among them hummed a Christmas tune, or
had a Christmas thought, or spoke below his breath to his
companion of some bygone Christmas Day, with homeward
hopes belonging to it. And every man on board, waking or
sleeping, good or bad, had had a kinder word for another
on that day than on any day in the year; and had shared
to some extent in its festivities; and had remembered those
he cared for at a distance, and had known that they delighted
to remember him.

It was a great surprise to Scrooge, while listening to the
moaning of the wind, and thinking what a solemn thing it
was to move on through the lonely darkness over an unknown
abyss, whose depths were secrets as profound as Death: it
was a great surprise to Scrooge, while thus engaged, to hear
a hearty laugh. It was a much greater surprise to Scrooge
to recognise it as his own nephew's and to find himself in a
bright, dry, gleaming room, with the Spirit standing smiling
by his side, and looking at that same nephew with approving
affability!

"Ha, ha!" laughed Scrooge's nephew. "Ha, ha, ha!"

If you should happen, by any unlikely chance, to know a
man more blest in a laugh than Scrooge's nephew, all I can
say is, I should like to know him too. Introduce him to me,
and I'll cultivate his acquaintance.

It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things, that
while there is infection in disease and sorrow, there is nothing
in the world so irresistibly contagious as laughter and
good-humour. When Scrooge's nephew laughed in this way: holding
his sides, rolling his head, and twisting his face into the
most extravagant contortions: Scrooge's niece, by marriage,
laughed as heartily as he. And their assembled friends being
not a bit behindhand, roared out lustily.

"Ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha, ha!"

"He said that Christmas was a humbug, as I live!" cried
Scrooge's nephew. "He believed it too!"

"More shame for him, Fred!" said Scrooge's niece,
indignantly. Bless those women; they never do anything by
halves. They are always in earnest.

She was very pretty: exceedingly pretty. With a dimpled,
surprised-looking, capital face; a ripe little mouth, that
seemed made to be kissed--as no doubt it was; all kinds of
good little dots about her chin, that melted into one another
when she laughed; and the sunniest pair of eyes you ever
saw in any little creature's head. Altogether she was what
you would have called provoking, you know; but satisfactory, too.
Oh, perfectly satisfactory.

"He's a comical old fellow," said Scrooge's nephew, "that's
the truth: and not so pleasant as he might be. However,
his offences carry their own punishment, and I have nothing
to say against him."

"I'm sure he is very rich, Fred," hinted Scrooge's niece.
"At least you always tell me so."

"What of that, my dear!" said Scrooge's nephew. "His
wealth is of no use to him. He don't do any good with it.
He don't make himself comfortable with it. He hasn't the
satisfaction of thinking--ha, ha, ha!--that he is ever going
to benefit US with it."

"I have no patience with him," observed Scrooge's niece.
Scrooge's niece's sisters, and all the other ladies, expressed
the same opinion.

"Oh, I have!" said Scrooge's nephew. "I am sorry for
him; I couldn't be angry with him if I tried. Who suffers
by his ill whims! Himself, always. Here, he takes it into
his head to dislike us, and he won't come and dine with us.
What's the consequence? He don't lose much of a dinner."

"Indeed, I think he loses a very good dinner," interrupted
Scrooge's niece. Everybody else said the same, and they
must be allowed to have been competent judges, because
they had just had dinner; and, with the dessert upon the
table, were clustered round the fire, by lamplight.

"Well! I'm very glad to hear it," said Scrooge's nephew,
"because I haven't great faith in these young housekeepers.
What do you say, Topper?"

Topper had clearly got his eye upon one of Scrooge's niece's
sisters, for he answered that a bachelor was a wretched outcast,
who had no right to express an opinion on the subject.
Whereat Scrooge's niece's sister--the plump one with the lace
tucker: not the one with the roses--blushed.

"Do go on, Fred," said Scrooge's niece, clapping her hands.
"He never finishes what he begins to say! He is such a
ridiculous fellow!"

Scrooge's nephew revelled in another laugh, and as it was
impossible to keep the infection off; though the plump sister
tried hard to do it with aromatic vinegar; his example was
unanimously followed.

"I was only going to say," said Scrooge's nephew, "that
the consequence of his taking a dislike to us, and not making
merry with us, is, as I think, that he loses some pleasant
moments, which could do him no harm. I am sure he loses
pleasanter companions than he can find in his own thoughts,
either in his mouldy old office, or his dusty chambers. I
mean to give him the same chance every year, whether he
likes it or not, for I pity him. He may rail at Christmas
till he dies, but he can't help thinking better of it--I defy
him--if he finds me going there, in good temper, year after
year, and saying Uncle Scrooge, how are you? If it only
puts him in the vein to leave his poor clerk fifty pounds,
that's something; and I think I shook him yesterday."

It was their turn to laugh now at the notion of his shaking
Scrooge. But being thoroughly good-natured, and not much
caring what they laughed at, so that they laughed at any
rate, he encouraged them in their merriment, and passed the
bottle joyously.

After tea, they had some music. For they were a musical
family, and knew what they were about, when they sung a
Glee or Catch, I can assure you: especially Topper, who
could growl away in the bass like a good one, and never
swell the large veins in his forehead, or get red in the face
over it. Scrooge's niece played well upon the harp; and
played among other tunes a simple little air (a mere nothing:
you might learn to whistle it in two minutes), which had
been familiar to the child who fetched Scrooge from the
boarding-school, as he had been reminded by the Ghost of
Christmas Past. When this strain of music sounded, all the
things that Ghost had shown him, came upon his mind; he
softened more and more; and thought that if he could have
listened to it often, years ago, he might have cultivated the
kindnesses of life for his own happiness with his own hands,
without resorting to the sexton's spade that buried Jacob
Marley.

But they didn't devote the whole evening to music. After
a while they played at forfeits; for it is good to be children
sometimes, and never better than at Christmas, when its
mighty Founder was a child himself. Stop! There was first
a game at blind-man's buff. Of course there was. And I
no more believe Topper was really blind than I believe he
had eyes in his boots. My opinion is, that it was a done
thing between him and Scrooge's nephew; and that the
Ghost of Christmas Present knew it. The way he went after
that plump sister in the lace tucker, was an outrage on the
credulity of human nature. Knocking down the fire-irons,
tumbling over the chairs, bumping against the piano,
smothering himself among the curtains, wherever she went,
there went he! He always knew where the plump sister was.
He wouldn't catch anybody else. If you had fallen up
against him (as some of them did), on purpose, he would
have made a feint of endeavouring to seize you, which would
have been an affront to your understanding, and would instantly
have sidled off in the direction of the plump sister.
She often cried out that it wasn't fair; and it really was not.
But when at last, he caught her; when, in spite of all her
silken rustlings, and her rapid flutterings past him, he got
her into a corner whence there was no escape; then his
conduct was the most execrable. For his pretending not to
know her; his pretending that it was necessary to touch her
head-dress, and further to assure himself of her identity by
pressing a certain ring upon her finger, and a certain chain
about her neck; was vile, monstrous! No doubt she told
him her opinion of it, when, another blind-man being in
office, they were so very confidential together, behind the
curtains.

Scrooge's niece was not one of the blind-man's buff party,
but was made comfortable with a large chair and a footstool,
in a snug corner, where the Ghost and Scrooge were close
behind her. But she joined in the forfeits, and loved her
love to admiration with all the letters of the alphabet.
Likewise at the game of How, When, and Where, she was
very great, and to the secret joy of Scrooge's nephew, beat
her sisters hollow: though they were sharp girls too, as Topper
could have told you. There might have been twenty people there,
young and old, but they all played, and so did Scrooge; for
wholly forgetting in the interest he had in what was going on, that
his voice made no sound in their ears, he sometimes came out with
his guess quite loud, and very often guessed quite right, too;
for the sharpest needle, best Whitechapel, warranted not to cut
in the eye, was not sharper than Scrooge; blunt as he took it in
his head to be.

The Ghost was greatly pleased to find him in this mood,
and looked upon him with such favour, that he begged like
a boy to be allowed to stay until the guests departed. But
this the Spirit said could not be done.

"Here is a new game," said Scrooge. "One half hour,
Spirit, only one!"

It was a Game called Yes and No, where Scrooge's nephew
had to think of something, and the rest must find out what;
he only answering to their questions yes or no, as the case
was. The brisk fire of questioning to which he was exposed,
elicited from him that he was thinking of an animal, a live
animal, rather a disagreeable animal, a savage animal, an
animal that growled and grunted sometimes, and talked sometimes,
and lived in London, and walked about the streets,
and wasn't made a show of, and wasn't led by anybody, and
didn't live in a menagerie, and was never killed in a market,
and was not a horse, or an ass, or a cow, or a bull, or a
tiger, or a dog, or a pig, or a cat, or a bear. At every fresh
question that was put to him, this nephew burst into a
fresh roar of laughter; and was so inexpressibly tickled, that
he was obliged to get up off the sofa and stamp. At last
the plump sister, falling into a similar state, cried out:

"I have found it out! I know what it is, Fred! I know
what it is!"

"What is it?" cried Fred.

"It's your Uncle Scro-o-o-o-oge!"

Which it certainly was. Admiration was the universal
sentiment, though some objected that the reply to "Is it a
bear?" ought to have been "Yes;" inasmuch as an answer
in the negative was sufficient to have diverted their thoughts
from Mr. Scrooge, supposing they had ever had any tendency
that way.

"He has given us plenty of merriment, I am sure," said
Fred, "and it would be ungrateful not to drink his health.
Here is a glass of mulled wine ready to our hand at the
moment; and I say, 'Uncle Scrooge!'"

"Well! Uncle Scrooge!" they cried.

"A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to the old
man, whatever he is!" said Scrooge's nephew. "He wouldn't
take it from me, but may he have it, nevertheless. Uncle
Scrooge!"

Uncle Scrooge had imperceptibly become so gay and light
of heart, that he would have pledged the unconscious
company in return, and thanked them in an inaudible speech,
if the Ghost had given him time. But the whole scene
passed off in the breath of the last word spoken by his
nephew; and he and the Spirit were again upon their travels.

Much they saw, and far they went, and many homes they
visited, but always with a happy end. The Spirit stood
beside sick beds, and they were cheerful; on foreign lands,
and they were close at home; by struggling men, and they
were patient in their greater hope; by poverty, and it was
rich. In almshouse, hospital, and jail, in misery's every
refuge, where vain man in his little brief authority had not
made fast the door, and barred the Spirit out, he left his
blessing, and taught Scrooge his precepts.

It was a long night, if it were only a night; but Scrooge
had his doubts of this, because the Christmas Holidays appeared
to be condensed into the space of time they passed
together. It was strange, too, that while Scrooge remained
unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly
older. Scrooge had observed this change, but never spoke of
it, until they left a children's Twelfth Night party, when,
looking at the Spirit as they stood together in an open place,
he noticed that its hair was grey.

"Are spirits' lives so short?" asked Scrooge.

"My life upon this globe, is very brief," replied the Ghost.
"It ends to-night."

"To-night!" cried Scrooge.

"To-night at midnight. Hark! The time is drawing
near."

The chimes were ringing the three quarters past eleven at
that moment.

"Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask," said
Scrooge, looking intently at the Spirit's robe, "but I see
something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding
from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?"

"It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it," was
the Spirit's sorrowful reply. "Look here."

From the foldings of its robe, it brought two children;
wretched, abject, frightful, hideous, miserable. They knelt
down at its feet, and clung upon the outside of its garment.

"Oh, Man! look here. Look, look, down here!" exclaimed
the Ghost.

They were a boy and girl. Yellow, meagre, ragged, scowling,
wolfish; but prostrate, too, in their humility. Where
graceful youth should have filled their features out, and
touched them with its freshest tints, a stale and shrivelled
hand, like that of age, had pinched, and twisted them, and
pulled them into shreds. Where angels might have sat
enthroned, devils lurked, and glared out menacing. No
change, no degradation, no perversion of humanity, in any
grade, through all the mysteries of wonderful creation, has
monsters half so horrible and dread.

Scrooge started back, appalled. Having them shown to
him in this way, he tried to say they were fine children, but
the words choked themselves, rather than be parties to a lie
of such enormous magnitude.

"Spirit! are they yours?" Scrooge could say no more.

"They are Man's," said the Spirit, looking down upon
them. "And they cling to me, appealing from their fathers.
This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both,
and all of their degree, but most of all beware this boy, for
on his brow I see that written which is Doom, unless the
writing be erased. Deny it!" cried the Spirit, stretching out
its hand towards the city. "Slander those who tell it ye!
Admit it for your factious purposes, and make it worse.
And bide the end!"

"Have they no refuge or resource?" cried Scrooge.

"Are there no prisons?" said the Spirit, turning on him
for the last time with his own words. "Are there no workhouses?"

The bell struck twelve.

Scrooge looked about him for the Ghost, and saw it not.
As the last stroke ceased to vibrate, he remembered the
prediction of old Jacob Marley, and lifting up his eyes,
beheld a solemn Phantom, draped and hooded, coming, like
a mist along the ground, towards him.


STAVE IV:  THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS

THE Phantom slowly, gravely, silently, approached. When
it came near him, Scrooge bent down upon his knee; for in
the very air through which this Spirit moved it seemed to
scatter gloom and mystery.

It was shrouded in a deep black garment, which concealed
its head, its face, its form, and left nothing of it visible
save one outstretched hand. But for this it would have been
difficult to detach its figure from the night, and separate it
from the darkness by which it was surrounded.

He felt that it was tall and stately when it came beside
him, and that its mysterious presence filled him with a
solemn dread. He knew no more, for the Spirit neither
spoke nor moved.

"I am in the presence of the Ghost of Christmas Yet To
Come?" said Scrooge.

The Spirit answered not, but pointed onward with its
hand.

"You are about to show me shadows of the things that
have not happened, but will happen in the time before us,"
Scrooge pursued. "Is that so, Spirit?"

The upper portion of the garment was contracted for an
instant in its folds, as if the Spirit had inclined its head.
That was the only answer he received.

Although well used to ghostly company by this time,
Scrooge feared the silent shape so much that his legs trembled
beneath him, and he found that he could hardly stand when
he prepared to follow it. The Spirit paused a moment, as
observing his condition, and giving him time to recover.

But Scrooge was all the worse for this. It thrilled him
with a vague uncertain horror, to know that behind the
dusky shroud, there were ghostly eyes intently fixed upon
him, while he, though he stretched his own to the utmost,
could see nothing but a spectral hand and one great heap
of black.

"Ghost of the Future!" he exclaimed, "I fear you more
than any spectre I have seen. But as I know your purpose
is to do me good, and as I hope to live to be another
man from what I was, I am prepared to bear you company,
and do it with a thankful heart. Will you not speak
to me?"

It gave him no reply. The hand was pointed straight
before them.

"Lead on!" said Scrooge. "Lead on! The night is
waning fast, and it is precious time to me, I know. Lead
on, Spirit!"

The Phantom moved away as it had come towards him.
Scrooge followed in the shadow of its dress, which bore him
up, he thought, and carried him along.

They scarcely seemed to enter the city; for the city rather
seemed to spring up about them, and encompass them of its
own act. But there they were, in the heart of it; on
'Change, amongst the merchants; who hurried up and down,
and chinked the money in their pockets, and conversed in
groups, and looked at their watches, and trifled thoughtfully
with their great gold seals; and so forth, as Scrooge had
seen them often.

The Spirit stopped beside one little knot of business men.
Observing that the hand was pointed to them, Scrooge
advanced to listen to their talk.

"No," said a great fat man with a monstrous chin, "I
don't know much about it, either way. I only know he's
dead."

"When did he die?" inquired another.

"Last night, I believe."

"Why, what was the matter with him?" asked a third,
taking a vast quantity of snuff out of a very large snuff-box.
"I thought he'd never die."

"God knows," said the first, with a yawn.

"What has he done with his money?" asked a red-faced
gentleman with a pendulous excrescence on the end of his
nose, that shook like the gills of a turkey-cock.

"I haven't heard," said the man with the large chin,
yawning again. "Left it to his company, perhaps. He hasn't
left it to me. That's all I know."

This pleasantry was received with a general laugh.

"It's likely to be a very cheap funeral," said the same
speaker; "for upon my life I don't know of anybody to go
to it. Suppose we make up a party and volunteer?"

"I don't mind going if a lunch is provided," observed the
gentleman with the excrescence on his nose. "But I must
be fed, if I make one."

Another laugh.

"Well, I am the most disinterested among you, after all,"
said the first speaker, "for I never wear black gloves, and I
never eat lunch. But I'll offer to go, if anybody else will.
When I come to think of it, I'm not at all sure that I wasn't
his most particular friend; for we used to stop and speak
whenever we met. Bye, bye!"

Speakers and listeners strolled away, and mixed with
other groups. Scrooge knew the men, and looked towards the
Spirit for an explanation.

The Phantom glided on into a street. Its finger pointed
to two persons meeting. Scrooge listened again, thinking
that the explanation might lie here.

He knew these men, also, perfectly. They were men of business:
very wealthy, and of great importance. He had made a point
always of standing well in their esteem: in a business point
of view, that is; strictly in a business point of view.

"How are you?" said one.

"How are you?" returned the other.

"Well!" said the first. "Old Scratch has got his own at
last, hey?"

"So I am told," returned the second. "Cold, isn't it?"

"Seasonable for Christmas time. You're not a skater, I
suppose?"

"No. No. Something else to think of. Good morning!"

Not another word. That was their meeting, their
conversation, and their parting.

Scrooge was at first inclined to be surprised that the
Spirit should attach importance to conversations apparently so
trivial; but feeling assured that they must have some hidden
purpose, he set himself to consider what it was likely to be.
They could scarcely be supposed to have any bearing on the
death of Jacob, his old partner, for that was Past, and this
Ghost's province was the Future. Nor could he think of any
one immediately connected with himself, to whom he could
apply them. But nothing doubting that to whomsoever they
applied they had some latent moral for his own improvement,
he resolved to treasure up every word he heard,
and everything he saw; and especially to observe the
shadow of himself when it appeared. For he had an expectation
that the conduct of his future self would give him
the clue he missed, and would render the solution of these
riddles easy.

He looked about in that very place for his own image; but
another man stood in his accustomed corner, and though the
clock pointed to his usual time of day for being there, he
saw no likeness of himself among the multitudes that poured
in through the Porch. It gave him little surprise, however;
for he had been revolving in his mind a change of life, and
thought and hoped he saw his new-born resolutions carried
out in this.

Quiet and dark, beside him stood the Phantom, with its
outstretched hand. When he roused himself from his
thoughtful quest, he fancied from the turn of the hand, and
its situation in reference to himself, that the Unseen Eyes
were looking at him keenly. It made him shudder, and feel
very cold.

They left the busy scene, and went into an obscure part
of the town, where Scrooge had never penetrated before,
although he recognised its situation, and its bad repute. The
ways were foul and narrow; the shops and houses wretched;
the people half-naked, drunken, slipshod, ugly. Alleys and
archways, like so many cesspools, disgorged their offences of
smell, and dirt, and life, upon the straggling streets; and the
whole quarter reeked with crime, with filth, and misery.

Far in this den of infamous resort, there was a low-browed,
beetling shop, below a pent-house roof, where iron, old rags,
bottles, bones, and greasy offal, were bought. Upon the floor
within, were piled up heaps of rusty keys, nails, chains, hinges,
files, scales, weights, and refuse iron of all kinds. Secrets
that few would like to scrutinise were bred and hidden in
mountains of unseemly rags, masses of corrupted fat, and
sepulchres of bones. Sitting in among the wares he dealt in, by a
charcoal stove, made of old bricks, was a grey-haired rascal,
nearly seventy years of age; who had screened himself from the
cold air without, by a frousy curtaining of miscellaneous
tatters, hung upon a line; and smoked his pipe in all the luxury
of calm retirement.

Scrooge and the Phantom came into the presence of this
man, just as a woman with a heavy bundle slunk into the
shop. But she had scarcely entered, when another woman,
similarly laden, came in too; and she was closely followed by
a man in faded black, who was no less startled by the sight
of them, than they had been upon the recognition of each
other. After a short period of blank astonishment, in which
the old man with the pipe had joined them, they all three
burst into a laugh.

"Let the charwoman alone to be the first!" cried she who
had entered first. "Let the laundress alone to be the second;
and let the undertaker's man alone to be the third. Look
here, old Joe, here's a chance! If we haven't all three met
here without meaning it!"

"You couldn't have met in a better place," said old Joe,
removing his pipe from his mouth. "Come into the parlour.
You were made free of it long ago, you know; and the other
two an't strangers. Stop till I shut the door of the shop.
Ah! How it skreeks! There an't such a rusty bit of metal
in the place as its own hinges, I believe; and I'm sure there's
no such old bones here, as mine. Ha, ha! We're all suitable
to our calling, we're well matched. Come into the
parlour. Come into the parlour."

The parlour was the space behind the screen of rags. The
old man raked the fire together with an old stair-rod, and
having trimmed his smoky lamp (for it was night), with the
stem of his pipe, put it in his mouth again.

While he did this, the woman who had already spoken
threw her bundle on the floor, and sat down in a flaunting
manner on a stool; crossing her elbows on her knees, and
looking with a bold defiance at the other two.

"What odds then! What odds, Mrs. Dilber?" said the
woman. "Every person has a right to take care of themselves.
He always did."

"That's true, indeed!" said the laundress. "No man
more so."

"Why then, don't stand staring as if you was afraid,
woman; who's the wiser? We're not going to pick holes in
each other's coats, I suppose?"

"No, indeed!" said Mrs. Dilber and the man together.
"We should hope not."

"Very well, then!" cried the woman. "That's enough.
Who's the worse for the loss of a few things like these?
Not a dead man, I suppose."

"No, indeed," said Mrs. Dilber, laughing.

"If he wanted to keep 'em after he was dead, a wicked old
screw," pursued the woman, "why wasn't he natural in his
lifetime? If he had been, he'd have had somebody to look
after him when he was struck with Death, instead of lying
gasping out his last there, alone by himself."

"It's the truest word that ever was spoke," said Mrs.
Dilber. "It's a judgment on him."

"I wish it was a little heavier judgment," replied the
woman; "and it should have been, you may depend upon it,
if I could have laid my hands on anything else. Open that
bundle, old Joe, and let me know the value of it. Speak out
plain. I'm not afraid to be the first, nor afraid for them to
see it. We know pretty well that we were helping ourselves,
before we met here, I believe. It's no sin. Open the bundle,
Joe."

But the gallantry of her friends would not allow of this;
and the man in faded black, mounting the breach first,
produced his plunder. It was not extensive. A seal or two,
a pencil-case, a pair of sleeve-buttons, and a brooch of no
great value, were all. They were severally examined and
appraised by old Joe, who chalked the sums he was disposed
to give for each, upon the wall, and added them up into a
total when he found there was nothing more to come.

"That's your account," said Joe, "and I wouldn't give
another sixpence, if I was to be boiled for not doing it.
Who's next?"

Mrs. Dilber was next. Sheets and towels, a little wearing
apparel, two old-fashioned silver teaspoons, a pair of
sugar-tongs, and a few boots. Her account was stated on the wall
in the same manner.

"I always give too much to ladies. It's a weakness of mine,
and that's the way I ruin myself," said old Joe. "That's
your account. If you asked me for another penny, and made
it an open question, I'd repent of being so liberal and knock
off half-a-crown."

"And now undo my bundle, Joe," said the first woman.

Joe went down on his knees for the greater convenience
of opening it, and having unfastened a great many knots,
dragged out a large and heavy roll of some dark stuff.

"What do you call this?" said Joe. "Bed-curtains!"

"Ah!" returned the woman, laughing and leaning forward
on her crossed arms. "Bed-curtains!"

"You don't mean to say you took 'em down, rings and
all, with him lying there?" said Joe.

"Yes I do," replied the woman. "Why not?"

"You were born to make your fortune," said Joe, "and
you'll certainly do it."

"I certainly shan't hold my hand, when I can get anything
in it by reaching it out, for the sake of such a man as He
was, I promise you, Joe," returned the woman coolly. "Don't
drop that oil upon the blankets, now."

"His blankets?" asked Joe.

"Whose else's do you think?" replied the woman. "He
isn't likely to take cold without 'em, I dare say."

"I hope he didn't die of anything catching? Eh?" said
old Joe, stopping in his work, and looking up.

"Don't you be afraid of that," returned the woman. "I
an't so fond of his company that I'd loiter about him for
such things, if he did. Ah! you may look through that
shirt till your eyes ache; but you won't find a hole in it, nor
a threadbare place. It's the best he had, and a fine one too.
They'd have wasted it, if it hadn't been for me."

"What do you call wasting of it?" asked old Joe.

"Putting it on him to be buried in, to be sure," replied
the woman with a laugh. "Somebody was fool enough to
do it, but I took it off again. If calico an't good enough for
such a purpose, it isn't good enough for anything. It's quite
as becoming to the body. He can't look uglier than he did
in that one."

Scrooge listened to this dialogue in horror. As they sat
grouped about their spoil, in the scanty light afforded by
the old man's lamp, he viewed them with a detestation and
disgust, which could hardly have been greater, though they
had been obscene demons, marketing the corpse itself.

"Ha, ha!" laughed the same woman, when old Joe,
producing a flannel bag with money in it, told out their
several gains upon the ground. "This is the end of it, you
see! He frightened every one away from him when he was
alive, to profit us when he was dead! Ha, ha, ha!"

"Spirit!" said Scrooge, shuddering from head to foot. "I
see, I see. The case of this unhappy man might be my own.
My life tends that way, now. Merciful Heaven, what is
this!"

He recoiled in terror, for the scene had changed, and now
he almost touched a bed: a bare, uncurtained bed: on which,
beneath a ragged sheet, there lay a something covered up,
which, though it was dumb, announced itself in awful
language.

The room was very dark, too dark to be observed with
any accuracy, though Scrooge glanced round it in obedience
to a secret impulse, anxious to know what kind of room it
was. A pale light, rising in the outer air, fell straight upon
the bed; and on it, plundered and bereft, unwatched, unwept,
uncared for, was the body of this man.

Scrooge glanced towards the Phantom. Its steady hand
was pointed to the head. The cover was so carelessly adjusted
that the slightest raising of it, the motion of a finger upon
Scrooge's part, would have disclosed the face. He thought
of it, felt how easy it would be to do, and longed to do it;
but had no more power to withdraw the veil than to dismiss
the spectre at his side.

Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar
here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy
command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved,
revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair
to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is
not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released;
it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the
hand WAS open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm,
and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike!
And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow
the world with life immortal!

No voice pronounced these words in Scrooge's ears, and
yet he heard them when he looked upon the bed. He
thought, if this man could be raised up now, what would be
his foremost thoughts? Avarice, hard-dealing, griping cares?
They have brought him to a rich end, truly!

He lay, in the dark empty house, with not a man, a
woman, or a child, to say that he was kind to me in this
or that, and for the memory of one kind word I will be
kind to him. A cat was tearing at the door, and there was
a sound of gnawing rats beneath the hearth-stone. What
they wanted in the room of death, and why they were so
restless and disturbed, Scrooge did not dare to think.

"Spirit!" he said, "this is a fearful place. In leaving it,
I shall not leave its lesson, trust me. Let us go!"

Still the Ghost pointed with an unmoved finger to the
head.

"I understand you," Scrooge returned, "and I would do
it, if I could. But I have not the power, Spirit. I have
not the power."

Again it seemed to look upon him.

"If there is any person in the town, who feels emotion
caused by this man's death," said Scrooge quite agonised,
"show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!"

The Phantom spread its dark robe before him for a
moment, like a wing; and withdrawing it, revealed a room
by daylight, where a mother and her children were.

She was expecting some one, and with anxious eagerness;
for she walked up and down the room; started at every
sound; looked out from the window; glanced at the clock;
tried, but in vain, to work with her needle; and could hardly
bear the voices of the children in their play.

At length the long-expected knock was heard. She hurried
to the door, and met her husband; a man whose face was
careworn and depressed, though he was young. There was
a remarkable expression in it now; a kind of serious delight
of which he felt ashamed, and which he struggled to repress.

He sat down to the dinner that had been hoarding for
him by the fire; and when she asked him faintly what news
(which was not until after a long silence), he appeared
embarrassed how to answer.

"Is it good?" she said, "or bad?"--to help him.

"Bad," he answered.

"We are quite ruined?"

"No. There is hope yet, Caroline."

"If he relents," she said, amazed, "there is! Nothing is
past hope, if such a miracle has happened."

"He is past relenting," said her husband. "He is dead."

She was a mild and patient creature if her face spoke
truth; but she was thankful in her soul to hear it, and she
said so, with clasped hands. She prayed forgiveness the next
moment, and was sorry; but the first was the emotion of
her heart.

"What the half-drunken woman whom I told you of last
night, said to me, when I tried to see him and obtain a
week's delay; and what I thought was a mere excuse to avoid
me; turns out to have been quite true. He was not only
very ill, but dying, then."

"To whom will our debt be transferred?"

"I don't know. But before that time we shall be ready
with the money; and even though we were not, it would be
a bad fortune indeed to find so merciless a creditor in his
successor. We may sleep to-night with light hearts, Caroline!"

Yes. Soften it as they would, their hearts were lighter.
The children's faces, hushed and clustered round to hear what
they so little understood, were brighter; and it was a happier
house for this man's death! The only emotion that the
Ghost could show him, caused by the event, was one of
pleasure.

"Let me see some tenderness connected with a death," said
Scrooge; "or that dark chamber, Spirit, which we left just
now, will be for ever present to me."

The Ghost conducted him through several streets familiar
to his feet; and as they went along, Scrooge looked here and
there to find himself, but nowhere was he to be seen. They
entered poor Bob Cratchit's house; the dwelling he had
visited before; and found the mother and the children seated
round the fire.

Quiet. Very quiet. The noisy little Cratchits were as
still as statues in one corner, and sat looking up at Peter,
who had a book before him. The mother and her daughters
were engaged in sewing. But surely they were very quiet!

"'And He took a child, and set him in the midst of
them.'"

Where had Scrooge heard those words? He had not
dreamed them. The boy must have read them out, as he
and the Spirit crossed the threshold. Why did he not
go on?

The mother laid her work upon the table, and put her
hand up to her face.

"The colour hurts my eyes," she said.

The colour? Ah, poor Tiny Tim!

"They're better now again," said Cratchit's wife. "It
makes them weak by candle-light; and I wouldn't show weak
eyes to your father when he comes home, for the world. It
must be near his time."

"Past it rather," Peter answered, shutting up his book.
"But I think he has walked a little slower than he used,
these few last evenings, mother."

They were very quiet again. At last she said, and in a
steady, cheerful voice, that only faltered once:

"I have known him walk with--I have known him walk
with Tiny Tim upon his shoulder, very fast indeed."

"And so have I," cried Peter. "Often."

"And so have I," exclaimed another. So had all.

"But he was very light to carry," she resumed, intent upon
her work, "and his father loved him so, that it was no
trouble: no trouble. And there is your father at the door!"

She hurried out to meet him; and little Bob in his comforter
--he had need of it, poor fellow--came in. His tea
was ready for him on the hob, and they all tried who should
help him to it most. Then the two young Cratchits got
upon his knees and laid, each child a little cheek, against
his face, as if they said, "Don't mind it, father. Don't be
grieved!"

Bob was very cheerful with them, and spoke pleasantly to
all the family. He looked at the work upon the table, and
praised the industry and speed of Mrs. Cratchit and the girls.
They would be done long before Sunday, he said.

"Sunday! You went to-day, then, Robert?" said his
wife.

"Yes, my dear," returned Bob. "I wish you could have
gone. It would have done you good to see how green a
place it is. But you'll see it often. I promised him that I
would walk there on a Sunday. My little, little child!"
cried Bob. "My little child!"

He broke down all at once. He couldn't help it. If he
could have helped it, he and his child would have been farther
apart perhaps than they were.

He left the room, and went up-stairs into the room above,
which was lighted cheerfully, and hung with Christmas.
There was a chair set close beside the child, and there were
signs of some one having been there, lately. Poor Bob sat
down in it, and when he had thought a little and composed
himself, he kissed the little face. He was reconciled to what
had happened, and went down again quite happy.

They drew about the fire, and talked; the girls and mother
working still. Bob told them of the extraordinary kindness
of Mr. Scrooge's nephew, whom he had scarcely seen but
once, and who, meeting him in the street that day, and seeing
that he looked a little--"just a little down you know," said
Bob, inquired what had happened to distress him. "On
which," said Bob, "for he is the pleasantest-spoken gentleman
you ever heard, I told him. 'I am heartily sorry for it, Mr.
Cratchit,' he said, 'and heartily sorry for your good wife.'
By the bye, how he ever knew that, I don't know."

"Knew what, my dear?"

"Why, that you were a good wife," replied Bob.

"Everybody knows that!" said Peter.

"Very well observed, my boy!" cried Bob. "I hope they
do. 'Heartily sorry,' he said, 'for your good wife. If I
can be of service to you in any way,' he said, giving me
his card, 'that's where I live. Pray come to me.' Now, it
wasn't," cried Bob, "for the sake of anything he might be
able to do for us, so much as for his kind way, that this was
quite delightful. It really seemed as if he had known our
Tiny Tim, and felt with us."

"I'm sure he's a good soul!" said Mrs. Cratchit.

"You would be surer of it, my dear," returned Bob, "if
you saw and spoke to him. I shouldn't be at all surprised--
mark what I say!--if he got Peter a better situation."

"Only hear that, Peter," said Mrs. Cratchit.

"And then," cried one of the girls, "Peter will be keeping
company with some one, and setting up for himself."

"Get along with you!" retorted Peter, grinning.

"It's just as likely as not," said Bob, "one of these days;
though there's plenty of time for that, my dear. But however
and whenever we part from one another, I am sure we
shall none of us forget poor Tiny Tim--shall we--or this
first parting that there was among us?"

"Never, father!" cried they all.

"And I know," said Bob, "I know, my dears, that when
we recollect how patient and how mild he was; although he
was a little, little child; we shall not quarrel easily among
ourselves, and forget poor Tiny Tim in doing it."

"No, never, father!" they all cried again.

"I am very happy," said little Bob, "I am very happy!"

Mrs. Cratchit kissed him, his daughters kissed him, the
two young Cratchits kissed him, and Peter and himself shook
hands. Spirit of Tiny Tim, thy childish essence was from
God!

"Spectre," said Scrooge, "something informs me that our
parting moment is at hand. I know it, but I know not
how. Tell me what man that was whom we saw lying dead?"

The Ghost of Christmas Yet To Come conveyed him, as
before--though at a different time, he thought: indeed, there
seemed no order in these latter visions, save that they were
in the Future--into the resorts of business men, but showed
him not himself. Indeed, the Spirit did not stay for anything,
but went straight on, as to the end just now desired,
until besought by Scrooge to tarry for a moment.

"This court," said Scrooge, "through which we hurry now,
is where my place of occupation is, and has been for a length
of time. I see the house. Let me behold what I shall be,
in days to come!"

The Spirit stopped; the hand was pointed elsewhere.

"The house is yonder," Scrooge exclaimed. "Why do you
point away?"

The inexorable finger underwent no change.

Scrooge hastened to the window of his office, and looked
in. It was an office still, but not his. The furniture was
not the same, and the figure in the chair was not himself.
The Phantom pointed as before.

He joined it once again, and wondering why and whither
he had gone, accompanied it until they reached an iron gate.
He paused to look round before entering.

A churchyard. Here, then; the wretched man whose name
he had now to learn, lay underneath the ground. It was a
worthy place. Walled in by houses; overrun by grass and
weeds, the growth of vegetation's death, not life; choked up
with too much burying; fat with repleted appetite. A
worthy place!

The Spirit stood among the graves, and pointed down to
One. He advanced towards it trembling. The Phantom was
exactly as it had been, but he dreaded that he saw new
meaning in its solemn shape.

"Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point,"
said Scrooge, "answer me one question. Are these the
shadows of the things that Will be, or are they shadows of
things that May be, only?"

Still the Ghost pointed downward to the grave by which
it stood.

"Men's courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if
persevered in, they must lead," said Scrooge. "But if the
courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is
thus with what you show me!"

The Spirit was immovable as ever.

Scrooge crept towards it, trembling as he went; and
following the finger, read upon the stone of the neglected
grave his own name, EBENEZER SCROOGE.

"Am I that man who lay upon the bed?" he cried, upon
his knees.

The finger pointed from the grave to him, and back again.

"No, Spirit! Oh no, no!"

The finger still was there.

"Spirit!" he cried, tight clutching at its robe, "hear me!
I am not the man I was. I will not be the man I must
have been but for this intercourse. Why show me this, if I
am past all hope!"

For the first time the hand appeared to shake.

"Good Spirit," he pursued, as down upon the ground he
fell before it: "Your nature intercedes for me, and pities
me. Assure me that I yet may change these shadows you
have shown me, by an altered life!"

The kind hand trembled.

"I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it
all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the
Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I
will not shut out the lessons that they teach. Oh, tell me I
may sponge away the writing on this stone!"

In his agony, he caught the spectral hand. It sought to
free itself, but he was strong in his entreaty, and detained it.
The Spirit, stronger yet, repulsed him.

Holding up his hands in a last prayer to have his fate
reversed, he saw an alteration in the Phantom's hood and dress.
It shrunk, collapsed, and dwindled down into a bedpost.


STAVE V:  THE END OF IT

YES! and the bedpost was his own. The bed was his own,
the room was his own. Best and happiest of all, the Time
before him was his own, to make amends in!

"I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future!"
Scrooge repeated, as he scrambled out of bed. "The Spirits
of all Three shall strive within me. Oh Jacob Marley!
Heaven, and the Christmas Time be praised for this! I say
it on my knees, old Jacob; on my knees!"

He was so fluttered and so glowing with his good intentions,
that his broken voice would scarcely answer to his
call. He had been sobbing violently in his conflict with the
Spirit, and his face was wet with tears.

"They are not torn down," cried Scrooge, folding one of
his bed-curtains in his arms, "they are not torn down, rings
and all. They are here--I am here--the shadows of the
things that would have been, may be dispelled. They will
be. I know they will!"

His hands were busy with his garments all this time;
turning them inside out, putting them on upside down,
tearing them, mislaying them, making them parties to every
kind of extravagance.

"I don't know what to do!" cried Scrooge, laughing and
crying in the same breath; and making a perfect Laocoön of
himself with his stockings. "I am as light as a feather, I
am as happy as an angel, I am as merry as a schoolboy. I
am as giddy as a drunken man. A merry Christmas to
everybody! A happy New Year to all the world. Hallo
here! Whoop! Hallo!"

He had frisked into the sitting-room, and was now standing
there: perfectly winded.

"There's the saucepan that the gruel was in!" cried
Scrooge, starting off again, and going round the fireplace.
"There's the door, by which the Ghost of Jacob Marley
entered! There's the corner where the Ghost of Christmas
Present, sat! There's the window where I saw the wandering
Spirits! It's all right, it's all true, it all happened.
Ha ha ha!"

Really, for a man who had been out of practice for so
many years, it was a splendid laugh, a most illustrious laugh.
The father of a long, long line of brilliant laughs!

"I don't know what day of the month it is!" said
Scrooge. "I don't know how long I've been among the
Spirits. I don't know anything. I'm quite a baby. Never
mind. I don't care. I'd rather be a baby. Hallo! Whoop!
Hallo here!"

He was checked in his transports by the churches ringing
out the lustiest peals he had ever heard. Clash, clang,
hammer; ding, dong, bell. Bell, dong, ding; hammer, clang,
clash! Oh, glorious, glorious!

Running to the window, he opened it, and put out his
head. No fog, no mist; clear, bright, jovial, stirring, cold;
cold, piping for the blood to dance to; Golden sunlight;
Heavenly sky; sweet fresh air; merry bells. Oh, glorious!
Glorious!

"What's to-day!" cried Scrooge, calling downward to a
boy in Sunday clothes, who perhaps had loitered in to look
about him.

"EH?" returned the boy, with all his might of wonder.

"What's to-day, my fine fellow?" said Scrooge.

"To-day!" replied the boy. "Why, CHRISTMAS DAY."

"It's Christmas Day!" said Scrooge to himself. "I
haven't missed it. The Spirits have done it all in one night.
They can do anything they like. Of course they can. Of
course they can. Hallo, my fine fellow!"

"Hallo!" returned the boy.

"Do you know the Poulterer's, in the next street but one,
at the corner?" Scrooge inquired.

"I should hope I did," replied the lad.

"An intelligent boy!" said Scrooge. "A remarkable boy!
Do you know whether they've sold the prize Turkey that
was hanging up there?--Not the little prize Turkey: the
big one?"

"What, the one as big as me?" returned the boy.

"What a delightful boy!" said Scrooge. "It's a pleasure
to talk to him. Yes, my buck!"

"It's hanging there now," replied the boy.

"Is it?" said Scrooge. "Go and buy it."

"Walk-ER!" exclaimed the boy.

"No, no," said Scrooge, "I am in earnest. Go and buy
it, and tell 'em to bring it here, that I may give them the
direction where to take it. Come back with the man, and
I'll give you a shilling. Come back with him in less than
five minutes and I'll give you half-a-crown!"

The boy was off like a shot. He must have had a steady
hand at a trigger who could have got a shot off half so fast.

"I'll send it to Bob Cratchit's!" whispered Scrooge,
rubbing his hands, and splitting with a laugh. "He sha'n't
know who sends it. It's twice the size of Tiny Tim. Joe
Miller never made such a joke as sending it to Bob's
will be!"

The hand in which he wrote the address was not a steady
one, but write it he did, somehow, and went down-stairs to
open the street door, ready for the coming of the poulterer's
man. As he stood there, waiting his arrival, the knocker
caught his eye.

"I shall love it, as long as I live!" cried Scrooge, patting
it with his hand. "I scarcely ever looked at it before.
What an honest expression it has in its face! It's a
wonderful knocker!--Here's the Turkey! Hallo! Whoop!
How are you! Merry Christmas!"

It was a Turkey! He never could have stood upon his
legs, that bird. He would have snapped 'em short off in a
minute, like sticks of sealing-wax.

"Why, it's impossible to carry that to Camden Town,"
said Scrooge. "You must have a cab."

The chuckle with which he said this, and the chuckle with
which he paid for the Turkey, and the chuckle with which
he paid for the cab, and the chuckle with which he recompensed
the boy, were only to be exceeded by the chuckle
with which he sat down breathless in his chair again, and
chuckled till he cried.

Shaving was not an easy task, for his hand continued to
shake very much; and shaving requires attention, even when
you don't dance while you are at it. But if he had cut the
end of his nose off, he would have put a piece of
sticking-plaister over it, and been quite satisfied.

He dressed himself "all in his best," and at last got out
into the streets. The people were by this time pouring forth,
as he had seen them with the Ghost of Christmas Present;
and walking with his hands behind him, Scrooge regarded
every one with a delighted smile. He looked so irresistibly
pleasant, in a word, that three or four good-humoured fellows
said, "Good morning, sir! A merry Christmas to you!"
And Scrooge said often afterwards, that of all the blithe
sounds he had ever heard, those were the blithest in his ears.

He had not gone far, when coming on towards him he
beheld the portly gentleman, who had walked into his
counting-house the day before, and said, "Scrooge and Marley's, I
believe?"  It sent a pang across his heart to think how this
old gentleman would look upon him when they met; but he
knew what path lay straight before him, and he took it.

"My dear sir," said Scrooge, quickening his pace, and
taking the old gentleman by both his hands. "How do you
do? I hope you succeeded yesterday. It was very kind of
you. A merry Christmas to you, sir!"

"Mr. Scrooge?"

"Yes," said Scrooge. "That is my name, and I fear it
may not be pleasant to you. Allow me to ask your pardon.
And will you have the goodness"--here Scrooge whispered in
his ear.

"Lord bless me!" cried the gentleman, as if his breath
were taken away. "My dear Mr. Scrooge, are you serious?"

"If you please," said Scrooge. "Not a farthing less. A
great many back-payments are included in it, I assure you.
Will you do me that favour?"

"My dear sir," said the other, shaking hands with him.
"I don't know what to say to such munifi--"

"Don't say anything, please," retorted Scrooge. "Come
and see me. Will you come and see me?"

"I will!" cried the old gentleman. And it was clear he
meant to do it.

"Thank'ee," said Scrooge. "I am much obliged to you.
I thank you fifty times. Bless you!"

He went to church, and walked about the streets, and
watched the people hurrying to and fro, and patted children
on the head, and questioned beggars, and looked down into
the kitchens of houses, and up to the windows, and found
that everything could yield him pleasure. He had never
dreamed that any walk--that anything--could give him so
much happiness. In the afternoon he turned his steps
towards his nephew's house.

He passed the door a dozen times, before he had the
courage to go up and knock. But he made a dash, and
did it:

"Is your master at home, my dear?" said Scrooge to the
girl. Nice girl! Very.

"Yes, sir."

"Where is he, my love?" said Scrooge.

"He's in the dining-room, sir, along with mistress. I'll
show you up-stairs, if you please."

"Thank'ee. He knows me," said Scrooge, with his hand
already on the dining-room lock. "I'll go in here, my dear."

He turned it gently, and sidled his face in, round the door.
They were looking at the table (which was spread out in
great array); for these young housekeepers are always nervous
on such points, and like to see that everything is right.

"Fred!" said Scrooge.

Dear heart alive, how his niece by marriage started!
Scrooge had forgotten, for the moment, about her sitting
in the corner with the footstool, or he wouldn't have done
it, on any account.

"Why bless my soul!" cried Fred, "who's that?"

"It's I. Your uncle Scrooge. I have come to dinner.
Will you let me in, Fred?"

Let him in! It is a mercy he didn't shake his arm off.
He was at home in five minutes. Nothing could be heartier.
His niece looked just the same. So did Topper when he
came. So did the plump sister when she came. So did
every one when they came. Wonderful party, wonderful
games, wonderful unanimity, won-der-ful happiness!

But he was early at the office next morning. Oh, he was
early there. If he could only be there first, and catch Bob
Cratchit coming late! That was the thing he had set his
heart upon.

And he did it; yes, he did! The clock struck nine. No
Bob. A quarter past. No Bob. He was full eighteen
minutes and a half behind his time. Scrooge sat with his
door wide open, that he might see him come into the Tank.

His hat was off, before he opened the door; his comforter
too. He was on his stool in a jiffy; driving away with his
pen, as if he were trying to overtake nine o'clock.

"Hallo!" growled Scrooge, in his accustomed voice, as
near as he could feign it. "What do you mean by coming
here at this time of day?"

"I am very sorry, sir," said Bob. "I am behind my time."

"You are?" repeated Scrooge. "Yes. I think you are.
Step this way, sir, if you please."

"It's only once a year, sir," pleaded Bob, appearing from
the Tank. "It shall not be repeated. I was making rather
merry yesterday, sir."

"Now, I'll tell you what, my friend," said Scrooge, "I
am not going to stand this sort of thing any longer. And
therefore," he continued, leaping from his stool, and giving
Bob such a dig in the waistcoat that he staggered back into
the Tank again; "and therefore I am about to raise your
salary!"

Bob trembled, and got a little nearer to the ruler. He
had a momentary idea of knocking Scrooge down with it,
holding him, and calling to the people in the court for help
and a strait-waistcoat.

"A merry Christmas, Bob!" said Scrooge, with an earnestness
that could not be mistaken, as he clapped him on the
back. "A merrier Christmas, Bob, my good fellow, than I
have given you, for many a year! I'll raise your salary, and
endeavour to assist your struggling family, and we will discuss
your affairs this very afternoon, over a Christmas bowl of
smoking bishop, Bob! Make up the fires, and buy another
coal-scuttle before you dot another i, Bob Cratchit!"


Scrooge was better than his word. He did it all, and
infinitely more; and to Tiny Tim, who did NOT die, he was
a second father. He became as good a friend, as good a
master, and as good a man, as the good old city knew, or
any other good old city, town, or borough, in the good old
world. Some people laughed to see the alteration in him,
but he let them laugh, and little heeded them; for he was
wise enough to know that nothing ever happened on this
globe, for good, at which some people did not have their fill
of laughter in the outset; and knowing that such as these
would be blind anyway, he thought it quite as well that they
should wrinkle up their eyes in grins, as have the malady in
less attractive forms. His own heart laughed: and that was
quite enough for him.

He had no further intercourse with Spirits, but lived upon
the Total Abstinence Principle, ever afterwards; and it was
always said of him, that he knew how to keep Christmas
well, if any man alive possessed the knowledge. May that
be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim
observed, God bless Us, Every One!



2xxxxxxxxx



                        THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD




CHAPTER I—THE DAWN


An ancient English Cathedral Tower?  How can the ancient English
Cathedral tower be here!  The well-known massive gray square tower of its
old Cathedral?  How can that be here!  There is no spike of rusty iron in
the air, between the eye and it, from any point of the real prospect.
What is the spike that intervenes, and who has set it up?  Maybe it is
set up by the Sultan’s orders for the impaling of a horde of Turkish
robbers, one by one.  It is so, for cymbals clash, and the Sultan goes by
to his palace in long procession.  Ten thousand scimitars flash in the
sunlight, and thrice ten thousand dancing-girls strew flowers.  Then,
follow white elephants caparisoned in countless gorgeous colours, and
infinite in number and attendants.  Still the Cathedral Tower rises in
the background, where it cannot be, and still no writhing figure is on
the grim spike.  Stay!  Is the spike so low a thing as the rusty spike on
the top of a post of an old bedstead that has tumbled all awry?  Some
vague period of drowsy laughter must be devoted to the consideration of
this possibility.

Shaking from head to foot, the man whose scattered consciousness has thus
fantastically pieced itself together, at length rises, supports his
trembling frame upon his arms, and looks around.  He is in the meanest
and closest of small rooms.  Through the ragged window-curtain, the light
of early day steals in from a miserable court.  He lies, dressed, across
a large unseemly bed, upon a bedstead that has indeed given way under the
weight upon it. Lying, also dressed and also across the bed, not
longwise, are a Chinaman, a Lascar, and a haggard woman.  The two first
are in a sleep or stupor; the last is blowing at a kind of pipe, to
kindle it.  And as she blows, and shading it with her lean hand,
concentrates its red spark of light, it serves in the dim morning as a
lamp to show him what he sees of her.

‘Another?’ says this woman, in a querulous, rattling whisper.  ‘Have
another?’

He looks about him, with his hand to his forehead.

‘Ye’ve smoked as many as five since ye come in at midnight,’ the woman
goes on, as she chronically complains.  ‘Poor me, poor me, my head is so
bad.  Them two come in after ye.  Ah, poor me, the business is slack, is
slack!  Few Chinamen about the Docks, and fewer Lascars, and no ships
coming in, these say!  Here’s another ready for ye, deary.  Ye’ll
remember like a good soul, won’t ye, that the market price is dreffle
high just now?  More nor three shillings and sixpence for a thimbleful!
And ye’ll remember that nobody but me (and Jack Chinaman t’other side the
court; but he can’t do it as well as me) has the true secret of mixing
it?  Ye’ll pay up accordingly, deary, won’t ye?’

She blows at the pipe as she speaks, and, occasionally bubbling at it,
inhales much of its contents.

‘O me, O me, my lungs is weak, my lungs is bad!  It’s nearly ready for
ye, deary.  Ah, poor me, poor me, my poor hand shakes like to drop off!
I see ye coming-to, and I ses to my poor self, “I’ll have another ready
for him, and he’ll bear in mind the market price of opium, and pay
according.”  O my poor head!  I makes my pipes of old penny ink-bottles,
ye see, deary—this is one—and I fits-in a mouthpiece, this way, and I
takes my mixter out of this thimble with this little horn spoon; and so I
fills, deary.  Ah, my poor nerves!  I got Heavens-hard drunk for sixteen
year afore I took to this; but this don’t hurt me, not to speak of.  And
it takes away the hunger as well as wittles, deary.’

She hands him the nearly-emptied pipe, and sinks back, turning over on
her face.

He rises unsteadily from the bed, lays the pipe upon the hearth-stone,
draws back the ragged curtain, and looks with repugnance at his three
companions.  He notices that the woman has opium-smoked herself into a
strange likeness of the Chinaman.  His form of cheek, eye, and temple,
and his colour, are repeated in her.  Said Chinaman convulsively wrestles
with one of his many Gods or Devils, perhaps, and snarls horribly.  The
Lascar laughs and dribbles at the mouth.  The hostess is still.

                         [Picture: In the Court]

‘What visions can _she_ have?’ the waking man muses, as he turns her face
towards him, and stands looking down at it.  ‘Visions of many butchers’
shops, and public-houses, and much credit?  Of an increase of hideous
customers, and this horrible bedstead set upright again, and this
horrible court swept clean?  What can she rise to, under any quantity of
opium, higher than that!—Eh?’

He bends down his ear, to listen to her mutterings.

‘Unintelligible!’

As he watches the spasmodic shoots and darts that break out of her face
and limbs, like fitful lightning out of a dark sky, some contagion in
them seizes upon him: insomuch that he has to withdraw himself to a lean
arm-chair by the hearth—placed there, perhaps, for such emergencies—and
to sit in it, holding tight, until he has got the better of this unclean
spirit of imitation.

Then he comes back, pounces on the Chinaman, and seizing him with both
hands by the throat, turns him violently on the bed.  The Chinaman
clutches the aggressive hands, resists, gasps, and protests.

‘What do you say?’

A watchful pause.

‘Unintelligible!’

Slowly loosening his grasp as he listens to the incoherent jargon with an
attentive frown, he turns to the Lascar and fairly drags him forth upon
the floor.  As he falls, the Lascar starts into a half-risen attitude,
glares with his eyes, lashes about him fiercely with his arms, and draws
a phantom knife.  It then becomes apparent that the woman has taken
possession of this knife, for safety’s sake; for, she too starting up,
and restraining and expostulating with him, the knife is visible in her
dress, not in his, when they drowsily drop back, side by side.

There has been chattering and clattering enough between them, but to no
purpose.  When any distinct word has been flung into the air, it has had
no sense or sequence.  Wherefore ‘unintelligible!’ is again the comment
of the watcher, made with some reassured nodding of his head, and a
gloomy smile.  He then lays certain silver money on the table, finds his
hat, gropes his way down the broken stairs, gives a good morning to some
rat-ridden doorkeeper, in bed in a black hutch beneath the stairs, and
passes out.

                                * * * * *

That same afternoon, the massive gray square tower of an old Cathedral
rises before the sight of a jaded traveller.  The bells are going for
daily vesper service, and he must needs attend it, one would say, from
his haste to reach the open Cathedral door.  The choir are getting on
their sullied white robes, in a hurry, when he arrives among them, gets
on his own robe, and falls into the procession filing in to service.
Then, the Sacristan locks the iron-barred gates that divide the sanctuary
from the chancel, and all of the procession having scuttled into their
places, hide their faces; and then the intoned words, ‘WHEN THE WICKED
MAN—’ rise among groins of arches and beams of roof, awakening muttered
thunder.




CHAPTER II—A DEAN, AND A CHAPTER ALSO


Whosoever has observed that sedate and clerical bird, the rook, may
perhaps have noticed that when he wings his way homeward towards
nightfall, in a sedate and clerical company, two rooks will suddenly
detach themselves from the rest, will retrace their flight for some
distance, and will there poise and linger; conveying to mere men the
fancy that it is of some occult importance to the body politic, that this
artful couple should pretend to have renounced connection with it.

Similarly, service being over in the old Cathedral with the square tower,
and the choir scuffling out again, and divers venerable persons of
rook-like aspect dispersing, two of these latter retrace their steps, and
walk together in the echoing Close.

Not only is the day waning, but the year.  The low sun is fiery and yet
cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral
wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement.  There
has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little
pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees
as they shed a gust of tears.  Their fallen leaves lie strewn thickly
about.  Some of these leaves, in a timid rush, seek sanctuary within the
low arched Cathedral door; but two men coming out resist them, and cast
them forth again with their feet; this done, one of the two locks the
door with a goodly key, and the other flits away with a folio music-book.

‘Mr. Jasper was that, Tope?’

‘Yes, Mr. Dean.’

‘He has stayed late.’

‘Yes, Mr. Dean.  I have stayed for him, your Reverence.  He has been took
a little poorly.’

‘Say “taken,” Tope—to the Dean,’ the younger rook interposes in a low
tone with this touch of correction, as who should say: ‘You may offer bad
grammar to the laity, or the humbler clergy, not to the Dean.’

Mr. Tope, Chief Verger and Showman, and accustomed to be high with
excursion parties, declines with a silent loftiness to perceive that any
suggestion has been tendered to him.

‘And when and how has Mr. Jasper been taken—for, as Mr. Crisparkle has
remarked, it is better to say taken—taken—’ repeats the Dean; ‘when and
how has Mr. Jasper been Taken—’

‘Taken, sir,’ Tope deferentially murmurs.

‘—Poorly, Tope?’

‘Why, sir, Mr. Jasper was that breathed—’

‘I wouldn’t say “That breathed,” Tope,’ Mr. Crisparkle interposes with
the same touch as before.  ‘Not English—to the Dean.’

‘Breathed to that extent,’ the Dean (not unflattered by this indirect
homage) condescendingly remarks, ‘would be preferable.’

‘Mr. Jasper’s breathing was so remarkably short’—thus discreetly does Mr.
Tope work his way round the sunken rock—‘when he came in, that it
distressed him mightily to get his notes out: which was perhaps the cause
of his having a kind of fit on him after a little.  His memory grew
DAZED.’  Mr. Tope, with his eyes on the Reverend Mr. Crisparkle, shoots
this word out, as defying him to improve upon it: ‘and a dimness and
giddiness crept over him as strange as ever I saw: though he didn’t seem
to mind it particularly, himself.  However, a little time and a little
water brought him out of his DAZE.’  Mr. Tope repeats the word and its
emphasis, with the air of saying: ‘As I _have_ made a success, I’ll make
it again.’

‘And Mr. Jasper has gone home quite himself, has he?’ asked the Dean.

‘Your Reverence, he has gone home quite himself.  And I’m glad to see
he’s having his fire kindled up, for it’s chilly after the wet, and the
Cathedral had both a damp feel and a damp touch this afternoon, and he
was very shivery.’

They all three look towards an old stone gatehouse crossing the Close,
with an arched thoroughfare passing beneath it.  Through its latticed
window, a fire shines out upon the fast-darkening scene, involving in
shadow the pendent masses of ivy and creeper covering the building’s
front.  As the deep Cathedral-bell strikes the hour, a ripple of wind
goes through these at their distance, like a ripple of the solemn sound
that hums through tomb and tower, broken niche and defaced statue, in the
pile close at hand.

‘Is Mr. Jasper’s nephew with him?’ the Dean asks.

‘No, sir,’ replied the Verger, ‘but expected.  There’s his own solitary
shadow betwixt his two windows—the one looking this way, and the one
looking down into the High Street—drawing his own curtains now.’

‘Well, well,’ says the Dean, with a sprightly air of breaking up the
little conference, ‘I hope Mr. Jasper’s heart may not be too much set
upon his nephew.  Our affections, however laudable, in this transitory
world, should never master us; we should guide them, guide them.  I find
I am not disagreeably reminded of my dinner, by hearing my dinner-bell.
Perhaps, Mr. Crisparkle, you will, before going home, look in on Jasper?’

‘Certainly, Mr. Dean.  And tell him that you had the kindness to desire
to know how he was?’

‘Ay; do so, do so.  Certainly.  Wished to know how he was.  By all means.
Wished to know how he was.’

With a pleasant air of patronage, the Dean as nearly cocks his quaint hat
as a Dean in good spirits may, and directs his comely gaiters towards the
ruddy dining-room of the snug old red-brick house where he is at present,
‘in residence’ with Mrs. Dean and Miss Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, fair and rosy, and perpetually pitching
himself head-foremost into all the deep running water in the surrounding
country; Mr. Crisparkle, Minor Canon, early riser, musical, classical,
cheerful, kind, good-natured, social, contented, and boy-like; Mr.
Crisparkle, Minor Canon and good man, lately ‘Coach’ upon the chief Pagan
high roads, but since promoted by a patron (grateful for a well-taught
son) to his present Christian beat; betakes himself to the gatehouse, on
his way home to his early tea.

‘Sorry to hear from Tope that you have not been well, Jasper.’

‘O, it was nothing, nothing!’

‘You look a little worn.’

‘Do I?  O, I don’t think so.  What is better, I don’t feel so.  Tope has
made too much of it, I suspect.  It’s his trade to make the most of
everything appertaining to the Cathedral, you know.’

‘I may tell the Dean—I call expressly from the Dean—that you are all
right again?’

The reply, with a slight smile, is: ‘Certainly; with my respects and
thanks to the Dean.’

‘I’m glad to hear that you expect young Drood.’

‘I expect the dear fellow every moment.’

‘Ah!  He will do you more good than a doctor, Jasper.’

‘More good than a dozen doctors.  For I love him dearly, and I don’t love
doctors, or doctors’ stuff.’

Mr. Jasper is a dark man of some six-and-twenty, with thick, lustrous,
well-arranged black hair and whiskers.  He looks older than he is, as
dark men often do.  His voice is deep and good, his face and figure are
good, his manner is a little sombre.  His room is a little sombre, and
may have had its influence in forming his manner.  It is mostly in
shadow.  Even when the sun shines brilliantly, it seldom touches the
grand piano in the recess, or the folio music-books on the stand, or the
book-shelves on the wall, or the unfinished picture of a blooming
schoolgirl hanging over the chimneypiece; her flowing brown hair tied
with a blue riband, and her beauty remarkable for a quite childish,
almost babyish, touch of saucy discontent, comically conscious of itself.
(There is not the least artistic merit in this picture, which is a mere
daub; but it is clear that the painter has made it humorously—one might
almost say, revengefully—like the original.)

‘We shall miss you, Jasper, at the “Alternate Musical Wednesdays”
to-night; but no doubt you are best at home.  Good-night.  God bless you!
“Tell me, shep-herds, te-e-ell me; tell me-e-e, have you seen (have you
seen, have you seen, have you seen) my-y-y Flo-o-ora-a pass this way!”’
Melodiously good Minor Canon the Reverend Septimus Crisparkle thus
delivers himself, in musical rhythm, as he withdraws his amiable face
from the doorway and conveys it down-stairs.

Sounds of recognition and greeting pass between the Reverend Septimus and
somebody else, at the stair-foot.  Mr. Jasper listens, starts from his
chair, and catches a young fellow in his arms, exclaiming:

‘My dear Edwin!’

‘My dear Jack!  So glad to see you!’

‘Get off your greatcoat, bright boy, and sit down here in your own
corner.  Your feet are not wet?  Pull your boots off.  Do pull your boots
off.’

‘My dear Jack, I am as dry as a bone.  Don’t moddley-coddley, there’s a
good fellow.  I like anything better than being moddley-coddleyed.’

With the check upon him of being unsympathetically restrained in a genial
outburst of enthusiasm, Mr. Jasper stands still, and looks on intently at
the young fellow, divesting himself of his outward coat, hat, gloves, and
so forth.  Once for all, a look of intentness and intensity—a look of
hungry, exacting, watchful, and yet devoted affection—is always, now and
ever afterwards, on the Jasper face whenever the Jasper face is addressed
in this direction.  And whenever it is so addressed, it is never, on this
occasion or on any other, dividedly addressed; it is always concentrated.

‘Now I am right, and now I’ll take my corner, Jack.  Any dinner, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper opens a door at the upper end of the room, and discloses a
small inner room pleasantly lighted and prepared, wherein a comely dame
is in the act of setting dishes on table.

‘What a jolly old Jack it is!’ cries the young fellow, with a clap of his
hands.  ‘Look here, Jack; tell me; whose birthday is it?’

‘Not yours, I know,’ Mr. Jasper answers, pausing to consider.

‘Not mine, you know?  No; not mine, _I_ know!  Pussy’s!’

Fixed as the look the young fellow meets, is, there is yet in it some
strange power of suddenly including the sketch over the chimneypiece.

‘Pussy’s, Jack!  We must drink Many happy returns to her.  Come, uncle;
take your dutiful and sharp-set nephew in to dinner.’

As the boy (for he is little more) lays a hand on Jasper’s shoulder,
Jasper cordially and gaily lays a hand on _his_ shoulder, and so
Marseillaise-wise they go in to dinner.

‘And, Lord! here’s Mrs. Tope!’ cries the boy.  ‘Lovelier than ever!’

‘Never you mind me, Master Edwin,’ retorts the Verger’s wife; ‘I can take
care of myself.’

‘You can’t.  You’re much too handsome.  Give me a kiss because it’s
Pussy’s birthday.’

‘I’d Pussy you, young man, if I was Pussy, as you call her,’ Mrs. Tope
blushingly retorts, after being saluted.  ‘Your uncle’s too much wrapt up
in you, that’s where it is.  He makes so much of you, that it’s my
opinion you think you’ve only to call your Pussys by the dozen, to make
’em come.’

‘You forget, Mrs. Tope,’ Mr. Jasper interposes, taking his place at the
table with a genial smile, ‘and so do you, Ned, that Uncle and Nephew are
words prohibited here by common consent and express agreement.  For what
we are going to receive His holy name be praised!’

‘Done like the Dean!  Witness, Edwin Drood!  Please to carve, Jack, for I
can’t.’

This sally ushers in the dinner.  Little to the present purpose, or to
any purpose, is said, while it is in course of being disposed of.  At
length the cloth is drawn, and a dish of walnuts and a decanter of
rich-coloured sherry are placed upon the table.

‘I say!  Tell me, Jack,’ the young fellow then flows on: ‘do you really
and truly feel as if the mention of our relationship divided us at all?
_I_ don’t.’

‘Uncles as a rule, Ned, are so much older than their nephews,’ is the
reply, ‘that I have that feeling instinctively.’

‘As a rule!  Ah, may-be!  But what is a difference in age of half-a-dozen
years or so? And some uncles, in large families, are even younger than
their nephews.  By George, I wish it was the case with us!’

‘Why?’

‘Because if it was, I’d take the lead with you, Jack, and be as wise as
Begone, dull Care! that turned a young man gray, and Begone, dull Care!
that turned an old man to clay.—Halloa, Jack!  Don’t drink.’

‘Why not?’

‘Asks why not, on Pussy’s birthday, and no Happy returns proposed!
Pussy, Jack, and many of ’em!  Happy returns, I mean.’

Laying an affectionate and laughing touch on the boy’s extended hand, as
if it were at once his giddy head and his light heart, Mr. Jasper drinks
the toast in silence.

‘Hip, hip, hip, and nine times nine, and one to finish with, and all
that, understood.  Hooray, hooray, hooray!—And now, Jack, let’s have a
little talk about Pussy.  Two pairs of nut-crackers?  Pass me one, and
take the other.’  Crack.  ‘How’s Pussy getting on Jack?’

‘With her music?  Fairly.’

‘What a dreadfully conscientious fellow you are, Jack!  But _I_ know,
Lord bless you!  Inattentive, isn’t she?’

‘She can learn anything, if she will.’

‘_If_ she will!  Egad, that’s it.  But if she won’t?’

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

‘How’s she looking, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper’s concentrated face again includes the portrait as he returns:
‘Very like your sketch indeed.’

‘I _am_ a little proud of it,’ says the young fellow, glancing up at the
sketch with complacency, and then shutting one eye, and taking a
corrected prospect of it over a level bridge of nut-crackers in the air:
‘Not badly hit off from memory.  But I ought to have caught that
expression pretty well, for I have seen it often enough.’

Crack!—on Edwin Drood’s part.

Crack!—on Mr. Jasper’s part.

‘In point of fact,’ the former resumes, after some silent dipping among
his fragments of walnut with an air of pique, ‘I see it whenever I go to
see Pussy.  If I don’t find it on her face, I leave it there.—You know I
do, Miss Scornful Pert.  Booh!’  With a twirl of the nut-crackers at the
portrait.

Crack! crack! crack.  Slowly, on Mr. Jasper’s part.

Crack.  Sharply on the part of Edwin Drood.

Silence on both sides.

‘Have you lost your tongue, Jack?’

‘Have you found yours, Ned?’

‘No, but really;—isn’t it, you know, after all—’

Mr. Jasper lifts his dark eyebrows inquiringly.

‘Isn’t it unsatisfactory to be cut off from choice in such a matter?
There, Jack!  I tell you!  If I could choose, I would choose Pussy from
all the pretty girls in the world.’

‘But you have not got to choose.’

‘That’s what I complain of.  My dead and gone father and Pussy’s dead and
gone father must needs marry us together by anticipation.  Why the—Devil,
I was going to say, if it had been respectful to their memory—couldn’t
they leave us alone?’

‘Tut, tut, dear boy,’ Mr. Jasper remonstrates, in a tone of gentle
deprecation.

‘Tut, tut?  Yes, Jack, it’s all very well for _you_.  _You_ can take it
easily.  _Your_ life is not laid down to scale, and lined and dotted out
for you, like a surveyor’s plan.  _You_ have no uncomfortable suspicion
that you are forced upon anybody, nor has anybody an uncomfortable
suspicion that she is forced upon you, or that you are forced upon her.
_You_ can choose for yourself.  Life, for _you_, is a plum with the
natural bloom on; it hasn’t been over-carefully wiped off for _you_—’

‘Don’t stop, dear fellow.  Go on.’

‘Can I anyhow have hurt your feelings, Jack?’

‘How can you have hurt my feelings?’

‘Good Heaven, Jack, you look frightfully ill!  There’s a strange film
come over your eyes.’

Mr. Jasper, with a forced smile, stretches out his right hand, as if at
once to disarm apprehension and gain time to get better.  After a while
he says faintly:

‘I have been taking opium for a pain—an agony—that sometimes overcomes
me.  The effects of the medicine steal over me like a blight or a cloud,
and pass.  You see them in the act of passing; they will be gone
directly.  Look away from me.  They will go all the sooner.’

With a scared face the younger man complies by casting his eyes downward
at the ashes on the hearth.  Not relaxing his own gaze on the fire, but
rather strengthening it with a fierce, firm grip upon his elbow-chair,
the elder sits for a few moments rigid, and then, with thick drops
standing on his forehead, and a sharp catch of his breath, becomes as he
was before.  On his so subsiding in his chair, his nephew gently and
assiduously tends him while he quite recovers.  When Jasper is restored,
he lays a tender hand upon his nephew’s shoulder, and, in a tone of voice
less troubled than the purport of his words—indeed with something of
raillery or banter in it—thus addresses him:

‘There is said to be a hidden skeleton in every house; but you thought
there was none in mine, dear Ned.’

‘Upon my life, Jack, I did think so.  However, when I come to consider
that even in Pussy’s house—if she had one—and in mine—if I had one—’

‘You were going to say (but that I interrupted you in spite of myself)
what a quiet life mine is.  No whirl and uproar around me, no distracting
commerce or calculation, no risk, no change of place, myself devoted to
the art I pursue, my business my pleasure.’

‘I really was going to say something of the kind, Jack; but you see, you,
speaking of yourself, almost necessarily leave out much that I should
have put in.  For instance: I should have put in the foreground your
being so much respected as Lay Precentor, or Lay Clerk, or whatever you
call it, of this Cathedral; your enjoying the reputation of having done
such wonders with the choir; your choosing your society, and holding such
an independent position in this queer old place; your gift of teaching
(why, even Pussy, who don’t like being taught, says there never was such
a Master as you are!), and your connexion.’

‘Yes; I saw what you were tending to.  I hate it.’

‘Hate it, Jack?’  (Much bewildered.)

‘I hate it.  The cramped monotony of my existence grinds me away by the
grain.  How does our service sound to you?’

‘Beautiful!  Quite celestial!’

‘It often sounds to me quite devilish.  I am so weary of it.  The echoes
of my own voice among the arches seem to mock me with my daily drudging
round.  No wretched monk who droned his life away in that gloomy place,
before me, can have been more tired of it than I am.  He could take for
relief (and did take) to carving demons out of the stalls and seats and
desks.  What shall I do?  Must I take to carving them out of my heart?’

‘I thought you had so exactly found your niche in life, Jack,’ Edwin
Drood returns, astonished, bending forward in his chair to lay a
sympathetic hand on Jasper’s knee, and looking at him with an anxious
face.

‘I know you thought so.  They all think so.’

‘Well, I suppose they do,’ says Edwin, meditating aloud.  ‘Pussy thinks
so.’

‘When did she tell you that?’

‘The last time I was here.  You remember when.  Three months ago.’

‘How did she phrase it?’

‘O, she only said that she had become your pupil, and that you were made
for your vocation.’

The younger man glances at the portrait.  The elder sees it in him.

‘Anyhow, my dear Ned,’ Jasper resumes, as he shakes his head with a grave
cheerfulness, ‘I must subdue myself to my vocation: which is much the
same thing outwardly.  It’s too late to find another now.  This is a
confidence between us.’

‘It shall be sacredly preserved, Jack.’

‘I have reposed it in you, because—’

‘I feel it, I assure you.  Because we are fast friends, and because you
love and trust me, as I love and trust you.  Both hands, Jack.’

As each stands looking into the other’s eyes, and as the uncle holds the
nephew’s hands, the uncle thus proceeds:

‘You know now, don’t you, that even a poor monotonous chorister and
grinder of music—in his niche—may be troubled with some stray sort of
ambition, aspiration, restlessness, dissatisfaction, what shall we call
it?’

‘Yes, dear Jack.’

‘And you will remember?’

‘My dear Jack, I only ask you, am I likely to forget what you have said
with so much feeling?’

‘Take it as a warning, then.’

In the act of having his hands released, and of moving a step back, Edwin
pauses for an instant to consider the application of these last words.
The instant over, he says, sensibly touched:

‘I am afraid I am but a shallow, surface kind of fellow, Jack, and that
my headpiece is none of the best.  But I needn’t say I am young; and
perhaps I shall not grow worse as I grow older.  At all events, I hope I
have something impressible within me, which feels—deeply feels—the
disinterestedness of your painfully laying your inner self bare, as a
warning to me.’

Mr. Jasper’s steadiness of face and figure becomes so marvellous that his
breathing seems to have stopped.

‘I couldn’t fail to notice, Jack, that it cost you a great effort, and
that you were very much moved, and very unlike your usual self.  Of
course I knew that you were extremely fond of me, but I really was not
prepared for your, as I may say, sacrificing yourself to me in that way.’

Mr. Jasper, becoming a breathing man again without the smallest stage of
transition between the two extreme states, lifts his shoulders, laughs,
and waves his right arm.

‘No; don’t put the sentiment away, Jack; please don’t; for I am very much
in earnest.  I have no doubt that that unhealthy state of mind which you
have so powerfully described is attended with some real suffering, and is
hard to bear.  But let me reassure you, Jack, as to the chances of its
overcoming me.  I don’t think I am in the way of it.  In some few months
less than another year, you know, I shall carry Pussy off from school as
Mrs. Edwin Drood.  I shall then go engineering into the East, and Pussy
with me.  And although we have our little tiffs now, arising out of a
certain unavoidable flatness that attends our love-making, owing to its
end being all settled beforehand, still I have no doubt of our getting on
capitally then, when it’s done and can’t be helped.  In short, Jack, to
go back to the old song I was freely quoting at dinner (and who knows old
songs better than you?), my wife shall dance, and I will sing, so merrily
pass the day.  Of Pussy’s being beautiful there cannot be a doubt;—and
when you are good besides, Little Miss Impudence,’ once more
apostrophising the portrait, ‘I’ll burn your comic likeness, and paint
your music-master another.’

Mr. Jasper, with his hand to his chin, and with an expression of musing
benevolence on his face, has attentively watched every animated look and
gesture attending the delivery of these words.  He remains in that
attitude after they, are spoken, as if in a kind of fascination attendant
on his strong interest in the youthful spirit that he loves so well.
Then he says with a quiet smile:

‘You won’t be warned, then?’

‘No, Jack.’

‘You can’t be warned, then?’

‘No, Jack, not by you.  Besides that I don’t really consider myself in
danger, I don’t like your putting yourself in that position.’

‘Shall we go and walk in the churchyard?’

‘By all means.  You won’t mind my slipping out of it for half a moment to
the Nuns’ House, and leaving a parcel there?  Only gloves for Pussy; as
many pairs of gloves as she is years old to-day.  Rather poetical, Jack?’

Mr. Jasper, still in the same attitude, murmurs: ‘“Nothing half so sweet
in life,” Ned!’

‘Here’s the parcel in my greatcoat-pocket.  They must be presented
to-night, or the poetry is gone.  It’s against regulations for me to call
at night, but not to leave a packet.  I am ready, Jack!’

Mr. Jasper dissolves his attitude, and they go out together.




CHAPTER III—THE NUNS’ HOUSE


For sufficient reasons, which this narrative will itself unfold as it
advances, a fictitious name must be bestowed upon the old Cathedral town.
Let it stand in these pages as Cloisterham.  It was once possibly known
to the Druids by another name, and certainly to the Romans by another,
and to the Saxons by another, and to the Normans by another; and a name
more or less in the course of many centuries can be of little moment to
its dusty chronicles.

An ancient city, Cloisterham, and no meet dwelling-place for any one with
hankerings after the noisy world.  A monotonous, silent city, deriving an
earthy flavour throughout from its Cathedral crypt, and so abounding in
vestiges of monastic graves, that the Cloisterham children grow small
salad in the dust of abbots and abbesses, and make dirt-pies of nuns and
friars; while every ploughman in its outlying fields renders to once
puissant Lord Treasurers, Archbishops, Bishops, and such-like, the
attention which the Ogre in the story-book desired to render to his
unbidden visitor, and grinds their bones to make his bread.

A drowsy city, Cloisterham, whose inhabitants seem to suppose, with an
inconsistency more strange than rare, that all its changes lie behind it,
and that there are no more to come.  A queer moral to derive from
antiquity, yet older than any traceable antiquity.  So silent are the
streets of Cloisterham (though prone to echo on the smallest
provocation), that of a summer-day the sunblinds of its shops scarce dare
to flap in the south wind; while the sun-browned tramps, who pass along
and stare, quicken their limp a little, that they may the sooner get
beyond the confines of its oppressive respectability.  This is a feat not
difficult of achievement, seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are
little more than one narrow street by which you get into it and get out
of it: the rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and
no thoroughfare—exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved Quaker
settlement, in colour and general confirmation very like a Quakeress’s
bonnet, up in a shady corner.

In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with its
hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the Cathedral
tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls far beneath.
Fragments of old wall, saint’s chapel, chapter-house, convent and
monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively built into many of its
houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled notions have become
incorporated into many of its citizens’ minds.  All things in it are of
the past.  Even its single pawnbroker takes in no pledges, nor has he for
a long time, but offers vainly an unredeemed stock for sale, of which the
costlier articles are dim and pale old watches apparently in a slow
perspiration, tarnished sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd
volumes of dismal books.  The most abundant and the most agreeable
evidences of progressing life in Cloisterham are the evidences of
vegetable life in many gardens; even its drooping and despondent little
theatre has its poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he
ducks from its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or
oyster-shells, according to the season of the year.

In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns’ House: a venerable brick
edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from the legend
of its conventual uses.  On the trim gate enclosing its old courtyard is
a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the legend: ‘Seminary for Young
Ladies.  Miss Twinkleton.’  The house-front is so old and worn, and the
brass plate is so shining and staring, that the general result has
reminded imaginative strangers of a battered old beau with a large modern
eye-glass stuck in his blind eye.

Whether the nuns of yore, being of a submissive rather than a
stiff-necked generation, habitually bent their contemplative heads to
avoid collision with the beams in the low ceilings of the many chambers
of their House; whether they sat in its long low windows telling their
beads for their mortification, instead of making necklaces of them for
their adornment; whether they were ever walled up alive in odd angles and
jutting gables of the building for having some ineradicable leaven of
busy mother Nature in them which has kept the fermenting world alive ever
since; these may be matters of interest to its haunting ghosts (if any),
but constitute no item in Miss Twinkleton’s half-yearly accounts.  They
are neither of Miss Twinkleton’s inclusive regulars, nor of her extras.
The lady who undertakes the poetical department of the establishment at
so much (or so little) a quarter has no pieces in her list of recitals
bearing on such unprofitable questions.

As, in some cases of drunkenness, and in others of animal magnetism,
there are two states of consciousness which never clash, but each of
which pursues its separate course as though it were continuous instead of
broken (thus, if I hide my watch when I am drunk, I must be drunk again
before I can remember where), so Miss Twinkleton has two distinct and
separate phases of being.  Every night, the moment the young ladies have
retired to rest, does Miss Twinkleton smarten up her curls a little,
brighten up her eyes a little, and become a sprightlier Miss Twinkleton
than the young ladies have ever seen.  Every night, at the same hour,
does Miss Twinkleton resume the topics of the previous night,
comprehending the tenderer scandal of Cloisterham, of which she has no
knowledge whatever by day, and references to a certain season at
Tunbridge Wells (airily called by Miss Twinkleton in this state of her
existence ‘The Wells’), notably the season wherein a certain finished
gentleman (compassionately called by Miss Twinkleton, in this stage of
her existence, ‘Foolish Mr. Porters’) revealed a homage of the heart,
whereof Miss Twinkleton, in her scholastic state of existence, is as
ignorant as a granite pillar.  Miss Twinkleton’s companion in both states
of existence, and equally adaptable to either, is one Mrs. Tisher: a
deferential widow with a weak back, a chronic sigh, and a suppressed
voice, who looks after the young ladies’ wardrobes, and leads them to
infer that she has seen better days.  Perhaps this is the reason why it
is an article of faith with the servants, handed down from race to race,
that the departed Tisher was a hairdresser.

The pet pupil of the Nuns’ House is Miss Rosa Bud, of course called
Rosebud; wonderfully pretty, wonderfully childish, wonderfully whimsical.
An awkward interest (awkward because romantic) attaches to Miss Bud in
the minds of the young ladies, on account of its being known to them that
a husband has been chosen for her by will and bequest, and that her
guardian is bound down to bestow her on that husband when he comes of
age.  Miss Twinkleton, in her seminarial state of existence, has combated
the romantic aspect of this destiny by affecting to shake her head over
it behind Miss Bud’s dimpled shoulders, and to brood on the unhappy lot
of that doomed little victim.  But with no better effect—possibly some
unfelt touch of foolish Mr. Porters has undermined the endeavour—than to
evoke from the young ladies an unanimous bedchamber cry of ‘O, what a
pretending old thing Miss Twinkleton is, my dear!’

The Nuns’ House is never in such a state of flutter as when this allotted
husband calls to see little Rosebud.  (It is unanimously understood by
the young ladies that he is lawfully entitled to this privilege, and that
if Miss Twinkleton disputed it, she would be instantly taken up and
transported.)  When his ring at the gate-bell is expected, or takes
place, every young lady who can, under any pretence, look out of window,
looks out of window; while every young lady who is ‘practising,’
practises out of time; and the French class becomes so demoralised that
the mark goes round as briskly as the bottle at a convivial party in the
last century.

On the afternoon of the day next after the dinner of two at the
gatehouse, the bell is rung with the usual fluttering results.

‘Mr. Edwin Drood to see Miss Rosa.’

This is the announcement of the parlour-maid in chief.  Miss Twinkleton,
with an exemplary air of melancholy on her, turns to the sacrifice, and
says, ‘You may go down, my dear.’  Miss Bud goes down, followed by all
eyes.

Mr. Edwin Drood is waiting in Miss Twinkleton’s own parlour: a dainty
room, with nothing more directly scholastic in it than a terrestrial and
a celestial globe.  These expressive machines imply (to parents and
guardians) that even when Miss Twinkleton retires into the bosom of
privacy, duty may at any moment compel her to become a sort of Wandering
Jewess, scouring the earth and soaring through the skies in search of
knowledge for her pupils.

The last new maid, who has never seen the young gentleman Miss Rosa is
engaged to, and who is making his acquaintance between the hinges of the
open door, left open for the purpose, stumbles guiltily down the kitchen
stairs, as a charming little apparition, with its face concealed by a
little silk apron thrown over its head, glides into the parlour.

‘O! _it is_ so ridiculous!’ says the apparition, stopping and shrinking.
‘Don’t, Eddy!’

‘Don’t what, Rosa?’

‘Don’t come any nearer, please.  It _is_ so absurd.’

‘What is absurd, Rosa?’

‘The whole thing is.  It _is_ so absurd to be an engaged orphan and it
_is_ so absurd to have the girls and the servants scuttling about after
one, like mice in the wainscot; and it _is_ so absurd to be called upon!’

The apparition appears to have a thumb in the corner of its mouth while
making this complaint.

‘You give me an affectionate reception, Pussy, I must say.’

‘Well, I will in a minute, Eddy, but I can’t just yet.  How are you?’
(very shortly.)

‘I am unable to reply that I am much the better for seeing you, Pussy,
inasmuch as I see nothing of you.’

This second remonstrance brings a dark, bright, pouting eye out from a
corner of the apron; but it swiftly becomes invisible again, as the
apparition exclaims: ‘O good gracious! you have had half your hair cut
off!’

‘I should have done better to have had my head cut off, I think,’ says
Edwin, rumpling the hair in question, with a fierce glance at the
looking-glass, and giving an impatient stamp.  ‘Shall I go?’

‘No; you needn’t go just yet, Eddy.  The girls would all be asking
questions why you went.’

‘Once for all, Rosa, will you uncover that ridiculous little head of
yours and give me a welcome?’

The apron is pulled off the childish head, as its wearer replies: ‘You’re
very welcome, Eddy.  There! I’m sure that’s nice.  Shake hands.  No, I
can’t kiss you, because I’ve got an acidulated drop in my mouth.’

‘Are you at all glad to see me, Pussy?’

‘O, yes, I’m dreadfully glad.—Go and sit down.—Miss Twinkleton.’

It is the custom of that excellent lady when these visits occur, to
appear every three minutes, either in her own person or in that of Mrs.
Tisher, and lay an offering on the shrine of Propriety by affecting to
look for some desiderated article.  On the present occasion Miss
Twinkleton, gracefully gliding in and out, says in passing: ‘How do you
do, Mr. Drood?  Very glad indeed to have the pleasure.  Pray excuse me.
Tweezers.  Thank you!’

‘I got the gloves last evening, Eddy, and I like them very much.  They
are beauties.’

‘Well, that’s something,’ the affianced replies, half grumbling.  ‘The
smallest encouragement thankfully received.  And how did you pass your
birthday, Pussy?’

‘Delightfully!  Everybody gave me a present.  And we had a feast.  And we
had a ball at night.’

‘A feast and a ball, eh?  These occasions seem to go off tolerably well
without me, Pussy.’

‘De-lightfully!’ cries Rosa, in a quite spontaneous manner, and without
the least pretence of reserve.

‘Hah!  And what was the feast?’

‘Tarts, oranges, jellies, and shrimps.’

‘Any partners at the ball?’

‘We danced with one another, of course, sir.  But some of the girls made
game to be their brothers.  It _was_ so droll!’

‘Did anybody make game to be—’

‘To be you?  O dear yes!’ cries Rosa, laughing with great enjoyment.
‘That was the first thing done.’

‘I hope she did it pretty well,’ says Edwin rather doubtfully.

‘O, it was excellent!—I wouldn’t dance with you, you know.’

Edwin scarcely seems to see the force of this; begs to know if he may
take the liberty to ask why?

‘Because I was so tired of you,’ returns Rosa.  But she quickly adds, and
pleadingly too, seeing displeasure in his face: ‘Dear Eddy, you were just
as tired of me, you know.’

‘Did I say so, Rosa?’

‘Say so!  Do you ever say so?  No, you only showed it.  O, she did it so
well!’ cries Rosa, in a sudden ecstasy with her counterfeit betrothed.

‘It strikes me that she must be a devilish impudent girl,’ says Edwin
Drood.  ‘And so, Pussy, you have passed your last birthday in this old
house.’

‘Ah, yes!’ Rosa clasps her hands, looks down with a sigh, and shakes her
head.

‘You seem to be sorry, Rosa.’

‘I am sorry for the poor old place.  Somehow, I feel as if it would miss
me, when I am gone so far away, so young.’

‘Perhaps we had better stop short, Rosa?’

She looks up at him with a swift bright look; next moment shakes her
head, sighs, and looks down again.

‘That is to say, is it, Pussy, that we are both resigned?’

She nods her head again, and after a short silence, quaintly bursts out
with: ‘You know we must be married, and married from here, Eddy, or the
poor girls will be so dreadfully disappointed!’

For the moment there is more of compassion, both for her and for himself,
in her affianced husband’s face, than there is of love.  He checks the
look, and asks: ‘Shall I take you out for a walk, Rosa dear?’

Rosa dear does not seem at all clear on this point, until her face, which
has been comically reflective, brightens.  ‘O, yes, Eddy; let us go for a
walk!  And I tell you what we’ll do.  You shall pretend that you are
engaged to somebody else, and I’ll pretend that I am not engaged to
anybody, and then we shan’t quarrel.’

‘Do you think that will prevent our falling out, Rosa?’

‘I know it will.  Hush!  Pretend to look out of window—Mrs. Tisher!’

Through a fortuitous concourse of accidents, the matronly Tisher heaves
in sight, says, in rustling through the room like the legendary ghost of
a dowager in silken skirts: ‘I hope I see Mr. Drood well; though I
needn’t ask, if I may judge from his complexion.  I trust I disturb no
one; but there _was_ a paper-knife—O, thank you, I am sure!’ and
disappears with her prize.

‘One other thing you must do, Eddy, to oblige me,’ says Rosebud.  ‘The
moment we get into the street, you must put me outside, and keep close to
the house yourself—squeeze and graze yourself against it.’

‘By all means, Rosa, if you wish it.  Might I ask why?’

‘O! because I don’t want the girls to see you.’

‘It’s a fine day; but would you like me to carry an umbrella up?’

‘Don’t be foolish, sir.  You haven’t got polished leather boots on,’
pouting, with one shoulder raised.

‘Perhaps that might escape the notice of the girls, even if they did see
me,’ remarks Edwin, looking down at his boots with a sudden distaste for
them.

‘Nothing escapes their notice, sir.  And then I know what would happen.
Some of them would begin reflecting on me by saying (for _they_ are free)
that they never will on any account engage themselves to lovers without
polished leather boots.  Hark!  Miss Twinkleton.  I’ll ask for leave.’

That discreet lady being indeed heard without, inquiring of nobody in a
blandly conversational tone as she advances: ‘Eh?  Indeed!  Are you quite
sure you saw my mother-of-pearl button-holder on the work-table in my
room?’ is at once solicited for walking leave, and graciously accords it.
And soon the young couple go out of the Nuns’ House, taking all
precautions against the discovery of the so vitally defective boots of
Mr. Edwin Drood: precautions, let us hope, effective for the peace of
Mrs. Edwin Drood that is to be.

‘Which way shall we take, Rosa?’

Rosa replies: ‘I want to go to the Lumps-of-Delight shop.’

‘To the—?’

‘A Turkish sweetmeat, sir.  My gracious me, don’t you understand
anything?  Call yourself an Engineer, and not know _that_?’

‘Why, how should I know it, Rosa?’

‘Because I am very fond of them.  But O! I forgot what we are to pretend.
No, you needn’t know anything about them; never mind.’

So he is gloomily borne off to the Lumps-of-Delight shop, where Rosa
makes her purchase, and, after offering some to him (which he rather
indignantly declines), begins to partake of it with great zest:
previously taking off and rolling up a pair of little pink gloves, like
rose-leaves, and occasionally putting her little pink fingers to her rosy
lips, to cleanse them from the Dust of Delight that comes off the Lumps.

‘Now, be a good-tempered Eddy, and pretend.  And so you are engaged?’

‘And so I am engaged.’

‘Is she nice?’

‘Charming.’

‘Tall?’

‘Immensely tall!’  Rosa being short.

‘Must be gawky, I should think,’ is Rosa’s quiet commentary.

‘I beg your pardon; not at all,’ contradiction rising in him.

‘What is termed a fine woman; a splendid woman.’

‘Big nose, no doubt,’ is the quiet commentary again.

‘Not a little one, certainly,’ is the quick reply, (Rosa’s being a little
one.)

‘Long pale nose, with a red knob in the middle.  I know the sort of
nose,’ says Rosa, with a satisfied nod, and tranquilly enjoying the
Lumps.

‘You _don’t_ know the sort of nose, Rosa,’ with some warmth; ‘because
it’s nothing of the kind.’

‘Not a pale nose, Eddy?’

‘No.’  Determined not to assent.

‘A red nose?  O! I don’t like red noses.  However; to be sure she can
always powder it.’

‘She would scorn to powder it,’ says Edwin, becoming heated.

‘Would she?  What a stupid thing she must be!  Is she stupid in
everything?’

‘No; in nothing.’

After a pause, in which the whimsically wicked face has not been
unobservant of him, Rosa says:

‘And this most sensible of creatures likes the idea of being carried off
to Egypt; does she, Eddy?’

‘Yes.  She takes a sensible interest in triumphs of engineering skill:
especially when they are to change the whole condition of an undeveloped
country.’

‘Lor!’ says Rosa, shrugging her shoulders, with a little laugh of wonder.

‘Do you object,’ Edwin inquires, with a majestic turn of his eyes
downward upon the fairy figure: ‘do you object, Rosa, to her feeling that
interest?’

‘Object? my dear Eddy!  But really, doesn’t she hate boilers and things?’

‘I can answer for her not being so idiotic as to hate Boilers,’ he
returns with angry emphasis; ‘though I cannot answer for her views about
Things; really not understanding what Things are meant.’

‘But don’t she hate Arabs, and Turks, and Fellahs, and people?’

‘Certainly not.’  Very firmly.

‘At least she _must_ hate the Pyramids?  Come, Eddy?’

‘Why should she be such a little—tall, I mean—goose, as to hate the
Pyramids, Rosa?’

‘Ah! you should hear Miss Twinkleton,’ often nodding her head, and much
enjoying the Lumps, ‘bore about them, and then you wouldn’t ask.
Tiresome old burying-grounds!  Isises, and Ibises, and Cheopses, and
Pharaohses; who cares about them?  And then there was Belzoni, or
somebody, dragged out by the legs, half-choked with bats and dust.  All
the girls say: Serve him right, and hope it hurt him, and wish he had
been quite choked.’

The two youthful figures, side by side, but not now arm-in-arm, wander
discontentedly about the old Close; and each sometimes stops and slowly
imprints a deeper footstep in the fallen leaves.

‘Well!’ says Edwin, after a lengthy silence.  ‘According to custom.  We
can’t get on, Rosa.’

Rosa tosses her head, and says she don’t want to get on.

‘That’s a pretty sentiment, Rosa, considering.’

‘Considering what?’

‘If I say what, you’ll go wrong again.’

‘_You’ll_ go wrong, you mean, Eddy.  Don’t be ungenerous.’

‘Ungenerous!  I like that!’

‘Then I _don’t_ like that, and so I tell you plainly,’ Rosa pouts.

‘Now, Rosa, I put it to you.  Who disparaged my profession, my
destination—’

‘You are not going to be buried in the Pyramids, I hope?’ she interrupts,
arching her delicate eyebrows.  ‘You never said you were.  If you are,
why haven’t you mentioned it to me?  I can’t find out your plans by
instinct.’

‘Now, Rosa, you know very well what I mean, my dear.’

‘Well then, why did you begin with your detestable red-nosed giantesses?
And she would, she would, she would, she would, she WOULD powder it!’
cries Rosa, in a little burst of comical contradictory spleen.

‘Somehow or other, I never can come right in these discussions,’ says
Edwin, sighing and becoming resigned.

‘How is it possible, sir, that you ever can come right when you’re always
wrong?  And as to Belzoni, I suppose he’s dead;—I’m sure I hope he is—and
how can his legs or his chokes concern you?’

‘It is nearly time for your return, Rosa.  We have not had a very happy
walk, have we?’

‘A happy walk?  A detestably unhappy walk, sir.  If I go up-stairs the
moment I get in and cry till I can’t take my dancing lesson, you are
responsible, mind!’

‘Let us be friends, Rosa.’

‘Ah!’ cries Rosa, shaking her head and bursting into real tears, ‘I wish
we _could_ be friends!  It’s because we can’t be friends, that we try one
another so.  I am a young little thing, Eddy, to have an old heartache;
but I really, really have, sometimes.  Don’t be angry.  I know you have
one yourself too often.  We should both of us have done better, if What
is to be had been left What might have been.  I am quite a little serious
thing now, and not teasing you.  Let each of us forbear, this one time,
on our own account, and on the other’s!’

Disarmed by this glimpse of a woman’s nature in the spoilt child, though
for an instant disposed to resent it as seeming to involve the enforced
infliction of himself upon her, Edwin Drood stands watching her as she
childishly cries and sobs, with both hands to the handkerchief at her
eyes, and then—she becoming more composed, and indeed beginning in her
young inconstancy to laugh at herself for having been so moved—leads her
to a seat hard by, under the elm-trees.

                        [Picture: Under the trees]

‘One clear word of understanding, Pussy dear.  I am not clever out of my
own line—now I come to think of it, I don’t know that I am particularly
clever in it—but I want to do right.  There is not—there may be—I really
don’t see my way to what I want to say, but I must say it before we
part—there is not any other young—’

‘O no, Eddy!  It’s generous of you to ask me; but no, no, no!’

They have come very near to the Cathedral windows, and at this moment the
organ and the choir sound out sublimely.  As they sit listening to the
solemn swell, the confidence of last night rises in young Edwin Drood’s
mind, and he thinks how unlike this music is to that discordance.

‘I fancy I can distinguish Jack’s voice,’ is his remark in a low tone in
connection with the train of thought.

‘Take me back at once, please,’ urges his Affianced, quickly laying her
light hand upon his wrist.  ‘They will all be coming out directly; let us
get away.  O, what a resounding chord!  But don’t let us stop to listen
to it; let us get away!’

Her hurry is over as soon as they have passed out of the Close.  They go
arm-in-arm now, gravely and deliberately enough, along the old
High-street, to the Nuns’ House.  At the gate, the street being within
sight empty, Edwin bends down his face to Rosebud’s.

She remonstrates, laughing, and is a childish schoolgirl again.

‘Eddy, no!  I’m too sticky to be kissed.  But give me your hand, and I’ll
blow a kiss into that.’

He does so.  She breathes a light breath into it and asks, retaining it
and looking into it:—

‘Now say, what do you see?’

‘See, Rosa?’

‘Why, I thought you Egyptian boys could look into a hand and see all
sorts of phantoms.  Can’t you see a happy Future?’

For certain, neither of them sees a happy Present, as the gate opens and
closes, and one goes in, and the other goes away.




CHAPTER IV—MR. SAPSEA


Accepting the Jackass as the type of self-sufficient stupidity and
conceit—a custom, perhaps, like some few other customs, more conventional
than fair—then the purest jackass in Cloisterham is Mr. Thomas Sapsea,
Auctioneer.

Mr. Sapsea ‘dresses at’ the Dean; has been bowed to for the Dean, in
mistake; has even been spoken to in the street as My Lord, under the
impression that he was the Bishop come down unexpectedly, without his
chaplain.  Mr. Sapsea is very proud of this, and of his voice, and of his
style.  He has even (in selling landed property) tried the experiment of
slightly intoning in his pulpit, to make himself more like what he takes
to be the genuine ecclesiastical article.  So, in ending a Sale by Public
Auction, Mr. Sapsea finishes off with an air of bestowing a benediction
on the assembled brokers, which leaves the real Dean—a modest and worthy
gentleman—far behind.

Mr. Sapsea has many admirers; indeed, the proposition is carried by a
large local majority, even including non-believers in his wisdom, that he
is a credit to Cloisterham.  He possesses the great qualities of being
portentous and dull, and of having a roll in his speech, and another roll
in his gait; not to mention a certain gravely flowing action with his
hands, as if he were presently going to Confirm the individual with whom
he holds discourse.  Much nearer sixty years of age than fifty, with a
flowing outline of stomach, and horizontal creases in his waistcoat;
reputed to be rich; voting at elections in the strictly respectable
interest; morally satisfied that nothing but he himself has grown since
he was a baby; how can dunder-headed Mr. Sapsea be otherwise than a
credit to Cloisterham, and society?

Mr. Sapsea’s premises are in the High-street, over against the Nuns’
House.  They are of about the period of the Nuns’ House, irregularly
modernised here and there, as steadily deteriorating generations found,
more and more, that they preferred air and light to Fever and the Plague.
Over the doorway is a wooden effigy, about half life-size, representing
Mr. Sapsea’s father, in a curly wig and toga, in the act of selling.  The
chastity of the idea, and the natural appearance of the little finger,
hammer, and pulpit, have been much admired.

Mr. Sapsea sits in his dull ground-floor sitting-room, giving first on
his paved back yard; and then on his railed-off garden.  Mr. Sapsea has a
bottle of port wine on a table before the fire—the fire is an early
luxury, but pleasant on the cool, chilly autumn evening—and is
characteristically attended by his portrait, his eight-day clock, and his
weather-glass.  Characteristically, because he would uphold himself
against mankind, his weather-glass against weather, and his clock against
time.

By Mr. Sapsea’s side on the table are a writing-desk and writing
materials.  Glancing at a scrap of manuscript, Mr. Sapsea reads it to
himself with a lofty air, and then, slowly pacing the room with his
thumbs in the arm-holes of his waistcoat, repeats it from memory: so
internally, though with much dignity, that the word ‘Ethelinda’ is alone
audible.

There are three clean wineglasses in a tray on the table.  His
serving-maid entering, and announcing ‘Mr. Jasper is come, sir,’ Mr.
Sapsea waves ‘Admit him,’ and draws two wineglasses from the rank, as
being claimed.

‘Glad to see you, sir.  I congratulate myself on having the honour of
receiving you here for the first time.’  Mr. Sapsea does the honours of
his house in this wise.

‘You are very good.  The honour is mine and the self-congratulation is
mine.’

‘You are pleased to say so, sir.  But I do assure you that it is a
satisfaction to me to receive you in my humble home.  And that is what I
would not say to everybody.’  Ineffable loftiness on Mr. Sapsea’s part
accompanies these words, as leaving the sentence to be understood: ‘You
will not easily believe that your society can be a satisfaction to a man
like myself; nevertheless, it is.’

‘I have for some time desired to know you, Mr. Sapsea.’

‘And I, sir, have long known you by reputation as a man of taste.  Let me
fill your glass.  I will give you, sir,’ says Mr. Sapsea, filling his
own:

    ‘When the French come over,
    May we meet them at Dover!’

This was a patriotic toast in Mr. Sapsea’s infancy, and he is therefore
fully convinced of its being appropriate to any subsequent era.

‘You can scarcely be ignorant, Mr. Sapsea,’ observes Jasper, watching the
auctioneer with a smile as the latter stretches out his legs before the
fire, ‘that you know the world.’

‘Well, sir,’ is the chuckling reply, ‘I think I know something of it;
something of it.’

‘Your reputation for that knowledge has always interested and surprised
me, and made me wish to know you.  For Cloisterham is a little place.
Cooped up in it myself, I know nothing beyond it, and feel it to be a
very little place.’

‘If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man,’ Mr. Sapsea begins,
and then stops:—‘You will excuse me calling you young man, Mr. Jasper?
You are much my junior.’

‘By all means.’

‘If I have not gone to foreign countries, young man, foreign countries
have come to me.  They have come to me in the way of business, and I have
improved upon my opportunities.  Put it that I take an inventory, or make
a catalogue.  I see a French clock.  I never saw him before, in my life,
but I instantly lay my finger on him and say “Paris!”  I see some cups
and saucers of Chinese make, equally strangers to me personally: I put my
finger on them, then and there, and I say “Pekin, Nankin, and Canton.”
It is the same with Japan, with Egypt, and with bamboo and sandalwood
from the East Indies; I put my finger on them all.  I have put my finger
on the North Pole before now, and said “Spear of Esquimaux make, for half
a pint of pale sherry!”’

‘Really?  A very remarkable way, Mr. Sapsea, of acquiring a knowledge of
men and things.’

‘I mention it, sir,’ Mr. Sapsea rejoins, with unspeakable complacency,
‘because, as I say, it don’t do to boast of what you are; but show how
you came to be it, and then you prove it.’

‘Most interesting.  We were to speak of the late Mrs. Sapsea.’

‘We were, sir.’  Mr. Sapsea fills both glasses, and takes the decanter
into safe keeping again.  ‘Before I consult your opinion as a man of
taste on this little trifle’—holding it up—‘which is _but_ a trifle, and
still has required some thought, sir, some little fever of the brow, I
ought perhaps to describe the character of the late Mrs. Sapsea, now dead
three quarters of a year.’

Mr. Jasper, in the act of yawning behind his wineglass, puts down that
screen and calls up a look of interest.  It is a little impaired in its
expressiveness by his having a shut-up gape still to dispose of, with
watering eyes.

‘Half a dozen years ago, or so,’ Mr. Sapsea proceeds, ‘when I had
enlarged my mind up to—I will not say to what it now is, for that might
seem to aim at too much, but up to the pitch of wanting another mind to
be absorbed in it—I cast my eye about me for a nuptial partner.  Because,
as I say, it is not good for man to be alone.’

Mr. Jasper appears to commit this original idea to memory.

‘Miss Brobity at that time kept, I will not call it the rival
establishment to the establishment at the Nuns’ House opposite, but I
will call it the other parallel establishment down town.  The world did
have it that she showed a passion for attending my sales, when they took
place on half holidays, or in vacation time.  The world did put it about,
that she admired my style.  The world did notice that as time flowed by,
my style became traceable in the dictation-exercises of Miss Brobity’s
pupils.  Young man, a whisper even sprang up in obscure malignity, that
one ignorant and besotted Churl (a parent) so committed himself as to
object to it by name.  But I do not believe this.  For is it likely that
any human creature in his right senses would so lay himself open to be
pointed at, by what I call the finger of scorn?’

Mr. Jasper shakes his head.  Not in the least likely.  Mr. Sapsea, in a
grandiloquent state of absence of mind, seems to refill his visitor’s
glass, which is full already; and does really refill his own, which is
empty.

‘Miss Brobity’s Being, young man, was deeply imbued with homage to Mind.
She revered Mind, when launched, or, as I say, precipitated, on an
extensive knowledge of the world.  When I made my proposal, she did me
the honour to be so overshadowed with a species of Awe, as to be able to
articulate only the two words, “O Thou!” meaning myself.  Her limpid blue
eyes were fixed upon me, her semi-transparent hands were clasped
together, pallor overspread her aquiline features, and, though encouraged
to proceed, she never did proceed a word further.  I disposed of the
parallel establishment by private contract, and we became as nearly one
as could be expected under the circumstances.  But she never could, and
she never did, find a phrase satisfactory to her perhaps-too-favourable
estimate of my intellect.  To the very last (feeble action of liver), she
addressed me in the same unfinished terms.’

Mr. Jasper has closed his eyes as the auctioneer has deepened his voice.
He now abruptly opens them, and says, in unison with the deepened voice
‘Ah!’—rather as if stopping himself on the extreme verge of adding—‘men!’

‘I have been since,’ says Mr. Sapsea, with his legs stretched out, and
solemnly enjoying himself with the wine and the fire, ‘what you behold
me; I have been since a solitary mourner; I have been since, as I say,
wasting my evening conversation on the desert air.  I will not say that I
have reproached myself; but there have been times when I have asked
myself the question: What if her husband had been nearer on a level with
her?  If she had not had to look up quite so high, what might the
stimulating action have been upon the liver?’

Mr. Jasper says, with an appearance of having fallen into dreadfully low
spirits, that he ‘supposes it was to be.’

‘We can only suppose so, sir,’ Mr. Sapsea coincides.  ‘As I say, Man
proposes, Heaven disposes.  It may or may not be putting the same thought
in another form; but that is the way I put it.’

Mr. Jasper murmurs assent.

‘And now, Mr. Jasper,’ resumes the auctioneer, producing his scrap of
manuscript, ‘Mrs. Sapsea’s monument having had full time to settle and
dry, let me take your opinion, as a man of taste, on the inscription I
have (as I before remarked, not without some little fever of the brow)
drawn out for it.  Take it in your own hand.  The setting out of the
lines requires to be followed with the eye, as well as the contents with
the mind.’

Mr. Jasper complying, sees and reads as follows:

                                 ETHELINDA,
                             Reverential Wife of
                             MR. THOMAS SAPSEA,
                   AUCTIONEER, VALUER, ESTATE AGENT, &c.,
                                OF THIS CITY.
                        Whose Knowledge of the World,
                         Though somewhat extensive,
                      Never brought him acquainted with
                                  A SPIRIT
                               More capable of
                             LOOKING UP TO HIM.
                               STRANGER, PAUSE
                        And ask thyself the Question,
                           CANST THOU DO LIKEWISE?
                                   If Not,
                            WITH A BLUSH RETIRE.

Mr. Sapsea having risen and stationed himself with his back to the fire,
for the purpose of observing the effect of these lines on the countenance
of a man of taste, consequently has his face towards the door, when his
serving-maid, again appearing, announces, ‘Durdles is come, sir!’  He
promptly draws forth and fills the third wineglass, as being now claimed,
and replies, ‘Show Durdles in.’

‘Admirable!’ quoth Mr. Jasper, handing back the paper.

‘You approve, sir?’

‘Impossible not to approve.  Striking, characteristic, and complete.’

The auctioneer inclines his head, as one accepting his due and giving a
receipt; and invites the entering Durdles to take off that glass of wine
(handing the same), for it will warm him.

Durdles is a stonemason; chiefly in the gravestone, tomb, and monument
way, and wholly of their colour from head to foot.  No man is better
known in Cloisterham.  He is the chartered libertine of the place.  Fame
trumpets him a wonderful workman—which, for aught that anybody knows, he
may be (as he never works); and a wonderful sot—which everybody knows he
is.  With the Cathedral crypt he is better acquainted than any living
authority; it may even be than any dead one.  It is said that the
intimacy of this acquaintance began in his habitually resorting to that
secret place, to lock-out the Cloisterham boy-populace, and sleep off
fumes of liquor: he having ready access to the Cathedral, as contractor
for rough repairs.  Be this as it may, he does know much about it, and,
in the demolition of impedimental fragments of wall, buttress, and
pavement, has seen strange sights.  He often speaks of himself in the
third person; perhaps, being a little misty as to his own identity, when
he narrates; perhaps impartially adopting the Cloisterham nomenclature in
reference to a character of acknowledged distinction.  Thus he will say,
touching his strange sights: ‘Durdles come upon the old chap,’ in
reference to a buried magnate of ancient time and high degree, ‘by
striking right into the coffin with his pick.  The old chap gave Durdles
a look with his open eyes, as much as to say, “Is your name Durdles?
Why, my man, I’ve been waiting for you a devil of a time!”  And then he
turned to powder.’  With a two-foot rule always in his pocket, and a
mason’s hammer all but always in his hand, Durdles goes continually
sounding and tapping all about and about the Cathedral; and whenever he
says to Tope: ‘Tope, here’s another old ’un in here!’  Tope announces it
to the Dean as an established discovery.

In a suit of coarse flannel with horn buttons, a yellow neckerchief with
draggled ends, an old hat more russet-coloured than black, and laced
boots of the hue of his stony calling, Durdles leads a hazy, gipsy sort
of life, carrying his dinner about with him in a small bundle, and
sitting on all manner of tombstones to dine.  This dinner of Durdles’s
has become quite a Cloisterham institution: not only because of his never
appearing in public without it, but because of its having been, on
certain renowned occasions, taken into custody along with Durdles (as
drunk and incapable), and exhibited before the Bench of justices at the
townhall.  These occasions, however, have been few and far apart: Durdles
being as seldom drunk as sober.  For the rest, he is an old bachelor, and
he lives in a little antiquated hole of a house that was never finished:
supposed to be built, so far, of stones stolen from the city wall.  To
this abode there is an approach, ankle-deep in stone chips, resembling a
petrified grove of tombstones, urns, draperies, and broken columns, in
all stages of sculpture.  Herein two journeymen incessantly chip, while
other two journeymen, who face each other, incessantly saw stone; dipping
as regularly in and out of their sheltering sentry-boxes, as if they were
mechanical figures emblematical of Time and Death.

To Durdles, when he had consumed his glass of port, Mr. Sapsea intrusts
that precious effort of his Muse.  Durdles unfeelingly takes out his
two-foot rule, and measures the lines calmly, alloying them with
stone-grit.

‘This is for the monument, is it, Mr. Sapsea?’

‘The Inscription.  Yes.’  Mr. Sapsea waits for its effect on a common
mind.

‘It’ll come in to a eighth of a inch,’ says Durdles.  ‘Your servant, Mr.
Jasper.  Hope I see you well.’

‘How are you Durdles?’

‘I’ve got a touch of the Tombatism on me, Mr. Jasper, but that I must
expect.’

‘You mean the Rheumatism,’ says Sapsea, in a sharp tone.  (He is nettled
by having his composition so mechanically received.)

‘No, I don’t.  I mean, Mr. Sapsea, the Tombatism.  It’s another sort from
Rheumatism.  Mr. Jasper knows what Durdles means.  You get among them
Tombs afore it’s well light on a winter morning, and keep on, as the
Catechism says, a-walking in the same all the days of your life, and
_you’ll_ know what Durdles means.’

‘It is a bitter cold place,’ Mr. Jasper assents, with an antipathetic
shiver.

‘And if it’s bitter cold for you, up in the chancel, with a lot of live
breath smoking out about you, what the bitterness is to Durdles, down in
the crypt among the earthy damps there, and the dead breath of the old
’uns,’ returns that individual, ‘Durdles leaves you to judge.—Is this to
be put in hand at once, Mr. Sapsea?’

Mr. Sapsea, with an Author’s anxiety to rush into publication, replies
that it cannot be out of hand too soon.

‘You had better let me have the key then,’ says Durdles.

‘Why, man, it is not to be put inside the monument!’

‘Durdles knows where it’s to be put, Mr. Sapsea; no man better.  Ask ’ere
a man in Cloisterham whether Durdles knows his work.’

Mr. Sapsea rises, takes a key from a drawer, unlocks an iron safe let
into the wall, and takes from it another key.

‘When Durdles puts a touch or a finish upon his work, no matter where,
inside or outside, Durdles likes to look at his work all round, and see
that his work is a-doing him credit,’ Durdles explains, doggedly.

The key proffered him by the bereaved widower being a large one, he slips
his two-foot rule into a side-pocket of his flannel trousers made for it,
and deliberately opens his flannel coat, and opens the mouth of a large
breast-pocket within it before taking the key to place it in that
repository.

‘Why, Durdles!’ exclaims Jasper, looking on amused, ‘you are undermined
with pockets!’

‘And I carries weight in ’em too, Mr. Jasper.  Feel those!’ producing two
other large keys.

‘Hand me Mr. Sapsea’s likewise.  Surely this is the heaviest of the
three.’

‘You’ll find ’em much of a muchness, I expect,’ says Durdles.  ‘They all
belong to monuments.  They all open Durdles’s work.  Durdles keeps the
keys of his work mostly.  Not that they’re much used.’

‘By the bye,’ it comes into Jasper’s mind to say, as he idly examines the
keys, ‘I have been going to ask you, many a day, and have always
forgotten.  You know they sometimes call you Stony Durdles, don’t you?’

‘Cloisterham knows me as Durdles, Mr. Jasper.’

‘I am aware of that, of course.  But the boys sometimes—’

‘O! if you mind them young imps of boys—’ Durdles gruffly interrupts.

‘I don’t mind them any more than you do.  But there was a discussion the
other day among the Choir, whether Stony stood for Tony;’ clinking one
key against another.

(‘Take care of the wards, Mr. Jasper.’)

‘Or whether Stony stood for Stephen;’ clinking with a change of keys.

(‘You can’t make a pitch pipe of ’em, Mr. Jasper.’)

‘Or whether the name comes from your trade.  How stands the fact?’

Mr. Jasper weighs the three keys in his hand, lifts his head from his
idly stooping attitude over the fire, and delivers the keys to Durdles
with an ingenuous and friendly face.

But the stony one is a gruff one likewise, and that hazy state of his is
always an uncertain state, highly conscious of its dignity, and prone to
take offence.  He drops his two keys back into his pocket one by one, and
buttons them up; he takes his dinner-bundle from the chair-back on which
he hung it when he came in; he distributes the weight he carries, by
tying the third key up in it, as though he were an Ostrich, and liked to
dine off cold iron; and he gets out of the room, deigning no word of
answer.

Mr. Sapsea then proposes a hit at backgammon, which, seasoned with his
own improving conversation, and terminating in a supper of cold roast
beef and salad, beguiles the golden evening until pretty late.  Mr.
Sapsea’s wisdom being, in its delivery to mortals, rather of the diffuse
than the epigrammatic order, is by no means expended even then; but his
visitor intimates that he will come back for more of the precious
commodity on future occasions, and Mr. Sapsea lets him off for the
present, to ponder on the instalment he carries away.




CHAPTER V—MR. DURDLES AND FRIEND


John Jasper, on his way home through the Close, is brought to a
stand-still by the spectacle of Stony Durdles, dinner-bundle and all,
leaning his back against the iron railing of the burial-ground enclosing
it from the old cloister-arches; and a hideous small boy in rags flinging
stones at him as a well-defined mark in the moonlight.  Sometimes the
stones hit him, and sometimes they miss him, but Durdles seems
indifferent to either fortune.  The hideous small boy, on the contrary,
whenever he hits Durdles, blows a whistle of triumph through a jagged
gap, convenient for the purpose, in the front of his mouth, where half
his teeth are wanting; and whenever he misses him, yelps out ‘Mulled
agin!’ and tries to atone for the failure by taking a more correct and
vicious aim.

‘What are you doing to the man?’ demands Jasper, stepping out into the
moonlight from the shade.

‘Making a cock-shy of him,’ replies the hideous small boy.

‘Give me those stones in your hand.’

‘Yes, I’ll give ’em you down your throat, if you come a-ketching hold of
me,’ says the small boy, shaking himself loose, and backing.  ‘I’ll smash
your eye, if you don’t look out!’

‘Baby-Devil that you are, what has the man done to you?’

‘He won’t go home.’

‘What is that to you?’

‘He gives me a ’apenny to pelt him home if I ketches him out too late,’
says the boy.  And then chants, like a little savage, half stumbling and
half dancing among the rags and laces of his dilapidated boots:—

    ‘Widdy widdy wen!
    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten,
    Widdy widdy wy!
    Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
    Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!’

—with a comprehensive sweep on the last word, and one more delivery at
Durdles.

This would seem to be a poetical note of preparation, agreed upon, as a
caution to Durdles to stand clear if he can, or to betake himself
homeward.

John Jasper invites the boy with a beck of his head to follow him
(feeling it hopeless to drag him, or coax him), and crosses to the iron
railing where the Stony (and stoned) One is profoundly meditating.

‘Do you know this thing, this child?’ asks Jasper, at a loss for a word
that will define this thing.

‘Deputy,’ says Durdles, with a nod.

‘Is that its—his—name?’

‘Deputy,’ assents Durdles.

‘I’m man-servant up at the Travellers’ Twopenny in Gas Works Garding,’
this thing explains.  ‘All us man-servants at Travellers’ Lodgings is
named Deputy.  When we’re chock full and the Travellers is all a-bed I
come out for my ’elth.’  Then withdrawing into the road, and taking aim,
he resumes:—

    ‘Widdy widdy wen!
    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—’

‘Hold your hand,’ cries Jasper, ‘and don’t throw while I stand so near
him, or I’ll kill you!  Come, Durdles; let me walk home with you
to-night.  Shall I carry your bundle?’

‘Not on any account,’ replies Durdles, adjusting it.  ‘Durdles was making
his reflections here when you come up, sir, surrounded by his works, like
a poplar Author.—Your own brother-in-law;’ introducing a sarcophagus
within the railing, white and cold in the moonlight.  ‘Mrs. Sapsea;’
introducing the monument of that devoted wife.  ‘Late Incumbent;’
introducing the Reverend Gentleman’s broken column.  ‘Departed Assessed
Taxes;’ introducing a vase and towel, standing on what might represent
the cake of soap.  ‘Former pastrycook and Muffin-maker, much respected;’
introducing gravestone.  ‘All safe and sound here, sir, and all Durdles’s
work.  Of the common folk, that is merely bundled up in turf and
brambles, the less said the better.  A poor lot, soon forgot.’

‘This creature, Deputy, is behind us,’ says Jasper, looking back.  ‘Is he
to follow us?’

The relations between Durdles and Deputy are of a capricious kind; for,
on Durdles’s turning himself about with the slow gravity of beery
suddenness, Deputy makes a pretty wide circuit into the road and stands
on the defensive.

‘You never cried Widdy Warning before you begun to-night,’ says Durdles,
unexpectedly reminded of, or imagining, an injury.

‘Yer lie, I did,’ says Deputy, in his only form of polite contradiction.

‘Own brother, sir,’ observes Durdles, turning himself about again, and as
unexpectedly forgetting his offence as he had recalled or conceived it;
‘own brother to Peter the Wild Boy!  But I gave him an object in life.’

‘At which he takes aim?’ Mr. Jasper suggests.

‘That’s it, sir,’ returns Durdles, quite satisfied; ‘at which he takes
aim.  I took him in hand and gave him an object.  What was he before?  A
destroyer.  What work did he do?  Nothing but destruction.  What did he
earn by it?  Short terms in Cloisterham jail.  Not a person, not a piece
of property, not a winder, not a horse, nor a dog, nor a cat, nor a bird,
nor a fowl, nor a pig, but what he stoned, for want of an enlightened
object.  I put that enlightened object before him, and now he can turn
his honest halfpenny by the three penn’orth a week.’

‘I wonder he has no competitors.’

‘He has plenty, Mr. Jasper, but he stones ’em all away.  Now, I don’t
know what this scheme of mine comes to,’ pursues Durdles, considering
about it with the same sodden gravity; ‘I don’t know what you may
precisely call it.  It ain’t a sort of a—scheme of a—National Education?’

‘I should say not,’ replies Jasper.

‘I should say not,’ assents Durdles; ‘then we won’t try to give it a
name.’

‘He still keeps behind us,’ repeats Jasper, looking over his shoulder;
‘is he to follow us?’

‘We can’t help going round by the Travellers’ Twopenny, if we go the
short way, which is the back way,’ Durdles answers, ‘and we’ll drop him
there.’

So they go on; Deputy, as a rear rank one, taking open order, and
invading the silence of the hour and place by stoning every wall, post,
pillar, and other inanimate object, by the deserted way.

‘Is there anything new down in the crypt, Durdles?’ asks John Jasper.

‘Anything old, I think you mean,’ growls Durdles.  ‘It ain’t a spot for
novelty.’

‘Any new discovery on your part, I meant.’

‘There’s a old ’un under the seventh pillar on the left as you go down
the broken steps of the little underground chapel as formerly was; I make
him out (so fur as I’ve made him out yet) to be one of them old ’uns with
a crook.  To judge from the size of the passages in the walls, and of the
steps and doors, by which they come and went, them crooks must have been
a good deal in the way of the old ’uns!  Two on ’em meeting promiscuous
must have hitched one another by the mitre pretty often, I should say.’

Without any endeavour to correct the literality of this opinion, Jasper
surveys his companion—covered from head to foot with old mortar, lime,
and stone grit—as though he, Jasper, were getting imbued with a romantic
interest in his weird life.

‘Yours is a curious existence.’

Without furnishing the least clue to the question, whether he receives
this as a compliment or as quite the reverse, Durdles gruffly answers:
‘Yours is another.’

‘Well! inasmuch as my lot is cast in the same old earthy, chilly,
never-changing place, Yes.  But there is much more mystery and interest
in your connection with the Cathedral than in mine.  Indeed, I am
beginning to have some idea of asking you to take me on as a sort of
student, or free ’prentice, under you, and to let me go about with you
sometimes, and see some of these odd nooks in which you pass your days.’

The Stony One replies, in a general way, ‘All right.  Everybody knows
where to find Durdles, when he’s wanted.’  Which, if not strictly true,
is approximately so, if taken to express that Durdles may always be found
in a state of vagabondage somewhere.

‘What I dwell upon most,’ says Jasper, pursuing his subject of romantic
interest, ‘is the remarkable accuracy with which you would seem to find
out where people are buried.—What is the matter?  That bundle is in your
way; let me hold it.’

Durdles has stopped and backed a little (Deputy, attentive to all his
movements, immediately skirmishing into the road), and was looking about
for some ledge or corner to place his bundle on, when thus relieved of
it.

‘Just you give me my hammer out of that,’ says Durdles, ‘and I’ll show
you.’

Clink, clink.  And his hammer is handed him.

‘Now, lookee here.  You pitch your note, don’t you, Mr. Jasper?’

‘Yes.’

‘So I sound for mine.  I take my hammer, and I tap.’  (Here he strikes
the pavement, and the attentive Deputy skirmishes at a rather wider
range, as supposing that his head may be in requisition.)  ‘I tap, tap,
tap.  Solid!  I go on tapping.  Solid still!  Tap again.  Holloa!
Hollow!  Tap again, persevering.  Solid in hollow!  Tap, tap, tap, to try
it better.  Solid in hollow; and inside solid, hollow again!  There you
are!  Old ’un crumbled away in stone coffin, in vault!’

‘Astonishing!’

‘I have even done this,’ says Durdles, drawing out his two-foot rule
(Deputy meanwhile skirmishing nearer, as suspecting that Treasure may be
about to be discovered, which may somehow lead to his own enrichment, and
the delicious treat of the discoverers being hanged by the neck, on his
evidence, until they are dead).  ‘Say that hammer of mine’s a wall—my
work.  Two; four; and two is six,’ measuring on the pavement.  ‘Six foot
inside that wall is Mrs. Sapsea.’

‘Not really Mrs. Sapsea?’

‘Say Mrs. Sapsea.  Her wall’s thicker, but say Mrs. Sapsea.  Durdles
taps, that wall represented by that hammer, and says, after good
sounding: “Something betwixt us!”  Sure enough, some rubbish has been
left in that same six-foot space by Durdles’s men!’

Jasper opines that such accuracy ‘is a gift.’

‘I wouldn’t have it at a gift,’ returns Durdles, by no means receiving
the observation in good part.  ‘I worked it out for myself.  Durdles
comes by _his_ knowledge through grubbing deep for it, and having it up
by the roots when it don’t want to come.—Holloa you Deputy!’

‘Widdy!’ is Deputy’s shrill response, standing off again.

‘Catch that ha’penny.  And don’t let me see any more of you to-night,
after we come to the Travellers’ Twopenny.’

‘Warning!’ returns Deputy, having caught the halfpenny, and appearing by
this mystic word to express his assent to the arrangement.

They have but to cross what was once the vineyard, belonging to what was
once the Monastery, to come into the narrow back lane wherein stands the
crazy wooden house of two low stories currently known as the Travellers’
Twopenny:—a house all warped and distorted, like the morals of the
travellers, with scant remains of a lattice-work porch over the door, and
also of a rustic fence before its stamped-out garden; by reason of the
travellers being so bound to the premises by a tender sentiment (or so
fond of having a fire by the roadside in the course of the day), that
they can never be persuaded or threatened into departure, without
violently possessing themselves of some wooden forget-me-not, and bearing
it off.

The semblance of an inn is attempted to be given to this wretched place
by fragments of conventional red curtaining in the windows, which rags
are made muddily transparent in the night-season by feeble lights of rush
or cotton dip burning dully in the close air of the inside.  As Durdles
and Jasper come near, they are addressed by an inscribed paper lantern
over the door, setting forth the purport of the house.  They are also
addressed by some half-dozen other hideous small boys—whether twopenny
lodgers or followers or hangers-on of such, who knows!—who, as if
attracted by some carrion-scent of Deputy in the air, start into the
moonlight, as vultures might gather in the desert, and instantly fall to
stoning him and one another.

‘Stop, you young brutes,’ cries Jasper angrily, ‘and let us go by!’

This remonstrance being received with yells and flying stones, according
to a custom of late years comfortably established among the police
regulations of our English communities, where Christians are stoned on
all sides, as if the days of Saint Stephen were revived, Durdles remarks
of the young savages, with some point, that ‘they haven’t got an object,’
and leads the way down the lane.

At the corner of the lane, Jasper, hotly enraged, checks his companion
and looks back.  All is silent.  Next moment, a stone coming rattling at
his hat, and a distant yell of ‘Wake-Cock!  Warning!’ followed by a crow,
as from some infernally-hatched Chanticleer, apprising him under whose
victorious fire he stands, he turns the corner into safety, and takes
Durdles home: Durdles stumbling among the litter of his stony yard as if
he were going to turn head foremost into one of the unfinished tombs.

John Jasper returns by another way to his gatehouse, and entering softly
with his key, finds his fire still burning.  He takes from a locked press
a peculiar-looking pipe, which he fills—but not with tobacco—and, having
adjusted the contents of the bowl, very carefully, with a little
instrument, ascends an inner staircase of only a few steps, leading to
two rooms.  One of these is his own sleeping chamber: the other is his
nephew’s.  There is a light in each.

His nephew lies asleep, calm and untroubled.  John Jasper stands looking
down upon him, his unlighted pipe in his hand, for some time, with a
fixed and deep attention.  Then, hushing his footsteps, he passes to his
own room, lights his pipe, and delivers himself to the Spectres it
invokes at midnight.




CHAPTER VI—PHILANTHROPY IN MINOR CANON CORNER


The Reverend Septimus Crisparkle (Septimus, because six little brother
Crisparkles before him went out, one by one, as they were born, like six
weak little rushlights, as they were lighted), having broken the thin
morning ice near Cloisterham Weir with his amiable head, much to the
invigoration of his frame, was now assisting his circulation by boxing at
a looking-glass with great science and prowess.  A fresh and healthy
portrait the looking-glass presented of the Reverend Septimus, feinting
and dodging with the utmost artfulness, and hitting out from the shoulder
with the utmost straightness, while his radiant features teemed with
innocence, and soft-hearted benevolence beamed from his boxing-gloves.

It was scarcely breakfast-time yet, for Mrs. Crisparkle—mother, not wife
of the Reverend Septimus—was only just down, and waiting for the urn.
Indeed, the Reverend Septimus left off at this very moment to take the
pretty old lady’s entering face between his boxing-gloves and kiss it.
Having done so with tenderness, the Reverend Septimus turned to again,
countering with his left, and putting in his right, in a tremendous
manner.

‘I say, every morning of my life, that you’ll do it at last, Sept,’
remarked the old lady, looking on; ‘and so you will.’

‘Do what, Ma dear?’

‘Break the pier-glass, or burst a blood-vessel.’

‘Neither, please God, Ma dear.  Here’s wind, Ma.  Look at this!’  In a
concluding round of great severity, the Reverend Septimus administered
and escaped all sorts of punishment, and wound up by getting the old
lady’s cap into Chancery—such is the technical term used in scientific
circles by the learned in the Noble Art—with a lightness of touch that
hardly stirred the lightest lavender or cherry riband on it.
Magnanimously releasing the defeated, just in time to get his gloves into
a drawer and feign to be looking out of window in a contemplative state
of mind when a servant entered, the Reverend Septimus then gave place to
the urn and other preparations for breakfast.  These completed, and the
two alone again, it was pleasant to see (or would have been, if there had
been any one to see it, which there never was), the old lady standing to
say the Lord’s Prayer aloud, and her son, Minor Canon nevertheless,
standing with bent head to hear it, he being within five years of forty:
much as he had stood to hear the same words from the same lips when he
was within five months of four.

What is prettier than an old lady—except a young lady—when her eyes are
bright, when her figure is trim and compact, when her face is cheerful
and calm, when her dress is as the dress of a china shepherdess: so
dainty in its colours, so individually assorted to herself, so neatly
moulded on her?  Nothing is prettier, thought the good Minor Canon
frequently, when taking his seat at table opposite his long-widowed
mother.  Her thought at such times may be condensed into the two words
that oftenest did duty together in all her conversations: ‘My Sept!’

They were a good pair to sit breakfasting together in Minor Canon Corner,
Cloisterham.  For Minor Canon Corner was a quiet place in the shadow of
the Cathedral, which the cawing of the rooks, the echoing footsteps of
rare passers, the sound of the Cathedral bell, or the roll of the
Cathedral organ, seemed to render more quiet than absolute silence.
Swaggering fighting men had had their centuries of ramping and raving
about Minor Canon Corner, and beaten serfs had had their centuries of
drudging and dying there, and powerful monks had had their centuries of
being sometimes useful and sometimes harmful there, and behold they were
all gone out of Minor Canon Corner, and so much the better.  Perhaps one
of the highest uses of their ever having been there, was, that there
might be left behind, that blessed air of tranquillity which pervaded
Minor Canon Corner, and that serenely romantic state of the
mind—productive for the most part of pity and forbearance—which is
engendered by a sorrowful story that is all told, or a pathetic play that
is played out.

Red-brick walls harmoniously toned down in colour by time, strong-rooted
ivy, latticed windows, panelled rooms, big oaken beams in little places,
and stone-walled gardens where annual fruit yet ripened upon monkish
trees, were the principal surroundings of pretty old Mrs. Crisparkle and
the Reverend Septimus as they sat at breakfast.

‘And what, Ma dear,’ inquired the Minor Canon, giving proof of a
wholesome and vigorous appetite, ‘does the letter say?’

The pretty old lady, after reading it, had just laid it down upon the
breakfast-cloth.  She handed it over to her son.

Now, the old lady was exceedingly proud of her bright eyes being so clear
that she could read writing without spectacles.  Her son was also so
proud of the circumstance, and so dutifully bent on her deriving the
utmost possible gratification from it, that he had invented the pretence
that he himself could _not_ read writing without spectacles.  Therefore
he now assumed a pair, of grave and prodigious proportions, which not
only seriously inconvenienced his nose and his breakfast, but seriously
impeded his perusal of the letter.  For, he had the eyes of a microscope
and a telescope combined, when they were unassisted.

‘It’s from Mr. Honeythunder, of course,’ said the old lady, folding her
arms.

‘Of course,’ assented her son.  He then lamely read on:

                                                  ‘“Haven of Philanthropy,
                                         Chief Offices, London, Wednesday.

‘“DEAR MADAM,

‘“I write in the—;”  In the what’s this?  What does he write in?’

‘In the chair,’ said the old lady.

The Reverend Septimus took off his spectacles, that he might see her
face, as he exclaimed:

‘Why, what should he write in?’

‘Bless me, bless me, Sept,’ returned the old lady, ‘you don’t see the
context!  Give it back to me, my dear.’

Glad to get his spectacles off (for they always made his eyes water), her
son obeyed: murmuring that his sight for reading manuscript got worse and
worse daily.

‘“I write,”’ his mother went on, reading very perspicuously and
precisely, ‘“from the chair, to which I shall probably be confined for
some hours.”’

Septimus looked at the row of chairs against the wall, with a
half-protesting and half-appealing countenance.

‘“We have,”’ the old lady read on with a little extra emphasis, ‘“a
meeting of our Convened Chief Composite Committee of Central and District
Philanthropists, at our Head Haven as above; and it is their unanimous
pleasure that I take the chair.”’

Septimus breathed more freely, and muttered: ‘O! if he comes to _that_,
let him.’

‘“Not to lose a day’s post, I take the opportunity of a long report being
read, denouncing a public miscreant—”’

‘It is a most extraordinary thing,’ interposed the gentle Minor Canon,
laying down his knife and fork to rub his ear in a vexed manner, ‘that
these Philanthropists are always denouncing somebody.  And it is another
most extraordinary thing that they are always so violently flush of
miscreants!’

‘“Denouncing a public miscreant—”’—the old lady resumed, ‘“to get our
little affair of business off my mind.  I have spoken with my two wards,
Neville and Helena Landless, on the subject of their defective education,
and they give in to the plan proposed; as I should have taken good care
they did, whether they liked it or not.”’

‘And it is another most extraordinary thing,’ remarked the Minor Canon in
the same tone as before, ‘that these philanthropists are so given to
seizing their fellow-creatures by the scruff of the neck, and (as one may
say) bumping them into the paths of peace.—I beg your pardon, Ma dear,
for interrupting.’

‘“Therefore, dear Madam, you will please prepare your son, the Rev. Mr.
Septimus, to expect Neville as an inmate to be read with, on Monday next.
On the same day Helena will accompany him to Cloisterham, to take up her
quarters at the Nuns’ House, the establishment recommended by yourself
and son jointly.  Please likewise to prepare for her reception and
tuition there.  The terms in both cases are understood to be exactly as
stated to me in writing by yourself, when I opened a correspondence with
you on this subject, after the honour of being introduced to you at your
sister’s house in town here.  With compliments to the Rev. Mr. Septimus,
I am, Dear Madam, Your affectionate brother (In Philanthropy), LUKE
HONEYTHUNDER.”’

‘Well, Ma,’ said Septimus, after a little more rubbing of his ear, ‘we
must try it.  There can be no doubt that we have room for an inmate, and
that I have time to bestow upon him, and inclination too.  I must confess
to feeling rather glad that he is not Mr. Honeythunder himself.  Though
that seems wretchedly prejudiced—does it not?—for I never saw him.  Is he
a large man, Ma?’

‘I should call him a large man, my dear,’ the old lady replied after some
hesitation, ‘but that his voice is so much larger.’

‘Than himself?’

‘Than anybody.’

‘Hah!’ said Septimus.  And finished his breakfast as if the flavour of
the Superior Family Souchong, and also of the ham and toast and eggs,
were a little on the wane.

Mrs. Crisparkle’s sister, another piece of Dresden china, and matching
her so neatly that they would have made a delightful pair of ornaments
for the two ends of any capacious old-fashioned chimneypiece, and by
right should never have been seen apart, was the childless wife of a
clergyman holding Corporation preferment in London City.  Mr.
Honeythunder in his public character of Professor of Philanthropy had
come to know Mrs. Crisparkle during the last re-matching of the china
ornaments (in other words during her last annual visit to her sister),
after a public occasion of a philanthropic nature, when certain devoted
orphans of tender years had been glutted with plum buns, and plump
bumptiousness.  These were all the antecedents known in Minor Canon
Corner of the coming pupils.

‘I am sure you will agree with me, Ma,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, after
thinking the matter over, ‘that the first thing to be done, is, to put
these young people as much at their ease as possible.  There is nothing
disinterested in the notion, because we cannot be at our ease with them
unless they are at their ease with us.  Now, Jasper’s nephew is down here
at present; and like takes to like, and youth takes to youth.  He is a
cordial young fellow, and we will have him to meet the brother and sister
at dinner.  That’s three.  We can’t think of asking him, without asking
Jasper.  That’s four.  Add Miss Twinkleton and the fairy bride that is to
be, and that’s six.  Add our two selves, and that’s eight.  Would eight
at a friendly dinner at all put you out, Ma?’

‘Nine would, Sept,’ returned the old lady, visibly nervous.

‘My dear Ma, I particularise eight.’

‘The exact size of the table and the room, my dear.’

So it was settled that way: and when Mr. Crisparkle called with his
mother upon Miss Twinkleton, to arrange for the reception of Miss Helena
Landless at the Nuns’ House, the two other invitations having reference
to that establishment were proffered and accepted.  Miss Twinkleton did,
indeed, glance at the globes, as regretting that they were not formed to
be taken out into society; but became reconciled to leaving them behind.
Instructions were then despatched to the Philanthropist for the departure
and arrival, in good time for dinner, of Mr. Neville and Miss Helena; and
stock for soup became fragrant in the air of Minor Canon Corner.

In those days there was no railway to Cloisterham, and Mr. Sapsea said
there never would be.  Mr. Sapsea said more; he said there never should
be.  And yet, marvellous to consider, it has come to pass, in these days,
that Express Trains don’t think Cloisterham worth stopping at, but yell
and whirl through it on their larger errands, casting the dust off their
wheels as a testimony against its insignificance.  Some remote fragment
of Main Line to somewhere else, there was, which was going to ruin the
Money Market if it failed, and Church and State if it succeeded, and (of
course), the Constitution, whether or no; but even that had already so
unsettled Cloisterham traffic, that the traffic, deserting the high road,
came sneaking in from an unprecedented part of the country by a back
stable-way, for many years labelled at the corner: ‘Beware of the Dog.’

To this ignominious avenue of approach, Mr. Crisparkle repaired, awaiting
the arrival of a short, squat omnibus, with a disproportionate heap of
luggage on the roof—like a little Elephant with infinitely too much
Castle—which was then the daily service between Cloisterham and external
mankind.  As this vehicle lumbered up, Mr. Crisparkle could hardly see
anything else of it for a large outside passenger seated on the box, with
his elbows squared, and his hands on his knees, compressing the driver
into a most uncomfortably small compass, and glowering about him with a
strongly-marked face.

‘Is this Cloisterham?’ demanded the passenger, in a tremendous voice.

‘It is,’ replied the driver, rubbing himself as if he ached, after
throwing the reins to the ostler.  ‘And I never was so glad to see it.’

‘Tell your master to make his box-seat wider, then,’ returned the
passenger.  ‘Your master is morally bound—and ought to be legally, under
ruinous penalties—to provide for the comfort of his fellow-man.’

The driver instituted, with the palms of his hands, a superficial
perquisition into the state of his skeleton; which seemed to make him
anxious.

‘Have I sat upon you?’ asked the passenger.

‘You have,’ said the driver, as if he didn’t like it at all.

‘Take that card, my friend.’

‘I think I won’t deprive you on it,’ returned the driver, casting his
eyes over it with no great favour, without taking it.  ‘What’s the good
of it to me?’

‘Be a Member of that Society,’ said the passenger.

‘What shall I get by it?’ asked the driver.

‘Brotherhood,’ returned the passenger, in a ferocious voice.

‘Thankee,’ said the driver, very deliberately, as he got down; ‘my mother
was contented with myself, and so am I.  I don’t want no brothers.’

‘But you must have them,’ replied the passenger, also descending,
‘whether you like it or not.  I am your brother.’

‘I say!’ expostulated the driver, becoming more chafed in temper, ‘not
too fur!  The worm _will_, when—’

But here, Mr. Crisparkle interposed, remonstrating aside, in a friendly
voice: ‘Joe, Joe, Joe! don’t forget yourself, Joe, my good fellow!’ and
then, when Joe peaceably touched his hat, accosting the passenger with:
‘Mr. Honeythunder?’

‘That is my name, sir.’

‘My name is Crisparkle.’

‘Reverend Mr. Septimus?  Glad to see you, sir.  Neville and Helena are
inside.  Having a little succumbed of late, under the pressure of my
public labours, I thought I would take a mouthful of fresh air, and come
down with them, and return at night.  So you are the Reverend Mr.
Septimus, are you?’ surveying him on the whole with disappointment, and
twisting a double eyeglass by its ribbon, as if he were roasting it, but
not otherwise using it.  ‘Hah!  I expected to see you older, sir.’

‘I hope you will,’ was the good-humoured reply.

‘Eh?’ demanded Mr. Honeythunder.

‘Only a poor little joke.  Not worth repeating.’

‘Joke?  Ay; I never see a joke,’ Mr. Honeythunder frowningly retorted.
‘A joke is wasted upon me, sir.  Where are they?  Helena and Neville,
come here!  Mr. Crisparkle has come down to meet you.’

An unusually handsome lithe young fellow, and an unusually handsome lithe
girl; much alike; both very dark, and very rich in colour; she of almost
the gipsy type; something untamed about them both; a certain air upon
them of hunter and huntress; yet withal a certain air of being the
objects of the chase, rather than the followers.  Slender, supple, quick
of eye and limb; half shy, half defiant; fierce of look; an indefinable
kind of pause coming and going on their whole expression, both of face
and form, which might be equally likened to the pause before a crouch or
a bound.  The rough mental notes made in the first five minutes by Mr.
Crisparkle would have read thus, _verbatim_.

He invited Mr. Honeythunder to dinner, with a troubled mind (for the
discomfiture of the dear old china shepherdess lay heavy on it), and gave
his arm to Helena Landless.  Both she and her brother, as they walked all
together through the ancient streets, took great delight in what he
pointed out of the Cathedral and the Monastery ruin, and wondered—so his
notes ran on—much as if they were beautiful barbaric captives brought
from some wild tropical dominion.  Mr. Honeythunder walked in the middle
of the road, shouldering the natives out of his way, and loudly
developing a scheme he had, for making a raid on all the unemployed
persons in the United Kingdom, laying them every one by the heels in
jail, and forcing them, on pain of prompt extermination, to become
philanthropists.

Mrs. Crisparkle had need of her own share of philanthropy when she beheld
this very large and very loud excrescence on the little party.  Always
something in the nature of a Boil upon the face of society, Mr.
Honeythunder expanded into an inflammatory Wen in Minor Canon Corner.
Though it was not literally true, as was facetiously charged against him
by public unbelievers, that he called aloud to his fellow-creatures:
‘Curse your souls and bodies, come here and be blessed!’ still his
philanthropy was of that gunpowderous sort that the difference between it
and animosity was hard to determine.  You were to abolish military force,
but you were first to bring all commanding officers who had done their
duty, to trial by court-martial for that offence, and shoot them.  You
were to abolish war, but were to make converts by making war upon them,
and charging them with loving war as the apple of their eye.  You were to
have no capital punishment, but were first to sweep off the face of the
earth all legislators, jurists, and judges, who were of the contrary
opinion.  You were to have universal concord, and were to get it by
eliminating all the people who wouldn’t, or conscientiously couldn’t, be
concordant.  You were to love your brother as yourself, but after an
indefinite interval of maligning him (very much as if you hated him), and
calling him all manner of names.  Above all things, you were to do
nothing in private, or on your own account.  You were to go to the
offices of the Haven of Philanthropy, and put your name down as a Member
and a Professing Philanthropist.  Then, you were to pay up your
subscription, get your card of membership and your riband and medal, and
were evermore to live upon a platform, and evermore to say what Mr.
Honeythunder said, and what the Treasurer said, and what the
sub-Treasurer said, and what the Committee said, and what the
sub-Committee said, and what the Secretary said, and what the
Vice-Secretary said.  And this was usually said in the
unanimously-carried resolution under hand and seal, to the effect: ‘That
this assembled Body of Professing Philanthropists views, with indignant
scorn and contempt, not unmixed with utter detestation and loathing
abhorrence’—in short, the baseness of all those who do not belong to it,
and pledges itself to make as many obnoxious statements as possible about
them, without being at all particular as to facts.

The dinner was a most doleful breakdown.  The philanthropist deranged the
symmetry of the table, sat himself in the way of the waiting, blocked up
the thoroughfare, and drove Mr. Tope (who assisted the parlour-maid) to
the verge of distraction by passing plates and dishes on, over his own
head.  Nobody could talk to anybody, because he held forth to everybody
at once, as if the company had no individual existence, but were a
Meeting.  He impounded the Reverend Mr. Septimus, as an official
personage to be addressed, or kind of human peg to hang his oratorical
hat on, and fell into the exasperating habit, common among such orators,
of impersonating him as a wicked and weak opponent.  Thus, he would ask:
‘And will you, sir, now stultify yourself by telling me’—and so forth,
when the innocent man had not opened his lips, nor meant to open them.
Or he would say: ‘Now see, sir, to what a position you are reduced.  I
will leave you no escape.  After exhausting all the resources of fraud
and falsehood, during years upon years; after exhibiting a combination of
dastardly meanness with ensanguined daring, such as the world has not
often witnessed; you have now the hypocrisy to bend the knee before the
most degraded of mankind, and to sue and whine and howl for mercy!’
Whereat the unfortunate Minor Canon would look, in part indignant and in
part perplexed; while his worthy mother sat bridling, with tears in her
eyes, and the remainder of the party lapsed into a sort of gelatinous
state, in which there was no flavour or solidity, and very little
resistance.

But the gush of philanthropy that burst forth when the departure of Mr.
Honeythunder began to impend, must have been highly gratifying to the
feelings of that distinguished man.  His coffee was produced, by the
special activity of Mr. Tope, a full hour before he wanted it.  Mr.
Crisparkle sat with his watch in his hand for about the same period, lest
he should overstay his time.  The four young people were unanimous in
believing that the Cathedral clock struck three-quarters, when it
actually struck but one.  Miss Twinkleton estimated the distance to the
omnibus at five-and-twenty minutes’ walk, when it was really five.  The
affectionate kindness of the whole circle hustled him into his greatcoat,
and shoved him out into the moonlight, as if he were a fugitive traitor
with whom they sympathised, and a troop of horse were at the back door.
Mr. Crisparkle and his new charge, who took him to the omnibus, were so
fervent in their apprehensions of his catching cold, that they shut him
up in it instantly and left him, with still half-an-hour to spare.




CHAPTER VII—MORE CONFIDENCES THAN ONE


‘I know very little of that gentleman, sir,’ said Neville to the Minor
Canon as they turned back.

‘You know very little of your guardian?’ the Minor Canon repeated.

‘Almost nothing!’

‘How came he—’

‘To _be_ my guardian?  I’ll tell you, sir.  I suppose you know that we
come (my sister and I) from Ceylon?’

‘Indeed, no.’

‘I wonder at that.  We lived with a stepfather there.  Our mother died
there, when we were little children.  We have had a wretched existence.
She made him our guardian, and he was a miserly wretch who grudged us
food to eat, and clothes to wear.  At his death, he passed us over to
this man; for no better reason that I know of, than his being a friend or
connexion of his, whose name was always in print and catching his
attention.’

‘That was lately, I suppose?’

‘Quite lately, sir.  This stepfather of ours was a cruel brute as well as
a grinding one.  It is well he died when he did, or I might have killed
him.’

Mr. Crisparkle stopped short in the moonlight and looked at his hopeful
pupil in consternation.

‘I surprise you, sir?’ he said, with a quick change to a submissive
manner.

‘You shock me; unspeakably shock me.’

The pupil hung his head for a little while, as they walked on, and then
said: ‘You never saw him beat your sister.  I have seen him beat mine,
more than once or twice, and I never forgot it.’

‘Nothing,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘not even a beloved and beautiful
sister’s tears under dastardly ill-usage;’ he became less severe, in
spite of himself, as his indignation rose; ‘could justify those horrible
expressions that you used.’

‘I am sorry I used them, and especially to you, sir.  I beg to recall
them.  But permit me to set you right on one point.  You spoke of my
sister’s tears.  My sister would have let him tear her to pieces, before
she would have let him believe that he could make her shed a tear.’

Mr. Crisparkle reviewed those mental notes of his, and was neither at all
surprised to hear it, nor at all disposed to question it.

‘Perhaps you will think it strange, sir,’—this was said in a hesitating
voice—‘that I should so soon ask you to allow me to confide in you, and
to have the kindness to hear a word or two from me in my defence?’

‘Defence?’ Mr. Crisparkle repeated.  ‘You are not on your defence, Mr.
Neville.’

‘I think I am, sir.  At least I know I should be, if you were better
acquainted with my character.’

‘Well, Mr. Neville,’ was the rejoinder.  ‘What if you leave me to find it
out?’

‘Since it is your pleasure, sir,’ answered the young man, with a quick
change in his manner to sullen disappointment: ‘since it is your pleasure
to check me in my impulse, I must submit.’

There was that in the tone of this short speech which made the
conscientious man to whom it was addressed uneasy.  It hinted to him that
he might, without meaning it, turn aside a trustfulness beneficial to a
mis-shapen young mind and perhaps to his own power of directing and
improving it.  They were within sight of the lights in his windows, and
he stopped.

‘Let us turn back and take a turn or two up and down, Mr. Neville, or you
may not have time to finish what you wish to say to me.  You are hasty in
thinking that I mean to check you.  Quite the contrary.  I invite your
confidence.’

‘You have invited it, sir, without knowing it, ever since I came here.  I
say “ever since,” as if I had been here a week.  The truth is, we came
here (my sister and I) to quarrel with you, and affront you, and break
away again.’

‘Really?’ said Mr. Crisparkle, at a dead loss for anything else to say.

‘You see, we could not know what you were beforehand, sir; could we?’

‘Clearly not,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘And having liked no one else with whom we have ever been brought into
contact, we had made up our minds not to like you.’

‘Really?’ said Mr. Crisparkle again.

‘But we do like you, sir, and we see an unmistakable difference between
your house and your reception of us, and anything else we have ever
known.  This—and my happening to be alone with you—and everything around
us seeming so quiet and peaceful after Mr. Honeythunder’s departure—and
Cloisterham being so old and grave and beautiful, with the moon shining
on it—these things inclined me to open my heart.’

‘I quite understand, Mr. Neville.  And it is salutary to listen to such
influences.’

‘In describing my own imperfections, sir, I must ask you not to suppose
that I am describing my sister’s.  She has come out of the disadvantages
of our miserable life, as much better than I am, as that Cathedral tower
is higher than those chimneys.’

Mr. Crisparkle in his own breast was not so sure of this.

‘I have had, sir, from my earliest remembrance, to suppress a deadly and
bitter hatred.  This has made me secret and revengeful.  I have been
always tyrannically held down by the strong hand.  This has driven me, in
my weakness, to the resource of being false and mean.  I have been
stinted of education, liberty, money, dress, the very necessaries of
life, the commonest pleasures of childhood, the commonest possessions of
youth.  This has caused me to be utterly wanting in I don’t know what
emotions, or remembrances, or good instincts—I have not even a name for
the thing, you see!—that you have had to work upon in other young men to
whom you have been accustomed.’

‘This is evidently true.  But this is not encouraging,’ thought Mr.
Crisparkle as they turned again.

‘And to finish with, sir: I have been brought up among abject and servile
dependents, of an inferior race, and I may easily have contracted some
affinity with them.  Sometimes, I don’t know but that it may be a drop of
what is tigerish in their blood.’

‘As in the case of that remark just now,’ thought Mr. Crisparkle.

‘In a last word of reference to my sister, sir (we are twin children),
you ought to know, to her honour, that nothing in our misery ever subdued
her, though it often cowed me.  When we ran away from it (we ran away
four times in six years, to be soon brought back and cruelly punished),
the flight was always of her planning and leading.  Each time she dressed
as a boy, and showed the daring of a man.  I take it we were seven years
old when we first decamped; but I remember, when I lost the pocket-knife
with which she was to have cut her hair short, how desperately she tried
to tear it out, or bite it off.  I have nothing further to say, sir,
except that I hope you will bear with me and make allowance for me.’

‘Of that, Mr. Neville, you may be sure,’ returned the Minor Canon.  ‘I
don’t preach more than I can help, and I will not repay your confidence
with a sermon.  But I entreat you to bear in mind, very seriously and
steadily, that if I am to do you any good, it can only be with your own
assistance; and that you can only render that, efficiently, by seeking
aid from Heaven.’

‘I will try to do my part, sir.’

‘And, Mr. Neville, I will try to do mine.  Here is my hand on it.  May
God bless our endeavours!’

They were now standing at his house-door, and a cheerful sound of voices
and laughter was heard within.

‘We will take one more turn before going in,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘for I
want to ask you a question.  When you said you were in a changed mind
concerning me, you spoke, not only for yourself, but for your sister
too?’

‘Undoubtedly I did, sir.’

‘Excuse me, Mr. Neville, but I think you have had no opportunity of
communicating with your sister, since I met you.  Mr. Honeythunder was
very eloquent; but perhaps I may venture to say, without ill-nature, that
he rather monopolised the occasion.  May you not have answered for your
sister without sufficient warrant?’

Neville shook his head with a proud smile.

‘You don’t know, sir, yet, what a complete understanding can exist
between my sister and me, though no spoken word—perhaps hardly as much as
a look—may have passed between us.  She not only feels as I have
described, but she very well knows that I am taking this opportunity of
speaking to you, both for her and for myself.’

Mr. Crisparkle looked in his face, with some incredulity; but his face
expressed such absolute and firm conviction of the truth of what he said,
that Mr. Crisparkle looked at the pavement, and mused, until they came to
his door again.

‘I will ask for one more turn, sir, this time,’ said the young man, with
a rather heightened colour rising in his face.  ‘But for Mr.
Honeythunder’s—I think you called it eloquence, sir?’ (somewhat slyly.)

‘I—yes, I called it eloquence,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘But for Mr. Honeythunder’s eloquence, I might have had no need to ask
you what I am going to ask you.  This Mr. Edwin Drood, sir: I think
that’s the name?’

‘Quite correct,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘D-r-double o-d.’

‘Does he—or did he—read with you, sir?’

‘Never, Mr. Neville.  He comes here visiting his relation, Mr. Jasper.’

‘Is Miss Bud his relation too, sir?’

(‘Now, why should he ask that, with sudden superciliousness?’ thought Mr.
Crisparkle.)  Then he explained, aloud, what he knew of the little story
of their betrothal.

‘O! _that’s_ it, is it?’ said the young man.  ‘I understand his air of
proprietorship now!’

This was said so evidently to himself, or to anybody rather than Mr.
Crisparkle, that the latter instinctively felt as if to notice it would
be almost tantamount to noticing a passage in a letter which he had read
by chance over the writer’s shoulder.  A moment afterwards they
re-entered the house.

Mr. Jasper was seated at the piano as they came into his drawing-room,
and was accompanying Miss Rosebud while she sang.  It was a consequence
of his playing the accompaniment without notes, and of her being a
heedless little creature, very apt to go wrong, that he followed her lips
most attentively, with his eyes as well as hands; carefully and softly
hinting the key-note from time to time.  Standing with an arm drawn round
her, but with a face far more intent on Mr. Jasper than on her singing,
stood Helena, between whom and her brother an instantaneous recognition
passed, in which Mr. Crisparkle saw, or thought he saw, the understanding
that had been spoken of, flash out.  Mr. Neville then took his admiring
station, leaning against the piano, opposite the singer; Mr. Crisparkle
sat down by the china shepherdess; Edwin Drood gallantly furled and
unfurled Miss Twinkleton’s fan; and that lady passively claimed that sort
of exhibitor’s proprietorship in the accomplishment on view, which Mr.
Tope, the Verger, daily claimed in the Cathedral service.

                         [Picture: At the piano]

The song went on.  It was a sorrowful strain of parting, and the fresh
young voice was very plaintive and tender.  As Jasper watched the pretty
lips, and ever and again hinted the one note, as though it were a low
whisper from himself, the voice became less steady, until all at once the
singer broke into a burst of tears, and shrieked out, with her hands over
her eyes: ‘I can’t bear this!  I am frightened!  Take me away!’

With one swift turn of her lithe figures Helena laid the little beauty on
a sofa, as if she had never caught her up.  Then, on one knee beside her,
and with one hand upon her rosy mouth, while with the other she appealed
to all the rest, Helena said to them: ‘It’s nothing; it’s all over; don’t
speak to her for one minute, and she is well!’

Jasper’s hands had, in the same instant, lifted themselves from the keys,
and were now poised above them, as though he waited to resume.  In that
attitude he yet sat quiet: not even looking round, when all the rest had
changed their places and were reassuring one another.

‘Pussy’s not used to an audience; that’s the fact,’ said Edwin Drood.
‘She got nervous, and couldn’t hold out.  Besides, Jack, you are such a
conscientious master, and require so much, that I believe you make her
afraid of you.  No wonder.’

‘No wonder,’ repeated Helena.

‘There, Jack, you hear!  You would be afraid of him, under similar
circumstances, wouldn’t you, Miss Landless?’

‘Not under any circumstances,’ returned Helena.

Jasper brought down his hands, looked over his shoulder, and begged to
thank Miss Landless for her vindication of his character.  Then he fell
to dumbly playing, without striking the notes, while his little pupil was
taken to an open window for air, and was otherwise petted and restored.
When she was brought back, his place was empty.  ‘Jack’s gone, Pussy,’
Edwin told her.  ‘I am more than half afraid he didn’t like to be charged
with being the Monster who had frightened you.’  But she answered never a
word, and shivered, as if they had made her a little too cold.

Miss Twinkleton now opining that indeed these were late hours, Mrs.
Crisparkle, for finding ourselves outside the walls of the Nuns’ House,
and that we who undertook the formation of the future wives and mothers
of England (the last words in a lower voice, as requiring to be
communicated in confidence) were really bound (voice coming up again) to
set a better example than one of rakish habits, wrappers were put in
requisition, and the two young cavaliers volunteered to see the ladies
home.  It was soon done, and the gate of the Nuns’ House closed upon
them.

The boarders had retired, and only Mrs. Tisher in solitary vigil awaited
the new pupil.  Her bedroom being within Rosa’s, very little introduction
or explanation was necessary, before she was placed in charge of her new
friend, and left for the night.

‘This is a blessed relief, my dear,’ said Helena.  ‘I have been dreading
all day, that I should be brought to bay at this time.’

‘There are not many of us,’ returned Rosa, ‘and we are good-natured
girls; at least the others are; I can answer for them.’

‘I can answer for you,’ laughed Helena, searching the lovely little face
with her dark, fiery eyes, and tenderly caressing the small figure.  ‘You
will be a friend to me, won’t you?’

‘I hope so.  But the idea of my being a friend to you seems too absurd,
though.’

‘Why?’

‘O, I am such a mite of a thing, and you are so womanly and handsome.
You seem to have resolution and power enough to crush me.  I shrink into
nothing by the side of your presence even.’

‘I am a neglected creature, my dear, unacquainted with all
accomplishments, sensitively conscious that I have everything to learn,
and deeply ashamed to own my ignorance.’

‘And yet you acknowledge everything to me!’ said Rosa.

‘My pretty one, can I help it?  There is a fascination in you.’

‘O! is there though?’ pouted Rosa, half in jest and half in earnest.
‘What a pity Master Eddy doesn’t feel it more!’

Of course her relations towards that young gentleman had been already
imparted in Minor Canon Corner.

‘Why, surely he must love you with all his heart!’ cried Helena, with an
earnestness that threatened to blaze into ferocity if he didn’t.

‘Eh?  O, well, I suppose he does,’ said Rosa, pouting again; ‘I am sure I
have no right to say he doesn’t.  Perhaps it’s my fault.  Perhaps I am
not as nice to him as I ought to be.  I don’t think I am.  But it _is_ so
ridiculous!’

Helena’s eyes demanded what was.

‘_We_ are,’ said Rosa, answering as if she had spoken.  ‘We are such a
ridiculous couple.  And we are always quarrelling.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we both know we are ridiculous, my dear!’  Rosa gave that answer
as if it were the most conclusive answer in the world.

Helena’s masterful look was intent upon her face for a few moments, and
then she impulsively put out both her hands and said:

‘You will be my friend and help me?’

‘Indeed, my dear, I will,’ replied Rosa, in a tone of affectionate
childishness that went straight and true to her heart; ‘I will be as good
a friend as such a mite of a thing can be to such a noble creature as
you.  And be a friend to me, please; I don’t understand myself: and I
want a friend who can understand me, very much indeed.’

Helena Landless kissed her, and retaining both her hands said:

‘Who is Mr. Jasper?’

Rosa turned aside her head in answering: ‘Eddy’s uncle, and my
music-master.’

‘You do not love him?’

‘Ugh!’  She put her hands up to her face, and shook with fear or horror.

‘You know that he loves you?’

‘O, don’t, don’t, don’t!’ cried Rosa, dropping on her knees, and clinging
to her new resource.  ‘Don’t tell me of it!  He terrifies me.  He haunts
my thoughts, like a dreadful ghost.  I feel that I am never safe from
him.  I feel as if he could pass in through the wall when he is spoken
of.’  She actually did look round, as if she dreaded to see him standing
in the shadow behind her.

‘Try to tell me more about it, darling.’

‘Yes, I will, I will.  Because you are so strong.  But hold me the while,
and stay with me afterwards.’

‘My child!  You speak as if he had threatened you in some dark way.’

‘He has never spoken to me about—that.  Never.’

‘What has he done?’

‘He has made a slave of me with his looks.  He has forced me to
understand him, without his saying a word; and he has forced me to keep
silence, without his uttering a threat.  When I play, he never moves his
eyes from my hands.  When I sing, he never moves his eyes from my lips.
When he corrects me, and strikes a note, or a chord, or plays a passage,
he himself is in the sounds, whispering that he pursues me as a lover,
and commanding me to keep his secret.  I avoid his eyes, but he forces me
to see them without looking at them.  Even when a glaze comes over them
(which is sometimes the case), and he seems to wander away into a
frightful sort of dream in which he threatens most, he obliges me to know
it, and to know that he is sitting close at my side, more terrible to me
than ever.’

‘What is this imagined threatening, pretty one?  What is threatened?’

‘I don’t know.  I have never even dared to think or wonder what it is.’

‘And was this all, to-night?’

‘This was all; except that to-night when he watched my lips so closely as
I was singing, besides feeling terrified I felt ashamed and passionately
hurt.  It was as if he kissed me, and I couldn’t bear it, but cried out.
You must never breathe this to any one.  Eddy is devoted to him.  But you
said to-night that you would not be afraid of him, under any
circumstances, and that gives me—who am so much afraid of him—courage to
tell only you.  Hold me!  Stay with me!  I am too frightened to be left
by myself.’

The lustrous gipsy-face drooped over the clinging arms and bosom, and the
wild black hair fell down protectingly over the childish form.  There was
a slumbering gleam of fire in the intense dark eyes, though they were
then softened with compassion and admiration.  Let whomsoever it most
concerned look well to it!




CHAPTER VIII—DAGGERS DRAWN


The two young men, having seen the damsels, their charges, enter the
courtyard of the Nuns’ House, and finding themselves coldly stared at by
the brazen door-plate, as if the battered old beau with the glass in his
eye were insolent, look at one another, look along the perspective of the
moonlit street, and slowly walk away together.

‘Do you stay here long, Mr. Drood?’ says Neville.

‘Not this time,’ is the careless answer.  ‘I leave for London again,
to-morrow.  But I shall be here, off and on, until next Midsummer; then I
shall take my leave of Cloisterham, and England too; for many a long day,
I expect.’

‘Are you going abroad?’

‘Going to wake up Egypt a little,’ is the condescending answer.

‘Are you reading?’

‘Reading?’ repeats Edwin Drood, with a touch of contempt.  ‘No.  Doing,
working, engineering.  My small patrimony was left a part of the capital
of the Firm I am with, by my father, a former partner; and I am a charge
upon the Firm until I come of age; and then I step into my modest share
in the concern.  Jack—you met him at dinner—is, until then, my guardian
and trustee.’

‘I heard from Mr. Crisparkle of your other good fortune.’

‘What do you mean by my other good fortune?’

Neville has made his remark in a watchfully advancing, and yet furtive
and shy manner, very expressive of that peculiar air already noticed, of
being at once hunter and hunted.  Edwin has made his retort with an
abruptness not at all polite.  They stop and interchange a rather heated
look.

‘I hope,’ says Neville, ‘there is no offence, Mr. Drood, in my innocently
referring to your betrothal?’

‘By George!’ cries Edwin, leading on again at a somewhat quicker pace;
‘everybody in this chattering old Cloisterham refers to it I wonder no
public-house has been set up, with my portrait for the sign of The
Betrothed’s Head.  Or Pussy’s portrait.  One or the other.’

‘I am not accountable for Mr. Crisparkle’s mentioning the matter to me,
quite openly,’ Neville begins.

‘No; that’s true; you are not,’ Edwin Drood assents.

‘But,’ resumes Neville, ‘I am accountable for mentioning it to you.  And
I did so, on the supposition that you could not fail to be highly proud
of it.’

Now, there are these two curious touches of human nature working the
secret springs of this dialogue.  Neville Landless is already enough
impressed by Little Rosebud, to feel indignant that Edwin Drood (far
below her) should hold his prize so lightly.  Edwin Drood is already
enough impressed by Helena, to feel indignant that Helena’s brother (far
below her) should dispose of him so coolly, and put him out of the way so
entirely.

However, the last remark had better be answered.  So, says Edwin:

‘I don’t know, Mr. Neville’ (adopting that mode of address from Mr.
Crisparkle), ‘that what people are proudest of, they usually talk most
about; I don’t know either, that what they are proudest of, they most
like other people to talk about.  But I live a busy life, and I speak
under correction by you readers, who ought to know everything, and I
daresay do.’

By this time they had both become savage; Mr. Neville out in the open;
Edwin Drood under the transparent cover of a popular tune, and a stop now
and then to pretend to admire picturesque effects in the moonlight before
him.

‘It does not seem to me very civil in you,’ remarks Neville, at length,
‘to reflect upon a stranger who comes here, not having had your
advantages, to try to make up for lost time.  But, to be sure, I was not
brought up in “busy life,” and my ideas of civility were formed among
Heathens.’

‘Perhaps, the best civility, whatever kind of people we are brought up
among,’ retorts Edwin Drood, ‘is to mind our own business.  If you will
set me that example, I promise to follow it.’

‘Do you know that you take a great deal too much upon yourself?’ is the
angry rejoinder, ‘and that in the part of the world I come from, you
would be called to account for it?’

‘By whom, for instance?’ asks Edwin Drood, coming to a halt, and
surveying the other with a look of disdain.

But, here a startling right hand is laid on Edwin’s shoulder, and Jasper
stands between them.  For, it would seem that he, too, has strolled round
by the Nuns’ House, and has come up behind them on the shadowy side of
the road.

‘Ned, Ned, Ned!’ he says; ‘we must have no more of this.  I don’t like
this.  I have overheard high words between you two.  Remember, my dear
boy, you are almost in the position of host to-night.  You belong, as it
were, to the place, and in a manner represent it towards a stranger.  Mr.
Neville is a stranger, and you should respect the obligations of
hospitality.  And, Mr. Neville,’ laying his left hand on the inner
shoulder of that young gentleman, and thus walking on between them, hand
to shoulder on either side: ‘you will pardon me; but I appeal to you to
govern your temper too.  Now, what is amiss?  But why ask!  Let there be
nothing amiss, and the question is superfluous.  We are all three on a
good understanding, are we not?’

After a silent struggle between the two young men who shall speak last,
Edwin Drood strikes in with: ‘So far as I am concerned, Jack, there is no
anger in me.’

‘Nor in me,’ says Neville Landless, though not so freely; or perhaps so
carelessly.  ‘But if Mr. Drood knew all that lies behind me, far away
from here, he might know better how it is that sharp-edged words have
sharp edges to wound me.’

‘Perhaps,’ says Jasper, in a soothing manner, ‘we had better not qualify
our good understanding.  We had better not say anything having the
appearance of a remonstrance or condition; it might not seem generous.
Frankly and freely, you see there is no anger in Ned.  Frankly and
freely, there is no anger in you, Mr. Neville?’

‘None at all, Mr. Jasper.’  Still, not quite so frankly or so freely; or,
be it said once again, not quite so carelessly perhaps.

‘All over then!  Now, my bachelor gatehouse is a few yards from here, and
the heater is on the fire, and the wine and glasses are on the table, and
it is not a stone’s throw from Minor Canon Corner.  Ned, you are up and
away to-morrow.  We will carry Mr. Neville in with us, to take a
stirrup-cup.’

‘With all my heart, Jack.’

‘And with all mine, Mr. Jasper.’  Neville feels it impossible to say
less, but would rather not go.  He has an impression upon him that he has
lost hold of his temper; feels that Edwin Drood’s coolness, so far from
being infectious, makes him red-hot.

Mr. Jasper, still walking in the centre, hand to shoulder on either side,
beautifully turns the Refrain of a drinking song, and they all go up to
his rooms.  There, the first object visible, when he adds the light of a
lamp to that of the fire, is the portrait over the chimneypicce.  It is
not an object calculated to improve the understanding between the two
young men, as rather awkwardly reviving the subject of their difference.
Accordingly, they both glance at it consciously, but say nothing.
Jasper, however (who would appear from his conduct to have gained but an
imperfect clue to the cause of their late high words), directly calls
attention to it.

‘You recognise that picture, Mr. Neville?’ shading the lamp to throw the
light upon it.

‘I recognise it, but it is far from flattering the original.’

‘O, you are hard upon it!  It was done by Ned, who made me a present of
it.’

‘I am sorry for that, Mr. Drood.’  Neville apologises, with a real
intention to apologise; ‘if I had known I was in the artist’s presence—’

‘O, a joke, sir, a mere joke,’ Edwin cuts in, with a provoking yawn.  ‘A
little humouring of Pussy’s points!  I’m going to paint her gravely, one
of these days, if she’s good.’

The air of leisurely patronage and indifference with which this is said,
as the speaker throws himself back in a chair and clasps his hands at the
back of his head, as a rest for it, is very exasperating to the excitable
and excited Neville.  Jasper looks observantly from the one to the other,
slightly smiles, and turns his back to mix a jug of mulled wine at the
fire.  It seems to require much mixing and compounding.

‘I suppose, Mr. Neville,’ says Edwin, quick to resent the indignant
protest against himself in the face of young Landless, which is fully as
visible as the portrait, or the fire, or the lamp: ‘I suppose that if you
painted the picture of your lady love—’

‘I can’t paint,’ is the hasty interruption.

‘That’s your misfortune, and not your fault.  You would if you could.
But if you could, I suppose you would make her (no matter what she was in
reality), Juno, Minerva, Diana, and Venus, all in one.  Eh?’

‘I have no lady love, and I can’t say.’

‘If I were to try my hand,’ says Edwin, with a boyish boastfulness
getting up in him, ‘on a portrait of Miss Landless—in earnest, mind you;
in earnest—you should see what I could do!’

‘My sister’s consent to sit for it being first got, I suppose?  As it
never will be got, I am afraid I shall never see what you can do.  I must
bear the loss.’

Jasper turns round from the fire, fills a large goblet glass for Neville,
fills a large goblet glass for Edwin, and hands each his own; then fills
for himself, saying:

‘Come, Mr. Neville, we are to drink to my nephew, Ned.  As it is his foot
that is in the stirrup—metaphorically—our stirrup-cup is to be devoted to
him.  Ned, my dearest fellow, my love!’

Jasper sets the example of nearly emptying his glass, and Neville follows
it.  Edwin Drood says, ‘Thank you both very much,’ and follows the double
example.

‘Look at him,’ cries Jasper, stretching out his hand admiringly and
tenderly, though rallyingly too.  ‘See where he lounges so easily, Mr.
Neville!  The world is all before him where to choose.  A life of
stirring work and interest, a life of change and excitement, a life of
domestic ease and love!  Look at him!’

Edwin Drood’s face has become quickly and remarkably flushed with the
wine; so has the face of Neville Landless.  Edwin still sits thrown back
in his chair, making that rest of clasped hands for his head.

‘See how little he heeds it all!’  Jasper proceeds in a bantering vein.
‘It is hardly worth his while to pluck the golden fruit that hangs ripe
on the tree for him.  And yet consider the contrast, Mr. Neville.  You
and I have no prospect of stirring work and interest, or of change and
excitement, or of domestic ease and love.  You and I have no prospect
(unless you are more fortunate than I am, which may easily be), but the
tedious unchanging round of this dull place.’

‘Upon my soul, Jack,’ says Edwin, complacently, ‘I feel quite apologetic
for having my way smoothed as you describe.  But you know what I know,
Jack, and it may not be so very easy as it seems, after all.  May it,
Pussy?’  To the portrait, with a snap of his thumb and finger.  ‘We have
got to hit it off yet; haven’t we, Pussy?  You know what I mean, Jack.’

                      [Picture: On dangerous ground]

His speech has become thick and indistinct.  Jasper, quiet and
self-possessed, looks to Neville, as expecting his answer or comment.
When Neville speaks, _his_ speech is also thick and indistinct.

‘It might have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some hardships,’
he says, defiantly.

‘Pray,’ retorts Edwin, turning merely his eyes in that direction, ‘pray
why might it have been better for Mr. Drood to have known some
hardships?’

‘Ay,’ Jasper assents, with an air of interest; ‘let us know why?’

‘Because they might have made him more sensible,’ says Neville, ‘of good
fortune that is not by any means necessarily the result of his own
merits.’

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to his nephew for his rejoinder.

‘Have _you_ known hardships, may I ask?’ says Edwin Drood, sitting
upright.

Mr. Jasper quickly looks to the other for his retort.

‘I have.’

‘And what have they made you sensible of?’

Mr. Jasper’s play of eyes between the two holds good throughout the
dialogue, to the end.

‘I have told you once before to-night.’

‘You have done nothing of the sort.’

‘I tell you I have.  That you take a great deal too much upon yourself.’

‘You added something else to that, if I remember?’

‘Yes, I did say something else.’

‘Say it again.’

‘I said that in the part of the world I come from, you would be called to
account for it.’

‘Only there?’ cries Edwin Drood, with a contemptuous laugh.  ‘A long way
off, I believe?  Yes; I see!  That part of the world is at a safe
distance.’

‘Say here, then,’ rejoins the other, rising in a fury.  ‘Say anywhere!
Your vanity is intolerable, your conceit is beyond endurance; you talk as
if you were some rare and precious prize, instead of a common boaster.
You are a common fellow, and a common boaster.’

‘Pooh, pooh,’ says Edwin Drood, equally furious, but more collected; ‘how
should you know?  You may know a black common fellow, or a black common
boaster, when you see him (and no doubt you have a large acquaintance
that way); but you are no judge of white men.’

This insulting allusion to his dark skin infuriates Neville to that
violent degree, that he flings the dregs of his wine at Edwin Drood, and
is in the act of flinging the goblet after it, when his arm is caught in
the nick of time by Jasper.

‘Ned, my dear fellow!’ he cries in a loud voice; ‘I entreat you, I
command you, to be still!’  There has been a rush of all the three, and a
clattering of glasses and overturning of chairs.  ‘Mr. Neville, for
shame!  Give this glass to me.  Open your hand, sir.  I WILL have it!’

But Neville throws him off, and pauses for an instant, in a raging
passion, with the goblet yet in his uplifted hand.  Then, he dashes it
down under the grate, with such force that the broken splinters fly out
again in a shower; and he leaves the house.

When he first emerges into the night air, nothing around him is still or
steady; nothing around him shows like what it is; he only knows that he
stands with a bare head in the midst of a blood-red whirl, waiting to be
struggled with, and to struggle to the death.

But, nothing happening, and the moon looking down upon him as if he were
dead after a fit of wrath, he holds his steam-hammer beating head and
heart, and staggers away.  Then, he becomes half-conscious of having
heard himself bolted and barred out, like a dangerous animal; and thinks
what shall he do?

Some wildly passionate ideas of the river dissolve under the spell of the
moonlight on the Cathedral and the graves, and the remembrance of his
sister, and the thought of what he owes to the good man who has but that
very day won his confidence and given him his pledge.  He repairs to
Minor Canon Corner, and knocks softly at the door.

It is Mr. Crisparkle’s custom to sit up last of the early household, very
softly touching his piano and practising his favourite parts in concerted
vocal music.  The south wind that goes where it lists, by way of Minor
Canon Corner on a still night, is not more subdued than Mr. Crisparkle at
such times, regardful of the slumbers of the china shepherdess.

His knock is immediately answered by Mr. Crisparkle himself.  When he
opens the door, candle in hand, his cheerful face falls, and disappointed
amazement is in it.

‘Mr. Neville!  In this disorder!  Where have you been?’

‘I have been to Mr. Jasper’s, sir.  With his nephew.’

‘Come in.’

The Minor Canon props him by the elbow with a strong hand (in a strictly
scientific manner, worthy of his morning trainings), and turns him into
his own little book-room, and shuts the door.’

‘I have begun ill, sir.  I have begun dreadfully ill.’

‘Too true.  You are not sober, Mr. Neville.’

‘I am afraid I am not, sir, though I can satisfy you at another time that
I have had a very little indeed to drink, and that it overcame me in the
strangest and most sudden manner.’

‘Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville,’ says the Minor Canon, shaking his head with a
sorrowful smile; ‘I have heard that said before.’

‘I think—my mind is much confused, but I think—it is equally true of Mr.
Jasper’s nephew, sir.’

‘Very likely,’ is the dry rejoinder.

‘We quarrelled, sir.  He insulted me most grossly.  He had heated that
tigerish blood I told you of to-day, before then.’

‘Mr. Neville,’ rejoins the Minor Canon, mildly, but firmly: ‘I request
you not to speak to me with that clenched right hand.  Unclench it, if
you please.’

‘He goaded me, sir,’ pursues the young man, instantly obeying, ‘beyond my
power of endurance.  I cannot say whether or no he meant it at first, but
he did it.  He certainly meant it at last.  In short, sir,’ with an
irrepressible outburst, ‘in the passion into which he lashed me, I would
have cut him down if I could, and I tried to do it.’

‘You have clenched that hand again,’ is Mr. Crisparkle’s quiet
commentary.

‘I beg your pardon, sir.’

‘You know your room, for I showed it you before dinner; but I will
accompany you to it once more.  Your arm, if you please.  Softly, for the
house is all a-bed.’

Scooping his hand into the same scientific elbow-rest as before, and
backing it up with the inert strength of his arm, as skilfully as a
Police Expert, and with an apparent repose quite unattainable by novices,
Mr. Crisparkle conducts his pupil to the pleasant and orderly old room
prepared for him.  Arrived there, the young man throws himself into a
chair, and, flinging his arms upon his reading-table, rests his head upon
them with an air of wretched self-reproach.

The gentle Minor Canon has had it in his thoughts to leave the room,
without a word.  But looking round at the door, and seeing this dejected
figure, he turns back to it, touches it with a mild hand, says ‘Good
night!’  A sob is his only acknowledgment.  He might have had many a
worse; perhaps, could have had few better.

Another soft knock at the outer door attracts his attention as he goes
down-stairs.  He opens it to Mr. Jasper, holding in his hand the pupil’s
hat.

‘We have had an awful scene with him,’ says Jasper, in a low voice.

‘Has it been so bad as that?’

‘Murderous!’

Mr. Crisparkle remonstrates: ‘No, no, no.  Do not use such strong words.’

‘He might have laid my dear boy dead at my feet.  It is no fault of his,
that he did not.  But that I was, through the mercy of God, swift and
strong with him, he would have cut him down on my hearth.’

The phrase smites home.  ‘Ah!’ thinks Mr. Crisparkle, ‘his own words!’

‘Seeing what I have seen to-night, and hearing what I have heard,’ adds
Jasper, with great earnestness, ‘I shall never know peace of mind when
there is danger of those two coming together, with no one else to
interfere.  It was horrible.  There is something of the tiger in his dark
blood.’

‘Ah!’ thinks Mr. Crisparkle, ‘so he said!’

‘You, my dear sir,’ pursues Jasper, taking his hand, ‘even you, have
accepted a dangerous charge.’

‘You need have no fear for me, Jasper,’ returns Mr. Crisparkle, with a
quiet smile.  ‘I have none for myself.’

‘I have none for myself,’ returns Jasper, with an emphasis on the last
pronoun, ‘because I am not, nor am I in the way of being, the object of
his hostility.  But you may be, and my dear boy has been.  Good night!’

Mr. Crisparkle goes in, with the hat that has so easily, so almost
imperceptibly, acquired the right to be hung up in his hall; hangs it up;
and goes thoughtfully to bed.




CHAPTER IX—BIRDS IN THE BUSH


Rosa, having no relation that she knew of in the world, had, from the
seventh year of her age, known no home but the Nuns’ House, and no mother
but Miss Twinkleton.  Her remembrance of her own mother was of a pretty
little creature like herself (not much older than herself it seemed to
her), who had been brought home in her father’s arms, drowned.  The fatal
accident had happened at a party of pleasure.  Every fold and colour in
the pretty summer dress, and even the long wet hair, with scattered
petals of ruined flowers still clinging to it, as the dead young figure,
in its sad, sad beauty lay upon the bed, were fixed indelibly in Rosa’s
recollection.  So were the wild despair and the subsequent bowed-down
grief of her poor young father, who died broken-hearted on the first
anniversary of that hard day.

The betrothal of Rosa grew out of the soothing of his year of mental
distress by his fast friend and old college companion, Drood: who
likewise had been left a widower in his youth.  But he, too, went the
silent road into which all earthly pilgrimages merge, some sooner, and
some later; and thus the young couple had come to be as they were.

The atmosphere of pity surrounding the little orphan girl when she first
came to Cloisterham, had never cleared away.  It had taken brighter hues
as she grew older, happier, prettier; now it had been golden, now
roseate, and now azure; but it had always adorned her with some soft
light of its own.  The general desire to console and caress her, had
caused her to be treated in the beginning as a child much younger than
her years; the same desire had caused her to be still petted when she was
a child no longer.  Who should be her favourite, who should anticipate
this or that small present, or do her this or that small service; who
should take her home for the holidays; who should write to her the
oftenest when they were separated, and whom she would most rejoice to see
again when they were reunited; even these gentle rivalries were not
without their slight dashes of bitterness in the Nuns’ House.  Well for
the poor Nuns in their day, if they hid no harder strife under their
veils and rosaries!

Thus Rosa had grown to be an amiable, giddy, wilful, winning little
creature; spoilt, in the sense of counting upon kindness from all around
her; but not in the sense of repaying it with indifference.  Possessing
an exhaustless well of affection in her nature, its sparkling waters had
freshened and brightened the Nuns’ House for years, and yet its depths
had never yet been moved: what might betide when that came to pass; what
developing changes might fall upon the heedless head, and light heart,
then; remained to be seen.

By what means the news that there had been a quarrel between the two
young men overnight, involving even some kind of onslaught by Mr. Neville
upon Edwin Drood, got into Miss Twinkleton’s establishment before
breakfast, it is impossible to say.  Whether it was brought in by the
birds of the air, or came blowing in with the very air itself, when the
casement windows were set open; whether the baker brought it kneaded into
the bread, or the milkman delivered it as part of the adulteration of his
milk; or the housemaids, beating the dust out of their mats against the
gateposts, received it in exchange deposited on the mats by the town
atmosphere; certain it is that the news permeated every gable of the old
building before Miss Twinkleton was down, and that Miss Twinkleton
herself received it through Mrs. Tisher, while yet in the act of
dressing; or (as she might have expressed the phrase to a parent or
guardian of a mythological turn) of sacrificing to the Graces.

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a bottle at Mr. Edwin Drood.

Miss Landless’s brother had thrown a knife at Mr. Edwin Drood.

A knife became suggestive of a fork; and Miss Landless’s brother had
thrown a fork at Mr. Edwin Drood.

As in the governing precedence of Peter Piper, alleged to have picked the
peck of pickled pepper, it was held physically desirable to have evidence
of the existence of the peck of pickled pepper which Peter Piper was
alleged to have picked; so, in this case, it was held psychologically
important to know why Miss Landless’s brother threw a bottle, knife, or
fork-or bottle, knife, _and_ fork—for the cook had been given to
understand it was all three—at Mr. Edwin Drood?

Well, then.  Miss Landless’s brother had said he admired Miss Bud.  Mr.
Edwin Drood had said to Miss Landless’s brother that he had no business
to admire Miss Bud.  Miss Landless’s brother had then ‘up’d’ (this was
the cook’s exact information) with the bottle, knife, fork, and decanter
(the decanter now coolly flying at everybody’s head, without the least
introduction), and thrown them all at Mr. Edwin Drood.

Poor little Rosa put a forefinger into each of her ears when these
rumours began to circulate, and retired into a corner, beseeching not to
be told any more; but Miss Landless, begging permission of Miss
Twinkleton to go and speak with her brother, and pretty plainly showing
that she would take it if it were not given, struck out the more definite
course of going to Mr. Crisparkle’s for accurate intelligence.

When she came back (being first closeted with Miss Twinkleton, in order
that anything objectionable in her tidings might be retained by that
discreet filter), she imparted to Rosa only, what had taken place;
dwelling with a flushed cheek on the provocation her brother had
received, but almost limiting it to that last gross affront as crowning
‘some other words between them,’ and, out of consideration for her new
friend, passing lightly over the fact that the other words had originated
in her lover’s taking things in general so very easily.  To Rosa direct,
she brought a petition from her brother that she would forgive him; and,
having delivered it with sisterly earnestness, made an end of the
subject.

It was reserved for Miss Twinkleton to tone down the public mind of the
Nuns’ House.  That lady, therefore, entering in a stately manner what
plebeians might have called the school-room, but what, in the patrician
language of the head of the Nuns’ House, was euphuistically, not to say
round-aboutedly, denominated ‘the apartment allotted to study,’ and
saying with a forensic air, ‘Ladies!’ all rose.  Mrs. Tisher at the same
time grouped herself behind her chief, as representing Queen Elizabeth’s
first historical female friend at Tilbury fort.  Miss Twinkleton then
proceeded to remark that Rumour, Ladies, had been represented by the bard
of Avon—needless were it to mention the immortal SHAKESPEARE, also called
the Swan of his native river, not improbably with some reference to the
ancient superstition that that bird of graceful plumage (Miss Jennings
will please stand upright) sang sweetly on the approach of death, for
which we have no ornithological authority,—Rumour, Ladies, had been
represented by that bard—hem!—

          ‘who drew
    The celebrated Jew,’

as painted full of tongues.  Rumour in Cloisterham (Miss Ferdinand will
honour me with her attention) was no exception to the great limner’s
portrait of Rumour elsewhere.  A slight _fracas_ between two young
gentlemen occurring last night within a hundred miles of these peaceful
walls (Miss Ferdinand, being apparently incorrigible, will have the
kindness to write out this evening, in the original language, the first
four fables of our vivacious neighbour, Monsieur La Fontaine) had been
very grossly exaggerated by Rumour’s voice.  In the first alarm and
anxiety arising from our sympathy with a sweet young friend, not wholly
to be dissociated from one of the gladiators in the bloodless arena in
question (the impropriety of Miss Reynolds’s appearing to stab herself in
the hand with a pin, is far too obvious, and too glaringly unladylike, to
be pointed out), we descended from our maiden elevation to discuss this
uncongenial and this unfit theme.  Responsible inquiries having assured
us that it was but one of those ‘airy nothings’ pointed at by the Poet
(whose name and date of birth Miss Giggles will supply within half an
hour), we would now discard the subject, and concentrate our minds upon
the grateful labours of the day.

But the subject so survived all day, nevertheless, that Miss Ferdinand
got into new trouble by surreptitiously clapping on a paper moustache at
dinner-time, and going through the motions of aiming a water-bottle at
Miss Giggles, who drew a table-spoon in defence.

Now, Rosa thought of this unlucky quarrel a great deal, and thought of it
with an uncomfortable feeling that she was involved in it, as cause, or
consequence, or what not, through being in a false position altogether as
to her marriage engagement.  Never free from such uneasiness when she was
with her affianced husband, it was not likely that she would be free from
it when they were apart.  To-day, too, she was cast in upon herself, and
deprived of the relief of talking freely with her new friend, because the
quarrel had been with Helena’s brother, and Helena undisguisedly avoided
the subject as a delicate and difficult one to herself.  At this critical
time, of all times, Rosa’s guardian was announced as having come to see
her.

Mr. Grewgious had been well selected for his trust, as a man of
incorruptible integrity, but certainly for no other appropriate quality
discernible on the surface.  He was an arid, sandy man, who, if he had
been put into a grinding-mill, looked as if he would have ground
immediately into high-dried snuff.  He had a scanty flat crop of hair, in
colour and consistency like some very mangy yellow fur tippet; it was so
unlike hair, that it must have been a wig, but for the stupendous
improbability of anybody’s voluntarily sporting such a head.  The little
play of feature that his face presented, was cut deep into it, in a few
hard curves that made it more like work; and he had certain notches in
his forehead, which looked as though Nature had been about to touch them
into sensibility or refinement, when she had impatiently thrown away the
chisel, and said: ‘I really cannot be worried to finish off this man; let
him go as he is.’

With too great length of throat at his upper end, and too much ankle-bone
and heel at his lower; with an awkward and hesitating manner; with a
shambling walk; and with what is called a near sight—which perhaps
prevented his observing how much white cotton stocking he displayed to
the public eye, in contrast with his black suit—Mr. Grewgious still had
some strange capacity in him of making on the whole an agreeable
impression.

Mr. Grewgious was discovered by his ward, much discomfited by being in
Miss Twinkleton’s company in Miss Twinkleton’s own sacred room.  Dim
forebodings of being examined in something, and not coming well out of
it, seemed to oppress the poor gentleman when found in these
circumstances.

‘My dear, how do you do?  I am glad to see you.  My dear, how much
improved you are.  Permit me to hand you a chair, my dear.’

Miss Twinkleton rose at her little writing-table, saying, with general
sweetness, as to the polite Universe: ‘Will you permit me to retire?’

‘By no means, madam, on my account.  I beg that you will not move.’

‘I must entreat permission to _move_,’ returned Miss Twinkleton,
repeating the word with a charming grace; ‘but I will not withdraw, since
you are so obliging.  If I wheel my desk to this corner window, shall I
be in the way?’

‘Madam!  In the way!’

‘You are very kind.—Rosa, my dear, you will be under no restraint, I am
sure.’

Here Mr. Grewgious, left by the fire with Rosa, said again: ‘My dear, how
do you do?  I am glad to see you, my dear.’  And having waited for her to
sit down, sat down himself.

‘My visits,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘are, like those of the angels—not that
I compare myself to an angel.’

‘No, sir,’ said Rosa.

‘Not by any means,’ assented Mr. Grewgious.  ‘I merely refer to my
visits, which are few and far between.  The angels are, we know very
well, up-stairs.’

Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare.

‘I refer, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, laying his hand on Rosa’s, as the
possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise seeming to take
the awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my dear; ‘I refer to the
other young ladies.’

Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing.

Mr. Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening point quite
as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head from back to front
as if he had just dived, and were pressing the water out—this smoothing
action, however superfluous, was habitual with him—and took a pocket-book
from his coat-pocket, and a stump of black-lead pencil from his
waistcoat-pocket.

‘I made,’ he said, turning the leaves: ‘I made a guiding memorandum or
so—as I usually do, for I have no conversational powers whatever—to which
I will, with your permission, my dear, refer.  “Well and happy.”  Truly.
You are well and happy, my dear?  You look so.’

‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ answered Rosa.

‘For which,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the
corner window, ‘our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are
rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and
consideration of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.’

This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr. Grewgious, and
never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the
courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside the
conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, as
waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celestial Nine
who might have one to spare.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another
reference to his pocket-book; lining out ‘well and happy,’ as disposed
of.

‘“Pounds, shillings, and pence,” is my next note.  A dry subject for a
young lady, but an important subject too.  Life is pounds, shillings, and
pence.  Death is—’  A sudden recollection of the death of her two parents
seemed to stop him, and he said in a softer tone, and evidently inserting
the negative as an after-thought: ‘Death is _not_ pounds, shillings, and
pence.’

His voice was as hard and dry as himself, and Fancy might have ground it
straight, like himself, into high-dried snuff.  And yet, through the very
limited means of expression that he possessed, he seemed to express
kindness.  If Nature had but finished him off, kindness might have been
recognisable in his face at this moment.  But if the notches in his
forehead wouldn’t fuse together, and if his face would work and couldn’t
play, what could he do, poor man!

‘“Pounds, shillings, and pence.”  You find your allowance always
sufficient for your wants, my dear?’

Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample.

‘And you are not in debt?’

Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt.  It seemed, to her
inexperience, a comical vagary of the imagination.  Mr. Grewgious
stretched his near sight to be sure that this was her view of the case.
‘Ah!’ he said, as comment, with a furtive glance towards Miss Twinkleton,
and lining out pounds, shillings, and pence: ‘I spoke of having got among
the angels!  So I did!’

Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and was blushing
and folding a crease in her dress with one embarrassed hand, long before
he found it.

‘“Marriage.”  Hem!’  Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing hand down over
his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing his chair a little
nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially: ‘I now touch, my dear,
upon the point that is the direct cause of my troubling you with the
present visit.  Othenwise, being a particularly Angular man, I should not
have intruded here.  I am the last man to intrude into a sphere for which
I am so entirely unfitted.  I feel, on these premises, as if I was a
bear—with the cramp—in a youthful Cotillon.’

His ungainliness gave him enough of the air of his simile to set Rosa off
laughing heartily.

‘It strikes you in the same light,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with perfect
calmness.  ‘Just so.  To return to my memorandum.  Mr. Edwin has been to
and fro here, as was arranged.  You have mentioned that, in your
quarterly letters to me.  And you like him, and he likes you.’

‘I _like_ him very much, sir,’ rejoined Rosa.

‘So I said, my dear,’ returned her guardian, for whose ear the timid
emphasis was much too fine.  ‘Good.  And you correspond.’

‘We write to one another,’ said Rosa, pouting, as she recalled their
epistolary differences.

‘Such is the meaning that I attach to the word “correspond” in this
application, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Good.  All goes well, time
works on, and at this next Christmas-time it will become necessary, as a
matter of form, to give the exemplary lady in the corner window, to whom
we are so much indebted, business notice of your departure in the ensuing
half-year.  Your relations with her are far more than business relations,
no doubt; but a residue of business remains in them, and business is
business ever.  I am a particularly Angular man,’ proceeded Mr.
Grewgious, as if it suddenly occurred to him to mention it, ‘and I am not
used to give anything away.  If, for these two reasons, some competent
Proxy would give _you_ away, I should take it very kindly.’

Rosa intimated, with her eyes on the ground, that she thought a
substitute might be found, if required.

‘Surely, surely,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘For instance, the gentleman who
teaches Dancing here—he would know how to do it with graceful propriety.
He would advance and retire in a manner satisfactory to the feelings of
the officiating clergyman, and of yourself, and the bridegroom, and all
parties concerned.  I am—I am a particularly Angular man,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, as if he had made up his mind to screw it out at last: ‘and
should only blunder.’

Rosa sat still and silent.  Perhaps her mind had not got quite so far as
the ceremony yet, but was lagging on the way there.

‘Memorandum, “Will.”  Now, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, referring to his
notes, disposing of ‘Marriage’ with his pencil, and taking a paper from
his pocket; ‘although.  I have before possessed you with the contents of
your father’s will, I think it right at this time to leave a certified
copy of it in your hands.  And although Mr. Edwin is also aware of its
contents, I think it right at this time likewise to place a certified
copy of it in Mr. Jasper’s hand—’

‘Not in his own!’ asked Rosa, looking up quickly.  ‘Cannot the copy go to
Eddy himself?’

‘Why, yes, my dear, if you particularly wish it; but I spoke of Mr.
Jasper as being his trustee.’

‘I do particularly wish it, if you please,’ said Rosa, hurriedly and
earnestly; ‘I don’t like Mr. Jasper to come between us, in any way.’

‘It is natural, I suppose,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘that your young husband
should be all in all.  Yes.  You observe that I say, I suppose.  The fact
is, I am a particularly Unnatural man, and I don’t know from my own
knowledge.’

Rosa looked at him with some wonder.

‘I mean,’ he explained, ‘that young ways were never my ways.  I was the
only offspring of parents far advanced in life, and I half believe I was
born advanced in life myself.  No personality is intended towards the
name you will so soon change, when I remark that while the general growth
of people seem to have come into existence, buds, I seem to have come
into existence a chip.  I was a chip—and a very dry one—when I first
became aware of myself.  Respecting the other certified copy, your wish
shall be complied with.  Respecting your inheritance, I think you know
all.  It is an annuity of two hundred and fifty pounds.  The savings upon
that annuity, and some other items to your credit, all duly carried to
account, with vouchers, will place you in possession of a lump-sum of
money, rather exceeding Seventeen Hundred Pounds.  I am empowered to
advance the cost of your preparations for your marriage out of that fund.
All is told.’

‘Will you please tell me,’ said Rosa, taking the paper with a prettily
knitted brow, but not opening it: ‘whether I am right in what I am going
to say?  I can understand what you tell me, so very much better than what
I read in law-writings.  My poor papa and Eddy’s father made their
agreement together, as very dear and firm and fast friends, in order that
we, too, might be very dear and firm and fast friends after them?’

‘Just so.’

‘For the lasting good of both of us, and the lasting happiness of both of
us?’

‘Just so.’

‘That we might be to one another even much more than they had been to one
another?’

‘Just so.’

‘It was not bound upon Eddy, and it was not bound upon me, by any
forfeit, in case—’

‘Don’t be agitated, my dear.  In the case that it brings tears into your
affectionate eyes even to picture to yourself—in the case of your not
marrying one another—no, no forfeiture on either side.  You would then
have been my ward until you were of age.  No worse would have befallen
you.  Bad enough perhaps!’

‘And Eddy?’

‘He would have come into his partnership derived from his father, and
into its arrears to his credit (if any), on attaining his majority, just
as now.’

Rosa, with her perplexed face and knitted brow, bit the corner of her
attested copy, as she sat with her head on one side, looking abstractedly
on the floor, and smoothing it with her foot.

‘In short,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘this betrothal is a wish, a sentiment, a
friendly project, tenderly expressed on both sides.  That it was strongly
felt, and that there was a lively hope that it would prosper, there can
be no doubt.  When you were both children, you began to be accustomed to
it, and it _has_ prospered.  But circumstances alter cases; and I made
this visit to-day, partly, indeed principally, to discharge myself of the
duty of telling you, my dear, that two young people can only be betrothed
in marriage (except as a matter of convenience, and therefore mockery and
misery) of their own free will, their own attachment, and their own
assurance (it may or it may not prove a mistaken one, but we must take
our chance of that), that they are suited to each other, and will make
each other happy.  Is it to be supposed, for example, that if either of
your fathers were living now, and had any mistrust on that subject, his
mind would not be changed by the change of circumstances involved in the
change of your years?  Untenable, unreasonable, inconclusive, and
preposterous!’

Mr. Grewgious said all this, as if he were reading it aloud; or, still
more, as if he were repeating a lesson.  So expressionless of any
approach to spontaneity were his face and manner.

‘I have now, my dear,’ he added, blurring out ‘Will’ with his pencil,
‘discharged myself of what is doubtless a formal duty in this case, but
still a duty in such a case.  Memorandum, “Wishes.”  My dear, is there
any wish of yours that I can further?’

Rosa shook her head, with an almost plaintive air of hesitation in want
of help.

‘Is there any instruction that I can take from you with reference to your
affairs?’

‘I—I should like to settle them with Eddy first, if you please,’ said
Rosa, plaiting the crease in her dress.

‘Surely, surely,’ returned Mr. Grewgious.  ‘You two should be of one mind
in all things.  Is the young gentleman expected shortly?’

‘He has gone away only this morning.  He will be back at Christmas.’

‘Nothing could happen better.  You will, on his return at Christmas,
arrange all matters of detail with him; you will then communicate with
me; and I will discharge myself (as a mere business acquaintance) of my
business responsibilities towards the accomplished lady in the corner
window.  They will accrue at that season.’  Blurring pencil once again.
‘Memorandum, “Leave.”  Yes.  I will now, my dear, take my leave.’

‘Could I,’ said Rosa, rising, as he jerked out of his chair in his
ungainly way: ‘could I ask you, most kindly to come to me at Christmas,
if I had anything particular to say to you?’

‘Why, certainly, certainly,’ he rejoined; apparently—if such a word can
be used of one who had no apparent lights or shadows about
him—complimented by the question.  ‘As a particularly Angular man, I do
not fit smoothly into the social circle, and consequently I have no other
engagement at Christmas-time than to partake, on the twenty-fifth, of a
boiled turkey and celery sauce with a—with a particularly Angular clerk I
have the good fortune to possess, whose father, being a Norfolk farmer,
sends him up (the turkey up), as a present to me, from the neighbourhood
of Norwich.  I should be quite proud of your wishing to see me, my dear.
As a professional Receiver of rents, so very few people _do_ wish to see
me, that the novelty would be bracing.’

For his ready acquiescence, the grateful Rosa put her hands upon his
shoulders, stood on tiptoe, and instantly kissed him.

‘Lord bless me!’ cried Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Thank you, my dear!  The honour
is almost equal to the pleasure.  Miss Twinkleton, madam, I have had a
most satisfactory conversation with my ward, and I will now release you
from the incumbrance of my presence.’

‘Nay, sir,’ rejoined Miss Twinkleton, rising with a gracious
condescension: ‘say not incumbrance.  Not so, by any means.  I cannot
permit you to say so.’

‘Thank you, madam.  I have read in the newspapers,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
stammering a little, ‘that when a distinguished visitor (not that I am
one: far from it) goes to a school (not that this is one: far from it),
he asks for a holiday, or some sort of grace.  It being now the afternoon
in the—College—of which you are the eminent head, the young ladies might
gain nothing, except in name, by having the rest of the day allowed them.
But if there is any young lady at all under a cloud, might I solicit—’

‘Ah, Mr. Grewgious, Mr. Grewgious!’ cried Miss Twinkleton, with a
chastely-rallying forefinger.  ‘O you gentlemen, you gentlemen!  Fie for
shame, that you are so hard upon us poor maligned disciplinarians of our
sex, for your sakes!  But as Miss Ferdinand is at present weighed down by
an incubus’—Miss Twinkleton might have said a pen-and-ink-ubus of writing
out Monsieur La Fontaine—‘go to her, Rosa my dear, and tell her the
penalty is remitted, in deference to the intercession of your guardian,
Mr. Grewgious.’

Miss Twinkleton here achieved a curtsey, suggestive of marvels happening
to her respected legs, and which she came out of nobly, three yards
behind her starting-point.

As he held it incumbent upon him to call on Mr. Jasper before leaving
Cloisterham, Mr. Grewgious went to the gatehouse, and climbed its postern
stair.  But Mr. Jasper’s door being closed, and presenting on a slip of
paper the word ‘Cathedral,’ the fact of its being service-time was borne
into the mind of Mr. Grewgious.  So he descended the stair again, and,
crossing the Close, paused at the great western folding-door of the
Cathedral, which stood open on the fine and bright, though short-lived,
afternoon, for the airing of the place.

‘Dear me,’ said Mr. Grewgious, peeping in, ‘it’s like looking down the
throat of Old Time.’

Old Time heaved a mouldy sigh from tomb and arch and vault; and gloomy
shadows began to deepen in corners; and damps began to rise from green
patches of stone; and jewels, cast upon the pavement of the nave from
stained glass by the declining sun, began to perish.  Within the
grill-gate of the chancel, up the steps surmounted loomingly by the
fast-darkening organ, white robes could be dimly seen, and one feeble
voice, rising and falling in a cracked, monotonous mutter, could at
intervals be faintly heard.  In the free outer air, the river, the green
pastures, and the brown arable lands, the teeming hills and dales, were
reddened by the sunset: while the distant little windows in windmills and
farm homesteads, shone, patches of bright beaten gold.  In the Cathedral,
all became gray, murky, and sepulchral, and the cracked monotonous mutter
went on like a dying voice, until the organ and the choir burst forth,
and drowned it in a sea of music.  Then, the sea fell, and the dying
voice made another feeble effort, and then the sea rose high, and beat
its life out, and lashed the roof, and surged among the arches, and
pierced the heights of the great tower; and then the sea was dry, and all
was still.

Mr. Grewgious had by that time walked to the chancel-steps, where he met
the living waters coming out.

‘Nothing is the matter?’  Thus Jasper accosted him, rather quickly.  ‘You
have not been sent for?’

‘Not at all, not at all.  I came down of my own accord.  I have been to
my pretty ward’s, and am now homeward bound again.’

‘You found her thriving?’

‘Blooming indeed.  Most blooming.  I merely came to tell her, seriously,
what a betrothal by deceased parents is.’

‘And what is it—according to your judgment?’

Mr. Grewgious noticed the whiteness of the lips that asked the question,
and put it down to the chilling account of the Cathedral.

‘I merely came to tell her that it could not be considered binding,
against any such reason for its dissolution as a want of affection, or
want of disposition to carry it into effect, on the side of either
party.’

‘May I ask, had you any especial reason for telling her that?’

Mr. Grewgious answered somewhat sharply: ‘The especial reason of doing my
duty, sir.  Simply that.’  Then he added: ‘Come, Mr. Jasper; I know your
affection for your nephew, and that you are quick to feel on his behalf.
I assure you that this implies not the least doubt of, or disrespect to,
your nephew.’

‘You could not,’ returned Jasper, with a friendly pressure of his arm, as
they walked on side by side, ‘speak more handsomely.’

Mr. Grewgious pulled off his hat to smooth his head, and, having smoothed
it, nodded it contentedly, and put his hat on again.

‘I will wager,’ said Jasper, smiling—his lips were still so white that he
was conscious of it, and bit and moistened them while speaking: ‘I will
wager that she hinted no wish to be released from Ned.’

‘And you will win your wager, if you do,’ retorted Mr. Grewgious.  ‘We
should allow some margin for little maidenly delicacies in a young
motherless creature, under such circumstances, I suppose; it is not in my
line; what do you think?’

‘There can be no doubt of it.’

‘I am glad you say so.  Because,’ proceeded Mr. Grewgious, who had all
this time very knowingly felt his way round to action on his remembrance
of what she had said of Jasper himself: ‘because she seems to have some
little delicate instinct that all preliminary arrangements had best be
made between Mr. Edwin Drood and herself, don’t you see?  She don’t want
us, don’t you know?’

Jasper touched himself on the breast, and said, somewhat indistinctly:
‘You mean me.’

Mr. Grewgious touched himself on the breast, and said: ‘I mean us.
Therefore, let them have their little discussions and councils together,
when Mr. Edwin Drood comes back here at Christmas; and then you and I
will step in, and put the final touches to the business.’

‘So, you settled with her that you would come back at Christmas?’
observed Jasper.  ‘I see!  Mr. Grewgious, as you quite fairly said just
now, there is such an exceptional attachment between my nephew and me,
that I am more sensitive for the dear, fortunate, happy, happy fellow
than for myself.  But it is only right that the young lady should be
considered, as you have pointed out, and that I should accept my cue from
you.  I accept it.  I understand that at Christmas they will complete
their preparations for May, and that their marriage will be put in final
train by themselves, and that nothing will remain for us but to put
ourselves in train also, and have everything ready for our formal release
from our trusts, on Edwin’s birthday.’

‘That is my understanding,’ assented Mr. Grewgious, as they shook hands
to part.  ‘God bless them both!’

‘God save them both!’ cried Jasper.

‘I said, bless them,’ remarked the former, looking back over his
shoulder.

‘I said, save them,’ returned the latter.  ‘Is there any difference?’




CHAPTER X—SMOOTHING THE WAY


It has been often enough remarked that women have a curious power of
divining the characters of men, which would seem to be innate and
instinctive; seeing that it is arrived at through no patient process of
reasoning, that it can give no satisfactory or sufficient account of
itself, and that it pronounces in the most confident manner even against
accumulated observation on the part of the other sex.  But it has not
been quite so often remarked that this power (fallible, like every other
human attribute) is for the most part absolutely incapable of
self-revision; and that when it has delivered an adverse opinion which by
all human lights is subsequently proved to have failed, it is
undistinguishable from prejudice, in respect of its determination not to
be corrected.  Nay, the very possibility of contradiction or disproof,
however remote, communicates to this feminine judgment from the first, in
nine cases out of ten, the weakness attendant on the testimony of an
interested witness; so personally and strongly does the fair diviner
connect herself with her divination.

‘Now, don’t you think, Ma dear,’ said the Minor Canon to his mother one
day as she sat at her knitting in his little book-room, ‘that you are
rather hard on Mr. Neville?’

‘No, I do _not_, Sept,’ returned the old lady.

‘Let us discuss it, Ma.’

‘I have no objection to discuss it, Sept.  I trust, my dear, I am always
open to discussion.’  There was a vibration in the old lady’s cap, as
though she internally added: ‘and I should like to see the discussion
that would change _my_ mind!’

‘Very good, Ma,’ said her conciliatory son.  ‘There is nothing like being
open to discussion.’

‘I hope not, my dear,’ returned the old lady, evidently shut to it.

‘Well!  Mr. Neville, on that unfortunate occasion, commits himself under
provocation.’

‘And under mulled wine,’ added the old lady.

‘I must admit the wine.  Though I believe the two young men were much
alike in that regard.’

‘I don’t,’ said the old lady.

‘Why not, Ma?’

‘Because I _don’t_,’ said the old lady.  ‘Still, I am quite open to
discussion.’

‘But, my dear Ma, I cannot see how we are to discuss, if you take that
line.’

‘Blame Mr. Neville for it, Sept, and not me,’ said the old lady, with
stately severity.

‘My dear Ma! why Mr. Neville?’

‘Because,’ said Mrs. Crisparkle, retiring on first principles, ‘he came
home intoxicated, and did great discredit to this house, and showed great
disrespect to this family.’

‘That is not to be denied, Ma.  He was then, and he is now, very sorry
for it.’

‘But for Mr. Jasper’s well-bred consideration in coming up to me, next
day, after service, in the Nave itself, with his gown still on, and
expressing his hope that I had not been greatly alarmed or had my rest
violently broken, I believe I might never have heard of that disgraceful
transaction,’ said the old lady.

‘To be candid, Ma, I think I should have kept it from you if I could:
though I had not decidedly made up my mind.  I was following Jasper out,
to confer with him on the subject, and to consider the expediency of his
and my jointly hushing the thing up on all accounts, when I found him
speaking to you.  Then it was too late.’

‘Too late, indeed, Sept.  He was still as pale as gentlemanly ashes at
what had taken place in his rooms overnight.’

‘If I _had_ kept it from you, Ma, you may be sure it would have been for
your peace and quiet, and for the good of the young men, and in my best
discharge of my duty according to my lights.’

The old lady immediately walked across the room and kissed him: saying,
‘Of course, my dear Sept, I am sure of that.’

‘However, it became the town-talk,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, rubbing his ear,
as his mother resumed her seat, and her knitting, ‘and passed out of my
power.’

‘And I said then, Sept,’ returned the old lady, ‘that I thought ill of
Mr. Neville.  And I say now, that I think ill of Mr. Neville.  And I said
then, and I say now, that I hope Mr. Neville may come to good, but I
don’t believe he will.’  Here the cap vibrated again considerably.

‘I am sorry to hear you say so, Ma—’

‘I am sorry to say so, my dear,’ interposed the old lady, knitting on
firmly, ‘but I can’t help it.’

‘—For,’ pursued the Minor Canon, ‘it is undeniable that Mr. Neville is
exceedingly industrious and attentive, and that he improves apace, and
that he has—I hope I may say—an attachment to me.’

‘There is no merit in the last article, my dear,’ said the old lady,
quickly; ‘and if he says there is, I think the worse of him for the
boast.’

‘But, my dear Ma, he never said there was.’

‘Perhaps not,’ returned the old lady; ‘still, I don’t see that it greatly
signifies.’

There was no impatience in the pleasant look with which Mr. Crisparkle
contemplated the pretty old piece of china as it knitted; but there was,
certainly, a humorous sense of its not being a piece of china to argue
with very closely.

‘Besides, Sept, ask yourself what he would be without his sister.  You
know what an influence she has over him; you know what a capacity she
has; you know that whatever he reads with you, he reads with her.  Give
her her fair share of your praise, and how much do you leave for him?’

At these words Mr. Crisparkle fell into a little reverie, in which he
thought of several things.  He thought of the times he had seen the
brother and sister together in deep converse over one of his own old
college books; now, in the rimy mornings, when he made those sharpening
pilgrimages to Cloisterham Weir; now, in the sombre evenings, when he
faced the wind at sunset, having climbed his favourite outlook, a
beetling fragment of monastery ruin; and the two studious figures passed
below him along the margin of the river, in which the town fires and
lights already shone, making the landscape bleaker.  He thought how the
consciousness had stolen upon him that in teaching one, he was teaching
two; and how he had almost insensibly adapted his explanations to both
minds—that with which his own was daily in contact, and that which he
only approached through it.  He thought of the gossip that had reached
him from the Nuns’ House, to the effect that Helena, whom he had
mistrusted as so proud and fierce, submitted herself to the fairy-bride
(as he called her), and learnt from her what she knew.  He thought of the
picturesque alliance between those two, externally so very different.  He
thought—perhaps most of all—could it be that these things were yet but so
many weeks old, and had become an integral part of his life?

As, whenever the Reverend Septimus fell a-musing, his good mother took it
to be an infallible sign that he ‘wanted support,’ the blooming old lady
made all haste to the dining-room closet, to produce from it the support
embodied in a glass of Constantia and a home-made biscuit.  It was a most
wonderful closet, worthy of Cloisterham and of Minor Canon Corner.  Above
it, a portrait of Handel in a flowing wig beamed down at the spectator,
with a knowing air of being up to the contents of the closet, and a
musical air of intending to combine all its harmonies in one delicious
fugue.  No common closet with a vulgar door on hinges, openable all at
once, and leaving nothing to be disclosed by degrees, this rare closet
had a lock in mid-air, where two perpendicular slides met; the one
falling down, and the other pushing up.  The upper slide, on being pulled
down (leaving the lower a double mystery), revealed deep shelves of
pickle-jars, jam-pots, tin canisters, spice-boxes, and agreeably
outlandish vessels of blue and white, the luscious lodgings of preserved
tamarinds and ginger.  Every benevolent inhabitant of this retreat had
his name inscribed upon his stomach.  The pickles, in a uniform of rich
brown double-breasted buttoned coat, and yellow or sombre drab
continuations, announced their portly forms, in printed capitals, as
Walnut, Gherkin, Onion, Cabbage, Cauliflower, Mixed, and other members of
that noble family.  The jams, as being of a less masculine temperament,
and as wearing curlpapers, announced themselves in feminine caligraphy,
like a soft whisper, to be Raspberry, Gooseberry, Apricot, Plum, Damson,
Apple, and Peach.  The scene closing on these charmers, and the lower
slide ascending, oranges were revealed, attended by a mighty japanned
sugar-box, to temper their acerbity if unripe.  Home-made biscuits waited
at the Court of these Powers, accompanied by a goodly fragment of
plum-cake, and various slender ladies’ fingers, to be dipped into sweet
wine and kissed.  Lowest of all, a compact leaden-vault enshrined the
sweet wine and a stock of cordials: whence issued whispers of Seville
Orange, Lemon, Almond, and Caraway-seed.  There was a crowning air upon
this closet of closets, of having been for ages hummed through by the
Cathedral bell and organ, until those venerable bees had made sublimated
honey of everything in store; and it was always observed that every
dipper among the shelves (deep, as has been noticed, and swallowing up
head, shoulders, and elbows) came forth again mellow-faced, and seeming
to have undergone a saccharine transfiguration.

The Reverend Septimus yielded himself up quite as willing a victim to a
nauseous medicinal herb-closet, also presided over by the china
shepherdess, as to this glorious cupboard.  To what amazing infusions of
gentian, peppermint, gilliflower, sage, parsley, thyme, rue, rosemary,
and dandelion, did his courageous stomach submit itself!  In what
wonderful wrappers, enclosing layers of dried leaves, would he swathe his
rosy and contented face, if his mother suspected him of a toothache!
What botanical blotches would he cheerfully stick upon his cheek, or
forehead, if the dear old lady convicted him of an imperceptible pimple
there!  Into this herbaceous penitentiary, situated on an upper
staircase-landing: a low and narrow whitewashed cell, where bunches of
dried leaves hung from rusty hooks in the ceiling, and were spread out
upon shelves, in company with portentous bottles: would the Reverend
Septimus submissively be led, like the highly popular lamb who has so
long and unresistingly been led to the slaughter, and there would he,
unlike that lamb, bore nobody but himself.  Not even doing that much, so
that the old lady were busy and pleased, he would quietly swallow what
was given him, merely taking a corrective dip of hands and face into the
great bowl of dried rose-leaves, and into the other great bowl of dried
lavender, and then would go out, as confident in the sweetening powers of
Cloisterham Weir and a wholesome mind, as Lady Macbeth was hopeless of
those of all the seas that roll.

In the present instance the good Minor Canon took his glass of Constantia
with an excellent grace, and, so supported to his mother’s satisfaction,
applied himself to the remaining duties of the day.  In their orderly and
punctual progress they brought round Vesper Service and twilight.  The
Cathedral being very cold, he set off for a brisk trot after service; the
trot to end in a charge at his favourite fragment of ruin, which was to
be carried by storm, without a pause for breath.

He carried it in a masterly manner, and, not breathed even then, stood
looking down upon the river.  The river at Cloisterham is sufficiently
near the sea to throw up oftentimes a quantity of seaweed.  An unusual
quantity had come in with the last tide, and this, and the confusion of
the water, and the restless dipping and flapping of the noisy gulls, and
an angry light out seaward beyond the brown-sailed barges that were
turning black, foreshadowed a stormy night.  In his mind he was
contrasting the wild and noisy sea with the quiet harbour of Minor Canon
Corner, when Helena and Neville Landless passed below him.  He had had
the two together in his thoughts all day, and at once climbed down to
speak to them together.  The footing was rough in an uncertain light for
any tread save that of a good climber; but the Minor Canon was as good a
climber as most men, and stood beside them before many good climbers
would have been half-way down.

‘A wild evening, Miss Landless!  Do you not find your usual walk with
your brother too exposed and cold for the time of year?  Or at all
events, when the sun is down, and the weather is driving in from the
sea?’

Helena thought not.  It was their favourite walk.  It was very retired.

‘It is very retired,’ assented Mr. Crisparkle, laying hold of his
opportunity straightway, and walking on with them.  ‘It is a place of all
others where one can speak without interruption, as I wish to do.  Mr.
Neville, I believe you tell your sister everything that passes between
us?’

‘Everything, sir.’

‘Consequently,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘your sister is aware that I have
repeatedly urged you to make some kind of apology for that unfortunate
occurrence which befell on the night of your arrival here.’  In saying it
he looked to her, and not to him; therefore it was she, and not he, who
replied:

‘Yes.’

‘I call it unfortunate, Miss Helena,’ resumed Mr. Crisparkle, ‘forasmuch
as it certainly has engendered a prejudice against Neville.  There is a
notion about, that he is a dangerously passionate fellow, of an
uncontrollable and furious temper: he is really avoided as such.’

‘I have no doubt he is, poor fellow,’ said Helena, with a look of proud
compassion at her brother, expressing a deep sense of his being
ungenerously treated.  ‘I should be quite sure of it, from your saying
so; but what you tell me is confirmed by suppressed hints and references
that I meet with every day.’

‘Now,’ Mr. Crisparkle again resumed, in a tone of mild though firm
persuasion, ‘is not this to be regretted, and ought it not to be amended?
These are early days of Neville’s in Cloisterham, and I have no fear of
his outliving such a prejudice, and proving himself to have been
misunderstood.  But how much wiser to take action at once, than to trust
to uncertain time!  Besides, apart from its being politic, it is right.
For there can be no question that Neville was wrong.’

‘He was provoked,’ Helena submitted.

‘He was the assailant,’ Mr. Crisparkle submitted.

They walked on in silence, until Helena raised her eyes to the Minor
Canon’s face, and said, almost reproachfully: ‘O Mr. Crisparkle, would
you have Neville throw himself at young Drood’s feet, or at Mr. Jasper’s,
who maligns him every day?  In your heart you cannot mean it.  From your
heart you could not do it, if his case were yours.’

‘I have represented to Mr. Crisparkle, Helena,’ said Neville, with a
glance of deference towards his tutor, ‘that if I could do it from my
heart, I would.  But I cannot, and I revolt from the pretence.  You
forget however, that to put the case to Mr. Crisparkle as his own, is to
suppose to have done what I did.’

‘I ask his pardon,’ said Helena.

‘You see,’ remarked Mr. Crisparkle, again laying hold of his opportunity,
though with a moderate and delicate touch, ‘you both instinctively
acknowledge that Neville did wrong.  Then why stop short, and not
otherwise acknowledge it?’

‘Is there no difference,’ asked Helena, with a little faltering in her
manner; ‘between submission to a generous spirit, and submission to a
base or trivial one?’

Before the worthy Minor Canon was quite ready with his argument in
reference to this nice distinction, Neville struck in:

‘Help me to clear myself with Mr. Crisparkle, Helena.  Help me to
convince him that I cannot be the first to make concessions without
mockery and falsehood.  My nature must be changed before I can do so, and
it is not changed.  I am sensible of inexpressible affront, and
deliberate aggravation of inexpressible affront, and I am angry.  The
plain truth is, I am still as angry when I recall that night as I was
that night.’

‘Neville,’ hinted the Minor Canon, with a steady countenance, ‘you have
repeated that former action of your hands, which I so much dislike.’

‘I am sorry for it, sir, but it was involuntary.  I confessed that I was
still as angry.’

‘And I confess,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that I hoped for better things.’

‘I am sorry to disappoint you, sir, but it would be far worse to deceive
you, and I should deceive you grossly if I pretended that you had
softened me in this respect.  The time may come when your powerful
influence will do even that with the difficult pupil whose antecedents
you know; but it has not come yet.  Is this so, and in spite of my
struggles against myself, Helena?’

She, whose dark eyes were watching the effect of what he said on Mr.
Crisparkle’s face, replied—to Mr. Crisparkle, not to him: ‘It is so.’
After a short pause, she answered the slightest look of inquiry
conceivable, in her brother’s eyes, with as slight an affirmative bend of
her own head; and he went on:

‘I have never yet had the courage to say to you, sir, what in full
openness I ought to have said when you first talked with me on this
subject.  It is not easy to say, and I have been withheld by a fear of
its seeming ridiculous, which is very strong upon me down to this last
moment, and might, but for my sister, prevent my being quite open with
you even now.—I admire Miss Bud, sir, so very much, that I cannot bear
her being treated with conceit or indifference; and even if I did not
feel that I had an injury against young Drood on my own account, I should
feel that I had an injury against him on hers.’

Mr. Crisparkle, in utter amazement, looked at Helena for corroboration,
and met in her expressive face full corroboration, and a plea for advice.

‘The young lady of whom you speak is, as you know, Mr. Neville, shortly
to be married,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, gravely; ‘therefore your admiration,
if it be of that special nature which you seem to indicate, is
outrageously misplaced.  Moreover, it is monstrous that you should take
upon yourself to be the young lady’s champion against her chosen husband.
Besides, you have seen them only once.  The young lady has become your
sister’s friend; and I wonder that your sister, even on her behalf, has
not checked you in this irrational and culpable fancy.’

‘She has tried, sir, but uselessly.  Husband or no husband, that fellow
is incapable of the feeling with which I am inspired towards the
beautiful young creature whom he treats like a doll.  I say he is as
incapable of it, as he is unworthy of her.  I say she is sacrificed in
being bestowed upon him.  I say that I love her, and despise and hate
him!’  This with a face so flushed, and a gesture so violent, that his
sister crossed to his side, and caught his arm, remonstrating, ‘Neville,
Neville!’

Thus recalled to himself, he quickly became sensible of having lost the
guard he had set upon his passionate tendency, and covered his face with
his hand, as one repentant and wretched.

Mr. Crisparkle, watching him attentively, and at the same time meditating
how to proceed, walked on for some paces in silence.  Then he spoke:

‘Mr. Neville, Mr. Neville, I am sorely grieved to see in you more traces
of a character as sullen, angry, and wild, as the night now closing in.
They are of too serious an aspect to leave me the resource of treating
the infatuation you have disclosed, as undeserving serious consideration.
I give it very serious consideration, and I speak to you accordingly.
This feud between you and young Drood must not go on.  I cannot permit it
to go on any longer, knowing what I now know from you, and you living
under my roof.  Whatever prejudiced and unauthorised constructions your
blind and envious wrath may put upon his character, it is a frank,
good-natured character.  I know I can trust to it for that.  Now, pray
observe what I am about to say.  On reflection, and on your sister’s
representation, I am willing to admit that, in making peace with young
Drood, you have a right to be met half-way.  I will engage that you shall
be, and even that young Drood shall make the first advance.  This
condition fulfilled, you will pledge me the honour of a Christian
gentleman that the quarrel is for ever at an end on your side.  What may
be in your heart when you give him your hand, can only be known to the
Searcher of all hearts; but it will never go well with you, if there be
any treachery there.  So far, as to that; next as to what I must again
speak of as your infatuation.  I understand it to have been confided to
me, and to be known to no other person save your sister and yourself.  Do
I understand aright?’

Helena answered in a low voice: ‘It is only known to us three who are
here together.’

‘It is not at all known to the young lady, your friend?’

‘On my soul, no!’

‘I require you, then, to give me your similar and solemn pledge, Mr.
Neville, that it shall remain the secret it is, and that you will take no
other action whatsoever upon it than endeavouring (and that most
earnestly) to erase it from your mind.  I will not tell you that it will
soon pass; I will not tell you that it is the fancy of the moment; I will
not tell you that such caprices have their rise and fall among the young
and ardent every hour; I will leave you undisturbed in the belief that it
has few parallels or none, that it will abide with you a long time, and
that it will be very difficult to conquer.  So much the more weight shall
I attach to the pledge I require from you, when it is unreservedly
given.’

The young man twice or thrice essayed to speak, but failed.

‘Let me leave you with your sister, whom it is time you took home,’ said
Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘You will find me alone in my room by-and-by.’

‘Pray do not leave us yet,’ Helena implored him.  ‘Another minute.’

‘I should not,’ said Neville, pressing his hand upon his face, ‘have
needed so much as another minute, if you had been less patient with me,
Mr. Crisparkle, less considerate of me, and less unpretendingly good and
true.  O, if in my childhood I had known such a guide!’

‘Follow your guide now, Neville,’ murmured Helena, ‘and follow him to
Heaven!’

There was that in her tone which broke the good Minor Canon’s voice, or
it would have repudiated her exaltation of him.  As it was, he laid a
finger on his lips, and looked towards her brother.

‘To say that I give both pledges, Mr. Crisparkle, out of my innermost
heart, and to say that there is no treachery in it, is to say nothing!’
Thus Neville, greatly moved.  ‘I beg your forgiveness for my miserable
lapse into a burst of passion.’

‘Not mine, Neville, not mine.  You know with whom forgiveness lies, as
the highest attribute conceivable.  Miss Helena, you and your brother are
twin children.  You came into this world with the same dispositions, and
you passed your younger days together surrounded by the same adverse
circumstances.  What you have overcome in yourself, can you not overcome
in him?  You see the rock that lies in his course.  Who but you can keep
him clear of it?’

‘Who but you, sir?’ replied Helena.  ‘What is my influence, or my weak
wisdom, compared with yours!’

‘You have the wisdom of Love,’ returned the Minor Canon, ‘and it was the
highest wisdom ever known upon this earth, remember.  As to mine—but the
less said of that commonplace commodity the better.  Good night!’

She took the hand he offered her, and gratefully and almost reverently
raised it to her lips.

‘Tut!’ said the Minor Canon softly, ‘I am much overpaid!’ and turned
away.

                  [Picture: Mr. Crisparkle is overpaid]

Retracing his steps towards the Cathedral Close, he tried, as he went
along in the dark, to think out the best means of bringing to pass what
he had promised to effect, and what must somehow be done.  ‘I shall
probably be asked to marry them,’ he reflected, ‘and I would they were
married and gone!  But this presses first.’

He debated principally whether he should write to young Drood, or whether
he should speak to Jasper.  The consciousness of being popular with the
whole Cathedral establishment inclined him to the latter course, and the
well-timed sight of the lighted gatehouse decided him to take it.  ‘I
will strike while the iron is hot,’ he said, ‘and see him now.’

Jasper was lying asleep on a couch before the fire, when, having ascended
the postern-stair, and received no answer to his knock at the door, Mr.
Crisparkle gently turned the handle and looked in.  Long afterwards he
had cause to remember how Jasper sprang from the couch in a delirious
state between sleeping and waking, and crying out: ‘What is the matter?
Who did it?’

‘It is only I, Jasper.  I am sorry to have disturbed you.’

The glare of his eyes settled down into a look of recognition, and he
moved a chair or two, to make a way to the fireside.

‘I was dreaming at a great rate, and am glad to be disturbed from an
indigestive after-dinner sleep.  Not to mention that you are always
welcome.’

‘Thank you.  I am not confident,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, as he sat
himself down in the easy-chair placed for him, ‘that my subject will at
first sight be quite as welcome as myself; but I am a minister of peace,
and I pursue my subject in the interests of peace.  In a word, Jasper, I
want to establish peace between these two young fellows.’

A very perplexed expression took hold of Mr. Jasper’s face; a very
perplexing expression too, for Mr. Crisparkle could make nothing of it.

‘How?’ was Jasper’s inquiry, in a low and slow voice, after a silence.

‘For the “How” I come to you.  I want to ask you to do me the great
favour and service of interposing with your nephew (I have already
interposed with Mr. Neville), and getting him to write you a short note,
in his lively way, saying that he is willing to shake hands.  I know what
a good-natured fellow he is, and what influence you have with him.  And
without in the least defending Mr. Neville, we must all admit that he was
bitterly stung.’

Jasper turned that perplexed face towards the fire.  Mr. Crisparkle
continuing to observe it, found it even more perplexing than before,
inasmuch as it seemed to denote (which could hardly be) some close
internal calculation.

‘I know that you are not prepossessed in Mr. Neville’s favour,’ the Minor
Canon was going on, when Jasper stopped him:

‘You have cause to say so.  I am not, indeed.’

‘Undoubtedly; and I admit his lamentable violence of temper, though I
hope he and I will get the better of it between us.  But I have exacted a
very solemn promise from him as to his future demeanour towards your
nephew, if you do kindly interpose; and I am sure he will keep it.’

‘You are always responsible and trustworthy, Mr. Crisparkle.  Do you
really feel sure that you can answer for him so confidently?’

‘I do.’

The perplexed and perplexing look vanished.

‘Then you relieve my mind of a great dread, and a heavy weight,’ said
Jasper; ‘I will do it.’

Mr. Crisparkle, delighted by the swiftness and completeness of his
success, acknowledged it in the handsomest terms.

‘I will do it,’ repeated Jasper, ‘for the comfort of having your
guarantee against my vague and unfounded fears.  You will laugh—but do
you keep a Diary?’

‘A line for a day; not more.’

‘A line for a day would be quite as much as my uneventful life would
need, Heaven knows,’ said Jasper, taking a book from a desk, ‘but that my
Diary is, in fact, a Diary of Ned’s life too.  You will laugh at this
entry; you will guess when it was made:

    ‘“Past midnight.—After what I have just now seen, I have a morbid
    dread upon me of some horrible consequences resulting to my dear boy,
    that I cannot reason with or in any way contend against.  All my
    efforts are vain.  The demoniacal passion of this Neville Landless,
    his strength in his fury, and his savage rage for the destruction of
    its object, appal me.  So profound is the impression, that twice
    since I have gone into my dear boy’s room, to assure myself of his
    sleeping safely, and not lying dead in his blood.”

‘Here is another entry next morning:

    ‘“Ned up and away.  Light-hearted and unsuspicious as ever.  He
    laughed when I cautioned him, and said he was as good a man as
    Neville Landless any day.  I told him that might be, but he was not
    as bad a man.  He continued to make light of it, but I travelled with
    him as far as I could, and left him most unwillingly.  I am unable to
    shake off these dark intangible presentiments of evil—if feelings
    founded upon staring facts are to be so called.”

‘Again and again,’ said Jasper, in conclusion, twirling the leaves of the
book before putting it by, ‘I have relapsed into these moods, as other
entries show.  But I have now your assurance at my back, and shall put it
in my book, and make it an antidote to my black humours.’

‘Such an antidote, I hope,’ returned Mr. Crisparkle, ‘as will induce you
before long to consign the black humours to the flames.  I ought to be
the last to find any fault with you this evening, when you have met my
wishes so freely; but I must say, Jasper, that your devotion to your
nephew has made you exaggerative here.’

‘You are my witness,’ said Jasper, shrugging his shoulders, ‘what my
state of mind honestly was, that night, before I sat down to write, and
in what words I expressed it.  You remember objecting to a word I used,
as being too strong?  It was a stronger word than any in my Diary.’

‘Well, well.  Try the antidote,’ rejoined Mr. Crisparkle; ‘and may it
give you a brighter and better view of the case!  We will discuss it no
more now.  I have to thank you for myself, thank you sincerely.’

‘You shall find,’ said Jasper, as they shook hands, ‘that I will not do
the thing you wish me to do, by halves.  I will take care that Ned,
giving way at all, shall give way thoroughly.’

On the third day after this conversation, he called on Mr. Crisparkle
with the following letter:

    ‘MY DEAR JACK,

    ‘I am touched by your account of your interview with Mr. Crisparkle,
    whom I much respect and esteem.  At once I openly say that I forgot
    myself on that occasion quite as much as Mr. Landless did, and that I
    wish that bygone to be a bygone, and all to be right again.

    ‘Look here, dear old boy.  Ask Mr. Landless to dinner on Christmas
    Eve (the better the day the better the deed), and let there be only
    we three, and let us shake hands all round there and then, and say no
    more about it.

                                                            ‘My dear Jack,
                                             ‘Ever your most affectionate,
                                                             ‘EDWIN DROOD.

    ‘P.S.  Love to Miss Pussy at the next music-lesson.’

‘You expect Mr. Neville, then?’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘I count upon his coming,’ said Mr. Jasper.




CHAPTER XI—A PICTURE AND A RING


Behind the most ancient part of Holborn, London, where certain gabled
houses some centuries of age still stand looking on the public way, as if
disconsolately looking for the Old Bourne that has long run dry, is a
little nook composed of two irregular quadrangles, called Staple Inn.  It
is one of those nooks, the turning into which out of the clashing street,
imparts to the relieved pedestrian the sensation of having put cotton in
his ears, and velvet soles on his boots.  It is one of those nooks where
a few smoky sparrows twitter in smoky trees, as though they called to one
another, ‘Let us play at country,’ and where a few feet of garden-mould
and a few yards of gravel enable them to do that refreshing violence to
their tiny understandings.  Moreover, it is one of those nooks which are
legal nooks; and it contains a little Hall, with a little lantern in its
roof: to what obstructive purposes devoted, and at whose expense, this
history knoweth not.

In the days when Cloisterham took offence at the existence of a railroad
afar off, as menacing that sensitive constitution, the property of us
Britons: the odd fortune of which sacred institution it is to be in
exactly equal degrees croaked about, trembled for, and boasted of,
whatever happens to anything, anywhere in the world: in those days no
neighbouring architecture of lofty proportions had arisen to overshadow
Staple Inn.  The westering sun bestowed bright glances on it, and the
south-west wind blew into it unimpeded.

Neither wind nor sun, however, favoured Staple Inn one December afternoon
towards six o’clock, when it was filled with fog, and candles shed murky
and blurred rays through the windows of all its then-occupied sets of
chambers; notably from a set of chambers in a corner house in the little
inner quadrangle, presenting in black and white over its ugly portal the
mysterious inscription:

            P
  J                  T
          1747

In which set of chambers, never having troubled his head about the
inscription, unless to bethink himself at odd times on glancing up at it,
that haply it might mean Perhaps John Thomas, or Perhaps Joe Tyler, sat
Mr. Grewgious writing by his fire.

Who could have told, by looking at Mr. Grewgious, whether he had ever
known ambition or disappointment?  He had been bred to the Bar, and had
laid himself out for chamber practice; to draw deeds; ‘convey the wise it
call,’ as Pistol says.  But Conveyancing and he had made such a very
indifferent marriage of it that they had separated by consent—if there
can be said to be separation where there has never been coming together.

No.  Coy Conveyancing would not come to Mr. Grewgious.  She was wooed,
not won, and they went their several ways.  But an Arbitration being
blown towards him by some unaccountable wind, and he gaining great credit
in it as one indefatigable in seeking out right and doing right, a pretty
fat Receivership was next blown into his pocket by a wind more traceable
to its source.  So, by chance, he had found his niche.  Receiver and
Agent now, to two rich estates, and deputing their legal business, in an
amount worth having, to a firm of solicitors on the floor below, he had
snuffed out his ambition (supposing him to have ever lighted it), and had
settled down with his snuffers for the rest of his life under the dry
vine and fig-tree of P. J. T., who planted in seventeen-forty-seven.

Many accounts and account-books, many files of correspondence, and
several strong boxes, garnished Mr. Grewgious’s room.  They can scarcely
be represented as having lumbered it, so conscientious and precise was
their orderly arrangement.  The apprehension of dying suddenly, and
leaving one fact or one figure with any incompleteness or obscurity
attaching to it, would have stretched Mr. Grewgious stone-dead any day.
The largest fidelity to a trust was the life-blood of the man.  There are
sorts of life-blood that course more quickly, more gaily, more
attractively; but there is no better sort in circulation.

There was no luxury in his room.  Even its comforts were limited to its
being dry and warm, and having a snug though faded fireside.  What may be
called its private life was confined to the hearth, and all easy-chair,
and an old-fashioned occasional round table that was brought out upon the
rug after business hours, from a corner where it elsewise remained turned
up like a shining mahogany shield.  Behind it, when standing thus on the
defensive, was a closet, usually containing something good to drink.  An
outer room was the clerk’s room; Mr. Grewgious’s sleeping-room was across
the common stair; and he held some not empty cellarage at the bottom of
the common stair.  Three hundred days in the year, at least, he crossed
over to the hotel in Furnival’s Inn for his dinner, and after dinner
crossed back again, to make the most of these simplicities until it
should become broad business day once more, with P. J. T., date
seventeen-forty-seven.

As Mr. Grewgious sat and wrote by his fire that afternoon, so did the
clerk of Mr. Grewgious sit and write by _his_ fire.  A pale, puffy-faced,
dark-haired person of thirty, with big dark eyes that wholly wanted
lustre, and a dissatisfied doughy complexion, that seemed to ask to be
sent to the baker’s, this attendant was a mysterious being, possessed of
some strange power over Mr. Grewgious.  As though he had been called into
existence, like a fabulous Familiar, by a magic spell which had failed
when required to dismiss him, he stuck tight to Mr. Grewgious’s stool,
although Mr. Grewgious’s comfort and convenience would manifestly have
been advanced by dispossessing him.  A gloomy person with tangled locks,
and a general air of having been reared under the shadow of that baleful
tree of Java which has given shelter to more lies than the whole
botanical kingdom, Mr. Grewgious, nevertheless, treated him with
unaccountable consideration.

‘Now, Bazzard,’ said Mr. Grewgious, on the entrance of his clerk: looking
up from his papers as he arranged them for the night: ‘what is in the
wind besides fog?’

‘Mr. Drood,’ said Bazzard.

‘What of him?’

‘Has called,’ said Bazzard.

‘You might have shown him in.’

‘I am doing it,’ said Bazzard.

The visitor came in accordingly.

‘Dear me!’ said Mr. Grewgious, looking round his pair of office candles.
‘I thought you had called and merely left your name and gone.  How do you
do, Mr. Edwin?  Dear me, you’re choking!’

‘It’s this fog,’ returned Edwin; ‘and it makes my eyes smart, like
Cayenne pepper.’

‘Is it really so bad as that?  Pray undo your wrappers.  It’s fortunate I
have so good a fire; but Mr. Bazzard has taken care of me.’

‘No I haven’t,’ said Mr. Bazzard at the door.

‘Ah! then it follows that I must have taken care of myself without
observing it,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Pray be seated in my chair.  No.  I
beg!  Coming out of such an atmosphere, in _my_ chair.’

Edwin took the easy-chair in the corner; and the fog he had brought in
with him, and the fog he took off with his greatcoat and neck-shawl, was
speedily licked up by the eager fire.

‘I look,’ said Edwin, smiling, ‘as if I had come to stop.’

‘—By the by,’ cried Mr. Grewgious; ‘excuse my interrupting you; do stop.
The fog may clear in an hour or two.  We can have dinner in from just
across Holborn.  You had better take your Cayenne pepper here than
outside; pray stop and dine.’

‘You are very kind,’ said Edwin, glancing about him as though attracted
by the notion of a new and relishing sort of gipsy-party.

‘Not at all,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘_you_ are very kind to join issue with
a bachelor in chambers, and take pot-luck.  And I’ll ask,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, dropping his voice, and speaking with a twinkling eye, as if
inspired with a bright thought: ‘I’ll ask Bazzard.  He mightn’t like it
else.—Bazzard!’

Bazzard reappeared.

‘Dine presently with Mr. Drood and me.’

‘If I am ordered to dine, of course I will, sir,’ was the gloomy answer.

‘Save the man!’ cried Mr. Grewgious.  ‘You’re not ordered; you’re
invited.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Bazzard; ‘in that case I don’t care if I do.’

‘That’s arranged.  And perhaps you wouldn’t mind,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
‘stepping over to the hotel in Furnival’s, and asking them to send in
materials for laying the cloth.  For dinner we’ll have a tureen of the
hottest and strongest soup available, and we’ll have the best made-dish
that can be recommended, and we’ll have a joint (such as a haunch of
mutton), and we’ll have a goose, or a turkey, or any little stuffed thing
of that sort that may happen to be in the bill of fare—in short, we’ll
have whatever there is on hand.’

These liberal directions Mr. Grewgious issued with his usual air of
reading an inventory, or repeating a lesson, or doing anything else by
rote.  Bazzard, after drawing out the round table, withdrew to execute
them.

‘I was a little delicate, you see,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a lower tone,
after his clerk’s departure, ‘about employing him in the foraging or
commissariat department.  Because he mightn’t like it.’

‘He seems to have his own way, sir,’ remarked Edwin.

‘His own way?’ returned Mr. Grewgious.  ‘O dear no!  Poor fellow, you
quite mistake him.  If he had his own way, he wouldn’t be here.’

‘I wonder where he would be!’ Edwin thought.  But he only thought it,
because Mr. Grewgious came and stood himself with his back to the other
corner of the fire, and his shoulder-blades against the chimneypiece, and
collected his skirts for easy conversation.

‘I take it, without having the gift of prophecy, that you have done me
the favour of looking in to mention that you are going down yonder—where
I can tell you, you are expected—and to offer to execute any little
commission from me to my charming ward, and perhaps to sharpen me up a
bit in any proceedings?  Eh, Mr. Edwin?’

‘I called, sir, before going down, as an act of attention.’

‘Of attention!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Ah! of course, not of impatience?’

‘Impatience, sir?’

Mr. Grewgious had meant to be arch—not that he in the remotest degree
expressed that meaning—and had brought himself into scarcely supportable
proximity with the fire, as if to burn the fullest effect of his archness
into himself, as other subtle impressions are burnt into hard metals.
But his archness suddenly flying before the composed face and manner of
his visitor, and only the fire remaining, he started and rubbed himself.

‘I have lately been down yonder,’ said Mr. Grewgious, rearranging his
skirts; ‘and that was what I referred to, when I said I could tell you
you are expected.’

‘Indeed, sir!  Yes; I knew that Pussy was looking out for me.’

‘Do you keep a cat down there?’ asked Mr. Grewgious.

Edwin coloured a little as he explained: ‘I call Rosa Pussy.’

‘O, really,’ said Mr. Grewgious, smoothing down his head; ‘that’s very
affable.’

Edwin glanced at his face, uncertain whether or no he seriously objected
to the appellation.  But Edwin might as well have glanced at the face of
a clock.

‘A pet name, sir,’ he explained again.

‘Umps,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with a nod.  But with such an extraordinary
compromise between an unqualified assent and a qualified dissent, that
his visitor was much disconcerted.

‘Did PRosa—’ Edwin began by way of recovering himself.

‘PRosa?’ repeated Mr. Grewgious.

‘I was going to say Pussy, and changed my mind;—did she tell you anything
about the Landlesses?’

‘No,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘What is the Landlesses?  An estate?  A villa?
A farm?’

‘A brother and sister.  The sister is at the Nuns’ House, and has become
a great friend of P—’

‘PRosa’s,’ Mr. Grewgious struck in, with a fixed face.

‘She is a strikingly handsome girl, sir, and I thought she might have
been described to you, or presented to you perhaps?’

‘Neither,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘But here is Bazzard.’

Bazzard returned, accompanied by two waiters—an immovable waiter, and a
flying waiter; and the three brought in with them as much fog as gave a
new roar to the fire.  The flying waiter, who had brought everything on
his shoulders, laid the cloth with amazing rapidity and dexterity; while
the immovable waiter, who had brought nothing, found fault with him.  The
flying waiter then highly polished all the glasses he had brought, and
the immovable waiter looked through them.  The flying waiter then flew
across Holborn for the soup, and flew back again, and then took another
flight for the made-dish, and flew back again, and then took another
flight for the joint and poultry, and flew back again, and between whiles
took supplementary flights for a great variety of articles, as it was
discovered from time to time that the immovable waiter had forgotten them
all.  But let the flying waiter cleave the air as he might, he was always
reproached on his return by the immovable waiter for bringing fog with
him, and being out of breath.  At the conclusion of the repast, by which
time the flying waiter was severely blown, the immovable waiter gathered
up the tablecloth under his arm with a grand air, and having sternly (not
to say with indignation) looked on at the flying waiter while he set the
clean glasses round, directed a valedictory glance towards Mr. Grewgious,
conveying: ‘Let it be clearly understood between us that the reward is
mine, and that Nil is the claim of this slave,’ and pushed the flying
waiter before him out of the room.

It was like a highly-finished miniature painting representing My Lords of
the Circumlocution Department, Commandership-in-Chief of any sort,
Government.  It was quite an edifying little picture to be hung on the
line in the National Gallery.

As the fog had been the proximate cause of this sumptuous repast, so the
fog served for its general sauce.  To hear the out-door clerks sneezing,
wheezing, and beating their feet on the gravel was a zest far surpassing
Doctor Kitchener’s.  To bid, with a shiver, the unfortunate flying waiter
shut the door before he had opened it, was a condiment of a profounder
flavour than Harvey.  And here let it be noticed, parenthetically, that
the leg of this young man, in its application to the door, evinced the
finest sense of touch: always preceding himself and tray (with something
of an angling air about it), by some seconds: and always lingering after
he and the tray had disappeared, like Macbeth’s leg when accompanying him
off the stage with reluctance to the assassination of Duncan.

The host had gone below to the cellar, and had brought up bottles of
ruby, straw-coloured, and golden drinks, which had ripened long ago in
lands where no fogs are, and had since lain slumbering in the shade.
Sparkling and tingling after so long a nap, they pushed at their corks to
help the corkscrew (like prisoners helping rioters to force their gates),
and danced out gaily.  If P. J. T. in seventeen-forty-seven, or in any
other year of his period, drank such wines—then, for a certainty, P. J.
T. was Pretty Jolly Too.

Externally, Mr. Grewgious showed no signs of being mellowed by these
glowing vintages.  Instead of his drinking them, they might have been
poured over him in his high-dried snuff form, and run to waste, for any
lights and shades they caused to flicker over his face.  Neither was his
manner influenced.  But, in his wooden way, he had observant eyes for
Edwin; and when at the end of dinner, he motioned Edwin back to his own
easy-chair in the fireside corner, and Edwin sank luxuriously into it
after very brief remonstrance, Mr. Grewgious, as he turned his seat round
towards the fire too, and smoothed his head and face, might have been
seen looking at his visitor between his smoothing fingers.

‘Bazzard!’ said Mr. Grewgious, suddenly turning to him.

‘I follow you, sir,’ returned Bazzard; who had done his work of consuming
meat and drink in a workmanlike manner, though mostly in speechlessness.

‘I drink to you, Bazzard; Mr. Edwin, success to Mr. Bazzard!’

‘Success to Mr. Bazzard!’ echoed Edwin, with a totally unfounded
appearance of enthusiasm, and with the unspoken addition: ‘What in, I
wonder!’

‘And May!’ pursued Mr. Grewgious—‘I am not at liberty to be
definite—May!—my conversational powers are so very limited that I know I
shall not come well out of this—May!—it ought to be put imaginatively,
but I have no imagination—May!—the thorn of anxiety is as nearly the mark
as I am likely to get—May it come out at last!’

Mr. Bazzard, with a frowning smile at the fire, put a hand into his
tangled locks, as if the thorn of anxiety were there; then into his
waistcoat, as if it were there; then into his pockets, as if it were
there.  In all these movements he was closely followed by the eyes of
Edwin, as if that young gentleman expected to see the thorn in action.
It was not produced, however, and Mr. Bazzard merely said: ‘I follow you,
sir, and I thank you.’

‘I am going,’ said Mr. Grewgious, jingling his glass on the table with
one hand, and bending aside under cover of the other, to whisper to
Edwin, ‘to drink to my ward.  But I put Bazzard first.  He mightn’t like
it else.’

This was said with a mysterious wink; or what would have been a wink, if,
in Mr. Grewgious’s hands, it could have been quick enough.  So Edwin
winked responsively, without the least idea what he meant by doing so.

‘And now,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘I devote a bumper to the fair and
fascinating Miss Rosa.  Bazzard, the fair and fascinating Miss Rosa!’

‘I follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and I pledge you!’

‘And so do I!’ said Edwin.

‘Lord bless me,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, breaking the blank silence which of
course ensued: though why these pauses _should_ come upon us when we have
performed any small social rite, not directly inducive of
self-examination or mental despondency, who can tell?  ‘I am a
particularly Angular man, and yet I fancy (if I may use the word, not
having a morsel of fancy), that I could draw a picture of a true lover’s
state of mind, to-night.’

‘Let us follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and have the picture.’

‘Mr. Edwin will correct it where it’s wrong,’ resumed Mr. Grewgious, ‘and
will throw in a few touches from the life.  I dare say it is wrong in
many particulars, and wants many touches from the life, for I was born a
Chip, and have neither soft sympathies nor soft experiences.  Well!  I
hazard the guess that the true lover’s mind is completely permeated by
the beloved object of his affections.  I hazard the guess that her dear
name is precious to him, cannot be heard or repeated without emotion, and
is preserved sacred.  If he has any distinguishing appellation of
fondness for her, it is reserved for her, and is not for common ears.  A
name that it would be a privilege to call her by, being alone with her
own bright self, it would be a liberty, a coldness, an insensibility,
almost a breach of good faith, to flaunt elsewhere.’

It was wonderful to see Mr. Grewgious sitting bolt upright, with his
hands on his knees, continuously chopping this discourse out of himself:
much as a charity boy with a very good memory might get his catechism
said: and evincing no correspondent emotion whatever, unless in a certain
occasional little tingling perceptible at the end of his nose.

‘My picture,’ Mr. Grewgious proceeded, ‘goes on to represent (under
correction from you, Mr. Edwin), the true lover as ever impatient to be
in the presence or vicinity of the beloved object of his affections; as
caring very little for his case in any other society; and as constantly
seeking that.  If I was to say seeking that, as a bird seeks its nest, I
should make an ass of myself, because that would trench upon what I
understand to be poetry; and I am so far from trenching upon poetry at
any time, that I never, to my knowledge, got within ten thousand miles of
it.  And I am besides totally unacquainted with the habits of birds,
except the birds of Staple Inn, who seek their nests on ledges, and in
gutter-pipes and chimneypots, not constructed for them by the beneficent
hand of Nature.  I beg, therefore, to be understood as foregoing the
bird’s-nest.  But my picture does represent the true lover as having no
existence separable from that of the beloved object of his affections,
and as living at once a doubled life and a halved life.  And if I do not
clearly express what I mean by that, it is either for the reason that
having no conversational powers, I cannot express what I mean, or that
having no meaning, I do not mean what I fail to express.  Which, to the
best of my belief, is not the case.’

Edwin had turned red and turned white, as certain points of this picture
came into the light.  He now sat looking at the fire, and bit his lip.

‘The speculations of an Angular man,’ resumed Mr. Grewgious, still
sitting and speaking exactly as before, ‘are probably erroneous on so
globular a topic.  But I figure to myself (subject, as before, to Mr.
Edwin’s correction), that there can be no coolness, no lassitude, no
doubt, no indifference, no half fire and half smoke state of mind, in a
real lover.  Pray am I at all near the mark in my picture?’

As abrupt in his conclusion as in his commencement and progress, he
jerked this inquiry at Edwin, and stopped when one might have supposed
him in the middle of his oration.

‘I should say, sir,’ stammered Edwin, ‘as you refer the question to me—’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘I refer it to you, as an authority.’

‘I should say, then, sir,’ Edwin went on, embarrassed, ‘that the picture
you have drawn is generally correct; but I submit that perhaps you may be
rather hard upon the unlucky lover.’

‘Likely so,’ assented Mr. Grewgious, ‘likely so.  I am a hard man in the
grain.’

‘He may not show,’ said Edwin, ‘all he feels; or he may not—’

There he stopped so long, to find the rest of his sentence, that Mr.
Grewgious rendered his difficulty a thousand times the greater by
unexpectedly striking in with:

‘No to be sure; he _may_ not!’

After that, they all sat silent; the silence of Mr. Bazzard being
occasioned by slumber.

‘His responsibility is very great, though,’ said Mr. Grewgious at length,
with his eyes on the fire.

Edwin nodded assent, with _his_ eyes on the fire.

‘And let him be sure that he trifles with no one,’ said Mr. Grewgious;
‘neither with himself, nor with any other.’

Edwin bit his lip again, and still sat looking at the fire.

‘He must not make a plaything of a treasure.  Woe betide him if he does!
Let him take that well to heart,’ said Mr. Grewgious.

Though he said these things in short sentences, much as the
supposititious charity boy just now referred to might have repeated a
verse or two from the Book of Proverbs, there was something dreamy (for
so literal a man) in the way in which he now shook his right forefinger
at the live coals in the grate, and again fell silent.

But not for long.  As he sat upright and stiff in his chair, he suddenly
rapped his knees, like the carved image of some queer Joss or other
coming out of its reverie, and said: ‘We must finish this bottle, Mr.
Edwin.  Let me help you.  I’ll help Bazzard too, though he _is_ asleep.
He mightn’t like it else.’

He helped them both, and helped himself, and drained his glass, and stood
it bottom upward on the table, as though he had just caught a bluebottle
in it.

‘And now, Mr. Edwin,’ he proceeded, wiping his mouth and hands upon his
handkerchief: ‘to a little piece of business.  You received from me, the
other day, a certified copy of Miss Rosa’s father’s will.  You knew its
contents before, but you received it from me as a matter of business.  I
should have sent it to Mr. Jasper, but for Miss Rosa’s wishing it to come
straight to you, in preference.  You received it?’

‘Quite safely, sir.’

‘You should have acknowledged its receipt,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘business
being business all the world over.  However, you did not.’

‘I meant to have acknowledged it when I first came in this evening, sir.’

‘Not a business-like acknowledgment,’ returned Mr. Grewgious; ‘however,
let that pass.  Now, in that document you have observed a few words of
kindly allusion to its being left to me to discharge a little trust,
confided to me in conversation, at such time as I in my discretion may
think best.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Mr. Edwin, it came into my mind just now, when I was looking at the
fire, that I could, in my discretion, acquit myself of that trust at no
better time than the present.  Favour me with your attention, half a
minute.’

He took a bunch of keys from his pocket, singled out by the candle-light
the key he wanted, and then, with a candle in his hand, went to a bureau
or escritoire, unlocked it, touched the spring of a little secret drawer,
and took from it an ordinary ring-case made for a single ring.  With this
in his hand, he returned to his chair.  As he held it up for the young
man to see, his hand trembled.

‘Mr. Edwin, this rose of diamonds and rubies delicately set in gold, was
a ring belonging to Miss Rosa’s mother.  It was removed from her dead
hand, in my presence, with such distracted grief as I hope it may never
be my lot to contemplate again.  Hard man as I am, I am not hard enough
for that.  See how bright these stones shine!’ opening the case.  ‘And
yet the eyes that were so much brighter, and that so often looked upon
them with a light and a proud heart, have been ashes among ashes, and
dust among dust, some years!  If I had any imagination (which it is
needless to say I have not), I might imagine that the lasting beauty of
these stones was almost cruel.’

He closed the case again as he spoke.

‘This ring was given to the young lady who was drowned so early in her
beautiful and happy career, by her husband, when they first plighted
their faith to one another.  It was he who removed it from her
unconscious hand, and it was he who, when his death drew very near,
placed it in mine.  The trust in which I received it, was, that, you and
Miss Rosa growing to manhood and womanhood, and your betrothal prospering
and coming to maturity, I should give it to you to place upon her finger.
Failing those desired results, it was to remain in my possession.’

Some trouble was in the young man’s face, and some indecision was in the
action of his hand, as Mr. Grewgious, looking steadfastly at him, gave
him the ring.

‘Your placing it on her finger,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘will be the solemn
seal upon your strict fidelity to the living and the dead.  You are going
to her, to make the last irrevocable preparations for your marriage.
Take it with you.’

The young man took the little case, and placed it in his breast.

‘If anything should be amiss, if anything should be even slightly wrong,
between you; if you should have any secret consciousness that you are
committing yourself to this step for no higher reason than because you
have long been accustomed to look forward to it; then,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, ‘I charge you once more, by the living and by the dead, to
bring that ring back to me!’

Here Bazzard awoke himself by his own snoring; and, as is usual in such
cases, sat apoplectically staring at vacancy, as defying vacancy to
accuse him of having been asleep.

‘Bazzard!’ said Mr. Grewgious, harder than ever.

‘I follow you, sir,’ said Bazzard, ‘and I have been following you.’

‘In discharge of a trust, I have handed Mr. Edwin Drood a ring of
diamonds and rubies.  You see?’

Edwin reproduced the little case, and opened it; and Bazzard looked into
it.

‘I follow you both, sir,’ returned Bazzard, ‘and I witness the
transaction.’

Evidently anxious to get away and be alone, Edwin Drood now resumed his
outer clothing, muttering something about time and appointments.  The fog
was reported no clearer (by the flying waiter, who alighted from a
speculative flight in the coffee interest), but he went out into it; and
Bazzard, after his manner, ‘followed’ him.

Mr. Grewgious, left alone, walked softly and slowly to and fro, for an
hour and more.  He was restless to-night, and seemed dispirited.

‘I hope I have done right,’ he said.  ‘The appeal to him seemed
necessary.  It was hard to lose the ring, and yet it must have gone from
me very soon.’

He closed the empty little drawer with a sigh, and shut and locked the
escritoire, and came back to the solitary fireside.

‘Her ring,’ he went on.  ‘Will it come back to me?  My mind hangs about
her ring very uneasily to-night.  But that is explainable.  I have had it
so long, and I have prized it so much!  I wonder—’

He was in a wondering mood as well as a restless; for, though he checked
himself at that point, and took another walk, he resumed his wondering
when he sat down again.

‘I wonder (for the ten-thousandth time, and what a weak fool I, for what
can it signify now!) whether he confided the charge of their orphan child
to me, because he knew—Good God, how like her mother she has become!’

‘I wonder whether he ever so much as suspected that some one doted on
her, at a hopeless, speechless distance, when he struck in and won her.
I wonder whether it ever crept into his mind who that unfortunate some
one was!’

‘I wonder whether I shall sleep to-night!  At all events, I will shut out
the world with the bedclothes, and try.’

Mr. Grewgious crossed the staircase to his raw and foggy bedroom, and was
soon ready for bed.  Dimly catching sight of his face in the misty
looking-glass, he held his candle to it for a moment.

‘A likely some one, _you_, to come into anybody’s thoughts in such an
aspect!’ he exclaimed.  ‘There! there! there!  Get to bed, poor man, and
cease to jabber!’

With that, he extinguished his light, pulled up the bedclothes around
him, and with another sigh shut out the world.  And yet there are such
unexplored romantic nooks in the unlikeliest men, that even old tinderous
and touchwoody P. J. T. Possibly Jabbered Thus, at some odd times, in or
about seventeen-forty-seven.




CHAPTER XII—A NIGHT WITH DURDLES


When Mr. Sapsea has nothing better to do, towards evening, and finds the
contemplation of his own profundity becoming a little monotonous in spite
of the vastness of the subject, he often takes an airing in the Cathedral
Close and thereabout.  He likes to pass the churchyard with a swelling
air of proprietorship, and to encourage in his breast a sort of
benignant-landlord feeling, in that he has been bountiful towards that
meritorious tenant, Mrs. Sapsea, and has publicly given her a prize.  He
likes to see a stray face or two looking in through the railings, and
perhaps reading his inscription.  Should he meet a stranger coming from
the churchyard with a quick step, he is morally convinced that the
stranger is ‘with a blush retiring,’ as monumentally directed.

Mr. Sapsea’s importance has received enhancement, for he has become Mayor
of Cloisterham.  Without mayors, and many of them, it cannot be disputed
that the whole framework of society—Mr. Sapsea is confident that he
invented that forcible figure—would fall to pieces.  Mayors have been
knighted for ‘going up’ with addresses: explosive machines intrepidly
discharging shot and shell into the English Grammar.  Mr. Sapsea may ‘go
up’ with an address.  Rise, Sir Thomas Sapsea!  Of such is the salt of
the earth.

Mr. Sapsea has improved the acquaintance of Mr. Jasper, since their first
meeting to partake of port, epitaph, backgammon, beef, and salad.  Mr.
Sapsea has been received at the gatehouse with kindred hospitality; and
on that occasion Mr. Jasper seated himself at the piano, and sang to him,
tickling his ears—figuratively—long enough to present a considerable area
for tickling.  What Mr. Sapsea likes in that young man is, that he is
always ready to profit by the wisdom of his elders, and that he is sound,
sir, at the core.  In proof of which, he sang to Mr. Sapsea that evening,
no kickshaw ditties, favourites with national enemies, but gave him the
genuine George the Third home-brewed; exhorting him (as ‘my brave boys’)
to reduce to a smashed condition all other islands but this island, and
all continents, peninsulas, isthmuses, promontories, and other
geographical forms of land soever, besides sweeping the seas in all
directions.  In short, he rendered it pretty clear that Providence made a
distinct mistake in originating so small a nation of hearts of oak, and
so many other verminous peoples.

Mr. Sapsea, walking slowly this moist evening near the churchyard with
his hands behind him, on the look-out for a blushing and retiring
stranger, turns a corner, and comes instead into the goodly presence of
the Dean, conversing with the Verger and Mr. Jasper.  Mr. Sapsea makes
his obeisance, and is instantly stricken far more ecclesiastical than any
Archbishop of York or Canterbury.

‘You are evidently going to write a book about us, Mr. Jasper,’ quoth the
Dean; ‘to write a book about us.  Well!  We are very ancient, and we
ought to make a good book.  We are not so richly endowed in possessions
as in age; but perhaps you will put _that_ in your book, among other
things, and call attention to our wrongs.’

Mr. Tope, as in duty bound, is greatly entertained by this.

‘I really have no intention at all, sir,’ replies Jasper, ‘of turning
author or archæologist.  It is but a whim of mine.  And even for my whim,
Mr. Sapsea here is more accountable than I am.’

‘How so, Mr. Mayor?’ says the Dean, with a nod of good-natured
recognition of his Fetch.  ‘How is that, Mr. Mayor?’

‘I am not aware,’ Mr. Sapsea remarks, looking about him for information,
‘to what the Very Reverend the Dean does me the honour of referring.’
And then falls to studying his original in minute points of detail.

‘Durdles,’ Mr. Tope hints.

‘Ay!’ the Dean echoes; ‘Durdles, Durdles!’

‘The truth is, sir,’ explains Jasper, ‘that my curiosity in the man was
first really stimulated by Mr. Sapsea.  Mr. Sapsea’s knowledge of mankind
and power of drawing out whatever is recluse or odd around him, first led
to my bestowing a second thought upon the man: though of course I had met
him constantly about.  You would not be surprised by this, Mr. Dean, if
you had seen Mr. Sapsea deal with him in his own parlour, as I did.’

‘O!’ cries Sapsea, picking up the ball thrown to him with ineffable
complacency and pomposity; ‘yes, yes.  The Very Reverend the Dean refers
to that?  Yes.  I happened to bring Durdles and Mr. Jasper together.  I
regard Durdles as a Character.’

‘A character, Mr. Sapsea, that with a few skilful touches you turn inside
out,’ says Jasper.

‘Nay, not quite that,’ returns the lumbering auctioneer.  ‘I may have a
little influence over him, perhaps; and a little insight into his
character, perhaps.  The Very Reverend the Dean will please to bear in
mind that I have seen the world.’  Here Mr. Sapsea gets a little behind
the Dean, to inspect his coat-buttons.

‘Well!’ says the Dean, looking about him to see what has become of his
copyist: ‘I hope, Mr. Mayor, you will use your study and knowledge of
Durdles to the good purpose of exhorting him not to break our worthy and
respected Choir-Master’s neck; we cannot afford it; his head and voice
are much too valuable to us.’

Mr. Tope is again highly entertained, and, having fallen into respectful
convulsions of laughter, subsides into a deferential murmur, importing
that surely any gentleman would deem it a pleasure and an honour to have
his neck broken, in return for such a compliment from such a source.

‘I will take it upon myself, sir,’ observes Sapsea loftily, ‘to answer
for Mr. Jasper’s neck.  I will tell Durdles to be careful of it.  He will
mind what _I_ say.  How is it at present endangered?’ he inquires,
looking about him with magnificent patronage.

‘Only by my making a moonlight expedition with Durdles among the tombs,
vaults, towers, and ruins,’ returns Jasper.  ‘You remember suggesting,
when you brought us together, that, as a lover of the picturesque, it
might be worth my while?’

‘I remember!’ replies the auctioneer.  And the solemn idiot really
believes that he does remember.

‘Profiting by your hint,’ pursues Jasper, ‘I have had some day-rambles
with the extraordinary old fellow, and we are to make a moonlight
hole-and-corner exploration to-night.’

‘And here he is,’ says the Dean.

Durdles with his dinner-bundle in his hand, is indeed beheld slouching
towards them.  Slouching nearer, and perceiving the Dean, he pulls off
his hat, and is slouching away with it under his arm, when Mr. Sapsea
stops him.

‘Mind you take care of my friend,’ is the injunction Mr. Sapsea lays upon
him.

‘What friend o’ yourn is dead?’ asks Durdles.  ‘No orders has come in for
any friend o’ yourn.’

‘I mean my live friend there.’

‘O! him?’ says Durdles.  ‘He can take care of himself, can Mister
Jarsper.’

‘But do you take care of him too,’ says Sapsea.

Whom Durdles (there being command in his tone) surlily surveys from head
to foot.

‘With submission to his Reverence the Dean, if you’ll mind what concerns
you, Mr. Sapsea, Durdles he’ll mind what concerns him.’

‘You’re out of temper,’ says Mr. Sapsea, winking to the company to
observe how smoothly he will manage him.  ‘My friend concerns me, and Mr.
Jasper is my friend.  And you are my friend.’

‘Don’t you get into a bad habit of boasting,’ retorts Durdles, with a
grave cautionary nod.  ‘It’ll grow upon you.’

         [Picture: Durdles cautions Mr. Sapsea against boasting]

‘You are out of temper,’ says Sapsea again; reddening, but again sinking
to the company.

‘I own to it,’ returns Durdles; ‘I don’t like liberties.’

Mr. Sapsea winks a third wink to the company, as who should say: ‘I think
you will agree with me that I have settled _his_ business;’ and stalks
out of the controversy.

Durdles then gives the Dean a good evening, and adding, as he puts his
hat on, ‘You’ll find me at home, Mister Jarsper, as agreed, when you want
me; I’m a-going home to clean myself,’ soon slouches out of sight.  This
going home to clean himself is one of the man’s incomprehensible
compromises with inexorable facts; he, and his hat, and his boots, and
his clothes, never showing any trace of cleaning, but being uniformly in
one condition of dust and grit.

The lamplighter now dotting the quiet Close with specks of light, and
running at a great rate up and down his little ladder with that
object—his little ladder under the sacred shadow of whose inconvenience
generations had grown up, and which all Cloisterham would have stood
aghast at the idea of abolishing—the Dean withdraws to his dinner, Mr.
Tope to his tea, and Mr. Jasper to his piano.  There, with no light but
that of the fire, he sits chanting choir-music in a low and beautiful
voice, for two or three hours; in short, until it has been for some time
dark, and the moon is about to rise.

Then he closes his piano softly, softly changes his coat for a
pea-jacket, with a goodly wicker-cased bottle in its largest pocket, and
putting on a low-crowned, flap-brimmed hat, goes softly out.  Why does he
move so softly to-night?  No outward reason is apparent for it.  Can
there be any sympathetic reason crouching darkly within him?

Repairing to Durdles’s unfinished house, or hole in the city wall, and
seeing a light within it, he softly picks his course among the
gravestones, monuments, and stony lumber of the yard, already touched
here and there, sidewise, by the rising moon.  The two journeymen have
left their two great saws sticking in their blocks of stone; and two
skeleton journeymen out of the Dance of Death might be grinning in the
shadow of their sheltering sentry-boxes, about to slash away at cutting
out the gravestones of the next two people destined to die in
Cloisterham.  Likely enough, the two think little of that now, being
alive, and perhaps merry.  Curious, to make a guess at the two;—or say
one of the two!

‘Ho!  Durdles!’

The light moves, and he appears with it at the door.  He would seem to
have been ‘cleaning himself’ with the aid of a bottle, jug, and tumbler;
for no other cleansing instruments are visible in the bare brick room
with rafters overhead and no plastered ceiling, into which he shows his
visitor.

‘Are you ready?’

‘I am ready, Mister Jarsper.  Let the old ’uns come out if they dare,
when we go among their tombs.  My spirit is ready for ’em.’

‘Do you mean animal spirits, or ardent?’

‘The one’s the t’other,’ answers Durdles, ‘and I mean ’em both.’

He takes a lantern from a hook, puts a match or two in his pocket
wherewith to light it, should there be need; and they go out together,
dinner-bundle and all.

Surely an unaccountable sort of expedition!  That Durdles himself, who is
always prowling among old graves, and ruins, like a Ghoul—that he should
be stealing forth to climb, and dive, and wander without an object, is
nothing extraordinary; but that the Choir-Master or any one else should
hold it worth his while to be with him, and to study moonlight effects in
such company is another affair.  Surely an unaccountable sort of
expedition, therefore!

‘’Ware that there mound by the yard-gate, Mister Jarsper.’

‘I see it.  What is it?’

‘Lime.’

Mr. Jasper stops, and waits for him to come up, for he lags behind.
‘What you call quick-lime?’

‘Ay!’ says Durdles; ‘quick enough to eat your boots.  With a little handy
stirring, quick enough to eat your bones.’

They go on, presently passing the red windows of the Travellers’
Twopenny, and emerging into the clear moonlight of the Monks’ Vineyard.
This crossed, they come to Minor Canon Corner: of which the greater part
lies in shadow until the moon shall rise higher in the sky.

The sound of a closing house-door strikes their ears, and two men come
out.  These are Mr. Crisparkle and Neville.  Jasper, with a strange and
sudden smile upon his face, lays the palm of his hand upon the breast of
Durdles, stopping him where he stands.

At that end of Minor Canon Corner the shadow is profound in the existing
state of the light: at that end, too, there is a piece of old dwarf wall,
breast high, the only remaining boundary of what was once a garden, but
is now the thoroughfare.  Jasper and Durdles would have turned this wall
in another instant; but, stopping so short, stand behind it.

‘Those two are only sauntering,’ Jasper whispers; ‘they will go out into
the moonlight soon.  Let us keep quiet here, or they will detain us, or
want to join us, or what not.’

Durdles nods assent, and falls to munching some fragments from his
bundle.  Jasper folds his arms upon the top of the wall, and, with his
chin resting on them, watches.  He takes no note whatever of the Minor
Canon, but watches Neville, as though his eye were at the trigger of a
loaded rifle, and he had covered him, and were going to fire.  A sense of
destructive power is so expressed in his face, that even Durdles pauses
in his munching, and looks at him, with an unmunched something in his
cheek.

Meanwhile Mr. Crisparkle and Neville walk to and fro, quietly talking
together.  What they say, cannot be heard consecutively; but Mr. Jasper
has already distinguished his own name more than once.

‘This is the first day of the week,’ Mr. Crisparkle can be distinctly
heard to observe, as they turn back; ‘and the last day of the week is
Christmas Eve.’

‘You may be certain of me, sir.’

The echoes were favourable at those points, but as the two approach, the
sound of their talking becomes confused again.  The word ‘confidence,’
shattered by the echoes, but still capable of being pieced together, is
uttered by Mr. Crisparkle.  As they draw still nearer, this fragment of a
reply is heard: ‘Not deserved yet, but shall be, sir.’  As they turn away
again, Jasper again hears his own name, in connection with the words from
Mr. Crisparkle: ‘Remember that I said I answered for you confidently.’
Then the sound of their talk becomes confused again; they halting for a
little while, and some earnest action on the part of Neville succeeding.
When they move once more, Mr. Crisparkle is seen to look up at the sky,
and to point before him.  They then slowly disappear; passing out into
the moonlight at the opposite end of the Corner.

It is not until they are gone, that Mr. Jasper moves.  But then he turns
to Durdles, and bursts into a fit of laughter.  Durdles, who still has
that suspended something in his cheek, and who sees nothing to laugh at,
stares at him until Mr. Jasper lays his face down on his arms to have his
laugh out.  Then Durdles bolts the something, as if desperately resigning
himself to indigestion.

Among those secluded nooks there is very little stir or movement after
dark.  There is little enough in the high tide of the day, but there is
next to none at night.  Besides that the cheerfully frequented High
Street lies nearly parallel to the spot (the old Cathedral rising between
the two), and is the natural channel in which the Cloisterham traffic
flows, a certain awful hush pervades the ancient pile, the cloisters, and
the churchyard, after dark, which not many people care to encounter.  Ask
the first hundred citizens of Cloisterham, met at random in the streets
at noon, if they believed in Ghosts, they would tell you no; but put them
to choose at night between these eerie Precincts and the thoroughfare of
shops, and you would find that ninety-nine declared for the longer round
and the more frequented way.  The cause of this is not to be found in any
local superstition that attaches to the Precincts—albeit a mysterious
lady, with a child in her arms and a rope dangling from her neck, has
been seen flitting about there by sundry witnesses as intangible as
herself—but it is to be sought in the innate shrinking of dust with the
breath of life in it from dust out of which the breath of life has
passed; also, in the widely diffused, and almost as widely
unacknowledged, reflection: ‘If the dead do, under any circumstances,
become visible to the living, these are such likely surroundings for the
purpose that I, the living, will get out of them as soon as I can.’
Hence, when Mr. Jasper and Durdles pause to glance around them, before
descending into the crypt by a small side door, of which the latter has a
key, the whole expanse of moonlight in their view is utterly deserted.
One might fancy that the tide of life was stemmed by Mr. Jasper’s own
gatehouse.  The murmur of the tide is heard beyond; but no wave passes
the archway, over which his lamp burns red behind his curtain, as if the
building were a Lighthouse.

They enter, locking themselves in, descend the rugged steps, and are down
in the Crypt.  The lantern is not wanted, for the moonlight strikes in at
the groined windows, bare of glass, the broken frames for which cast
patterns on the ground.  The heavy pillars which support the roof
engender masses of black shade, but between them there are lanes of
light.  Up and down these lanes they walk, Durdles discoursing of the
‘old uns’ he yet counts on disinterring, and slapping a wall, in which he
considers ‘a whole family on ’em’ to be stoned and earthed up, just as if
he were a familiar friend of the family.  The taciturnity of Durdles is
for the time overcome by Mr. Jasper’s wicker bottle, which circulates
freely;—in the sense, that is to say, that its contents enter freely into
Mr. Durdles’s circulation, while Mr. Jasper only rinses his mouth once,
and casts forth the rinsing.

They are to ascend the great Tower.  On the steps by which they rise to
the Cathedral, Durdles pauses for new store of breath.  The steps are
very dark, but out of the darkness they can see the lanes of light they
have traversed.  Durdles seats himself upon a step.  Mr. Jasper seats
himself upon another.  The odour from the wicker bottle (which has
somehow passed into Durdles’s keeping) soon intimates that the cork has
been taken out; but this is not ascertainable through the sense of sight,
since neither can descry the other.  And yet, in talking, they turn to
one another, as though their faces could commune together.

‘This is good stuff, Mister Jarsper!’

‘It is very good stuff, I hope.—I bought it on purpose.’

‘They don’t show, you see, the old uns don’t, Mister Jarsper!’

‘It would be a more confused world than it is, if they could.’

‘Well, it _would_ lead towards a mixing of things,’ Durdles acquiesces:
pausing on the remark, as if the idea of ghosts had not previously
presented itself to him in a merely inconvenient light, domestically or
chronologically.  ‘But do you think there may be Ghosts of other things,
though not of men and women?’

‘What things?  Flower-beds and watering-pots? horses and harness?’

‘No.  Sounds.’

‘What sounds?’

‘Cries.’

‘What cries do you mean?  Chairs to mend?’

‘No.  I mean screeches.  Now I’ll tell you, Mr. Jarsper.  Wait a bit till
I put the bottle right.’  Here the cork is evidently taken out again, and
replaced again.  ‘There!  _Now_ it’s right!  This time last year, only a
few days later, I happened to have been doing what was correct by the
season, in the way of giving it the welcome it had a right to expect,
when them town-boys set on me at their worst.  At length I gave ’em the
slip, and turned in here.  And here I fell asleep.  And what woke me?
The ghost of a cry.  The ghost of one terrific shriek, which shriek was
followed by the ghost of the howl of a dog: a long, dismal, woeful howl,
such as a dog gives when a person’s dead.  That was _my_ last Christmas
Eve.’

‘What do you mean?’ is the very abrupt, and, one might say, fierce
retort.

‘I mean that I made inquiries everywhere about, and, that no living ears
but mine heard either that cry or that howl.  So I say they was both
ghosts; though why they came to me, I’ve never made out.’

‘I thought you were another kind of man,’ says Jasper, scornfully.

‘So I thought myself,’ answers Durdles with his usual composure; ‘and yet
I was picked out for it.’

Jasper had risen suddenly, when he asked him what he meant, and he now
says, ‘Come; we shall freeze here; lead the way.’

Durdles complies, not over-steadily; opens the door at the top of the
steps with the key he has already used; and so emerges on the Cathedral
level, in a passage at the side of the chancel.  Here, the moonlight is
so very bright again that the colours of the nearest stained-glass window
are thrown upon their faces.  The appearance of the unconscious Durdles,
holding the door open for his companion to follow, as if from the grave,
is ghastly enough, with a purple hand across his face, and a yellow
splash upon his brow; but he bears the close scrutiny of his companion in
an insensible way, although it is prolonged while the latter fumbles
among his pockets for a key confided to him that will open an iron gate,
so to enable them to pass to the staircase of the great tower.

‘That and the bottle are enough for you to carry,’ he says, giving it to
Durdles; ‘hand your bundle to me; I am younger and longer-winded than
you.’  Durdles hesitates for a moment between bundle and bottle; but
gives the preference to the bottle as being by far the better company,
and consigns the dry weight to his fellow-explorer.

Then they go up the winding staircase of the great tower, toilsomely,
turning and turning, and lowering their heads to avoid the stairs above,
or the rough stone pivot around which they twist.  Durdles has lighted
his lantern, by drawing from the cold, hard wall a spark of that
mysterious fire which lurks in everything, and, guided by this speck,
they clamber up among the cobwebs and the dust.  Their way lies through
strange places.  Twice or thrice they emerge into level, low-arched
galleries, whence they can look down into the moon-lit nave; and where
Durdles, waving his lantern, waves the dim angels’ heads upon the corbels
of the roof, seeming to watch their progress.  Anon they turn into
narrower and steeper staircases, and the night-air begins to blow upon
them, and the chirp of some startled jackdaw or frightened rook precedes
the heavy beating of wings in a confined space, and the beating down of
dust and straws upon their heads.  At last, leaving their light behind a
stair—for it blows fresh up here—they look down on Cloisterham, fair to
see in the moonlight: its ruined habitations and sanctuaries of the dead,
at the tower’s base: its moss-softened red-tiled roofs and red-brick
houses of the living, clustered beyond: its river winding down from the
mist on the horizon, as though that were its source, and already heaving
with a restless knowledge of its approach towards the sea.

Once again, an unaccountable expedition this!  Jasper (always moving
softly with no visible reason) contemplates the scene, and especially
that stillest part of it which the Cathedral overshadows.  But he
contemplates Durdles quite as curiously, and Durdles is by times
conscious of his watchful eyes.

Only by times, because Durdles is growing drowsy.  As aëronauts lighten
the load they carry, when they wish to rise, similarly Durdles has
lightened the wicker bottle in coming up.  Snatches of sleep surprise him
on his legs, and stop him in his talk.  A mild fit of calenture seizes
him, in which he deems that the ground so far below, is on a level with
the tower, and would as lief walk off the tower into the air as not.
Such is his state when they begin to come down.  And as aëronauts make
themselves heavier when they wish to descend, similarly Durdles charges
himself with more liquid from the wicker bottle, that he may come down
the better.

The iron gate attained and locked—but not before Durdles has tumbled
twice, and cut an eyebrow open once—they descend into the crypt again,
with the intent of issuing forth as they entered.  But, while returning
among those lanes of light, Durdles becomes so very uncertain, both of
foot and speech, that he half drops, half throws himself down, by one of
the heavy pillars, scarcely less heavy than itself, and indistinctly
appeals to his companion for forty winks of a second each.

‘If you will have it so, or must have it so,’ replies Jasper, ‘I’ll not
leave you here.  Take them, while I walk to and fro.’

Durdles is asleep at once; and in his sleep he dreams a dream.

It is not much of a dream, considering the vast extent of the domains of
dreamland, and their wonderful productions; it is only remarkable for
being unusually restless and unusually real.  He dreams of lying there,
asleep, and yet counting his companion’s footsteps as he walks to and
fro.  He dreams that the footsteps die away into distance of time and of
space, and that something touches him, and that something falls from his
hand.  Then something clinks and gropes about, and he dreams that he is
alone for so long a time, that the lanes of light take new directions as
the moon advances in her course.  From succeeding unconsciousness he
passes into a dream of slow uneasiness from cold; and painfully awakes to
a perception of the lanes of light—really changed, much as he had
dreamed—and Jasper walking among them, beating his hands and feet.

‘Holloa!’ Durdles cries out, unmeaningly alarmed.

‘Awake at last?’ says Jasper, coming up to him.  ‘Do you know that your
forties have stretched into thousands?’

‘No.’

‘They have though.’

‘What’s the time?’

‘Hark!  The bells are going in the Tower!’

They strike four quarters, and then the great bell strikes.

‘Two!’ cries Durdles, scrambling up; ‘why didn’t you try to wake me,
Mister Jarsper?’

‘I did.  I might as well have tried to wake the dead—your own family of
dead, up in the corner there.’

‘Did you touch me?’

‘Touch you!  Yes.  Shook you.’

As Durdles recalls that touching something in his dream, he looks down on
the pavement, and sees the key of the crypt door lying close to where he
himself lay.

‘I dropped you, did I?’ he says, picking it up, and recalling that part
of his dream.  As he gathers himself up again into an upright position,
or into a position as nearly upright as he ever maintains, he is again
conscious of being watched by his companion.

‘Well?’ says Jasper, smiling, ‘are you quite ready?  Pray don’t hurry.’

‘Let me get my bundle right, Mister Jarsper, and I’m with you.’  As he
ties it afresh, he is once more conscious that he is very narrowly
observed.

‘What do you suspect me of, Mister Jarsper?’ he asks, with drunken
displeasure.  ‘Let them as has any suspicions of Durdles name ’em.’

‘I’ve no suspicions of you, my good Mr. Durdles; but I have suspicions
that my bottle was filled with something stiffer than either of us
supposed.  And I also have suspicions,’ Jasper adds, taking it from the
pavement and turning it bottom upwards, ‘that it’s empty.’

Durdles condescends to laugh at this.  Continuing to chuckle when his
laugh is over, as though remonstrant with himself on his drinking powers,
he rolls to the door and unlocks it.  They both pass out, and Durdles
relocks it, and pockets his key.

‘A thousand thanks for a curious and interesting night,’ says Jasper,
giving him his hand; ‘you can make your own way home?’

‘I should think so!’ answers Durdles.  ‘If you was to offer Durdles the
affront to show him his way home, he wouldn’t go home.

    Durdles wouldn’t go home till morning;
    And _then_ Durdles wouldn’t go home,

Durdles wouldn’t.’  This with the utmost defiance.

‘Good-night, then.’

‘Good-night, Mister Jarsper.’

Each is turning his own way, when a sharp whistle rends the silence, and
the jargon is yelped out:

    Widdy widdy wen!
    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten.
    Widdy widdy wy!
    Then—E—don’t—go—then—I—shy—
    Widdy Widdy Wake-cock warning!’

Instantly afterwards, a rapid fire of stones rattles at the Cathedral
wall, and the hideous small boy is beheld opposite, dancing in the
moonlight.

‘What!  Is that baby-devil on the watch there!’ cries Jasper in a fury:
so quickly roused, and so violent, that he seems an older devil himself.
‘I shall shed the blood of that impish wretch!  I know I shall do it!’
Regardless of the fire, though it hits him more than once, he rushes at
Deputy, collars him, and tries to bring him across.  But Deputy is not to
be so easily brought across.  With a diabolical insight into the
strongest part of his position, he is no sooner taken by the throat than
he curls up his legs, forces his assailant to hang him, as it were, and
gurgles in his throat, and screws his body, and twists, as already
undergoing the first agonies of strangulation.  There is nothing for it
but to drop him.  He instantly gets himself together, backs over to
Durdles, and cries to his assailant, gnashing the great gap in front of
his mouth with rage and malice:

‘I’ll blind yer, s’elp me!  I’ll stone yer eyes out, s’elp me!  If I
don’t have yer eyesight, bellows me!’  At the same time dodging behind
Durdles, and snarling at Jasper, now from this side of him, and now from
that: prepared, if pounced upon, to dart away in all manner of
curvilinear directions, and, if run down after all, to grovel in the
dust, and cry: ‘Now, hit me when I’m down!  Do it!’

‘Don’t hurt the boy, Mister Jarsper,’ urges Durdles, shielding him.
‘Recollect yourself.’

‘He followed us to-night, when we first came here!’

‘Yer lie, I didn’t!’ replies Deputy, in his one form of polite
contradiction.

‘He has been prowling near us ever since!’

‘Yer lie, I haven’t,’ returns Deputy.  ‘I’d only jist come out for my
’elth when I see you two a-coming out of the Kin-freederel.  If

    I—ket—ches—Im—out—ar—ter—ten!’

(with the usual rhythm and dance, though dodging behind Durdles), ‘it
ain’t _any_ fault, is it?’

‘Take him home, then,’ retorts Jasper, ferociously, though with a strong
check upon himself, ‘and let my eyes be rid of the sight of you!’

Deputy, with another sharp whistle, at once expressing his relief, and
his commencement of a milder stoning of Mr. Durdles, begins stoning that
respectable gentleman home, as if he were a reluctant ox.  Mr. Jasper
goes to his gatehouse, brooding.  And thus, as everything comes to an
end, the unaccountable expedition comes to an end—for the time.




CHAPTER XIII—BOTH AT THEIR BEST


Miss Twinkleton’s establishment was about to undergo a serene hush.  The
Christmas recess was at hand.  What had once, and at no remote period,
been called, even by the erudite Miss Twinkleton herself, ‘the half;’ but
what was now called, as being more elegant, and more strictly collegiate,
‘the term,’ would expire to-morrow.  A noticeable relaxation of
discipline had for some few days pervaded the Nuns’ House.  Club suppers
had occurred in the bedrooms, and a dressed tongue had been carved with a
pair of scissors, and handed round with the curling tongs.  Portions of
marmalade had likewise been distributed on a service of plates
constructed of curlpaper; and cowslip wine had been quaffed from the
small squat measuring glass in which little Rickitts (a junior of weakly
constitution) took her steel drops daily.  The housemaids had been bribed
with various fragments of riband, and sundry pairs of shoes more or less
down at heel, to make no mention of crumbs in the beds; the airiest
costumes had been worn on these festive occasions; and the daring Miss
Ferdinand had even surprised the company with a sprightly solo on the
comb-and-curlpaper, until suffocated in her own pillow by two
flowing-haired executioners.

Nor were these the only tokens of dispersal.  Boxes appeared in the
bedrooms (where they were capital at other times), and a surprising
amount of packing took place, out of all proportion to the amount packed.
Largess, in the form of odds and ends of cold cream and pomatum, and also
of hairpins, was freely distributed among the attendants.  On charges of
inviolable secrecy, confidences were interchanged respecting golden youth
of England expected to call, ‘at home,’ on the first opportunity.  Miss
Giggles (deficient in sentiment) did indeed profess that she, for her
part, acknowledged such homage by making faces at the golden youth; but
this young lady was outvoted by an immense majority.

On the last night before a recess, it was always expressly made a point
of honour that nobody should go to sleep, and that Ghosts should be
encouraged by all possible means.  This compact invariably broke down,
and all the young ladies went to sleep very soon, and got up very early.

The concluding ceremony came off at twelve o’clock on the day of
departure; when Miss Twinkleton, supported by Mrs. Tisher, held a
drawing-room in her own apartment (the globes already covered with brown
Holland), where glasses of white-wine and plates of cut pound-cake were
discovered on the table.  Miss Twinkleton then said: Ladies, another
revolving year had brought us round to that festive period at which the
first feelings of our nature bounded in our—Miss Twinkleton was annually
going to add ‘bosoms,’ but annually stopped on the brink of that
expression, and substituted ‘hearts.’  Hearts; our hearts.  Hem!  Again a
revolving year, ladies, had brought us to a pause in our studies—let us
hope our greatly advanced studies—and, like the mariner in his bark, the
warrior in his tent, the captive in his dungeon, and the traveller in his
various conveyances, we yearned for home.  Did we say, on such an
occasion, in the opening words of Mr. Addison’s impressive tragedy:

    ‘The dawn is overcast, the morning lowers,
    And heavily in clouds brings on the day,
    The great, th’ important day—?’

Not so.  From horizon to zenith all was _couleur de rose_, for all was
redolent of our relations and friends.  Might _we_ find _them_ prospering
as _we_ expected; might _they_ find _us_ prospering as _they_ expected!
Ladies, we would now, with our love to one another, wish one another
good-bye, and happiness, until we met again.  And when the time should
come for our resumption of those pursuits which (here a general
depression set in all round), pursuits which, pursuits which;—then let us
ever remember what was said by the Spartan General, in words too trite
for repetition, at the battle it were superfluous to specify.

The handmaidens of the establishment, in their best caps, then handed the
trays, and the young ladies sipped and crumbled, and the bespoken coaches
began to choke the street.  Then leave-taking was not long about; and
Miss Twinkleton, in saluting each young lady’s cheek, confided to her an
exceedingly neat letter, addressed to her next friend at law, ‘with Miss
Twinkleton’s best compliments’ in the corner.  This missive she handed
with an air as if it had not the least connexion with the bill, but were
something in the nature of a delicate and joyful surprise.

So many times had Rosa seen such dispersals, and so very little did she
know of any other Home, that she was contented to remain where she was,
and was even better contented than ever before, having her latest friend
with her.  And yet her latest friendship had a blank place in it of which
she could not fail to be sensible.  Helena Landless, having been a party
to her brother’s revelation about Rosa, and having entered into that
compact of silence with Mr. Crisparkle, shrank from any allusion to Edwin
Drood’s name.  Why she so avoided it, was mysterious to Rosa, but she
perfectly perceived the fact.  But for the fact, she might have relieved
her own little perplexed heart of some of its doubts and hesitations, by
taking Helena into her confidence.  As it was, she had no such vent: she
could only ponder on her own difficulties, and wonder more and more why
this avoidance of Edwin’s name should last, now that she knew—for so much
Helena had told her—that a good understanding was to be reëstablished
between the two young men, when Edwin came down.

It would have made a pretty picture, so many pretty girls kissing Rosa in
the cold porch of the Nuns’ House, and that sunny little creature peeping
out of it (unconscious of sly faces carved on spout and gable peeping at
her), and waving farewells to the departing coaches, as if she
represented the spirit of rosy youth abiding in the place to keep it
bright and warm in its desertion.  The hoarse High Street became musical
with the cry, in various silvery voices, ‘Good-bye, Rosebud darling!’ and
the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father over the opposite doorway seemed to say
to mankind: ‘Gentlemen, favour me with your attention to this charming
little last lot left behind, and bid with a spirit worthy of the
occasion!’  Then the staid street, so unwontedly sparkling, youthful, and
fresh for a few rippling moments, ran dry, and Cloisterham was itself
again.

                  [Picture: “Good-bye, Rosebud darling”]

If Rosebud in her bower now waited Edwin Drood’s coming with an uneasy
heart, Edwin for his part was uneasy too.  With far less force of purpose
in his composition than the childish beauty, crowned by acclamation fairy
queen of Miss Twinkleton’s establishment, he had a conscience, and Mr.
Grewgious had pricked it.  That gentleman’s steady convictions of what
was right and what was wrong in such a case as his, were neither to be
frowned aside nor laughed aside.  They would not be moved.  But for the
dinner in Staple Inn, and but for the ring he carried in the breast
pocket of his coat, he would have drifted into their wedding-day without
another pause for real thought, loosely trusting that all would go well,
left alone.  But that serious putting him on his truth to the living and
the dead had brought him to a check.  He must either give the ring to
Rosa, or he must take it back.  Once put into this narrowed way of
action, it was curious that he began to consider Rosa’s claims upon him
more unselfishly than he had ever considered them before, and began to be
less sure of himself than he had ever been in all his easy-going days.

‘I will be guided by what she says, and by how we get on,’ was his
decision, walking from the gatehouse to the Nuns’ House.  ‘Whatever comes
of it, I will bear his words in mind, and try to be true to the living
and the dead.’

Rosa was dressed for walking.  She expected him.  It was a bright, frosty
day, and Miss Twinkleton had already graciously sanctioned fresh air.
Thus they got out together before it became necessary for either Miss
Twinkleton, or the deputy high-priest Mrs. Tisher, to lay even so much as
one of those usual offerings on the shrine of Propriety.

‘My dear Eddy,’ said Rosa, when they had turned out of the High Street,
and had got among the quiet walks in the neighbourhood of the Cathedral
and the river: ‘I want to say something very serious to you.  I have been
thinking about it for a long, long time.’

‘I want to be serious with you too, Rosa dear.  I mean to be serious and
earnest.’

‘Thank you, Eddy.  And you will not think me unkind because I begin, will
you?  You will not think I speak for myself only, because I speak first?
That would not be generous, would it?  And I know you are generous!’

He said, ‘I hope I am not ungenerous to you, Rosa.’  He called her Pussy
no more.  Never again.

‘And there is no fear,’ pursued Rosa, ‘of our quarrelling, is there?
Because, Eddy,’ clasping her hand on his arm, ‘we have so much reason to
be very lenient to each other!’

‘We will be, Rosa.’

‘That’s a dear good boy!  Eddy, let us be courageous.  Let us change to
brother and sister from this day forth.’

‘Never be husband and wife?’

‘Never!’

Neither spoke again for a little while.  But after that pause he said,
with some effort:

‘Of course I know that this has been in both our minds, Rosa, and of
course I am in honour bound to confess freely that it does not originate
with you.’

‘No, nor with you, dear,’ she returned, with pathetic earnestness.  ‘That
sprung up between us.  You are not truly happy in our engagement; I am
not truly happy in it.  O, I am so sorry, so sorry!’  And there she broke
into tears.

‘I am deeply sorry too, Rosa.  Deeply sorry for you.’

‘And I for you, poor boy!  And I for you!’

This pure young feeling, this gentle and forbearing feeling of each
towards the other, brought with it its reward in a softening light that
seemed to shine on their position.  The relations between them did not
look wilful, or capricious, or a failure, in such a light; they became
elevated into something more self-denying, honourable, affectionate, and
true.

‘If we knew yesterday,’ said Rosa, as she dried her eyes, ‘and we did
know yesterday, and on many, many yesterdays, that we were far from right
together in those relations which were not of our own choosing, what
better could we do to-day than change them?  It is natural that we should
be sorry, and you see how sorry we both are; but how much better to be
sorry now than then!’

‘When, Rosa?’

‘When it would be too late.  And then we should be angry, besides.’

Another silence fell upon them.

‘And you know,’ said Rosa innocently, ‘you couldn’t like me then; and you
can always like me now, for I shall not be a drag upon you, or a worry to
you.  And I can always like you now, and your sister will not tease or
trifle with you.  I often did when I was not your sister, and I beg your
pardon for it.’

‘Don’t let us come to that, Rosa; or I shall want more pardoning than I
like to think of.’

‘No, indeed, Eddy; you are too hard, my generous boy, upon yourself.  Let
us sit down, brother, on these ruins, and let me tell you how it was with
us.  I think I know, for I have considered about it very much since you
were here last time.  You liked me, didn’t you?  You thought I was a nice
little thing?’

‘Everybody thinks that, Rosa.’

‘Do they?’  She knitted her brow musingly for a moment, and then flashed
out with the bright little induction: ‘Well, but say they do.  Surely it
was not enough that you should think of me only as other people did; now,
was it?’

The point was not to be got over.  It was not enough.

‘And that is just what I mean; that is just how it was with us,’ said
Rosa.  ‘You liked me very well, and you had grown used to me, and had
grown used to the idea of our being married.  You accepted the situation
as an inevitable kind of thing, didn’t you?  It was to be, you thought,
and why discuss or dispute it?’

It was new and strange to him to have himself presented to himself so
clearly, in a glass of her holding up.  He had always patronised her, in
his superiority to her share of woman’s wit.  Was that but another
instance of something radically amiss in the terms on which they had been
gliding towards a life-long bondage?

‘All this that I say of you is true of me as well, Eddy.  Unless it was,
I might not be bold enough to say it.  Only, the difference between us
was, that by little and little there crept into my mind a habit of
thinking about it, instead of dismissing it.  My life is not so busy as
yours, you see, and I have not so many things to think of.  So I thought
about it very much, and I cried about it very much too (though that was
not your fault, poor boy); when all at once my guardian came down, to
prepare for my leaving the Nuns’ House.  I tried to hint to him that I
was not quite settled in my mind, but I hesitated and failed, and he
didn’t understand me. But he is a good, good man.  And he put before me
so kindly, and yet so strongly, how seriously we ought to consider, in
our circumstances, that I resolved to speak to you the next moment we
were alone and grave.  And if I seemed to come to it easily just now,
because I came to it all at once, don’t think it was so really, Eddy, for
O, it was very, very hard, and O, I am very, very sorry!’

Her full heart broke into tears again.  He put his arm about her waist,
and they walked by the river-side together.

‘Your guardian has spoken to me too, Rosa dear.  I saw him before I left
London.’  His right hand was in his breast, seeking the ring; but he
checked it, as he thought: ‘If I am to take it back, why should I tell
her of it?’

‘And that made you more serious about it, didn’t it, Eddy?  And if I had
not spoken to you, as I have, you would have spoken to me?  I hope you
can tell me so?  I don’t like it to be _all_ my doing, though it _is_ so
much better for us.’

‘Yes, I should have spoken; I should have put everything before you; I
came intending to do it.  But I never could have spoken to you as you
have spoken to me, Rosa.’

‘Don’t say you mean so coldly or unkindly, Eddy, please, if you can help
it.’

‘I mean so sensibly and delicately, so wisely and affectionately.’

‘That’s my dear brother!’  She kissed his hand in a little rapture.  ‘The
dear girls will be dreadfully disappointed,’ added Rosa, laughing, with
the dewdrops glistening in her bright eyes.  ‘They have looked forward to
it so, poor pets!’

‘Ah! but I fear it will be a worse disappointment to Jack,’ said Edwin
Drood, with a start.  ‘I never thought of Jack!’

Her swift and intent look at him as he said the words could no more be
recalled than a flash of lightning can.  But it appeared as though she
would have instantly recalled it, if she could; for she looked down,
confused, and breathed quickly.

‘You don’t doubt its being a blow to Jack, Rosa?’

She merely replied, and that evasively and hurriedly: Why should she?
She had not thought about it.  He seemed, to her, to have so little to do
with it.

‘My dear child! can you suppose that any one so wrapped up in
another—Mrs. Tope’s expression: not mine—as Jack is in me, could fail to
be struck all of a heap by such a sudden and complete change in my life?
I say sudden, because it will be sudden to _him_, you know.’

She nodded twice or thrice, and her lips parted as if she would have
assented.  But she uttered no sound, and her breathing was no slower.

‘How shall I tell Jack?’ said Edwin, ruminating.  If he had been less
occupied with the thought, he must have seen her singular emotion.  ‘I
never thought of Jack.  It must be broken to him, before the town-crier
knows it.  I dine with the dear fellow to-morrow and next day—Christmas
Eve and Christmas Day—but it would never do to spoil his feast-days.  He
always worries about me, and moddley-coddleys in the merest trifles.  The
news is sure to overset him.  How on earth shall this be broken to Jack?’

‘He must be told, I suppose?’ said Rosa.

‘My dear Rosa! who ought to be in our confidence, if not Jack?’

‘My guardian promised to come down, if I should write and ask him.  I am
going to do so.  Would you like to leave it to him?’

‘A bright idea!’ cried Edwin.  ‘The other trustee.  Nothing more natural.
He comes down, he goes to Jack, he relates what we have agreed upon, and
he states our case better than we could.  He has already spoken feelingly
to you, he has already spoken feelingly to me, and he’ll put the whole
thing feelingly to Jack.  That’s it!  I am not a coward, Rosa, but to
tell you a secret, I am a little afraid of Jack.’

‘No, no! you are not afraid of him!’ cried Rosa, turning white, and
clasping her hands.

‘Why, sister Rosa, sister Rosa, what do you see from the turret?’ said
Edwin, rallying her.  ‘My dear girl!’

‘You frightened me.’

‘Most unintentionally, but I am as sorry as if I had meant to do it.
Could you possibly suppose for a moment, from any loose way of speaking
of mine, that I was literally afraid of the dear fond fellow?  What I
mean is, that he is subject to a kind of paroxysm, or fit—I saw him in it
once—and I don’t know but that so great a surprise, coming upon him
direct from me whom he is so wrapped up in, might bring it on perhaps.
Which—and this is the secret I was going to tell you—is another reason
for your guardian’s making the communication.  He is so steady, precise,
and exact, that he will talk Jack’s thoughts into shape, in no time:
whereas with me Jack is always impulsive and hurried, and, I may say,
almost womanish.’

Rosa seemed convinced.  Perhaps from her own very different point of view
of ‘Jack,’ she felt comforted and protected by the interposition of Mr.
Grewgious between herself and him.

And now, Edwin Drood’s right hand closed again upon the ring in its
little case, and again was checked by the consideration: ‘It is certain,
now, that I am to give it back to him; then why should I tell her of it?’
That pretty sympathetic nature which could be so sorry for him in the
blight of their childish hopes of happiness together, and could so
quietly find itself alone in a new world to weave fresh wreaths of such
flowers as it might prove to bear, the old world’s flowers being
withered, would be grieved by those sorrowful jewels; and to what
purpose?  Why should it be?  They were but a sign of broken joys and
baseless projects; in their very beauty they were (as the unlikeliest of
men had said) almost a cruel satire on the loves, hopes, plans, of
humanity, which are able to forecast nothing, and are so much brittle
dust.  Let them be.  He would restore them to her guardian when he came
down; he in his turn would restore them to the cabinet from which he had
unwillingly taken them; and there, like old letters or old vows, or other
records of old aspirations come to nothing, they would be disregarded,
until, being valuable, they were sold into circulation again, to repeat
their former round.

Let them be.  Let them lie unspoken of, in his breast.  However
distinctly or indistinctly he entertained these thoughts, he arrived at
the conclusion, Let them be.  Among the mighty store of wonderful chains
that are for ever forging, day and night, in the vast iron-works of time
and circumstance, there was one chain forged in the moment of that small
conclusion, riveted to the foundations of heaven and earth, and gifted
with invincible force to hold and drag.

They walked on by the river.  They began to speak of their separate
plans.  He would quicken his departure from England, and she would remain
where she was, at least as long as Helena remained.  The poor dear girls
should have their disappointment broken to them gently, and, as the first
preliminary, Miss Twinkleton should be confided in by Rosa, even in
advance of the reappearance of Mr. Grewgious.  It should be made clear in
all quarters that she and Edwin were the best of friends.  There had
never been so serene an understanding between them since they were first
affianced.  And yet there was one reservation on each side; on hers, that
she intended through her guardian to withdraw herself immediately from
the tuition of her music-master; on his, that he did already entertain
some wandering speculations whether it might ever come to pass that he
would know more of Miss Landless.

The bright, frosty day declined as they walked and spoke together.  The
sun dipped in the river far behind them, and the old city lay red before
them, as their walk drew to a close.  The moaning water cast its seaweed
duskily at their feet, when they turned to leave its margin; and the
rooks hovered above them with hoarse cries, darker splashes in the
darkening air.

‘I will prepare Jack for my flitting soon,’ said Edwin, in a low voice,
‘and I will but see your guardian when he comes, and then go before they
speak together.  It will be better done without my being by.  Don’t you
think so?’

‘Yes.’

‘We know we have done right, Rosa?’

‘Yes.’

‘We know we are better so, even now?’

‘And shall be far, far better so by-and-by.’

Still there was that lingering tenderness in their hearts towards the old
positions they were relinquishing, that they prolonged their parting.
When they came among the elm-trees by the Cathedral, where they had last
sat together, they stopped as by consent, and Rosa raised her face to
his, as she had never raised it in the old days;—for they were old
already.

‘God bless you, dear!  Good-bye!’

‘God bless you, dear!  Good-bye!’

They kissed each other fervently.

‘Now, please take me home, Eddy, and let me be by myself.’

‘Don’t look round, Rosa,’ he cautioned her, as he drew her arm through
his, and led her away.  ‘Didn’t you see Jack?’

‘No!  Where?’

‘Under the trees.  He saw us, as we took leave of each other.  Poor
fellow! he little thinks we have parted.  This will be a blow to him, I
am much afraid!’

She hurried on, without resting, and hurried on until they had passed
under the gatehouse into the street; once there, she asked:

‘Has he followed us?  You can look without seeming to.  Is he behind?’

‘No. Yes, he is!  He has just passed out under the gateway.  The dear,
sympathetic old fellow likes to keep us in sight.  I am afraid he will be
bitterly disappointed!’

She pulled hurriedly at the handle of the hoarse old bell, and the gate
soon opened.  Before going in, she gave him one last, wide, wondering
look, as if she would have asked him with imploring emphasis: ‘O! don’t
you understand?’  And out of that look he vanished from her view.




CHAPTER XIV—WHEN SHALL THESE THREE MEET AGAIN?


Christmas Eve in Cloisterham.  A few strange faces in the streets; a few
other faces, half strange and half familiar, once the faces of
Cloisterham children, now the faces of men and women who come back from
the outer world at long intervals to find the city wonderfully shrunken
in size, as if it had not washed by any means well in the meanwhile.  To
these, the striking of the Cathedral clock, and the cawing of the rooks
from the Cathedral tower, are like voices of their nursery time.  To such
as these, it has happened in their dying hours afar off, that they have
imagined their chamber-floor to be strewn with the autumnal leaves fallen
from the elm-trees in the Close: so have the rustling sounds and fresh
scents of their earliest impressions revived when the circle of their
lives was very nearly traced, and the beginning and the end were drawing
close together.

Seasonable tokens are about.  Red berries shine here and there in the
lattices of Minor Canon Corner; Mr. and Mrs. Tope are daintily sticking
sprigs of holly into the carvings and sconces of the Cathedral stalls, as
if they were sticking them into the coat-button-holes of the Dean and
Chapter.  Lavish profusion is in the shops: particularly in the articles
of currants, raisins, spices, candied peel, and moist sugar.  An unusual
air of gallantry and dissipation is abroad; evinced in an immense bunch
of mistletoe hanging in the greengrocer’s shop doorway, and a poor little
Twelfth Cake, culminating in the figure of a Harlequin—such a very poor
little Twelfth Cake, that one would rather called it a Twenty-fourth Cake
or a Forty-eighth Cake—to be raffled for at the pastrycook’s, terms one
shilling per member.  Public amusements are not wanting.  The Wax-Work
which made so deep an impression on the reflective mind of the Emperor of
China is to be seen by particular desire during Christmas Week only, on
the premises of the bankrupt livery-stable-keeper up the lane; and a new
grand comic Christmas pantomime is to be produced at the Theatre: the
latter heralded by the portrait of Signor Jacksonini the clown, saying
‘How do you do to-morrow?’ quite as large as life, and almost as
miserably.  In short, Cloisterham is up and doing: though from this
description the High School and Miss Twinkleton’s are to be excluded.
From the former establishment the scholars have gone home, every one of
them in love with one of Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies (who knows
nothing about it); and only the handmaidens flutter occasionally in the
windows of the latter.  It is noticed, by the bye, that these damsels
become, within the limits of decorum, more skittish when thus intrusted
with the concrete representation of their sex, than when dividing the
representation with Miss Twinkleton’s young ladies.

Three are to meet at the gatehouse to-night.  How does each one of the
three get through the day?

                                * * * * *

Neville Landless, though absolved from his books for the time by Mr.
Crisparkle—whose fresh nature is by no means insensible to the charms of
a holiday—reads and writes in his quiet room, with a concentrated air,
until it is two hours past noon.  He then sets himself to clearing his
table, to arranging his books, and to tearing up and burning his stray
papers.  He makes a clean sweep of all untidy accumulations, puts all his
drawers in order, and leaves no note or scrap of paper undestroyed, save
such memoranda as bear directly on his studies.  This done, he turns to
his wardrobe, selects a few articles of ordinary wear—among them, change
of stout shoes and socks for walking—and packs these in a knapsack.  This
knapsack is new, and he bought it in the High Street yesterday.  He also
purchased, at the same time and at the same place, a heavy walking-stick;
strong in the handle for the grip of the hand, and iron-shod.  He tries
this, swings it, poises it, and lays it by, with the knapsack, on a
window-seat.  By this time his arrangements are complete.

He dresses for going out, and is in the act of going—indeed has left his
room, and has met the Minor Canon on the staircase, coming out of his
bedroom upon the same story—when he turns back again for his
walking-stick, thinking he will carry it now.  Mr. Crisparkle, who has
paused on the staircase, sees it in his hand on his immediately
reappearing, takes it from him, and asks him with a smile how he chooses
a stick?

‘Really I don’t know that I understand the subject,’ he answers.  ‘I
chose it for its weight.’

‘Much too heavy, Neville; _much_ too heavy.’

‘To rest upon in a long walk, sir?’

‘Rest upon?’ repeats Mr. Crisparkle, throwing himself into pedestrian
form.  ‘You don’t rest upon it; you merely balance with it.’

‘I shall know better, with practice, sir.  I have not lived in a walking
country, you know.’

‘True,’ says Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘Get into a little training, and we will
have a few score miles together.  I should leave you nowhere now.  Do you
come back before dinner?’

‘I think not, as we dine early.’

Mr. Crisparkle gives him a bright nod and a cheerful good-bye; expressing
(not without intention) absolute confidence and ease.

Neville repairs to the Nuns’ House, and requests that Miss Landless may
be informed that her brother is there, by appointment.  He waits at the
gate, not even crossing the threshold; for he is on his parole not to put
himself in Rosa’s way.

His sister is at least as mindful of the obligation they have taken on
themselves as he can be, and loses not a moment in joining him.  They
meet affectionately, avoid lingering there, and walk towards the upper
inland country.

‘I am not going to tread upon forbidden ground, Helena,’ says Neville,
when they have walked some distance and are turning; ‘you will understand
in another moment that I cannot help referring to—what shall I say?—my
infatuation.’

‘Had you not better avoid it, Neville?  You know that I can hear
nothing.’

‘You can hear, my dear, what Mr. Crisparkle has heard, and heard with
approval.’

‘Yes; I can hear so much.’

‘Well, it is this.  I am not only unsettled and unhappy myself, but I am
conscious of unsettling and interfering with other people.  How do I know
that, but for my unfortunate presence, you, and—and—the rest of that
former party, our engaging guardian excepted, might be dining cheerfully
in Minor Canon Corner to-morrow?  Indeed it probably would be so.  I can
see too well that I am not high in the old lady’s opinion, and it is easy
to understand what an irksome clog I must be upon the hospitalities of
her orderly house—especially at this time of year—when I must be kept
asunder from this person, and there is such a reason for my not being
brought into contact with that person, and an unfavourable reputation has
preceded me with such another person; and so on.  I have put this very
gently to Mr. Crisparkle, for you know his self-denying ways; but still I
have put it.  What I have laid much greater stress upon at the same time
is, that I am engaged in a miserable struggle with myself, and that a
little change and absence may enable me to come through it the better.
So, the weather being bright and hard, I am going on a walking
expedition, and intend taking myself out of everybody’s way (my own
included, I hope) to-morrow morning.’

‘When to come back?’

‘In a fortnight.’

‘And going quite alone?’

‘I am much better without company, even if there were any one but you to
bear me company, my dear Helena.’

‘Mr. Crisparkle entirely agrees, you say?’

‘Entirely.  I am not sure but that at first he was inclined to think it
rather a moody scheme, and one that might do a brooding mind harm.  But
we took a moonlight walk last Monday night, to talk it over at leisure,
and I represented the case to him as it really is.  I showed him that I
do want to conquer myself, and that, this evening well got over, it is
surely better that I should be away from here just now, than here.  I
could hardly help meeting certain people walking together here, and that
could do no good, and is certainly not the way to forget.  A fortnight
hence, that chance will probably be over, for the time; and when it again
arises for the last time, why, I can again go away.  Farther, I really do
feel hopeful of bracing exercise and wholesome fatigue.  You know that
Mr. Crisparkle allows such things their full weight in the preservation
of his own sound mind in his own sound body, and that his just spirit is
not likely to maintain one set of natural laws for himself and another
for me.  He yielded to my view of the matter, when convinced that I was
honestly in earnest; and so, with his full consent, I start to-morrow
morning.  Early enough to be not only out of the streets, but out of
hearing of the bells, when the good people go to church.’

Helena thinks it over, and thinks well of it.  Mr. Crisparkle doing so,
she would do so; but she does originally, out of her own mind, think well
of it, as a healthy project, denoting a sincere endeavour and an active
attempt at self-correction.  She is inclined to pity him, poor fellow,
for going away solitary on the great Christmas festival; but she feels it
much more to the purpose to encourage him.  And she does encourage him.

He will write to her?

He will write to her every alternate day, and tell her all his
adventures.

Does he send clothes on in advance of him?

‘My dear Helena, no.  Travel like a pilgrim, with wallet and staff.  My
wallet—or my knapsack—is packed, and ready for strapping on; and here is
my staff!’

He hands it to her; she makes the same remark as Mr. Crisparkle, that it
is very heavy; and gives it back to him, asking what wood it is?
Iron-wood.

Up to this point he has been extremely cheerful.  Perhaps, the having to
carry his case with her, and therefore to present it in its brightest
aspect, has roused his spirits.  Perhaps, the having done so with
success, is followed by a revulsion.  As the day closes in, and the
city-lights begin to spring up before them, he grows depressed.

‘I wish I were not going to this dinner, Helena.’

‘Dear Neville, is it worth while to care much about it?  Think how soon
it will be over.’

‘How soon it will be over!’ he repeats gloomily.  ‘Yes.  But I don’t like
it.’

There may be a moment’s awkwardness, she cheeringly represents to him,
but it can only last a moment.  He is quite sure of himself.

‘I wish I felt as sure of everything else, as I feel of myself,’ he
answers her.

‘How strangely you speak, dear!  What do you mean?’

‘Helena, I don’t know.  I only know that I don’t like it.  What a strange
dead weight there is in the air!’

She calls his attention to those copperous clouds beyond the river, and
says that the wind is rising.  He scarcely speaks again, until he takes
leave of her, at the gate of the Nuns’ House.  She does not immediately
enter, when they have parted, but remains looking after him along the
street.  Twice he passes the gatehouse, reluctant to enter.  At length,
the Cathedral clock chiming one quarter, with a rapid turn he hurries in.

And so _he_ goes up the postern stair.

                                * * * * *

Edwin Drood passes a solitary day.  Something of deeper moment than he
had thought, has gone out of his life; and in the silence of his own
chamber he wept for it last night.  Though the image of Miss Landless
still hovers in the background of his mind, the pretty little
affectionate creature, so much firmer and wiser than he had supposed,
occupies its stronghold.  It is with some misgiving of his own
unworthiness that he thinks of her, and of what they might have been to
one another, if he had been more in earnest some time ago; if he had set
a higher value on her; if, instead of accepting his lot in life as an
inheritance of course, he had studied the right way to its appreciation
and enhancement.  And still, for all this, and though there is a sharp
heartache in all this, the vanity and caprice of youth sustain that
handsome figure of Miss Landless in the background of his mind.

That was a curious look of Rosa’s when they parted at the gate.  Did it
mean that she saw below the surface of his thoughts, and down into their
twilight depths?  Scarcely that, for it was a look of astonished and keen
inquiry.  He decides that he cannot understand it, though it was
remarkably expressive.

As he only waits for Mr. Grewgious now, and will depart immediately after
having seen him, he takes a sauntering leave of the ancient city and its
neighbourhood.  He recalls the time when Rosa and he walked here or
there, mere children, full of the dignity of being engaged.  Poor
children! he thinks, with a pitying sadness.

Finding that his watch has stopped, he turns into the jeweller’s shop, to
have it wound and set.  The jeweller is knowing on the subject of a
bracelet, which he begs leave to submit, in a general and quite aimless
way.  It would suit (he considers) a young bride, to perfection;
especially if of a rather diminutive style of beauty.  Finding the
bracelet but coldly looked at, the jeweller invites attention to a tray
of rings for gentlemen; here is a style of ring, now, he remarks—a very
chaste signet—which gentlemen are much given to purchasing, when changing
their condition.  A ring of a very responsible appearance.  With the date
of their wedding-day engraved inside, several gentlemen have preferred it
to any other kind of memento.

The rings are as coldly viewed as the bracelet.  Edwin tells the tempter
that he wears no jewellery but his watch and chain, which were his
father’s; and his shirt-pin.

‘That I was aware of,’ is the jeweller’s reply, ‘for Mr. Jasper dropped
in for a watch-glass the other day, and, in fact, I showed these articles
to him, remarking that if he _should_ wish to make a present to a
gentleman relative, on any particular occasion—But he said with a smile
that he had an inventory in his mind of all the jewellery his gentleman
relative ever wore; namely, his watch and chain, and his shirt-pin.’
Still (the jeweller considers) that might not apply to all times, though
applying to the present time.  ‘Twenty minutes past two, Mr. Drood, I set
your watch at.  Let me recommend you not to let it run down, sir.’

Edwin takes his watch, puts it on, and goes out, thinking: ‘Dear old
Jack!  If I were to make an extra crease in my neckcloth, he would think
it worth noticing!’

He strolls about and about, to pass the time until the dinner-hour.  It
somehow happens that Cloisterham seems reproachful to him to-day; has
fault to find with him, as if he had not used it well; but is far more
pensive with him than angry.  His wonted carelessness is replaced by a
wistful looking at, and dwelling upon, all the old landmarks.  He will
soon be far away, and may never see them again, he thinks.  Poor youth!
Poor youth!

As dusk draws on, he paces the Monks’ Vineyard.  He has walked to and
fro, full half an hour by the Cathedral chimes, and it has closed in
dark, before he becomes quite aware of a woman crouching on the ground
near a wicket gate in a corner.  The gate commands a cross bye-path,
little used in the gloaming; and the figure must have been there all the
time, though he has but gradually and lately made it out.

He strikes into that path, and walks up to the wicket.  By the light of a
lamp near it, he sees that the woman is of a haggard appearance, and that
her weazen chin is resting on her hands, and that her eyes are
staring—with an unwinking, blind sort of steadfastness—before her.

Always kindly, but moved to be unusually kind this evening, and having
bestowed kind words on most of the children and aged people he has met,
he at once bends down, and speaks to this woman.

‘Are you ill?’

‘No, deary,’ she answers, without looking at him, and with no departure
from her strange blind stare.

‘Are you blind?’

‘No, deary.’

‘Are you lost, homeless, faint?  What is the matter, that you stay here
in the cold so long, without moving?’

By slow and stiff efforts, she appears to contract her vision until it
can rest upon him; and then a curious film passes over her, and she
begins to shake.

He straightens himself, recoils a step, and looks down at her in a dread
amazement; for he seems to know her.

‘Good Heaven!’ he thinks, next moment.  ‘Like Jack that night!’

As he looks down at her, she looks up at him, and whimpers: ‘My lungs is
weakly; my lungs is dreffle bad.  Poor me, poor me, my cough is rattling
dry!’ and coughs in confirmation horribly.

‘Where do you come from?’

‘Come from London, deary.’  (Her cough still rending her.)

‘Where are you going to?’

‘Back to London, deary.  I came here, looking for a needle in a haystack,
and I ain’t found it.  Look’ee, deary; give me three-and-sixpence, and
don’t you be afeard for me.  I’ll get back to London then, and trouble no
one.  I’m in a business.—Ah, me!  It’s slack, it’s slack, and times is
very bad!—but I can make a shift to live by it.’

‘Do you eat opium?’

‘Smokes it,’ she replies with difficulty, still racked by her cough.
‘Give me three-and-sixpence, and I’ll lay it out well, and get back.  If
you don’t give me three-and-sixpence, don’t give me a brass farden.  And
if you do give me three-and-sixpence, deary, I’ll tell you something.’

He counts the money from his pocket, and puts it in her hand.  She
instantly clutches it tight, and rises to her feet with a croaking laugh
of satisfaction.

‘Bless ye!  Hark’ee, dear genl’mn.  What’s your Chris’en name?’

‘Edwin.’

‘Edwin, Edwin, Edwin,’ she repeats, trailing off into a drowsy repetition
of the word; and then asks suddenly: ‘Is the short of that name Eddy?’

‘It is sometimes called so,’ he replies, with the colour starting to his
face.

‘Don’t sweethearts call it so?’ she asks, pondering.

‘How should I know?’

‘Haven’t you a sweetheart, upon your soul?’

‘None.’

She is moving away, with another ‘Bless ye, and thank’ee, deary!’ when he
adds: ‘You were to tell me something; you may as well do so.’

‘So I was, so I was.  Well, then.  Whisper.  You be thankful that your
name ain’t Ned.’

He looks at her quite steadily, as he asks: ‘Why?’

‘Because it’s a bad name to have just now.’

‘How a bad name?’

‘A threatened name.  A dangerous name.’

‘The proverb says that threatened men live long,’ he tells her, lightly.

‘Then Ned—so threatened is he, wherever he may be while I am a-talking to
you, deary—should live to all eternity!’ replies the woman.

She has leaned forward to say it in his ear, with her forefinger shaking
before his eyes, and now huddles herself together, and with another
‘Bless ye, and thank’ee!’ goes away in the direction of the Travellers’
Lodging House.

This is not an inspiriting close to a dull day.  Alone, in a sequestered
place, surrounded by vestiges of old time and decay, it rather has a
tendency to call a shudder into being.  He makes for the better-lighted
streets, and resolves as he walks on to say nothing of this to-night, but
to mention it to Jack (who alone calls him Ned), as an odd coincidence,
to-morrow; of course only as a coincidence, and not as anything better
worth remembering.

Still, it holds to him, as many things much better worth remembering
never did.  He has another mile or so, to linger out before the
dinner-hour; and, when he walks over the bridge and by the river, the
woman’s words are in the rising wind, in the angry sky, in the troubled
water, in the flickering lights.  There is some solemn echo of them even
in the Cathedral chime, which strikes a sudden surprise to his heart as
he turns in under the archway of the gatehouse.

And so _he_ goes up the postern stair.

                                * * * * *

John Jasper passes a more agreeable and cheerful day than either of his
guests.  Having no music-lessons to give in the holiday season, his time
is his own, but for the Cathedral services.  He is early among the
shopkeepers, ordering little table luxuries that his nephew likes.  His
nephew will not be with him long, he tells his provision-dealers, and so
must be petted and made much of.  While out on his hospitable
preparations, he looks in on Mr. Sapsea; and mentions that dear Ned, and
that inflammable young spark of Mr. Crisparkle’s, are to dine at the
gatehouse to-day, and make up their difference.  Mr. Sapsea is by no
means friendly towards the inflammable young spark.  He says that his
complexion is ‘Un-English.’  And when Mr. Sapsea has once declared
anything to be Un-English, he considers that thing everlastingly sunk in
the bottomless pit.

John Jasper is truly sorry to hear Mr. Sapsea speak thus, for he knows
right well that Mr. Sapsea never speaks without a meaning, and that he
has a subtle trick of being right.  Mr. Sapsea (by a very remarkable
coincidence) is of exactly that opinion.

Mr. Jasper is in beautiful voice this day.  In the pathetic supplication
to have his heart inclined to keep this law, he quite astonishes his
fellows by his melodious power.  He has never sung difficult music with
such skill and harmony, as in this day’s Anthem.  His nervous temperament
is occasionally prone to take difficult music a little too quickly;
to-day, his time is perfect.

These results are probably attained through a grand composure of the
spirits.  The mere mechanism of his throat is a little tender, for he
wears, both with his singing-robe and with his ordinary dress, a large
black scarf of strong close-woven silk, slung loosely round his neck.
But his composure is so noticeable, that Mr. Crisparkle speaks of it as
they come out from Vespers.

‘I must thank you, Jasper, for the pleasure with which I have heard you
to-day.  Beautiful!  Delightful!  You could not have so outdone yourself,
I hope, without being wonderfully well.’

‘I _am_ wonderfully well.’

‘Nothing unequal,’ says the Minor Canon, with a smooth motion of his
hand: ‘nothing unsteady, nothing forced, nothing avoided; all thoroughly
done in a masterly manner, with perfect self-command.’

‘Thank you.  I hope so, if it is not too much to say.’

‘One would think, Jasper, you had been trying a new medicine for that
occasional indisposition of yours.’

‘No, really?  That’s well observed; for I have.’

‘Then stick to it, my good fellow,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, clapping him on
the shoulder with friendly encouragement, ‘stick to it.’

‘I will.’

‘I congratulate you,’ Mr. Crisparkle pursues, as they come out of the
Cathedral, ‘on all accounts.’

‘Thank you again.  I will walk round to the Corner with you, if you don’t
object; I have plenty of time before my company come; and I want to say a
word to you, which I think you will not be displeased to hear.’

‘What is it?’

‘Well.  We were speaking, the other evening, of my black humours.’

Mr. Crisparkle’s face falls, and he shakes his head deploringly.

‘I said, you know, that I should make you an antidote to those black
humours; and you said you hoped I would consign them to the flames.’

‘And I still hope so, Jasper.’

‘With the best reason in the world!  I mean to burn this year’s Diary at
the year’s end.’

‘Because you—?’  Mr. Crisparkle brightens greatly as he thus begins.

‘You anticipate me.  Because I feel that I have been out of sorts,
gloomy, bilious, brain-oppressed, whatever it may be.  You said I had
been exaggerative.  So I have.’

Mr. Crisparkle’s brightened face brightens still more.

‘I couldn’t see it then, because I _was_ out of sorts; but I am in a
healthier state now, and I acknowledge it with genuine pleasure.  I made
a great deal of a very little; that’s the fact.’

‘It does me good,’ cries Mr. Crisparkle, ‘to hear you say it!’

‘A man leading a monotonous life,’ Jasper proceeds, ‘and getting his
nerves, or his stomach, out of order, dwells upon an idea until it loses
its proportions.  That was my case with the idea in question.  So I shall
burn the evidence of my case, when the book is full, and begin the next
volume with a clearer vision.’

‘This is better,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, stopping at the steps of his own
door to shake hands, ‘than I could have hoped.’

‘Why, naturally,’ returns Jasper.  ‘You had but little reason to hope
that I should become more like yourself.  You are always training
yourself to be, mind and body, as clear as crystal, and you always are,
and never change; whereas I am a muddy, solitary, moping weed.  However,
I have got over that mope.  Shall I wait, while you ask if Mr. Neville
has left for my place?  If not, he and I may walk round together.’

‘I think,’ says Mr. Crisparkle, opening the entrance-door with his key,
‘that he left some time ago; at least I know he left, and I think he has
not come back.  But I’ll inquire.  You won’t come in?’

‘My company wait,’ said Jasper, with a smile.

The Minor Canon disappears, and in a few moments returns.  As he thought,
Mr. Neville has not come back; indeed, as he remembers now, Mr. Neville
said he would probably go straight to the gatehouse.

‘Bad manners in a host!’ says Jasper.  ‘My company will be there before
me!  What will you bet that I don’t find my company embracing?’

‘I will bet—or I would, if ever I did bet,’ returns Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that
your company will have a gay entertainer this evening.’

Jasper nods, and laughs good-night!

He retraces his steps to the Cathedral door, and turns down past it to
the gatehouse.  He sings, in a low voice and with delicate expression, as
he walks along.  It still seems as if a false note were not within his
power to-night, and as if nothing could hurry or retard him.  Arriving
thus under the arched entrance of his dwelling, he pauses for an instant
in the shelter to pull off that great black scarf, and bang it in a loop
upon his arm.  For that brief time, his face is knitted and stern.  But
it immediately clears, as he resumes his singing, and his way.

And so _he_ goes up the postern stair.

                                * * * * *

The red light burns steadily all the evening in the lighthouse on the
margin of the tide of busy life.  Softened sounds and hum of traffic pass
it and flow on irregularly into the lonely Precincts; but very little
else goes by, save violent rushes of wind.  It comes on to blow a
boisterous gale.

The Precincts are never particularly well lighted; but the strong blasts
of wind blowing out many of the lamps (in some instances shattering the
frames too, and bringing the glass rattling to the ground), they are
unusually dark to-night.  The darkness is augmented and confused, by
flying dust from the earth, dry twigs from the trees, and great ragged
fragments from the rooks’ nests up in the tower.  The trees themselves so
toss and creak, as this tangible part of the darkness madly whirls about,
that they seem in peril of being torn out of the earth: while ever and
again a crack, and a rushing fall, denote that some large branch has
yielded to the storm.

Not such power of wind has blown for many a winter night.  Chimneys
topple in the streets, and people hold to posts and corners, and to one
another, to keep themselves upon their feet.  The violent rushes abate
not, but increase in frequency and fury until at midnight, when the
streets are empty, the storm goes thundering along them, rattling at all
the latches, and tearing at all the shutters, as if warning the people to
get up and fly with it, rather than have the roofs brought down upon
their brains.

Still, the red light burns steadily.  Nothing is steady but the red
light.

All through the night the wind blows, and abates not.  But early in the
morning, when there is barely enough light in the east to dim the stars,
it begins to lull.  From that time, with occasional wild charges, like a
wounded monster dying, it drops and sinks; and at full daylight it is
dead.

It is then seen that the hands of the Cathedral clock are torn off; that
lead from the roof has been stripped away, rolled up, and blown into the
Close; and that some stones have been displaced upon the summit of the
great tower.  Christmas morning though it be, it is necessary to send up
workmen, to ascertain the extent of the damage done.  These, led by
Durdles, go aloft; while Mr. Tope and a crowd of early idlers gather down
in Minor Canon Corner, shading their eyes and watching for their
appearance up there.

This cluster is suddenly broken and put aside by the hands of Mr. Jasper;
all the gazing eyes are brought down to the earth by his loudly inquiring
of Mr. Crisparkle, at an open window:

‘Where is my nephew?’

‘He has not been here.  Is he not with you?’

‘No.  He went down to the river last night, with Mr. Neville, to look at
the storm, and has not been back.  Call Mr. Neville!’

‘He left this morning, early.’

‘Left this morning early?  Let me in! let me in!’

There is no more looking up at the tower, now.  All the assembled eyes
are turned on Mr. Jasper, white, half-dressed, panting, and clinging to
the rail before the Minor Canon’s house.




CHAPTER XV—IMPEACHED


Neville Landless had started so early and walked at so good a pace, that
when the church-bells began to ring in Cloisterham for morning service,
he was eight miles away.  As he wanted his breakfast by that time, having
set forth on a crust of bread, he stopped at the next roadside tavern to
refresh.

Visitors in want of breakfast—unless they were horses or cattle, for
which class of guests there was preparation enough in the way of
water-trough and hay—were so unusual at the sign of The Tilted Wagon,
that it took a long time to get the wagon into the track of tea and toast
and bacon.  Neville in the interval, sitting in a sanded parlour,
wondering in how long a time after he had gone, the sneezy fire of damp
fagots would begin to make somebody else warm.

Indeed, The Tilted Wagon, as a cool establishment on the top of a hill,
where the ground before the door was puddled with damp hoofs and trodden
straw; where a scolding landlady slapped a moist baby (with one red sock
on and one wanting), in the bar; where the cheese was cast aground upon a
shelf, in company with a mouldy tablecloth and a green-handled knife, in
a sort of cast-iron canoe; where the pale-faced bread shed tears of crumb
over its shipwreck in another canoe; where the family linen, half washed
and half dried, led a public life of lying about; where everything to
drink was drunk out of mugs, and everything else was suggestive of a
rhyme to mugs; The Tilted Wagon, all these things considered, hardly kept
its painted promise of providing good entertainment for Man and Beast.
However, Man, in the present case, was not critical, but took what
entertainment he could get, and went on again after a longer rest than he
needed.

He stopped at some quarter of a mile from the house, hesitating whether
to pursue the road, or to follow a cart track between two high hedgerows,
which led across the slope of a breezy heath, and evidently struck into
the road again by-and-by.  He decided in favour of this latter track, and
pursued it with some toil; the rise being steep, and the way worn into
deep ruts.

He was labouring along, when he became aware of some other pedestrians
behind him.  As they were coming up at a faster pace than his, he stood
aside, against one of the high banks, to let them pass.  But their manner
was very curious.  Only four of them passed.  Other four slackened speed,
and loitered as intending to follow him when he should go on.  The
remainder of the party (half-a-dozen perhaps) turned, and went back at a
great rate.

He looked at the four behind him, and he looked at the four before him.
They all returned his look.  He resumed his way.  The four in advance
went on, constantly looking back; the four in the rear came closing up.

When they all ranged out from the narrow track upon the open slope of the
heath, and this order was maintained, let him diverge as he would to
either side, there was no longer room to doubt that he was beset by these
fellows.  He stopped, as a last test; and they all stopped.

‘Why do you attend upon me in this way?’ he asked the whole body.  ‘Are
you a pack of thieves?’

‘Don’t answer him,’ said one of the number; he did not see which.
‘Better be quiet.’

‘Better be quiet?’ repeated Neville.  ‘Who said so?’

Nobody replied.

‘It’s good advice, whichever of you skulkers gave it,’ he went on
angrily.  ‘I will not submit to be penned in between four men there, and
four men there.  I wish to pass, and I mean to pass, those four in
front.’

They were all standing still; himself included.

‘If eight men, or four men, or two men, set upon one,’ he proceeded,
growing more enraged, ‘the one has no chance but to set his mark upon
some of them.  And, by the Lord, I’ll do it, if I am interrupted any
farther!’

Shouldering his heavy stick, and quickening his pace, he shot on to pass
the four ahead.  The largest and strongest man of the number changed
swiftly to the side on which he came up, and dexterously closed with him
and went down with him; but not before the heavy stick had descended
smartly.

‘Let him be!’ said this man in a suppressed voice, as they struggled
together on the grass.  ‘Fair play!  His is the build of a girl to mine,
and he’s got a weight strapped to his back besides.  Let him alone.  I’ll
manage him.’

After a little rolling about, in a close scuffle which caused the faces
of both to be besmeared with blood, the man took his knee from Neville’s
chest, and rose, saying: ‘There!  Now take him arm-in-arm, any two of
you!’

It was immediately done.

‘As to our being a pack of thieves, Mr. Landless,’ said the man, as he
spat out some blood, and wiped more from his face; ‘you know better than
that at midday.  We wouldn’t have touched you if you hadn’t forced us.
We’re going to take you round to the high road, anyhow, and you’ll find
help enough against thieves there, if you want it.—Wipe his face,
somebody; see how it’s a-trickling down him!’

When his face was cleansed, Neville recognised in the speaker, Joe,
driver of the Cloisterham omnibus, whom he had seen but once, and that on
the day of his arrival.

‘And what I recommend you for the present, is, don’t talk, Mr. Landless.
You’ll find a friend waiting for you, at the high road—gone ahead by the
other way when we split into two parties—and you had much better say
nothing till you come up with him.  Bring that stick along, somebody
else, and let’s be moving!’

Utterly bewildered, Neville stared around him and said not a word.
Walking between his two conductors, who held his arms in theirs, he went
on, as in a dream, until they came again into the high road, and into the
midst of a little group of people.  The men who had turned back were
among the group; and its central figures were Mr. Jasper and Mr.
Crisparkle.  Neville’s conductors took him up to the Minor Canon, and
there released him, as an act of deference to that gentleman.

‘What is all this, sir?  What is the matter?  I feel as if I had lost my
senses!’ cried Neville, the group closing in around him.

‘Where is my nephew?’ asked Mr. Jasper, wildly.

‘Where is your nephew?’ repeated Neville, ‘Why do you ask me?’

‘I ask you,’ retorted Jasper, ‘because you were the last person in his
company, and he is not to be found.’

‘Not to be found!’ cried Neville, aghast.

‘Stay, stay,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘Permit me, Jasper.  Mr. Neville, you
are confounded; collect your thoughts; it is of great importance that you
should collect your thoughts; attend to me.’

‘I will try, sir, but I seem mad.’

‘You left Mr. Jasper last night with Edwin Drood?’

‘Yes.’

‘At what hour?’

‘Was it at twelve o’clock?’ asked Neville, with his hand to his confused
head, and appealing to Jasper.

‘Quite right,’ said Mr. Crisparkle; ‘the hour Mr. Jasper has already
named to me.  You went down to the river together?’

‘Undoubtedly.  To see the action of the wind there.’

‘What followed?  How long did you stay there?’

‘About ten minutes; I should say not more.  We then walked together to
your house, and he took leave of me at the door.’

‘Did he say that he was going down to the river again?’

‘No.  He said that he was going straight back.’

The bystanders looked at one another, and at Mr. Crisparkle.  To whom Mr.
Jasper, who had been intensely watching Neville, said, in a low,
distinct, suspicious voice: ‘What are those stains upon his dress?’

All eyes were turned towards the blood upon his clothes.

‘And here are the same stains upon this stick!’ said Jasper, taking it
from the hand of the man who held it.  ‘I know the stick to be his, and
he carried it last night.  What does this mean?’

‘In the name of God, say what it means, Neville!’ urged Mr. Crisparkle.

‘That man and I,’ said Neville, pointing out his late adversary, ‘had a
struggle for the stick just now, and you may see the same marks on him,
sir.  What was I to suppose, when I found myself molested by eight
people?  Could I dream of the true reason when they would give me none at
all?’

They admitted that they had thought it discreet to be silent, and that
the struggle had taken place.  And yet the very men who had seen it
looked darkly at the smears which the bright cold air had already dried.

‘We must return, Neville,’ said Mr. Crisparkle; ‘of course you will be
glad to come back to clear yourself?’

‘Of course, sir.’

‘Mr. Landless will walk at my side,’ the Minor Canon continued, looking
around him.  ‘Come, Neville!’

They set forth on the walk back; and the others, with one exception,
straggled after them at various distances.  Jasper walked on the other
side of Neville, and never quitted that position.  He was silent, while
Mr. Crisparkle more than once repeated his former questions, and while
Neville repeated his former answers; also, while they both hazarded some
explanatory conjectures.  He was obstinately silent, because Mr.
Crisparkle’s manner directly appealed to him to take some part in the
discussion, and no appeal would move his fixed face.  When they drew near
to the city, and it was suggested by the Minor Canon that they might do
well in calling on the Mayor at once, he assented with a stern nod; but
he spake no word until they stood in Mr. Sapsea’s parlour.

Mr. Sapsea being informed by Mr. Crisparkle of the circumstances under
which they desired to make a voluntary statement before him, Mr. Jasper
broke silence by declaring that he placed his whole reliance, humanly
speaking, on Mr. Sapsea’s penetration.  There was no conceivable reason
why his nephew should have suddenly absconded, unless Mr. Sapsea could
suggest one, and then he would defer.  There was no intelligible
likelihood of his having returned to the river, and been accidentally
drowned in the dark, unless it should appear likely to Mr. Sapsea, and
then again he would defer.  He washed his hands as clean as he could of
all horrible suspicions, unless it should appear to Mr. Sapsea that some
such were inseparable from his last companion before his disappearance
(not on good terms with previously), and then, once more, he would defer.
His own state of mind, he being distracted with doubts, and labouring
under dismal apprehensions, was not to be safely trusted; but Mr.
Sapsea’s was.

Mr. Sapsea expressed his opinion that the case had a dark look; in short
(and here his eyes rested full on Neville’s countenance), an Un-English
complexion.  Having made this grand point, he wandered into a denser haze
and maze of nonsense than even a mayor might have been expected to
disport himself in, and came out of it with the brilliant discovery that
to take the life of a fellow-creature was to take something that didn’t
belong to you.  He wavered whether or no he should at once issue his
warrant for the committal of Neville Landless to jail, under
circumstances of grave suspicion; and he might have gone so far as to do
it but for the indignant protest of the Minor Canon: who undertook for
the young man’s remaining in his own house, and being produced by his own
hands, whenever demanded.  Mr. Jasper then understood Mr. Sapsea to
suggest that the river should be dragged, that its banks should be
rigidly examined, that particulars of the disappearance should be sent to
all outlying places and to London, and that placards and advertisements
should be widely circulated imploring Edwin Drood, if for any unknown
reason he had withdrawn himself from his uncle’s home and society, to
take pity on that loving kinsman’s sore bereavement and distress, and
somehow inform him that he was yet alive.  Mr. Sapsea was perfectly
understood, for this was exactly his meaning (though he had said nothing
about it); and measures were taken towards all these ends immediately.

It would be difficult to determine which was the more oppressed with
horror and amazement: Neville Landless, or John Jasper.  But that
Jasper’s position forced him to be active, while Neville’s forced him to
be passive, there would have been nothing to choose between them.  Each
was bowed down and broken.

With the earliest light of the next morning, men were at work upon the
river, and other men—most of whom volunteered for the service—were
examining the banks.  All the livelong day the search went on; upon the
river, with barge and pole, and drag and net; upon the muddy and rushy
shore, with jack-boots, hatchet, spade, rope, dogs, and all imaginable
appliances.  Even at night, the river was specked with lanterns, and
lurid with fires; far-off creeks, into which the tide washed as it
changed, had their knots of watchers, listening to the lapping of the
stream, and looking out for any burden it might bear; remote shingly
causeways near the sea, and lonely points off which there was a race of
water, had their unwonted flaring cressets and rough-coated figures when
the next day dawned; but no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of
the sun.

All that day, again, the search went on.  Now, in barge and boat; and now
ashore among the osiers, or tramping amidst mud and stakes and jagged
stones in low-lying places, where solitary watermarks and signals of
strange shapes showed like spectres, John Jasper worked and toiled.  But
to no purpose; for still no trace of Edwin Drood revisited the light of
the sun.

Setting his watches for that night again, so that vigilant eyes should be
kept on every change of tide, he went home exhausted.  Unkempt and
disordered, bedaubed with mud that had dried upon him, and with much of
his clothing torn to rags, he had but just dropped into his easy-chair,
when Mr. Grewgious stood before him.

‘This is strange news,’ said Mr. Grewgious.

‘Strange and fearful news.’

Jasper had merely lifted up his heavy eyes to say it, and now dropped
them again as he drooped, worn out, over one side of his easy-chair.

Mr. Grewgious smoothed his head and face, and stood looking at the fire.

‘How is your ward?’ asked Jasper, after a time, in a faint, fatigued
voice.

‘Poor little thing!  You may imagine her condition.’

‘Have you seen his sister?’ inquired Jasper, as before.

‘Whose?’

The curtness of the counter-question, and the cool, slow manner in which,
as he put it, Mr. Grewgious moved his eyes from the fire to his
companion’s face, might at any other time have been exasperating.  In his
depression and exhaustion, Jasper merely opened his eyes to say: ‘The
suspected young man’s.’

‘Do you suspect him?’ asked Mr. Grewgious.

‘I don’t know what to think.  I cannot make up my mind.’

‘Nor I,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘But as you spoke of him as the suspected
young man, I thought you _had_ made up your mind.—I have just left Miss
Landless.’

               [Picture: Mr. Grewgious has his suspicions]

‘What is her state?’

‘Defiance of all suspicion, and unbounded faith in her brother.’

‘Poor thing!’

‘However,’ pursued Mr. Grewgious, ‘it is not of her that I came to speak.
It is of my ward.  I have a communication to make that will surprise you.
At least, it has surprised me.’

Jasper, with a groaning sigh, turned wearily in his chair.

‘Shall I put it off till to-morrow?’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Mind, I warn
you, that I think it will surprise you!’

More attention and concentration came into John Jasper’s eyes as they
caught sight of Mr. Grewgious smoothing his head again, and again looking
at the fire; but now, with a compressed and determined mouth.

‘What is it?’ demanded Jasper, becoming upright in his chair.

‘To be sure,’ said Mr. Grewgious, provokingly slowly and internally, as
he kept his eyes on the fire: ‘I might have known it sooner; she gave me
the opening; but I am such an exceedingly Angular man, that it never
occurred to me; I took all for granted.’

‘What is it?’ demanded Jasper once more.

Mr. Grewgious, alternately opening and shutting the palms of his hands as
he warmed them at the fire, and looking fixedly at him sideways, and
never changing either his action or his look in all that followed, went
on to reply.

‘This young couple, the lost youth and Miss Rosa, my ward, though so long
betrothed, and so long recognising their betrothal, and so near being
married—’

Mr. Grewgious saw a staring white face, and two quivering white lips, in
the easy-chair, and saw two muddy hands gripping its sides.  But for the
hands, he might have thought he had never seen the face.

‘—This young couple came gradually to the discovery (made on both sides
pretty equally, I think), that they would be happier and better, both in
their present and their future lives, as affectionate friends, or say
rather as brother and sister, than as husband and wife.’

Mr. Grewgious saw a lead-coloured face in the easy-chair, and on its
surface dreadful starting drops or bubbles, as if of steel.

‘This young couple formed at length the healthy resolution of
interchanging their discoveries, openly, sensibly, and tenderly.  They
met for that purpose.  After some innocent and generous talk, they agreed
to dissolve their existing, and their intended, relations, for ever and
ever.’

Mr. Grewgious saw a ghastly figure rise, open-mouthed, from the
easy-chair, and lift its outspread hands towards its head.

‘One of this young couple, and that one your nephew, fearful, however,
that in the tenderness of your affection for him you would be bitterly
disappointed by so wide a departure from his projected life, forbore to
tell you the secret, for a few days, and left it to be disclosed by me,
when I should come down to speak to you, and he would be gone.  I speak
to you, and he is gone.’

Mr. Grewgious saw the ghastly figure throw back its head, clutch its hair
with its hands, and turn with a writhing action from him.

‘I have now said all I have to say: except that this young couple parted,
firmly, though not without tears and sorrow, on the evening when you last
saw them together.’

Mr. Grewgious heard a terrible shriek, and saw no ghastly figure, sitting
or standing; saw nothing but a heap of torn and miry clothes upon the
floor.

Not changing his action even then, he opened and shut the palms of his
hands as he warmed them, and looked down at it.




CHAPTER XVI—DEVOTED


When John Jasper recovered from his fit or swoon, he found himself being
tended by Mr. and Mrs. Tope, whom his visitor had summoned for the
purpose.  His visitor, wooden of aspect, sat stiffly in a chair, with his
hands upon his knees, watching his recovery.

‘There!  You’ve come to nicely now, sir,’ said the tearful Mrs. Tope;
‘you were thoroughly worn out, and no wonder!’

‘A man,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with his usual air of repeating a lesson,
‘cannot have his rest broken, and his mind cruelly tormented, and his
body overtaxed by fatigue, without being thoroughly worn out.’

‘I fear I have alarmed you?’ Jasper apologised faintly, when he was
helped into his easy-chair.

‘Not at all, I thank you,’ answered Mr. Grewgious.

‘You are too considerate.’

‘Not at all, I thank you,’ answered Mr. Grewgious again.

‘You must take some wine, sir,’ said Mrs. Tope, ‘and the jelly that I had
ready for you, and that you wouldn’t put your lips to at noon, though I
warned you what would come of it, you know, and you not breakfasted; and
you must have a wing of the roast fowl that has been put back twenty
times if it’s been put back once.  It shall all be on table in five
minutes, and this good gentleman belike will stop and see you take it.’

This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean yes, or no, or
anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would have found highly
mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the service of the
table.

‘You will take something with me?’ said Jasper, as the cloth was laid.

‘I couldn’t get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,’ answered Mr.
Grewgious.

Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously.  Combined with the hurry in
his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the taste of what he
took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify himself against any
other failure of the spirits, far more than to gratify his palate.  Mr.
Grewgious in the meantime sat upright, with no expression in his face,
and a hard kind of imperturbably polite protest all over him: as though
he would have said, in reply to some invitation to discourse; ‘I couldn’t
originate the faintest approach to an observation on any subject
whatever, I thank you.’

‘Do you know,’ said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate and glass,
and had sat meditating for a few minutes: ‘do you know that I find some
crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you have so much amazed
me?’

‘_Do_ you?’ returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the unspoken
clause: ‘I don’t, I thank you!’

‘After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear boy, so
entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I had built
for him; and after having had time to think of it; yes.’

‘I shall be glad to pick up your crumbs,’ said Mr. Grewgious, dryly.

‘Is there not, or is there—if I deceive myself, tell me so, and shorten
my pain—is there not, or is there, hope that, finding himself in this new
position, and becoming sensitively alive to the awkward burden of
explanation, in this quarter, and that, and the other, with which it
would load him, he avoided the awkwardness, and took to flight?’

‘Such a thing might be,’ said Mr. Grewgious, pondering.

‘Such a thing has been.  I have read of cases in which people, rather
than face a seven days’ wonder, and have to account for themselves to the
idle and impertinent, have taken themselves away, and been long unheard
of.’

‘I believe such things have happened,’ said Mr. Grewgious, pondering
still.

‘When I had, and could have, no suspicion,’ pursued Jasper, eagerly
following the new track, ‘that the dear lost boy had withheld anything
from me—most of all, such a leading matter as this—what gleam of light
was there for me in the whole black sky?  When I supposed that his
intended wife was here, and his marriage close at hand, how could I
entertain the possibility of his voluntarily leaving this place, in a
manner that would be so unaccountable, capricious, and cruel?  But now
that I know what you have told me, is there no little chink through which
day pierces?  Supposing him to have disappeared of his own act, is not
his disappearance more accountable and less cruel?  The fact of his
having just parted from your ward, is in itself a sort of reason for his
going away.  It does not make his mysterious departure the less cruel to
me, it is true; but it relieves it of cruelty to her.’

Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.

‘And even as to me,’ continued Jasper, still pursuing the new track, with
ardour, and, as he did so, brightening with hope: ‘he knew that you were
coming to me; he knew that you were intrusted to tell me what you have
told me; if your doing so has awakened a new train of thought in my
perplexed mind, it reasonably follows that, from the same premises, he
might have foreseen the inferences that I should draw.  Grant that he did
foresee them; and even the cruelty to me—and who am I!—John Jasper, Music
Master, vanishes!’—

Once more, Mr. Grewgious could not but assent to this.

‘I have had my distrusts, and terrible distrusts they have been,’ said
Jasper; ‘but your disclosure, overpowering as it was at first—showing me
that my own dear boy had had a great disappointing reservation from me,
who so fondly loved him, kindles hope within me.  You do not extinguish
it when I state it, but admit it to be a reasonable hope.  I begin to
believe it possible:’ here he clasped his hands: ‘that he may have
disappeared from among us of his own accord, and that he may yet be alive
and well.’

Mr. Crisparkle came in at the moment.  To whom Mr. Jasper repeated:

‘I begin to believe it possible that he may have disappeared of his own
accord, and may yet be alive and well.’

Mr. Crisparkle taking a seat, and inquiring: ‘Why so?’  Mr. Jasper
repeated the arguments he had just set forth.  If they had been less
plausible than they were, the good Minor Canon’s mind would have been in
a state of preparation to receive them, as exculpatory of his unfortunate
pupil.  But he, too, did really attach great importance to the lost young
man’s having been, so immediately before his disappearance, placed in a
new and embarrassing relation towards every one acquainted with his
projects and affairs; and the fact seemed to him to present the question
in a new light.

‘I stated to Mr. Sapsea, when we waited on him,’ said Jasper: as he
really had done: ‘that there was no quarrel or difference between the two
young men at their last meeting.  We all know that their first meeting
was unfortunately very far from amicable; but all went smoothly and
quietly when they were last together at my house.  My dear boy was not in
his usual spirits; he was depressed—I noticed that—and I am bound
henceforth to dwell upon the circumstance the more, now that I know there
was a special reason for his being depressed: a reason, moreover, which
may possibly have induced him to absent himself.’

‘I pray to Heaven it may turn out so!’ exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle.

‘_I_ pray to Heaven it may turn out so!’ repeated Jasper.  ‘You know—and
Mr. Grewgious should now know likewise—that I took a great prepossession
against Mr. Neville Landless, arising out of his furious conduct on that
first occasion.  You know that I came to you, extremely apprehensive, on
my dear boy’s behalf, of his mad violence.  You know that I even entered
in my Diary, and showed the entry to you, that I had dark forebodings
against him.  Mr. Grewgious ought to be possessed of the whole case.  He
shall not, through any suppression of mine, be informed of a part of it,
and kept in ignorance of another part of it.  I wish him to be good
enough to understand that the communication he has made to me has
hopefully influenced my mind, in spite of its having been, before this
mysterious occurrence took place, profoundly impressed against young
Landless.’

This fairness troubled the Minor Canon much.  He felt that he was not as
open in his own dealing.  He charged against himself reproachfully that
he had suppressed, so far, the two points of a second strong outbreak of
temper against Edwin Drood on the part of Neville, and of the passion of
jealousy having, to his own certain knowledge, flamed up in Neville’s
breast against him.  He was convinced of Neville’s innocence of any part
in the ugly disappearance; and yet so many little circumstances combined
so wofully against him, that he dreaded to add two more to their
cumulative weight.  He was among the truest of men; but he had been
balancing in his mind, much to its distress, whether his volunteering to
tell these two fragments of truth, at this time, would not be tantamount
to a piecing together of falsehood in the place of truth.

However, here was a model before him.  He hesitated no longer.
Addressing Mr. Grewgious, as one placed in authority by the revelation he
had brought to bear on the mystery (and surpassingly Angular Mr.
Grewgious became when he found himself in that unexpected position), Mr.
Crisparkle bore his testimony to Mr. Jasper’s strict sense of justice,
and, expressing his absolute confidence in the complete clearance of his
pupil from the least taint of suspicion, sooner or later, avowed that his
confidence in that young gentleman had been formed, in spite of his
confidential knowledge that his temper was of the hottest and fiercest,
and that it was directly incensed against Mr. Jasper’s nephew, by the
circumstance of his romantically supposing himself to be enamoured of the
same young lady.  The sanguine reaction manifest in Mr. Jasper was proof
even against this unlooked-for declaration.  It turned him paler; but he
repeated that he would cling to the hope he had derived from Mr.
Grewgious; and that if no trace of his dear boy were found, leading to
the dreadful inference that he had been made away with, he would cherish
unto the last stretch of possibility the idea, that he might have
absconded of his own wild will.

Now, it fell out that Mr. Crisparkle, going away from this conference
still very uneasy in his mind, and very much troubled on behalf of the
young man whom he held as a kind of prisoner in his own house, took a
memorable night walk.

He walked to Cloisterham Weir.

He often did so, and consequently there was nothing remarkable in his
footsteps tending that way.  But the preoccupation of his mind so
hindered him from planning any walk, or taking heed of the objects he
passed, that his first consciousness of being near the Weir, was derived
from the sound of the falling water close at hand.

‘How did I come here!’ was his first thought, as he stopped.

‘Why did I come here!’ was his second.

Then, he stood intently listening to the water.  A familiar passage in
his reading, about airy tongues that syllable men’s names, rose so
unbidden to his ear, that he put it from him with his hand, as if it were
tangible.

It was starlight.  The Weir was full two miles above the spot to which
the young men had repaired to watch the storm.  No search had been made
up here, for the tide had been running strongly down, at that time of the
night of Christmas Eve, and the likeliest places for the discovery of a
body, if a fatal accident had happened under such circumstances, all
lay—both when the tide ebbed, and when it flowed again—between that spot
and the sea.  The water came over the Weir, with its usual sound on a
cold starlight night, and little could be seen of it; yet Mr. Crisparkle
had a strange idea that something unusual hung about the place.

He reasoned with himself: What was it?  Where was it?  Put it to the
proof.  Which sense did it address?

No sense reported anything unusual there.  He listened again, and his
sense of hearing again checked the water coming over the Weir, with its
usual sound on a cold starlight night.

Knowing very well that the mystery with which his mind was occupied,
might of itself give the place this haunted air, he strained those hawk’s
eyes of his for the correction of his sight.  He got closer to the Weir,
and peered at its well-known posts and timbers.  Nothing in the least
unusual was remotely shadowed forth.  But he resolved that he would come
back early in the morning.

The Weir ran through his broken sleep, all night, and he was back again
at sunrise.  It was a bright frosty morning.  The whole composition
before him, when he stood where he had stood last night, was clearly
discernible in its minutest details.  He had surveyed it closely for some
minutes, and was about to withdraw his eyes, when they were attracted
keenly to one spot.

He turned his back upon the Weir, and looked far away at the sky, and at
the earth, and then looked again at that one spot.  It caught his sight
again immediately, and he concentrated his vision upon it.  He could not
lose it now, though it was but such a speck in the landscape.  It
fascinated his sight.  His hands began plucking off his coat.  For it
struck him that at that spot—a corner of the Weir—something glistened,
which did not move and come over with the glistening water-drops, but
remained stationary.

He assured himself of this, he threw off his clothes, he plunged into the
icy water, and swam for the spot.  Climbing the timbers, he took from
them, caught among their interstices by its chain, a gold watch, bearing
engraved upon its back E. D.

He brought the watch to the bank, swam to the Weir again, climbed it, and
dived off.  He knew every hole and corner of all the depths, and dived
and dived and dived, until he could bear the cold no more.  His notion
was, that he would find the body; he only found a shirt-pin sticking in
some mud and ooze.

With these discoveries he returned to Cloisterham, and, taking Neville
Landless with him, went straight to the Mayor.  Mr. Jasper was sent for,
the watch and shirt-pin were identified, Neville was detained, and the
wildest frenzy and fatuity of evil report rose against him.  He was of
that vindictive and violent nature, that but for his poor sister, who
alone had influence over him, and out of whose sight he was never to be
trusted, he would be in the daily commission of murder.  Before coming to
England he had caused to be whipped to death sundry ‘Natives’—nomadic
persons, encamping now in Asia, now in Africa, now in the West Indies,
and now at the North Pole—vaguely supposed in Cloisterham to be always
black, always of great virtue, always calling themselves Me, and
everybody else Massa or Missie (according to sex), and always reading
tracts of the obscurest meaning, in broken English, but always accurately
understanding them in the purest mother tongue.  He had nearly brought
Mrs. Crisparkle’s grey hairs with sorrow to the grave.  (Those original
expressions were Mr. Sapsea’s.)  He had repeatedly said he would have Mr.
Crisparkle’s life.  He had repeatedly said he would have everybody’s
life, and become in effect the last man.  He had been brought down to
Cloisterham, from London, by an eminent Philanthropist, and why?  Because
that Philanthropist had expressly declared: ‘I owe it to my
fellow-creatures that he should be, in the words of BENTHAM, where he is
the cause of the greatest danger to the smallest number.’

These dropping shots from the blunderbusses of blunderheadedness might
not have hit him in a vital place.  But he had to stand against a trained
and well-directed fire of arms of precision too.  He had notoriously
threatened the lost young man, and had, according to the showing of his
own faithful friend and tutor who strove so hard for him, a cause of
bitter animosity (created by himself, and stated by himself), against
that ill-starred fellow.  He had armed himself with an offensive weapon
for the fatal night, and he had gone off early in the morning, after
making preparations for departure.  He had been found with traces of
blood on him; truly, they might have been wholly caused as he
represented, but they might not, also.  On a search-warrant being issued
for the examination of his room, clothes, and so forth, it was discovered
that he had destroyed all his papers, and rearranged all his possessions,
on the very afternoon of the disappearance.  The watch found at the Weir
was challenged by the jeweller as one he had wound and set for Edwin
Drood, at twenty minutes past two on that same afternoon; and it had run
down, before being cast into the water; and it was the jeweller’s
positive opinion that it had never been re-wound.  This would justify the
hypothesis that the watch was taken from him not long after he left Mr.
Jasper’s house at midnight, in company with the last person seen with
him, and that it had been thrown away after being retained some hours.
Why thrown away?  If he had been murdered, and so artfully disfigured, or
concealed, or both, as that the murderer hoped identification to be
impossible, except from something that he wore, assuredly the murderer
would seek to remove from the body the most lasting, the best known, and
the most easily recognisable, things upon it.  Those things would be the
watch and shirt-pin.  As to his opportunities of casting them into the
river; if he were the object of these suspicions, they were easy.  For,
he had been seen by many persons, wandering about on that side of the
city—indeed on all sides of it—in a miserable and seemingly
half-distracted manner.  As to the choice of the spot, obviously such
criminating evidence had better take its chance of being found anywhere,
rather than upon himself, or in his possession.  Concerning the
reconciliatory nature of the appointed meeting between the two young men,
very little could be made of that in young Landless’s favour; for it
distinctly appeared that the meeting originated, not with him, but with
Mr. Crisparkle, and that it had been urged on by Mr. Crisparkle; and who
could say how unwillingly, or in what ill-conditioned mood, his enforced
pupil had gone to it?  The more his case was looked into, the weaker it
became in every point.  Even the broad suggestion that the lost young man
had absconded, was rendered additionally improbable on the showing of the
young lady from whom he had so lately parted; for; what did she say, with
great earnestness and sorrow, when interrogated?  That he had, expressly
and enthusiastically, planned with her, that he would await the arrival
of her guardian, Mr. Grewgious.  And yet, be it observed, he disappeared
before that gentleman appeared.

On the suspicions thus urged and supported, Neville was detained, and
re-detained, and the search was pressed on every hand, and Jasper
laboured night and day.  But nothing more was found.  No discovery being
made, which proved the lost man to be dead, it at length became necessary
to release the person suspected of having made away with him.  Neville
was set at large.  Then, a consequence ensued which Mr. Crisparkle had
too well foreseen.  Neville must leave the place, for the place shunned
him and cast him out.  Even had it not been so, the dear old china
shepherdess would have worried herself to death with fears for her son,
and with general trepidation occasioned by their having such an inmate.
Even had that not been so, the authority to which the Minor Canon
deferred officially, would have settled the point.

‘Mr. Crisparkle,’ quoth the Dean, ‘human justice may err, but it must act
according to its lights.  The days of taking sanctuary are past.  This
young man must not take sanctuary with us.’

‘You mean that he must leave my house, sir?’

‘Mr. Crisparkle,’ returned the prudent Dean, ‘I claim no authority in
your house.  I merely confer with you, on the painful necessity you find
yourself under, of depriving this young man of the great advantages of
your counsel and instruction.’

‘It is very lamentable, sir,’ Mr. Crisparkle represented.

‘Very much so,’ the Dean assented.

‘And if it be a necessity—’ Mr. Crisparkle faltered.

‘As you unfortunately find it to be,’ returned the Dean.

Mr. Crisparkle bowed submissively: ‘It is hard to prejudge his case, sir,
but I am sensible that—’

‘Just so.  Perfectly.  As you say, Mr. Crisparkle,’ interposed the Dean,
nodding his head smoothly, ‘there is nothing else to be done.  No doubt,
no doubt.  There is no alternative, as your good sense has discovered.’

‘I am entirely satisfied of his perfect innocence, sir, nevertheless.’

‘We-e-ell!’ said the Dean, in a more confidential tone, and slightly
glancing around him, ‘I would not say so, generally.  Not generally.
Enough of suspicion attaches to him to—no, I think I would not say so,
generally.’

Mr. Crisparkle bowed again.

‘It does not become us, perhaps,’ pursued the Dean, ‘to be partisans.
Not partisans.  We clergy keep our hearts warm and our heads cool, and we
hold a judicious middle course.’

‘I hope you do not object, sir, to my having stated in public,
emphatically, that he will reappear here, whenever any new suspicion may
be awakened, or any new circumstance may come to light in this
extraordinary matter?’

‘Not at all,’ returned the Dean.  ‘And yet, do you know, I don’t think,’
with a very nice and neat emphasis on those two words: ‘I _don’t think_ I
would state it emphatically.  State it?  Ye-e-es!  But emphatically?
No-o-o.  I _think_ not.  In point of fact, Mr. Crisparkle, keeping our
hearts warm and our heads cool, we clergy need do nothing emphatically.’

So Minor Canon Row knew Neville Landless no more; and he went
whithersoever he would, or could, with a blight upon his name and fame.

It was not until then that John Jasper silently resumed his place in the
choir.  Haggard and red-eyed, his hopes plainly had deserted him, his
sanguine mood was gone, and all his worst misgivings had come back.  A
day or two afterwards, while unrobing, he took his Diary from a pocket of
his coat, turned the leaves, and with an impressive look, and without one
spoken word, handed this entry to Mr. Crisparkle to read:

‘My dear boy is murdered.  The discovery of the watch and shirt-pin
convinces me that he was murdered that night, and that his jewellery was
taken from him to prevent identification by its means.  All the delusive
hopes I had founded on his separation from his betrothed wife, I give to
the winds.  They perish before this fatal discovery.  I now swear, and
record the oath on this page, That I nevermore will discuss this mystery
with any human creature until I hold the clue to it in my hand.  That I
never will relax in my secrecy or in my search.  That I will fasten the
crime of the murder of my dear dead boy upon the murderer.  And, That I
devote myself to his destruction.’




CHAPTER XVII—PHILANTHROPY, PROFESSIONAL AND UNPROFESSIONAL


Full half a year had come and gone, and Mr. Crisparkle sat in a
waiting-room in the London chief offices of the Haven of Philanthropy,
until he could have audience of Mr. Honeythunder.

In his college days of athletic exercises, Mr. Crisparkle had known
professors of the Noble Art of fisticuffs, and had attended two or three
of their gloved gatherings.  He had now an opportunity of observing that
as to the phrenological formation of the backs of their heads, the
Professing Philanthropists were uncommonly like the Pugilists.  In the
development of all those organs which constitute, or attend, a propensity
to ‘pitch into’ your fellow-creatures, the Philanthropists were
remarkably favoured.  There were several Professors passing in and out,
with exactly the aggressive air upon them of being ready for a turn-up
with any Novice who might happen to be on hand, that Mr. Crisparkle well
remembered in the circles of the Fancy.  Preparations were in progress
for a moral little Mill somewhere on the rural circuit, and other
Professors were backing this or that Heavy-Weight as good for such or
such speech-making hits, so very much after the manner of the sporting
publicans, that the intended Resolutions might have been Rounds.  In an
official manager of these displays much celebrated for his platform
tactics, Mr. Crisparkle recognised (in a suit of black) the counterpart
of a deceased benefactor of his species, an eminent public character,
once known to fame as Frosty-faced Fogo, who in days of yore
superintended the formation of the magic circle with the ropes and
stakes.  There were only three conditions of resemblance wanting between
these Professors and those.  Firstly, the Philanthropists were in very
bad training: much too fleshy, and presenting, both in face and figure, a
superabundance of what is known to Pugilistic Experts as Suet Pudding.
Secondly, the Philanthropists had not the good temper of the Pugilists,
and used worse language.  Thirdly, their fighting code stood in great
need of revision, as empowering them not only to bore their man to the
ropes, but to bore him to the confines of distraction; also to hit him
when he was down, hit him anywhere and anyhow, kick him, stamp upon him,
gouge him, and maul him behind his back without mercy.  In these last
particulars the Professors of the Noble Art were much nobler than the
Professors of Philanthropy.

Mr. Crisparkle was so completely lost in musing on these similarities and
dissimilarities, at the same time watching the crowd which came and went
by, always, as it seemed, on errands of antagonistically snatching
something from somebody, and never giving anything to anybody, that his
name was called before he heard it.  On his at length responding, he was
shown by a miserably shabby and underpaid stipendiary Philanthropist (who
could hardly have done worse if he had taken service with a declared
enemy of the human race) to Mr. Honeythunder’s room.

‘Sir,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, in his tremendous voice, like a
schoolmaster issuing orders to a boy of whom he had a bad opinion, ‘sit
down.’

Mr. Crisparkle seated himself.

Mr. Honeythunder having signed the remaining few score of a few thousand
circulars, calling upon a corresponding number of families without means
to come forward, stump up instantly, and be Philanthropists, or go to the
Devil, another shabby stipendiary Philanthropist (highly disinterested,
if in earnest) gathered these into a basket and walked off with them.

‘Now, Mr. Crisparkle,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, turning his chair half
round towards him when they were alone, and squaring his arms with his
hands on his knees, and his brows knitted, as if he added, I am going to
make short work of _you_: ‘Now, Mr. Crisparkle, we entertain different
views, you and I, sir, of the sanctity of human life.’

‘Do we?’ returned the Minor Canon.

‘We do, sir?’

‘Might I ask you,’ said the Minor Canon: ‘what are your views on that
subject?’

‘That human life is a thing to be held sacred, sir.’

‘Might I ask you,’ pursued the Minor Canon as before: ‘what you suppose
to be my views on that subject?’

‘By George, sir!’ returned the Philanthropist, squaring his arms still
more, as he frowned on Mr. Crisparkle: ‘they are best known to yourself.’

‘Readily admitted.  But you began by saying that we took different views,
you know.  Therefore (or you could not say so) you must have set up some
views as mine.  Pray, what views _have_ you set up as mine?’

‘Here is a man—and a young man,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, as if that made
the matter infinitely worse, and he could have easily borne the loss of
an old one, ‘swept off the face of the earth by a deed of violence.  What
do you call that?’

‘Murder,’ said the Minor Canon.

‘What do you call the doer of that deed, sir?

‘A murderer,’ said the Minor Canon.

‘I am glad to hear you admit so much, sir,’ retorted Mr. Honeythunder, in
his most offensive manner; ‘and I candidly tell you that I didn’t expect
it.’  Here he lowered heavily at Mr. Crisparkle again.

‘Be so good as to explain what you mean by those very unjustifiable
expressions.’

‘I don’t sit here, sir,’ returned the Philanthropist, raising his voice
to a roar, ‘to be browbeaten.’

‘As the only other person present, no one can possibly know that better
than I do,’ returned the Minor Canon very quietly.  ‘But I interrupt your
explanation.’

‘Murder!’ proceeded Mr. Honeythunder, in a kind of boisterous reverie,
with his platform folding of his arms, and his platform nod of abhorrent
reflection after each short sentiment of a word.  ‘Bloodshed!  Abel!
Cain!  I hold no terms with Cain.  I repudiate with a shudder the red
hand when it is offered me.’

Instead of instantly leaping into his chair and cheering himself hoarse,
as the Brotherhood in public meeting assembled would infallibly have done
on this cue, Mr. Crisparkle merely reversed the quiet crossing of his
legs, and said mildly: ‘Don’t let me interrupt your explanation—when you
begin it.’

‘The Commandments say, no murder.  NO murder, sir!’ proceeded Mr.
Honeythunder, platformally pausing as if he took Mr. Crisparkle to task
for having distinctly asserted that they said: You may do a little
murder, and then leave off.

‘And they also say, you shall bear no false witness,’ observed Mr.
Crisparkle.

‘Enough!’ bellowed Mr. Honeythunder, with a solemnity and severity that
would have brought the house down at a meeting, ‘E-e-nough!  My late
wards being now of age, and I being released from a trust which I cannot
contemplate without a thrill of horror, there are the accounts which you
have undertaken to accept on their behalf, and there is a statement of
the balance which you have undertaken to receive, and which you cannot
receive too soon.  And let me tell you, sir, I wish that, as a man and a
Minor Canon, you were better employed,’ with a nod.  ‘Better employed,’
with another nod.  ‘Bet-ter em-ployed!’ with another and the three nods
added up.

Mr. Crisparkle rose; a little heated in the face, but with perfect
command of himself.

‘Mr. Honeythunder,’ he said, taking up the papers referred to: ‘my being
better or worse employed than I am at present is a matter of taste and
opinion.  You might think me better employed in enrolling myself a member
of your Society.’

‘Ay, indeed, sir!’ retorted Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head in a
threatening manner.  ‘It would have been better for you if you had done
that long ago!’

‘I think otherwise.’

‘Or,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, shaking his head again, ‘I might think one
of your profession better employed in devoting himself to the discovery
and punishment of guilt than in leaving that duty to be undertaken by a
layman.’

‘I may regard my profession from a point of view which teaches me that
its first duty is towards those who are in necessity and tribulation, who
are desolate and oppressed,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘However, as I have
quite clearly satisfied myself that it is no part of my profession to
make professions, I say no more of that.  But I owe it to Mr. Neville,
and to Mr. Neville’s sister (and in a much lower degree to myself), to
say to you that I _know_ I was in the full possession and understanding
of Mr. Neville’s mind and heart at the time of this occurrence; and that,
without in the least colouring or concealing what was to be deplored in
him and required to be corrected, I feel certain that his tale is true.
Feeling that certainty, I befriend him.  As long as that certainty shall
last, I will befriend him.  And if any consideration could shake me in
this resolve, I should be so ashamed of myself for my meanness, that no
man’s good opinion—no, nor no woman’s—so gained, could compensate me for
the loss of my own.’

Good fellow! manly fellow!  And he was so modest, too.  There was no more
self-assertion in the Minor Canon than in the schoolboy who had stood in
the breezy playing-fields keeping a wicket.  He was simply and staunchly
true to his duty alike in the large case and in the small.  So all true
souls ever are.  So every true soul ever was, ever is, and ever will be.
There is nothing little to the really great in spirit.

‘Then who do you make out did the deed?’ asked Mr. Honeythunder, turning
on him abruptly.

‘Heaven forbid,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that in my desire to clear one man
I should lightly criminate another!  I accuse no one.’

‘Tcha!’ ejaculated Mr. Honeythunder with great disgust; for this was by
no means the principle on which the Philanthropic Brotherhood usually
proceeded.  ‘And, sir, you are not a disinterested witness, we must bear
in mind.’

‘How am I an interested one?’ inquired Mr. Crisparkle, smiling
innocently, at a loss to imagine.

‘There was a certain stipend, sir, paid to you for your pupil, which may
have warped your judgment a bit,’ said Mr. Honeythunder, coarsely.

‘Perhaps I expect to retain it still?’  Mr. Crisparkle returned,
enlightened; ‘do you mean that too?’

‘Well, sir,’ returned the professional Philanthropist, getting up and
thrusting his hands down into his trousers-pockets, ‘I don’t go about
measuring people for caps.  If people find I have any about me that fit
’em, they can put ’em on and wear ’em, if they like.  That’s their look
out: not mine.’

Mr. Crisparkle eyed him with a just indignation, and took him to task
thus:

‘Mr. Honeythunder, I hoped when I came in here that I might be under no
necessity of commenting on the introduction of platform manners or
platform manœuvres among the decent forbearances of private life.  But
you have given me such a specimen of both, that I should be a fit subject
for both if I remained silent respecting them.  They are detestable.’

‘They don’t suit _you_, I dare say, sir.’

‘They are,’ repeated Mr. Crisparkle, without noticing the interruption,
‘detestable.  They violate equally the justice that should belong to
Christians, and the restraints that should belong to gentlemen.  You
assume a great crime to have been committed by one whom I, acquainted
with the attendant circumstances, and having numerous reasons on my side,
devoutly believe to be innocent of it.  Because I differ from you on that
vital point, what is your platform resource?  Instantly to turn upon me,
charging that I have no sense of the enormity of the crime itself, but am
its aider and abettor!  So, another time—taking me as representing your
opponent in other cases—you set up a platform credulity; a moved and
seconded and carried-unanimously profession of faith in some ridiculous
delusion or mischievous imposition.  I decline to believe it, and you
fall back upon your platform resource of proclaiming that I believe
nothing; that because I will not bow down to a false God of your making,
I deny the true God!  Another time you make the platform discovery that
War is a calamity, and you propose to abolish it by a string of twisted
resolutions tossed into the air like the tail of a kite.  I do not admit
the discovery to be yours in the least, and I have not a grain of faith
in your remedy.  Again, your platform resource of representing me as
revelling in the horrors of a battle-field like a fiend incarnate!
Another time, in another of your undiscriminating platform rushes, you
would punish the sober for the drunken.  I claim consideration for the
comfort, convenience, and refreshment of the sober; and you presently
make platform proclamation that I have a depraved desire to turn Heaven’s
creatures into swine and wild beasts!  In all such cases your movers, and
your seconders, and your supporters—your regular Professors of all
degrees, run amuck like so many mad Malays; habitually attributing the
lowest and basest motives with the utmost recklessness (let me call your
attention to a recent instance in yourself for which you should blush),
and quoting figures which you know to be as wilfully onesided as a
statement of any complicated account that should be all Creditor side and
no Debtor, or all Debtor side and no Creditor.  Therefore it is, Mr.
Honeythunder, that I consider the platform a sufficiently bad example and
a sufficiently bad school, even in public life; but hold that, carried
into private life, it becomes an unendurable nuisance.’

‘These are strong words, sir!’ exclaimed the Philanthropist.

‘I hope so,’ said Mr. Crisparkle.  ‘Good morning.’

He walked out of the Haven at a great rate, but soon fell into his
regular brisk pace, and soon had a smile upon his face as he went along,
wondering what the china shepherdess would have said if she had seen him
pounding Mr. Honeythunder in the late little lively affair.  For Mr.
Crisparkle had just enough of harmless vanity to hope that he had hit
hard, and to glow with the belief that he had trimmed the Philanthropic
Jacket pretty handsomely.

He took himself to Staple Inn, but not to P. J. T. and Mr. Grewgious.
Full many a creaking stair he climbed before he reached some attic rooms
in a corner, turned the latch of their unbolted door, and stood beside
the table of Neville Landless.

An air of retreat and solitude hung about the rooms and about their
inhabitant.  He was much worn, and so were they.  Their sloping ceilings,
cumbrous rusty locks and grates, and heavy wooden bins and beams, slowly
mouldering withal, had a prisonous look, and he had the haggard face of a
prisoner.  Yet the sunlight shone in at the ugly garret-window, which had
a penthouse to itself thrust out among the tiles; and on the cracked and
smoke-blackened parapet beyond, some of the deluded sparrows of the place
rheumatically hopped, like little feathered cripples who had left their
crutches in their nests; and there was a play of living leaves at hand
that changed the air, and made an imperfect sort of music in it that
would have been melody in the country.

The rooms were sparely furnished, but with good store of books.
Everything expressed the abode of a poor student.  That Mr. Crisparkle
had been either chooser, lender, or donor of the books, or that he
combined the three characters, might have been easily seen in the
friendly beam of his eyes upon them as he entered.

‘How goes it, Neville?’

‘I am in good heart, Mr. Crisparkle, and working away.’

‘I wish your eyes were not quite so large and not quite so bright,’ said
the Minor Canon, slowly releasing the hand he had taken in his.

‘They brighten at the sight of you,’ returned Neville.  ‘If you were to
fall away from me, they would soon be dull enough.’

‘Rally, rally!’ urged the other, in a stimulating tone.  ‘Fight for it,
Neville!’

‘If I were dying, I feel as if a word from you would rally me; if my
pulse had stopped, I feel as if your touch would make it beat again,’
said Neville.  ‘But I _have_ rallied, and am doing famously.’

Mr. Crisparkle turned him with his face a little more towards the light.

‘I want to see a ruddier touch here, Neville,’ he said, indicating his
own healthy cheek by way of pattern.  ‘I want more sun to shine upon
you.’

Neville drooped suddenly, as he replied in a lowered voice: ‘I am not
hardy enough for that, yet.  I may become so, but I cannot bear it yet.
If you had gone through those Cloisterham streets as I did; if you had
seen, as I did, those averted eyes, and the better sort of people
silently giving me too much room to pass, that I might not touch them or
come near them, you wouldn’t think it quite unreasonable that I cannot go
about in the daylight.’

‘My poor fellow!’ said the Minor Canon, in a tone so purely sympathetic
that the young man caught his hand, ‘I never said it was unreasonable;
never thought so.  But I should like you to do it.’

‘And that would give me the strongest motive to do it.  But I cannot yet.
I cannot persuade myself that the eyes of even the stream of strangers I
pass in this vast city look at me without suspicion.  I feel marked and
tainted, even when I go out—as I do only—at night.  But the darkness
covers me then, and I take courage from it.’

Mr. Crisparkle laid a hand upon his shoulder, and stood looking down at
him.

‘If I could have changed my name,’ said Neville, ‘I would have done so.
But as you wisely pointed out to me, I can’t do that, for it would look
like guilt.  If I could have gone to some distant place, I might have
found relief in that, but the thing is not to be thought of, for the same
reason.  Hiding and escaping would be the construction in either case.
It seems a little hard to be so tied to a stake, and innocent; but I
don’t complain.’

‘And you must expect no miracle to help you, Neville,’ said Mr.
Crisparkle, compassionately.

‘No, sir, I know that.  The ordinary fulness of time and circumstances is
all I have to trust to.’

‘It will right you at last, Neville.’

‘So I believe, and I hope I may live to know it.’

But perceiving that the despondent mood into which he was falling cast a
shadow on the Minor Canon, and (it may be) feeling that the broad hand
upon his shoulder was not then quite as steady as its own natural
strength had rendered it when it first touched him just now, he
brightened and said:

‘Excellent circumstances for study, anyhow! and you know, Mr. Crisparkle,
what need I have of study in all ways.  Not to mention that you have
advised me to study for the difficult profession of the law, specially,
and that of course I am guiding myself by the advice of such a friend and
helper.  Such a good friend and helper!’

He took the fortifying hand from his shoulder, and kissed it.  Mr.
Crisparkle beamed at the books, but not so brightly as when he had
entered.

‘I gather from your silence on the subject that my late guardian is
adverse, Mr. Crisparkle?’

The Minor Canon answered: ‘Your late guardian is a—a most unreasonable
person, and it signifies nothing to any reasonable person whether he is
_ad_verse, _per_verse, or the _re_verse.’

‘Well for me that I have enough with economy to live upon,’ sighed
Neville, half wearily and half cheerily, ‘while I wait to be learned, and
wait to be righted!  Else I might have proved the proverb, that while the
grass grows, the steed starves!’

He opened some books as he said it, and was soon immersed in their
interleaved and annotated passages; while Mr. Crisparkle sat beside him,
expounding, correcting, and advising.  The Minor Canon’s Cathedral duties
made these visits of his difficult to accomplish, and only to be
compassed at intervals of many weeks.  But they were as serviceable as
they were precious to Neville Landless.

When they had got through such studies as they had in hand, they stood
leaning on the window-sill, and looking down upon the patch of garden.
‘Next week,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘you will cease to be alone, and will
have a devoted companion.’

‘And yet,’ returned Neville, ‘this seems an uncongenial place to bring my
sister to.’

‘I don’t think so,’ said the Minor Canon.  ‘There is duty to be done
here; and there are womanly feeling, sense, and courage wanted here.’

‘I meant,’ explained Neville, ‘that the surroundings are so dull and
unwomanly, and that Helena can have no suitable friend or society here.’

‘You have only to remember,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘that you are here
yourself, and that she has to draw you into the sunlight.’

They were silent for a little while, and then Mr. Crisparkle began anew.

‘When we first spoke together, Neville, you told me that your sister had
risen out of the disadvantages of your past lives as superior to you as
the tower of Cloisterham Cathedral is higher than the chimneys of Minor
Canon Corner.  Do you remember that?’

‘Right well!’

‘I was inclined to think it at the time an enthusiastic flight.  No
matter what I think it now.  What I would emphasise is, that under the
head of Pride your sister is a great and opportune example to you.’

‘Under _all_ heads that are included in the composition of a fine
character, she is.’

‘Say so; but take this one.  Your sister has learnt how to govern what is
proud in her nature.  She can dominate it even when it is wounded through
her sympathy with you.  No doubt she has suffered deeply in those same
streets where you suffered deeply.  No doubt her life is darkened by the
cloud that darkens yours.  But bending her pride into a grand composure
that is not haughty or aggressive, but is a sustained confidence in you
and in the truth, she has won her way through those streets until she
passes along them as high in the general respect as any one who treads
them.  Every day and hour of her life since Edwin Drood’s disappearance,
she has faced malignity and folly—for you—as only a brave nature well
directed can.  So it will be with her to the end.  Another and weaker
kind of pride might sink broken-hearted, but never such a pride as hers:
which knows no shrinking, and can get no mastery over her.’

The pale cheek beside him flushed under the comparison, and the hint
implied in it.

‘I will do all I can to imitate her,’ said Neville.

‘Do so, and be a truly brave man, as she is a truly brave woman,’
answered Mr. Crisparkle stoutly.  ‘It is growing dark.  Will you go my
way with me, when it is quite dark?  Mind! it is not I who wait for
darkness.’

Neville replied, that he would accompany him directly.  But Mr.
Crisparkle said he had a moment’s call to make on Mr. Grewgious as an act
of courtesy, and would run across to that gentleman’s chambers, and
rejoin Neville on his own doorstep, if he would come down there to meet
him.

Mr. Grewgious, bolt upright as usual, sat taking his wine in the dusk at
his open window; his wineglass and decanter on the round table at his
elbow; himself and his legs on the window-seat; only one hinge in his
whole body, like a bootjack.

‘How do you do, reverend sir?’ said Mr. Grewgious, with abundant offers
of hospitality, which were as cordially declined as made.  ‘And how is
your charge getting on over the way in the set that I had the pleasure of
recommending to you as vacant and eligible?’

Mr. Crisparkle replied suitably.

‘I am glad you approve of them,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘because I entertain
a sort of fancy for having him under my eye.’

As Mr. Grewgious had to turn his eye up considerably before he could see
the chambers, the phrase was to be taken figuratively and not literally.

‘And how did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?’ said Mr. Grewgious.

Mr. Crisparkle had left him pretty well.

‘And where did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?’  Mr. Crisparkle had
left him at Cloisterham.

‘And when did you leave Mr. Jasper, reverend sir?’  That morning.

‘Umps!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘He didn’t say he was coming, perhaps?’

‘Coming where?’

‘Anywhere, for instance?’ said Mr. Grewgious.

‘No.’

‘Because here he is,’ said Mr. Grewgious, who had asked all these
questions, with his preoccupied glance directed out at window.  ‘And he
don’t look agreeable, does he?’

Mr. Crisparkle was craning towards the window, when Mr. Grewgious added:

‘If you will kindly step round here behind me, in the gloom of the room,
and will cast your eye at the second-floor landing window in yonder
house, I think you will hardly fail to see a slinking individual in whom
I recognise our local friend.’

‘You are right!’ cried Mr. Crisparkle.

‘Umps!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  Then he added, turning his face so abruptly
that his head nearly came into collision with Mr. Crisparkle’s: ‘what
should you say that our local friend was up to?’

The last passage he had been shown in the Diary returned on Mr.
Crisparkle’s mind with the force of a strong recoil, and he asked Mr.
Grewgious if he thought it possible that Neville was to be harassed by
the keeping of a watch upon him?

‘A watch?’ repeated Mr. Grewgious musingly.  ‘Ay!’

‘Which would not only of itself haunt and torture his life,’ said Mr.
Crisparkle warmly, ‘but would expose him to the torment of a perpetually
reviving suspicion, whatever he might do, or wherever he might go.’

‘Ay!’ said Mr. Grewgious musingly still.  ‘Do I see him waiting for you?’

‘No doubt you do.’

‘Then _would_ you have the goodness to excuse my getting up to see you
out, and to go out to join him, and to go the way that you were going,
and to take no notice of our local friend?’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘I
entertain a sort of fancy for having _him_ under my eye to-night, do you
know?’

Mr. Crisparkle, with a significant need complied; and rejoining Neville,
went away with him.  They dined together, and parted at the yet
unfinished and undeveloped railway station: Mr. Crisparkle to get home;
Neville to walk the streets, cross the bridges, make a wide round of the
city in the friendly darkness, and tire himself out.

It was midnight when he returned from his solitary expedition and climbed
his staircase.  The night was hot, and the windows of the staircase were
all wide open.  Coming to the top, it gave him a passing chill of
surprise (there being no rooms but his up there) to find a stranger
sitting on the window-sill, more after the manner of a venturesome
glazier than an amateur ordinarily careful of his neck; in fact, so much
more outside the window than inside, as to suggest the thought that he
must have come up by the water-spout instead of the stairs.

The stranger said nothing until Neville put his key in his door; then,
seeming to make sure of his identity from the action, he spoke:

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, coming from the window with a frank and
smiling air, and a prepossessing address; ‘the beans.’

Neville was quite at a loss.

‘Runners,’ said the visitor.  ‘Scarlet.  Next door at the back.’

‘O,’ returned Neville.  ‘And the mignonette and wall-flower?’

‘The same,’ said the visitor.

‘Pray walk in.’

‘Thank you.’

Neville lighted his candles, and the visitor sat down.  A handsome
gentleman, with a young face, but with an older figure in its robustness
and its breadth of shoulder; say a man of eight-and-twenty, or at the
utmost thirty; so extremely sunburnt that the contrast between his brown
visage and the white forehead shaded out of doors by his hat, and the
glimpses of white throat below the neckerchief, would have been almost
ludicrous but for his broad temples, bright blue eyes, clustering brown
hair, and laughing teeth.

‘I have noticed,’ said he; ‘—my name is Tartar.’

Neville inclined his head.

‘I have noticed (excuse me) that you shut yourself up a good deal, and
that you seem to like my garden aloft here.  If you would like a little
more of it, I could throw out a few lines and stays between my windows
and yours, which the runners would take to directly.  And I have some
boxes, both of mignonette and wall-flower, that I could shove on along
the gutter (with a boathook I have by me) to your windows, and draw back
again when they wanted watering or gardening, and shove on again when
they were ship-shape; so that they would cause you no trouble.  I
couldn’t take this liberty without asking your permission, so I venture
to ask it.  Tartar, corresponding set, next door.’

‘You are very kind.’

‘Not at all.  I ought to apologise for looking in so late.  But having
noticed (excuse me) that you generally walk out at night, I thought I
should inconvenience you least by awaiting your return.  I am always
afraid of inconveniencing busy men, being an idle man.’

‘I should not have thought so, from your appearance.’

‘No?  I take it as a compliment.  In fact, I was bred in the Royal Navy,
and was First Lieutenant when I quitted it.  But, an uncle disappointed
in the service leaving me his property on condition that I left the Navy,
I accepted the fortune, and resigned my commission.’

‘Lately, I presume?’

‘Well, I had had twelve or fifteen years of knocking about first.  I came
here some nine months before you; I had had one crop before you came.  I
chose this place, because, having served last in a little corvette, I
knew I should feel more at home where I had a constant opportunity of
knocking my head against the ceiling.  Besides, it would never do for a
man who had been aboard ship from his boyhood to turn luxurious all at
once.  Besides, again; having been accustomed to a very short allowance
of land all my life, I thought I’d feel my way to the command of a landed
estate, by beginning in boxes.’

Whimsically as this was said, there was a touch of merry earnestness in
it that made it doubly whimsical.

‘However,’ said the Lieutenant, ‘I have talked quite enough about myself.
It is not my way, I hope; it has merely been to present myself to you
naturally.  If you will allow me to take the liberty I have described, it
will be a charity, for it will give me something more to do.  And you are
not to suppose that it will entail any interruption or intrusion on you,
for that is far from my intention.’

Neville replied that he was greatly obliged, and that he thankfully
accepted the kind proposal.

‘I am very glad to take your windows in tow,’ said the Lieutenant.  ‘From
what I have seen of you when I have been gardening at mine, and you have
been looking on, I have thought you (excuse me) rather too studious and
delicate.  May I ask, is your health at all affected?’

‘I have undergone some mental distress,’ said Neville, confused, ‘which
has stood me in the stead of illness.’

‘Pardon me,’ said Mr. Tartar.

With the greatest delicacy he shifted his ground to the windows again,
and asked if he could look at one of them.  On Neville’s opening it, he
immediately sprang out, as if he were going aloft with a whole watch in
an emergency, and were setting a bright example.

‘For Heaven’s sake,’ cried Neville, ‘don’t do that!  Where are you going
Mr. Tartar?  You’ll be dashed to pieces!’

‘All well!’ said the Lieutenant, coolly looking about him on the
housetop.  ‘All taut and trim here.  Those lines and stays shall be
rigged before you turn out in the morning.  May I take this short cut
home, and say good-night?’

‘Mr. Tartar!’ urged Neville.  ‘Pray!  It makes me giddy to see you!’

But Mr. Tartar, with a wave of his hand and the deftness of a cat, had
already dipped through his scuttle of scarlet runners without breaking a
leaf, and ‘gone below.’

Mr. Grewgious, his bedroom window-blind held aside with his hand,
happened at the moment to have Neville’s chambers under his eye for the
last time that night.  Fortunately his eye was on the front of the house
and not the back, or this remarkable appearance and disappearance might
have broken his rest as a phenomenon.  But Mr. Grewgious seeing nothing
there, not even a light in the windows, his gaze wandered from the
windows to the stars, as if he would have read in them something that was
hidden from him.  Many of us would, if we could; but none of us so much
as know our letters in the stars yet—or seem likely to do it, in this
state of existence—and few languages can be read until their alphabets
are mastered.




CHAPTER XVIII—A SETTLER IN CLOISTERHAM


At about this time a stranger appeared in Cloisterham; a white-haired
personage, with black eyebrows.  Being buttoned up in a tightish blue
surtout, with a buff waistcoat and gray trousers, he had something of a
military air, but he announced himself at the Crozier (the orthodox
hotel, where he put up with a portmanteau) as an idle dog who lived upon
his means; and he farther announced that he had a mind to take a lodging
in the picturesque old city for a month or two, with a view of settling
down there altogether.  Both announcements were made in the coffee-room
of the Crozier, to all whom it might or might not concern, by the
stranger as he stood with his back to the empty fireplace, waiting for
his fried sole, veal cutlet, and pint of sherry.  And the waiter
(business being chronically slack at the Crozier) represented all whom it
might or might not concern, and absorbed the whole of the information.

This gentleman’s white head was unusually large, and his shock of white
hair was unusually thick and ample.  ‘I suppose, waiter,’ he said,
shaking his shock of hair, as a Newfoundland dog might shake his before
sitting down to dinner, ‘that a fair lodging for a single buffer might be
found in these parts, eh?’

The waiter had no doubt of it.

‘Something old,’ said the gentleman.  ‘Take my hat down for a moment from
that peg, will you?  No, I don’t want it; look into it.  What do you see
written there?’

The waiter read: ‘Datchery.’

‘Now you know my name,’ said the gentleman; ‘Dick Datchery.  Hang it up
again.  I was saying something old is what I should prefer, something odd
and out of the way; something venerable, architectural, and
inconvenient.’

‘We have a good choice of inconvenient lodgings in the town, sir, I
think,’ replied the waiter, with modest confidence in its resources that
way; ‘indeed, I have no doubt that we could suit you that far, however
particular you might be.  But a architectural lodging!’  That seemed to
trouble the waiter’s head, and he shook it.

‘Anything Cathedraly, now,’ Mr. Datchery suggested.

‘Mr. Tope,’ said the waiter, brightening, as he rubbed his chin with his
hand, ‘would be the likeliest party to inform in that line.’

‘Who is Mr. Tope?’ inquired Dick Datchery.

The waiter explained that he was the Verger, and that Mrs. Tope had
indeed once upon a time let lodgings herself or offered to let them; but
that as nobody had ever taken them, Mrs. Tope’s window-bill, long a
Cloisterham Institution, had disappeared; probably had tumbled down one
day, and never been put up again.

‘I’ll call on Mrs. Tope,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘after dinner.’

So when he had done his dinner, he was duly directed to the spot, and
sallied out for it.  But the Crozier being an hotel of a most retiring
disposition, and the waiter’s directions being fatally precise, he soon
became bewildered, and went boggling about and about the Cathedral Tower,
whenever he could catch a glimpse of it, with a general impression on his
mind that Mrs. Tope’s was somewhere very near it, and that, like the
children in the game of hot boiled beans and very good butter, he was
warm in his search when he saw the Tower, and cold when he didn’t see it.

He was getting very cold indeed when he came upon a fragment of
burial-ground in which an unhappy sheep was grazing.  Unhappy, because a
hideous small boy was stoning it through the railings, and had already
lamed it in one leg, and was much excited by the benevolent sportsmanlike
purpose of breaking its other three legs, and bringing it down.

‘’It ’im agin!’ cried the boy, as the poor creature leaped; ‘and made a
dint in his wool.’

‘Let him be!’ said Mr. Datchery.  ‘Don’t you see you have lamed him?’

‘Yer lie,’ returned the sportsman.  ‘’E went and lamed isself.  I see ’im
do it, and I giv’ ’im a shy as a Widdy-warning to ’im not to go
a-bruisin’ ’is master’s mutton any more.’

‘Come here.’

‘I won’t; I’ll come when yer can ketch me.’

‘Stay there then, and show me which is Mr. Tope’s.’

‘Ow can I stay here and show you which is Topeseses, when Topeseses is
t’other side the Kinfreederal, and over the crossings, and round ever so
many comers?  Stoo-pid!  Ya-a-ah!’

‘Show me where it is, and I’ll give you something.’

‘Come on, then.’

This brisk dialogue concluded, the boy led the way, and by-and-by stopped
at some distance from an arched passage, pointing.

‘Lookie yonder.  You see that there winder and door?’

‘That’s Tope’s?’

‘Yer lie; it ain’t.  That’s Jarsper’s.’

‘Indeed?’ said Mr. Datchery, with a second look of some interest.

‘Yes, and I ain’t a-goin’ no nearer ’IM, I tell yer.’

‘Why not?’

‘’Cos I ain’t a-goin’ to be lifted off my legs and ’ave my braces bust
and be choked; not if I knows it, and not by ‘Im.  Wait till I set a
jolly good flint a-flyin’ at the back o’ ’is jolly old ’ed some day!  Now
look t’other side the harch; not the side where Jarsper’s door is;
t’other side.’

‘I see.’

‘A little way in, o’ that side, there’s a low door, down two steps.
That’s Topeseses with ’is name on a hoval plate.’

‘Good.  See here,’ said Mr. Datchery, producing a shilling.  ‘You owe me
half of this.’

‘Yer lie!  I don’t owe yer nothing; I never seen yer.’

‘I tell you you owe me half of this, because I have no sixpence in my
pocket.  So the next time you meet me you shall do something else for me,
to pay me.’

‘All right, give us ’old.’

‘What is your name, and where do you live?’

‘Deputy.  Travellers’ Twopenny, ’cross the green.’

The boy instantly darted off with the shilling, lest Mr. Datchery should
repent, but stopped at a safe distance, on the happy chance of his being
uneasy in his mind about it, to goad him with a demon dance expressive of
its irrevocability.

Mr. Datchery, taking off his hat to give that shock of white hair of his
another shake, seemed quite resigned, and betook himself whither he had
been directed.

Mr. Tope’s official dwelling, communicating by an upper stair with Mr.
Jasper’s (hence Mrs. Tope’s attendance on that gentleman), was of very
modest proportions, and partook of the character of a cool dungeon.  Its
ancient walls were massive, and its rooms rather seemed to have been dug
out of them, than to have been designed beforehand with any reference to
them.  The main door opened at once on a chamber of no describable shape,
with a groined roof, which in its turn opened on another chamber of no
describable shape, with another groined roof: their windows small, and in
the thickness of the walls.  These two chambers, close as to their
atmosphere, and swarthy as to their illumination by natural light, were
the apartments which Mrs. Tope had so long offered to an unappreciative
city.  Mr. Datchery, however, was more appreciative.  He found that if he
sat with the main door open he would enjoy the passing society of all
comers to and fro by the gateway, and would have light enough.  He found
that if Mr. and Mrs. Tope, living overhead, used for their own egress and
ingress a little side stair that came plump into the Precincts by a door
opening outward, to the surprise and inconvenience of a limited public of
pedestrians in a narrow way, he would be alone, as in a separate
residence.  He found the rent moderate, and everything as quaintly
inconvenient as he could desire.  He agreed, therefore, to take the
lodging then and there, and money down, possession to be had next
evening, on condition that reference was permitted him to Mr. Jasper as
occupying the gatehouse, of which on the other side of the gateway, the
Verger’s hole-in-the-wall was an appanage or subsidiary part.

The poor dear gentleman was very solitary and very sad, Mrs. Tope said,
but she had no doubt he would ‘speak for her.’  Perhaps Mr. Datchery had
heard something of what had occurred there last winter?

Mr. Datchery had as confused a knowledge of the event in question, on
trying to recall it, as he well could have.  He begged Mrs. Tope’s pardon
when she found it incumbent on her to correct him in every detail of his
summary of the facts, but pleaded that he was merely a single buffer
getting through life upon his means as idly as he could, and that so many
people were so constantly making away with so many other people, as to
render it difficult for a buffer of an easy temper to preserve the
circumstances of the several cases unmixed in his mind.

Mr. Jasper proving willing to speak for Mrs. Tope, Mr. Datchery, who had
sent up his card, was invited to ascend the postern staircase.  The Mayor
was there, Mr. Tope said; but he was not to be regarded in the light of
company, as he and Mr. Jasper were great friends.

‘I beg pardon,’ said Mr. Datchery, making a leg with his hat under his
arm, as he addressed himself equally to both gentlemen; ‘a selfish
precaution on my part, and not personally interesting to anybody but
myself.  But as a buffer living on his means, and having an idea of doing
it in this lovely place in peace and quiet, for remaining span of life, I
beg to ask if the Tope family are quite respectable?’

Mr. Jasper could answer for that without the slightest hesitation.

‘That is enough, sir,’ said Mr. Datchery.

‘My friend the Mayor,’ added Mr. Jasper, presenting Mr. Datchery with a
courtly motion of his hand towards that potentate; ‘whose recommendation
is actually much more important to a stranger than that of an obscure
person like myself, will testify in their behalf, I am sure.’

‘The Worshipful the Mayor,’ said Mr. Datchery, with a low bow, ‘places me
under an infinite obligation.’

‘Very good people, sir, Mr. and Mrs. Tope,’ said Mr. Sapsea, with
condescension.  ‘Very good opinions.  Very well behaved.  Very
respectful.  Much approved by the Dean and Chapter.’

‘The Worshipful the Mayor gives them a character,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘of
which they may indeed be proud.  I would ask His Honour (if I might be
permitted) whether there are not many objects of great interest in the
city which is under his beneficent sway?’

‘We are, sir,’ returned Mr. Sapsea, ‘an ancient city, and an
ecclesiastical city.  We are a constitutional city, as it becomes such a
city to be, and we uphold and maintain our glorious privileges.’

‘His Honour,’ said Mr. Datchery, bowing, ‘inspires me with a desire to
know more of the city, and confirms me in my inclination to end my days
in the city.’

‘Retired from the Army, sir?’ suggested Mr. Sapsea.

‘His Honour the Mayor does me too much credit,’ returned Mr. Datchery.

‘Navy, sir?’ suggested Mr. Sapsea.

‘Again,’ repeated Mr. Datchery, ‘His Honour the Mayor does me too much
credit.’

‘Diplomacy is a fine profession,’ said Mr. Sapsea, as a general remark.

‘There, I confess, His Honour the Mayor is too many for me,’ said Mr.
Datchery, with an ingenious smile and bow; ‘even a diplomatic bird must
fall to such a gun.’

Now this was very soothing.  Here was a gentleman of a great, not to say
a grand, address, accustomed to rank and dignity, really setting a fine
example how to behave to a Mayor.  There was something in that
third-person style of being spoken to, that Mr. Sapsea found particularly
recognisant of his merits and position.

‘But I crave pardon,’ said Mr. Datchery.  ‘His Honour the Mayor will bear
with me, if for a moment I have been deluded into occupying his time, and
have forgotten the humble claims upon my own, of my hotel, the Crozier.’

‘Not at all, sir,’ said Mr. Sapsea.  ‘I am returning home, and if you
would like to take the exterior of our Cathedral in your way, I shall be
glad to point it out.’

‘His Honour the Mayor,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘is more than kind and
gracious.’

As Mr. Datchery, when he had made his acknowledgments to Mr. Jasper,
could not be induced to go out of the room before the Worshipful, the
Worshipful led the way down-stairs; Mr. Datchery following with his hat
under his arm, and his shock of white hair streaming in the evening
breeze.

‘Might I ask His Honour,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘whether that gentleman we
have just left is the gentleman of whom I have heard in the neighbourhood
as being much afflicted by the loss of a nephew, and concentrating his
life on avenging the loss?’

‘That is the gentleman.  John Jasper, sir.’

‘Would His Honour allow me to inquire whether there are strong suspicions
of any one?’

‘More than suspicions, sir,’ returned Mr. Sapsea; ‘all but certainties.’

‘Only think now!’ cried Mr. Datchery.

‘But proof, sir, proof must be built up stone by stone,’ said the Mayor.
‘As I say, the end crowns the work.  It is not enough that justice should
be morally certain; she must be immorally certain—legally, that is.’

‘His Honour,’ said Mr. Datchery, ‘reminds me of the nature of the law.
Immoral.  How true!’

‘As I say, sir,’ pompously went on the Mayor, ‘the arm of the law is a
strong arm, and a long arm.  That is the may I put it.  A strong arm and
a long arm.’

‘How forcible!—And yet, again, how true!’ murmured Mr. Datchery.

‘And without betraying, what I call the secrets of the prison-house,’
said Mr. Sapsea; ‘the secrets of the prison-house is the term I used on
the bench.’

‘And what other term than His Honour’s would express it?’ said Mr.
Datchery.

‘Without, I say, betraying them, I predict to you, knowing the iron will
of the gentleman we have just left (I take the bold step of calling it
iron, on account of its strength), that in this case the long arm will
reach, and the strong arm will strike.—This is our Cathedral, sir.  The
best judges are pleased to admire it, and the best among our townsmen own
to being a little vain of it.’

All this time Mr. Datchery had walked with his hat under his arm, and his
white hair streaming.  He had an odd momentary appearance upon him of
having forgotten his hat, when Mr. Sapsea now touched it; and he clapped
his hand up to his head as if with some vague expectation of finding
another hat upon it.

‘Pray be covered, sir,’ entreated Mr. Sapsea; magnificently plying: ‘I
shall not mind it, I assure you.’

‘His Honour is very good, but I do it for coolness,’ said Mr. Datchery.

Then Mr. Datchery admired the Cathedral, and Mr. Sapsea pointed it out as
if he himself had invented and built it: there were a few details indeed
of which he did not approve, but those he glossed over, as if the workmen
had made mistakes in his absence.  The Cathedral disposed of, he led the
way by the churchyard, and stopped to extol the beauty of the evening—by
chance—in the immediate vicinity of Mrs. Sapsea’s epitaph.

‘And by the by,’ said Mr. Sapsea, appearing to descend from an elevation
to remember it all of a sudden; like Apollo shooting down from Olympus to
pick up his forgotten lyre; ‘_that_ is one of our small lions.  The
partiality of our people has made it so, and strangers have been seen
taking a copy of it now and then.  I am not a judge of it myself, for it
is a little work of my own.  But it was troublesome to turn, sir; I may
say, difficult to turn with elegance.’

Mr. Datchery became so ecstatic over Mr. Sapsea’s composition, that, in
spite of his intention to end his days in Cloisterham, and therefore his
probably having in reserve many opportunities of copying it, he would
have transcribed it into his pocket-book on the spot, but for the
slouching towards them of its material producer and perpetuator, Durdles,
whom Mr. Sapsea hailed, not sorry to show him a bright example of
behaviour to superiors.

‘Ah, Durdles!  This is the mason, sir; one of our Cloisterham worthies;
everybody here knows Durdles.  Mr. Datchery, Durdles a gentleman who is
going to settle here.’

‘I wouldn’t do it if I was him,’ growled Durdles.  ‘We’re a heavy lot.’

‘You surely don’t speak for yourself, Mr. Durdles,’ returned Mr.
Datchery, ‘any more than for His Honour.’

‘Who’s His Honour?’ demanded Durdles.

‘His Honour the Mayor.’

‘I never was brought afore him,’ said Durdles, with anything but the look
of a loyal subject of the mayoralty, ‘and it’ll be time enough for me to
Honour him when I am.  Until which, and when, and where,

    “Mister Sapsea is his name,
       England is his nation,
    Cloisterham’s his dwelling-place,
       Aukshneer’s his occupation.”’

Here, Deputy (preceded by a flying oyster-shell) appeared upon the scene,
and requested to have the sum of threepence instantly ‘chucked’ to him by
Mr. Durdles, whom he had been vainly seeking up and down, as lawful wages
overdue.  While that gentleman, with his bundle under his arm, slowly
found and counted out the money, Mr. Sapsea informed the new settler of
Durdles’s habits, pursuits, abode, and reputation.  ‘I suppose a curious
stranger might come to see you, and your works, Mr. Durdles, at any odd
time?’ said Mr. Datchery upon that.

‘Any gentleman is welcome to come and see me any evening if he brings
liquor for two with him,’ returned Durdles, with a penny between his
teeth and certain halfpence in his hands; ‘or if he likes to make it
twice two, he’ll be doubly welcome.’

‘I shall come.  Master Deputy, what do you owe me?’

‘A job.’

‘Mind you pay me honestly with the job of showing me Mr. Durdles’s house
when I want to go there.’

Deputy, with a piercing broadside of whistle through the whole gap in his
mouth, as a receipt in full for all arrears, vanished.

The Worshipful and the Worshipper then passed on together until they
parted, with many ceremonies, at the Worshipful’s door; even then the
Worshipper carried his hat under his arm, and gave his streaming white
hair to the breeze.

Said Mr. Datchery to himself that night, as he looked at his white hair
in the gas-lighted looking-glass over the coffee-room chimneypiece at the
Crozier, and shook it out: ‘For a single buffer, of an easy temper,
living idly on his means, I have had a rather busy afternoon!’




CHAPTER XIX—SHADOW ON THE SUN-DIAL


Again Miss Twinkleton has delivered her valedictory address, with the
accompaniments of white-wine and pound-cake, and again the young ladies
have departed to their several homes.  Helena Landless has left the Nuns’
House to attend her brother’s fortunes, and pretty Rosa is alone.

Cloisterham is so bright and sunny in these summer days, that the
Cathedral and the monastery-ruin show as if their strong walls were
transparent.  A soft glow seems to shine from within them, rather than
upon them from without, such is their mellowness as they look forth on
the hot corn-fields and the smoking roads that distantly wind among them.
The Cloisterham gardens blush with ripening fruit.  Time was when
travel-stained pilgrims rode in clattering parties through the city’s
welcome shades; time is when wayfarers, leading a gipsy life between
haymaking time and harvest, and looking as if they were just made of the
dust of the earth, so very dusty are they, lounge about on cool
door-steps, trying to mend their unmendable shoes, or giving them to the
city kennels as a hopeless job, and seeking others in the bundles that
they carry, along with their yet unused sickles swathed in bands of
straw.  At all the more public pumps there is much cooling of bare feet,
together with much bubbling and gurgling of drinking with hand to spout
on the part of these Bedouins; the Cloisterham police meanwhile looking
askant from their beats with suspicion, and manifest impatience that the
intruders should depart from within the civic bounds, and once more fry
themselves on the simmering high-roads.

On the afternoon of such a day, when the last Cathedral service is done,
and when that side of the High Street on which the Nuns’ House stands is
in grateful shade, save where its quaint old garden opens to the west
between the boughs of trees, a servant informs Rosa, to her terror, that
Mr. Jasper desires to see her.

If he had chosen his time for finding her at a disadvantage, he could
have done no better.  Perhaps he has chosen it.  Helena Landless is gone,
Mrs. Tisher is absent on leave, Miss Twinkleton (in her amateur state of
existence) has contributed herself and a veal pie to a picnic.

‘O why, why, why, did you say I was at home!’ cried Rosa, helplessly.

The maid replies, that Mr. Jasper never asked the question.

That he said he knew she was at home, and begged she might be told that
he asked to see her.

‘What shall I do! what shall I do!’ thinks Rosa, clasping her hands.

Possessed by a kind of desperation, she adds in the next breath, that she
will come to Mr. Jasper in the garden.  She shudders at the thought of
being shut up with him in the house; but many of its windows command the
garden, and she can be seen as well as heard there, and can shriek in the
free air and run away.  Such is the wild idea that flutters through her
mind.

She has never seen him since the fatal night, except when she was
questioned before the Mayor, and then he was present in gloomy
watchfulness, as representing his lost nephew and burning to avenge him.
She hangs her garden-hat on her arm, and goes out.  The moment she sees
him from the porch, leaning on the sun-dial, the old horrible feeling of
being compelled by him, asserts its hold upon her.  She feels that she
would even then go back, but that he draws her feet towards him.  She
cannot resist, and sits down, with her head bent, on the garden-seat
beside the sun-dial.  She cannot look up at him for abhorrence, but she
has perceived that he is dressed in deep mourning.  So is she.  It was
not so at first; but the lost has long been given up, and mourned for, as
dead.

He would begin by touching her hand.  She feels the intention, and draws
her hand back.  His eyes are then fixed upon her, she knows, though her
own see nothing but the grass.

‘I have been waiting,’ he begins, ‘for some time, to be summoned back to
my duty near you.’

After several times forming her lips, which she knows he is closely
watching, into the shape of some other hesitating reply, and then into
none, she answers: ‘Duty, sir?’

‘The duty of teaching you, serving you as your faithful music-master.’

‘I have left off that study.’

‘Not left off, I think.  Discontinued.  I was told by your guardian that
you discontinued it under the shock that we have all felt so acutely.
When will you resume?’

‘Never, sir.’

‘Never?  You could have done no more if you had loved my dear boy.’

‘I did love him!’ cried Rosa, with a flash of anger.

‘Yes; but not quite—not quite in the right way, shall I say?  Not in the
intended and expected way.  Much as my dear boy was, unhappily, too
self-conscious and self-satisfied (I’ll draw no parallel between him and
you in that respect) to love as he should have loved, or as any one in
his place would have loved—must have loved!’

She sits in the same still attitude, but shrinking a little more.

‘Then, to be told that you discontinued your study with me, was to be
politely told that you abandoned it altogether?’ he suggested.

‘Yes,’ says Rosa, with sudden spirit, ‘The politeness was my guardian’s,
not mine.  I told him that I was resolved to leave off, and that I was
determined to stand by my resolution.’

‘And you still are?’

‘I still am, sir.  And I beg not to be questioned any more about it.  At
all events, I will not answer any more; I have that in my power.’

She is so conscious of his looking at her with a gloating admiration of
the touch of anger on her, and the fire and animation it brings with it,
that even as her spirit rises, it falls again, and she struggles with a
sense of shame, affront, and fear, much as she did that night at the
piano.

‘I will not question you any more, since you object to it so much; I will
confess—’

‘I do not wish to hear you, sir,’ cries Rosa, rising.

This time he does touch her with his outstretched hand.  In shrinking
from it, she shrinks into her seat again.

‘We must sometimes act in opposition to our wishes,’ he tells her in a
low voice.  ‘You must do so now, or do more harm to others than you can
ever set right.’

‘What harm?’

‘Presently, presently.  You question _me_, you see, and surely that’s not
fair when you forbid me to question you.  Nevertheless, I will answer the
question presently.  Dearest Rosa! Charming Rosa!’

She starts up again.

This time he does not touch her.  But his face looks so wicked and
menacing, as he stands leaning against the sun-dial-setting, as it were,
his black mark upon the very face of day—that her flight is arrested by
horror as she looks at him.

‘I do not forget how many windows command a view of us,’ he says,
glancing towards them.  ‘I will not touch you again; I will come no
nearer to you than I am.  Sit down, and there will be no mighty wonder in
your music-master’s leaning idly against a pedestal and speaking with
you, remembering all that has happened, and our shares in it.  Sit down,
my beloved.’

She would have gone once more—was all but gone—and once more his face,
darkly threatening what would follow if she went, has stopped her.
Looking at him with the expression of the instant frozen on her face, she
sits down on the seat again.

‘Rosa, even when my dear boy was affianced to you, I loved you madly;
even when I thought his happiness in having you for his wife was certain,
I loved you madly; even when I strove to make him more ardently devoted
to you, I loved you madly; even when he gave me the picture of your
lovely face so carelessly traduced by him, which I feigned to hang always
in my sight for his sake, but worshipped in torment for years, I loved
you madly; in the distasteful work of the day, in the wakeful misery of
the night, girded by sordid realities, or wandering through Paradises and
Hells of visions into which I rushed, carrying your image in my arms, I
loved you madly.’

If anything could make his words more hideous to her than they are in
themselves, it would be the contrast between the violence of his look and
delivery, and the composure of his assumed attitude.

‘I endured it all in silence.  So long as you were his, or so long as I
supposed you to be his, I hid my secret loyally.  Did I not?’

This lie, so gross, while the mere words in which it is told are so true,
is more than Rosa can endure.  She answers with kindling indignation:
‘You were as false throughout, sir, as you are now.  You were false to
him, daily and hourly.  You know that you made my life unhappy by your
pursuit of me.  You know that you made me afraid to open his generous
eyes, and that you forced me, for his own trusting, good, good sake, to
keep the truth from him, that you were a bad, bad man!’

His preservation of his easy attitude rendering his working features and
his convulsive hands absolutely diabolical, he returns, with a fierce
extreme of admiration:

‘How beautiful you are!  You are more beautiful in anger than in repose.
I don’t ask you for your love; give me yourself and your hatred; give me
yourself and that pretty rage; give me yourself and that enchanting
scorn; it will be enough for me.’

Impatient tears rise to the eyes of the trembling little beauty, and her
face flames; but as she again rises to leave him in indignation, and seek
protection within the house, he stretches out his hand towards the porch,
as though he invited her to enter it.

‘I told you, you rare charmer, you sweet witch, that you must stay and
hear me, or do more harm than can ever be undone.  You asked me what
harm.  Stay, and I will tell you.  Go, and I will do it!’

Again Rosa quails before his threatening face, though innocent of its
meaning, and she remains.  Her panting breathing comes and goes as if it
would choke her; but with a repressive hand upon her bosom, she remains.

‘I have made my confession that my love is mad.  It is so mad, that had
the ties between me and my dear lost boy been one silken thread less
strong, I might have swept even him from your side, when you favoured
him.’

A film comes over the eyes she raises for an instant, as though he had
turned her faint.

‘Even him,’ he repeats.  ‘Yes, even him!  Rosa, you see me and you hear
me.  Judge for yourself whether any other admirer shall love you and
live, whose life is in my hand.’

‘What do you mean, sir?’

‘I mean to show you how mad my love is.  It was hawked through the late
inquiries by Mr. Crisparkle, that young Landless had confessed to him
that he was a rival of my lost boy.  That is an inexpiable offence in my
eyes.  The same Mr. Crisparkle knows under my hand that I have devoted
myself to the murderer’s discovery and destruction, be he whom he might,
and that I determined to discuss the mystery with no one until I should
hold the clue in which to entangle the murderer as in a net.  I have
since worked patiently to wind and wind it round him; and it is slowly
winding as I speak.’

                      [Picture: Jasper’s sacrifices]

‘Your belief, if you believe in the criminality of Mr. Landless, is not
Mr. Crisparkle’s belief, and he is a good man,’ Rosa retorts.

‘My belief is my own; and I reserve it, worshipped of my soul!
Circumstances may accumulate so strongly _even against an innocent man_,
that directed, sharpened, and pointed, they may slay him.  One wanting
link discovered by perseverance against a guilty man, proves his guilt,
however slight its evidence before, and he dies.  Young Landless stands
in deadly peril either way.’

‘If you really suppose,’ Rosa pleads with him, turning paler, ‘that I
favour Mr. Landless, or that Mr. Landless has ever in any way addressed
himself to me, you are wrong.’

He puts that from him with a slighting action of his hand and a curled
lip.

‘I was going to show you how madly I love you.  More madly now than ever,
for I am willing to renounce the second object that has arisen in my life
to divide it with you; and henceforth to have no object in existence but
you only.  Miss Landless has become your bosom friend.  You care for her
peace of mind?’

‘I love her dearly.’

‘You care for her good name?’

‘I have said, sir, I love her dearly.’

‘I am unconsciously,’ he observes with a smile, as he folds his hands
upon the sun-dial and leans his chin upon them, so that his talk would
seem from the windows (faces occasionally come and go there) to be of the
airiest and playfullest—‘I am unconsciously giving offence by questioning
again.  I will simply make statements, therefore, and not put questions.
You do care for your bosom friend’s good name, and you do care for her
peace of mind.  Then remove the shadow of the gallows from her, dear
one!’

‘You dare propose to me to—’

‘Darling, I dare propose to you.  Stop there.  If it be bad to idolise
you, I am the worst of men; if it be good, I am the best.  My love for
you is above all other love, and my truth to you is above all other
truth.  Let me have hope and favour, and I am a forsworn man for your
sake.’

Rosa puts her hands to her temples, and, pushing back her hair, looks
wildly and abhorrently at him, as though she were trying to piece
together what it is his deep purpose to present to her only in fragments.

‘Reckon up nothing at this moment, angel, but the sacrifices that I lay
at those dear feet, which I could fall down among the vilest ashes and
kiss, and put upon my head as a poor savage might.  There is my fidelity
to my dear boy after death.  Tread upon it!’

With an action of his hands, as though he cast down something precious.

‘There is the inexpiable offence against my adoration of you.  Spurn it!’

With a similar action.

‘There are my labours in the cause of a just vengeance for six toiling
months.  Crush them!’

With another repetition of the action.

‘There is my past and my present wasted life.  There is the desolation of
my heart and my soul.  There is my peace; there is my despair.  Stamp
them into the dust; so that you take me, were it even mortally hating
me!’

The frightful vehemence of the man, now reaching its full height, so
additionally terrifies her as to break the spell that has held her to the
spot.  She swiftly moves towards the porch; but in an instant he is at
her side, and speaking in her ear.

‘Rosa, I am self-repressed again.  I am walking calmly beside you to the
house.  I shall wait for some encouragement and hope.  I shall not strike
too soon.  Give me a sign that you attend to me.’

She slightly and constrainedly moves her hand.

‘Not a word of this to any one, or it will bring down the blow, as
certainly as night follows day.  Another sign that you attend to me.’

She moves her hand once more.

‘I love you, love you, love you!  If you were to cast me off now—but you
will not—you would never be rid of me.  No one should come between us.  I
would pursue you to the death.’

The handmaid coming out to open the gate for him, he quietly pulls off
his hat as a parting salute, and goes away with no greater show of
agitation than is visible in the effigy of Mr. Sapsea’s father opposite.
Rosa faints in going up-stairs, and is carefully carried to her room and
laid down on her bed.  A thunderstorm is coming on, the maids say, and
the hot and stifling air has overset the pretty dear: no wonder; they
have felt their own knees all of a tremble all day long.




CHAPTER XX—A FLIGHT


Rosa no sooner came to herself than the whole of the late interview was
before her.  It even seemed as if it had pursued her into her
insensibility, and she had not had a moment’s unconsciousness of it.
What to do, she was at a frightened loss to know: the only one clear
thought in her mind was, that she must fly from this terrible man.

But where could she take refuge, and how could she go?  She had never
breathed her dread of him to any one but Helena.  If she went to Helena,
and told her what had passed, that very act might bring down the
irreparable mischief that he threatened he had the power, and that she
knew he had the will, to do.  The more fearful he appeared to her excited
memory and imagination, the more alarming her responsibility appeared;
seeing that a slight mistake on her part, either in action or delay,
might let his malevolence loose on Helena’s brother.

Rosa’s mind throughout the last six months had been stormily confused.  A
half-formed, wholly unexpressed suspicion tossed in it, now heaving
itself up, and now sinking into the deep; now gaining palpability, and
now losing it.  Jasper’s self-absorption in his nephew when he was alive,
and his unceasing pursuit of the inquiry how he came by his death, if he
were dead, were themes so rife in the place, that no one appeared able to
suspect the possibility of foul play at his hands.  She had asked herself
the question, ‘Am I so wicked in my thoughts as to conceive a wickedness
that others cannot imagine?’  Then she had considered, Did the suspicion
come of her previous recoiling from him before the fact?  And if so, was
not that a proof of its baselessness?  Then she had reflected, ‘What
motive could he have, according to my accusation?’  She was ashamed to
answer in her mind, ‘The motive of gaining _me_!’  And covered her face,
as if the lightest shadow of the idea of founding murder on such an idle
vanity were a crime almost as great.

She ran over in her mind again, all that he had said by the sun-dial in
the garden.  He had persisted in treating the disappearance as murder,
consistently with his whole public course since the finding of the watch
and shirt-pin.  If he were afraid of the crime being traced out, would he
not rather encourage the idea of a voluntary disappearance?  He had even
declared that if the ties between him and his nephew had been less
strong, he might have swept ‘even him’ away from her side.  Was that like
his having really done so?  He had spoken of laying his six months’
labours in the cause of a just vengeance at her feet.  Would he have done
that, with that violence of passion, if they were a pretence?  Would he
have ranged them with his desolate heart and soul, his wasted life, his
peace and his despair?  The very first sacrifice that he represented
himself as making for her, was his fidelity to his dear boy after death.
Surely these facts were strong against a fancy that scarcely dared to
hint itself.  And yet he was so terrible a man!  In short, the poor girl
(for what could she know of the criminal intellect, which its own
professed students perpetually misread, because they persist in trying to
reconcile it with the average intellect of average men, instead of
identifying it as a horrible wonder apart) could get by no road to any
other conclusion than that he _was_ a terrible man, and must be fled
from.

She had been Helena’s stay and comfort during the whole time.  She had
constantly assured her of her full belief in her brother’s innocence, and
of her sympathy with him in his misery.  But she had never seen him since
the disappearance, nor had Helena ever spoken one word of his avowal to
Mr. Crisparkle in regard of Rosa, though as a part of the interest of the
case it was well known far and wide.  He was Helena’s unfortunate
brother, to her, and nothing more.  The assurance she had given her
odious suitor was strictly true, though it would have been better (she
considered now) if she could have restrained herself from so giving it.
Afraid of him as the bright and delicate little creature was, her spirit
swelled at the thought of his knowing it from her own lips.

But where was she to go?  Anywhere beyond his reach, was no reply to the
question.  Somewhere must be thought of.  She determined to go to her
guardian, and to go immediately.  The feeling she had imparted to Helena
on the night of their first confidence, was so strong upon her—the
feeling of not being safe from him, and of the solid walls of the old
convent being powerless to keep out his ghostly following of her—that no
reasoning of her own could calm her terrors.  The fascination of
repulsion had been upon her so long, and now culminated so darkly, that
she felt as if he had power to bind her by a spell.  Glancing out at
window, even now, as she rose to dress, the sight of the sun-dial on
which he had leaned when he declared himself, turned her cold, and made
her shrink from it, as though he had invested it with some awful quality
from his own nature.

She wrote a hurried note to Miss Twinkleton, saying that she had sudden
reason for wishing to see her guardian promptly, and had gone to him;
also, entreating the good lady not to be uneasy, for all was well with
her.  She hurried a few quite useless articles into a very little bag,
left the note in a conspicuous place, and went out, softly closing the
gate after her.

It was the first time she had ever been even in Cloisterham High Street
alone.  But knowing all its ways and windings very well, she hurried
straight to the corner from which the omnibus departed.  It was, at that
very moment, going off.

‘Stop and take me, if you please, Joe.  I am obliged to go to London.’

In less than another minute she was on her road to the railway, under
Joe’s protection. Joe waited on her when she got there, put her safely
into the railway carriage, and handed in the very little bag after her,
as though it were some enormous trunk, hundredweights heavy, which she
must on no account endeavour to lift.

‘Can you go round when you get back, and tell Miss Twinkleton that you
saw me safely off, Joe?’

‘It shall be done, Miss.’

‘With my love, please, Joe.’

‘Yes, Miss—and I wouldn’t mind having it myself!’  But Joe did not
articulate the last clause; only thought it.

Now that she was whirling away for London in real earnest, Rosa was at
leisure to resume the thoughts which her personal hurry had checked.  The
indignant thought that his declaration of love soiled her; that she could
only be cleansed from the stain of its impurity by appealing to the
honest and true; supported her for a time against her fears, and
confirmed her in her hasty resolution.  But as the evening grew darker
and darker, and the great city impended nearer and nearer, the doubts
usual in such cases began to arise.  Whether this was not a wild
proceeding, after all; how Mr. Grewgious might regard it; whether she
should find him at the journey’s end; how she would act if he were
absent; what might become of her, alone, in a place so strange and
crowded; how if she had but waited and taken counsel first; whether, if
she could now go back, she would not do it thankfully; a multitude of
such uneasy speculations disturbed her, more and more as they
accumulated.  At length the train came into London over the housetops;
and down below lay the gritty streets with their yet un-needed lamps
a-glow, on a hot, light, summer night.

‘Hiram Grewgious, Esquire, Staple Inn, London.’  This was all Rosa knew
of her destination; but it was enough to send her rattling away again in
a cab, through deserts of gritty streets, where many people crowded at
the corner of courts and byways to get some air, and where many other
people walked with a miserably monotonous noise of shuffling of feet on
hot paving-stones, and where all the people and all their surroundings
were so gritty and so shabby!

There was music playing here and there, but it did not enliven the case.
No barrel-organ mended the matter, and no big drum beat dull care away.
Like the chapel bells that were also going here and there, they only
seemed to evoke echoes from brick surfaces, and dust from everything.  As
to the flat wind-instruments, they seemed to have cracked their hearts
and souls in pining for the country.

Her jingling conveyance stopped at last at a fast-closed gateway, which
appeared to belong to somebody who had gone to bed very early, and was
much afraid of housebreakers; Rosa, discharging her conveyance, timidly
knocked at this gateway, and was let in, very little bag and all, by a
watchman.

‘Does Mr. Grewgious live here?’

‘Mr. Grewgious lives there, Miss,’ said the watchman, pointing further
in.

So Rosa went further in, and, when the clocks were striking ten, stood on
P. J. T.’s doorsteps, wondering what P. J. T. had done with his
street-door.

Guided by the painted name of Mr. Grewgious, she went up-stairs and
softly tapped and tapped several times.  But no one answering, and Mr.
Grewgious’s door-handle yielding to her touch, she went in, and saw her
guardian sitting on a window-seat at an open window, with a shaded lamp
placed far from him on a table in a corner.

Rosa drew nearer to him in the twilight of the room.  He saw her, and he
said, in an undertone: ‘Good Heaven!’

Rosa fell upon his neck, with tears, and then he said, returning her
embrace:

‘My child, my child!  I thought you were your mother!—But what, what,
what,’ he added, soothingly, ‘has happened?  My dear, what has brought
you here?  Who has brought you here?’

‘No one.  I came alone.’

‘Lord bless me!’ ejaculated Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Came alone!  Why didn’t you
write to me to come and fetch you?’

‘I had no time.  I took a sudden resolution.  Poor, poor Eddy!’

‘Ah, poor fellow, poor fellow!’

‘His uncle has made love to me.  I cannot bear it,’ said Rosa, at once
with a burst of tears, and a stamp of her little foot; ‘I shudder with
horror of him, and I have come to you to protect me and all of us from
him, if you will?’

‘I will,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, with a sudden rush of amazing energy.
‘Damn him!

    “Confound his politics!
    Frustrate his knavish tricks!
    On Thee his hopes to fix?
          Damn him again!”’

After this most extraordinary outburst, Mr. Grewgious, quite beside
himself, plunged about the room, to all appearance undecided whether he
was in a fit of loyal enthusiasm, or combative denunciation.

He stopped and said, wiping his face: ‘I beg your pardon, my dear, but
you will be glad to know I feel better.  Tell me no more just now, or I
might do it again.  You must be refreshed and cheered.  What did you take
last?  Was it breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?  And what will
you take next?  Shall it be breakfast, lunch, dinner, tea, or supper?’

The respectful tenderness with which, on one knee before her, he helped
her to remove her hat, and disentangle her pretty hair from it, was quite
a chivalrous sight.  Yet who, knowing him only on the surface, would have
expected chivalry—and of the true sort, too; not the spurious—from Mr.
Grewgious?

‘Your rest too must be provided for,’ he went on; ‘and you shall have the
prettiest chamber in Furnival’s.  Your toilet must be provided for, and
you shall have everything that an unlimited head chambermaid—by which
expression I mean a head chambermaid not limited as to outlay—can
procure.  Is that a bag?’ he looked hard at it; sooth to say, it required
hard looking at to be seen at all in a dimly lighted room: ‘and is it
your property, my dear?’

‘Yes, sir.  I brought it with me.’

‘It is not an extensive bag,’ said Mr. Grewgious, candidly, ‘though
admirably calculated to contain a day’s provision for a canary-bird.
Perhaps you brought a canary-bird?’

Rosa smiled and shook her head.

‘If you had, he should have been made welcome,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘and
I think he would have been pleased to be hung upon a nail outside and pit
himself against our Staple sparrows; whose execution must be admitted to
be not quite equal to their intention.  Which is the case with so many of
us!  You didn’t say what meal, my dear.  Have a nice jumble of all
meals.’

Rosa thanked him, but said she could only take a cup of tea.  Mr.
Grewgious, after several times running out, and in again, to mention such
supplementary items as marmalade, eggs, watercresses, salted fish, and
frizzled ham, ran across to Furnival’s without his hat, to give his
various directions.  And soon afterwards they were realised in practice,
and the board was spread.

‘Lord bless my soul,’ cried Mr. Grewgious, putting the lamp upon it, and
taking his seat opposite Rosa; ‘what a new sensation for a poor old
Angular bachelor, to be sure!’

           [Picture: Mr. Grewgious experiences a new sensation]

Rosa’s expressive little eyebrows asked him what he meant?

‘The sensation of having a sweet young presence in the place, that
whitewashes it, paints it, papers it, decorates it with gilding, and
makes it Glorious!’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Ah me!  Ah me!’

As there was something mournful in his sigh, Rosa, in touching him with
her tea-cup, ventured to touch him with her small hand too.

‘Thank you, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Ahem!  Let’s talk!’

‘Do you always live here, sir?’ asked Rosa.

‘Yes, my dear.’

‘And always alone?’

‘Always alone; except that I have daily company in a gentleman by the
name of Bazzard, my clerk.’

‘_He_ doesn’t live here?’

‘No, he goes his way, after office hours.  In fact, he is off duty here,
altogether, just at present; and a firm down-stairs, with which I have
business relations, lend me a substitute.  But it would be extremely
difficult to replace Mr. Bazzard.’

‘He must be very fond of you,’ said Rosa.

‘He bears up against it with commendable fortitude if he is,’ returned
Mr. Grewgious, after considering the matter.  ‘But I doubt if he is.  Not
particularly so.  You see, he is discontented, poor fellow.’

‘Why isn’t he contented?’ was the natural inquiry.

‘Misplaced,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with great mystery.

Rosa’s eyebrows resumed their inquisitive and perplexed expression.

‘So misplaced,’ Mr. Grewgious went on, ‘that I feel constantly apologetic
towards him.  And he feels (though he doesn’t mention it) that I have
reason to be.’

Mr. Grewgious had by this time grown so very mysterious, that Rosa did
not know how to go on.  While she was thinking about it Mr. Grewgious
suddenly jerked out of himself for the second time:

‘Let’s talk.  We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard.  It’s a secret, and
moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret; but the sweet presence at my table
makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must impart it in
inviolable confidence.  What do you think Mr. Bazzard has done?’

‘O dear!’ cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her mind
reverting to Jasper, ‘nothing dreadful, I hope?’

‘He has written a play,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn whisper.  ‘A
tragedy.’

Rosa seemed much relieved.

‘And nobody,’ pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, ‘will hear, on any
account whatever, of bringing it out.’

Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly; as who should say,
‘Such things are, and why are they!’

‘Now, you know,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘_I_ couldn’t write a play.’

‘Not a bad one, sir?’ said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows again in
action.

‘No.  If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about to be
instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon for the
condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should be under the
necessity of resuming the block, and begging the executioner to proceed
to extremities,—meaning,’ said Mr. Grewgious, passing his hand under his
chin, ‘the singular number, and this extremity.’

Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward supposititious
case were hers.

‘Consequently,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘Mr. Bazzard would have a sense of my
inferiority to himself under any circumstances; but when I am his master,
you know, the case is greatly aggravated.’

Mr. Grewgious shook his head seriously, as if he felt the offence to be a
little too much, though of his own committing.

‘How came you to be his master, sir?’ asked Rosa.

‘A question that naturally follows,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Let’s talk.
Mr. Bazzard’s father, being a Norfolk farmer, would have furiously laid
about him with a flail, a pitch-fork, and every agricultural implement
available for assaulting purposes, on the slightest hint of his son’s
having written a play.  So the son, bringing to me the father’s rent
(which I receive), imparted his secret, and pointed out that he was
determined to pursue his genius, and that it would put him in peril of
starvation, and that he was not formed for it.’

‘For pursuing his genius, sir?’

‘No, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘for starvation.  It was impossible to
deny the position, that Mr. Bazzard was not formed to be starved, and Mr.
Bazzard then pointed out that it was desirable that I should stand
between him and a fate so perfectly unsuited to his formation.  In that
way Mr. Bazzard became my clerk, and he feels it very much.’

‘I am glad he is grateful,’ said Rosa.

‘I didn’t quite mean that, my dear.  I mean, that he feels the
degradation.  There are some other geniuses that Mr. Bazzard has become
acquainted with, who have also written tragedies, which likewise nobody
will on any account whatever hear of bringing out, and these choice
spirits dedicate their plays to one another in a highly panegyrical
manner.  Mr. Bazzard has been the subject of one of these dedications.
Now, you know, I never had a play dedicated to _me_!’

Rosa looked at him as if she would have liked him to be the recipient of
a thousand dedications.

‘Which again, naturally, rubs against the grain of Mr. Bazzard,’ said Mr.
Grewgious.  ‘He is very short with me sometimes, and then I feel that he
is meditating, “This blockhead is my master!  A fellow who couldn’t write
a tragedy on pain of death, and who will never have one dedicated to him
with the most complimentary congratulations on the high position he has
taken in the eyes of posterity!”  Very trying, very trying.  However, in
giving him directions, I reflect beforehand: “Perhaps he may not like
this,” or “He might take it ill if I asked that;” and so we get on very
well.  Indeed, better than I could have expected.’

‘Is the tragedy named, sir?’ asked Rosa.

‘Strictly between ourselves,’ answered Mr. Grewgious, ‘it has a
dreadfully appropriate name.  It is called The Thorn of Anxiety.  But Mr.
Bazzard hopes—and I hope—that it will come out at last.’

It was not hard to divine that Mr. Grewgious had related the Bazzard
history thus fully, at least quite as much for the recreation of his
ward’s mind from the subject that had driven her there, as for the
gratification of his own tendency to be social and communicative.

‘And now, my dear,’ he said at this point, ‘if you are not too tired to
tell me more of what passed to-day—but only if you feel quite able—I
should be glad to hear it.  I may digest it the better, if I sleep on it
to-night.’

Rosa, composed now, gave him a faithful account of the interview.  Mr.
Grewgious often smoothed his head while it was in progress, and begged to
be told a second time those parts which bore on Helena and Neville.  When
Rosa had finished, he sat grave, silent, and meditative for a while.

‘Clearly narrated,’ was his only remark at last, ‘and, I hope, clearly
put away here,’ smoothing his head again.  ‘See, my dear,’ taking her to
the open window, ‘where they live!  The dark windows over yonder.’

‘I may go to Helena to-morrow?’ asked Rosa.

‘I should like to sleep on that question to-night,’ he answered
doubtfully.  ‘But let me take you to your own rest, for you must need
it.’

With that Mr. Grewgious helped her to get her hat on again, and hung upon
his arm the very little bag that was of no earthly use, and led her by
the hand (with a certain stately awkwardness, as if he were going to walk
a minuet) across Holborn, and into Furnival’s Inn.  At the hotel door, he
confided her to the Unlimited head chambermaid, and said that while she
went up to see her room, he would remain below, in case she should wish
it exchanged for another, or should find that there was anything she
wanted.

Rosa’s room was airy, clean, comfortable, almost gay.  The Unlimited had
laid in everything omitted from the very little bag (that is to say,
everything she could possibly need), and Rosa tripped down the great many
stairs again, to thank her guardian for his thoughtful and affectionate
care of her.

‘Not at all, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, infinitely gratified; ‘it is I
who thank you for your charming confidence and for your charming company.
Your breakfast will be provided for you in a neat, compact, and graceful
little sitting-room (appropriate to your figure), and I will come to you
at ten o’clock in the morning.  I hope you don’t feel very strange
indeed, in this strange place.’

‘O no, I feel so safe!’

‘Yes, you may be sure that the stairs are fire-proof,’ said Mr.
Grewgious, ‘and that any outbreak of the devouring element would be
perceived and suppressed by the watchmen.’

‘I did not mean that,’ Rosa replied.  ‘I mean, I feel so safe from him.’

‘There is a stout gate of iron bars to keep him out,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
smiling; ‘and Furnival’s is fire-proof, and specially watched and
lighted, and _I_ live over the way!’  In the stoutness of his
knight-errantry, he seemed to think the last-named protection all
sufficient.  In the same spirit he said to the gate-porter as he went
out, ‘If some one staying in the hotel should wish to send across the
road to me in the night, a crown will be ready for the messenger.’  In
the same spirit, he walked up and down outside the iron gate for the best
part of an hour, with some solicitude; occasionally looking in between
the bars, as if he had laid a dove in a high roost in a cage of lions,
and had it on his mind that she might tumble out.




CHAPTER XXI—A RECOGNITION


Nothing occurred in the night to flutter the tired dove; and the dove
arose refreshed.  With Mr. Grewgious, when the clock struck ten in the
morning, came Mr. Crisparkle, who had come at one plunge out of the river
at Cloisterham.

‘Miss Twinkleton was so uneasy, Miss Rosa,’ he explained to her, ‘and
came round to Ma and me with your note, in such a state of wonder, that,
to quiet her, I volunteered on this service by the very first train to be
caught in the morning.  I wished at the time that you had come to me; but
now I think it best that you did _as_ you did, and came to your
guardian.’

‘I did think of you,’ Rosa told him; ‘but Minor Canon Corner was so near
him—’

‘I understand.  It was quite natural.’

‘I have told Mr. Crisparkle,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘all that you told me
last night, my dear.  Of course I should have written it to him
immediately; but his coming was most opportune.  And it was particularly
kind of him to come, for he had but just gone.’

‘Have you settled,’ asked Rosa, appealing to them both, ‘what is to be
done for Helena and her brother?’

‘Why really,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘I am in great perplexity.  If even
Mr. Grewgious, whose head is much longer than mine, and who is a whole
night’s cogitation in advance of me, is undecided, what must I be!’

The Unlimited here put her head in at the door—after having rapped, and
been authorised to present herself—announcing that a gentleman wished for
a word with another gentleman named Crisparkle, if any such gentleman
were there.  If no such gentleman were there, he begged pardon for being
mistaken.

‘Such a gentleman is here,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘but is engaged just
now.’

‘Is it a dark gentleman?’ interposed Rosa, retreating on her guardian.

‘No, Miss, more of a brown gentleman.’

‘You are sure not with black hair?’ asked Rosa, taking courage.

‘Quite sure of that, Miss.  Brown hair and blue eyes.’

‘Perhaps,’ hinted Mr. Grewgious, with habitual caution, ‘it might be well
to see him, reverend sir, if you don’t object.  When one is in a
difficulty or at a loss, one never knows in what direction a way out may
chance to open.  It is a business principle of mine, in such a case, not
to close up any direction, but to keep an eye on every direction that may
present itself.  I could relate an anecdote in point, but that it would
be premature.’

‘If Miss Rosa will allow me, then?  Let the gentleman come in,’ said Mr.
Crisparkle.

The gentleman came in; apologised, with a frank but modest grace, for not
finding Mr. Crisparkle alone; turned to Mr. Crisparkle, and smilingly
asked the unexpected question: ‘Who am I?’

‘You are the gentleman I saw smoking under the trees in Staple Inn, a few
minutes ago.’

‘True.  There I saw you.  Who else am I?’

Mr. Crisparkle concentrated his attention on a handsome face, much
sunburnt; and the ghost of some departed boy seemed to rise, gradually
and dimly, in the room.

The gentleman saw a struggling recollection lighten up the Minor Canon’s
features, and smiling again, said: ‘What will you have for breakfast this
morning?  You are out of jam.’

‘Wait a moment!’ cried Mr. Crisparkle, raising his right hand.  ‘Give me
another instant!  Tartar!’

The two shook hands with the greatest heartiness, and then went the
wonderful length—for Englishmen—of laying their hands each on the other’s
shoulders, and looking joyfully each into the other’s face.

‘My old fag!’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘My old master!’ said Mr. Tartar.

‘You saved me from drowning!’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘After which you took to swimming, you know!’ said Mr. Tartar.

‘God bless my soul!’ said Mr. Crisparkle.

‘Amen!’ said Mr. Tartar.

And then they fell to shaking hands most heartily again.

‘Imagine,’ exclaimed Mr. Crisparkle, with glistening eyes: ‘Miss Rosa Bud
and Mr. Grewgious, imagine Mr. Tartar, when he was the smallest of
juniors, diving for me, catching me, a big heavy senior, by the hair of
the head, and striking out for the shore with me like a water-giant!’

‘Imagine my not letting him sink, as I was his fag!’ said Mr. Tartar.
‘But the truth being that he was my best protector and friend, and did me
more good than all the masters put together, an irrational impulse seized
me to pick him up, or go down with him.’

‘Hem!  Permit me, sir, to have the honour,’ said Mr. Grewgious, advancing
with extended hand, ‘for an honour I truly esteem it.  I am proud to make
your acquaintance.  I hope you didn’t take cold.  I hope you were not
inconvenienced by swallowing too much water.  How have you been since?’

It was by no means apparent that Mr. Grewgious knew what he said, though
it was very apparent that he meant to say something highly friendly and
appreciative.

If Heaven, Rosa thought, had but sent such courage and skill to her poor
mother’s aid!  And he to have been so slight and young then!

‘I don’t wish to be complimented upon it, I thank you; but I think I have
an idea,’ Mr. Grewgious announced, after taking a jog-trot or two across
the room, so unexpected and unaccountable that they all stared at him,
doubtful whether he was choking or had the cramp—‘I _think_ I have an
idea.  I believe I have had the pleasure of seeing Mr. Tartar’s name as
tenant of the top set in the house next the top set in the corner?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mr. Tartar.  ‘You are right so far.’

‘I am right so far,’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘Tick that off;’ which he did,
with his right thumb on his left.  ‘Might you happen to know the name of
your neighbour in the top set on the other side of the party-wall?’
coming very close to Mr. Tartar, to lose nothing of his face, in his
shortness of sight.

‘Landless.’

‘Tick that off,’ said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and then coming
back.  ‘No personal knowledge, I suppose, sir?’

‘Slight, but some.’

‘Tick that off,’ said Mr. Grewgious, taking another trot, and again
coming back.  ‘Nature of knowledge, Mr. Tartar?’

‘I thought he seemed to be a young fellow in a poor way, and I asked his
leave—only within a day or so—to share my flowers up there with him; that
is to say, to extend my flower-garden to his windows.’

‘Would you have the kindness to take seats?’ said Mr. Grewgious.  ‘I
_have_ an idea!’

They complied; Mr. Tartar none the less readily, for being all abroad;
and Mr. Grewgious, seated in the centre, with his hands upon his knees,
thus stated his idea, with his usual manner of having got the statement
by heart.

‘I cannot as yet make up my mind whether it is prudent to hold open
communication under present circumstances, and on the part of the fair
member of the present company, with Mr. Neville or Miss Helena.  I have
reason to know that a local friend of ours (on whom I beg to bestow a
passing but a hearty malediction, with the kind permission of my reverend
friend) sneaks to and fro, and dodges up and down.  When not doing so
himself, he may have some informant skulking about, in the person of a
watchman, porter, or such-like hanger-on of Staple.  On the other hand,
Miss Rosa very naturally wishes to see her friend Miss Helena, and it
would seem important that at least Miss Helena (if not her brother too,
through her) should privately know from Miss Rosa’s lips what has
occurred, and what has been threatened.  Am I agreed with generally in
the views I take?’

‘I entirely coincide with them,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, who had been very
attentive.

‘As I have no doubt I should,’ added Mr. Tartar, smiling, ‘if I
understood them.’

‘Fair and softly, sir,’ said Mr. Grewgious; ‘we shall fully confide in
you directly, if you will favour us with your permission.  Now, if our
local friend should have any informant on the spot, it is tolerably clear
that such informant can only be set to watch the chambers in the
occupation of Mr. Neville.  He reporting, to our local friend, who comes
and goes there, our local friend would supply for himself, from his own
previous knowledge, the identity of the parties.  Nobody can be set to
watch all Staple, or to concern himself with comers and goers to other
sets of chambers: unless, indeed, mine.’

‘I begin to understand to what you tend,’ said Mr. Crisparkle, ‘and
highly approve of your caution.’

‘I needn’t repeat that I know nothing yet of the why and wherefore,’ said
Mr. Tartar; ‘but I also understand to what you tend, so let me say at
once that my chambers are freely at your disposal.’

‘There!’ cried Mr. Grewgious, smoothing his head triumphantly, ‘now we
have all got the idea.  You have it, my dear?’

‘I think I have,’ said Rosa, blushing a little as Mr. Tartar looked
quickly towards her.

‘You see, you go over to Staple with Mr. Crisparkle and Mr. Tartar,’ said
Mr. Grewgious; ‘I going in and out, and out and in alone, in my usual
way; you go up with those gentlemen to Mr. Tartar’s rooms; you look into
Mr. Tartar’s flower-garden; you wait for Miss Helena’s appearance there,
or you signify to Miss Helena that you are close by; and you communicate
with her freely, and no spy can be the wiser.’

‘I am very much afraid I shall be—’

‘Be what, my dear?’ asked Mr. Grewgious, as she hesitated.  ‘Not
frightened?’

‘No, not that,’ said Rosa, shyly; ‘in Mr. Tartar’s way.  We seem to be
appropriating Mr. Tartar’s residence so very coolly.’

‘I protest to you,’ returned that gentleman, ‘that I shall think the
better of it for evermore, if your voice sounds in it only once.’

Rosa, not quite knowing what to say about that, cast down her eyes, and
turning to Mr. Grewgious, dutifully asked if she should put her hat on?
Mr. Grewgious being of opinion that she could not do better, she withdrew
for the purpose.  Mr. Crisparkle took the opportunity of giving Mr.
Tartar a summary of the distresses of Neville and his sister; the
opportunity was quite long enough, as the hat happened to require a
little extra fitting on.

Mr. Tartar gave his arm to Rosa, and Mr. Crisparkle walked, detached, in
front.

‘Poor, poor Eddy!’ thought Rosa, as they went along.

Mr. Tartar waved his right hand as he bent his head down over Rosa,
talking in an animated way.

‘It was not so powerful or so sun-browned when it saved Mr. Crisparkle,’
thought Rosa, glancing at it; ‘but it must have been very steady and
determined even then.’

Mr. Tartar told her he had been a sailor, roving everywhere for years and
years.

‘When are you going to sea again?’ asked Rosa.

‘Never!’

Rosa wondered what the girls would say if they could see her crossing the
wide street on the sailor’s arm.  And she fancied that the passers-by
must think her very little and very helpless, contrasted with the strong
figure that could have caught her up and carried her out of any danger,
miles and miles without resting.

She was thinking further, that his far-seeing blue eyes looked as if they
had been used to watch danger afar off, and to watch it without
flinching, drawing nearer and nearer: when, happening to raise her own
eyes, she found that he seemed to be thinking something about _them_.

This a little confused Rosebud, and may account for her never afterwards
quite knowing how she ascended (with his help) to his garden in the air,
and seemed to get into a marvellous country that came into sudden bloom
like the country on the summit of the magic bean-stalk.  May it flourish
for ever!




CHAPTER XXII—A GRITTY STATE OF THINGS COMES ON


Mr. Tartar’s chambers were the neatest, the cleanest, and the
best-ordered chambers ever seen under the sun, moon, and stars.  The
floors were scrubbed to that extent, that you might have supposed the
London blacks emancipated for ever, and gone out of the land for good.
Every inch of brass-work in Mr. Tartar’s possession was polished and
burnished, till it shone like a brazen mirror.  No speck, nor spot, nor
spatter soiled the purity of any of Mr. Tartar’s household gods, large,
small, or middle-sized.  His sitting-room was like the admiral’s cabin,
his bath-room was like a dairy, his sleeping-chamber, fitted all about
with lockers and drawers, was like a seedsman’s shop; and his
nicely-balanced cot just stirred in the midst, as if it breathed.
Everything belonging to Mr. Tartar had quarters of its own assigned to
it: his maps and charts had their quarters; his books had theirs; his
brushes had theirs; his boots had theirs; his clothes had theirs; his
case-bottles had theirs; his telescopes and other instruments had theirs.
Everything was readily accessible.  Shelf, bracket, locker, hook, and
drawer were equally within reach, and were equally contrived with a view
to avoiding waste of room, and providing some snug inches of stowage for
something that would have exactly fitted nowhere else.  His gleaming
little service of plate was so arranged upon his sideboard as that a
slack salt-spoon would have instantly betrayed itself; his toilet
implements were so arranged upon his dressing-table as that a toothpick
of slovenly deportment could have been reported at a glance.  So with the
curiosities he had brought home from various voyages.  Stuffed, dried,
repolished, or otherwise preserved, according to their kind; birds,
fishes, reptiles, arms, articles of dress, shells, seaweeds, grasses, or
memorials of coral reef; each was displayed in its especial place, and
each could have been displayed in no better place.  Paint and varnish
seemed to be kept somewhere out of sight, in constant readiness to
obliterate stray finger-marks wherever any might become perceptible in
Mr. Tartar’s chambers.  No man-of-war was ever kept more spick and span
from careless touch.  On this bright summer day, a neat awning was rigged
over Mr. Tartar’s flower-garden as only a sailor can rig it, and there
was a sea-going air upon the whole effect, so delightfully complete, that
the flower-garden might have appertained to stern-windows afloat, and the
whole concern might have bowled away gallantly with all on board, if Mr.
Tartar had only clapped to his lips the speaking-trumpet that was slung
in a corner, and given hoarse orders to heave the anchor up, look alive
there, men, and get all sail upon her!

Mr. Tartar doing the honours of this gallant craft was of a piece with
the rest.  When a man rides an amiable hobby that shies at nothing and
kicks nobody, it is only agreeable to find him riding it with a humorous
sense of the droll side of the creature.  When the man is a cordial and
an earnest man by nature, and withal is perfectly fresh and genuine, it
may be doubted whether he is ever seen to greater advantage than at such
a time.  So Rosa would have naturally thought (even if she hadn’t been
conducted over the ship with all the homage due to the First Lady of the
Admiralty, or First Fairy of the Sea), that it was charming to see and
hear Mr. Tartar half laughing at, and half rejoicing in, his various
contrivances.  So Rosa would have naturally thought, anyhow, that the
sunburnt sailor showed to great advantage when, the inspection finished,
he delicately withdrew out of his admiral’s cabin, beseeching her to
consider herself its Queen, and waving her free of his flower-garden with
the hand that had had Mr. Crisparkle’s life in it.

‘Helena!  Helena Landless!  Are you there?’

‘Who speaks to me?  Not Rosa?’  Then a second handsome face appearing.

‘Yes, my darling!’

‘Why, how did you come here, dearest?’

‘I—I don’t quite know,’ said Rosa with a blush; ‘unless I am dreaming!’

Why with a blush?  For their two faces were alone with the other flowers.
Are blushes among the fruits of the country of the magic bean-stalk?

‘_I_ am not dreaming,’ said Helena, smiling.  ‘I should take more for
granted if I were.  How do we come together—or so near together—so very
unexpectedly?’

Unexpectedly indeed, among the dingy gables and chimney-pots of P. J.
T.’s connection, and the flowers that had sprung from the salt sea.  But
Rosa, waking, told in a hurry how they came to be together, and all the
why and wherefore of that matter.

‘And Mr. Crisparkle is here,’ said Rosa, in rapid conclusion; ‘and, could
you believe it? long ago he saved his life!’

‘I could believe any such thing of Mr. Crisparkle,’ returned Helena, with
a mantling face.

(More blushes in the bean-stalk country!)

‘Yes, but it wasn’t Crisparkle,’ said Rosa, quickly putting in the
correction.

‘I don’t understand, love.’

‘It was very nice of Mr. Crisparkle to be saved,’ said Rosa, ‘and he
couldn’t have shown his high opinion of Mr. Tartar more expressively.
But it was Mr. Tartar who saved him.’

Helena’s dark eyes looked very earnestly at the bright face among the
leaves, and she asked, in a slower and more thoughtful tone:

‘Is Mr. Tartar with you now, dear?’

‘No; because he has given up his rooms to me—to us, I mean.  It is such a
beautiful place!’

‘Is it?’

‘It is like the inside of the most exquisite ship that ever sailed.  It
is like—it is like—’

‘Like a dream?’ suggested Helena.

Rosa answered with a little nod, and smelled the flowers.

Helena resumed, after a short pause of silence, during which she seemed
(or it was Rosa’s fancy) to compassionate somebody: ‘My poor Neville is
reading in his own room, the sun being so very bright on this side just
now.  I think he had better not know that you are so near.’

‘O, I think so too!’ cried Rosa very readily.

‘I suppose,’ pursued Helena, doubtfully, ‘that he must know by-and-by all
you have told me; but I am not sure.  Ask Mr. Crisparkle’s advice, my
darling.  Ask him whether I may tell Neville as much or as little of what
you have told me as I think best.’

Rosa subsided into her state-cabin, and propounded the question.  The
Minor Canon was for the free exercise of Helena’s judgment.

‘I thank him very much,’ said Helena, when Rosa emerged again with her
report.  ‘Ask him whether it would be best to wait until any more
maligning and pursuing of Neville on the part of this wretch shall
disclose itself, or to try to anticipate it: I mean, so far as to find
out whether any such goes on darkly about us?’

The Minor Canon found this point so difficult to give a confident opinion
on, that, after two or three attempts and failures, he suggested a
reference to Mr. Grewgious.  Helena acquiescing, he betook himself (with
a most unsuccessful assumption of lounging indifference) across the
quadrangle to P. J. T.’s, and stated it.  Mr. Grewgious held decidedly to
the general principle, that if you could steal a march upon a brigand or
a wild beast, you had better do it; and he also held decidedly to the
special case, that John Jasper was a brigand and a wild beast in
combination.

Thus advised, Mr. Crisparkle came back again and reported to Rosa, who in
her turn reported to Helena.  She now steadily pursuing her train of
thought at her window, considered thereupon.

‘We may count on Mr. Tartar’s readiness to help us, Rosa?’ she inquired.

O yes!  Rosa shyly thought so.  O yes, Rosa shyly believed she could
almost answer for it.  But should she ask Mr. Crisparkle?  ‘I think your
authority on the point as good as his, my dear,’ said Helena, sedately,
‘and you needn’t disappear again for that.’  Odd of Helena!

‘You see, Neville,’ Helena pursued after more reflection, ‘knows no one
else here: he has not so much as exchanged a word with any one else here.
If Mr. Tartar would call to see him openly and often; if he would spare a
minute for the purpose, frequently; if he would even do so, almost daily;
something might come of it.’

‘Something might come of it, dear?’ repeated Rosa, surveying her friend’s
beauty with a highly perplexed face.  ‘Something might?’

‘If Neville’s movements are really watched, and if the purpose really is
to isolate him from all friends and acquaintance and wear his daily life
out grain by grain (which would seem to be the threat to you), does it
not appear likely,’ said Helena, ‘that his enemy would in some way
communicate with Mr. Tartar to warn him off from Neville?  In which case,
we might not only know the fact, but might know from Mr. Tartar what the
terms of the communication were.’

‘I see!’ cried Rosa.  And immediately darted into her state-cabin again.

Presently her pretty face reappeared, with a greatly heightened colour,
and she said that she had told Mr. Crisparkle, and that Mr. Crisparkle
had fetched in Mr. Tartar, and that Mr. Tartar—‘who is waiting now, in
case you want him,’ added Rosa, with a half look back, and in not a
little confusion between the inside of the state-cabin and out—had
declared his readiness to act as she had suggested, and to enter on his
task that very day.

‘I thank him from my heart,’ said Helena.  ‘Pray tell him so.’

Again not a little confused between the Flower-garden and the Cabin, Rosa
dipped in with her message, and dipped out again with more assurances
from Mr. Tartar, and stood wavering in a divided state between Helena and
him, which proved that confusion is not always necessarily awkward, but
may sometimes present a very pleasant appearance.

‘And now, darling,’ said Helena, ‘we will be mindful of the caution that
has restricted us to this interview for the present, and will part.  I
hear Neville moving too.  Are you going back?’

‘To Miss Twinkleton’s?’ asked Rosa.

‘Yes.’

‘O, I could never go there any more.  I couldn’t indeed, after that
dreadful interview!’ said Rosa.

‘Then where _are_ you going, pretty one?’

‘Now I come to think of it, I don’t know,’ said Rosa.  ‘I have settled
nothing at all yet, but my guardian will take care of me.  Don’t be
uneasy, dear.  I shall be sure to be somewhere.’

(It did seem likely.)

‘And I shall hear of my Rosebud from Mr. Tartar?’ inquired Helena.

‘Yes, I suppose so; from—’ Rosa looked back again in a flutter, instead
of supplying the name.  ‘But tell me one thing before we part, dearest
Helena.  Tell me—that you are sure, sure, sure, I couldn’t help it.’

‘Help it, love?’

‘Help making him malicious and revengeful.  I couldn’t hold any terms
with him, could I?’

‘You know how I love you, darling,’ answered Helena, with indignation;
‘but I would sooner see you dead at his wicked feet.’

‘That’s a great comfort to me!  And you will tell your poor brother so,
won’t you?  And you will give him my remembrance and my sympathy?  And
you will ask him not to hate me?’

With a mournful shake of the head, as if that would be quite a
superfluous entreaty, Helena lovingly kissed her two hands to her friend,
and her friend’s two hands were kissed to her; and then she saw a third
hand (a brown one) appear among the flowers and leaves, and help her
friend out of sight.

The refection that Mr. Tartar produced in the Admiral’s Cabin by merely
touching the spring knob of a locker and the handle of a drawer, was a
dazzling enchanted repast.  Wonderful macaroons, glittering liqueurs,
magically-preserved tropical spices, and jellies of celestial tropical
fruits, displayed themselves profusely at an instant’s notice.  But Mr.
Tartar could not make time stand still; and time, with his hard-hearted
fleetness, strode on so fast, that Rosa was obliged to come down from the
bean-stalk country to earth and her guardian’s chambers.

‘And now, my dear,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘what is to be done next?  To put
the same thought in another form; what is to be done with you?’

Rosa could only look apologetically sensible of being very much in her
own way and in everybody else’s.  Some passing idea of living, fireproof,
up a good many stairs in Furnival’s Inn for the rest of her life, was the
only thing in the nature of a plan that occurred to her.

‘It has come into my thoughts,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘that as the
respected lady, Miss Twinkleton, occasionally repairs to London in the
recess, with the view of extending her connection, and being available
for interviews with metropolitan parents, if any—whether, until we have
time in which to turn ourselves round, we might invite Miss Twinkleton to
come and stay with you for a month?’

‘Stay where, sir?’

‘Whether,’ explained Mr. Grewgious, ‘we might take a furnished lodging in
town for a month, and invite Miss Twinkleton to assume the charge of you
in it for that period?’

‘And afterwards?’ hinted Rosa.

‘And afterwards,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘we should be no worse off than we
are now.’

‘I think that might smooth the way,’ assented Rosa.

‘Then let us,’ said Mr. Grewgious, rising, ‘go and look for a furnished
lodging.  Nothing could be more acceptable to me than the sweet presence
of last evening, for all the remaining evenings of my existence; but
these are not fit surroundings for a young lady.  Let us set out in quest
of adventures, and look for a furnished lodging.  In the meantime, Mr.
Crisparkle here, about to return home immediately, will no doubt kindly
see Miss Twinkleton, and invite that lady to co-operate in our plan.’

Mr. Crisparkle, willingly accepting the commission, took his departure;
Mr. Grewgious and his ward set forth on their expedition.

As Mr. Grewgious’s idea of looking at a furnished lodging was to get on
the opposite side of the street to a house with a suitable bill in the
window, and stare at it; and then work his way tortuously to the back of
the house, and stare at that; and then not go in, but make similar trials
of another house, with the same result; their progress was but slow.  At
length he bethought himself of a widowed cousin, divers times removed, of
Mr. Bazzard’s, who had once solicited his influence in the lodger world,
and who lived in Southampton Street, Bloomsbury Square.  This lady’s
name, stated in uncompromising capitals of considerable size on a brass
door-plate, and yet not lucidly as to sex or condition, was BILLICKIN.

Personal faintness, and an overpowering personal candour, were the
distinguishing features of Mrs. Billickin’s organisation.  She came
languishing out of her own exclusive back parlour, with the air of having
been expressly brought-to for the purpose, from an accumulation of
several swoons.

‘I hope I see you well, sir,’ said Mrs. Billickin, recognising her
visitor with a bend.

‘Thank you, quite well.  And you, ma’am?’ returned Mr. Grewgious.

‘I am as well,’ said Mrs. Billickin, becoming aspirational with excess of
faintness, ‘as I hever ham.’

‘My ward and an elderly lady,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘wish to find a
genteel lodging for a month or so.  Have you any apartments available,
ma’am?’

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘I will not deceive you; far
from it.  I _have_ apartments available.’

This with the air of adding: ‘Convey me to the stake, if you will; but
while I live, I will be candid.’

‘And now, what apartments, ma’am?’ asked Mr. Grewgious, cosily.  To tame
a certain severity apparent on the part of Mrs. Billickin.

‘There is this sitting-room—which, call it what you will, it is the front
parlour, Miss,’ said Mrs. Billickin, impressing Rosa into the
conversation: ‘the back parlour being what I cling to and never part
with; and there is two bedrooms at the top of the ’ouse with gas laid on.
I do not tell you that your bedroom floors is firm, for firm they are
not.  The gas-fitter himself allowed, that to make a firm job, he must go
right under your jistes, and it were not worth the outlay as a yearly
tenant so to do.  The piping is carried above your jistes, and it is best
that it should be made known to you.’

Mr. Grewgious and Rosa exchanged looks of some dismay, though they had
not the least idea what latent horrors this carriage of the piping might
involve.  Mrs. Billickin put her hand to her heart, as having eased it of
a load.

‘Well!  The roof is all right, no doubt,’ said Mr. Grewgious, plucking up
a little.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘if I was to tell you, sir,
that to have nothink above you is to have a floor above you, I should put
a deception upon you which I will not do.  No, sir.  Your slates WILL
rattle loose at that elewation in windy weather, do your utmost, best or
worst!  I defy you, sir, be you what you may, to keep your slates tight,
try how you can.’  Here Mrs. Billickin, having been warm with Mr.
Grewgious, cooled a little, not to abuse the moral power she held over
him.  ‘Consequent,’ proceeded Mrs. Billickin, more mildly, but still
firmly in her incorruptible candour: ‘consequent it would be worse than
of no use for me to trapse and travel up to the top of the ’ouse with
you, and for you to say, “Mrs. Billickin, what stain do I notice in the
ceiling, for a stain I do consider it?” and for me to answer, “I do not
understand you, sir.”  No, sir, I will not be so underhand.  I _do_
understand you before you pint it out.  It is the wet, sir.  It do come
in, and it do not come in.  You may lay dry there half your lifetime; but
the time will come, and it is best that you should know it, when a
dripping sop would be no name for you.’

Mr. Grewgious looked much disgraced by being prefigured in this pickle.

‘Have you any other apartments, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, with much solemnity, ‘I have.
You ask me have I, and my open and my honest answer air, I have.  The
first and second floors is wacant, and sweet rooms.’

‘Come, come!  There’s nothing against _them_,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
comforting himself.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ replied Mrs. Billickin, ‘pardon me, there is the stairs.
Unless your mind is prepared for the stairs, it will lead to inevitable
disappointment.  You cannot, Miss,’ said Mrs. Billickin, addressing Rosa
reproachfully, ‘place a first floor, and far less a second, on the level
footing ‘of a parlour.  No, you cannot do it, Miss, it is beyond your
power, and wherefore try?’

Mrs. Billickin put it very feelingly, as if Rosa had shown a headstrong
determination to hold the untenable position.

‘Can we see these rooms, ma’am?’ inquired her guardian.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘you can.  I will not disguise
it from you, sir; you can.’

Mrs. Billickin then sent into her back parlour for her shawl (it being a
state fiction, dating from immemorial antiquity, that she could never go
anywhere without being wrapped up), and having been enrolled by her
attendant, led the way.  She made various genteel pauses on the stairs
for breath, and clutched at her heart in the drawing-room as if it had
very nearly got loose, and she had caught it in the act of taking wing.

‘And the second floor?’ said Mr. Grewgious, on finding the first
satisfactory.

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ replied Mrs. Billickin, turning upon him with ceremony,
as if the time had now come when a distinct understanding on a difficult
point must be arrived at, and a solemn confidence established, ‘the
second floor is over this.’

‘Can we see that too, ma’am?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Billickin, ‘it is open as the day.’

That also proving satisfactory, Mr. Grewgious retired into a window with
Rosa for a few words of consultation, and then asking for pen and ink,
sketched out a line or two of agreement.  In the meantime Mrs. Billickin
took a seat, and delivered a kind of Index to, or Abstract of, the
general question.

‘Five-and-forty shillings per week by the month certain at the time of
year,’ said Mrs. Billickin, ‘is only reasonable to both parties.  It is
not Bond Street nor yet St. James’s Palace; but it is not pretended that
it is.  Neither is it attempted to be denied—for why should it?—that the
Arching leads to a mews.  Mewses must exist.  Respecting attendance; two
is kep’, at liberal wages.  Words _has_ arisen as to tradesmen, but dirty
shoes on fresh hearth-stoning was attributable, and no wish for a
commission on your orders.  Coals is either _by_ the fire, or _per_ the
scuttle.’  She emphasised the prepositions as marking a subtle but
immense difference.  ‘Dogs is not viewed with favour.  Besides litter,
they gets stole, and sharing suspicions is apt to creep in, and
unpleasantness takes place.’

By this time Mr. Grewgious had his agreement-lines, and his
earnest-money, ready.  ‘I have signed it for the ladies, ma’am,’ he said,
‘and you’ll have the goodness to sign it for yourself, Christian and
Surname, there, if you please.’

‘Mr. Grewgious,’ said Mrs. Billickin in a new burst of candour, ‘no, sir!
You must excuse the Christian name.’

Mr. Grewgious stared at her.

‘The door-plate is used as a protection,’ said Mrs. Billickin, ‘and acts
as such, and go from it I will not.’

Mr. Grewgious stared at Rosa.

‘No, Mr. Grewgious, you must excuse me.  So long as this ’ouse is known
indefinite as Billickin’s, and so long as it is a doubt with the
riff-raff where Billickin may be hidin’, near the street-door or down the
airy, and what his weight and size, so long I feel safe.  But commit
myself to a solitary female statement, no, Miss!  Nor would you for a
moment wish,’ said Mrs. Billickin, with a strong sense of injury, ‘to
take that advantage of your sex, if you were not brought to it by
inconsiderate example.’

Rosa reddening as if she had made some most disgraceful attempt to
overreach the good lady, besought Mr. Grewgious to rest content with any
signature.  And accordingly, in a baronial way, the sign-manual BILLICKIN
got appended to the document.

Details were then settled for taking possession on the next day but one,
when Miss Twinkleton might be reasonably expected; and Rosa went back to
Furnival’s Inn on her guardian’s arm.

Behold Mr. Tartar walking up and down Furnival’s Inn, checking himself
when he saw them coming, and advancing towards them!

‘It occurred to me,’ hinted Mr. Tartar, ‘that we might go up the river,
the weather being so delicious and the tide serving.  I have a boat of my
own at the Temple Stairs.’

‘I have not been up the river for this many a day,’ said Mr. Grewgious,
tempted.

‘I was never up the river,’ added Rosa.

Within half an hour they were setting this matter right by going up the
river.  The tide was running with them, the afternoon was charming.  Mr.
Tartar’s boat was perfect.  Mr. Tartar and Lobley (Mr. Tartar’s man)
pulled a pair of oars.  Mr. Tartar had a yacht, it seemed, lying
somewhere down by Greenhithe; and Mr. Tartar’s man had charge of this
yacht, and was detached upon his present service.  He was a
jolly-favoured man, with tawny hair and whiskers, and a big red face.  He
was the dead image of the sun in old woodcuts, his hair and whiskers
answering for rays all around him.  Resplendent in the bow of the boat,
he was a shining sight, with a man-of-war’s man’s shirt on—or off,
according to opinion—and his arms and breast tattooed all sorts of
patterns.  Lobley seemed to take it easily, and so did Mr. Tartar; yet
their oars bent as they pulled, and the boat bounded under them.  Mr.
Tartar talked as if he were doing nothing, to Rosa who was really doing
nothing, and to Mr. Grewgious who was doing this much that he steered all
wrong; but what did that matter, when a turn of Mr. Tartar’s skilful
wrist, or a mere grin of Mr. Lobley’s over the bow, put all to rights!
The tide bore them on in the gayest and most sparkling manner, until they
stopped to dine in some ever-lastingly-green garden, needing no
matter-of-fact identification here; and then the tide obligingly
turned—being devoted to that party alone for that day; and as they
floated idly among some osier-beds, Rosa tried what she could do in the
rowing way, and came off splendidly, being much assisted; and Mr.
Grewgious tried what he could do, and came off on his back, doubled up
with an oar under his chin, being not assisted at all.  Then there was an
interval of rest under boughs (such rest!) what time Mr. Lobley mopped,
and, arranging cushions, stretchers, and the like, danced the tight-rope
the whole length of the boat like a man to whom shoes were a superstition
and stockings slavery; and then came the sweet return among delicious
odours of limes in bloom, and musical ripplings; and, all too soon, the
great black city cast its shadow on the waters, and its dark bridges
spanned them as death spans life, and the everlastingly-green garden
seemed to be left for everlasting, unregainable and far away.

                         [Picture: Up the river]

‘Cannot people get through life without gritty stages, I wonder?’ Rosa
thought next day, when the town was very gritty again, and everything had
a strange and an uncomfortable appearance of seeming to wait for
something that wouldn’t come.  NO.  She began to think, that, now the
Cloisterham school-days had glided past and gone, the gritty stages would
begin to set in at intervals and make themselves wearily known!

Yet what did Rosa expect?  Did she expect Miss Twinkleton?  Miss
Twinkleton duly came.  Forth from her back parlour issued the Billickin
to receive Miss Twinkleton, and War was in the Billickin’s eye from that
fell moment.

Miss Twinkleton brought a quantity of luggage with her, having all Rosa’s
as well as her own.  The Billickin took it ill that Miss Twinkleton’s
mind, being sorely disturbed by this luggage, failed to take in her
personal identity with that clearness of perception which was due to its
demands.  Stateliness mounted her gloomy throne upon the Billickin’s brow
in consequence.  And when Miss Twinkleton, in agitation taking stock of
her trunks and packages, of which she had seventeen, particularly counted
in the Billickin herself as number eleven, the B. found it necessary to
repudiate.

‘Things cannot too soon be put upon the footing,’ said she, with a
candour so demonstrative as to be almost obtrusive, ‘that the person of
the ’ouse is not a box nor yet a bundle, nor a carpet-bag.  No, I am ’ily
obleeged to you, Miss Twinkleton, nor yet a beggar.’

This last disclaimer had reference to Miss Twinkleton’s distractedly
pressing two-and-sixpence on her, instead of the cabman.

Thus cast off, Miss Twinkleton wildly inquired, ‘which gentleman’ was to
be paid?  There being two gentlemen in that position (Miss Twinkleton
having arrived with two cabs), each gentleman on being paid held forth
his two-and-sixpence on the flat of his open hand, and, with a speechless
stare and a dropped jaw, displayed his wrong to heaven and earth.
Terrified by this alarming spectacle, Miss Twinkleton placed another
shilling in each hand; at the same time appealing to the law in flurried
accents, and recounting her luggage this time with the two gentlemen in,
who caused the total to come out complicated.  Meanwhile the two
gentlemen, each looking very hard at the last shilling grumblingly, as if
it might become eighteen-pence if he kept his eyes on it, descended the
doorsteps, ascended their carriages, and drove away, leaving Miss
Twinkleton on a bonnet-box in tears.

The Billickin beheld this manifestation of weakness without sympathy, and
gave directions for ‘a young man to be got in’ to wrestle with the
luggage.  When that gladiator had disappeared from the arena, peace
ensued, and the new lodgers dined.

But the Billickin had somehow come to the knowledge that Miss Twinkleton
kept a school.  The leap from that knowledge to the inference that Miss
Twinkleton set herself to teach _her_ something, was easy.  ‘But you
don’t do it,’ soliloquised the Billickin; ‘I am not your pupil, whatever
she,’ meaning Rosa, ‘may be, poor thing!’

Miss Twinkleton, on the other hand, having changed her dress and
recovered her spirits, was animated by a bland desire to improve the
occasion in all ways, and to be as serene a model as possible.  In a
happy compromise between her two states of existence, she had already
become, with her workbasket before her, the equably vivacious companion
with a slight judicious flavouring of information, when the Billickin
announced herself.

‘I will not hide from you, ladies,’ said the B., enveloped in the shawl
of state, ‘for it is not my character to hide neither my motives nor my
actions, that I take the liberty to look in upon you to express a ’ope
that your dinner was to your liking.  Though not Professed but Plain,
still her wages should be a sufficient object to her to stimilate to soar
above mere roast and biled.’

‘We dined very well indeed,’ said Rosa, ‘thank you.’

‘Accustomed,’ said Miss Twinkleton with a gracious air, which to the
jealous ears of the Billickin seemed to add ‘my good woman’—‘accustomed
to a liberal and nutritious, yet plain and salutary diet, we have found
no reason to bemoan our absence from the ancient city, and the methodical
household, in which the quiet routine of our lot has been hitherto cast.’

‘I did think it well to mention to my cook,’ observed the Billickin with
a gush of candour, ‘which I ’ope you will agree with, Miss Twinkleton,
was a right precaution, that the young lady being used to what we should
consider here but poor diet, had better be brought forward by degrees.
For, a rush from scanty feeding to generous feeding, and from what you
may call messing to what you may call method, do require a power of
constitution which is not often found in youth, particular when
undermined by boarding-school!’

It will be seen that the Billickin now openly pitted herself against Miss
Twinkleton, as one whom she had fully ascertained to be her natural
enemy.

‘Your remarks,’ returned Miss Twinkleton, from a remote moral eminence,
‘are well meant, I have no doubt; but you will permit me to observe that
they develop a mistaken view of the subject, which can only be imputed to
your extreme want of accurate information.’

‘My informiation,’ retorted the Billickin, throwing in an extra syllable
for the sake of emphasis at once polite and powerful—‘my informiation,
Miss Twinkleton, were my own experience, which I believe is usually
considered to be good guidance.  But whether so or not, I was put in
youth to a very genteel boarding-school, the mistress being no less a
lady than yourself, of about your own age or it may be some years
younger, and a poorness of blood flowed from the table which has run
through my life.’

‘Very likely,’ said Miss Twinkleton, still from her distant eminence;
‘and very much to be deplored.—Rosa, my dear, how are you getting on with
your work?’

‘Miss Twinkleton,’ resumed the Billickin, in a courtly manner, ‘before
retiring on the ’int, as a lady should, I wish to ask of yourself, as a
lady, whether I am to consider that my words is doubted?’

‘I am not aware on what ground you cherish such a supposition,’ began
Miss Twinkleton, when the Billickin neatly stopped her.

‘Do not, if you please, put suppositions betwixt my lips where none such
have been imparted by myself.  Your flow of words is great, Miss
Twinkleton, and no doubt is expected from you by your pupils, and no
doubt is considered worth the money.  _No_ doubt, I am sure.  But not
paying for flows of words, and not asking to be favoured with them here,
I wish to repeat my question.’

‘If you refer to the poverty of your circulation,’ began Miss Twinkleton,
when again the Billickin neatly stopped her.

‘I have used no such expressions.’

‘If you refer, then, to the poorness of your blood—’

‘Brought upon me,’ stipulated the Billickin, expressly, ‘at a
boarding-school—’

‘Then,’ resumed Miss Twinkleton, ‘all I can say is, that I am bound to
believe, on your asseveration, that it is very poor indeed.  I cannot
forbear adding, that if that unfortunate circumstance influences your
conversation, it is much to be lamented, and it is eminently desirable
that your blood were richer.—Rosa, my dear, how are you getting on with
your work?’

‘Hem!  Before retiring, Miss,’ proclaimed the Billickin to Rosa, loftily
cancelling Miss Twinkleton, ‘I should wish it to be understood between
yourself and me that my transactions in future is with you alone.  I know
no elderly lady here, Miss, none older than yourself.’

‘A highly desirable arrangement, Rosa my dear,’ observed Miss Twinkleton.

‘It is not, Miss,’ said the Billickin, with a sarcastic smile, ‘that I
possess the Mill I have heard of, in which old single ladies could be
ground up young (what a gift it would be to some of us), but that I limit
myself to you totally.’

‘When I have any desire to communicate a request to the person of the
house, Rosa my dear,’ observed Miss Twinkleton with majestic
cheerfulness, ‘I will make it known to you, and you will kindly
undertake, I am sure, that it is conveyed to the proper quarter.’

‘Good-evening, Miss,’ said the Billickin, at once affectionately and
distantly.  ‘Being alone in my eyes, I wish you good-evening with best
wishes, and do not find myself drove, I am truly ’appy to say, into
expressing my contempt for an indiwidual, unfortunately for yourself,
belonging to you.’

The Billickin gracefully withdrew with this parting speech, and from that
time Rosa occupied the restless position of shuttlecock between these two
battledores.  Nothing could be done without a smart match being played
out.  Thus, on the daily-arising question of dinner, Miss Twinkleton
would say, the three being present together:

‘Perhaps, my love, you will consult with the person of the house, whether
she can procure us a lamb’s fry; or, failing that, a roast fowl.’

On which the Billickin would retort (Rosa not having spoken a word), ‘If
you was better accustomed to butcher’s meat, Miss, you would not
entertain the idea of a lamb’s fry.  Firstly, because lambs has long been
sheep, and secondly, because there is such things as killing-days, and
there is not.  As to roast fowls, Miss, why you must be quite surfeited
with roast fowls, letting alone your buying, when you market for
yourself, the agedest of poultry with the scaliest of legs, quite as if
you was accustomed to picking ’em out for cheapness.  Try a little
inwention, Miss.  Use yourself to ’ousekeeping a bit.  Come now, think of
somethink else.’

To this encouragement, offered with the indulgent toleration of a wise
and liberal expert, Miss Twinkleton would rejoin, reddening:

‘Or, my dear, you might propose to the person of the house a duck.’

‘Well, Miss!’ the Billickin would exclaim (still no word being spoken by
Rosa), ‘you do surprise me when you speak of ducks!  Not to mention that
they’re getting out of season and very dear, it really strikes to my
heart to see you have a duck; for the breast, which is the only delicate
cuts in a duck, always goes in a direction which I cannot imagine where,
and your own plate comes down so miserably skin-and-bony!  Try again,
Miss.  Think more of yourself, and less of others.  A dish of sweetbreads
now, or a bit of mutton.  Something at which you can get your equal
chance.’

Occasionally the game would wax very brisk indeed, and would be kept up
with a smartness rendering such an encounter as this quite tame.  But the
Billickin almost invariably made by far the higher score; and would come
in with side hits of the most unexpected and extraordinary description,
when she seemed without a chance.

All this did not improve the gritty state of things in London, or the air
that London had acquired in Rosa’s eyes of waiting for something that
never came.  Tired of working, and conversing with Miss Twinkleton, she
suggested working and reading: to which Miss Twinkleton readily assented,
as an admirable reader, of tried powers.  But Rosa soon made the
discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn’t read fairly.  She cut the
love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was
guilty of other glaring pious frauds.  As an instance in point, take the
glowing passage: ‘Ever dearest and best adored,—said Edward, clasping the
dear head to his breast, and drawing the silken hair through his
caressing fingers, from which he suffered it to fall like golden
rain,—ever dearest and best adored, let us fly from the unsympathetic
world and the sterile coldness of the stony-hearted, to the rich warm
Paradise of Trust and Love.’  Miss Twinkleton’s fraudulent version tamely
ran thus: ‘Ever engaged to me with the consent of our parents on both
sides, and the approbation of the silver-haired rector of the
district,—said Edward, respectfully raising to his lips the taper fingers
so skilful in embroidery, tambour, crochet, and other truly feminine
arts,—let me call on thy papa ere to-morrow’s dawn has sunk into the
west, and propose a suburban establishment, lowly it may be, but within
our means, where he will be always welcome as an evening guest, and where
every arrangement shall invest economy, and constant interchange of
scholastic acquirements with the attributes of the ministering angel to
domestic bliss.’

As the days crept on and nothing happened, the neighbours began to say
that the pretty girl at Billickin’s, who looked so wistfully and so much
out of the gritty windows of the drawing-room, seemed to be losing her
spirits.  The pretty girl might have lost them but for the accident of
lighting on some books of voyages and sea-adventure.  As a compensation
against their romance, Miss Twinkleton, reading aloud, made the most of
all the latitudes and longitudes, bearings, winds, currents, offsets, and
other statistics (which she felt to be none the less improving because
they expressed nothing whatever to her); while Rosa, listening intently,
made the most of what was nearest to her heart.  So they both did better
than before.




CHAPTER XXIII—THE DAWN AGAIN


Although Mr. Crisparkle and John Jasper met daily under the Cathedral
roof, nothing at any time passed between them having reference to Edwin
Drood, after the time, more than half a year gone by, when Jasper mutely
showed the Minor Canon the conclusion and the resolution entered in his
Diary.  It is not likely that they ever met, though so often, without the
thoughts of each reverting to the subject.  It is not likely that they
ever met, though so often, without a sensation on the part of each that
the other was a perplexing secret to him. Jasper as the denouncer and
pursuer of Neville Landless, and Mr. Crisparkle as his consistent
advocate and protector, must at least have stood sufficiently in
opposition to have speculated with keen interest on the steadiness and
next direction of the other’s designs.  But neither ever broached the
theme.

False pretence not being in the Minor Canon’s nature, he doubtless
displayed openly that he would at any time have revived the subject, and
even desired to discuss it.  The determined reticence of Jasper, however,
was not to be so approached.  Impassive, moody, solitary, resolute, so
concentrated on one idea, and on its attendant fixed purpose, that he
would share it with no fellow-creature, he lived apart from human life.
Constantly exercising an Art which brought him into mechanical harmony
with others, and which could not have been pursued unless he and they had
been in the nicest mechanical relations and unison, it is curious to
consider that the spirit of the man was in moral accordance or
interchange with nothing around him.  This indeed he had confided to his
lost nephew, before the occasion for his present inflexibility arose.

That he must know of Rosa’s abrupt departure, and that he must divine its
cause, was not to be doubted.  Did he suppose that he had terrified her
into silence? or did he suppose that she had imparted to any one—to Mr.
Crisparkle himself, for instance—the particulars of his last interview
with her?  Mr. Crisparkle could not determine this in his mind.  He could
not but admit, however, as a just man, that it was not, of itself, a
crime to fall in love with Rosa, any more than it was a crime to offer to
set love above revenge.

The dreadful suspicion of Jasper, which Rosa was so shocked to have
received into her imagination, appeared to have no harbour in Mr.
Crisparkle’s.  If it ever haunted Helena’s thoughts or Neville’s, neither
gave it one spoken word of utterance.  Mr. Grewgious took no pains to
conceal his implacable dislike of Jasper, yet he never referred it,
however distantly, to such a source.  But he was a reticent as well as an
eccentric man; and he made no mention of a certain evening when he warmed
his hands at the gatehouse fire, and looked steadily down upon a certain
heap of torn and miry clothes upon the floor.

Drowsy Cloisterham, whenever it awoke to a passing reconsideration of a
story above six months old and dismissed by the bench of magistrates, was
pretty equally divided in opinion whether John Jasper’s beloved nephew
had been killed by his treacherously passionate rival, or in an open
struggle; or had, for his own purposes, spirited himself away.  It then
lifted up its head, to notice that the bereaved Jasper was still ever
devoted to discovery and revenge; and then dozed off again.  This was the
condition of matters, all round, at the period to which the present
history has now attained.

The Cathedral doors have closed for the night; and the Choir-master, on a
short leave of absence for two or three services, sets his face towards
London.  He travels thither by the means by which Rosa travelled, and
arrives, as Rosa arrived, on a hot, dusty evening.

His travelling baggage is easily carried in his hand, and he repairs with
it on foot, to a hybrid hotel in a little square behind Aldersgate
Street, near the General Post Office.  It is hotel, boarding-house, or
lodging-house, at its visitor’s option.  It announces itself, in the new
Railway Advertisers, as a novel enterprise, timidly beginning to spring
up.  It bashfully, almost apologetically, gives the traveller to
understand that it does not expect him, on the good old constitutional
hotel plan, to order a pint of sweet blacking for his drinking, and throw
it away; but insinuates that he may have his boots blacked instead of his
stomach, and maybe also have bed, breakfast, attendance, and a porter up
all night, for a certain fixed charge.  From these and similar premises,
many true Britons in the lowest spirits deduce that the times are
levelling times, except in the article of high roads, of which there will
shortly be not one in England.

He eats without appetite, and soon goes forth again.  Eastward and still
eastward through the stale streets he takes his way, until he reaches his
destination: a miserable court, specially miserable among many such.

He ascends a broken staircase, opens a door, looks into a dark stifling
room, and says: ‘Are you alone here?’

‘Alone, deary; worse luck for me, and better for you,’ replies a croaking
voice.  ‘Come in, come in, whoever you be: I can’t see you till I light a
match, yet I seem to know the sound of your speaking.  I’m acquainted
with you, ain’t I?’

‘Light your match, and try.’

‘So I will, deary, so I will; but my hand that shakes, as I can’t lay it
on a match all in a moment.  And I cough so, that, put my matches where I
may, I never find ’em there.  They jump and start, as I cough and cough,
like live things.  Are you off a voyage, deary?’

‘No.’

‘Not seafaring?’

‘No.’

‘Well, there’s land customers, and there’s water customers.  I’m a mother
to both.  Different from Jack Chinaman t’other side the court.  He ain’t
a father to neither.  It ain’t in him.  And he ain’t got the true secret
of mixing, though he charges as much as me that has, and more if he can
get it.  Here’s a match, and now where’s the candle?  If my cough takes
me, I shall cough out twenty matches afore I gets a light.’

But she finds the candle, and lights it, before the cough comes on.  It
seizes her in the moment of success, and she sits down rocking herself to
and fro, and gasping at intervals: ‘O, my lungs is awful bad! my lungs is
wore away to cabbage-nets!’ until the fit is over.  During its
continuance she has had no power of sight, or any other power not
absorbed in the struggle; but as it leaves her, she begins to strain her
eyes, and as soon as she is able to articulate, she cries, staring:

‘Why, it’s you!’

‘Are you so surprised to see me?’

‘I thought I never should have seen you again, deary.  I thought you was
dead, and gone to Heaven.’

‘Why?’

‘I didn’t suppose you could have kept away, alive, so long, from the poor
old soul with the real receipt for mixing it.  And you are in mourning
too!  Why didn’t you come and have a pipe or two of comfort?  Did they
leave you money, perhaps, and so you didn’t want comfort?’

‘No.’

‘Who was they as died, deary?’

‘A relative.’

‘Died of what, lovey?’

‘Probably, Death.’

‘We are short to-night!’ cries the woman, with a propitiatory laugh.
‘Short and snappish we are!  But we’re out of sorts for want of a smoke.
We’ve got the all-overs, haven’t us, deary?  But this is the place to
cure ’em in; this is the place where the all-overs is smoked off.’

‘You may make ready, then,’ replies the visitor, ‘as soon as you like.’

He divests himself of his shoes, loosens his cravat, and lies across the
foot of the squalid bed, with his head resting on his left hand.

‘Now you begin to look like yourself,’ says the woman approvingly.  ‘Now
I begin to know my old customer indeed!  Been trying to mix for yourself
this long time, poppet?’

‘I have been taking it now and then in my own way.’

‘Never take it your own way.  It ain’t good for trade, and it ain’t good
for you.  Where’s my ink-bottle, and where’s my thimble, and where’s my
little spoon?  He’s going to take it in a artful form now, my deary
dear!’

Entering on her process, and beginning to bubble and blow at the faint
spark enclosed in the hollow of her hands, she speaks from time to time,
in a tone of snuffling satisfaction, without leaving off.  When he
speaks, he does so without looking at her, and as if his thoughts were
already roaming away by anticipation.

‘I’ve got a pretty many smokes ready for you, first and last, haven’t I,
chuckey?’

‘A good many.’

‘When you first come, you was quite new to it; warn’t ye?’

‘Yes, I was easily disposed of, then.’

‘But you got on in the world, and was able by-and-by to take your pipe
with the best of ’em, warn’t ye?’

‘Ah; and the worst.’

‘It’s just ready for you.  What a sweet singer you was when you first
come!  Used to drop your head, and sing yourself off like a bird!  It’s
ready for you now, deary.’

He takes it from her with great care, and puts the mouthpiece to his
lips.  She seats herself beside him, ready to refill the pipe.

After inhaling a few whiffs in silence, he doubtingly accosts her with:

‘Is it as potent as it used to be?’

‘What do you speak of, deary?’

‘What should I speak of, but what I have in my mouth?’

‘It’s just the same.  Always the identical same.’

‘It doesn’t taste so.  And it’s slower.’

‘You’ve got more used to it, you see.’

‘That may be the cause, certainly.  Look here.’  He stops, becomes
dreamy, and seems to forget that he has invited her attention.  She bends
over him, and speaks in his ear.

‘I’m attending to you.  Says you just now, Look here.  Says I now, I’m
attending to ye.  We was talking just before of your being used to it.’

‘I know all that.  I was only thinking.  Look here.  Suppose you had
something in your mind; something you were going to do.’

‘Yes, deary; something I was going to do?’

‘But had not quite determined to do.’

‘Yes, deary.’

‘Might or might not do, you understand.’

‘Yes.’  With the point of a needle she stirs the contents of the bowl.

‘Should you do it in your fancy, when you were lying here doing this?’

She nods her head.  ‘Over and over again.’

‘Just like me!  I did it over and over again.  I have done it hundreds of
thousands of times in this room.’

‘It’s to be hoped it was pleasant to do, deary.’

‘It _was_ pleasant to do!’

He says this with a savage air, and a spring or start at her.  Quite
unmoved she retouches and replenishes the contents of the bowl with her
little spatula.  Seeing her intent upon the occupation, he sinks into his
former attitude.

‘It was a journey, a difficult and dangerous journey.  That was the
subject in my mind.  A hazardous and perilous journey, over abysses where
a slip would be destruction.  Look down, look down!  You see what lies at
the bottom there?’

He has darted forward to say it, and to point at the ground, as though at
some imaginary object far beneath.  The woman looks at him, as his
spasmodic face approaches close to hers, and not at his pointing.  She
seems to know what the influence of her perfect quietude would be; if so,
she has not miscalculated it, for he subsides again.

‘Well; I have told you I did it here hundreds of thousands of times.
What do I say?  I did it millions and billions of times.  I did it so
often, and through such vast expanses of time, that when it was really
done, it seemed not worth the doing, it was done so soon.’

‘That’s the journey you have been away upon,’ she quietly remarks.

He glares at her as he smokes; and then, his eyes becoming filmy,
answers: ‘That’s the journey.’

Silence ensues.  His eyes are sometimes closed and sometimes open.  The
woman sits beside him, very attentive to the pipe, which is all the while
at his lips.

‘I’ll warrant,’ she observes, when he has been looking fixedly at her for
some consecutive moments, with a singular appearance in his eyes of
seeming to see her a long way off, instead of so near him: ‘I’ll warrant
you made the journey in a many ways, when you made it so often?’

‘No, always in one way.’

‘Always in the same way?’

‘Ay.’

‘In the way in which it was really made at last?’

‘Ay.’

‘And always took the same pleasure in harping on it?’

‘Ay.’

For the time he appears unequal to any other reply than this lazy
monosyllabic assent.  Probably to assure herself that it is not the
assent of a mere automaton, she reverses the form of her next sentence.

‘Did you never get tired of it, deary, and try to call up something else
for a change?’

He struggles into a sitting posture, and retorts upon her: ‘What do you
mean?  What did I want?  What did I come for?’

She gently lays him back again, and before returning him the instrument
he has dropped, revives the fire in it with her own breath; then says to
him, coaxingly:

‘Sure, sure, sure!  Yes, yes, yes!  Now I go along with you.  You was too
quick for me.  I see now.  You come o’ purpose to take the journey.  Why,
I might have known it, through its standing by you so.’

He answers first with a laugh, and then with a passionate setting of his
teeth: ‘Yes, I came on purpose.  When I could not bear my life, I came to
get the relief, and I got it.  It WAS one!  It WAS one!’  This repetition
with extraordinary vehemence, and the snarl of a wolf.

She observes him very cautiously, as though mentally feeling her way to
her next remark.  It is: ‘There was a fellow-traveller, deary.’

‘Ha, ha, ha!’  He breaks into a ringing laugh, or rather yell.

‘To think,’ he cries, ‘how often fellow-traveller, and yet not know it!
To think how many times he went the journey, and never saw the road!’

The woman kneels upon the floor, with her arms crossed on the coverlet of
the bed, close by him, and her chin upon them.  In this crouching
attitude she watches him.  The pipe is falling from his mouth.  She puts
it back, and laying her hand upon his chest, moves him slightly from side
to side.  Upon that he speaks, as if she had spoken.

‘Yes!  I always made the journey first, before the changes of colours and
the great landscapes and glittering processions began.  They couldn’t
begin till it was off my mind.  I had no room till then for anything
else.’

Once more he lapses into silence.  Once more she lays her hand upon his
chest, and moves him slightly to and fro, as a cat might stimulate a
half-slain mouse.  Once more he speaks, as if she had spoken.

                        [Picture: Sleeping it off]

‘What?  I told you so.  When it comes to be real at last, it is so short
that it seems unreal for the first time.  Hark!’

‘Yes, deary.  I’m listening.’

‘Time and place are both at hand.’

He is on his feet, speaking in a whisper, and as if in the dark.

‘Time, place, and fellow-traveller,’ she suggests, adopting his tone, and
holding him softly by the arm.

‘How could the time be at hand unless the fellow-traveller was?  Hush!
The journey’s made.  It’s over.’

‘So soon?’

‘That’s what I said to you.  So soon.  Wait a little.  This is a vision.
I shall sleep it off.  It has been too short and easy.  I must have a
better vision than this; this is the poorest of all.  No struggle, no
consciousness of peril, no entreaty—and yet I never saw _that_ before.’
With a start.

‘Saw what, deary?’

‘Look at it!  Look what a poor, mean, miserable thing it is!  _That_ must
be real.  It’s over.’

He has accompanied this incoherence with some wild unmeaning gestures;
but they trail off into the progressive inaction of stupor, and he lies a
log upon the bed.

The woman, however, is still inquisitive.  With a repetition of her
cat-like action she slightly stirs his body again, and listens; stirs
again, and listens; whispers to it, and listens.  Finding it past all
rousing for the time, she slowly gets upon her feet, with an air of
disappointment, and flicks the face with the back of her hand in turning
from it.

But she goes no further away from it than the chair upon the hearth.  She
sits in it, with an elbow on one of its arms, and her chin upon her hand,
intent upon him.  ‘I heard ye say once,’ she croaks under her breath, ‘I
heard ye say once, when I was lying where you’re lying, and you were
making your speculations upon me, “Unintelligible!”  I heard you say so,
of two more than me.  But don’t ye be too sure always; don’t be ye too
sure, beauty!’

Unwinking, cat-like, and intent, she presently adds: ‘Not so potent as it
once was?  Ah!  Perhaps not at first.  You may be more right there.
Practice makes perfect.  I may have learned the secret how to make ye
talk, deary.’

He talks no more, whether or no.  Twitching in an ugly way from time to
time, both as to his face and limbs, he lies heavy and silent.  The
wretched candle burns down; the woman takes its expiring end between her
fingers, lights another at it, crams the guttering frying morsel deep
into the candlestick, and rams it home with the new candle, as if she
were loading some ill-savoured and unseemly weapon of witchcraft; the new
candle in its turn burns down; and still he lies insensible.  At length
what remains of the last candle is blown out, and daylight looks into the
room.

It has not looked very long, when he sits up, chilled and shaking, slowly
recovers consciousness of where he is, and makes himself ready to depart.
The woman receives what he pays her with a grateful, ‘Bless ye, bless ye,
deary!’ and seems, tired out, to begin making herself ready for sleep as
he leaves the room.

But seeming may be false or true.  It is false in this case; for, the
moment the stairs have ceased to creak under his tread, she glides after
him, muttering emphatically: ‘I’ll not miss ye twice!’

There is no egress from the court but by its entrance.  With a weird peep
from the doorway, she watches for his looking back.  He does not look
back before disappearing, with a wavering step.  She follows him, peeps
from the court, sees him still faltering on without looking back, and
holds him in view.

He repairs to the back of Aldersgate Street, where a door immediately
opens to his knocking.  She crouches in another doorway, watching that
one, and easily comprehending that he puts up temporarily at that house.
Her patience is unexhausted by hours.  For sustenance she can, and does,
buy bread within a hundred yards, and milk as it is carried past her.

He comes forth again at noon, having changed his dress, but carrying
nothing in his hand, and having nothing carried for him.  He is not going
back into the country, therefore, just yet.  She follows him a little
way, hesitates, instantaneously turns confidently, and goes straight into
the house he has quitted.

‘Is the gentleman from Cloisterham indoors?

‘Just gone out.’

‘Unlucky.  When does the gentleman return to Cloisterham?’

‘At six this evening.’

‘Bless ye and thank ye.  May the Lord prosper a business where a civil
question, even from a poor soul, is so civilly answered!’

‘I’ll not miss ye twice!’ repeats the poor soul in the street, and not so
civilly.  ‘I lost ye last, where that omnibus you got into nigh your
journey’s end plied betwixt the station and the place.  I wasn’t so much
as certain that you even went right on to the place.  Now I know ye did.
My gentleman from Cloisterham, I’ll be there before ye, and bide your
coming.  I’ve swore my oath that I’ll not miss ye twice!’

Accordingly, that same evening the poor soul stands in Cloisterham High
Street, looking at the many quaint gables of the Nuns’ House, and getting
through the time as she best can until nine o’clock; at which hour she
has reason to suppose that the arriving omnibus passengers may have some
interest for her.  The friendly darkness, at that hour, renders it easy
for her to ascertain whether this be so or not; and it is so, for the
passenger not to be missed twice arrives among the rest.

‘Now let me see what becomes of you.  Go on!’

An observation addressed to the air, and yet it might be addressed to the
passenger, so compliantly does he go on along the High Street until he
comes to an arched gateway, at which he unexpectedly vanishes.  The poor
soul quickens her pace; is swift, and close upon him entering under the
gateway; but only sees a postern staircase on one side of it, and on the
other side an ancient vaulted room, in which a large-headed, gray-haired
gentleman is writing, under the odd circumstances of sitting open to the
thoroughfare and eyeing all who pass, as if he were toll-taker of the
gateway: though the way is free.

‘Halloa!’ he cries in a low voice, seeing her brought to a stand-still:
‘who are you looking for?’

‘There was a gentleman passed in here this minute, sir.’

‘Of course there was.  What do you want with him?’

‘Where do he live, deary?’

‘Live?  Up that staircase.’

‘Bless ye!  Whisper.  What’s his name, deary?’

‘Surname Jasper, Christian name John.  Mr. John Jasper.’

‘Has he a calling, good gentleman?’

‘Calling?  Yes.  Sings in the choir.’

‘In the spire?’

‘Choir.’

‘What’s that?’

Mr. Datchery rises from his papers, and comes to his doorstep.  ‘Do you
know what a cathedral is?’ he asks, jocosely.

The woman nods.

‘What is it?’

She looks puzzled, casting about in her mind to find a definition, when
it occurs to her that it is easier to point out the substantial object
itself, massive against the dark-blue sky and the early stars.

‘That’s the answer.  Go in there at seven to-morrow morning, and you may
see Mr. John Jasper, and hear him too.’

‘Thank ye!  Thank ye!’

The burst of triumph in which she thanks him does not escape the notice
of the single buffer of an easy temper living idly on his means.  He
glances at her; clasps his hands behind him, as the wont of such buffers
is; and lounges along the echoing Precincts at her side.

‘Or,’ he suggests, with a backward hitch of his head, ‘you can go up at
once to Mr. Jasper’s rooms there.’

The woman eyes him with a cunning smile, and shakes her head.

‘O! you don’t want to speak to him?’

She repeats her dumb reply, and forms with her lips a soundless ‘No.’

‘You can admire him at a distance three times a day, whenever you like.
It’s a long way to come for that, though.’

The woman looks up quickly.  If Mr. Datchery thinks she is to be so
induced to declare where she comes from, he is of a much easier temper
than she is.  But she acquits him of such an artful thought, as he
lounges along, like the chartered bore of the city, with his uncovered
gray hair blowing about, and his purposeless hands rattling the loose
money in the pockets of his trousers.

The chink of the money has an attraction for her greedy ears.  ‘Wouldn’t
you help me to pay for my traveller’s lodging, dear gentleman, and to pay
my way along?  I am a poor soul, I am indeed, and troubled with a
grievous cough.’

‘You know the travellers’ lodging, I perceive, and are making directly
for it,’ is Mr. Datchery’s bland comment, still rattling his loose money.
‘Been here often, my good woman?’

‘Once in all my life.’

‘Ay, ay?’

They have arrived at the entrance to the Monks’ Vineyard.  An appropriate
remembrance, presenting an exemplary model for imitation, is revived in
the woman’s mind by the sight of the place.  She stops at the gate, and
says energetically:

‘By this token, though you mayn’t believe it, That a young gentleman gave
me three-and-sixpence as I was coughing my breath away on this very
grass.  I asked him for three-and-sixpence, and he gave it me.’

‘Wasn’t it a little cool to name your sum?’ hints Mr. Datchery, still
rattling.  ‘Isn’t it customary to leave the amount open?  Mightn’t it
have had the appearance, to the young gentleman—only the appearance—that
he was rather dictated to?’

‘Look’ee here, deary,’ she replies, in a confidential and persuasive
tone, ‘I wanted the money to lay it out on a medicine as does me good,
and as I deal in.  I told the young gentleman so, and he gave it me, and
I laid it out honest to the last brass farden.  I want to lay out the
same sum in the same way now; and if you’ll give it me, I’ll lay it out
honest to the last brass farden again, upon my soul!’

‘What’s the medicine?’

‘I’ll be honest with you beforehand, as well as after.  It’s opium.’

Mr. Datchery, with a sudden change of countenance, gives her a sudden
look.

‘It’s opium, deary.  Neither more nor less.  And it’s like a human
creetur so far, that you always hear what can be said against it, but
seldom what can be said in its praise.’

Mr. Datchery begins very slowly to count out the sum demanded of him.
Greedily watching his hands, she continues to hold forth on the great
example set him.

‘It was last Christmas Eve, just arter dark, the once that I was here
afore, when the young gentleman gave me the three-and-six.’  Mr. Datchery
stops in his counting, finds he has counted wrong, shakes his money
together, and begins again.

‘And the young gentleman’s name,’ she adds, ‘was Edwin.’

Mr. Datchery drops some money, stoops to pick it up, and reddens with the
exertion as he asks:

‘How do you know the young gentleman’s name?’

‘I asked him for it, and he told it me.  I only asked him the two
questions, what was his Chris’en name, and whether he’d a sweetheart?
And he answered, Edwin, and he hadn’t.’

Mr. Datchery pauses with the selected coins in his hand, rather as if he
were falling into a brown study of their value, and couldn’t bear to part
with them.  The woman looks at him distrustfully, and with her anger
brewing for the event of his thinking better of the gift; but he bestows
it on her as if he were abstracting his mind from the sacrifice, and with
many servile thanks she goes her way.

John Jasper’s lamp is kindled, and his lighthouse is shining when Mr.
Datchery returns alone towards it.  As mariners on a dangerous voyage,
approaching an iron-bound coast, may look along the beams of the warning
light to the haven lying beyond it that may never be reached, so Mr.
Datchery’s wistful gaze is directed to this beacon, and beyond.

His object in now revisiting his lodging is merely to put on the hat
which seems so superfluous an article in his wardrobe.  It is half-past
ten by the Cathedral clock when he walks out into the Precincts again; he
lingers and looks about him, as though, the enchanted hour when Mr.
Durdles may be stoned home having struck, he had some expectation of
seeing the Imp who is appointed to the mission of stoning him.

In effect, that Power of Evil is abroad.  Having nothing living to stone
at the moment, he is discovered by Mr. Datchery in the unholy office of
stoning the dead, through the railings of the churchyard.  The Imp finds
this a relishing and piquing pursuit; firstly, because their
resting-place is announced to be sacred; and secondly, because the tall
headstones are sufficiently like themselves, on their beat in the dark,
to justify the delicious fancy that they are hurt when hit.

Mr. Datchery hails with him: ‘Halloa, Winks!’

He acknowledges the hail with: ‘Halloa, Dick!’  Their acquaintance
seemingly having been established on a familiar footing.

‘But, I say,’ he remonstrates, ‘don’t yer go a-making my name public.  I
never means to plead to no name, mind yer.  When they says to me in the
Lock-up, a-going to put me down in the book, “What’s your name?” I says
to them, “Find out.”  Likewise when they says, “What’s your religion?” I
says, “Find out.”’

Which, it may be observed in passing, it would be immensely difficult for
the State, however statistical, to do.

‘Asides which,’ adds the boy, ‘there ain’t no family of Winkses.’

‘I think there must be.’

‘Yer lie, there ain’t.  The travellers give me the name on account of my
getting no settled sleep and being knocked up all night; whereby I gets
one eye roused open afore I’ve shut the other.  That’s what Winks means.
Deputy’s the nighest name to indict me by: but yer wouldn’t catch me
pleading to that, neither.’

‘Deputy be it always, then.  We two are good friends; eh, Deputy?’

‘Jolly good.’

‘I forgave you the debt you owed me when we first became acquainted, and
many of my sixpences have come your way since; eh, Deputy?’

‘Ah!  And what’s more, yer ain’t no friend o’ Jarsper’s.  What did he go
a-histing me off my legs for?’

‘What indeed!  But never mind him now.  A shilling of mine is going your
way to-night, Deputy.  You have just taken in a lodger I have been
speaking to; an infirm woman with a cough.’

‘Puffer,’ assents Deputy, with a shrewd leer of recognition, and smoking
an imaginary pipe, with his head very much on one side and his eyes very
much out of their places: ‘Hopeum Puffer.’

‘What is her name?’

‘’Er Royal Highness the Princess Puffer.’

‘She has some other name than that; where does she live?’

‘Up in London.  Among the Jacks.’

‘The sailors?’

‘I said so; Jacks; and Chayner men: and hother Knifers.’

‘I should like to know, through you, exactly where she lives.’

‘All right.  Give us ’old.’

A shilling passes; and, in that spirit of confidence which should pervade
all business transactions between principals of honour, this piece of
business is considered done.

‘But here’s a lark!’ cries Deputy.  ‘Where did yer think ‘Er Royal
Highness is a-goin’ to to-morrow morning?  Blest if she ain’t a-goin’ to
the KIN-FREE-DER-EL!’  He greatly prolongs the word in his ecstasy, and
smites his leg, and doubles himself up in a fit of shrill laughter.

‘How do you know that, Deputy?’

‘Cos she told me so just now.  She said she must be hup and hout o’
purpose.  She ses, “Deputy, I must ’ave a early wash, and make myself as
swell as I can, for I’m a-goin’ to take a turn at the KIN-FREE-DER-EL!”’
He separates the syllables with his former zest, and, not finding his
sense of the ludicrous sufficiently relieved by stamping about on the
pavement, breaks into a slow and stately dance, perhaps supposed to be
performed by the Dean.

Mr. Datchery receives the communication with a well-satisfied though
pondering face, and breaks up the conference.  Returning to his quaint
lodging, and sitting long over the supper of bread-and-cheese and salad
and ale which Mrs. Tope has left prepared for him, he still sits when his
supper is finished.  At length he rises, throws open the door of a corner
cupboard, and refers to a few uncouth chalked strokes on its inner side.

‘I like,’ says Mr. Datchery, ‘the old tavern way of keeping scores.
Illegible except to the scorer.  The scorer not committed, the scored
debited with what is against him.  Hum; ha!  A very small score this; a
very poor score!’

He sighs over the contemplation of its poverty, takes a bit of chalk from
one of the cupboard shelves, and pauses with it in his hand, uncertain
what addition to make to the account.

‘I think a moderate stroke,’ he concludes, ‘is all I am justified in
scoring up;’ so, suits the action to the word, closes the cupboard, and
goes to bed.

A brilliant morning shines on the old city.  Its antiquities and ruins
are surpassingly beautiful, with a lusty ivy gleaming in the sun, and the
rich trees waving in the balmy air.  Changes of glorious light from
moving boughs, songs of birds, scents from gardens, woods, and fields—or,
rather, from the one great garden of the whole cultivated island in its
yielding time—penetrate into the Cathedral, subdue its earthy odour, and
preach the Resurrection and the Life.  The cold stone tombs of centuries
ago grow warm; and flecks of brightness dart into the sternest marble
corners of the building, fluttering there like wings.

Comes Mr. Tope with his large keys, and yawningly unlocks and sets open.
Come Mrs. Tope and attendant sweeping sprites.  Come, in due time,
organist and bellows-boy, peeping down from the red curtains in the loft,
fearlessly flapping dust from books up at that remote elevation, and
whisking it from stops and pedals.  Come sundry rooks, from various
quarters of the sky, back to the great tower; who may be presumed to
enjoy vibration, and to know that bell and organ are going to give it
them.  Come a very small and straggling congregation indeed: chiefly from
Minor Canon Corner and the Precincts.  Come Mr. Crisparkle, fresh and
bright; and his ministering brethren, not quite so fresh and bright.
Come the Choir in a hurry (always in a hurry, and struggling into their
nightgowns at the last moment, like children shirking bed), and comes
John Jasper leading their line.  Last of all comes Mr. Datchery into a
stall, one of a choice empty collection very much at his service, and
glancing about him for Her Royal Highness the Princess Puffer.

The service is pretty well advanced before Mr. Datchery can discern Her
Royal Highness.  But by that time he has made her out, in the shade.  She
is behind a pillar, carefully withdrawn from the Choir-master’s view, but
regards him with the closest attention.  All unconscious of her presence,
he chants and sings.  She grins when he is most musically fervid,
and—yes, Mr. Datchery sees her do it!—shakes her fist at him behind the
pillar’s friendly shelter.

Mr. Datchery looks again, to convince himself.  Yes, again!  As ugly and
withered as one of the fantastic carvings on the under brackets of the
stall seats, as malignant as the Evil One, as hard as the big brass eagle
holding the sacred books upon his wings (and, according to the sculptor’s
representation of his ferocious attributes, not at all converted by
them), she hugs herself in her lean arms, and then shakes both fists at
the leader of the Choir.

And at that moment, outside the grated door of the Choir, having eluded
the vigilance of Mr. Tope by shifty resources in which he is an adept,
Deputy peeps, sharp-eyed, through the bars, and stares astounded from the
threatener to the threatened.

The service comes to an end, and the servitors disperse to breakfast.
Mr. Datchery accosts his last new acquaintance outside, when the Choir
(as much in a hurry to get their bedgowns off, as they were but now to
get them on) have scuffled away.

‘Well, mistress.  Good morning.  You have seen him?’

‘_I’ve_ seen him, deary; _I’ve_ seen him!’

‘And you know him?’

‘Know him!  Better far than all the Reverend Parsons put together know
him.’

Mrs. Tope’s care has spread a very neat, clean breakfast ready for her
lodger.  Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner-cupboard door;
takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score,
extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls
to with an appetite.




APPENDIX: FRAGMENT OF “THE MYSTERY OF EDWIN DROOD”


When Forster was just finishing his biography of Dickens, he found among
the leaves of one of the novelist’s other manuscripts certain loose slips
in his writing, “on paper only half the size of that used for the tale,
so cramped, interlined, and blotted as to be nearly illegible.”  These
proved, upon examination, to contain a suggested chapter for _Edwin
Drood_, in which Sapsea, the auctioneer, appears as the principal figure,
surrounded by a group of characters new to the story.  That chapter,
being among the last things Dickens wrote, seems to contain so much of
interest that it may be well to reprint it here.—ED.



HOW MR. SAPSEA CEASED TO BE A MEMBER OF THE EIGHT CLUB
TOLD BY HIMSELF


Wishing to take the air, I proceeded by a circuitous route to the Club,
it being our weekly night of meeting.  I found that we mustered our full
strength.  We were enrolled under the denomination of the Eight Club.  We
were eight in number; we met at eight o’clock during eight months of the
year; we played eight games of four-handed cribbage, at eightpence the
game; our frugal supper was composed of eight rolls, eight mutton chops,
eight pork sausages, eight baked potatoes, eight marrow-bones, with eight
toasts, and eight bottles of ale.  There may, or may not, be a certain
harmony of colour in the ruling idea of this (to adopt a phrase of our
lively neighbours) reunion.  It was a little idea of mine.

 [Picture: Facsimile of a page of the manuscript of “The Mystery of Edwin
                                 Drood”]

A somewhat popular member of the Eight Club, was a member by the name of
Kimber.  By profession, a dancing-master.  A commonplace, hopeful sort of
man, wholly destitute of dignity or knowledge of the world.

As I entered the Club-room, Kimber was making the remark: “And he still
half-believes him to be very high in the Church.”

In the act of hanging up my hat on the eighth peg by the door, I caught
Kimber’s visual ray.  He lowered it, and passed a remark on the next
change of the moon.  I did not take particular notice of this at the
moment, because the world was often pleased to be a little shy of
ecclesiastical topics in my presence.  For I felt that I was picked out
(though perhaps only through a coincidence) to a certain extent to
represent what I call our glorious constitution in Church and State.  The
phrase may be objected to by cautious minds; but I own to it as mine.  I
threw it off in argument some little time back.  I said: “OUR GLORIOUS
CONSTITUTION in CHURCH and STATE.”

Another member of the Eight Club was Peartree; also member of the Royal
College of Surgeons.  Mr. Peartree is not accountable to me for his
opinions, and I say no more of them here than that he attends the poor
gratis whenever they want him, and is not the parish doctor.  Mr.
Peartree may justify it to the grasp of _his_ mind thus to do his
republican utmost to bring an appointed officer into contempt.  Suffice
it that Mr. Peartree can never justify it to the grasp of _mine_.

Between Peartree and Kimber there was a sickly sort of feeble-minded
alliance.  It came under my particular notice when I sold off Kimber by
auction.  (Goods taken in execution.)  He was a widower in a white
under-waistcoat, and slight shoes with bows, and had two daughters not
ill-looking.  Indeed the reverse.  Both daughters taught dancing in
scholastic establishments for Young Ladies—had done so at Mrs. Sapsea’s;
nay, Twinkleton’s—and both, in giving lessons, presented the unwomanly
spectacle of having little fiddles tucked under their chins.  In spite of
which, the younger one might, if I am correctly informed—I will raise the
veil so far as to say I KNOW she might—have soared for life from this
degrading taint, but for having the class of mind allotted to what I call
the common herd, and being so incredibly devoid of veneration as to
become painfully ludicrous.

When I sold off Kimber without reserve, Peartree (as poor as he can hold
together) had several prime household lots knocked down to him.  I am not
to be blinded; and of course it was as plain to me what he was going to
do with them, as it was that he was a brown hulking sort of revolutionary
subject who had been in India with the soldiers, and ought (for the sake
of society) to have his neck broke.  I saw the lots shortly afterwards in
Kimber’s lodgings—through the window—and I easily made out that there had
been a sneaking pretence of lending them till better times.  A man with a
smaller knowledge of the world than myself might have been led to suspect
that Kimber had held back money from his creditors, and fraudulently
bought the goods.  But, besides that I knew for certain he had no money,
I knew that this would involve a species of forethought not to be made
compatible with the frivolity of a caperer, inoculating other people with
capering, for his bread.

As it was the first time I had seen either of those two since the sale, I
kept myself in what I call Abeyance.  When selling him up, I had
delivered a few remarks—shall I say a little homily?—concerning Kimber,
which the world did regard as more than usually worth notice.  I had come
up into my pulpit, it was said, uncommonly like—and a murmur of
recognition had repeated his (I will not name whose) title, before I
spoke.  I had then gone on to say that all present would find, in the
first page of the catalogue that was lying before them, in the last
paragraph before the first lot, the following words: “Sold in pursuance
of a writ of execution issued by a creditor.”  I had then proceeded to
remind my friends, that however frivolous, not to say contemptible, the
business by which a man got his goods together, still his goods were as
dear to him, and as cheap to society (if sold without reserve), as though
his pursuits had been of a character that would bear serious
contemplation.  I had then divided my text (if I may be allowed so to
call it) into three heads: firstly, Sold; secondly, In pursuance of a
writ of execution; thirdly, Issued by a creditor; with a few moral
reflections on each, and winding up with, “Now to the first lot” in a
manner that was complimented when I afterwards mingled with my hearers.

So, not being certain on what terms I and Kimber stood, I was grave, I
was chilling.  Kimber, however, moving to me, I moved to Kimber.  (I was
the creditor who had issued the writ.  Not that it matters.)

“I was alluding, Mr. Sapsea,” said Kimber, “to a stranger who entered
into conversation with me in the street as I came to the Club.  He had
been speaking to you just before, it seemed, by the churchyard; and
though you had told him who you were, I could hardly persuade him that
you were not high in the Church.”

“Idiot?” said Peartree.

“Ass!” said Kimber.

“Idiot and Ass!” said the other five members.

“Idiot and Ass, gentlemen,” I remonstrated, looking around me, “are
strong expressions to apply to a young man of good appearance and
address.”  My generosity was roused; I own it.

“You’ll admit that he must be a Fool,” said Peartree.

“You can’t deny that he must be a Blockhead,” said Kimber.

Their tone of disgust amounted to being offensive.  Why should the young
man be so calumniated?  What had he done?  He had only made an innocent
and natural mistake.  I controlled my generous indignation, and said so.

“Natural?” repeated Kimber.  “_He’s_ a Natural!”

The remaining six members of the Eight Club laughed unanimously.  It
stung me.  It was a scornful laugh.  My anger was roused in behalf of an
absent, friendless stranger.  I rose (for I had been sitting down).

“Gentlemen,” I said with dignity, “I will not remain one of this Club
allowing opprobrium to be cast on an unoffending person in his absence.
I will not so violate what I call the sacred rites of hospitality.
Gentlemen, until you know how to behave yourselves better, I leave you.
Gentlemen, until then I withdraw, from this place of meeting, whatever
personal qualifications I may have brought into it.  Gentlemen, until
then you cease to be the Eight Club, and must make the best you can of
becoming the Seven.”

I put on my hat and retired.  As I went down stairs I distinctly heard
them give a suppressed cheer.  Such is the power of demeanour and
knowledge of mankind.  I had forced it out of them.



II


Whom should I meet in the street, within a few yards of the door of the
inn where the Club was held, but the self-same young man whoso cause I
had felt it my duty so warmly—and I will add so disinterestedly—to take
up.

“Is it Mr. Sapsea,” he said doubtfully, “or is it—”

“It is Mr. Sapsea,” I replied.

“Pardon me, Mr. Sapsea; you appear warm, sir.”

“I have been warm,” I said, “and on your account.”  Having stated the
circumstances at some length (my generosity almost overpowered him), I
asked him his name.

“Mr. Sapsea,” he answered, looking down, “your penetration is so acute,
your glance into the souls of your fellow men is so penetrating, that if
I was hardly enough to deny that my name is Poker, what would it avail
me?”

I don’t know that I had quite exactly made out to a fraction that his
name _was_ Poker, but I daresay I had been pretty near doing it.

“Well, well,” said I, trying to put him at his ease by nodding my head in
a soothing way.  “Your name is Poker, and there is no harm in being named
Poker.”

“Oh, Mr. Sapsea!” cried the young man, in a very well-behaved manner.
“Bless you for those words!”  He then, as if ashamed of having given way
to his feelings, looked down again.

“Come Poker,” said I, “let me hear more about you.  Tell me.  Where are
you going to, Poker? and where do you come from?”

“Ah Mr. Sapsea!” exclaimed the young man.  “Disguise from you is
impossible.  You know already that I come from somewhere, and am going
somewhere else.  If I was to deny it, what would it avail me?”

“Then don’t deny it,” was my remark.

“Or,” pursued Poker, in a kind of despondent rapture, “or if I was to
deny that I came to this town to see and hear you, sir, what would it
avail me?  Or if I was to deny—”





3xxxxxxxxx


GREAT EXPECTATIONS





Chapter I

My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my
infant tongue could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit
than Pip. So, I called myself Pip, and came to be called Pip.

I give Pirrip as my father's family name, on the authority of his
tombstone and my sister,--Mrs. Joe Gargery, who married the blacksmith.
As I never saw my father or my mother, and never saw any likeness
of either of them (for their days were long before the days of
photographs), my first fancies regarding what they were like were
unreasonably derived from their tombstones. The shape of the letters on
my father's, gave me an odd idea that he was a square, stout, dark man,
with curly black hair. From the character and turn of the inscription,
“Also Georgiana Wife of the Above,” I drew a childish conclusion that
my mother was freckled and sickly. To five little stone lozenges, each
about a foot and a half long, which were arranged in a neat row beside
their grave, and were sacred to the memory of five little brothers of
mine,--who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in
that universal struggle,--I am indebted for a belief I religiously
entertained that they had all been born on their backs with their hands
in their trousers-pockets, and had never taken them out in this state of
existence.

Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river
wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression
of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable
raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain
that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard; and
that Philip Pirrip, late of this parish, and also Georgiana wife of the
above, were dead and buried; and that Alexander, Bartholomew, Abraham,
Tobias, and Roger, infant children of the aforesaid, were also dead
and buried; and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard,
intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle
feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond
was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was
rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid
of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from
among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you
little devil, or I'll cut your throat!”

A fearful man, all in coarse gray, with a great iron on his leg. A man
with no hat, and with broken shoes, and with an old rag tied round his
head. A man who had been soaked in water, and smothered in mud, and
lamed by stones, and cut by flints, and stung by nettles, and torn by
briars; who limped, and shivered, and glared, and growled; and whose
teeth chattered in his head as he seized me by the chin.

“Oh! Don't cut my throat, sir,” I pleaded in terror. “Pray don't do it,
sir.”

“Tell us your name!” said the man. “Quick!”

“Pip, sir.”

“Once more,” said the man, staring at me. “Give it mouth!”

“Pip. Pip, sir.”

“Show us where you live,” said the man. “Pint out the place!”

I pointed to where our village lay, on the flat in-shore among the
alder-trees and pollards, a mile or more from the church.

The man, after looking at me for a moment, turned me upside down, and
emptied my pockets. There was nothing in them but a piece of bread. When
the church came to itself,--for he was so sudden and strong that he
made it go head over heels before me, and I saw the steeple under my
feet,--when the church came to itself, I say, I was seated on a high
tombstone, trembling while he ate the bread ravenously.

“You young dog,” said the man, licking his lips, “what fat cheeks you
ha' got.”

I believe they were fat, though I was at that time undersized for my
years, and not strong.

“Darn me if I couldn't eat em,” said the man, with a threatening shake
of his head, “and if I han't half a mind to't!”

I earnestly expressed my hope that he wouldn't, and held tighter to
the tombstone on which he had put me; partly, to keep myself upon it;
partly, to keep myself from crying.

“Now lookee here!” said the man. “Where's your mother?”

“There, sir!” said I.

He started, made a short run, and stopped and looked over his shoulder.

“There, sir!” I timidly explained. “Also Georgiana. That's my mother.”

“Oh!” said he, coming back. “And is that your father alonger your
mother?”

“Yes, sir,” said I; “him too; late of this parish.”

“Ha!” he muttered then, considering. “Who d'ye live with,--supposin'
you're kindly let to live, which I han't made up my mind about?”

“My sister, sir,--Mrs. Joe Gargery,--wife of Joe Gargery, the
blacksmith, sir.”

“Blacksmith, eh?” said he. And looked down at his leg.

After darkly looking at his leg and me several times, he came closer
to my tombstone, took me by both arms, and tilted me back as far as he
could hold me; so that his eyes looked most powerfully down into mine,
and mine looked most helplessly up into his.

“Now lookee here,” he said, “the question being whether you're to be let
to live. You know what a file is?”

“Yes, sir.”

“And you know what wittles is?”

“Yes, sir.”

After each question he tilted me over a little more, so as to give me a
greater sense of helplessness and danger.

“You get me a file.” He tilted me again. “And you get me wittles.” He
tilted me again. “You bring 'em both to me.” He tilted me again. “Or
I'll have your heart and liver out.” He tilted me again.

I was dreadfully frightened, and so giddy that I clung to him with both
hands, and said, “If you would kindly please to let me keep upright,
sir, perhaps I shouldn't be sick, and perhaps I could attend more.”

He gave me a most tremendous dip and roll, so that the church jumped
over its own weathercock. Then, he held me by the arms, in an upright
position on the top of the stone, and went on in these fearful terms:--

“You bring me, to-morrow morning early, that file and them wittles. You
bring the lot to me, at that old Battery over yonder. You do it, and you
never dare to say a word or dare to make a sign concerning your having
seen such a person as me, or any person sumever, and you shall be let to
live. You fail, or you go from my words in any partickler, no matter how
small it is, and your heart and your liver shall be tore out, roasted,
and ate. Now, I ain't alone, as you may think I am. There's a young man
hid with me, in comparison with which young man I am a Angel. That young
man hears the words I speak. That young man has a secret way pecooliar
to himself, of getting at a boy, and at his heart, and at his liver. It
is in wain for a boy to attempt to hide himself from that young man. A
boy may lock his door, may be warm in bed, may tuck himself up, may draw
the clothes over his head, may think himself comfortable and safe, but
that young man will softly creep and creep his way to him and tear him
open. I am a keeping that young man from harming of you at the present
moment, with great difficulty. I find it wery hard to hold that young
man off of your inside. Now, what do you say?”

I said that I would get him the file, and I would get him what broken
bits of food I could, and I would come to him at the Battery, early in
the morning.

“Say Lord strike you dead if you don't!” said the man.

I said so, and he took me down.

“Now,” he pursued, “you remember what you've undertook, and you remember
that young man, and you get home!”

“Goo-good night, sir,” I faltered.

“Much of that!” said he, glancing about him over the cold wet flat. “I
wish I was a frog. Or a eel!”

At the same time, he hugged his shuddering body in both his
arms,--clasping himself, as if to hold himself together,--and limped
towards the low church wall. As I saw him go, picking his way among the
nettles, and among the brambles that bound the green mounds, he looked
in my young eyes as if he were eluding the hands of the dead people,
stretching up cautiously out of their graves, to get a twist upon his
ankle and pull him in.

When he came to the low church wall, he got over it, like a man whose
legs were numbed and stiff, and then turned round to look for me. When I
saw him turning, I set my face towards home, and made the best use of
my legs. But presently I looked over my shoulder, and saw him going on
again towards the river, still hugging himself in both arms, and picking
his way with his sore feet among the great stones dropped into the
marshes here and there, for stepping-places when the rains were heavy or
the tide was in.

The marshes were just a long black horizontal line then, as I stopped
to look after him; and the river was just another horizontal line, not
nearly so broad nor yet so black; and the sky was just a row of long
angry red lines and dense black lines intermixed. On the edge of the
river I could faintly make out the only two black things in all the
prospect that seemed to be standing upright; one of these was the beacon
by which the sailors steered,--like an unhooped cask upon a pole,--an
ugly thing when you were near it; the other, a gibbet, with some chains
hanging to it which had once held a pirate. The man was limping on
towards this latter, as if he were the pirate come to life, and come
down, and going back to hook himself up again. It gave me a terrible
turn when I thought so; and as I saw the cattle lifting their heads to
gaze after him, I wondered whether they thought so too. I looked all
round for the horrible young man, and could see no signs of him. But now
I was frightened again, and ran home without stopping.




Chapter II

My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I,
and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbors
because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out
for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and
heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as
well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up
by hand.

She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general
impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. Joe
was a fair man, with curls of flaxen hair on each side of his smooth
face, and with eyes of such a very undecided blue that they seemed
to have somehow got mixed with their own whites. He was a mild,
good-natured, sweet-tempered, easy-going, foolish, dear fellow,--a sort
of Hercules in strength, and also in weakness.

My sister, Mrs. Joe, with black hair and eyes, had such a prevailing
redness of skin that I sometimes used to wonder whether it was possible
she washed herself with a nutmeg-grater instead of soap. She was tall
and bony, and almost always wore a coarse apron, fastened over her
figure behind with two loops, and having a square impregnable bib in
front, that was stuck full of pins and needles. She made it a powerful
merit in herself, and a strong reproach against Joe, that she wore this
apron so much. Though I really see no reason why she should have worn it
at all; or why, if she did wear it at all, she should not have taken it
off, every day of her life.

Joe's forge adjoined our house, which was a wooden house, as many of the
dwellings in our country were,--most of them, at that time. When I ran
home from the churchyard, the forge was shut up, and Joe was sitting
alone in the kitchen. Joe and I being fellow-sufferers, and having
confidences as such, Joe imparted a confidence to me, the moment I
raised the latch of the door and peeped in at him opposite to it,
sitting in the chimney corner.

“Mrs. Joe has been out a dozen times, looking for you, Pip. And she's
out now, making it a baker's dozen.”

“Is she?”

“Yes, Pip,” said Joe; “and what's worse, she's got Tickler with her.”

At this dismal intelligence, I twisted the only button on my waistcoat
round and round, and looked in great depression at the fire. Tickler
was a wax-ended piece of cane, worn smooth by collision with my tickled
frame.

“She sot down,” said Joe, “and she got up, and she made a grab at
Tickler, and she Ram-paged out. That's what she did,” said Joe, slowly
clearing the fire between the lower bars with the poker, and looking at
it; “she Ram-paged out, Pip.”

“Has she been gone long, Joe?” I always treated him as a larger species
of child, and as no more than my equal.

“Well,” said Joe, glancing up at the Dutch clock, “she's been on the
Ram-page, this last spell, about five minutes, Pip. She's a coming! Get
behind the door, old chap, and have the jack-towel betwixt you.”

I took the advice. My sister, Mrs. Joe, throwing the door wide open,
and finding an obstruction behind it, immediately divined the cause, and
applied Tickler to its further investigation. She concluded by throwing
me--I often served as a connubial missile--at Joe, who, glad to get hold
of me on any terms, passed me on into the chimney and quietly fenced me
up there with his great leg.

“Where have you been, you young monkey?” said Mrs. Joe, stamping her
foot. “Tell me directly what you've been doing to wear me away with fret
and fright and worrit, or I'd have you out of that corner if you was
fifty Pips, and he was five hundred Gargerys.”

“I have only been to the churchyard,” said I, from my stool, crying and
rubbing myself.

“Churchyard!” repeated my sister. “If it warn't for me you'd have been
to the churchyard long ago, and stayed there. Who brought you up by
hand?”

“You did,” said I.

“And why did I do it, I should like to know?” exclaimed my sister.

I whimpered, “I don't know.”

“I don't!” said my sister. “I'd never do it again! I know that. I may
truly say I've never had this apron of mine off since born you were.
It's bad enough to be a blacksmith's wife (and him a Gargery) without
being your mother.”

My thoughts strayed from that question as I looked disconsolately at
the fire. For the fugitive out on the marshes with the ironed leg, the
mysterious young man, the file, the food, and the dreadful pledge I was
under to commit a larceny on those sheltering premises, rose before me
in the avenging coals.

“Hah!” said Mrs. Joe, restoring Tickler to his station. “Churchyard,
indeed! You may well say churchyard, you two.” One of us, by the by, had
not said it at all. “You'll drive me to the churchyard betwixt you, one
of these days, and O, a pr-r-recious pair you'd be without me!”

As she applied herself to set the tea-things, Joe peeped down at me
over his leg, as if he were mentally casting me and himself up, and
calculating what kind of pair we practically should make, under the
grievous circumstances foreshadowed. After that, he sat feeling his
right-side flaxen curls and whisker, and following Mrs. Joe about with
his blue eyes, as his manner always was at squally times.

My sister had a trenchant way of cutting our bread and butter for us,
that never varied. First, with her left hand she jammed the loaf hard
and fast against her bib,--where it sometimes got a pin into it, and
sometimes a needle, which we afterwards got into our mouths. Then she
took some butter (not too much) on a knife and spread it on the loaf, in
an apothecary kind of way, as if she were making a plaster,--using both
sides of the knife with a slapping dexterity, and trimming and moulding
the butter off round the crust. Then, she gave the knife a final smart
wipe on the edge of the plaster, and then sawed a very thick round off
the loaf: which she finally, before separating from the loaf, hewed into
two halves, of which Joe got one, and I the other.

On the present occasion, though I was hungry, I dared not eat my
slice. I felt that I must have something in reserve for my dreadful
acquaintance, and his ally the still more dreadful young man. I knew
Mrs. Joe's housekeeping to be of the strictest kind, and that my
larcenous researches might find nothing available in the safe. Therefore
I resolved to put my hunk of bread and butter down the leg of my
trousers.

The effort of resolution necessary to the achievement of this purpose I
found to be quite awful. It was as if I had to make up my mind to leap
from the top of a high house, or plunge into a great depth of water.
And it was made the more difficult by the unconscious Joe. In
our already-mentioned freemasonry as fellow-sufferers, and in his
good-natured companionship with me, it was our evening habit to compare
the way we bit through our slices, by silently holding them up to each
other's admiration now and then,--which stimulated us to new exertions.
To-night, Joe several times invited me, by the display of his fast
diminishing slice, to enter upon our usual friendly competition; but
he found me, each time, with my yellow mug of tea on one knee, and
my untouched bread and butter on the other. At last, I desperately
considered that the thing I contemplated must be done, and that it
had best be done in the least improbable manner consistent with the
circumstances. I took advantage of a moment when Joe had just looked at
me, and got my bread and butter down my leg.

Joe was evidently made uncomfortable by what he supposed to be my loss
of appetite, and took a thoughtful bite out of his slice, which he
didn't seem to enjoy. He turned it about in his mouth much longer than
usual, pondering over it a good deal, and after all gulped it down like
a pill. He was about to take another bite, and had just got his head on
one side for a good purchase on it, when his eye fell on me, and he saw
that my bread and butter was gone.

The wonder and consternation with which Joe stopped on the threshold
of his bite and stared at me, were too evident to escape my sister's
observation.

“What's the matter now?” said she, smartly, as she put down her cup.

“I say, you know!” muttered Joe, shaking his head at me in very serious
remonstrance. “Pip, old chap! You'll do yourself a mischief. It'll stick
somewhere. You can't have chawed it, Pip.”

“What's the matter now?” repeated my sister, more sharply than before.

“If you can cough any trifle on it up, Pip, I'd recommend you to do it,”
 said Joe, all aghast. “Manners is manners, but still your elth's your
elth.”

By this time, my sister was quite desperate, so she pounced on Joe,
and, taking him by the two whiskers, knocked his head for a little while
against the wall behind him, while I sat in the corner, looking guiltily
on.

“Now, perhaps you'll mention what's the matter,” said my sister, out of
breath, “you staring great stuck pig.”

Joe looked at her in a helpless way, then took a helpless bite, and
looked at me again.

“You know, Pip,” said Joe, solemnly, with his last bite in his cheek,
and speaking in a confidential voice, as if we two were quite alone,
“you and me is always friends, and I'd be the last to tell upon you,
any time. But such a--” he moved his chair and looked about the floor
between us, and then again at me--“such a most oncommon Bolt as that!”

“Been bolting his food, has he?” cried my sister.

“You know, old chap,” said Joe, looking at me, and not at Mrs. Joe,
with his bite still in his cheek, “I Bolted, myself, when I was your
age--frequent--and as a boy I've been among a many Bolters; but I never
see your Bolting equal yet, Pip, and it's a mercy you ain't Bolted
dead.”

My sister made a dive at me, and fished me up by the hair, saying
nothing more than the awful words, “You come along and be dosed.”

Some medical beast had revived Tar-water in those days as a fine
medicine, and Mrs. Joe always kept a supply of it in the cupboard;
having a belief in its virtues correspondent to its nastiness. At the
best of times, so much of this elixir was administered to me as a choice
restorative, that I was conscious of going about, smelling like a new
fence. On this particular evening the urgency of my case demanded a
pint of this mixture, which was poured down my throat, for my greater
comfort, while Mrs. Joe held my head under her arm, as a boot would
be held in a bootjack. Joe got off with half a pint; but was made to
swallow that (much to his disturbance, as he sat slowly munching and
meditating before the fire), “because he had had a turn.” Judging from
myself, I should say he certainly had a turn afterwards, if he had had
none before.

Conscience is a dreadful thing when it accuses man or boy; but when, in
the case of a boy, that secret burden co-operates with another secret
burden down the leg of his trousers, it is (as I can testify) a great
punishment. The guilty knowledge that I was going to rob Mrs. Joe--I
never thought I was going to rob Joe, for I never thought of any of the
housekeeping property as his--united to the necessity of always keeping
one hand on my bread and butter as I sat, or when I was ordered about
the kitchen on any small errand, almost drove me out of my mind. Then,
as the marsh winds made the fire glow and flare, I thought I heard the
voice outside, of the man with the iron on his leg who had sworn me to
secrecy, declaring that he couldn't and wouldn't starve until to-morrow,
but must be fed now. At other times, I thought, What if the young man
who was with so much difficulty restrained from imbruing his hands in me
should yield to a constitutional impatience, or should mistake the time,
and should think himself accredited to my heart and liver to-night,
instead of to-morrow! If ever anybody's hair stood on end with terror,
mine must have done so then. But, perhaps, nobody's ever did?

It was Christmas Eve, and I had to stir the pudding for next day, with
a copper-stick, from seven to eight by the Dutch clock. I tried it with
the load upon my leg (and that made me think afresh of the man with the
load on HIS leg), and found the tendency of exercise to bring the bread
and butter out at my ankle, quite unmanageable. Happily I slipped away,
and deposited that part of my conscience in my garret bedroom.

“Hark!” said I, when I had done my stirring, and was taking a final warm
in the chimney corner before being sent up to bed; “was that great guns,
Joe?”

“Ah!” said Joe. “There's another conwict off.”

“What does that mean, Joe?” said I.

Mrs. Joe, who always took explanations upon herself, said, snappishly,
“Escaped. Escaped.” Administering the definition like Tar-water.

While Mrs. Joe sat with her head bending over her needlework, I put my
mouth into the forms of saying to Joe, “What's a convict?” Joe put his
mouth into the forms of returning such a highly elaborate answer, that I
could make out nothing of it but the single word “Pip.”

“There was a conwict off last night,” said Joe, aloud, “after
sunset-gun. And they fired warning of him. And now it appears they're
firing warning of another.”

“Who's firing?” said I.

“Drat that boy,” interposed my sister, frowning at me over her work,
“what a questioner he is. Ask no questions, and you'll be told no lies.”

It was not very polite to herself, I thought, to imply that I should be
told lies by her even if I did ask questions. But she never was polite
unless there was company.

At this point Joe greatly augmented my curiosity by taking the utmost
pains to open his mouth very wide, and to put it into the form of a word
that looked to me like “sulks.” Therefore, I naturally pointed to Mrs.
Joe, and put my mouth into the form of saying, “her?” But Joe wouldn't
hear of that, at all, and again opened his mouth very wide, and shook
the form of a most emphatic word out of it. But I could make nothing of
the word.

“Mrs. Joe,” said I, as a last resort, “I should like to know--if you
wouldn't much mind--where the firing comes from?”

“Lord bless the boy!” exclaimed my sister, as if she didn't quite mean
that but rather the contrary. “From the Hulks!”

“Oh-h!” said I, looking at Joe. “Hulks!”

Joe gave a reproachful cough, as much as to say, “Well, I told you so.”

“And please, what's Hulks?” said I.

“That's the way with this boy!” exclaimed my sister, pointing me out
with her needle and thread, and shaking her head at me. “Answer him one
question, and he'll ask you a dozen directly. Hulks are prison-ships,
right 'cross th' meshes.” We always used that name for marshes, in our
country.

“I wonder who's put into prison-ships, and why they're put there?” said
I, in a general way, and with quiet desperation.

It was too much for Mrs. Joe, who immediately rose. “I tell you what,
young fellow,” said she, “I didn't bring you up by hand to badger
people's lives out. It would be blame to me and not praise, if I had.
People are put in the Hulks because they murder, and because they rob,
and forge, and do all sorts of bad; and they always begin by asking
questions. Now, you get along to bed!”

I was never allowed a candle to light me to bed, and, as I went upstairs
in the dark, with my head tingling,--from Mrs. Joe's thimble
having played the tambourine upon it, to accompany her last words,--I
felt fearfully sensible of the great convenience that the hulks were
handy for me. I was clearly on my way there. I had begun by asking
questions, and I was going to rob Mrs. Joe.

Since that time, which is far enough away now, I have often thought
that few people know what secrecy there is in the young under terror.
No matter how unreasonable the terror, so that it be terror. I was in
mortal terror of the young man who wanted my heart and liver; I was
in mortal terror of my interlocutor with the iron leg; I was in mortal
terror of myself, from whom an awful promise had been extracted; I had
no hope of deliverance through my all-powerful sister, who repulsed
me at every turn; I am afraid to think of what I might have done on
requirement, in the secrecy of my terror.

If I slept at all that night, it was only to imagine myself drifting
down the river on a strong spring-tide, to the Hulks; a ghostly
pirate calling out to me through a speaking-trumpet, as I passed the
gibbet-station, that I had better come ashore and be hanged there at
once, and not put it off. I was afraid to sleep, even if I had been
inclined, for I knew that at the first faint dawn of morning I must rob
the pantry. There was no doing it in the night, for there was no getting
a light by easy friction then; to have got one I must have struck it out
of flint and steel, and have made a noise like the very pirate himself
rattling his chains.

As soon as the great black velvet pall outside my little window was shot
with gray, I got up and went downstairs; every board upon the way, and
every crack in every board calling after me, “Stop thief!” and “Get up,
Mrs. Joe!” In the pantry, which was far more abundantly supplied than
usual, owing to the season, I was very much alarmed by a hare hanging
up by the heels, whom I rather thought I caught, when my back was half
turned, winking. I had no time for verification, no time for selection,
no time for anything, for I had no time to spare. I stole some bread,
some rind of cheese, about half a jar of mincemeat (which I tied up in
my pocket-handkerchief with my last night's slice), some brandy from a
stone bottle (which I decanted into a glass bottle I had secretly used
for making that intoxicating fluid, Spanish-liquorice-water, up in my
room: diluting the stone bottle from a jug in the kitchen cupboard),
a meat bone with very little on it, and a beautiful round compact pork
pie. I was nearly going away without the pie, but I was tempted to mount
upon a shelf, to look what it was that was put away so carefully in a
covered earthenware dish in a corner, and I found it was the pie, and
I took it in the hope that it was not intended for early use, and would
not be missed for some time.

There was a door in the kitchen, communicating with the forge; I
unlocked and unbolted that door, and got a file from among Joe's tools.
Then I put the fastenings as I had found them, opened the door at which
I had entered when I ran home last night, shut it, and ran for the misty
marshes.




Chapter III

It was a rimy morning, and very damp. I had seen the damp lying on the
outside of my little window, as if some goblin had been crying there all
night, and using the window for a pocket-handkerchief. Now, I saw the
damp lying on the bare hedges and spare grass, like a coarser sort of
spiders' webs; hanging itself from twig to twig and blade to blade. On
every rail and gate, wet lay clammy, and the marsh mist was so thick,
that the wooden finger on the post directing people to our village--a
direction which they never accepted, for they never came there--was
invisible to me until I was quite close under it. Then, as I looked up
at it, while it dripped, it seemed to my oppressed conscience like a
phantom devoting me to the Hulks.

The mist was heavier yet when I got out upon the marshes, so that
instead of my running at everything, everything seemed to run at me.
This was very disagreeable to a guilty mind. The gates and dikes and
banks came bursting at me through the mist, as if they cried as plainly
as could be, “A boy with somebody else's pork pie! Stop him!” The
cattle came upon me with like suddenness, staring out of their eyes,
and steaming out of their nostrils, “Halloa, young thief!” One black
ox, with a white cravat on,--who even had to my awakened conscience
something of a clerical air,--fixed me so obstinately with his eyes,
and moved his blunt head round in such an accusatory manner as I moved
round, that I blubbered out to him, “I couldn't help it, sir! It wasn't
for myself I took it!” Upon which he put down his head, blew a cloud of
smoke out of his nose, and vanished with a kick-up of his hind-legs and
a flourish of his tail.

All this time, I was getting on towards the river; but however fast I
went, I couldn't warm my feet, to which the damp cold seemed riveted, as
the iron was riveted to the leg of the man I was running to meet. I knew
my way to the Battery, pretty straight, for I had been down there on a
Sunday with Joe, and Joe, sitting on an old gun, had told me that when
I was 'prentice to him, regularly bound, we would have such Larks there!
However, in the confusion of the mist, I found myself at last too far to
the right, and consequently had to try back along the river-side, on the
bank of loose stones above the mud and the stakes that staked the tide
out. Making my way along here with all despatch, I had just crossed a
ditch which I knew to be very near the Battery, and had just scrambled
up the mound beyond the ditch, when I saw the man sitting before me.
His back was towards me, and he had his arms folded, and was nodding
forward, heavy with sleep.

I thought he would be more glad if I came upon him with his breakfast,
in that unexpected manner, so I went forward softly and touched him on
the shoulder. He instantly jumped up, and it was not the same man, but
another man!

And yet this man was dressed in coarse gray, too, and had a great iron
on his leg, and was lame, and hoarse, and cold, and was everything that
the other man was; except that he had not the same face, and had a flat
broad-brimmed low-crowned felt hat on. All this I saw in a moment, for
I had only a moment to see it in: he swore an oath at me, made a hit at
me,--it was a round weak blow that missed me and almost knocked himself
down, for it made him stumble,--and then he ran into the mist, stumbling
twice as he went, and I lost him.

“It's the young man!” I thought, feeling my heart shoot as I identified
him. I dare say I should have felt a pain in my liver, too, if I had
known where it was.

I was soon at the Battery after that, and there was the right
man,--hugging himself and limping to and fro, as if he had never all
night left off hugging and limping,--waiting for me. He was awfully
cold, to be sure. I half expected to see him drop down before my face
and die of deadly cold. His eyes looked so awfully hungry too, that when
I handed him the file and he laid it down on the grass, it occurred to
me he would have tried to eat it, if he had not seen my bundle. He did
not turn me upside down this time to get at what I had, but left me
right side upwards while I opened the bundle and emptied my pockets.

“What's in the bottle, boy?” said he.

“Brandy,” said I.

He was already handing mincemeat down his throat in the most curious
manner,--more like a man who was putting it away somewhere in a violent
hurry, than a man who was eating it,--but he left off to take some of
the liquor. He shivered all the while so violently, that it was quite
as much as he could do to keep the neck of the bottle between his teeth,
without biting it off.

“I think you have got the ague,” said I.

“I'm much of your opinion, boy,” said he.

“It's bad about here,” I told him. “You've been lying out on the meshes,
and they're dreadful aguish. Rheumatic too.”

“I'll eat my breakfast afore they're the death of me,” said he. “I'd do
that, if I was going to be strung up to that there gallows as there is
over there, directly afterwards. I'll beat the shivers so far, I'll bet
you.”

He was gobbling mincemeat, meatbone, bread, cheese, and pork pie, all
at once: staring distrustfully while he did so at the mist all round
us, and often stopping--even stopping his jaws--to listen. Some real or
fancied sound, some clink upon the river or breathing of beast upon the
marsh, now gave him a start, and he said, suddenly,--

“You're not a deceiving imp? You brought no one with you?”

“No, sir! No!”

“Nor giv' no one the office to follow you?”

“No!”

“Well,” said he, “I believe you. You'd be but a fierce young hound
indeed, if at your time of life you could help to hunt a wretched
warmint hunted as near death and dunghill as this poor wretched warmint
is!”

Something clicked in his throat as if he had works in him like a clock,
and was going to strike. And he smeared his ragged rough sleeve over his
eyes.

Pitying his desolation, and watching him as he gradually settled down
upon the pie, I made bold to say, “I am glad you enjoy it.”

“Did you speak?”

“I said I was glad you enjoyed it.”

“Thankee, my boy. I do.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now
noticed a decided similarity between the dog's way of eating, and the
man's. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He
swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast;
and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought
there was danger in every direction of somebody's coming to take the pie
away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate
it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without
making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars
he was very like the dog.

“I am afraid you won't leave any of it for him,” said I, timidly; after
a silence during which I had hesitated as to the politeness of making
the remark. “There's no more to be got where that came from.” It was the
certainty of this fact that impelled me to offer the hint.

“Leave any for him? Who's him?” said my friend, stopping in his
crunching of pie-crust.

“The young man. That you spoke of. That was hid with you.”

“Oh ah!” he returned, with something like a gruff laugh. “Him? Yes, yes!
He don't want no wittles.”

“I thought he looked as if he did,” said I.

The man stopped eating, and regarded me with the keenest scrutiny and
the greatest surprise.

“Looked? When?”

“Just now.”

“Where?”

“Yonder,” said I, pointing; “over there, where I found him nodding
asleep, and thought it was you.”

He held me by the collar and stared at me so, that I began to think his
first idea about cutting my throat had revived.

“Dressed like you, you know, only with a hat,” I explained, trembling;
“and--and”--I was very anxious to put this delicately--“and with--the
same reason for wanting to borrow a file. Didn't you hear the cannon
last night?”

“Then there was firing!” he said to himself.

“I wonder you shouldn't have been sure of that,” I returned, “for
we heard it up at home, and that's farther away, and we were shut in
besides.”

“Why, see now!” said he. “When a man's alone on these flats, with a
light head and a light stomach, perishing of cold and want, he hears
nothin' all night, but guns firing, and voices calling. Hears? He sees
the soldiers, with their red coats lighted up by the torches carried
afore, closing in round him. Hears his number called, hears himself
challenged, hears the rattle of the muskets, hears the orders 'Make
ready! Present! Cover him steady, men!' and is laid hands on--and
there's nothin'! Why, if I see one pursuing party last night--coming up
in order, Damn 'em, with their tramp, tramp--I see a hundred. And as to
firing! Why, I see the mist shake with the cannon, arter it was broad
day,--But this man”; he had said all the rest, as if he had forgotten my
being there; “did you notice anything in him?”

“He had a badly bruised face,” said I, recalling what I hardly knew I
knew.

“Not here?” exclaimed the man, striking his left cheek mercilessly, with
the flat of his hand.

“Yes, there!”

“Where is he?” He crammed what little food was left, into the breast of
his gray jacket. “Show me the way he went. I'll pull him down, like a
bloodhound. Curse this iron on my sore leg! Give us hold of the file,
boy.”

I indicated in what direction the mist had shrouded the other man,
and he looked up at it for an instant. But he was down on the rank wet
grass, filing at his iron like a madman, and not minding me or minding
his own leg, which had an old chafe upon it and was bloody, but which he
handled as roughly as if it had no more feeling in it than the file. I
was very much afraid of him again, now that he had worked himself into
this fierce hurry, and I was likewise very much afraid of keeping away
from home any longer. I told him I must go, but he took no notice, so
I thought the best thing I could do was to slip off. The last I saw
of him, his head was bent over his knee and he was working hard at his
fetter, muttering impatient imprecations at it and at his leg. The last
I heard of him, I stopped in the mist to listen, and the file was still
going.




Chapter IV

I fully expected to find a Constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me
up. But not only was there no Constable there, but no discovery had yet
been made of the robbery. Mrs. Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the
house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon
the kitchen doorstep to keep him out of the dust-pan,--an article into
which his destiny always led him, sooner or later, when my sister was
vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment.

“And where the deuce ha' you been?” was Mrs. Joe's Christmas salutation,
when I and my conscience showed ourselves.

I said I had been down to hear the Carols. “Ah! well!” observed Mrs.
Joe. “You might ha' done worse.” Not a doubt of that I thought.

“Perhaps if I warn't a blacksmith's wife, and (what's the same thing) a
slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear the Carols,”
 said Mrs. Joe. “I'm rather partial to Carols, myself, and that's the
best of reasons for my never hearing any.”

Joe, who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had
retired before us, drew the back of his hand across his nose with a
conciliatory air, when Mrs. Joe darted a look at him, and, when her eyes
were withdrawn, secretly crossed his two forefingers, and exhibited them
to me, as our token that Mrs. Joe was in a cross temper. This was so
much her normal state, that Joe and I would often, for weeks together,
be, as to our fingers, like monumental Crusaders as to their legs.

We were to have a superb dinner, consisting of a leg of pickled pork and
greens, and a pair of roast stuffed fowls. A handsome mince-pie had
been made yesterday morning (which accounted for the mincemeat not
being missed), and the pudding was already on the boil. These extensive
arrangements occasioned us to be cut off unceremoniously in respect of
breakfast; “for I ain't,” said Mrs. Joe,--“I ain't a going to have
no formal cramming and busting and washing up now, with what I've got
before me, I promise you!”

So, we had our slices served out, as if we were two thousand troops on a
forced march instead of a man and boy at home; and we took gulps of milk
and water, with apologetic countenances, from a jug on the dresser. In
the meantime, Mrs. Joe put clean white curtains up, and tacked a new
flowered flounce across the wide chimney to replace the old one, and
uncovered the little state parlor across the passage, which was never
uncovered at any other time, but passed the rest of the year in a cool
haze of silver paper, which even extended to the four little white
crockery poodles on the mantel-shelf, each with a black nose and a
basket of flowers in his mouth, and each the counterpart of the other.
Mrs. Joe was a very clean housekeeper, but had an exquisite art of
making her cleanliness more uncomfortable and unacceptable than dirt
itself. Cleanliness is next to Godliness, and some people do the same by
their religion.

My sister, having so much to do, was going to church vicariously, that
is to say, Joe and I were going. In his working-clothes, Joe was a
well-knit characteristic-looking blacksmith; in his holiday clothes,
he was more like a scarecrow in good circumstances, than anything else.
Nothing that he wore then fitted him or seemed to belong to him; and
everything that he wore then grazed him. On the present festive occasion
he emerged from his room, when the blithe bells were going, the picture
of misery, in a full suit of Sunday penitentials. As to me, I think my
sister must have had some general idea that I was a young offender whom
an Accoucheur Policeman had taken up (on my birthday) and delivered over
to her, to be dealt with according to the outraged majesty of the law.
I was always treated as if I had insisted on being born in opposition
to the dictates of reason, religion, and morality, and against the
dissuading arguments of my best friends. Even when I was taken to have
a new suit of clothes, the tailor had orders to make them like a kind of
Reformatory, and on no account to let me have the free use of my limbs.

Joe and I going to church, therefore, must have been a moving spectacle
for compassionate minds. Yet, what I suffered outside was nothing to
what I underwent within. The terrors that had assailed me whenever
Mrs. Joe had gone near the pantry, or out of the room, were only to be
equalled by the remorse with which my mind dwelt on what my hands had
done. Under the weight of my wicked secret, I pondered whether the
Church would be powerful enough to shield me from the vengeance of the
terrible young man, if I divulged to that establishment. I conceived the
idea that the time when the banns were read and when the clergyman said,
“Ye are now to declare it!” would be the time for me to rise and propose
a private conference in the vestry. I am far from being sure that I
might not have astonished our small congregation by resorting to this
extreme measure, but for its being Christmas Day and no Sunday.

Mr. Wopsle, the clerk at church, was to dine with us; and Mr. Hubble
the wheelwright and Mrs. Hubble; and Uncle Pumblechook (Joe's uncle,
but Mrs. Joe appropriated him), who was a well-to-do cornchandler in
the nearest town, and drove his own chaise-cart. The dinner hour was
half-past one. When Joe and I got home, we found the table laid, and
Mrs. Joe dressed, and the dinner dressing, and the front door unlocked
(it never was at any other time) for the company to enter by, and
everything most splendid. And still, not a word of the robbery.

The time came, without bringing with it any relief to my feelings, and
the company came. Mr. Wopsle, united to a Roman nose and a large shining
bald forehead, had a deep voice which he was uncommonly proud of; indeed
it was understood among his acquaintance that if you could only give him
his head, he would read the clergyman into fits; he himself confessed
that if the Church was “thrown open,” meaning to competition, he would
not despair of making his mark in it. The Church not being “thrown
open,” he was, as I have said, our clerk. But he punished the Amens
tremendously; and when he gave out the psalm,--always giving the whole
verse,--he looked all round the congregation first, as much as to say,
“You have heard my friend overhead; oblige me with your opinion of this
style!”

I opened the door to the company,--making believe that it was a habit
of ours to open that door,--and I opened it first to Mr. Wopsle, next
to Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, and last of all to Uncle Pumblechook. N.B. I was
not allowed to call him uncle, under the severest penalties.

“Mrs. Joe,” said Uncle Pumblechook, a large hard-breathing middle-aged
slow man, with a mouth like a fish, dull staring eyes, and sandy hair
standing upright on his head, so that he looked as if he had just been
all but choked, and had that moment come to, “I have brought you as the
compliments of the season--I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of sherry
wine--and I have brought you, Mum, a bottle of port wine.”

Every Christmas Day he presented himself, as a profound novelty, with
exactly the same words, and carrying the two bottles like dumb-bells.
Every Christmas Day, Mrs. Joe replied, as she now replied, “O, Un--cle
Pum-ble--chook! This is kind!” Every Christmas Day, he retorted, as
he now retorted, “It's no more than your merits. And now are you all
bobbish, and how's Sixpennorth of halfpence?” meaning me.

We dined on these occasions in the kitchen, and adjourned, for the nuts
and oranges and apples to the parlor; which was a change very like
Joe's change from his working-clothes to his Sunday dress. My sister was
uncommonly lively on the present occasion, and indeed was generally more
gracious in the society of Mrs. Hubble than in other company. I remember
Mrs. Hubble as a little curly sharp-edged person in sky-blue, who held a
conventionally juvenile position, because she had married Mr. Hubble,--I
don't know at what remote period,--when she was much younger than he. I
remember Mr Hubble as a tough, high-shouldered, stooping old man, of a
sawdusty fragrance, with his legs extraordinarily wide apart: so that in
my short days I always saw some miles of open country between them when
I met him coming up the lane.

Among this good company I should have felt myself, even if I hadn't
robbed the pantry, in a false position. Not because I was squeezed in
at an acute angle of the tablecloth, with the table in my chest, and the
Pumblechookian elbow in my eye, nor because I was not allowed to speak
(I didn't want to speak), nor because I was regaled with the scaly tips
of the drumsticks of the fowls, and with those obscure corners of pork
of which the pig, when living, had had the least reason to be vain. No;
I should not have minded that, if they would only have left me alone.
But they wouldn't leave me alone. They seemed to think the opportunity
lost, if they failed to point the conversation at me, every now and
then, and stick the point into me. I might have been an unfortunate
little bull in a Spanish arena, I got so smartingly touched up by these
moral goads.

It began the moment we sat down to dinner. Mr. Wopsle said grace with
theatrical declamation,--as it now appears to me, something like a
religious cross of the Ghost in Hamlet with Richard the Third,--and
ended with the very proper aspiration that we might be truly grateful.
Upon which my sister fixed me with her eye, and said, in a low
reproachful voice, “Do you hear that? Be grateful.”

“Especially,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “be grateful, boy, to them which
brought you up by hand.”

Mrs. Hubble shook her head, and contemplating me with a mournful
presentiment that I should come to no good, asked, “Why is it that the
young are never grateful?” This moral mystery seemed too much for
the company until Mr. Hubble tersely solved it by saying, “Naterally
wicious.” Everybody then murmured “True!” and looked at me in a
particularly unpleasant and personal manner.

Joe's station and influence were something feebler (if possible) when
there was company than when there was none. But he always aided and
comforted me when he could, in some way of his own, and he always did so
at dinner-time by giving me gravy, if there were any. There being plenty
of gravy to-day, Joe spooned into my plate, at this point, about half a
pint.

A little later on in the dinner, Mr. Wopsle reviewed the sermon with
some severity, and intimated--in the usual hypothetical case of the
Church being “thrown open”--what kind of sermon he would have given
them. After favoring them with some heads of that discourse, he remarked
that he considered the subject of the day's homily, ill chosen; which
was the less excusable, he added, when there were so many subjects
“going about.”

“True again,” said Uncle Pumblechook. “You've hit it, sir! Plenty of
subjects going about, for them that know how to put salt upon their
tails. That's what's wanted. A man needn't go far to find a subject,
if he's ready with his salt-box.” Mr. Pumblechook added, after a short
interval of reflection, “Look at Pork alone. There's a subject! If you
want a subject, look at Pork!”

“True, sir. Many a moral for the young,” returned Mr. Wopsle,--and I
knew he was going to lug me in, before he said it; “might be deduced
from that text.”

(“You listen to this,” said my sister to me, in a severe parenthesis.)

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Swine,” pursued Mr. Wopsle, in his deepest voice, and pointing his fork
at my blushes, as if he were mentioning my Christian name,--“swine were
the companions of the prodigal. The gluttony of Swine is put before us,
as an example to the young.” (I thought this pretty well in him who
had been praising up the pork for being so plump and juicy.) “What is
detestable in a pig is more detestable in a boy.”

“Or girl,” suggested Mr. Hubble.

“Of course, or girl, Mr. Hubble,” assented Mr. Wopsle, rather irritably,
“but there is no girl present.”

“Besides,” said Mr. Pumblechook, turning sharp on me, “think what you've
got to be grateful for. If you'd been born a Squeaker--”

“He was, if ever a child was,” said my sister, most emphatically.

Joe gave me some more gravy.

“Well, but I mean a four-footed Squeaker,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “If you
had been born such, would you have been here now? Not you--”

“Unless in that form,” said Mr. Wopsle, nodding towards the dish.

“But I don't mean in that form, sir,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, who had
an objection to being interrupted; “I mean, enjoying himself with his
elders and betters, and improving himself with their conversation, and
rolling in the lap of luxury. Would he have been doing that? No, he
wouldn't. And what would have been your destination?” turning on me
again. “You would have been disposed of for so many shillings according
to the market price of the article, and Dunstable the butcher would have
come up to you as you lay in your straw, and he would have whipped you
under his left arm, and with his right he would have tucked up his frock
to get a penknife from out of his waistcoat-pocket, and he would have
shed your blood and had your life. No bringing up by hand then. Not a
bit of it!”

Joe offered me more gravy, which I was afraid to take.

“He was a world of trouble to you, ma'am,” said Mrs. Hubble,
commiserating my sister.

“Trouble?” echoed my sister; “trouble?” and then entered on a fearful
catalogue of all the illnesses I had been guilty of, and all the acts
of sleeplessness I had committed, and all the high places I had tumbled
from, and all the low places I had tumbled into, and all the injuries I
had done myself, and all the times she had wished me in my grave, and I
had contumaciously refused to go there.

I think the Romans must have aggravated one another very much, with
their noses. Perhaps, they became the restless people they were, in
consequence. Anyhow, Mr. Wopsle's Roman nose so aggravated me, during
the recital of my misdemeanours, that I should have liked to pull it
until he howled. But, all I had endured up to this time was nothing in
comparison with the awful feelings that took possession of me when the
pause was broken which ensued upon my sister's recital, and in which
pause everybody had looked at me (as I felt painfully conscious) with
indignation and abhorrence.

“Yet,” said Mr. Pumblechook, leading the company gently back to the
theme from which they had strayed, “Pork--regarded as biled--is rich,
too; ain't it?”

“Have a little brandy, uncle,” said my sister.

O Heavens, it had come at last! He would find it was weak, he would say
it was weak, and I was lost! I held tight to the leg of the table under
the cloth, with both hands, and awaited my fate.

My sister went for the stone bottle, came back with the stone bottle,
and poured his brandy out: no one else taking any. The wretched man
trifled with his glass,--took it up, looked at it through the light,
put it down,--prolonged my misery. All this time Mrs. Joe and Joe were
briskly clearing the table for the pie and pudding.

I couldn't keep my eyes off him. Always holding tight by the leg of the
table with my hands and feet, I saw the miserable creature finger his
glass playfully, take it up, smile, throw his head back, and drink
the brandy off. Instantly afterwards, the company were seized with
unspeakable consternation, owing to his springing to his feet, turning
round several times in an appalling spasmodic whooping-cough dance,
and rushing out at the door; he then became visible through the window,
violently plunging and expectorating, making the most hideous faces, and
apparently out of his mind.

I held on tight, while Mrs. Joe and Joe ran to him. I didn't know how
I had done it, but I had no doubt I had murdered him somehow. In my
dreadful situation, it was a relief when he was brought back, and
surveying the company all round as if they had disagreed with him, sank
down into his chair with the one significant gasp, “Tar!”

I had filled up the bottle from the tar-water jug. I knew he would be
worse by and by. I moved the table, like a Medium of the present day, by
the vigor of my unseen hold upon it.

“Tar!” cried my sister, in amazement. “Why, how ever could Tar come
there?”

But, Uncle Pumblechook, who was omnipotent in that kitchen, wouldn't
hear the word, wouldn't hear of the subject, imperiously waved it all
away with his hand, and asked for hot gin and water. My sister, who had
begun to be alarmingly meditative, had to employ herself actively in
getting the gin, the hot water, the sugar, and the lemon-peel, and mixing
them. For the time being at least, I was saved. I still held on to the
leg of the table, but clutched it now with the fervor of gratitude.

By degrees, I became calm enough to release my grasp and partake of
pudding. Mr. Pumblechook partook of pudding. All partook of pudding.
The course terminated, and Mr. Pumblechook had begun to beam under the
genial influence of gin and water. I began to think I should get over
the day, when my sister said to Joe, “Clean plates,--cold.”

I clutched the leg of the table again immediately, and pressed it to my
bosom as if it had been the companion of my youth and friend of my soul.
I foresaw what was coming, and I felt that this time I really was gone.

“You must taste,” said my sister, addressing the guests with her best
grace--“you must taste, to finish with, such a delightful and delicious
present of Uncle Pumblechook's!”

Must they! Let them not hope to taste it!

“You must know,” said my sister, rising, “it's a pie; a savory pork
pie.”

The company murmured their compliments. Uncle Pumblechook, sensible of
having deserved well of his fellow-creatures, said,--quite vivaciously,
all things considered,--“Well, Mrs. Joe, we'll do our best endeavors;
let us have a cut at this same pie.”

My sister went out to get it. I heard her steps proceed to the pantry. I
saw Mr. Pumblechook balance his knife. I saw reawakening appetite in the
Roman nostrils of Mr. Wopsle. I heard Mr. Hubble remark that “a bit of
savory pork pie would lay atop of anything you could mention, and do
no harm,” and I heard Joe say, “You shall have some, Pip.” I have never
been absolutely certain whether I uttered a shrill yell of terror,
merely in spirit, or in the bodily hearing of the company. I felt that I
could bear no more, and that I must run away. I released the leg of the
table, and ran for my life.

But I ran no farther than the house door, for there I ran head-foremost
into a party of soldiers with their muskets, one of whom held out a pair
of handcuffs to me, saying, “Here you are, look sharp, come on!”




Chapter V

The apparition of a file of soldiers ringing down the but-ends of their
loaded muskets on our door-step, caused the dinner-party to rise
from table in confusion, and caused Mrs. Joe re-entering the kitchen
empty-handed, to stop short and stare, in her wondering lament of
“Gracious goodness gracious me, what's gone--with the--pie!”

The sergeant and I were in the kitchen when Mrs. Joe stood staring;
at which crisis I partially recovered the use of my senses. It was
the sergeant who had spoken to me, and he was now looking round at the
company, with his handcuffs invitingly extended towards them in his
right hand, and his left on my shoulder.

“Excuse me, ladies and gentleman,” said the sergeant, “but as I have
mentioned at the door to this smart young shaver,” (which he hadn't), “I
am on a chase in the name of the king, and I want the blacksmith.”

“And pray what might you want with him?” retorted my sister, quick to
resent his being wanted at all.

“Missis,” returned the gallant sergeant, “speaking for myself, I should
reply, the honor and pleasure of his fine wife's acquaintance; speaking
for the king, I answer, a little job done.”

This was received as rather neat in the sergeant; insomuch that Mr.
Pumblechook cried audibly, “Good again!”

“You see, blacksmith,” said the sergeant, who had by this time picked
out Joe with his eye, “we have had an accident with these, and I find
the lock of one of 'em goes wrong, and the coupling don't act pretty.
As they are wanted for immediate service, will you throw your eye over
them?”

Joe threw his eye over them, and pronounced that the job would
necessitate the lighting of his forge fire, and would take nearer
two hours than one. “Will it? Then will you set about it at once,
blacksmith?” said the off-hand sergeant, “as it's on his Majesty's
service. And if my men can bear a hand anywhere, they'll make themselves
useful.” With that, he called to his men, who came trooping into the
kitchen one after another, and piled their arms in a corner. And then
they stood about, as soldiers do; now, with their hands loosely clasped
before them; now, resting a knee or a shoulder; now, easing a belt or a
pouch; now, opening the door to spit stiffly over their high stocks, out
into the yard.

All these things I saw without then knowing that I saw them, for I
was in an agony of apprehension. But beginning to perceive that the
handcuffs were not for me, and that the military had so far got the
better of the pie as to put it in the background, I collected a little
more of my scattered wits.

“Would you give me the time?” said the sergeant, addressing himself to
Mr. Pumblechook, as to a man whose appreciative powers justified the
inference that he was equal to the time.

“It's just gone half past two.”

“That's not so bad,” said the sergeant, reflecting; “even if I was
forced to halt here nigh two hours, that'll do. How far might you call
yourselves from the marshes, hereabouts? Not above a mile, I reckon?”

“Just a mile,” said Mrs. Joe.

“That'll do. We begin to close in upon 'em about dusk. A little before
dusk, my orders are. That'll do.”

“Convicts, sergeant?” asked Mr. Wopsle, in a matter-of-course way.

“Ay!” returned the sergeant, “two. They're pretty well known to be out
on the marshes still, and they won't try to get clear of 'em before
dusk. Anybody here seen anything of any such game?”

Everybody, myself excepted, said no, with confidence. Nobody thought of
me.

“Well!” said the sergeant, “they'll find themselves trapped in a circle,
I expect, sooner than they count on. Now, blacksmith! If you're ready,
his Majesty the King is.”

Joe had got his coat and waistcoat and cravat off, and his leather apron
on, and passed into the forge. One of the soldiers opened its wooden
windows, another lighted the fire, another turned to at the bellows, the
rest stood round the blaze, which was soon roaring. Then Joe began to
hammer and clink, hammer and clink, and we all looked on.

The interest of the impending pursuit not only absorbed the general
attention, but even made my sister liberal. She drew a pitcher of beer
from the cask for the soldiers, and invited the sergeant to take a glass
of brandy. But Mr. Pumblechook said, sharply, “Give him wine, Mum. I'll
engage there's no tar in that:” so, the sergeant thanked him and said
that as he preferred his drink without tar, he would take wine, if it
was equally convenient. When it was given him, he drank his Majesty's
health and compliments of the season, and took it all at a mouthful and
smacked his lips.

“Good stuff, eh, sergeant?” said Mr. Pumblechook.

“I'll tell you something,” returned the sergeant; “I suspect that
stuff's of your providing.”

Mr. Pumblechook, with a fat sort of laugh, said, “Ay, ay? Why?”

“Because,” returned the sergeant, clapping him on the shoulder, “you're
a man that knows what's what.”

“D'ye think so?” said Mr. Pumblechook, with his former laugh. “Have
another glass!”

“With you. Hob and nob,” returned the sergeant. “The top of mine to the
foot of yours,--the foot of yours to the top of mine,--Ring once, ring
twice,--the best tune on the Musical Glasses! Your health. May you live
a thousand years, and never be a worse judge of the right sort than you
are at the present moment of your life!”

The sergeant tossed off his glass again and seemed quite ready for
another glass. I noticed that Mr. Pumblechook in his hospitality
appeared to forget that he had made a present of the wine, but took the
bottle from Mrs. Joe and had all the credit of handing it about in a
gush of joviality. Even I got some. And he was so very free of the wine
that he even called for the other bottle, and handed that about with the
same liberality, when the first was gone.

As I watched them while they all stood clustering about the forge,
enjoying themselves so much, I thought what terrible good sauce for
a dinner my fugitive friend on the marshes was. They had not enjoyed
themselves a quarter so much, before the entertainment was brightened
with the excitement he furnished. And now, when they were all in lively
anticipation of “the two villains” being taken, and when the bellows
seemed to roar for the fugitives, the fire to flare for them, the smoke
to hurry away in pursuit of them, Joe to hammer and clink for them,
and all the murky shadows on the wall to shake at them in menace as the
blaze rose and sank, and the red-hot sparks dropped and died, the pale
afternoon outside almost seemed in my pitying young fancy to have turned
pale on their account, poor wretches.

At last, Joe's job was done, and the ringing and roaring stopped. As Joe
got on his coat, he mustered courage to propose that some of us should
go down with the soldiers and see what came of the hunt. Mr. Pumblechook
and Mr. Hubble declined, on the plea of a pipe and ladies' society; but
Mr. Wopsle said he would go, if Joe would. Joe said he was agreeable,
and would take me, if Mrs. Joe approved. We never should have got leave
to go, I am sure, but for Mrs. Joe's curiosity to know all about it and
how it ended. As it was, she merely stipulated, “If you bring the boy
back with his head blown to bits by a musket, don't look to me to put it
together again.”

The sergeant took a polite leave of the ladies, and parted from Mr.
Pumblechook as from a comrade; though I doubt if he were quite as fully
sensible of that gentleman's merits under arid conditions, as when
something moist was going. His men resumed their muskets and fell in.
Mr. Wopsle, Joe, and I, received strict charge to keep in the rear, and
to speak no word after we reached the marshes. When we were all out in
the raw air and were steadily moving towards our business, I treasonably
whispered to Joe, “I hope, Joe, we shan't find them.” and Joe whispered
to me, “I'd give a shilling if they had cut and run, Pip.”

We were joined by no stragglers from the village, for the weather was
cold and threatening, the way dreary, the footing bad, darkness coming
on, and the people had good fires in-doors and were keeping the day. A
few faces hurried to glowing windows and looked after us, but none came
out. We passed the finger-post, and held straight on to the churchyard.
There we were stopped a few minutes by a signal from the sergeant's
hand, while two or three of his men dispersed themselves among the
graves, and also examined the porch. They came in again without finding
anything, and then we struck out on the open marshes, through the gate
at the side of the churchyard. A bitter sleet came rattling against us
here on the east wind, and Joe took me on his back.

Now that we were out upon the dismal wilderness where they little
thought I had been within eight or nine hours and had seen both men
hiding, I considered for the first time, with great dread, if we should
come upon them, would my particular convict suppose that it was I who
had brought the soldiers there? He had asked me if I was a deceiving
imp, and he had said I should be a fierce young hound if I joined the
hunt against him. Would he believe that I was both imp and hound in
treacherous earnest, and had betrayed him?

It was of no use asking myself this question now. There I was, on Joe's
back, and there was Joe beneath me, charging at the ditches like a
hunter, and stimulating Mr. Wopsle not to tumble on his Roman nose, and
to keep up with us. The soldiers were in front of us, extending into a
pretty wide line with an interval between man and man. We were taking
the course I had begun with, and from which I had diverged in the mist.
Either the mist was not out again yet, or the wind had dispelled it.
Under the low red glare of sunset, the beacon, and the gibbet, and the
mound of the Battery, and the opposite shore of the river, were plain,
though all of a watery lead color.

With my heart thumping like a blacksmith at Joe's broad shoulder, I
looked all about for any sign of the convicts. I could see none, I could
hear none. Mr. Wopsle had greatly alarmed me more than once, by his
blowing and hard breathing; but I knew the sounds by this time, and
could dissociate them from the object of pursuit. I got a dreadful
start, when I thought I heard the file still going; but it was only a
sheep-bell. The sheep stopped in their eating and looked timidly at
us; and the cattle, their heads turned from the wind and sleet, stared
angrily as if they held us responsible for both annoyances; but, except
these things, and the shudder of the dying day in every blade of grass,
there was no break in the bleak stillness of the marshes.

The soldiers were moving on in the direction of the old Battery, and we
were moving on a little way behind them, when, all of a sudden, we all
stopped. For there had reached us on the wings of the wind and rain, a
long shout. It was repeated. It was at a distance towards the east, but
it was long and loud. Nay, there seemed to be two or more shouts raised
together,--if one might judge from a confusion in the sound.

To this effect the sergeant and the nearest men were speaking under
their breath, when Joe and I came up. After another moment's listening,
Joe (who was a good judge) agreed, and Mr. Wopsle (who was a bad judge)
agreed. The sergeant, a decisive man, ordered that the sound should not
be answered, but that the course should be changed, and that his men
should make towards it “at the double.” So we slanted to the right
(where the East was), and Joe pounded away so wonderfully, that I had to
hold on tight to keep my seat.

It was a run indeed now, and what Joe called, in the only two words he
spoke all the time, “a Winder.” Down banks and up banks, and over gates,
and splashing into dikes, and breaking among coarse rushes: no man cared
where he went. As we came nearer to the shouting, it became more and
more apparent that it was made by more than one voice. Sometimes, it
seemed to stop altogether, and then the soldiers stopped. When it broke
out again, the soldiers made for it at a greater rate than ever, and we
after them. After a while, we had so run it down, that we could hear one
voice calling “Murder!” and another voice, “Convicts! Runaways! Guard!
This way for the runaway convicts!” Then both voices would seem to be
stifled in a struggle, and then would break out again. And when it had
come to this, the soldiers ran like deer, and Joe too.

The sergeant ran in first, when we had run the noise quite down, and two
of his men ran in close upon him. Their pieces were cocked and levelled
when we all ran in.

“Here are both men!” panted the sergeant, struggling at the bottom of a
ditch. “Surrender, you two! and confound you for two wild beasts! Come
asunder!”

Water was splashing, and mud was flying, and oaths were being sworn, and
blows were being struck, when some more men went down into the ditch to
help the sergeant, and dragged out, separately, my convict and the other
one. Both were bleeding and panting and execrating and struggling; but
of course I knew them both directly.

“Mind!” said my convict, wiping blood from his face with his ragged
sleeves, and shaking torn hair from his fingers: “I took him! I give him
up to you! Mind that!”

“It's not much to be particular about,” said the sergeant; “it'll do you
small good, my man, being in the same plight yourself. Handcuffs there!”

“I don't expect it to do me any good. I don't want it to do me more good
than it does now,” said my convict, with a greedy laugh. “I took him. He
knows it. That's enough for me.”

The other convict was livid to look at, and, in addition to the old
bruised left side of his face, seemed to be bruised and torn all over.
He could not so much as get his breath to speak, until they were both
separately handcuffed, but leaned upon a soldier to keep himself from
falling.

“Take notice, guard,--he tried to murder me,” were his first words.

“Tried to murder him?” said my convict, disdainfully. “Try, and not
do it? I took him, and giv' him up; that's what I done. I not only
prevented him getting off the marshes, but I dragged him here,--dragged
him this far on his way back. He's a gentleman, if you please, this
villain. Now, the Hulks has got its gentleman again, through me. Murder
him? Worth my while, too, to murder him, when I could do worse and drag
him back!”

The other one still gasped, “He tried--he tried-to--murder me.
Bear--bear witness.”

“Lookee here!” said my convict to the sergeant. “Single-handed I got
clear of the prison-ship; I made a dash and I done it. I could ha' got
clear of these death-cold flats likewise--look at my leg: you won't find
much iron on it--if I hadn't made the discovery that he was here. Let
him go free? Let him profit by the means as I found out? Let him make a
tool of me afresh and again? Once more? No, no, no. If I had died at
the bottom there,” and he made an emphatic swing at the ditch with his
manacled hands, “I'd have held to him with that grip, that you should
have been safe to find him in my hold.”

The other fugitive, who was evidently in extreme horror of his
companion, repeated, “He tried to murder me. I should have been a dead
man if you had not come up.”

“He lies!” said my convict, with fierce energy. “He's a liar born, and
he'll die a liar. Look at his face; ain't it written there? Let him turn
those eyes of his on me. I defy him to do it.”

The other, with an effort at a scornful smile, which could not, however,
collect the nervous working of his mouth into any set expression, looked
at the soldiers, and looked about at the marshes and at the sky, but
certainly did not look at the speaker.

“Do you see him?” pursued my convict. “Do you see what a villain he is?
Do you see those grovelling and wandering eyes? That's how he looked
when we were tried together. He never looked at me.”

The other, always working and working his dry lips and turning his eyes
restlessly about him far and near, did at last turn them for a moment on
the speaker, with the words, “You are not much to look at,” and with
a half-taunting glance at the bound hands. At that point, my convict
became so frantically exasperated, that he would have rushed upon him
but for the interposition of the soldiers. “Didn't I tell you,” said the
other convict then, “that he would murder me, if he could?” And any one
could see that he shook with fear, and that there broke out upon his
lips curious white flakes, like thin snow.

“Enough of this parley,” said the sergeant. “Light those torches.”

As one of the soldiers, who carried a basket in lieu of a gun, went down
on his knee to open it, my convict looked round him for the first time,
and saw me. I had alighted from Joe's back on the brink of the ditch
when we came up, and had not moved since. I looked at him eagerly when
he looked at me, and slightly moved my hands and shook my head. I had
been waiting for him to see me that I might try to assure him of my
innocence. It was not at all expressed to me that he even comprehended
my intention, for he gave me a look that I did not understand, and it
all passed in a moment. But if he had looked at me for an hour or for
a day, I could not have remembered his face ever afterwards, as having
been more attentive.

The soldier with the basket soon got a light, and lighted three or four
torches, and took one himself and distributed the others. It had been
almost dark before, but now it seemed quite dark, and soon afterwards
very dark. Before we departed from that spot, four soldiers standing in
a ring, fired twice into the air. Presently we saw other torches kindled
at some distance behind us, and others on the marshes on the opposite
bank of the river. “All right,” said the sergeant. “March.”

We had not gone far when three cannon were fired ahead of us with a
sound that seemed to burst something inside my ear. “You are expected
on board,” said the sergeant to my convict; “they know you are coming.
Don't straggle, my man. Close up here.”

The two were kept apart, and each walked surrounded by a separate guard.
I had hold of Joe's hand now, and Joe carried one of the torches. Mr.
Wopsle had been for going back, but Joe was resolved to see it out, so
we went on with the party. There was a reasonably good path now, mostly
on the edge of the river, with a divergence here and there where a dike
came, with a miniature windmill on it and a muddy sluice-gate. When
I looked round, I could see the other lights coming in after us. The
torches we carried dropped great blotches of fire upon the track, and
I could see those, too, lying smoking and flaring. I could see nothing
else but black darkness. Our lights warmed the air about us with their
pitchy blaze, and the two prisoners seemed rather to like that, as they
limped along in the midst of the muskets. We could not go fast, because
of their lameness; and they were so spent, that two or three times we
had to halt while they rested.

After an hour or so of this travelling, we came to a rough wooden hut
and a landing-place. There was a guard in the hut, and they challenged,
and the sergeant answered. Then, we went into the hut, where there was
a smell of tobacco and whitewash, and a bright fire, and a lamp, and
a stand of muskets, and a drum, and a low wooden bedstead, like an
overgrown mangle without the machinery, capable of holding about a dozen
soldiers all at once. Three or four soldiers who lay upon it in their
great-coats were not much interested in us, but just lifted their heads
and took a sleepy stare, and then lay down again. The sergeant made some
kind of report, and some entry in a book, and then the convict whom I
call the other convict was drafted off with his guard, to go on board
first.

My convict never looked at me, except that once. While we stood in the
hut, he stood before the fire looking thoughtfully at it, or putting up
his feet by turns upon the hob, and looking thoughtfully at them as if
he pitied them for their recent adventures. Suddenly, he turned to the
sergeant, and remarked,--

“I wish to say something respecting this escape. It may prevent some
persons laying under suspicion alonger me.”

“You can say what you like,” returned the sergeant, standing coolly
looking at him with his arms folded, “but you have no call to say it
here. You'll have opportunity enough to say about it, and hear about it,
before it's done with, you know.”

“I know, but this is another pint, a separate matter. A man can't
starve; at least I can't. I took some wittles, up at the willage over
yonder,--where the church stands a'most out on the marshes.”

“You mean stole,” said the sergeant.

“And I'll tell you where from. From the blacksmith's.”

“Halloa!” said the sergeant, staring at Joe.

“Halloa, Pip!” said Joe, staring at me.

“It was some broken wittles--that's what it was--and a dram of liquor,
and a pie.”

“Have you happened to miss such an article as a pie, blacksmith?” asked
the sergeant, confidentially.

“My wife did, at the very moment when you came in. Don't you know, Pip?”

“So,” said my convict, turning his eyes on Joe in a moody manner, and
without the least glance at me,--“so you're the blacksmith, are you?
Than I'm sorry to say, I've eat your pie.”

“God knows you're welcome to it,--so far as it was ever mine,” returned
Joe, with a saving remembrance of Mrs. Joe. “We don't know what you have
done, but we wouldn't have you starved to death for it, poor miserable
fellow-creatur.--Would us, Pip?”

The something that I had noticed before, clicked in the man's throat
again, and he turned his back. The boat had returned, and his guard were
ready, so we followed him to the landing-place made of rough stakes
and stones, and saw him put into the boat, which was rowed by a crew of
convicts like himself. No one seemed surprised to see him, or interested
in seeing him, or glad to see him, or sorry to see him, or spoke a word,
except that somebody in the boat growled as if to dogs, “Give way,
you!” which was the signal for the dip of the oars. By the light of the
torches, we saw the black Hulk lying out a little way from the mud of
the shore, like a wicked Noah's ark. Cribbed and barred and moored by
massive rusty chains, the prison-ship seemed in my young eyes to be
ironed like the prisoners. We saw the boat go alongside, and we saw
him taken up the side and disappear. Then, the ends of the torches were
flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with
him.




Chapter VI

My state of mind regarding the pilfering from which I had been so
unexpectedly exonerated did not impel me to frank disclosure; but I hope
it had some dregs of good at the bottom of it.

I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference
to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But
I loved Joe,--perhaps for no better reason in those early days than
because the dear fellow let me love him,--and, as to him, my inner self
was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when
I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the
whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that
if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe's
confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night
staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my
tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never
afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker,
without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I
never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday's
meat or pudding when it came on to-day's table, without thinking that he
was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and
at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his
beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected tar in it,
would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly
to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing
what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at
that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this
manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of
action for myself.

As I was sleepy before we were far away from the prison-ship, Joe took
me on his back again and carried me home. He must have had a tiresome
journey of it, for Mr. Wopsle, being knocked up, was in such a very bad
temper that if the Church had been thrown open, he would probably have
excommunicated the whole expedition, beginning with Joe and myself. In
his lay capacity, he persisted in sitting down in the damp to such
an insane extent, that when his coat was taken off to be dried at the
kitchen fire, the circumstantial evidence on his trousers would have
hanged him, if it had been a capital offence.

By that time, I was staggering on the kitchen floor like a little
drunkard, through having been newly set upon my feet, and through having
been fast asleep, and through waking in the heat and lights and noise of
tongues. As I came to myself (with the aid of a heavy thump between the
shoulders, and the restorative exclamation “Yah! Was there ever such
a boy as this!” from my sister,) I found Joe telling them about the
convict's confession, and all the visitors suggesting different ways
by which he had got into the pantry. Mr. Pumblechook made out, after
carefully surveying the premises, that he had first got upon the roof of
the forge, and had then got upon the roof of the house, and had then let
himself down the kitchen chimney by a rope made of his bedding cut
into strips; and as Mr. Pumblechook was very positive and drove his
own chaise-cart--over everybody--it was agreed that it must be so. Mr.
Wopsle, indeed, wildly cried out, “No!” with the feeble malice of a
tired man; but, as he had no theory, and no coat on, he was unanimously
set at naught,--not to mention his smoking hard behind, as he stood
with his back to the kitchen fire to draw the damp out: which was not
calculated to inspire confidence.

This was all I heard that night before my sister clutched me, as a
slumberous offence to the company's eyesight, and assisted me up to bed
with such a strong hand that I seemed to have fifty boots on, and to be
dangling them all against the edges of the stairs. My state of mind, as
I have described it, began before I was up in the morning, and lasted
long after the subject had died out, and had ceased to be mentioned
saving on exceptional occasions.




Chapter VII

At the time when I stood in the churchyard reading the family
tombstones, I had just enough learning to be able to spell them out. My
construction even of their simple meaning was not very correct, for I
read “wife of the Above” as a complimentary reference to my father's
exaltation to a better world; and if any one of my deceased relations
had been referred to as “Below,” I have no doubt I should have formed
the worst opinions of that member of the family. Neither were my notions
of the theological positions to which my Catechism bound me, at
all accurate; for, I have a lively remembrance that I supposed my
declaration that I was to “walk in the same all the days of my life,”
 laid me under an obligation always to go through the village from our
house in one particular direction, and never to vary it by turning down
by the wheelwright's or up by the mill.

When I was old enough, I was to be apprenticed to Joe, and until I could
assume that dignity I was not to be what Mrs. Joe called “Pompeyed,” or
(as I render it) pampered. Therefore, I was not only odd-boy about the
forge, but if any neighbor happened to want an extra boy to frighten
birds, or pick up stones, or do any such job, I was favored with the
employment. In order, however, that our superior position might not be
compromised thereby, a money-box was kept on the kitchen mantel-shelf,
into which it was publicly made known that all my earnings were
dropped. I have an impression that they were to be contributed
eventually towards the liquidation of the National Debt, but I know I
had no hope of any personal participation in the treasure.

Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt kept an evening school in the village; that is
to say, she was a ridiculous old woman of limited means and unlimited
infirmity, who used to go to sleep from six to seven every evening, in
the society of youth who paid two pence per week each, for the improving
opportunity of seeing her do it. She rented a small cottage, and Mr.
Wopsle had the room upstairs, where we students used to overhear him
reading aloud in a most dignified and terrific manner, and occasionally
bumping on the ceiling. There was a fiction that Mr. Wopsle “examined”
 the scholars once a quarter. What he did on those occasions was to turn
up his cuffs, stick up his hair, and give us Mark Antony's oration over
the body of Caesar. This was always followed by Collins's Ode on
the Passions, wherein I particularly venerated Mr. Wopsle as Revenge
throwing his blood-stained sword in thunder down, and taking the
War-denouncing trumpet with a withering look. It was not with me then,
as it was in later life, when I fell into the society of the Passions,
and compared them with Collins and Wopsle, rather to the disadvantage of
both gentlemen.

Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, besides keeping this Educational Institution,
kept in the same room--a little general shop. She had no idea what stock
she had, or what the price of anything in it was; but there was a little
greasy memorandum-book kept in a drawer, which served as a Catalogue
of Prices, and by this oracle Biddy arranged all the shop transactions.
Biddy was Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's granddaughter; I confess myself
quite unequal to the working out of the problem, what relation she was
to Mr. Wopsle. She was an orphan like myself; like me, too, had been
brought up by hand. She was most noticeable, I thought, in respect of
her extremities; for, her hair always wanted brushing, her hands always
wanted washing, and her shoes always wanted mending and pulling up at
heel. This description must be received with a week-day limitation. On
Sundays, she went to church elaborated.

Much of my unassisted self, and more by the help of Biddy than of Mr.
Wopsle's great-aunt, I struggled through the alphabet as if it had been
a bramble-bush; getting considerably worried and scratched by every
letter. After that I fell among those thieves, the nine figures, who
seemed every evening to do something new to disguise themselves and
baffle recognition. But, at last I began, in a purblind groping way, to
read, write, and cipher, on the very smallest scale.

One night I was sitting in the chimney corner with my slate, expending
great efforts on the production of a letter to Joe. I think it must have
been a full year after our hunt upon the marshes, for it was a long
time after, and it was winter and a hard frost. With an alphabet on the
hearth at my feet for reference, I contrived in an hour or two to print
and smear this epistle:--

“MI DEER JO i OPE U R KRWITE WELL i OPE i SHAL SON B HABELL 4 2 TEEDGE
U JO AN THEN WE SHORL B SO GLODD AN WEN i M PRENGTD 2 U JO WOT LARX AN
BLEVE ME INF XN PIP.”

There was no indispensable necessity for my communicating with Joe by
letter, inasmuch as he sat beside me and we were alone. But I delivered
this written communication (slate and all) with my own hand, and Joe
received it as a miracle of erudition.

“I say, Pip, old chap!” cried Joe, opening his blue eyes wide, “what a
scholar you are! An't you?”

“I should like to be,” said I, glancing at the slate as he held it; with
a misgiving that the writing was rather hilly.

“Why, here's a J,” said Joe, “and a O equal to anythink! Here's a J and
a O, Pip, and a J-O, Joe.”

I had never heard Joe read aloud to any greater extent than this
monosyllable, and I had observed at church last Sunday, when I
accidentally held our Prayer-Book upside down, that it seemed to suit
his convenience quite as well as if it had been all right. Wishing to
embrace the present occasion of finding out whether in teaching Joe, I
should have to begin quite at the beginning, I said, “Ah! But read the
rest, Jo.”

“The rest, eh, Pip?” said Joe, looking at it with a slow, searching eye,
“One, two, three. Why, here's three Js, and three Os, and three J-O,
Joes in it, Pip!”

I leaned over Joe, and, with the aid of my forefinger read him the whole
letter.

“Astonishing!” said Joe, when I had finished. “You ARE a scholar.”

“How do you spell Gargery, Joe?” I asked him, with a modest patronage.

“I don't spell it at all,” said Joe.

“But supposing you did?”

“It can't be supposed,” said Joe. “Tho' I'm uncommon fond of reading,
too.”

“Are you, Joe?”

“On-common. Give me,” said Joe, “a good book, or a good newspaper, and
sit me down afore a good fire, and I ask no better. Lord!” he continued,
after rubbing his knees a little, “when you do come to a J and a O, and
says you, 'Here, at last, is a J-O, Joe,' how interesting reading is!”

I derived from this, that Joe's education, like Steam, was yet in its
infancy. Pursuing the subject, I inquired,--

“Didn't you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“No, Pip.”

“Why didn't you ever go to school, Joe, when you were as little as me?”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, taking up the poker, and settling himself to
his usual occupation when he was thoughtful, of slowly raking the fire
between the lower bars; “I'll tell you. My father, Pip, he were given
to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at
my mother, most onmerciful. It were a'most the only hammering he did,
indeed, 'xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigor only
to be equalled by the wigor with which he didn't hammer at his
anwil.--You're a listening and understanding, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“'Consequence, my mother and me we ran away from my father several
times; and then my mother she'd go out to work, and she'd say, “Joe,”
 she'd say, “now, please God, you shall have some schooling, child,” and
she'd put me to school. But my father were that good in his hart that
he couldn't abear to be without us. So, he'd come with a most tremenjous
crowd and make such a row at the doors of the houses where we was, that
they used to be obligated to have no more to do with us and to give us
up to him. And then he took us home and hammered us. Which, you see,
Pip,” said Joe, pausing in his meditative raking of the fire, and
looking at me, “were a drawback on my learning.”

“Certainly, poor Joe!”

“Though mind you, Pip,” said Joe, with a judicial touch or two of the
poker on the top bar, “rendering unto all their doo, and maintaining
equal justice betwixt man and man, my father were that good in his hart,
don't you see?”

I didn't see; but I didn't say so.

“Well!” Joe pursued, “somebody must keep the pot a biling, Pip, or the
pot won't bile, don't you know?”

I saw that, and said so.

“'Consequence, my father didn't make objections to my going to work; so
I went to work at my present calling, which were his too, if he
would have followed it, and I worked tolerable hard, I assure you, Pip.
In time I were able to keep him, and I kep him till he went off in a
purple leptic fit. And it were my intentions to have had put upon his
tombstone that, Whatsume'er the failings on his part, Remember reader he
were that good in his heart.”

Joe recited this couplet with such manifest pride and careful
perspicuity, that I asked him if he had made it himself.

“I made it,” said Joe, “my own self. I made it in a moment. It was like
striking out a horseshoe complete, in a single blow. I never was so much
surprised in all my life,--couldn't credit my own ed,--to tell you the
truth, hardly believed it were my own ed. As I was saying, Pip, it were
my intentions to have had it cut over him; but poetry costs money, cut
it how you will, small or large, and it were not done. Not to mention
bearers, all the money that could be spared were wanted for my mother.
She were in poor elth, and quite broke. She weren't long of following,
poor soul, and her share of peace come round at last.”

Joe's blue eyes turned a little watery; he rubbed first one of them, and
then the other, in a most uncongenial and uncomfortable manner, with the
round knob on the top of the poker.

“It were but lonesome then,” said Joe, “living here alone, and I got
acquainted with your sister. Now, Pip,”--Joe looked firmly at me as
if he knew I was not going to agree with him;--“your sister is a fine
figure of a woman.”

I could not help looking at the fire, in an obvious state of doubt.

“Whatever family opinions, or whatever the world's opinions, on that
subject may be, Pip, your sister is,” Joe tapped the top bar with the
poker after every word following, “a-fine-figure--of--a--woman!”

I could think of nothing better to say than “I am glad you think so,
Joe.”

“So am I,” returned Joe, catching me up. “I am glad I think so, Pip. A
little redness or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does it
signify to Me?”

I sagaciously observed, if it didn't signify to him, to whom did it
signify?

“Certainly!” assented Joe. “That's it. You're right, old chap! When I
got acquainted with your sister, it were the talk how she was bringing
you up by hand. Very kind of her too, all the folks said, and I said,
along with all the folks. As to you,” Joe pursued with a countenance
expressive of seeing something very nasty indeed, “if you could have
been aware how small and flabby and mean you was, dear me, you'd have
formed the most contemptible opinion of yourself!”

Not exactly relishing this, I said, “Never mind me, Joe.”

“But I did mind you, Pip,” he returned with tender simplicity. “When
I offered to your sister to keep company, and to be asked in church at
such times as she was willing and ready to come to the forge, I said to
her, 'And bring the poor little child. God bless the poor little child,'
I said to your sister, 'there's room for him at the forge!'”

I broke out crying and begging pardon, and hugged Joe round the neck:
who dropped the poker to hug me, and to say, “Ever the best of friends;
an't us, Pip? Don't cry, old chap!”

When this little interruption was over, Joe resumed:--

“Well, you see, Pip, and here we are! That's about where it lights; here
we are! Now, when you take me in hand in my learning, Pip (and I tell
you beforehand I am awful dull, most awful dull), Mrs. Joe mustn't see
too much of what we're up to. It must be done, as I may say, on the sly.
And why on the sly? I'll tell you why, Pip.”

He had taken up the poker again; without which, I doubt if he could have
proceeded in his demonstration.

“Your sister is given to government.”

“Given to government, Joe?” I was startled, for I had some shadowy idea
(and I am afraid I must add, hope) that Joe had divorced her in a favor
of the Lords of the Admiralty, or Treasury.

“Given to government,” said Joe. “Which I meantersay the government of
you and myself.”

“Oh!”

“And she an't over partial to having scholars on the premises,” Joe
continued, “and in partickler would not be over partial to my being a
scholar, for fear as I might rise. Like a sort of rebel, don't you see?”

I was going to retort with an inquiry, and had got as far as “Why--”
 when Joe stopped me.

“Stay a bit. I know what you're a going to say, Pip; stay a bit! I don't
deny that your sister comes the Mo-gul over us, now and again. I don't
deny that she do throw us back-falls, and that she do drop down upon us
heavy. At such times as when your sister is on the Ram-page, Pip,” Joe
sank his voice to a whisper and glanced at the door, “candor compels fur
to admit that she is a Buster.”

Joe pronounced this word, as if it began with at least twelve capital
Bs.

“Why don't I rise? That were your observation when I broke it off, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“Well,” said Joe, passing the poker in to his left hand, that he might
feel his whisker; and I had no hope of him whenever he took to that
placid occupation; “your sister's a master-mind. A master-mind.”

“What's that?” I asked, in some hope of bringing him to a stand. But
Joe was readier with his definition than I had expected, and completely
stopped me by arguing circularly, and answering with a fixed look,
“Her.”

“And I ain't a master-mind,” Joe resumed, when he had unfixed his look,
and got back to his whisker. “And last of all, Pip,--and this I want to
say very serious to you, old chap,--I see so much in my poor mother,
of a woman drudging and slaving and breaking her honest hart and never
getting no peace in her mortal days, that I'm dead afeerd of going wrong
in the way of not doing what's right by a woman, and I'd fur rather
of the two go wrong the t'other way, and be a little ill-conwenienced
myself. I wish it was only me that got put out, Pip; I wish there warn't
no Tickler for you, old chap; I wish I could take it all on myself;
but this is the up-and-down-and-straight on it, Pip, and I hope you'll
overlook shortcomings.”

Young as I was, I believe that I dated a new admiration of Joe from that
night. We were equals afterwards, as we had been before; but, afterwards
at quiet times when I sat looking at Joe and thinking about him, I had
a new sensation of feeling conscious that I was looking up to Joe in my
heart.

“However,” said Joe, rising to replenish the fire; “here's the
Dutch-clock a working himself up to being equal to strike Eight of 'em,
and she's not come home yet! I hope Uncle Pumblechook's mare mayn't have
set a forefoot on a piece o' ice, and gone down.”

Mrs. Joe made occasional trips with Uncle Pumblechook on market-days,
to assist him in buying such household stuffs and goods as required a
woman's judgment; Uncle Pumblechook being a bachelor and reposing no
confidences in his domestic servant. This was market-day, and Mrs. Joe
was out on one of these expeditions.

Joe made the fire and swept the hearth, and then we went to the door to
listen for the chaise-cart. It was a dry cold night, and the wind blew
keenly, and the frost was white and hard. A man would die to-night of
lying out on the marshes, I thought. And then I looked at the stars, and
considered how awful it would be for a man to turn his face up to them
as he froze to death, and see no help or pity in all the glittering
multitude.

“Here comes the mare,” said Joe, “ringing like a peal of bells!”

The sound of her iron shoes upon the hard road was quite musical, as she
came along at a much brisker trot than usual. We got a chair out, ready
for Mrs. Joe's alighting, and stirred up the fire that they might see a
bright window, and took a final survey of the kitchen that nothing might
be out of its place. When we had completed these preparations, they
drove up, wrapped to the eyes. Mrs. Joe was soon landed, and Uncle
Pumblechook was soon down too, covering the mare with a cloth, and we
were soon all in the kitchen, carrying so much cold air in with us that
it seemed to drive all the heat out of the fire.

“Now,” said Mrs. Joe, unwrapping herself with haste and excitement, and
throwing her bonnet back on her shoulders where it hung by the strings,
“if this boy ain't grateful this night, he never will be!”

I looked as grateful as any boy possibly could, who was wholly
uninformed why he ought to assume that expression.

“It's only to be hoped,” said my sister, “that he won't be Pompeyed. But
I have my fears.”

“She ain't in that line, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “She knows better.”

She? I looked at Joe, making the motion with my lips and eyebrows,
“She?” Joe looked at me, making the motion with his lips and eyebrows,
“She?” My sister catching him in the act, he drew the back of his hand
across his nose with his usual conciliatory air on such occasions, and
looked at her.

“Well?” said my sister, in her snappish way. “What are you staring at?
Is the house afire?”

“--Which some individual,” Joe politely hinted, “mentioned--she.”

“And she is a she, I suppose?” said my sister. “Unless you call Miss
Havisham a he. And I doubt if even you'll go so far as that.”

“Miss Havisham, up town?” said Joe.

“Is there any Miss Havisham down town?” returned my sister.

“She wants this boy to go and play there. And of course he's going. And
he had better play there,” said my sister, shaking her head at me as an
encouragement to be extremely light and sportive, “or I'll work him.”

I had heard of Miss Havisham up town,--everybody for miles round had
heard of Miss Havisham up town,--as an immensely rich and grim lady who
lived in a large and dismal house barricaded against robbers, and who
led a life of seclusion.

“Well to be sure!” said Joe, astounded. “I wonder how she come to know
Pip!”

“Noodle!” cried my sister. “Who said she knew him?”

“--Which some individual,” Joe again politely hinted, “mentioned that
she wanted him to go and play there.”

“And couldn't she ask Uncle Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and
play there? Isn't it just barely possible that Uncle Pumblechook may be
a tenant of hers, and that he may sometimes--we won't say quarterly
or half-yearly, for that would be requiring too much of you--but
sometimes--go there to pay his rent? And couldn't she then ask Uncle
Pumblechook if he knew of a boy to go and play there? And couldn't Uncle
Pumblechook, being always considerate and thoughtful for us--though you
may not think it, Joseph,” in a tone of the deepest reproach, as if
he were the most callous of nephews, “then mention this boy, standing
Prancing here”--which I solemnly declare I was not doing--“that I have
for ever been a willing slave to?”

“Good again!” cried Uncle Pumblechook. “Well put! Prettily pointed! Good
indeed! Now Joseph, you know the case.”

“No, Joseph,” said my sister, still in a reproachful manner, while Joe
apologetically drew the back of his hand across and across his nose,
“you do not yet--though you may not think it--know the case. You may
consider that you do, but you do not, Joseph. For you do not know that
Uncle Pumblechook, being sensible that for anything we can tell, this
boy's fortune may be made by his going to Miss Havisham's, has offered
to take him into town to-night in his own chaise-cart, and to keep
him to-night, and to take him with his own hands to Miss Havisham's
to-morrow morning. And Lor-a-mussy me!” cried my sister, casting off her
bonnet in sudden desperation, “here I stand talking to mere Mooncalfs,
with Uncle Pumblechook waiting, and the mare catching cold at the door,
and the boy grimed with crock and dirt from the hair of his head to the
sole of his foot!”

With that, she pounced upon me, like an eagle on a lamb, and my face was
squeezed into wooden bowls in sinks, and my head was put under taps of
water-butts, and I was soaped, and kneaded, and towelled, and thumped,
and harrowed, and rasped, until I really was quite beside myself. (I
may here remark that I suppose myself to be better acquainted than
any living authority, with the ridgy effect of a wedding-ring, passing
unsympathetically over the human countenance.)

When my ablutions were completed, I was put into clean linen of the
stiffest character, like a young penitent into sackcloth, and was
trussed up in my tightest and fearfullest suit. I was then delivered
over to Mr. Pumblechook, who formally received me as if he were the
Sheriff, and who let off upon me the speech that I knew he had been
dying to make all along: “Boy, be forever grateful to all friends, but
especially unto them which brought you up by hand!”

“Good-bye, Joe!”

“God bless you, Pip, old chap!”

I had never parted from him before, and what with my feelings and what
with soapsuds, I could at first see no stars from the chaise-cart.
But they twinkled out one by one, without throwing any light on the
questions why on earth I was going to play at Miss Havisham's, and what
on earth I was expected to play at.




Chapter VIII

Mr. Pumblechook's premises in the High Street of the market town,
were of a peppercorny and farinaceous character, as the premises of a
cornchandler and seedsman should be. It appeared to me that he must be a
very happy man indeed, to have so many little drawers in his shop; and
I wondered when I peeped into one or two on the lower tiers, and saw the
tied-up brown paper packets inside, whether the flower-seeds and bulbs
ever wanted of a fine day to break out of those jails, and bloom.

It was in the early morning after my arrival that I entertained this
speculation. On the previous night, I had been sent straight to bed in
an attic with a sloping roof, which was so low in the corner where the
bedstead was, that I calculated the tiles as being within a foot of my
eyebrows. In the same early morning, I discovered a singular affinity
between seeds and corduroys. Mr. Pumblechook wore corduroys, and so did
his shopman; and somehow, there was a general air and flavor about the
corduroys, so much in the nature of seeds, and a general air and flavor
about the seeds, so much in the nature of corduroys, that I hardly knew
which was which. The same opportunity served me for noticing that Mr.
Pumblechook appeared to conduct his business by looking across the
street at the saddler, who appeared to transact his business by keeping
his eye on the coachmaker, who appeared to get on in life by putting his
hands in his pockets and contemplating the baker, who in his turn folded
his arms and stared at the grocer, who stood at his door and yawned at
the chemist. The watchmaker, always poring over a little desk with
a magnifying-glass at his eye, and always inspected by a group of
smock-frocks poring over him through the glass of his shop-window,
seemed to be about the only person in the High Street whose trade
engaged his attention.

Mr. Pumblechook and I breakfasted at eight o'clock in the parlor behind
the shop, while the shopman took his mug of tea and hunch of bread
and butter on a sack of peas in the front premises. I considered Mr.
Pumblechook wretched company. Besides being possessed by my sister's
idea that a mortifying and penitential character ought to be imparted
to my diet,--besides giving me as much crumb as possible in combination
with as little butter, and putting such a quantity of warm water into
my milk that it would have been more candid to have left the milk out
altogether,--his conversation consisted of nothing but arithmetic. On
my politely bidding him Good morning, he said, pompously, “Seven times
nine, boy?” And how should I be able to answer, dodged in that way, in
a strange place, on an empty stomach! I was hungry, but before I had
swallowed a morsel, he began a running sum that lasted all through the
breakfast. “Seven?” “And four?” “And eight?” “And six?” “And two?” “And
ten?” And so on. And after each figure was disposed of, it was as much
as I could do to get a bite or a sup, before the next came; while he sat
at his ease guessing nothing, and eating bacon and hot roll, in (if I
may be allowed the expression) a gorging and gormandizing manner.

For such reasons, I was very glad when ten o'clock came and we started
for Miss Havisham's; though I was not at all at my ease regarding the
manner in which I should acquit myself under that lady's roof. Within
a quarter of an hour we came to Miss Havisham's house, which was of old
brick, and dismal, and had a great many iron bars to it. Some of the
windows had been walled up; of those that remained, all the lower were
rustily barred. There was a courtyard in front, and that was barred; so
we had to wait, after ringing the bell, until some one should come
to open it. While we waited at the gate, I peeped in (even then Mr.
Pumblechook said, “And fourteen?” but I pretended not to hear him), and
saw that at the side of the house there was a large brewery. No brewing
was going on in it, and none seemed to have gone on for a long long
time.

A window was raised, and a clear voice demanded “What name?” To which my
conductor replied, “Pumblechook.” The voice returned, “Quite right,” and
the window was shut again, and a young lady came across the court-yard,
with keys in her hand.

“This,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “is Pip.”

“This is Pip, is it?” returned the young lady, who was very pretty and
seemed very proud; “come in, Pip.”

Mr. Pumblechook was coming in also, when she stopped him with the gate.

“Oh!” she said. “Did you wish to see Miss Havisham?”

“If Miss Havisham wished to see me,” returned Mr. Pumblechook,
discomfited.

“Ah!” said the girl; “but you see she don't.”

She said it so finally, and in such an undiscussible way, that Mr.
Pumblechook, though in a condition of ruffled dignity, could not
protest. But he eyed me severely,--as if I had done anything to
him!--and departed with the words reproachfully delivered: “Boy! Let
your behavior here be a credit unto them which brought you up by hand!”
 I was not free from apprehension that he would come back to propound
through the gate, “And sixteen?” But he didn't.

My young conductress locked the gate, and we went across the courtyard.
It was paved and clean, but grass was growing in every crevice. The
brewery buildings had a little lane of communication with it, and the
wooden gates of that lane stood open, and all the brewery beyond stood
open, away to the high enclosing wall; and all was empty and disused.
The cold wind seemed to blow colder there than outside the gate; and
it made a shrill noise in howling in and out at the open sides of the
brewery, like the noise of wind in the rigging of a ship at sea.

She saw me looking at it, and she said, “You could drink without hurt
all the strong beer that's brewed there now, boy.”

“I should think I could, miss,” said I, in a shy way.

“Better not try to brew beer there now, or it would turn out sour, boy;
don't you think so?”

“It looks like it, miss.”

“Not that anybody means to try,” she added, “for that's all done with,
and the place will stand as idle as it is till it falls. As to strong
beer, there's enough of it in the cellars already, to drown the Manor
House.”

“Is that the name of this house, miss?”

“One of its names, boy.”

“It has more than one, then, miss?”

“One more. Its other name was Satis; which is Greek, or Latin, or
Hebrew, or all three--or all one to me--for enough.”

“Enough House,” said I; “that's a curious name, miss.”

“Yes,” she replied; “but it meant more than it said. It meant, when it
was given, that whoever had this house could want nothing else. They
must have been easily satisfied in those days, I should think. But don't
loiter, boy.”

Though she called me “boy” so often, and with a carelessness that was
far from complimentary, she was of about my own age. She seemed much
older than I, of course, being a girl, and beautiful and self-possessed;
and she was as scornful of me as if she had been one-and-twenty, and a
queen.

We went into the house by a side door, the great front entrance had two
chains across it outside,--and the first thing I noticed was, that the
passages were all dark, and that she had left a candle burning there.
She took it up, and we went through more passages and up a staircase,
and still it was all dark, and only the candle lighted us.

At last we came to the door of a room, and she said, “Go in.”

I answered, more in shyness than politeness, “After you, miss.”

To this she returned: “Don't be ridiculous, boy; I am not going in.” And
scornfully walked away, and--what was worse--took the candle with her.

This was very uncomfortable, and I was half afraid. However, the only
thing to be done being to knock at the door, I knocked, and was told
from within to enter. I entered, therefore, and found myself in a pretty
large room, well lighted with wax candles. No glimpse of daylight was to
be seen in it. It was a dressing-room, as I supposed from the furniture,
though much of it was of forms and uses then quite unknown to me. But
prominent in it was a draped table with a gilded looking-glass, and that
I made out at first sight to be a fine lady's dressing-table.

Whether I should have made out this object so soon if there had been no
fine lady sitting at it, I cannot say. In an arm-chair, with an
elbow resting on the table and her head leaning on that hand, sat the
strangest lady I have ever seen, or shall ever see.

She was dressed in rich materials,--satins, and lace, and silks,--all
of white. Her shoes were white. And she had a long white veil dependent
from her hair, and she had bridal flowers in her hair, but her hair was
white. Some bright jewels sparkled on her neck and on her hands, and
some other jewels lay sparkling on the table. Dresses, less splendid
than the dress she wore, and half-packed trunks, were scattered about.
She had not quite finished dressing, for she had but one shoe on,--the
other was on the table near her hand,--her veil was but half arranged,
her watch and chain were not put on, and some lace for her bosom lay
with those trinkets, and with her handkerchief, and gloves, and
some flowers, and a Prayer-Book all confusedly heaped about the
looking-glass.

It was not in the first few moments that I saw all these things, though
I saw more of them in the first moments than might be supposed. But I
saw that everything within my view which ought to be white, had been
white long ago, and had lost its lustre and was faded and yellow. I saw
that the bride within the bridal dress had withered like the dress, and
like the flowers, and had no brightness left but the brightness of her
sunken eyes. I saw that the dress had been put upon the rounded figure
of a young woman, and that the figure upon which it now hung loose had
shrunk to skin and bone. Once, I had been taken to see some ghastly
waxwork at the Fair, representing I know not what impossible personage
lying in state. Once, I had been taken to one of our old marsh churches
to see a skeleton in the ashes of a rich dress that had been dug out of
a vault under the church pavement. Now, waxwork and skeleton seemed to
have dark eyes that moved and looked at me. I should have cried out, if
I could.

“Who is it?” said the lady at the table.

“Pip, ma'am.”

“Pip?”

“Mr. Pumblechook's boy, ma'am. Come--to play.”

“Come nearer; let me look at you. Come close.”

It was when I stood before her, avoiding her eyes, that I took note of
the surrounding objects in detail, and saw that her watch had stopped
at twenty minutes to nine, and that a clock in the room had stopped at
twenty minutes to nine.

“Look at me,” said Miss Havisham. “You are not afraid of a woman who has
never seen the sun since you were born?”

I regret to state that I was not afraid of telling the enormous lie
comprehended in the answer “No.”

“Do you know what I touch here?” she said, laying her hands, one upon
the other, on her left side.

“Yes, ma'am.” (It made me think of the young man.)

“What do I touch?”

“Your heart.”

“Broken!”

She uttered the word with an eager look, and with strong emphasis, and
with a weird smile that had a kind of boast in it. Afterwards she kept
her hands there for a little while, and slowly took them away as if they
were heavy.

“I am tired,” said Miss Havisham. “I want diversion, and I have done
with men and women. Play.”

I think it will be conceded by my most disputatious reader, that she
could hardly have directed an unfortunate boy to do anything in the wide
world more difficult to be done under the circumstances.

“I sometimes have sick fancies,” she went on, “and I have a sick fancy
that I want to see some play. There, there!” with an impatient movement
of the fingers of her right hand; “play, play, play!”

For a moment, with the fear of my sister's working me before my eyes, I
had a desperate idea of starting round the room in the assumed character
of Mr. Pumblechook's chaise-cart. But I felt myself so unequal to the
performance that I gave it up, and stood looking at Miss Havisham in
what I suppose she took for a dogged manner, inasmuch as she said, when
we had taken a good look at each other,--

“Are you sullen and obstinate?”

“No, ma'am, I am very sorry for you, and very sorry I can't play just
now. If you complain of me I shall get into trouble with my sister, so
I would do it if I could; but it's so new here, and so strange, and so
fine,--and melancholy--.” I stopped, fearing I might say too much, or
had already said it, and we took another look at each other.

Before she spoke again, she turned her eyes from me, and looked at the
dress she wore, and at the dressing-table, and finally at herself in the
looking-glass.

“So new to him,” she muttered, “so old to me; so strange to him, so
familiar to me; so melancholy to both of us! Call Estella.”

As she was still looking at the reflection of herself, I thought she was
still talking to herself, and kept quiet.

“Call Estella,” she repeated, flashing a look at me. “You can do that.
Call Estella. At the door.”

To stand in the dark in a mysterious passage of an unknown house,
bawling Estella to a scornful young lady neither visible nor responsive,
and feeling it a dreadful liberty so to roar out her name, was almost
as bad as playing to order. But she answered at last, and her light came
along the dark passage like a star.

Miss Havisham beckoned her to come close, and took up a jewel from the
table, and tried its effect upon her fair young bosom and against her
pretty brown hair. “Your own, one day, my dear, and you will use it
well. Let me see you play cards with this boy.”

“With this boy? Why, he is a common laboring boy!”

I thought I overheard Miss Havisham answer,--only it seemed so
unlikely,--“Well? You can break his heart.”

“What do you play, boy?” asked Estella of myself, with the greatest
disdain.

“Nothing but beggar my neighbor, miss.”

“Beggar him,” said Miss Havisham to Estella. So we sat down to cards.

It was then I began to understand that everything in the room had
stopped, like the watch and the clock, a long time ago. I noticed that
Miss Havisham put down the jewel exactly on the spot from which she had
taken it up. As Estella dealt the cards, I glanced at the dressing-table
again, and saw that the shoe upon it, once white, now yellow, had never
been worn. I glanced down at the foot from which the shoe was absent,
and saw that the silk stocking on it, once white, now yellow, had been
trodden ragged. Without this arrest of everything, this standing still
of all the pale decayed objects, not even the withered bridal dress on
the collapsed form could have looked so like grave-clothes, or the long
veil so like a shroud.

So she sat, corpse-like, as we played at cards; the frillings and
trimmings on her bridal dress, looking like earthy paper. I knew nothing
then of the discoveries that are occasionally made of bodies buried in
ancient times, which fall to powder in the moment of being distinctly
seen; but, I have often thought since, that she must have looked as if
the admission of the natural light of day would have struck her to dust.

“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with disdain, before
our first game was out. “And what coarse hands he has! And what thick
boots!”

I had never thought of being ashamed of my hands before; but I began
to consider them a very indifferent pair. Her contempt for me was so
strong, that it became infectious, and I caught it.

She won the game, and I dealt. I misdealt, as was only natural, when I
knew she was lying in wait for me to do wrong; and she denounced me for
a stupid, clumsy laboring-boy.

“You say nothing of her,” remarked Miss Havisham to me, as she looked
on. “She says many hard things of you, but you say nothing of her. What
do you think of her?”

“I don't like to say,” I stammered.

“Tell me in my ear,” said Miss Havisham, bending down.

“I think she is very proud,” I replied, in a whisper.

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very pretty.”

“Anything else?”

“I think she is very insulting.” (She was looking at me then with a look
of supreme aversion.)

“Anything else?”

“I think I should like to go home.”

“And never see her again, though she is so pretty?”

“I am not sure that I shouldn't like to see her again, but I should like
to go home now.”

“You shall go soon,” said Miss Havisham, aloud. “Play the game out.”

Saving for the one weird smile at first, I should have felt almost
sure that Miss Havisham's face could not smile. It had dropped into a
watchful and brooding expression,--most likely when all the things about
her had become transfixed,--and it looked as if nothing could ever lift
it up again. Her chest had dropped, so that she stooped; and her voice
had dropped, so that she spoke low, and with a dead lull upon her;
altogether, she had the appearance of having dropped body and soul,
within and without, under the weight of a crushing blow.

I played the game to an end with Estella, and she beggared me. She
threw the cards down on the table when she had won them all, as if she
despised them for having been won of me.

“When shall I have you here again?” said Miss Havisham. “Let me think.”

I was beginning to remind her that to-day was Wednesday, when she
checked me with her former impatient movement of the fingers of her
right hand.

“There, there! I know nothing of days of the week; I know nothing of
weeks of the year. Come again after six days. You hear?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Estella, take him down. Let him have something to eat, and let him roam
and look about him while he eats. Go, Pip.”

I followed the candle down, as I had followed the candle up, and she
stood it in the place where we had found it. Until she opened the
side entrance, I had fancied, without thinking about it, that it must
necessarily be night-time. The rush of the daylight quite confounded me,
and made me feel as if I had been in the candlelight of the strange room
many hours.

“You are to wait here, you boy,” said Estella; and disappeared and
closed the door.

I took the opportunity of being alone in the courtyard to look at my
coarse hands and my common boots. My opinion of those accessories was
not favorable. They had never troubled me before, but they troubled
me now, as vulgar appendages. I determined to ask Joe why he had ever
taught me to call those picture-cards Jacks, which ought to be called
knaves. I wished Joe had been rather more genteelly brought up, and then
I should have been so too.

She came back, with some bread and meat and a little mug of beer. She
put the mug down on the stones of the yard, and gave me the bread
and meat without looking at me, as insolently as if I were a dog in
disgrace. I was so humiliated, hurt, spurned, offended, angry, sorry,--I
cannot hit upon the right name for the smart--God knows what its name
was,--that tears started to my eyes. The moment they sprang there, the
girl looked at me with a quick delight in having been the cause of them.
This gave me power to keep them back and to look at her: so, she gave a
contemptuous toss--but with a sense, I thought, of having made too sure
that I was so wounded--and left me.

But when she was gone, I looked about me for a place to hide my face
in, and got behind one of the gates in the brewery-lane, and leaned my
sleeve against the wall there, and leaned my forehead on it and cried.
As I cried, I kicked the wall, and took a hard twist at my hair; so
bitter were my feelings, and so sharp was the smart without a name, that
needed counteraction.

My sister's bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in
which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is
nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt as injustice. It may be
only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child
is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many
hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within
myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with
injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my
sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had
cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand gave her
no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces,
fasts, and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed
this assurance; and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and
unprotected way, I in great part refer the fact that I was morally timid
and very sensitive.

I got rid of my injured feelings for the time by kicking them into the
brewery wall, and twisting them out of my hair, and then I smoothed my
face with my sleeve, and came from behind the gate. The bread and meat
were acceptable, and the beer was warming and tingling, and I was soon
in spirits to look about me.

To be sure, it was a deserted place, down to the pigeon-house in the
brewery-yard, which had been blown crooked on its pole by some high
wind, and would have made the pigeons think themselves at sea, if there
had been any pigeons there to be rocked by it. But there were no pigeons
in the dove-cot, no horses in the stable, no pigs in the sty, no malt in
the storehouse, no smells of grains and beer in the copper or the vat.
All the uses and scents of the brewery might have evaporated with its
last reek of smoke. In a by-yard, there was a wilderness of empty casks,
which had a certain sour remembrance of better days lingering about
them; but it was too sour to be accepted as a sample of the beer that
was gone,--and in this respect I remember those recluses as being like
most others.

Behind the furthest end of the brewery, was a rank garden with an old
wall; not so high but that I could struggle up and hold on long enough
to look over it, and see that the rank garden was the garden of the
house, and that it was overgrown with tangled weeds, but that there was
a track upon the green and yellow paths, as if some one sometimes walked
there, and that Estella was walking away from me even then. But she
seemed to be everywhere. For when I yielded to the temptation presented
by the casks, and began to walk on them, I saw her walking on them at
the end of the yard of casks. She had her back towards me, and held her
pretty brown hair spread out in her two hands, and never looked round,
and passed out of my view directly. So, in the brewery itself,--by which
I mean the large paved lofty place in which they used to make the beer,
and where the brewing utensils still were. When I first went into it,
and, rather oppressed by its gloom, stood near the door looking about
me, I saw her pass among the extinguished fires, and ascend some light
iron stairs, and go out by a gallery high overhead, as if she were going
out into the sky.

It was in this place, and at this moment, that a strange thing happened
to my fancy. I thought it a strange thing then, and I thought it a
stranger thing long afterwards. I turned my eyes--a little dimmed by
looking up at the frosty light--towards a great wooden beam in a low
nook of the building near me on my right hand, and I saw a figure
hanging there by the neck. A figure all in yellow white, with but
one shoe to the feet; and it hung so, that I could see that the faded
trimmings of the dress were like earthy paper, and that the face was
Miss Havisham's, with a movement going over the whole countenance as if
she were trying to call to me. In the terror of seeing the figure,
and in the terror of being certain that it had not been there a moment
before, I at first ran from it, and then ran towards it. And my terror
was greatest of all when I found no figure there.

Nothing less than the frosty light of the cheerful sky, the sight of
people passing beyond the bars of the court-yard gate, and the reviving
influence of the rest of the bread and meat and beer, would have brought
me round. Even with those aids, I might not have come to myself as soon
as I did, but that I saw Estella approaching with the keys, to let
me out. She would have some fair reason for looking down upon me, I
thought, if she saw me frightened; and she would have no fair reason.

She gave me a triumphant glance in passing me, as if she rejoiced that
my hands were so coarse and my boots were so thick, and she opened the
gate, and stood holding it. I was passing out without looking at her,
when she touched me with a taunting hand.

“Why don't you cry?”

“Because I don't want to.”

“You do,” said she. “You have been crying till you are half blind, and
you are near crying again now.”

She laughed contemptuously, pushed me out, and locked the gate upon me.
I went straight to Mr. Pumblechook's, and was immensely relieved to find
him not at home. So, leaving word with the shopman on what day I was
wanted at Miss Havisham's again, I set off on the four-mile walk to
our forge; pondering, as I went along, on all I had seen, and deeply
revolving that I was a common laboring-boy; that my hands were coarse;
that my boots were thick; that I had fallen into a despicable habit
of calling knaves Jacks; that I was much more ignorant than I had
considered myself last night, and generally that I was in a low-lived
bad way.




Chapter IX

When I reached home, my sister was very curious to know all about Miss
Havisham's, and asked a number of questions. And I soon found myself
getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the small
of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen
wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient length.

If a dread of not being understood be hidden in the breasts of other
young people to anything like the extent to which it used to be hidden
in mine,--which I consider probable, as I have no particular reason
to suspect myself of having been a monstrosity,--it is the key to many
reservations. I felt convinced that if I described Miss Havisham's as my
eyes had seen it, I should not be understood. Not only that, but I felt
convinced that Miss Havisham too would not be understood; and although
she was perfectly incomprehensible to me, I entertained an impression
that there would be something coarse and treacherous in my dragging
her as she really was (to say nothing of Miss Estella) before the
contemplation of Mrs. Joe. Consequently, I said as little as I could,
and had my face shoved against the kitchen wall.

The worst of it was that that bullying old Pumblechook, preyed upon by
a devouring curiosity to be informed of all I had seen and heard, came
gaping over in his chaise-cart at tea-time, to have the details divulged
to him. And the mere sight of the torment, with his fishy eyes and mouth
open, his sandy hair inquisitively on end, and his waistcoat heaving
with windy arithmetic, made me vicious in my reticence.

“Well, boy,” Uncle Pumblechook began, as soon as he was seated in the
chair of honor by the fire. “How did you get on up town?”

I answered, “Pretty well, sir,” and my sister shook her fist at me.

“Pretty well?” Mr. Pumblechook repeated. “Pretty well is no answer. Tell
us what you mean by pretty well, boy?”

Whitewash on the forehead hardens the brain into a state of obstinacy
perhaps. Anyhow, with whitewash from the wall on my forehead, my
obstinacy was adamantine. I reflected for some time, and then answered
as if I had discovered a new idea, “I mean pretty well.”

My sister with an exclamation of impatience was going to fly at me,--I
had no shadow of defence, for Joe was busy in the forge,--when Mr.
Pumblechook interposed with “No! Don't lose your temper. Leave this
lad to me, ma'am; leave this lad to me.” Mr. Pumblechook then turned me
towards him, as if he were going to cut my hair, and said,--

“First (to get our thoughts in order): Forty-three pence?”

I calculated the consequences of replying “Four Hundred Pound,” and
finding them against me, went as near the answer as I could--which was
somewhere about eightpence off. Mr. Pumblechook then put me through my
pence-table from “twelve pence make one shilling,” up to “forty pence
make three and fourpence,” and then triumphantly demanded, as if he had
done for me, “Now! How much is forty-three pence?” To which I replied,
after a long interval of reflection, “I don't know.” And I was so
aggravated that I almost doubt if I did know.

Mr. Pumblechook worked his head like a screw to screw it out of me,
and said, “Is forty-three pence seven and sixpence three fardens, for
instance?”

“Yes!” said I. And although my sister instantly boxed my ears, it was
highly gratifying to me to see that the answer spoilt his joke, and
brought him to a dead stop.

“Boy! What like is Miss Havisham?” Mr. Pumblechook began again when
he had recovered; folding his arms tight on his chest and applying the
screw.

“Very tall and dark,” I told him.

“Is she, uncle?” asked my sister.

Mr. Pumblechook winked assent; from which I at once inferred that he had
never seen Miss Havisham, for she was nothing of the kind.

“Good!” said Mr. Pumblechook conceitedly. (“This is the way to have him!
We are beginning to hold our own, I think, Mum?”)

“I am sure, uncle,” returned Mrs. Joe, “I wish you had him always; you
know so well how to deal with him.”

“Now, boy! What was she a doing of, when you went in today?” asked Mr.
Pumblechook.

“She was sitting,” I answered, “in a black velvet coach.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another--as they well
might--and both repeated, “In a black velvet coach?”

“Yes,” said I. “And Miss Estella--that's her niece, I think--handed her
in cake and wine at the coach-window, on a gold plate. And we all had
cake and wine on gold plates. And I got up behind the coach to eat mine,
because she told me to.”

“Was anybody else there?” asked Mr. Pumblechook.

“Four dogs,” said I.

“Large or small?”

“Immense,” said I. “And they fought for veal-cutlets out of a silver
basket.”

Mr. Pumblechook and Mrs. Joe stared at one another again, in utter
amazement. I was perfectly frantic,--a reckless witness under the
torture,--and would have told them anything.

“Where was this coach, in the name of gracious?” asked my sister.

“In Miss Havisham's room.” They stared again. “But there weren't any
horses to it.” I added this saving clause, in the moment of rejecting
four richly caparisoned coursers which I had had wild thoughts of
harnessing.

“Can this be possible, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe. “What can the boy mean?”

“I'll tell you, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “My opinion is, it's a
sedan-chair. She's flighty, you know,--very flighty,--quite flighty
enough to pass her days in a sedan-chair.”

“Did you ever see her in it, uncle?” asked Mrs. Joe.

“How could I,” he returned, forced to the admission, “when I never see
her in my life? Never clapped eyes upon her!”

“Goodness, uncle! And yet you have spoken to her?”

“Why, don't you know,” said Mr. Pumblechook, testily, “that when I have
been there, I have been took up to the outside of her door, and the door
has stood ajar, and she has spoke to me that way. Don't say you don't
know that, Mum. Howsever, the boy went there to play. What did you play
at, boy?”

“We played with flags,” I said. (I beg to observe that I think of myself
with amazement, when I recall the lies I told on this occasion.)

“Flags!” echoed my sister.

“Yes,” said I. “Estella waved a blue flag, and I waved a red one, and
Miss Havisham waved one sprinkled all over with little gold stars, out
at the coach-window. And then we all waved our swords and hurrahed.”

“Swords!” repeated my sister. “Where did you get swords from?”

“Out of a cupboard,” said I. “And I saw pistols in it,--and jam,--and
pills. And there was no daylight in the room, but it was all lighted up
with candles.”

“That's true, Mum,” said Mr. Pumblechook, with a grave nod. “That's the
state of the case, for that much I've seen myself.” And then they
both stared at me, and I, with an obtrusive show of artlessness on my
countenance, stared at them, and plaited the right leg of my trousers
with my right hand.

If they had asked me any more questions, I should undoubtedly have
betrayed myself, for I was even then on the point of mentioning that
there was a balloon in the yard, and should have hazarded the statement
but for my invention being divided between that phenomenon and a bear
in the brewery. They were so much occupied, however, in discussing the
marvels I had already presented for their consideration, that I escaped.
The subject still held them when Joe came in from his work to have a cup
of tea. To whom my sister, more for the relief of her own mind than for
the gratification of his, related my pretended experiences.

Now, when I saw Joe open his blue eyes and roll them all round the
kitchen in helpless amazement, I was overtaken by penitence; but only as
regarded him,--not in the least as regarded the other two. Towards
Joe, and Joe only, I considered myself a young monster, while they sat
debating what results would come to me from Miss Havisham's acquaintance
and favor. They had no doubt that Miss Havisham would “do something”
 for me; their doubts related to the form that something would take.
My sister stood out for “property.” Mr. Pumblechook was in favor of a
handsome premium for binding me apprentice to some genteel trade,--say,
the corn and seed trade, for instance. Joe fell into the deepest
disgrace with both, for offering the bright suggestion that I might only
be presented with one of the dogs who had fought for the veal-cutlets.
“If a fool's head can't express better opinions than that,” said my
sister, “and you have got any work to do, you had better go and do it.”
 So he went.

After Mr. Pumblechook had driven off, and when my sister was washing up,
I stole into the forge to Joe, and remained by him until he had done for
the night. Then I said, “Before the fire goes out, Joe, I should like to
tell you something.”

“Should you, Pip?” said Joe, drawing his shoeing-stool near the forge.
“Then tell us. What is it, Pip?”

“Joe,” said I, taking hold of his rolled-up shirt sleeve, and twisting
it between my finger and thumb, “you remember all that about Miss
Havisham's?”

“Remember?” said Joe. “I believe you! Wonderful!”

“It's a terrible thing, Joe; it ain't true.”

“What are you telling of, Pip?” cried Joe, falling back in the greatest
amazement. “You don't mean to say it's--”

“Yes I do; it's lies, Joe.”

“But not all of it? Why sure you don't mean to say, Pip, that there was
no black welwet co--eh?” For, I stood shaking my head. “But at least
there was dogs, Pip? Come, Pip,” said Joe, persuasively, “if there
warn't no weal-cutlets, at least there was dogs?”

“No, Joe.”

“A dog?” said Joe. “A puppy? Come?”

“No, Joe, there was nothing at all of the kind.”

As I fixed my eyes hopelessly on Joe, Joe contemplated me in dismay.
“Pip, old chap! This won't do, old fellow! I say! Where do you expect to
go to?”

“It's terrible, Joe; ain't it?”

“Terrible?” cried Joe. “Awful! What possessed you?”

“I don't know what possessed me, Joe,” I replied, letting his shirt
sleeve go, and sitting down in the ashes at his feet, hanging my head;
“but I wish you hadn't taught me to call Knaves at cards Jacks; and I
wish my boots weren't so thick nor my hands so coarse.”

And then I told Joe that I felt very miserable, and that I hadn't been
able to explain myself to Mrs. Joe and Pumblechook, who were so rude to
me, and that there had been a beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's
who was dreadfully proud, and that she had said I was common, and that I
knew I was common, and that I wished I was not common, and that the lies
had come of it somehow, though I didn't know how.

This was a case of metaphysics, at least as difficult for Joe to deal
with as for me. But Joe took the case altogether out of the region of
metaphysics, and by that means vanquished it.

“There's one thing you may be sure of, Pip,” said Joe, after some
rumination, “namely, that lies is lies. Howsever they come, they didn't
ought to come, and they come from the father of lies, and work round to
the same. Don't you tell no more of 'em, Pip. That ain't the way to get
out of being common, old chap. And as to being common, I don't make
it out at all clear. You are oncommon in some things. You're oncommon
small. Likewise you're a oncommon scholar.”

“No, I am ignorant and backward, Joe.”

“Why, see what a letter you wrote last night! Wrote in print even! I've
seen letters--Ah! and from gentlefolks!--that I'll swear weren't wrote
in print,” said Joe.

“I have learnt next to nothing, Joe. You think much of me. It's only
that.”

“Well, Pip,” said Joe, “be it so or be it son't, you must be a common
scholar afore you can be a oncommon one, I should hope! The king upon
his throne, with his crown upon his ed, can't sit and write his acts
of Parliament in print, without having begun, when he were a unpromoted
Prince, with the alphabet.--Ah!” added Joe, with a shake of the head
that was full of meaning, “and begun at A too, and worked his way to Z.
And I know what that is to do, though I can't say I've exactly done it.”

There was some hope in this piece of wisdom, and it rather encouraged
me.

“Whether common ones as to callings and earnings,” pursued Joe,
reflectively, “mightn't be the better of continuing for to keep
company with common ones, instead of going out to play with oncommon
ones,--which reminds me to hope that there were a flag, perhaps?”

“No, Joe.”

“(I'm sorry there weren't a flag, Pip). Whether that might be or
mightn't be, is a thing as can't be looked into now, without putting
your sister on the Rampage; and that's a thing not to be thought of as
being done intentional. Lookee here, Pip, at what is said to you by a
true friend. Which this to you the true friend say. If you can't get to
be oncommon through going straight, you'll never get to do it through
going crooked. So don't tell no more on 'em, Pip, and live well and die
happy.”

“You are not angry with me, Joe?”

“No, old chap. But bearing in mind that them were which I meantersay
of a stunning and outdacious sort,--alluding to them which bordered on
weal-cutlets and dog-fighting,--a sincere well-wisher would adwise, Pip,
their being dropped into your meditations, when you go upstairs to bed.
That's all, old chap, and don't never do it no more.”

When I got up to my little room and said my prayers, I did not forget
Joe's recommendation, and yet my young mind was in that disturbed and
unthankful state, that I thought long after I laid me down, how common
Estella would consider Joe, a mere blacksmith; how thick his boots, and
how coarse his hands. I thought how Joe and my sister were then sitting
in the kitchen, and how I had come up to bed from the kitchen, and how
Miss Havisham and Estella never sat in a kitchen, but were far above the
level of such common doings. I fell asleep recalling what I “used to
do” when I was at Miss Havisham's; as though I had been there weeks or
months, instead of hours; and as though it were quite an old subject of
remembrance, instead of one that had arisen only that day.

That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But it
is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it,
and think how different its course would have been. Pause you who read
this, and think for a moment of the long chain of iron or gold,
of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the
formation of the first link on one memorable day.




Chapter X

The felicitous idea occurred to me a morning or two later when I woke,
that the best step I could take towards making myself uncommon was to
get out of Biddy everything she knew. In pursuance of this luminous
conception I mentioned to Biddy when I went to Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's
at night, that I had a particular reason for wishing to get on in life,
and that I should feel very much obliged to her if she would impart
all her learning to me. Biddy, who was the most obliging of girls,
immediately said she would, and indeed began to carry out her promise
within five minutes.

The Educational scheme or Course established by Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt
may be resolved into the following synopsis. The pupils ate apples
and put straws down one another's backs, until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt
collected her energies, and made an indiscriminate totter at them with
a birch-rod. After receiving the charge with every mark of derision, the
pupils formed in line and buzzingly passed a ragged book from hand to
hand. The book had an alphabet in it, some figures and tables, and
a little spelling,--that is to say, it had had once. As soon as this
volume began to circulate, Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt fell into a state of
coma, arising either from sleep or a rheumatic paroxysm. The pupils then
entered among themselves upon a competitive examination on the subject
of Boots, with the view of ascertaining who could tread the hardest upon
whose toes. This mental exercise lasted until Biddy made a rush at
them and distributed three defaced Bibles (shaped as if they had been
unskilfully cut off the chump end of something), more illegibly printed
at the best than any curiosities of literature I have since met with,
speckled all over with ironmould, and having various specimens of the
insect world smashed between their leaves. This part of the Course was
usually lightened by several single combats between Biddy and refractory
students. When the fights were over, Biddy gave out the number of a
page, and then we all read aloud what we could,--or what we couldn't--in
a frightful chorus; Biddy leading with a high, shrill, monotonous voice,
and none of us having the least notion of, or reverence for, what we
were reading about. When this horrible din had lasted a certain time,
it mechanically awoke Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt, who staggered at a boy
fortuitously, and pulled his ears. This was understood to terminate
the Course for the evening, and we emerged into the air with shrieks of
intellectual victory. It is fair to remark that there was no prohibition
against any pupil's entertaining himself with a slate or even with the
ink (when there was any), but that it was not easy to pursue that branch
of study in the winter season, on account of the little general shop
in which the classes were holden--and which was also Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt's sitting-room and bedchamber--being but faintly illuminated
through the agency of one low-spirited dip-candle and no snuffers.

It appeared to me that it would take time to become uncommon, under
these circumstances: nevertheless, I resolved to try it, and that
very evening Biddy entered on our special agreement, by imparting some
information from her little catalogue of Prices, under the head of moist
sugar, and lending me, to copy at home, a large old English D which she
had imitated from the heading of some newspaper, and which I supposed,
until she told me what it was, to be a design for a buckle.

Of course there was a public-house in the village, and of course Joe
liked sometimes to smoke his pipe there. I had received strict orders
from my sister to call for him at the Three Jolly Bargemen, that
evening, on my way from school, and bring him home at my peril. To the
Three Jolly Bargemen, therefore, I directed my steps.

There was a bar at the Jolly Bargemen, with some alarmingly long chalk
scores in it on the wall at the side of the door, which seemed to me to
be never paid off. They had been there ever since I could remember, and
had grown more than I had. But there was a quantity of chalk about our
country, and perhaps the people neglected no opportunity of turning it
to account.

It being Saturday night, I found the landlord looking rather grimly
at these records; but as my business was with Joe and not with him, I
merely wished him good evening, and passed into the common room at the
end of the passage, where there was a bright large kitchen fire,
and where Joe was smoking his pipe in company with Mr. Wopsle and a
stranger. Joe greeted me as usual with “Halloa, Pip, old chap!” and the
moment he said that, the stranger turned his head and looked at me.

He was a secret-looking man whom I had never seen before. His head was
all on one side, and one of his eyes was half shut up, as if he were
taking aim at something with an invisible gun. He had a pipe in his
mouth, and he took it out, and, after slowly blowing all his smoke away
and looking hard at me all the time, nodded. So, I nodded, and then he
nodded again, and made room on the settle beside him that I might sit
down there.

But as I was used to sit beside Joe whenever I entered that place of
resort, I said “No, thank you, sir,” and fell into the space Joe made
for me on the opposite settle. The strange man, after glancing at Joe,
and seeing that his attention was otherwise engaged, nodded to me again
when I had taken my seat, and then rubbed his leg--in a very odd way, as
it struck me.

“You was saying,” said the strange man, turning to Joe, “that you was a
blacksmith.”

“Yes. I said it, you know,” said Joe.

“What'll you drink, Mr.--? You didn't mention your name, by the bye.”

Joe mentioned it now, and the strange man called him by it. “What'll you
drink, Mr. Gargery? At my expense? To top up with?”

“Well,” said Joe, “to tell you the truth, I ain't much in the habit of
drinking at anybody's expense but my own.”

“Habit? No,” returned the stranger, “but once and away, and on a
Saturday night too. Come! Put a name to it, Mr. Gargery.”

“I wouldn't wish to be stiff company,” said Joe. “Rum.”

“Rum,” repeated the stranger. “And will the other gentleman originate a
sentiment.”

“Rum,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Three Rums!” cried the stranger, calling to the landlord. “Glasses
round!”

“This other gentleman,” observed Joe, by way of introducing Mr. Wopsle,
“is a gentleman that you would like to hear give it out. Our clerk at
church.”

“Aha!” said the stranger, quickly, and cocking his eye at me. “The
lonely church, right out on the marshes, with graves round it!”

“That's it,” said Joe.

The stranger, with a comfortable kind of grunt over his pipe, put
his legs up on the settle that he had to himself. He wore a flapping
broad-brimmed traveller's hat, and under it a handkerchief tied over his
head in the manner of a cap: so that he showed no hair. As he looked
at the fire, I thought I saw a cunning expression, followed by a
half-laugh, come into his face.

“I am not acquainted with this country, gentlemen, but it seems a
solitary country towards the river.”

“Most marshes is solitary,” said Joe.

“No doubt, no doubt. Do you find any gypsies, now, or tramps, or
vagrants of any sort, out there?”

“No,” said Joe; “none but a runaway convict now and then. And we don't
find them, easy. Eh, Mr. Wopsle?”

Mr. Wopsle, with a majestic remembrance of old discomfiture, assented;
but not warmly.

“Seems you have been out after such?” asked the stranger.

“Once,” returned Joe. “Not that we wanted to take them, you understand;
we went out as lookers on; me, and Mr. Wopsle, and Pip. Didn't us, Pip?”

“Yes, Joe.”

The stranger looked at me again,--still cocking his eye, as if he were
expressly taking aim at me with his invisible gun,--and said, “He's a
likely young parcel of bones that. What is it you call him?”

“Pip,” said Joe.

“Christened Pip?”

“No, not christened Pip.”

“Surname Pip?”

“No,” said Joe, “it's a kind of family name what he gave himself when a
infant, and is called by.”

“Son of yours?”

“Well,” said Joe, meditatively, not, of course, that it could be in
anywise necessary to consider about it, but because it was the way at
the Jolly Bargemen to seem to consider deeply about everything that was
discussed over pipes,--“well--no. No, he ain't.”

“Nevvy?” said the strange man.

“Well,” said Joe, with the same appearance of profound cogitation, “he
is not--no, not to deceive you, he is not--my nevvy.”

“What the Blue Blazes is he?” asked the stranger. Which appeared to me
to be an inquiry of unnecessary strength.

Mr. Wopsle struck in upon that; as one who knew all about relationships,
having professional occasion to bear in mind what female relations a man
might not marry; and expounded the ties between me and Joe. Having
his hand in, Mr. Wopsle finished off with a most terrifically snarling
passage from Richard the Third, and seemed to think he had done quite
enough to account for it when he added, “--as the poet says.”

And here I may remark that when Mr. Wopsle referred to me, he considered
it a necessary part of such reference to rumple my hair and poke it into
my eyes. I cannot conceive why everybody of his standing who visited
at our house should always have put me through the same inflammatory
process under similar circumstances. Yet I do not call to mind that I
was ever in my earlier youth the subject of remark in our social family
circle, but some large-handed person took some such ophthalmic steps to
patronize me.

All this while, the strange man looked at nobody but me, and looked at
me as if he were determined to have a shot at me at last, and bring me
down. But he said nothing after offering his Blue Blazes observation,
until the glasses of rum and water were brought; and then he made his
shot, and a most extraordinary shot it was.

It was not a verbal remark, but a proceeding in dumb-show, and was
pointedly addressed to me. He stirred his rum and water pointedly at me,
and he tasted his rum and water pointedly at me. And he stirred it and
he tasted it; not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file.

He did this so that nobody but I saw the file; and when he had done it
he wiped the file and put it in a breast-pocket. I knew it to be
Joe's file, and I knew that he knew my convict, the moment I saw the
instrument. I sat gazing at him, spell-bound. But he now reclined on his
settle, taking very little notice of me, and talking principally about
turnips.

There was a delicious sense of cleaning-up and making a quiet pause
before going on in life afresh, in our village on Saturday nights, which
stimulated Joe to dare to stay out half an hour longer on Saturdays
than at other times. The half-hour and the rum and water running out
together, Joe got up to go, and took me by the hand.

“Stop half a moment, Mr. Gargery,” said the strange man. “I think I've
got a bright new shilling somewhere in my pocket, and if I have, the boy
shall have it.”

He looked it out from a handful of small change, folded it in some
crumpled paper, and gave it to me. “Yours!” said he. “Mind! Your own.”

I thanked him, staring at him far beyond the bounds of good manners,
and holding tight to Joe. He gave Joe good-night, and he gave Mr. Wopsle
good-night (who went out with us), and he gave me only a look with his
aiming eye,--no, not a look, for he shut it up, but wonders may be done
with an eye by hiding it.

On the way home, if I had been in a humor for talking, the talk must
have been all on my side, for Mr. Wopsle parted from us at the door of
the Jolly Bargemen, and Joe went all the way home with his mouth wide
open, to rinse the rum out with as much air as possible. But I was in
a manner stupefied by this turning up of my old misdeed and old
acquaintance, and could think of nothing else.

My sister was not in a very bad temper when we presented ourselves in
the kitchen, and Joe was encouraged by that unusual circumstance to tell
her about the bright shilling. “A bad un, I'll be bound,” said Mrs. Joe
triumphantly, “or he wouldn't have given it to the boy! Let's look at
it.”

I took it out of the paper, and it proved to be a good one. “But what's
this?” said Mrs. Joe, throwing down the shilling and catching up the
paper. “Two One-Pound notes?”

Nothing less than two fat sweltering one-pound notes that seemed to have
been on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle-markets in
the county. Joe caught up his hat again, and ran with them to the Jolly
Bargemen to restore them to their owner. While he was gone, I sat down
on my usual stool and looked vacantly at my sister, feeling pretty sure
that the man would not be there.

Presently, Joe came back, saying that the man was gone, but that he,
Joe, had left word at the Three Jolly Bargemen concerning the notes.
Then my sister sealed them up in a piece of paper, and put them under
some dried rose-leaves in an ornamental teapot on the top of a press in
the state parlor. There they remained, a nightmare to me, many and many
a night and day.

I had sadly broken sleep when I got to bed, through thinking of the
strange man taking aim at me with his invisible gun, and of the guiltily
coarse and common thing it was, to be on secret terms of conspiracy with
convicts,--a feature in my low career that I had previously forgotten.
I was haunted by the file too. A dread possessed me that when I least
expected it, the file would reappear. I coaxed myself to sleep by
thinking of Miss Havisham's, next Wednesday; and in my sleep I saw
the file coming at me out of a door, without seeing who held it, and I
screamed myself awake.




Chapter XI

At the appointed time I returned to Miss Havisham's, and my hesitating
ring at the gate brought out Estella. She locked it after admitting
me, as she had done before, and again preceded me into the dark passage
where her candle stood. She took no notice of me until she had the
candle in her hand, when she looked over her shoulder, superciliously
saying, “You are to come this way to-day,” and took me to quite another
part of the house.

The passage was a long one, and seemed to pervade the whole square
basement of the Manor House. We traversed but one side of the square,
however, and at the end of it she stopped, and put her candle down and
opened a door. Here, the daylight reappeared, and I found myself in
a small paved courtyard, the opposite side of which was formed by a
detached dwelling-house, that looked as if it had once belonged to the
manager or head clerk of the extinct brewery. There was a clock in the
outer wall of this house. Like the clock in Miss Havisham's room, and
like Miss Havisham's watch, it had stopped at twenty minutes to nine.

We went in at the door, which stood open, and into a gloomy room with a
low ceiling, on the ground-floor at the back. There was some company in
the room, and Estella said to me as she joined it, “You are to go and
stand there boy, till you are wanted.” “There”, being the window, I
crossed to it, and stood “there,” in a very uncomfortable state of mind,
looking out.

It opened to the ground, and looked into a most miserable corner of the
neglected garden, upon a rank ruin of cabbage-stalks, and one box-tree
that had been clipped round long ago, like a pudding, and had a new
growth at the top of it, out of shape and of a different color, as if
that part of the pudding had stuck to the saucepan and got burnt. This
was my homely thought, as I contemplated the box-tree. There had been
some light snow, overnight, and it lay nowhere else to my knowledge;
but, it had not quite melted from the cold shadow of this bit of garden,
and the wind caught it up in little eddies and threw it at the window,
as if it pelted me for coming there.

I divined that my coming had stopped conversation in the room, and that
its other occupants were looking at me. I could see nothing of the room
except the shining of the fire in the window-glass, but I stiffened in
all my joints with the consciousness that I was under close inspection.

There were three ladies in the room and one gentleman. Before I had been
standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that
they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not
to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission
that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady
and humbug.

They all had a listless and dreary air of waiting somebody's pleasure,
and the most talkative of the ladies had to speak quite rigidly to
repress a yawn. This lady, whose name was Camilla, very much reminded
me of my sister, with the difference that she was older, and (as I found
when I caught sight of her) of a blunter cast of features. Indeed, when
I knew her better I began to think it was a Mercy she had any features
at all, so very blank and high was the dead wall of her face.

“Poor dear soul!” said this lady, with an abruptness of manner quite my
sister's. “Nobody's enemy but his own!”

“It would be much more commendable to be somebody else's enemy,” said
the gentleman; “far more natural.”

“Cousin Raymond,” observed another lady, “we are to love our neighbor.”

“Sarah Pocket,” returned Cousin Raymond, “if a man is not his own
neighbor, who is?”

Miss Pocket laughed, and Camilla laughed and said (checking a yawn),
“The idea!” But I thought they seemed to think it rather a good
idea too. The other lady, who had not spoken yet, said gravely and
emphatically, “Very true!”

“Poor soul!” Camilla presently went on (I knew they had all been looking
at me in the mean time), “he is so very strange! Would anyone believe
that when Tom's wife died, he actually could not be induced to see the
importance of the children's having the deepest of trimmings to their
mourning? 'Good Lord!' says he, 'Camilla, what can it signify so long
as the poor bereaved little things are in black?' So like Matthew! The
idea!”

“Good points in him, good points in him,” said Cousin Raymond; “Heaven
forbid I should deny good points in him; but he never had, and he never
will have, any sense of the proprieties.”

“You know I was obliged,” said Camilla,--“I was obliged to be firm. I
said, 'It WILL NOT DO, for the credit of the family.' I told him that,
without deep trimmings, the family was disgraced. I cried about it from
breakfast till dinner. I injured my digestion. And at last he flung out
in his violent way, and said, with a D, 'Then do as you like.' Thank
Goodness it will always be a consolation to me to know that I instantly
went out in a pouring rain and bought the things.”

“He paid for them, did he not?” asked Estella.

“It's not the question, my dear child, who paid for them,” returned
Camilla. “I bought them. And I shall often think of that with peace,
when I wake up in the night.”

The ringing of a distant bell, combined with the echoing of some cry or
call along the passage by which I had come, interrupted the conversation
and caused Estella to say to me, “Now, boy!” On my turning round, they
all looked at me with the utmost contempt, and, as I went out, I heard
Sarah Pocket say, “Well I am sure! What next!” and Camilla add, with
indignation, “Was there ever such a fancy! The i-de-a!”

As we were going with our candle along the dark passage, Estella stopped
all of a sudden, and, facing round, said in her taunting manner, with
her face quite close to mine,--

“Well?”

“Well, miss?” I answered, almost falling over her and checking myself.

She stood looking at me, and, of course, I stood looking at her.

“Am I pretty?”

“Yes; I think you are very pretty.”

“Am I insulting?”

“Not so much so as you were last time,” said I.

“Not so much so?”

“No.”

She fired when she asked the last question, and she slapped my face with
such force as she had, when I answered it.

“Now?” said she. “You little coarse monster, what do you think of me
now?”

“I shall not tell you.”

“Because you are going to tell upstairs. Is that it?”

“No,” said I, “that's not it.”

“Why don't you cry again, you little wretch?”

“Because I'll never cry for you again,” said I. Which was, I suppose, as
false a declaration as ever was made; for I was inwardly crying for her
then, and I know what I know of the pain she cost me afterwards.

We went on our way upstairs after this episode; and, as we were going
up, we met a gentleman groping his way down.

“Whom have we here?” asked the gentleman, stopping and looking at me.

“A boy,” said Estella.

He was a burly man of an exceedingly dark complexion, with an
exceedingly large head, and a corresponding large hand. He took my chin
in his large hand and turned up my face to have a look at me by the
light of the candle. He was prematurely bald on the top of his head, and
had bushy black eyebrows that wouldn't lie down but stood up bristling.
His eyes were set very deep in his head, and were disagreeably sharp and
suspicious. He had a large watch-chain, and strong black dots where his
beard and whiskers would have been if he had let them. He was nothing
to me, and I could have had no foresight then, that he ever would be
anything to me, but it happened that I had this opportunity of observing
him well.

“Boy of the neighborhood? Hey?” said he.

“Yes, sir,” said I.

“How do you come here?”

“Miss Havisham sent for me, sir,” I explained.

“Well! Behave yourself. I have a pretty large experience of boys, and
you're a bad set of fellows. Now mind!” said he, biting the side of his
great forefinger as he frowned at me, “you behave yourself!”

With those words, he released me--which I was glad of, for his hand
smelt of scented soap--and went his way downstairs. I wondered whether
he could be a doctor; but no, I thought; he couldn't be a doctor, or he
would have a quieter and more persuasive manner. There was not much time
to consider the subject, for we were soon in Miss Havisham's room, where
she and everything else were just as I had left them. Estella left me
standing near the door, and I stood there until Miss Havisham cast her
eyes upon me from the dressing-table.

“So!” she said, without being startled or surprised: “the days have worn
away, have they?”

“Yes, ma'am. To-day is--”

“There, there, there!” with the impatient movement of her fingers. “I
don't want to know. Are you ready to play?”

I was obliged to answer in some confusion, “I don't think I am, ma'am.”

“Not at cards again?” she demanded, with a searching look.

“Yes, ma'am; I could do that, if I was wanted.”

“Since this house strikes you old and grave, boy,” said Miss Havisham,
impatiently, “and you are unwilling to play, are you willing to work?”

I could answer this inquiry with a better heart than I had been able to
find for the other question, and I said I was quite willing.

“Then go into that opposite room,” said she, pointing at the door behind
me with her withered hand, “and wait there till I come.”

I crossed the staircase landing, and entered the room she indicated.
From that room, too, the daylight was completely excluded, and it had an
airless smell that was oppressive. A fire had been lately kindled in
the damp old-fashioned grate, and it was more disposed to go out than
to burn up, and the reluctant smoke which hung in the room seemed colder
than the clearer air,--like our own marsh mist. Certain wintry branches
of candles on the high chimney-piece faintly lighted the chamber; or it
would be more expressive to say, faintly troubled its darkness. It was
spacious, and I dare say had once been handsome, but every discernible
thing in it was covered with dust and mould, and dropping to pieces. The
most prominent object was a long table with a tablecloth spread on it,
as if a feast had been in preparation when the house and the clocks all
stopped together. An epergne or centre-piece of some kind was in the
middle of this cloth; it was so heavily overhung with cobwebs that its
form was quite undistinguishable; and, as I looked along the yellow
expanse out of which I remember its seeming to grow, like a black
fungus, I saw speckle-legged spiders with blotchy bodies running home
to it, and running out from it, as if some circumstances of the greatest
public importance had just transpired in the spider community.

I heard the mice too, rattling behind the panels, as if the same
occurrence were important to their interests. But the black beetles took
no notice of the agitation, and groped about the hearth in a ponderous
elderly way, as if they were short-sighted and hard of hearing, and not
on terms with one another.

These crawling things had fascinated my attention, and I was watching
them from a distance, when Miss Havisham laid a hand upon my shoulder.
In her other hand she had a crutch-headed stick on which she leaned, and
she looked like the Witch of the place.

“This,” said she, pointing to the long table with her stick, “is where I
will be laid when I am dead. They shall come and look at me here.”

With some vague misgiving that she might get upon the table then and
there and die at once, the complete realization of the ghastly waxwork
at the Fair, I shrank under her touch.

“What do you think that is?” she asked me, again pointing with her
stick; “that, where those cobwebs are?”

“I can't guess what it is, ma'am.”

“It's a great cake. A bride-cake. Mine!”

She looked all round the room in a glaring manner, and then said,
leaning on me while her hand twitched my shoulder, “Come, come, come!
Walk me, walk me!”

I made out from this, that the work I had to do, was to walk Miss
Havisham round and round the room. Accordingly, I started at once, and
she leaned upon my shoulder, and we went away at a pace that might have
been an imitation (founded on my first impulse under that roof) of Mr.
Pumblechook's chaise-cart.

She was not physically strong, and after a little time said, “Slower!”
 Still, we went at an impatient fitful speed, and as we went, she
twitched the hand upon my shoulder, and worked her mouth, and led me to
believe that we were going fast because her thoughts went fast. After a
while she said, “Call Estella!” so I went out on the landing and
roared that name as I had done on the previous occasion. When her light
appeared, I returned to Miss Havisham, and we started away again round
and round the room.

If only Estella had come to be a spectator of our proceedings, I should
have felt sufficiently discontented; but as she brought with her the
three ladies and the gentleman whom I had seen below, I didn't know
what to do. In my politeness, I would have stopped; but Miss
Havisham twitched my shoulder, and we posted on,--with a shame-faced
consciousness on my part that they would think it was all my doing.

“Dear Miss Havisham,” said Miss Sarah Pocket. “How well you look!”

“I do not,” returned Miss Havisham. “I am yellow skin and bone.”

Camilla brightened when Miss Pocket met with this rebuff; and she
murmured, as she plaintively contemplated Miss Havisham, “Poor dear
soul! Certainly not to be expected to look well, poor thing. The idea!”

“And how are you?” said Miss Havisham to Camilla. As we were close to
Camilla then, I would have stopped as a matter of course, only Miss
Havisham wouldn't stop. We swept on, and I felt that I was highly
obnoxious to Camilla.

“Thank you, Miss Havisham,” she returned, “I am as well as can be
expected.”

“Why, what's the matter with you?” asked Miss Havisham, with exceeding
sharpness.

“Nothing worth mentioning,” replied Camilla. “I don't wish to make a
display of my feelings, but I have habitually thought of you more in the
night than I am quite equal to.”

“Then don't think of me,” retorted Miss Havisham.

“Very easily said!” remarked Camilla, amiably repressing a sob, while a
hitch came into her upper lip, and her tears overflowed. “Raymond is a
witness what ginger and sal volatile I am obliged to take in the night.
Raymond is a witness what nervous jerkings I have in my legs. Chokings
and nervous jerkings, however, are nothing new to me when I think with
anxiety of those I love. If I could be less affectionate and sensitive,
I should have a better digestion and an iron set of nerves. I am sure
I wish it could be so. But as to not thinking of you in the night--The
idea!” Here, a burst of tears.

The Raymond referred to, I understood to be the gentleman present, and
him I understood to be Mr. Camilla. He came to the rescue at this point,
and said in a consolatory and complimentary voice, “Camilla, my dear, it
is well known that your family feelings are gradually undermining you to
the extent of making one of your legs shorter than the other.”

“I am not aware,” observed the grave lady whose voice I had heard but
once, “that to think of any person is to make a great claim upon that
person, my dear.”

Miss Sarah Pocket, whom I now saw to be a little dry, brown, corrugated
old woman, with a small face that might have been made of walnut-shells,
and a large mouth like a cat's without the whiskers, supported this
position by saying, “No, indeed, my dear. Hem!”

“Thinking is easy enough,” said the grave lady.

“What is easier, you know?” assented Miss Sarah Pocket.

“Oh, yes, yes!” cried Camilla, whose fermenting feelings appeared to
rise from her legs to her bosom. “It's all very true! It's a weakness
to be so affectionate, but I can't help it. No doubt my health would be
much better if it was otherwise, still I wouldn't change my disposition
if I could. It's the cause of much suffering, but it's a consolation to
know I posses it, when I wake up in the night.” Here another burst of
feeling.

Miss Havisham and I had never stopped all this time, but kept going
round and round the room; now brushing against the skirts of the
visitors, now giving them the whole length of the dismal chamber.

“There's Matthew!” said Camilla. “Never mixing with any natural ties,
never coming here to see how Miss Havisham is! I have taken to the sofa
with my staylace cut, and have lain there hours insensible, with my head
over the side, and my hair all down, and my feet I don't know where--”

(“Much higher than your head, my love,” said Mr. Camilla.)

“I have gone off into that state, hours and hours, on account of
Matthew's strange and inexplicable conduct, and nobody has thanked me.”

“Really I must say I should think not!” interposed the grave lady.

“You see, my dear,” added Miss Sarah Pocket (a blandly vicious
personage), “the question to put to yourself is, who did you expect to
thank you, my love?”

“Without expecting any thanks, or anything of the sort,” resumed
Camilla, “I have remained in that state, hours and hours, and Raymond
is a witness of the extent to which I have choked, and what the total
inefficacy of ginger has been, and I have been heard at the piano-forte
tuner's across the street, where the poor mistaken children have even
supposed it to be pigeons cooing at a distance,--and now to be told--”
 Here Camilla put her hand to her throat, and began to be quite chemical
as to the formation of new combinations there.

When this same Matthew was mentioned, Miss Havisham stopped me and
herself, and stood looking at the speaker. This change had a great
influence in bringing Camilla's chemistry to a sudden end.

“Matthew will come and see me at last,” said Miss Havisham, sternly,
“when I am laid on that table. That will be his place,--there,” striking
the table with her stick, “at my head! And yours will be there! And your
husband's there! And Sarah Pocket's there! And Georgiana's there! Now
you all know where to take your stations when you come to feast upon me.
And now go!”

At the mention of each name, she had struck the table with her stick in
a new place. She now said, “Walk me, walk me!” and we went on again.

“I suppose there's nothing to be done,” exclaimed Camilla, “but comply
and depart. It's something to have seen the object of one's love and
duty for even so short a time. I shall think of it with a melancholy
satisfaction when I wake up in the night. I wish Matthew could have
that comfort, but he sets it at defiance. I am determined not to make a
display of my feelings, but it's very hard to be told one wants to feast
on one's relations,--as if one was a Giant,--and to be told to go. The
bare idea!”

Mr. Camilla interposing, as Mrs. Camilla laid her hand upon her heaving
bosom, that lady assumed an unnatural fortitude of manner which I
supposed to be expressive of an intention to drop and choke when out of
view, and kissing her hand to Miss Havisham, was escorted forth. Sarah
Pocket and Georgiana contended who should remain last; but Sarah was
too knowing to be outdone, and ambled round Georgiana with that artful
slipperiness that the latter was obliged to take precedence. Sarah
Pocket then made her separate effect of departing with, “Bless you, Miss
Havisham dear!” and with a smile of forgiving pity on her walnut-shell
countenance for the weaknesses of the rest.

While Estella was away lighting them down, Miss Havisham still walked
with her hand on my shoulder, but more and more slowly. At last she
stopped before the fire, and said, after muttering and looking at it
some seconds,--

“This is my birthday, Pip.”

I was going to wish her many happy returns, when she lifted her stick.

“I don't suffer it to be spoken of. I don't suffer those who were here
just now, or any one to speak of it. They come here on the day, but they
dare not refer to it.”

Of course I made no further effort to refer to it.

“On this day of the year, long before you were born, this heap of
decay,” stabbing with her crutched stick at the pile of cobwebs on the
table, but not touching it, “was brought here. It and I have worn away
together. The mice have gnawed at it, and sharper teeth than teeth of
mice have gnawed at me.”

She held the head of her stick against her heart as she stood looking
at the table; she in her once white dress, all yellow and withered; the
once white cloth all yellow and withered; everything around in a state
to crumble under a touch.

“When the ruin is complete,” said she, with a ghastly look, “and when
they lay me dead, in my bride's dress on the bride's table,--which shall
be done, and which will be the finished curse upon him,--so much the
better if it is done on this day!”

She stood looking at the table as if she stood looking at her own figure
lying there. I remained quiet. Estella returned, and she too remained
quiet. It seemed to me that we continued thus for a long time. In
the heavy air of the room, and the heavy darkness that brooded in its
remoter corners, I even had an alarming fancy that Estella and I might
presently begin to decay.

At length, not coming out of her distraught state by degrees, but in an
instant, Miss Havisham said, “Let me see you two play cards; why have
you not begun?” With that, we returned to her room, and sat down as
before; I was beggared, as before; and again, as before, Miss Havisham
watched us all the time, directed my attention to Estella's beauty, and
made me notice it the more by trying her jewels on Estella's breast and
hair.

Estella, for her part, likewise treated me as before, except that she
did not condescend to speak. When we had played some half-dozen games,
a day was appointed for my return, and I was taken down into the yard
to be fed in the former dog-like manner. There, too, I was again left to
wander about as I liked.

It is not much to the purpose whether a gate in that garden wall which
I had scrambled up to peep over on the last occasion was, on that last
occasion, open or shut. Enough that I saw no gate then, and that I
saw one now. As it stood open, and as I knew that Estella had let
the visitors out,--for she had returned with the keys in her hand,--I
strolled into the garden, and strolled all over it. It was quite a
wilderness, and there were old melon-frames and cucumber-frames in it,
which seemed in their decline to have produced a spontaneous growth of
weak attempts at pieces of old hats and boots, with now and then a weedy
offshoot into the likeness of a battered saucepan.

When I had exhausted the garden and a greenhouse with nothing in it but
a fallen-down grape-vine and some bottles, I found myself in the dismal
corner upon which I had looked out of the window. Never questioning for
a moment that the house was now empty, I looked in at another window,
and found myself, to my great surprise, exchanging a broad stare with a
pale young gentleman with red eyelids and light hair.

This pale young gentleman quickly disappeared, and reappeared beside me.
He had been at his books when I had found myself staring at him, and I
now saw that he was inky.

“Halloa!” said he, “young fellow!”

Halloa being a general observation which I had usually observed to
be best answered by itself, I said, “Halloa!” politely omitting young
fellow.

“Who let you in?” said he.

“Miss Estella.”

“Who gave you leave to prowl about?”

“Miss Estella.”

“Come and fight,” said the pale young gentleman.

What could I do but follow him? I have often asked myself the question
since; but what else could I do? His manner was so final, and I was
so astonished, that I followed where he led, as if I had been under a
spell.

“Stop a minute, though,” he said, wheeling round before we had gone many
paces. “I ought to give you a reason for fighting, too. There it is!”
 In a most irritating manner he instantly slapped his hands against one
another, daintily flung one of his legs up behind him, pulled my hair,
slapped his hands again, dipped his head, and butted it into my stomach.

The bull-like proceeding last mentioned, besides that it was
unquestionably to be regarded in the light of a liberty, was
particularly disagreeable just after bread and meat. I therefore hit out
at him and was going to hit out again, when he said, “Aha! Would you?”
 and began dancing backwards and forwards in a manner quite unparalleled
within my limited experience.

“Laws of the game!” said he. Here, he skipped from his left leg on to
his right. “Regular rules!” Here, he skipped from his right leg on to
his left. “Come to the ground, and go through the preliminaries!” Here,
he dodged backwards and forwards, and did all sorts of things while I
looked helplessly at him.

I was secretly afraid of him when I saw him so dexterous; but I felt
morally and physically convinced that his light head of hair could have
had no business in the pit of my stomach, and that I had a right to
consider it irrelevant when so obtruded on my attention. Therefore, I
followed him without a word, to a retired nook of the garden, formed by
the junction of two walls and screened by some rubbish. On his asking me
if I was satisfied with the ground, and on my replying Yes, he begged my
leave to absent himself for a moment, and quickly returned with a bottle
of water and a sponge dipped in vinegar. “Available for both,” he said,
placing these against the wall. And then fell to pulling off, not
only his jacket and waistcoat, but his shirt too, in a manner at once
light-hearted, business-like, and bloodthirsty.

Although he did not look very healthy,--having pimples on his face, and
a breaking out at his mouth,--these dreadful preparations quite appalled
me. I judged him to be about my own age, but he was much taller, and he
had a way of spinning himself about that was full of appearance. For
the rest, he was a young gentleman in a gray suit (when not denuded
for battle), with his elbows, knees, wrists, and heels considerably in
advance of the rest of him as to development.

My heart failed me when I saw him squaring at me with every
demonstration of mechanical nicety, and eyeing my anatomy as if he were
minutely choosing his bone. I never have been so surprised in my life,
as I was when I let out the first blow, and saw him lying on his
back, looking up at me with a bloody nose and his face exceedingly
fore-shortened.

But, he was on his feet directly, and after sponging himself with
a great show of dexterity began squaring again. The second greatest
surprise I have ever had in my life was seeing him on his back again,
looking up at me out of a black eye.

His spirit inspired me with great respect. He seemed to have no
strength, and he never once hit me hard, and he was always knocked down;
but he would be up again in a moment, sponging himself or drinking out
of the water-bottle, with the greatest satisfaction in seconding himself
according to form, and then came at me with an air and a show that made
me believe he really was going to do for me at last. He got heavily
bruised, for I am sorry to record that the more I hit him, the harder I
hit him; but he came up again and again and again, until at last he got
a bad fall with the back of his head against the wall. Even after that
crisis in our affairs, he got up and turned round and round confusedly a
few times, not knowing where I was; but finally went on his knees to his
sponge and threw it up: at the same time panting out, “That means you
have won.”

He seemed so brave and innocent, that although I had not proposed the
contest, I felt but a gloomy satisfaction in my victory. Indeed, I go
so far as to hope that I regarded myself while dressing as a species of
savage young wolf or other wild beast. However, I got dressed, darkly
wiping my sanguinary face at intervals, and I said, “Can I help you?”
 and he said “No thankee,” and I said “Good afternoon,” and he said “Same
to you.”

When I got into the courtyard, I found Estella waiting with the keys.
But she neither asked me where I had been, nor why I had kept her
waiting; and there was a bright flush upon her face, as though something
had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too,
she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me.

“Come here! You may kiss me, if you like.”

I kissed her cheek as she turned it to me. I think I would have gone
through a great deal to kiss her cheek. But I felt that the kiss was
given to the coarse common boy as a piece of money might have been, and
that it was worth nothing.

What with the birthday visitors, and what with the cards, and what with
the fight, my stay had lasted so long, that when I neared home the light
on the spit of sand off the point on the marshes was gleaming against
a black night-sky, and Joe's furnace was flinging a path of fire across
the road.




Chapter XII

My mind grew very uneasy on the subject of the pale young gentleman. The
more I thought of the fight, and recalled the pale young gentleman on
his back in various stages of puffy and incrimsoned countenance, the
more certain it appeared that something would be done to me. I felt that
the pale young gentleman's blood was on my head, and that the Law would
avenge it. Without having any definite idea of the penalties I had
incurred, it was clear to me that village boys could not go stalking
about the country, ravaging the houses of gentlefolks and pitching into
the studious youth of England, without laying themselves open to severe
punishment. For some days, I even kept close at home, and looked out at
the kitchen door with the greatest caution and trepidation before going
on an errand, lest the officers of the County Jail should pounce upon
me. The pale young gentleman's nose had stained my trousers, and I tried
to wash out that evidence of my guilt in the dead of night. I had cut
my knuckles against the pale young gentleman's teeth, and I twisted my
imagination into a thousand tangles, as I devised incredible ways of
accounting for that damnatory circumstance when I should be haled before
the Judges.

When the day came round for my return to the scene of the deed of
violence, my terrors reached their height. Whether myrmidons of Justice,
specially sent down from London, would be lying in ambush behind the
gate;--whether Miss Havisham, preferring to take personal vengeance for
an outrage done to her house, might rise in those grave-clothes of hers,
draw a pistol, and shoot me dead:--whether suborned boys--a numerous
band of mercenaries--might be engaged to fall upon me in the brewery,
and cuff me until I was no more;--it was high testimony to my confidence
in the spirit of the pale young gentleman, that I never imagined him
accessory to these retaliations; they always came into my mind as the
acts of injudicious relatives of his, goaded on by the state of his
visage and an indignant sympathy with the family features.

However, go to Miss Havisham's I must, and go I did. And behold! nothing
came of the late struggle. It was not alluded to in any way, and no pale
young gentleman was to be discovered on the premises. I found the same
gate open, and I explored the garden, and even looked in at the windows
of the detached house; but my view was suddenly stopped by the closed
shutters within, and all was lifeless. Only in the corner where
the combat had taken place could I detect any evidence of the young
gentleman's existence. There were traces of his gore in that spot, and I
covered them with garden-mould from the eye of man.

On the broad landing between Miss Havisham's own room and that other
room in which the long table was laid out, I saw a garden-chair,--a
light chair on wheels, that you pushed from behind. It had been placed
there since my last visit, and I entered, that same day, on a regular
occupation of pushing Miss Havisham in this chair (when she was tired of
walking with her hand upon my shoulder) round her own room, and across
the landing, and round the other room. Over and over and over again,
we would make these journeys, and sometimes they would last as long as
three hours at a stretch. I insensibly fall into a general mention of
these journeys as numerous, because it was at once settled that I should
return every alternate day at noon for these purposes, and because I am
now going to sum up a period of at least eight or ten months.

As we began to be more used to one another, Miss Havisham talked more
to me, and asked me such questions as what had I learnt and what was
I going to be? I told her I was going to be apprenticed to Joe, I
believed; and I enlarged upon my knowing nothing and wanting to know
everything, in the hope that she might offer some help towards that
desirable end. But she did not; on the contrary, she seemed to prefer my
being ignorant. Neither did she ever give me any money,--or anything
but my daily dinner,--nor ever stipulate that I should be paid for my
services.

Estella was always about, and always let me in and out, but never told
me I might kiss her again. Sometimes, she would coldly tolerate me;
sometimes, she would condescend to me; sometimes, she would be quite
familiar with me; sometimes, she would tell me energetically that she
hated me. Miss Havisham would often ask me in a whisper, or when we were
alone, “Does she grow prettier and prettier, Pip?” And when I said yes
(for indeed she did), would seem to enjoy it greedily. Also, when we
played at cards Miss Havisham would look on, with a miserly relish of
Estella's moods, whatever they were. And sometimes, when her moods were
so many and so contradictory of one another that I was puzzled what
to say or do, Miss Havisham would embrace her with lavish fondness,
murmuring something in her ear that sounded like “Break their hearts my
pride and hope, break their hearts and have no mercy!”

There was a song Joe used to hum fragments of at the forge, of which the
burden was Old Clem. This was not a very ceremonious way of rendering
homage to a patron saint, but I believe Old Clem stood in that relation
towards smiths. It was a song that imitated the measure of beating upon
iron, and was a mere lyrical excuse for the introduction of Old Clem's
respected name. Thus, you were to hammer boys round--Old Clem! With a
thump and a sound--Old Clem! Beat it out, beat it out--Old Clem! With a
clink for the stout--Old Clem! Blow the fire, blow the fire--Old
Clem! Roaring dryer, soaring higher--Old Clem! One day soon after the
appearance of the chair, Miss Havisham suddenly saying to me, with the
impatient movement of her fingers, “There, there, there! Sing!” I was
surprised into crooning this ditty as I pushed her over the floor. It
happened so to catch her fancy that she took it up in a low brooding
voice as if she were singing in her sleep. After that, it became
customary with us to have it as we moved about, and Estella would often
join in; though the whole strain was so subdued, even when there were
three of us, that it made less noise in the grim old house than the
lightest breath of wind.

What could I become with these surroundings? How could my character fail
to be influenced by them? Is it to be wondered at if my thoughts were
dazed, as my eyes were, when I came out into the natural light from the
misty yellow rooms?

Perhaps I might have told Joe about the pale young gentleman, if I had
not previously been betrayed into those enormous inventions to which
I had confessed. Under the circumstances, I felt that Joe could hardly
fail to discern in the pale young gentleman, an appropriate passenger
to be put into the black velvet coach; therefore, I said nothing of him.
Besides, that shrinking from having Miss Havisham and Estella discussed,
which had come upon me in the beginning, grew much more potent as time
went on. I reposed complete confidence in no one but Biddy; but I told
poor Biddy everything. Why it came natural to me to do so, and why Biddy
had a deep concern in everything I told her, I did not know then, though
I think I know now.

Meanwhile, councils went on in the kitchen at home, fraught with
almost insupportable aggravation to my exasperated spirit. That ass,
Pumblechook, used often to come over of a night for the purpose of
discussing my prospects with my sister; and I really do believe (to
this hour with less penitence than I ought to feel), that if these hands
could have taken a linchpin out of his chaise-cart, they would have done
it. The miserable man was a man of that confined stolidity of mind, that
he could not discuss my prospects without having me before him,--as it
were, to operate upon,--and he would drag me up from my stool (usually
by the collar) where I was quiet in a corner, and, putting me before the
fire as if I were going to be cooked, would begin by saying, “Now, Mum,
here is this boy! Here is this boy which you brought up by hand. Hold up
your head, boy, and be forever grateful unto them which so did do. Now,
Mum, with respections to this boy!” And then he would rumple my hair
the wrong way,--which from my earliest remembrance, as already hinted,
I have in my soul denied the right of any fellow-creature to do,--and
would hold me before him by the sleeve,--a spectacle of imbecility only
to be equalled by himself.

Then, he and my sister would pair off in such nonsensical speculations
about Miss Havisham, and about what she would do with me and for me,
that I used to want--quite painfully--to burst into spiteful tears, fly
at Pumblechook, and pummel him all over. In these dialogues, my sister
spoke to me as if she were morally wrenching one of my teeth out at
every reference; while Pumblechook himself, self-constituted my patron,
would sit supervising me with a depreciatory eye, like the architect of
my fortunes who thought himself engaged on a very unremunerative job.

In these discussions, Joe bore no part. But he was often talked at,
while they were in progress, by reason of Mrs. Joe's perceiving that
he was not favorable to my being taken from the forge. I was fully old
enough now to be apprenticed to Joe; and when Joe sat with the poker on
his knees thoughtfully raking out the ashes between the lower bars, my
sister would so distinctly construe that innocent action into opposition
on his part, that she would dive at him, take the poker out of his
hands, shake him, and put it away. There was a most irritating end to
every one of these debates. All in a moment, with nothing to lead up to
it, my sister would stop herself in a yawn, and catching sight of me as
it were incidentally, would swoop upon me with, “Come! there's enough of
you! You get along to bed; you've given trouble enough for one night, I
hope!” As if I had besought them as a favor to bother my life out.

We went on in this way for a long time, and it seemed likely that we
should continue to go on in this way for a long time, when one day Miss
Havisham stopped short as she and I were walking, she leaning on my
shoulder; and said with some displeasure,--

“You are growing tall, Pip!”

I thought it best to hint, through the medium of a meditative look, that
this might be occasioned by circumstances over which I had no control.

She said no more at the time; but she presently stopped and looked at me
again; and presently again; and after that, looked frowning and moody.
On the next day of my attendance, when our usual exercise was over, and
I had landed her at her dressing-table, she stayed me with a movement of
her impatient fingers:--

“Tell me the name again of that blacksmith of yours.”

“Joe Gargery, ma'am.”

“Meaning the master you were to be apprenticed to?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“You had better be apprenticed at once. Would Gargery come here with
you, and bring your indentures, do you think?”

I signified that I had no doubt he would take it as an honor to be
asked.

“Then let him come.”

“At any particular time, Miss Havisham?”

“There, there! I know nothing about times. Let him come soon, and come
along with you.”

When I got home at night, and delivered this message for Joe, my sister
“went on the Rampage,” in a more alarming degree than at any previous
period. She asked me and Joe whether we supposed she was door-mats under
our feet, and how we dared to use her so, and what company we graciously
thought she was fit for? When she had exhausted a torrent of such
inquiries, she threw a candlestick at Joe, burst into a loud sobbing,
got out the dustpan,--which was always a very bad sign,--put on her
coarse apron, and began cleaning up to a terrible extent. Not satisfied
with a dry cleaning, she took to a pail and scrubbing-brush, and cleaned
us out of house and home, so that we stood shivering in the back-yard.
It was ten o'clock at night before we ventured to creep in again, and
then she asked Joe why he hadn't married a Negress Slave at once?
Joe offered no answer, poor fellow, but stood feeling his whisker and
looking dejectedly at me, as if he thought it really might have been a
better speculation.




Chapter XIII

It was a trial to my feelings, on the next day but one, to see
Joe arraying himself in his Sunday clothes to accompany me to Miss
Havisham's. However, as he thought his court-suit necessary to the
occasion, it was not for me to tell him that he looked far better in his
working-dress; the rather, because I knew he made himself so dreadfully
uncomfortable, entirely on my account, and that it was for me he pulled
up his shirt-collar so very high behind, that it made the hair on the
crown of his head stand up like a tuft of feathers.

At breakfast-time my sister declared her intention of going to town with
us, and being left at Uncle Pumblechook's and called for “when we had
done with our fine ladies”--a way of putting the case, from which Joe
appeared inclined to augur the worst. The forge was shut up for the day,
and Joe inscribed in chalk upon the door (as it was his custom to do on
the very rare occasions when he was not at work) the monosyllable
HOUT, accompanied by a sketch of an arrow supposed to be flying in the
direction he had taken.

We walked to town, my sister leading the way in a very large beaver
bonnet, and carrying a basket like the Great Seal of England in plaited
Straw, a pair of pattens, a spare shawl, and an umbrella, though it
was a fine bright day. I am not quite clear whether these articles were
carried penitentially or ostentatiously; but I rather think they were
displayed as articles of property,--much as Cleopatra or any other
sovereign lady on the Rampage might exhibit her wealth in a pageant or
procession.

When we came to Pumblechook's, my sister bounced in and left us. As it
was almost noon, Joe and I held straight on to Miss Havisham's house.
Estella opened the gate as usual, and, the moment she appeared, Joe took
his hat off and stood weighing it by the brim in both his hands; as if
he had some urgent reason in his mind for being particular to half a
quarter of an ounce.

Estella took no notice of either of us, but led us the way that I knew
so well. I followed next to her, and Joe came last. When I looked back
at Joe in the long passage, he was still weighing his hat with the
greatest care, and was coming after us in long strides on the tips of
his toes.

Estella told me we were both to go in, so I took Joe by the coat-cuff
and conducted him into Miss Havisham's presence. She was seated at her
dressing-table, and looked round at us immediately.

“Oh!” said she to Joe. “You are the husband of the sister of this boy?”

I could hardly have imagined dear old Joe looking so unlike himself or
so like some extraordinary bird; standing as he did speechless, with his
tuft of feathers ruffled, and his mouth open as if he wanted a worm.

“You are the husband,” repeated Miss Havisham, “of the sister of this
boy?”

It was very aggravating; but, throughout the interview, Joe persisted in
addressing Me instead of Miss Havisham.

“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe now observed in a manner that was at
once expressive of forcible argumentation, strict confidence, and great
politeness, “as I hup and married your sister, and I were at the time
what you might call (if you was anyways inclined) a single man.”

“Well!” said Miss Havisham. “And you have reared the boy, with the
intention of taking him for your apprentice; is that so, Mr. Gargery?”

“You know, Pip,” replied Joe, “as you and me were ever friends, and it
were looked for'ard to betwixt us, as being calc'lated to lead to
larks. Not but what, Pip, if you had ever made objections to the
business,--such as its being open to black and sut, or such-like,--not
but what they would have been attended to, don't you see?”

“Has the boy,” said Miss Havisham, “ever made any objection? Does he
like the trade?”

“Which it is well beknown to yourself, Pip,” returned Joe, strengthening
his former mixture of argumentation, confidence, and politeness, “that
it were the wish of your own hart.” (I saw the idea suddenly break upon
him that he would adapt his epitaph to the occasion, before he went on
to say) “And there weren't no objection on your part, and Pip it were
the great wish of your hart!”

It was quite in vain for me to endeavor to make him sensible that he
ought to speak to Miss Havisham. The more I made faces and gestures
to him to do it, the more confidential, argumentative, and polite, he
persisted in being to Me.

“Have you brought his indentures with you?” asked Miss Havisham.

“Well, Pip, you know,” replied Joe, as if that were a little
unreasonable, “you yourself see me put 'em in my 'at, and therefore you
know as they are here.” With which he took them out, and gave them, not
to Miss Havisham, but to me. I am afraid I was ashamed of the dear good
fellow,--I know I was ashamed of him,--when I saw that Estella stood
at the back of Miss Havisham's chair, and that her eyes laughed
mischievously. I took the indentures out of his hand and gave them to
Miss Havisham.

“You expected,” said Miss Havisham, as she looked them over, “no premium
with the boy?”

“Joe!” I remonstrated, for he made no reply at all. “Why don't you
answer--”

“Pip,” returned Joe, cutting me short as if he were hurt, “which I
meantersay that were not a question requiring a answer betwixt yourself
and me, and which you know the answer to be full well No. You know it to
be No, Pip, and wherefore should I say it?”

Miss Havisham glanced at him as if she understood what he really was
better than I had thought possible, seeing what he was there; and took
up a little bag from the table beside her.

“Pip has earned a premium here,” she said, “and here it is. There are
five-and-twenty guineas in this bag. Give it to your master, Pip.”

As if he were absolutely out of his mind with the wonder awakened in
him by her strange figure and the strange room, Joe, even at this pass,
persisted in addressing me.

“This is wery liberal on your part, Pip,” said Joe, “and it is as such
received and grateful welcome, though never looked for, far nor near,
nor nowheres. And now, old chap,” said Joe, conveying to me a sensation,
first of burning and then of freezing, for I felt as if that familiar
expression were applied to Miss Havisham,--“and now, old chap, may we
do our duty! May you and me do our duty, both on us, by one and another,
and by them which your liberal present--have-conweyed--to be--for the
satisfaction of mind-of--them as never--” here Joe showed that he felt
he had fallen into frightful difficulties, until he triumphantly rescued
himself with the words, “and from myself far be it!” These words had
such a round and convincing sound for him that he said them twice.

“Good-bye, Pip!” said Miss Havisham. “Let them out, Estella.”

“Am I to come again, Miss Havisham?” I asked.

“No. Gargery is your master now. Gargery! One word!”

Thus calling him back as I went out of the door, I heard her say to Joe
in a distinct emphatic voice, “The boy has been a good boy here, and
that is his reward. Of course, as an honest man, you will expect no
other and no more.”

How Joe got out of the room, I have never been able to determine; but
I know that when he did get out he was steadily proceeding upstairs
instead of coming down, and was deaf to all remonstrances until I went
after him and laid hold of him. In another minute we were outside the
gate, and it was locked, and Estella was gone. When we stood in the
daylight alone again, Joe backed up against a wall, and said to me,
“Astonishing!” And there he remained so long saying, “Astonishing” at
intervals, so often, that I began to think his senses were never coming
back. At length he prolonged his remark into “Pip, I do assure you this
is as-TON-ishing!” and so, by degrees, became conversational and able to
walk away.

I have reason to think that Joe's intellects were brightened by the
encounter they had passed through, and that on our way to Pumblechook's
he invented a subtle and deep design. My reason is to be found in
what took place in Mr. Pumblechook's parlor: where, on our presenting
ourselves, my sister sat in conference with that detested seedsman.

“Well?” cried my sister, addressing us both at once. “And what's
happened to you? I wonder you condescend to come back to such poor
society as this, I am sure I do!”

“Miss Havisham,” said Joe, with a fixed look at me, like an effort of
remembrance, “made it wery partick'ler that we should give her--were it
compliments or respects, Pip?”

“Compliments,” I said.

“Which that were my own belief,” answered Joe; “her compliments to Mrs.
J. Gargery--”

“Much good they'll do me!” observed my sister; but rather gratified too.

“And wishing,” pursued Joe, with another fixed look at me, like another
effort of remembrance, “that the state of Miss Havisham's elth were
sitch as would have--allowed, were it, Pip?”

“Of her having the pleasure,” I added.

“Of ladies' company,” said Joe. And drew a long breath.

“Well!” cried my sister, with a mollified glance at Mr. Pumblechook.
“She might have had the politeness to send that message at first, but
it's better late than never. And what did she give young Rantipole
here?”

“She giv' him,” said Joe, “nothing.”

Mrs. Joe was going to break out, but Joe went on.

“What she giv',” said Joe, “she giv' to his friends. 'And by his
friends,' were her explanation, 'I mean into the hands of his sister
Mrs. J. Gargery.' Them were her words; 'Mrs. J. Gargery.' She mayn't
have know'd,” added Joe, with an appearance of reflection, “whether it
were Joe, or Jorge.”

My sister looked at Pumblechook: who smoothed the elbows of his wooden
arm-chair, and nodded at her and at the fire, as if he had known all
about it beforehand.

“And how much have you got?” asked my sister, laughing. Positively
laughing!

“What would present company say to ten pound?” demanded Joe.

“They'd say,” returned my sister, curtly, “pretty well. Not too much,
but pretty well.”

“It's more than that, then,” said Joe.

That fearful Impostor, Pumblechook, immediately nodded, and said, as he
rubbed the arms of his chair, “It's more than that, Mum.”

“Why, you don't mean to say--” began my sister.

“Yes I do, Mum,” said Pumblechook; “but wait a bit. Go on, Joseph. Good
in you! Go on!”

“What would present company say,” proceeded Joe, “to twenty pound?”

“Handsome would be the word,” returned my sister.

“Well, then,” said Joe, “It's more than twenty pound.”

That abject hypocrite, Pumblechook, nodded again, and said, with a
patronizing laugh, “It's more than that, Mum. Good again! Follow her up,
Joseph!”

“Then to make an end of it,” said Joe, delightedly handing the bag to my
sister; “it's five-and-twenty pound.”

“It's five-and-twenty pound, Mum,” echoed that basest of swindlers,
Pumblechook, rising to shake hands with her; “and it's no more than your
merits (as I said when my opinion was asked), and I wish you joy of the
money!”

If the villain had stopped here, his case would have been sufficiently
awful, but he blackened his guilt by proceeding to take me into custody,
with a right of patronage that left all his former criminality far
behind.

“Now you see, Joseph and wife,” said Pumblechook, as he took me by the
arm above the elbow, “I am one of them that always go right through with
what they've begun. This boy must be bound, out of hand. That's my way.
Bound out of hand.”

“Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,” said my sister (grasping the
money), “we're deeply beholden to you.”

“Never mind me, Mum,” returned that diabolical cornchandler. “A
pleasure's a pleasure all the world over. But this boy, you know; we
must have him bound. I said I'd see to it--to tell you the truth.”

The Justices were sitting in the Town Hall near at hand, and we at
once went over to have me bound apprentice to Joe in the Magisterial
presence. I say we went over, but I was pushed over by Pumblechook,
exactly as if I had that moment picked a pocket or fired a rick; indeed,
it was the general impression in Court that I had been taken red-handed;
for, as Pumblechook shoved me before him through the crowd, I heard some
people say, “What's he done?” and others, “He's a young 'un, too, but
looks bad, don't he?” One person of mild and benevolent aspect even gave
me a tract ornamented with a woodcut of a malevolent young man fitted
up with a perfect sausage-shop of fetters, and entitled TO BE READ IN MY
CELL.

The Hall was a queer place, I thought, with higher pews in it than a
church,--and with people hanging over the pews looking on,--and with
mighty Justices (one with a powdered head) leaning back in chairs, with
folded arms, or taking snuff, or going to sleep, or writing, or reading
the newspapers,--and with some shining black portraits on the walls,
which my unartistic eye regarded as a composition of hardbake and
sticking-plaster. Here, in a corner my indentures were duly signed and
attested, and I was “bound”; Mr. Pumblechook holding me all the while
as if we had looked in on our way to the scaffold, to have those little
preliminaries disposed of.

When we had come out again, and had got rid of the boys who had been put
into great spirits by the expectation of seeing me publicly tortured,
and who were much disappointed to find that my friends were merely
rallying round me, we went back to Pumblechook's. And there my sister
became so excited by the twenty-five guineas, that nothing would serve
her but we must have a dinner out of that windfall at the Blue Boar, and
that Pumblechook must go over in his chaise-cart, and bring the Hubbles
and Mr. Wopsle.

It was agreed to be done; and a most melancholy day I passed. For,
it inscrutably appeared to stand to reason, in the minds of the whole
company, that I was an excrescence on the entertainment. And to make it
worse, they all asked me from time to time,--in short, whenever they
had nothing else to do,--why I didn't enjoy myself? And what could I
possibly do then, but say I was enjoying myself,--when I wasn't!

However, they were grown up and had their own way, and they made the
most of it. That swindling Pumblechook, exalted into the beneficent
contriver of the whole occasion, actually took the top of the table;
and, when he addressed them on the subject of my being bound, and had
fiendishly congratulated them on my being liable to imprisonment if I
played at cards, drank strong liquors, kept late hours or bad company,
or indulged in other vagaries which the form of my indentures appeared
to contemplate as next to inevitable, he placed me standing on a chair
beside him to illustrate his remarks.

My only other remembrances of the great festival are, That they wouldn't
let me go to sleep, but whenever they saw me dropping off, woke me up
and told me to enjoy myself. That, rather late in the evening Mr. Wopsle
gave us Collins's ode, and threw his bloodstained sword in thunder
down, with such effect, that a waiter came in and said, “The Commercials
underneath sent up their compliments, and it wasn't the Tumblers' Arms.”
 That, they were all in excellent spirits on the road home, and sang, O
Lady Fair! Mr. Wopsle taking the bass, and asserting with a tremendously
strong voice (in reply to the inquisitive bore who leads that piece
of music in a most impertinent manner, by wanting to know all about
everybody's private affairs) that he was the man with his white locks
flowing, and that he was upon the whole the weakest pilgrim going.

Finally, I remember that when I got into my little bedroom, I was truly
wretched, and had a strong conviction on me that I should never like
Joe's trade. I had liked it once, but once was not now.




Chapter XIV

It is a most miserable thing to feel ashamed of home. There may be black
ingratitude in the thing, and the punishment may be retributive and well
deserved; but that it is a miserable thing, I can testify.

Home had never been a very pleasant place to me, because of my sister's
temper. But, Joe had sanctified it, and I had believed in it. I had
believed in the best parlor as a most elegant saloon; I had believed
in the front door, as a mysterious portal of the Temple of State whose
solemn opening was attended with a sacrifice of roast fowls; I had
believed in the kitchen as a chaste though not magnificent apartment;
I had believed in the forge as the glowing road to manhood and
independence. Within a single year all this was changed. Now it was all
coarse and common, and I would not have had Miss Havisham and Estella
see it on any account.

How much of my ungracious condition of mind may have been my own fault,
how much Miss Havisham's, how much my sister's, is now of no moment to
me or to any one. The change was made in me; the thing was done. Well or
ill done, excusably or inexcusably, it was done.

Once, it had seemed to me that when I should at last roll up my
shirt-sleeves and go into the forge, Joe's 'prentice, I should be
distinguished and happy. Now the reality was in my hold, I only felt
that I was dusty with the dust of small-coal, and that I had a weight
upon my daily remembrance to which the anvil was a feather. There have
been occasions in my later life (I suppose as in most lives) when I have
felt for a time as if a thick curtain had fallen on all its interest
and romance, to shut me out from anything save dull endurance any more.
Never has that curtain dropped so heavy and blank, as when my way in
life lay stretched out straight before me through the newly entered road
of apprenticeship to Joe.

I remember that at a later period of my “time,” I used to stand about
the churchyard on Sunday evenings when night was falling, comparing my
own perspective with the windy marsh view, and making out some likeness
between them by thinking how flat and low both were, and how on both
there came an unknown way and a dark mist and then the sea. I was quite
as dejected on the first working-day of my apprenticeship as in that
after-time; but I am glad to know that I never breathed a murmur to Joe
while my indentures lasted. It is about the only thing I am glad to know
of myself in that connection.

For, though it includes what I proceed to add, all the merit of what I
proceed to add was Joe's. It was not because I was faithful, but because
Joe was faithful, that I never ran away and went for a soldier or
a sailor. It was not because I had a strong sense of the virtue of
industry, but because Joe had a strong sense of the virtue of industry,
that I worked with tolerable zeal against the grain. It is not possible
to know how far the influence of any amiable honest-hearted duty-doing
man flies out into the world; but it is very possible to know how it has
touched one's self in going by, and I know right well that any good that
intermixed itself with my apprenticeship came of plain contented Joe,
and not of restlessly aspiring discontented me.

What I wanted, who can say? How can I say, when I never knew? What
I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and
commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one
of the wooden windows of the forge. I was haunted by the fear that she
would, sooner or later, find me out, with a black face and hands, doing
the coarsest part of my work, and would exult over me and despise me.
Often after dark, when I was pulling the bellows for Joe, and we were
singing Old Clem, and when the thought how we used to sing it at Miss
Havisham's would seem to show me Estella's face in the fire, with her
pretty hair fluttering in the wind and her eyes scorning me,--often at
such a time I would look towards those panels of black night in the wall
which the wooden windows then were, and would fancy that I saw her just
drawing her face away, and would believe that she had come at last.

After that, when we went into supper, the place and the meal would have
a more homely look than ever, and I would feel more ashamed of home than
ever, in my own ungracious breast.




Chapter XV

As I was getting too big for Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt's room, my
education under that preposterous female terminated. Not, however, until
Biddy had imparted to me everything she knew, from the little catalogue
of prices, to a comic song she had once bought for a half-penny.
Although the only coherent part of the latter piece of literature were
the opening lines.

     When I went to Lunnon town sirs,
     Too rul loo rul
     Too rul loo rul
     Wasn't I done very brown sirs?
     Too rul loo rul
     Too rul loo rul

--still, in my desire to be wiser, I got this composition by heart with the utmost gravity; nor do I recollect that I questioned its merit, except that I
thought (as I still do) the amount of Too rul somewhat in excess of the
poetry. In my hunger for information, I made proposals to Mr. Wopsle to
bestow some intellectual crumbs upon me, with which he kindly complied.
As it turned out, however, that he only wanted me for a dramatic
lay-figure, to be contradicted and embraced and wept over and bullied
and clutched and stabbed and knocked about in a variety of ways, I soon
declined that course of instruction; though not until Mr. Wopsle in his
poetic fury had severely mauled me.

Whatever I acquired, I tried to impart to Joe. This statement sounds so
well, that I cannot in my conscience let it pass unexplained. I wanted
to make Joe less ignorant and common, that he might be worthier of my
society and less open to Estella's reproach.

The old Battery out on the marshes was our place of study, and a broken
slate and a short piece of slate-pencil were our educational implements:
to which Joe always added a pipe of tobacco. I never knew Joe to
remember anything from one Sunday to another, or to acquire, under my
tuition, any piece of information whatever. Yet he would smoke his pipe
at the Battery with a far more sagacious air than anywhere else,--even
with a learned air,--as if he considered himself to be advancing
immensely. Dear fellow, I hope he did.

It was pleasant and quiet, out there with the sails on the river passing
beyond the earthwork, and sometimes, when the tide was low, looking
as if they belonged to sunken ships that were still sailing on at the
bottom of the water. Whenever I watched the vessels standing out to sea
with their white sails spread, I somehow thought of Miss Havisham and
Estella; and whenever the light struck aslant, afar off, upon a cloud
or sail or green hillside or water-line, it was just the same.--Miss
Havisham and Estella and the strange house and the strange life appeared
to have something to do with everything that was picturesque.

One Sunday when Joe, greatly enjoying his pipe, had so plumed himself on
being “most awful dull,” that I had given him up for the day, I lay on
the earthwork for some time with my chin on my hand, descrying traces of
Miss Havisham and Estella all over the prospect, in the sky and in the
water, until at last I resolved to mention a thought concerning them
that had been much in my head.

“Joe,” said I; “don't you think I ought to make Miss Havisham a visit?”

“Well, Pip,” returned Joe, slowly considering. “What for?”

“What for, Joe? What is any visit made for?”

“There is some wisits p'r'aps,” said Joe, “as for ever remains open to
the question, Pip. But in regard to wisiting Miss Havisham. She might
think you wanted something,--expected something of her.”

“Don't you think I might say that I did not, Joe?”

“You might, old chap,” said Joe. “And she might credit it. Similarly she
mightn't.”

Joe felt, as I did, that he had made a point there, and he pulled hard
at his pipe to keep himself from weakening it by repetition.

“You see, Pip,” Joe pursued, as soon as he was past that danger, “Miss
Havisham done the handsome thing by you. When Miss Havisham done the
handsome thing by you, she called me back to say to me as that were
all.”

“Yes, Joe. I heard her.”

“ALL,” Joe repeated, very emphatically.

“Yes, Joe. I tell you, I heard her.”

“Which I meantersay, Pip, it might be that her meaning were,--Make a
end on it!--As you was!--Me to the North, and you to the South!--Keep in
sunders!”

I had thought of that too, and it was very far from comforting to me
to find that he had thought of it; for it seemed to render it more
probable.

“But, Joe.”

“Yes, old chap.”

“Here am I, getting on in the first year of my time, and, since the day
of my being bound, I have never thanked Miss Havisham, or asked after
her, or shown that I remember her.”

“That's true, Pip; and unless you was to turn her out a set of shoes
all four round,--and which I meantersay as even a set of shoes all
four round might not be acceptable as a present, in a total wacancy of
hoofs--”

“I don't mean that sort of remembrance, Joe; I don't mean a present.”

But Joe had got the idea of a present in his head and must harp upon it.
“Or even,” said he, “if you was helped to knocking her up a new chain
for the front door,--or say a gross or two of shark-headed screws for
general use,--or some light fancy article, such as a toasting-fork
when she took her muffins,--or a gridiron when she took a sprat or such
like--”

“I don't mean any present at all, Joe,” I interposed.

“Well,” said Joe, still harping on it as though I had particularly
pressed it, “if I was yourself, Pip, I wouldn't. No, I would not. For
what's a door-chain when she's got one always up? And shark-headers is
open to misrepresentations. And if it was a toasting-fork, you'd go into
brass and do yourself no credit. And the oncommonest workman can't show
himself oncommon in a gridiron,--for a gridiron IS a gridiron,” said
Joe, steadfastly impressing it upon me, as if he were endeavouring to
rouse me from a fixed delusion, “and you may haim at what you like, but
a gridiron it will come out, either by your leave or again your leave,
and you can't help yourself--”

“My dear Joe,” I cried, in desperation, taking hold of his coat, “don't
go on in that way. I never thought of making Miss Havisham any present.”

“No, Pip,” Joe assented, as if he had been contending for that, all
along; “and what I say to you is, you are right, Pip.”

“Yes, Joe; but what I wanted to say, was, that as we are rather slack
just now, if you would give me a half-holiday to-morrow, I think I would
go uptown and make a call on Miss Est--Havisham.”

“Which her name,” said Joe, gravely, “ain't Estavisham, Pip, unless she
have been rechris'ened.”

“I know, Joe, I know. It was a slip of mine. What do you think of it,
Joe?”

In brief, Joe thought that if I thought well of it, he thought well of
it. But, he was particular in stipulating that if I were not received
with cordiality, or if I were not encouraged to repeat my visit as a
visit which had no ulterior object but was simply one of gratitude for a
favor received, then this experimental trip should have no successor. By
these conditions I promised to abide.

Now, Joe kept a journeyman at weekly wages whose name was Orlick.
He pretended that his Christian name was Dolge,--a clear
Impossibility,--but he was a fellow of that obstinate disposition that I
believe him to have been the prey of no delusion in this particular, but
wilfully to have imposed that name upon the village as an affront to its
understanding. He was a broadshouldered loose-limbed swarthy fellow of
great strength, never in a hurry, and always slouching. He never even
seemed to come to his work on purpose, but would slouch in as if by mere
accident; and when he went to the Jolly Bargemen to eat his dinner, or
went away at night, he would slouch out, like Cain or the Wandering Jew,
as if he had no idea where he was going and no intention of ever
coming back. He lodged at a sluice-keeper's out on the marshes, and on
working-days would come slouching from his hermitage, with his hands in
his pockets and his dinner loosely tied in a bundle round his neck
and dangling on his back. On Sundays he mostly lay all day on the
sluice-gates, or stood against ricks and barns. He always slouched,
locomotively, with his eyes on the ground; and, when accosted or
otherwise required to raise them, he looked up in a half-resentful,
half-puzzled way, as though the only thought he ever had was, that it
was rather an odd and injurious fact that he should never be thinking.

This morose journeyman had no liking for me. When I was very small and
timid, he gave me to understand that the Devil lived in a black corner
of the forge, and that he knew the fiend very well: also that it was
necessary to make up the fire, once in seven years, with a live boy, and
that I might consider myself fuel. When I became Joe's 'prentice, Orlick
was perhaps confirmed in some suspicion that I should displace him;
howbeit, he liked me still less. Not that he ever said anything, or did
anything, openly importing hostility; I only noticed that he always beat
his sparks in my direction, and that whenever I sang Old Clem, he came
in out of time.

Dolge Orlick was at work and present, next day, when I reminded Joe of
my half-holiday. He said nothing at the moment, for he and Joe had just
got a piece of hot iron between them, and I was at the bellows; but by
and by he said, leaning on his hammer,--

“Now, master! Sure you're not a going to favor only one of us. If Young
Pip has a half-holiday, do as much for Old Orlick.” I suppose he was
about five-and-twenty, but he usually spoke of himself as an ancient
person.

“Why, what'll you do with a half-holiday, if you get it?” said Joe.

“What'll I do with it! What'll he do with it? I'll do as much with it as
him,” said Orlick.

“As to Pip, he's going up town,” said Joe.

“Well then, as to Old Orlick, he's a going up town,” retorted that
worthy. “Two can go up town. Tain't only one wot can go up town.

“Don't lose your temper,” said Joe.

“Shall if I like,” growled Orlick. “Some and their uptowning! Now,
master! Come. No favoring in this shop. Be a man!”

The master refusing to entertain the subject until the journeyman was in
a better temper, Orlick plunged at the furnace, drew out a red-hot
bar, made at me with it as if he were going to run it through my body,
whisked it round my head, laid it on the anvil, hammered it out,--as
if it were I, I thought, and the sparks were my spirting blood,--and
finally said, when he had hammered himself hot and the iron cold, and he
again leaned on his hammer,--

“Now, master!”

“Are you all right now?” demanded Joe.

“Ah! I am all right,” said gruff Old Orlick.

“Then, as in general you stick to your work as well as most men,” said
Joe, “let it be a half-holiday for all.”

My sister had been standing silent in the yard, within hearing,--she was
a most unscrupulous spy and listener,--and she instantly looked in at
one of the windows.

“Like you, you fool!” said she to Joe, “giving holidays to great idle
hulkers like that. You are a rich man, upon my life, to waste wages in
that way. I wish I was his master!”

“You'd be everybody's master, if you durst,” retorted Orlick, with an
ill-favored grin.

(“Let her alone,” said Joe.)

“I'd be a match for all noodles and all rogues,” returned my sister,
beginning to work herself into a mighty rage. “And I couldn't be a
match for the noodles, without being a match for your master, who's the
dunder-headed king of the noodles. And I couldn't be a match for the
rogues, without being a match for you, who are the blackest-looking and
the worst rogue between this and France. Now!”

“You're a foul shrew, Mother Gargery,” growled the journeyman. “If that
makes a judge of rogues, you ought to be a good'un.”

(“Let her alone, will you?” said Joe.)

“What did you say?” cried my sister, beginning to scream. “What did you
say? What did that fellow Orlick say to me, Pip? What did he call me,
with my husband standing by? Oh! oh! oh!” Each of these exclamations was
a shriek; and I must remark of my sister, what is equally true of all
the violent women I have ever seen, that passion was no excuse for
her, because it is undeniable that instead of lapsing into passion, she
consciously and deliberately took extraordinary pains to force herself
into it, and became blindly furious by regular stages; “what was the
name he gave me before the base man who swore to defend me? Oh! Hold me!
Oh!”

“Ah-h-h!” growled the journeyman, between his teeth, “I'd hold you, if
you was my wife. I'd hold you under the pump, and choke it out of you.”

(“I tell you, let her alone,” said Joe.)

“Oh! To hear him!” cried my sister, with a clap of her hands and a
scream together,--which was her next stage. “To hear the names he's
giving me! That Orlick! In my own house! Me, a married woman! With my
husband standing by! Oh! Oh!” Here my sister, after a fit of clappings
and screamings, beat her hands upon her bosom and upon her knees, and
threw her cap off, and pulled her hair down,--which were the last stages
on her road to frenzy. Being by this time a perfect Fury and a complete
success, she made a dash at the door which I had fortunately locked.

What could the wretched Joe do now, after his disregarded parenthetical
interruptions, but stand up to his journeyman, and ask him what he meant
by interfering betwixt himself and Mrs. Joe; and further whether he was
man enough to come on? Old Orlick felt that the situation admitted of
nothing less than coming on, and was on his defence straightway; so,
without so much as pulling off their singed and burnt aprons, they went
at one another, like two giants. But, if any man in that neighborhood
could stand uplong against Joe, I never saw the man. Orlick, as if he
had been of no more account than the pale young gentleman, was very
soon among the coal-dust, and in no hurry to come out of it. Then Joe
unlocked the door and picked up my sister, who had dropped insensible
at the window (but who had seen the fight first, I think), and who was
carried into the house and laid down, and who was recommended to revive,
and would do nothing but struggle and clench her hands in Joe's hair.
Then, came that singular calm and silence which succeed all uproars; and
then, with the vague sensation which I have always connected with such
a lull,--namely, that it was Sunday, and somebody was dead,--I went upstairs
to dress myself.

When I came down again, I found Joe and Orlick sweeping up, without any
other traces of discomposure than a slit in one of Orlick's nostrils,
which was neither expressive nor ornamental. A pot of beer had appeared
from the Jolly Bargemen, and they were sharing it by turns in a
peaceable manner. The lull had a sedative and philosophical influence on
Joe, who followed me out into the road to say, as a parting observation
that might do me good, “On the Rampage, Pip, and off the Rampage,
Pip:--such is Life!”

With what absurd emotions (for we think the feelings that are very
serious in a man quite comical in a boy) I found myself again going to
Miss Havisham's, matters little here. Nor, how I passed and repassed
the gate many times before I could make up my mind to ring. Nor, how
I debated whether I should go away without ringing; nor, how I should
undoubtedly have gone, if my time had been my own, to come back.

Miss Sarah Pocket came to the gate. No Estella.

“How, then? You here again?” said Miss Pocket. “What do you want?”

When I said that I only came to see how Miss Havisham was, Sarah
evidently deliberated whether or no she should send me about my
business. But unwilling to hazard the responsibility, she let me in, and
presently brought the sharp message that I was to “come up.”

Everything was unchanged, and Miss Havisham was alone.

“Well?” said she, fixing her eyes upon me. “I hope you want nothing?
You'll get nothing.”

“No indeed, Miss Havisham. I only wanted you to know that I am doing
very well in my apprenticeship, and am always much obliged to you.”

“There, there!” with the old restless fingers. “Come now and then; come
on your birthday.--Ay!” she cried suddenly, turning herself and her
chair towards me, “You are looking round for Estella? Hey?”

I had been looking round,--in fact, for Estella,--and I stammered that I
hoped she was well.

“Abroad,” said Miss Havisham; “educating for a lady; far out of reach;
prettier than ever; admired by all who see her. Do you feel that you
have lost her?”

There was such a malignant enjoyment in her utterance of the last words,
and she broke into such a disagreeable laugh, that I was at a loss what
to say. She spared me the trouble of considering, by dismissing me. When
the gate was closed upon me by Sarah of the walnut-shell countenance, I
felt more than ever dissatisfied with my home and with my trade and with
everything; and that was all I took by that motion.

As I was loitering along the High Street, looking in disconsolately at
the shop windows, and thinking what I would buy if I were a gentleman,
who should come out of the bookshop but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in
his hand the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in which he had that
moment invested sixpence, with the view of heaping every word of it on
the head of Pumblechook, with whom he was going to drink tea. No sooner
did he see me, than he appeared to consider that a special Providence
had put a 'prentice in his way to be read at; and he laid hold of me,
and insisted on my accompanying him to the Pumblechookian parlor. As I
knew it would be miserable at home, and as the nights were dark and the
way was dreary, and almost any companionship on the road was better
than none, I made no great resistance; consequently, we turned into
Pumblechook's just as the street and the shops were lighting up.

As I never assisted at any other representation of George Barnwell, I
don't know how long it may usually take; but I know very well that it
took until half-past nine o' clock that night, and that when Mr. Wopsle
got into Newgate, I thought he never would go to the scaffold, he became
so much slower than at any former period of his disgraceful career. I
thought it a little too much that he should complain of being cut short
in his flower after all, as if he had not been running to seed, leaf
after leaf, ever since his course began. This, however, was a
mere question of length and wearisomeness. What stung me, was the
identification of the whole affair with my unoffending self. When
Barnwell began to go wrong, I declare that I felt positively apologetic,
Pumblechook's indignant stare so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took
pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I
was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever;
Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer
monomania in my master's daughter to care a button for me; and all I can
say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is,
that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after
I was happily hanged and Wopsle had closed the book, Pumblechook sat
staring at me, and shaking his head, and saying, “Take warning, boy,
take warning!” as if it were a well-known fact that I contemplated
murdering a near relation, provided I could only induce one to have the
weakness to become my benefactor.

It was a very dark night when it was all over, and when I set out with
Mr. Wopsle on the walk home. Beyond town, we found a heavy mist out, and
it fell wet and thick. The turnpike lamp was a blur, quite out of the
lamp's usual place apparently, and its rays looked solid substance on
the fog. We were noticing this, and saying how that the mist rose with a
change of wind from a certain quarter of our marshes, when we came upon
a man, slouching under the lee of the turnpike house.

“Halloa!” we said, stopping. “Orlick there?”

“Ah!” he answered, slouching out. “I was standing by a minute, on the
chance of company.”

“You are late,” I remarked.

Orlick not unnaturally answered, “Well? And you're late.”

“We have been,” said Mr. Wopsle, exalted with his late performance,--“we
have been indulging, Mr. Orlick, in an intellectual evening.”

Old Orlick growled, as if he had nothing to say about that, and we all
went on together. I asked him presently whether he had been spending his
half-holiday up and down town?

“Yes,” said he, “all of it. I come in behind yourself. I didn't see you,
but I must have been pretty close behind you. By the by, the guns is
going again.”

“At the Hulks?” said I.

“Ay! There's some of the birds flown from the cages. The guns have been
going since dark, about. You'll hear one presently.”

In effect, we had not walked many yards further, when the
well-remembered boom came towards us, deadened by the mist, and heavily
rolled away along the low grounds by the river, as if it were pursuing
and threatening the fugitives.

“A good night for cutting off in,” said Orlick. “We'd be puzzled how to
bring down a jail-bird on the wing, to-night.”

The subject was a suggestive one to me, and I thought about it in
silence. Mr. Wopsle, as the ill-requited uncle of the evening's tragedy,
fell to meditating aloud in his garden at Camberwell. Orlick, with his
hands in his pockets, slouched heavily at my side. It was very dark,
very wet, very muddy, and so we splashed along. Now and then, the sound
of the signal cannon broke upon us again, and again rolled sulkily along
the course of the river. I kept myself to myself and my thoughts. Mr.
Wopsle died amiably at Camberwell, and exceedingly game on Bosworth
Field, and in the greatest agonies at Glastonbury. Orlick sometimes
growled, “Beat it out, beat it out,--Old Clem! With a clink for the
stout,--Old Clem!” I thought he had been drinking, but he was not drunk.

Thus, we came to the village. The way by which we approached it took us
past the Three Jolly Bargemen, which we were surprised to find--it being
eleven o'clock--in a state of commotion, with the door wide open, and
unwonted lights that had been hastily caught up and put down scattered
about. Mr. Wopsle dropped into ask what was the matter (surmising that
a convict had been taken), but came running out in a great hurry.

“There's something wrong,” said he, without stopping, “up at your place,
Pip. Run all!”

“What is it?” I asked, keeping up with him. So did Orlick, at my side.

“I can't quite understand. The house seems to have been violently
entered when Joe Gargery was out. Supposed by convicts. Somebody has
been attacked and hurt.”

We were running too fast to admit of more being said, and we made no
stop until we got into our kitchen. It was full of people; the whole
village was there, or in the yard; and there was a surgeon, and there
was Joe, and there were a group of women, all on the floor in the midst
of the kitchen. The unemployed bystanders drew back when they saw me,
and so I became aware of my sister,--lying without sense or movement on
the bare boards where she had been knocked down by a tremendous blow
on the back of the head, dealt by some unknown hand when her face was
turned towards the fire,--destined never to be on the Rampage again,
while she was the wife of Joe.




Chapter XVI

With my head full of George Barnwell, I was at first disposed to believe
that I must have had some hand in the attack upon my sister, or at
all events that as her near relation, popularly known to be under
obligations to her, I was a more legitimate object of suspicion than
any one else. But when, in the clearer light of next morning, I began to
reconsider the matter and to hear it discussed around me on all sides, I
took another view of the case, which was more reasonable.

Joe had been at the Three Jolly Bargemen, smoking his pipe, from a
quarter after eight o'clock to a quarter before ten. While he was there,
my sister had been seen standing at the kitchen door, and had exchanged
Good Night with a farm-laborer going home. The man could not be more
particular as to the time at which he saw her (he got into dense
confusion when he tried to be), than that it must have been before nine.
When Joe went home at five minutes before ten, he found her struck down
on the floor, and promptly called in assistance. The fire had not then
burnt unusually low, nor was the snuff of the candle very long; the
candle, however, had been blown out.

Nothing had been taken away from any part of the house. Neither, beyond
the blowing out of the candle,--which stood on a table between the door
and my sister, and was behind her when she stood facing the fire and was
struck,--was there any disarrangement of the kitchen, excepting such
as she herself had made, in falling and bleeding. But, there was one
remarkable piece of evidence on the spot. She had been struck with
something blunt and heavy, on the head and spine; after the blows were
dealt, something heavy had been thrown down at her with considerable
violence, as she lay on her face. And on the ground beside her, when Joe
picked her up, was a convict's leg-iron which had been filed asunder.

Now, Joe, examining this iron with a smith's eye, declared it to have
been filed asunder some time ago. The hue and cry going off to the
Hulks, and people coming thence to examine the iron, Joe's opinion
was corroborated. They did not undertake to say when it had left the
prison-ships to which it undoubtedly had once belonged; but they claimed
to know for certain that that particular manacle had not been worn by
either of the two convicts who had escaped last night. Further, one of
those two was already retaken, and had not freed himself of his iron.

Knowing what I knew, I set up an inference of my own here. I believed
the iron to be my convict's iron,--the iron I had seen and heard him
filing at, on the marshes,--but my mind did not accuse him of having put
it to its latest use. For I believed one of two other persons to have
become possessed of it, and to have turned it to this cruel account.
Either Orlick, or the strange man who had shown me the file.

Now, as to Orlick; he had gone to town exactly as he told us when we
picked him up at the turnpike, he had been seen about town all the
evening, he had been in divers companies in several public-houses, and
he had come back with myself and Mr. Wopsle. There was nothing against
him, save the quarrel; and my sister had quarrelled with him, and with
everybody else about her, ten thousand times. As to the strange man; if
he had come back for his two bank-notes there could have been no dispute
about them, because my sister was fully prepared to restore them.
Besides, there had been no altercation; the assailant had come in so
silently and suddenly, that she had been felled before she could look
round.

It was horrible to think that I had provided the weapon, however
undesignedly, but I could hardly think otherwise. I suffered unspeakable
trouble while I considered and reconsidered whether I should at last
dissolve that spell of my childhood and tell Joe all the story. For
months afterwards, I every day settled the question finally in the
negative, and reopened and reargued it next morning. The contention
came, after all, to this;--the secret was such an old one now, had so
grown into me and become a part of myself, that I could not tear it
away. In addition to the dread that, having led up to so much mischief,
it would be now more likely than ever to alienate Joe from me if he
believed it, I had a further restraining dread that he would not believe
it, but would assort it with the fabulous dogs and veal-cutlets as a
monstrous invention. However, I temporized with myself, of course--for,
was I not wavering between right and wrong, when the thing is always
done?--and resolved to make a full disclosure if I should see any
such new occasion as a new chance of helping in the discovery of the
assailant.

The Constables and the Bow Street men from London--for, this happened in
the days of the extinct red-waistcoated police--were about the house for
a week or two, and did pretty much what I have heard and read of like
authorities doing in other such cases. They took up several obviously
wrong people, and they ran their heads very hard against wrong ideas,
and persisted in trying to fit the circumstances to the ideas, instead
of trying to extract ideas from the circumstances. Also, they stood
about the door of the Jolly Bargemen, with knowing and reserved looks
that filled the whole neighborhood with admiration; and they had a
mysterious manner of taking their drink, that was almost as good as
taking the culprit. But not quite, for they never did it.

Long after these constitutional powers had dispersed, my sister lay very
ill in bed. Her sight was disturbed, so that she saw objects multiplied,
and grasped at visionary teacups and wineglasses instead of the
realities; her hearing was greatly impaired; her memory also; and her
speech was unintelligible. When, at last, she came round so far as to
be helped downstairs, it was still necessary to keep my slate always by
her, that she might indicate in writing what she could not indicate in
speech. As she was (very bad handwriting apart) a more than indifferent
speller, and as Joe was a more than indifferent reader, extraordinary
complications arose between them which I was always called in to solve.
The administration of mutton instead of medicine, the substitution of
Tea for Joe, and the baker for bacon, were among the mildest of my own
mistakes.

However, her temper was greatly improved, and she was patient. A
tremulous uncertainty of the action of all her limbs soon became a
part of her regular state, and afterwards, at intervals of two or three
months, she would often put her hands to her head, and would then remain
for about a week at a time in some gloomy aberration of mind. We were
at a loss to find a suitable attendant for her, until a circumstance
happened conveniently to relieve us. Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt conquered a
confirmed habit of living into which she had fallen, and Biddy became a
part of our establishment.

It may have been about a month after my sister's reappearance in the
kitchen, when Biddy came to us with a small speckled box containing the
whole of her worldly effects, and became a blessing to the household.
Above all, she was a blessing to Joe, for the dear old fellow was sadly
cut up by the constant contemplation of the wreck of his wife, and had
been accustomed, while attending on her of an evening, to turn to me
every now and then and say, with his blue eyes moistened, “Such a fine
figure of a woman as she once were, Pip!” Biddy instantly taking the
cleverest charge of her as though she had studied her from infancy; Joe
became able in some sort to appreciate the greater quiet of his life,
and to get down to the Jolly Bargemen now and then for a change that did
him good. It was characteristic of the police people that they had all
more or less suspected poor Joe (though he never knew it), and that they
had to a man concurred in regarding him as one of the deepest spirits
they had ever encountered.

Biddy's first triumph in her new office, was to solve a difficulty
that had completely vanquished me. I had tried hard at it, but had made
nothing of it. Thus it was:--

Again and again and again, my sister had traced upon the slate, a
character that looked like a curious T, and then with the utmost
eagerness had called our attention to it as something she particularly
wanted. I had in vain tried everything producible that began with a T,
from tar to toast and tub. At length it had come into my head that the
sign looked like a hammer, and on my lustily calling that word in my
sister's ear, she had begun to hammer on the table and had expressed a
qualified assent. Thereupon, I had brought in all our hammers, one after
another, but without avail. Then I bethought me of a crutch, the shape
being much the same, and I borrowed one in the village, and displayed
it to my sister with considerable confidence. But she shook her head to
that extent when she was shown it, that we were terrified lest in her
weak and shattered state she should dislocate her neck.

When my sister found that Biddy was very quick to understand her, this
mysterious sign reappeared on the slate. Biddy looked thoughtfully
at it, heard my explanation, looked thoughtfully at my sister, looked
thoughtfully at Joe (who was always represented on the slate by his
initial letter), and ran into the forge, followed by Joe and me.

“Why, of course!” cried Biddy, with an exultant face. “Don't you see?
It's him!”

Orlick, without a doubt! She had lost his name, and could only signify
him by his hammer. We told him why we wanted him to come into the
kitchen, and he slowly laid down his hammer, wiped his brow with his
arm, took another wipe at it with his apron, and came slouching
out, with a curious loose vagabond bend in the knees that strongly
distinguished him.

I confess that I expected to see my sister denounce him, and that I
was disappointed by the different result. She manifested the greatest
anxiety to be on good terms with him, was evidently much pleased by his
being at length produced, and motioned that she would have him
given something to drink. She watched his countenance as if she were
particularly wishful to be assured that he took kindly to his reception,
she showed every possible desire to conciliate him, and there was an air
of humble propitiation in all she did, such as I have seen pervade the
bearing of a child towards a hard master. After that day, a day rarely
passed without her drawing the hammer on her slate, and without Orlick's
slouching in and standing doggedly before her, as if he knew no more
than I did what to make of it.




Chapter XVII

I now fell into a regular routine of apprenticeship life, which was
varied beyond the limits of the village and the marshes, by no more
remarkable circumstance than the arrival of my birthday and my paying
another visit to Miss Havisham. I found Miss Sarah Pocket still on duty
at the gate; I found Miss Havisham just as I had left her, and she spoke
of Estella in the very same way, if not in the very same words. The
interview lasted but a few minutes, and she gave me a guinea when I was
going, and told me to come again on my next birthday. I may mention at
once that this became an annual custom. I tried to decline taking the
guinea on the first occasion, but with no better effect than causing her
to ask me very angrily, if I expected more? Then, and after that, I took
it.

So unchanging was the dull old house, the yellow light in the darkened
room, the faded spectre in the chair by the dressing-table glass, that
I felt as if the stopping of the clocks had stopped Time in that
mysterious place, and, while I and everything else outside it grew
older, it stood still. Daylight never entered the house as to my
thoughts and remembrances of it, any more than as to the actual fact. It
bewildered me, and under its influence I continued at heart to hate my
trade and to be ashamed of home.

Imperceptibly I became conscious of a change in Biddy, however. Her
shoes came up at the heel, her hair grew bright and neat, her hands were
always clean. She was not beautiful,--she was common, and could not be
like Estella,--but she was pleasant and wholesome and sweet-tempered.
She had not been with us more than a year (I remember her being newly
out of mourning at the time it struck me), when I observed to myself one
evening that she had curiously thoughtful and attentive eyes; eyes that
were very pretty and very good.

It came of my lifting up my own eyes from a task I was poring
at--writing some passages from a book, to improve myself in two ways at
once by a sort of stratagem--and seeing Biddy observant of what I was
about. I laid down my pen, and Biddy stopped in her needlework without
laying it down.

“Biddy,” said I, “how do you manage it? Either I am very stupid, or you
are very clever.”

“What is it that I manage? I don't know,” returned Biddy, smiling.

She managed our whole domestic life, and wonderfully too; but I did not
mean that, though that made what I did mean more surprising.

“How do you manage, Biddy,” said I, “to learn everything that I learn,
and always to keep up with me?” I was beginning to be rather vain of
my knowledge, for I spent my birthday guineas on it, and set aside the
greater part of my pocket-money for similar investment; though I have no
doubt, now, that the little I knew was extremely dear at the price.

“I might as well ask you,” said Biddy, “how you manage?”

“No; because when I come in from the forge of a night, any one can see
me turning to at it. But you never turn to at it, Biddy.”

“I suppose I must catch it like a cough,” said Biddy, quietly; and went
on with her sewing.

Pursuing my idea as I leaned back in my wooden chair, and looked at
Biddy sewing away with her head on one side, I began to think her rather
an extraordinary girl. For I called to mind now, that she was equally
accomplished in the terms of our trade, and the names of our different
sorts of work, and our various tools. In short, whatever I knew, Biddy
knew. Theoretically, she was already as good a blacksmith as I, or
better.

“You are one of those, Biddy,” said I, “who make the most of every
chance. You never had a chance before you came here, and see how
improved you are!”

Biddy looked at me for an instant, and went on with her sewing. “I was
your first teacher though; wasn't I?” said she, as she sewed.

“Biddy!” I exclaimed, in amazement. “Why, you are crying!”

“No I am not,” said Biddy, looking up and laughing. “What put that in
your head?”

What could have put it in my head but the glistening of a tear as it
dropped on her work? I sat silent, recalling what a drudge she had been
until Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt successfully overcame that bad habit of
living, so highly desirable to be got rid of by some people. I recalled
the hopeless circumstances by which she had been surrounded in the
miserable little shop and the miserable little noisy evening school,
with that miserable old bundle of incompetence always to be dragged and
shouldered. I reflected that even in those untoward times there must
have been latent in Biddy what was now developing, for, in my first
uneasiness and discontent I had turned to her for help, as a matter of
course. Biddy sat quietly sewing, shedding no more tears, and while I
looked at her and thought about it all, it occurred to me that perhaps
I had not been sufficiently grateful to Biddy. I might have been too
reserved, and should have patronized her more (though I did not use that
precise word in my meditations) with my confidence.

“Yes, Biddy,” I observed, when I had done turning it over, “you were my
first teacher, and that at a time when we little thought of ever being
together like this, in this kitchen.”

“Ah, poor thing!” replied Biddy. It was like her self-forgetfulness to
transfer the remark to my sister, and to get up and be busy about her,
making her more comfortable; “that's sadly true!”

“Well!” said I, “we must talk together a little more, as we used to do.
And I must consult you a little more, as I used to do. Let us have a
quiet walk on the marshes next Sunday, Biddy, and a long chat.”

My sister was never left alone now; but Joe more than readily undertook
the care of her on that Sunday afternoon, and Biddy and I went out
together. It was summer-time, and lovely weather. When we had passed the
village and the church and the churchyard, and were out on the marshes
and began to see the sails of the ships as they sailed on, I began to
combine Miss Havisham and Estella with the prospect, in my usual way.
When we came to the river-side and sat down on the bank, with the water
rippling at our feet, making it all more quiet than it would have been
without that sound, I resolved that it was a good time and place for the
admission of Biddy into my inner confidence.

“Biddy,” said I, after binding her to secrecy, “I want to be a
gentleman.”

“O, I wouldn't, if I was you!” she returned. “I don't think it would
answer.”

“Biddy,” said I, with some severity, “I have particular reasons for
wanting to be a gentleman.”

“You know best, Pip; but don't you think you are happier as you are?”

“Biddy,” I exclaimed, impatiently, “I am not at all happy as I am. I
am disgusted with my calling and with my life. I have never taken to
either, since I was bound. Don't be absurd.”

“Was I absurd?” said Biddy, quietly raising her eyebrows; “I am sorry
for that; I didn't mean to be. I only want you to do well, and to be
comfortable.”

“Well, then, understand once for all that I never shall or can be
comfortable--or anything but miserable--there, Biddy!--unless I can lead
a very different sort of life from the life I lead now.”

“That's a pity!” said Biddy, shaking her head with a sorrowful air.

Now, I too had so often thought it a pity, that, in the singular kind of
quarrel with myself which I was always carrying on, I was half inclined
to shed tears of vexation and distress when Biddy gave utterance to her
sentiment and my own. I told her she was right, and I knew it was much
to be regretted, but still it was not to be helped.

“If I could have settled down,” I said to Biddy, plucking up the short
grass within reach, much as I had once upon a time pulled my feelings
out of my hair and kicked them into the brewery wall,--“if I could have
settled down and been but half as fond of the forge as I was when I was
little, I know it would have been much better for me. You and I and Joe
would have wanted nothing then, and Joe and I would perhaps have gone
partners when I was out of my time, and I might even have grown up to
keep company with you, and we might have sat on this very bank on a fine
Sunday, quite different people. I should have been good enough for you;
shouldn't I, Biddy?”

Biddy sighed as she looked at the ships sailing on, and returned for
answer, “Yes; I am not over-particular.” It scarcely sounded flattering,
but I knew she meant well.

“Instead of that,” said I, plucking up more grass and chewing a blade or
two, “see how I am going on. Dissatisfied, and uncomfortable, and--what
would it signify to me, being coarse and common, if nobody had told me
so!”

Biddy turned her face suddenly towards mine, and looked far more
attentively at me than she had looked at the sailing ships.

“It was neither a very true nor a very polite thing to say,” she
remarked, directing her eyes to the ships again. “Who said it?”

I was disconcerted, for I had broken away without quite seeing where
I was going to. It was not to be shuffled off now, however, and I
answered, “The beautiful young lady at Miss Havisham's, and she's more
beautiful than anybody ever was, and I admire her dreadfully, and I want
to be a gentleman on her account.” Having made this lunatic confession,
I began to throw my torn-up grass into the river, as if I had some
thoughts of following it.

“Do you want to be a gentleman, to spite her or to gain her over?” Biddy
quietly asked me, after a pause.

“I don't know,” I moodily answered.

“Because, if it is to spite her,” Biddy pursued, “I should think--but
you know best--that might be better and more independently done by
caring nothing for her words. And if it is to gain her over, I should
think--but you know best--she was not worth gaining over.”

Exactly what I myself had thought, many times. Exactly what was
perfectly manifest to me at the moment. But how could I, a poor dazed
village lad, avoid that wonderful inconsistency into which the best and
wisest of men fall every day?

“It may be all quite true,” said I to Biddy, “but I admire her
dreadfully.”

In short, I turned over on my face when I came to that, and got a good
grasp on the hair on each side of my head, and wrenched it well. All the
while knowing the madness of my heart to be so very mad and misplaced,
that I was quite conscious it would have served my face right, if I
had lifted it up by my hair, and knocked it against the pebbles as a
punishment for belonging to such an idiot.

Biddy was the wisest of girls, and she tried to reason no more with me.
She put her hand, which was a comfortable hand though roughened by work,
upon my hands, one after another, and gently took them out of my hair.
Then she softly patted my shoulder in a soothing way, while with my face
upon my sleeve I cried a little,--exactly as I had done in the brewery
yard,--and felt vaguely convinced that I was very much ill-used by
somebody, or by everybody; I can't say which.

“I am glad of one thing,” said Biddy, “and that is, that you have felt
you could give me your confidence, Pip. And I am glad of another thing,
and that is, that of course you know you may depend upon my keeping it
and always so far deserving it. If your first teacher (dear! such a poor
one, and so much in need of being taught herself!) had been your teacher
at the present time, she thinks she knows what lesson she would set. But
it would be a hard one to learn, and you have got beyond her, and it's
of no use now.” So, with a quiet sigh for me, Biddy rose from the bank,
and said, with a fresh and pleasant change of voice, “Shall we walk a
little farther, or go home?”

“Biddy,” I cried, getting up, putting my arm round her neck, and giving
her a kiss, “I shall always tell you everything.”

“Till you're a gentleman,” said Biddy.

“You know I never shall be, so that's always. Not that I have any
occasion to tell you anything, for you know everything I know,--as I
told you at home the other night.”

“Ah!” said Biddy, quite in a whisper, as she looked away at the ships.
And then repeated, with her former pleasant change, “shall we walk a
little farther, or go home?”

I said to Biddy we would walk a little farther, and we did so, and the
summer afternoon toned down into the summer evening, and it was very
beautiful. I began to consider whether I was not more naturally and
wholesomely situated, after all, in these circumstances, than playing
beggar my neighbor by candle-light in the room with the stopped clocks,
and being despised by Estella. I thought it would be very good for me if
I could get her out of my head, with all the rest of those remembrances
and fancies, and could go to work determined to relish what I had to do,
and stick to it, and make the best of it. I asked myself the question
whether I did not surely know that if Estella were beside me at that
moment instead of Biddy, she would make me miserable? I was obliged to
admit that I did know it for a certainty, and I said to myself, “Pip,
what a fool you are!”

We talked a good deal as we walked, and all that Biddy said seemed
right. Biddy was never insulting, or capricious, or Biddy to-day and
somebody else to-morrow; she would have derived only pain, and no
pleasure, from giving me pain; she would far rather have wounded her own
breast than mine. How could it be, then, that I did not like her much
the better of the two?

“Biddy,” said I, when we were walking homeward, “I wish you could put me
right.”

“I wish I could!” said Biddy.

“If I could only get myself to fall in love with you,--you don't mind my
speaking so openly to such an old acquaintance?”

“Oh dear, not at all!” said Biddy. “Don't mind me.”

“If I could only get myself to do it, that would be the thing for me.”

“But you never will, you see,” said Biddy.

It did not appear quite so unlikely to me that evening, as it would have
done if we had discussed it a few hours before. I therefore observed
I was not quite sure of that. But Biddy said she was, and she said it
decisively. In my heart I believed her to be right; and yet I took it
rather ill, too, that she should be so positive on the point.

When we came near the churchyard, we had to cross an embankment, and
get over a stile near a sluice-gate. There started up, from the gate, or
from the rushes, or from the ooze (which was quite in his stagnant way),
Old Orlick.

“Halloa!” he growled, “where are you two going?”

“Where should we be going, but home?”

“Well, then,” said he, “I'm jiggered if I don't see you home!”

This penalty of being jiggered was a favorite supposititious case of
his. He attached no definite meaning to the word that I am aware of, but
used it, like his own pretended Christian name, to affront mankind, and
convey an idea of something savagely damaging. When I was younger, I
had had a general belief that if he had jiggered me personally, he would
have done it with a sharp and twisted hook.

Biddy was much against his going with us, and said to me in a whisper,
“Don't let him come; I don't like him.” As I did not like him either,
I took the liberty of saying that we thanked him, but we didn't want
seeing home. He received that piece of information with a yell of
laughter, and dropped back, but came slouching after us at a little
distance.

Curious to know whether Biddy suspected him of having had a hand in
that murderous attack of which my sister had never been able to give any
account, I asked her why she did not like him.

“Oh!” she replied, glancing over her shoulder as he slouched after us,
“because I--I am afraid he likes me.”

“Did he ever tell you he liked you?” I asked indignantly.

“No,” said Biddy, glancing over her shoulder again, “he never told me
so; but he dances at me, whenever he can catch my eye.”

However novel and peculiar this testimony of attachment, I did not
doubt the accuracy of the interpretation. I was very hot indeed upon
Old Orlick's daring to admire her; as hot as if it were an outrage on
myself.

“But it makes no difference to you, you know,” said Biddy, calmly.

“No, Biddy, it makes no difference to me; only I don't like it; I don't
approve of it.”

“Nor I neither,” said Biddy. “Though that makes no difference to you.”

“Exactly,” said I; “but I must tell you I should have no opinion of you,
Biddy, if he danced at you with your own consent.”

I kept an eye on Orlick after that night, and, whenever circumstances
were favorable to his dancing at Biddy, got before him to obscure that
demonstration. He had struck root in Joe's establishment, by reason
of my sister's sudden fancy for him, or I should have tried to get him
dismissed. He quite understood and reciprocated my good intentions, as I
had reason to know thereafter.

And now, because my mind was not confused enough before, I complicated
its confusion fifty thousand-fold, by having states and seasons when I
was clear that Biddy was immeasurably better than Estella, and that the
plain honest working life to which I was born had nothing in it to
be ashamed of, but offered me sufficient means of self-respect
and happiness. At those times, I would decide conclusively that my
disaffection to dear old Joe and the forge was gone, and that I was
growing up in a fair way to be partners with Joe and to keep company
with Biddy,--when all in a moment some confounding remembrance of the
Havisham days would fall upon me like a destructive missile, and scatter
my wits again. Scattered wits take a long time picking up; and often
before I had got them well together, they would be dispersed in all
directions by one stray thought, that perhaps after all Miss Havisham
was going to make my fortune when my time was out.

If my time had run out, it would have left me still at the height of my
perplexities, I dare say. It never did run out, however, but was brought
to a premature end, as I proceed to relate.




Chapter XVIII

It was in the fourth year of my apprenticeship to Joe, and it was a
Saturday night. There was a group assembled round the fire at the Three
Jolly Bargemen, attentive to Mr. Wopsle as he read the newspaper aloud.
Of that group I was one.

A highly popular murder had been committed, and Mr. Wopsle was imbrued
in blood to the eyebrows. He gloated over every abhorrent adjective
in the description, and identified himself with every witness at the
Inquest. He faintly moaned, “I am done for,” as the victim, and he
barbarously bellowed, “I'll serve you out,” as the murderer. He gave the
medical testimony, in pointed imitation of our local practitioner; and
he piped and shook, as the aged turnpike-keeper who had heard blows, to
an extent so very paralytic as to suggest a doubt regarding the mental
competency of that witness. The coroner, in Mr. Wopsle's hands, became
Timon of Athens; the beadle, Coriolanus. He enjoyed himself thoroughly,
and we all enjoyed ourselves, and were delightfully comfortable. In this
cosey state of mind we came to the verdict Wilful Murder.

Then, and not sooner, I became aware of a strange gentleman leaning over
the back of the settle opposite me, looking on. There was an expression
of contempt on his face, and he bit the side of a great forefinger as he
watched the group of faces.

“Well!” said the stranger to Mr. Wopsle, when the reading was done, “you
have settled it all to your own satisfaction, I have no doubt?”

Everybody started and looked up, as if it were the murderer. He looked
at everybody coldly and sarcastically.

“Guilty, of course?” said he. “Out with it. Come!”

“Sir,” returned Mr. Wopsle, “without having the honor of your
acquaintance, I do say Guilty.” Upon this we all took courage to unite
in a confirmatory murmur.

“I know you do,” said the stranger; “I knew you would. I told you so.
But now I'll ask you a question. Do you know, or do you not know,
that the law of England supposes every man to be innocent, until he is
proved--proved--to be guilty?”

“Sir,” Mr. Wopsle began to reply, “as an Englishman myself, I--”

“Come!” said the stranger, biting his forefinger at him. “Don't evade
the question. Either you know it, or you don't know it. Which is it to
be?”

He stood with his head on one side and himself on one side, in a
bullying, interrogative manner, and he threw his forefinger at Mr.
Wopsle,--as it were to mark him out--before biting it again.

“Now!” said he. “Do you know it, or don't you know it?”

“Certainly I know it,” replied Mr. Wopsle.

“Certainly you know it. Then why didn't you say so at first? Now, I'll
ask you another question,”--taking possession of Mr. Wopsle, as if he
had a right to him,--“do you know that none of these witnesses have yet
been cross-examined?”

Mr. Wopsle was beginning, “I can only say--” when the stranger stopped
him.

“What? You won't answer the question, yes or no? Now, I'll try you
again.” Throwing his finger at him again. “Attend to me. Are you
aware, or are you not aware, that none of these witnesses have yet been
cross-examined? Come, I only want one word from you. Yes, or no?”

Mr. Wopsle hesitated, and we all began to conceive rather a poor opinion
of him.

“Come!” said the stranger, “I'll help you. You don't deserve help, but
I'll help you. Look at that paper you hold in your hand. What is it?”

“What is it?” repeated Mr. Wopsle, eyeing it, much at a loss.

“Is it,” pursued the stranger in his most sarcastic and suspicious
manner, “the printed paper you have just been reading from?”

“Undoubtedly.”

“Undoubtedly. Now, turn to that paper, and tell me whether it distinctly
states that the prisoner expressly said that his legal advisers
instructed him altogether to reserve his defence?”

“I read that just now,” Mr. Wopsle pleaded.

“Never mind what you read just now, sir; I don't ask you what you read
just now. You may read the Lord's Prayer backwards, if you like,--and,
perhaps, have done it before to-day. Turn to the paper. No, no, no my
friend; not to the top of the column; you know better than that; to
the bottom, to the bottom.” (We all began to think Mr. Wopsle full of
subterfuge.) “Well? Have you found it?”

“Here it is,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Now, follow that passage with your eye, and tell me whether it
distinctly states that the prisoner expressly said that he was
instructed by his legal advisers wholly to reserve his defence? Come! Do
you make that of it?”

Mr. Wopsle answered, “Those are not the exact words.”

“Not the exact words!” repeated the gentleman bitterly. “Is that the
exact substance?”

“Yes,” said Mr. Wopsle.

“Yes,” repeated the stranger, looking round at the rest of the company
with his right hand extended towards the witness, Wopsle. “And now I ask
you what you say to the conscience of that man who, with that passage
before his eyes, can lay his head upon his pillow after having
pronounced a fellow-creature guilty, unheard?”

We all began to suspect that Mr. Wopsle was not the man we had thought
him, and that he was beginning to be found out.

“And that same man, remember,” pursued the gentleman, throwing his
finger at Mr. Wopsle heavily,--“that same man might be summoned as a
juryman upon this very trial, and, having thus deeply committed himself,
might return to the bosom of his family and lay his head upon his
pillow, after deliberately swearing that he would well and truly try the
issue joined between Our Sovereign Lord the King and the prisoner at the
bar, and would a true verdict give according to the evidence, so help
him God!”

We were all deeply persuaded that the unfortunate Wopsle had gone too
far, and had better stop in his reckless career while there was yet
time.

The strange gentleman, with an air of authority not to be disputed, and
with a manner expressive of knowing something secret about every one of
us that would effectually do for each individual if he chose to disclose
it, left the back of the settle, and came into the space between the two
settles, in front of the fire, where he remained standing, his left hand
in his pocket, and he biting the forefinger of his right.

“From information I have received,” said he, looking round at us as we
all quailed before him, “I have reason to believe there is a blacksmith
among you, by name Joseph--or Joe--Gargery. Which is the man?”

“Here is the man,” said Joe.

The strange gentleman beckoned him out of his place, and Joe went.

“You have an apprentice,” pursued the stranger, “commonly known as Pip?
Is he here?”

“I am here!” I cried.

The stranger did not recognize me, but I recognized him as the gentleman
I had met on the stairs, on the occasion of my second visit to Miss
Havisham. I had known him the moment I saw him looking over the settle,
and now that I stood confronting him with his hand upon my shoulder,
I checked off again in detail his large head, his dark complexion, his
deep-set eyes, his bushy black eyebrows, his large watch-chain, his
strong black dots of beard and whisker, and even the smell of scented
soap on his great hand.

“I wish to have a private conference with you two,” said he, when he had
surveyed me at his leisure. “It will take a little time. Perhaps we
had better go to your place of residence. I prefer not to anticipate my
communication here; you will impart as much or as little of it as you
please to your friends afterwards; I have nothing to do with that.”

Amidst a wondering silence, we three walked out of the Jolly Bargemen,
and in a wondering silence walked home. While going along, the strange
gentleman occasionally looked at me, and occasionally bit the side of
his finger. As we neared home, Joe vaguely acknowledging the occasion as
an impressive and ceremonious one, went on ahead to open the front door.
Our conference was held in the state parlor, which was feebly lighted by
one candle.

It began with the strange gentleman's sitting down at the table, drawing
the candle to him, and looking over some entries in his pocket-book.
He then put up the pocket-book and set the candle a little aside, after
peering round it into the darkness at Joe and me, to ascertain which was
which.

“My name,” he said, “is Jaggers, and I am a lawyer in London. I am
pretty well known. I have unusual business to transact with you, and I
commence by explaining that it is not of my originating. If my advice
had been asked, I should not have been here. It was not asked, and you
see me here. What I have to do as the confidential agent of another, I
do. No less, no more.”

Finding that he could not see us very well from where he sat, he got
up, and threw one leg over the back of a chair and leaned upon it; thus
having one foot on the seat of the chair, and one foot on the ground.

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I am the bearer of an offer to relieve you of
this young fellow your apprentice. You would not object to cancel his
indentures at his request and for his good? You would want nothing for
so doing?”

“Lord forbid that I should want anything for not standing in Pip's way,”
 said Joe, staring.

“Lord forbidding is pious, but not to the purpose,” returned Mr.
Jaggers. “The question is, Would you want anything? Do you want
anything?”

“The answer is,” returned Joe, sternly, “No.”

I thought Mr. Jaggers glanced at Joe, as if he considered him a fool for
his disinterestedness. But I was too much bewildered between breathless
curiosity and surprise, to be sure of it.

“Very well,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Recollect the admission you have made,
and don't try to go from it presently.”

“Who's a going to try?” retorted Joe.

“I don't say anybody is. Do you keep a dog?”

“Yes, I do keep a dog.”

“Bear in mind then, that Brag is a good dog, but Holdfast is a better.
Bear that in mind, will you?” repeated Mr. Jaggers, shutting his eyes
and nodding his head at Joe, as if he were forgiving him something.
“Now, I return to this young fellow. And the communication I have got to
make is, that he has great expectations.”

Joe and I gasped, and looked at one another.

“I am instructed to communicate to him,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing
his finger at me sideways, “that he will come into a handsome property.
Further, that it is the desire of the present possessor of that
property, that he be immediately removed from his present sphere of life
and from this place, and be brought up as a gentleman,--in a word, as a
young fellow of great expectations.”

My dream was out; my wild fancy was surpassed by sober reality; Miss
Havisham was going to make my fortune on a grand scale.

“Now, Mr. Pip,” pursued the lawyer, “I address the rest of what I have
to say, to you. You are to understand, first, that it is the request
of the person from whom I take my instructions that you always bear
the name of Pip. You will have no objection, I dare say, to your great
expectations being encumbered with that easy condition. But if you have
any objection, this is the time to mention it.”

My heart was beating so fast, and there was such a singing in my ears,
that I could scarcely stammer I had no objection.

“I should think not! Now you are to understand, secondly, Mr. Pip, that
the name of the person who is your liberal benefactor remains a profound
secret, until the person chooses to reveal it. I am empowered to mention
that it is the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by
word of mouth to yourself. When or where that intention may be carried
out, I cannot say; no one can say. It may be years hence. Now, you are
distinctly to understand that you are most positively prohibited from
making any inquiry on this head, or any allusion or reference, however
distant, to any individual whomsoever as the individual, in all the
communications you may have with me. If you have a suspicion in your own
breast, keep that suspicion in your own breast. It is not the least to
the purpose what the reasons of this prohibition are; they may be the
strongest and gravest reasons, or they may be mere whim. This is not for
you to inquire into. The condition is laid down. Your acceptance of it,
and your observance of it as binding, is the only remaining condition
that I am charged with, by the person from whom I take my instructions,
and for whom I am not otherwise responsible. That person is the person
from whom you derive your expectations, and the secret is solely held by
that person and by me. Again, not a very difficult condition with which
to encumber such a rise in fortune; but if you have any objection to it,
this is the time to mention it. Speak out.”

Once more, I stammered with difficulty that I had no objection.

“I should think not! Now, Mr. Pip, I have done with stipulations.”
 Though he called me Mr. Pip, and began rather to make up to me, he still
could not get rid of a certain air of bullying suspicion; and even now
he occasionally shut his eyes and threw his finger at me while he
spoke, as much as to express that he knew all kinds of things to my
disparagement, if he only chose to mention them. “We come next, to mere
details of arrangement. You must know that, although I have used
the term 'expectations' more than once, you are not endowed with
expectations only. There is already lodged in my hands a sum of money
amply sufficient for your suitable education and maintenance. You will
please consider me your guardian. Oh!” for I was going to thank him, “I
tell you at once, I am paid for my services, or I shouldn't render them.
It is considered that you must be better educated, in accordance with
your altered position, and that you will be alive to the importance and
necessity of at once entering on that advantage.”

I said I had always longed for it.

“Never mind what you have always longed for, Mr. Pip,” he retorted;
“keep to the record. If you long for it now, that's enough. Am I
answered that you are ready to be placed at once under some proper
tutor? Is that it?”

I stammered yes, that was it.

“Good. Now, your inclinations are to be consulted. I don't think that
wise, mind, but it's my trust. Have you ever heard of any tutor whom you
would prefer to another?”

I had never heard of any tutor but Biddy and Mr. Wopsle's great-aunt;
so, I replied in the negative.

“There is a certain tutor, of whom I have some knowledge, who I think
might suit the purpose,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I don't recommend him,
observe; because I never recommend anybody. The gentleman I speak of is
one Mr. Matthew Pocket.”

Ah! I caught at the name directly. Miss Havisham's relation. The Matthew
whom Mr. and Mrs. Camilla had spoken of. The Matthew whose place was to
be at Miss Havisham's head, when she lay dead, in her bride's dress on
the bride's table.

“You know the name?” said Mr. Jaggers, looking shrewdly at me, and then
shutting up his eyes while he waited for my answer.

My answer was, that I had heard of the name.

“Oh!” said he. “You have heard of the name. But the question is, what do
you say of it?”

I said, or tried to say, that I was much obliged to him for his
recommendation--

“No, my young friend!” he interrupted, shaking his great head very
slowly. “Recollect yourself!”

Not recollecting myself, I began again that I was much obliged to him
for his recommendation--

“No, my young friend,” he interrupted, shaking his head and frowning and
smiling both at once,--“no, no, no; it's very well done, but it won't
do; you are too young to fix me with it. Recommendation is not the word,
Mr. Pip. Try another.”

Correcting myself, I said that I was much obliged to him for his mention
of Mr. Matthew Pocket--

“That's more like it!” cried Mr. Jaggers.--And (I added), I would
gladly try that gentleman.

“Good. You had better try him in his own house. The way shall be
prepared for you, and you can see his son first, who is in London. When
will you come to London?”

I said (glancing at Joe, who stood looking on, motionless), that I
supposed I could come directly.

“First,” said Mr. Jaggers, “you should have some new clothes to come in,
and they should not be working-clothes. Say this day week. You'll want
some money. Shall I leave you twenty guineas?”

He produced a long purse, with the greatest coolness, and counted them
out on the table and pushed them over to me. This was the first time he
had taken his leg from the chair. He sat astride of the chair when he
had pushed the money over, and sat swinging his purse and eyeing Joe.

“Well, Joseph Gargery? You look dumbfoundered?”

“I am!” said Joe, in a very decided manner.

“It was understood that you wanted nothing for yourself, remember?”

“It were understood,” said Joe. “And it are understood. And it ever will
be similar according.”

“But what,” said Mr. Jaggers, swinging his purse,--“what if it was in my
instructions to make you a present, as compensation?”

“As compensation what for?” Joe demanded.

“For the loss of his services.”

Joe laid his hand upon my shoulder with the touch of a woman. I have
often thought him since, like the steam-hammer that can crush a man or
pat an egg-shell, in his combination of strength with gentleness. “Pip
is that hearty welcome,” said Joe, “to go free with his services, to
honor and fortun', as no words can tell him. But if you think as Money
can make compensation to me for the loss of the little child--what come
to the forge--and ever the best of friends!--”

O dear good Joe, whom I was so ready to leave and so unthankful to, I
see you again, with your muscular blacksmith's arm before your eyes,
and your broad chest heaving, and your voice dying away. O dear good
faithful tender Joe, I feel the loving tremble of your hand upon my arm,
as solemnly this day as if it had been the rustle of an angel's wing!

But I encouraged Joe at the time. I was lost in the mazes of my future
fortunes, and could not retrace the by-paths we had trodden together. I
begged Joe to be comforted, for (as he said) we had ever been the best
of friends, and (as I said) we ever would be so. Joe scooped his eyes
with his disengaged wrist, as if he were bent on gouging himself, but
said not another word.

Mr. Jaggers had looked on at this, as one who recognized in Joe the
village idiot, and in me his keeper. When it was over, he said, weighing
in his hand the purse he had ceased to swing:--

“Now, Joseph Gargery, I warn you this is your last chance. No half
measures with me. If you mean to take a present that I have it in charge
to make you, speak out, and you shall have it. If on the contrary you
mean to say--” Here, to his great amazement, he was stopped by Joe's
suddenly working round him with every demonstration of a fell pugilistic
purpose.

“Which I meantersay,” cried Joe, “that if you come into my place
bull-baiting and badgering me, come out! Which I meantersay as sech if
you're a man, come on! Which I meantersay that what I say, I meantersay
and stand or fall by!”

I drew Joe away, and he immediately became placable; merely stating to
me, in an obliging manner and as a polite expostulatory notice to any
one whom it might happen to concern, that he were not a going to be
bull-baited and badgered in his own place. Mr. Jaggers had risen when
Joe demonstrated, and had backed near the door. Without evincing
any inclination to come in again, he there delivered his valedictory
remarks. They were these.

“Well, Mr. Pip, I think the sooner you leave here--as you are to be a
gentleman--the better. Let it stand for this day week, and you shall
receive my printed address in the meantime. You can take a hackney-coach
at the stage-coach office in London, and come straight to me.
Understand, that I express no opinion, one way or other, on the trust
I undertake. I am paid for undertaking it, and I do so. Now, understand
that, finally. Understand that!”

He was throwing his finger at both of us, and I think would have gone
on, but for his seeming to think Joe dangerous, and going off.

Something came into my head which induced me to run after him, as he was
going down to the Jolly Bargemen, where he had left a hired carriage.

“I beg your pardon, Mr. Jaggers.”

“Halloa!” said he, facing round, “what's the matter?”

“I wish to be quite right, Mr. Jaggers, and to keep to your directions;
so I thought I had better ask. Would there be any objection to my taking
leave of any one I know, about here, before I go away?”

“No,” said he, looking as if he hardly understood me.

“I don't mean in the village only, but up town?”

“No,” said he. “No objection.”

I thanked him and ran home again, and there I found that Joe had already
locked the front door and vacated the state parlor, and was seated
by the kitchen fire with a hand on each knee, gazing intently at the
burning coals. I too sat down before the fire and gazed at the coals,
and nothing was said for a long time.

My sister was in her cushioned chair in her corner, and Biddy sat at her
needle-work before the fire, and Joe sat next Biddy, and I sat next Joe
in the corner opposite my sister. The more I looked into the glowing
coals, the more incapable I became of looking at Joe; the longer the
silence lasted, the more unable I felt to speak.

At length I got out, “Joe, have you told Biddy?”

“No, Pip,” returned Joe, still looking at the fire, and holding his
knees tight, as if he had private information that they intended to make
off somewhere, “which I left it to yourself, Pip.”

“I would rather you told, Joe.”

“Pip's a gentleman of fortun' then,” said Joe, “and God bless him in
it!”

Biddy dropped her work, and looked at me. Joe held his knees and looked
at me. I looked at both of them. After a pause, they both heartily
congratulated me; but there was a certain touch of sadness in their
congratulations that I rather resented.

I took it upon myself to impress Biddy (and through Biddy, Joe) with the
grave obligation I considered my friends under, to know nothing and say
nothing about the maker of my fortune. It would all come out in good
time, I observed, and in the meanwhile nothing was to be said, save
that I had come into great expectations from a mysterious patron. Biddy
nodded her head thoughtfully at the fire as she took up her work again,
and said she would be very particular; and Joe, still detaining his
knees, said, “Ay, ay, I'll be ekervally partickler, Pip;” and then they
congratulated me again, and went on to express so much wonder at the
notion of my being a gentleman that I didn't half like it.

Infinite pains were then taken by Biddy to convey to my sister some idea
of what had happened. To the best of my belief, those efforts entirely
failed. She laughed and nodded her head a great many times, and even
repeated after Biddy, the words “Pip” and “Property.” But I doubt if
they had more meaning in them than an election cry, and I cannot suggest
a darker picture of her state of mind.

I never could have believed it without experience, but as Joe and
Biddy became more at their cheerful ease again, I became quite gloomy.
Dissatisfied with my fortune, of course I could not be; but it is
possible that I may have been, without quite knowing it, dissatisfied
with myself.

Any how, I sat with my elbow on my knee and my face upon my hand,
looking into the fire, as those two talked about my going away, and
about what they should do without me, and all that. And whenever I
caught one of them looking at me, though never so pleasantly (and they
often looked at me,--particularly Biddy), I felt offended: as if they
were expressing some mistrust of me. Though Heaven knows they never did
by word or sign.

At those times I would get up and look out at the door; for our kitchen
door opened at once upon the night, and stood open on summer evenings to
air the room. The very stars to which I then raised my eyes, I am afraid
I took to be but poor and humble stars for glittering on the rustic
objects among which I had passed my life.

“Saturday night,” said I, when we sat at our supper of bread and cheese
and beer. “Five more days, and then the day before the day! They'll soon
go.”

“Yes, Pip,” observed Joe, whose voice sounded hollow in his beer-mug.
“They'll soon go.”

“Soon, soon go,” said Biddy.

“I have been thinking, Joe, that when I go down town on Monday, and
order my new clothes, I shall tell the tailor that I'll come and put
them on there, or that I'll have them sent to Mr. Pumblechook's. It
would be very disagreeable to be stared at by all the people here.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Hubble might like to see you in your new gen-teel figure
too, Pip,” said Joe, industriously cutting his bread, with his cheese on
it, in the palm of his left hand, and glancing at my untasted supper
as if he thought of the time when we used to compare slices. “So might
Wopsle. And the Jolly Bargemen might take it as a compliment.”

“That's just what I don't want, Joe. They would make such a business of
it,--such a coarse and common business,--that I couldn't bear myself.”

“Ah, that indeed, Pip!” said Joe. “If you couldn't abear yourself--”

Biddy asked me here, as she sat holding my sister's plate, “Have you
thought about when you'll show yourself to Mr. Gargery, and your sister
and me? You will show yourself to us; won't you?”

“Biddy,” I returned with some resentment, “you are so exceedingly quick
that it's difficult to keep up with you.”

(“She always were quick,” observed Joe.)

“If you had waited another moment, Biddy, you would have heard me say
that I shall bring my clothes here in a bundle one evening,--most likely
on the evening before I go away.”

Biddy said no more. Handsomely forgiving her, I soon exchanged an
affectionate good night with her and Joe, and went up to bed. When I got
into my little room, I sat down and took a long look at it, as a mean
little room that I should soon be parted from and raised above, for
ever. It was furnished with fresh young remembrances too, and even at
the same moment I fell into much the same confused division of mind
between it and the better rooms to which I was going, as I had been in
so often between the forge and Miss Havisham's, and Biddy and Estella.

The sun had been shining brightly all day on the roof of my attic, and
the room was warm. As I put the window open and stood looking out, I saw
Joe come slowly forth at the dark door, below, and take a turn or two
in the air; and then I saw Biddy come, and bring him a pipe and light
it for him. He never smoked so late, and it seemed to hint to me that he
wanted comforting, for some reason or other.

He presently stood at the door immediately beneath me, smoking his pipe,
and Biddy stood there too, quietly talking to him, and I knew that they
talked of me, for I heard my name mentioned in an endearing tone by both
of them more than once. I would not have listened for more, if I could
have heard more; so I drew away from the window, and sat down in my one
chair by the bedside, feeling it very sorrowful and strange that this
first night of my bright fortunes should be the loneliest I had ever
known.

Looking towards the open window, I saw light wreaths from Joe's pipe
floating there, and I fancied it was like a blessing from Joe,--not
obtruded on me or paraded before me, but pervading the air we shared
together. I put my light out, and crept into bed; and it was an uneasy
bed now, and I never slept the old sound sleep in it any more.




Chapter XIX

Morning made a considerable difference in my general prospect of Life,
and brightened it so much that it scarcely seemed the same. What lay
heaviest on my mind was, the consideration that six days intervened
between me and the day of departure; for I could not divest myself of
a misgiving that something might happen to London in the meanwhile, and
that, when I got there, it would be either greatly deteriorated or clean
gone.

Joe and Biddy were very sympathetic and pleasant when I spoke of our
approaching separation; but they only referred to it when I did. After
breakfast, Joe brought out my indentures from the press in the best
parlor, and we put them in the fire, and I felt that I was free. With
all the novelty of my emancipation on me, I went to church with Joe, and
thought perhaps the clergyman wouldn't have read that about the rich man
and the kingdom of Heaven, if he had known all.

After our early dinner, I strolled out alone, purposing to finish off
the marshes at once, and get them done with. As I passed the church, I
felt (as I had felt during service in the morning) a sublime compassion
for the poor creatures who were destined to go there, Sunday after
Sunday, all their lives through, and to lie obscurely at last among the
low green mounds. I promised myself that I would do something for them
one of these days, and formed a plan in outline for bestowing a
dinner of roast-beef and plum-pudding, a pint of ale, and a gallon of
condescension, upon everybody in the village.

If I had often thought before, with something allied to shame, of my
companionship with the fugitive whom I had once seen limping among those
graves, what were my thoughts on this Sunday, when the place recalled
the wretch, ragged and shivering, with his felon iron and badge! My
comfort was, that it happened a long time ago, and that he had doubtless
been transported a long way off, and that he was dead to me, and might
be veritably dead into the bargain.

No more low, wet grounds, no more dikes and sluices, no more of these
grazing cattle,--though they seemed, in their dull manner, to wear a
more respectful air now, and to face round, in order that they
might stare as long as possible at the possessor of such great
expectations,--farewell, monotonous acquaintances of my childhood,
henceforth I was for London and greatness; not for smith's work in
general, and for you! I made my exultant way to the old Battery, and,
lying down there to consider the question whether Miss Havisham intended
me for Estella, fell asleep.

When I awoke, I was much surprised to find Joe sitting beside me,
smoking his pipe. He greeted me with a cheerful smile on my opening my
eyes, and said,--

“As being the last time, Pip, I thought I'd foller.”

“And Joe, I am very glad you did so.”

“Thankee, Pip.”

“You may be sure, dear Joe,” I went on, after we had shaken hands, “that
I shall never forget you.”

“No, no, Pip!” said Joe, in a comfortable tone, “I'm sure of that. Ay,
ay, old chap! Bless you, it were only necessary to get it well round in
a man's mind, to be certain on it. But it took a bit of time to get it
well round, the change come so oncommon plump; didn't it?”

Somehow, I was not best pleased with Joe's being so mightily secure of
me. I should have liked him to have betrayed emotion, or to have said,
“It does you credit, Pip,” or something of that sort. Therefore, I made
no remark on Joe's first head; merely saying as to his second, that the
tidings had indeed come suddenly, but that I had always wanted to be a
gentleman, and had often and often speculated on what I would do, if I
were one.

“Have you though?” said Joe. “Astonishing!”

“It's a pity now, Joe,” said I, “that you did not get on a little more,
when we had our lessons here; isn't it?”

“Well, I don't know,” returned Joe. “I'm so awful dull. I'm only master
of my own trade. It were always a pity as I was so awful dull; but it's
no more of a pity now, than it was--this day twelvemonth--don't you
see?”

What I had meant was, that when I came into my property and was able to
do something for Joe, it would have been much more agreeable if he
had been better qualified for a rise in station. He was so perfectly
innocent of my meaning, however, that I thought I would mention it to
Biddy in preference.

So, when we had walked home and had had tea, I took Biddy into our
little garden by the side of the lane, and, after throwing out in a
general way for the elevation of her spirits, that I should never forget
her, said I had a favor to ask of her.

“And it is, Biddy,” said I, “that you will not omit any opportunity of
helping Joe on, a little.”

“How helping him on?” asked Biddy, with a steady sort of glance.

“Well! Joe is a dear good fellow,--in fact, I think he is the dearest
fellow that ever lived,--but he is rather backward in some things. For
instance, Biddy, in his learning and his manners.”

Although I was looking at Biddy as I spoke, and although she opened her
eyes very wide when I had spoken, she did not look at me.

“O, his manners! won't his manners do then?” asked Biddy, plucking a
black-currant leaf.

“My dear Biddy, they do very well here--”

“O! they do very well here?” interrupted Biddy, looking closely at the
leaf in her hand.

“Hear me out,--but if I were to remove Joe into a higher sphere, as I
shall hope to remove him when I fully come into my property, they would
hardly do him justice.”

“And don't you think he knows that?” asked Biddy.

It was such a very provoking question (for it had never in the most
distant manner occurred to me), that I said, snappishly,--

“Biddy, what do you mean?”

Biddy, having rubbed the leaf to pieces between her hands,--and the
smell of a black-currant bush has ever since recalled to me that evening
in the little garden by the side of the lane,--said, “Have you never
considered that he may be proud?”

“Proud?” I repeated, with disdainful emphasis.

“O! there are many kinds of pride,” said Biddy, looking full at me and
shaking her head; “pride is not all of one kind--”

“Well? What are you stopping for?” said I.

“Not all of one kind,” resumed Biddy. “He may be too proud to let any
one take him out of a place that he is competent to fill, and fills well
and with respect. To tell you the truth, I think he is; though it sounds
bold in me to say so, for you must know him far better than I do.”

“Now, Biddy,” said I, “I am very sorry to see this in you. I did not
expect to see this in you. You are envious, Biddy, and grudging. You
are dissatisfied on account of my rise in fortune, and you can't help
showing it.”

“If you have the heart to think so,” returned Biddy, “say so. Say so
over and over again, if you have the heart to think so.”

“If you have the heart to be so, you mean, Biddy,” said I, in a virtuous
and superior tone; “don't put it off upon me. I am very sorry to see it,
and it's a--it's a bad side of human nature. I did intend to ask you
to use any little opportunities you might have after I was gone, of
improving dear Joe. But after this I ask you nothing. I am extremely
sorry to see this in you, Biddy,” I repeated. “It's a--it's a bad side
of human nature.”

“Whether you scold me or approve of me,” returned poor Biddy, “you may
equally depend upon my trying to do all that lies in my power, here,
at all times. And whatever opinion you take away of me, shall make
no difference in my remembrance of you. Yet a gentleman should not be
unjust neither,” said Biddy, turning away her head.

I again warmly repeated that it was a bad side of human nature (in which
sentiment, waiving its application, I have since seen reason to think I
was right), and I walked down the little path away from Biddy, and
Biddy went into the house, and I went out at the garden gate and took a
dejected stroll until supper-time; again feeling it very sorrowful and
strange that this, the second night of my bright fortunes, should be as
lonely and unsatisfactory as the first.

But, morning once more brightened my view, and I extended my clemency to
Biddy, and we dropped the subject. Putting on the best clothes I had,
I went into town as early as I could hope to find the shops open,
and presented myself before Mr. Trabb, the tailor, who was having his
breakfast in the parlor behind his shop, and who did not think it worth
his while to come out to me, but called me into him.

“Well!” said Mr. Trabb, in a hail-fellow-well-met kind of way. “How are
you, and what can I do for you?”

Mr. Trabb had sliced his hot roll into three feather-beds, and was
slipping butter in between the blankets, and covering it up. He was a
prosperous old bachelor, and his open window looked into a prosperous
little garden and orchard, and there was a prosperous iron safe let into
the wall at the side of his fireplace, and I did not doubt that heaps of
his prosperity were put away in it in bags.

“Mr. Trabb,” said I, “it's an unpleasant thing to have to mention,
because it looks like boasting; but I have come into a handsome
property.”

A change passed over Mr. Trabb. He forgot the butter in bed, got up from
the bedside, and wiped his fingers on the tablecloth, exclaiming, “Lord
bless my soul!”

“I am going up to my guardian in London,” said I, casually drawing some
guineas out of my pocket and looking at them; “and I want a fashionable
suit of clothes to go in. I wish to pay for them,” I added--otherwise I
thought he might only pretend to make them, “with ready money.”

“My dear sir,” said Mr. Trabb, as he respectfully bent his body, opened
his arms, and took the liberty of touching me on the outside of each
elbow, “don't hurt me by mentioning that. May I venture to congratulate
you? Would you do me the favor of stepping into the shop?”

Mr. Trabb's boy was the most audacious boy in all that country-side.
When I had entered he was sweeping the shop, and he had sweetened his
labors by sweeping over me. He was still sweeping when I came out into
the shop with Mr. Trabb, and he knocked the broom against all possible
corners and obstacles, to express (as I understood it) equality with any
blacksmith, alive or dead.

“Hold that noise,” said Mr. Trabb, with the greatest sternness, “or I'll
knock your head off!--Do me the favor to be seated, sir. Now, this,”
 said Mr. Trabb, taking down a roll of cloth, and tiding it out in a
flowing manner over the counter, preparatory to getting his hand under
it to show the gloss, “is a very sweet article. I can recommend it for
your purpose, sir, because it really is extra super. But you shall
see some others. Give me Number Four, you!” (To the boy, and with a
dreadfully severe stare; foreseeing the danger of that miscreant's
brushing me with it, or making some other sign of familiarity.)

Mr. Trabb never removed his stern eye from the boy until he had
deposited number four on the counter and was at a safe distance again.
Then he commanded him to bring number five, and number eight. “And let
me have none of your tricks here,” said Mr. Trabb, “or you shall repent
it, you young scoundrel, the longest day you have to live.”

Mr. Trabb then bent over number four, and in a sort of deferential
confidence recommended it to me as a light article for summer wear, an
article much in vogue among the nobility and gentry, an article that
it would ever be an honor to him to reflect upon a distinguished
fellow-townsman's (if he might claim me for a fellow-townsman) having
worn. “Are you bringing numbers five and eight, you vagabond,” said Mr.
Trabb to the boy after that, “or shall I kick you out of the shop and
bring them myself?”

I selected the materials for a suit, with the assistance of Mr. Trabb's
judgment, and re-entered the parlor to be measured. For although Mr.
Trabb had my measure already, and had previously been quite contented
with it, he said apologetically that it “wouldn't do under existing
circumstances, sir,--wouldn't do at all.” So, Mr. Trabb measured and
calculated me in the parlor, as if I were an estate and he the finest
species of surveyor, and gave himself such a world of trouble that
I felt that no suit of clothes could possibly remunerate him for his
pains. When he had at last done and had appointed to send the articles
to Mr. Pumblechook's on the Thursday evening, he said, with his hand
upon the parlor lock, “I know, sir, that London gentlemen cannot be
expected to patronize local work, as a rule; but if you would give me a
turn now and then in the quality of a townsman, I should greatly esteem
it. Good morning, sir, much obliged.--Door!”

The last word was flung at the boy, who had not the least notion what
it meant. But I saw him collapse as his master rubbed me out with his
hands, and my first decided experience of the stupendous power of money
was, that it had morally laid upon his back Trabb's boy.

After this memorable event, I went to the hatter's, and the bootmaker's,
and the hosier's, and felt rather like Mother Hubbard's dog whose outfit
required the services of so many trades. I also went to the coach-office
and took my place for seven o'clock on Saturday morning. It was
not necessary to explain everywhere that I had come into a handsome
property; but whenever I said anything to that effect, it followed that
the officiating tradesman ceased to have his attention diverted through
the window by the High Street, and concentrated his mind upon me. When
I had ordered everything I wanted, I directed my steps towards
Pumblechook's, and, as I approached that gentleman's place of business,
I saw him standing at his door.

He was waiting for me with great impatience. He had been out early with
the chaise-cart, and had called at the forge and heard the news. He had
prepared a collation for me in the Barnwell parlor, and he too ordered
his shopman to “come out of the gangway” as my sacred person passed.

“My dear friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, taking me by both hands, when
he and I and the collation were alone, “I give you joy of your good
fortune. Well deserved, well deserved!”

This was coming to the point, and I thought it a sensible way of
expressing himself.

“To think,” said Mr. Pumblechook, after snorting admiration at me for
some moments, “that I should have been the humble instrument of leading
up to this, is a proud reward.”

I begged Mr. Pumblechook to remember that nothing was to be ever said or
hinted, on that point.

“My dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook; “if you will allow me to
call you so--”

I murmured “Certainly,” and Mr. Pumblechook took me by both hands again,
and communicated a movement to his waistcoat, which had an emotional
appearance, though it was rather low down, “My dear young friend, rely
upon my doing my little all in your absence, by keeping the fact before
the mind of Joseph.--Joseph!” said Mr. Pumblechook, in the way of a
compassionate adjuration. “Joseph!! Joseph!!!” Thereupon he shook his
head and tapped it, expressing his sense of deficiency in Joseph.

“But my dear young friend,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “you must be hungry,
you must be exhausted. Be seated. Here is a chicken had round from the
Boar, here is a tongue had round from the Boar, here's one or two little
things had round from the Boar, that I hope you may not despise. But do
I,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again the moment after he had sat
down, “see afore me, him as I ever sported with in his times of happy
infancy? And may I--may I--?”

This May I, meant might he shake hands? I consented, and he was fervent,
and then sat down again.

“Here is wine,” said Mr. Pumblechook. “Let us drink, Thanks to Fortune,
and may she ever pick out her favorites with equal judgment! And yet I
cannot,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, “see afore me One--and
likewise drink to One--without again expressing--May I--may I--?”

I said he might, and he shook hands with me again, and emptied his glass
and turned it upside down. I did the same; and if I had turned myself
upside down before drinking, the wine could not have gone more direct to
my head.

Mr. Pumblechook helped me to the liver wing, and to the best slice of
tongue (none of those out-of-the-way No Thoroughfares of Pork now), and
took, comparatively speaking, no care of himself at all. “Ah! poultry,
poultry! You little thought,” said Mr. Pumblechook, apostrophizing the
fowl in the dish, “when you was a young fledgling, what was in store for
you. You little thought you was to be refreshment beneath this humble
roof for one as--Call it a weakness, if you will,” said Mr. Pumblechook,
getting up again, “but may I? may I--?”

It began to be unnecessary to repeat the form of saying he might, so
he did it at once. How he ever did it so often without wounding himself
with my knife, I don't know.

“And your sister,” he resumed, after a little steady eating, “which had
the honor of bringing you up by hand! It's a sad picter, to reflect that
she's no longer equal to fully understanding the honor. May--”

I saw he was about to come at me again, and I stopped him.

“We'll drink her health,” said I.

“Ah!” cried Mr. Pumblechook, leaning back in his chair, quite flaccid
with admiration, “that's the way you know 'em, sir!” (I don't know
who Sir was, but he certainly was not I, and there was no third person
present); “that's the way you know the noble-minded, sir! Ever forgiving
and ever affable. It might,” said the servile Pumblechook, putting down
his untasted glass in a hurry and getting up again, “to a common person,
have the appearance of repeating--but may I--?”

When he had done it, he resumed his seat and drank to my sister. “Let us
never be blind,” said Mr. Pumblechook, “to her faults of temper, but it
is to be hoped she meant well.”

At about this time, I began to observe that he was getting flushed in
the face; as to myself, I felt all face, steeped in wine and smarting.

I mentioned to Mr. Pumblechook that I wished to have my new clothes
sent to his house, and he was ecstatic on my so distinguishing him. I
mentioned my reason for desiring to avoid observation in the village,
and he lauded it to the skies. There was nobody but himself, he
intimated, worthy of my confidence, and--in short, might he? Then he
asked me tenderly if I remembered our boyish games at sums, and how we
had gone together to have me bound apprentice, and, in effect, how he
had ever been my favorite fancy and my chosen friend? If I had taken
ten times as many glasses of wine as I had, I should have known that he
never had stood in that relation towards me, and should in my heart of
hearts have repudiated the idea. Yet for all that, I remember feeling
convinced that I had been much mistaken in him, and that he was a
sensible, practical, good-hearted prime fellow.

By degrees he fell to reposing such great confidence in me, as to ask my
advice in reference to his own affairs. He mentioned that there was an
opportunity for a great amalgamation and monopoly of the corn and seed
trade on those premises, if enlarged, such as had never occurred
before in that or any other neighborhood. What alone was wanting to the
realization of a vast fortune, he considered to be More Capital.
Those were the two little words, more capital. Now it appeared to him
(Pumblechook) that if that capital were got into the business, through a
sleeping partner, sir,--which sleeping partner would have nothing to
do but walk in, by self or deputy, whenever he pleased, and examine
the books,--and walk in twice a year and take his profits away in his
pocket, to the tune of fifty per cent,--it appeared to him that that
might be an opening for a young gentleman of spirit combined with
property, which would be worthy of his attention. But what did I think?
He had great confidence in my opinion, and what did I think? I gave it
as my opinion. “Wait a bit!” The united vastness and distinctness of
this view so struck him, that he no longer asked if he might shake hands
with me, but said he really must,--and did.

We drank all the wine, and Mr. Pumblechook pledged himself over and over
again to keep Joseph up to the mark (I don't know what mark), and to
render me efficient and constant service (I don't know what service). He
also made known to me for the first time in my life, and certainly after
having kept his secret wonderfully well, that he had always said of me,
“That boy is no common boy, and mark me, his fortun' will be no common
fortun'.” He said with a tearful smile that it was a singular thing to
think of now, and I said so too. Finally, I went out into the air, with
a dim perception that there was something unwonted in the conduct of the
sunshine, and found that I had slumberously got to the turnpike without
having taken any account of the road.

There, I was roused by Mr. Pumblechook's hailing me. He was a long way
down the sunny street, and was making expressive gestures for me to
stop. I stopped, and he came up breathless.

“No, my dear friend,” said he, when he had recovered wind for speech.
“Not if I can help it. This occasion shall not entirely pass without
that affability on your part.--May I, as an old friend and well-wisher?
May I?”

We shook hands for the hundredth time at least, and he ordered a young
carter out of my way with the greatest indignation. Then, he blessed
me and stood waving his hand to me until I had passed the crook in the
road; and then I turned into a field and had a long nap under a hedge
before I pursued my way home.

I had scant luggage to take with me to London, for little of the little
I possessed was adapted to my new station. But I began packing that same
afternoon, and wildly packed up things that I knew I should want next
morning, in a fiction that there was not a moment to be lost.

So, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, passed; and on Friday morning I
went to Mr. Pumblechook's, to put on my new clothes and pay my visit to
Miss Havisham. Mr. Pumblechook's own room was given up to me to dress
in, and was decorated with clean towels expressly for the event. My
clothes were rather a disappointment, of course. Probably every new
and eagerly expected garment ever put on since clothes came in, fell
a trifle short of the wearer's expectation. But after I had had my
new suit on some half an hour, and had gone through an immensity of
posturing with Mr. Pumblechook's very limited dressing-glass, in the
futile endeavor to see my legs, it seemed to fit me better. It being
market morning at a neighboring town some ten miles off, Mr. Pumblechook
was not at home. I had not told him exactly when I meant to leave, and
was not likely to shake hands with him again before departing. This was
all as it should be, and I went out in my new array, fearfully ashamed
of having to pass the shopman, and suspicious after all that I was at a
personal disadvantage, something like Joe's in his Sunday suit.

I went circuitously to Miss Havisham's by all the back ways, and rang
at the bell constrainedly, on account of the stiff long fingers of my
gloves. Sarah Pocket came to the gate, and positively reeled back when
she saw me so changed; her walnut-shell countenance likewise turned from
brown to green and yellow.

“You?” said she. “You? Good gracious! What do you want?”

“I am going to London, Miss Pocket,” said I, “and want to say good-bye to
Miss Havisham.”

I was not expected, for she left me locked in the yard, while she went
to ask if I were to be admitted. After a very short delay, she returned
and took me up, staring at me all the way.

Miss Havisham was taking exercise in the room with the long spread
table, leaning on her crutch stick. The room was lighted as of yore, and
at the sound of our entrance, she stopped and turned. She was then just
abreast of the rotted bride-cake.

“Don't go, Sarah,” she said. “Well, Pip?”

“I start for London, Miss Havisham, to-morrow,” I was exceedingly
careful what I said, “and I thought you would kindly not mind my taking
leave of you.”

“This is a gay figure, Pip,” said she, making her crutch stick play
round me, as if she, the fairy godmother who had changed me, were
bestowing the finishing gift.

“I have come into such good fortune since I saw you last, Miss
Havisham,” I murmured. “And I am so grateful for it, Miss Havisham!”

“Ay, ay!” said she, looking at the discomfited and envious Sarah, with
delight. “I have seen Mr. Jaggers. I have heard about it, Pip. So you go
to-morrow?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“And you are adopted by a rich person?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“Not named?”

“No, Miss Havisham.”

“And Mr. Jaggers is made your guardian?”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

She quite gloated on these questions and answers, so keen was her
enjoyment of Sarah Pocket's jealous dismay. “Well!” she went on; “you
have a promising career before you. Be good--deserve it--and abide by
Mr. Jaggers's instructions.” She looked at me, and looked at Sarah, and
Sarah's countenance wrung out of her watchful face a cruel smile. “Good-bye,
Pip!--you will always keep the name of Pip, you know.”

“Yes, Miss Havisham.”

“Good-bye, Pip!”

She stretched out her hand, and I went down on my knee and put it to
my lips. I had not considered how I should take leave of her; it came
naturally to me at the moment to do this. She looked at Sarah Pocket
with triumph in her weird eyes, and so I left my fairy godmother, with
both her hands on her crutch stick, standing in the midst of the dimly
lighted room beside the rotten bride-cake that was hidden in cobwebs.

Sarah Pocket conducted me down, as if I were a ghost who must be seen
out. She could not get over my appearance, and was in the last degree
confounded. I said “Good-bye, Miss Pocket;” but she merely stared, and
did not seem collected enough to know that I had spoken. Clear of the
house, I made the best of my way back to Pumblechook's, took off my new
clothes, made them into a bundle, and went back home in my older dress,
carrying it--to speak the truth--much more at my ease too, though I had
the bundle to carry.

And now, those six days which were to have run out so slowly, had
run out fast and were gone, and to-morrow looked me in the face more
steadily than I could look at it. As the six evenings had dwindled
away, to five, to four, to three, to two, I had become more and more
appreciative of the society of Joe and Biddy. On this last evening, I
dressed my self out in my new clothes for their delight, and sat in my
splendor until bedtime. We had a hot supper on the occasion, graced by
the inevitable roast fowl, and we had some flip to finish with. We were
all very low, and none the higher for pretending to be in spirits.

I was to leave our village at five in the morning, carrying my little
hand-portmanteau, and I had told Joe that I wished to walk away all
alone. I am afraid--sore afraid--that this purpose originated in my
sense of the contrast there would be between me and Joe, if we went to
the coach together. I had pretended with myself that there was nothing
of this taint in the arrangement; but when I went up to my little room
on this last night, I felt compelled to admit that it might be so, and
had an impulse upon me to go down again and entreat Joe to walk with me
in the morning. I did not.

All night there were coaches in my broken sleep, going to wrong places
instead of to London, and having in the traces, now dogs, now cats, now
pigs, now men,--never horses. Fantastic failures of journeys occupied
me until the day dawned and the birds were singing. Then, I got up and
partly dressed, and sat at the window to take a last look out, and in
taking it fell asleep.

Biddy was astir so early to get my breakfast, that, although I did not
sleep at the window an hour, I smelt the smoke of the kitchen fire when
I started up with a terrible idea that it must be late in the afternoon.
But long after that, and long after I had heard the clinking of the
teacups and was quite ready, I wanted the resolution to go downstairs.
After all, I remained up there, repeatedly unlocking and unstrapping
my small portmanteau and locking and strapping it up again, until Biddy
called to me that I was late.

It was a hurried breakfast with no taste in it. I got up from the meal,
saying with a sort of briskness, as if it had only just occurred to me,
“Well! I suppose I must be off!” and then I kissed my sister who was
laughing and nodding and shaking in her usual chair, and kissed
Biddy, and threw my arms around Joe's neck. Then I took up my little
portmanteau and walked out. The last I saw of them was, when I presently
heard a scuffle behind me, and looking back, saw Joe throwing an old
shoe after me and Biddy throwing another old shoe. I stopped then, to
wave my hat, and dear old Joe waved his strong right arm above his head,
crying huskily “Hooroar!” and Biddy put her apron to her face.

I walked away at a good pace, thinking it was easier to go than I had
supposed it would be, and reflecting that it would never have done to
have had an old shoe thrown after the coach, in sight of all the High
Street. I whistled and made nothing of going. But the village was very
peaceful and quiet, and the light mists were solemnly rising, as if to
show me the world, and I had been so innocent and little there, and all
beyond was so unknown and great, that in a moment with a strong heave
and sob I broke into tears. It was by the finger-post at the end of the
village, and I laid my hand upon it, and said, “Good-bye, O my dear, dear
friend!”

Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears, for they are rain
upon the blinding dust of earth, overlying our hard hearts. I was
better after I had cried than before,--more sorry, more aware of my own
ingratitude, more gentle. If I had cried before, I should have had Joe
with me then.

So subdued I was by those tears, and by their breaking out again in the
course of the quiet walk, that when I was on the coach, and it was clear
of the town, I deliberated with an aching heart whether I would not get
down when we changed horses and walk back, and have another evening at
home, and a better parting. We changed, and I had not made up my mind,
and still reflected for my comfort that it would be quite practicable to
get down and walk back, when we changed again. And while I was occupied
with these deliberations, I would fancy an exact resemblance to Joe
in some man coming along the road towards us, and my heart would beat
high.--As if he could possibly be there!

We changed again, and yet again, and it was now too late and too far to
go back, and I went on. And the mists had all solemnly risen now, and
the world lay spread before me.

This is the end of the first stage of Pip's expectations.

Chapter XX

The journey from our town to the metropolis was a journey of about five
hours. It was a little past midday when the four-horse stage-coach by
which I was a passenger, got into the ravel of traffic frayed out about
the Cross Keys, Wood Street, Cheapside, London.

We Britons had at that time particularly settled that it was treasonable
to doubt our having and our being the best of everything: otherwise,
while I was scared by the immensity of London, I think I might have had
some faint doubts whether it was not rather ugly, crooked, narrow, and
dirty.

Mr. Jaggers had duly sent me his address; it was, Little Britain, and he
had written after it on his card, “just out of Smithfield, and close by
the coach-office.” Nevertheless, a hackney-coachman, who seemed to have
as many capes to his greasy great-coat as he was years old, packed me
up in his coach and hemmed me in with a folding and jingling barrier of
steps, as if he were going to take me fifty miles. His getting on his
box, which I remember to have been decorated with an old weather-stained
pea-green hammercloth moth-eaten into rags, was quite a work of time.
It was a wonderful equipage, with six great coronets outside, and ragged
things behind for I don't know how many footmen to hold on by, and
a harrow below them, to prevent amateur footmen from yielding to the
temptation.

I had scarcely had time to enjoy the coach and to think how like a
straw-yard it was, and yet how like a rag-shop, and to wonder why
the horses' nose-bags were kept inside, when I observed the coachman
beginning to get down, as if we were going to stop presently. And stop
we presently did, in a gloomy street, at certain offices with an open
door, whereon was painted MR. JAGGERS.

“How much?” I asked the coachman.

The coachman answered, “A shilling--unless you wish to make it more.”

I naturally said I had no wish to make it more.

“Then it must be a shilling,” observed the coachman. “I don't want to
get into trouble. I know him!” He darkly closed an eye at Mr. Jaggers's
name, and shook his head.

When he had got his shilling, and had in course of time completed the
ascent to his box, and had got away (which appeared to relieve his
mind), I went into the front office with my little portmanteau in my
hand and asked, Was Mr. Jaggers at home?

“He is not,” returned the clerk. “He is in Court at present. Am I
addressing Mr. Pip?”

I signified that he was addressing Mr. Pip.

“Mr. Jaggers left word, would you wait in his room. He couldn't say how
long he might be, having a case on. But it stands to reason, his time
being valuable, that he won't be longer than he can help.”

With those words, the clerk opened a door, and ushered me into an inner
chamber at the back. Here, we found a gentleman with one eye, in a
velveteen suit and knee-breeches, who wiped his nose with his sleeve on
being interrupted in the perusal of the newspaper.

“Go and wait outside, Mike,” said the clerk.

I began to say that I hoped I was not interrupting, when the clerk
shoved this gentleman out with as little ceremony as I ever saw used,
and tossing his fur cap out after him, left me alone.

Mr. Jaggers's room was lighted by a skylight only, and was a most dismal
place; the skylight, eccentrically pitched like a broken head, and the
distorted adjoining houses looking as if they had twisted themselves to
peep down at me through it. There were not so many papers about, as I
should have expected to see; and there were some odd objects about, that
I should not have expected to see,--such as an old rusty pistol, a
sword in a scabbard, several strange-looking boxes and packages, and
two dreadful casts on a shelf, of faces peculiarly swollen, and twitchy
about the nose. Mr. Jaggers's own high-backed chair was of deadly black
horsehair, with rows of brass nails round it, like a coffin; and I
fancied I could see how he leaned back in it, and bit his forefinger at
the clients. The room was but small, and the clients seemed to have had
a habit of backing up against the wall; the wall, especially opposite to
Mr. Jaggers's chair, being greasy with shoulders. I recalled, too, that
the one-eyed gentleman had shuffled forth against the wall when I was
the innocent cause of his being turned out.

I sat down in the cliental chair placed over against Mr. Jaggers's
chair, and became fascinated by the dismal atmosphere of the place. I
called to mind that the clerk had the same air of knowing something to
everybody else's disadvantage, as his master had. I wondered how many
other clerks there were upstairs, and whether they all claimed to have
the same detrimental mastery of their fellow-creatures. I wondered what
was the history of all the odd litter about the room, and how it came
there. I wondered whether the two swollen faces were of Mr. Jaggers's
family, and, if he were so unfortunate as to have had a pair of such
ill-looking relations, why he stuck them on that dusty perch for the
blacks and flies to settle on, instead of giving them a place at home.
Of course I had no experience of a London summer day, and my spirits may
have been oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit
that lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.
Jaggers's close room, until I really could not bear the two casts on the
shelf above Mr. Jaggers's chair, and got up and went out.

When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I
waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into
Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all
asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So,
I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where
I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's bulging at me from behind a
grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following
the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden
the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of
people standing about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred
that the trials were on.

While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk
minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and hear a
trial or so: informing me that he could give me a front place for half a
crown, whence I should command a full view of the Lord Chief Justice in
his wig and robes,--mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and
presently offering him at the reduced price of eighteen-pence. As I
declined the proposal on the plea of an appointment, he was so good as
to take me into a yard and show me where the gallows was kept, and also
where people were publicly whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors'
Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged; heightening the interest
of that dreadful portal by giving me to understand that “four on 'em”
 would come out at that door the day after to-morrow at eight in the
morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a
sickening idea of London; the more so as the Lord Chief Justice's
proprietor wore (from his hat down to his boots and up again to his
pocket-handkerchief inclusive) mildewed clothes which had evidently
not belonged to him originally, and which I took it into my head he had
bought cheap of the executioner. Under these circumstances I thought
myself well rid of him for a shilling.

I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and I
found he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made the tour
of Little Britain, and turned into Bartholomew Close; and now I became
aware that other people were waiting about for Mr. Jaggers, as well
as I. There were two men of secret appearance lounging in Bartholomew
Close, and thoughtfully fitting their feet into the cracks of the
pavement as they talked together, one of whom said to the other when
they first passed me, that “Jaggers would do it if it was to be done.”
 There was a knot of three men and two women standing at a corner, and
one of the women was crying on her dirty shawl, and the other comforted
her by saying, as she pulled her own shawl over her shoulders, “Jaggers
is for him, 'Melia, and what more could you have?” There was a red-eyed
little Jew who came into the Close while I was loitering there, in
company with a second little Jew whom he sent upon an errand; and
while the messenger was gone, I remarked this Jew, who was of a highly
excitable temperament, performing a jig of anxiety under a lamp-post and
accompanying himself, in a kind of frenzy, with the words, “O Jaggerth,
Jaggerth, Jaggerth! all otherth ith Cag-Maggerth, give me Jaggerth!”
 These testimonies to the popularity of my guardian made a deep
impression on me, and I admired and wondered more than ever.

At length, as I was looking out at the iron gate of Bartholomew Close
into Little Britain, I saw Mr. Jaggers coming across the road towards
me. All the others who were waiting saw him at the same time, and there
was quite a rush at him. Mr. Jaggers, putting a hand on my shoulder
and walking me on at his side without saying anything to me, addressed
himself to his followers.

First, he took the two secret men.

“Now, I have nothing to say to you,” said Mr. Jaggers, throwing his
finger at them. “I want to know no more than I know. As to the result,
it's a toss-up. I told you from the first it was a toss-up. Have you
paid Wemmick?”

“We made the money up this morning, sir,” said one of the men,
submissively, while the other perused Mr. Jaggers's face.

“I don't ask you when you made it up, or where, or whether you made it
up at all. Has Wemmick got it?”

“Yes, sir,” said both the men together.

“Very well; then you may go. Now, I won't have it!” said Mr Jaggers,
waving his hand at them to put them behind him. “If you say a word to
me, I'll throw up the case.”

“We thought, Mr. Jaggers--” one of the men began, pulling off his hat.

“That's what I told you not to do,” said Mr. Jaggers. “You thought! I
think for you; that's enough for you. If I want you, I know where to
find you; I don't want you to find me. Now I won't have it. I won't hear
a word.”

The two men looked at one another as Mr. Jaggers waved them behind
again, and humbly fell back and were heard no more.

“And now you!” said Mr. Jaggers, suddenly stopping, and turning on
the two women with the shawls, from whom the three men had meekly
separated,--“Oh! Amelia, is it?”

“Yes, Mr. Jaggers.”

“And do you remember,” retorted Mr. Jaggers, “that but for me you
wouldn't be here and couldn't be here?”

“O yes, sir!” exclaimed both women together. “Lord bless you, sir, well
we knows that!”

“Then why,” said Mr. Jaggers, “do you come here?”

“My Bill, sir!” the crying woman pleaded.

“Now, I tell you what!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Once for all. If you don't
know that your Bill's in good hands, I know it. And if you come here
bothering about your Bill, I'll make an example of both your Bill and
you, and let him slip through my fingers. Have you paid Wemmick?”

“O yes, sir! Every farden.”

“Very well. Then you have done all you have got to do. Say another
word--one single word--and Wemmick shall give you your money back.”

This terrible threat caused the two women to fall off immediately.
No one remained now but the excitable Jew, who had already raised the
skirts of Mr. Jaggers's coat to his lips several times.

“I don't know this man!” said Mr. Jaggers, in the same devastating
strain: “What does this fellow want?”

“Ma thear Mithter Jaggerth. Hown brother to Habraham Latharuth?”

“Who's he?” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let go of my coat.”

The suitor, kissing the hem of the garment again before relinquishing
it, replied, “Habraham Latharuth, on thuthpithion of plate.”

“You're too late,” said Mr. Jaggers. “I am over the way.”

“Holy father, Mithter Jaggerth!” cried my excitable acquaintance,
turning white, “don't thay you're again Habraham Latharuth!”

“I am,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and there's an end of it. Get out of the
way.”

“Mithter Jaggerth! Half a moment! My hown cuthen'th gone to Mithter
Wemmick at thith prethent minute, to hoffer him hany termth. Mithter
Jaggerth! Half a quarter of a moment! If you'd have the condethenthun to
be bought off from the t'other thide--at hany thuperior prithe!--money
no object!--Mithter Jaggerth--Mithter--!”

My guardian threw his supplicant off with supreme indifference, and
left him dancing on the pavement as if it were red hot. Without further
interruption, we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and
the man in velveteen with the fur cap.

“Here's Mike,” said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and
approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.

“Oh!” said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of
hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling
at the bell-rope; “your man comes on this afternoon. Well?”

“Well, Mas'r Jaggers,” returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a
constitutional cold; “arter a deal o' trouble, I've found one, sir, as
might do.”

“What is he prepared to swear?”

“Well, Mas'r Jaggers,” said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this
time; “in a general way, anythink.”

Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. “Now, I warned you before,” said
he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, “that if you ever
presumed to talk in that way here, I'd make an example of you. You
infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?”

The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious
what he had done.

“Spooney!” said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his
elbow. “Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?”

“Now, I ask you, you blundering booby,” said my guardian, very sternly,
“once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is
prepared to swear?”

Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson
from his face, and slowly replied, “Ayther to character, or to having
been in his company and never left him all the night in question.”

“Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?”

Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the
ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before
beginning to reply in a nervous manner, “We've dressed him up like--”
 when my guardian blustered out,--

“What? You WILL, will you?”

(“Spooney!” added the clerk again, with another stir.)

After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:--

“He is dressed like a 'spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook.”

“Is he here?” asked my guardian.

“I left him,” said Mike, “a setting on some doorsteps round the corner.”

“Take him past that window, and let me see him.”

The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to
it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an
accidental manner, with a murderous-looking tall individual, in a short
suit of white linen and a paper cap. This guileless confectioner was not
by any means sober, and had a black eye in the green stage of recovery,
which was painted over.

“Tell him to take his witness away directly,” said my guardian to the
clerk, in extreme disgust, “and ask him what he means by bringing such a
fellow as that.”

My guardian then took me into his own room, and while he lunched,
standing, from a sandwich-box and a pocket-flask of sherry (he seemed to
bully his very sandwich as he ate it), informed me what arrangements he
had made for me. I was to go to “Barnard's Inn,” to young Mr. Pocket's
rooms, where a bed had been sent in for my accommodation; I was to
remain with young Mr. Pocket until Monday; on Monday I was to go with
him to his father's house on a visit, that I might try how I liked it.
Also, I was told what my allowance was to be,--it was a very liberal
one,--and had handed to me from one of my guardian's drawers, the cards
of certain tradesmen with whom I was to deal for all kinds of clothes,
and such other things as I could in reason want. “You will find your
credit good, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian, whose flask of sherry smelt
like a whole caskful, as he hastily refreshed himself, “but I shall by
this means be able to check your bills, and to pull you up if I find you
outrunning the constable. Of course you'll go wrong somehow, but that's
no fault of mine.”

After I had pondered a little over this encouraging sentiment, I asked
Mr. Jaggers if I could send for a coach? He said it was not worth while,
I was so near my destination; Wemmick should walk round with me, if I
pleased.

I then found that Wemmick was the clerk in the next room. Another clerk
was rung down from upstairs to take his place while he was out, and I
accompanied him into the street, after shaking hands with my guardian.
We found a new set of people lingering outside, but Wemmick made a way
among them by saying coolly yet decisively, “I tell you it's no use; he
won't have a word to say to one of you;” and we soon got clear of them,
and went on side by side.




Chapter XXI

Casting my eyes on Mr. Wemmick as we went along, to see what he was
like in the light of day, I found him to be a dry man, rather short in
stature, with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been
imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel. There were some marks
in it that might have been dimples, if the material had been softer and
the instrument finer, but which, as it was, were only dints. The chisel
had made three or four of these attempts at embellishment over his nose,
but had given them up without an effort to smooth them off. I judged him
to be a bachelor from the frayed condition of his linen, and he appeared
to have sustained a good many bereavements; for he wore at least four
mourning rings, besides a brooch representing a lady and a weeping
willow at a tomb with an urn on it. I noticed, too, that several rings
and seals hung at his watch-chain, as if he were quite laden with
remembrances of departed friends. He had glittering eyes,--small, keen,
and black,--and thin wide mottled lips. He had had them, to the best of
my belief, from forty to fifty years.

“So you were never in London before?” said Mr. Wemmick to me.

“No,” said I.

“I was new here once,” said Mr. Wemmick. “Rum to think of now!”

“You are well acquainted with it now?”

“Why, yes,” said Mr. Wemmick. “I know the moves of it.”

“Is it a very wicked place?” I asked, more for the sake of saying
something than for information.

“You may get cheated, robbed, and murdered in London. But there are
plenty of people anywhere, who'll do that for you.”

“If there is bad blood between you and them,” said I, to soften it off a
little.

“O! I don't know about bad blood,” returned Mr. Wemmick; “there's not
much bad blood about. They'll do it, if there's anything to be got by
it.”

“That makes it worse.”

“You think so?” returned Mr. Wemmick. “Much about the same, I should
say.”

He wore his hat on the back of his head, and looked straight before him:
walking in a self-contained way as if there were nothing in the streets
to claim his attention. His mouth was such a post-office of a mouth
that he had a mechanical appearance of smiling. We had got to the top of
Holborn Hill before I knew that it was merely a mechanical appearance,
and that he was not smiling at all.

“Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?” I asked Mr. Wemmick.

“Yes,” said he, nodding in the direction. “At Hammersmith, west of
London.”

“Is that far?”

“Well! Say five miles.”

“Do you know him?”

“Why, you're a regular cross-examiner!” said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me
with an approving air. “Yes, I know him. I know him!”

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of
these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways
at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,
when he said here we were at Barnard's Inn. My depression was not
alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment
to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town
was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied
spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby
buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for
Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an
introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me
like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in
it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most
dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I
thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were
divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled
flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while
To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new
wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were
being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants
and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot
and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn
ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere
dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all
the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,--rot of rat
and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides--addressed
themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, “Try Barnard's
Mixture.”

So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations,
that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. “Ah!” said he, mistaking me;
“the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me.”

He led me into a corner and conducted me up a flight of stairs,--which
appeared to me to be slowly collapsing into sawdust, so that one of
those days the upper lodgers would look out at their doors and find
themselves without the means of coming down,--to a set of chambers on
the top floor. MR. POCKET, JUN., was painted on the door, and there was
a label on the letter-box, “Return shortly.”

“He hardly thought you'd come so soon,” Mr. Wemmick explained. “You
don't want me any more?”

“No, thank you,” said I.

“As I keep the cash,” Mr. Wemmick observed, “we shall most likely meet
pretty often. Good day.”

“Good day.”

I put out my hand, and Mr. Wemmick at first looked at it as if he
thought I wanted something. Then he looked at me, and said, correcting
himself,--

“To be sure! Yes. You're in the habit of shaking hands?”

I was rather confused, thinking it must be out of the London fashion,
but said yes.

“I have got so out of it!” said Mr. Wemmick,--“except at last. Very
glad, I'm sure, to make your acquaintance. Good day!”

When we had shaken hands and he was gone, I opened the staircase window
and had nearly beheaded myself, for, the lines had rotted away, and it
came down like the guillotine. Happily it was so quick that I had not
put my head out. After this escape, I was content to take a foggy view
of the Inn through the window's encrusting dirt, and to stand dolefully
looking out, saying to myself that London was decidedly overrated.

Mr. Pocket, Junior's, idea of Shortly was not mine, for I had nearly
maddened myself with looking out for half an hour, and had written
my name with my finger several times in the dirt of every pane in the
window, before I heard footsteps on the stairs. Gradually there arose
before me the hat, head, neckcloth, waistcoat, trousers, boots, of a
member of society of about my own standing. He had a paper-bag under
each arm and a pottle of strawberries in one hand, and was out of
breath.

“Mr. Pip?” said he.

“Mr. Pocket?” said I.

“Dear me!” he exclaimed. “I am extremely sorry; but I knew there was a
coach from your part of the country at midday, and I thought you would
come by that one. The fact is, I have been out on your account,--not
that that is any excuse,--for I thought, coming from the country, you
might like a little fruit after dinner, and I went to Covent Garden
Market to get it good.”

For a reason that I had, I felt as if my eyes would start out of my
head. I acknowledged his attention incoherently, and began to think this
was a dream.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “This door sticks so!”

As he was fast making jam of his fruit by wrestling with the door while
the paper-bags were under his arms, I begged him to allow me to hold
them. He relinquished them with an agreeable smile, and combated with
the door as if it were a wild beast. It yielded so suddenly at last,
that he staggered back upon me, and I staggered back upon the opposite
door, and we both laughed. But still I felt as if my eyes must start out
of my head, and as if this must be a dream.

“Pray come in,” said Mr. Pocket, Junior. “Allow me to lead the way. I am
rather bare here, but I hope you'll be able to make out tolerably well
till Monday. My father thought you would get on more agreeably through
to-morrow with me than with him, and might like to take a walk about
London. I am sure I shall be very happy to show London to you. As to our
table, you won't find that bad, I hope, for it will be supplied from our
coffee-house here, and (it is only right I should add) at your expense,
such being Mr. Jaggers's directions. As to our lodging, it's not by
any means splendid, because I have my own bread to earn, and my father
hasn't anything to give me, and I shouldn't be willing to take it, if he
had. This is our sitting-room,--just such chairs and tables and carpet
and so forth, you see, as they could spare from home. You mustn't give
me credit for the tablecloth and spoons and castors, because they come
for you from the coffee-house. This is my little bedroom; rather musty,
but Barnard's is musty. This is your bedroom; the furniture's hired for
the occasion, but I trust it will answer the purpose; if you should want
anything, I'll go and fetch it. The chambers are retired, and we shall
be alone together, but we shan't fight, I dare say. But dear me, I beg
your pardon, you're holding the fruit all this time. Pray let me take
these bags from you. I am quite ashamed.”

As I stood opposite to Mr. Pocket, Junior, delivering him the bags, One,
Two, I saw the starting appearance come into his own eyes that I knew to
be in mine, and he said, falling back,--

“Lord bless me, you're the prowling boy!”

“And you,” said I, “are the pale young gentleman!”




Chapter XXII

The pale young gentleman and I stood contemplating one another in
Barnard's Inn, until we both burst out laughing. “The idea of its
being you!” said he. “The idea of its being you!” said I. And then we
contemplated one another afresh, and laughed again. “Well!” said the
pale young gentleman, reaching out his hand good-humoredly, “it's all
over now, I hope, and it will be magnanimous in you if you'll forgive me
for having knocked you about so.”

I derived from this speech that Mr. Herbert Pocket (for Herbert was the
pale young gentleman's name) still rather confounded his intention with
his execution. But I made a modest reply, and we shook hands warmly.

“You hadn't come into your good fortune at that time?” said Herbert
Pocket.

“No,” said I.

“No,” he acquiesced: “I heard it had happened very lately. I was rather
on the lookout for good fortune then.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. Miss Havisham had sent for me, to see if she could take a fancy to
me. But she couldn't,--at all events, she didn't.”

I thought it polite to remark that I was surprised to hear that.

“Bad taste,” said Herbert, laughing, “but a fact. Yes, she had sent for
me on a trial visit, and if I had come out of it successfully, I
suppose I should have been provided for; perhaps I should have been
what-you-may-called it to Estella.”

“What's that?” I asked, with sudden gravity.

He was arranging his fruit in plates while we talked, which divided his
attention, and was the cause of his having made this lapse of a word.
“Affianced,” he explained, still busy with the fruit. “Betrothed.
Engaged. What's-his-named. Any word of that sort.”

“How did you bear your disappointment?” I asked.

“Pooh!” said he, “I didn't care much for it. She's a Tartar.”

“Miss Havisham?”

“I don't say no to that, but I meant Estella. That girl's hard and
haughty and capricious to the last degree, and has been brought up by
Miss Havisham to wreak revenge on all the male sex.”

“What relation is she to Miss Havisham?”

“None,” said he. “Only adopted.”

“Why should she wreak revenge on all the male sex? What revenge?”

“Lord, Mr. Pip!” said he. “Don't you know?”

“No,” said I.

“Dear me! It's quite a story, and shall be saved till dinner-time. And
now let me take the liberty of asking you a question. How did you come
there, that day?”

I told him, and he was attentive until I had finished, and then burst
out laughing again, and asked me if I was sore afterwards? I didn't
ask him if he was, for my conviction on that point was perfectly
established.

“Mr. Jaggers is your guardian, I understand?” he went on.

“Yes.”

“You know he is Miss Havisham's man of business and solicitor, and has
her confidence when nobody else has?”

This was bringing me (I felt) towards dangerous ground. I answered with
a constraint I made no attempt to disguise, that I had seen Mr. Jaggers
in Miss Havisham's house on the very day of our combat, but never at any
other time, and that I believed he had no recollection of having ever
seen me there.

“He was so obliging as to suggest my father for your tutor, and he
called on my father to propose it. Of course he knew about my father
from his connection with Miss Havisham. My father is Miss Havisham's
cousin; not that that implies familiar intercourse between them, for he
is a bad courtier and will not propitiate her.”

Herbert Pocket had a frank and easy way with him that was very taking.
I had never seen any one then, and I have never seen any one since,
who more strongly expressed to me, in every look and tone, a natural
incapacity to do anything secret and mean. There was something
wonderfully hopeful about his general air, and something that at the
same time whispered to me he would never be very successful or rich. I
don't know how this was. I became imbued with the notion on that first
occasion before we sat down to dinner, but I cannot define by what
means.

He was still a pale young gentleman, and had a certain conquered languor
about him in the midst of his spirits and briskness, that did not seem
indicative of natural strength. He had not a handsome face, but it was
better than handsome: being extremely amiable and cheerful. His figure
was a little ungainly, as in the days when my knuckles had taken such
liberties with it, but it looked as if it would always be light and
young. Whether Mr. Trabb's local work would have sat more gracefully on
him than on me, may be a question; but I am conscious that he carried
off his rather old clothes much better than I carried off my new suit.

As he was so communicative, I felt that reserve on my part would be a
bad return unsuited to our years. I therefore told him my small story,
and laid stress on my being forbidden to inquire who my benefactor was.
I further mentioned that as I had been brought up a blacksmith in a
country place, and knew very little of the ways of politeness, I would
take it as a great kindness in him if he would give me a hint whenever
he saw me at a loss or going wrong.

“With pleasure,” said he, “though I venture to prophesy that you'll want
very few hints. I dare say we shall be often together, and I should like
to banish any needless restraint between us. Will you do me the favour
to begin at once to call me by my Christian name, Herbert?”

I thanked him and said I would. I informed him in exchange that my
Christian name was Philip.

“I don't take to Philip,” said he, smiling, “for it sounds like a moral
boy out of the spelling-book, who was so lazy that he fell into a pond,
or so fat that he couldn't see out of his eyes, or so avaricious that
he locked up his cake till the mice ate it, or so determined to go a
bird's-nesting that he got himself eaten by bears who lived handy in the
neighborhood. I tell you what I should like. We are so harmonious, and
you have been a blacksmith,---would you mind it?”

“I shouldn't mind anything that you propose,” I answered, “but I don't
understand you.”

“Would you mind Handel for a familiar name? There's a charming piece of
music by Handel, called the Harmonious Blacksmith.”

“I should like it very much.”

“Then, my dear Handel,” said he, turning round as the door opened,
“here is the dinner, and I must beg of you to take the top of the table,
because the dinner is of your providing.”

This I would not hear of, so he took the top, and I faced him. It was a
nice little dinner,--seemed to me then a very Lord Mayor's Feast,--and
it acquired additional relish from being eaten under those independent
circumstances, with no old people by, and with London all around us.
This again was heightened by a certain gypsy character that set the
banquet off; for while the table was, as Mr. Pumblechook might have
said, the lap of luxury,--being entirely furnished forth from the
coffee-house,--the circumjacent region of sitting-room was of a
comparatively pastureless and shifty character; imposing on the waiter
the wandering habits of putting the covers on the floor (where he
fell over them), the melted butter in the arm-chair, the bread on the
bookshelves, the cheese in the coal-scuttle, and the boiled fowl into my
bed in the next room,--where I found much of its parsley and butter in
a state of congelation when I retired for the night. All this made the
feast delightful, and when the waiter was not there to watch me, my
pleasure was without alloy.

We had made some progress in the dinner, when I reminded Herbert of his
promise to tell me about Miss Havisham.

“True,” he replied. “I'll redeem it at once. Let me introduce the topic,
Handel, by mentioning that in London it is not the custom to put the
knife in the mouth,--for fear of accidents,--and that while the fork is
reserved for that use, it is not put further in than necessary. It is
scarcely worth mentioning, only it's as well to do as other people do.
Also, the spoon is not generally used over-hand, but under. This has
two advantages. You get at your mouth better (which after all is the
object), and you save a good deal of the attitude of opening oysters, on
the part of the right elbow.”

He offered these friendly suggestions in such a lively way, that we both
laughed and I scarcely blushed.

“Now,” he pursued, “concerning Miss Havisham. Miss Havisham, you must
know, was a spoilt child. Her mother died when she was a baby, and her
father denied her nothing. Her father was a country gentleman down in
your part of the world, and was a brewer. I don't know why it should
be a crack thing to be a brewer; but it is indisputable that while you
cannot possibly be genteel and bake, you may be as genteel as never was
and brew. You see it every day.”

“Yet a gentleman may not keep a public-house; may he?” said I.

“Not on any account,” returned Herbert; “but a public-house may keep a
gentleman. Well! Mr. Havisham was very rich and very proud. So was his
daughter.”

“Miss Havisham was an only child?” I hazarded.

“Stop a moment, I am coming to that. No, she was not an only child;
she had a half-brother. Her father privately married again--his cook, I
rather think.”

“I thought he was proud,” said I.

“My good Handel, so he was. He married his second wife privately,
because he was proud, and in course of time she died. When she was dead,
I apprehend he first told his daughter what he had done, and then
the son became a part of the family, residing in the house you are
acquainted with. As the son grew a young man, he turned out riotous,
extravagant, undutiful,--altogether bad. At last his father disinherited
him; but he softened when he was dying, and left him well off, though
not nearly so well off as Miss Havisham.--Take another glass of wine,
and excuse my mentioning that society as a body does not expect one
to be so strictly conscientious in emptying one's glass, as to turn it
bottom upwards with the rim on one's nose.”

I had been doing this, in an excess of attention to his recital. I
thanked him, and apologized. He said, “Not at all,” and resumed.

“Miss Havisham was now an heiress, and you may suppose was looked after
as a great match. Her half-brother had now ample means again, but what
with debts and what with new madness wasted them most fearfully again.
There were stronger differences between him and her than there had been
between him and his father, and it is suspected that he cherished a deep
and mortal grudge against her as having influenced the father's anger.
Now, I come to the cruel part of the story,--merely breaking off, my
dear Handel, to remark that a dinner-napkin will not go into a tumbler.”

Why I was trying to pack mine into my tumbler, I am wholly unable to
say. I only know that I found myself, with a perseverance worthy of a
much better cause, making the most strenuous exertions to compress it
within those limits. Again I thanked him and apologized, and again he
said in the cheerfullest manner, “Not at all, I am sure!” and resumed.

“There appeared upon the scene--say at the races, or the public
balls, or anywhere else you like--a certain man, who made love to Miss
Havisham. I never saw him (for this happened five-and-twenty years ago,
before you and I were, Handel), but I have heard my father mention that
he was a showy man, and the kind of man for the purpose. But that he was
not to be, without ignorance or prejudice, mistaken for a gentleman, my
father most strongly asseverates; because it is a principle of his that
no man who was not a true gentleman at heart ever was, since the world
began, a true gentleman in manner. He says, no varnish can hide the
grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the
grain will express itself. Well! This man pursued Miss Havisham closely,
and professed to be devoted to her. I believe she had not shown much
susceptibility up to that time; but all the susceptibility she possessed
certainly came out then, and she passionately loved him. There is no
doubt that she perfectly idolized him. He practised on her affection in
that systematic way, that he got great sums of money from her, and he
induced her to buy her brother out of a share in the brewery (which had
been weakly left him by his father) at an immense price, on the plea
that when he was her husband he must hold and manage it all. Your
guardian was not at that time in Miss Havisham's counsels, and she was
too haughty and too much in love to be advised by any one. Her relations
were poor and scheming, with the exception of my father; he was poor
enough, but not time-serving or jealous. The only independent one among
them, he warned her that she was doing too much for this man, and
was placing herself too unreservedly in his power. She took the first
opportunity of angrily ordering my father out of the house, in his
presence, and my father has never seen her since.”

I thought of her having said, “Matthew will come and see me at last when
I am laid dead upon that table;” and I asked Herbert whether his father
was so inveterate against her?

“It's not that,” said he, “but she charged him, in the presence of her
intended husband, with being disappointed in the hope of fawning upon
her for his own advancement, and, if he were to go to her now, it would
look true--even to him--and even to her. To return to the man and make
an end of him. The marriage day was fixed, the wedding dresses were
bought, the wedding tour was planned out, the wedding guests were
invited. The day came, but not the bridegroom. He wrote her a letter--”

“Which she received,” I struck in, “when she was dressing for her
marriage? At twenty minutes to nine?”

“At the hour and minute,” said Herbert, nodding, “at which she
afterwards stopped all the clocks. What was in it, further than that
it most heartlessly broke the marriage off, I can't tell you, because I
don't know. When she recovered from a bad illness that she had, she
laid the whole place waste, as you have seen it, and she has never since
looked upon the light of day.”

“Is that all the story?” I asked, after considering it.

“All I know of it; and indeed I only know so much, through piecing it
out for myself; for my father always avoids it, and, even when Miss
Havisham invited me to go there, told me no more of it than it was
absolutely requisite I should understand. But I have forgotten one
thing. It has been supposed that the man to whom she gave her misplaced
confidence acted throughout in concert with her half-brother; that it
was a conspiracy between them; and that they shared the profits.”

“I wonder he didn't marry her and get all the property,” said I.

“He may have been married already, and her cruel mortification may have
been a part of her half-brother's scheme,” said Herbert. “Mind! I don't
know that.”

“What became of the two men?” I asked, after again considering the
subject.

“They fell into deeper shame and degradation--if there can be
deeper--and ruin.”

“Are they alive now?”

“I don't know.”

“You said just now that Estella was not related to Miss Havisham, but
adopted. When adopted?”

Herbert shrugged his shoulders. “There has always been an Estella, since
I have heard of a Miss Havisham. I know no more. And now, Handel,” said
he, finally throwing off the story as it were, “there is a perfectly
open understanding between us. All that I know about Miss Havisham, you
know.”

“And all that I know,” I retorted, “you know.”

“I fully believe it. So there can be no competition or perplexity
between you and me. And as to the condition on which you hold your
advancement in life,--namely, that you are not to inquire or discuss to
whom you owe it,--you may be very sure that it will never be encroached
upon, or even approached, by me, or by any one belonging to me.”

In truth, he said this with so much delicacy, that I felt the subject
done with, even though I should be under his father's roof for years and
years to come. Yet he said it with so much meaning, too, that I felt
he as perfectly understood Miss Havisham to be my benefactress, as I
understood the fact myself.

It had not occurred to me before, that he had led up to the theme for
the purpose of clearing it out of our way; but we were so much the
lighter and easier for having broached it, that I now perceived this
to be the case. We were very gay and sociable, and I asked him, in the
course of conversation, what he was? He replied, “A capitalist,--an
Insurer of Ships.” I suppose he saw me glancing about the room in search
of some tokens of Shipping, or capital, for he added, “In the City.”

I had grand ideas of the wealth and importance of Insurers of Ships in
the City, and I began to think with awe of having laid a young Insurer
on his back, blackened his enterprising eye, and cut his responsible
head open. But again there came upon me, for my relief, that odd
impression that Herbert Pocket would never be very successful or rich.

“I shall not rest satisfied with merely employing my capital in insuring
ships. I shall buy up some good Life Assurance shares, and cut into the
Direction. I shall also do a little in the mining way. None of these
things will interfere with my chartering a few thousand tons on my own
account. I think I shall trade,” said he, leaning back in his chair, “to
the East Indies, for silks, shawls, spices, dyes, drugs, and precious
woods. It's an interesting trade.”

“And the profits are large?” said I.

“Tremendous!” said he.

I wavered again, and began to think here were greater expectations than
my own.

“I think I shall trade, also,” said he, putting his thumbs in his
waist-coat pockets, “to the West Indies, for sugar, tobacco, and rum.
Also to Ceylon, specially for elephants' tusks.”

“You will want a good many ships,” said I.

“A perfect fleet,” said he.

Quite overpowered by the magnificence of these transactions, I asked him
where the ships he insured mostly traded to at present?

“I haven't begun insuring yet,” he replied. “I am looking about me.”

Somehow, that pursuit seemed more in keeping with Barnard's Inn. I said
(in a tone of conviction), “Ah-h!”

“Yes. I am in a counting-house, and looking about me.”

“Is a counting-house profitable?” I asked.

“To--do you mean to the young fellow who's in it?” he asked, in reply.

“Yes; to you.”

“Why, n-no; not to me.” He said this with the air of one carefully
reckoning up and striking a balance. “Not directly profitable. That is,
it doesn't pay me anything, and I have to--keep myself.”

This certainly had not a profitable appearance, and I shook my head as
if I would imply that it would be difficult to lay by much accumulative
capital from such a source of income.

“But the thing is,” said Herbert Pocket, “that you look about you.
That's the grand thing. You are in a counting-house, you know, and you
look about you.”

It struck me as a singular implication that you couldn't be out of a
counting-house, you know, and look about you; but I silently deferred to
his experience.

“Then the time comes,” said Herbert, “when you see your opening. And you
go in, and you swoop upon it and you make your capital, and then there
you are! When you have once made your capital, you have nothing to do
but employ it.”

This was very like his way of conducting that encounter in the garden;
very like. His manner of bearing his poverty, too, exactly corresponded
to his manner of bearing that defeat. It seemed to me that he took all
blows and buffets now with just the same air as he had taken mine
then. It was evident that he had nothing around him but the simplest
necessaries, for everything that I remarked upon turned out to have been
sent in on my account from the coffee-house or somewhere else.

Yet, having already made his fortune in his own mind, he was so
unassuming with it that I felt quite grateful to him for not being
puffed up. It was a pleasant addition to his naturally pleasant ways,
and we got on famously. In the evening we went out for a walk in the
streets, and went half-price to the Theatre; and next day we went to
church at Westminster Abbey, and in the afternoon we walked in the
Parks; and I wondered who shod all the horses there, and wished Joe did.

On a moderate computation, it was many months, that Sunday, since I had
left Joe and Biddy. The space interposed between myself and them partook
of that expansion, and our marshes were any distance off. That I could
have been at our old church in my old church-going clothes, on the very
last Sunday that ever was, seemed a combination of impossibilities,
geographical and social, solar and lunar. Yet in the London streets so
crowded with people and so brilliantly lighted in the dusk of evening,
there were depressing hints of reproaches for that I had put the poor
old kitchen at home so far away; and in the dead of night, the footsteps
of some incapable impostor of a porter mooning about Barnard's Inn,
under pretence of watching it, fell hollow on my heart.

On the Monday morning at a quarter before nine, Herbert went to
the counting-house to report himself,--to look about him, too, I
suppose,--and I bore him company. He was to come away in an hour or
two to attend me to Hammersmith, and I was to wait about for him. It
appeared to me that the eggs from which young Insurers were hatched were
incubated in dust and heat, like the eggs of ostriches, judging from the
places to which those incipient giants repaired on a Monday morning. Nor
did the counting-house where Herbert assisted, show in my eyes as at
all a good Observatory; being a back second floor up a yard, of a grimy
presence in all particulars, and with a look into another back second
floor, rather than a look out.

I waited about until it was noon, and I went upon 'Change, and I saw
fluey men sitting there under the bills about shipping, whom I took to
be great merchants, though I couldn't understand why they should all be
out of spirits. When Herbert came, we went and had lunch at a celebrated
house which I then quite venerated, but now believe to have been the
most abject superstition in Europe, and where I could not help noticing,
even then, that there was much more gravy on the tablecloths and knives
and waiters' clothes, than in the steaks. This collation disposed of at
a moderate price (considering the grease, which was not charged for), we
went back to Barnard's Inn and got my little portmanteau, and then took
coach for Hammersmith. We arrived there at two or three o'clock in
the afternoon, and had very little way to walk to Mr. Pocket's house.
Lifting the latch of a gate, we passed direct into a little garden
overlooking the river, where Mr. Pocket's children were playing
about. And unless I deceive myself on a point where my interests or
prepossessions are certainly not concerned, I saw that Mr. and Mrs.
Pocket's children were not growing up or being brought up, but were
tumbling up.

Mrs. Pocket was sitting on a garden chair under a tree, reading, with
her legs upon another garden chair; and Mrs. Pocket's two nurse-maids
were looking about them while the children played. “Mamma,” said
Herbert, “this is young Mr. Pip.” Upon which Mrs. Pocket received me
with an appearance of amiable dignity.

“Master Alick and Miss Jane,” cried one of the nurses to two of the
children, “if you go a bouncing up against them bushes you'll fall over
into the river and be drownded, and what'll your pa say then?”

At the same time this nurse picked up Mrs. Pocket's handkerchief, and
said, “If that don't make six times you've dropped it, Mum!” Upon which
Mrs. Pocket laughed and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and settling herself
in one chair only, resumed her book. Her countenance immediately assumed
a knitted and intent expression as if she had been reading for a week,
but before she could have read half a dozen lines, she fixed her eyes
upon me, and said, “I hope your mamma is quite well?” This unexpected
inquiry put me into such a difficulty that I began saying in the
absurdest way that if there had been any such person I had no doubt she
would have been quite well and would have been very much obliged and
would have sent her compliments, when the nurse came to my rescue.

“Well!” she cried, picking up the pocket-handkerchief, “if that don't
make seven times! What ARE you a doing of this afternoon, Mum!” Mrs.
Pocket received her property, at first with a look of unutterable
surprise as if she had never seen it before, and then with a laugh of
recognition, and said, “Thank you, Flopson,” and forgot me, and went on
reading.

I found, now I had leisure to count them, that there were no fewer than
six little Pockets present, in various stages of tumbling up. I had
scarcely arrived at the total when a seventh was heard, as in the region
of air, wailing dolefully.

“If there ain't Baby!” said Flopson, appearing to think it most
surprising. “Make haste up, Millers.”

Millers, who was the other nurse, retired into the house, and by degrees
the child's wailing was hushed and stopped, as if it were a young
ventriloquist with something in its mouth. Mrs. Pocket read all the
time, and I was curious to know what the book could be.

We were waiting, I supposed, for Mr. Pocket to come out to us; at any
rate we waited there, and so I had an opportunity of observing the
remarkable family phenomenon that whenever any of the children strayed
near Mrs. Pocket in their play, they always tripped themselves up and
tumbled over her,--always very much to her momentary astonishment, and
their own more enduring lamentation. I was at a loss to account for
this surprising circumstance, and could not help giving my mind to
speculations about it, until by and by Millers came down with the baby,
which baby was handed to Flopson, which Flopson was handing it to Mrs.
Pocket, when she too went fairly head foremost over Mrs. Pocket, baby
and all, and was caught by Herbert and myself.

“Gracious me, Flopson!” said Mrs. Pocket, looking off her book for a
moment, “everybody's tumbling!”

“Gracious you, indeed, Mum!” returned Flopson, very red in the face;
“what have you got there?”

“I got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.

“Why, if it ain't your footstool!” cried Flopson. “And if you keep it
under your skirts like that, who's to help tumbling? Here! Take the
baby, Mum, and give me your book.”

Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a
little in her lap, while the other children played about it. This had
lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders
that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap. Thus I made the
second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little
Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down.

Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children
into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out
of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr.
Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and
with his very gray hair disordered on his head, as if he didn't quite
see his way to putting anything straight.




Chapter XXIII

Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to
see him. “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son's smile,
“an alarming personage.” He was a young-looking man, in spite of
his perplexities and his very gray hair, and his manner seemed quite
natural. I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected;
there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have
been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very
near being so. When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs.
Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were
black and handsome, “Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?” And she
looked up from her book, and said, “Yes.” She then smiled upon me in an
absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower
water? As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone
or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like
her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs.
Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased
Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased
father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody's determined
opposition arising out of entirely personal motives,--I forget whose,
if I ever knew,--the Sovereign's, the Prime Minister's, the Lord
Chancellor's, the Archbishop of Canterbury's, anybody's,--and had
tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite
supposititious fact. I believe he had been knighted himself for storming
the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address
engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of
some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the
trowel or the mortar. Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to
be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things
must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of
plebeian domestic knowledge.

So successful a watch and ward had been established over the young lady
by this judicious parent, that she had grown up highly ornamental, but
perfectly helpless and useless. With her character thus happily formed,
in the first bloom of her youth she had encountered Mr. Pocket: who was
also in the first bloom of youth, and not quite decided whether to mount
to the Woolsack, or to roof himself in with a mitre. As his doing the
one or the other was a mere question of time, he and Mrs. Pocket had
taken Time by the forelock (when, to judge from its length, it would
seem to have wanted cutting), and had married without the knowledge of
the judicious parent. The judicious parent, having nothing to bestow or
withhold but his blessing, had handsomely settled that dower upon them
after a short struggle, and had informed Mr. Pocket that his wife was “a
treasure for a Prince.” Mr. Pocket had invested the Prince's treasure
in the ways of the world ever since, and it was supposed to have brought
him in but indifferent interest. Still, Mrs. Pocket was in general the
object of a queer sort of respectful pity, because she had not married
a title; while Mr. Pocket was the object of a queer sort of forgiving
reproach, because he had never got one.

Mr. Pocket took me into the house and showed me my room: which was a
pleasant one, and so furnished as that I could use it with comfort for
my own private sitting-room. He then knocked at the doors of two other
similar rooms, and introduced me to their occupants, by name Drummle
and Startop. Drummle, an old-looking young man of a heavy order of
architecture, was whistling. Startop, younger in years and appearance,
was reading and holding his head, as if he thought himself in danger of
exploding it with too strong a charge of knowledge.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had such a noticeable air of being in somebody
else's hands, that I wondered who really was in possession of the house
and let them live there, until I found this unknown power to be the
servants. It was a smooth way of going on, perhaps, in respect of saving
trouble; but it had the appearance of being expensive, for the servants
felt it a duty they owed to themselves to be nice in their eating and
drinking, and to keep a deal of company downstairs. They allowed a very
liberal table to Mr. and Mrs. Pocket, yet it always appeared to me that
by far the best part of the house to have boarded in would have been
the kitchen,--always supposing the boarder capable of self-defence, for,
before I had been there a week, a neighboring lady with whom the family
were personally unacquainted, wrote in to say that she had seen Millers
slapping the baby. This greatly distressed Mrs. Pocket, who burst into
tears on receiving the note, and said that it was an extraordinary thing
that the neighbors couldn't mind their own business.

By degrees I learnt, and chiefly from Herbert, that Mr. Pocket had been
educated at Harrow and at Cambridge, where he had distinguished himself;
but that when he had had the happiness of marrying Mrs. Pocket very
early in life, he had impaired his prospects and taken up the calling
of a Grinder. After grinding a number of dull blades,--of whom it was
remarkable that their fathers, when influential, were always going to
help him to preferment, but always forgot to do it when the blades had
left the Grindstone,--he had wearied of that poor work and had come to
London. Here, after gradually failing in loftier hopes, he had “read”
 with divers who had lacked opportunities or neglected them, and had
refurbished divers others for special occasions, and had turned his
acquirements to the account of literary compilation and correction,
and on such means, added to some very moderate private resources, still
maintained the house I saw.

Mr. and Mrs. Pocket had a toady neighbor; a widow lady of that highly
sympathetic nature that she agreed with everybody, blessed everybody,
and shed smiles and tears on everybody, according to circumstances. This
lady's name was Mrs. Coiler, and I had the honor of taking her down to
dinner on the day of my installation. She gave me to understand on the
stairs, that it was a blow to dear Mrs. Pocket that dear Mr. Pocket
should be under the necessity of receiving gentlemen to read with him.
That did not extend to me, she told me in a gush of love and confidence
(at that time, I had known her something less than five minutes); if
they were all like Me, it would be quite another thing.

“But dear Mrs. Pocket,” said Mrs. Coiler, “after her early
disappointment (not that dear Mr. Pocket was to blame in that), requires
so much luxury and elegance--”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said, to stop her, for I was afraid she was going to
cry.

“And she is of so aristocratic a disposition--”

“Yes, ma'am,” I said again, with the same object as before.

“--That it is hard,” said Mrs. Coiler, “to have dear Mr. Pocket's time
and attention diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket.”

I could not help thinking that it might be harder if the butcher's time
and attention were diverted from dear Mrs. Pocket; but I said nothing,
and indeed had enough to do in keeping a bashful watch upon my company
manners.

It came to my knowledge, through what passed between Mrs. Pocket and
Drummle while I was attentive to my knife and fork, spoon, glasses, and
other instruments of self-destruction, that Drummle, whose Christian
name was Bentley, was actually the next heir but one to a baronetcy.
It further appeared that the book I had seen Mrs. Pocket reading in the
garden was all about titles, and that she knew the exact date at which
her grandpapa would have come into the book, if he ever had come at all.
Drummle didn't say much, but in his limited way (he struck me as a sulky
kind of fellow) he spoke as one of the elect, and recognized Mrs. Pocket
as a woman and a sister. No one but themselves and Mrs. Coiler the toady
neighbor showed any interest in this part of the conversation, and it
appeared to me that it was painful to Herbert; but it promised to last
a long time, when the page came in with the announcement of a domestic
affliction. It was, in effect, that the cook had mislaid the beef. To my
unutterable amazement, I now, for the first time, saw Mr. Pocket
relieve his mind by going through a performance that struck me as very
extraordinary, but which made no impression on anybody else, and
with which I soon became as familiar as the rest. He laid down the
carving-knife and fork,--being engaged in carving, at the moment,--put
his two hands into his disturbed hair, and appeared to make an
extraordinary effort to lift himself up by it. When he had done this,
and had not lifted himself up at all, he quietly went on with what he
was about.

Mrs. Coiler then changed the subject and began to flatter me. I liked
it for a few moments, but she flattered me so very grossly that the
pleasure was soon over. She had a serpentine way of coming close at
me when she pretended to be vitally interested in the friends and
localities I had left, which was altogether snaky and fork-tongued; and
when she made an occasional bounce upon Startop (who said very little to
her), or upon Drummle (who said less), I rather envied them for being on
the opposite side of the table.

After dinner the children were introduced, and Mrs. Coiler made admiring
comments on their eyes, noses, and legs,--a sagacious way of improving
their minds. There were four little girls, and two little boys, besides
the baby who might have been either, and the baby's next successor who
was as yet neither. They were brought in by Flopson and Millers, much as
though those two non-commissioned officers had been recruiting somewhere
for children and had enlisted these, while Mrs. Pocket looked at the
young Nobles that ought to have been as if she rather thought she had
had the pleasure of inspecting them before, but didn't quite know what
to make of them.

“Here! Give me your fork, Mum, and take the baby,” said Flopson. “Don't
take it that way, or you'll get its head under the table.”

Thus advised, Mrs. Pocket took it the other way, and got its head
upon the table; which was announced to all present by a prodigious
concussion.

“Dear, dear! Give it me back, Mum,” said Flopson; “and Miss Jane, come
and dance to baby, do!”

One of the little girls, a mere mite who seemed to have prematurely
taken upon herself some charge of the others, stepped out of her place
by me, and danced to and from the baby until it left off crying, and
laughed. Then, all the children laughed, and Mr. Pocket (who in the
meantime had twice endeavored to lift himself up by the hair) laughed,
and we all laughed and were glad.

Flopson, by dint of doubling the baby at the joints like a Dutch doll,
then got it safely into Mrs. Pocket's lap, and gave it the nut-crackers
to play with; at the same time recommending Mrs. Pocket to take notice
that the handles of that instrument were not likely to agree with its
eyes, and sharply charging Miss Jane to look after the same. Then, the
two nurses left the room, and had a lively scuffle on the staircase with
a dissipated page who had waited at dinner, and who had clearly lost
half his buttons at the gaming-table.

I was made very uneasy in my mind by Mrs. Pocket's falling into a
discussion with Drummle respecting two baronetcies, while she ate a
sliced orange steeped in sugar and wine, and, forgetting all about the
baby on her lap, who did most appalling things with the nut-crackers. At
length little Jane, perceiving its young brains to be imperilled, softly
left her place, and with many small artifices coaxed the dangerous
weapon away. Mrs. Pocket finishing her orange at about the same time,
and not approving of this, said to Jane,--

“You naughty child, how dare you? Go and sit down this instant!”

“Mamma dear,” lisped the little girl, “baby ood have put hith eyeth
out.”

“How dare you tell me so?” retorted Mrs. Pocket. “Go and sit down in
your chair this moment!”

Mrs. Pocket's dignity was so crushing, that I felt quite abashed, as if
I myself had done something to rouse it.

“Belinda,” remonstrated Mr. Pocket, from the other end of the table,
“how can you be so unreasonable? Jane only interfered for the protection
of baby.”

“I will not allow anybody to interfere,” said Mrs. Pocket. “I am
surprised, Matthew, that you should expose me to the affront of
interference.”

“Good God!” cried Mr. Pocket, in an outbreak of desolate desperation.
“Are infants to be nut-crackered into their tombs, and is nobody to save
them?”

“I will not be interfered with by Jane,” said Mrs. Pocket, with a
majestic glance at that innocent little offender. “I hope I know my poor
grandpapa's position. Jane, indeed!”

Mr. Pocket got his hands in his hair again, and this time really did
lift himself some inches out of his chair. “Hear this!” he helplessly
exclaimed to the elements. “Babies are to be nut-crackered dead, for
people's poor grandpapa's positions!” Then he let himself down again,
and became silent.

We all looked awkwardly at the tablecloth while this was going on. A
pause succeeded, during which the honest and irrepressible baby made a
series of leaps and crows at little Jane, who appeared to me to be the
only member of the family (irrespective of servants) with whom it had
any decided acquaintance.

“Mr. Drummle,” said Mrs. Pocket, “will you ring for Flopson? Jane, you
undutiful little thing, go and lie down. Now, baby darling, come with
ma!”

The baby was the soul of honor, and protested with all its might. It
doubled itself up the wrong way over Mrs. Pocket's arm, exhibited a pair
of knitted shoes and dimpled ankles to the company in lieu of its soft
face, and was carried out in the highest state of mutiny. And it gained
its point after all, for I saw it through the window within a few
minutes, being nursed by little Jane.

It happened that the other five children were left behind at the
dinner-table, through Flopson's having some private engagement, and
their not being anybody else's business. I thus became aware of the
mutual relations between them and Mr. Pocket, which were exemplified in
the following manner. Mr. Pocket, with the normal perplexity of his face
heightened and his hair rumpled, looked at them for some minutes, as if
he couldn't make out how they came to be boarding and lodging in that
establishment, and why they hadn't been billeted by Nature on
somebody else. Then, in a distant Missionary way he asked them certain
questions,--as why little Joe had that hole in his frill, who said, Pa,
Flopson was going to mend it when she had time,--and how little Fanny
came by that whitlow, who said, Pa, Millers was going to poultice it
when she didn't forget. Then, he melted into parental tenderness, and
gave them a shilling apiece and told them to go and play; and then as
they went out, with one very strong effort to lift himself up by the
hair he dismissed the hopeless subject.

In the evening there was rowing on the river. As Drummle and Startop had
each a boat, I resolved to set up mine, and to cut them both out. I was
pretty good at most exercises in which country boys are adepts, but as
I was conscious of wanting elegance of style for the Thames,--not to say
for other waters,--I at once engaged to place myself under the tuition
of the winner of a prize-wherry who plied at our stairs, and to whom I
was introduced by my new allies. This practical authority confused me
very much by saying I had the arm of a blacksmith. If he could have
known how nearly the compliment lost him his pupil, I doubt if he would
have paid it.

There was a supper-tray after we got home at night, and I think we
should all have enjoyed ourselves, but for a rather disagreeable
domestic occurrence. Mr. Pocket was in good spirits, when a housemaid
came in, and said, “If you please, sir, I should wish to speak to you.”

“Speak to your master?” said Mrs. Pocket, whose dignity was roused
again. “How can you think of such a thing? Go and speak to Flopson. Or
speak to me--at some other time.”

“Begging your pardon, ma'am,” returned the housemaid, “I should wish to
speak at once, and to speak to master.”

Hereupon, Mr. Pocket went out of the room, and we made the best of
ourselves until he came back.

“This is a pretty thing, Belinda!” said Mr. Pocket, returning with a
countenance expressive of grief and despair. “Here's the cook lying
insensibly drunk on the kitchen floor, with a large bundle of fresh
butter made up in the cupboard ready to sell for grease!”

Mrs. Pocket instantly showed much amiable emotion, and said, “This is
that odious Sophia's doing!”

“What do you mean, Belinda?” demanded Mr. Pocket.

“Sophia has told you,” said Mrs. Pocket. “Did I not see her with my own
eyes and hear her with my own ears, come into the room just now and ask
to speak to you?”

“But has she not taken me downstairs, Belinda,” returned Mr. Pocket,
“and shown me the woman, and the bundle too?”

“And do you defend her, Matthew,” said Mrs. Pocket, “for making
mischief?”

Mr. Pocket uttered a dismal groan.

“Am I, grandpapa's granddaughter, to be nothing in the house?” said Mrs.
Pocket. “Besides, the cook has always been a very nice respectful woman,
and said in the most natural manner when she came to look after the
situation, that she felt I was born to be a Duchess.”

There was a sofa where Mr. Pocket stood, and he dropped upon it in the
attitude of the Dying Gladiator. Still in that attitude he said, with a
hollow voice, “Good night, Mr. Pip,” when I deemed it advisable to go to
bed and leave him.




Chapter XXIV

After two or three days, when I had established myself in my room and
had gone backwards and forwards to London several times, and had ordered
all I wanted of my tradesmen, Mr. Pocket and I had a long talk together.
He knew more of my intended career than I knew myself, for he referred
to his having been told by Mr. Jaggers that I was not designed for any
profession, and that I should be well enough educated for my destiny
if I could “hold my own” with the average of young men in prosperous
circumstances. I acquiesced, of course, knowing nothing to the contrary.

He advised my attending certain places in London, for the acquisition of
such mere rudiments as I wanted, and my investing him with the functions
of explainer and director of all my studies. He hoped that with
intelligent assistance I should meet with little to discourage me, and
should soon be able to dispense with any aid but his. Through his way
of saying this, and much more to similar purpose, he placed himself on
confidential terms with me in an admirable manner; and I may state
at once that he was always so zealous and honorable in fulfilling his
compact with me, that he made me zealous and honorable in fulfilling
mine with him. If he had shown indifference as a master, I have no doubt
I should have returned the compliment as a pupil; he gave me no such
excuse, and each of us did the other justice. Nor did I ever regard
him as having anything ludicrous about him--or anything but what was
serious, honest, and good--in his tutor communication with me.

When these points were settled, and so far carried out as that I had
begun to work in earnest, it occurred to me that if I could retain my
bedroom in Barnard's Inn, my life would be agreeably varied, while my
manners would be none the worse for Herbert's society. Mr. Pocket did
not object to this arrangement, but urged that before any step could
possibly be taken in it, it must be submitted to my guardian. I felt
that this delicacy arose out of the consideration that the plan would
save Herbert some expense, so I went off to Little Britain and imparted
my wish to Mr. Jaggers.

“If I could buy the furniture now hired for me,” said I, “and one or two
other little things, I should be quite at home there.”

“Go it!” said Mr. Jaggers, with a short laugh. “I told you you'd get on.
Well! How much do you want?”

I said I didn't know how much.

“Come!” retorted Mr. Jaggers. “How much? Fifty pounds?”

“O, not nearly so much.”

“Five pounds?” said Mr. Jaggers.

This was such a great fall, that I said in discomfiture, “O, more than
that.”

“More than that, eh!” retorted Mr. Jaggers, lying in wait for me, with
his hands in his pockets, his head on one side, and his eyes on the wall
behind me; “how much more?”

“It is so difficult to fix a sum,” said I, hesitating.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers. “Let's get at it. Twice five; will that do?
Three times five; will that do? Four times five; will that do?”

I said I thought that would do handsomely.

“Four times five will do handsomely, will it?” said Mr. Jaggers,
knitting his brows. “Now, what do you make of four times five?”

“What do I make of it?”

“Ah!” said Mr. Jaggers; “how much?”

“I suppose you make it twenty pounds,” said I, smiling.

“Never mind what I make it, my friend,” observed Mr. Jaggers, with a
knowing and contradictory toss of his head. “I want to know what you
make it.”

“Twenty pounds, of course.”

“Wemmick!” said Mr. Jaggers, opening his office door. “Take Mr. Pip's
written order, and pay him twenty pounds.”

This strongly marked way of doing business made a strongly marked
impression on me, and that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers never
laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots, and, in poising
himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows
joined together, awaiting an answer, he sometimes caused the boots to
creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he happened
to go out now, and as Wemmick was brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick
that I hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's manner.

“Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment,” answered Wemmick;
“he don't mean that you should know what to make of it.--Oh!” for
I looked surprised, “it's not personal; it's professional: only
professional.”

Wemmick was at his desk, lunching--and crunching--on a dry hard biscuit;
pieces of which he threw from time to time into his slit of a mouth, as
if he were posting them.

“Always seems to me,” said Wemmick, “as if he had set a man-trap and was
watching it. Suddenly-click--you're caught!”

Without remarking that man-traps were not among the amenities of life, I
said I supposed he was very skilful?

“Deep,” said Wemmick, “as Australia.” Pointing with his pen at the
office floor, to express that Australia was understood, for the purposes
of the figure, to be symmetrically on the opposite spot of the globe.
“If there was anything deeper,” added Wemmick, bringing his pen to
paper, “he'd be it.”

Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business, and Wemmick said,
“Ca-pi-tal!” Then I asked if there were many clerks? to which he
replied,--

“We don't run much into clerks, because there's only one Jaggers, and
people won't have him at second hand. There are only four of us. Would
you like to see 'em? You are one of us, as I may say.”

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick had put all the biscuit into the
post, and had paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe, the key
of which safe he kept somewhere down his back and produced from his
coat-collar like an iron-pigtail, we went upstairs. The house was dark
and shabby, and the greasy shoulders that had left their mark in Mr.
Jaggers's room seemed to have been shuffling up and down the staircase
for years. In the front first floor, a clerk who looked something
between a publican and a rat-catcher--a large pale, puffed, swollen
man--was attentively engaged with three or four people of shabby
appearance, whom he treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed to
be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's coffers. “Getting evidence
together,” said Mr. Wemmick, as we came out, “for the Bailey.” In the
room over that, a little flabby terrier of a clerk with dangling hair
(his cropping seemed to have been forgotten when he was a puppy) was
similarly engaged with a man with weak eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented
to me as a smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who would melt
me anything I pleased,--and who was in an excessive white-perspiration,
as if he had been trying his art on himself. In a back room, a
high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied up in dirty flannel, who was
dressed in old black clothes that bore the appearance of having been
waxed, was stooping over his work of making fair copies of the notes of
the other two gentlemen, for Mr. Jaggers's own use.

This was all the establishment. When we went downstairs again, Wemmick
led me into my guardian's room, and said, “This you've seen already.”

“Pray,” said I, as the two odious casts with the twitchy leer upon them
caught my sight again, “whose likenesses are those?”

“These?” said Wemmick, getting upon a chair, and blowing the dust off
the horrible heads before bringing them down. “These are two celebrated
ones. Famous clients of ours that got us a world of credit. This chap
(why you must have come down in the night and been peeping into the
inkstand, to get this blot upon your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered
his master, and, considering that he wasn't brought up to evidence,
didn't plan it badly.”

“Is it like him?” I asked, recoiling from the brute, as Wemmick spat
upon his eyebrow and gave it a rub with his sleeve.

“Like him? It's himself, you know. The cast was made in Newgate,
directly after he was taken down. You had a particular fancy for
me, hadn't you, Old Artful?” said Wemmick. He then explained this
affectionate apostrophe, by touching his brooch representing the lady
and the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn upon it, and saying,
“Had it made for me, express!”

“Is the lady anybody?” said I.

“No,” returned Wemmick. “Only his game. (You liked your bit of game,
didn't you?) No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip, except
one,--and she wasn't of this slender lady-like sort, and you wouldn't
have caught her looking after this urn, unless there was something to
drink in it.” Wemmick's attention being thus directed to his brooch, he
put down the cast, and polished the brooch with his pocket-handkerchief.

“Did that other creature come to the same end?” I asked. “He has the
same look.”

“You're right,” said Wemmick; “it's the genuine look. Much as if one
nostril was caught up with a horse-hair and a little fish-hook. Yes,
he came to the same end; quite the natural end here, I assure you.
He forged wills, this blade did, if he didn't also put the supposed
testators to sleep too. You were a gentlemanly Cove, though” (Mr.
Wemmick was again apostrophizing), “and you said you could write Greek.
Yah, Bounceable! What a liar you were! I never met such a liar as you!”
 Before putting his late friend on his shelf again, Wemmick touched the
largest of his mourning rings and said, “Sent out to buy it for me, only
the day before.”

While he was putting up the other cast and coming down from the chair,
the thought crossed my mind that all his personal jewelry was derived
from like sources. As he had shown no diffidence on the subject, I
ventured on the liberty of asking him the question, when he stood before
me, dusting his hands.

“O yes,” he returned, “these are all gifts of that kind. One brings
another, you see; that's the way of it. I always take 'em. They're
curiosities. And they're property. They may not be worth much, but,
after all, they're property and portable. It don't signify to you with
your brilliant lookout, but as to myself, my guiding-star always is,
'Get hold of portable property'.”

When I had rendered homage to this light, he went on to say, in a
friendly manner:--

“If at any odd time when you have nothing better to do, you wouldn't
mind coming over to see me at Walworth, I could offer you a bed, and I
should consider it an honor. I have not much to show you; but such two
or three curiosities as I have got you might like to look over; and I am
fond of a bit of garden and a summer-house.”

I said I should be delighted to accept his hospitality.

“Thankee,” said he; “then we'll consider that it's to come off, when
convenient to you. Have you dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?”

“Not yet.”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “he'll give you wine, and good wine. I'll give you
punch, and not bad punch. And now I'll tell you something. When you go
to dine with Mr. Jaggers, look at his housekeeper.”

“Shall I see something very uncommon?”

“Well,” said Wemmick, “you'll see a wild beast tamed. Not so very
uncommon, you'll tell me. I reply, that depends on the original wildness
of the beast, and the amount of taming. It won't lower your opinion of
Mr. Jaggers's powers. Keep your eye on it.”

I told him I would do so, with all the interest and curiosity that his
preparation awakened. As I was taking my departure, he asked me if I
would like to devote five minutes to seeing Mr. Jaggers “at it?”

For several reasons, and not least because I didn't clearly know what
Mr. Jaggers would be found to be “at,” I replied in the affirmative.
We dived into the City, and came up in a crowded police-court, where
a blood-relation (in the murderous sense) of the deceased, with the
fanciful taste in brooches, was standing at the bar, uncomfortably
chewing something; while my guardian had a woman under examination or
cross-examination,--I don't know which,--and was striking her, and
the bench, and everybody present, with awe. If anybody, of whatsoever
degree, said a word that he didn't approve of, he instantly required to
have it “taken down.” If anybody wouldn't make an admission, he said,
“I'll have it out of you!” and if anybody made an admission, he said,
“Now I have got you!” The magistrates shivered under a single bite of
his finger. Thieves and thief-takers hung in dread rapture on his words,
and shrank when a hair of his eyebrows turned in their direction. Which
side he was on I couldn't make out, for he seemed to me to be grinding
the whole place in a mill; I only know that when I stole out on tiptoe,
he was not on the side of the bench; for, he was making the legs of the
old gentleman who presided, quite convulsive under the table, by his
denunciations of his conduct as the representative of British law and
justice in that chair that day.




Chapter XXV

Bentley Drummle, who was so sulky a fellow that he even took up a book
as if its writer had done him an injury, did not take up an
acquaintance in a more agreeable spirit. Heavy in figure, movement,
and comprehension,--in the sluggish complexion of his face, and in
the large, awkward tongue that seemed to loll about in his mouth as
he himself lolled about in a room,--he was idle, proud, niggardly,
reserved, and suspicious. He came of rich people down in Somersetshire,
who had nursed this combination of qualities until they made the
discovery that it was just of age and a blockhead. Thus, Bentley Drummle
had come to Mr. Pocket when he was a head taller than that gentleman,
and half a dozen heads thicker than most gentlemen.

Startop had been spoilt by a weak mother and kept at home when he
ought to have been at school, but he was devotedly attached to her, and
admired her beyond measure. He had a woman's delicacy of feature,
and was--“as you may see, though you never saw her,” said Herbert to
me--“exactly like his mother.” It was but natural that I should take to
him much more kindly than to Drummle, and that, even in the earliest
evenings of our boating, he and I should pull homeward abreast of one
another, conversing from boat to boat, while Bentley Drummle came up
in our wake alone, under the overhanging banks and among the rushes. He
would always creep in-shore like some uncomfortable amphibious creature,
even when the tide would have sent him fast upon his way; and I always
think of him as coming after us in the dark or by the back-water,
when our own two boats were breaking the sunset or the moonlight in
mid-stream.

Herbert was my intimate companion and friend. I presented him with a
half-share in my boat, which was the occasion of his often coming down
to Hammersmith; and my possession of a half-share in his chambers often
took me up to London. We used to walk between the two places at all
hours. I have an affection for the road yet (though it is not so
pleasant a road as it was then), formed in the impressibility of untried
youth and hope.

When I had been in Mr. Pocket's family a month or two, Mr. and Mrs.
Camilla turned up. Camilla was Mr. Pocket's sister. Georgiana, whom I
had seen at Miss Havisham's on the same occasion, also turned up. She
was a cousin,--an indigestive single woman, who called her rigidity
religion, and her liver love. These people hated me with the hatred of
cupidity and disappointment. As a matter of course, they fawned upon
me in my prosperity with the basest meanness. Towards Mr. Pocket, as
a grown-up infant with no notion of his own interests, they showed the
complacent forbearance I had heard them express. Mrs. Pocket they
held in contempt; but they allowed the poor soul to have been heavily
disappointed in life, because that shed a feeble reflected light upon
themselves.

These were the surroundings among which I settled down, and applied
myself to my education. I soon contracted expensive habits, and began
to spend an amount of money that within a few short months I should have
thought almost fabulous; but through good and evil I stuck to my books.
There was no other merit in this, than my having sense enough to feel
my deficiencies. Between Mr. Pocket and Herbert I got on fast; and, with
one or the other always at my elbow to give me the start I wanted, and
clear obstructions out of my road, I must have been as great a dolt as
Drummle if I had done less.

I had not seen Mr. Wemmick for some weeks, when I thought I would write
him a note and propose to go home with him on a certain evening. He
replied that it would give him much pleasure, and that he would expect
me at the office at six o'clock. Thither I went, and there I found him,
putting the key of his safe down his back as the clock struck.

“Did you think of walking down to Walworth?” said he.

“Certainly,” said I, “if you approve.”

“Very much,” was Wemmick's reply, “for I have had my legs under the desk
all day, and shall be glad to stretch them. Now, I'll tell you what I
have got for supper, Mr. Pip. I have got a stewed steak,--which is
of home preparation,--and a cold roast fowl,--which is from the
cook's-shop. I think it's tender, because the master of the shop was a
Juryman in some cases of ours the other day, and we let him down easy.
I reminded him of it when I bought the fowl, and I said, “Pick us out
a good one, old Briton, because if we had chosen to keep you in the box
another day or two, we could easily have done it.” He said to that,
“Let me make you a present of the best fowl in the shop.” I let him, of
course. As far as it goes, it's property and portable. You don't object
to an aged parent, I hope?”

I really thought he was still speaking of the fowl, until he added,
“Because I have got an aged parent at my place.” I then said what
politeness required.

“So, you haven't dined with Mr. Jaggers yet?” he pursued, as we walked
along.

“Not yet.”

“He told me so this afternoon when he heard you were coming. I expect
you'll have an invitation to-morrow. He's going to ask your pals, too.
Three of 'em; ain't there?”

Although I was not in the habit of counting Drummle as one of my
intimate associates, I answered, “Yes.”

“Well, he's going to ask the whole gang,”--I hardly felt complimented by
the word,--“and whatever he gives you, he'll give you good. Don't look
forward to variety, but you'll have excellence. And there's another rum
thing in his house,” proceeded Wemmick, after a moment's pause, as if
the remark followed on the housekeeper understood; “he never lets a door
or window be fastened at night.”

“Is he never robbed?”

“That's it!” returned Wemmick. “He says, and gives it out publicly, “I
want to see the man who'll rob me.” Lord bless you, I have heard him, a
hundred times, if I have heard him once, say to regular cracksmen in our
front office, “You know where I live; now, no bolt is ever drawn there;
why don't you do a stroke of business with me? Come; can't I tempt you?”
 Not a man of them, sir, would be bold enough to try it on, for love or
money.”

“They dread him so much?” said I.

“Dread him,” said Wemmick. “I believe you they dread him. Not but what
he's artful, even in his defiance of them. No silver, sir. Britannia
metal, every spoon.”

“So they wouldn't have much,” I observed, “even if they--”

“Ah! But he would have much,” said Wemmick, cutting me short, “and they
know it. He'd have their lives, and the lives of scores of 'em. He'd
have all he could get. And it's impossible to say what he couldn't get,
if he gave his mind to it.”

I was falling into meditation on my guardian's greatness, when Wemmick
remarked:--

“As to the absence of plate, that's only his natural depth, you know.
A river's its natural depth, and he's his natural depth. Look at his
watch-chain. That's real enough.”

“It's very massive,” said I.

“Massive?” repeated Wemmick. “I think so. And his watch is a gold
repeater, and worth a hundred pound if it's worth a penny. Mr. Pip,
there are about seven hundred thieves in this town who know all about
that watch; there's not a man, a woman, or a child, among them, who
wouldn't identify the smallest link in that chain, and drop it as if it
was red hot, if inveigled into touching it.”

At first with such discourse, and afterwards with conversation of a more
general nature, did Mr. Wemmick and I beguile the time and the road,
until he gave me to understand that we had arrived in the district of
Walworth.

It appeared to be a collection of back lanes, ditches, and little
gardens, and to present the aspect of a rather dull retirement.
Wemmick's house was a little wooden cottage in the midst of plots of
garden, and the top of it was cut out and painted like a battery mounted
with guns.

“My own doing,” said Wemmick. “Looks pretty; don't it?”

I highly commended it, I think it was the smallest house I ever saw;
with the queerest gothic windows (by far the greater part of them sham),
and a gothic door almost too small to get in at.

“That's a real flagstaff, you see,” said Wemmick, “and on Sundays I
run up a real flag. Then look here. After I have crossed this bridge, I
hoist it up--so--and cut off the communication.”

The bridge was a plank, and it crossed a chasm about four feet wide
and two deep. But it was very pleasant to see the pride with which he
hoisted it up and made it fast; smiling as he did so, with a relish and
not merely mechanically.

“At nine o'clock every night, Greenwich time,” said Wemmick, “the gun
fires. There he is, you see! And when you hear him go, I think you'll
say he's a Stinger.”

The piece of ordnance referred to, was mounted in a separate fortress,
constructed of lattice-work. It was protected from the weather by an
ingenious little tarpaulin contrivance in the nature of an umbrella.

“Then, at the back,” said Wemmick, “out of sight, so as not to impede
the idea of fortifications,--for it's a principle with me, if you have
an idea, carry it out and keep it up,--I don't know whether that's your
opinion--”

I said, decidedly.

“--At the back, there's a pig, and there are fowls and rabbits; then,
I knock together my own little frame, you see, and grow cucumbers; and
you'll judge at supper what sort of a salad I can raise. So, sir,” said
Wemmick, smiling again, but seriously too, as he shook his head, “if you
can suppose the little place besieged, it would hold out a devil of a
time in point of provisions.”

Then, he conducted me to a bower about a dozen yards off, but which was
approached by such ingenious twists of path that it took quite a long
time to get at; and in this retreat our glasses were already set forth.
Our punch was cooling in an ornamental lake, on whose margin the bower
was raised. This piece of water (with an island in the middle which
might have been the salad for supper) was of a circular form, and he had
constructed a fountain in it, which, when you set a little mill going
and took a cork out of a pipe, played to that powerful extent that it
made the back of your hand quite wet.

“I am my own engineer, and my own carpenter, and my own plumber, and
my own gardener, and my own Jack of all Trades,” said Wemmick, in
acknowledging my compliments. “Well; it's a good thing, you know. It
brushes the Newgate cobwebs away, and pleases the Aged. You wouldn't
mind being at once introduced to the Aged, would you? It wouldn't put
you out?”

I expressed the readiness I felt, and we went into the castle. There
we found, sitting by a fire, a very old man in a flannel coat: clean,
cheerful, comfortable, and well cared for, but intensely deaf.

“Well aged parent,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him in a cordial
and jocose way, “how am you?”

“All right, John; all right!” replied the old man.

“Here's Mr. Pip, aged parent,” said Wemmick, “and I wish you could hear
his name. Nod away at him, Mr. Pip; that's what he likes. Nod away at
him, if you please, like winking!”

“This is a fine place of my son's, sir,” cried the old man, while I
nodded as hard as I possibly could. “This is a pretty pleasure-ground,
sir. This spot and these beautiful works upon it ought to be kept
together by the Nation, after my son's time, for the people's
enjoyment.”

“You're as proud of it as Punch; ain't you, Aged?” said Wemmick,
contemplating the old man, with his hard face really softened; “there's
a nod for you;” giving him a tremendous one; “there's another for you;”
 giving him a still more tremendous one; “you like that, don't you? If
you're not tired, Mr. Pip--though I know it's tiring to strangers--will
you tip him one more? You can't think how it pleases him.”

I tipped him several more, and he was in great spirits. We left him
bestirring himself to feed the fowls, and we sat down to our punch in
the arbor; where Wemmick told me, as he smoked a pipe, that it had taken
him a good many years to bring the property up to its present pitch of
perfection.

“Is it your own, Mr. Wemmick?”

“O yes,” said Wemmick, “I have got hold of it, a bit at a time. It's a
freehold, by George!”

“Is it indeed? I hope Mr. Jaggers admires it?”

“Never seen it,” said Wemmick. “Never heard of it. Never seen the Aged.
Never heard of him. No; the office is one thing, and private life is
another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me, and
when I come into the Castle, I leave the office behind me. If it's not
in any way disagreeable to you, you'll oblige me by doing the same. I
don't wish it professionally spoken about.”

Of course I felt my good faith involved in the observance of his
request. The punch being very nice, we sat there drinking it and
talking, until it was almost nine o'clock. “Getting near gun-fire,” said
Wemmick then, as he laid down his pipe; “it's the Aged's treat.”

Proceeding into the Castle again, we found the Aged heating the poker,
with expectant eyes, as a preliminary to the performance of this great
nightly ceremony. Wemmick stood with his watch in his hand until the
moment was come for him to take the red-hot poker from the Aged, and
repair to the battery. He took it, and went out, and presently the
Stinger went off with a Bang that shook the crazy little box of a
cottage as if it must fall to pieces, and made every glass and teacup in
it ring. Upon this, the Aged--who I believe would have been blown out
of his arm-chair but for holding on by the elbows--cried out exultingly,
“He's fired! I heerd him!” and I nodded at the old gentleman until it is
no figure of speech to declare that I absolutely could not see him.

The interval between that time and supper Wemmick devoted to showing
me his collection of curiosities. They were mostly of a felonious
character; comprising the pen with which a celebrated forgery had been
committed, a distinguished razor or two, some locks of hair, and several
manuscript confessions written under condemnation,--upon which Mr.
Wemmick set particular value as being, to use his own words, “every one
of 'em Lies, sir.” These were agreeably dispersed among small specimens
of china and glass, various neat trifles made by the proprietor of the
museum, and some tobacco-stoppers carved by the Aged. They were all
displayed in that chamber of the Castle into which I had been first
inducted, and which served, not only as the general sitting-room but
as the kitchen too, if I might judge from a saucepan on the hob, and
a brazen bijou over the fireplace designed for the suspension of a
roasting-jack.

There was a neat little girl in attendance, who looked after the Aged in
the day. When she had laid the supper-cloth, the bridge was lowered to
give her means of egress, and she withdrew for the night. The supper was
excellent; and though the Castle was rather subject to dry-rot insomuch
that it tasted like a bad nut, and though the pig might have been
farther off, I was heartily pleased with my whole entertainment. Nor was
there any drawback on my little turret bedroom, beyond there being such
a very thin ceiling between me and the flagstaff, that when I lay down
on my back in bed, it seemed as if I had to balance that pole on my
forehead all night.

Wemmick was up early in the morning, and I am afraid I heard him
cleaning my boots. After that, he fell to gardening, and I saw him from
my gothic window pretending to employ the Aged, and nodding at him in
a most devoted manner. Our breakfast was as good as the supper, and at
half-past eight precisely we started for Little Britain. By degrees,
Wemmick got dryer and harder as we went along, and his mouth tightened
into a post-office again. At last, when we got to his place of business
and he pulled out his key from his coat-collar, he looked as unconscious
of his Walworth property as if the Castle and the drawbridge and the
arbor and the lake and the fountain and the Aged, had all been blown
into space together by the last discharge of the Stinger.




Chapter XXVI

It fell out as Wemmick had told me it would, that I had an early
opportunity of comparing my guardian's establishment with that of his
cashier and clerk. My guardian was in his room, washing his hands with
his scented soap, when I went into the office from Walworth; and he
called me to him, and gave me the invitation for myself and friends
which Wemmick had prepared me to receive. “No ceremony,” he stipulated,
“and no dinner dress, and say to-morrow.” I asked him where we should
come to (for I had no idea where he lived), and I believe it was in his
general objection to make anything like an admission, that he replied,
“Come here, and I'll take you home with me.” I embrace this opportunity
of remarking that he washed his clients off, as if he were a surgeon or
a dentist. He had a closet in his room, fitted up for the purpose, which
smelt of the scented soap like a perfumer's shop. It had an unusually
large jack-towel on a roller inside the door, and he would wash his
hands, and wipe them and dry them all over this towel, whenever he came
in from a police court or dismissed a client from his room. When I and
my friends repaired to him at six o'clock next day, he seemed to have
been engaged on a case of a darker complexion than usual, for we found
him with his head butted into this closet, not only washing his hands,
but laving his face and gargling his throat. And even when he had
done all that, and had gone all round the jack-towel, he took out his
penknife and scraped the case out of his nails before he put his coat
on.

There were some people slinking about as usual when we passed out into
the street, who were evidently anxious to speak with him; but there was
something so conclusive in the halo of scented soap which encircled
his presence, that they gave it up for that day. As we walked along
westward, he was recognized ever and again by some face in the crowd of
the streets, and whenever that happened he talked louder to me; but
he never otherwise recognized anybody, or took notice that anybody
recognized him.

He conducted us to Gerrard Street, Soho, to a house on the south side of
that street. Rather a stately house of its kind, but dolefully in want
of painting, and with dirty windows. He took out his key and opened the
door, and we all went into a stone hall, bare, gloomy, and little used.
So, up a dark brown staircase into a series of three dark brown rooms on
the first floor. There were carved garlands on the panelled walls, and
as he stood among them giving us welcome, I know what kind of loops I
thought they looked like.

Dinner was laid in the best of these rooms; the second was his
dressing-room; the third, his bedroom. He told us that he held the whole
house, but rarely used more of it than we saw. The table was comfortably
laid--no silver in the service, of course--and at the side of his chair
was a capacious dumb-waiter, with a variety of bottles and decanters on
it, and four dishes of fruit for dessert. I noticed throughout, that he
kept everything under his own hand, and distributed everything himself.

There was a bookcase in the room; I saw from the backs of the books,
that they were about evidence, criminal law, criminal biography, trials,
acts of Parliament, and such things. The furniture was all very solid
and good, like his watch-chain. It had an official look, however, and
there was nothing merely ornamental to be seen. In a corner was a little
table of papers with a shaded lamp: so that he seemed to bring the
office home with him in that respect too, and to wheel it out of an
evening and fall to work.

As he had scarcely seen my three companions until now,--for he and I had
walked together,--he stood on the hearth-rug, after ringing the bell,
and took a searching look at them. To my surprise, he seemed at once to
be principally if not solely interested in Drummle.

“Pip,” said he, putting his large hand on my shoulder and moving me to
the window, “I don't know one from the other. Who's the Spider?”

“The spider?” said I.

“The blotchy, sprawly, sulky fellow.”

“That's Bentley Drummle,” I replied; “the one with the delicate face is
Startop.”

Not making the least account of “the one with the delicate face,” he
returned, “Bentley Drummle is his name, is it? I like the look of that
fellow.”

He immediately began to talk to Drummle: not at all deterred by his
replying in his heavy reticent way, but apparently led on by it to screw
discourse out of him. I was looking at the two, when there came between
me and them the housekeeper, with the first dish for the table.

She was a woman of about forty, I supposed,--but I may have thought her
younger than she was. Rather tall, of a lithe nimble figure, extremely
pale, with large faded eyes, and a quantity of streaming hair. I cannot
say whether any diseased affection of the heart caused her lips to be
parted as if she were panting, and her face to bear a curious expression
of suddenness and flutter; but I know that I had been to see Macbeth at
the theatre, a night or two before, and that her face looked to me as if
it were all disturbed by fiery air, like the faces I had seen rise out
of the Witches' caldron.

She set the dish on, touched my guardian quietly on the arm with a
finger to notify that dinner was ready, and vanished. We took our seats
at the round table, and my guardian kept Drummle on one side of him,
while Startop sat on the other. It was a noble dish of fish that the
housekeeper had put on table, and we had a joint of equally choice
mutton afterwards, and then an equally choice bird. Sauces, wines, all
the accessories we wanted, and all of the best, were given out by our
host from his dumb-waiter; and when they had made the circuit of the
table, he always put them back again. Similarly, he dealt us clean
plates and knives and forks, for each course, and dropped those just
disused into two baskets on the ground by his chair. No other attendant
than the housekeeper appeared. She set on every dish; and I always saw
in her face, a face rising out of the caldron. Years afterwards, I made
a dreadful likeness of that woman, by causing a face that had no other
natural resemblance to it than it derived from flowing hair to pass
behind a bowl of flaming spirits in a dark room.

Induced to take particular notice of the housekeeper, both by her
own striking appearance and by Wemmick's preparation, I observed
that whenever she was in the room she kept her eyes attentively on my
guardian, and that she would remove her hands from any dish she put
before him, hesitatingly, as if she dreaded his calling her back, and
wanted him to speak when she was nigh, if he had anything to say. I
fancied that I could detect in his manner a consciousness of this, and a
purpose of always holding her in suspense.

Dinner went off gayly, and although my guardian seemed to follow rather
than originate subjects, I knew that he wrenched the weakest part of
our dispositions out of us. For myself, I found that I was expressing my
tendency to lavish expenditure, and to patronize Herbert, and to boast
of my great prospects, before I quite knew that I had opened my lips.
It was so with all of us, but with no one more than Drummle: the
development of whose inclination to gird in a grudging and suspicious
way at the rest, was screwed out of him before the fish was taken off.

It was not then, but when we had got to the cheese, that our
conversation turned upon our rowing feats, and that Drummle was rallied
for coming up behind of a night in that slow amphibious way of his.
Drummle upon this, informed our host that he much preferred our room to
our company, and that as to skill he was more than our master, and that
as to strength he could scatter us like chaff. By some invisible agency,
my guardian wound him up to a pitch little short of ferocity about this
trifle; and he fell to baring and spanning his arm to show how muscular
it was, and we all fell to baring and spanning our arms in a ridiculous
manner.

Now the housekeeper was at that time clearing the table; my guardian,
taking no heed of her, but with the side of his face turned from her,
was leaning back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger and
showing an interest in Drummle, that, to me, was quite inexplicable.
Suddenly, he clapped his large hand on the housekeeper's, like a trap,
as she stretched it across the table. So suddenly and smartly did he do
this, that we all stopped in our foolish contention.

“If you talk of strength,” said Mr. Jaggers, “I'll show you a wrist.
Molly, let them see your wrist.”

Her entrapped hand was on the table, but she had already put her other
hand behind her waist. “Master,” she said, in a low voice, with her eyes
attentively and entreatingly fixed upon him. “Don't.”

“I'll show you a wrist,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, with an immovable
determination to show it. “Molly, let them see your wrist.”

“Master,” she again murmured. “Please!”

“Molly,” said Mr. Jaggers, not looking at her, but obstinately looking
at the opposite side of the room, “let them see both your wrists. Show
them. Come!”

He took his hand from hers, and turned that wrist up on the table. She
brought her other hand from behind her, and held the two out side by
side. The last wrist was much disfigured,--deeply scarred and scarred
across and across. When she held her hands out she took her eyes from
Mr. Jaggers, and turned them watchfully on every one of the rest of us
in succession.

“There's power here,” said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews
with his forefinger. “Very few men have the power of wrist that this
woman has. It's remarkable what mere force of grip there is in these
hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw
stronger in that respect, man's or woman's, than these.”

While he said these words in a leisurely, critical style, she continued
to look at every one of us in regular succession as we sat. The moment
he ceased, she looked at him again. “That'll do, Molly,” said Mr.
Jaggers, giving her a slight nod; “you have been admired, and can
go.” She withdrew her hands and went out of the room, and Mr. Jaggers,
putting the decanters on from his dumb-waiter, filled his glass and
passed round the wine.

“At half-past nine, gentlemen,” said he, “we must break up. Pray make
the best use of your time. I am glad to see you all. Mr. Drummle, I
drink to you.”

If his object in singling out Drummle were to bring him out still more,
it perfectly succeeded. In a sulky triumph, Drummle showed his morose
depreciation of the rest of us, in a more and more offensive degree,
until he became downright intolerable. Through all his stages, Mr.
Jaggers followed him with the same strange interest. He actually seemed
to serve as a zest to Mr. Jaggers's wine.

In our boyish want of discretion I dare say we took too much to drink,
and I know we talked too much. We became particularly hot upon some
boorish sneer of Drummle's, to the effect that we were too free with our
money. It led to my remarking, with more zeal than discretion, that it
came with a bad grace from him, to whom Startop had lent money in my
presence but a week or so before.

“Well,” retorted Drummle; “he'll be paid.”

“I don't mean to imply that he won't,” said I, “but it might make you
hold your tongue about us and our money, I should think.”

“You should think!” retorted Drummle. “Oh Lord!”

“I dare say,” I went on, meaning to be very severe, “that you wouldn't
lend money to any of us if we wanted it.”

“You are right,” said Drummle. “I wouldn't lend one of you a sixpence. I
wouldn't lend anybody a sixpence.”

“Rather mean to borrow under those circumstances, I should say.”

“You should say,” repeated Drummle. “Oh Lord!”

This was so very aggravating--the more especially as I found myself
making no way against his surly obtuseness--that I said, disregarding
Herbert's efforts to check me,--

“Come, Mr. Drummle, since we are on the subject, I'll tell you what
passed between Herbert here and me, when you borrowed that money.”

“I don't want to know what passed between Herbert there and you,”
 growled Drummle. And I think he added in a lower growl, that we might
both go to the devil and shake ourselves.

“I'll tell you, however,” said I, “whether you want to know or not. We
said that as you put it in your pocket very glad to get it, you seemed
to be immensely amused at his being so weak as to lend it.”

Drummle laughed outright, and sat laughing in our faces, with his hands
in his pockets and his round shoulders raised; plainly signifying that
it was quite true, and that he despised us as asses all.

Hereupon Startop took him in hand, though with a much better grace than
I had shown, and exhorted him to be a little more agreeable. Startop,
being a lively, bright young fellow, and Drummle being the exact
opposite, the latter was always disposed to resent him as a direct
personal affront. He now retorted in a coarse, lumpish way, and Startop
tried to turn the discussion aside with some small pleasantry that made
us all laugh. Resenting this little success more than anything, Drummle,
without any threat or warning, pulled his hands out of his pockets,
dropped his round shoulders, swore, took up a large glass, and would
have flung it at his adversary's head, but for our entertainer's
dexterously seizing it at the instant when it was raised for that
purpose.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Jaggers, deliberately putting down the glass, and
hauling out his gold repeater by its massive chain, “I am exceedingly
sorry to announce that it's half past nine.”

On this hint we all rose to depart. Before we got to the street door,
Startop was cheerily calling Drummle “old boy,” as if nothing had
happened. But the old boy was so far from responding, that he would not
even walk to Hammersmith on the same side of the way; so Herbert and I,
who remained in town, saw them going down the street on opposite sides;
Startop leading, and Drummle lagging behind in the shadow of the houses,
much as he was wont to follow in his boat.

As the door was not yet shut, I thought I would leave Herbert there for
a moment, and run upstairs again to say a word to my guardian. I found
him in his dressing-room surrounded by his stock of boots, already hard
at it, washing his hands of us.

I told him I had come up again to say how sorry I was that anything
disagreeable should have occurred, and that I hoped he would not blame
me much.

“Pooh!” said he, sluicing his face, and speaking through the
water-drops; “it's nothing, Pip. I like that Spider though.”

He had turned towards me now, and was shaking his head, and blowing, and
towelling himself.

“I am glad you like him, sir,” said I--“but I don't.”

“No, no,” my guardian assented; “don't have too much to do with him.
Keep as clear of him as you can. But I like the fellow, Pip; he is one
of the true sort. Why, if I was a fortune-teller--”

Looking out of the towel, he caught my eye.

“But I am not a fortune-teller,” he said, letting his head drop into a
festoon of towel, and towelling away at his two ears. “You know what I
am, don't you? Good night, Pip.”

“Good night, sir.”

In about a month after that, the Spider's time with Mr. Pocket was up
for good, and, to the great relief of all the house but Mrs. Pocket, he
went home to the family hole.




Chapter XXVII


“MY DEAR MR PIP:--

“I write this by request of Mr. Gargery, for to let you know that he
is going to London in company with Mr. Wopsle and would be glad if
agreeable to be allowed to see you. He would call at Barnard's Hotel
Tuesday morning at nine o'clock, when if not agreeable please leave
word. Your poor sister is much the same as when you left. We talk of you
in the kitchen every night, and wonder what you are saying and doing. If
now considered in the light of a liberty, excuse it for the love of
poor old days. No more, dear Mr. Pip, from your ever obliged, and
affectionate servant,

“BIDDY.”

“P.S. He wishes me most particular to write what larks. He says you will
understand. I hope and do not doubt it will be agreeable to see him,
even though a gentleman, for you had ever a good heart, and he is a
worthy, worthy man. I have read him all, excepting only the last little
sentence, and he wishes me most particular to write again what larks.”

I received this letter by the post on Monday morning, and therefore its
appointment was for next day. Let me confess exactly with what feelings
I looked forward to Joe's coming.

Not with pleasure, though I was bound to him by so many ties; no;
with considerable disturbance, some mortification, and a keen sense of
incongruity. If I could have kept him away by paying money, I certainly
would have paid money. My greatest reassurance was that he was coming
to Barnard's Inn, not to Hammersmith, and consequently would not fall
in Bentley Drummle's way. I had little objection to his being seen by
Herbert or his father, for both of whom I had a respect; but I had the
sharpest sensitiveness as to his being seen by Drummle, whom I held in
contempt. So, throughout life, our worst weaknesses and meannesses are
usually committed for the sake of the people whom we most despise.

I had begun to be always decorating the chambers in some quite
unnecessary and inappropriate way or other, and very expensive those
wrestles with Barnard proved to be. By this time, the rooms were
vastly different from what I had found them, and I enjoyed the honor
of occupying a few prominent pages in the books of a neighboring
upholsterer. I had got on so fast of late, that I had even started a boy
in boots,--top boots,--in bondage and slavery to whom I might have been
said to pass my days. For, after I had made the monster (out of the
refuse of my washerwoman's family), and had clothed him with a blue
coat, canary waistcoat, white cravat, creamy breeches, and the boots
already mentioned, I had to find him a little to do and a great deal
to eat; and with both of those horrible requirements he haunted my
existence.

This avenging phantom was ordered to be on duty at eight on Tuesday
morning in the hall, (it was two feet square, as charged for
floorcloth,) and Herbert suggested certain things for breakfast that he
thought Joe would like. While I felt sincerely obliged to him for being
so interested and considerate, I had an odd half-provoked sense of
suspicion upon me, that if Joe had been coming to see him, he wouldn't
have been quite so brisk about it.

However, I came into town on the Monday night to be ready for Joe, and
I got up early in the morning, and caused the sitting-room and
breakfast-table to assume their most splendid appearance. Unfortunately
the morning was drizzly, and an angel could not have concealed the fact
that Barnard was shedding sooty tears outside the window, like some weak
giant of a Sweep.

As the time approached I should have liked to run away, but the Avenger
pursuant to orders was in the hall, and presently I heard Joe on
the staircase. I knew it was Joe, by his clumsy manner of coming upstairs,
--his state boots being always too big for him,--and by the time
it took him to read the names on the other floors in the course of
his ascent. When at last he stopped outside our door, I could hear his
finger tracing over the painted letters of my name, and I afterwards
distinctly heard him breathing in at the keyhole. Finally he gave a
faint single rap, and Pepper--such was the compromising name of the
avenging boy--announced “Mr. Gargery!” I thought he never would have
done wiping his feet, and that I must have gone out to lift him off the
mat, but at last he came in.

“Joe, how are you, Joe?”

“Pip, how AIR you, Pip?”

With his good honest face all glowing and shining, and his hat put
down on the floor between us, he caught both my hands and worked them
straight up and down, as if I had been the last-patented Pump.

“I am glad to see you, Joe. Give me your hat.”

But Joe, taking it up carefully with both hands, like a bird's-nest with
eggs in it, wouldn't hear of parting with that piece of property, and
persisted in standing talking over it in a most uncomfortable way.

“Which you have that growed,” said Joe, “and that swelled, and that
gentle-folked;” Joe considered a little before he discovered this word;
“as to be sure you are a honor to your king and country.”

“And you, Joe, look wonderfully well.”

“Thank God,” said Joe, “I'm ekerval to most. And your sister, she's
no worse than she were. And Biddy, she's ever right and ready. And all
friends is no backerder, if not no forarder. 'Ceptin Wopsle; he's had a
drop.”

All this time (still with both hands taking great care of the
bird's-nest), Joe was rolling his eyes round and round the room, and
round and round the flowered pattern of my dressing-gown.

“Had a drop, Joe?”

“Why yes,” said Joe, lowering his voice, “he's left the Church and went
into the playacting. Which the playacting have likeways brought him
to London along with me. And his wish were,” said Joe, getting the
bird's-nest under his left arm for the moment, and groping in it for an
egg with his right; “if no offence, as I would 'and you that.”

I took what Joe gave me, and found it to be the crumpled play-bill of
a small metropolitan theatre, announcing the first appearance, in that
very week, of “the celebrated Provincial Amateur of Roscian renown,
whose unique performance in the highest tragic walk of our National Bard
has lately occasioned so great a sensation in local dramatic circles.”

“Were you at his performance, Joe?” I inquired.

“I were,” said Joe, with emphasis and solemnity.

“Was there a great sensation?”

“Why,” said Joe, “yes, there certainly were a peck of orange-peel.
Partickler when he see the ghost. Though I put it to yourself, sir,
whether it were calc'lated to keep a man up to his work with a good
hart, to be continiwally cutting in betwixt him and the Ghost with
“Amen!” A man may have had a misfortun' and been in the Church,” said
Joe, lowering his voice to an argumentative and feeling tone, “but
that is no reason why you should put him out at such a time. Which I
meantersay, if the ghost of a man's own father cannot be allowed to
claim his attention, what can, Sir? Still more, when his mourning 'at
is unfortunately made so small as that the weight of the black feathers
brings it off, try to keep it on how you may.”

A ghost-seeing effect in Joe's own countenance informed me that Herbert
had entered the room. So, I presented Joe to Herbert, who held out his
hand; but Joe backed from it, and held on by the bird's-nest.

“Your servant, Sir,” said Joe, “which I hope as you and Pip”--here his
eye fell on the Avenger, who was putting some toast on table, and so
plainly denoted an intention to make that young gentleman one of the
family, that I frowned it down and confused him more--“I meantersay, you
two gentlemen,--which I hope as you get your elths in this close spot?
For the present may be a werry good inn, according to London opinions,”
 said Joe, confidentially, “and I believe its character do stand it; but I
wouldn't keep a pig in it myself,--not in the case that I wished him to
fatten wholesome and to eat with a meller flavor on him.”

Having borne this flattering testimony to the merits of our
dwelling-place, and having incidentally shown this tendency to call me
“sir,” Joe, being invited to sit down to table, looked all round the
room for a suitable spot on which to deposit his hat,--as if it were
only on some very few rare substances in nature that it could find a
resting place,--and ultimately stood it on an extreme corner of the
chimney-piece, from which it ever afterwards fell off at intervals.

“Do you take tea, or coffee, Mr. Gargery?” asked Herbert, who always
presided of a morning.

“Thankee, Sir,” said Joe, stiff from head to foot, “I'll take whichever
is most agreeable to yourself.”

“What do you say to coffee?”

“Thankee, Sir,” returned Joe, evidently dispirited by the proposal,
“since you are so kind as make chice of coffee, I will not run contrairy
to your own opinions. But don't you never find it a little 'eating?”

“Say tea then,” said Herbert, pouring it out.

Here Joe's hat tumbled off the mantel-piece, and he started out of his
chair and picked it up, and fitted it to the same exact spot. As if it
were an absolute point of good breeding that it should tumble off again
soon.

“When did you come to town, Mr. Gargery?”

“Were it yesterday afternoon?” said Joe, after coughing behind his hand,
as if he had had time to catch the whooping-cough since he came. “No
it were not. Yes it were. Yes. It were yesterday afternoon” (with an
appearance of mingled wisdom, relief, and strict impartiality).

“Have you seen anything of London yet?”

“Why, yes, Sir,” said Joe, “me and Wopsle went off straight to look at
the Blacking Ware'us. But we didn't find that it come up to its likeness
in the red bills at the shop doors; which I meantersay,” added Joe, in
an explanatory manner, “as it is there drawd too architectooralooral.”

I really believe Joe would have prolonged this word (mightily expressive
to my mind of some architecture that I know) into a perfect Chorus, but
for his attention being providentially attracted by his hat, which
was toppling. Indeed, it demanded from him a constant attention, and a
quickness of eye and hand, very like that exacted by wicket-keeping.
He made extraordinary play with it, and showed the greatest skill; now,
rushing at it and catching it neatly as it dropped; now, merely stopping
it midway, beating it up, and humoring it in various parts of the room
and against a good deal of the pattern of the paper on the wall,
before he felt it safe to close with it; finally splashing it into the
slop-basin, where I took the liberty of laying hands upon it.

As to his shirt-collar, and his coat-collar, they were perplexing to
reflect upon,--insoluble mysteries both. Why should a man scrape himself
to that extent, before he could consider himself full dressed? Why
should he suppose it necessary to be purified by suffering for
his holiday clothes? Then he fell into such unaccountable fits of
meditation, with his fork midway between his plate and his mouth; had
his eyes attracted in such strange directions; was afflicted with such
remarkable coughs; sat so far from the table, and dropped so much
more than he ate, and pretended that he hadn't dropped it; that I was
heartily glad when Herbert left us for the City.

I had neither the good sense nor the good feeling to know that this was
all my fault, and that if I had been easier with Joe, Joe would have
been easier with me. I felt impatient of him and out of temper with him;
in which condition he heaped coals of fire on my head.

“Us two being now alone, sir,”--began Joe.

“Joe,” I interrupted, pettishly, “how can you call me, sir?”

Joe looked at me for a single instant with something faintly like
reproach. Utterly preposterous as his cravat was, and as his collars
were, I was conscious of a sort of dignity in the look.

“Us two being now alone,” resumed Joe, “and me having the intentions and
abilities to stay not many minutes more, I will now conclude--leastways
begin--to mention what have led to my having had the present honor. For
was it not,” said Joe, with his old air of lucid exposition, “that my
only wish were to be useful to you, I should not have had the honor of
breaking wittles in the company and abode of gentlemen.”

I was so unwilling to see the look again, that I made no remonstrance
against this tone.

“Well, sir,” pursued Joe, “this is how it were. I were at the Bargemen
t'other night, Pip;”--whenever he subsided into affection, he called me
Pip, and whenever he relapsed into politeness he called me sir; “when
there come up in his shay-cart, Pumblechook. Which that same identical,”
 said Joe, going down a new track, “do comb my 'air the wrong way
sometimes, awful, by giving out up and down town as it were him which
ever had your infant companionation and were looked upon as a playfellow
by yourself.”

“Nonsense. It was you, Joe.”

“Which I fully believed it were, Pip,” said Joe, slightly tossing
his head, “though it signify little now, sir. Well, Pip; this same
identical, which his manners is given to blusterous, come to me at
the Bargemen (wot a pipe and a pint of beer do give refreshment to the
workingman, sir, and do not over stimilate), and his word were, 'Joseph,
Miss Havisham she wish to speak to you.'”

“Miss Havisham, Joe?”

“'She wish,' were Pumblechook's word, 'to speak to you.'” Joe sat and
rolled his eyes at the ceiling.

“Yes, Joe? Go on, please.”

“Next day, sir,” said Joe, looking at me as if I were a long way off,
“having cleaned myself, I go and I see Miss A.”

“Miss A., Joe? Miss Havisham?”

“Which I say, sir,” replied Joe, with an air of legal formality, as if
he were making his will, “Miss A., or otherways Havisham. Her expression
air then as follering: 'Mr. Gargery. You air in correspondence with Mr.
Pip?' Having had a letter from you, I were able to say 'I am.' (When
I married your sister, sir, I said 'I will;' and when I answered your
friend, Pip, I said 'I am.') 'Would you tell him, then,' said she, 'that
which Estella has come home and would be glad to see him.'”

I felt my face fire up as I looked at Joe. I hope one remote cause
of its firing may have been my consciousness that if I had known his
errand, I should have given him more encouragement.

“Biddy,” pursued Joe, “when I got home and asked her fur to write the
message to you, a little hung back. Biddy says, 'I know he will be very
glad to have it by word of mouth, it is holiday time, you want to see
him, go!' I have now concluded, sir,” said Joe, rising from his chair,
“and, Pip, I wish you ever well and ever prospering to a greater and a
greater height.”

“But you are not going now, Joe?”

“Yes I am,” said Joe.

“But you are coming back to dinner, Joe?”

“No I am not,” said Joe.

Our eyes met, and all the “Sir” melted out of that manly heart as he gave
me his hand.

“Pip, dear old chap, life is made of ever so many partings welded
together, as I may say, and one man's a blacksmith, and one's a
whitesmith, and one's a goldsmith, and one's a coppersmith. Diwisions
among such must come, and must be met as they come. If there's been
any fault at all to-day, it's mine. You and me is not two figures to
be together in London; nor yet anywheres else but what is private, and
beknown, and understood among friends. It ain't that I am proud, but
that I want to be right, as you shall never see me no more in these
clothes. I'm wrong in these clothes. I'm wrong out of the forge, the
kitchen, or off th' meshes. You won't find half so much fault in me if
you think of me in my forge dress, with my hammer in my hand, or even
my pipe. You won't find half so much fault in me if, supposing as you
should ever wish to see me, you come and put your head in at the forge
window and see Joe the blacksmith, there, at the old anvil, in the old
burnt apron, sticking to the old work. I'm awful dull, but I hope I've
beat out something nigh the rights of this at last. And so GOD bless
you, dear old Pip, old chap, GOD bless you!”

I had not been mistaken in my fancy that there was a simple dignity
in him. The fashion of his dress could no more come in its way when he
spoke these words than it could come in its way in Heaven. He touched me
gently on the forehead, and went out. As soon as I could recover
myself sufficiently, I hurried out after him and looked for him in the
neighboring streets; but he was gone.




Chapter XXVIII

It was clear that I must repair to our town next day, and in the first
flow of my repentance, it was equally clear that I must stay at Joe's.
But, when I had secured my box-place by to-morrow's coach, and had been
down to Mr. Pocket's and back, I was not by any means convinced on the
last point, and began to invent reasons and make excuses for putting
up at the Blue Boar. I should be an inconvenience at Joe's; I was not
expected, and my bed would not be ready; I should be too far from
Miss Havisham's, and she was exacting and mightn't like it. All other
swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such
pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should
innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture is
reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin
of my own make as good money! An obliging stranger, under pretence of
compactly folding up my bank-notes for security's sake, abstracts the
notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine,
when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!

Having settled that I must go to the Blue Boar, my mind was much
disturbed by indecision whether or not to take the Avenger. It was
tempting to think of that expensive Mercenary publicly airing his boots
in the archway of the Blue Boar's posting-yard; it was almost solemn to
imagine him casually produced in the tailor's shop, and confounding
the disrespectful senses of Trabb's boy. On the other hand, Trabb's boy
might worm himself into his intimacy and tell him things; or, reckless
and desperate wretch as I knew he could be, might hoot him in the High
Street. My patroness, too, might hear of him, and not approve. On the
whole, I resolved to leave the Avenger behind.

It was the afternoon coach by which I had taken my place, and, as winter
had now come round, I should not arrive at my destination until two or
three hours after dark. Our time of starting from the Cross Keys was
two o'clock. I arrived on the ground with a quarter of an hour to spare,
attended by the Avenger,--if I may connect that expression with one who
never attended on me if he could possibly help it.

At that time it was customary to carry Convicts down to the dock-yards
by stage-coach. As I had often heard of them in the capacity of outside
passengers, and had more than once seen them on the high road dangling
their ironed legs over the coach roof, I had no cause to be surprised
when Herbert, meeting me in the yard, came up and told me there were two
convicts going down with me. But I had a reason that was an old reason
now for constitutionally faltering whenever I heard the word “convict.”

“You don't mind them, Handel?” said Herbert.

“O no!”

“I thought you seemed as if you didn't like them?”

“I can't pretend that I do like them, and I suppose you don't
particularly. But I don't mind them.”

“See! There they are,” said Herbert, “coming out of the Tap. What a
degraded and vile sight it is!”

They had been treating their guard, I suppose, for they had a gaoler
with them, and all three came out wiping their mouths on their hands.
The two convicts were handcuffed together, and had irons on their
legs,--irons of a pattern that I knew well. They wore the dress that I
likewise knew well. Their keeper had a brace of pistols, and carried
a thick-knobbed bludgeon under his arm; but he was on terms of good
understanding with them, and stood with them beside him, looking on at
the putting-to of the horses, rather with an air as if the convicts were
an interesting Exhibition not formally open at the moment, and he the
Curator. One was a taller and stouter man than the other, and appeared
as a matter of course, according to the mysterious ways of the world,
both convict and free, to have had allotted to him the smaller suit of
clothes. His arms and legs were like great pincushions of those shapes,
and his attire disguised him absurdly; but I knew his half-closed eye
at one glance. There stood the man whom I had seen on the settle at the
Three Jolly Bargemen on a Saturday night, and who had brought me down
with his invisible gun!

It was easy to make sure that as yet he knew me no more than if he had
never seen me in his life. He looked across at me, and his eye appraised
my watch-chain, and then he incidentally spat and said something to the
other convict, and they laughed and slued themselves round with a clink
of their coupling manacle, and looked at something else. The great
numbers on their backs, as if they were street doors; their coarse mangy
ungainly outer surface, as if they were lower animals; their ironed
legs, apologetically garlanded with pocket-handkerchiefs; and the way
in which all present looked at them and kept from them; made them (as
Herbert had said) a most disagreeable and degraded spectacle.

But this was not the worst of it. It came out that the whole of the back
of the coach had been taken by a family removing from London, and that
there were no places for the two prisoners but on the seat in front
behind the coachman. Hereupon, a choleric gentleman, who had taken the
fourth place on that seat, flew into a most violent passion, and said
that it was a breach of contract to mix him up with such villainous
company, and that it was poisonous, and pernicious, and infamous, and
shameful, and I don't know what else. At this time the coach was ready
and the coachman impatient, and we were all preparing to get up, and
the prisoners had come over with their keeper,--bringing with them that
curious flavor of bread-poultice, baize, rope-yarn, and hearthstone,
which attends the convict presence.

“Don't take it so much amiss, sir,” pleaded the keeper to the angry
passenger; “I'll sit next you myself. I'll put 'em on the outside of
the row. They won't interfere with you, sir. You needn't know they're
there.”

“And don't blame me,” growled the convict I had recognized. “I don't
want to go. I am quite ready to stay behind. As fur as I am concerned
any one's welcome to my place.”

“Or mine,” said the other, gruffly. “I wouldn't have incommoded none
of you, if I'd had my way.” Then they both laughed, and began cracking
nuts, and spitting the shells about.--As I really think I should have
liked to do myself, if I had been in their place and so despised.

At length, it was voted that there was no help for the angry gentleman,
and that he must either go in his chance company or remain behind. So he
got into his place, still making complaints, and the keeper got into the
place next him, and the convicts hauled themselves up as well as they
could, and the convict I had recognized sat behind me with his breath on
the hair of my head.

“Good-bye, Handel!” Herbert called out as we started. I thought what a
blessed fortune it was, that he had found another name for me than Pip.

It is impossible to express with what acuteness I felt the convict's
breathing, not only on the back of my head, but all along my spine. The
sensation was like being touched in the marrow with some pungent and
searching acid, it set my very teeth on edge. He seemed to have more
breathing business to do than another man, and to make more noise in
doing it; and I was conscious of growing high-shouldered on one side, in
my shrinking endeavors to fend him off.

The weather was miserably raw, and the two cursed the cold. It made us
all lethargic before we had gone far, and when we had left the Half-way
House behind, we habitually dozed and shivered and were silent. I dozed
off, myself, in considering the question whether I ought to restore a
couple of pounds sterling to this creature before losing sight of him,
and how it could best be done. In the act of dipping forward as if I
were going to bathe among the horses, I woke in a fright and took the
question up again.

But I must have lost it longer than I had thought, since, although
I could recognize nothing in the darkness and the fitful lights and
shadows of our lamps, I traced marsh country in the cold damp wind that
blew at us. Cowering forward for warmth and to make me a screen against
the wind, the convicts were closer to me than before. The very first
words I heard them interchange as I became conscious, were the words of
my own thought, “Two One Pound notes.”

“How did he get 'em?” said the convict I had never seen.

“How should I know?” returned the other. “He had 'em stowed away
somehows. Giv him by friends, I expect.”

“I wish,” said the other, with a bitter curse upon the cold, “that I had
'em here.”

“Two one pound notes, or friends?”

“Two one pound notes. I'd sell all the friends I ever had for one, and
think it a blessed good bargain. Well? So he says--?”

“So he says,” resumed the convict I had recognized,--“it was all
said and done in half a minute, behind a pile of timber in the
Dock-yard,--'You're a going to be discharged?' Yes, I was. Would I find
out that boy that had fed him and kep his secret, and give him them two
one pound notes? Yes, I would. And I did.”

“More fool you,” growled the other. “I'd have spent 'em on a Man, in
wittles and drink. He must have been a green one. Mean to say he knowed
nothing of you?”

“Not a ha'porth. Different gangs and different ships. He was tried again
for prison breaking, and got made a Lifer.”

“And was that--Honor!--the only time you worked out, in this part of the
country?”

“The only time.”

“What might have been your opinion of the place?”

“A most beastly place. Mudbank, mist, swamp, and work; work, swamp,
mist, and mudbank.”

They both execrated the place in very strong language, and gradually
growled themselves out, and had nothing left to say.

After overhearing this dialogue, I should assuredly have got down and
been left in the solitude and darkness of the highway, but for feeling
certain that the man had no suspicion of my identity. Indeed, I was not
only so changed in the course of nature, but so differently dressed and
so differently circumstanced, that it was not at all likely he could
have known me without accidental help. Still, the coincidence of our
being together on the coach, was sufficiently strange to fill me with a
dread that some other coincidence might at any moment connect me, in his
hearing, with my name. For this reason, I resolved to alight as soon as
we touched the town, and put myself out of his hearing. This device I
executed successfully. My little portmanteau was in the boot under my
feet; I had but to turn a hinge to get it out; I threw it down before
me, got down after it, and was left at the first lamp on the first
stones of the town pavement. As to the convicts, they went their way
with the coach, and I knew at what point they would be spirited off to
the river. In my fancy, I saw the boat with its convict crew waiting for
them at the slime-washed stairs,--again heard the gruff “Give way, you!”
 like and order to dogs,--again saw the wicked Noah's Ark lying out on
the black water.

I could not have said what I was afraid of, for my fear was altogether
undefined and vague, but there was great fear upon me. As I walked on to
the hotel, I felt that a dread, much exceeding the mere apprehension of
a painful or disagreeable recognition, made me tremble. I am confident
that it took no distinctness of shape, and that it was the revival for a
few minutes of the terror of childhood.

The coffee-room at the Blue Boar was empty, and I had not only ordered
my dinner there, but had sat down to it, before the waiter knew me. As
soon as he had apologized for the remissness of his memory, he asked me
if he should send Boots for Mr. Pumblechook?

“No,” said I, “certainly not.”

The waiter (it was he who had brought up the Great Remonstrance from the
Commercials, on the day when I was bound) appeared surprised, and
took the earliest opportunity of putting a dirty old copy of a local
newspaper so directly in my way, that I took it up and read this
paragraph:--

Our readers will learn, not altogether without interest, in reference to
the recent romantic rise in fortune of a young artificer in iron of this
neighborhood (what a theme, by the way, for the magic pen of our as yet
not universally acknowledged townsman TOOBY, the poet of our columns!)
that the youth's earliest patron, companion, and friend, was a highly
respected individual not entirely unconnected with the corn and seed
trade, and whose eminently convenient and commodious business premises
are situate within a hundred miles of the High Street. It is not wholly
irrespective of our personal feelings that we record HIM as the Mentor
of our young Telemachus, for it is good to know that our town produced
the founder of the latter's fortunes. Does the thought-contracted brow
of the local Sage or the lustrous eye of local Beauty inquire whose
fortunes? We believe that Quintin Matsys was the BLACKSMITH of Antwerp.
VERB. SAP.

I entertain a conviction, based upon large experience, that if in the
days of my prosperity I had gone to the North Pole, I should have met
somebody there, wandering Esquimaux or civilized man, who would have
told me that Pumblechook was my earliest patron and the founder of my
fortunes.




Chapter XXIX

Betimes in the morning I was up and out. It was too early yet to go to
Miss Havisham's, so I loitered into the country on Miss Havisham's
side of town,--which was not Joe's side; I could go there
to-morrow,--thinking about my patroness, and painting brilliant pictures
of her plans for me.

She had adopted Estella, she had as good as adopted me, and it could not
fail to be her intention to bring us together. She reserved it for me to
restore the desolate house, admit the sunshine into the dark rooms,
set the clocks a-going and the cold hearths a-blazing, tear down the
cobwebs, destroy the vermin,--in short, do all the shining deeds of the
young Knight of romance, and marry the Princess. I had stopped to
look at the house as I passed; and its seared red brick walls, blocked
windows, and strong green ivy clasping even the stacks of chimneys with
its twigs and tendons, as if with sinewy old arms, had made up a rich
attractive mystery, of which I was the hero. Estella was the inspiration
of it, and the heart of it, of course. But, though she had taken such
strong possession of me, though my fancy and my hope were so set upon
her, though her influence on my boyish life and character had been
all-powerful, I did not, even that romantic morning, invest her with any
attributes save those she possessed. I mention this in this place, of a
fixed purpose, because it is the clew by which I am to be followed into
my poor labyrinth. According to my experience, the conventional notion
of a lover cannot be always true. The unqualified truth is, that when I
loved Estella with the love of a man, I loved her simply because I found
her irresistible. Once for all; I knew to my sorrow, often and often,
if not always, that I loved her against reason, against promise, against
peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that
could be. Once for all; I loved her none the less because I knew it,
and it had no more influence in restraining me than if I had devoutly
believed her to be human perfection.

I so shaped out my walk as to arrive at the gate at my old time. When
I had rung at the bell with an unsteady hand, I turned my back upon the
gate, while I tried to get my breath and keep the beating of my heart
moderately quiet. I heard the side-door open, and steps come across the
courtyard; but I pretended not to hear, even when the gate swung on its
rusty hinges.

Being at last touched on the shoulder, I started and turned. I started
much more naturally then, to find myself confronted by a man in a sober
gray dress. The last man I should have expected to see in that place of
porter at Miss Havisham's door.

“Orlick!”

“Ah, young master, there's more changes than yours. But come in, come
in. It's opposed to my orders to hold the gate open.”

I entered and he swung it, and locked it, and took the key out. “Yes!”
 said he, facing round, after doggedly preceding me a few steps towards
the house. “Here I am!”

“How did you come here?”

“I come her,” he retorted, “on my legs. I had my box brought alongside
me in a barrow.”

“Are you here for good?”

“I ain't here for harm, young master, I suppose?”

I was not so sure of that. I had leisure to entertain the retort in my
mind, while he slowly lifted his heavy glance from the pavement, up my
legs and arms, to my face.

“Then you have left the forge?” I said.

“Do this look like a forge?” replied Orlick, sending his glance all
round him with an air of injury. “Now, do it look like it?”

I asked him how long he had left Gargery's forge?

“One day is so like another here,” he replied, “that I don't know
without casting it up. However, I come here some time since you left.”

“I could have told you that, Orlick.”

“Ah!” said he, dryly. “But then you've got to be a scholar.”

By this time we had come to the house, where I found his room to be one
just within the side-door, with a little window in it looking on the
courtyard. In its small proportions, it was not unlike the kind of place
usually assigned to a gate-porter in Paris. Certain keys were hanging on
the wall, to which he now added the gate key; and his patchwork-covered
bed was in a little inner division or recess. The whole had a slovenly,
confined, and sleepy look, like a cage for a human dormouse; while he,
looming dark and heavy in the shadow of a corner by the window, looked
like the human dormouse for whom it was fitted up,--as indeed he was.

“I never saw this room before,” I remarked; “but there used to be no
Porter here.”

“No,” said he; “not till it got about that there was no protection on
the premises, and it come to be considered dangerous, with convicts and
Tag and Rag and Bobtail going up and down. And then I was recommended to
the place as a man who could give another man as good as he brought, and
I took it. It's easier than bellowsing and hammering.--That's loaded,
that is.”

My eye had been caught by a gun with a brass-bound stock over the
chimney-piece, and his eye had followed mine.

“Well,” said I, not desirous of more conversation, “shall I go up to
Miss Havisham?”

“Burn me, if I know!” he retorted, first stretching himself and then
shaking himself; “my orders ends here, young master. I give this here
bell a rap with this here hammer, and you go on along the passage till
you meet somebody.”

“I am expected, I believe?”

“Burn me twice over, if I can say!” said he.

Upon that, I turned down the long passage which I had first trodden in
my thick boots, and he made his bell sound. At the end of the passage,
while the bell was still reverberating, I found Sarah Pocket, who
appeared to have now become constitutionally green and yellow by reason
of me.

“Oh!” said she. “You, is it, Mr. Pip?”

“It is, Miss Pocket. I am glad to tell you that Mr. Pocket and family
are all well.”

“Are they any wiser?” said Sarah, with a dismal shake of the head; “they
had better be wiser, than well. Ah, Matthew, Matthew! You know your way,
sir?”

Tolerably, for I had gone up the staircase in the dark, many a time. I
ascended it now, in lighter boots than of yore, and tapped in my old
way at the door of Miss Havisham's room. “Pip's rap,” I heard her say,
immediately; “come in, Pip.”

She was in her chair near the old table, in the old dress, with her two
hands crossed on her stick, her chin resting on them, and her eyes on
the fire. Sitting near her, with the white shoe, that had never been
worn, in her hand, and her head bent as she looked at it, was an elegant
lady whom I had never seen.

“Come in, Pip,” Miss Havisham continued to mutter, without looking round
or up; “come in, Pip, how do you do, Pip? so you kiss my hand as if I
were a queen, eh?--Well?”

She looked up at me suddenly, only moving her eyes, and repeated in a
grimly playful manner,--

“Well?”

“I heard, Miss Havisham,” said I, rather at a loss, “that you were so
kind as to wish me to come and see you, and I came directly.”

“Well?”

The lady whom I had never seen before, lifted up her eyes and looked
archly at me, and then I saw that the eyes were Estella's eyes. But she
was so much changed, was so much more beautiful, so much more womanly,
in all things winning admiration, had made such wonderful advance,
that I seemed to have made none. I fancied, as I looked at her, that
I slipped hopelessly back into the coarse and common boy again. O
the sense of distance and disparity that came upon me, and the
inaccessibility that came about her!

She gave me her hand. I stammered something about the pleasure I felt in
seeing her again, and about my having looked forward to it, for a long,
long time.

“Do you find her much changed, Pip?” asked Miss Havisham, with her
greedy look, and striking her stick upon a chair that stood between
them, as a sign to me to sit down there.

“When I came in, Miss Havisham, I thought there was nothing of Estella
in the face or figure; but now it all settles down so curiously into the
old--”

“What? You are not going to say into the old Estella?” Miss Havisham
interrupted. “She was proud and insulting, and you wanted to go away
from her. Don't you remember?”

I said confusedly that that was long ago, and that I knew no better
then, and the like. Estella smiled with perfect composure, and said she
had no doubt of my having been quite right, and of her having been very
disagreeable.

“Is he changed?” Miss Havisham asked her.

“Very much,” said Estella, looking at me.

“Less coarse and common?” said Miss Havisham, playing with Estella's
hair.

Estella laughed, and looked at the shoe in her hand, and laughed again,
and looked at me, and put the shoe down. She treated me as a boy still,
but she lured me on.

We sat in the dreamy room among the old strange influences which had
so wrought upon me, and I learnt that she had but just come home from
France, and that she was going to London. Proud and wilful as of old,
she had brought those qualities into such subjection to her beauty that
it was impossible and out of nature--or I thought so--to separate them
from her beauty. Truly it was impossible to dissociate her presence
from all those wretched hankerings after money and gentility that had
disturbed my boyhood,--from all those ill-regulated aspirations that had
first made me ashamed of home and Joe,--from all those visions that had
raised her face in the glowing fire, struck it out of the iron on the
anvil, extracted it from the darkness of night to look in at the wooden
window of the forge, and flit away. In a word, it was impossible for me
to separate her, in the past or in the present, from the innermost life
of my life.

It was settled that I should stay there all the rest of the day, and
return to the hotel at night, and to London to-morrow. When we had
conversed for a while, Miss Havisham sent us two out to walk in the
neglected garden: on our coming in by and by, she said, I should wheel
her about a little, as in times of yore.

So, Estella and I went out into the garden by the gate through which I
had strayed to my encounter with the pale young gentleman, now Herbert;
I, trembling in spirit and worshipping the very hem of her dress; she,
quite composed and most decidedly not worshipping the hem of mine. As we
drew near to the place of encounter, she stopped and said,--

“I must have been a singular little creature to hide and see that fight
that day; but I did, and I enjoyed it very much.”

“You rewarded me very much.”

“Did I?” she replied, in an incidental and forgetful way. “I remember I
entertained a great objection to your adversary, because I took it ill
that he should be brought here to pester me with his company.”

“He and I are great friends now.”

“Are you? I think I recollect though, that you read with his father?”

“Yes.”

I made the admission with reluctance, for it seemed to have a boyish
look, and she already treated me more than enough like a boy.

“Since your change of fortune and prospects, you have changed your
companions,” said Estella.

“Naturally,” said I.

“And necessarily,” she added, in a haughty tone; “what was fit company
for you once, would be quite unfit company for you now.”

In my conscience, I doubt very much whether I had any lingering
intention left of going to see Joe; but if I had, this observation put
it to flight.

“You had no idea of your impending good fortune, in those times?” said
Estella, with a slight wave of her hand, signifying in the fighting
times.

“Not the least.”

The air of completeness and superiority with which she walked at my
side, and the air of youthfulness and submission with which I walked at
hers, made a contrast that I strongly felt. It would have rankled in me
more than it did, if I had not regarded myself as eliciting it by being
so set apart for her and assigned to her.

The garden was too overgrown and rank for walking in with ease, and
after we had made the round of it twice or thrice, we came out again
into the brewery yard. I showed her to a nicety where I had seen her
walking on the casks, that first old day, and she said, with a cold and
careless look in that direction, “Did I?” I reminded her where she had
come out of the house and given me my meat and drink, and she said, “I
don't remember.” “Not remember that you made me cry?” said I. “No,” said
she, and shook her head and looked about her. I verily believe that
her not remembering and not minding in the least, made me cry again,
inwardly,--and that is the sharpest crying of all.

“You must know,” said Estella, condescending to me as a brilliant and
beautiful woman might, “that I have no heart,--if that has anything to
do with my memory.”

I got through some jargon to the effect that I took the liberty of
doubting that. That I knew better. That there could be no such beauty
without it.

“Oh! I have a heart to be stabbed in or shot in, I have no doubt,” said
Estella, “and of course if it ceased to beat I should cease
to be. But you know what I mean. I have no softness there,
no--sympathy--sentiment--nonsense.”

What was it that was borne in upon my mind when she stood still and
looked attentively at me? Anything that I had seen in Miss Havisham? No.
In some of her looks and gestures there was that tinge of resemblance
to Miss Havisham which may often be noticed to have been acquired by
children, from grown person with whom they have been much associated and
secluded, and which, when childhood is passed, will produce a remarkable
occasional likeness of expression between faces that are otherwise quite
different. And yet I could not trace this to Miss Havisham. I looked
again, and though she was still looking at me, the suggestion was gone.

What was it?

“I am serious,” said Estella, not so much with a frown (for her brow was
smooth) as with a darkening of her face; “if we are to be thrown much
together, you had better believe it at once. No!” imperiously stopping
me as I opened my lips. “I have not bestowed my tenderness anywhere. I
have never had any such thing.”

In another moment we were in the brewery, so long disused, and she
pointed to the high gallery where I had seen her going out on that same
first day, and told me she remembered to have been up there, and to have
seen me standing scared below. As my eyes followed her white hand, again
the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly grasp crossed me. My
involuntary start occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly
the ghost passed once more and was gone.

What was it?

“What is the matter?” asked Estella. “Are you scared again?”

“I should be, if I believed what you said just now,” I replied, to turn
it off.

“Then you don't? Very well. It is said, at any rate. Miss Havisham will
soon be expecting you at your old post, though I think that might be
laid aside now, with other old belongings. Let us make one more round
of the garden, and then go in. Come! You shall not shed tears for my
cruelty to-day; you shall be my Page, and give me your shoulder.”

Her handsome dress had trailed upon the ground. She held it in one hand
now, and with the other lightly touched my shoulder as we walked. We
walked round the ruined garden twice or thrice more, and it was all in
bloom for me. If the green and yellow growth of weed in the chinks of
the old wall had been the most precious flowers that ever blew, it could
not have been more cherished in my remembrance.

There was no discrepancy of years between us to remove her far from me;
we were of nearly the same age, though of course the age told for more
in her case than in mine; but the air of inaccessibility which her
beauty and her manner gave her, tormented me in the midst of my delight,
and at the height of the assurance I felt that our patroness had chosen
us for one another. Wretched boy!

At last we went back into the house, and there I heard, with surprise,
that my guardian had come down to see Miss Havisham on business, and
would come back to dinner. The old wintry branches of chandeliers in
the room where the mouldering table was spread had been lighted while we
were out, and Miss Havisham was in her chair and waiting for me.

It was like pushing the chair itself back into the past, when we began
the old slow circuit round about the ashes of the bridal feast. But,
in the funereal room, with that figure of the grave fallen back in the
chair fixing its eyes upon her, Estella looked more bright and beautiful
than before, and I was under stronger enchantment.

The time so melted away, that our early dinner-hour drew close at hand,
and Estella left us to prepare herself. We had stopped near the centre
of the long table, and Miss Havisham, with one of her withered arms
stretched out of the chair, rested that clenched hand upon the yellow
cloth. As Estella looked back over her shoulder before going out at the
door, Miss Havisham kissed that hand to her, with a ravenous intensity
that was of its kind quite dreadful.

Then, Estella being gone and we two left alone, she turned to me, and
said in a whisper,--

“Is she beautiful, graceful, well-grown? Do you admire her?”

“Everybody must who sees her, Miss Havisham.”

She drew an arm round my neck, and drew my head close down to hers as
she sat in the chair. “Love her, love her, love her! How does she use
you?”

Before I could answer (if I could have answered so difficult a question
at all) she repeated, “Love her, love her, love her! If she favors
you, love her. If she wounds you, love her. If she tears your heart to
pieces,--and as it gets older and stronger it will tear deeper,--love
her, love her, love her!”

Never had I seen such passionate eagerness as was joined to her
utterance of these words. I could feel the muscles of the thin arm round
my neck swell with the vehemence that possessed her.

“Hear me, Pip! I adopted her, to be loved. I bred her and educated her,
to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved.
Love her!”

She said the word often enough, and there could be no doubt that she
meant to say it; but if the often repeated word had been hate instead of
love--despair--revenge--dire death--it could not have sounded from her
lips more like a curse.

“I'll tell you,” said she, in the same hurried passionate whisper, “what
real love is. It is blind devotion, unquestioning self-humiliation,
utter submission, trust and belief against yourself and against the
whole world, giving up your whole heart and soul to the smiter--as I
did!”

When she came to that, and to a wild cry that followed that, I caught
her round the waist. For she rose up in the chair, in her shroud of a
dress, and struck at the air as if she would as soon have struck herself
against the wall and fallen dead.

All this passed in a few seconds. As I drew her down into her chair, I
was conscious of a scent that I knew, and turning, saw my guardian in
the room.

He always carried (I have not yet mentioned it, I think) a
pocket-handkerchief of rich silk and of imposing proportions, which was
of great value to him in his profession. I have seen him so terrify a
client or a witness by ceremoniously unfolding this pocket-handkerchief
as if he were immediately going to blow his nose, and then pausing,
as if he knew he should not have time to do it before such client
or witness committed himself, that the self-committal has followed
directly, quite as a matter of course. When I saw him in the room he had
this expressive pocket-handkerchief in both hands, and was looking at
us. On meeting my eye, he said plainly, by a momentary and silent pause
in that attitude, “Indeed? Singular!” and then put the handkerchief to
its right use with wonderful effect.

Miss Havisham had seen him as soon as I, and was (like everybody
else) afraid of him. She made a strong attempt to compose herself, and
stammered that he was as punctual as ever.

“As punctual as ever,” he repeated, coming up to us. “(How do you do,
Pip? Shall I give you a ride, Miss Havisham? Once round?) And so you are
here, Pip?”

I told him when I had arrived, and how Miss Havisham had wished me to
come and see Estella. To which he replied, “Ah! Very fine young lady!”
 Then he pushed Miss Havisham in her chair before him, with one of his
large hands, and put the other in his trousers-pocket as if the pocket
were full of secrets.

“Well, Pip! How often have you seen Miss Estella before?” said he, when
he came to a stop.

“How often?”

“Ah! How many times? Ten thousand times?”

“Oh! Certainly not so many.”

“Twice?”

“Jaggers,” interposed Miss Havisham, much to my relief, “leave my Pip
alone, and go with him to your dinner.”

He complied, and we groped our way down the dark stairs together. While
we were still on our way to those detached apartments across the paved
yard at the back, he asked me how often I had seen Miss Havisham eat
and drink; offering me a breadth of choice, as usual, between a hundred
times and once.

I considered, and said, “Never.”

“And never will, Pip,” he retorted, with a frowning smile. “She has
never allowed herself to be seen doing either, since she lived this
present life of hers. She wanders about in the night, and then lays
hands on such food as she takes.”

“Pray, sir,” said I, “may I ask you a question?”

“You may,” said he, “and I may decline to answer it. Put your question.”

“Estella's name. Is it Havisham or--?” I had nothing to add.

“Or what?” said he.

“Is it Havisham?”

“It is Havisham.”

This brought us to the dinner-table, where she and Sarah Pocket awaited
us. Mr. Jaggers presided, Estella sat opposite to him, I faced my
green and yellow friend. We dined very well, and were waited on by a
maid-servant whom I had never seen in all my comings and goings, but
who, for anything I know, had been in that mysterious house the whole
time. After dinner a bottle of choice old port was placed before my
guardian (he was evidently well acquainted with the vintage), and the
two ladies left us.

Anything to equal the determined reticence of Mr. Jaggers under that
roof I never saw elsewhere, even in him. He kept his very looks to
himself, and scarcely directed his eyes to Estella's face once during
dinner. When she spoke to him, he listened, and in due course answered,
but never looked at her, that I could see. On the other hand, she often
looked at him, with interest and curiosity, if not distrust, but his
face never showed the least consciousness. Throughout dinner he took
a dry delight in making Sarah Pocket greener and yellower, by often
referring in conversation with me to my expectations; but here,
again, he showed no consciousness, and even made it appear that he
extorted--and even did extort, though I don't know how--those references
out of my innocent self.

And when he and I were left alone together, he sat with an air upon him
of general lying by in consequence of information he possessed, that
really was too much for me. He cross-examined his very wine when he had
nothing else in hand. He held it between himself and the candle, tasted
the port, rolled it in his mouth, swallowed it, looked at his
glass again, smelt the port, tried it, drank it, filled again, and
cross-examined the glass again, until I was as nervous as if I had known
the wine to be telling him something to my disadvantage. Three or four
times I feebly thought I would start conversation; but whenever he saw
me going to ask him anything, he looked at me with his glass in his
hand, and rolling his wine about in his mouth, as if requesting me to
take notice that it was of no use, for he couldn't answer.

I think Miss Pocket was conscious that the sight of me involved her
in the danger of being goaded to madness, and perhaps tearing off her
cap,--which was a very hideous one, in the nature of a muslin mop,--and
strewing the ground with her hair,--which assuredly had never grown
on her head. She did not appear when we afterwards went up to Miss
Havisham's room, and we four played at whist. In the interval, Miss
Havisham, in a fantastic way, had put some of the most beautiful jewels
from her dressing-table into Estella's hair, and about her bosom and
arms; and I saw even my guardian look at her from under his thick
eyebrows, and raise them a little, when her loveliness was before him,
with those rich flushes of glitter and color in it.

Of the manner and extent to which he took our trumps into custody, and
came out with mean little cards at the ends of hands, before which the
glory of our Kings and Queens was utterly abased, I say nothing; nor, of
the feeling that I had, respecting his looking upon us personally in the
light of three very obvious and poor riddles that he had found out long
ago. What I suffered from, was the incompatibility between his cold
presence and my feelings towards Estella. It was not that I knew I could
never bear to speak to him about her, that I knew I could never bear to
hear him creak his boots at her, that I knew I could never bear to see
him wash his hands of her; it was, that my admiration should be within
a foot or two of him,--it was, that my feelings should be in the same
place with him,--that, was the agonizing circumstance.

We played until nine o'clock, and then it was arranged that when Estella
came to London I should be forewarned of her coming and should meet her
at the coach; and then I took leave of her, and touched her and left
her.

My guardian lay at the Boar in the next room to mine. Far into the
night, Miss Havisham's words, “Love her, love her, love her!” sounded in
my ears. I adapted them for my own repetition, and said to my pillow, “I
love her, I love her, I love her!” hundreds of times. Then, a burst of
gratitude came upon me, that she should be destined for me, once the
blacksmith's boy. Then I thought if she were, as I feared, by no means
rapturously grateful for that destiny yet, when would she begin to be
interested in me? When should I awaken the heart within her that was
mute and sleeping now?

Ah me! I thought those were high and great emotions. But I never thought
there was anything low and small in my keeping away from Joe, because
I knew she would be contemptuous of him. It was but a day gone, and Joe
had brought the tears into my eyes; they had soon dried, God forgive me!
soon dried.




Chapter XXX

After well considering the matter while I was dressing at the Blue Boar
in the morning, I resolved to tell my guardian that I doubted Orlick's
being the right sort of man to fill a post of trust at Miss Havisham's.
“Why of course he is not the right sort of man, Pip,” said my guardian,
comfortably satisfied beforehand on the general head, “because the man
who fills the post of trust never is the right sort of man.” It seemed
quite to put him into spirits to find that this particular post was
not exceptionally held by the right sort of man, and he listened in a
satisfied manner while I told him what knowledge I had of Orlick. “Very
good, Pip,” he observed, when I had concluded, “I'll go round presently,
and pay our friend off.” Rather alarmed by this summary action, I was
for a little delay, and even hinted that our friend himself might be
difficult to deal with. “Oh no he won't,” said my guardian, making his
pocket-handkerchief-point, with perfect confidence; “I should like to
see him argue the question with me.”

As we were going back together to London by the midday coach, and as I
breakfasted under such terrors of Pumblechook that I could scarcely hold
my cup, this gave me an opportunity of saying that I wanted a walk, and
that I would go on along the London road while Mr. Jaggers was occupied,
if he would let the coachman know that I would get into my place when
overtaken. I was thus enabled to fly from the Blue Boar immediately
after breakfast. By then making a loop of about a couple of miles into
the open country at the back of Pumblechook's premises, I got round into
the High Street again, a little beyond that pitfall, and felt myself in
comparative security.

It was interesting to be in the quiet old town once more, and it was not
disagreeable to be here and there suddenly recognized and stared after.
One or two of the tradespeople even darted out of their shops and went
a little way down the street before me, that they might turn, as if they
had forgotten something, and pass me face to face,--on which occasions I
don't know whether they or I made the worse pretence; they of not doing
it, or I of not seeing it. Still my position was a distinguished one,
and I was not at all dissatisfied with it, until Fate threw me in the
way of that unlimited miscreant, Trabb's boy.

Casting my eyes along the street at a certain point of my progress, I
beheld Trabb's boy approaching, lashing himself with an empty blue bag.
Deeming that a serene and unconscious contemplation of him would best
beseem me, and would be most likely to quell his evil mind, I advanced
with that expression of countenance, and was rather congratulating
myself on my success, when suddenly the knees of Trabb's boy smote
together, his hair uprose, his cap fell off, he trembled violently in
every limb, staggered out into the road, and crying to the populace,
“Hold me! I'm so frightened!” feigned to be in a paroxysm of terror and
contrition, occasioned by the dignity of my appearance. As I passed him,
his teeth loudly chattered in his head, and with every mark of extreme
humiliation, he prostrated himself in the dust.

This was a hard thing to bear, but this was nothing. I had not advanced
another two hundred yards when, to my inexpressible terror, amazement,
and indignation, I again beheld Trabb's boy approaching. He was coming
round a narrow corner. His blue bag was slung over his shoulder, honest
industry beamed in his eyes, a determination to proceed to Trabb's with
cheerful briskness was indicated in his gait. With a shock he became
aware of me, and was severely visited as before; but this time his
motion was rotatory, and he staggered round and round me with knees
more afflicted, and with uplifted hands as if beseeching for mercy. His
sufferings were hailed with the greatest joy by a knot of spectators,
and I felt utterly confounded.

I had not got as much further down the street as the post-office, when I
again beheld Trabb's boy shooting round by a back way. This time, he was
entirely changed. He wore the blue bag in the manner of my great-coat,
and was strutting along the pavement towards me on the opposite side of
the street, attended by a company of delighted young friends to whom he
from time to time exclaimed, with a wave of his hand, “Don't know yah!”
 Words cannot state the amount of aggravation and injury wreaked upon
me by Trabb's boy, when passing abreast of me, he pulled up his
shirt-collar, twined his side-hair, stuck an arm akimbo, and smirked
extravagantly by, wriggling his elbows and body, and drawling to his
attendants, “Don't know yah, don't know yah, 'pon my soul don't know
yah!” The disgrace attendant on his immediately afterwards taking
to crowing and pursuing me across the bridge with crows, as from an
exceedingly dejected fowl who had known me when I was a blacksmith,
culminated the disgrace with which I left the town, and was, so to
speak, ejected by it into the open country.

But unless I had taken the life of Trabb's boy on that occasion, I
really do not even now see what I could have done save endure. To
have struggled with him in the street, or to have exacted any lower
recompense from him than his heart's best blood, would have been
futile and degrading. Moreover, he was a boy whom no man could hurt; an
invulnerable and dodging serpent who, when chased into a corner, flew
out again between his captor's legs, scornfully yelping. I wrote,
however, to Mr. Trabb by next day's post, to say that Mr. Pip must
decline to deal further with one who could so far forget what he owed to
the best interests of society, as to employ a boy who excited Loathing
in every respectable mind.

The coach, with Mr. Jaggers inside, came up in due time, and I took my
box-seat again, and arrived in London safe,--but not sound, for my heart
was gone. As soon as I arrived, I sent a penitential codfish and barrel
of oysters to Joe (as reparation for not having gone myself), and then
went on to Barnard's Inn.

I found Herbert dining on cold meat, and delighted to welcome me back.
Having despatched The Avenger to the coffee-house for an addition to the
dinner, I felt that I must open my breast that very evening to my friend
and chum. As confidence was out of the question with The Avenger in the
hall, which could merely be regarded in the light of an antechamber to
the keyhole, I sent him to the Play. A better proof of the severity
of my bondage to that taskmaster could scarcely be afforded, than
the degrading shifts to which I was constantly driven to find him
employment. So mean is extremity, that I sometimes sent him to Hyde Park
corner to see what o'clock it was.

Dinner done and we sitting with our feet upon the fender, I said to
Herbert, “My dear Herbert, I have something very particular to tell
you.”

“My dear Handel,” he returned, “I shall esteem and respect your
confidence.”

“It concerns myself, Herbert,” said I, “and one other person.”

Herbert crossed his feet, looked at the fire with his head on one side,
and having looked at it in vain for some time, looked at me because I
didn't go on.

“Herbert,” said I, laying my hand upon his knee, “I love--I
adore--Estella.”

Instead of being transfixed, Herbert replied in an easy matter-of-course
way, “Exactly. Well?”

“Well, Herbert? Is that all you say? Well?”

“What next, I mean?” said Herbert. “Of course I know that.”

“How do you know it?” said I.

“How do I know it, Handel? Why, from you.”

“I never told you.”

“Told me! You have never told me when you have got your hair cut, but I
have had senses to perceive it. You have always adored her, ever since
I have known you. You brought your adoration and your portmanteau here
together. Told me! Why, you have always told me all day long. When you
told me your own story, you told me plainly that you began adoring her
the first time you saw her, when you were very young indeed.”

“Very well, then,” said I, to whom this was a new and not unwelcome
light, “I have never left off adoring her. And she has come back, a most
beautiful and most elegant creature. And I saw her yesterday. And if I
adored her before, I now doubly adore her.”

“Lucky for you then, Handel,” said Herbert, “that you are picked out for
her and allotted to her. Without encroaching on forbidden ground, we
may venture to say that there can be no doubt between ourselves of
that fact. Have you any idea yet, of Estella's views on the adoration
question?”

I shook my head gloomily. “Oh! She is thousands of miles away, from me,”
 said I.

“Patience, my dear Handel: time enough, time enough. But you have
something more to say?”

“I am ashamed to say it,” I returned, “and yet it's no worse to say it
than to think it. You call me a lucky fellow. Of course, I am. I was a
blacksmith's boy but yesterday; I am--what shall I say I am--to-day?”

“Say a good fellow, if you want a phrase,” returned Herbert, smiling,
and clapping his hand on the back of mine--“a good fellow, with
impetuosity and hesitation, boldness and diffidence, action and
dreaming, curiously mixed in him.”

I stopped for a moment to consider whether there really was this mixture
in my character. On the whole, I by no means recognized the analysis,
but thought it not worth disputing.

“When I ask what I am to call myself to-day, Herbert,” I went on, “I
suggest what I have in my thoughts. You say I am lucky. I know I have
done nothing to raise myself in life, and that Fortune alone has raised
me; that is being very lucky. And yet, when I think of Estella--”

(“And when don't you, you know?” Herbert threw in, with his eyes on the
fire; which I thought kind and sympathetic of him.)

“--Then, my dear Herbert, I cannot tell you how dependent and uncertain
I feel, and how exposed to hundreds of chances. Avoiding forbidden
ground, as you did just now, I may still say that on the constancy of
one person (naming no person) all my expectations depend. And at the
best, how indefinite and unsatisfactory, only to know so vaguely what
they are!” In saying this, I relieved my mind of what had always been
there, more or less, though no doubt most since yesterday.

“Now, Handel,” Herbert replied, in his gay, hopeful way, “it seems to me
that in the despondency of the tender passion, we are looking into our
gift-horse's mouth with a magnifying-glass. Likewise, it seems to me
that, concentrating our attention on the examination, we altogether
overlook one of the best points of the animal. Didn't you tell me that
your guardian, Mr. Jaggers, told you in the beginning, that you were
not endowed with expectations only? And even if he had not told you
so,--though that is a very large If, I grant,--could you believe that of
all men in London, Mr. Jaggers is the man to hold his present relations
towards you unless he were sure of his ground?”

I said I could not deny that this was a strong point. I said it (people
often do so, in such cases) like a rather reluctant concession to truth
and justice;--as if I wanted to deny it!

“I should think it was a strong point,” said Herbert, “and I should
think you would be puzzled to imagine a stronger; as to the rest, you
must bide your guardian's time, and he must bide his client's time.
You'll be one-and-twenty before you know where you are, and then perhaps
you'll get some further enlightenment. At all events, you'll be nearer
getting it, for it must come at last.”

“What a hopeful disposition you have!” said I, gratefully admiring his
cheery ways.

“I ought to have,” said Herbert, “for I have not much else. I must
acknowledge, by the by, that the good sense of what I have just said is
not my own, but my father's. The only remark I ever heard him make on
your story, was the final one, “The thing is settled and done, or Mr.
Jaggers would not be in it.” And now before I say anything more about my
father, or my father's son, and repay confidence with confidence, I want
to make myself seriously disagreeable to you for a moment,--positively
repulsive.”

“You won't succeed,” said I.

“O yes I shall!” said he. “One, two, three, and now I am in for it.
Handel, my good fellow;”--though he spoke in this light tone, he was
very much in earnest,--“I have been thinking since we have been talking
with our feet on this fender, that Estella surely cannot be a condition
of your inheritance, if she was never referred to by your guardian. Am
I right in so understanding what you have told me, as that he never
referred to her, directly or indirectly, in any way? Never even hinted,
for instance, that your patron might have views as to your marriage
ultimately?”

“Never.”

“Now, Handel, I am quite free from the flavor of sour grapes, upon my
soul and honor! Not being bound to her, can you not detach yourself from
her?--I told you I should be disagreeable.”

I turned my head aside, for, with a rush and a sweep, like the old marsh
winds coming up from the sea, a feeling like that which had subdued
me on the morning when I left the forge, when the mists were solemnly
rising, and when I laid my hand upon the village finger-post, smote upon
my heart again. There was silence between us for a little while.

“Yes; but my dear Handel,” Herbert went on, as if we had been talking,
instead of silent, “its having been so strongly rooted in the breast of
a boy whom nature and circumstances made so romantic, renders it very
serious. Think of her bringing-up, and think of Miss Havisham. Think of
what she is herself (now I am repulsive and you abominate me). This may
lead to miserable things.”

“I know it, Herbert,” said I, with my head still turned away, “but I
can't help it.”

“You can't detach yourself?”

“No. Impossible!”

“You can't try, Handel?”

“No. Impossible!”

“Well!” said Herbert, getting up with a lively shake as if he had
been asleep, and stirring the fire, “now I'll endeavor to make myself
agreeable again!”

So he went round the room and shook the curtains out, put the chairs
in their places, tidied the books and so forth that were lying about,
looked into the hall, peeped into the letter-box, shut the door, and
came back to his chair by the fire: where he sat down, nursing his left
leg in both arms.

“I was going to say a word or two, Handel, concerning my father and my
father's son. I am afraid it is scarcely necessary for my father's son
to remark that my father's establishment is not particularly brilliant
in its housekeeping.”

“There is always plenty, Herbert,” said I, to say something encouraging.

“O yes! and so the dustman says, I believe, with the strongest approval,
and so does the marine-store shop in the back street. Gravely, Handel,
for the subject is grave enough, you know how it is as well as I do. I
suppose there was a time once when my father had not given matters up;
but if ever there was, the time is gone. May I ask you if you have ever
had an opportunity of remarking, down in your part of the country,
that the children of not exactly suitable marriages are always most
particularly anxious to be married?”

This was such a singular question, that I asked him in return, “Is it
so?”

“I don't know,” said Herbert, “that's what I want to know. Because it
is decidedly the case with us. My poor sister Charlotte, who was next me
and died before she was fourteen, was a striking example. Little Jane
is the same. In her desire to be matrimonially established, you
might suppose her to have passed her short existence in the perpetual
contemplation of domestic bliss. Little Alick in a frock has already
made arrangements for his union with a suitable young person at Kew. And
indeed, I think we are all engaged, except the baby.”

“Then you are?” said I.

“I am,” said Herbert; “but it's a secret.”

I assured him of my keeping the secret, and begged to be favored with
further particulars. He had spoken so sensibly and feelingly of my
weakness that I wanted to know something about his strength.

“May I ask the name?” I said.

“Name of Clara,” said Herbert.

“Live in London?”

“Yes, perhaps I ought to mention,” said Herbert, who had become
curiously crestfallen and meek, since we entered on the interesting
theme, “that she is rather below my mother's nonsensical family notions.
Her father had to do with the victualling of passenger-ships. I think he
was a species of purser.”

“What is he now?” said I.

“He's an invalid now,” replied Herbert.

“Living on--?”

“On the first floor,” said Herbert. Which was not at all what I meant,
for I had intended my question to apply to his means. “I have never seen
him, for he has always kept his room overhead, since I have known Clara.
But I have heard him constantly. He makes tremendous rows,--roars, and
pegs at the floor with some frightful instrument.” In looking at me and
then laughing heartily, Herbert for the time recovered his usual lively
manner.

“Don't you expect to see him?” said I.

“O yes, I constantly expect to see him,” returned Herbert, “because
I never hear him, without expecting him to come tumbling through the
ceiling. But I don't know how long the rafters may hold.”

When he had once more laughed heartily, he became meek again, and told
me that the moment he began to realize Capital, it was his intention
to marry this young lady. He added as a self-evident proposition,
engendering low spirits, “But you can't marry, you know, while you're
looking about you.”

As we contemplated the fire, and as I thought what a difficult vision to
realize this same Capital sometimes was, I put my hands in my pockets.
A folded piece of paper in one of them attracting my attention, I opened
it and found it to be the play-bill I had received from Joe, relative
to the celebrated provincial amateur of Roscian renown. “And bless my
heart,” I involuntarily added aloud, “it's to-night!”

This changed the subject in an instant, and made us hurriedly resolve
to go to the play. So, when I had pledged myself to comfort and abet
Herbert in the affair of his heart by all practicable and impracticable
means, and when Herbert had told me that his affianced already knew me
by reputation and that I should be presented to her, and when we had
warmly shaken hands upon our mutual confidence, we blew out our candles,
made up our fire, locked our door, and issued forth in quest of Mr.
Wopsle and Denmark.




Chapter XXXI

On our arrival in Denmark, we found the king and queen of that country
elevated in two arm-chairs on a kitchen-table, holding a Court. The
whole of the Danish nobility were in attendance; consisting of a noble
boy in the wash-leather boots of a gigantic ancestor, a venerable Peer
with a dirty face who seemed to have risen from the people late in life,
and the Danish chivalry with a comb in its hair and a pair of white
silk legs, and presenting on the whole a feminine appearance. My gifted
townsman stood gloomily apart, with folded arms, and I could have wished
that his curls and forehead had been more probable.

Several curious little circumstances transpired as the action proceeded.
The late king of the country not only appeared to have been troubled
with a cough at the time of his decease, but to have taken it with him
to the tomb, and to have brought it back. The royal phantom also carried
a ghostly manuscript round its truncheon, to which it had the appearance
of occasionally referring, and that too, with an air of anxiety and a
tendency to lose the place of reference which were suggestive of a state
of mortality. It was this, I conceive, which led to the Shade's being
advised by the gallery to “turn over!”--a recommendation which it took
extremely ill. It was likewise to be noted of this majestic spirit, that
whereas it always appeared with an air of having been out a long time
and walked an immense distance, it perceptibly came from a closely
contiguous wall. This occasioned its terrors to be received derisively.
The Queen of Denmark, a very buxom lady, though no doubt historically
brazen, was considered by the public to have too much brass about her;
her chin being attached to her diadem by a broad band of that metal (as
if she had a gorgeous toothache), her waist being encircled by another,
and each of her arms by another, so that she was openly mentioned
as “the kettle-drum.” The noble boy in the ancestral boots was
inconsistent, representing himself, as it were in one breath, as an able
seaman, a strolling actor, a grave-digger, a clergyman, and a person
of the utmost importance at a Court fencing-match, on the authority
of whose practised eye and nice discrimination the finest strokes were
judged. This gradually led to a want of toleration for him, and even--on
his being detected in holy orders, and declining to perform the funeral
service--to the general indignation taking the form of nuts. Lastly,
Ophelia was a prey to such slow musical madness, that when, in course of
time, she had taken off her white muslin scarf, folded it up, and buried
it, a sulky man who had been long cooling his impatient nose against an
iron bar in the front row of the gallery, growled, “Now the baby's put
to bed let's have supper!” Which, to say the least of it, was out of
keeping.

Upon my unfortunate townsman all these incidents accumulated with
playful effect. Whenever that undecided Prince had to ask a question or
state a doubt, the public helped him out with it. As for example; on the
question whether 'twas nobler in the mind to suffer, some roared yes,
and some no, and some inclining to both opinions said “Toss up for
it;” and quite a Debating Society arose. When he asked what should such
fellows as he do crawling between earth and heaven, he was encouraged
with loud cries of “Hear, hear!” When he appeared with his stocking
disordered (its disorder expressed, according to usage, by one very neat
fold in the top, which I suppose to be always got up with a flat iron),
a conversation took place in the gallery respecting the paleness of his
leg, and whether it was occasioned by the turn the ghost had given him.
On his taking the recorders,--very like a little black flute that had
just been played in the orchestra and handed out at the door,--he was
called upon unanimously for Rule Britannia. When he recommended the
player not to saw the air thus, the sulky man said, “And don't you do
it, neither; you're a deal worse than him!” And I grieve to add that
peals of laughter greeted Mr. Wopsle on every one of these occasions.

But his greatest trials were in the churchyard, which had the appearance
of a primeval forest, with a kind of small ecclesiastical wash-house
on one side, and a turnpike gate on the other. Mr. Wopsle in a
comprehensive black cloak, being descried entering at the turnpike,
the gravedigger was admonished in a friendly way, “Look out! Here's the
undertaker a coming, to see how you're a getting on with your work!”
 I believe it is well known in a constitutional country that Mr. Wopsle
could not possibly have returned the skull, after moralizing over it,
without dusting his fingers on a white napkin taken from his breast;
but even that innocent and indispensable action did not pass without the
comment, “Wai-ter!” The arrival of the body for interment (in an empty
black box with the lid tumbling open), was the signal for a general
joy, which was much enhanced by the discovery, among the bearers, of
an individual obnoxious to identification. The joy attended Mr. Wopsle
through his struggle with Laertes on the brink of the orchestra and
the grave, and slackened no more until he had tumbled the king off the
kitchen-table, and had died by inches from the ankles upward.

We had made some pale efforts in the beginning to applaud Mr. Wopsle;
but they were too hopeless to be persisted in. Therefore we had sat,
feeling keenly for him, but laughing, nevertheless, from ear to ear. I
laughed in spite of myself all the time, the whole thing was so droll;
and yet I had a latent impression that there was something decidedly
fine in Mr. Wopsle's elocution,--not for old associations' sake, I am
afraid, but because it was very slow, very dreary, very uphill and
downhill, and very unlike any way in which any man in any natural
circumstances of life or death ever expressed himself about anything.
When the tragedy was over, and he had been called for and hooted, I said
to Herbert, “Let us go at once, or perhaps we shall meet him.”

We made all the haste we could downstairs, but we were not quick enough
either. Standing at the door was a Jewish man with an unnatural heavy
smear of eyebrow, who caught my eyes as we advanced, and said, when we
came up with him,--

“Mr. Pip and friend?”

Identity of Mr. Pip and friend confessed.

“Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man, “would be glad to have the honor.”

“Waldengarver?” I repeated--when Herbert murmured in my ear, “Probably
Wopsle.”

“Oh!” said I. “Yes. Shall we follow you?”

“A few steps, please.” When we were in a side alley, he turned and
asked, “How did you think he looked?--I dressed him.”

I don't know what he had looked like, except a funeral; with the
addition of a large Danish sun or star hanging round his neck by a
blue ribbon, that had given him the appearance of being insured in some
extraordinary Fire Office. But I said he had looked very nice.

“When he come to the grave,” said our conductor, “he showed his cloak
beautiful. But, judging from the wing, it looked to me that when he
see the ghost in the queen's apartment, he might have made more of his
stockings.”

I modestly assented, and we all fell through a little dirty swing door,
into a sort of hot packing-case immediately behind it. Here Mr. Wopsle
was divesting himself of his Danish garments, and here there was just
room for us to look at him over one another's shoulders, by keeping the
packing-case door, or lid, wide open.

“Gentlemen,” said Mr. Wopsle, “I am proud to see you. I hope, Mr. Pip,
you will excuse my sending round. I had the happiness to know you in
former times, and the Drama has ever had a claim which has ever been
acknowledged, on the noble and the affluent.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Waldengarver, in a frightful perspiration, was trying to
get himself out of his princely sables.

“Skin the stockings off Mr. Waldengarver,” said the owner of that
property, “or you'll bust 'em. Bust 'em, and you'll bust five-and-thirty
shillings. Shakspeare never was complimented with a finer pair. Keep
quiet in your chair now, and leave 'em to me.”

With that, he went upon his knees, and began to flay his victim; who, on
the first stocking coming off, would certainly have fallen over backward
with his chair, but for there being no room to fall anyhow.

I had been afraid until then to say a word about the play. But then, Mr.
Waldengarver looked up at us complacently, and said,--

“Gentlemen, how did it seem to you, to go, in front?”

Herbert said from behind (at the same time poking me), “Capitally.” So I
said “Capitally.”

“How did you like my reading of the character, gentlemen?” said Mr.
Waldengarver, almost, if not quite, with patronage.

Herbert said from behind (again poking me), “Massive and concrete.” So I
said boldly, as if I had originated it, and must beg to insist upon it,
“Massive and concrete.”

“I am glad to have your approbation, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver,
with an air of dignity, in spite of his being ground against the wall at
the time, and holding on by the seat of the chair.

“But I'll tell you one thing, Mr. Waldengarver,” said the man who was on
his knees, “in which you're out in your reading. Now mind! I don't care
who says contrairy; I tell you so. You're out in your reading of Hamlet
when you get your legs in profile. The last Hamlet as I dressed, made
the same mistakes in his reading at rehearsal, till I got him to put a
large red wafer on each of his shins, and then at that rehearsal (which
was the last) I went in front, sir, to the back of the pit, and whenever
his reading brought him into profile, I called out “I don't see no
wafers!” And at night his reading was lovely.”

Mr. Waldengarver smiled at me, as much as to say “a faithful
Dependent--I overlook his folly;” and then said aloud, “My view is a
little classic and thoughtful for them here; but they will improve, they
will improve.”

Herbert and I said together, O, no doubt they would improve.

“Did you observe, gentlemen,” said Mr. Waldengarver, “that there was a
man in the gallery who endeavored to cast derision on the service,--I
mean, the representation?”

We basely replied that we rather thought we had noticed such a man. I
added, “He was drunk, no doubt.”

“O dear no, sir,” said Mr. Wopsle, “not drunk. His employer would see to
that, sir. His employer would not allow him to be drunk.”

“You know his employer?” said I.

Mr. Wopsle shut his eyes, and opened them again; performing both
ceremonies very slowly. “You must have observed, gentlemen,” said he,
“an ignorant and a blatant ass, with a rasping throat and a countenance
expressive of low malignity, who went through--I will not say
sustained--the rôle (if I may use a French expression) of Claudius, King
of Denmark. That is his employer, gentlemen. Such is the profession!”

Without distinctly knowing whether I should have been more sorry for Mr.
Wopsle if he had been in despair, I was so sorry for him as it was,
that I took the opportunity of his turning round to have his braces
put on,--which jostled us out at the doorway,--to ask Herbert what he
thought of having him home to supper? Herbert said he thought it would
be kind to do so; therefore I invited him, and he went to Barnard's
with us, wrapped up to the eyes, and we did our best for him, and he sat
until two o'clock in the morning, reviewing his success and developing
his plans. I forget in detail what they were, but I have a general
recollection that he was to begin with reviving the Drama, and to end
with crushing it; inasmuch as his decease would leave it utterly bereft
and without a chance or hope.

Miserably I went to bed after all, and miserably thought of Estella, and
miserably dreamed that my expectations were all cancelled, and that I
had to give my hand in marriage to Herbert's Clara, or play Hamlet to
Miss Havisham's Ghost, before twenty thousand people, without knowing
twenty words of it.




Chapter XXXII

One day when I was busy with my books and Mr. Pocket, I received a note
by the post, the mere outside of which threw me into a great flutter;
for, though I had never seen the handwriting in which it was addressed,
I divined whose hand it was. It had no set beginning, as Dear Mr. Pip,
or Dear Pip, or Dear Sir, or Dear Anything, but ran thus:--

“I am to come to London the day after to-morrow by the midday coach. I
believe it was settled you should meet me? At all events Miss Havisham
has that impression, and I write in obedience to it. She sends you her
regard.

“Yours, ESTELLA.”

If there had been time, I should probably have ordered several suits
of clothes for this occasion; but as there was not, I was fain to be
content with those I had. My appetite vanished instantly, and I knew
no peace or rest until the day arrived. Not that its arrival brought
me either; for, then I was worse than ever, and began haunting the
coach-office in Wood Street, Cheapside, before the coach had left the
Blue Boar in our town. For all that I knew this perfectly well, I still
felt as if it were not safe to let the coach-office be out of my sight
longer than five minutes at a time; and in this condition of unreason I
had performed the first half-hour of a watch of four or five hours, when
Wemmick ran against me.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip,” said he; “how do you do? I should hardly have thought
this was your beat.”

I explained that I was waiting to meet somebody who was coming up by
coach, and I inquired after the Castle and the Aged.

“Both flourishing thankye,” said Wemmick, “and particularly the Aged.
He's in wonderful feather. He'll be eighty-two next birthday. I have
a notion of firing eighty-two times, if the neighborhood shouldn't
complain, and that cannon of mine should prove equal to the pressure.
However, this is not London talk. Where do you think I am going to?”

“To the office?” said I, for he was tending in that direction.

“Next thing to it,” returned Wemmick, “I am going to Newgate. We are in
a banker's-parcel case just at present, and I have been down the road
taking a squint at the scene of action, and thereupon must have a word
or two with our client.”

“Did your client commit the robbery?” I asked.

“Bless your soul and body, no,” answered Wemmick, very drily. “But he
is accused of it. So might you or I be. Either of us might be accused of
it, you know.”

“Only neither of us is,” I remarked.

“Yah!” said Wemmick, touching me on the breast with his forefinger;
“you're a deep one, Mr. Pip! Would you like to have a look at Newgate?
Have you time to spare?”

I had so much time to spare, that the proposal came as a relief,
notwithstanding its irreconcilability with my latent desire to keep my
eye on the coach-office. Muttering that I would make the inquiry whether
I had time to walk with him, I went into the office, and ascertained
from the clerk with the nicest precision and much to the trying of his
temper, the earliest moment at which the coach could be expected,--which
I knew beforehand, quite as well as he. I then rejoined Mr. Wemmick, and
affecting to consult my watch, and to be surprised by the information I
had received, accepted his offer.

We were at Newgate in a few minutes, and we passed through the lodge
where some fetters were hanging up on the bare walls among the prison
rules, into the interior of the jail. At that time jails were much
neglected, and the period of exaggerated reaction consequent on
all public wrongdoing--and which is always its heaviest and longest
punishment--was still far off. So, felons were not lodged and fed better
than soldiers (to say nothing of paupers), and seldom set fire to their
prisons with the excusable object of improving the flavor of their soup.
It was visiting time when Wemmick took me in, and a potman was going his
rounds with beer; and the prisoners, behind bars in yards, were buying
beer, and talking to friends; and a frowzy, ugly, disorderly, depressing
scene it was.

It struck me that Wemmick walked among the prisoners much as a gardener
might walk among his plants. This was first put into my head by his
seeing a shoot that had come up in the night, and saying, “What, Captain
Tom? Are you there? Ah, indeed!” and also, “Is that Black Bill behind
the cistern? Why I didn't look for you these two months; how do you find
yourself?” Equally in his stopping at the bars and attending to
anxious whisperers,--always singly,--Wemmick with his post-office in
an immovable state, looked at them while in conference, as if he were
taking particular notice of the advance they had made, since last
observed, towards coming out in full blow at their trial.

He was highly popular, and I found that he took the familiar department
of Mr. Jaggers's business; though something of the state of Mr. Jaggers
hung about him too, forbidding approach beyond certain limits. His
personal recognition of each successive client was comprised in a nod,
and in his settling his hat a little easier on his head with both
hands, and then tightening the post-office, and putting his hands in his
pockets. In one or two instances there was a difficulty respecting the
raising of fees, and then Mr. Wemmick, backing as far as possible from
the insufficient money produced, said, “it's no use, my boy. I'm only
a subordinate. I can't take it. Don't go on in that way with a
subordinate. If you are unable to make up your quantum, my boy, you had
better address yourself to a principal; there are plenty of principals
in the profession, you know, and what is not worth the while of one, may
be worth the while of another; that's my recommendation to you, speaking
as a subordinate. Don't try on useless measures. Why should you? Now,
who's next?”

Thus, we walked through Wemmick's greenhouse, until he turned to me and
said, “Notice the man I shall shake hands with.” I should have done so,
without the preparation, as he had shaken hands with no one yet.

Almost as soon as he had spoken, a portly upright man (whom I can
see now, as I write) in a well-worn olive-colored frock-coat, with a
peculiar pallor overspreading the red in his complexion, and eyes that
went wandering about when he tried to fix them, came up to a corner
of the bars, and put his hand to his hat--which had a greasy and fatty
surface like cold broth--with a half-serious and half-jocose military
salute.

“Colonel, to you!” said Wemmick; “how are you, Colonel?”

“All right, Mr. Wemmick.”

“Everything was done that could be done, but the evidence was too strong
for us, Colonel.”

“Yes, it was too strong, sir,--but I don't care.”

“No, no,” said Wemmick, coolly, “you don't care.” Then, turning to me,
“Served His Majesty this man. Was a soldier in the line and bought his
discharge.”

I said, “Indeed?” and the man's eyes looked at me, and then looked over
my head, and then looked all round me, and then he drew his hand across
his lips and laughed.

“I think I shall be out of this on Monday, sir,” he said to Wemmick.

“Perhaps,” returned my friend, “but there's no knowing.”

“I am glad to have the chance of bidding you good-bye, Mr. Wemmick,” said
the man, stretching out his hand between two bars.

“Thankye,” said Wemmick, shaking hands with him. “Same to you, Colonel.”

“If what I had upon me when taken had been real, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
man, unwilling to let his hand go, “I should have asked the favor of
your wearing another ring--in acknowledgment of your attentions.”

“I'll accept the will for the deed,” said Wemmick. “By the by; you were
quite a pigeon-fancier.” The man looked up at the sky. “I am told you
had a remarkable breed of tumblers. Could you commission any friend of
yours to bring me a pair, if you've no further use for 'em?”

“It shall be done, sir.”

“All right,” said Wemmick, “they shall be taken care of. Good afternoon,
Colonel. Good-bye!” They shook hands again, and as we walked away Wemmick
said to me, “A Coiner, a very good workman. The Recorder's report is
made to-day, and he is sure to be executed on Monday. Still you see, as
far as it goes, a pair of pigeons are portable property all the same.”
 With that, he looked back, and nodded at this dead plant, and then cast
his eyes about him in walking out of the yard, as if he were considering
what other pot would go best in its place.

As we came out of the prison through the lodge, I found that the great
importance of my guardian was appreciated by the turnkeys, no less
than by those whom they held in charge. “Well, Mr. Wemmick,” said the
turnkey, who kept us between the two studded and spiked lodge gates,
and who carefully locked one before he unlocked the other, “what's Mr.
Jaggers going to do with that water-side murder? Is he going to make it
manslaughter, or what's he going to make of it?”

“Why don't you ask him?” returned Wemmick.

“O yes, I dare say!” said the turnkey.

“Now, that's the way with them here, Mr. Pip,” remarked Wemmick, turning
to me with his post-office elongated. “They don't mind what they ask of
me, the subordinate; but you'll never catch 'em asking any questions of
my principal.”

“Is this young gentleman one of the 'prentices or articled ones of your
office?” asked the turnkey, with a grin at Mr. Wemmick's humor.

“There he goes again, you see!” cried Wemmick, “I told you so! Asks
another question of the subordinate before his first is dry! Well,
supposing Mr. Pip is one of them?”

“Why then,” said the turnkey, grinning again, “he knows what Mr. Jaggers
is.”

“Yah!” cried Wemmick, suddenly hitting out at the turnkey in a facetious
way, “you're dumb as one of your own keys when you have to do with my
principal, you know you are. Let us out, you old fox, or I'll get him to
bring an action against you for false imprisonment.”

The turnkey laughed, and gave us good day, and stood laughing at us over
the spikes of the wicket when we descended the steps into the street.

“Mind you, Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, gravely in my ear, as he took my arm
to be more confidential; “I don't know that Mr. Jaggers does a better
thing than the way in which he keeps himself so high. He's always so
high. His constant height is of a piece with his immense abilities. That
Colonel durst no more take leave of him, than that turnkey durst ask him
his intentions respecting a case. Then, between his height and them, he
slips in his subordinate,--don't you see?--and so he has 'em, soul and
body.”

I was very much impressed, and not for the first time, by my guardian's
subtlety. To confess the truth, I very heartily wished, and not for the
first time, that I had had some other guardian of minor abilities.

Mr. Wemmick and I parted at the office in Little Britain, where
suppliants for Mr. Jaggers's notice were lingering about as usual, and I
returned to my watch in the street of the coach-office, with some three
hours on hand. I consumed the whole time in thinking how strange it
was that I should be encompassed by all this taint of prison and crime;
that, in my childhood out on our lonely marshes on a winter evening, I
should have first encountered it; that, it should have reappeared on two
occasions, starting out like a stain that was faded but not gone; that,
it should in this new way pervade my fortune and advancement. While my
mind was thus engaged, I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud
and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence
of the contrast between the jail and her. I wished that Wemmick had not
met me, or that I had not yielded to him and gone with him, so that,
of all days in the year on this day, I might not have had Newgate in
my breath and on my clothes. I beat the prison dust off my feet as I
sauntered to and fro, and I shook it out of my dress, and I exhaled
its air from my lungs. So contaminated did I feel, remembering who was
coming, that the coach came quickly after all, and I was not yet free
from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick's conservatory, when I saw
her face at the coach window and her hand waving to me.

What was the nameless shadow which again in that one instant had passed?




Chapter XXXIII

In her furred travelling-dress, Estella seemed more delicately beautiful
than she had ever seemed yet, even in my eyes. Her manner was more
winning than she had cared to let it be to me before, and I thought I
saw Miss Havisham's influence in the change.

We stood in the Inn Yard while she pointed out her luggage to me, and
when it was all collected I remembered--having forgotten everything but
herself in the meanwhile--that I knew nothing of her destination.

“I am going to Richmond,” she told me. “Our lesson is, that there are
two Richmonds, one in Surrey and one in Yorkshire, and that mine is the
Surrey Richmond. The distance is ten miles. I am to have a carriage, and
you are to take me. This is my purse, and you are to pay my charges out
of it. O, you must take the purse! We have no choice, you and I, but to
obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you
and I.”

As she looked at me in giving me the purse, I hoped there was an
inner meaning in her words. She said them slightingly, but not with
displeasure.

“A carriage will have to be sent for, Estella. Will you rest here a
little?”

“Yes, I am to rest here a little, and I am to drink some tea, and you
are to take care of me the while.”

She drew her arm through mine, as if it must be done, and I requested a
waiter who had been staring at the coach like a man who had never seen
such a thing in his life, to show us a private sitting-room. Upon that,
he pulled out a napkin, as if it were a magic clew without which he
couldn't find the way upstairs, and led us to the black hole of the
establishment, fitted up with a diminishing mirror (quite a superfluous
article, considering the hole's proportions), an anchovy sauce-cruet,
and somebody's pattens. On my objecting to this retreat, he took us into
another room with a dinner-table for thirty, and in the grate a scorched
leaf of a copy-book under a bushel of coal-dust. Having looked at this
extinct conflagration and shaken his head, he took my order; which,
proving to be merely, “Some tea for the lady,” sent him out of the room
in a very low state of mind.

I was, and I am, sensible that the air of this chamber, in its strong
combination of stable with soup-stock, might have led one to infer that
the coaching department was not doing well, and that the enterprising
proprietor was boiling down the horses for the refreshment department.
Yet the room was all in all to me, Estella being in it. I thought that
with her I could have been happy there for life. (I was not at all happy
there at the time, observe, and I knew it well.)

“Where are you going to, at Richmond?” I asked Estella.

“I am going to live,” said she, “at a great expense, with a lady there,
who has the power--or says she has--of taking me about, and introducing
me, and showing people to me and showing me to people.”

“I suppose you will be glad of variety and admiration?”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

She answered so carelessly, that I said, “You speak of yourself as if
you were some one else.”

“Where did you learn how I speak of others? Come, come,” said Estella,
smiling delightfully, “you must not expect me to go to school to you; I
must talk in my own way. How do you thrive with Mr. Pocket?”

“I live quite pleasantly there; at least--” It appeared to me that I was
losing a chance.

“At least?” repeated Estella.

“As pleasantly as I could anywhere, away from you.”

“You silly boy,” said Estella, quite composedly, “how can you talk such
nonsense? Your friend Mr. Matthew, I believe, is superior to the rest of
his family?”

“Very superior indeed. He is nobody's enemy--”

“Don't add but his own,” interposed Estella, “for I hate that class of
man. But he really is disinterested, and above small jealousy and spite,
I have heard?”

“I am sure I have every reason to say so.”

“You have not every reason to say so of the rest of his people,” said
Estella, nodding at me with an expression of face that was at once
grave and rallying, “for they beset Miss Havisham with reports and
insinuations to your disadvantage. They watch you, misrepresent you,
write letters about you (anonymous sometimes), and you are the torment
and the occupation of their lives. You can scarcely realize to yourself
the hatred those people feel for you.”

“They do me no harm, I hope?”

Instead of answering, Estella burst out laughing. This was very singular
to me, and I looked at her in considerable perplexity. When she left
off--and she had not laughed languidly, but with real enjoyment--I said,
in my diffident way with her,--

“I hope I may suppose that you would not be amused if they did me any
harm.”

“No, no you may be sure of that,” said Estella. “You may be certain that
I laugh because they fail. O, those people with Miss Havisham, and the
tortures they undergo!” She laughed again, and even now when she had
told me why, her laughter was very singular to me, for I could not
doubt its being genuine, and yet it seemed too much for the occasion.
I thought there must really be something more here than I knew; she saw
the thought in my mind, and answered it.

“It is not easy for even you.” said Estella, “to know what satisfaction
it gives me to see those people thwarted, or what an enjoyable sense of
the ridiculous I have when they are made ridiculous. For you were not
brought up in that strange house from a mere baby. I was. You had not
your little wits sharpened by their intriguing against you, suppressed
and defenceless, under the mask of sympathy and pity and what not that
is soft and soothing. I had. You did not gradually open your round
childish eyes wider and wider to the discovery of that impostor of a
woman who calculates her stores of peace of mind for when she wakes up
in the night. I did.”

It was no laughing matter with Estella now, nor was she summoning these
remembrances from any shallow place. I would not have been the cause of
that look of hers for all my expectations in a heap.

“Two things I can tell you,” said Estella. “First, notwithstanding the
proverb that constant dropping will wear away a stone, you may set
your mind at rest that these people never will--never would, in hundred
years--impair your ground with Miss Havisham, in any particular, great
or small. Second, I am beholden to you as the cause of their being so
busy and so mean in vain, and there is my hand upon it.”

As she gave it to me playfully,--for her darker mood had been but
Momentary,--I held it and put it to my lips. “You ridiculous boy,” said
Estella, “will you never take warning? Or do you kiss my hand in the
same spirit in which I once let you kiss my cheek?”

“What spirit was that?” said I.

“I must think a moment. A spirit of contempt for the fawners and
plotters.”

“If I say yes, may I kiss the cheek again?”

“You should have asked before you touched the hand. But, yes, if you
like.”

I leaned down, and her calm face was like a statue's. “Now,” said
Estella, gliding away the instant I touched her cheek, “you are to take
care that I have some tea, and you are to take me to Richmond.”

Her reverting to this tone as if our association were forced upon
us, and we were mere puppets, gave me pain; but everything in our
intercourse did give me pain. Whatever her tone with me happened to be,
I could put no trust in it, and build no hope on it; and yet I went on
against trust and against hope. Why repeat it a thousand times? So it
always was.

I rang for the tea, and the waiter, reappearing with his magic clew,
brought in by degrees some fifty adjuncts to that refreshment, but of
tea not a glimpse. A teaboard, cups and saucers, plates, knives and
forks (including carvers), spoons (various), saltcellars, a meek little
muffin confined with the utmost precaution under a strong iron cover,
Moses in the bulrushes typified by a soft bit of butter in a quantity of
parsley, a pale loaf with a powdered head, two proof impressions of
the bars of the kitchen fireplace on triangular bits of bread, and
ultimately a fat family urn; which the waiter staggered in with,
expressing in his countenance burden and suffering. After a prolonged
absence at this stage of the entertainment, he at length came back with
a casket of precious appearance containing twigs. These I steeped in hot
water, and so from the whole of these appliances extracted one cup of I
don't know what for Estella.

The bill paid, and the waiter remembered, and the ostler not forgotten,
and the chambermaid taken into consideration,--in a word, the whole
house bribed into a state of contempt and animosity, and Estella's purse
much lightened,--we got into our post-coach and drove away. Turning into
Cheapside and rattling up Newgate Street, we were soon under the walls
of which I was so ashamed.

“What place is that?” Estella asked me.

I made a foolish pretence of not at first recognizing it, and then
told her. As she looked at it, and drew in her head again,
murmuring, “Wretches!” I would not have confessed to my visit for any
consideration.

“Mr. Jaggers,” said I, by way of putting it neatly on somebody else,
“has the reputation of being more in the secrets of that dismal place
than any man in London.”

“He is more in the secrets of every place, I think,” said Estella, in a
low voice.

“You have been accustomed to see him often, I suppose?”

“I have been accustomed to see him at uncertain intervals, ever since
I can remember. But I know him no better now, than I did before I could
speak plainly. What is your own experience of him? Do you advance with
him?”

“Once habituated to his distrustful manner,” said I, “I have done very
well.”

“Are you intimate?”

“I have dined with him at his private house.”

“I fancy,” said Estella, shrinking “that must be a curious place.”

“It is a curious place.”

I should have been chary of discussing my guardian too freely even with
her; but I should have gone on with the subject so far as to describe
the dinner in Gerrard Street, if we had not then come into a sudden
glare of gas. It seemed, while it lasted, to be all alight and alive
with that inexplicable feeling I had had before; and when we were out of
it, I was as much dazed for a few moments as if I had been in lightning.

So we fell into other talk, and it was principally about the way by
which we were travelling, and about what parts of London lay on this
side of it, and what on that. The great city was almost new to her, she
told me, for she had never left Miss Havisham's neighborhood until she
had gone to France, and she had merely passed through London then in
going and returning. I asked her if my guardian had any charge of her
while she remained here? To that she emphatically said “God forbid!” and
no more.

It was impossible for me to avoid seeing that she cared to attract me;
that she made herself winning, and would have won me even if the task
had needed pains. Yet this made me none the happier, for even if she had
not taken that tone of our being disposed of by others, I should have
felt that she held my heart in her hand because she wilfully chose to do
it, and not because it would have wrung any tenderness in her to crush
it and throw it away.

When we passed through Hammersmith, I showed her where Mr. Matthew
Pocket lived, and said it was no great way from Richmond, and that I
hoped I should see her sometimes.

“O yes, you are to see me; you are to come when you think proper; you
are to be mentioned to the family; indeed you are already mentioned.”

I inquired was it a large household she was going to be a member of?

“No; there are only two; mother and daughter. The mother is a lady of
some station, though not averse to increasing her income.”

“I wonder Miss Havisham could part with you again so soon.”

“It is a part of Miss Havisham's plans for me, Pip,” said Estella, with
a sigh, as if she were tired; “I am to write to her constantly and see
her regularly and report how I go on,--I and the jewels,--for they are
nearly all mine now.”

It was the first time she had ever called me by my name. Of course she
did so purposely, and knew that I should treasure it up.

We came to Richmond all too soon, and our destination there was a house
by the green,--a staid old house, where hoops and powder and patches,
embroidered coats, rolled stockings, ruffles and swords, had had their
court days many a time. Some ancient trees before the house were still
cut into fashions as formal and unnatural as the hoops and wigs and
stiff skirts; but their own allotted places in the great procession of
the dead were not far off, and they would soon drop into them and go the
silent way of the rest.

A bell with an old voice--which I dare say in its time had often said
to the house, Here is the green farthingale, Here is the diamond-hilted
sword, Here are the shoes with red heels and the blue solitaire--sounded
gravely in the moonlight, and two cherry-colored maids came fluttering
out to receive Estella. The doorway soon absorbed her boxes, and she
gave me her hand and a smile, and said good night, and was absorbed
likewise. And still I stood looking at the house, thinking how happy I
should be if I lived there with her, and knowing that I never was happy
with her, but always miserable.

I got into the carriage to be taken back to Hammersmith, and I got in
with a bad heart-ache, and I got out with a worse heart-ache. At our
own door, I found little Jane Pocket coming home from a little party
escorted by her little lover; and I envied her little lover, in spite of
his being subject to Flopson.

Mr. Pocket was out lecturing; for, he was a most delightful lecturer on
domestic economy, and his treatises on the management of children and
servants were considered the very best text-books on those themes. But
Mrs. Pocket was at home, and was in a little difficulty, on account of
the baby's having been accommodated with a needle-case to keep him quiet
during the unaccountable absence (with a relative in the Foot Guards)
of Millers. And more needles were missing than it could be regarded
as quite wholesome for a patient of such tender years either to apply
externally or to take as a tonic.

Mr. Pocket being justly celebrated for giving most excellent practical
advice, and for having a clear and sound perception of things and a
highly judicious mind, I had some notion in my heart-ache of begging him
to accept my confidence. But happening to look up at Mrs. Pocket as she
sat reading her book of dignities after prescribing Bed as a sovereign
remedy for baby, I thought--Well--No, I wouldn't.




Chapter XXXIV

As I had grown accustomed to my expectations, I had insensibly begun to
notice their effect upon myself and those around me. Their influence on
my own character I disguised from my recognition as much as possible,
but I knew very well that it was not all good. I lived in a state of
chronic uneasiness respecting my behavior to Joe. My conscience was not
by any means comfortable about Biddy. When I woke up in the night,--like
Camilla,--I used to think, with a weariness on my spirits, that I should
have been happier and better if I had never seen Miss Havisham's face,
and had risen to manhood content to be partners with Joe in the honest
old forge. Many a time of an evening, when I sat alone looking at the
fire, I thought, after all there was no fire like the forge fire and the
kitchen fire at home.

Yet Estella was so inseparable from all my restlessness and disquiet of
mind, that I really fell into confusion as to the limits of my own part
in its production. That is to say, supposing I had had no expectations,
and yet had had Estella to think of, I could not make out to my
satisfaction that I should have done much better. Now, concerning the
influence of my position on others, I was in no such difficulty, and so
I perceived--though dimly enough perhaps--that it was not beneficial
to anybody, and, above all, that it was not beneficial to Herbert.
My lavish habits led his easy nature into expenses that he could not
afford, corrupted the simplicity of his life, and disturbed his peace
with anxieties and regrets. I was not at all remorseful for having
unwittingly set those other branches of the Pocket family to the poor
arts they practised; because such littlenesses were their natural
bent, and would have been evoked by anybody else, if I had left them
slumbering. But Herbert's was a very different case, and it often caused
me a twinge to think that I had done him evil service in crowding his
sparely furnished chambers with incongruous upholstery work, and placing
the Canary-breasted Avenger at his disposal.

So now, as an infallible way of making little ease great ease, I began
to contract a quantity of debt. I could hardly begin but Herbert
must begin too, so he soon followed. At Startop's suggestion, we put
ourselves down for election into a club called The Finches of the Grove:
the object of which institution I have never divined, if it were not
that the members should dine expensively once a fortnight, to quarrel
among themselves as much as possible after dinner, and to cause six
waiters to get drunk on the stairs. I know that these gratifying social
ends were so invariably accomplished, that Herbert and I understood
nothing else to be referred to in the first standing toast of the
society: which ran “Gentlemen, may the present promotion of good feeling
ever reign predominant among the Finches of the Grove.”

The Finches spent their money foolishly (the Hotel we dined at was
in Covent Garden), and the first Finch I saw when I had the honor of
joining the Grove was Bentley Drummle, at that time floundering about
town in a cab of his own, and doing a great deal of damage to the posts
at the street corners. Occasionally, he shot himself out of his equipage
headforemost over the apron; and I saw him on one occasion deliver
himself at the door of the Grove in this unintentional way--like coals.
But here I anticipate a little, for I was not a Finch, and could not be,
according to the sacred laws of the society, until I came of age.

In my confidence in my own resources, I would willingly have taken
Herbert's expenses on myself; but Herbert was proud, and I could make
no such proposal to him. So he got into difficulties in every direction,
and continued to look about him. When we gradually fell into keeping
late hours and late company, I noticed that he looked about him with a
desponding eye at breakfast-time; that he began to look about him more
hopefully about mid-day; that he drooped when he came into dinner;
that he seemed to descry Capital in the distance, rather clearly, after
dinner; that he all but realized Capital towards midnight; and that at
about two o'clock in the morning, he became so deeply despondent again
as to talk of buying a rifle and going to America, with a general
purpose of compelling buffaloes to make his fortune.

I was usually at Hammersmith about half the week, and when I was at
Hammersmith I haunted Richmond, whereof separately by and by. Herbert
would often come to Hammersmith when I was there, and I think at those
seasons his father would occasionally have some passing perception that
the opening he was looking for, had not appeared yet. But in the general
tumbling up of the family, his tumbling out in life somewhere, was
a thing to transact itself somehow. In the meantime Mr. Pocket grew
grayer, and tried oftener to lift himself out of his perplexities by the
hair. While Mrs. Pocket tripped up the family with her footstool, read
her book of dignities, lost her pocket-handkerchief, told us about her
grandpapa, and taught the young idea how to shoot, by shooting it into
bed whenever it attracted her notice.

As I am now generalizing a period of my life with the object of clearing
my way before me, I can scarcely do so better than by at once completing
the description of our usual manners and customs at Barnard's Inn.

We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people
could make up their minds to give us. We were always more or less
miserable, and most of our acquaintance were in the same condition.
There was a gay fiction among us that we were constantly enjoying
ourselves, and a skeleton truth that we never did. To the best of my
belief, our case was in the last aspect a rather common one.

Every morning, with an air ever new, Herbert went into the City to look
about him. I often paid him a visit in the dark back-room in which
he consorted with an ink-jar, a hat-peg, a coal-box, a string-box, an
almanac, a desk and stool, and a ruler; and I do not remember that I
ever saw him do anything else but look about him. If we all did what
we undertake to do, as faithfully as Herbert did, we might live in a
Republic of the Virtues. He had nothing else to do, poor fellow, except
at a certain hour of every afternoon to “go to Lloyd's”--in observance
of a ceremony of seeing his principal, I think. He never did anything
else in connection with Lloyd's that I could find out, except come back
again. When he felt his case unusually serious, and that he positively
must find an opening, he would go on 'Change at a busy time, and walk in
and out, in a kind of gloomy country dance figure, among the assembled
magnates. “For,” says Herbert to me, coming home to dinner on one
of those special occasions, “I find the truth to be, Handel, that an
opening won't come to one, but one must go to it,--so I have been.”

If we had been less attached to one another, I think we must have hated
one another regularly every morning. I detested the chambers beyond
expression at that period of repentance, and could not endure the
sight of the Avenger's livery; which had a more expensive and a
less remunerative appearance then than at any other time in the
four-and-twenty hours. As we got more and more into debt, breakfast
became a hollower and hollower form, and, being on one occasion at
breakfast-time threatened (by letter) with legal proceedings, “not
unwholly unconnected,” as my local paper might put it, “with jewelery,”
 I went so far as to seize the Avenger by his blue collar and shake
him off his feet,--so that he was actually in the air, like a booted
Cupid,--for presuming to suppose that we wanted a roll.

At certain times--meaning at uncertain times, for they depended on our
humor--I would say to Herbert, as if it were a remarkable discovery,--

“My dear Herbert, we are getting on badly.”

“My dear Handel,” Herbert would say to me, in all sincerity, “if you will
believe me, those very words were on my lips, by a strange coincidence.”

“Then, Herbert,” I would respond, “let us look into our affairs.”

We always derived profound satisfaction from making an appointment for
this purpose. I always thought this was business, this was the way to
confront the thing, this was the way to take the foe by the throat. And
I know Herbert thought so too.

We ordered something rather special for dinner, with a bottle of
something similarly out of the common way, in order that our minds might
be fortified for the occasion, and we might come well up to the mark.
Dinner over, we produced a bundle of pens, a copious supply of ink, and
a goodly show of writing and blotting paper. For there was something
very comfortable in having plenty of stationery.

I would then take a sheet of paper, and write across the top of it, in a
neat hand, the heading, “Memorandum of Pip's debts”; with Barnard's Inn
and the date very carefully added. Herbert would also take a sheet of
paper, and write across it with similar formalities, “Memorandum of
Herbert's debts.”

Each of us would then refer to a confused heap of papers at his side,
which had been thrown into drawers, worn into holes in pockets, half
burnt in lighting candles, stuck for weeks into the looking-glass, and
otherwise damaged. The sound of our pens going refreshed us exceedingly,
insomuch that I sometimes found it difficult to distinguish between this
edifying business proceeding and actually paying the money. In point of
meritorious character, the two things seemed about equal.

When we had written a little while, I would ask Herbert how he got on?
Herbert probably would have been scratching his head in a most rueful
manner at the sight of his accumulating figures.

“They are mounting up, Handel,” Herbert would say; “upon my life, they
are mounting up.”

“Be firm, Herbert,” I would retort, plying my own pen with great
assiduity. “Look the thing in the face. Look into your affairs. Stare
them out of countenance.”

“So I would, Handel, only they are staring me out of countenance.”

However, my determined manner would have its effect, and Herbert would
fall to work again. After a time he would give up once more, on the plea
that he had not got Cobbs's bill, or Lobbs's, or Nobbs's, as the case
might be.

“Then, Herbert, estimate; estimate it in round numbers, and put it
down.”

“What a fellow of resource you are!” my friend would reply, with
admiration. “Really your business powers are very remarkable.”

I thought so too. I established with myself, on these occasions,
the reputation of a first-rate man of business,--prompt, decisive,
energetic, clear, cool-headed. When I had got all my responsibilities
down upon my list, I compared each with the bill, and ticked it off. My
self-approval when I ticked an entry was quite a luxurious sensation.
When I had no more ticks to make, I folded all my bills up uniformly,
docketed each on the back, and tied the whole into a symmetrical
bundle. Then I did the same for Herbert (who modestly said he had not my
administrative genius), and felt that I had brought his affairs into a
focus for him.

My business habits had one other bright feature, which I called “leaving
a Margin.” For example; supposing Herbert's debts to be one hundred and
sixty-four pounds four-and-twopence, I would say, “Leave a margin, and
put them down at two hundred.” Or, supposing my own to be four times as
much, I would leave a margin, and put them down at seven hundred. I had
the highest opinion of the wisdom of this same Margin, but I am bound
to acknowledge that on looking back, I deem it to have been an expensive
device. For, we always ran into new debt immediately, to the full extent
of the margin, and sometimes, in the sense of freedom and solvency it
imparted, got pretty far on into another margin.

But there was a calm, a rest, a virtuous hush, consequent on these
examinations of our affairs that gave me, for the time, an admirable
opinion of myself. Soothed by my exertions, my method, and Herbert's
compliments, I would sit with his symmetrical bundle and my own on the
table before me among the stationary, and feel like a Bank of some sort,
rather than a private individual.

We shut our outer door on these solemn occasions, in order that we might
not be interrupted. I had fallen into my serene state one evening, when
we heard a letter dropped through the slit in the said door, and fall on
the ground. “It's for you, Handel,” said Herbert, going out and coming
back with it, “and I hope there is nothing the matter.” This was in
allusion to its heavy black seal and border.

The letter was signed Trabb & Co., and its contents were simply, that
I was an honored sir, and that they begged to inform me that Mrs. J.
Gargery had departed this life on Monday last at twenty minutes past six
in the evening, and that my attendance was requested at the interment on
Monday next at three o'clock in the afternoon.




Chapter XXXV

It was the first time that a grave had opened in my road of life, and
the gap it made in the smooth ground was wonderful. The figure of my
sister in her chair by the kitchen fire, haunted me night and day. That
the place could possibly be, without her, was something my mind seemed
unable to compass; and whereas she had seldom or never been in my
thoughts of late, I had now the strangest ideas that she was coming
towards me in the street, or that she would presently knock at the door.
In my rooms too, with which she had never been at all associated, there
was at once the blankness of death and a perpetual suggestion of the
sound of her voice or the turn of her face or figure, as if she were
still alive and had been often there.

Whatever my fortunes might have been, I could scarcely have recalled my
sister with much tenderness. But I suppose there is a shock of regret
which may exist without much tenderness. Under its influence (and
perhaps to make up for the want of the softer feeling) I was seized with
a violent indignation against the assailant from whom she had suffered
so much; and I felt that on sufficient proof I could have revengefully
pursued Orlick, or any one else, to the last extremity.

Having written to Joe, to offer him consolation, and to assure him
that I would come to the funeral, I passed the intermediate days in
the curious state of mind I have glanced at. I went down early in the
morning, and alighted at the Blue Boar in good time to walk over to the
forge.

It was fine summer weather again, and, as I walked along, the times
when I was a little helpless creature, and my sister did not spare me,
vividly returned. But they returned with a gentle tone upon them that
softened even the edge of Tickler. For now, the very breath of the beans
and clover whispered to my heart that the day must come when it would
be well for my memory that others walking in the sunshine should be
softened as they thought of me.

At last I came within sight of the house, and saw that Trabb and Co. had
put in a funereal execution and taken possession. Two dismally absurd
persons, each ostentatiously exhibiting a crutch done up in a black
bandage,--as if that instrument could possibly communicate any comfort
to anybody,--were posted at the front door; and in one of them I
recognized a postboy discharged from the Boar for turning a young couple
into a sawpit on their bridal morning, in consequence of intoxication
rendering it necessary for him to ride his horse clasped round the neck
with both arms. All the children of the village, and most of the women,
were admiring these sable warders and the closed windows of the house
and forge; and as I came up, one of the two warders (the postboy)
knocked at the door,--implying that I was far too much exhausted by
grief to have strength remaining to knock for myself.

Another sable warder (a carpenter, who had once eaten two geese for a
wager) opened the door, and showed me into the best parlor. Here, Mr.
Trabb had taken unto himself the best table, and had got all the leaves
up, and was holding a kind of black Bazaar, with the aid of a quantity
of black pins. At the moment of my arrival, he had just finished putting
somebody's hat into black long-clothes, like an African baby; so he held
out his hand for mine. But I, misled by the action, and confused by the
occasion, shook hands with him with every testimony of warm affection.

Poor dear Joe, entangled in a little black cloak tied in a large bow
under his chin, was seated apart at the upper end of the room; where,
as chief mourner, he had evidently been stationed by Trabb. When I bent
down and said to him, “Dear Joe, how are you?” he said, “Pip, old chap,
you knowed her when she were a fine figure of a--” and clasped my hand
and said no more.

Biddy, looking very neat and modest in her black dress, went quietly
here and there, and was very helpful. When I had spoken to Biddy, as
I thought it not a time for talking I went and sat down near Joe, and
there began to wonder in what part of the house it--she--my sister--was.
The air of the parlor being faint with the smell of sweet-cake, I looked
about for the table of refreshments; it was scarcely visible until one
had got accustomed to the gloom, but there was a cut-up plum cake upon
it, and there were cut-up oranges, and sandwiches, and biscuits, and two
decanters that I knew very well as ornaments, but had never seen used
in all my life; one full of port, and one of sherry. Standing at this
table, I became conscious of the servile Pumblechook in a black cloak
and several yards of hatband, who was alternately stuffing himself,
and making obsequious movements to catch my attention. The moment he
succeeded, he came over to me (breathing sherry and crumbs), and said
in a subdued voice, “May I, dear sir?” and did. I then descried Mr. and
Mrs. Hubble; the last-named in a decent speechless paroxysm in a corner.
We were all going to “follow,” and were all in course of being tied up
separately (by Trabb) into ridiculous bundles.

“Which I meantersay, Pip,” Joe whispered me, as we were being what Mr.
Trabb called “formed” in the parlor, two and two,--and it was dreadfully
like a preparation for some grim kind of dance; “which I meantersay,
sir, as I would in preference have carried her to the church myself,
along with three or four friendly ones wot come to it with willing harts
and arms, but it were considered wot the neighbors would look down on
such and would be of opinions as it were wanting in respect.”

“Pocket-handkerchiefs out, all!” cried Mr. Trabb at this point, in a
depressed business-like voice. “Pocket-handkerchiefs out! We are ready!”

So we all put our pocket-handkerchiefs to our faces, as if our
noses were bleeding, and filed out two and two; Joe and I; Biddy and
Pumblechook; Mr. and Mrs. Hubble. The remains of my poor sister had been
brought round by the kitchen door, and, it being a point of Undertaking
ceremony that the six bearers must be stifled and blinded under a
horrible black velvet housing with a white border, the whole looked like
a blind monster with twelve human legs, shuffling and blundering along,
under the guidance of two keepers,--the postboy and his comrade.

The neighborhood, however, highly approved of these arrangements, and we
were much admired as we went through the village; the more youthful and
vigorous part of the community making dashes now and then to cut us off,
and lying in wait to intercept us at points of vantage. At such times
the more exuberant among them called out in an excited manner on our
emergence round some corner of expectancy, “Here they come!” “Here they
are!” and we were all but cheered. In this progress I was much annoyed
by the abject Pumblechook, who, being behind me, persisted all the way
as a delicate attention in arranging my streaming hatband, and smoothing
my cloak. My thoughts were further distracted by the excessive pride of
Mr. and Mrs. Hubble, who were surpassingly conceited and vainglorious in
being members of so distinguished a procession.

And now the range of marshes lay clear before us, with the sails of the
ships on the river growing out of it; and we went into the churchyard,
close to the graves of my unknown parents, Philip Pirrip, late of this
parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife of the Above. And there, my sister was
laid quietly in the earth, while the larks sang high above it, and the
light wind strewed it with beautiful shadows of clouds and trees.

Of the conduct of the worldly minded Pumblechook while this was doing,
I desire to say no more than it was all addressed to me; and that even
when those noble passages were read which remind humanity how it brought
nothing into the world and can take nothing out, and how it fleeth like
a shadow and never continueth long in one stay, I heard him cough a
reservation of the case of a young gentleman who came unexpectedly into
large property. When we got back, he had the hardihood to tell me that
he wished my sister could have known I had done her so much honor, and
to hint that she would have considered it reasonably purchased at the
price of her death. After that, he drank all the rest of the sherry,
and Mr. Hubble drank the port, and the two talked (which I have since
observed to be customary in such cases) as if they were of quite another
race from the deceased, and were notoriously immortal. Finally, he went
away with Mr. and Mrs. Hubble,--to make an evening of it, I felt sure,
and to tell the Jolly Bargemen that he was the founder of my fortunes
and my earliest benefactor.

When they were all gone, and when Trabb and his men--but not his Boy; I
looked for him--had crammed their mummery into bags, and were gone too,
the house felt wholesomer. Soon afterwards, Biddy, Joe, and I, had a
cold dinner together; but we dined in the best parlor, not in the old
kitchen, and Joe was so exceedingly particular what he did with his
knife and fork and the saltcellar and what not, that there was great
restraint upon us. But after dinner, when I made him take his pipe,
and when I had loitered with him about the forge, and when we sat down
together on the great block of stone outside it, we got on better. I
noticed that after the funeral Joe changed his clothes so far, as to
make a compromise between his Sunday dress and working dress; in which
the dear fellow looked natural, and like the Man he was.

He was very much pleased by my asking if I might sleep in my own little
room, and I was pleased too; for I felt that I had done rather a great
thing in making the request. When the shadows of evening were closing
in, I took an opportunity of getting into the garden with Biddy for a
little talk.

“Biddy,” said I, “I think you might have written to me about these sad
matters.”

“Do you, Mr. Pip?” said Biddy. “I should have written if I had thought
that.”

“Don't suppose that I mean to be unkind, Biddy, when I say I consider
that you ought to have thought that.”

“Do you, Mr. Pip?”

She was so quiet, and had such an orderly, good, and pretty way with
her, that I did not like the thought of making her cry again. After
looking a little at her downcast eyes as she walked beside me, I gave up
that point.

“I suppose it will be difficult for you to remain here now, Biddy dear?”

“Oh! I can't do so, Mr. Pip,” said Biddy, in a tone of regret but still
of quiet conviction. “I have been speaking to Mrs. Hubble, and I am
going to her to-morrow. I hope we shall be able to take some care of Mr.
Gargery, together, until he settles down.”

“How are you going to live, Biddy? If you want any mo--”

“How am I going to live?” repeated Biddy, striking in, with a momentary
flush upon her face. “I'll tell you, Mr. Pip. I am going to try to get
the place of mistress in the new school nearly finished here. I can be
well recommended by all the neighbors, and I hope I can be industrious
and patient, and teach myself while I teach others. You know, Mr. Pip,”
 pursued Biddy, with a smile, as she raised her eyes to my face, “the new
schools are not like the old, but I learnt a good deal from you after
that time, and have had time since then to improve.”

“I think you would always improve, Biddy, under any circumstances.”

“Ah! Except in my bad side of human nature,” murmured Biddy.

It was not so much a reproach as an irresistible thinking aloud. Well!
I thought I would give up that point too. So, I walked a little further
with Biddy, looking silently at her downcast eyes.

“I have not heard the particulars of my sister's death, Biddy.”

“They are very slight, poor thing. She had been in one of her bad
states--though they had got better of late, rather than worse--for four
days, when she came out of it in the evening, just at tea-time, and said
quite plainly, 'Joe.' As she had never said any word for a long while, I
ran and fetched in Mr. Gargery from the forge. She made signs to me that
she wanted him to sit down close to her, and wanted me to put her arms
round his neck. So I put them round his neck, and she laid her head down
on his shoulder quite content and satisfied. And so she presently said
'Joe' again, and once 'Pardon,' and once 'Pip.' And so she never lifted
her head up any more, and it was just an hour later when we laid it down
on her own bed, because we found she was gone.”

Biddy cried; the darkening garden, and the lane, and the stars that were
coming out, were blurred in my own sight.

“Nothing was ever discovered, Biddy?”

“Nothing.”

“Do you know what is become of Orlick?”

“I should think from the color of his clothes that he is working in the
quarries.”

“Of course you have seen him then?--Why are you looking at that dark
tree in the lane?”

“I saw him there, on the night she died.”

“That was not the last time either, Biddy?”

“No; I have seen him there, since we have been walking here.--It is of
no use,” said Biddy, laying her hand upon my arm, as I was for running
out, “you know I would not deceive you; he was not there a minute, and
he is gone.”

It revived my utmost indignation to find that she was still pursued by
this fellow, and I felt inveterate against him. I told her so, and told
her that I would spend any money or take any pains to drive him out of
that country. By degrees she led me into more temperate talk, and she
told me how Joe loved me, and how Joe never complained of anything,--she
didn't say, of me; she had no need; I knew what she meant,--but ever did
his duty in his way of life, with a strong hand, a quiet tongue, and a
gentle heart.

“Indeed, it would be hard to say too much for him,” said I; “and Biddy,
we must often speak of these things, for of course I shall be often down
here now. I am not going to leave poor Joe alone.”

Biddy said never a single word.

“Biddy, don't you hear me?”

“Yes, Mr. Pip.”

“Not to mention your calling me Mr. Pip,--which appears to me to be in
bad taste, Biddy,--what do you mean?”

“What do I mean?” asked Biddy, timidly.

“Biddy,” said I, in a virtuously self-asserting manner, “I must request
to know what you mean by this?”

“By this?” said Biddy.

“Now, don't echo,” I retorted. “You used not to echo, Biddy.”

“Used not!” said Biddy. “O Mr. Pip! Used!”

Well! I rather thought I would give up that point too. After another
silent turn in the garden, I fell back on the main position.

“Biddy,” said I, “I made a remark respecting my coming down here often,
to see Joe, which you received with a marked silence. Have the goodness,
Biddy, to tell me why.”

“Are you quite sure, then, that you WILL come to see him often?” asked
Biddy, stopping in the narrow garden walk, and looking at me under the
stars with a clear and honest eye.

“O dear me!” said I, as if I found myself compelled to give up Biddy in
despair. “This really is a very bad side of human nature! Don't say any
more, if you please, Biddy. This shocks me very much.”

For which cogent reason I kept Biddy at a distance during supper, and
when I went up to my own old little room, took as stately a leave of her
as I could, in my murmuring soul, deem reconcilable with the churchyard
and the event of the day. As often as I was restless in the night, and
that was every quarter of an hour, I reflected what an unkindness, what
an injury, what an injustice, Biddy had done me.

Early in the morning I was to go. Early in the morning I was out, and
looking in, unseen, at one of the wooden windows of the forge. There
I stood, for minutes, looking at Joe, already at work with a glow of
health and strength upon his face that made it show as if the bright sun
of the life in store for him were shining on it.

“Good-bye, dear Joe!--No, don't wipe it off--for God's sake, give me your
blackened hand!--I shall be down soon and often.”

“Never too soon, sir,” said Joe, “and never too often, Pip!”

Biddy was waiting for me at the kitchen door, with a mug of new milk and
a crust of bread. “Biddy,” said I, when I gave her my hand at parting,
“I am not angry, but I am hurt.”

“No, don't be hurt,” she pleaded quite pathetically; “let only me be
hurt, if I have been ungenerous.”

Once more, the mists were rising as I walked away. If they disclosed to
me, as I suspect they did, that I should not come back, and that Biddy
was quite right, all I can say is,--they were quite right too.




Chapter XXXVI

Herbert and I went on from bad to worse, in the way of increasing our
debts, looking into our affairs, leaving Margins, and the like exemplary
transactions; and Time went on, whether or no, as he has a way of doing;
and I came of age,--in fulfilment of Herbert's prediction, that I should
do so before I knew where I was.

Herbert himself had come of age eight months before me. As he had
nothing else than his majority to come into, the event did not make a
profound sensation in Barnard's Inn. But we had looked forward to
my one-and-twentieth birthday, with a crowd of speculations and
anticipations, for we had both considered that my guardian could hardly
help saying something definite on that occasion.

I had taken care to have it well understood in Little Britain when my
birthday was. On the day before it, I received an official note from
Wemmick, informing me that Mr. Jaggers would be glad if I would call
upon him at five in the afternoon of the auspicious day. This convinced
us that something great was to happen, and threw me into an unusual
flutter when I repaired to my guardian's office, a model of punctuality.

In the outer office Wemmick offered me his congratulations, and
incidentally rubbed the side of his nose with a folded piece of
tissue-paper that I liked the look of. But he said nothing respecting
it, and motioned me with a nod into my guardian's room. It was November,
and my guardian was standing before his fire leaning his back against
the chimney-piece, with his hands under his coattails.

“Well, Pip,” said he, “I must call you Mr. Pip to-day. Congratulations,
Mr. Pip.”

We shook hands,--he was always a remarkably short shaker,--and I thanked
him.

“Take a chair, Mr. Pip,” said my guardian.

As I sat down, and he preserved his attitude and bent his brows at his
boots, I felt at a disadvantage, which reminded me of that old time when
I had been put upon a tombstone. The two ghastly casts on the shelf
were not far from him, and their expression was as if they were making a
stupid apoplectic attempt to attend to the conversation.

“Now my young friend,” my guardian began, as if I were a witness in the
box, “I am going to have a word or two with you.”

“If you please, sir.”

“What do you suppose,” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at the
ground, and then throwing his head back to look at the ceiling,--“what
do you suppose you are living at the rate of?”

“At the rate of, sir?”

“At,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, still looking at the ceiling,
“the--rate--of?” And then looked all round the room, and paused with his
pocket-handkerchief in his hand, half-way to his nose.

I had looked into my affairs so often, that I had thoroughly destroyed
any slight notion I might ever have had of their bearings. Reluctantly,
I confessed myself quite unable to answer the question. This reply
seemed agreeable to Mr. Jaggers, who said, “I thought so!” and blew his
nose with an air of satisfaction.

“Now, I have asked you a question, my friend,” said Mr. Jaggers. “Have
you anything to ask me?”

“Of course it would be a great relief to me to ask you several
questions, sir; but I remember your prohibition.”

“Ask one,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Is my benefactor to be made known to me to-day?”

“No. Ask another.”

“Is that confidence to be imparted to me soon?”

“Waive that, a moment,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and ask another.”

I looked about me, but there appeared to be now no possible escape from
the inquiry, “Have-I--anything to receive, sir?” On that, Mr. Jaggers
said, triumphantly, “I thought we should come to it!” and called to
Wemmick to give him that piece of paper. Wemmick appeared, handed it in,
and disappeared.

“Now, Mr. Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “attend, if you please. You have been
drawing pretty freely here; your name occurs pretty often in Wemmick's
cash-book; but you are in debt, of course?”

“I am afraid I must say yes, sir.”

“You know you must say yes; don't you?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Yes, sir.”

“I don't ask you what you owe, because you don't know; and if you did
know, you wouldn't tell me; you would say less. Yes, yes, my friend,”
 cried Mr. Jaggers, waving his forefinger to stop me as I made a show
of protesting: “it's likely enough that you think you wouldn't, but
you would. You'll excuse me, but I know better than you. Now, take this
piece of paper in your hand. You have got it? Very good. Now, unfold it
and tell me what it is.”

“This is a bank-note,” said I, “for five hundred pounds.”

“That is a bank-note,” repeated Mr. Jaggers, “for five hundred pounds.
And a very handsome sum of money too, I think. You consider it so?”

“How could I do otherwise!”

“Ah! But answer the question,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Undoubtedly.”

“You consider it, undoubtedly, a handsome sum of money. Now, that
handsome sum of money, Pip, is your own. It is a present to you on this
day, in earnest of your expectations. And at the rate of that handsome
sum of money per annum, and at no higher rate, you are to live until the
donor of the whole appears. That is to say, you will now take your money
affairs entirely into your own hands, and you will draw from Wemmick
one hundred and twenty-five pounds per quarter, until you are in
communication with the fountain-head, and no longer with the mere
agent. As I have told you before, I am the mere agent. I execute my
instructions, and I am paid for doing so. I think them injudicious, but
I am not paid for giving any opinion on their merits.”

I was beginning to express my gratitude to my benefactor for the great
liberality with which I was treated, when Mr. Jaggers stopped me. “I am
not paid, Pip,” said he, coolly, “to carry your words to any one;” and
then gathered up his coat-tails, as he had gathered up the subject, and
stood frowning at his boots as if he suspected them of designs against
him.

After a pause, I hinted,--

“There was a question just now, Mr. Jaggers, which you desired me to
waive for a moment. I hope I am doing nothing wrong in asking it again?”

“What is it?” said he.

I might have known that he would never help me out; but it took me aback
to have to shape the question afresh, as if it were quite new. “Is it
likely,” I said, after hesitating, “that my patron, the fountain-head
you have spoken of, Mr. Jaggers, will soon--” there I delicately
stopped.

“Will soon what?” asked Mr. Jaggers. “That's no question as it stands,
you know.”

“Will soon come to London,” said I, after casting about for a precise
form of words, “or summon me anywhere else?”

“Now, here,” replied Mr. Jaggers, fixing me for the first time with
his dark deep-set eyes, “we must revert to the evening when we first
encountered one another in your village. What did I tell you then, Pip?”

“You told me, Mr. Jaggers, that it might be years hence when that person
appeared.”

“Just so,” said Mr. Jaggers, “that's my answer.”

As we looked full at one another, I felt my breath come quicker in my
strong desire to get something out of him. And as I felt that it came
quicker, and as I felt that he saw that it came quicker, I felt that I
had less chance than ever of getting anything out of him.

“Do you suppose it will still be years hence, Mr. Jaggers?”

Mr. Jaggers shook his head,--not in negativing the question, but in
altogether negativing the notion that he could anyhow be got to answer
it,--and the two horrible casts of the twitched faces looked, when
my eyes strayed up to them, as if they had come to a crisis in their
suspended attention, and were going to sneeze.

“Come!” said Mr. Jaggers, warming the backs of his legs with the backs
of his warmed hands, “I'll be plain with you, my friend Pip. That's a
question I must not be asked. You'll understand that better, when I tell
you it's a question that might compromise me. Come! I'll go a little
further with you; I'll say something more.”

He bent down so low to frown at his boots, that he was able to rub the
calves of his legs in the pause he made.

“When that person discloses,” said Mr. Jaggers, straightening himself,
“you and that person will settle your own affairs. When that person
discloses, my part in this business will cease and determine. When that
person discloses, it will not be necessary for me to know anything about
it. And that's all I have got to say.”

We looked at one another until I withdrew my eyes, and looked
thoughtfully at the floor. From this last speech I derived the notion
that Miss Havisham, for some reason or no reason, had not taken him
into her confidence as to her designing me for Estella; that he resented
this, and felt a jealousy about it; or that he really did object to
that scheme, and would have nothing to do with it. When I raised my eyes
again, I found that he had been shrewdly looking at me all the time, and
was doing so still.

“If that is all you have to say, sir,” I remarked, “there can be nothing
left for me to say.”

He nodded assent, and pulled out his thief-dreaded watch, and asked me
where I was going to dine? I replied at my own chambers, with Herbert.
As a necessary sequence, I asked him if he would favor us with his
company, and he promptly accepted the invitation. But he insisted on
walking home with me, in order that I might make no extra preparation
for him, and first he had a letter or two to write, and (of course) had
his hands to wash. So I said I would go into the outer office and talk
to Wemmick.

The fact was, that when the five hundred pounds had come into my pocket,
a thought had come into my head which had been often there before;
and it appeared to me that Wemmick was a good person to advise with
concerning such thought.

He had already locked up his safe, and made preparations for going home.
He had left his desk, brought out his two greasy office candlesticks and
stood them in line with the snuffers on a slab near the door, ready to
be extinguished; he had raked his fire low, put his hat and great-coat
ready, and was beating himself all over the chest with his safe-key, as
an athletic exercise after business.

“Mr. Wemmick,” said I, “I want to ask your opinion. I am very desirous
to serve a friend.”

Wemmick tightened his post-office and shook his head, as if his opinion
were dead against any fatal weakness of that sort.

“This friend,” I pursued, “is trying to get on in commercial life,
but has no money, and finds it difficult and disheartening to make a
beginning. Now I want somehow to help him to a beginning.”

“With money down?” said Wemmick, in a tone drier than any sawdust.

“With some money down,” I replied, for an uneasy remembrance shot across
me of that symmetrical bundle of papers at home--“with some money down,
and perhaps some anticipation of my expectations.”

“Mr. Pip,” said Wemmick, “I should like just to run over with you on my
fingers, if you please, the names of the various bridges up as high
as Chelsea Reach. Let's see; there's London, one; Southwark, two;
Blackfriars, three; Waterloo, four; Westminster, five; Vauxhall, six.”
 He had checked off each bridge in its turn, with the handle of his
safe-key on the palm of his hand. “There's as many as six, you see, to
choose from.”

“I don't understand you,” said I.

“Choose your bridge, Mr. Pip,” returned Wemmick, “and take a walk upon
your bridge, and pitch your money into the Thames over the centre arch
of your bridge, and you know the end of it. Serve a friend with it, and
you may know the end of it too,--but it's a less pleasant and profitable
end.”

I could have posted a newspaper in his mouth, he made it so wide after
saying this.

“This is very discouraging,” said I.

“Meant to be so,” said Wemmick.

“Then is it your opinion,” I inquired, with some little indignation,
“that a man should never--”

“--Invest portable property in a friend?” said Wemmick. “Certainly
he should not. Unless he wants to get rid of the friend,--and then it
becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid
of him.”

“And that,” said I, “is your deliberate opinion, Mr. Wemmick?”

“That,” he returned, “is my deliberate opinion in this office.”

“Ah!” said I, pressing him, for I thought I saw him near a loophole
here; “but would that be your opinion at Walworth?”

“Mr. Pip,” he replied, with gravity, “Walworth is one place, and this
office is another. Much as the Aged is one person, and Mr. Jaggers is
another. They must not be confounded together. My Walworth sentiments
must be taken at Walworth; none but my official sentiments can be taken
in this office.”

“Very well,” said I, much relieved, “then I shall look you up at
Walworth, you may depend upon it.”

“Mr. Pip,” he returned, “you will be welcome there, in a private and
personal capacity.”

We had held this conversation in a low voice, well knowing my guardian's
ears to be the sharpest of the sharp. As he now appeared in his doorway,
towelling his hands, Wemmick got on his great-coat and stood by to snuff
out the candles. We all three went into the street together, and from
the door-step Wemmick turned his way, and Mr. Jaggers and I turned ours.

I could not help wishing more than once that evening, that Mr. Jaggers
had had an Aged in Gerrard Street, or a Stinger, or a Something, or
a Somebody, to unbend his brows a little. It was an uncomfortable
consideration on a twenty-first birthday, that coming of age at all
seemed hardly worth while in such a guarded and suspicious world as he
made of it. He was a thousand times better informed and cleverer than
Wemmick, and yet I would a thousand times rather have had Wemmick to
dinner. And Mr. Jaggers made not me alone intensely melancholy, because,
after he was gone, Herbert said of himself, with his eyes fixed on the
fire, that he thought he must have committed a felony and forgotten the
details of it, he felt so dejected and guilty.




Chapter XXXVII

Deeming Sunday the best day for taking Mr. Wemmick's Walworth
sentiments, I devoted the next ensuing Sunday afternoon to a pilgrimage
to the Castle. On arriving before the battlements, I found the Union
Jack flying and the drawbridge up; but undeterred by this show of
defiance and resistance, I rang at the gate, and was admitted in a most
pacific manner by the Aged.

“My son, sir,” said the old man, after securing the drawbridge, “rather
had it in his mind that you might happen to drop in, and he left word
that he would soon be home from his afternoon's walk. He is very regular
in his walks, is my son. Very regular in everything, is my son.”

I nodded at the old gentleman as Wemmick himself might have nodded, and
we went in and sat down by the fireside.

“You made acquaintance with my son, sir,” said the old man, in his
chirping way, while he warmed his hands at the blaze, “at his office, I
expect?” I nodded. “Hah! I have heerd that my son is a wonderful hand at
his business, sir?” I nodded hard. “Yes; so they tell me. His business
is the Law?” I nodded harder. “Which makes it more surprising in my
son,” said the old man, “for he was not brought up to the Law, but to
the Wine-Coopering.”

Curious to know how the old gentleman stood informed concerning the
reputation of Mr. Jaggers, I roared that name at him. He threw me into
the greatest confusion by laughing heartily and replying in a very
sprightly manner, “No, to be sure; you're right.” And to this hour I
have not the faintest notion what he meant, or what joke he thought I
had made.

As I could not sit there nodding at him perpetually, without making
some other attempt to interest him, I shouted at inquiry whether his own
calling in life had been “the Wine-Coopering.” By dint of straining that
term out of myself several times and tapping the old gentleman on the
chest to associate it with him, I at last succeeded in making my meaning
understood.

“No,” said the old gentleman; “the warehousing, the warehousing. First,
over yonder;” he appeared to mean up the chimney, but I believe he
intended to refer me to Liverpool; “and then in the City of London here.
However, having an infirmity--for I am hard of hearing, sir--”

I expressed in pantomime the greatest astonishment.

“--Yes, hard of hearing; having that infirmity coming upon me, my son he
went into the Law, and he took charge of me, and he by little and little
made out this elegant and beautiful property. But returning to what you
said, you know,” pursued the old man, again laughing heartily, “what I
say is, No to be sure; you're right.”

I was modestly wondering whether my utmost ingenuity would have enabled
me to say anything that would have amused him half as much as this
imaginary pleasantry, when I was startled by a sudden click in the wall
on one side of the chimney, and the ghostly tumbling open of a little
wooden flap with “JOHN” upon it. The old man, following my eyes, cried
with great triumph, “My son's come home!” and we both went out to the
drawbridge.

It was worth any money to see Wemmick waving a salute to me from the
other side of the moat, when we might have shaken hands across it with
the greatest ease. The Aged was so delighted to work the drawbridge,
that I made no offer to assist him, but stood quiet until Wemmick had
come across, and had presented me to Miss Skiffins; a lady by whom he
was accompanied.

Miss Skiffins was of a wooden appearance, and was, like her escort, in
the post-office branch of the service. She might have been some two or
three years younger than Wemmick, and I judged her to stand possessed
of portable property. The cut of her dress from the waist upward, both
before and behind, made her figure very like a boy's kite; and I might
have pronounced her gown a little too decidedly orange, and her gloves a
little too intensely green. But she seemed to be a good sort of fellow,
and showed a high regard for the Aged. I was not long in discovering
that she was a frequent visitor at the Castle; for, on our going in,
and my complimenting Wemmick on his ingenious contrivance for announcing
himself to the Aged, he begged me to give my attention for a moment to
the other side of the chimney, and disappeared. Presently another click
came, and another little door tumbled open with “Miss Skiffins” on it;
then Miss Skiffins shut up and John tumbled open; then Miss Skiffins
and John both tumbled open together, and finally shut up together. On
Wemmick's return from working these mechanical appliances, I expressed
the great admiration with which I regarded them, and he said, “Well, you
know, they're both pleasant and useful to the Aged. And by George, sir,
it's a thing worth mentioning, that of all the people who come to
this gate, the secret of those pulls is only known to the Aged, Miss
Skiffins, and me!”

“And Mr. Wemmick made them,” added Miss Skiffins, “with his own hands
out of his own head.”

While Miss Skiffins was taking off her bonnet (she retained her green
gloves during the evening as an outward and visible sign that there was
company), Wemmick invited me to take a walk with him round the property,
and see how the island looked in wintertime. Thinking that he did this
to give me an opportunity of taking his Walworth sentiments, I seized
the opportunity as soon as we were out of the Castle.

Having thought of the matter with care, I approached my subject as if I
had never hinted at it before. I informed Wemmick that I was anxious in
behalf of Herbert Pocket, and I told him how we had first met, and how
we had fought. I glanced at Herbert's home, and at his character, and
at his having no means but such as he was dependent on his father for;
those, uncertain and unpunctual. I alluded to the advantages I had
derived in my first rawness and ignorance from his society, and I
confessed that I feared I had but ill repaid them, and that he might
have done better without me and my expectations. Keeping Miss Havisham
in the background at a great distance, I still hinted at the possibility
of my having competed with him in his prospects, and at the certainty of
his possessing a generous soul, and being far above any mean distrusts,
retaliations, or designs. For all these reasons (I told Wemmick),
and because he was my young companion and friend, and I had a great
affection for him, I wished my own good fortune to reflect some rays
upon him, and therefore I sought advice from Wemmick's experience and
knowledge of men and affairs, how I could best try with my resources to
help Herbert to some present income,--say of a hundred a year, to keep
him in good hope and heart,--and gradually to buy him on to some small
partnership. I begged Wemmick, in conclusion, to understand that my help
must always be rendered without Herbert's knowledge or suspicion, and
that there was no one else in the world with whom I could advise. I
wound up by laying my hand upon his shoulder, and saying, “I can't help
confiding in you, though I know it must be troublesome to you; but that
is your fault, in having ever brought me here.”

Wemmick was silent for a little while, and then said with a kind of
start, “Well you know, Mr. Pip, I must tell you one thing. This is
devilish good of you.”

“Say you'll help me to be good then,” said I.

“Ecod,” replied Wemmick, shaking his head, “that's not my trade.”

“Nor is this your trading-place,” said I.

“You are right,” he returned. “You hit the nail on the head. Mr. Pip,
I'll put on my considering-cap, and I think all you want to do may be
done by degrees. Skiffins (that's her brother) is an accountant and
agent. I'll look him up and go to work for you.”

“I thank you ten thousand times.”

“On the contrary,” said he, “I thank you, for though we are strictly in
our private and personal capacity, still it may be mentioned that there
are Newgate cobwebs about, and it brushes them away.”

After a little further conversation to the same effect, we returned into
the Castle where we found Miss Skiffins preparing tea. The responsible
duty of making the toast was delegated to the Aged, and that excellent
old gentleman was so intent upon it that he seemed to me in some danger
of melting his eyes. It was no nominal meal that we were going to make,
but a vigorous reality. The Aged prepared such a hay-stack of buttered
toast, that I could scarcely see him over it as it simmered on an iron
stand hooked on to the top-bar; while Miss Skiffins brewed such a jorum
of tea, that the pig in the back premises became strongly excited, and
repeatedly expressed his desire to participate in the entertainment.

The flag had been struck, and the gun had been fired, at the right
moment of time, and I felt as snugly cut off from the rest of Walworth
as if the moat were thirty feet wide by as many deep. Nothing disturbed
the tranquillity of the Castle, but the occasional tumbling open of
John and Miss Skiffins: which little doors were a prey to some spasmodic
infirmity that made me sympathetically uncomfortable until I got used
to it. I inferred from the methodical nature of Miss Skiffins's
arrangements that she made tea there every Sunday night; and I rather
suspected that a classic brooch she wore, representing the profile of an
undesirable female with a very straight nose and a very new moon, was a
piece of portable property that had been given her by Wemmick.

We ate the whole of the toast, and drank tea in proportion, and it was
delightful to see how warm and greasy we all got after it. The Aged
especially, might have passed for some clean old chief of a savage
tribe, just oiled. After a short pause of repose, Miss Skiffins--in the
absence of the little servant who, it seemed, retired to the bosom of
her family on Sunday afternoons--washed up the tea-things, in a trifling
lady-like amateur manner that compromised none of us. Then, she put on
her gloves again, and we drew round the fire, and Wemmick said, “Now,
Aged Parent, tip us the paper.”

Wemmick explained to me while the Aged got his spectacles out, that this
was according to custom, and that it gave the old gentleman infinite
satisfaction to read the news aloud. “I won't offer an apology,” said
Wemmick, “for he isn't capable of many pleasures--are you, Aged P.?”

“All right, John, all right,” returned the old man, seeing himself
spoken to.

“Only tip him a nod every now and then when he looks off his paper,”
 said Wemmick, “and he'll be as happy as a king. We are all attention,
Aged One.”

“All right, John, all right!” returned the cheerful old man, so busy and
so pleased, that it really was quite charming.

The Aged's reading reminded me of the classes at Mr. Wopsle's
great-aunt's, with the pleasanter peculiarity that it seemed to come
through a keyhole. As he wanted the candles close to him, and as he was
always on the verge of putting either his head or the newspaper into
them, he required as much watching as a powder-mill. But Wemmick was
equally untiring and gentle in his vigilance, and the Aged read on,
quite unconscious of his many rescues. Whenever he looked at us, we
all expressed the greatest interest and amazement, and nodded until he
resumed again.

As Wemmick and Miss Skiffins sat side by side, and as I sat in a shadowy
corner, I observed a slow and gradual elongation of Mr. Wemmick's mouth,
powerfully suggestive of his slowly and gradually stealing his arm round
Miss Skiffins's waist. In course of time I saw his hand appear on the
other side of Miss Skiffins; but at that moment Miss Skiffins neatly
stopped him with the green glove, unwound his arm again as if it were
an article of dress, and with the greatest deliberation laid it on the
table before her. Miss Skiffins's composure while she did this was one
of the most remarkable sights I have ever seen, and if I could have
thought the act consistent with abstraction of mind, I should have
deemed that Miss Skiffins performed it mechanically.

By and by, I noticed Wemmick's arm beginning to disappear again, and
gradually fading out of view. Shortly afterwards, his mouth began to
widen again. After an interval of suspense on my part that was quite
enthralling and almost painful, I saw his hand appear on the other side
of Miss Skiffins. Instantly, Miss Skiffins stopped it with the neatness
of a placid boxer, took off that girdle or cestus as before, and laid
it on the table. Taking the table to represent the path of virtue, I am
justified in stating that during the whole time of the Aged's reading,
Wemmick's arm was straying from the path of virtue and being recalled to
it by Miss Skiffins.

At last, the Aged read himself into a light slumber. This was the time
for Wemmick to produce a little kettle, a tray of glasses, and a
black bottle with a porcelain-topped cork, representing some clerical
dignitary of a rubicund and social aspect. With the aid of these
appliances we all had something warm to drink, including the Aged, who
was soon awake again. Miss Skiffins mixed, and I observed that she and
Wemmick drank out of one glass. Of course I knew better than to offer to
see Miss Skiffins home, and under the circumstances I thought I had best
go first; which I did, taking a cordial leave of the Aged, and having
passed a pleasant evening.

Before a week was out, I received a note from Wemmick, dated Walworth,
stating that he hoped he had made some advance in that matter
appertaining to our private and personal capacities, and that he would
be glad if I could come and see him again upon it. So, I went out
to Walworth again, and yet again, and yet again, and I saw him by
appointment in the City several times, but never held any communication
with him on the subject in or near Little Britain. The upshot was,
that we found a worthy young merchant or shipping-broker, not long
established in business, who wanted intelligent help, and who wanted
capital, and who in due course of time and receipt would want a partner.
Between him and me, secret articles were signed of which Herbert was the
subject, and I paid him half of my five hundred pounds down, and engaged
for sundry other payments: some, to fall due at certain dates out of my
income: some, contingent on my coming into my property. Miss Skiffins's
brother conducted the negotiation. Wemmick pervaded it throughout, but
never appeared in it.

The whole business was so cleverly managed, that Herbert had not the
least suspicion of my hand being in it. I never shall forget the radiant
face with which he came home one afternoon, and told me, as a mighty
piece of news, of his having fallen in with one Clarriker (the young
merchant's name), and of Clarriker's having shown an extraordinary
inclination towards him, and of his belief that the opening had come at
last. Day by day as his hopes grew stronger and his face brighter, he
must have thought me a more and more affectionate friend, for I had the
greatest difficulty in restraining my tears of triumph when I saw him so
happy. At length, the thing being done, and he having that day entered
Clarriker's House, and he having talked to me for a whole evening in a
flush of pleasure and success, I did really cry in good earnest when
I went to bed, to think that my expectations had done some good to
somebody.

A great event in my life, the turning point of my life, now opens on my
view. But, before I proceed to narrate it, and before I pass on to all
the changes it involved, I must give one chapter to Estella. It is not
much to give to the theme that so long filled my heart.




Chapter XXXVIII

If that staid old house near the Green at Richmond should ever come to
be haunted when I am dead, it will be haunted, surely, by my ghost. O
the many, many nights and days through which the unquiet spirit within
me haunted that house when Estella lived there! Let my body be where it
would, my spirit was always wandering, wandering, wandering, about that
house.

The lady with whom Estella was placed, Mrs. Brandley by name, was a
widow, with one daughter several years older than Estella. The mother
looked young, and the daughter looked old; the mother's complexion was
pink, and the daughter's was yellow; the mother set up for frivolity,
and the daughter for theology. They were in what is called a good
position, and visited, and were visited by, numbers of people. Little,
if any, community of feeling subsisted between them and Estella, but the
understanding was established that they were necessary to her, and
that she was necessary to them. Mrs. Brandley had been a friend of Miss
Havisham's before the time of her seclusion.

In Mrs. Brandley's house and out of Mrs. Brandley's house, I suffered
every kind and degree of torture that Estella could cause me. The
nature of my relations with her, which placed me on terms of familiarity
without placing me on terms of favor, conduced to my distraction.
She made use of me to tease other admirers, and she turned the very
familiarity between herself and me to the account of putting a constant
slight on my devotion to her. If I had been her secretary, steward,
half-brother, poor relation,--if I had been a younger brother of her
appointed husband,--I could not have seemed to myself further from my
hopes when I was nearest to her. The privilege of calling her by her
name and hearing her call me by mine became, under the circumstances
an aggravation of my trials; and while I think it likely that it almost
maddened her other lovers, I know too certainly that it almost maddened
me.

She had admirers without end. No doubt my jealousy made an admirer of
every one who went near her; but there were more than enough of them
without that.

I saw her often at Richmond, I heard of her often in town, and I used
often to take her and the Brandleys on the water; there were picnics,
fête days, plays, operas, concerts, parties, all sorts of pleasures,
through which I pursued her,--and they were all miseries to me. I never
had one hour's happiness in her society, and yet my mind all round the
four-and-twenty hours was harping on the happiness of having her with me
unto death.

Throughout this part of our intercourse,--and it lasted, as will
presently be seen, for what I then thought a long time,--she habitually
reverted to that tone which expressed that our association was forced
upon us. There were other times when she would come to a sudden check in
this tone and in all her many tones, and would seem to pity me.

“Pip, Pip,” she said one evening, coming to such a check, when we sat
apart at a darkening window of the house in Richmond; “will you never
take warning?”

“Of what?”

“Of me.”

“Warning not to be attracted by you, do you mean, Estella?”

“Do I mean! If you don't know what I mean, you are blind.”

I should have replied that Love was commonly reputed blind, but for the
reason that I always was restrained--and this was not the least of my
miseries--by a feeling that it was ungenerous to press myself upon her,
when she knew that she could not choose but obey Miss Havisham. My
dread always was, that this knowledge on her part laid me under a heavy
disadvantage with her pride, and made me the subject of a rebellious
struggle in her bosom.

“At any rate,” said I, “I have no warning given me just now, for you
wrote to me to come to you, this time.”

“That's true,” said Estella, with a cold careless smile that always
chilled me.

After looking at the twilight without, for a little while, she went on
to say:--

“The time has come round when Miss Havisham wishes to have me for a day
at Satis. You are to take me there, and bring me back, if you will. She
would rather I did not travel alone, and objects to receiving my maid,
for she has a sensitive horror of being talked of by such people. Can
you take me?”

“Can I take you, Estella!”

“You can then? The day after to-morrow, if you please. You are to pay
all charges out of my purse, You hear the condition of your going?”

“And must obey,” said I.

This was all the preparation I received for that visit, or for others
like it; Miss Havisham never wrote to me, nor had I ever so much as seen
her handwriting. We went down on the next day but one, and we found her
in the room where I had first beheld her, and it is needless to add that
there was no change in Satis House.

She was even more dreadfully fond of Estella than she had been when
I last saw them together; I repeat the word advisedly, for there was
something positively dreadful in the energy of her looks and embraces.
She hung upon Estella's beauty, hung upon her words, hung upon her
gestures, and sat mumbling her own trembling fingers while she looked at
her, as though she were devouring the beautiful creature she had reared.

From Estella she looked at me, with a searching glance that seemed to
pry into my heart and probe its wounds. “How does she use you, Pip; how
does she use you?” she asked me again, with her witch-like eagerness,
even in Estella's hearing. But, when we sat by her flickering fire
at night, she was most weird; for then, keeping Estella's hand drawn
through her arm and clutched in her own hand, she extorted from her,
by dint of referring back to what Estella had told her in her regular
letters, the names and conditions of the men whom she had fascinated;
and as Miss Havisham dwelt upon this roll, with the intensity of a mind
mortally hurt and diseased, she sat with her other hand on her crutch
stick, and her chin on that, and her wan bright eyes glaring at me, a
very spectre.

I saw in this, wretched though it made me, and bitter the sense of
dependence and even of degradation that it awakened,--I saw in this that
Estella was set to wreak Miss Havisham's revenge on men, and that she
was not to be given to me until she had gratified it for a term. I saw
in this, a reason for her being beforehand assigned to me. Sending her
out to attract and torment and do mischief, Miss Havisham sent her with
the malicious assurance that she was beyond the reach of all admirers,
and that all who staked upon that cast were secured to lose. I saw in
this that I, too, was tormented by a perversion of ingenuity, even while
the prize was reserved for me. I saw in this the reason for my being
staved off so long and the reason for my late guardian's declining to
commit himself to the formal knowledge of such a scheme. In a word, I
saw in this Miss Havisham as I had her then and there before my eyes,
and always had had her before my eyes; and I saw in this, the distinct
shadow of the darkened and unhealthy house in which her life was hidden
from the sun.

The candles that lighted that room of hers were placed in sconces on
the wall. They were high from the ground, and they burnt with the steady
dulness of artificial light in air that is seldom renewed. As I looked
round at them, and at the pale gloom they made, and at the stopped
clock, and at the withered articles of bridal dress upon the table and
the ground, and at her own awful figure with its ghostly reflection
thrown large by the fire upon the ceiling and the wall, I saw in
everything the construction that my mind had come to, repeated and
thrown back to me. My thoughts passed into the great room across the
landing where the table was spread, and I saw it written, as it were, in
the falls of the cobwebs from the centre-piece, in the crawlings of the
spiders on the cloth, in the tracks of the mice as they betook their
little quickened hearts behind the panels, and in the gropings and
pausings of the beetles on the floor.

It happened on the occasion of this visit that some sharp words arose
between Estella and Miss Havisham. It was the first time I had ever seen
them opposed.

We were seated by the fire, as just now described, and Miss Havisham
still had Estella's arm drawn through her own, and still clutched
Estella's hand in hers, when Estella gradually began to detach herself.
She had shown a proud impatience more than once before, and had rather
endured that fierce affection than accepted or returned it.

“What!” said Miss Havisham, flashing her eyes upon her, “are you tired
of me?”

“Only a little tired of myself,” replied Estella, disengaging her arm,
and moving to the great chimney-piece, where she stood looking down at
the fire.

“Speak the truth, you ingrate!” cried Miss Havisham, passionately
striking her stick upon the floor; “you are tired of me.”

Estella looked at her with perfect composure, and again looked down
at the fire. Her graceful figure and her beautiful face expressed a
self-possessed indifference to the wild heat of the other, that was
almost cruel.

“You stock and stone!” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “You cold, cold heart!”

“What?” said Estella, preserving her attitude of indifference as she
leaned against the great chimney-piece and only moving her eyes; “do you
reproach me for being cold? You?”

“Are you not?” was the fierce retort.

“You should know,” said Estella. “I am what you have made me. Take
all the praise, take all the blame; take all the success, take all the
failure; in short, take me.”

“O, look at her, look at her!” cried Miss Havisham, bitterly; “Look at
her so hard and thankless, on the hearth where she was reared! Where I
took her into this wretched breast when it was first bleeding from its
stabs, and where I have lavished years of tenderness upon her!”

“At least I was no party to the compact,” said Estella, “for if I could
walk and speak, when it was made, it was as much as I could do. But what
would you have? You have been very good to me, and I owe everything to
you. What would you have?”

“Love,” replied the other.

“You have it.”

“I have not,” said Miss Havisham.

“Mother by adoption,” retorted Estella, never departing from the easy
grace of her attitude, never raising her voice as the other did, never
yielding either to anger or tenderness,--“mother by adoption, I have
said that I owe everything to you. All I possess is freely yours. All
that you have given me, is at your command to have again. Beyond that, I
have nothing. And if you ask me to give you, what you never gave me, my
gratitude and duty cannot do impossibilities.”

“Did I never give her love!” cried Miss Havisham, turning wildly to me.
“Did I never give her a burning love, inseparable from jealousy at all
times, and from sharp pain, while she speaks thus to me! Let her call me
mad, let her call me mad!”

“Why should I call you mad,” returned Estella, “I, of all people? Does
any one live, who knows what set purposes you have, half as well as I
do? Does any one live, who knows what a steady memory you have, half
as well as I do? I who have sat on this same hearth on the little stool
that is even now beside you there, learning your lessons and looking up
into your face, when your face was strange and frightened me!”

“Soon forgotten!” moaned Miss Havisham. “Times soon forgotten!”

“No, not forgotten,” retorted Estella,--“not forgotten, but treasured up
in my memory. When have you found me false to your teaching? When have
you found me unmindful of your lessons? When have you found me giving
admission here,” she touched her bosom with her hand, “to anything that
you excluded? Be just to me.”

“So proud, so proud!” moaned Miss Havisham, pushing away her gray hair
with both her hands.

“Who taught me to be proud?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I
learnt my lesson?”

“So hard, so hard!” moaned Miss Havisham, with her former action.

“Who taught me to be hard?” returned Estella. “Who praised me when I
learnt my lesson?”

“But to be proud and hard to me!” Miss Havisham quite shrieked, as she
stretched out her arms. “Estella, Estella, Estella, to be proud and hard
to me!”

Estella looked at her for a moment with a kind of calm wonder, but was
not otherwise disturbed; when the moment was past, she looked down at
the fire again.

“I cannot think,” said Estella, raising her eyes after a silence “why
you should be so unreasonable when I come to see you after a separation.
I have never forgotten your wrongs and their causes. I have never been
unfaithful to you or your schooling. I have never shown any weakness
that I can charge myself with.”

“Would it be weakness to return my love?” exclaimed Miss Havisham. “But
yes, yes, she would call it so!”

“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment
of calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this comes about. If you
had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of
these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as
the daylight by which she had never once seen your face,--if you had
done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the
daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and
angry?”

Miss Havisham, with her head in her hands, sat making a low moaning, and
swaying herself on her chair, but gave no answer.

“Or,” said Estella,--“which is a nearer case,--if you had taught her,
from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might,
that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her
enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had
blighted you and would else blight her;--if you had done this, and then,
for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she
could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?”

Miss Havisham sat listening (or it seemed so, for I could not see her
face), but still made no answer.

“So,” said Estella, “I must be taken as I have been made. The success is
not mine, the failure is not mine, but the two together make me.”

Miss Havisham had settled down, I hardly knew how, upon the floor, among
the faded bridal relics with which it was strewn. I took advantage of
the moment--I had sought one from the first--to leave the room, after
beseeching Estella's attention to her, with a movement of my hand. When
I left, Estella was yet standing by the great chimney-piece, just as she
had stood throughout. Miss Havisham's gray hair was all adrift upon the
ground, among the other bridal wrecks, and was a miserable sight to see.

It was with a depressed heart that I walked in the starlight for an
hour and more, about the courtyard, and about the brewery, and about
the ruined garden. When I at last took courage to return to the room, I
found Estella sitting at Miss Havisham's knee, taking up some stitches
in one of those old articles of dress that were dropping to pieces, and
of which I have often been reminded since by the faded tatters of old
banners that I have seen hanging up in cathedrals. Afterwards, Estella
and I played at cards, as of yore,--only we were skilful now, and played
French games,--and so the evening wore away, and I went to bed.

I lay in that separate building across the courtyard. It was the first
time I had ever lain down to rest in Satis House, and sleep refused to
come near me. A thousand Miss Havishams haunted me. She was on this side
of my pillow, on that, at the head of the bed, at the foot, behind the
half-opened door of the dressing-room, in the dressing-room, in the room
overhead, in the room beneath,--everywhere. At last, when the night was
slow to creep on towards two o'clock, I felt that I absolutely could no
longer bear the place as a place to lie down in, and that I must get up.
I therefore got up and put on my clothes, and went out across the yard
into the long stone passage, designing to gain the outer courtyard and
walk there for the relief of my mind. But I was no sooner in the passage
than I extinguished my candle; for I saw Miss Havisham going along it
in a ghostly manner, making a low cry. I followed her at a distance,
and saw her go up the staircase. She carried a bare candle in her hand,
which she had probably taken from one of the sconces in her own room,
and was a most unearthly object by its light. Standing at the bottom
of the staircase, I felt the mildewed air of the feast-chamber, without
seeing her open the door, and I heard her walking there, and so across
into her own room, and so across again into that, never ceasing the low
cry. After a time, I tried in the dark both to get out, and to go back,
but I could do neither until some streaks of day strayed in and showed
me where to lay my hands. During the whole interval, whenever I went to
the bottom of the staircase, I heard her footstep, saw her light pass
above, and heard her ceaseless low cry.

Before we left next day, there was no revival of the difference between
her and Estella, nor was it ever revived on any similar occasion; and
there were four similar occasions, to the best of my remembrance. Nor,
did Miss Havisham's manner towards Estella in anywise change, except
that I believed it to have something like fear infused among its former
characteristics.

It is impossible to turn this leaf of my life, without putting Bentley
Drummle's name upon it; or I would, very gladly.

On a certain occasion when the Finches were assembled in force, and when
good feeling was being promoted in the usual manner by nobody's agreeing
with anybody else, the presiding Finch called the Grove to order,
forasmuch as Mr. Drummle had not yet toasted a lady; which, according
to the solemn constitution of the society, it was the brute's turn to
do that day. I thought I saw him leer in an ugly way at me while the
decanters were going round, but as there was no love lost between us,
that might easily be. What was my indignant surprise when he called upon
the company to pledge him to “Estella!”

“Estella who?” said I.

“Never you mind,” retorted Drummle.

“Estella of where?” said I. “You are bound to say of where.” Which he
was, as a Finch.

“Of Richmond, gentlemen,” said Drummle, putting me out of the question,
“and a peerless beauty.”

Much he knew about peerless beauties, a mean, miserable idiot! I
whispered Herbert.

“I know that lady,” said Herbert, across the table, when the toast had
been honored.

“Do you?” said Drummle.

“And so do I,” I added, with a scarlet face.

“Do you?” said Drummle. “O, Lord!”

This was the only retort--except glass or crockery--that the heavy
creature was capable of making; but, I became as highly incensed by it
as if it had been barbed with wit, and I immediately rose in my place
and said that I could not but regard it as being like the honorable
Finch's impudence to come down to that Grove,--we always talked
about coming down to that Grove, as a neat Parliamentary turn of
expression,--down to that Grove, proposing a lady of whom he knew
nothing. Mr. Drummle, upon this, starting up, demanded what I meant by
that? Whereupon I made him the extreme reply that I believed he knew
where I was to be found.

Whether it was possible in a Christian country to get on without blood,
after this, was a question on which the Finches were divided. The debate
upon it grew so lively, indeed, that at least six more honorable members
told six more, during the discussion, that they believed they knew where
they were to be found. However, it was decided at last (the Grove being
a Court of Honor) that if Mr. Drummle would bring never so slight
a certificate from the lady, importing that he had the honor of her
acquaintance, Mr. Pip must express his regret, as a gentleman and a
Finch, for “having been betrayed into a warmth which.” Next day was
appointed for the production (lest our honor should take cold from
delay), and next day Drummle appeared with a polite little avowal in
Estella's hand, that she had had the honor of dancing with him several
times. This left me no course but to regret that I had been “betrayed
into a warmth which,” and on the whole to repudiate, as untenable, the
idea that I was to be found anywhere. Drummle and I then sat snorting
at one another for an hour, while the Grove engaged in indiscriminate
contradiction, and finally the promotion of good feeling was declared to
have gone ahead at an amazing rate.

I tell this lightly, but it was no light thing to me. For, I cannot
adequately express what pain it gave me to think that Estella should
show any favor to a contemptible, clumsy, sulky booby, so very far below
the average. To the present moment, I believe it to have been referable
to some pure fire of generosity and disinterestedness in my love for
her, that I could not endure the thought of her stooping to that hound.
No doubt I should have been miserable whomsoever she had favored; but
a worthier object would have caused me a different kind and degree of
distress.

It was easy for me to find out, and I did soon find out, that Drummle
had begun to follow her closely, and that she allowed him to do it. A
little while, and he was always in pursuit of her, and he and I crossed
one another every day. He held on, in a dull persistent way, and Estella
held him on; now with encouragement, now with discouragement, now almost
flattering him, now openly despising him, now knowing him very well, now
scarcely remembering who he was.

The Spider, as Mr. Jaggers had called him, was used to lying in wait,
however, and had the patience of his tribe. Added to that, he had a
blockhead confidence in his money and in his family greatness,
which sometimes did him good service,--almost taking the place of
concentration and determined purpose. So, the Spider, doggedly watching
Estella, outwatched many brighter insects, and would often uncoil
himself and drop at the right nick of time.

At a certain Assembly Ball at Richmond (there used to be Assembly Balls
at most places then), where Estella had outshone all other beauties,
this blundering Drummle so hung about her, and with so much toleration
on her part, that I resolved to speak to her concerning him. I took the
next opportunity; which was when she was waiting for Mrs. Blandley to
take her home, and was sitting apart among some flowers, ready to go.
I was with her, for I almost always accompanied them to and from such
places.

“Are you tired, Estella?”

“Rather, Pip.”

“You should be.”

“Say rather, I should not be; for I have my letter to Satis House to
write, before I go to sleep.”

“Recounting to-night's triumph?” said I. “Surely a very poor one,
Estella.”

“What do you mean? I didn't know there had been any.”

“Estella,” said I, “do look at that fellow in the corner yonder, who is
looking over here at us.”

“Why should I look at him?” returned Estella, with her eyes on me
instead. “What is there in that fellow in the corner yonder,--to use
your words,--that I need look at?”

“Indeed, that is the very question I want to ask you,” said I. “For he
has been hovering about you all night.”

“Moths, and all sorts of ugly creatures,” replied Estella, with a glance
towards him, “hover about a lighted candle. Can the candle help it?”

“No,” I returned; “but cannot the Estella help it?”

“Well!” said she, laughing, after a moment, “perhaps. Yes. Anything you
like.”

“But, Estella, do hear me speak. It makes me wretched that you should
encourage a man so generally despised as Drummle. You know he is
despised.”

“Well?” said she.

“You know he is as ungainly within as without. A deficient,
ill-tempered, lowering, stupid fellow.”

“Well?” said she.

“You know he has nothing to recommend him but money and a ridiculous
roll of addle-headed predecessors; now, don't you?”

“Well?” said she again; and each time she said it, she opened her lovely
eyes the wider.

To overcome the difficulty of getting past that monosyllable, I took it
from her, and said, repeating it with emphasis, “Well! Then, that is why
it makes me wretched.”

Now, if I could have believed that she favored Drummle with any idea of
making me-me--wretched, I should have been in better heart about it;
but in that habitual way of hers, she put me so entirely out of the
question, that I could believe nothing of the kind.

“Pip,” said Estella, casting her glance over the room, “don't be foolish
about its effect on you. It may have its effect on others, and may be
meant to have. It's not worth discussing.”

“Yes it is,” said I, “because I cannot bear that people should say, 'she
throws away her graces and attractions on a mere boor, the lowest in the
crowd.'”

“I can bear it,” said Estella.

“Oh! don't be so proud, Estella, and so inflexible.”

“Calls me proud and inflexible in this breath!” said Estella, opening
her hands. “And in his last breath reproached me for stooping to a
boor!”

“There is no doubt you do,” said I, something hurriedly, “for I have
seen you give him looks and smiles this very night, such as you never
give to--me.”

“Do you want me then,” said Estella, turning suddenly with a fixed and
serious, if not angry, look, “to deceive and entrap you?”

“Do you deceive and entrap him, Estella?”

“Yes, and many others,--all of them but you. Here is Mrs. Brandley. I'll
say no more.”

* *

And now that I have given the one chapter to the theme that so filled my
heart, and so often made it ache and ache again, I pass on unhindered,
to the event that had impended over me longer yet; the event that had
begun to be prepared for, before I knew that the world held Estella,
and in the days when her baby intelligence was receiving its first
distortions from Miss Havisham's wasting hands.

In the Eastern story, the heavy slab that was to fall on the bed of
state in the flush of conquest was slowly wrought out of the quarry, the
tunnel for the rope to hold it in its place was slowly carried through
the leagues of rock, the slab was slowly raised and fitted in the roof,
the rope was rove to it and slowly taken through the miles of hollow to
the great iron ring. All being made ready with much labor, and the hour
come, the sultan was aroused in the dead of the night, and the sharpened
axe that was to sever the rope from the great iron ring was put into his
hand, and he struck with it, and the rope parted and rushed away, and
the ceiling fell. So, in my case; all the work, near and afar, that
tended to the end, had been accomplished; and in an instant the blow was
struck, and the roof of my stronghold dropped upon me.




Chapter XXXIX

I was three-and-twenty years of age. Not another word had I heard to
enlighten me on the subject of my expectations, and my twenty-third
birthday was a week gone. We had left Barnard's Inn more than a year,
and lived in the Temple. Our chambers were in Garden-court, down by the
river.

Mr. Pocket and I had for some time parted company as to our original
relations, though we continued on the best terms. Notwithstanding my
inability to settle to anything,--which I hope arose out of the restless
and incomplete tenure on which I held my means,--I had a taste for
reading, and read regularly so many hours a day. That matter of
Herbert's was still progressing, and everything with me was as I have
brought it down to the close of the last preceding chapter.

Business had taken Herbert on a journey to Marseilles. I was alone, and
had a dull sense of being alone. Dispirited and anxious, long hoping
that to-morrow or next week would clear my way, and long disappointed, I
sadly missed the cheerful face and ready response of my friend.

It was wretched weather; stormy and wet, stormy and wet; and mud, mud,
mud, deep in all the streets. Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been
driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East
there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts,
that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs;
and in the country, trees had been torn up, and sails of windmills
carried away; and gloomy accounts had come in from the coast, of
shipwreck and death. Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages
of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the
worst of all.

Alterations have been made in that part of the Temple since that time,
and it has not now so lonely a character as it had then, nor is it so
exposed to the river. We lived at the top of the last house, and the
wind rushing up the river shook the house that night, like discharges
of cannon, or breakings of a sea. When the rain came with it and dashed
against the windows, I thought, raising my eyes to them as they
rocked, that I might have fancied myself in a storm-beaten lighthouse.
Occasionally, the smoke came rolling down the chimney as though it could
not bear to go out into such a night; and when I set the doors open and
looked down the staircase, the staircase lamps were blown out; and when
I shaded my face with my hands and looked through the black windows
(opening them ever so little was out of the question in the teeth of
such wind and rain), I saw that the lamps in the court were blown out,
and that the lamps on the bridges and the shore were shuddering, and
that the coal-fires in barges on the river were being carried away
before the wind like red-hot splashes in the rain.

I read with my watch upon the table, purposing to close my book
at eleven o'clock. As I shut it, Saint Paul's, and all the many
church-clocks in the City--some leading, some accompanying, some
following--struck that hour. The sound was curiously flawed by the wind;
and I was listening, and thinking how the wind assailed and tore it,
when I heard a footstep on the stair.

What nervous folly made me start, and awfully connect it with the
footstep of my dead sister, matters not. It was past in a moment, and I
listened again, and heard the footstep stumble in coming on.
Remembering then, that the staircase-lights were blown out, I took up
my reading-lamp and went out to the stair-head. Whoever was below had
stopped on seeing my lamp, for all was quiet.

“There is some one down there, is there not?” I called out, looking
down.

“Yes,” said a voice from the darkness beneath.

“What floor do you want?”

“The top. Mr. Pip.”

“That is my name.--There is nothing the matter?”

“Nothing the matter,” returned the voice. And the man came on.

I stood with my lamp held out over the stair-rail, and he came slowly
within its light. It was a shaded lamp, to shine upon a book, and its
circle of light was very contracted; so that he was in it for a mere
instant, and then out of it. In the instant, I had seen a face that was
strange to me, looking up with an incomprehensible air of being touched
and pleased by the sight of me.

Moving the lamp as the man moved, I made out that he was substantially
dressed, but roughly, like a voyager by sea. That he had long iron-gray
hair. That his age was about sixty. That he was a muscular man, strong
on his legs, and that he was browned and hardened by exposure to
weather. As he ascended the last stair or two, and the light of my lamp
included us both, I saw, with a stupid kind of amazement, that he was
holding out both his hands to me.

“Pray what is your business?” I asked him.

“My business?” he repeated, pausing. “Ah! Yes. I will explain my
business, by your leave.”

“Do you wish to come in?”

“Yes,” he replied; “I wish to come in, master.”

I had asked him the question inhospitably enough, for I resented the
sort of bright and gratified recognition that still shone in his face.
I resented it, because it seemed to imply that he expected me to respond
to it. But I took him into the room I had just left, and, having set the
lamp on the table, asked him as civilly as I could to explain himself.

He looked about him with the strangest air,--an air of wondering
pleasure, as if he had some part in the things he admired,--and he
pulled off a rough outer coat, and his hat. Then, I saw that his head
was furrowed and bald, and that the long iron-gray hair grew only on
its sides. But, I saw nothing that in the least explained him. On the
contrary, I saw him next moment, once more holding out both his hands to
me.

“What do you mean?” said I, half suspecting him to be mad.

He stopped in his looking at me, and slowly rubbed his right hand over
his head. “It's disapinting to a man,” he said, in a coarse broken
voice, “arter having looked for'ard so distant, and come so fur; but
you're not to blame for that,--neither on us is to blame for that. I'll
speak in half a minute. Give me half a minute, please.”

He sat down on a chair that stood before the fire, and covered his
forehead with his large brown veinous hands. I looked at him attentively
then, and recoiled a little from him; but I did not know him.

“There's no one nigh,” said he, looking over his shoulder; “is there?”

“Why do you, a stranger coming into my rooms at this time of the night,
ask that question?” said I.

“You're a game one,” he returned, shaking his head at me with a
deliberate affection, at once most unintelligible and most exasperating;
“I'm glad you've grow'd up, a game one! But don't catch hold of me.
You'd be sorry arterwards to have done it.”

I relinquished the intention he had detected, for I knew him! Even yet
I could not recall a single feature, but I knew him! If the wind and
the rain had driven away the intervening years, had scattered all the
intervening objects, had swept us to the churchyard where we first stood
face to face on such different levels, I could not have known my convict
more distinctly than I knew him now as he sat in the chair before the
fire. No need to take a file from his pocket and show it to me; no need
to take the handkerchief from his neck and twist it round his head; no
need to hug himself with both his arms, and take a shivering turn across
the room, looking back at me for recognition. I knew him before he gave
me one of those aids, though, a moment before, I had not been conscious
of remotely suspecting his identity.

He came back to where I stood, and again held out both his hands.
Not knowing what to do,--for, in my astonishment I had lost my
self-possession,--I reluctantly gave him my hands. He grasped them
heartily, raised them to his lips, kissed them, and still held them.

“You acted noble, my boy,” said he. “Noble, Pip! And I have never forgot
it!”

At a change in his manner as if he were even going to embrace me, I laid
a hand upon his breast and put him away.

“Stay!” said I. “Keep off! If you are grateful to me for what I did when
I was a little child, I hope you have shown your gratitude by mending
your way of life. If you have come here to thank me, it was not
necessary. Still, however you have found me out, there must be something
good in the feeling that has brought you here, and I will not repulse
you; but surely you must understand that--I--”

My attention was so attracted by the singularity of his fixed look at
me, that the words died away on my tongue.

“You was a saying,” he observed, when we had confronted one another
in silence, “that surely I must understand. What, surely must I
understand?”

“That I cannot wish to renew that chance intercourse with you of long
ago, under these different circumstances. I am glad to believe you have
repented and recovered yourself. I am glad to tell you so. I am glad
that, thinking I deserve to be thanked, you have come to thank me. But
our ways are different ways, none the less. You are wet, and you look
weary. Will you drink something before you go?”

He had replaced his neckerchief loosely, and had stood, keenly observant
of me, biting a long end of it. “I think,” he answered, still with the
end at his mouth and still observant of me, “that I will drink (I thank
you) afore I go.”

There was a tray ready on a side-table. I brought it to the table
near the fire, and asked him what he would have? He touched one of the
bottles without looking at it or speaking, and I made him some hot rum
and water. I tried to keep my hand steady while I did so, but his look
at me as he leaned back in his chair with the long draggled end of his
neckerchief between his teeth--evidently forgotten--made my hand very
difficult to master. When at last I put the glass to him, I saw with
amazement that his eyes were full of tears.

Up to this time I had remained standing, not to disguise that I wished
him gone. But I was softened by the softened aspect of the man, and felt
a touch of reproach. “I hope,” said I, hurriedly putting something into
a glass for myself, and drawing a chair to the table, “that you will not
think I spoke harshly to you just now. I had no intention of doing it,
and I am sorry for it if I did. I wish you well and happy!”

As I put my glass to my lips, he glanced with surprise at the end of his
neckerchief, dropping from his mouth when he opened it, and stretched
out his hand. I gave him mine, and then he drank, and drew his sleeve
across his eyes and forehead.

“How are you living?” I asked him.

“I've been a sheep-farmer, stock-breeder, other trades besides, away in
the new world,” said he; “many a thousand mile of stormy water off from
this.”

“I hope you have done well?”

“I've done wonderfully well. There's others went out alonger me as has
done well too, but no man has done nigh as well as me. I'm famous for
it.”

“I am glad to hear it.”

“I hope to hear you say so, my dear boy.”

Without stopping to try to understand those words or the tone in which
they were spoken, I turned off to a point that had just come into my
mind.

“Have you ever seen a messenger you once sent to me,” I inquired, “since
he undertook that trust?”

“Never set eyes upon him. I warn't likely to it.”

“He came faithfully, and he brought me the two one-pound notes. I was
a poor boy then, as you know, and to a poor boy they were a little
fortune. But, like you, I have done well since, and you must let me pay
them back. You can put them to some other poor boy's use.” I took out my
purse.

He watched me as I laid my purse upon the table and opened it, and he
watched me as I separated two one-pound notes from its contents. They
were clean and new, and I spread them out and handed them over to
him. Still watching me, he laid them one upon the other, folded them
long-wise, gave them a twist, set fire to them at the lamp, and dropped
the ashes into the tray.

“May I make so bold,” he said then, with a smile that was like a frown,
and with a frown that was like a smile, “as ask you how you have done
well, since you and me was out on them lone shivering marshes?”

“How?”

“Ah!”

He emptied his glass, got up, and stood at the side of the fire, with
his heavy brown hand on the mantel-shelf. He put a foot up to the bars,
to dry and warm it, and the wet boot began to steam; but, he neither
looked at it, nor at the fire, but steadily looked at me. It was only
now that I began to tremble.

When my lips had parted, and had shaped some words that were
without sound, I forced myself to tell him (though I could not do it
distinctly), that I had been chosen to succeed to some property.

“Might a mere warmint ask what property?” said he.

I faltered, “I don't know.”

“Might a mere warmint ask whose property?” said he.

I faltered again, “I don't know.”

“Could I make a guess, I wonder,” said the Convict, “at your income
since you come of age! As to the first figure now. Five?”

With my heart beating like a heavy hammer of disordered action, I rose
out of my chair, and stood with my hand upon the back of it, looking
wildly at him.

“Concerning a guardian,” he went on. “There ought to have been some
guardian, or such-like, whiles you was a minor. Some lawyer, maybe. As
to the first letter of that lawyer's name now. Would it be J?”

All the truth of my position came flashing on me; and its
disappointments, dangers, disgraces, consequences of all kinds, rushed
in in such a multitude that I was borne down by them and had to struggle
for every breath I drew.

“Put it,” he resumed, “as the employer of that lawyer whose name begun
with a J, and might be Jaggers,--put it as he had come over sea to
Portsmouth, and had landed there, and had wanted to come on to you.
'However, you have found me out,' you says just now. Well! However, did
I find you out? Why, I wrote from Portsmouth to a person in London, for
particulars of your address. That person's name? Why, Wemmick.”

I could not have spoken one word, though it had been to save my life.
I stood, with a hand on the chair-back and a hand on my breast, where
I seemed to be suffocating,--I stood so, looking wildly at him, until I
grasped at the chair, when the room began to surge and turn. He caught
me, drew me to the sofa, put me up against the cushions, and bent on one
knee before me, bringing the face that I now well remembered, and that I
shuddered at, very near to mine.

“Yes, Pip, dear boy, I've made a gentleman on you! It's me wot has
done it! I swore that time, sure as ever I earned a guinea, that guinea
should go to you. I swore arterwards, sure as ever I spec'lated and got
rich, you should get rich. I lived rough, that you should live smooth;
I worked hard, that you should be above work. What odds, dear boy? Do I
tell it, fur you to feel a obligation? Not a bit. I tell it, fur you to
know as that there hunted dunghill dog wot you kep life in, got his head
so high that he could make a gentleman,--and, Pip, you're him!”

The abhorrence in which I held the man, the dread I had of him, the
repugnance with which I shrank from him, could not have been exceeded if
he had been some terrible beast.

“Look'ee here, Pip. I'm your second father. You're my son,--more to me
nor any son. I've put away money, only for you to spend. When I was a
hired-out shepherd in a solitary hut, not seeing no faces but faces of
sheep till I half forgot wot men's and women's faces wos like, I see
yourn. I drops my knife many a time in that hut when I was a-eating my
dinner or my supper, and I says, 'Here's the boy again, a looking at
me whiles I eats and drinks!' I see you there a many times, as plain as
ever I see you on them misty marshes. 'Lord strike me dead!' I says each
time,--and I goes out in the air to say it under the open heavens,--'but
wot, if I gets liberty and money, I'll make that boy a gentleman!' And
I done it. Why, look at you, dear boy! Look at these here lodgings
o'yourn, fit for a lord! A lord? Ah! You shall show money with lords for
wagers, and beat 'em!”

In his heat and triumph, and in his knowledge that I had been nearly
fainting, he did not remark on my reception of all this. It was the one
grain of relief I had.

“Look'ee here!” he went on, taking my watch out of my pocket, and
turning towards him a ring on my finger, while I recoiled from his
touch as if he had been a snake, “a gold 'un and a beauty: that's a
gentleman's, I hope! A diamond all set round with rubies; that's a
gentleman's, I hope! Look at your linen; fine and beautiful! Look at
your clothes; better ain't to be got! And your books too,” turning his
eyes round the room, “mounting up, on their shelves, by hundreds! And
you read 'em; don't you? I see you'd been a reading of 'em when I come
in. Ha, ha, ha! You shall read 'em to me, dear boy! And if they're in
foreign languages wot I don't understand, I shall be just as proud as if
I did.”

Again he took both my hands and put them to his lips, while my blood ran
cold within me.

“Don't you mind talking, Pip,” said he, after again drawing his sleeve
over his eyes and forehead, as the click came in his throat which I well
remembered,--and he was all the more horrible to me that he was so much
in earnest; “you can't do better nor keep quiet, dear boy. You ain't
looked slowly forward to this as I have; you wosn't prepared for this as
I wos. But didn't you never think it might be me?”

“O no, no, no,” I returned, “Never, never!”

“Well, you see it wos me, and single-handed. Never a soul in it but my
own self and Mr. Jaggers.”

“Was there no one else?” I asked.

“No,” said he, with a glance of surprise: “who else should there be?
And, dear boy, how good looking you have growed! There's bright eyes
somewheres--eh? Isn't there bright eyes somewheres, wot you love the
thoughts on?”

O Estella, Estella!

“They shall be yourn, dear boy, if money can buy 'em. Not that a
gentleman like you, so well set up as you, can't win 'em off of his own
game; but money shall back you! Let me finish wot I was a telling you,
dear boy. From that there hut and that there hiring-out, I got money
left me by my master (which died, and had been the same as me), and got
my liberty and went for myself. In every single thing I went for, I went
for you. 'Lord strike a blight upon it,' I says, wotever it was I went
for, 'if it ain't for him!' It all prospered wonderful. As I giv' you
to understand just now, I'm famous for it. It was the money left me, and
the gains of the first few year wot I sent home to Mr. Jaggers--all for
you--when he first come arter you, agreeable to my letter.”

O that he had never come! That he had left me at the forge,--far from
contented, yet, by comparison happy!

“And then, dear boy, it was a recompense to me, look'ee here, to know in
secret that I was making a gentleman. The blood horses of them colonists
might fling up the dust over me as I was walking; what do I say? I says
to myself, 'I'm making a better gentleman nor ever you'll be!' When
one of 'em says to another, 'He was a convict, a few year ago, and is a
ignorant common fellow now, for all he's lucky,' what do I say? I says
to myself, 'If I ain't a gentleman, nor yet ain't got no learning, I'm
the owner of such. All on you owns stock and land; which on you owns a
brought-up London gentleman?' This way I kep myself a going. And this
way I held steady afore my mind that I would for certain come one day
and see my boy, and make myself known to him, on his own ground.”

He laid his hand on my shoulder. I shuddered at the thought that for
anything I knew, his hand might be stained with blood.

“It warn't easy, Pip, for me to leave them parts, nor yet it warn't
safe. But I held to it, and the harder it was, the stronger I held, for
I was determined, and my mind firm made up. At last I done it. Dear boy,
I done it!”

I tried to collect my thoughts, but I was stunned. Throughout, I had
seemed to myself to attend more to the wind and the rain than to him;
even now, I could not separate his voice from those voices, though those
were loud and his was silent.

“Where will you put me?” he asked, presently. “I must be put somewheres,
dear boy.”

“To sleep?” said I.

“Yes. And to sleep long and sound,” he answered; “for I've been
sea-tossed and sea-washed, months and months.”

“My friend and companion,” said I, rising from the sofa, “is absent; you
must have his room.”

“He won't come back to-morrow; will he?”

“No,” said I, answering almost mechanically, in spite of my utmost
efforts; “not to-morrow.”

“Because, look'ee here, dear boy,” he said, dropping his voice, and
laying a long finger on my breast in an impressive manner, “caution is
necessary.”

“How do you mean? Caution?”

“By G----, it's Death!”

“What's death?”

“I was sent for life. It's death to come back. There's been overmuch
coming back of late years, and I should of a certainty be hanged if
took.”

Nothing was needed but this; the wretched man, after loading wretched me
with his gold and silver chains for years, had risked his life to come
to me, and I held it there in my keeping! If I had loved him instead
of abhorring him; if I had been attracted to him by the strongest
admiration and affection, instead of shrinking from him with the
strongest repugnance; it could have been no worse. On the contrary, it
would have been better, for his preservation would then have naturally
and tenderly addressed my heart.

My first care was to close the shutters, so that no light might be seen
from without, and then to close and make fast the doors. While I did so,
he stood at the table drinking rum and eating biscuit; and when I saw
him thus engaged, I saw my convict on the marshes at his meal again. It
almost seemed to me as if he must stoop down presently, to file at his
leg.

When I had gone into Herbert's room, and had shut off any other
communication between it and the staircase than through the room in
which our conversation had been held, I asked him if he would go to bed?
He said yes, but asked me for some of my “gentleman's linen” to put
on in the morning. I brought it out, and laid it ready for him, and my
blood again ran cold when he again took me by both hands to give me good
night.

I got away from him, without knowing how I did it, and mended the fire
in the room where we had been together, and sat down by it, afraid to go
to bed. For an hour or more, I remained too stunned to think; and it
was not until I began to think, that I began fully to know how wrecked I
was, and how the ship in which I had sailed was gone to pieces.

Miss Havisham's intentions towards me, all a mere dream; Estella not
designed for me; I only suffered in Satis House as a convenience, a
sting for the greedy relations, a model with a mechanical heart to
practise on when no other practice was at hand; those were the first
smarts I had. But, sharpest and deepest pain of all,--it was for the
convict, guilty of I knew not what crimes, and liable to be taken out
of those rooms where I sat thinking, and hanged at the Old Bailey door,
that I had deserted Joe.

I would not have gone back to Joe now, I would not have gone back to
Biddy now, for any consideration; simply, I suppose, because my sense of
my own worthless conduct to them was greater than every consideration.
No wisdom on earth could have given me the comfort that I should have
derived from their simplicity and fidelity; but I could never, never,
undo what I had done.

In every rage of wind and rush of rain, I heard pursuers. Twice, I could
have sworn there was a knocking and whispering at the outer door. With
these fears upon me, I began either to imagine or recall that I had had
mysterious warnings of this man's approach. That, for weeks gone by, I
had passed faces in the streets which I had thought like his. That these
likenesses had grown more numerous, as he, coming over the sea, had
drawn nearer. That his wicked spirit had somehow sent these messengers
to mine, and that now on this stormy night he was as good as his word,
and with me.

Crowding up with these reflections came the reflection that I had seen
him with my childish eyes to be a desperately violent man; that I had
heard that other convict reiterate that he had tried to murder him; that
I had seen him down in the ditch tearing and fighting like a wild
beast. Out of such remembrances I brought into the light of the fire a
half-formed terror that it might not be safe to be shut up there with
him in the dead of the wild solitary night. This dilated until it filled
the room, and impelled me to take a candle and go in and look at my
dreadful burden.

He had rolled a handkerchief round his head, and his face was set and
lowering in his sleep. But he was asleep, and quietly too, though he had
a pistol lying on the pillow. Assured of this, I softly removed the key
to the outside of his door, and turned it on him before I again sat down
by the fire. Gradually I slipped from the chair and lay on the floor.
When I awoke without having parted in my sleep with the perception of
my wretchedness, the clocks of the Eastward churches were striking five,
the candles were wasted out, the fire was dead, and the wind and rain
intensified the thick black darkness.

THIS IS THE END OF THE SECOND STAGE OF PIP'S EXPECTATIONS.




Chapter XL

It was fortunate for me that I had to take precautions to ensure (so far
as I could) the safety of my dreaded visitor; for, this thought pressing
on me when I awoke, held other thoughts in a confused concourse at a
distance.

The impossibility of keeping him concealed in the chambers was
self-evident. It could not be done, and the attempt to do it would
inevitably engender suspicion. True, I had no Avenger in my service now,
but I was looked after by an inflammatory old female, assisted by an
animated rag-bag whom she called her niece, and to keep a room secret
from them would be to invite curiosity and exaggeration. They both had
weak eyes, which I had long attributed to their chronically looking in
at keyholes, and they were always at hand when not wanted; indeed that
was their only reliable quality besides larceny. Not to get up a mystery
with these people, I resolved to announce in the morning that my uncle
had unexpectedly come from the country.

This course I decided on while I was yet groping about in the darkness
for the means of getting a light. Not stumbling on the means after all,
I was fain to go out to the adjacent Lodge and get the watchman there to
come with his lantern. Now, in groping my way down the black staircase I
fell over something, and that something was a man crouching in a corner.

As the man made no answer when I asked him what he did there, but eluded
my touch in silence, I ran to the Lodge and urged the watchman to come
quickly; telling him of the incident on the way back. The wind being as
fierce as ever, we did not care to endanger the light in the lantern by
rekindling the extinguished lamps on the staircase, but we examined the
staircase from the bottom to the top and found no one there. It then
occurred to me as possible that the man might have slipped into my
rooms; so, lighting my candle at the watchman's, and leaving him
standing at the door, I examined them carefully, including the room in
which my dreaded guest lay asleep. All was quiet, and assuredly no other
man was in those chambers.

It troubled me that there should have been a lurker on the stairs, on
that night of all nights in the year, and I asked the watchman, on the
chance of eliciting some hopeful explanation as I handed him a dram
at the door, whether he had admitted at his gate any gentleman who had
perceptibly been dining out? Yes, he said; at different times of the
night, three. One lived in Fountain Court, and the other two lived in
the Lane, and he had seen them all go home. Again, the only other man
who dwelt in the house of which my chambers formed a part had been in
the country for some weeks, and he certainly had not returned in the
night, because we had seen his door with his seal on it as we came
upstairs.

“The night being so bad, sir,” said the watchman, as he gave me back
my glass, “uncommon few have come in at my gate. Besides them three
gentlemen that I have named, I don't call to mind another since about
eleven o'clock, when a stranger asked for you.”

“My uncle,” I muttered. “Yes.”

“You saw him, sir?”

“Yes. Oh yes.”

“Likewise the person with him?”

“Person with him!” I repeated.

“I judged the person to be with him,” returned the watchman. “The person
stopped, when he stopped to make inquiry of me, and the person took this
way when he took this way.”

“What sort of person?”

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of clothes
on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I
did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart,--as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,
who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my
staircase and dropped asleep there,--and my nameless visitor might have
brought some one with him to show him the way,--still, joined, they had
an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a
few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the
morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a
whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and
a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily,
with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder
of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep
from which the daylight woke me with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor
could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly
dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.
As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an
elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild
morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I
sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to
appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long
I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even
who I was that made it.

At last, the old woman and the niece came in,--the latter with a head
not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom,--and testified surprise
at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my uncle had come in
the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations were
to be modified accordingly. Then I washed and dressed while they knocked
the furniture about and made a dust; and so, in a sort of dream
or sleep-waking, I found myself sitting by the fire again, waiting
for--Him--to come to breakfast.

By and by, his door opened and he came out. I could not bring myself to
bear the sight of him, and I thought he had a worse look by daylight.

“I do not even know,” said I, speaking low as he took his seat at the
table, “by what name to call you. I have given out that you are my
uncle.”

“That's it, dear boy! Call me uncle.”

“You assumed some name, I suppose, on board ship?”

“Yes, dear boy. I took the name of Provis.”

“Do you mean to keep that name?”

“Why, yes, dear boy, it's as good as another,--unless you'd like
another.”

“What is your real name?” I asked him in a whisper.

“Magwitch,” he answered, in the same tone; “chrisen'd Abel.”

“What were you brought up to be?”

“A warmint, dear boy.”

He answered quite seriously, and used the word as if it denoted some
profession.

“When you came into the Temple last night--” said I, pausing to wonder
whether that could really have been last night, which seemed so long
ago.

“Yes, dear boy?”

“When you came in at the gate and asked the watchman the way here, had
you any one with you?”

“With me? No, dear boy.”

“But there was some one there?”

“I didn't take particular notice,” he said, dubiously, “not knowing the
ways of the place. But I think there was a person, too, come in alonger
me.”

“Are you known in London?”

“I hope not!” said he, giving his neck a jerk with his forefinger that
made me turn hot and sick.

“Were you known in London, once?”

“Not over and above, dear boy. I was in the provinces mostly.”

“Were you--tried--in London?”

“Which time?” said he, with a sharp look.

“The last time.”

He nodded. “First knowed Mr. Jaggers that way. Jaggers was for me.”

It was on my lips to ask him what he was tried for, but he took up
a knife, gave it a flourish, and with the words, “And what I done is
worked out and paid for!” fell to at his breakfast.

He ate in a ravenous way that was very disagreeable, and all his actions
were uncouth, noisy, and greedy. Some of his teeth had failed him since
I saw him eat on the marshes, and as he turned his food in his mouth,
and turned his head sideways to bring his strongest fangs to bear upon
it, he looked terribly like a hungry old dog. If I had begun with any
appetite, he would have taken it away, and I should have sat much as
I did,--repelled from him by an insurmountable aversion, and gloomily
looking at the cloth.

“I'm a heavy grubber, dear boy,” he said, as a polite kind of apology
when he made an end of his meal, “but I always was. If it had been in
my constitution to be a lighter grubber, I might ha' got into lighter
trouble. Similarly, I must have my smoke. When I was first hired out as
shepherd t'other side the world, it's my belief I should ha' turned into
a molloncolly-mad sheep myself, if I hadn't a had my smoke.”

As he said so, he got up from table, and putting his hand into the
breast of the pea-coat he wore, brought out a short black pipe, and a
handful of loose tobacco of the kind that is called Negro-head. Having
filled his pipe, he put the surplus tobacco back again, as if his pocket
were a drawer. Then, he took a live coal from the fire with the tongs,
and lighted his pipe at it, and then turned round on the hearth-rug with
his back to the fire, and went through his favorite action of holding
out both his hands for mine.

“And this,” said he, dandling my hands up and down in his, as he puffed
at his pipe,--“and this is the gentleman what I made! The real genuine
One! It does me good fur to look at you, Pip. All I stip'late, is, to
stand by and look at you, dear boy!”

I released my hands as soon as I could, and found that I was beginning
slowly to settle down to the contemplation of my condition. What I was
chained to, and how heavily, became intelligible to me, as I heard his
hoarse voice, and sat looking up at his furrowed bald head with its iron
gray hair at the sides.

“I mustn't see my gentleman a footing it in the mire of the streets;
there mustn't be no mud on his boots. My gentleman must have horses,
Pip! Horses to ride, and horses to drive, and horses for his servant
to ride and drive as well. Shall colonists have their horses (and blood
'uns, if you please, good Lord!) and not my London gentleman? No, no.
We'll show 'em another pair of shoes than that, Pip; won't us?”

He took out of his pocket a great thick pocket-book, bursting with
papers, and tossed it on the table.

“There's something worth spending in that there book, dear boy. It's
yourn. All I've got ain't mine; it's yourn. Don't you be afeerd on it.
There's more where that come from. I've come to the old country fur
to see my gentleman spend his money like a gentleman. That'll be my
pleasure. My pleasure 'ull be fur to see him do it. And blast you all!”
 he wound up, looking round the room and snapping his fingers once with
a loud snap, “blast you every one, from the judge in his wig, to the
colonist a stirring up the dust, I'll show a better gentleman than the
whole kit on you put together!”

“Stop!” said I, almost in a frenzy of fear and dislike, “I want to speak
to you. I want to know what is to be done. I want to know how you are to
be kept out of danger, how long you are going to stay, what projects you
have.”

“Look'ee here, Pip,” said he, laying his hand on my arm in a suddenly
altered and subdued manner; “first of all, look'ee here. I forgot myself
half a minute ago. What I said was low; that's what it was; low. Look'ee
here, Pip. Look over it. I ain't a going to be low.”

“First,” I resumed, half groaning, “what precautions can be taken
against your being recognized and seized?”

“No, dear boy,” he said, in the same tone as before, “that don't
go first. Lowness goes first. I ain't took so many year to make a
gentleman, not without knowing what's due to him. Look'ee here, Pip. I
was low; that's what I was; low. Look over it, dear boy.”

Some sense of the grimly-ludicrous moved me to a fretful laugh, as I
replied, “I have looked over it. In Heaven's name, don't harp upon it!”

“Yes, but look'ee here,” he persisted. “Dear boy, I ain't come so fur,
not fur to be low. Now, go on, dear boy. You was a saying--”

“How are you to be guarded from the danger you have incurred?”

“Well, dear boy, the danger ain't so great. Without I was informed
agen, the danger ain't so much to signify. There's Jaggers, and there's
Wemmick, and there's you. Who else is there to inform?”

“Is there no chance person who might identify you in the street?” said
I.

“Well,” he returned, “there ain't many. Nor yet I don't intend to
advertise myself in the newspapers by the name of A.M. come back from
Botany Bay; and years have rolled away, and who's to gain by it? Still,
look'ee here, Pip. If the danger had been fifty times as great, I should
ha' come to see you, mind you, just the same.”

“And how long do you remain?”

“How long?” said he, taking his black pipe from his mouth, and dropping
his jaw as he stared at me. “I'm not a going back. I've come for good.”

“Where are you to live?” said I. “What is to be done with you? Where
will you be safe?”

“Dear boy,” he returned, “there's disguising wigs can be bought
for money, and there's hair powder, and spectacles, and black
clothes,--shorts and what not. Others has done it safe afore, and what
others has done afore, others can do agen. As to the where and how of
living, dear boy, give me your own opinions on it.”

“You take it smoothly now,” said I, “but you were very serious last
night, when you swore it was Death.”

“And so I swear it is Death,” said he, putting his pipe back in his
mouth, “and Death by the rope, in the open street not fur from this, and
it's serious that you should fully understand it to be so. What then,
when that's once done? Here I am. To go back now 'ud be as bad as to
stand ground--worse. Besides, Pip, I'm here, because I've meant it by
you, years and years. As to what I dare, I'm a old bird now, as has
dared all manner of traps since first he was fledged, and I'm not afeerd
to perch upon a scarecrow. If there's Death hid inside of it, there is,
and let him come out, and I'll face him, and then I'll believe in him
and not afore. And now let me have a look at my gentleman agen.”

Once more, he took me by both hands and surveyed me with an air of
admiring proprietorship: smoking with great complacency all the while.

It appeared to me that I could do no better than secure him some
quiet lodging hard by, of which he might take possession when Herbert
returned: whom I expected in two or three days. That the secret must
be confided to Herbert as a matter of unavoidable necessity, even if I
could have put the immense relief I should derive from sharing it with
him out of the question, was plain to me. But it was by no means so
plain to Mr. Provis (I resolved to call him by that name), who reserved
his consent to Herbert's participation until he should have seen him
and formed a favorable judgment of his physiognomy. “And even then, dear
boy,” said he, pulling a greasy little clasped black Testament out of
his pocket, “we'll have him on his oath.”

To state that my terrible patron carried this little black book about
the world solely to swear people on in cases of emergency, would be to
state what I never quite established; but this I can say, that I never
knew him put it to any other use. The book itself had the appearance of
having been stolen from some court of justice, and perhaps his knowledge
of its antecedents, combined with his own experience in that wise, gave
him a reliance on its powers as a sort of legal spell or charm. On this
first occasion of his producing it, I recalled how he had made me swear
fidelity in the churchyard long ago, and how he had described himself
last night as always swearing to his resolutions in his solitude.

As he was at present dressed in a seafaring slop suit, in which he
looked as if he had some parrots and cigars to dispose of, I next
discussed with him what dress he should wear. He cherished an
extraordinary belief in the virtues of “shorts” as a disguise, and had
in his own mind sketched a dress for himself that would have made
him something between a dean and a dentist. It was with considerable
difficulty that I won him over to the assumption of a dress more like a
prosperous farmer's; and we arranged that he should cut his hair close,
and wear a little powder. Lastly, as he had not yet been seen by the
laundress or her niece, he was to keep himself out of their view until
his change of dress was made.

It would seem a simple matter to decide on these precautions; but in my
dazed, not to say distracted, state, it took so long, that I did not
get out to further them until two or three in the afternoon. He was to
remain shut up in the chambers while I was gone, and was on no account
to open the door.

There being to my knowledge a respectable lodging-house in Essex Street,
the back of which looked into the Temple, and was almost within hail of
my windows, I first of all repaired to that house, and was so fortunate
as to secure the second floor for my uncle, Mr. Provis. I then went from
shop to shop, making such purchases as were necessary to the change in
his appearance. This business transacted, I turned my face, on my own
account, to Little Britain. Mr. Jaggers was at his desk, but, seeing me
enter, got up immediately and stood before his fire.

“Now, Pip,” said he, “be careful.”

“I will, sir,” I returned. For, coming along I had thought well of what
I was going to say.

“Don't commit yourself,” said Mr. Jaggers, “and don't commit any one.
You understand--any one. Don't tell me anything: I don't want to know
anything; I am not curious.”

Of course I saw that he knew the man was come.

“I merely want, Mr. Jaggers,” said I, “to assure myself that what I have
been told is true. I have no hope of its being untrue, but at least I
may verify it.”

Mr. Jaggers nodded. “But did you say 'told' or 'informed'?” he asked
me, with his head on one side, and not looking at me, but looking in
a listening way at the floor. “Told would seem to imply verbal
communication. You can't have verbal communication with a man in New
South Wales, you know.”

“I will say, informed, Mr. Jaggers.”

“Good.”

“I have been informed by a person named Abel Magwitch, that he is the
benefactor so long unknown to me.”

“That is the man,” said Mr. Jaggers, “in New South Wales.”

“And only he?” said I.

“And only he,” said Mr. Jaggers.

“I am not so unreasonable, sir, as to think you at all responsible for
my mistakes and wrong conclusions; but I always supposed it was Miss
Havisham.”

“As you say, Pip,” returned Mr. Jaggers, turning his eyes upon
me coolly, and taking a bite at his forefinger, “I am not at all
responsible for that.”

“And yet it looked so like it, sir,” I pleaded with a downcast heart.

“Not a particle of evidence, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, shaking his head
and gathering up his skirts. “Take nothing on its looks; take everything
on evidence. There's no better rule.”

“I have no more to say,” said I, with a sigh, after standing silent for
a little while. “I have verified my information, and there's an end.”

“And Magwitch--in New South Wales--having at last disclosed himself,”
 said Mr. Jaggers, “you will comprehend, Pip, how rigidly throughout
my communication with you, I have always adhered to the strict line of
fact. There has never been the least departure from the strict line of
fact. You are quite aware of that?”

“Quite, sir.”

“I communicated to Magwitch--in New South Wales--when he first wrote to
me--from New South Wales--the caution that he must not expect me ever to
deviate from the strict line of fact. I also communicated to him another
caution. He appeared to me to have obscurely hinted in his letter at
some distant idea he had of seeing you in England here. I cautioned
him that I must hear no more of that; that he was not at all likely to
obtain a pardon; that he was expatriated for the term of his natural
life; and that his presenting himself in this country would be an act of
felony, rendering him liable to the extreme penalty of the law. I gave
Magwitch that caution,” said Mr. Jaggers, looking hard at me; “I wrote
it to New South Wales. He guided himself by it, no doubt.”

“No doubt,” said I.

“I have been informed by Wemmick,” pursued Mr. Jaggers, still looking
hard at me, “that he has received a letter, under date Portsmouth, from
a colonist of the name of Purvis, or--”

“Or Provis,” I suggested.

“Or Provis--thank you, Pip. Perhaps it is Provis? Perhaps you know it's
Provis?”

“Yes,” said I.

“You know it's Provis. A letter, under date Portsmouth, from a colonist
of the name of Provis, asking for the particulars of your address, on
behalf of Magwitch. Wemmick sent him the particulars, I understand, by
return of post. Probably it is through Provis that you have received the
explanation of Magwitch--in New South Wales?”

“It came through Provis,” I replied.

“Good day, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, offering his hand; “glad to have
seen you. In writing by post to Magwitch--in New South Wales--or in
communicating with him through Provis, have the goodness to mention that
the particulars and vouchers of our long account shall be sent to you,
together with the balance; for there is still a balance remaining. Good
day, Pip!”

We shook hands, and he looked hard at me as long as he could see me. I
turned at the door, and he was still looking hard at me, while the two
vile casts on the shelf seemed to be trying to get their eyelids open,
and to force out of their swollen throats, “O, what a man he is!”

Wemmick was out, and though he had been at his desk he could have done
nothing for me. I went straight back to the Temple, where I found
the terrible Provis drinking rum and water and smoking negro-head, in
safety.

Next day the clothes I had ordered all came home, and he put them on.
Whatever he put on, became him less (it dismally seemed to me) than what
he had worn before. To my thinking, there was something in him that made
it hopeless to attempt to disguise him. The more I dressed him and the
better I dressed him, the more he looked like the slouching fugitive on
the marshes. This effect on my anxious fancy was partly referable, no
doubt, to his old face and manner growing more familiar to me; but I
believe too that he dragged one of his legs as if there were still a
weight of iron on it, and that from head to foot there was Convict in
the very grain of the man.

The influences of his solitary hut-life were upon him besides, and
gave him a savage air that no dress could tame; added to these were the
influences of his subsequent branded life among men, and, crowning all,
his consciousness that he was dodging and hiding now. In all his ways of
sitting and standing, and eating and drinking,--of brooding about in a
high-shouldered reluctant style,--of taking out his great horn-handled
jackknife and wiping it on his legs and cutting his food,--of
lifting light glasses and cups to his lips, as if they were clumsy
pannikins,--of chopping a wedge off his bread, and soaking up with it
the last fragments of gravy round and round his plate, as if to make the
most of an allowance, and then drying his finger-ends on it, and then
swallowing it,--in these ways and a thousand other small nameless
instances arising every minute in the day, there was Prisoner, Felon,
Bondsman, plain as plain could be.

It had been his own idea to wear that touch of powder, and I had
conceded the powder after overcoming the shorts. But I can compare the
effect of it, when on, to nothing but the probable effect of rouge upon
the dead; so awful was the manner in which everything in him that it was
most desirable to repress, started through that thin layer of pretence,
and seemed to come blazing out at the crown of his head. It was
abandoned as soon as tried, and he wore his grizzled hair cut short.

Words cannot tell what a sense I had, at the same time, of the dreadful
mystery that he was to me. When he fell asleep of an evening, with his
knotted hands clenching the sides of the easy-chair, and his bald head
tattooed with deep wrinkles falling forward on his breast, I would sit
and look at him, wondering what he had done, and loading him with all
the crimes in the Calendar, until the impulse was powerful on me to
start up and fly from him. Every hour so increased my abhorrence of
him, that I even think I might have yielded to this impulse in the first
agonies of being so haunted, notwithstanding all he had done for me and
the risk he ran, but for the knowledge that Herbert must soon come back.
Once, I actually did start out of bed in the night, and begin to dress
myself in my worst clothes, hurriedly intending to leave him there with
everything else I possessed, and enlist for India as a private soldier.

I doubt if a ghost could have been more terrible to me, up in those
lonely rooms in the long evenings and long nights, with the wind and the
rain always rushing by. A ghost could not have been taken and hanged on
my account, and the consideration that he could be, and the dread that
he would be, were no small addition to my horrors. When he was not
asleep, or playing a complicated kind of Patience with a ragged pack of
cards of his own,--a game that I never saw before or since, and in which
he recorded his winnings by sticking his jackknife into the table,--when
he was not engaged in either of these pursuits, he would ask me to
read to him,--“Foreign language, dear boy!” While I complied, he, not
comprehending a single word, would stand before the fire surveying me
with the air of an Exhibitor, and I would see him, between the fingers
of the hand with which I shaded my face, appealing in dumb show to
the furniture to take notice of my proficiency. The imaginary student
pursued by the misshapen creature he had impiously made, was not more
wretched than I, pursued by the creature who had made me, and recoiling
from him with a stronger repulsion, the more he admired me and the
fonder he was of me.

This is written of, I am sensible, as if it had lasted a year. It lasted
about five days. Expecting Herbert all the time, I dared not go out,
except when I took Provis for an airing after dark. At length, one
evening when dinner was over and I had dropped into a slumber quite
worn out,--for my nights had been agitated and my rest broken by fearful
dreams,--I was roused by the welcome footstep on the staircase. Provis,
who had been asleep too, staggered up at the noise I made, and in an
instant I saw his jackknife shining in his hand.

“Quiet! It's Herbert!” I said; and Herbert came bursting in, with the
airy freshness of six hundred miles of France upon him.

“Handel, my dear fellow, how are you, and again how are you, and again
how are you? I seem to have been gone a twelvemonth! Why, so I must have
been, for you have grown quite thin and pale! Handel, my--Halloa! I beg
your pardon.”

He was stopped in his running on and in his shaking hands with me, by
seeing Provis. Provis, regarding him with a fixed attention, was slowly
putting up his jackknife, and groping in another pocket for something
else.

“Herbert, my dear friend,” said I, shutting the double doors, while
Herbert stood staring and wondering, “something very strange has
happened. This is--a visitor of mine.”

“It's all right, dear boy!” said Provis coming forward, with his little
clasped black book, and then addressing himself to Herbert. “Take it in
your right hand. Lord strike you dead on the spot, if ever you split in
any way sumever! Kiss it!”

“Do so, as he wishes it,” I said to Herbert. So, Herbert, looking at
me with a friendly uneasiness and amazement, complied, and Provis
immediately shaking hands with him, said, “Now you're on your oath, you
know. And never believe me on mine, if Pip shan't make a gentleman on
you!”




Chapter XLI

In vain should I attempt to describe the astonishment and disquiet
of Herbert, when he and I and Provis sat down before the fire, and I
recounted the whole of the secret. Enough, that I saw my own feelings
reflected in Herbert's face, and not least among them, my repugnance
towards the man who had done so much for me.

What would alone have set a division between that man and us, if there
had been no other dividing circumstance, was his triumph in my story.
Saving his troublesome sense of having been “low” on one occasion since
his return,--on which point he began to hold forth to Herbert, the
moment my revelation was finished,--he had no perception of the
possibility of my finding any fault with my good fortune. His boast that
he had made me a gentleman, and that he had come to see me support the
character on his ample resources, was made for me quite as much as for
himself. And that it was a highly agreeable boast to both of us,
and that we must both be very proud of it, was a conclusion quite
established in his own mind.

“Though, look'ee here, Pip's comrade,” he said to Herbert, after having
discoursed for some time, “I know very well that once since I come
back--for half a minute--I've been low. I said to Pip, I knowed as I had
been low. But don't you fret yourself on that score. I ain't made Pip a
gentleman, and Pip ain't a going to make you a gentleman, not fur me not
to know what's due to ye both. Dear boy, and Pip's comrade, you two may
count upon me always having a gen-teel muzzle on. Muzzled I have been
since that half a minute when I was betrayed into lowness, muzzled I am
at the present time, muzzled I ever will be.”

Herbert said, “Certainly,” but looked as if there were no specific
consolation in this, and remained perplexed and dismayed. We were
anxious for the time when he would go to his lodging and leave us
together, but he was evidently jealous of leaving us together, and sat
late. It was midnight before I took him round to Essex Street, and
saw him safely in at his own dark door. When it closed upon him, I
experienced the first moment of relief I had known since the night of
his arrival.

Never quite free from an uneasy remembrance of the man on the stairs,
I had always looked about me in taking my guest out after dark, and in
bringing him back; and I looked about me now. Difficult as it is in a
large city to avoid the suspicion of being watched, when the mind is
conscious of danger in that regard, I could not persuade myself that any
of the people within sight cared about my movements. The few who were
passing passed on their several ways, and the street was empty when I
turned back into the Temple. Nobody had come out at the gate with us,
nobody went in at the gate with me. As I crossed by the fountain, I saw
his lighted back windows looking bright and quiet, and, when I stood for
a few moments in the doorway of the building where I lived, before going
up the stairs, Garden Court was as still and lifeless as the staircase
was when I ascended it.

Herbert received me with open arms, and I had never felt before so
blessedly what it is to have a friend. When he had spoken some sound
words of sympathy and encouragement, we sat down to consider the
question, What was to be done?

The chair that Provis had occupied still remaining where it had
stood,--for he had a barrack way with him of hanging about one spot, in
one unsettled manner, and going through one round of observances with
his pipe and his negro-head and his jackknife and his pack of cards,
and what not, as if it were all put down for him on a slate,--I say his
chair remaining where it had stood, Herbert unconsciously took it, but
next moment started out of it, pushed it away, and took another. He had
no occasion to say after that that he had conceived an aversion for my
patron, neither had I occasion to confess my own. We interchanged that
confidence without shaping a syllable.

“What,” said I to Herbert, when he was safe in another chair,--“what is
to be done?”

“My poor dear Handel,” he replied, holding his head, “I am too stunned
to think.”

“So was I, Herbert, when the blow first fell. Still, something must be
done. He is intent upon various new expenses,--horses, and carriages,
and lavish appearances of all kinds. He must be stopped somehow.”

“You mean that you can't accept--”

“How can I?” I interposed, as Herbert paused. “Think of him! Look at
him!”

An involuntary shudder passed over both of us.

“Yet I am afraid the dreadful truth is, Herbert, that he is attached to
me, strongly attached to me. Was there ever such a fate!”

“My poor dear Handel,” Herbert repeated.

“Then,” said I, “after all, stopping short here, never taking another
penny from him, think what I owe him already! Then again: I am heavily
in debt,--very heavily for me, who have now no expectations,--and I have
been bred to no calling, and I am fit for nothing.”

“Well, well, well!” Herbert remonstrated. “Don't say fit for nothing.”

“What am I fit for? I know only one thing that I am fit for, and that
is, to go for a soldier. And I might have gone, my dear Herbert, but for
the prospect of taking counsel with your friendship and affection.”

Of course I broke down there: and of course Herbert, beyond seizing a
warm grip of my hand, pretended not to know it.

“Anyhow, my dear Handel,” said he presently, “soldiering won't do. If
you were to renounce this patronage and these favors, I suppose you
would do so with some faint hope of one day repaying what you have
already had. Not very strong, that hope, if you went soldiering!
Besides, it's absurd. You would be infinitely better in Clarriker's
house, small as it is. I am working up towards a partnership, you know.”

Poor fellow! He little suspected with whose money.

“But there is another question,” said Herbert. “This is an ignorant,
determined man, who has long had one fixed idea. More than that, he
seems to me (I may misjudge him) to be a man of a desperate and fierce
character.”

“I know he is,” I returned. “Let me tell you what evidence I have seen
of it.” And I told him what I had not mentioned in my narrative, of that
encounter with the other convict.

“See, then,” said Herbert; “think of this! He comes here at the peril
of his life, for the realization of his fixed idea. In the moment of
realization, after all his toil and waiting, you cut the ground from
under his feet, destroy his idea, and make his gains worthless to him.
Do you see nothing that he might do, under the disappointment?”

“I have seen it, Herbert, and dreamed of it, ever since the fatal night
of his arrival. Nothing has been in my thoughts so distinctly as his
putting himself in the way of being taken.”

“Then you may rely upon it,” said Herbert, “that there would be great
danger of his doing it. That is his power over you as long as he remains
in England, and that would be his reckless course if you forsook him.”

I was so struck by the horror of this idea, which had weighed upon
me from the first, and the working out of which would make me regard
myself, in some sort, as his murderer, that I could not rest in my
chair, but began pacing to and fro. I said to Herbert, meanwhile, that
even if Provis were recognized and taken, in spite of himself, I should
be wretched as the cause, however innocently. Yes; even though I was so
wretched in having him at large and near me, and even though I would
far rather have worked at the forge all the days of my life than I would
ever have come to this!

But there was no staving off the question, What was to be done?

“The first and the main thing to be done,” said Herbert, “is to get him
out of England. You will have to go with him, and then he may be induced
to go.”

“But get him where I will, could I prevent his coming back?”

“My good Handel, is it not obvious that with Newgate in the next street,
there must be far greater hazard in your breaking your mind to him and
making him reckless, here, than elsewhere? If a pretext to get him away
could be made out of that other convict, or out of anything else in his
life, now.”

“There, again!” said I, stopping before Herbert, with my open hands held
out, as if they contained the desperation of the case. “I know nothing
of his life. It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see
him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so
unknown to me, except as the miserable wretch who terrified me two days
in my childhood!”

Herbert got up, and linked his arm in mine, and we slowly walked to and
fro together, studying the carpet.

“Handel,” said Herbert, stopping, “you feel convinced that you can take
no further benefits from him; do you?”

“Fully. Surely you would, too, if you were in my place?”

“And you feel convinced that you must break with him?”

“Herbert, can you ask me?”

“And you have, and are bound to have, that tenderness for the life he
has risked on your account, that you must save him, if possible, from
throwing it away. Then you must get him out of England before you stir a
finger to extricate yourself. That done, extricate yourself, in Heaven's
name, and we'll see it out together, dear old boy.”

It was a comfort to shake hands upon it, and walk up and down again,
with only that done.

“Now, Herbert,” said I, “with reference to gaining some knowledge of
his history. There is but one way that I know of. I must ask him point
blank.”

“Yes. Ask him,” said Herbert, “when we sit at breakfast in the morning.”
 For he had said, on taking leave of Herbert, that he would come to
breakfast with us.

With this project formed, we went to bed. I had the wildest dreams
concerning him, and woke unrefreshed; I woke, too, to recover the fear
which I had lost in the night, of his being found out as a returned
transport. Waking, I never lost that fear.

He came round at the appointed time, took out his jackknife, and sat
down to his meal. He was full of plans “for his gentleman's coming out
strong, and like a gentleman,” and urged me to begin speedily upon
the pocket-book which he had left in my possession. He considered the
chambers and his own lodging as temporary residences, and advised me to
look out at once for a “fashionable crib” near Hyde Park, in which he
could have “a shake-down.” When he had made an end of his breakfast,
and was wiping his knife on his leg, I said to him, without a word of
preface,--

“After you were gone last night, I told my friend of the struggle that
the soldiers found you engaged in on the marshes, when we came up. You
remember?”

“Remember!” said he. “I think so!”

“We want to know something about that man--and about you. It is strange
to know no more about either, and particularly you, than I was able to
tell last night. Is not this as good a time as another for our knowing
more?”

“Well!” he said, after consideration. “You're on your oath, you know,
Pip's comrade?”

“Assuredly,” replied Herbert.

“As to anything I say, you know,” he insisted. “The oath applies to
all.”

“I understand it to do so.”

“And look'ee here! Wotever I done is worked out and paid for,” he
insisted again.

“So be it.”

He took out his black pipe and was going to fill it with negro-head,
when, looking at the tangle of tobacco in his hand, he seemed to think
it might perplex the thread of his narrative. He put it back again,
stuck his pipe in a button-hole of his coat, spread a hand on each knee,
and after turning an angry eye on the fire for a few silent moments,
looked round at us and said what follows.




Chapter XLII

“Dear boy and Pip's comrade. I am not a going fur to tell you my life
like a song, or a story-book. But to give it you short and handy, I'll
put it at once into a mouthful of English. In jail and out of jail, in
jail and out of jail, in jail and out of jail. There, you've got it.
That's my life pretty much, down to such times as I got shipped off,
arter Pip stood my friend.

“I've been done everything to, pretty well--except hanged. I've been
locked up as much as a silver tea-kittle. I've been carted here and
carted there, and put out of this town, and put out of that town, and
stuck in the stocks, and whipped and worried and drove. I've no more
notion where I was born than you have--if so much. I first become aware
of myself down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun had
run away from me--a man--a tinker--and he'd took the fire with him, and
left me wery cold.

“I know'd my name to be Magwitch, chrisen'd Abel. How did I know
it? Much as I know'd the birds' names in the hedges to be chaffinch,
sparrer, thrush. I might have thought it was all lies together, only as
the birds' names come out true, I supposed mine did.

“So fur as I could find, there warn't a soul that see young Abel
Magwitch, with us little on him as in him, but wot caught fright at him,
and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took
up, to that extent that I reg'larly grow'd up took up.

“This is the way it was, that when I was a ragged little creetur as much
to be pitied as ever I see (not that I looked in the glass, for there
warn't many insides of furnished houses known to me), I got the name of
being hardened. 'This is a terrible hardened one,' they says to prison
wisitors, picking out me. 'May be said to live in jails, this boy.' Then
they looked at me, and I looked at them, and they measured my head, some
on 'em,--they had better a measured my stomach,--and others on 'em giv
me tracts what I couldn't read, and made me speeches what I couldn't
understand. They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what
the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn't
I?--Howsomever, I'm a getting low, and I know what's due. Dear boy and
Pip's comrade, don't you be afeerd of me being low.

“Tramping, begging, thieving, working sometimes when I could,--though
that warn't as often as you may think, till you put the question whether
you would ha' been over-ready to give me work yourselves,--a bit of a
poacher, a bit of a laborer, a bit of a wagoner, a bit of a haymaker,
a bit of a hawker, a bit of most things that don't pay and lead to
trouble, I got to be a man. A deserting soldier in a Traveller's Rest,
what lay hid up to the chin under a lot of taturs, learnt me to read;
and a travelling Giant what signed his name at a penny a time learnt me
to write. I warn't locked up as often now as formerly, but I wore out my
good share of key-metal still.

“At Epsom races, a matter of over twenty years ago, I got acquainted wi'
a man whose skull I'd crack wi' this poker, like the claw of a lobster,
if I'd got it on this hob. His right name was Compeyson; and that's the
man, dear boy, what you see me a pounding in the ditch, according to
what you truly told your comrade arter I was gone last night.

“He set up fur a gentleman, this Compeyson, and he'd been to a public
boarding-school and had learning. He was a smooth one to talk, and was
a dab at the ways of gentlefolks. He was good-looking too. It was the
night afore the great race, when I found him on the heath, in a booth
that I know'd on. Him and some more was a sitting among the tables when
I went in, and the landlord (which had a knowledge of me, and was a
sporting one) called him out, and said, 'I think this is a man that
might suit you,'--meaning I was.

“Compeyson, he looks at me very noticing, and I look at him. He has a
watch and a chain and a ring and a breast-pin and a handsome suit of
clothes.

“'To judge from appearances, you're out of luck,' says Compeyson to me.

“'Yes, master, and I've never been in it much.' (I had come out of
Kingston Jail last on a vagrancy committal. Not but what it might have
been for something else; but it warn't.)

“'Luck changes,' says Compeyson; 'perhaps yours is going to change.'

“I says, 'I hope it may be so. There's room.'

“'What can you do?' says Compeyson.

“'Eat and drink,' I says; 'if you'll find the materials.'

“Compeyson laughed, looked at me again very noticing, giv me five
shillings, and appointed me for next night. Same place.

“I went to Compeyson next night, same place, and Compeyson took me on
to be his man and pardner. And what was Compeyson's business in which we
was to go pardners? Compeyson's business was the swindling, handwriting
forging, stolen bank-note passing, and such-like. All sorts of traps as
Compeyson could set with his head, and keep his own legs out of and get
the profits from and let another man in for, was Compeyson's business.
He'd no more heart than a iron file, he was as cold as death, and he had
the head of the Devil afore mentioned.

“There was another in with Compeyson, as was called Arthur,--not as
being so chrisen'd, but as a surname. He was in a Decline, and was a
shadow to look at. Him and Compeyson had been in a bad thing with a
rich lady some years afore, and they'd made a pot of money by it; but
Compeyson betted and gamed, and he'd have run through the king's taxes.
So, Arthur was a dying, and a dying poor and with the horrors on him,
and Compeyson's wife (which Compeyson kicked mostly) was a having pity
on him when she could, and Compeyson was a having pity on nothing and
nobody.

“I might a took warning by Arthur, but I didn't; and I won't pretend I
was partick'ler--for where 'ud be the good on it, dear boy and comrade?
So I begun wi' Compeyson, and a poor tool I was in his hands. Arthur
lived at the top of Compeyson's house (over nigh Brentford it was), and
Compeyson kept a careful account agen him for board and lodging, in case
he should ever get better to work it out. But Arthur soon settled the
account. The second or third time as ever I see him, he come a tearing
down into Compeyson's parlor late at night, in only a flannel gown, with
his hair all in a sweat, and he says to Compeyson's wife, 'Sally, she
really is upstairs alonger me, now, and I can't get rid of her. She's
all in white,' he says, 'wi' white flowers in her hair, and she's awful
mad, and she's got a shroud hanging over her arm, and she says she'll
put it on me at five in the morning.'

“Says Compeyson: 'Why, you fool, don't you know she's got a living body?
And how should she be up there, without coming through the door, or in
at the window, and up the stairs?'

“'I don't know how she's there,' says Arthur, shivering dreadful with
the horrors, 'but she's standing in the corner at the foot of the bed,
awful mad. And over where her heart's broke--you broke it!--there's
drops of blood.'

“Compeyson spoke hardy, but he was always a coward. 'Go up alonger this
drivelling sick man,' he says to his wife, 'and Magwitch, lend her a
hand, will you?' But he never come nigh himself.

“Compeyson's wife and me took him up to bed agen, and he raved most
dreadful. 'Why look at her!' he cries out. 'She's a shaking the shroud
at me! Don't you see her? Look at her eyes! Ain't it awful to see her so
mad?' Next he cries, 'She'll put it on me, and then I'm done for! Take
it away from her, take it away!' And then he catched hold of us, and kep
on a talking to her, and answering of her, till I half believed I see
her myself.

“Compeyson's wife, being used to him, giv him some liquor to get the
horrors off, and by and by he quieted. 'O, she's gone! Has her keeper
been for her?' he says. 'Yes,' says Compeyson's wife. 'Did you tell him
to lock her and bar her in?' 'Yes.' 'And to take that ugly thing away
from her?' 'Yes, yes, all right.' 'You're a good creetur,' he says,
'don't leave me, whatever you do, and thank you!'

“He rested pretty quiet till it might want a few minutes of five, and
then he starts up with a scream, and screams out, 'Here she is! She's
got the shroud again. She's unfolding it. She's coming out of the
corner. She's coming to the bed. Hold me, both on you--one of each
side--don't let her touch me with it. Hah! she missed me that time.
Don't let her throw it over my shoulders. Don't let her lift me up to
get it round me. She's lifting me up. Keep me down!' Then he lifted
himself up hard, and was dead.

“Compeyson took it easy as a good riddance for both sides. Him and
me was soon busy, and first he swore me (being ever artful) on my own
book,--this here little black book, dear boy, what I swore your comrade
on.

“Not to go into the things that Compeyson planned, and I done--which 'ud
take a week--I'll simply say to you, dear boy, and Pip's comrade, that
that man got me into such nets as made me his black slave. I was always
in debt to him, always under his thumb, always a working, always a
getting into danger. He was younger than me, but he'd got craft, and
he'd got learning, and he overmatched me five hundred times told and
no mercy. My Missis as I had the hard time wi'--Stop though! I ain't
brought her in--”

He looked about him in a confused way, as if he had lost his place in
the book of his remembrance; and he turned his face to the fire, and
spread his hands broader on his knees, and lifted them off and put them
on again.

“There ain't no need to go into it,” he said, looking round once more.
“The time wi' Compeyson was a'most as hard a time as ever I had; that
said, all's said. Did I tell you as I was tried, alone, for misdemeanor,
while with Compeyson?”

I answered, No.

“Well!” he said, “I was, and got convicted. As to took up on suspicion,
that was twice or three times in the four or five year that it lasted;
but evidence was wanting. At last, me and Compeyson was both committed
for felony,--on a charge of putting stolen notes in circulation,--and
there was other charges behind. Compeyson says to me, 'Separate
defences, no communication,' and that was all. And I was so miserable
poor, that I sold all the clothes I had, except what hung on my back,
afore I could get Jaggers.

“When we was put in the dock, I noticed first of all what a gentleman
Compeyson looked, wi' his curly hair and his black clothes and his white
pocket-handkercher, and what a common sort of a wretch I looked. When
the prosecution opened and the evidence was put short, aforehand, I
noticed how heavy it all bore on me, and how light on him. When the
evidence was giv in the box, I noticed how it was always me that had
come for'ard, and could be swore to, how it was always me that the money
had been paid to, how it was always me that had seemed to work the thing
and get the profit. But when the defence come on, then I see the plan
plainer; for, says the counsellor for Compeyson, 'My lord and gentlemen,
here you has afore you, side by side, two persons as your eyes can
separate wide; one, the younger, well brought up, who will be spoke to
as such; one, the elder, ill brought up, who will be spoke to as such;
one, the younger, seldom if ever seen in these here transactions, and
only suspected; t'other, the elder, always seen in 'em and always wi' his
guilt brought home. Can you doubt, if there is but one in it, which is
the one, and, if there is two in it, which is much the worst one?' And
such-like. And when it come to character, warn't it Compeyson as had
been to the school, and warn't it his schoolfellows as was in this
position and in that, and warn't it him as had been know'd by witnesses
in such clubs and societies, and nowt to his disadvantage? And warn't it
me as had been tried afore, and as had been know'd up hill and down dale
in Bridewells and Lock-Ups! And when it come to speech-making, warn't it
Compeyson as could speak to 'em wi' his face dropping every now and then
into his white pocket-handkercher,--ah! and wi' verses in his speech,
too,--and warn't it me as could only say, 'Gentlemen, this man at my
side is a most precious rascal'? And when the verdict come, warn't it
Compeyson as was recommended to mercy on account of good character and
bad company, and giving up all the information he could agen me,
and warn't it me as got never a word but Guilty? And when I says to
Compeyson, 'Once out of this court, I'll smash that face of yourn!'
ain't it Compeyson as prays the Judge to be protected, and gets two
turnkeys stood betwixt us? And when we're sentenced, ain't it him as
gets seven year, and me fourteen, and ain't it him as the Judge is
sorry for, because he might a done so well, and ain't it me as the Judge
perceives to be a old offender of wiolent passion, likely to come to
worse?”

He had worked himself into a state of great excitement, but he checked
it, took two or three short breaths, swallowed as often, and stretching
out his hand towards me said, in a reassuring manner, “I ain't a going
to be low, dear boy!”

He had so heated himself that he took out his handkerchief and wiped his
face and head and neck and hands, before he could go on.

“I had said to Compeyson that I'd smash that face of his, and I swore
Lord smash mine! to do it. We was in the same prison-ship, but I
couldn't get at him for long, though I tried. At last I come behind him
and hit him on the cheek to turn him round and get a smashing one at
him, when I was seen and seized. The black-hole of that ship warn't
a strong one, to a judge of black-holes that could swim and dive. I
escaped to the shore, and I was a hiding among the graves there, envying
them as was in 'em and all over, when I first see my boy!”

He regarded me with a look of affection that made him almost abhorrent
to me again, though I had felt great pity for him.

“By my boy, I was giv to understand as Compeyson was out on them marshes
too. Upon my soul, I half believe he escaped in his terror, to get quit
of me, not knowing it was me as had got ashore. I hunted him down. I
smashed his face. 'And now,' says I 'as the worst thing I can do, caring
nothing for myself, I'll drag you back.' And I'd have swum off, towing
him by the hair, if it had come to that, and I'd a got him aboard
without the soldiers.

“Of course he'd much the best of it to the last,--his character was so
good. He had escaped when he was made half wild by me and my murderous
intentions; and his punishment was light. I was put in irons, brought
to trial again, and sent for life. I didn't stop for life, dear boy and
Pip's comrade, being here.”

He wiped himself again, as he had done before, and then slowly took
his tangle of tobacco from his pocket, and plucked his pipe from his
button-hole, and slowly filled it, and began to smoke.

“Is he dead?” I asked, after a silence.

“Is who dead, dear boy?”

“Compeyson.”

“He hopes I am, if he's alive, you may be sure,” with a fierce look. “I
never heerd no more of him.”

Herbert had been writing with his pencil in the cover of a book. He
softly pushed the book over to me, as Provis stood smoking with his eyes
on the fire, and I read in it:--

“Young Havisham's name was Arthur. Compeyson is the man who professed to
be Miss Havisham's lover.”

I shut the book and nodded slightly to Herbert, and put the book by; but
we neither of us said anything, and both looked at Provis as he stood
smoking by the fire.




Chapter XLIII

Why should I pause to ask how much of my shrinking from Provis might be
traced to Estella? Why should I loiter on my road, to compare the state
of mind in which I had tried to rid myself of the stain of the prison
before meeting her at the coach-office, with the state of mind in which
I now reflected on the abyss between Estella in her pride and beauty,
and the returned transport whom I harbored? The road would be none the
smoother for it, the end would be none the better for it, he would not
be helped, nor I extenuated.

A new fear had been engendered in my mind by his narrative; or rather,
his narrative had given form and purpose to the fear that was already
there. If Compeyson were alive and should discover his return, I could
hardly doubt the consequence. That Compeyson stood in mortal fear of
him, neither of the two could know much better than I; and that any
such man as that man had been described to be would hesitate to release
himself for good from a dreaded enemy by the safe means of becoming an
informer was scarcely to be imagined.

Never had I breathed, and never would I breathe--or so I resolved--a
word of Estella to Provis. But, I said to Herbert that, before I could
go abroad, I must see both Estella and Miss Havisham. This was when we
were left alone on the night of the day when Provis told us his story. I
resolved to go out to Richmond next day, and I went.

On my presenting myself at Mrs. Brandley's, Estella's maid was called to
tell that Estella had gone into the country. Where? To Satis House, as
usual. Not as usual, I said, for she had never yet gone there without
me; when was she coming back? There was an air of reservation in the
answer which increased my perplexity, and the answer was, that her maid
believed she was only coming back at all for a little while. I could
make nothing of this, except that it was meant that I should make
nothing of it, and I went home again in complete discomfiture.

Another night consultation with Herbert after Provis was gone home (I
always took him home, and always looked well about me), led us to the
conclusion that nothing should be said about going abroad until I came
back from Miss Havisham's. In the mean time, Herbert and I were to
consider separately what it would be best to say; whether we should
devise any pretence of being afraid that he was under suspicious
observation; or whether I, who had never yet been abroad, should propose
an expedition. We both knew that I had but to propose anything, and he
would consent. We agreed that his remaining many days in his present
hazard was not to be thought of.

Next day I had the meanness to feign that I was under a binding promise
to go down to Joe; but I was capable of almost any meanness towards Joe
or his name. Provis was to be strictly careful while I was gone, and
Herbert was to take the charge of him that I had taken. I was to be
absent only one night, and, on my return, the gratification of his
impatience for my starting as a gentleman on a greater scale was to
be begun. It occurred to me then, and as I afterwards found to
Herbert also, that he might be best got away across the water, on that
pretence,--as, to make purchases, or the like.

Having thus cleared the way for my expedition to Miss Havisham's, I set
off by the early morning coach before it was yet light, and was out
on the open country road when the day came creeping on, halting and
whimpering and shivering, and wrapped in patches of cloud and rags of
mist, like a beggar. When we drove up to the Blue Boar after a drizzly
ride, whom should I see come out under the gateway, toothpick in hand,
to look at the coach, but Bentley Drummle!

As he pretended not to see me, I pretended not to see him. It was a very
lame pretence on both sides; the lamer, because we both went into the
coffee-room, where he had just finished his breakfast, and where I
ordered mine. It was poisonous to me to see him in the town, for I very
well knew why he had come there.

Pretending to read a smeary newspaper long out of date, which had
nothing half so legible in its local news, as the foreign matter of
coffee, pickles, fish sauces, gravy, melted butter, and wine with which
it was sprinkled all over, as if it had taken the measles in a highly
irregular form, I sat at my table while he stood before the fire. By
degrees it became an enormous injury to me that he stood before the
fire. And I got up, determined to have my share of it. I had to put my
hand behind his legs for the poker when I went up to the fireplace to
stir the fire, but still pretended not to know him.

“Is this a cut?” said Mr. Drummle.

“Oh!” said I, poker in hand; “it's you, is it? How do you do? I was
wondering who it was, who kept the fire off.”

With that, I poked tremendously, and having done so, planted myself side
by side with Mr. Drummle, my shoulders squared and my back to the fire.

“You have just come down?” said Mr. Drummle, edging me a little away
with his shoulder.

“Yes,” said I, edging him a little away with my shoulder.

“Beastly place,” said Drummle. “Your part of the country, I think?”

“Yes,” I assented. “I am told it's very like your Shropshire.”

“Not in the least like it,” said Drummle.

Here Mr. Drummle looked at his boots and I looked at mine, and then Mr.
Drummle looked at my boots, and I looked at his.

“Have you been here long?” I asked, determined not to yield an inch of
the fire.

“Long enough to be tired of it,” returned Drummle, pretending to yawn,
but equally determined.

“Do you stay here long?”

“Can't say,” answered Mr. Drummle. “Do you?”

“Can't say,” said I.

I felt here, through a tingling in my blood, that if Mr. Drummle's
shoulder had claimed another hair's breadth of room, I should have
jerked him into the window; equally, that if my own shoulder had urged a
similar claim, Mr. Drummle would have jerked me into the nearest box. He
whistled a little. So did I.

“Large tract of marshes about here, I believe?” said Drummle.

“Yes. What of that?” said I.

Mr. Drummle looked at me, and then at my boots, and then said, “Oh!” and
laughed.

“Are you amused, Mr. Drummle?”

“No,” said he, “not particularly. I am going out for a ride in the
saddle. I mean to explore those marshes for amusement. Out-of-the-way
villages there, they tell me. Curious little public-houses--and
smithies--and that. Waiter!”

“Yes, sir.”

“Is that horse of mine ready?”

“Brought round to the door, sir.”

“I say. Look here, you sir. The lady won't ride to-day; the weather
won't do.”

“Very good, sir.”

“And I don't dine, because I'm going to dine at the lady's.”

“Very good, sir.”

Then, Drummle glanced at me, with an insolent triumph on his
great-jowled face that cut me to the heart, dull as he was, and so
exasperated me, that I felt inclined to take him in my arms (as the
robber in the story-book is said to have taken the old lady) and seat
him on the fire.

One thing was manifest to both of us, and that was, that until relief
came, neither of us could relinquish the fire. There we stood, well
squared up before it, shoulder to shoulder and foot to foot, with our
hands behind us, not budging an inch. The horse was visible outside in
the drizzle at the door, my breakfast was put on the table, Drummle's
was cleared away, the waiter invited me to begin, I nodded, we both
stood our ground.

“Have you been to the Grove since?” said Drummle.

“No,” said I, “I had quite enough of the Finches the last time I was
there.”

“Was that when we had a difference of opinion?”

“Yes,” I replied, very shortly.

“Come, come! They let you off easily enough,” sneered Drummle. “You
shouldn't have lost your temper.”

“Mr. Drummle,” said I, “you are not competent to give advice on that
subject. When I lose my temper (not that I admit having done so on that
occasion), I don't throw glasses.”

“I do,” said Drummle.

After glancing at him once or twice, in an increased state of
smouldering ferocity, I said,--

“Mr. Drummle, I did not seek this conversation, and I don't think it an
agreeable one.”

“I am sure it's not,” said he, superciliously over his shoulder; “I
don't think anything about it.”

“And therefore,” I went on, “with your leave, I will suggest that we
hold no kind of communication in future.”

“Quite my opinion,” said Drummle, “and what I should have suggested
myself, or done--more likely--without suggesting. But don't lose your
temper. Haven't you lost enough without that?”

“What do you mean, sir?”

“Waiter!” said Drummle, by way of answering me.

The waiter reappeared.

“Look here, you sir. You quite understand that the young lady don't ride
to-day, and that I dine at the young lady's?”

“Quite so, sir!”

When the waiter had felt my fast-cooling teapot with the palm of his
hand, and had looked imploringly at me, and had gone out, Drummle,
careful not to move the shoulder next me, took a cigar from his pocket
and bit the end off, but showed no sign of stirring. Choking and
boiling as I was, I felt that we could not go a word further, without
introducing Estella's name, which I could not endure to hear him utter;
and therefore I looked stonily at the opposite wall, as if there were
no one present, and forced myself to silence. How long we might have
remained in this ridiculous position it is impossible to say, but
for the incursion of three thriving farmers--laid on by the waiter, I
think--who came into the coffee-room unbuttoning their great-coats and
rubbing their hands, and before whom, as they charged at the fire, we
were obliged to give way.

I saw him through the window, seizing his horse's mane, and mounting in
his blundering brutal manner, and sidling and backing away. I thought
he was gone, when he came back, calling for a light for the cigar in his
mouth, which he had forgotten. A man in a dust-colored dress appeared
with what was wanted,--I could not have said from where: whether from
the inn yard, or the street, or where not,--and as Drummle leaned down
from the saddle and lighted his cigar and laughed, with a jerk of his
head towards the coffee-room windows, the slouching shoulders and ragged
hair of this man whose back was towards me reminded me of Orlick.

Too heavily out of sorts to care much at the time whether it were he or
no, or after all to touch the breakfast, I washed the weather and the
journey from my face and hands, and went out to the memorable old house
that it would have been so much the better for me never to have entered,
never to have seen.




Chapter XLIV

In the room where the dressing-table stood, and where the wax-candles
burnt on the wall, I found Miss Havisham and Estella; Miss Havisham
seated on a settee near the fire, and Estella on a cushion at her feet.
Estella was knitting, and Miss Havisham was looking on. They both raised
their eyes as I went in, and both saw an alteration in me. I derived
that, from the look they interchanged.

“And what wind,” said Miss Havisham, “blows you here, Pip?”

Though she looked steadily at me, I saw that she was rather confused.
Estella, pausing a moment in her knitting with her eyes upon me, and
then going on, I fancied that I read in the action of her fingers, as
plainly as if she had told me in the dumb alphabet, that she perceived I
had discovered my real benefactor.

“Miss Havisham,” said I, “I went to Richmond yesterday, to speak to
Estella; and finding that some wind had blown her here, I followed.”

Miss Havisham motioning to me for the third or fourth time to sit down,
I took the chair by the dressing-table, which I had often seen her
occupy. With all that ruin at my feet and about me, it seemed a natural
place for me, that day.

“What I had to say to Estella, Miss Havisham, I will say before you,
presently--in a few moments. It will not surprise you, it will not
displease you. I am as unhappy as you can ever have meant me to be.”

Miss Havisham continued to look steadily at me. I could see in the
action of Estella's fingers as they worked that she attended to what I
said; but she did not look up.

“I have found out who my patron is. It is not a fortunate discovery,
and is not likely ever to enrich me in reputation, station, fortune,
anything. There are reasons why I must say no more of that. It is not my
secret, but another's.”

As I was silent for a while, looking at Estella and considering how to
go on, Miss Havisham repeated, “It is not your secret, but another's.
Well?”

“When you first caused me to be brought here, Miss Havisham, when I
belonged to the village over yonder, that I wish I had never left,
I suppose I did really come here, as any other chance boy might have
come,--as a kind of servant, to gratify a want or a whim, and to be paid
for it?”

“Ay, Pip,” replied Miss Havisham, steadily nodding her head; “you did.”

“And that Mr. Jaggers--”

“Mr. Jaggers,” said Miss Havisham, taking me up in a firm tone, “had
nothing to do with it, and knew nothing of it. His being my lawyer, and
his being the lawyer of your patron is a coincidence. He holds the same
relation towards numbers of people, and it might easily arise. Be that
as it may, it did arise, and was not brought about by any one.”

Any one might have seen in her haggard face that there was no
suppression or evasion so far.

“But when I fell into the mistake I have so long remained in, at least
you led me on?” said I.

“Yes,” she returned, again nodding steadily, “I let you go on.”

“Was that kind?”

“Who am I,” cried Miss Havisham, striking her stick upon the floor
and flashing into wrath so suddenly that Estella glanced up at her in
surprise,--“who am I, for God's sake, that I should be kind?”

It was a weak complaint to have made, and I had not meant to make it. I
told her so, as she sat brooding after this outburst.

“Well, well, well!” she said. “What else?”

“I was liberally paid for my old attendance here,” I said, to soothe
her, “in being apprenticed, and I have asked these questions only for
my own information. What follows has another (and I hope more
disinterested) purpose. In humoring my mistake, Miss Havisham, you
punished--practised on--perhaps you will supply whatever term expresses
your intention, without offence--your self-seeking relations?”

“I did. Why, they would have it so! So would you. What has been my
history, that I should be at the pains of entreating either them or you
not to have it so! You made your own snares. I never made them.”

Waiting until she was quiet again,--for this, too, flashed out of her in
a wild and sudden way,--I went on.

“I have been thrown among one family of your relations, Miss Havisham,
and have been constantly among them since I went to London. I know them
to have been as honestly under my delusion as I myself. And I should be
false and base if I did not tell you, whether it is acceptable to you or
no, and whether you are inclined to give credence to it or no, that you
deeply wrong both Mr. Matthew Pocket and his son Herbert, if you suppose
them to be otherwise than generous, upright, open, and incapable of
anything designing or mean.”

“They are your friends,” said Miss Havisham.

“They made themselves my friends,” said I, “when they supposed me
to have superseded them; and when Sarah Pocket, Miss Georgiana, and
Mistress Camilla were not my friends, I think.”

This contrasting of them with the rest seemed, I was glad to see, to do
them good with her. She looked at me keenly for a little while, and then
said quietly,--

“What do you want for them?”

“Only,” said I, “that you would not confound them with the others. They
may be of the same blood, but, believe me, they are not of the same
nature.”

Still looking at me keenly, Miss Havisham repeated,--

“What do you want for them?”

“I am not so cunning, you see,” I said, in answer, conscious that I
reddened a little, “as that I could hide from you, even if I desired,
that I do want something. Miss Havisham, if you would spare the money
to do my friend Herbert a lasting service in life, but which from the
nature of the case must be done without his knowledge, I could show you
how.”

“Why must it be done without his knowledge?” she asked, settling her
hands upon her stick, that she might regard me the more attentively.

“Because,” said I, “I began the service myself, more than two years ago,
without his knowledge, and I don't want to be betrayed. Why I fail in my
ability to finish it, I cannot explain. It is a part of the secret which
is another person's and not mine.”

She gradually withdrew her eyes from me, and turned them on the fire.
After watching it for what appeared in the silence and by the light
of the slowly wasting candles to be a long time, she was roused by
the collapse of some of the red coals, and looked towards me again--at
first, vacantly--then, with a gradually concentrating attention. All
this time Estella knitted on. When Miss Havisham had fixed her
attention on me, she said, speaking as if there had been no lapse in our
dialogue,--

“What else?”

“Estella,” said I, turning to her now, and trying to command my
trembling voice, “you know I love you. You know that I have loved you
long and dearly.”

She raised her eyes to my face, on being thus addressed, and her fingers
plied their work, and she looked at me with an unmoved countenance. I
saw that Miss Havisham glanced from me to her, and from her to me.

“I should have said this sooner, but for my long mistake. It induced me
to hope that Miss Havisham meant us for one another. While I thought you
could not help yourself, as it were, I refrained from saying it. But I
must say it now.”

Preserving her unmoved countenance, and with her fingers still going,
Estella shook her head.

“I know,” said I, in answer to that action,--“I know. I have no hope
that I shall ever call you mine, Estella. I am ignorant what may become
of me very soon, how poor I may be, or where I may go. Still, I love
you. I have loved you ever since I first saw you in this house.”

Looking at me perfectly unmoved and with her fingers busy, she shook her
head again.

“It would have been cruel in Miss Havisham, horribly cruel, to practise
on the susceptibility of a poor boy, and to torture me through all these
years with a vain hope and an idle pursuit, if she had reflected on the
gravity of what she did. But I think she did not. I think that, in the
endurance of her own trial, she forgot mine, Estella.”

I saw Miss Havisham put her hand to her heart and hold it there, as she
sat looking by turns at Estella and at me.

“It seems,” said Estella, very calmly, “that there are sentiments,
fancies,--I don't know how to call them,--which I am not able to
comprehend. When you say you love me, I know what you mean, as a form
of words; but nothing more. You address nothing in my breast, you touch
nothing there. I don't care for what you say at all. I have tried to
warn you of this; now, have I not?”

I said in a miserable manner, “Yes.”

“Yes. But you would not be warned, for you thought I did not mean it.
Now, did you not think so?”

“I thought and hoped you could not mean it. You, so young, untried, and
beautiful, Estella! Surely it is not in Nature.”

“It is in my nature,” she returned. And then she added, with a stress
upon the words, “It is in the nature formed within me. I make a great
difference between you and all other people when I say so much. I can do
no more.”

“Is it not true,” said I, “that Bentley Drummle is in town here, and
pursuing you?”

“It is quite true,” she replied, referring to him with the indifference
of utter contempt.

“That you encourage him, and ride out with him, and that he dines with
you this very day?”

She seemed a little surprised that I should know it, but again replied,
“Quite true.”

“You cannot love him, Estella!”

Her fingers stopped for the first time, as she retorted rather angrily,
“What have I told you? Do you still think, in spite of it, that I do not
mean what I say?”

“You would never marry him, Estella?”

She looked towards Miss Havisham, and considered for a moment with her
work in her hands. Then she said, “Why not tell you the truth? I am
going to be married to him.”

I dropped my face into my hands, but was able to control myself better
than I could have expected, considering what agony it gave me to hear
her say those words. When I raised my face again, there was such a
ghastly look upon Miss Havisham's, that it impressed me, even in my
passionate hurry and grief.

“Estella, dearest Estella, do not let Miss Havisham lead you into this
fatal step. Put me aside for ever,--you have done so, I well know,--but
bestow yourself on some worthier person than Drummle. Miss Havisham
gives you to him, as the greatest slight and injury that could be done
to the many far better men who admire you, and to the few who truly
love you. Among those few there may be one who loves you even as dearly,
though he has not loved you as long, as I. Take him, and I can bear it
better, for your sake!”

My earnestness awoke a wonder in her that seemed as if it would have
been touched with compassion, if she could have rendered me at all
intelligible to her own mind.

“I am going,” she said again, in a gentler voice, “to be married to
him. The preparations for my marriage are making, and I shall be
married soon. Why do you injuriously introduce the name of my mother by
adoption? It is my own act.”

“Your own act, Estella, to fling yourself away upon a brute?”

“On whom should I fling myself away?” she retorted, with a smile.
“Should I fling myself away upon the man who would the soonest feel (if
people do feel such things) that I took nothing to him? There! It is
done. I shall do well enough, and so will my husband. As to leading
me into what you call this fatal step, Miss Havisham would have had me
wait, and not marry yet; but I am tired of the life I have led, which
has very few charms for me, and I am willing enough to change it. Say no
more. We shall never understand each other.”

“Such a mean brute, such a stupid brute!” I urged, in despair.

“Don't be afraid of my being a blessing to him,” said Estella; “I shall
not be that. Come! Here is my hand. Do we part on this, you visionary
boy--or man?”

“O Estella!” I answered, as my bitter tears fell fast on her hand, do
what I would to restrain them; “even if I remained in England and could
hold my head up with the rest, how could I see you Drummle's wife?”

“Nonsense,” she returned,--“nonsense. This will pass in no time.”

“Never, Estella!”

“You will get me out of your thoughts in a week.”

“Out of my thoughts! You are part of my existence, part of myself. You
have been in every line I have ever read since I first came here, the
rough common boy whose poor heart you wounded even then. You have been
in every prospect I have ever seen since,--on the river, on the sails of
the ships, on the marshes, in the clouds, in the light, in the darkness,
in the wind, in the woods, in the sea, in the streets. You have been
the embodiment of every graceful fancy that my mind has ever become
acquainted with. The stones of which the strongest London buildings
are made are not more real, or more impossible to be displaced by your
hands, than your presence and influence have been to me, there and
everywhere, and will be. Estella, to the last hour of my life, you
cannot choose but remain part of my character, part of the little good
in me, part of the evil. But, in this separation, I associate you only
with the good; and I will faithfully hold you to that always, for you
must have done me far more good than harm, let me feel now what sharp
distress I may. O God bless you, God forgive you!”

In what ecstasy of unhappiness I got these broken words out of myself, I
don't know. The rhapsody welled up within me, like blood from an
inward wound, and gushed out. I held her hand to my lips some lingering
moments, and so I left her. But ever afterwards, I remembered,--and soon
afterwards with stronger reason,--that while Estella looked at me merely
with incredulous wonder, the spectral figure of Miss Havisham, her hand
still covering her heart, seemed all resolved into a ghastly stare of
pity and remorse.

All done, all gone! So much was done and gone, that when I went out at
the gate, the light of the day seemed of a darker color than when I went
in. For a while, I hid myself among some lanes and by-paths, and then
struck off to walk all the way to London. For, I had by that time come
to myself so far as to consider that I could not go back to the inn and
see Drummle there; that I could not bear to sit upon the coach and
be spoken to; that I could do nothing half so good for myself as tire
myself out.

It was past midnight when I crossed London Bridge. Pursuing the narrow
intricacies of the streets which at that time tended westward near the
Middlesex shore of the river, my readiest access to the Temple was
close by the river-side, through Whitefriars. I was not expected till
to-morrow; but I had my keys, and, if Herbert were gone to bed, could
get to bed myself without disturbing him.

As it seldom happened that I came in at that Whitefriars gate after the
Temple was closed, and as I was very muddy and weary, I did not take it
ill that the night-porter examined me with much attention as he held the
gate a little way open for me to pass in. To help his memory I mentioned
my name.

“I was not quite sure, sir, but I thought so. Here's a note, sir. The
messenger that brought it, said would you be so good as read it by my
lantern?”

Much surprised by the request, I took the note. It was directed to
Philip Pip, Esquire, and on the top of the superscription were the
words, “PLEASE READ THIS, HERE.” I opened it, the watchman holding up
his light, and read inside, in Wemmick's writing,--

“DON'T GO HOME.”




Chapter XLV

Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I made
the best of my way to Fleet Street, and there got a late hackney chariot
and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times a bed was
always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain,
letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on
his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order on his
list. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a
despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in it, straddling over the
whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace
and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little
washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.

As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in,
before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those
virtuous days--an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which
instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever be
lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the bottom
of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly
wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed, and lay there
footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no more close my own
eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And thus, in the
gloom and death of the night, we stared at one another.

What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an
inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I
looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what
a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers', and earwigs from the
market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying
by for next summer. This led me to speculate whether any of them ever
tumbled down, and then I fancied that I felt light falls on my face,--a
disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable
approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a little while, those
extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves
audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little
washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the
chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired
a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw
written, DON'T GO HOME.

Whatever night-fancies and night-noises crowded on me, they never warded
off this DON'T GO HOME. It plaited itself into whatever I thought of,
as a bodily pain would have done. Not long before, I had read in the
newspapers, how a gentleman unknown had come to the Hummums in the
night, and had gone to bed, and had destroyed himself, and had been
found in the morning weltering in blood. It came into my head that he
must have occupied this very vault of mine, and I got out of bed to
assure myself that there were no red marks about; then opened the door
to look out into the passages, and cheer myself with the companionship
of a distant light, near which I knew the chamberlain to be dozing. But
all this time, why I was not to go home, and what had happened at home,
and when I should go home, and whether Provis was safe at home, were
questions occupying my mind so busily, that one might have supposed
there could be no more room in it for any other theme. Even when I
thought of Estella, and how we had parted that day forever, and when
I recalled all the circumstances of our parting, and all her looks and
tones, and the action of her fingers while she knitted,--even then I
was pursuing, here and there and everywhere, the caution, Don't go home.
When at last I dozed, in sheer exhaustion of mind and body, it became
a vast shadowy verb which I had to conjugate. Imperative mood, present
tense: Do not thou go home, let him not go home, let us not go home, do
not ye or you go home, let not them go home. Then potentially: I may not
and I cannot go home; and I might not, could not, would not, and should
not go home; until I felt that I was going distracted, and rolled over
on the pillow, and looked at the staring rounds upon the wall again.

I had left directions that I was to be called at seven; for it was plain
that I must see Wemmick before seeing any one else, and equally plain
that this was a case in which his Walworth sentiments only could be
taken. It was a relief to get out of the room where the night had been
so miserable, and I needed no second knocking at the door to startle me
from my uneasy bed.

The Castle battlements arose upon my view at eight o'clock. The little
servant happening to be entering the fortress with two hot rolls, I
passed through the postern and crossed the drawbridge in her company,
and so came without announcement into the presence of Wemmick as he was
making tea for himself and the Aged. An open door afforded a perspective
view of the Aged in bed.

“Halloa, Mr. Pip!” said Wemmick. “You did come home, then?”

“Yes,” I returned; “but I didn't go home.”

“That's all right,” said he, rubbing his hands. “I left a note for you
at each of the Temple gates, on the chance. Which gate did you come to?”

I told him.

“I'll go round to the others in the course of the day and destroy the
notes,” said Wemmick; “it's a good rule never to leave documentary
evidence if you can help it, because you don't know when it may be put
in. I'm going to take a liberty with you. Would you mind toasting this
sausage for the Aged P.?”

I said I should be delighted to do it.

“Then you can go about your work, Mary Anne,” said Wemmick to the little
servant; “which leaves us to ourselves, don't you see, Mr. Pip?” he
added, winking, as she disappeared.

I thanked him for his friendship and caution, and our discourse
proceeded in a low tone, while I toasted the Aged's sausage and he
buttered the crumb of the Aged's roll.

“Now, Mr. Pip, you know,” said Wemmick, “you and I understand one
another. We are in our private and personal capacities, and we have been
engaged in a confidential transaction before to-day. Official sentiments
are one thing. We are extra official.”

I cordially assented. I was so very nervous, that I had already lighted
the Aged's sausage like a torch, and been obliged to blow it out.

“I accidentally heard, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “being in a
certain place where I once took you,--even between you and me, it's as
well not to mention names when avoidable--”

“Much better not,” said I. “I understand you.”

“I heard there by chance, yesterday morning,” said Wemmick, “that
a certain person not altogether of uncolonial pursuits, and not
unpossessed of portable property,--I don't know who it may really
be,--we won't name this person--”

“Not necessary,” said I.

“--Had made some little stir in a certain part of the world where a good
many people go, not always in gratification of their own inclinations,
and not quite irrespective of the government expense--”

In watching his face, I made quite a firework of the Aged's sausage,
and greatly discomposed both my own attention and Wemmick's; for which I
apologized.

“--By disappearing from such place, and being no more heard of
thereabouts. From which,” said Wemmick, “conjectures had been raised and
theories formed. I also heard that you at your chambers in Garden Court,
Temple, had been watched, and might be watched again.”

“By whom?” said I.

“I wouldn't go into that,” said Wemmick, evasively, “it might clash with
official responsibilities. I heard it, as I have in my time heard other
curious things in the same place. I don't tell it you on information
received. I heard it.”

He took the toasting-fork and sausage from me as he spoke, and set forth
the Aged's breakfast neatly on a little tray. Previous to placing it
before him, he went into the Aged's room with a clean white cloth, and
tied the same under the old gentleman's chin, and propped him up, and
put his nightcap on one side, and gave him quite a rakish air. Then he
placed his breakfast before him with great care, and said, “All right,
ain't you, Aged P.?” To which the cheerful Aged replied, “All right,
John, my boy, all right!” As there seemed to be a tacit understanding
that the Aged was not in a presentable state, and was therefore to be
considered invisible, I made a pretence of being in complete ignorance
of these proceedings.

“This watching of me at my chambers (which I have once had reason to
suspect),” I said to Wemmick when he came back, “is inseparable from the
person to whom you have adverted; is it?”

Wemmick looked very serious. “I couldn't undertake to say that, of my
own knowledge. I mean, I couldn't undertake to say it was at first. But
it either is, or it will be, or it's in great danger of being.”

As I saw that he was restrained by fealty to Little Britain from saying
as much as he could, and as I knew with thankfulness to him how far out
of his way he went to say what he did, I could not press him. But I told
him, after a little meditation over the fire, that I would like to ask
him a question, subject to his answering or not answering, as he
deemed right, and sure that his course would be right. He paused in his
breakfast, and crossing his arms, and pinching his shirt-sleeves (his
notion of in-door comfort was to sit without any coat), he nodded to me
once, to put my question.

“You have heard of a man of bad character, whose true name is
Compeyson?”

He answered with one other nod.

“Is he living?”

One other nod.

“Is he in London?”

He gave me one other nod, compressed the post-office exceedingly, gave
me one last nod, and went on with his breakfast.

“Now,” said Wemmick, “questioning being over,” which he emphasized and
repeated for my guidance, “I come to what I did, after hearing what I
heard. I went to Garden Court to find you; not finding you, I went to
Clarriker's to find Mr. Herbert.”

“And him you found?” said I, with great anxiety.

“And him I found. Without mentioning any names or going into any
details, I gave him to understand that if he was aware of anybody--Tom,
Jack, or Richard--being about the chambers, or about the immediate
neighborhood, he had better get Tom, Jack, or Richard out of the way
while you were out of the way.”

“He would be greatly puzzled what to do?”

“He was puzzled what to do; not the less, because I gave him my opinion
that it was not safe to try to get Tom, Jack, or Richard too far out
of the way at present. Mr. Pip, I'll tell you something. Under existing
circumstances, there is no place like a great city when you are once
in it. Don't break cover too soon. Lie close. Wait till things slacken,
before you try the open, even for foreign air.”

I thanked him for his valuable advice, and asked him what Herbert had
done?

“Mr. Herbert,” said Wemmick, “after being all of a heap for half an
hour, struck out a plan. He mentioned to me as a secret, that he is
courting a young lady who has, as no doubt you are aware, a bedridden
Pa. Which Pa, having been in the Purser line of life, lies a-bed in a
bow-window where he can see the ships sail up and down the river. You
are acquainted with the young lady, most probably?”

“Not personally,” said I.

The truth was, that she had objected to me as an expensive companion
who did Herbert no good, and that, when Herbert had first proposed to
present me to her, she had received the proposal with such very moderate
warmth, that Herbert had felt himself obliged to confide the state of
the case to me, with a view to the lapse of a little time before I made
her acquaintance. When I had begun to advance Herbert's prospects by
stealth, I had been able to bear this with cheerful philosophy: he and
his affianced, for their part, had naturally not been very anxious to
introduce a third person into their interviews; and thus, although I was
assured that I had risen in Clara's esteem, and although the young
lady and I had long regularly interchanged messages and remembrances by
Herbert, I had never seen her. However, I did not trouble Wemmick with
these particulars.

“The house with the bow-window,” said Wemmick, “being by the river-side,
down the Pool there between Limehouse and Greenwich, and being kept, it
seems, by a very respectable widow who has a furnished upper floor to
let, Mr. Herbert put it to me, what did I think of that as a temporary
tenement for Tom, Jack, or Richard? Now, I thought very well of it, for
three reasons I'll give you. That is to say: Firstly. It's altogether
out of all your beats, and is well away from the usual heap of streets
great and small. Secondly. Without going near it yourself, you could
always hear of the safety of Tom, Jack, or Richard, through Mr. Herbert.
Thirdly. After a while and when it might be prudent, if you should want
to slip Tom, Jack, or Richard on board a foreign packet-boat, there he
is--ready.”

Much comforted by these considerations, I thanked Wemmick again and
again, and begged him to proceed.

“Well, sir! Mr. Herbert threw himself into the business with a will, and
by nine o'clock last night he housed Tom, Jack, or Richard,--whichever
it may be,--you and I don't want to know,--quite successfully. At the
old lodgings it was understood that he was summoned to Dover, and, in
fact, he was taken down the Dover road and cornered out of it. Now,
another great advantage of all this is, that it was done without you,
and when, if any one was concerning himself about your movements, you
must be known to be ever so many miles off and quite otherwise engaged.
This diverts suspicion and confuses it; and for the same reason I
recommended that, even if you came back last night, you should not go
home. It brings in more confusion, and you want confusion.”

Wemmick, having finished his breakfast, here looked at his watch, and
began to get his coat on.

“And now, Mr. Pip,” said he, with his hands still in the sleeves, “I
have probably done the most I can do; but if I can ever do more,--from
a Walworth point of view, and in a strictly private and personal
capacity,--I shall be glad to do it. Here's the address. There can be
no harm in your going here to-night, and seeing for yourself that all is
well with Tom, Jack, or Richard, before you go home,--which is another
reason for your not going home last night. But, after you have gone
home, don't go back here. You are very welcome, I am sure, Mr. Pip”; his
hands were now out of his sleeves, and I was shaking them; “and let me
finally impress one important point upon you.” He laid his hands upon
my shoulders, and added in a solemn whisper: “Avail yourself of this
evening to lay hold of his portable property. You don't know what may
happen to him. Don't let anything happen to the portable property.”

Quite despairing of making my mind clear to Wemmick on this point, I
forbore to try.

“Time's up,” said Wemmick, “and I must be off. If you had nothing more
pressing to do than to keep here till dark, that's what I should advise.
You look very much worried, and it would do you good to have a perfectly
quiet day with the Aged,--he'll be up presently,--and a little bit
of--you remember the pig?”

“Of course,” said I.

“Well; and a little bit of him. That sausage you toasted was his, and
he was in all respects a first-rater. Do try him, if it is only for old
acquaintance sake. Good-bye, Aged Parent!” in a cheery shout.

“All right, John; all right, my boy!” piped the old man from within.

I soon fell asleep before Wemmick's fire, and the Aged and I enjoyed one
another's society by falling asleep before it more or less all day.
We had loin of pork for dinner, and greens grown on the estate; and
I nodded at the Aged with a good intention whenever I failed to do it
drowsily. When it was quite dark, I left the Aged preparing the fire for
toast; and I inferred from the number of teacups, as well as from his
glances at the two little doors in the wall, that Miss Skiffins was
expected.




Chapter XLVI

Eight o'clock had struck before I got into the air, that was scented,
not disagreeably, by the chips and shavings of the long-shore
boat-builders, and mast, oar, and block makers. All that water-side
region of the upper and lower Pool below Bridge was unknown ground to
me; and when I struck down by the river, I found that the spot I wanted
was not where I had supposed it to be, and was anything but easy to
find. It was called Mill Pond Bank, Chinks's Basin; and I had no other
guide to Chinks's Basin than the Old Green Copper Rope-walk.

It matters not what stranded ships repairing in dry docks I lost myself
among, what old hulls of ships in course of being knocked to pieces,
what ooze and slime and other dregs of tide, what yards of ship-builders
and ship-breakers, what rusty anchors blindly biting into the ground,
though for years off duty, what mountainous country of accumulated casks
and timber, how many rope-walks that were not the Old Green Copper. After
several times falling short of my destination and as often overshooting
it, I came unexpectedly round a corner, upon Mill Pond Bank. It was a
fresh kind of place, all circumstances considered, where the wind from
the river had room to turn itself round; and there were two or three
trees in it, and there was the stump of a ruined windmill, and there
was the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,--whose long and narrow vista I could
trace in the moonlight, along a series of wooden frames set in the
ground, that looked like superannuated haymaking-rakes which had grown
old and lost most of their teeth.

Selecting from the few queer houses upon Mill Pond Bank a house with a
wooden front and three stories of bow-window (not bay-window, which is
another thing), I looked at the plate upon the door, and read there,
Mrs. Whimple. That being the name I wanted, I knocked, and an elderly
woman of a pleasant and thriving appearance responded. She was
immediately deposed, however, by Herbert, who silently led me into
the parlor and shut the door. It was an odd sensation to see his very
familiar face established quite at home in that very unfamiliar room
and region; and I found myself looking at him, much as I looked at
the corner-cupboard with the glass and china, the shells upon the
chimney-piece, and the colored engravings on the wall, representing the
death of Captain Cook, a ship-launch, and his Majesty King George the
Third in a state coachman's wig, leather-breeches, and top-boots, on the
terrace at Windsor.

“All is well, Handel,” said Herbert, “and he is quite satisfied, though
eager to see you. My dear girl is with her father; and if you'll wait
till she comes down, I'll make you known to her, and then we'll go upstairs.
That's her father.”

I had become aware of an alarming growling overhead, and had probably
expressed the fact in my countenance.

“I am afraid he is a sad old rascal,” said Herbert, smiling, “but I have
never seen him. Don't you smell rum? He is always at it.”

“At rum?” said I.

“Yes,” returned Herbert, “and you may suppose how mild it makes his
gout. He persists, too, in keeping all the provisions upstairs in his
room, and serving them out. He keeps them on shelves over his head, and
will weigh them all. His room must be like a chandler's shop.”

While he thus spoke, the growling noise became a prolonged roar, and
then died away.

“What else can be the consequence,” said Herbert, in explanation, “if
he will cut the cheese? A man with the gout in his right hand--and
everywhere else--can't expect to get through a Double Gloucester without
hurting himself.”

He seemed to have hurt himself very much, for he gave another furious
roar.

“To have Provis for an upper lodger is quite a godsend to Mrs. Whimple,”
 said Herbert, “for of course people in general won't stand that noise. A
curious place, Handel; isn't it?”

It was a curious place, indeed; but remarkably well kept and clean.

“Mrs. Whimple,” said Herbert, when I told him so, “is the best of
housewives, and I really do not know what my Clara would do without
her motherly help. For, Clara has no mother of her own, Handel, and no
relation in the world but old Gruffandgrim.”

“Surely that's not his name, Herbert?”

“No, no,” said Herbert, “that's my name for him. His name is Mr. Barley.
But what a blessing it is for the son of my father and mother to love a
girl who has no relations, and who can never bother herself or anybody
else about her family!”

Herbert had told me on former occasions, and now reminded me, that he
first knew Miss Clara Barley when she was completing her education at
an establishment at Hammersmith, and that on her being recalled home
to nurse her father, he and she had confided their affection to the
motherly Mrs. Whimple, by whom it had been fostered and regulated
with equal kindness and discretion, ever since. It was understood that
nothing of a tender nature could possibly be confided to old Barley, by
reason of his being totally unequal to the consideration of any subject
more psychological than Gout, Rum, and Purser's stores.

As we were thus conversing in a low tone while Old Barley's sustained
growl vibrated in the beam that crossed the ceiling, the room door
opened, and a very pretty, slight, dark-eyed girl of twenty or so came
in with a basket in her hand: whom Herbert tenderly relieved of the
basket, and presented, blushing, as “Clara.” She really was a most
charming girl, and might have passed for a captive fairy, whom that
truculent Ogre, Old Barley, had pressed into his service.

“Look here,” said Herbert, showing me the basket, with a compassionate
and tender smile, after we had talked a little; “here's poor Clara's
supper, served out every night. Here's her allowance of bread, and
here's her slice of cheese, and here's her rum,--which I drink. This
is Mr. Barley's breakfast for to-morrow, served out to be cooked. Two
mutton-chops, three potatoes, some split peas, a little flour, two
ounces of butter, a pinch of salt, and all this black pepper. It's
stewed up together, and taken hot, and it's a nice thing for the gout, I
should think!”

There was something so natural and winning in Clara's resigned way of
looking at these stores in detail, as Herbert pointed them out; and
something so confiding, loving, and innocent in her modest manner of
yielding herself to Herbert's embracing arm; and something so gentle in
her, so much needing protection on Mill Pond Bank, by Chinks's Basin,
and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk, with Old Barley growling in the
beam,--that I would not have undone the engagement between her and
Herbert for all the money in the pocket-book I had never opened.

I was looking at her with pleasure and admiration, when suddenly the
growl swelled into a roar again, and a frightful bumping noise was heard
above, as if a giant with a wooden leg were trying to bore it through
the ceiling to come at us. Upon this Clara said to Herbert, “Papa wants
me, darling!” and ran away.

“There is an unconscionable old shark for you!” said Herbert. “What do
you suppose he wants now, Handel?”

“I don't know,” said I. “Something to drink?”

“That's it!” cried Herbert, as if I had made a guess of extraordinary
merit. “He keeps his grog ready mixed in a little tub on the table.
Wait a moment, and you'll hear Clara lift him up to take some. There
he goes!” Another roar, with a prolonged shake at the end. “Now,” said
Herbert, as it was succeeded by silence, “he's drinking. Now,” said
Herbert, as the growl resounded in the beam once more, “he's down again
on his back!”

Clara returned soon afterwards, and Herbert accompanied me upstairs to
see our charge. As we passed Mr. Barley's door, he was heard hoarsely
muttering within, in a strain that rose and fell like wind, the
following Refrain, in which I substitute good wishes for something quite
the reverse:--

“Ahoy! Bless your eyes, here's old Bill Barley. Here's old Bill Barley,
bless your eyes. Here's old Bill Barley on the flat of his back, by the
Lord. Lying on the flat of his back like a drifting old dead flounder,
here's your old Bill Barley, bless your eyes. Ahoy! Bless you.”

In this strain of consolation, Herbert informed me the invisible Barley
would commune with himself by the day and night together; Often, while
it was light, having, at the same time, one eye at a telescope which was
fitted on his bed for the convenience of sweeping the river.

In his two cabin rooms at the top of the house, which were fresh and
airy, and in which Mr. Barley was less audible than below, I found
Provis comfortably settled. He expressed no alarm, and seemed to
feel none that was worth mentioning; but it struck me that he was
softened,--indefinably, for I could not have said how, and could never
afterwards recall how when I tried, but certainly.

The opportunity that the day's rest had given me for reflection had
resulted in my fully determining to say nothing to him respecting
Compeyson. For anything I knew, his animosity towards the man
might otherwise lead to his seeking him out and rushing on his own
destruction. Therefore, when Herbert and I sat down with him by his
fire, I asked him first of all whether he relied on Wemmick's judgment
and sources of information?

“Ay, ay, dear boy!” he answered, with a grave nod, “Jaggers knows.”

“Then, I have talked with Wemmick,” said I, “and have come to tell you
what caution he gave me and what advice.”

This I did accurately, with the reservation just mentioned; and I told
him how Wemmick had heard, in Newgate prison (whether from officers or
prisoners I could not say), that he was under some suspicion, and that
my chambers had been watched; how Wemmick had recommended his keeping
close for a time, and my keeping away from him; and what Wemmick had
said about getting him abroad. I added, that of course, when the time
came, I should go with him, or should follow close upon him, as might
be safest in Wemmick's judgment. What was to follow that I did not touch
upon; neither, indeed, was I at all clear or comfortable about it in my
own mind, now that I saw him in that softer condition, and in declared
peril for my sake. As to altering my way of living by enlarging my
expenses, I put it to him whether in our present unsettled and difficult
circumstances, it would not be simply ridiculous, if it were no worse?

He could not deny this, and indeed was very reasonable throughout. His
coming back was a venture, he said, and he had always known it to be a
venture. He would do nothing to make it a desperate venture, and he had
very little fear of his safety with such good help.

Herbert, who had been looking at the fire and pondering, here said
that something had come into his thoughts arising out of Wemmick's
suggestion, which it might be worth while to pursue. “We are both good
watermen, Handel, and could take him down the river ourselves when the
right time comes. No boat would then be hired for the purpose, and no
boatmen; that would save at least a chance of suspicion, and any chance
is worth saving. Never mind the season; don't you think it might be a
good thing if you began at once to keep a boat at the Temple stairs, and
were in the habit of rowing up and down the river? You fall into that
habit, and then who notices or minds? Do it twenty or fifty times,
and there is nothing special in your doing it the twenty-first or
fifty-first.”

I liked this scheme, and Provis was quite elated by it. We agreed
that it should be carried into execution, and that Provis should never
recognize us if we came below Bridge, and rowed past Mill Pond Bank. But
we further agreed that he should pull down the blind in that part of his
window which gave upon the east, whenever he saw us and all was right.

Our conference being now ended, and everything arranged, I rose to go;
remarking to Herbert that he and I had better not go home together, and
that I would take half an hour's start of him. “I don't like to leave
you here,” I said to Provis, “though I cannot doubt your being safer
here than near me. Good-bye!”

“Dear boy,” he answered, clasping my hands, “I don't know when we may
meet again, and I don't like good-bye. Say good night!”

“Good night! Herbert will go regularly between us, and when the time
comes you may be certain I shall be ready. Good night, good night!”

We thought it best that he should stay in his own rooms; and we left him
on the landing outside his door, holding a light over the stair-rail to
light us downstairs. Looking back at him, I thought of the first night
of his return, when our positions were reversed, and when I little
supposed my heart could ever be as heavy and anxious at parting from him
as it was now.

Old Barley was growling and swearing when we repassed his door, with no
appearance of having ceased or of meaning to cease. When we got to the
foot of the stairs, I asked Herbert whether he had preserved the name of
Provis. He replied, certainly not, and that the lodger was Mr. Campbell.
He also explained that the utmost known of Mr. Campbell there was,
that he (Herbert) had Mr. Campbell consigned to him, and felt a strong
personal interest in his being well cared for, and living a secluded
life. So, when we went into the parlor where Mrs. Whimple and Clara were
seated at work, I said nothing of my own interest in Mr. Campbell, but
kept it to myself.

When I had taken leave of the pretty, gentle, dark-eyed girl, and of the
motherly woman who had not outlived her honest sympathy with a little
affair of true love, I felt as if the Old Green Copper Rope-walk had
grown quite a different place. Old Barley might be as old as the hills,
and might swear like a whole field of troopers, but there were redeeming
youth and trust and hope enough in Chinks's Basin to fill it to
overflowing. And then I thought of Estella, and of our parting, and went
home very sadly.

All things were as quiet in the Temple as ever I had seen them. The
windows of the rooms on that side, lately occupied by Provis, were dark
and still, and there was no lounger in Garden Court. I walked past the
fountain twice or thrice before I descended the steps that were between
me and my rooms, but I was quite alone. Herbert, coming to my
bedside when he came in,--for I went straight to bed, dispirited and
fatigued,--made the same report. Opening one of the windows after that,
he looked out into the moonlight, and told me that the pavement was as
solemnly empty as the pavement of any cathedral at that same hour.

Next day I set myself to get the boat. It was soon done, and the boat
was brought round to the Temple stairs, and lay where I could reach
her within a minute or two. Then, I began to go out as for training and
practice: sometimes alone, sometimes with Herbert. I was often out in
cold, rain, and sleet, but nobody took much note of me after I had been
out a few times. At first, I kept above Blackfriars Bridge; but as the
hours of the tide changed, I took towards London Bridge. It was Old
London Bridge in those days, and at certain states of the tide there
was a race and fall of water there which gave it a bad reputation. But I
knew well enough how to 'shoot' the bridge after seeing it done, and so
began to row about among the shipping in the Pool, and down to Erith.
The first time I passed Mill Pond Bank, Herbert and I were pulling a
pair of oars; and, both in going and returning, we saw the blind towards
the east come down. Herbert was rarely there less frequently than three
times in a week, and he never brought me a single word of intelligence
that was at all alarming. Still, I knew that there was cause for alarm,
and I could not get rid of the notion of being watched. Once received,
it is a haunting idea; how many undesigning persons I suspected of
watching me, it would be hard to calculate.

In short, I was always full of fears for the rash man who was in hiding.
Herbert had sometimes said to me that he found it pleasant to stand at
one of our windows after dark, when the tide was running down, and to
think that it was flowing, with everything it bore, towards Clara. But
I thought with dread that it was flowing towards Magwitch, and that
any black mark on its surface might be his pursuers, going swiftly,
silently, and surely, to take him.




Chapter XLVII

Some weeks passed without bringing any change. We waited for Wemmick,
and he made no sign. If I had never known him out of Little Britain, and
had never enjoyed the privilege of being on a familiar footing at the
Castle, I might have doubted him; not so for a moment, knowing him as I
did.

My worldly affairs began to wear a gloomy appearance, and I was pressed
for money by more than one creditor. Even I myself began to know the
want of money (I mean of ready money in my own pocket), and to relieve
it by converting some easily spared articles of jewelery into cash. But
I had quite determined that it would be a heartless fraud to take more
money from my patron in the existing state of my uncertain thoughts and
plans. Therefore, I had sent him the unopened pocket-book by Herbert, to
hold in his own keeping, and I felt a kind of satisfaction--whether it
was a false kind or a true, I hardly know--in not having profited by his
generosity since his revelation of himself.

As the time wore on, an impression settled heavily upon me that Estella
was married. Fearful of having it confirmed, though it was all but a
conviction, I avoided the newspapers, and begged Herbert (to whom I had
confided the circumstances of our last interview) never to speak of her
to me. Why I hoarded up this last wretched little rag of the robe of
hope that was rent and given to the winds, how do I know? Why did you
who read this, commit that not dissimilar inconsistency of your own last
year, last month, last week?

It was an unhappy life that I lived; and its one dominant anxiety,
towering over all its other anxieties, like a high mountain above a
range of mountains, never disappeared from my view. Still, no new cause
for fear arose. Let me start from my bed as I would, with the terror
fresh upon me that he was discovered; let me sit listening, as I would
with dread, for Herbert's returning step at night, lest it should be
fleeter than ordinary, and winged with evil news,--for all that, and
much more to like purpose, the round of things went on. Condemned to
inaction and a state of constant restlessness and suspense, I rowed
about in my boat, and waited, waited, waited, as I best could.

There were states of the tide when, having been down the river, I could
not get back through the eddy-chafed arches and starlings of old London
Bridge; then, I left my boat at a wharf near the Custom House, to be
brought up afterwards to the Temple stairs. I was not averse to doing
this, as it served to make me and my boat a commoner incident among the
water-side people there. From this slight occasion sprang two meetings
that I have now to tell of.

One afternoon, late in the month of February, I came ashore at the wharf
at dusk. I had pulled down as far as Greenwich with the ebb tide, and
had turned with the tide. It had been a fine bright day, but had become
foggy as the sun dropped, and I had had to feel my way back among the
shipping, pretty carefully. Both in going and returning, I had seen the
signal in his window, All well.

As it was a raw evening, and I was cold, I thought I would comfort
myself with dinner at once; and as I had hours of dejection and solitude
before me if I went home to the Temple, I thought I would afterwards go
to the play. The theatre where Mr. Wopsle had achieved his questionable
triumph was in that water-side neighborhood (it is nowhere now), and
to that theatre I resolved to go. I was aware that Mr. Wopsle had
not succeeded in reviving the Drama, but, on the contrary, had rather
partaken of its decline. He had been ominously heard of, through the
play-bills, as a faithful Black, in connection with a little girl of
noble birth, and a monkey. And Herbert had seen him as a predatory
Tartar of comic propensities, with a face like a red brick, and an
outrageous hat all over bells.

I dined at what Herbert and I used to call a geographical chop-house,
where there were maps of the world in porter-pot rims on every half-yard
of the tablecloths, and charts of gravy on every one of the knives,--to
this day there is scarcely a single chop-house within the Lord Mayor's
dominions which is not geographical,--and wore out the time in dozing
over crumbs, staring at gas, and baking in a hot blast of dinners. By
and by, I roused myself, and went to the play.

There, I found a virtuous boatswain in His Majesty's service,--a most
excellent man, though I could have wished his trousers not quite so
tight in some places, and not quite so loose in others,--who knocked all
the little men's hats over their eyes, though he was very generous and
brave, and who wouldn't hear of anybody's paying taxes, though he was
very patriotic. He had a bag of money in his pocket, like a pudding in
the cloth, and on that property married a young person in bed-furniture,
with great rejoicings; the whole population of Portsmouth (nine in
number at the last census) turning out on the beach to rub their own
hands and shake everybody else's, and sing “Fill, fill!” A certain
dark-complexioned Swab, however, who wouldn't fill, or do anything else
that was proposed to him, and whose heart was openly stated (by the
boatswain) to be as black as his figure-head, proposed to two other
Swabs to get all mankind into difficulties; which was so effectually
done (the Swab family having considerable political influence) that it
took half the evening to set things right, and then it was only brought
about through an honest little grocer with a white hat, black gaiters,
and red nose, getting into a clock, with a gridiron, and listening, and
coming out, and knocking everybody down from behind with the gridiron
whom he couldn't confute with what he had overheard. This led to Mr.
Wopsle's (who had never been heard of before) coming in with a star
and garter on, as a plenipotentiary of great power direct from the
Admiralty, to say that the Swabs were all to go to prison on the spot,
and that he had brought the boatswain down the Union Jack, as a slight
acknowledgment of his public services. The boatswain, unmanned for the
first time, respectfully dried his eyes on the Jack, and then cheering
up, and addressing Mr. Wopsle as Your Honor, solicited permission to
take him by the fin. Mr. Wopsle, conceding his fin with a gracious
dignity, was immediately shoved into a dusty corner, while everybody
danced a hornpipe; and from that corner, surveying the public with a
discontented eye, became aware of me.

The second piece was the last new grand comic Christmas pantomime, in
the first scene of which, it pained me to suspect that I detected
Mr. Wopsle with red worsted legs under a highly magnified phosphoric
countenance and a shock of red curtain-fringe for his hair, engaged
in the manufacture of thunderbolts in a mine, and displaying great
cowardice when his gigantic master came home (very hoarse) to dinner.
But he presently presented himself under worthier circumstances; for,
the Genius of Youthful Love being in want of assistance,--on account of
the parental brutality of an ignorant farmer who opposed the choice
of his daughter's heart, by purposely falling upon the object, in a
flour-sack, out of the first-floor window,--summoned a sententious
Enchanter; and he, coming up from the antipodes rather unsteadily, after
an apparently violent journey, proved to be Mr. Wopsle in a high-crowned
hat, with a necromantic work in one volume under his arm. The business
of this enchanter on earth being principally to be talked at, sung at,
butted at, danced at, and flashed at with fires of various colors,
he had a good deal of time on his hands. And I observed, with great
surprise, that he devoted it to staring in my direction as if he were
lost in amazement.

There was something so remarkable in the increasing glare of Mr.
Wopsle's eye, and he seemed to be turning so many things over in his
mind and to grow so confused, that I could not make it out. I sat
thinking of it long after he had ascended to the clouds in a large
watch-case, and still I could not make it out. I was still thinking
of it when I came out of the theatre an hour afterwards, and found him
waiting for me near the door.

“How do you do?” said I, shaking hands with him as we turned down the
street together. “I saw that you saw me.”

“Saw you, Mr. Pip!” he returned. “Yes, of course I saw you. But who else
was there?”

“Who else?”

“It is the strangest thing,” said Mr. Wopsle, drifting into his lost
look again; “and yet I could swear to him.”

Becoming alarmed, I entreated Mr. Wopsle to explain his meaning.

“Whether I should have noticed him at first but for your being there,”
 said Mr. Wopsle, going on in the same lost way, “I can't be positive;
yet I think I should.”

Involuntarily I looked round me, as I was accustomed to look round me
when I went home; for these mysterious words gave me a chill.

“Oh! He can't be in sight,” said Mr. Wopsle. “He went out before I went
off. I saw him go.”

Having the reason that I had for being suspicious, I even suspected
this poor actor. I mistrusted a design to entrap me into some admission.
Therefore I glanced at him as we walked on together, but said nothing.

“I had a ridiculous fancy that he must be with you, Mr. Pip, till I saw
that you were quite unconscious of him, sitting behind you there like a
ghost.”

My former chill crept over me again, but I was resolved not to speak
yet, for it was quite consistent with his words that he might be set on
to induce me to connect these references with Provis. Of course, I was
perfectly sure and safe that Provis had not been there.

“I dare say you wonder at me, Mr. Pip; indeed, I see you do. But it is
so very strange! You'll hardly believe what I am going to tell you. I
could hardly believe it myself, if you told me.”

“Indeed?” said I.

“No, indeed. Mr. Pip, you remember in old times a certain Christmas Day,
when you were quite a child, and I dined at Gargery's, and some soldiers
came to the door to get a pair of handcuffs mended?”

“I remember it very well.”

“And you remember that there was a chase after two convicts, and that we
joined in it, and that Gargery took you on his back, and that I took the
lead, and you kept up with me as well as you could?”

“I remember it all very well.” Better than he thought,--except the last
clause.

“And you remember that we came up with the two in a ditch, and that
there was a scuffle between them, and that one of them had been severely
handled and much mauled about the face by the other?”

“I see it all before me.”

“And that the soldiers lighted torches, and put the two in the centre,
and that we went on to see the last of them, over the black marshes,
with the torchlight shining on their faces,--I am particular about
that,--with the torchlight shining on their faces, when there was an
outer ring of dark night all about us?”

“Yes,” said I. “I remember all that.”

“Then, Mr. Pip, one of those two prisoners sat behind you tonight. I saw
him over your shoulder.”

“Steady!” I thought. I asked him then, “Which of the two do you suppose
you saw?”

“The one who had been mauled,” he answered readily, “and I'll swear I
saw him! The more I think of him, the more certain I am of him.”

“This is very curious!” said I, with the best assumption I could put on
of its being nothing more to me. “Very curious indeed!”

I cannot exaggerate the enhanced disquiet into which this conversation
threw me, or the special and peculiar terror I felt at Compeyson's
having been behind me “like a ghost.” For if he had ever been out of my
thoughts for a few moments together since the hiding had begun, it was
in those very moments when he was closest to me; and to think that I
should be so unconscious and off my guard after all my care was as if
I had shut an avenue of a hundred doors to keep him out, and then had
found him at my elbow. I could not doubt, either, that he was there,
because I was there, and that, however slight an appearance of danger
there might be about us, danger was always near and active.

I put such questions to Mr. Wopsle as, When did the man come in? He
could not tell me that; he saw me, and over my shoulder he saw the man.
It was not until he had seen him for some time that he began to identify
him; but he had from the first vaguely associated him with me, and
known him as somehow belonging to me in the old village time. How was
he dressed? Prosperously, but not noticeably otherwise; he thought, in
black. Was his face at all disfigured? No, he believed not. I believed
not too, for, although in my brooding state I had taken no especial
notice of the people behind me, I thought it likely that a face at all
disfigured would have attracted my attention.

When Mr. Wopsle had imparted to me all that he could recall or I
extract, and when I had treated him to a little appropriate refreshment,
after the fatigues of the evening, we parted. It was between twelve and
one o'clock when I reached the Temple, and the gates were shut. No one
was near me when I went in and went home.

Herbert had come in, and we held a very serious council by the fire. But
there was nothing to be done, saving to communicate to Wemmick what I
had that night found out, and to remind him that we waited for his hint.
As I thought that I might compromise him if I went too often to the
Castle, I made this communication by letter. I wrote it before I went to
bed, and went out and posted it; and again no one was near me. Herbert
and I agreed that we could do nothing else but be very cautious. And
we were very cautious indeed,--more cautious than before, if that were
possible,--and I for my part never went near Chinks's Basin, except
when I rowed by, and then I only looked at Mill Pond Bank as I looked at
anything else.




Chapter XLVIII

The second of the two meetings referred to in the last chapter occurred
about a week after the first. I had again left my boat at the wharf
below Bridge; the time was an hour earlier in the afternoon; and,
undecided where to dine, I had strolled up into Cheapside, and was
strolling along it, surely the most unsettled person in all the busy
concourse, when a large hand was laid upon my shoulder by some one
overtaking me. It was Mr. Jaggers's hand, and he passed it through my
arm.

“As we are going in the same direction, Pip, we may walk together. Where
are you bound for?”

“For the Temple, I think,” said I.

“Don't you know?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Well,” I returned, glad for once to get the better of him in
cross-examination, “I do not know, for I have not made up my mind.”

“You are going to dine?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You don't mind admitting
that, I suppose?”

“No,” I returned, “I don't mind admitting that.”

“And are not engaged?”

“I don't mind admitting also that I am not engaged.”

“Then,” said Mr. Jaggers, “come and dine with me.”

I was going to excuse myself, when he added, “Wemmick's coming.” So
I changed my excuse into an acceptance,--the few words I had uttered,
serving for the beginning of either,--and we went along Cheapside
and slanted off to Little Britain, while the lights were springing up
brilliantly in the shop windows, and the street lamp-lighters, scarcely
finding ground enough to plant their ladders on in the midst of the
afternoon's bustle, were skipping up and down and running in and out,
opening more red eyes in the gathering fog than my rushlight tower at
the Hummums had opened white eyes in the ghostly wall.

At the office in Little Britain there was the usual letter-writing,
hand-washing, candle-snuffing, and safe-locking, that closed the
business of the day. As I stood idle by Mr. Jaggers's fire, its rising
and falling flame made the two casts on the shelf look as if they were
playing a diabolical game at bo-peep with me; while the pair of coarse,
fat office candles that dimly lighted Mr. Jaggers as he wrote in a
corner were decorated with dirty winding-sheets, as if in remembrance of
a host of hanged clients.

We went to Gerrard Street, all three together, in a hackney-coach: And,
as soon as we got there, dinner was served. Although I should not have
thought of making, in that place, the most distant reference by so much
as a look to Wemmick's Walworth sentiments, yet I should have had no
objection to catching his eye now and then in a friendly way. But it
was not to be done. He turned his eyes on Mr. Jaggers whenever he raised
them from the table, and was as dry and distant to me as if there were
twin Wemmicks, and this was the wrong one.

“Did you send that note of Miss Havisham's to Mr. Pip, Wemmick?” Mr.
Jaggers asked, soon after we began dinner.

“No, sir,” returned Wemmick; “it was going by post, when you brought Mr.
Pip into the office. Here it is.” He handed it to his principal instead
of to me.

“It's a note of two lines, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, handing it on, “sent
up to me by Miss Havisham on account of her not being sure of your
address. She tells me that she wants to see you on a little matter of
business you mentioned to her. You'll go down?”

“Yes,” said I, casting my eyes over the note, which was exactly in those
terms.

“When do you think of going down?”

“I have an impending engagement,” said I, glancing at Wemmick, who was
putting fish into the post-office, “that renders me rather uncertain of
my time. At once, I think.”

“If Mr. Pip has the intention of going at once,” said Wemmick to Mr.
Jaggers, “he needn't write an answer, you know.”

Receiving this as an intimation that it was best not to delay, I settled
that I would go to-morrow, and said so. Wemmick drank a glass of wine,
and looked with a grimly satisfied air at Mr. Jaggers, but not at me.

“So, Pip! Our friend the Spider,” said Mr. Jaggers, “has played his
cards. He has won the pool.”

It was as much as I could do to assent.

“Hah! He is a promising fellow--in his way--but he may not have it all
his own way. The stronger will win in the end, but the stronger has to
be found out first. If he should turn to, and beat her--”

“Surely,” I interrupted, with a burning face and heart, “you do not
seriously think that he is scoundrel enough for that, Mr. Jaggers?”

“I didn't say so, Pip. I am putting a case. If he should turn to and
beat her, he may possibly get the strength on his side; if it should be
a question of intellect, he certainly will not. It would be chance
work to give an opinion how a fellow of that sort will turn out in such
circumstances, because it's a toss-up between two results.”

“May I ask what they are?”

“A fellow like our friend the Spider,” answered Mr. Jaggers, “either
beats or cringes. He may cringe and growl, or cringe and not growl; but
he either beats or cringes. Ask Wemmick his opinion.”

“Either beats or cringes,” said Wemmick, not at all addressing himself
to me.

“So here's to Mrs. Bentley Drummle,” said Mr. Jaggers, taking a decanter
of choicer wine from his dumb-waiter, and filling for each of us and
for himself, “and may the question of supremacy be settled to the lady's
satisfaction! To the satisfaction of the lady and the gentleman,
it never will be. Now, Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly, how slow you are
to-day!”

She was at his elbow when he addressed her, putting a dish upon the
table. As she withdrew her hands from it, she fell back a step or two,
nervously muttering some excuse. And a certain action of her fingers, as
she spoke, arrested my attention.

“What's the matter?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Nothing. Only the subject we were speaking of,” said I, “was rather
painful to me.”

The action of her fingers was like the action of knitting. She stood
looking at her master, not understanding whether she was free to go, or
whether he had more to say to her and would call her back if she did go.
Her look was very intent. Surely, I had seen exactly such eyes and such
hands on a memorable occasion very lately!

He dismissed her, and she glided out of the room. But she remained
before me as plainly as if she were still there. I looked at those
hands, I looked at those eyes, I looked at that flowing hair; and I
compared them with other hands, other eyes, other hair, that I knew of,
and with what those might be after twenty years of a brutal husband
and a stormy life. I looked again at those hands and eyes of the
housekeeper, and thought of the inexplicable feeling that had come over
me when I last walked--not alone--in the ruined garden, and through the
deserted brewery. I thought how the same feeling had come back when I
saw a face looking at me, and a hand waving to me from a stage-coach
window; and how it had come back again and had flashed about me like
lightning, when I had passed in a carriage--not alone--through a sudden
glare of light in a dark street. I thought how one link of association
had helped that identification in the theatre, and how such a link,
wanting before, had been riveted for me now, when I had passed by a
chance swift from Estella's name to the fingers with their knitting
action, and the attentive eyes. And I felt absolutely certain that this
woman was Estella's mother.

Mr. Jaggers had seen me with Estella, and was not likely to have missed
the sentiments I had been at no pains to conceal. He nodded when I said
the subject was painful to me, clapped me on the back, put round the
wine again, and went on with his dinner.

Only twice more did the housekeeper reappear, and then her stay in the
room was very short, and Mr. Jaggers was sharp with her. But her hands
were Estella's hands, and her eyes were Estella's eyes, and if she had
reappeared a hundred times I could have been neither more sure nor less
sure that my conviction was the truth.

It was a dull evening, for Wemmick drew his wine, when it came round,
quite as a matter of business,--just as he might have drawn his salary
when that came round,--and with his eyes on his chief, sat in a state of
perpetual readiness for cross-examination. As to the quantity of wine,
his post-office was as indifferent and ready as any other post-office
for its quantity of letters. From my point of view, he was the wrong
twin all the time, and only externally like the Wemmick of Walworth.

We took our leave early, and left together. Even when we were groping
among Mr. Jaggers's stock of boots for our hats, I felt that the right
twin was on his way back; and we had not gone half a dozen yards down
Gerrard Street in the Walworth direction, before I found that I was
walking arm in arm with the right twin, and that the wrong twin had
evaporated into the evening air.

“Well!” said Wemmick, “that's over! He's a wonderful man, without his
living likeness; but I feel that I have to screw myself up when I dine
with him,--and I dine more comfortably unscrewed.”

I felt that this was a good statement of the case, and told him so.

“Wouldn't say it to anybody but yourself,” he answered. “I know that
what is said between you and me goes no further.”

I asked him if he had ever seen Miss Havisham's adopted daughter, Mrs.
Bentley Drummle. He said no. To avoid being too abrupt, I then spoke
of the Aged and of Miss Skiffins. He looked rather sly when I mentioned
Miss Skiffins, and stopped in the street to blow his nose, with a roll
of the head, and a flourish not quite free from latent boastfulness.

“Wemmick,” said I, “do you remember telling me, before I first went to
Mr. Jaggers's private house, to notice that housekeeper?”

“Did I?” he replied. “Ah, I dare say I did. Deuce take me,” he added,
suddenly, “I know I did. I find I am not quite unscrewed yet.”

“A wild beast tamed, you called her.”

“And what do you call her?”

“The same. How did Mr. Jaggers tame her, Wemmick?”

“That's his secret. She has been with him many a long year.”

“I wish you would tell me her story. I feel a particular interest in
being acquainted with it. You know that what is said between you and me
goes no further.”

“Well!” Wemmick replied, “I don't know her story,--that is, I don't know
all of it. But what I do know I'll tell you. We are in our private and
personal capacities, of course.”

“Of course.”

“A score or so of years ago, that woman was tried at the Old Bailey for
murder, and was acquitted. She was a very handsome young woman, and I
believe had some gypsy blood in her. Anyhow, it was hot enough when it
was up, as you may suppose.”

“But she was acquitted.”

“Mr. Jaggers was for her,” pursued Wemmick, with a look full of meaning,
“and worked the case in a way quite astonishing. It was a desperate
case, and it was comparatively early days with him then, and he worked
it to general admiration; in fact, it may almost be said to have made
him. He worked it himself at the police-office, day after day for many
days, contending against even a committal; and at the trial where he
couldn't work it himself, sat under counsel, and--every one knew--put
in all the salt and pepper. The murdered person was a woman,--a woman a
good ten years older, very much larger, and very much stronger. It was
a case of jealousy. They both led tramping lives, and this woman in
Gerrard Street here had been married very young, over the broomstick (as
we say), to a tramping man, and was a perfect fury in point of jealousy.
The murdered woman,--more a match for the man, certainly, in point of
years--was found dead in a barn near Hounslow Heath. There had been a
violent struggle, perhaps a fight. She was bruised and scratched and
torn, and had been held by the throat, at last, and choked. Now, there
was no reasonable evidence to implicate any person but this woman, and
on the improbabilities of her having been able to do it Mr. Jaggers
principally rested his case. You may be sure,” said Wemmick, touching me
on the sleeve, “that he never dwelt upon the strength of her hands then,
though he sometimes does now.”

I had told Wemmick of his showing us her wrists, that day of the dinner
party.

“Well, sir!” Wemmick went on; “it happened--happened, don't you
see?--that this woman was so very artfully dressed from the time of
her apprehension, that she looked much slighter than she really was; in
particular, her sleeves are always remembered to have been so skilfully
contrived that her arms had quite a delicate look. She had only a bruise
or two about her,--nothing for a tramp,--but the backs of her hands
were lacerated, and the question was, Was it with finger-nails? Now, Mr.
Jaggers showed that she had struggled through a great lot of brambles
which were not as high as her face; but which she could not have got
through and kept her hands out of; and bits of those brambles were
actually found in her skin and put in evidence, as well as the fact that
the brambles in question were found on examination to have been broken
through, and to have little shreds of her dress and little spots of
blood upon them here and there. But the boldest point he made was this:
it was attempted to be set up, in proof of her jealousy, that she was
under strong suspicion of having, at about the time of the murder,
frantically destroyed her child by this man--some three years old--to
revenge herself upon him. Mr. Jaggers worked that in this way: “We say
these are not marks of finger-nails, but marks of brambles, and we show
you the brambles. You say they are marks of finger-nails, and you set
up the hypothesis that she destroyed her child. You must accept all
consequences of that hypothesis. For anything we know, she may have
destroyed her child, and the child in clinging to her may have scratched
her hands. What then? You are not trying her for the murder of her
child; why don't you? As to this case, if you will have scratches,
we say that, for anything we know, you may have accounted for them,
assuming for the sake of argument that you have not invented them?” “To
sum up, sir,” said Wemmick, “Mr. Jaggers was altogether too many for the
jury, and they gave in.”

“Has she been in his service ever since?”

“Yes; but not only that,” said Wemmick, “she went into his service
immediately after her acquittal, tamed as she is now. She has since been
taught one thing and another in the way of her duties, but she was tamed
from the beginning.”

“Do you remember the sex of the child?”

“Said to have been a girl.”

“You have nothing more to say to me to-night?”

“Nothing. I got your letter and destroyed it. Nothing.”

We exchanged a cordial good-night, and I went home, with new matter for
my thoughts, though with no relief from the old.




Chapter XLIX

Putting Miss Havisham's note in my pocket, that it might serve as
my credentials for so soon reappearing at Satis House, in case her
waywardness should lead her to express any surprise at seeing me, I went
down again by the coach next day. But I alighted at the Halfway House,
and breakfasted there, and walked the rest of the distance; for I sought
to get into the town quietly by the unfrequented ways, and to leave it
in the same manner.

The best light of the day was gone when I passed along the quiet echoing
courts behind the High Street. The nooks of ruin where the old monks had
once had their refectories and gardens, and where the strong walls were
now pressed into the service of humble sheds and stables, were almost
as silent as the old monks in their graves. The cathedral chimes had at
once a sadder and a more remote sound to me, as I hurried on avoiding
observation, than they had ever had before; so, the swell of the old
organ was borne to my ears like funeral music; and the rooks, as they
hovered about the gray tower and swung in the bare high trees of the
priory garden, seemed to call to me that the place was changed, and that
Estella was gone out of it for ever.

An elderly woman, whom I had seen before as one of the servants who
lived in the supplementary house across the back courtyard, opened the
gate. The lighted candle stood in the dark passage within, as of old,
and I took it up and ascended the staircase alone. Miss Havisham was not
in her own room, but was in the larger room across the landing. Looking
in at the door, after knocking in vain, I saw her sitting on the hearth
in a ragged chair, close before, and lost in the contemplation of, the
ashy fire.

Doing as I had often done, I went in, and stood touching the old
chimney-piece, where she could see me when she raised her eyes. There
was an air of utter loneliness upon her, that would have moved me to
pity though she had wilfully done me a deeper injury than I could charge
her with. As I stood compassionating her, and thinking how, in the
progress of time, I too had come to be a part of the wrecked fortunes of
that house, her eyes rested on me. She stared, and said in a low voice,
“Is it real?”

“It is I, Pip. Mr. Jaggers gave me your note yesterday, and I have lost
no time.”

“Thank you. Thank you.”

As I brought another of the ragged chairs to the hearth and sat down, I
remarked a new expression on her face, as if she were afraid of me.

“I want,” she said, “to pursue that subject you mentioned to me when you
were last here, and to show you that I am not all stone. But perhaps you
can never believe, now, that there is anything human in my heart?”

When I said some reassuring words, she stretched out her tremulous right
hand, as though she was going to touch me; but she recalled it again
before I understood the action, or knew how to receive it.

“You said, speaking for your friend, that you could tell me how to do
something useful and good. Something that you would like done, is it
not?”

“Something that I would like done very much.”

“What is it?”

I began explaining to her that secret history of the partnership. I had
not got far into it, when I judged from her looks that she was thinking
in a discursive way of me, rather than of what I said. It seemed to be
so; for, when I stopped speaking, many moments passed before she showed
that she was conscious of the fact.

“Do you break off,” she asked then, with her former air of being afraid
of me, “because you hate me too much to bear to speak to me?”

“No, no,” I answered, “how can you think so, Miss Havisham! I stopped
because I thought you were not following what I said.”

“Perhaps I was not,” she answered, putting a hand to her head. “Begin
again, and let me look at something else. Stay! Now tell me.”

She set her hand upon her stick in the resolute way that sometimes was
habitual to her, and looked at the fire with a strong expression of
forcing herself to attend. I went on with my explanation, and told her
how I had hoped to complete the transaction out of my means, but how
in this I was disappointed. That part of the subject (I reminded her)
involved matters which could form no part of my explanation, for they
were the weighty secrets of another.

“So!” said she, assenting with her head, but not looking at me. “And how
much money is wanting to complete the purchase?”

I was rather afraid of stating it, for it sounded a large sum. “Nine
hundred pounds.”

“If I give you the money for this purpose, will you keep my secret as
you have kept your own?”

“Quite as faithfully.”

“And your mind will be more at rest?”

“Much more at rest.”

“Are you very unhappy now?”

She asked this question, still without looking at me, but in an unwonted
tone of sympathy. I could not reply at the moment, for my voice failed
me. She put her left arm across the head of her stick, and softly laid
her forehead on it.

“I am far from happy, Miss Havisham; but I have other causes of disquiet
than any you know of. They are the secrets I have mentioned.”

After a little while, she raised her head, and looked at the fire again.

“It is noble in you to tell me that you have other causes of
unhappiness. Is it true?”

“Too true.”

“Can I only serve you, Pip, by serving your friend? Regarding that as
done, is there nothing I can do for you yourself?”

“Nothing. I thank you for the question. I thank you even more for the
tone of the question. But there is nothing.”

She presently rose from her seat, and looked about the blighted room
for the means of writing. There were none there, and she took from her
pocket a yellow set of ivory tablets, mounted in tarnished gold, and
wrote upon them with a pencil in a case of tarnished gold that hung from
her neck.

“You are still on friendly terms with Mr. Jaggers?”

“Quite. I dined with him yesterday.”

“This is an authority to him to pay you that money, to lay out at your
irresponsible discretion for your friend. I keep no money here; but if
you would rather Mr. Jaggers knew nothing of the matter, I will send it
to you.”

“Thank you, Miss Havisham; I have not the least objection to receiving
it from him.”

She read me what she had written; and it was direct and clear, and
evidently intended to absolve me from any suspicion of profiting by the
receipt of the money. I took the tablets from her hand, and it trembled
again, and it trembled more as she took off the chain to which the
pencil was attached, and put it in mine. All this she did without
looking at me.

“My name is on the first leaf. If you can ever write under my name, “I
forgive her,” though ever so long after my broken heart is dust pray do
it!”

“O Miss Havisham,” said I, “I can do it now. There have been sore
mistakes; and my life has been a blind and thankless one; and I want
forgiveness and direction far too much, to be bitter with you.”

She turned her face to me for the first time since she had averted it,
and, to my amazement, I may even add to my terror, dropped on her knees
at my feet; with her folded hands raised to me in the manner in which,
when her poor heart was young and fresh and whole, they must often have
been raised to heaven from her mother's side.

To see her with her white hair and her worn face kneeling at my feet
gave me a shock through all my frame. I entreated her to rise, and got
my arms about her to help her up; but she only pressed that hand of mine
which was nearest to her grasp, and hung her head over it and wept. I
had never seen her shed a tear before, and, in the hope that the
relief might do her good, I bent over her without speaking. She was not
kneeling now, but was down upon the ground.

“O!” she cried, despairingly. “What have I done! What have I done!”

“If you mean, Miss Havisham, what have you done to injure me, let me
answer. Very little. I should have loved her under any circumstances. Is
she married?”

“Yes.”

It was a needless question, for a new desolation in the desolate house
had told me so.

“What have I done! What have I done!” She wrung her hands, and crushed
her white hair, and returned to this cry over and over again. “What have
I done!”

I knew not how to answer, or how to comfort her. That she had done a
grievous thing in taking an impressionable child to mould into the form
that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride found
vengeance in, I knew full well. But that, in shutting out the light
of day, she had shut out infinitely more; that, in seclusion, she had
secluded herself from a thousand natural and healing influences; that,
her mind, brooding solitary, had grown diseased, as all minds do and
must and will that reverse the appointed order of their Maker, I knew
equally well. And could I look upon her without compassion, seeing her
punishment in the ruin she was, in her profound unfitness for this earth
on which she was placed, in the vanity of sorrow which had become a
master mania, like the vanity of penitence, the vanity of remorse, the
vanity of unworthiness, and other monstrous vanities that have been
curses in this world?

“Until you spoke to her the other day, and until I saw in you a
looking-glass that showed me what I once felt myself, I did not know
what I had done. What have I done! What have I done!” And so again,
twenty, fifty times over, What had she done!

“Miss Havisham,” I said, when her cry had died away, “you may dismiss me
from your mind and conscience. But Estella is a different case, and if
you can ever undo any scrap of what you have done amiss in keeping a
part of her right nature away from her, it will be better to do that
than to bemoan the past through a hundred years.”

“Yes, yes, I know it. But, Pip--my dear!” There was an earnest womanly
compassion for me in her new affection. “My dear! Believe this: when she
first came to me, I meant to save her from misery like my own. At first,
I meant no more.”

“Well, well!” said I. “I hope so.”

“But as she grew, and promised to be very beautiful, I gradually did
worse, and with my praises, and with my jewels, and with my teachings,
and with this figure of myself always before her, a warning to back and
point my lessons, I stole her heart away, and put ice in its place.”

“Better,” I could not help saying, “to have left her a natural heart,
even to be bruised or broken.”

With that, Miss Havisham looked distractedly at me for a while, and then
burst out again, What had she done!

“If you knew all my story,” she pleaded, “you would have some compassion
for me and a better understanding of me.”

“Miss Havisham,” I answered, as delicately as I could, “I believe I may
say that I do know your story, and have known it ever since I first left
this neighborhood. It has inspired me with great commiseration, and I
hope I understand it and its influences. Does what has passed between us
give me any excuse for asking you a question relative to Estella? Not as
she is, but as she was when she first came here?”

She was seated on the ground, with her arms on the ragged chair, and
her head leaning on them. She looked full at me when I said this, and
replied, “Go on.”

“Whose child was Estella?”

She shook her head.

“You don't know?”

She shook her head again.

“But Mr. Jaggers brought her here, or sent her here?”

“Brought her here.”

“Will you tell me how that came about?”

She answered in a low whisper and with caution: “I had been shut up in
these rooms a long time (I don't know how long; you know what time the
clocks keep here), when I told him that I wanted a little girl to rear
and love, and save from my fate. I had first seen him when I sent
for him to lay this place waste for me; having read of him in the
newspapers, before I and the world parted. He told me that he would
look about him for such an orphan child. One night he brought her here
asleep, and I called her Estella.”

“Might I ask her age then?”

“Two or three. She herself knows nothing, but that she was left an
orphan and I adopted her.”

So convinced I was of that woman's being her mother, that I wanted
no evidence to establish the fact in my own mind. But, to any mind, I
thought, the connection here was clear and straight.

What more could I hope to do by prolonging the interview? I had
succeeded on behalf of Herbert, Miss Havisham had told me all she knew
of Estella, I had said and done what I could to ease her mind. No matter
with what other words we parted; we parted.

Twilight was closing in when I went downstairs into the natural air. I
called to the woman who had opened the gate when I entered, that I would
not trouble her just yet, but would walk round the place before leaving.
For I had a presentiment that I should never be there again, and I felt
that the dying light was suited to my last view of it.

By the wilderness of casks that I had walked on long ago, and on which
the rain of years had fallen since, rotting them in many places, and
leaving miniature swamps and pools of water upon those that stood on
end, I made my way to the ruined garden. I went all round it; round by
the corner where Herbert and I had fought our battle; round by the paths
where Estella and I had walked. So cold, so lonely, so dreary all!

Taking the brewery on my way back, I raised the rusty latch of a little
door at the garden end of it, and walked through. I was going out at the
opposite door,--not easy to open now, for the damp wood had started and
swelled, and the hinges were yielding, and the threshold was encumbered
with a growth of fungus,--when I turned my head to look back. A childish
association revived with wonderful force in the moment of the slight
action, and I fancied that I saw Miss Havisham hanging to the beam. So
strong was the impression, that I stood under the beam shuddering from
head to foot before I knew it was a fancy,--though to be sure I was
there in an instant.

The mournfulness of the place and time, and the great terror of
this illusion, though it was but momentary, caused me to feel an
indescribable awe as I came out between the open wooden gates where I
had once wrung my hair after Estella had wrung my heart. Passing on into
the front courtyard, I hesitated whether to call the woman to let me out
at the locked gate of which she had the key, or first to go upstairs
and assure myself that Miss Havisham was as safe and well as I had left
her. I took the latter course and went up.

I looked into the room where I had left her, and I saw her seated in the
ragged chair upon the hearth close to the fire, with her back towards
me. In the moment when I was withdrawing my head to go quietly away,
I saw a great flaming light spring up. In the same moment I saw her
running at me, shrieking, with a whirl of fire blazing all about her,
and soaring at least as many feet above her head as she was high.

I had a double-caped great-coat on, and over my arm another thick coat.
That I got them off, closed with her, threw her down, and got them over
her; that I dragged the great cloth from the table for the same purpose,
and with it dragged down the heap of rottenness in the midst, and
all the ugly things that sheltered there; that we were on the ground
struggling like desperate enemies, and that the closer I covered her,
the more wildly she shrieked and tried to free herself,--that this
occurred I knew through the result, but not through anything I felt, or
thought, or knew I did. I knew nothing until I knew that we were on the
floor by the great table, and that patches of tinder yet alight were
floating in the smoky air, which, a moment ago, had been her faded
bridal dress.

Then, I looked round and saw the disturbed beetles and spiders running
away over the floor, and the servants coming in with breathless cries
at the door. I still held her forcibly down with all my strength, like
a prisoner who might escape; and I doubt if I even knew who she was, or
why we had struggled, or that she had been in flames, or that the flames
were out, until I saw the patches of tinder that had been her garments
no longer alight but falling in a black shower around us.

She was insensible, and I was afraid to have her moved, or even
touched. Assistance was sent for, and I held her until it came, as if
I unreasonably fancied (I think I did) that, if I let her go, the fire
would break out again and consume her. When I got up, on the surgeon's
coming to her with other aid, I was astonished to see that both my hands
were burnt; for, I had no knowledge of it through the sense of feeling.

On examination it was pronounced that she had received serious hurts,
but that they of themselves were far from hopeless; the danger lay
mainly in the nervous shock. By the surgeon's directions, her bed was
carried into that room and laid upon the great table, which happened to
be well suited to the dressing of her injuries. When I saw her again, an
hour afterwards, she lay, indeed, where I had seen her strike her stick,
and had heard her say that she would lie one day.

Though every vestige of her dress was burnt, as they told me, she
still had something of her old ghastly bridal appearance; for, they had
covered her to the throat with white cotton-wool, and as she lay with
a white sheet loosely overlying that, the phantom air of something that
had been and was changed was still upon her.

I found, on questioning the servants, that Estella was in Paris, and I
got a promise from the surgeon that he would write to her by the
next post. Miss Havisham's family I took upon myself; intending to
communicate with Mr. Matthew Pocket only, and leave him to do as he
liked about informing the rest. This I did next day, through Herbert, as
soon as I returned to town.

There was a stage, that evening, when she spoke collectedly of what had
happened, though with a certain terrible vivacity. Towards midnight she
began to wander in her speech; and after that it gradually set in that
she said innumerable times in a low solemn voice, “What have I done!”
 And then, “When she first came, I meant to save her from misery like
mine.” And then, “Take the pencil and write under my name, 'I forgive
her!'” She never changed the order of these three sentences, but she
sometimes left out a word in one or other of them; never putting in
another word, but always leaving a blank and going on to the next word.

As I could do no service there, and as I had, nearer home, that pressing
reason for anxiety and fear which even her wanderings could not drive
out of my mind, I decided, in the course of the night that I would
return by the early morning coach, walking on a mile or so, and being
taken up clear of the town. At about six o'clock of the morning,
therefore, I leaned over her and touched her lips with mine, just as
they said, not stopping for being touched, “Take the pencil and write
under my name, 'I forgive her.'”




Chapter L

My hands had been dressed twice or thrice in the night, and again in
the morning. My left arm was a good deal burned to the elbow, and, less
severely, as high as the shoulder; it was very painful, but the flames
had set in that direction, and I felt thankful it was no worse. My right
hand was not so badly burnt but that I could move the fingers. It was
bandaged, of course, but much less inconveniently than my left hand and
arm; those I carried in a sling; and I could only wear my coat like a
cloak, loose over my shoulders and fastened at the neck. My hair had
been caught by the fire, but not my head or face.

When Herbert had been down to Hammersmith and seen his father, he came
back to me at our chambers, and devoted the day to attending on me. He
was the kindest of nurses, and at stated times took off the bandages,
and steeped them in the cooling liquid that was kept ready, and put them
on again, with a patient tenderness that I was deeply grateful for.

At first, as I lay quiet on the sofa, I found it painfully difficult, I
might say impossible, to get rid of the impression of the glare of the
flames, their hurry and noise, and the fierce burning smell. If I
dozed for a minute, I was awakened by Miss Havisham's cries, and by her
running at me with all that height of fire above her head. This pain
of the mind was much harder to strive against than any bodily pain I
suffered; and Herbert, seeing that, did his utmost to hold my attention
engaged.

Neither of us spoke of the boat, but we both thought of it. That
was made apparent by our avoidance of the subject, and by our
agreeing--without agreement--to make my recovery of the use of my hands
a question of so many hours, not of so many weeks.

My first question when I saw Herbert had been of course, whether all
was well down the river? As he replied in the affirmative, with perfect
confidence and cheerfulness, we did not resume the subject until the day
was wearing away. But then, as Herbert changed the bandages, more by
the light of the fire than by the outer light, he went back to it
spontaneously.

“I sat with Provis last night, Handel, two good hours.”

“Where was Clara?”

“Dear little thing!” said Herbert. “She was up and down with
Gruffandgrim all the evening. He was perpetually pegging at the floor
the moment she left his sight. I doubt if he can hold out long, though.
What with rum and pepper,--and pepper and rum,--I should think his
pegging must be nearly over.”

“And then you will be married, Herbert?”

“How can I take care of the dear child otherwise?--Lay your arm out upon
the back of the sofa, my dear boy, and I'll sit down here, and get the
bandage off so gradually that you shall not know when it comes. I was
speaking of Provis. Do you know, Handel, he improves?”

“I said to you I thought he was softened when I last saw him.”

“So you did. And so he is. He was very communicative last night, and
told me more of his life. You remember his breaking off here about some
woman that he had had great trouble with.--Did I hurt you?”

I had started, but not under his touch. His words had given me a start.

“I had forgotten that, Herbert, but I remember it now you speak of it.”

“Well! He went into that part of his life, and a dark wild part it is.
Shall I tell you? Or would it worry you just now?”

“Tell me by all means. Every word.”

Herbert bent forward to look at me more nearly, as if my reply had been
rather more hurried or more eager than he could quite account for. “Your
head is cool?” he said, touching it.

“Quite,” said I. “Tell me what Provis said, my dear Herbert.”

“It seems,” said Herbert, “--there's a bandage off most charmingly, and
now comes the cool one,--makes you shrink at first, my poor dear fellow,
don't it? but it will be comfortable presently,--it seems that the
woman was a young woman, and a jealous woman, and a revengeful woman;
revengeful, Handel, to the last degree.”

“To what last degree?”

“Murder.--Does it strike too cold on that sensitive place?”

“I don't feel it. How did she murder? Whom did she murder?”

“Why, the deed may not have merited quite so terrible a name,”
 said Herbert, “but, she was tried for it, and Mr. Jaggers defended
her, and the reputation of that defence first made his name known
to Provis. It was another and a stronger woman who was the victim,
and there had been a struggle--in a barn. Who began it, or how fair
it was, or how unfair, may be doubtful; but how it ended is
certainly not doubtful, for the victim was found throttled.”

“Was the woman brought in guilty?”

“No; she was acquitted.--My poor Handel, I hurt you!”

“It is impossible to be gentler, Herbert. Yes? What else?”

“This acquitted young woman and Provis had a little child; a little
child of whom Provis was exceedingly fond. On the evening of the very
night when the object of her jealousy was strangled as I tell you, the
young woman presented herself before Provis for one moment, and swore
that she would destroy the child (which was in her possession), and he
should never see it again; then she vanished.--There's the worst arm
comfortably in the sling once more, and now there remains but the right
hand, which is a far easier job. I can do it better by this light
than by a stronger, for my hand is steadiest when I don't see the poor
blistered patches too distinctly.--You don't think your breathing is
affected, my dear boy? You seem to breathe quickly.”

“Perhaps I do, Herbert. Did the woman keep her oath?”

“There comes the darkest part of Provis's life. She did.”

“That is, he says she did.”

“Why, of course, my dear boy,” returned Herbert, in a tone of surprise,
and again bending forward to get a nearer look at me. “He says it all. I
have no other information.”

“No, to be sure.”

“Now, whether,” pursued Herbert, “he had used the child's mother ill, or
whether he had used the child's mother well, Provis doesn't say; but she
had shared some four or five years of the wretched life he described
to us at this fireside, and he seems to have felt pity for her, and
forbearance towards her. Therefore, fearing he should be called upon to
depose about this destroyed child, and so be the cause of her death, he
hid himself (much as he grieved for the child), kept himself dark, as he
says, out of the way and out of the trial, and was only vaguely talked
of as a certain man called Abel, out of whom the jealousy arose. After
the acquittal she disappeared, and thus he lost the child and the
child's mother.”

“I want to ask--”

“A moment, my dear boy, and I have done. That evil genius, Compeyson,
the worst of scoundrels among many scoundrels, knowing of his keeping
out of the way at that time and of his reasons for doing so, of course
afterwards held the knowledge over his head as a means of keeping him
poorer and working him harder. It was clear last night that this barbed
the point of Provis's animosity.”

“I want to know,” said I, “and particularly, Herbert, whether he told
you when this happened?”

“Particularly? Let me remember, then, what he said as to that. His
expression was, 'a round score o' year ago, and a'most directly after I
took up wi' Compeyson.' How old were you when you came upon him in the
little churchyard?”

“I think in my seventh year.”

“Ay. It had happened some three or four years then, he said, and you
brought into his mind the little girl so tragically lost, who would have
been about your age.”

“Herbert,” said I, after a short silence, in a hurried way, “can you see
me best by the light of the window, or the light of the fire?”

“By the firelight,” answered Herbert, coming close again.

“Look at me.”

“I do look at you, my dear boy.”

“Touch me.”

“I do touch you, my dear boy.”

“You are not afraid that I am in any fever, or that my head is much
disordered by the accident of last night?”

“N-no, my dear boy,” said Herbert, after taking time to examine me. “You
are rather excited, but you are quite yourself.”

“I know I am quite myself. And the man we have in hiding down the river,
is Estella's Father.”




Chapter LI

What purpose I had in view when I was hot on tracing out and proving
Estella's parentage, I cannot say. It will presently be seen that the
question was not before me in a distinct shape until it was put before
me by a wiser head than my own.

But when Herbert and I had held our momentous conversation, I was seized
with a feverish conviction that I ought to hunt the matter down,--that I
ought not to let it rest, but that I ought to see Mr. Jaggers, and come
at the bare truth. I really do not know whether I felt that I did this
for Estella's sake, or whether I was glad to transfer to the man in
whose preservation I was so much concerned some rays of the romantic
interest that had so long surrounded me. Perhaps the latter possibility
may be the nearer to the truth.

Any way, I could scarcely be withheld from going out to Gerrard Street
that night. Herbert's representations that, if I did, I should probably
be laid up and stricken useless, when our fugitive's safety would depend
upon me, alone restrained my impatience. On the understanding, again
and again reiterated, that, come what would, I was to go to Mr. Jaggers
to-morrow, I at length submitted to keep quiet, and to have my hurts
looked after, and to stay at home. Early next morning we went out
together, and at the corner of Giltspur Street by Smithfield, I left
Herbert to go his way into the City, and took my way to Little Britain.

There were periodical occasions when Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick went over
the office accounts, and checked off the vouchers, and put all things
straight. On these occasions, Wemmick took his books and papers into Mr.
Jaggers's room, and one of the upstairs clerks came down into the outer
office. Finding such clerk on Wemmick's post that morning, I knew
what was going on; but I was not sorry to have Mr. Jaggers and Wemmick
together, as Wemmick would then hear for himself that I said nothing to
compromise him.

My appearance, with my arm bandaged and my coat loose over my shoulders,
favored my object. Although I had sent Mr. Jaggers a brief account of
the accident as soon as I had arrived in town, yet I had to give him all
the details now; and the speciality of the occasion caused our talk
to be less dry and hard, and less strictly regulated by the rules of
evidence, than it had been before. While I described the disaster, Mr.
Jaggers stood, according to his wont, before the fire. Wemmick leaned
back in his chair, staring at me, with his hands in the pockets of his
trousers, and his pen put horizontally into the post. The two brutal
casts, always inseparable in my mind from the official proceedings,
seemed to be congestively considering whether they didn't smell fire at
the present moment.

My narrative finished, and their questions exhausted, I then produced
Miss Havisham's authority to receive the nine hundred pounds for
Herbert. Mr. Jaggers's eyes retired a little deeper into his head when
I handed him the tablets, but he presently handed them over to Wemmick,
with instructions to draw the check for his signature. While that was
in course of being done, I looked on at Wemmick as he wrote, and Mr.
Jaggers, poising and swaying himself on his well-polished boots, looked
on at me. “I am sorry, Pip,” said he, as I put the check in my pocket,
when he had signed it, “that we do nothing for you.”

“Miss Havisham was good enough to ask me,” I returned, “whether she
could do nothing for me, and I told her No.”

“Everybody should know his own business,” said Mr. Jaggers. And I saw
Wemmick's lips form the words “portable property.”

“I should not have told her No, if I had been you,” said Mr Jaggers;
“but every man ought to know his own business best.”

“Every man's business,” said Wemmick, rather reproachfully towards me,
“is portable property.”

As I thought the time was now come for pursuing the theme I had at
heart, I said, turning on Mr. Jaggers:--

“I did ask something of Miss Havisham, however, sir. I asked her to give
me some information relative to her adopted daughter, and she gave me
all she possessed.”

“Did she?” said Mr. Jaggers, bending forward to look at his boots and
then straightening himself. “Hah! I don't think I should have done so,
if I had been Miss Havisham. But she ought to know her own business
best.”

“I know more of the history of Miss Havisham's adopted child than Miss
Havisham herself does, sir. I know her mother.”

Mr. Jaggers looked at me inquiringly, and repeated “Mother?”

“I have seen her mother within these three days.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“And so have you, sir. And you have seen her still more recently.”

“Yes?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Perhaps I know more of Estella's history than even you do,” said I. “I
know her father too.”

A certain stop that Mr. Jaggers came to in his manner--he was too
self-possessed to change his manner, but he could not help its being
brought to an indefinably attentive stop--assured me that he did not
know who her father was. This I had strongly suspected from Provis's
account (as Herbert had repeated it) of his having kept himself dark;
which I pieced on to the fact that he himself was not Mr. Jaggers's
client until some four years later, and when he could have no reason for
claiming his identity. But, I could not be sure of this unconsciousness
on Mr. Jaggers's part before, though I was quite sure of it now.

“So! You know the young lady's father, Pip?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Yes,” I replied, “and his name is Provis--from New South Wales.”

Even Mr. Jaggers started when I said those words. It was the slightest
start that could escape a man, the most carefully repressed and the
sooner checked, but he did start, though he made it a part of the
action of taking out his pocket-handkerchief. How Wemmick received the
announcement I am unable to say; for I was afraid to look at him just
then, lest Mr. Jaggers's sharpness should detect that there had been
some communication unknown to him between us.

“And on what evidence, Pip,” asked Mr. Jaggers, very coolly, as he
paused with his handkerchief half way to his nose, “does Provis make
this claim?”

“He does not make it,” said I, “and has never made it, and has no
knowledge or belief that his daughter is in existence.”

For once, the powerful pocket-handkerchief failed. My reply was so
unexpected, that Mr. Jaggers put the handkerchief back into his pocket
without completing the usual performance, folded his arms, and looked
with stern attention at me, though with an immovable face.

Then I told him all I knew, and how I knew it; with the one reservation
that I left him to infer that I knew from Miss Havisham what I in fact
knew from Wemmick. I was very careful indeed as to that. Nor did I look
towards Wemmick until I had finished all I had to tell, and had been for
some time silently meeting Mr. Jaggers's look. When I did at last turn
my eyes in Wemmick's direction, I found that he had unposted his pen,
and was intent upon the table before him.

“Hah!” said Mr. Jaggers at last, as he moved towards the papers on the
table. “What item was it you were at, Wemmick, when Mr. Pip came in?”

But I could not submit to be thrown off in that way, and I made a
passionate, almost an indignant appeal, to him to be more frank and
manly with me. I reminded him of the false hopes into which I had
lapsed, the length of time they had lasted, and the discovery I had
made: and I hinted at the danger that weighed upon my spirits. I
represented myself as being surely worthy of some little confidence from
him, in return for the confidence I had just now imparted. I said that
I did not blame him, or suspect him, or mistrust him, but I wanted
assurance of the truth from him. And if he asked me why I wanted it,
and why I thought I had any right to it, I would tell him, little as he
cared for such poor dreams, that I had loved Estella dearly and long,
and that although I had lost her, and must live a bereaved life,
whatever concerned her was still nearer and dearer to me than anything
else in the world. And seeing that Mr. Jaggers stood quite still and
silent, and apparently quite obdurate, under this appeal, I turned to
Wemmick, and said, “Wemmick, I know you to be a man with a gentle
heart. I have seen your pleasant home, and your old father, and all the
innocent, cheerful playful ways with which you refresh your business
life. And I entreat you to say a word for me to Mr. Jaggers, and to
represent to him that, all circumstances considered, he ought to be more
open with me!”

I have never seen two men look more oddly at one another than Mr.
Jaggers and Wemmick did after this apostrophe. At first, a misgiving
crossed me that Wemmick would be instantly dismissed from his
employment; but it melted as I saw Mr. Jaggers relax into something like
a smile, and Wemmick become bolder.

“What's all this?” said Mr. Jaggers. “You with an old father, and you
with pleasant and playful ways?”

“Well!” returned Wemmick. “If I don't bring 'em here, what does it
matter?”

“Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, laying his hand upon my arm, and smiling
openly, “this man must be the most cunning impostor in all London.”

“Not a bit of it,” returned Wemmick, growing bolder and bolder. “I think
you're another.”

Again they exchanged their former odd looks, each apparently still
distrustful that the other was taking him in.

“You with a pleasant home?” said Mr. Jaggers.

“Since it don't interfere with business,” returned Wemmick, “let it be
so. Now, I look at you, sir, I shouldn't wonder if you might be planning
and contriving to have a pleasant home of your own one of these days,
when you're tired of all this work.”

Mr. Jaggers nodded his head retrospectively two or three times, and
actually drew a sigh. “Pip,” said he, “we won't talk about 'poor
dreams;' you know more about such things than I, having much fresher
experience of that kind. But now about this other matter. I'll put a
case to you. Mind! I admit nothing.”

He waited for me to declare that I quite understood that he expressly
said that he admitted nothing.

“Now, Pip,” said Mr. Jaggers, “put this case. Put the case that a
woman, under such circumstances as you have mentioned, held her child
concealed, and was obliged to communicate the fact to her legal adviser,
on his representing to her that he must know, with an eye to the
latitude of his defence, how the fact stood about that child. Put the
case that, at the same time he held a trust to find a child for an
eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case that he lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he
saw of children was their being generated in great numbers for certain
destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at
a criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that
he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported,
neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing
up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw
in his daily business life he had reason to look upon as so much
spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net,--to be
prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, bedevilled somehow.”

“I follow you, sir.”

“Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty little child out of the
heap who could be saved; whom the father believed dead, and dared make
no stir about; as to whom, over the mother, the legal adviser had this
power: “I know what you did, and how you did it. You came so and so, you
did such and such things to divert suspicion. I have tracked you through
it all, and I tell it you all. Part with the child, unless it should
be necessary to produce it to clear you, and then it shall be produced.
Give the child into my hands, and I will do my best to bring you off. If
you are saved, your child is saved too; if you are lost, your child is
still saved.” Put the case that this was done, and that the woman was
cleared.”

“I understand you perfectly.”

“But that I make no admissions?”

“That you make no admissions.” And Wemmick repeated, “No admissions.”

“Put the case, Pip, that passion and the terror of death had a little
shaken the woman's intellects, and that when she was set at liberty,
she was scared out of the ways of the world, and went to him to be
sheltered. Put the case that he took her in, and that he kept down the
old, wild, violent nature whenever he saw an inkling of its breaking
out, by asserting his power over her in the old way. Do you comprehend
the imaginary case?”

“Quite.”

“Put the case that the child grew up, and was married for money. That
the mother was still living. That the father was still living. That the
mother and father, unknown to one another, were dwelling within so many
miles, furlongs, yards if you like, of one another. That the secret was
still a secret, except that you had got wind of it. Put that last case
to yourself very carefully.”

“I do.”

“I ask Wemmick to put it to himself very carefully.”

And Wemmick said, “I do.”

“For whose sake would you reveal the secret? For the father's? I think
he would not be much the better for the mother. For the mother's? I
think if she had done such a deed she would be safer where she was.
For the daughter's? I think it would hardly serve her to establish her
parentage for the information of her husband, and to drag her back to
disgrace, after an escape of twenty years, pretty secure to last for
life. But add the case that you had loved her, Pip, and had made her the
subject of those 'poor dreams' which have, at one time or another, been
in the heads of more men than you think likely, then I tell you that you
had better--and would much sooner when you had thought well of it--chop
off that bandaged left hand of yours with your bandaged right hand, and
then pass the chopper on to Wemmick there, to cut that off too.”

I looked at Wemmick, whose face was very grave. He gravely touched his
lips with his forefinger. I did the same. Mr. Jaggers did the same.
“Now, Wemmick,” said the latter then, resuming his usual manner, “what
item was it you were at when Mr. Pip came in?”

Standing by for a little, while they were at work, I observed that the
odd looks they had cast at one another were repeated several times: with
this difference now, that each of them seemed suspicious, not to say
conscious, of having shown himself in a weak and unprofessional light to
the other. For this reason, I suppose, they were now inflexible with one
another; Mr. Jaggers being highly dictatorial, and Wemmick obstinately
justifying himself whenever there was the smallest point in abeyance for
a moment. I had never seen them on such ill terms; for generally they
got on very well indeed together.

But they were both happily relieved by the opportune appearance of Mike,
the client with the fur cap and the habit of wiping his nose on his
sleeve, whom I had seen on the very first day of my appearance within
those walls. This individual, who, either in his own person or in that
of some member of his family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in
that place meant Newgate), called to announce that his eldest daughter
was taken up on suspicion of shoplifting. As he imparted this melancholy
circumstance to Wemmick, Mr. Jaggers standing magisterially before the
fire and taking no share in the proceedings, Mike's eye happened to
twinkle with a tear.

“What are you about?” demanded Wemmick, with the utmost indignation.
“What do you come snivelling here for?”

“I didn't go to do it, Mr. Wemmick.”

“You did,” said Wemmick. “How dare you? You're not in a fit state to
come here, if you can't come here without spluttering like a bad pen.
What do you mean by it?”

“A man can't help his feelings, Mr. Wemmick,” pleaded Mike.

“His what?” demanded Wemmick, quite savagely. “Say that again!”

“Now look here my man,” said Mr. Jaggers, advancing a step, and pointing
to the door. “Get out of this office. I'll have no feelings here. Get
out.”

“It serves you right,” said Wemmick, “Get out.”

So, the unfortunate Mike very humbly withdrew, and Mr. Jaggers and
Wemmick appeared to have re-established their good understanding, and
went to work again with an air of refreshment upon them as if they had
just had lunch.




Chapter LII


From Little Britain I went, with my check in my pocket, to Miss
Skiffins's brother, the accountant; and Miss Skiffins's brother, the
accountant, going straight to Clarriker's and bringing Clarriker to me,
I had the great satisfaction of concluding that arrangement. It was the
only good thing I had done, and the only completed thing I had done,
since I was first apprised of my great expectations.

Clarriker informing me on that occasion that the affairs of the House
were steadily progressing, that he would now be able to establish a
small branch-house in the East which was much wanted for the extension
of the business, and that Herbert in his new partnership capacity would
go out and take charge of it, I found that I must have prepared for
a separation from my friend, even though my own affairs had been more
settled. And now, indeed, I felt as if my last anchor were loosening its
hold, and I should soon be driving with the winds and waves.

But there was recompense in the joy with which Herbert would come home
of a night and tell me of these changes, little imagining that he told
me no news, and would sketch airy pictures of himself conducting Clara
Barley to the land of the Arabian Nights, and of me going out to join
them (with a caravan of camels, I believe), and of our all going up the
Nile and seeing wonders. Without being sanguine as to my own part in
those bright plans, I felt that Herbert's way was clearing fast, and
that old Bill Barley had but to stick to his pepper and rum, and his
daughter would soon be happily provided for.

We had now got into the month of March. My left arm, though it presented
no bad symptoms, took, in the natural course, so long to heal that I
was still unable to get a coat on. My right arm was tolerably restored;
disfigured, but fairly serviceable.

On a Monday morning, when Herbert and I were at breakfast, I received
the following letter from Wemmick by the post.

“Walworth. Burn this as soon as read. Early in the week, or say
Wednesday, you might do what you know of, if you felt disposed to try
it. Now burn.”

When I had shown this to Herbert and had put it in the fire--but not
before we had both got it by heart--we considered what to do. For, of
course my being disabled could now be no longer kept out of view.

“I have thought it over again and again,” said Herbert, “and I think I
know a better course than taking a Thames waterman. Take Startop. A good
fellow, a skilled hand, fond of us, and enthusiastic and honorable.”

I had thought of him more than once.

“But how much would you tell him, Herbert?”

“It is necessary to tell him very little. Let him suppose it a mere
freak, but a secret one, until the morning comes: then let him know that
there is urgent reason for your getting Provis aboard and away. You go
with him?”

“No doubt.”

“Where?”

It had seemed to me, in the many anxious considerations I had given the
point, almost indifferent what port we made for,--Hamburg, Rotterdam,
Antwerp,--the place signified little, so that he was out of England. Any
foreign steamer that fell in our way and would take us up would do.
I had always proposed to myself to get him well down the river in the
boat; certainly well beyond Gravesend, which was a critical place for
search or inquiry if suspicion were afoot. As foreign steamers would
leave London at about the time of high-water, our plan would be to get
down the river by a previous ebb-tide, and lie by in some quiet spot
until we could pull off to one. The time when one would be due where we
lay, wherever that might be, could be calculated pretty nearly, if we
made inquiries beforehand.

Herbert assented to all this, and we went out immediately after
breakfast to pursue our investigations. We found that a steamer for
Hamburg was likely to suit our purpose best, and we directed our
thoughts chiefly to that vessel. But we noted down what other foreign
steamers would leave London with the same tide, and we satisfied
ourselves that we knew the build and color of each. We then separated
for a few hours: I, to get at once such passports as were necessary;
Herbert, to see Startop at his lodgings. We both did what we had to do
without any hindrance, and when we met again at one o'clock reported
it done. I, for my part, was prepared with passports; Herbert had seen
Startop, and he was more than ready to join.

Those two should pull a pair of oars, we settled, and I would steer; our
charge would be sitter, and keep quiet; as speed was not our object, we
should make way enough. We arranged that Herbert should not come home to
dinner before going to Mill Pond Bank that evening; that he should
not go there at all to-morrow evening, Tuesday; that he should prepare
Provis to come down to some stairs hard by the house, on Wednesday, when
he saw us approach, and not sooner; that all the arrangements with
him should be concluded that Monday night; and that he should be
communicated with no more in any way, until we took him on board.

These precautions well understood by both of us, I went home.

On opening the outer door of our chambers with my key, I found a letter
in the box, directed to me; a very dirty letter, though not ill-written.
It had been delivered by hand (of course, since I left home), and its
contents were these:--

“If you are not afraid to come to the old marshes to-night or to-morrow
night at nine, and to come to the little sluice-house by the limekiln,
you had better come. If you want information regarding your uncle
Provis, you had much better come and tell no one, and lose no time. You
must come alone. Bring this with you.”

I had had load enough upon my mind before the receipt of this strange
letter. What to do now, I could not tell. And the worst was, that I must
decide quickly, or I should miss the afternoon coach, which would take
me down in time for to-night. To-morrow night I could not think of
going, for it would be too close upon the time of the flight. And again,
for anything I knew, the proffered information might have some important
bearing on the flight itself.

If I had had ample time for consideration, I believe I should still have
gone. Having hardly any time for consideration,--my watch showing me
that the coach started within half an hour,--I resolved to go. I should
certainly not have gone, but for the reference to my Uncle Provis. That,
coming on Wemmick's letter and the morning's busy preparation, turned
the scale.

It is so difficult to become clearly possessed of the contents of almost
any letter, in a violent hurry, that I had to read this mysterious
epistle again twice, before its injunction to me to be secret got
mechanically into my mind. Yielding to it in the same mechanical kind of
way, I left a note in pencil for Herbert, telling him that as I should
be so soon going away, I knew not for how long, I had decided to hurry
down and back, to ascertain for myself how Miss Havisham was faring.
I had then barely time to get my great-coat, lock up the chambers,
and make for the coach-office by the short by-ways. If I had taken a
hackney-chariot and gone by the streets, I should have missed my aim;
going as I did, I caught the coach just as it came out of the yard. I
was the only inside passenger, jolting away knee-deep in straw, when I
came to myself.

For I really had not been myself since the receipt of the letter; it had
so bewildered me, ensuing on the hurry of the morning. The morning hurry
and flutter had been great; for, long and anxiously as I had waited for
Wemmick, his hint had come like a surprise at last. And now I began
to wonder at myself for being in the coach, and to doubt whether I had
sufficient reason for being there, and to consider whether I should
get out presently and go back, and to argue against ever heeding an
anonymous communication, and, in short, to pass through all those phases
of contradiction and indecision to which I suppose very few hurried
people are strangers. Still, the reference to Provis by name mastered
everything. I reasoned as I had reasoned already without knowing it,--if
that be reasoning,--in case any harm should befall him through my not
going, how could I ever forgive myself!

It was dark before we got down, and the journey seemed long and dreary
to me, who could see little of it inside, and who could not go outside
in my disabled state. Avoiding the Blue Boar, I put up at an inn of
minor reputation down the town, and ordered some dinner. While it was
preparing, I went to Satis House and inquired for Miss Havisham; she was
still very ill, though considered something better.

My inn had once been a part of an ancient ecclesiastical house, and I
dined in a little octagonal common-room, like a font. As I was not able
to cut my dinner, the old landlord with a shining bald head did it for
me. This bringing us into conversation, he was so good as to entertain
me with my own story,--of course with the popular feature that
Pumblechook was my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortunes.

“Do you know the young man?” said I.

“Know him!” repeated the landlord. “Ever since he was--no height at
all.”

“Does he ever come back to this neighborhood?”

“Ay, he comes back,” said the landlord, “to his great friends, now and
again, and gives the cold shoulder to the man that made him.”

“What man is that?”

“Him that I speak of,” said the landlord. “Mr. Pumblechook.”

“Is he ungrateful to no one else?”

“No doubt he would be, if he could,” returned the landlord, “but he
can't. And why? Because Pumblechook done everything for him.”

“Does Pumblechook say so?”

“Say so!” replied the landlord. “He han't no call to say so.”

“But does he say so?”

“It would turn a man's blood to white wine winegar to hear him tell of
it, sir,” said the landlord.

I thought, “Yet Joe, dear Joe, you never tell of it. Long-suffering and
loving Joe, you never complain. Nor you, sweet-tempered Biddy!”

“Your appetite's been touched like by your accident,” said the landlord,
glancing at the bandaged arm under my coat. “Try a tenderer bit.”

“No, thank you,” I replied, turning from the table to brood over the
fire. “I can eat no more. Please take it away.”

I had never been struck at so keenly, for my thanklessness to Joe, as
through the brazen impostor Pumblechook. The falser he, the truer Joe;
the meaner he, the nobler Joe.

My heart was deeply and most deservedly humbled as I mused over the fire
for an hour or more. The striking of the clock aroused me, but not from
my dejection or remorse, and I got up and had my coat fastened round
my neck, and went out. I had previously sought in my pockets for the
letter, that I might refer to it again; but I could not find it, and
was uneasy to think that it must have been dropped in the straw of
the coach. I knew very well, however, that the appointed place was the
little sluice-house by the limekiln on the marshes, and the hour nine.
Towards the marshes I now went straight, having no time to spare.




Chapter LIII

It was a dark night, though the full moon rose as I left the enclosed
lands, and passed out upon the marshes. Beyond their dark line there was
a ribbon of clear sky, hardly broad enough to hold the red large moon.
In a few minutes she had ascended out of that clear field, in among the
piled mountains of cloud.

There was a melancholy wind, and the marshes were very dismal. A
stranger would have found them insupportable, and even to me they were
so oppressive that I hesitated, half inclined to go back. But I knew
them well, and could have found my way on a far darker night, and had
no excuse for returning, being there. So, having come there against my
inclination, I went on against it.

The direction that I took was not that in which my old home lay, nor
that in which we had pursued the convicts. My back was turned towards
the distant Hulks as I walked on, and, though I could see the old lights
away on the spits of sand, I saw them over my shoulder. I knew the
limekiln as well as I knew the old Battery, but they were miles apart;
so that, if a light had been burning at each point that night, there
would have been a long strip of the blank horizon between the two bright
specks.

At first, I had to shut some gates after me, and now and then to stand
still while the cattle that were lying in the banked-up pathway arose
and blundered down among the grass and reeds. But after a little while I
seemed to have the whole flats to myself.

It was another half-hour before I drew near to the kiln. The lime was
burning with a sluggish stifling smell, but the fires were made up and
left, and no workmen were visible. Hard by was a small stone-quarry. It
lay directly in my way, and had been worked that day, as I saw by the
tools and barrows that were lying about.

Coming up again to the marsh level out of this excavation,--for the rude
path lay through it,--I saw a light in the old sluice-house. I quickened
my pace, and knocked at the door with my hand. Waiting for some reply,
I looked about me, noticing how the sluice was abandoned and broken, and
how the house--of wood with a tiled roof--would not be proof against the
weather much longer, if it were so even now, and how the mud and ooze
were coated with lime, and how the choking vapor of the kiln crept in a
ghostly way towards me. Still there was no answer, and I knocked again.
No answer still, and I tried the latch.

It rose under my hand, and the door yielded. Looking in, I saw a lighted
candle on a table, a bench, and a mattress on a truckle bedstead. As
there was a loft above, I called, “Is there any one here?” but no voice
answered. Then I looked at my watch, and, finding that it was past nine,
called again, “Is there any one here?” There being still no answer, I
went out at the door, irresolute what to do.

It was beginning to rain fast. Seeing nothing save what I had seen
already, I turned back into the house, and stood just within the shelter
of the doorway, looking out into the night. While I was considering that
some one must have been there lately and must soon be coming back, or
the candle would not be burning, it came into my head to look if the
wick were long. I turned round to do so, and had taken up the candle in
my hand, when it was extinguished by some violent shock; and the next
thing I comprehended was, that I had been caught in a strong running
noose, thrown over my head from behind.

“Now,” said a suppressed voice with an oath, “I've got you!”

“What is this?” I cried, struggling. “Who is it? Help, help, help!”

Not only were my arms pulled close to my sides, but the pressure on
my bad arm caused me exquisite pain. Sometimes, a strong man's hand,
sometimes a strong man's breast, was set against my mouth to deaden
my cries, and with a hot breath always close to me, I struggled
ineffectually in the dark, while I was fastened tight to the wall. “And
now,” said the suppressed voice with another oath, “call out again, and
I'll make short work of you!”

Faint and sick with the pain of my injured arm, bewildered by the
surprise, and yet conscious how easily this threat could be put in
execution, I desisted, and tried to ease my arm were it ever so little.
But, it was bound too tight for that. I felt as if, having been burnt
before, it were now being boiled.

The sudden exclusion of the night, and the substitution of black
darkness in its place, warned me that the man had closed a shutter.
After groping about for a little, he found the flint and steel he
wanted, and began to strike a light. I strained my sight upon the sparks
that fell among the tinder, and upon which he breathed and breathed,
match in hand, but I could only see his lips, and the blue point of
the match; even those but fitfully. The tinder was damp,--no wonder
there,--and one after another the sparks died out.

The man was in no hurry, and struck again with the flint and steel. As
the sparks fell thick and bright about him, I could see his hands, and
touches of his face, and could make out that he was seated and bending
over the table; but nothing more. Presently I saw his blue lips again,
breathing on the tinder, and then a flare of light flashed up, and
showed me Orlick.

Whom I had looked for, I don't know. I had not looked for him. Seeing
him, I felt that I was in a dangerous strait indeed, and I kept my eyes
upon him.

He lighted the candle from the flaring match with great deliberation,
and dropped the match, and trod it out. Then he put the candle away from
him on the table, so that he could see me, and sat with his arms folded
on the table and looked at me. I made out that I was fastened to a stout
perpendicular ladder a few inches from the wall,--a fixture there,--the
means of ascent to the loft above.

“Now,” said he, when we had surveyed one another for some time, “I've
got you.”

“Unbind me. Let me go!”

“Ah!” he returned, “I'll let you go. I'll let you go to the moon, I'll
let you go to the stars. All in good time.”

“Why have you lured me here?”

“Don't you know?” said he, with a deadly look.

“Why have you set upon me in the dark?”

“Because I mean to do it all myself. One keeps a secret better than two.
O you enemy, you enemy!”

His enjoyment of the spectacle I furnished, as he sat with his arms
folded on the table, shaking his head at me and hugging himself, had a
malignity in it that made me tremble. As I watched him in silence,
he put his hand into the corner at his side, and took up a gun with a
brass-bound stock.

“Do you know this?” said he, making as if he would take aim at me. “Do
you know where you saw it afore? Speak, wolf!”

“Yes,” I answered.

“You cost me that place. You did. Speak!”

“What else could I do?”

“You did that, and that would be enough, without more. How dared you to
come betwixt me and a young woman I liked?”

“When did I?”

“When didn't you? It was you as always give Old Orlick a bad name to
her.”

“You gave it to yourself; you gained it for yourself. I could have done
you no harm, if you had done yourself none.”

“You're a liar. And you'll take any pains, and spend any money, to drive
me out of this country, will you?” said he, repeating my words to Biddy
in the last interview I had with her. “Now, I'll tell you a piece of
information. It was never so well worth your while to get me out of this
country as it is to-night. Ah! If it was all your money twenty times
told, to the last brass farden!” As he shook his heavy hand at me, with
his mouth snarling like a tiger's, I felt that it was true.

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I'm a going,” said he, bringing his fist down upon the table with a
heavy blow, and rising as the blow fell to give it greater force,--“I'm
a going to have your life!”

He leaned forward staring at me, slowly unclenched his hand and drew it
across his mouth as if his mouth watered for me, and sat down again.

“You was always in Old Orlick's way since ever you was a child. You goes
out of his way this present night. He'll have no more on you. You're
dead.”

I felt that I had come to the brink of my grave. For a moment I looked
wildly round my trap for any chance of escape; but there was none.

“More than that,” said he, folding his arms on the table again, “I won't
have a rag of you, I won't have a bone of you, left on earth. I'll put
your body in the kiln,--I'd carry two such to it, on my Shoulders,--and,
let people suppose what they may of you, they shall never know nothing.”

My mind, with inconceivable rapidity followed out all the consequences
of such a death. Estella's father would believe I had deserted him,
would be taken, would die accusing me; even Herbert would doubt me,
when he compared the letter I had left for him with the fact that I had
called at Miss Havisham's gate for only a moment; Joe and Biddy would
never know how sorry I had been that night, none would ever know what
I had suffered, how true I had meant to be, what an agony I had passed
through. The death close before me was terrible, but far more terrible
than death was the dread of being misremembered after death. And
so quick were my thoughts, that I saw myself despised by unborn
generations,--Estella's children, and their children,--while the
wretch's words were yet on his lips.

“Now, wolf,” said he, “afore I kill you like any other beast,--which is
wot I mean to do and wot I have tied you up for,--I'll have a good look
at you and a good goad at you. O you enemy!”

It had passed through my thoughts to cry out for help again; though
few could know better than I, the solitary nature of the spot, and the
hopelessness of aid. But as he sat gloating over me, I was supported by
a scornful detestation of him that sealed my lips. Above all things, I
resolved that I would not entreat him, and that I would die making some
last poor resistance to him. Softened as my thoughts of all the rest of
men were in that dire extremity; humbly beseeching pardon, as I did, of
Heaven; melted at heart, as I was, by the thought that I had taken no
farewell, and never now could take farewell of those who were dear to
me, or could explain myself to them, or ask for their compassion on my
miserable errors,--still, if I could have killed him, even in dying, I
would have done it.

He had been drinking, and his eyes were red and bloodshot. Around his
neck was slung a tin bottle, as I had often seen his meat and drink
slung about him in other days. He brought the bottle to his lips, and
took a fiery drink from it; and I smelt the strong spirits that I saw
flash into his face.

“Wolf!” said he, folding his arms again, “Old Orlick's a going to tell
you somethink. It was you as did for your shrew sister.”

Again my mind, with its former inconceivable rapidity, had exhausted the
whole subject of the attack upon my sister, her illness, and her death,
before his slow and hesitating speech had formed these words.

“It was you, villain,” said I.

“I tell you it was your doing,--I tell you it was done through you,” he
retorted, catching up the gun, and making a blow with the stock at the
vacant air between us. “I come upon her from behind, as I come upon you
to-night. I giv' it her! I left her for dead, and if there had been a
limekiln as nigh her as there is now nigh you, she shouldn't have come
to life again. But it warn't Old Orlick as did it; it was you. You was
favored, and he was bullied and beat. Old Orlick bullied and beat, eh?
Now you pays for it. You done it; now you pays for it.”

He drank again, and became more ferocious. I saw by his tilting of
the bottle that there was no great quantity left in it. I distinctly
understood that he was working himself up with its contents to make an
end of me. I knew that every drop it held was a drop of my life. I knew
that when I was changed into a part of the vapor that had crept towards
me but a little while before, like my own warning ghost, he would do
as he had done in my sister's case,--make all haste to the town, and
be seen slouching about there drinking at the alehouses. My rapid mind
pursued him to the town, made a picture of the street with him in it,
and contrasted its lights and life with the lonely marsh and the white
vapor creeping over it, into which I should have dissolved.

It was not only that I could have summed up years and years and years
while he said a dozen words, but that what he did say presented pictures
to me, and not mere words. In the excited and exalted state of my brain,
I could not think of a place without seeing it, or of persons without
seeing them. It is impossible to overstate the vividness of these
images, and yet I was so intent, all the time, upon him himself,--who
would not be intent on the tiger crouching to spring!--that I knew of
the slightest action of his fingers.

When he had drunk this second time, he rose from the bench on which
he sat, and pushed the table aside. Then, he took up the candle, and,
shading it with his murderous hand so as to throw its light on me, stood
before me, looking at me and enjoying the sight.

“Wolf, I'll tell you something more. It was Old Orlick as you tumbled
over on your stairs that night.”

I saw the staircase with its extinguished lamps. I saw the shadows of
the heavy stair-rails, thrown by the watchman's lantern on the wall.
I saw the rooms that I was never to see again; here, a door half open;
there, a door closed; all the articles of furniture around.

“And why was Old Orlick there? I'll tell you something more, wolf.
You and her have pretty well hunted me out of this country, so far as
getting a easy living in it goes, and I've took up with new companions,
and new masters. Some of 'em writes my letters when I wants 'em
wrote,--do you mind?--writes my letters, wolf! They writes fifty hands;
they're not like sneaking you, as writes but one. I've had a firm mind
and a firm will to have your life, since you was down here at your
sister's burying. I han't seen a way to get you safe, and I've looked
arter you to know your ins and outs. For, says Old Orlick to himself,
'Somehow or another I'll have him!' What! When I looks for you, I finds
your uncle Provis, eh?”

Mill Pond Bank, and Chinks's Basin, and the Old Green Copper Rope-walk,
all so clear and plain! Provis in his rooms, the signal whose use was
over, pretty Clara, the good motherly woman, old Bill Barley on his
back, all drifting by, as on the swift stream of my life fast running
out to sea!

“You with a uncle too! Why, I know'd you at Gargery's when you was so
small a wolf that I could have took your weazen betwixt this finger and
thumb and chucked you away dead (as I'd thoughts o' doing, odd times,
when I see you loitering amongst the pollards on a Sunday), and you
hadn't found no uncles then. No, not you! But when Old Orlick come for
to hear that your uncle Provis had most like wore the leg-iron wot Old
Orlick had picked up, filed asunder, on these meshes ever so many year
ago, and wot he kep by him till he dropped your sister with it, like
a bullock, as he means to drop you--hey?--when he come for to hear
that--hey?”

In his savage taunting, he flared the candle so close at me that I
turned my face aside to save it from the flame.

“Ah!” he cried, laughing, after doing it again, “the burnt child dreads
the fire! Old Orlick knowed you was burnt, Old Orlick knowed you was
smuggling your uncle Provis away, Old Orlick's a match for you and
know'd you'd come to-night! Now I'll tell you something more, wolf, and
this ends it. There's them that's as good a match for your uncle Provis
as Old Orlick has been for you. Let him 'ware them, when he's lost his
nevvy! Let him 'ware them, when no man can't find a rag of his dear
relation's clothes, nor yet a bone of his body. There's them that can't
and that won't have Magwitch,--yes, I know the name!--alive in the same
land with them, and that's had such sure information of him when he
was alive in another land, as that he couldn't and shouldn't leave it
unbeknown and put them in danger. P'raps it's them that writes fifty
hands, and that's not like sneaking you as writes but one. 'Ware
Compeyson, Magwitch, and the gallows!”

He flared the candle at me again, smoking my face and hair, and for an
instant blinding me, and turned his powerful back as he replaced the
light on the table. I had thought a prayer, and had been with Joe and
Biddy and Herbert, before he turned towards me again.

There was a clear space of a few feet between the table and the opposite
wall. Within this space, he now slouched backwards and forwards. His
great strength seemed to sit stronger upon him than ever before, as he
did this with his hands hanging loose and heavy at his sides, and with
his eyes scowling at me. I had no grain of hope left. Wild as my inward
hurry was, and wonderful the force of the pictures that rushed by me
instead of thoughts, I could yet clearly understand that, unless he had
resolved that I was within a few moments of surely perishing out of all
human knowledge, he would never have told me what he had told.

Of a sudden, he stopped, took the cork out of his bottle, and tossed
it away. Light as it was, I heard it fall like a plummet. He swallowed
slowly, tilting up the bottle by little and little, and now he looked at
me no more. The last few drops of liquor he poured into the palm of his
hand, and licked up. Then, with a sudden hurry of violence and swearing
horribly, he threw the bottle from him, and stooped; and I saw in his
hand a stone-hammer with a long heavy handle.

The resolution I had made did not desert me, for, without uttering
one vain word of appeal to him, I shouted out with all my might, and
struggled with all my might. It was only my head and my legs that I
could move, but to that extent I struggled with all the force, until
then unknown, that was within me. In the same instant I heard responsive
shouts, saw figures and a gleam of light dash in at the door, heard
voices and tumult, and saw Orlick emerge from a struggle of men, as if
it were tumbling water, clear the table at a leap, and fly out into the
night.

After a blank, I found that I was lying unbound, on the floor, in the
same place, with my head on some one's knee. My eyes were fixed on the
ladder against the wall, when I came to myself,--had opened on it before
my mind saw it,--and thus as I recovered consciousness, I knew that I
was in the place where I had lost it.

Too indifferent at first, even to look round and ascertain who supported
me, I was lying looking at the ladder, when there came between me and it
a face. The face of Trabb's boy!

“I think he's all right!” said Trabb's boy, in a sober voice; “but ain't
he just pale though!”

At these words, the face of him who supported me looked over into mine,
and I saw my supporter to be--

“Herbert! Great Heaven!”

“Softly,” said Herbert. “Gently, Handel. Don't be too eager.”

“And our old comrade, Startop!” I cried, as he too bent over me.

“Remember what he is going to assist us in,” said Herbert, “and be
calm.”

The allusion made me spring up; though I dropped again from the pain
in my arm. “The time has not gone by, Herbert, has it? What night is
to-night? How long have I been here?” For, I had a strange and
strong misgiving that I had been lying there a long time--a day and a
night,--two days and nights,--more.

“The time has not gone by. It is still Monday night.”

“Thank God!”

“And you have all to-morrow, Tuesday, to rest in,” said Herbert. “But
you can't help groaning, my dear Handel. What hurt have you got? Can you
stand?”

“Yes, yes,” said I, “I can walk. I have no hurt but in this throbbing
arm.”

They laid it bare, and did what they could. It was violently swollen and
inflamed, and I could scarcely endure to have it touched. But, they tore
up their handkerchiefs to make fresh bandages, and carefully replaced
it in the sling, until we could get to the town and obtain some cooling
lotion to put upon it. In a little while we had shut the door of the
dark and empty sluice-house, and were passing through the quarry on our
way back. Trabb's boy--Trabb's overgrown young man now--went before us
with a lantern, which was the light I had seen come in at the door. But,
the moon was a good two hours higher than when I had last seen the sky,
and the night, though rainy, was much lighter. The white vapor of the
kiln was passing from us as we went by, and as I had thought a prayer
before, I thought a thanksgiving now.

Entreating Herbert to tell me how he had come to my rescue,--which at
first he had flatly refused to do, but had insisted on my remaining
quiet,--I learnt that I had in my hurry dropped the letter, open, in our
chambers, where he, coming home to bring with him Startop whom he had
met in the street on his way to me, found it, very soon after I
was gone. Its tone made him uneasy, and the more so because of the
inconsistency between it and the hasty letter I had left for him. His
uneasiness increasing instead of subsiding, after a quarter of an
hour's consideration, he set off for the coach-office with Startop, who
volunteered his company, to make inquiry when the next coach went
down. Finding that the afternoon coach was gone, and finding that his
uneasiness grew into positive alarm, as obstacles came in his way, he
resolved to follow in a post-chaise. So he and Startop arrived at the
Blue Boar, fully expecting there to find me, or tidings of me; but,
finding neither, went on to Miss Havisham's, where they lost me.
Hereupon they went back to the hotel (doubtless at about the time when
I was hearing the popular local version of my own story) to refresh
themselves and to get some one to guide them out upon the marshes. Among
the loungers under the Boar's archway happened to be Trabb's Boy,--true
to his ancient habit of happening to be everywhere where he had no
business,--and Trabb's boy had seen me passing from Miss Havisham's in
the direction of my dining-place. Thus Trabb's boy became their guide,
and with him they went out to the sluice-house, though by the town way
to the marshes, which I had avoided. Now, as they went along, Herbert
reflected, that I might, after all, have been brought there on some
genuine and serviceable errand tending to Provis's safety, and,
bethinking himself that in that case interruption must be mischievous,
left his guide and Startop on the edge of the quarry, and went on by
himself, and stole round the house two or three times, endeavouring to
ascertain whether all was right within. As he could hear nothing but
indistinct sounds of one deep rough voice (this was while my mind was so
busy), he even at last began to doubt whether I was there, when suddenly
I cried out loudly, and he answered the cries, and rushed in, closely
followed by the other two.

When I told Herbert what had passed within the house, he was for our
immediately going before a magistrate in the town, late at night as it
was, and getting out a warrant. But, I had already considered that such
a course, by detaining us there, or binding us to come back, might
be fatal to Provis. There was no gainsaying this difficulty, and we
relinquished all thoughts of pursuing Orlick at that time. For the
present, under the circumstances, we deemed it prudent to make rather
light of the matter to Trabb's boy; who, I am convinced, would have been
much affected by disappointment, if he had known that his intervention
saved me from the limekiln. Not that Trabb's boy was of a malignant
nature, but that he had too much spare vivacity, and that it was in his
constitution to want variety and excitement at anybody's expense. When
we parted, I presented him with two guineas (which seemed to meet his
views), and told him that I was sorry ever to have had an ill opinion of
him (which made no impression on him at all).

Wednesday being so close upon us, we determined to go back to London
that night, three in the post-chaise; the rather, as we should then be
clear away before the night's adventure began to be talked of. Herbert
got a large bottle of stuff for my arm; and by dint of having this stuff
dropped over it all the night through, I was just able to bear its pain
on the journey. It was daylight when we reached the Temple, and I went
at once to bed, and lay in bed all day.

My terror, as I lay there, of falling ill, and being unfitted for
to-morrow, was so besetting, that I wonder it did not disable me of
itself. It would have done so, pretty surely, in conjunction with the
mental wear and tear I had suffered, but for the unnatural strain upon
me that to-morrow was. So anxiously looked forward to, charged with such
consequences, its results so impenetrably hidden, though so near.

No precaution could have been more obvious than our refraining
from communication with him that day; yet this again increased my
restlessness. I started at every footstep and every sound, believing
that he was discovered and taken, and this was the messenger to tell
me so. I persuaded myself that I knew he was taken; that there was
something more upon my mind than a fear or a presentiment; that the fact
had occurred, and I had a mysterious knowledge of it. As the days wore
on, and no ill news came, as the day closed in and darkness fell,
my overshadowing dread of being disabled by illness before to-morrow
morning altogether mastered me. My burning arm throbbed, and my burning
head throbbed, and I fancied I was beginning to wander. I counted up to
high numbers, to make sure of myself, and repeated passages that I knew
in prose and verse. It happened sometimes that in the mere escape of a
fatigued mind, I dozed for some moments or forgot; then I would say to
myself with a start, “Now it has come, and I am turning delirious!”

They kept me very quiet all day, and kept my arm constantly dressed, and
gave me cooling drinks. Whenever I fell asleep, I awoke with the notion
I had had in the sluice-house, that a long time had elapsed and the
opportunity to save him was gone. About midnight I got out of bed
and went to Herbert, with the conviction that I had been asleep for
four-and-twenty hours, and that Wednesday was past. It was the last
self-exhausting effort of my fretfulness, for after that I slept
soundly.

Wednesday morning was dawning when I looked out of window. The winking
lights upon the bridges were already pale, the coming sun was like a
marsh of fire on the horizon. The river, still dark and mysterious, was
spanned by bridges that were turning coldly gray, with here and there
at top a warm touch from the burning in the sky. As I looked along
the clustered roofs, with church-towers and spires shooting into the
unusually clear air, the sun rose up, and a veil seemed to be drawn from
the river, and millions of sparkles burst out upon its waters. From me
too, a veil seemed to be drawn, and I felt strong and well.

Herbert lay asleep in his bed, and our old fellow-student lay asleep on
the sofa. I could not dress myself without help; but I made up the fire,
which was still burning, and got some coffee ready for them. In good
time they too started up strong and well, and we admitted the sharp
morning air at the windows, and looked at the tide that was still
flowing towards us.

“When it turns at nine o'clock,” said Herbert, cheerfully, “look out for
us, and stand ready, you over there at Mill Pond Bank!”




Chapter LIV

It was one of those March days when the sun shines hot and the wind
blows cold: when it is summer in the light, and winter in the shade.
We had our pea-coats with us, and I took a bag. Of all my worldly
possessions I took no more than the few necessaries that filled the
bag. Where I might go, what I might do, or when I might return, were
questions utterly unknown to me; nor did I vex my mind with them, for
it was wholly set on Provis's safety. I only wondered for the passing
moment, as I stopped at the door and looked back, under what altered
circumstances I should next see those rooms, if ever.

We loitered down to the Temple stairs, and stood loitering there, as if
we were not quite decided to go upon the water at all. Of course, I had
taken care that the boat should be ready and everything in order. After
a little show of indecision, which there were none to see but the two
or three amphibious creatures belonging to our Temple stairs, we went
on board and cast off; Herbert in the bow, I steering. It was then about
high-water,--half-past eight.

Our plan was this. The tide, beginning to run down at nine, and being
with us until three, we intended still to creep on after it had turned,
and row against it until dark. We should then be well in those long
reaches below Gravesend, between Kent and Essex, where the river is
broad and solitary, where the water-side inhabitants are very few, and
where lone public-houses are scattered here and there, of which we could
choose one for a resting-place. There, we meant to lie by all night.
The steamer for Hamburg and the steamer for Rotterdam would start from
London at about nine on Thursday morning. We should know at what time
to expect them, according to where we were, and would hail the first;
so that, if by any accident we were not taken abroad, we should have
another chance. We knew the distinguishing marks of each vessel.

The relief of being at last engaged in the execution of the purpose
was so great to me that I felt it difficult to realize the condition in
which I had been a few hours before. The crisp air, the sunlight, the
movement on the river, and the moving river itself,--the road that ran
with us, seeming to sympathize with us, animate us, and encourage us
on,--freshened me with new hope. I felt mortified to be of so little use
in the boat; but, there were few better oarsmen than my two friends, and
they rowed with a steady stroke that was to last all day.

At that time, the steam-traffic on the Thames was far below its present
extent, and watermen's boats were far more numerous. Of barges, sailing
colliers, and coasting-traders, there were perhaps, as many as now;
but of steam-ships, great and small, not a tithe or a twentieth part
so many. Early as it was, there were plenty of scullers going here and
there that morning, and plenty of barges dropping down with the tide;
the navigation of the river between bridges, in an open boat, was a much
easier and commoner matter in those days than it is in these; and we
went ahead among many skiffs and wherries briskly.

Old London Bridge was soon passed, and old Billingsgate Market with its
oyster-boats and Dutchmen, and the White Tower and Traitor's Gate, and
we were in among the tiers of shipping. Here were the Leith, Aberdeen,
and Glasgow steamers, loading and unloading goods, and looking immensely
high out of the water as we passed alongside; here, were colliers by the
score and score, with the coal-whippers plunging off stages on deck, as
counterweights to measures of coal swinging up, which were then rattled
over the side into barges; here, at her moorings was to-morrow's steamer
for Rotterdam, of which we took good notice; and here to-morrow's for
Hamburg, under whose bowsprit we crossed. And now I, sitting in the
stern, could see, with a faster beating heart, Mill Pond Bank and Mill
Pond stairs.

“Is he there?” said Herbert.

“Not yet.”

“Right! He was not to come down till he saw us. Can you see his signal?”

“Not well from here; but I think I see it.--Now I see him! Pull both.
Easy, Herbert. Oars!”

We touched the stairs lightly for a single moment, and he was on board,
and we were off again. He had a boat-cloak with him, and a black canvas
bag; and he looked as like a river-pilot as my heart could have wished.

“Dear boy!” he said, putting his arm on my shoulder, as he took his
seat. “Faithful dear boy, well done. Thankye, thankye!”

Again among the tiers of shipping, in and out, avoiding rusty
chain-cables frayed hempen hawsers and bobbing buoys, sinking for the
moment floating broken baskets, scattering floating chips of wood
and shaving, cleaving floating scum of coal, in and out, under the
figure-head of the John of Sunderland making a speech to the winds (as
is done by many Johns), and the Betsy of Yarmouth with a firm formality
of bosom and her knobby eyes starting two inches out of her head; in
and out, hammers going in ship-builders' yards, saws going at timber,
clashing engines going at things unknown, pumps going in leaky ships,
capstans going, ships going out to sea, and unintelligible sea-creatures
roaring curses over the bulwarks at respondent lightermen, in and
out,--out at last upon the clearer river, where the ships' boys might
take their fenders in, no longer fishing in troubled waters with them
over the side, and where the festooned sails might fly out to the wind.

At the stairs where we had taken him abroad, and ever since, I had
looked warily for any token of our being suspected. I had seen none. We
certainly had not been, and at that time as certainly we were not either
attended or followed by any boat. If we had been waited on by any boat,
I should have run in to shore, and have obliged her to go on, or to
make her purpose evident. But we held our own without any appearance of
molestation.

He had his boat-cloak on him, and looked, as I have said, a natural part
of the scene. It was remarkable (but perhaps the wretched life he had
led accounted for it) that he was the least anxious of any of us. He
was not indifferent, for he told me that he hoped to live to see his
gentleman one of the best of gentlemen in a foreign country; he was not
disposed to be passive or resigned, as I understood it; but he had no
notion of meeting danger half way. When it came upon him, he confronted
it, but it must come before he troubled himself.

“If you knowed, dear boy,” he said to me, “what it is to sit here
alonger my dear boy and have my smoke, arter having been day by day
betwixt four walls, you'd envy me. But you don't know what it is.”

“I think I know the delights of freedom,” I answered.

“Ah,” said he, shaking his head gravely. “But you don't know it equal to
me. You must have been under lock and key, dear boy, to know it equal to
me,--but I ain't a going to be low.”

It occurred to me as inconsistent, that, for any mastering idea, he
should have endangered his freedom, and even his life. But I reflected
that perhaps freedom without danger was too much apart from all the
habit of his existence to be to him what it would be to another man. I
was not far out, since he said, after smoking a little:--

“You see, dear boy, when I was over yonder, t'other side the world, I
was always a looking to this side; and it come flat to be there, for
all I was a growing rich. Everybody knowed Magwitch, and Magwitch could
come, and Magwitch could go, and nobody's head would be troubled about
him. They ain't so easy concerning me here, dear boy,--wouldn't be,
leastwise, if they knowed where I was.”

“If all goes well,” said I, “you will be perfectly free and safe again
within a few hours.”

“Well,” he returned, drawing a long breath, “I hope so.”

“And think so?”

He dipped his hand in the water over the boat's gunwale, and said,
smiling with that softened air upon him which was not new to me:--

“Ay, I s'pose I think so, dear boy. We'd be puzzled to be more quiet
and easy-going than we are at present. But--it's a flowing so soft
and pleasant through the water, p'raps, as makes me think it--I was
a thinking through my smoke just then, that we can no more see to the
bottom of the next few hours than we can see to the bottom of this river
what I catches hold of. Nor yet we can't no more hold their tide than
I can hold this. And it's run through my fingers and gone, you see!”
 holding up his dripping hand.

“But for your face I should think you were a little despondent,” said I.

“Not a bit on it, dear boy! It comes of flowing on so quiet, and of that
there rippling at the boat's head making a sort of a Sunday tune. Maybe
I'm a growing a trifle old besides.”

He put his pipe back in his mouth with an undisturbed expression of
face, and sat as composed and contented as if we were already out of
England. Yet he was as submissive to a word of advice as if he had been
in constant terror; for, when we ran ashore to get some bottles of beer
into the boat, and he was stepping out, I hinted that I thought he would
be safest where he was, and he said. “Do you, dear boy?” and quietly sat
down again.

The air felt cold upon the river, but it was a bright day, and the
sunshine was very cheering. The tide ran strong, I took care to lose
none of it, and our steady stroke carried us on thoroughly well. By
imperceptible degrees, as the tide ran out, we lost more and more of the
nearer woods and hills, and dropped lower and lower between the muddy
banks, but the tide was yet with us when we were off Gravesend. As our
charge was wrapped in his cloak, I purposely passed within a boat or
two's length of the floating Custom House, and so out to catch the
stream, alongside of two emigrant ships, and under the bows of a large
transport with troops on the forecastle looking down at us. And soon
the tide began to slacken, and the craft lying at anchor to swing,
and presently they had all swung round, and the ships that were taking
advantage of the new tide to get up to the Pool began to crowd upon us
in a fleet, and we kept under the shore, as much out of the strength of
the tide now as we could, standing carefully off from low shallows and
mudbanks.

Our oarsmen were so fresh, by dint of having occasionally let her drive
with the tide for a minute or two, that a quarter of an hour's rest
proved full as much as they wanted. We got ashore among some slippery
stones while we ate and drank what we had with us, and looked about.
It was like my own marsh country, flat and monotonous, and with a
dim horizon; while the winding river turned and turned, and the great
floating buoys upon it turned and turned, and everything else seemed
stranded and still. For now the last of the fleet of ships was round
the last low point we had headed; and the last green barge, straw-laden,
with a brown sail, had followed; and some ballast-lighters, shaped like
a child's first rude imitation of a boat, lay low in the mud; and a
little squat shoal-lighthouse on open piles stood crippled in the mud
on stilts and crutches; and slimy stakes stuck out of the mud, and slimy
stones stuck out of the mud, and red landmarks and tidemarks stuck
out of the mud, and an old landing-stage and an old roofless building
slipped into the mud, and all about us was stagnation and mud.

We pushed off again, and made what way we could. It was much harder work
now, but Herbert and Startop persevered, and rowed and rowed and rowed
until the sun went down. By that time the river had lifted us a little,
so that we could see above the bank. There was the red sun, on the low
level of the shore, in a purple haze, fast deepening into black; and
there was the solitary flat marsh; and far away there were the rising
grounds, between which and us there seemed to be no life, save here and
there in the foreground a melancholy gull.

As the night was fast falling, and as the moon, being past the full,
would not rise early, we held a little council; a short one, for clearly
our course was to lie by at the first lonely tavern we could find. So,
they plied their oars once more, and I looked out for anything like a
house. Thus we held on, speaking little, for four or five dull miles. It
was very cold, and, a collier coming by us, with her galley-fire smoking
and flaring, looked like a comfortable home. The night was as dark by
this time as it would be until morning; and what light we had, seemed
to come more from the river than the sky, as the oars in their dipping
struck at a few reflected stars.

At this dismal time we were evidently all possessed by the idea that
we were followed. As the tide made, it flapped heavily at irregular
intervals against the shore; and whenever such a sound came, one or
other of us was sure to start, and look in that direction. Here and
there, the set of the current had worn down the bank into a little
creek, and we were all suspicious of such places, and eyed them
nervously. Sometimes, “What was that ripple?” one of us would say in a
low voice. Or another, “Is that a boat yonder?” And afterwards we would
fall into a dead silence, and I would sit impatiently thinking with what
an unusual amount of noise the oars worked in the thowels.

At length we descried a light and a roof, and presently afterwards ran
alongside a little causeway made of stones that had been picked up hard
by. Leaving the rest in the boat, I stepped ashore, and found the light
to be in a window of a public-house. It was a dirty place enough, and I
dare say not unknown to smuggling adventurers; but there was a good
fire in the kitchen, and there were eggs and bacon to eat, and various
liquors to drink. Also, there were two double-bedded rooms,--“such as
they were,” the landlord said. No other company was in the house than
the landlord, his wife, and a grizzled male creature, the “Jack” of the
little causeway, who was as slimy and smeary as if he had been low-water
mark too.

With this assistant, I went down to the boat again, and we all came
ashore, and brought out the oars, and rudder and boat-hook, and all
else, and hauled her up for the night. We made a very good meal by the
kitchen fire, and then apportioned the bedrooms: Herbert and Startop
were to occupy one; I and our charge the other. We found the air as
carefully excluded from both, as if air were fatal to life; and there
were more dirty clothes and bandboxes under the beds than I should have
thought the family possessed. But we considered ourselves well off,
notwithstanding, for a more solitary place we could not have found.

While we were comforting ourselves by the fire after our meal, the
Jack--who was sitting in a corner, and who had a bloated pair of shoes
on, which he had exhibited while we were eating our eggs and bacon, as
interesting relics that he had taken a few days ago from the feet of
a drowned seaman washed ashore--asked me if we had seen a four-oared
galley going up with the tide? When I told him No, he said she must have
gone down then, and yet she “took up too,” when she left there.

“They must ha' thought better on't for some reason or another,” said the
Jack, “and gone down.”

“A four-oared galley, did you say?” said I.

“A four,” said the Jack, “and two sitters.”

“Did they come ashore here?”

“They put in with a stone two-gallon jar for some beer. I'd ha' been
glad to pison the beer myself,” said the Jack, “or put some rattling
physic in it.”

“Why?”

“I know why,” said the Jack. He spoke in a slushy voice, as if much mud
had washed into his throat.

“He thinks,” said the landlord, a weakly meditative man with a pale eye,
who seemed to rely greatly on his Jack,--“he thinks they was, what they
wasn't.”

“I knows what I thinks,” observed the Jack.

“You thinks Custum 'Us, Jack?” said the landlord.

“I do,” said the Jack.

“Then you're wrong, Jack.”

“AM I!”

In the infinite meaning of his reply and his boundless confidence in
his views, the Jack took one of his bloated shoes off, looked into
it, knocked a few stones out of it on the kitchen floor, and put it on
again. He did this with the air of a Jack who was so right that he could
afford to do anything.

“Why, what do you make out that they done with their buttons then,
Jack?” asked the landlord, vacillating weakly.

“Done with their buttons?” returned the Jack. “Chucked 'em overboard.
Swallered 'em. Sowed 'em, to come up small salad. Done with their
buttons!”

“Don't be cheeky, Jack,” remonstrated the landlord, in a melancholy and
pathetic way.

“A Custum 'Us officer knows what to do with his Buttons,” said the Jack,
repeating the obnoxious word with the greatest contempt, “when they
comes betwixt him and his own light. A four and two sitters don't go
hanging and hovering, up with one tide and down with another, and both
with and against another, without there being Custum 'Us at the bottom
of it.” Saying which he went out in disdain; and the landlord, having no
one to reply upon, found it impracticable to pursue the subject.

This dialogue made us all uneasy, and me very uneasy. The dismal wind
was muttering round the house, the tide was flapping at the shore, and
I had a feeling that we were caged and threatened. A four-oared galley
hovering about in so unusual a way as to attract this notice was an ugly
circumstance that I could not get rid of. When I had induced Provis to
go up to bed, I went outside with my two companions (Startop by this
time knew the state of the case), and held another council. Whether we
should remain at the house until near the steamer's time, which would
be about one in the afternoon, or whether we should put off early in the
morning, was the question we discussed. On the whole we deemed it the
better course to lie where we were, until within an hour or so of the
steamer's time, and then to get out in her track, and drift easily with
the tide. Having settled to do this, we returned into the house and went
to bed.

I lay down with the greater part of my clothes on, and slept well for a
few hours. When I awoke, the wind had risen, and the sign of the house
(the Ship) was creaking and banging about, with noises that startled
me. Rising softly, for my charge lay fast asleep, I looked out of the
window. It commanded the causeway where we had hauled up our boat, and,
as my eyes adapted themselves to the light of the clouded moon, I saw
two men looking into her. They passed by under the window, looking at
nothing else, and they did not go down to the landing-place which I
could discern to be empty, but struck across the marsh in the direction
of the Nore.

My first impulse was to call up Herbert, and show him the two men going
away. But reflecting, before I got into his room, which was at the back
of the house and adjoined mine, that he and Startop had had a harder day
than I, and were fatigued, I forbore. Going back to my window, I could
see the two men moving over the marsh. In that light, however, I soon
lost them, and, feeling very cold, lay down to think of the matter, and
fell asleep again.

We were up early. As we walked to and fro, all four together, before
breakfast, I deemed it right to recount what I had seen. Again our
charge was the least anxious of the party. It was very likely that the
men belonged to the Custom House, he said quietly, and that they had no
thought of us. I tried to persuade myself that it was so,--as, indeed,
it might easily be. However, I proposed that he and I should walk away
together to a distant point we could see, and that the boat should take
us aboard there, or as near there as might prove feasible, at about
noon. This being considered a good precaution, soon after breakfast he
and I set forth, without saying anything at the tavern.

He smoked his pipe as we went along, and sometimes stopped to clap me on
the shoulder. One would have supposed that it was I who was in danger,
not he, and that he was reassuring me. We spoke very little. As we
approached the point, I begged him to remain in a sheltered place, while
I went on to reconnoitre; for it was towards it that the men had passed
in the night. He complied, and I went on alone. There was no boat off
the point, nor any boat drawn up anywhere near it, nor were there any
signs of the men having embarked there. But, to be sure, the tide was
high, and there might have been some footpints under water.

When he looked out from his shelter in the distance, and saw that I
waved my hat to him to come up, he rejoined me, and there we waited;
sometimes lying on the bank, wrapped in our coats, and sometimes moving
about to warm ourselves, until we saw our boat coming round. We got
aboard easily, and rowed out into the track of the steamer. By that time
it wanted but ten minutes of one o'clock, and we began to look out for
her smoke.

But, it was half-past one before we saw her smoke, and soon afterwards
we saw behind it the smoke of another steamer. As they were coming on
at full speed, we got the two bags ready, and took that opportunity
of saying good-bye to Herbert and Startop. We had all shaken hands
cordially, and neither Herbert's eyes nor mine were quite dry, when I
saw a four-oared galley shoot out from under the bank but a little way
ahead of us, and row out into the same track.

A stretch of shore had been as yet between us and the steamer's smoke,
by reason of the bend and wind of the river; but now she was visible,
coming head on. I called to Herbert and Startop to keep before the tide,
that she might see us lying by for her, and I adjured Provis to sit
quite still, wrapped in his cloak. He answered cheerily, “Trust to me,
dear boy,” and sat like a statue. Meantime the galley, which was very
skilfully handled, had crossed us, let us come up with her, and fallen
alongside. Leaving just room enough for the play of the oars, she kept
alongside, drifting when we drifted, and pulling a stroke or two when we
pulled. Of the two sitters one held the rudder-lines, and looked at us
attentively,--as did all the rowers; the other sitter was wrapped up,
much as Provis was, and seemed to shrink, and whisper some instruction
to the steerer as he looked at us. Not a word was spoken in either boat.

Startop could make out, after a few minutes, which steamer was first,
and gave me the word “Hamburg,” in a low voice, as we sat face to face.
She was nearing us very fast, and the beating of her peddles grew louder
and louder. I felt as if her shadow were absolutely upon us, when the
galley hailed us. I answered.

“You have a returned Transport there,” said the man who held the lines.
“That's the man, wrapped in the cloak. His name is Abel Magwitch,
otherwise Provis. I apprehend that man, and call upon him to surrender,
and you to assist.”

At the same moment, without giving any audible direction to his crew,
he ran the galley abroad of us. They had pulled one sudden stroke ahead,
had got their oars in, had run athwart us, and were holding on to
our gunwale, before we knew what they were doing. This caused great
confusion on board the steamer, and I heard them calling to us, and
heard the order given to stop the paddles, and heard them stop, but felt
her driving down upon us irresistibly. In the same moment, I saw the
steersman of the galley lay his hand on his prisoner's shoulder, and saw
that both boats were swinging round with the force of the tide, and
saw that all hands on board the steamer were running forward quite
frantically. Still, in the same moment, I saw the prisoner start
up, lean across his captor, and pull the cloak from the neck of the
shrinking sitter in the galley. Still in the same moment, I saw that the
face disclosed, was the face of the other convict of long ago. Still, in
the same moment, I saw the face tilt backward with a white terror on it
that I shall never forget, and heard a great cry on board the steamer,
and a loud splash in the water, and felt the boat sink from under me.

It was but for an instant that I seemed to struggle with a thousand
mill-weirs and a thousand flashes of light; that instant past, I was
taken on board the galley. Herbert was there, and Startop was there; but
our boat was gone, and the two convicts were gone.

What with the cries aboard the steamer, and the furious blowing off of
her steam, and her driving on, and our driving on, I could not at first
distinguish sky from water or shore from shore; but the crew of the
galley righted her with great speed, and, pulling certain swift strong
strokes ahead, lay upon their oars, every man looking silently and
eagerly at the water astern. Presently a dark object was seen in it,
bearing towards us on the tide. No man spoke, but the steersman held up
his hand, and all softly backed water, and kept the boat straight and
true before it. As it came nearer, I saw it to be Magwitch, swimming,
but not swimming freely. He was taken on board, and instantly manacled
at the wrists and ankles.

The galley was kept steady, and the silent, eager look-out at the water
was resumed. But, the Rotterdam steamer now came up, and apparently not
understanding what had happened, came on at speed. By the time she had
been hailed and stopped, both steamers were drifting away from us, and
we were rising and falling in a troubled wake of water. The look-out was
kept, long after all was still again and the two steamers were gone; but
everybody knew that it was hopeless now.

At length we gave it up, and pulled under the shore towards the tavern
we had lately left, where we were received with no little surprise. Here
I was able to get some comforts for Magwitch,--Provis no longer,--who
had received some very severe injury in the Chest, and a deep cut in the
head.

He told me that he believed himself to have gone under the keel of the
steamer, and to have been struck on the head in rising. The injury to
his chest (which rendered his breathing extremely painful) he thought
he had received against the side of the galley. He added that he did not
pretend to say what he might or might not have done to Compeyson, but
that, in the moment of his laying his hand on his cloak to identify him,
that villain had staggered up and staggered back, and they had both gone
overboard together, when the sudden wrenching of him (Magwitch) out of
our boat, and the endeavor of his captor to keep him in it, had capsized
us. He told me in a whisper that they had gone down fiercely locked in
each other's arms, and that there had been a struggle under water, and
that he had disengaged himself, struck out, and swum away.

I never had any reason to doubt the exact truth of what he thus told me.
The officer who steered the galley gave the same account of their going
overboard.

When I asked this officer's permission to change the prisoner's
wet clothes by purchasing any spare garments I could get at the
public-house, he gave it readily: merely observing that he must take
charge of everything his prisoner had about him. So the pocket-book
which had once been in my hands passed into the officer's. He further
gave me leave to accompany the prisoner to London; but declined to
accord that grace to my two friends.

The Jack at the Ship was instructed where the drowned man had gone
down, and undertook to search for the body in the places where it was
likeliest to come ashore. His interest in its recovery seemed to me to
be much heightened when he heard that it had stockings on. Probably, it
took about a dozen drowned men to fit him out completely; and that may
have been the reason why the different articles of his dress were in
various stages of decay.

We remained at the public-house until the tide turned, and then Magwitch
was carried down to the galley and put on board. Herbert and Startop
were to get to London by land, as soon as they could. We had a doleful
parting, and when I took my place by Magwitch's side, I felt that that
was my place henceforth while he lived.

For now, my repugnance to him had all melted away; and in the hunted,
wounded, shackled creature who held my hand in his, I only saw a man
who had meant to be my benefactor, and who had felt affectionately,
gratefully, and generously, towards me with great constancy through a
series of years. I only saw in him a much better man than I had been to
Joe.

His breathing became more difficult and painful as the night drew on,
and often he could not repress a groan. I tried to rest him on the arm
I could use, in any easy position; but it was dreadful to think that
I could not be sorry at heart for his being badly hurt, since it was
unquestionably best that he should die. That there were, still living,
people enough who were able and willing to identify him, I could not
doubt. That he would be leniently treated, I could not hope. He who had
been presented in the worst light at his trial, who had since broken
prison and had been tried again, who had returned from transportation
under a life sentence, and who had occasioned the death of the man who
was the cause of his arrest.

As we returned towards the setting sun we had yesterday left behind us,
and as the stream of our hopes seemed all running back, I told him how
grieved I was to think that he had come home for my sake.

“Dear boy,” he answered, “I'm quite content to take my chance. I've seen
my boy, and he can be a gentleman without me.”

No. I had thought about that, while we had been there side by side. No.
Apart from any inclinations of my own, I understood Wemmick's hint now.
I foresaw that, being convicted, his possessions would be forfeited to
the Crown.

“Lookee here, dear boy,” said he “It's best as a gentleman should not be
knowed to belong to me now. Only come to see me as if you come by chance
alonger Wemmick. Sit where I can see you when I am swore to, for the
last o' many times, and I don't ask no more.”

“I will never stir from your side,” said I, “when I am suffered to be
near you. Please God, I will be as true to you as you have been to me!”

I felt his hand tremble as it held mine, and he turned his face away
as he lay in the bottom of the boat, and I heard that old sound in his
throat,--softened now, like all the rest of him. It was a good thing
that he had touched this point, for it put into my mind what I might not
otherwise have thought of until too late,--that he need never know how
his hopes of enriching me had perished.




Chapter LV

He was taken to the Police Court next day, and would have been
immediately committed for trial, but that it was necessary to send down
for an old officer of the prison-ship from which he had once escaped, to
speak to his identity. Nobody doubted it; but Compeyson, who had meant
to depose to it, was tumbling on the tides, dead, and it happened that
there was not at that time any prison officer in London who could give
the required evidence. I had gone direct to Mr. Jaggers at his private
house, on my arrival over night, to retain his assistance, and Mr.
Jaggers on the prisoner's behalf would admit nothing. It was the sole
resource; for he told me that the case must be over in five minutes
when the witness was there, and that no power on earth could prevent its
going against us.

I imparted to Mr. Jaggers my design of keeping him in ignorance of the
fate of his wealth. Mr. Jaggers was querulous and angry with me for
having “let it slip through my fingers,” and said we must memorialize
by and by, and try at all events for some of it. But he did not conceal
from me that, although there might be many cases in which the forfeiture
would not be exacted, there were no circumstances in this case to make
it one of them. I understood that very well. I was not related to the
outlaw, or connected with him by any recognizable tie; he had put his
hand to no writing or settlement in my favor before his apprehension,
and to do so now would be idle. I had no claim, and I finally resolved,
and ever afterwards abided by the resolution, that my heart should never
be sickened with the hopeless task of attempting to establish one.

There appeared to be reason for supposing that the drowned informer
had hoped for a reward out of this forfeiture, and had obtained some
accurate knowledge of Magwitch's affairs. When his body was found, many
miles from the scene of his death, and so horribly disfigured that he
was only recognizable by the contents of his pockets, notes were still
legible, folded in a case he carried. Among these were the name of a
banking-house in New South Wales, where a sum of money was, and the
designation of certain lands of considerable value. Both these heads of
information were in a list that Magwitch, while in prison, gave to Mr.
Jaggers, of the possessions he supposed I should inherit. His ignorance,
poor fellow, at last served him; he never mistrusted but that my
inheritance was quite safe, with Mr. Jaggers's aid.

After three days' delay, during which the crown prosecution stood over
for the production of the witness from the prison-ship, the witness
came, and completed the easy case. He was committed to take his trial at
the next Sessions, which would come on in a month.

It was at this dark time of my life that Herbert returned home one
evening, a good deal cast down, and said,--

“My dear Handel, I fear I shall soon have to leave you.”

His partner having prepared me for that, I was less surprised than he
thought.

“We shall lose a fine opportunity if I put off going to Cairo, and I am
very much afraid I must go, Handel, when you most need me.”

“Herbert, I shall always need you, because I shall always love you; but
my need is no greater now than at another time.”

“You will be so lonely.”

“I have not leisure to think of that,” said I. “You know that I am
always with him to the full extent of the time allowed, and that I
should be with him all day long, if I could. And when I come away from
him, you know that my thoughts are with him.”

The dreadful condition to which he was brought, was so appalling to both
of us, that we could not refer to it in plainer words.

“My dear fellow,” said Herbert, “let the near prospect of our
separation--for, it is very near--be my justification for troubling you
about yourself. Have you thought of your future?”

“No, for I have been afraid to think of any future.”

“But yours cannot be dismissed; indeed, my dear dear Handel, it must not
be dismissed. I wish you would enter on it now, as far as a few friendly
words go, with me.”

“I will,” said I.

“In this branch house of ours, Handel, we must have a--”

I saw that his delicacy was avoiding the right word, so I said, “A
clerk.”

“A clerk. And I hope it is not at all unlikely that he may expand (as
a clerk of your acquaintance has expanded) into a partner. Now,
Handel,--in short, my dear boy, will you come to me?”

There was something charmingly cordial and engaging in the manner in
which after saying “Now, Handel,” as if it were the grave beginning of
a portentous business exordium, he had suddenly given up that tone,
stretched out his honest hand, and spoken like a schoolboy.

“Clara and I have talked about it again and again,” Herbert pursued,
“and the dear little thing begged me only this evening, with tears in
her eyes, to say to you that, if you will live with us when we come
together, she will do her best to make you happy, and to convince her
husband's friend that he is her friend too. We should get on so well,
Handel!”

I thanked her heartily, and I thanked him heartily, but said I could not
yet make sure of joining him as he so kindly offered. Firstly, my
mind was too preoccupied to be able to take in the subject clearly.
Secondly,--Yes! Secondly, there was a vague something lingering in my
thoughts that will come out very near the end of this slight narrative.

“But if you thought, Herbert, that you could, without doing any injury
to your business, leave the question open for a little while--”

“For any while,” cried Herbert. “Six months, a year!”

“Not so long as that,” said I. “Two or three months at most.”

Herbert was highly delighted when we shook hands on this arrangement,
and said he could now take courage to tell me that he believed he must
go away at the end of the week.

“And Clara?” said I.

“The dear little thing,” returned Herbert, “holds dutifully to her
father as long as he lasts; but he won't last long. Mrs. Whimple
confides to me that he is certainly going.”

“Not to say an unfeeling thing,” said I, “he cannot do better than go.”

“I am afraid that must be admitted,” said Herbert; “and then I shall
come back for the dear little thing, and the dear little thing and I
will walk quietly into the nearest church. Remember! The blessed darling
comes of no family, my dear Handel, and never looked into the red book,
and hasn't a notion about her grandpapa. What a fortune for the son of
my mother!”

On the Saturday in that same week, I took my leave of Herbert,--full
of bright hope, but sad and sorry to leave me,--as he sat on one of the
seaport mail coaches. I went into a coffee-house to write a little note
to Clara, telling her he had gone off, sending his love to her over and
over again, and then went to my lonely home,--if it deserved the name;
for it was now no home to me, and I had no home anywhere.

On the stairs I encountered Wemmick, who was coming down, after an
unsuccessful application of his knuckles to my door. I had not seen him
alone since the disastrous issue of the attempted flight; and he had
come, in his private and personal capacity, to say a few words of
explanation in reference to that failure.

“The late Compeyson,” said Wemmick, “had by little and little got at the
bottom of half of the regular business now transacted; and it was from
the talk of some of his people in trouble (some of his people being
always in trouble) that I heard what I did. I kept my ears open, seeming
to have them shut, until I heard that he was absent, and I thought that
would be the best time for making the attempt. I can only suppose now,
that it was a part of his policy, as a very clever man, habitually to
deceive his own instruments. You don't blame me, I hope, Mr. Pip? I am
sure I tried to serve you, with all my heart.”

“I am as sure of that, Wemmick, as you can be, and I thank you most
earnestly for all your interest and friendship.”

“Thank you, thank you very much. It's a bad job,” said Wemmick,
scratching his head, “and I assure you I haven't been so cut up for a
long time. What I look at is the sacrifice of so much portable property.
Dear me!”

“What I think of, Wemmick, is the poor owner of the property.”

“Yes, to be sure,” said Wemmick. “Of course, there can be no objection
to your being sorry for him, and I'd put down a five-pound note myself
to get him out of it. But what I look at is this. The late Compeyson
having been beforehand with him in intelligence of his return, and being
so determined to bring him to book, I do not think he could have been
saved. Whereas, the portable property certainly could have been saved.
That's the difference between the property and the owner, don't you
see?”

I invited Wemmick to come upstairs, and refresh himself with a glass
of grog before walking to Walworth. He accepted the invitation. While he
was drinking his moderate allowance, he said, with nothing to lead up to
it, and after having appeared rather fidgety,--

“What do you think of my meaning to take a holiday on Monday, Mr. Pip?”

“Why, I suppose you have not done such a thing these twelve months.”

“These twelve years, more likely,” said Wemmick. “Yes. I'm going to take
a holiday. More than that; I'm going to take a walk. More than that; I'm
going to ask you to take a walk with me.”

I was about to excuse myself, as being but a bad companion just then,
when Wemmick anticipated me.

“I know your engagements,” said he, “and I know you are out of sorts,
Mr. Pip. But if you could oblige me, I should take it as a kindness.
It ain't a long walk, and it's an early one. Say it might occupy you
(including breakfast on the walk) from eight to twelve. Couldn't you
stretch a point and manage it?”

He had done so much for me at various times, that this was very little
to do for him. I said I could manage it,--would manage it,--and he was
so very much pleased by my acquiescence, that I was pleased too. At his
particular request, I appointed to call for him at the Castle at half
past eight on Monday morning, and so we parted for the time.

Punctual to my appointment, I rang at the Castle gate on the Monday
morning, and was received by Wemmick himself, who struck me as looking
tighter than usual, and having a sleeker hat on. Within, there were two
glasses of rum and milk prepared, and two biscuits. The Aged must have
been stirring with the lark, for, glancing into the perspective of his
bedroom, I observed that his bed was empty.

When we had fortified ourselves with the rum and milk and biscuits, and
were going out for the walk with that training preparation on us, I was
considerably surprised to see Wemmick take up a fishing-rod, and put
it over his shoulder. “Why, we are not going fishing!” said I. “No,”
 returned Wemmick, “but I like to walk with one.”

I thought this odd; however, I said nothing, and we set off. We went
towards Camberwell Green, and when we were thereabouts, Wemmick said
suddenly,--

“Halloa! Here's a church!”

There was nothing very surprising in that; but again, I was rather
surprised, when he said, as if he were animated by a brilliant idea,--

“Let's go in!”

We went in, Wemmick leaving his fishing-rod in the porch, and looked all
round. In the mean time, Wemmick was diving into his coat-pockets, and
getting something out of paper there.

“Halloa!” said he. “Here's a couple of pair of gloves! Let's put 'em
on!”

As the gloves were white kid gloves, and as the post-office was widened
to its utmost extent, I now began to have my strong suspicions. They
were strengthened into certainty when I beheld the Aged enter at a side
door, escorting a lady.

“Halloa!” said Wemmick. “Here's Miss Skiffins! Let's have a wedding.”

That discreet damsel was attired as usual, except that she was now
engaged in substituting for her green kid gloves a pair of white. The
Aged was likewise occupied in preparing a similar sacrifice for
the altar of Hymen. The old gentleman, however, experienced so much
difficulty in getting his gloves on, that Wemmick found it necessary
to put him with his back against a pillar, and then to get behind the
pillar himself and pull away at them, while I for my part held the old
gentleman round the waist, that he might present an equal and safe
resistance. By dint of this ingenious scheme, his gloves were got on to
perfection.

The clerk and clergyman then appearing, we were ranged in order at
those fatal rails. True to his notion of seeming to do it all without
preparation, I heard Wemmick say to himself, as he took something out of
his waistcoat-pocket before the service began, “Halloa! Here's a ring!”

I acted in the capacity of backer, or best-man, to the bridegroom; while
a little limp pew-opener in a soft bonnet like a baby's, made a feint
of being the bosom friend of Miss Skiffins. The responsibility of giving
the lady away devolved upon the Aged, which led to the clergyman's being
unintentionally scandalized, and it happened thus. When he said, “Who
giveth this woman to be married to this man?” the old gentleman, not in
the least knowing what point of the ceremony we had arrived at, stood
most amiably beaming at the ten commandments. Upon which, the clergyman
said again, “WHO giveth this woman to be married to this man?” The old
gentleman being still in a state of most estimable unconsciousness, the
bridegroom cried out in his accustomed voice, “Now Aged P. you know; who
giveth?” To which the Aged replied with great briskness, before saying
that he gave, “All right, John, all right, my boy!” And the clergyman
came to so gloomy a pause upon it, that I had doubts for the moment
whether we should get completely married that day.

It was completely done, however, and when we were going out of church
Wemmick took the cover off the font, and put his white gloves in it, and
put the cover on again. Mrs. Wemmick, more heedful of the future, put
her white gloves in her pocket and assumed her green. “Now, Mr. Pip,”
 said Wemmick, triumphantly shouldering the fishing-rod as we came
out, “let me ask you whether anybody would suppose this to be a
wedding-party!”

Breakfast had been ordered at a pleasant little tavern, a mile or so
away upon the rising ground beyond the green; and there was a bagatelle
board in the room, in case we should desire to unbend our minds after
the solemnity. It was pleasant to observe that Mrs. Wemmick no longer
unwound Wemmick's arm when it adapted itself to her figure, but sat in a
high-backed chair against the wall, like a violoncello in its case, and
submitted to be embraced as that melodious instrument might have done.

We had an excellent breakfast, and when any one declined anything on
table, Wemmick said, “Provided by contract, you know; don't be afraid of
it!” I drank to the new couple, drank to the Aged, drank to the Castle,
saluted the bride at parting, and made myself as agreeable as I could.

Wemmick came down to the door with me, and I again shook hands with him,
and wished him joy.

“Thankee!” said Wemmick, rubbing his hands. “She's such a manager
of fowls, you have no idea. You shall have some eggs, and judge for
yourself. I say, Mr. Pip!” calling me back, and speaking low. “This is
altogether a Walworth sentiment, please.”

“I understand. Not to be mentioned in Little Britain,” said I.

Wemmick nodded. “After what you let out the other day, Mr. Jaggers
may as well not know of it. He might think my brain was softening, or
something of the kind.”




Chapter LVI

He lay in prison very ill, during the whole interval between his
committal for trial and the coming round of the Sessions. He had broken
two ribs, they had wounded one of his lungs, and he breathed with great
pain and difficulty, which increased daily. It was a consequence of his
hurt that he spoke so low as to be scarcely audible; therefore he spoke
very little. But he was ever ready to listen to me; and it became the
first duty of my life to say to him, and read to him, what I knew he
ought to hear.

Being far too ill to remain in the common prison, he was removed, after
the first day or so, into the infirmary. This gave me opportunities
of being with him that I could not otherwise have had. And but for
his illness he would have been put in irons, for he was regarded as a
determined prison-breaker, and I know not what else.

Although I saw him every day, it was for only a short time; hence, the
regularly recurring spaces of our separation were long enough to record
on his face any slight changes that occurred in his physical state. I
do not recollect that I once saw any change in it for the better; he
wasted, and became slowly weaker and worse, day by day, from the day
when the prison door closed upon him.

The kind of submission or resignation that he showed was that of a man
who was tired out. I sometimes derived an impression, from his manner
or from a whispered word or two which escaped him, that he pondered
over the question whether he might have been a better man under better
circumstances. But he never justified himself by a hint tending that
way, or tried to bend the past out of its eternal shape.

It happened on two or three occasions in my presence, that his desperate
reputation was alluded to by one or other of the people in attendance on
him. A smile crossed his face then, and he turned his eyes on me with
a trustful look, as if he were confident that I had seen some small
redeeming touch in him, even so long ago as when I was a little child.
As to all the rest, he was humble and contrite, and I never knew him
complain.

When the Sessions came round, Mr. Jaggers caused an application to be
made for the postponement of his trial until the following Sessions. It
was obviously made with the assurance that he could not live so long,
and was refused. The trial came on at once, and, when he was put to the
bar, he was seated in a chair. No objection was made to my getting
close to the dock, on the outside of it, and holding the hand that he
stretched forth to me.

The trial was very short and very clear. Such things as could be said
for him were said,--how he had taken to industrious habits, and had
thriven lawfully and reputably. But nothing could unsay the fact that
he had returned, and was there in presence of the Judge and Jury. It was
impossible to try him for that, and do otherwise than find him guilty.

At that time, it was the custom (as I learnt from my terrible experience
of that Sessions) to devote a concluding day to the passing of
Sentences, and to make a finishing effect with the Sentence of Death.
But for the indelible picture that my remembrance now holds before me,
I could scarcely believe, even as I write these words, that I saw
two-and-thirty men and women put before the Judge to receive that
sentence together. Foremost among the two-and-thirty was he; seated,
that he might get breath enough to keep life in him.

The whole scene starts out again in the vivid colors of the moment, down
to the drops of April rain on the windows of the court, glittering in
the rays of April sun. Penned in the dock, as I again stood outside it
at the corner with his hand in mine, were the two-and-thirty men
and women; some defiant, some stricken with terror, some sobbing and
weeping, some covering their faces, some staring gloomily about. There
had been shrieks from among the women convicts; but they had been
stilled, and a hush had succeeded. The sheriffs with their great chains
and nosegays, other civic gewgaws and monsters, criers, ushers, a great
gallery full of people,--a large theatrical audience,--looked on, as the
two-and-thirty and the Judge were solemnly confronted. Then the Judge
addressed them. Among the wretched creatures before him whom he must
single out for special address was one who almost from his infancy had
been an offender against the laws; who, after repeated imprisonments and
punishments, had been at length sentenced to exile for a term of years;
and who, under circumstances of great violence and daring, had made his
escape and been re-sentenced to exile for life. That miserable man would
seem for a time to have become convinced of his errors, when far removed
from the scenes of his old offences, and to have lived a peaceable and
honest life. But in a fatal moment, yielding to those propensities and
passions, the indulgence of which had so long rendered him a scourge to
society, he had quitted his haven of rest and repentance, and had
come back to the country where he was proscribed. Being here presently
denounced, he had for a time succeeded in evading the officers of
Justice, but being at length seized while in the act of flight, he had
resisted them, and had--he best knew whether by express design, or in
the blindness of his hardihood--caused the death of his denouncer, to
whom his whole career was known. The appointed punishment for his return
to the land that had cast him out, being Death, and his case being this
aggravated case, he must prepare himself to Die.

The sun was striking in at the great windows of the court, through the
glittering drops of rain upon the glass, and it made a broad shaft of
light between the two-and-thirty and the Judge, linking both together,
and perhaps reminding some among the audience how both were passing on,
with absolute equality, to the greater Judgment that knoweth all things,
and cannot err. Rising for a moment, a distinct speck of face in this
way of light, the prisoner said, “My Lord, I have received my sentence
of Death from the Almighty, but I bow to yours,” and sat down again.
There was some hushing, and the Judge went on with what he had to say
to the rest. Then they were all formally doomed, and some of them were
supported out, and some of them sauntered out with a haggard look of
bravery, and a few nodded to the gallery, and two or three shook hands,
and others went out chewing the fragments of herb they had taken from
the sweet herbs lying about. He went last of all, because of having to
be helped from his chair, and to go very slowly; and he held my hand
while all the others were removed, and while the audience got up
(putting their dresses right, as they might at church or elsewhere), and
pointed down at this criminal or at that, and most of all at him and me.

I earnestly hoped and prayed that he might die before the Recorder's
Report was made; but, in the dread of his lingering on, I began that
night to write out a petition to the Home Secretary of State, setting
forth my knowledge of him, and how it was that he had come back for my
sake. I wrote it as fervently and pathetically as I could; and when I
had finished it and sent it in, I wrote out other petitions to such men
in authority as I hoped were the most merciful, and drew up one to the
Crown itself. For several days and nights after he was sentenced I took
no rest except when I fell asleep in my chair, but was wholly absorbed
in these appeals. And after I had sent them in, I could not keep away
from the places where they were, but felt as if they were more
hopeful and less desperate when I was near them. In this unreasonable
restlessness and pain of mind I would roam the streets of an evening,
wandering by those offices and houses where I had left the petitions. To
the present hour, the weary western streets of London on a cold, dusty
spring night, with their ranges of stern, shut-up mansions, and their
long rows of lamps, are melancholy to me from this association.

The daily visits I could make him were shortened now, and he was more
strictly kept. Seeing, or fancying, that I was suspected of an intention
of carrying poison to him, I asked to be searched before I sat down
at his bedside, and told the officer who was always there, that I was
willing to do anything that would assure him of the singleness of my
designs. Nobody was hard with him or with me. There was duty to be
done, and it was done, but not harshly. The officer always gave me the
assurance that he was worse, and some other sick prisoners in the
room, and some other prisoners who attended on them as sick nurses,
(malefactors, but not incapable of kindness, God be thanked!) always
joined in the same report.

As the days went on, I noticed more and more that he would lie placidly
looking at the white ceiling, with an absence of light in his face
until some word of mine brightened it for an instant, and then it would
subside again. Sometimes he was almost or quite unable to speak, then
he would answer me with slight pressures on my hand, and I grew to
understand his meaning very well.

The number of the days had risen to ten, when I saw a greater change
in him than I had seen yet. His eyes were turned towards the door, and
lighted up as I entered.

“Dear boy,” he said, as I sat down by his bed: “I thought you was late.
But I knowed you couldn't be that.”

“It is just the time,” said I. “I waited for it at the gate.”

“You always waits at the gate; don't you, dear boy?”

“Yes. Not to lose a moment of the time.”

“Thank'ee dear boy, thank'ee. God bless you! You've never deserted me,
dear boy.”

I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had once
meant to desert him.

“And what's the best of all,” he said, “you've been more comfortable
alonger me, since I was under a dark cloud, than when the sun shone.
That's best of all.”

He lay on his back, breathing with great difficulty. Do what he would,
and love me though he did, the light left his face ever and again, and a
film came over the placid look at the white ceiling.

“Are you in much pain to-day?”

“I don't complain of none, dear boy.”

“You never do complain.”

He had spoken his last words. He smiled, and I understood his touch to
mean that he wished to lift my hand, and lay it on his breast. I laid it
there, and he smiled again, and put both his hands upon it.

The allotted time ran out, while we were thus; but, looking round, I
found the governor of the prison standing near me, and he whispered,
“You needn't go yet.” I thanked him gratefully, and asked, “Might I
speak to him, if he can hear me?”

The governor stepped aside, and beckoned the officer away. The change,
though it was made without noise, drew back the film from the placid
look at the white ceiling, and he looked most affectionately at me.

“Dear Magwitch, I must tell you now, at last. You understand what I
say?”

A gentle pressure on my hand.

“You had a child once, whom you loved and lost.”

A stronger pressure on my hand.

“She lived, and found powerful friends. She is living now. She is a lady
and very beautiful. And I love her!”

With a last faint effort, which would have been powerless but for my
yielding to it and assisting it, he raised my hand to his lips. Then,
he gently let it sink upon his breast again, with his own hands lying on
it. The placid look at the white ceiling came back, and passed away, and
his head dropped quietly on his breast.

Mindful, then, of what we had read together, I thought of the two men
who went up into the Temple to pray, and I knew there were no better
words that I could say beside his bed, than “O Lord, be merciful to him
a sinner!”




Chapter LVII

Now that I was left wholly to myself, I gave notice of my intention
to quit the chambers in the Temple as soon as my tenancy could legally
determine, and in the meanwhile to underlet them. At once I put bills
up in the windows; for, I was in debt, and had scarcely any money, and
began to be seriously alarmed by the state of my affairs. I ought
rather to write that I should have been alarmed if I had had energy and
concentration enough to help me to the clear perception of any truth
beyond the fact that I was falling very ill. The late stress upon me had
enabled me to put off illness, but not to put it away; I knew that it
was coming on me now, and I knew very little else, and was even careless
as to that.

For a day or two, I lay on the sofa, or on the floor,--anywhere,
according as I happened to sink down,--with a heavy head and aching
limbs, and no purpose, and no power. Then there came, one night which
appeared of great duration, and which teemed with anxiety and horror;
and when in the morning I tried to sit up in my bed and think of it, I
found I could not do so.

Whether I really had been down in Garden Court in the dead of the night,
groping about for the boat that I supposed to be there; whether I had
two or three times come to myself on the staircase with great terror,
not knowing how I had got out of bed; whether I had found myself
lighting the lamp, possessed by the idea that he was coming up
the stairs, and that the lights were blown out; whether I had been
inexpressibly harassed by the distracted talking, laughing, and groaning
of some one, and had half suspected those sounds to be of my own making;
whether there had been a closed iron furnace in a dark corner of
the room, and a voice had called out, over and over again, that Miss
Havisham was consuming within it,--these were things that I tried to
settle with myself and get into some order, as I lay that morning on
my bed. But the vapor of a limekiln would come between me and them,
disordering them all, and it was through the vapor at last that I saw
two men looking at me.

“What do you want?” I asked, starting; “I don't know you.”

“Well, sir,” returned one of them, bending down and touching me on the
shoulder, “this is a matter that you'll soon arrange, I dare say, but
you're arrested.”

“What is the debt?”

“Hundred and twenty-three pound, fifteen, six. Jeweller's account, I
think.”

“What is to be done?”

“You had better come to my house,” said the man. “I keep a very nice
house.”

I made some attempt to get up and dress myself. When I next attended
to them, they were standing a little off from the bed, looking at me. I
still lay there.

“You see my state,” said I. “I would come with you if I could; but
indeed I am quite unable. If you take me from here, I think I shall die
by the way.”

Perhaps they replied, or argued the point, or tried to encourage me to
believe that I was better than I thought. Forasmuch as they hang in
my memory by only this one slender thread, I don't know what they did,
except that they forbore to remove me.

That I had a fever and was avoided, that I suffered greatly, that
I often lost my reason, that the time seemed interminable, that I
confounded impossible existences with my own identity; that I was a
brick in the house-wall, and yet entreating to be released from the
giddy place where the builders had set me; that I was a steel beam of a
vast engine, clashing and whirling over a gulf, and yet that I implored
in my own person to have the engine stopped, and my part in it hammered
off; that I passed through these phases of disease, I know of my own
remembrance, and did in some sort know at the time. That I sometimes
struggled with real people, in the belief that they were murderers, and
that I would all at once comprehend that they meant to do me good, and
would then sink exhausted in their arms, and suffer them to lay me
down, I also knew at the time. But, above all, I knew that there was a
constant tendency in all these people,--who, when I was very ill, would
present all kinds of extraordinary transformations of the human face,
and would be much dilated in size,--above all, I say, I knew that there
was an extraordinary tendency in all these people, sooner or later, to
settle down into the likeness of Joe.

After I had turned the worst point of my illness, I began to notice that
while all its other features changed, this one consistent feature did
not change. Whoever came about me, still settled down into Joe. I opened
my eyes in the night, and I saw, in the great chair at the bedside, Joe.
I opened my eyes in the day, and, sitting on the window-seat, smoking
his pipe in the shaded open window, still I saw Joe. I asked for cooling
drink, and the dear hand that gave it me was Joe's. I sank back on
my pillow after drinking, and the face that looked so hopefully and
tenderly upon me was the face of Joe.

At last, one day, I took courage, and said, “Is it Joe?”

And the dear old home-voice answered, “Which it air, old chap.”

“O Joe, you break my heart! Look angry at me, Joe. Strike me, Joe. Tell
me of my ingratitude. Don't be so good to me!”

For Joe had actually laid his head down on the pillow at my side, and
put his arm round my neck, in his joy that I knew him.

“Which dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe, “you and me was ever friends.
And when you're well enough to go out for a ride--what larks!”

After which, Joe withdrew to the window, and stood with his back towards
me, wiping his eyes. And as my extreme weakness prevented me from
getting up and going to him, I lay there, penitently whispering, “O God
bless him! O God bless this gentle Christian man!”

Joe's eyes were red when I next found him beside me; but I was holding
his hand, and we both felt happy.

“How long, dear Joe?”

“Which you meantersay, Pip, how long have your illness lasted, dear old
chap?”

“Yes, Joe.”

“It's the end of May, Pip. To-morrow is the first of June.”

“And have you been here all that time, dear Joe?”

“Pretty nigh, old chap. For, as I says to Biddy when the news of your
being ill were brought by letter, which it were brought by the post, and
being formerly single he is now married though underpaid for a deal of
walking and shoe-leather, but wealth were not a object on his part, and
marriage were the great wish of his hart--”

“It is so delightful to hear you, Joe! But I interrupt you in what you
said to Biddy.”

“Which it were,” said Joe, “that how you might be amongst strangers, and
that how you and me having been ever friends, a wisit at such a moment
might not prove unacceptabobble. And Biddy, her word were, 'Go to him,
without loss of time.' That,” said Joe, summing up with his judicial
air, “were the word of Biddy. 'Go to him,' Biddy say, 'without loss of
time.' In short, I shouldn't greatly deceive you,” Joe added, after a
little grave reflection, “if I represented to you that the word of that
young woman were, 'without a minute's loss of time.'”

There Joe cut himself short, and informed me that I was to be talked
to in great moderation, and that I was to take a little nourishment at
stated frequent times, whether I felt inclined for it or not, and that
I was to submit myself to all his orders. So I kissed his hand, and lay
quiet, while he proceeded to indite a note to Biddy, with my love in it.

Evidently Biddy had taught Joe to write. As I lay in bed looking at him,
it made me, in my weak state, cry again with pleasure to see the
pride with which he set about his letter. My bedstead, divested of its
curtains, had been removed, with me upon it, into the sitting-room, as
the airiest and largest, and the carpet had been taken away, and
the room kept always fresh and wholesome night and day. At my own
writing-table, pushed into a corner and cumbered with little bottles,
Joe now sat down to his great work, first choosing a pen from the
pen-tray as if it were a chest of large tools, and tucking up his
sleeves as if he were going to wield a crow-bar or sledgehammer. It was
necessary for Joe to hold on heavily to the table with his left elbow,
and to get his right leg well out behind him, before he could begin; and
when he did begin he made every downstroke so slowly that it might
have been six feet long, while at every upstroke I could hear his pen
spluttering extensively. He had a curious idea that the inkstand was
on the side of him where it was not, and constantly dipped his pen into
space, and seemed quite satisfied with the result. Occasionally, he was
tripped up by some orthographical stumbling-block; but on the whole
he got on very well indeed; and when he had signed his name, and had
removed a finishing blot from the paper to the crown of his head with
his two forefingers, he got up and hovered about the table, trying the
effect of his performance from various points of view, as it lay there,
with unbounded satisfaction.

Not to make Joe uneasy by talking too much, even if I had been able to
talk much, I deferred asking him about Miss Havisham until next day. He
shook his head when I then asked him if she had recovered.

“Is she dead, Joe?”

“Why you see, old chap,” said Joe, in a tone of remonstrance, and by way
of getting at it by degrees, “I wouldn't go so far as to say that, for
that's a deal to say; but she ain't--”

“Living, Joe?”

“That's nigher where it is,” said Joe; “she ain't living.”

“Did she linger long, Joe?”

“Arter you was took ill, pretty much about what you might call (if you
was put to it) a week,” said Joe; still determined, on my account, to
come at everything by degrees.

“Dear Joe, have you heard what becomes of her property?”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “it do appear that she had settled the most
of it, which I meantersay tied it up, on Miss Estella. But she had
wrote out a little coddleshell in her own hand a day or two afore the
accident, leaving a cool four thousand to Mr. Matthew Pocket. And why,
do you suppose, above all things, Pip, she left that cool four thousand
unto him? 'Because of Pip's account of him, the said Matthew.' I am told
by Biddy, that air the writing,” said Joe, repeating the legal turn as
if it did him infinite good, “'account of him the said Matthew.' And a
cool four thousand, Pip!”

I never discovered from whom Joe derived the conventional temperature of
the four thousand pounds; but it appeared to make the sum of money more
to him, and he had a manifest relish in insisting on its being cool.

This account gave me great joy, as it perfected the only good thing I
had done. I asked Joe whether he had heard if any of the other relations
had any legacies?

“Miss Sarah,” said Joe, “she have twenty-five pound perannium fur to
buy pills, on account of being bilious. Miss Georgiana, she have twenty
pound down. Mrs.--what's the name of them wild beasts with humps, old
chap?”

“Camels?” said I, wondering why he could possibly want to know.

Joe nodded. “Mrs. Camels,” by which I presently understood he meant
Camilla, “she have five pound fur to buy rushlights to put her in
spirits when she wake up in the night.”

The accuracy of these recitals was sufficiently obvious to me, to give
me great confidence in Joe's information. “And now,” said Joe, “you
ain't that strong yet, old chap, that you can take in more nor one
additional shovelful to-day. Old Orlick he's been a bustin' open a
dwelling-ouse.”

“Whose?” said I.

“Not, I grant you, but what his manners is given to blusterous,” said
Joe, apologetically; “still, a Englishman's ouse is his Castle, and
castles must not be busted 'cept when done in war time. And wotsume'er
the failings on his part, he were a corn and seedsman in his hart.”

“Is it Pumblechook's house that has been broken into, then?”

“That's it, Pip,” said Joe; “and they took his till, and they took his
cash-box, and they drinked his wine, and they partook of his wittles,
and they slapped his face, and they pulled his nose, and they tied him
up to his bedpust, and they giv' him a dozen, and they stuffed his
mouth full of flowering annuals to prewent his crying out. But he knowed
Orlick, and Orlick's in the county jail.”

By these approaches we arrived at unrestricted conversation. I was slow
to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe
stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again.

For the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need,
that I was like a child in his hands. He would sit and talk to me in the
old confidence, and with the old simplicity, and in the old unassertive
protecting way, so that I would half believe that all my life since the
days of the old kitchen was one of the mental troubles of the fever that
was gone. He did everything for me except the household work, for which
he had engaged a very decent woman, after paying off the laundress on
his first arrival. “Which I do assure you, Pip,” he would often say, in
explanation of that liberty; “I found her a tapping the spare bed, like
a cask of beer, and drawing off the feathers in a bucket, for sale.
Which she would have tapped yourn next, and draw'd it off with you a
laying on it, and was then a carrying away the coals gradiwally in
the soup-tureen and wegetable-dishes, and the wine and spirits in your
Wellington boots.”

We looked forward to the day when I should go out for a ride, as we had
once looked forward to the day of my apprenticeship. And when the day
came, and an open carriage was got into the Lane, Joe wrapped me up,
took me in his arms, carried me down to it, and put me in, as if I were
still the small helpless creature to whom he had so abundantly given of
the wealth of his great nature.

And Joe got in beside me, and we drove away together into the country,
where the rich summer growth was already on the trees and on the grass,
and sweet summer scents filled all the air. The day happened to be
Sunday, and when I looked on the loveliness around me, and thought
how it had grown and changed, and how the little wild-flowers had been
forming, and the voices of the birds had been strengthening, by day and
by night, under the sun and under the stars, while poor I lay burning
and tossing on my bed, the mere remembrance of having burned and tossed
there came like a check upon my peace. But when I heard the Sunday
bells, and looked around a little more upon the outspread beauty, I felt
that I was not nearly thankful enough,--that I was too weak yet to be
even that,--and I laid my head on Joe's shoulder, as I had laid it long
ago when he had taken me to the Fair or where not, and it was too much
for my young senses.

More composure came to me after a while, and we talked as we used
to talk, lying on the grass at the old Battery. There was no change
whatever in Joe. Exactly what he had been in my eyes then, he was in my
eyes still; just as simply faithful, and as simply right.

When we got back again, and he lifted me out, and carried me--so
easily!--across the court and up the stairs, I thought of that eventful
Christmas Day when he had carried me over the marshes. We had not yet
made any allusion to my change of fortune, nor did I know how much of
my late history he was acquainted with. I was so doubtful of myself now,
and put so much trust in him, that I could not satisfy myself whether I
ought to refer to it when he did not.

“Have you heard, Joe,” I asked him that evening, upon further
consideration, as he smoked his pipe at the window, “who my patron was?”

“I heerd,” returned Joe, “as it were not Miss Havisham, old chap.”

“Did you hear who it was, Joe?”

“Well! I heerd as it were a person what sent the person what giv' you
the bank-notes at the Jolly Bargemen, Pip.”

“So it was.”

“Astonishing!” said Joe, in the placidest way.

“Did you hear that he was dead, Joe?” I presently asked, with increasing
diffidence.

“Which? Him as sent the bank-notes, Pip?”

“Yes.”

“I think,” said Joe, after meditating a long time, and looking rather
evasively at the window-seat, “as I did hear tell that how he were
something or another in a general way in that direction.”

“Did you hear anything of his circumstances, Joe?”

“Not partickler, Pip.”

“If you would like to hear, Joe--” I was beginning, when Joe got up and
came to my sofa.

“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe, bending over me. “Ever the best of
friends; ain't us, Pip?”

I was ashamed to answer him.

“Wery good, then,” said Joe, as if I had answered; “that's all right;
that's agreed upon. Then why go into subjects, old chap, which as
betwixt two sech must be for ever onnecessary? There's subjects enough
as betwixt two sech, without onnecessary ones. Lord! To think of your
poor sister and her Rampages! And don't you remember Tickler?”

“I do indeed, Joe.”

“Lookee here, old chap,” said Joe. “I done what I could to keep you
and Tickler in sunders, but my power were not always fully equal to my
inclinations. For when your poor sister had a mind to drop into you, it
were not so much,” said Joe, in his favorite argumentative way, “that
she dropped into me too, if I put myself in opposition to her, but that
she dropped into you always heavier for it. I noticed that. It ain't a
grab at a man's whisker, not yet a shake or two of a man (to which your
sister was quite welcome), that 'ud put a man off from getting a little
child out of punishment. But when that little child is dropped into
heavier for that grab of whisker or shaking, then that man naterally up
and says to himself, 'Where is the good as you are a doing? I grant you
I see the 'arm,' says the man, 'but I don't see the good. I call upon
you, sir, therefore, to pint out the good.'”

“The man says?” I observed, as Joe waited for me to speak.

“The man says,” Joe assented. “Is he right, that man?”

“Dear Joe, he is always right.”

“Well, old chap,” said Joe, “then abide by your words. If he's always
right (which in general he's more likely wrong), he's right when he says
this: Supposing ever you kep any little matter to yourself, when you
was a little child, you kep it mostly because you know'd as J. Gargery's
power to part you and Tickler in sunders were not fully equal to his
inclinations. Theerfore, think no more of it as betwixt two sech, and do
not let us pass remarks upon onnecessary subjects. Biddy giv' herself a
deal o' trouble with me afore I left (for I am almost awful dull), as I
should view it in this light, and, viewing it in this light, as I should
so put it. Both of which,” said Joe, quite charmed with his logical
arrangement, “being done, now this to you a true friend, say. Namely.
You mustn't go a overdoing on it, but you must have your supper and your
wine and water, and you must be put betwixt the sheets.”

The delicacy with which Joe dismissed this theme, and the sweet tact and
kindness with which Biddy--who with her woman's wit had found me out so
soon--had prepared him for it, made a deep impression on my mind. But
whether Joe knew how poor I was, and how my great expectations had
all dissolved, like our own marsh mists before the sun, I could not
understand.

Another thing in Joe that I could not understand when it first began to
develop itself, but which I soon arrived at a sorrowful comprehension
of, was this: As I became stronger and better, Joe became a little less
easy with me. In my weakness and entire dependence on him, the dear
fellow had fallen into the old tone, and called me by the old names,
the dear “old Pip, old chap,” that now were music in my ears. I too had
fallen into the old ways, only happy and thankful that he let me. But,
imperceptibly, though I held by them fast, Joe's hold upon them began
to slacken; and whereas I wondered at this, at first, I soon began to
understand that the cause of it was in me, and that the fault of it was
all mine.

Ah! Had I given Joe no reason to doubt my constancy, and to think that
in prosperity I should grow cold to him and cast him off? Had I given
Joe's innocent heart no cause to feel instinctively that as I got
stronger, his hold upon me would be weaker, and that he had better
loosen it in time and let me go, before I plucked myself away?

It was on the third or fourth occasion of my going out walking in the
Temple Gardens leaning on Joe's arm, that I saw this change in him very
plainly. We had been sitting in the bright warm sunlight, looking at the
river, and I chanced to say as we got up,--

“See, Joe! I can walk quite strongly. Now, you shall see me walk back by
myself.”

“Which do not overdo it, Pip,” said Joe; “but I shall be happy fur to
see you able, sir.”

The last word grated on me; but how could I remonstrate! I walked no
further than the gate of the gardens, and then pretended to be
weaker than I was, and asked Joe for his arm. Joe gave it me, but was
thoughtful.

I, for my part, was thoughtful too; for, how best to check this growing
change in Joe was a great perplexity to my remorseful thoughts. That I
was ashamed to tell him exactly how I was placed, and what I had come
down to, I do not seek to conceal; but I hope my reluctance was not
quite an unworthy one. He would want to help me out of his little
savings, I knew, and I knew that he ought not to help me, and that I
must not suffer him to do it.

It was a thoughtful evening with both of us. But, before we went to
bed, I had resolved that I would wait over to-morrow,--to-morrow being
Sunday,--and would begin my new course with the new week. On Monday
morning I would speak to Joe about this change, I would lay aside this
last vestige of reserve, I would tell him what I had in my thoughts
(that Secondly, not yet arrived at), and why I had not decided to go
out to Herbert, and then the change would be conquered for ever. As I
cleared, Joe cleared, and it seemed as though he had sympathetically
arrived at a resolution too.

We had a quiet day on the Sunday, and we rode out into the country, and
then walked in the fields.

“I feel thankful that I have been ill, Joe,” I said.

“Dear old Pip, old chap, you're a'most come round, sir.”

“It has been a memorable time for me, Joe.”

“Likeways for myself, sir,” Joe returned.

“We have had a time together, Joe, that I can never forget. There were
days once, I know, that I did for a while forget; but I never shall
forget these.”

“Pip,” said Joe, appearing a little hurried and troubled, “there has
been larks. And, dear sir, what have been betwixt us--have been.”

At night, when I had gone to bed, Joe came into my room, as he had done
all through my recovery. He asked me if I felt sure that I was as well
as in the morning?

“Yes, dear Joe, quite.”

“And are always a getting stronger, old chap?”

“Yes, dear Joe, steadily.”

Joe patted the coverlet on my shoulder with his great good hand, and
said, in what I thought a husky voice, “Good night!”

When I got up in the morning, refreshed and stronger yet, I was full of
my resolution to tell Joe all, without delay. I would tell him before
breakfast. I would dress at once and go to his room and surprise him;
for, it was the first day I had been up early. I went to his room, and
he was not there. Not only was he not there, but his box was gone.

I hurried then to the breakfast-table, and on it found a letter. These
were its brief contents:--

“Not wishful to intrude I have departured fur you are well again dear
Pip and will do better without JO.

“P.S. Ever the best of friends.”

Enclosed in the letter was a receipt for the debt and costs on which I
had been arrested. Down to that moment, I had vainly supposed that my
creditor had withdrawn, or suspended proceedings until I should be quite
recovered. I had never dreamed of Joe's having paid the money; but Joe
had paid it, and the receipt was in his name.

What remained for me now, but to follow him to the dear old forge, and
there to have out my disclosure to him, and my penitent remonstrance
with him, and there to relieve my mind and heart of that reserved
Secondly, which had begun as a vague something lingering in my thoughts,
and had formed into a settled purpose?

The purpose was, that I would go to Biddy, that I would show her how
humbled and repentant I came back, that I would tell her how I had lost
all I once hoped for, that I would remind her of our old confidences in
my first unhappy time. Then I would say to her, “Biddy, I think you once
liked me very well, when my errant heart, even while it strayed away
from you, was quieter and better with you than it ever has been since.
If you can like me only half as well once more, if you can take me with
all my faults and disappointments on my head, if you can receive me like
a forgiven child (and indeed I am as sorry, Biddy, and have as much need
of a hushing voice and a soothing hand), I hope I am a little worthier
of you that I was,--not much, but a little. And, Biddy, it shall rest
with you to say whether I shall work at the forge with Joe, or whether I
shall try for any different occupation down in this country, or whether
we shall go away to a distant place where an opportunity awaits me which
I set aside, when it was offered, until I knew your answer. And now,
dear Biddy, if you can tell me that you will go through the world with
me, you will surely make it a better world for me, and me a better man
for it, and I will try hard to make it a better world for you.”

Such was my purpose. After three days more of recovery, I went down to
the old place to put it in execution. And how I sped in it is all I have
left to tell.




Chapter LVIII

The tidings of my high fortunes having had a heavy fall had got down
to my native place and its neighborhood before I got there. I found the
Blue Boar in possession of the intelligence, and I found that it made a
great change in the Boar's demeanour. Whereas the Boar had cultivated
my good opinion with warm assiduity when I was coming into property,
the Boar was exceedingly cool on the subject now that I was going out of
property.

It was evening when I arrived, much fatigued by the journey I had so
often made so easily. The Boar could not put me into my usual bedroom,
which was engaged (probably by some one who had expectations), and
could only assign me a very indifferent chamber among the pigeons and
post-chaises up the yard. But I had as sound a sleep in that lodging as
in the most superior accommodation the Boar could have given me, and the
quality of my dreams was about the same as in the best bedroom.

Early in the morning, while my breakfast was getting ready, I strolled
round by Satis House. There were printed bills on the gate and on bits
of carpet hanging out of the windows, announcing a sale by auction of
the Household Furniture and Effects, next week. The House itself was to
be sold as old building materials, and pulled down. LOT 1 was marked in
whitewashed knock-knee letters on the brew house; LOT 2 on that part of
the main building which had been so long shut up. Other lots were marked
off on other parts of the structure, and the ivy had been torn down to
make room for the inscriptions, and much of it trailed low in the dust
and was withered already. Stepping in for a moment at the open gate, and
looking around me with the uncomfortable air of a stranger who had no
business there, I saw the auctioneer's clerk walking on the casks and
telling them off for the information of a catalogue-compiler, pen in
hand, who made a temporary desk of the wheeled chair I had so often
pushed along to the tune of Old Clem.

When I got back to my breakfast in the Boar's coffee-room, I found Mr.
Pumblechook conversing with the landlord. Mr. Pumblechook (not improved
in appearance by his late nocturnal adventure) was waiting for me, and
addressed me in the following terms:--

“Young man, I am sorry to see you brought low. But what else could be
expected! what else could be expected!”

As he extended his hand with a magnificently forgiving air, and as I was
broken by illness and unfit to quarrel, I took it.

“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook to the waiter, “put a muffin on table.
And has it come to this! Has it come to this!”

I frowningly sat down to my breakfast. Mr. Pumblechook stood over me and
poured out my tea--before I could touch the teapot--with the air of a
benefactor who was resolved to be true to the last.

“William,” said Mr. Pumblechook, mournfully, “put the salt on. In
happier times,” addressing me, “I think you took sugar? And did you take
milk? You did. Sugar and milk. William, bring a watercress.”

“Thank you,” said I, shortly, “but I don't eat watercresses.”

“You don't eat 'em,” returned Mr. Pumblechook, sighing and nodding
his head several times, as if he might have expected that, and as if
abstinence from watercresses were consistent with my downfall. “True.
The simple fruits of the earth. No. You needn't bring any, William.”

I went on with my breakfast, and Mr. Pumblechook continued to stand over
me, staring fishily and breathing noisily, as he always did.

“Little more than skin and bone!” mused Mr. Pumblechook, aloud. “And yet
when he went from here (I may say with my blessing), and I spread afore
him my humble store, like the Bee, he was as plump as a Peach!”

This reminded me of the wonderful difference between the servile manner
in which he had offered his hand in my new prosperity, saying, “May I?”
 and the ostentatious clemency with which he had just now exhibited the
same fat five fingers.

“Hah!” he went on, handing me the bread and butter. “And air you a going
to Joseph?”

“In heaven's name,” said I, firing in spite of myself, “what does it
matter to you where I am going? Leave that teapot alone.”

It was the worst course I could have taken, because it gave Pumblechook
the opportunity he wanted.

“Yes, young man,” said he, releasing the handle of the article in
question, retiring a step or two from my table, and speaking for the
behoof of the landlord and waiter at the door, “I will leave that teapot
alone. You are right, young man. For once you are right. I forgit myself
when I take such an interest in your breakfast, as to wish your frame,
exhausted by the debilitating effects of prodigygality, to be stimilated
by the 'olesome nourishment of your forefathers. And yet,” said
Pumblechook, turning to the landlord and waiter, and pointing me out at
arm's length, “this is him as I ever sported with in his days of happy
infancy! Tell me not it cannot be; I tell you this is him!”

A low murmur from the two replied. The waiter appeared to be
particularly affected.

“This is him,” said Pumblechook, “as I have rode in my shay-cart. This
is him as I have seen brought up by hand. This is him untoe the sister
of which I was uncle by marriage, as her name was Georgiana M'ria from
her own mother, let him deny it if he can!”

The waiter seemed convinced that I could not deny it, and that it gave
the case a black look.

“Young man,” said Pumblechook, screwing his head at me in the old
fashion, “you air a going to Joseph. What does it matter to me, you
ask me, where you air a going? I say to you, Sir, you air a going to
Joseph.”

The waiter coughed, as if he modestly invited me to get over that.

“Now,” said Pumblechook, and all this with a most exasperating air
of saying in the cause of virtue what was perfectly convincing and
conclusive, “I will tell you what to say to Joseph. Here is Squires of
the Boar present, known and respected in this town, and here is William,
which his father's name was Potkins if I do not deceive myself.”

“You do not, sir,” said William.

“In their presence,” pursued Pumblechook, “I will tell you, young
man, what to say to Joseph. Says you, “Joseph, I have this day seen
my earliest benefactor and the founder of my fortun's. I will name no
names, Joseph, but so they are pleased to call him up town, and I have
seen that man.”

“I swear I don't see him here,” said I.

“Say that likewise,” retorted Pumblechook. “Say you said that, and even
Joseph will probably betray surprise.”

“There you quite mistake him,” said I. “I know better.”

“Says you,” Pumblechook went on, “'Joseph, I have seen that man, and
that man bears you no malice and bears me no malice. He knows your
character, Joseph, and is well acquainted with your pig-headedness and
ignorance; and he knows my character, Joseph, and he knows my want of
gratitoode. Yes, Joseph,' says you,” here Pumblechook shook his head and
hand at me, “'he knows my total deficiency of common human gratitoode.
He knows it, Joseph, as none can. You do not know it, Joseph, having no
call to know it, but that man do.'”

Windy donkey as he was, it really amazed me that he could have the face
to talk thus to mine.

“Says you, 'Joseph, he gave me a little message, which I will now
repeat. It was that, in my being brought low, he saw the finger of
Providence. He knowed that finger when he saw Joseph, and he saw it
plain. It pinted out this writing, Joseph. Reward of ingratitoode to his
earliest benefactor, and founder of fortun's. But that man said he did
not repent of what he had done, Joseph. Not at all. It was right to do
it, it was kind to do it, it was benevolent to do it, and he would do it
again.'”

“It's pity,” said I, scornfully, as I finished my interrupted breakfast,
“that the man did not say what he had done and would do again.”

“Squires of the Boar!” Pumblechook was now addressing the landlord, “and
William! I have no objections to your mentioning, either up town or down
town, if such should be your wishes, that it was right to do it, kind to
do it, benevolent to do it, and that I would do it again.”

With those words the Impostor shook them both by the hand, with an air,
and left the house; leaving me much more astonished than delighted by
the virtues of that same indefinite “it.” I was not long after him in
leaving the house too, and when I went down the High Street I saw him
holding forth (no doubt to the same effect) at his shop door to a select
group, who honored me with very unfavorable glances as I passed on the
opposite side of the way.

But, it was only the pleasanter to turn to Biddy and to Joe, whose
great forbearance shone more brightly than before, if that could be,
contrasted with this brazen pretender. I went towards them slowly, for
my limbs were weak, but with a sense of increasing relief as I drew
nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance and untruthfulness
further and further behind.

The June weather was delicious. The sky was blue, the larks were soaring
high over the green corn, I thought all that countryside more beautiful
and peaceful by far than I had ever known it to be yet. Many pleasant
pictures of the life that I would lead there, and of the change for the
better that would come over my character when I had a guiding spirit at
my side whose simple faith and clear home wisdom I had proved, beguiled
my way. They awakened a tender emotion in me; for my heart was softened
by my return, and such a change had come to pass, that I felt like one
who was toiling home barefoot from distant travel, and whose wanderings
had lasted many years.

The schoolhouse where Biddy was mistress I had never seen; but, the
little roundabout lane by which I entered the village, for quietness'
sake, took me past it. I was disappointed to find that the day was a
holiday; no children were there, and Biddy's house was closed. Some
hopeful notion of seeing her, busily engaged in her daily duties, before
she saw me, had been in my mind and was defeated.

But the forge was a very short distance off, and I went towards it under
the sweet green limes, listening for the clink of Joe's hammer. Long
after I ought to have heard it, and long after I had fancied I heard it
and found it but a fancy, all was still. The limes were there, and the
white thorns were there, and the chestnut-trees were there, and their
leaves rustled harmoniously when I stopped to listen; but, the clink of
Joe's hammer was not in the midsummer wind.

Almost fearing, without knowing why, to come in view of the forge, I saw
it at last, and saw that it was closed. No gleam of fire, no glittering
shower of sparks, no roar of bellows; all shut up, and still.

But the house was not deserted, and the best parlor seemed to be in use,
for there were white curtains fluttering in its window, and the window
was open and gay with flowers. I went softly towards it, meaning to peep
over the flowers, when Joe and Biddy stood before me, arm in arm.

At first Biddy gave a cry, as if she thought it was my apparition, but
in another moment she was in my embrace. I wept to see her, and she wept
to see me; I, because she looked so fresh and pleasant; she, because I
looked so worn and white.

“But dear Biddy, how smart you are!”

“Yes, dear Pip.”

“And Joe, how smart you are!”

“Yes, dear old Pip, old chap.”

I looked at both of them, from one to the other, and then--

“It's my wedding-day!” cried Biddy, in a burst of happiness, “and I am
married to Joe!”

They had taken me into the kitchen, and I had laid my head down on
the old deal table. Biddy held one of my hands to her lips, and Joe's
restoring touch was on my shoulder. “Which he warn't strong enough, my
dear, fur to be surprised,” said Joe. And Biddy said, “I ought to
have thought of it, dear Joe, but I was too happy.” They were both so
overjoyed to see me, so proud to see me, so touched by my coming to
them, so delighted that I should have come by accident to make their day
complete!

My first thought was one of great thankfulness that I had never breathed
this last baffled hope to Joe. How often, while he was with me in my
illness, had it risen to my lips! How irrevocable would have been his
knowledge of it, if he had remained with me but another hour!

“Dear Biddy,” said I, “you have the best husband in the whole world,
and if you could have seen him by my bed you would have--But no, you
couldn't love him better than you do.”

“No, I couldn't indeed,” said Biddy.

“And, dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she will
make you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, good, noble Joe!”

Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve before
his eyes.

“And Joe and Biddy both, as you have been to church to-day, and are in
charity and love with all mankind, receive my humble thanks for all you
have done for me, and all I have so ill repaid! And when I say that I am
going away within the hour, for I am soon going abroad, and that I shall
never rest until I have worked for the money with which you have kept me
out of prison, and have sent it to you, don't think, dear Joe and Biddy,
that if I could repay it a thousand times over, I suppose I could cancel
a farthing of the debt I owe you, or that I would do so if I could!”

They were both melted by these words, and both entreated me to say no
more.

“But I must say more. Dear Joe, I hope you will have children to love,
and that some little fellow will sit in this chimney-corner of a winter
night, who may remind you of another little fellow gone out of it for
ever. Don't tell him, Joe, that I was thankless; don't tell him, Biddy,
that I was ungenerous and unjust; only tell him that I honored you both,
because you were both so good and true, and that, as your child, I said
it would be natural to him to grow up a much better man than I did.”

“I ain't a going,” said Joe, from behind his sleeve, “to tell him
nothink o' that natur, Pip. Nor Biddy ain't. Nor yet no one ain't.”

“And now, though I know you have already done it in your own kind
hearts, pray tell me, both, that you forgive me! Pray let me hear you
say the words, that I may carry the sound of them away with me, and then
I shall be able to believe that you can trust me, and think better of
me, in the time to come!”

“O dear old Pip, old chap,” said Joe. “God knows as I forgive you, if I
have anythink to forgive!”

“Amen! And God knows I do!” echoed Biddy.

“Now let me go up and look at my old little room, and rest there a few
minutes by myself. And then, when I have eaten and drunk with you, go
with me as far as the finger-post, dear Joe and Biddy, before we say
good-bye!”

***

I sold all I had, and put aside as much as I could, for a composition
with my creditors,--who gave me ample time to pay them in full,--and I
went out and joined Herbert. Within a month, I had quitted England,
and within two months I was clerk to Clarriker and Co., and within four
months I assumed my first undivided responsibility. For the beam across
the parlor ceiling at Mill Pond Bank had then ceased to tremble under
old Bill Barley's growls and was at peace, and Herbert had gone away to
marry Clara, and I was left in sole charge of the Eastern Branch until
he brought her back.

Many a year went round before I was a partner in the House; but I lived
happily with Herbert and his wife, and lived frugally, and paid my
debts, and maintained a constant correspondence with Biddy and Joe. It
was not until I became third in the Firm, that Clarriker betrayed me to
Herbert; but he then declared that the secret of Herbert's partnership
had been long enough upon his conscience, and he must tell it. So he
told it, and Herbert was as much moved as amazed, and the dear fellow
and I were not the worse friends for the long concealment. I must not
leave it to be supposed that we were ever a great House, or that we made
mints of money. We were not in a grand way of business, but we had a
good name, and worked for our profits, and did very well. We owed so
much to Herbert's ever cheerful industry and readiness, that I often
wondered how I had conceived that old idea of his inaptitude, until I
was one day enlightened by the reflection, that perhaps the inaptitude
had never been in him at all, but had been in me.




Chapter LIX

For eleven years, I had not seen Joe nor Biddy with my bodily
eyes,--though they had both been often before my fancy in the
East,--when, upon an evening in December, an hour or two after dark, I
laid my hand softly on the latch of the old kitchen door. I touched it
so softly that I was not heard, and looked in unseen. There, smoking his
pipe in the old place by the kitchen firelight, as hale and as strong as
ever, though a little gray, sat Joe; and there, fenced into the corner
with Joe's leg, and sitting on my own little stool looking at the fire,
was--I again!

“We giv' him the name of Pip for your sake, dear old chap,” said Joe,
delighted, when I took another stool by the child's side (but I did not
rumple his hair), “and we hoped he might grow a little bit like you, and
we think he do.”

I thought so too, and I took him out for a walk next morning, and we
talked immensely, understanding one another to perfection. And I took
him down to the churchyard, and set him on a certain tombstone there,
and he showed me from that elevation which stone was sacred to the
memory of Philip Pirrip, late of this Parish, and Also Georgiana, Wife
of the Above.

“Biddy,” said I, when I talked with her after dinner, as her little girl
lay sleeping in her lap, “you must give Pip to me one of these days; or
lend him, at all events.”

“No, no,” said Biddy, gently. “You must marry.”

“So Herbert and Clara say, but I don't think I shall, Biddy. I have so
settled down in their home, that it's not at all likely. I am already
quite an old bachelor.”

Biddy looked down at her child, and put its little hand to her lips, and
then put the good matronly hand with which she had touched it into mine.
There was something in the action, and in the light pressure of Biddy's
wedding-ring, that had a very pretty eloquence in it.

“Dear Pip,” said Biddy, “you are sure you don't fret for her?”

“O no,--I think not, Biddy.”

“Tell me as an old, old friend. Have you quite forgotten her?

“My dear Biddy, I have forgotten nothing in my life that ever had a
foremost place there, and little that ever had any place there. But that
poor dream, as I once used to call it, has all gone by, Biddy,--all gone
by!”

Nevertheless, I knew, while I said those words, that I secretly intended
to revisit the site of the old house that evening, alone, for her sake.
Yes, even so. For Estella's sake.

I had heard of her as leading a most unhappy life, and as being
separated from her husband, who had used her with great cruelty, and who
had become quite renowned as a compound of pride, avarice, brutality,
and meanness. And I had heard of the death of her husband, from an
accident consequent on his ill-treatment of a horse. This release had
befallen her some two years before; for anything I knew, she was married
again.

The early dinner hour at Joe's, left me abundance of time, without
hurrying my talk with Biddy, to walk over to the old spot before dark.
But, what with loitering on the way to look at old objects and to think
of old times, the day had quite declined when I came to the place.

There was no house now, no brewery, no building whatever left, but the
wall of the old garden. The cleared space had been enclosed with a rough
fence, and looking over it, I saw that some of the old ivy had struck
root anew, and was growing green on low quiet mounds of ruin. A gate in
the fence standing ajar, I pushed it open, and went in.

A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and the moon was not yet
up to scatter it. But, the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the
moon was coming, and the evening was not dark. I could trace out where
every part of the old house had been, and where the brewery had been,
and where the gates, and where the casks. I had done so, and was looking
along the desolate garden walk, when I beheld a solitary figure in it.

The figure showed itself aware of me, as I advanced. It had been moving
towards me, but it stood still. As I drew nearer, I saw it to be the
figure of a woman. As I drew nearer yet, it was about to turn away, when
it stopped, and let me come up with it. Then, it faltered, as if much
surprised, and uttered my name, and I cried out,--

“Estella!”

“I am greatly changed. I wonder you know me.”

The freshness of her beauty was indeed gone, but its indescribable
majesty and its indescribable charm remained. Those attractions in it,
I had seen before; what I had never seen before, was the saddened,
softened light of the once proud eyes; what I had never felt before was
the friendly touch of the once insensible hand.

We sat down on a bench that was near, and I said, “After so many years,
it is strange that we should thus meet again, Estella, here where our
first meeting was! Do you often come back?”

“I have never been here since.”

“Nor I.”

The moon began to rise, and I thought of the placid look at the white
ceiling, which had passed away. The moon began to rise, and I thought of
the pressure on my hand when I had spoken the last words he had heard on
earth.

Estella was the next to break the silence that ensued between us.

“I have very often hoped and intended to come back, but have been
prevented by many circumstances. Poor, poor old place!”

The silvery mist was touched with the first rays of the moonlight, and
the same rays touched the tears that dropped from her eyes. Not knowing
that I saw them, and setting herself to get the better of them, she said
quietly,--

“Were you wondering, as you walked along, how it came to be left in this
condition?”

“Yes, Estella.”

“The ground belongs to me. It is the only possession I have not
relinquished. Everything else has gone from me, little by little, but I
have kept this. It was the subject of the only determined resistance I
made in all the wretched years.”

“Is it to be built on?”

“At last, it is. I came here to take leave of it before its change. And
you,” she said, in a voice of touching interest to a wanderer,--“you
live abroad still?”

“Still.”

“And do well, I am sure?”

“I work pretty hard for a sufficient living, and therefore--yes, I do
well.”

“I have often thought of you,” said Estella.

“Have you?”

“Of late, very often. There was a long hard time when I kept far from me
the remembrance of what I had thrown away when I was quite ignorant
of its worth. But since my duty has not been incompatible with the
admission of that remembrance, I have given it a place in my heart.”

“You have always held your place in my heart,” I answered.

And we were silent again until she spoke.

“I little thought,” said Estella, “that I should take leave of you in
taking leave of this spot. I am very glad to do so.”

“Glad to part again, Estella? To me, parting is a painful thing. To me,
the remembrance of our last parting has been ever mournful and painful.”

“But you said to me,” returned Estella, very earnestly, “'God bless you,
God forgive you!' And if you could say that to me then, you will not
hesitate to say that to me now,--now, when suffering has been stronger
than all other teaching, and has taught me to understand what your heart
used to be. I have been bent and broken, but--I hope--into a better
shape. Be as considerate and good to me as you were, and tell me we are
friends.”

“We are friends,” said I, rising and bending over her, as she rose from
the bench.

“And will continue friends apart,” said Estella.

I took her hand in mine, and we went out of the ruined place; and, as
the morning mists had risen long ago when I first left the forge, so the
evening mists were rising now, and in all the broad expanse of tranquil
light they showed to me, I saw no shadow of another parting from her.

4xxxxxxxxx

                                HARD TIMES



BOOK THE FIRST
_SOWING_


CHAPTER I
THE ONE THING NEEDFUL


‘NOW, what I want is, Facts.  Teach these boys and girls nothing but
Facts.  Facts alone are wanted in life.  Plant nothing else, and root out
everything else.  You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon
Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them.  This is the
principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle
on which I bring up these children.  Stick to Facts, sir!’

The scene was a plain, bare, monotonous vault of a school-room, and the
speaker’s square forefinger emphasized his observations by underscoring
every sentence with a line on the schoolmaster’s sleeve.  The emphasis
was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which had his
eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two
dark caves, overshadowed by the wall.  The emphasis was helped by the
speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set.  The emphasis was
helped by the speaker’s voice, which was inflexible, dry, and
dictatorial.  The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which
bristled on the skirts of his bald head, a plantation of firs to keep the
wind from its shining surface, all covered with knobs, like the crust of
a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the hard facts
stored inside.  The speaker’s obstinate carriage, square coat, square
legs, square shoulders,—nay, his very neckcloth, trained to take him by
the throat with an unaccommodating grasp, like a stubborn fact, as it
was,—all helped the emphasis.

‘In this life, we want nothing but Facts, sir; nothing but Facts!’

The speaker, and the schoolmaster, and the third grown person present,
all backed a little, and swept with their eyes the inclined plane of
little vessels then and there arranged in order, ready to have imperial
gallons of facts poured into them until they were full to the brim.



CHAPTER II
MURDERING THE INNOCENTS


THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir.  A man of realities.  A man of facts and
calculations.  A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are
four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for
anything over.  Thomas Gradgrind, sir—peremptorily Thomas—Thomas
Gradgrind.  With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication
table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of
human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.  It is a mere
question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.  You might hope to get
some other nonsensical belief into the head of George Gradgrind, or
Augustus Gradgrind, or John Gradgrind, or Joseph Gradgrind (all
supposititious, non-existent persons), but into the head of Thomas
Gradgrind—no, sir!

In such terms Mr. Gradgrind always mentally introduced himself, whether
to his private circle of acquaintance, or to the public in general.  In
such terms, no doubt, substituting the words ‘boys and girls,’ for ‘sir,’
Thomas Gradgrind now presented Thomas Gradgrind to the little pitchers
before him, who were to be filled so full of facts.

Indeed, as he eagerly sparkled at them from the cellarage before
mentioned, he seemed a kind of cannon loaded to the muzzle with facts,
and prepared to blow them clean out of the regions of childhood at one
discharge.  He seemed a galvanizing apparatus, too, charged with a grim
mechanical substitute for the tender young imaginations that were to be
stormed away.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, squarely pointing with his
square forefinger, ‘I don’t know that girl.  Who is that girl?’

‘Sissy Jupe, sir,’ explained number twenty, blushing, standing up, and
curtseying.

‘Sissy is not a name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Don’t call yourself Sissy.
Call yourself Cecilia.’

‘It’s father as calls me Sissy, sir,’ returned the young girl in a
trembling voice, and with another curtsey.

‘Then he has no business to do it,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Tell him he
mustn’t.  Cecilia Jupe.  Let me see.  What is your father?’

‘He belongs to the horse-riding, if you please, sir.’

Mr. Gradgrind frowned, and waved off the objectionable calling with his
hand.

‘We don’t want to know anything about that, here.  You mustn’t tell us
about that, here.  Your father breaks horses, don’t he?’

‘If you please, sir, when they can get any to break, they do break horses
in the ring, sir.’

‘You mustn’t tell us about the ring, here.  Very well, then.  Describe
your father as a horsebreaker.  He doctors sick horses, I dare say?’

‘Oh yes, sir.’

‘Very well, then.  He is a veterinary surgeon, a farrier, and
horsebreaker.  Give me your definition of a horse.’

(Sissy Jupe thrown into the greatest alarm by this demand.)

‘Girl number twenty unable to define a horse!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, for
the general behoof of all the little pitchers.  ‘Girl number twenty
possessed of no facts, in reference to one of the commonest of animals!
Some boy’s definition of a horse.  Bitzer, yours.’

The square finger, moving here and there, lighted suddenly on Bitzer,
perhaps because he chanced to sit in the same ray of sunlight which,
darting in at one of the bare windows of the intensely white-washed room,
irradiated Sissy.  For, the boys and girls sat on the face of the
inclined plane in two compact bodies, divided up the centre by a narrow
interval; and Sissy, being at the corner of a row on the sunny side, came
in for the beginning of a sunbeam, of which Bitzer, being at the corner
of a row on the other side, a few rows in advance, caught the end.  But,
whereas the girl was so dark-eyed and dark-haired, that she seemed to
receive a deeper and more lustrous colour from the sun, when it shone
upon her, the boy was so light-eyed and light-haired that the self-same
rays appeared to draw out of him what little colour he ever possessed.
His cold eyes would hardly have been eyes, but for the short ends of
lashes which, by bringing them into immediate contrast with something
paler than themselves, expressed their form.  His short-cropped hair
might have been a mere continuation of the sandy freckles on his forehead
and face.  His skin was so unwholesomely deficient in the natural tinge,
that he looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.

‘Bitzer,’ said Thomas Gradgrind.  ‘Your definition of a horse.’

‘Quadruped.  Graminivorous.  Forty teeth, namely twenty-four grinders,
four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive.  Sheds coat in the spring; in marshy
countries, sheds hoofs, too.  Hoofs hard, but requiring to be shod with
iron.  Age known by marks in mouth.’  Thus (and much more) Bitzer.

‘Now girl number twenty,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘You know what a horse
is.’

She curtseyed again, and would have blushed deeper, if she could have
blushed deeper than she had blushed all this time.  Bitzer, after rapidly
blinking at Thomas Gradgrind with both eyes at once, and so catching the
light upon his quivering ends of lashes that they looked like the antennæ
of busy insects, put his knuckles to his freckled forehead, and sat down
again.

The third gentleman now stepped forth.  A mighty man at cutting and
drying, he was; a government officer; in his way (and in most other
people’s too), a professed pugilist; always in training, always with a
system to force down the general throat like a bolus, always to be heard
of at the bar of his little Public-office, ready to fight all England.
To continue in fistic phraseology, he had a genius for coming up to the
scratch, wherever and whatever it was, and proving himself an ugly
customer.  He would go in and damage any subject whatever with his right,
follow up with his left, stop, exchange, counter, bore his opponent (he
always fought All England) to the ropes, and fall upon him neatly.  He
was certain to knock the wind out of common sense, and render that
unlucky adversary deaf to the call of time.  And he had it in charge from
high authority to bring about the great public-office Millennium, when
Commissioners should reign upon earth.

‘Very well,’ said this gentleman, briskly smiling, and folding his arms.
‘That’s a horse.  Now, let me ask you girls and boys, Would you paper a
room with representations of horses?’

After a pause, one half of the children cried in chorus, ‘Yes, sir!’
Upon which the other half, seeing in the gentleman’s face that Yes was
wrong, cried out in chorus, ‘No, sir!’—as the custom is, in these
examinations.

‘Of course, No.  Why wouldn’t you?’

A pause.  One corpulent slow boy, with a wheezy manner of breathing,
ventured the answer, Because he wouldn’t paper a room at all, but would
paint it.

‘You _must_ paper it,’ said the gentleman, rather warmly.

‘You must paper it,’ said Thomas Gradgrind, ‘whether you like it or not.
Don’t tell _us_ you wouldn’t paper it.  What do you mean, boy?’

‘I’ll explain to you, then,’ said the gentleman, after another and a
dismal pause, ‘why you wouldn’t paper a room with representations of
horses.  Do you ever see horses walking up and down the sides of rooms in
reality—in fact?  Do you?’

‘Yes, sir!’ from one half.  ‘No, sir!’ from the other.

‘Of course no,’ said the gentleman, with an indignant look at the wrong
half.  ‘Why, then, you are not to see anywhere, what you don’t see in
fact; you are not to have anywhere, what you don’t have in fact.  What is
called Taste, is only another name for Fact.’  Thomas Gradgrind nodded
his approbation.

‘This is a new principle, a discovery, a great discovery,’ said the
gentleman.  ‘Now, I’ll try you again.  Suppose you were going to carpet a
room.  Would you use a carpet having a representation of flowers upon
it?’

There being a general conviction by this time that ‘No, sir!’ was always
the right answer to this gentleman, the chorus of NO was very strong.
Only a few feeble stragglers said Yes: among them Sissy Jupe.

‘Girl number twenty,’ said the gentleman, smiling in the calm strength of
knowledge.

Sissy blushed, and stood up.

‘So you would carpet your room—or your husband’s room, if you were a
grown woman, and had a husband—with representations of flowers, would
you?’ said the gentleman.  ‘Why would you?’

‘If you please, sir, I am very fond of flowers,’ returned the girl.

‘And is that why you would put tables and chairs upon them, and have
people walking over them with heavy boots?’

‘It wouldn’t hurt them, sir.  They wouldn’t crush and wither, if you
please, sir.  They would be the pictures of what was very pretty and
pleasant, and I would fancy—’

‘Ay, ay, ay!  But you mustn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman, quite elated
by coming so happily to his point.  ‘That’s it!  You are never to fancy.’

‘You are not, Cecilia Jupe,’ Thomas Gradgrind solemnly repeated, ‘to do
anything of that kind.’

‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman.  And ‘Fact, fact, fact!’ repeated
Thomas Gradgrind.

‘You are to be in all things regulated and governed,’ said the gentleman,
‘by fact.  We hope to have, before long, a board of fact, composed of
commissioners of fact, who will force the people to be a people of fact,
and of nothing but fact.  You must discard the word Fancy altogether.
You have nothing to do with it.  You are not to have, in any object of
use or ornament, what would be a contradiction in fact.  You don’t walk
upon flowers in fact; you cannot be allowed to walk upon flowers in
carpets.  You don’t find that foreign birds and butterflies come and
perch upon your crockery; you cannot be permitted to paint foreign birds
and butterflies upon your crockery.  You never meet with quadrupeds going
up and down walls; you must not have quadrupeds represented upon walls.
You must use,’ said the gentleman, ‘for all these purposes, combinations
and modifications (in primary colours) of mathematical figures which are
susceptible of proof and demonstration.  This is the new discovery.  This
is fact.  This is taste.’

The girl curtseyed, and sat down.  She was very young, and she looked as
if she were frightened by the matter-of-fact prospect the world afforded.

‘Now, if Mr. M’Choakumchild,’ said the gentleman, ‘will proceed to give
his first lesson here, Mr. Gradgrind, I shall be happy, at your request,
to observe his mode of procedure.’

Mr. Gradgrind was much obliged.  ‘Mr. M’Choakumchild, we only wait for
you.’

So, Mr. M’Choakumchild began in his best manner.  He and some one hundred
and forty other schoolmasters, had been lately turned at the same time,
in the same factory, on the same principles, like so many pianoforte
legs.  He had been put through an immense variety of paces, and had
answered volumes of head-breaking questions.  Orthography, etymology,
syntax, and prosody, biography, astronomy, geography, and general
cosmography, the sciences of compound proportion, algebra, land-surveying
and levelling, vocal music, and drawing from models, were all at the ends
of his ten chilled fingers.  He had worked his stony way into Her
Majesty’s most Honourable Privy Council’s Schedule B, and had taken the
bloom off the higher branches of mathematics and physical science,
French, German, Latin, and Greek.  He knew all about all the Water Sheds
of all the world (whatever they are), and all the histories of all the
peoples, and all the names of all the rivers and mountains, and all the
productions, manners, and customs of all the countries, and all their
boundaries and bearings on the two and thirty points of the compass.  Ah,
rather overdone, M’Choakumchild.  If he had only learnt a little less,
how infinitely better he might have taught much more!

He went to work in this preparatory lesson, not unlike Morgiana in the
Forty Thieves: looking into all the vessels ranged before him, one after
another, to see what they contained.  Say, good M’Choakumchild.  When
from thy boiling store, thou shalt fill each jar brim full by-and-by,
dost thou think that thou wilt always kill outright the robber Fancy
lurking within—or sometimes only maim him and distort him!



CHAPTER III
A LOOPHOLE


MR. GRADGRIND walked homeward from the school, in a state of considerable
satisfaction.  It was his school, and he intended it to be a model.  He
intended every child in it to be a model—just as the young Gradgrinds
were all models.

There were five young Gradgrinds, and they were models every one.  They
had been lectured at, from their tenderest years; coursed, like little
hares.  Almost as soon as they could run alone, they had been made to run
to the lecture-room.  The first object with which they had an
association, or of which they had a remembrance, was a large black board
with a dry Ogre chalking ghastly white figures on it.

Not that they knew, by name or nature, anything about an Ogre Fact
forbid!  I only use the word to express a monster in a lecturing castle,
with Heaven knows how many heads manipulated into one, taking childhood
captive, and dragging it into gloomy statistical dens by the hair.

No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the
moon before it could speak distinctly.  No little Gradgrind had ever
learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what
you are!  No little Gradgrind had ever known wonder on the subject, each
little Gradgrind having at five years old dissected the Great Bear like a
Professor Owen, and driven Charles’s Wain like a locomotive
engine-driver.  No little Gradgrind had ever associated a cow in a field
with that famous cow with the crumpled horn who tossed the dog who
worried the cat who killed the rat who ate the malt, or with that yet
more famous cow who swallowed Tom Thumb: it had never heard of those
celebrities, and had only been introduced to a cow as a graminivorous
ruminating quadruped with several stomachs.

To his matter-of-fact home, which was called Stone Lodge, Mr. Gradgrind
directed his steps.  He had virtually retired from the wholesale hardware
trade before he built Stone Lodge, and was now looking about for a
suitable opportunity of making an arithmetical figure in Parliament.
Stone Lodge was situated on a moor within a mile or two of a great
town—called Coketown in the present faithful guide-book.

A very regular feature on the face of the country, Stone Lodge was.  Not
the least disguise toned down or shaded off that uncompromising fact in
the landscape.  A great square house, with a heavy portico darkening the
principal windows, as its master’s heavy brows overshadowed his eyes.  A
calculated, cast up, balanced, and proved house.  Six windows on this
side of the door, six on that side; a total of twelve in this wing, a
total of twelve in the other wing; four-and-twenty carried over to the
back wings.  A lawn and garden and an infant avenue, all ruled straight
like a botanical account-book.  Gas and ventilation, drainage and
water-service, all of the primest quality.  Iron clamps and girders,
fire-proof from top to bottom; mechanical lifts for the housemaids, with
all their brushes and brooms; everything that heart could desire.

Everything?  Well, I suppose so.  The little Gradgrinds had cabinets in
various departments of science too.  They had a little conchological
cabinet, and a little metallurgical cabinet, and a little mineralogical
cabinet; and the specimens were all arranged and labelled, and the bits
of stone and ore looked as though they might have been broken from the
parent substances by those tremendously hard instruments their own names;
and, to paraphrase the idle legend of Peter Piper, who had never found
his way into their nursery, If the greedy little Gradgrinds grasped at
more than this, what was it for good gracious goodness’ sake, that the
greedy little Gradgrinds grasped it!

Their father walked on in a hopeful and satisfied frame of mind.  He was
an affectionate father, after his manner; but he would probably have
described himself (if he had been put, like Sissy Jupe, upon a
definition) as ‘an eminently practical’ father.  He had a particular
pride in the phrase eminently practical, which was considered to have a
special application to him.  Whatsoever the public meeting held in
Coketown, and whatsoever the subject of such meeting, some Coketowner was
sure to seize the occasion of alluding to his eminently practical friend
Gradgrind.  This always pleased the eminently practical friend.  He knew
it to be his due, but his due was acceptable.

He had reached the neutral ground upon the outskirts of the town, which
was neither town nor country, and yet was either spoiled, when his ears
were invaded by the sound of music.  The clashing and banging band
attached to the horse-riding establishment, which had there set up its
rest in a wooden pavilion, was in full bray.  A flag, floating from the
summit of the temple, proclaimed to mankind that it was ‘Sleary’s
Horse-riding’ which claimed their suffrages.  Sleary himself, a stout
modern statue with a money-box at its elbow, in an ecclesiastical niche
of early Gothic architecture, took the money.  Miss Josephine Sleary, as
some very long and very narrow strips of printed bill announced, was then
inaugurating the entertainments with her graceful equestrian Tyrolean
flower-act.  Among the other pleasing but always strictly moral wonders
which must be seen to be believed, Signor Jupe was that afternoon to
‘elucidate the diverting accomplishments of his highly trained performing
dog Merrylegs.’  He was also to exhibit ‘his astounding feat of throwing
seventy-five hundred-weight in rapid succession backhanded over his head,
thus forming a fountain of solid iron in mid-air, a feat never before
attempted in this or any other country, and which having elicited such
rapturous plaudits from enthusiastic throngs it cannot be withdrawn.’
The same Signor Jupe was to ‘enliven the varied performances at frequent
intervals with his chaste Shaksperean quips and retorts.’  Lastly, he was
to wind them up by appearing in his favourite character of Mr. William
Button, of Tooley Street, in ‘the highly novel and laughable
hippo-comedietta of The Tailor’s Journey to Brentford.’

Thomas Gradgrind took no heed of these trivialities of course, but passed
on as a practical man ought to pass on, either brushing the noisy insects
from his thoughts, or consigning them to the House of Correction.  But,
the turning of the road took him by the back of the booth, and at the
back of the booth a number of children were congregated in a number of
stealthy attitudes, striving to peep in at the hidden glories of the
place.

This brought him to a stop.  ‘Now, to think of these vagabonds,’ said he,
‘attracting the young rabble from a model school.’

A space of stunted grass and dry rubbish being between him and the young
rabble, he took his eyeglass out of his waistcoat to look for any child
he knew by name, and might order off.  Phenomenon almost incredible
though distinctly seen, what did he then behold but his own metallurgical
Louisa, peeping with all her might through a hole in a deal board, and
his own mathematical Thomas abasing himself on the ground to catch but a
hoof of the graceful equestrian Tyrolean flower-act!

Dumb with amazement, Mr. Gradgrind crossed to the spot where his family
was thus disgraced, laid his hand upon each erring child, and said:

‘Louisa!!  Thomas!!’

Both rose, red and disconcerted.  But, Louisa looked at her father with
more boldness than Thomas did.  Indeed, Thomas did not look at him, but
gave himself up to be taken home like a machine.

‘In the name of wonder, idleness, and folly!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, leading
each away by a hand; ‘what do you do here?’

‘Wanted to see what it was like,’ returned Louisa, shortly.

‘What it was like?’

‘Yes, father.’

There was an air of jaded sullenness in them both, and particularly in
the girl: yet, struggling through the dissatisfaction of her face, there
was a light with nothing to rest upon, a fire with nothing to burn, a
starved imagination keeping life in itself somehow, which brightened its
expression.  Not with the brightness natural to cheerful youth, but with
uncertain, eager, doubtful flashes, which had something painful in them,
analogous to the changes on a blind face groping its way.

She was a child now, of fifteen or sixteen; but at no distant day would
seem to become a woman all at once.  Her father thought so as he looked
at her.  She was pretty.  Would have been self-willed (he thought in his
eminently practical way) but for her bringing-up.

‘Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it difficult to believe
that you, with your education and resources, should have brought your
sister to a scene like this.’

‘I brought _him_, father,’ said Louisa, quickly.  ‘I asked him to come.’

‘I am sorry to hear it.  I am very sorry indeed to hear it.  It makes
Thomas no better, and it makes you worse, Louisa.’

She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her cheek.

‘You!  Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open; Thomas
and you, who may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who
have been trained to mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!’ cried
Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘In this degraded position!  I am amazed.’

‘I was tired, father.  I have been tired a long time,’ said Louisa.

‘Tired?  Of what?’ asked the astonished father.

‘I don’t know of what—of everything, I think.’

‘Say not another word,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘You are childish.  I
will hear no more.’  He did not speak again until they had walked some
half-a-mile in silence, when he gravely broke out with: ‘What would your
best friends say, Louisa?  Do you attach no value to their good opinion?
What would Mr. Bounderby say?’  At the mention of this name, his daughter
stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and searching character.
He saw nothing of it, for before he looked at her, she had again cast
down her eyes!

‘What,’ he repeated presently, ‘would Mr. Bounderby say?’  All the way to
Stone Lodge, as with grave indignation he led the two delinquents home,
he repeated at intervals ‘What would Mr. Bounderby say?’—as if Mr.
Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.



CHAPTER IV
MR. BOUNDERBY


NOT being Mrs. Grundy, who _was_ Mr. Bounderby?

Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s bosom friend, as a
man perfectly devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual
relationship towards another man perfectly devoid of sentiment.  So near
was Mr. Bounderby—or, if the reader should prefer it, so far off.

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not.  A big,
loud man, with a stare, and a metallic laugh.  A man made out of a coarse
material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him.  A
man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples,
and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes
open, and lift his eyebrows up.  A man with a pervading appearance on him
of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start.  A man who could
never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man.  A man who was always
proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his
old ignorance and his old poverty.  A man who was the Bully of humility.

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby
looked older; his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or
eight added to it again, without surprising anybody.  He had not much
hair.  One might have fancied he had talked it off; and that what was
left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being
constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.

In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug,
warming himself before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some
observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his
birthday.  He stood before the fire, partly because it was a cool spring
afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge
was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus
took up a commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot.  As to a stocking, I didn’t know such a
thing by name.  I passed the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty.
That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday.  Not that a ditch was new to
me, for I was born in a ditch.’

Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of
surpassing feebleness, mental and bodily; who was always taking physic
without any effect, and who, whenever she showed a symptom of coming to
life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece of fact tumbling on
her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?

‘No!  As wet as a sop.  A foot of water in it,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Enough to give a baby cold,’ Mrs. Gradgrind considered.

‘Cold?  I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything
else, I believe, that was capable of inflammation,’ returned Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘For years, ma’am, I was one of the most miserable little
wretches ever seen.  I was so sickly, that I was always moaning and
groaning.  I was so ragged and dirty, that you wouldn’t have touched me
with a pair of tongs.’

Mrs. Gradgrind faintly looked at the tongs, as the most appropriate thing
her imbecility could think of doing.

‘How I fought through it, _I_ don’t know,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was
determined, I suppose.  I have been a determined character in later life,
and I suppose I was then.  Here I am, Mrs. Gradgrind, anyhow, and nobody
to thank for my being here, but myself.’

Mrs. Gradgrind meekly and weakly hoped that his mother—

‘_My_ mother?  Bolted, ma’am!’ said Bounderby.

Mrs. Gradgrind, stunned as usual, collapsed and gave it up.

‘My mother left me to my grandmother,’ said Bounderby; ‘and, according to
the best of my remembrance, my grandmother was the wickedest and the
worst old woman that ever lived.  If I got a little pair of shoes by any
chance, she would take ’em off and sell ’em for drink.  Why, I have known
that grandmother of mine lie in her bed and drink her four-teen glasses
of liquor before breakfast!’

Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of vitality,
looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed transparency of
a small female figure, without enough light behind it.

‘She kept a chandler’s shop,’ pursued Bounderby, ‘and kept me in an
egg-box.  That was the cot of _my_ infancy; an old egg-box.  As soon as I
was big enough to run away, of course I ran away.  Then I became a young
vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me about and starving me,
everybody of all ages knocked me about and starved me.  They were right;
they had no business to do anything else.  I was a nuisance, an
incumbrance, and a pest.  I know that very well.’

His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great social
distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest, was only to
be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the boast.

‘I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind.  Whether I was to
do it or not, ma’am, I did it.  I pulled through it, though nobody threw
me out a rope.  Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk,
chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Those are
the antecedents, and the culmination.  Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and
was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the
steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a
drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant.
Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your
model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish
of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all
right, all correct—he hadn’t such advantages—but let us have hard-headed,
solid-fisted people—the education that made him won’t do for everybody,
he knows well—such and such his education was, however, and you may force
him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress the
facts of his life.’

Being heated when he arrived at this climax, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
stopped.  He stopped just as his eminently practical friend, still
accompanied by the two young culprits, entered the room.  His eminently
practical friend, on seeing him, stopped also, and gave Louisa a
reproachful look that plainly said, ‘Behold your Bounderby!’

‘Well!’ blustered Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter?  What is young
Thomas in the dumps about?’

He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.

‘We were peeping at the circus,’ muttered Louisa, haughtily, without
lifting up her eyes, ‘and father caught us.’

‘And, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband in a lofty manner, ‘I should as
soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.’

‘Dear me,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘How can you, Louisa and Thomas!  I
wonder at you.  I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever having
had a family at all.  I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn’t.  _Then_
what would you have done, I should like to know?’

Mr. Gradgrind did not seem favourably impressed by these cogent remarks.
He frowned impatiently.

‘As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn’t go and
look at the shells and minerals and things provided for you, instead of
circuses!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘You know, as well as I do, no young
people have circus masters, or keep circuses in cabinets, or attend
lectures about circuses.  What can you possibly want to know of circuses
then?  I am sure you have enough to do, if that’s what you want.  With my
head in its present state, I couldn’t remember the mere names of half the
facts you have got to attend to.’

‘That’s the reason!’ pouted Louisa.

‘Don’t tell me that’s the reason, because it can’t be nothing of the
sort,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘Go and be somethingological directly.’
Mrs. Gradgrind was not a scientific character, and usually dismissed her
children to their studies with this general injunction to choose their
pursuit.

In truth, Mrs. Gradgrind’s stock of facts in general was woefully
defective; but Mr. Gradgrind in raising her to her high matrimonial
position, had been influenced by two reasons.  Firstly, she was most
satisfactory as a question of figures; and, secondly, she had ‘no
nonsense’ about her.  By nonsense he meant fancy; and truly it is
probable she was as free from any alloy of that nature, as any human
being not arrived at the perfection of an absolute idiot, ever was.

The simple circumstance of being left alone with her husband and Mr.
Bounderby, was sufficient to stun this admirable lady again without
collision between herself and any other fact.  So, she once more died
away, and nobody minded her.

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, drawing a chair to the fireside, ‘you
are always so interested in my young people—particularly in Louisa—that I
make no apology for saying to you, I am very much vexed by this
discovery.  I have systematically devoted myself (as you know) to the
education of the reason of my family.  The reason is (as you know) the
only faculty to which education should be addressed.  ‘And yet,
Bounderby, it would appear from this unexpected circumstance of to-day,
though in itself a trifling one, as if something had crept into Thomas’s
and Louisa’s minds which is—or rather, which is not—I don’t know that I
can express myself better than by saying—which has never been intended to
be developed, and in which their reason has no part.’

‘There certainly is no reason in looking with interest at a parcel of
vagabonds,’ returned Bounderby.  ‘When I was a vagabond myself, nobody
looked with any interest at _me_; I know that.’

‘Then comes the question; said the eminently practical father, with his
eyes on the fire, ‘in what has this vulgar curiosity its rise?’

‘I’ll tell you in what.  In idle imagination.’

‘I hope not,’ said the eminently practical; ‘I confess, however, that the
misgiving _has_ crossed me on my way home.’

‘In idle imagination, Gradgrind,’ repeated Bounderby.  ‘A very bad thing
for anybody, but a cursed bad thing for a girl like Louisa.  I should ask
Mrs. Gradgrind’s pardon for strong expressions, but that she knows very
well I am not a refined character.  Whoever expects refinement in _me_
will be disappointed.  I hadn’t a refined bringing up.’

‘Whether,’ said Gradgrind, pondering with his hands in his pockets, and
his cavernous eyes on the fire, ‘whether any instructor or servant can
have suggested anything?  Whether Louisa or Thomas can have been reading
anything?  Whether, in spite of all precautions, any idle story-book can
have got into the house?  Because, in minds that have been practically
formed by rule and line, from the cradle upwards, this is so curious, so
incomprehensible.’

‘Stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, who all this time had been standing, as
before, on the hearth, bursting at the very furniture of the room with
explosive humility.  ‘You have one of those strollers’ children in the
school.’

‘Cecilia Jupe, by name,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with something of a stricken
look at his friend.

‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby again.  ‘How did she come there?’

‘Why, the fact is, I saw the girl myself, for the first time, only just
now.  She specially applied here at the house to be admitted, as not
regularly belonging to our town, and—yes, you are right, Bounderby, you
are right.’

‘Now, stop a bit!’ cried Bounderby, once more.  ‘Louisa saw her when she
came?’

‘Louisa certainly did see her, for she mentioned the application to me.
But Louisa saw her, I have no doubt, in Mrs. Gradgrind’s presence.’

‘Pray, Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, ‘what passed?’

‘Oh, my poor health!’ returned Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘The girl wanted to come
to the school, and Mr. Gradgrind wanted girls to come to the school, and
Louisa and Thomas both said that the girl wanted to come, and that Mr.
Gradgrind wanted girls to come, and how was it possible to contradict
them when such was the fact!’

‘Now I tell you what, Gradgrind!’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Turn this girl to
the right about, and there’s an end of it.’

‘I am much of your opinion.’

‘Do it at once,’ said Bounderby, ‘has always been my motto from a child.
When I thought I would run away from my egg-box and my grandmother, I did
it at once.  Do you the same.  Do this at once!’

‘Are you walking?’ asked his friend.  ‘I have the father’s address.
Perhaps you would not mind walking to town with me?’

‘Not the least in the world,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘as long as you do it
at once!’

So, Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it on, as expressing a
man who had been far too busily employed in making himself, to acquire
any fashion of wearing his hat—and with his hands in his pockets,
sauntered out into the hall.  ‘I never wear gloves,’ it was his custom to
say.  ‘I didn’t climb up the ladder in _them_.—Shouldn’t be so high up,
if I had.’

Being left to saunter in the hall a minute or two while Mr. Gradgrind
went up-stairs for the address, he opened the door of the children’s
study and looked into that serene floor-clothed apartment, which,
notwithstanding its book-cases and its cabinets and its variety of
learned and philosophical appliances, had much of the genial aspect of a
room devoted to hair-cutting.  Louisa languidly leaned upon the window
looking out, without looking at anything, while young Thomas stood
sniffing revengefully at the fire.  Adam Smith and Malthus, two younger
Gradgrinds, were out at lecture in custody; and little Jane, after
manufacturing a good deal of moist pipe-clay on her face with
slate-pencil and tears, had fallen asleep over vulgar fractions.

‘It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right, young Thomas,’ said Mr.
Bounderby; ‘you won’t do so any more.  I’ll answer for it’s being all
over with father.  Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?’

‘You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,’ returned Louisa, when she had coldly
paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously raised her
cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

‘Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Good-bye,
Louisa!’

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had
kissed, with her handkerchief, until it was burning red.  She was still
doing this, five minutes afterwards.

‘What are you about, Loo?’ her brother sulkily remonstrated.  ‘You’ll rub
a hole in your face.’

‘You may cut the piece out with your penknife if you like, Tom.  I
wouldn’t cry!’



CHAPTER V
THE KEYNOTE


COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a
triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs.
Gradgrind herself.  Let us strike the key-note, Coketown, before pursuing
our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the
smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of
unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.  It was a town
of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of
smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled.  It
had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling
dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a
rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the
steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an
elephant in a state of melancholy madness.  It contained several large
streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like
one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went
in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same
pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as
yesterday and to-morrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and
the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work
by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off, comforts of
life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life
which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely
bear to hear the place mentioned.  The rest of its features were
voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful.  If the
members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of
eighteen religious persuasions had done—they made it a pious warehouse of
red brick, with sometimes (but this is only in highly ornamental
examples) a bell in a birdcage on the top of it.  The solitary exception
was the New Church; a stuccoed edifice with a square steeple over the
door, terminating in four short pinnacles like florid wooden legs.  All
the public inscriptions in the town were painted alike, in severe
characters of black and white.  The jail might have been the infirmary,
the infirmary might have been the jail, the town-hall might have been
either, or both, or anything else, for anything that appeared to the
contrary in the graces of their construction.  Fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the material aspect of the town; fact, fact, fact,
everywhere in the immaterial.  The M’Choakumchild school was all fact,
and the school of design was all fact, and the relations between master
and man were all fact, and everything was fact between the lying-in
hospital and the cemetery, and what you couldn’t state in figures, or
show to be purchaseable in the cheapest market and saleable in the
dearest, was not, and never should be, world without end, Amen.

A town so sacred to fact, and so triumphant in its assertion, of course
got on well?  Why no, not quite well.  No?  Dear me!

No.  Coketown did not come out of its own furnaces, in all respects like
gold that had stood the fire.  First, the perplexing mystery of the place
was, Who belonged to the eighteen denominations?  Because, whoever did,
the labouring people did not.  It was very strange to walk through the
streets on a Sunday morning, and note how few of _them_ the barbarous
jangling of bells that was driving the sick and nervous mad, called away
from their own quarter, from their own close rooms, from the corners of
their own streets, where they lounged listlessly, gazing at all the
church and chapel going, as at a thing with which they had no manner of
concern.  Nor was it merely the stranger who noticed this, because there
was a native organization in Coketown itself, whose members were to be
heard of in the House of Commons every session, indignantly petitioning
for acts of parliament that should make these people religious by main
force.  Then came the Teetotal Society, who complained that these same
people _would_ get drunk, and showed in tabular statements that they did
get drunk, and proved at tea parties that no inducement, human or Divine
(except a medal), would induce them to forego their custom of getting
drunk.  Then came the chemist and druggist, with other tabular
statements, showing that when they didn’t get drunk, they took opium.
Then came the experienced chaplain of the jail, with more tabular
statements, outdoing all the previous tabular statements, and showing
that the same people _would_ resort to low haunts, hidden from the public
eye, where they heard low singing and saw low dancing, and mayhap joined
in it; and where A. B., aged twenty-four next birthday, and committed for
eighteen months’ solitary, had himself said (not that he had ever shown
himself particularly worthy of belief) his ruin began, as he was
perfectly sure and confident that otherwise he would have been a tip-top
moral specimen.  Then came Mr. Gradgrind and Mr. Bounderby, the two
gentlemen at this present moment walking through Coketown, and both
eminently practical, who could, on occasion, furnish more tabular
statements derived from their own personal experience, and illustrated by
cases they had known and seen, from which it clearly appeared—in short,
it was the only clear thing in the case—that these same people were a bad
lot altogether, gentlemen; that do what you would for them they were
never thankful for it, gentlemen; that they were restless, gentlemen;
that they never knew what they wanted; that they lived upon the best, and
bought fresh butter; and insisted on Mocha coffee, and rejected all but
prime parts of meat, and yet were eternally dissatisfied and
unmanageable.  In short, it was the moral of the old nursery fable:

    There was an old woman, and what do you think?
    She lived upon nothing but victuals and drink;
    Victuals and drink were the whole of her diet,
    And yet this old woman would NEVER be quiet.

Is it possible, I wonder, that there was any analogy between the case of
the Coketown population and the case of the little Gradgrinds?  Surely,
none of us in our sober senses and acquainted with figures, are to be
told at this time of day, that one of the foremost elements in the
existence of the Coketown working-people had been for scores of years,
deliberately set at nought?  That there was any Fancy in them demanding
to be brought into healthy existence instead of struggling on in
convulsions?  That exactly in the ratio as they worked long and
monotonously, the craving grew within them for some physical relief—some
relaxation, encouraging good humour and good spirits, and giving them a
vent—some recognized holiday, though it were but for an honest dance to a
stirring band of music—some occasional light pie in which even
M’Choakumchild had no finger—which craving must and would be satisfied
aright, or must and would inevitably go wrong, until the laws of the
Creation were repealed?

‘This man lives at Pod’s End, and I don’t quite know Pod’s End,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.  ‘Which is it, Bounderby?’

Mr. Bounderby knew it was somewhere down town, but knew no more
respecting it.  So they stopped for a moment, looking about.

Almost as they did so, there came running round the corner of the street
at a quick pace and with a frightened look, a girl whom Mr. Gradgrind
recognized.  ‘Halloa!’ said he.  ‘Stop!  Where are you going! Stop!’
Girl number twenty stopped then, palpitating, and made him a curtsey.

‘Why are you tearing about the streets,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘in this
improper manner?’

‘I was—I was run after, sir,’ the girl panted, ‘and I wanted to get
away.’

‘Run after?’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Who would run after _you_?’

The question was unexpectedly and suddenly answered for her, by the
colourless boy, Bitzer, who came round the corner with such blind speed
and so little anticipating a stoppage on the pavement, that he brought
himself up against Mr. Gradgrind’s waistcoat and rebounded into the road.

‘What do you mean, boy?’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘What are you doing?  How
dare you dash against—everybody—in this manner?’  Bitzer picked up his
cap, which the concussion had knocked off; and backing, and knuckling his
forehead, pleaded that it was an accident.

‘Was this boy running after you, Jupe?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Yes, sir,’ said the girl reluctantly.

‘No, I wasn’t, sir!’ cried Bitzer.  ‘Not till she run away from me.  But
the horse-riders never mind what they say, sir; they’re famous for it.
You know the horse-riders are famous for never minding what they say,’
addressing Sissy.  ‘It’s as well known in the town as—please, sir, as the
multiplication table isn’t known to the horse-riders.’  Bitzer tried Mr.
Bounderby with this.

‘He frightened me so,’ said the girl, ‘with his cruel faces!’

‘Oh!’ cried Bitzer.  ‘Oh!  An’t you one of the rest!  An’t you a
horse-rider!  I never looked at her, sir.  I asked her if she would know
how to define a horse to-morrow, and offered to tell her again, and she
ran away, and I ran after her, sir, that she might know how to answer
when she was asked.  You wouldn’t have thought of saying such mischief if
you hadn’t been a horse-rider?’

‘Her calling seems to be pretty well known among ’em,’ observed Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘You’d have had the whole school peeping in a row, in a
week.’

‘Truly, I think so,’ returned his friend.  ‘Bitzer, turn you about and
take yourself home. Jupe, stay here a moment.  Let me hear of your
running in this manner any more, boy, and you will hear of me through the
master of the school.  You understand what I mean.  Go along.’

The boy stopped in his rapid blinking, knuckled his forehead again,
glanced at Sissy, turned about, and retreated.

‘Now, girl,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘take this gentleman and me to your
father’s; we are going there.  What have you got in that bottle you are
carrying?’

‘Gin,’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Dear, no, sir!  It’s the nine oils.’

‘The what?’ cried Mr. Bounderby.

‘The nine oils, sir, to rub father with.’

‘Then,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a loud short laugh, ‘what the devil do
you rub your father with nine oils for?’

‘It’s what our people aways use, sir, when they get any hurts in the
ring,’ replied the girl, looking over her shoulder, to assure herself
that her pursuer was gone.  ‘They bruise themselves very bad sometimes.’

‘Serve ’em right,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘for being idle.’  She glanced up
at his face, with mingled astonishment and dread.

‘By George!’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘when I was four or five years younger
than you, I had worse bruises upon me than ten oils, twenty oils, forty
oils, would have rubbed off.  I didn’t get ’em by posture-making, but by
being banged about.  There was no rope-dancing for me; I danced on the
bare ground and was larruped with the rope.’

Mr. Gradgrind, though hard enough, was by no means so rough a man as Mr.
Bounderby.  His character was not unkind, all things considered; it might
have been a very kind one indeed, if he had only made some round mistake
in the arithmetic that balanced it, years ago.  He said, in what he meant
for a reassuring tone, as they turned down a narrow road, ‘And this is
Pod’s End; is it, Jupe?’

‘This is it, sir, and—if you wouldn’t mind, sir—this is the house.’

She stopped, at twilight, at the door of a mean little public-house, with
dim red lights in it.  As haggard and as shabby, as if, for want of
custom, it had itself taken to drinking, and had gone the way all
drunkards go, and was very near the end of it.

‘It’s only crossing the bar, sir, and up the stairs, if you wouldn’t
mind, and waiting there for a moment till I get a candle.  If you should
hear a dog, sir, it’s only Merrylegs, and he only barks.’

‘Merrylegs and nine oils, eh!’ said Mr. Bounderby, entering last with his
metallic laugh.  ‘Pretty well this, for a self-made man!’



CHAPTER VI
SLEARY’S HORSEMANSHIP


THE name of the public-house was the Pegasus’s Arms.  The Pegasus’s legs
might have been more to the purpose; but, underneath the winged horse
upon the sign-board, the Pegasus’s Arms was inscribed in Roman letters.
Beneath that inscription again, in a flowing scroll, the painter had
touched off the lines:

    Good malt makes good beer,
    Walk in, and they’ll draw it here;
    Good wine makes good brandy,
    Give us a call, and you’ll find it handy.

Framed and glazed upon the wall behind the dingy little bar, was another
Pegasus—a theatrical one—with real gauze let in for his wings, golden
stars stuck on all over him, and his ethereal harness made of red silk.

As it had grown too dusky without, to see the sign, and as it had not
grown light enough within to see the picture, Mr. Gradgrind and Mr.
Bounderby received no offence from these idealities.  They followed the
girl up some steep corner-stairs without meeting any one, and stopped in
the dark while she went on for a candle.  They expected every moment to
hear Merrylegs give tongue, but the highly trained performing dog had not
barked when the girl and the candle appeared together.

‘Father is not in our room, sir,’ she said, with a face of great
surprise.  ‘If you wouldn’t mind walking in, I’ll find him directly.’
They walked in; and Sissy, having set two chairs for them, sped away with
a quick light step.  It was a mean, shabbily furnished room, with a bed
in it.  The white night-cap, embellished with two peacock’s feathers and
a pigtail bolt upright, in which Signor Jupe had that very afternoon
enlivened the varied performances with his chaste Shaksperean quips and
retorts, hung upon a nail; but no other portion of his wardrobe, or other
token of himself or his pursuits, was to be seen anywhere.  As to
Merrylegs, that respectable ancestor of the highly trained animal who
went aboard the ark, might have been accidentally shut out of it, for any
sign of a dog that was manifest to eye or ear in the Pegasus’s Arms.

They heard the doors of rooms above, opening and shutting as Sissy went
from one to another in quest of her father; and presently they heard
voices expressing surprise.  She came bounding down again in a great
hurry, opened a battered and mangy old hair trunk, found it empty, and
looked round with her hands clasped and her face full of terror.

‘Father must have gone down to the Booth, sir.  I don’t know why he
should go there, but he must be there; I’ll bring him in a minute!’  She
was gone directly, without her bonnet; with her long, dark, childish hair
streaming behind her.

‘What does she mean!’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Back in a minute?  It’s more
than a mile off.’

Before Mr. Bounderby could reply, a young man appeared at the door, and
introducing himself with the words, ‘By your leaves, gentlemen!’ walked
in with his hands in his pockets.  His face, close-shaven, thin, and
sallow, was shaded by a great quantity of dark hair, brushed into a roll
all round his head, and parted up the centre.  His legs were very robust,
but shorter than legs of good proportions should have been.  His chest
and back were as much too broad, as his legs were too short.  He was
dressed in a Newmarket coat and tight-fitting trousers; wore a shawl
round his neck; smelt of lamp-oil, straw, orange-peel, horses’ provender,
and sawdust; and looked a most remarkable sort of Centaur, compounded of
the stable and the play-house.  Where the one began, and the other ended,
nobody could have told with any precision.  This gentleman was mentioned
in the bills of the day as Mr. E. W. B. Childers, so justly celebrated
for his daring vaulting act as the Wild Huntsman of the North American
Prairies; in which popular performance, a diminutive boy with an old
face, who now accompanied him, assisted as his infant son: being carried
upside down over his father’s shoulder, by one foot, and held by the
crown of his head, heels upwards, in the palm of his father’s hand,
according to the violent paternal manner in which wild huntsmen may be
observed to fondle their offspring.  Made up with curls, wreaths, wings,
white bismuth, and carmine, this hopeful young person soared into so
pleasing a Cupid as to constitute the chief delight of the maternal part
of the spectators; but in private, where his characteristics were a
precocious cutaway coat and an extremely gruff voice, he became of the
Turf, turfy.

‘By your leaves, gentlemen,’ said Mr. E. W. B. Childers, glancing round
the room.  ‘It was you, I believe, that were wishing to see Jupe!’

‘It was,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘His daughter has gone to fetch him, but I
can’t wait; therefore, if you please, I will leave a message for him with
you.’

‘You see, my friend,’ Mr. Bounderby put in, ‘we are the kind of people
who know the value of time, and you are the kind of people who don’t know
the value of time.’

‘I have not,’ retorted Mr. Childers, after surveying him from head to
foot, ‘the honour of knowing _you_,—but if you mean that you can make
more money of your time than I can of mine, I should judge from your
appearance, that you are about right.’

‘And when you have made it, you can keep it too, I should think,’ said
Cupid.

‘Kidderminster, stow that!’ said Mr. Childers.  (Master Kidderminster was
Cupid’s mortal name.)

‘What does he come here cheeking us for, then?’ cried Master
Kidderminster, showing a very irascible temperament.  ‘If you want to
cheek us, pay your ochre at the doors and take it out.’

‘Kidderminster,’ said Mr. Childers, raising his voice, ‘stow that!—Sir,’
to Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I was addressing myself to you.  You may or you may
not be aware (for perhaps you have not been much in the audience), that
Jupe has missed his tip very often, lately.’

‘Has—what has he missed?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, glancing at the potent
Bounderby for assistance.

‘Missed his tip.’

‘Offered at the Garters four times last night, and never done ’em once,’
said Master Kidderminster.  ‘Missed his tip at the banners, too, and was
loose in his ponging.’

‘Didn’t do what he ought to do.  Was short in his leaps and bad in his
tumbling,’ Mr. Childers interpreted.

‘Oh!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is tip, is it?’

‘In a general way that’s missing his tip,’ Mr. E. W. B. Childers
answered.

‘Nine oils, Merrylegs, missing tips, garters, banners, and Ponging, eh!’
ejaculated Bounderby, with his laugh of laughs.  ‘Queer sort of company,
too, for a man who has raised himself!’

‘Lower yourself, then,’ retorted Cupid.  ‘Oh Lord! if you’ve raised
yourself so high as all that comes to, let yourself down a bit.’

‘This is a very obtrusive lad!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, turning, and knitting
his brows on him.

‘We’d have had a young gentleman to meet you, if we had known you were
coming,’ retorted Master Kidderminster, nothing abashed.  ‘It’s a pity
you don’t have a bespeak, being so particular.  You’re on the Tight-Jeff,
ain’t you?’

‘What does this unmannerly boy mean,’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, eyeing him in
a sort of desperation, ‘by Tight-Jeff?’

‘There!  Get out, get out!’ said Mr. Childers, thrusting his young friend
from the room, rather in the prairie manner.  ‘Tight-Jeff or Slack-Jeff,
it don’t much signify: it’s only tight-rope and slack-rope.  You were
going to give me a message for Jupe?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘Then,’ continued Mr. Childers, quickly, ‘my opinion is, he will never
receive it.  Do you know much of him?’

‘I never saw the man in my life.’

‘I doubt if you ever _will_ see him now.  It’s pretty plain to me, he’s
off.’

‘Do you mean that he has deserted his daughter?’

‘Ay!  I mean,’ said Mr. Childers, with a nod, ‘that he has cut.  He was
goosed last night, he was goosed the night before last, he was goosed
to-day.  He has lately got in the way of being always goosed, and he
can’t stand it.’

‘Why has he been—so very much—Goosed?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, forcing the
word out of himself, with great solemnity and reluctance.

‘His joints are turning stiff, and he is getting used up,’ said Childers.
‘He has his points as a Cackler still, but he can’t get a living out of
_them_.’

‘A Cackler!’ Bounderby repeated.  ‘Here we go again!’

‘A speaker, if the gentleman likes it better,’ said Mr. E. W. B.
Childers, superciliously throwing the interpretation over his shoulder,
and accompanying it with a shake of his long hair—which all shook at
once.  ‘Now, it’s a remarkable fact, sir, that it cut that man deeper, to
know that his daughter knew of his being goosed, than to go through with
it.’

‘Good!’ interrupted Mr. Bounderby.  ‘This is good, Gradgrind!  A man so
fond of his daughter, that he runs away from her!  This is devilish good!
Ha! ha!  Now, I’ll tell you what, young man.  I haven’t always occupied
my present station of life.  I know what these things are.  You may be
astonished to hear it, but my mother—ran away from _me_.’

E. W. B. Childers replied pointedly, that he was not at all astonished to
hear it.

‘Very well,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I was born in a ditch, and my mother ran
away from me.  Do I excuse her for it?  No.  Have I ever excused her for
it?  Not I.  What do I call her for it?  I call her probably the very
worst woman that ever lived in the world, except my drunken grandmother.
There’s no family pride about me, there’s no imaginative sentimental
humbug about me.  I call a spade a spade; and I call the mother of Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown, without any fear or any favour, what I should call
her if she had been the mother of Dick Jones of Wapping.  So, with this
man.  He is a runaway rogue and a vagabond, that’s what he is, in
English.’

‘It’s all the same to me what he is or what he is not, whether in English
or whether in French,’ retorted Mr. E. W. B. Childers, facing about.  ‘I
am telling your friend what’s the fact; if you don’t like to hear it, you
can avail yourself of the open air.  You give it mouth enough, you do;
but give it mouth in your own building at least,’ remonstrated E. W. B.
with stern irony.  ‘Don’t give it mouth in this building, till you’re
called upon.  You have got some building of your own I dare say, now?’

‘Perhaps so,’ replied Mr. Bounderby, rattling his money and laughing.

‘Then give it mouth in your own building, will you, if you please?’ said
Childers.  ‘Because this isn’t a strong building, and too much of you
might bring it down!’

Eyeing Mr. Bounderby from head to foot again, he turned from him, as from
a man finally disposed of, to Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Jupe sent his daughter out on an errand not an hour ago, and then was
seen to slip out himself, with his hat over his eyes, and a bundle tied
up in a handkerchief under his arm.  She will never believe it of him,
but he has cut away and left her.’

‘Pray,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘why will she never believe it of him?’

‘Because those two were one.  Because they were never asunder.  Because,
up to this time, he seemed to dote upon her,’ said Childers, taking a
step or two to look into the empty trunk.  Both Mr. Childers and Master
Kidderminster walked in a curious manner; with their legs wider apart
than the general run of men, and with a very knowing assumption of being
stiff in the knees.  This walk was common to all the male members of
Sleary’s company, and was understood to express, that they were always on
horseback.

‘Poor Sissy!  He had better have apprenticed her,’ said Childers, giving
his hair another shake, as he looked up from the empty box.  ‘Now, he
leaves her without anything to take to.’

‘It is creditable to you, who have never been apprenticed, to express
that opinion,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, approvingly.

‘_I_ never apprenticed?  I was apprenticed when I was seven year old.’

‘Oh!  Indeed?’ said Mr. Gradgrind, rather resentfully, as having been
defrauded of his good opinion.  ‘I was not aware of its being the custom
to apprentice young persons to—’

‘Idleness,’ Mr. Bounderby put in with a loud laugh.  ‘No, by the Lord
Harry!  Nor I!’

‘Her father always had it in his head,’ resumed Childers, feigning
unconsciousness of Mr. Bounderby’s existence, ‘that she was to be taught
the deuce-and-all of education.  How it got into his head, I can’t say; I
can only say that it never got out.  He has been picking up a bit of
reading for her, here—and a bit of writing for her, there—and a bit of
ciphering for her, somewhere else—these seven years.’

Mr. E. W. B. Childers took one of his hands out of his pockets, stroked
his face and chin, and looked, with a good deal of doubt and a little
hope, at Mr. Gradgrind.  From the first he had sought to conciliate that
gentleman, for the sake of the deserted girl.

‘When Sissy got into the school here,’ he pursued, ‘her father was as
pleased as Punch.  I couldn’t altogether make out why, myself, as we were
not stationary here, being but comers and goers anywhere.  I suppose,
however, he had this move in his mind—he was always half-cracked—and then
considered her provided for.  If you should happen to have looked in
to-night, for the purpose of telling him that you were going to do her
any little service,’ said Mr. Childers, stroking his face again, and
repeating his look, ‘it would be very fortunate and well-timed; very
fortunate and well-timed.’

‘On the contrary,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘I came to tell him that her
connections made her not an object for the school, and that she must not
attend any more.  Still, if her father really has left her, without any
connivance on her part—Bounderby, let me have a word with you.’

Upon this, Mr. Childers politely betook himself, with his equestrian
walk, to the landing outside the door, and there stood stroking his face,
and softly whistling.  While thus engaged, he overheard such phrases in
Mr. Bounderby’s voice as ‘No.  _I_ say no.  I advise you not.  I say by
no means.’  While, from Mr. Gradgrind, he heard in his much lower tone
the words, ‘But even as an example to Louisa, of what this pursuit which
has been the subject of a vulgar curiosity, leads to and ends in.  Think
of it, Bounderby, in that point of view.’

Meanwhile, the various members of Sleary’s company gradually gathered
together from the upper regions, where they were quartered, and, from
standing about, talking in low voices to one another and to Mr. Childers,
gradually insinuated themselves and him into the room.  There were two or
three handsome young women among them, with their two or three husbands,
and their two or three mothers, and their eight or nine little children,
who did the fairy business when required.  The father of one of the
families was in the habit of balancing the father of another of the
families on the top of a great pole; the father of a third family often
made a pyramid of both those fathers, with Master Kidderminster for the
apex, and himself for the base; all the fathers could dance upon rolling
casks, stand upon bottles, catch knives and balls, twirl hand-basins,
ride upon anything, jump over everything, and stick at nothing.  All the
mothers could (and did) dance, upon the slack wire and the tight-rope,
and perform rapid acts on bare-backed steeds; none of them were at all
particular in respect of showing their legs; and one of them, alone in a
Greek chariot, drove six in hand into every town they came to.  They all
assumed to be mighty rakish and knowing, they were not very tidy in their
private dresses, they were not at all orderly in their domestic
arrangements, and the combined literature of the whole company would have
produced but a poor letter on any subject.  Yet there was a remarkable
gentleness and childishness about these people, a special inaptitude for
any kind of sharp practice, and an untiring readiness to help and pity
one another, deserving often of as much respect, and always of as much
generous construction, as the every-day virtues of any class of people in
the world.

Last of all appeared Mr. Sleary: a stout man as already mentioned, with
one fixed eye, and one loose eye, a voice (if it can be called so) like
the efforts of a broken old pair of bellows, a flabby surface, and a
muddled head which was never sober and never drunk.

‘Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, who was troubled with asthma, and whose
breath came far too thick and heavy for the letter s, ‘Your thervant!
Thith ith a bad piethe of bithnith, thith ith.  You’ve heard of my Clown
and hith dog being thuppothed to have morrithed?’

He addressed Mr. Gradgrind, who answered ‘Yes.’

‘Well, Thquire,’ he returned, taking off his hat, and rubbing the lining
with his pocket-handkerchief, which he kept inside for the purpose.  ‘Ith
it your intenthion to do anything for the poor girl, Thquire?’

‘I shall have something to propose to her when she comes back,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.

‘Glad to hear it, Thquire.  Not that I want to get rid of the child, any
more than I want to thtand in her way.  I’m willing to take her prentith,
though at her age ith late.  My voithe ith a little huthky, Thquire, and
not eathy heard by them ath don’t know me; but if you’d been chilled and
heated, heated and chilled, chilled and heated in the ring when you wath
young, ath often ath I have been, _your_ voithe wouldn’t have lathted
out, Thquire, no more than mine.’

‘I dare say not,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘What thall it be, Thquire, while you wait?  Thall it be Therry?  Give it
a name, Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, with hospitable ease.

‘Nothing for me, I thank you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Don’t thay nothing, Thquire.  What doth your friend thay?  If you
haven’t took your feed yet, have a glath of bitterth.’

Here his daughter Josephine—a pretty fair-haired girl of eighteen, who
had been tied on a horse at two years old, and had made a will at twelve,
which she always carried about with her, expressive of her dying desire
to be drawn to the grave by the two piebald ponies—cried, ‘Father, hush!
she has come back!’  Then came Sissy Jupe, running into the room as she
had run out of it.  And when she saw them all assembled, and saw their
looks, and saw no father there, she broke into a most deplorable cry, and
took refuge on the bosom of the most accomplished tight-rope lady
(herself in the family-way), who knelt down on the floor to nurse her,
and to weep over her.

‘Ith an internal thame, upon my thoul it ith,’ said Sleary.

‘O my dear father, my good kind father, where are you gone?  You are gone
to try to do me some good, I know!  You are gone away for my sake, I am
sure!  And how miserable and helpless you will be without me, poor, poor
father, until you come back!’  It was so pathetic to hear her saying many
things of this kind, with her face turned upward, and her arms stretched
out as if she were trying to stop his departing shadow and embrace it,
that no one spoke a word until Mr. Bounderby (growing impatient) took the
case in hand.

‘Now, good people all,’ said he, ‘this is wanton waste of time.  Let the
girl understand the fact.  Let her take it from me, if you like, who have
been run away from, myself.  Here, what’s your name!  Your father has
absconded—deserted you—and you mustn’t expect to see him again as long as
you live.’

They cared so little for plain Fact, these people, and were in that
advanced state of degeneracy on the subject, that instead of being
impressed by the speaker’s strong common sense, they took it in
extraordinary dudgeon.  The men muttered ‘Shame!’ and the women ‘Brute!’
and Sleary, in some haste, communicated the following hint, apart to Mr.
Bounderby.

‘I tell you what, Thquire.  To thpeak plain to you, my opinion ith that
you had better cut it thort, and drop it.  They’re a very good natur’d
people, my people, but they’re accuthtomed to be quick in their
movementh; and if you don’t act upon my advithe, I’m damned if I don’t
believe they’ll pith you out o’ winder.’

Mr. Bounderby being restrained by this mild suggestion, Mr. Gradgrind
found an opening for his eminently practical exposition of the subject.

‘It is of no moment,’ said he, ‘whether this person is to be expected
back at any time, or the contrary.  He is gone away, and there is no
present expectation of his return.  That, I believe, is agreed on all
hands.’

‘Thath agreed, Thquire.  Thick to that!’  From Sleary.

‘Well then.  I, who came here to inform the father of the poor girl,
Jupe, that she could not be received at the school any more, in
consequence of there being practical objections, into which I need not
enter, to the reception there of the children of persons so employed, am
prepared in these altered circumstances to make a proposal.  I am willing
to take charge of you, Jupe, and to educate you, and provide for you.
The only condition (over and above your good behaviour) I make is, that
you decide now, at once, whether to accompany me or remain here.  Also,
that if you accompany me now, it is understood that you communicate no
more with any of your friends who are here present.  These observations
comprise the whole of the case.’

‘At the thame time,’ said Sleary, ‘I mutht put in my word, Thquire, tho
that both thides of the banner may be equally theen.  If you like,
Thethilia, to be prentitht, you know the natur of the work and you know
your companionth.  Emma Gordon, in whothe lap you’re a lying at prethent,
would be a mother to you, and Joth’phine would be a thithter to you.  I
don’t pretend to be of the angel breed myself, and I don’t thay but what,
when you mith’d your tip, you’d find me cut up rough, and thwear an oath
or two at you.  But what I thay, Thquire, ith, that good tempered or bad
tempered, I never did a horthe a injury yet, no more than thwearing at
him went, and that I don’t expect I thall begin otherwithe at my time of
life, with a rider.  I never wath much of a Cackler, Thquire, and I have
thed my thay.’

The latter part of this speech was addressed to Mr. Gradgrind, who
received it with a grave inclination of his head, and then remarked:

‘The only observation I will make to you, Jupe, in the way of influencing
your decision, is, that it is highly desirable to have a sound practical
education, and that even your father himself (from what I understand)
appears, on your behalf, to have known and felt that much.’

The last words had a visible effect upon her.  She stopped in her wild
crying, a little detached herself from Emma Gordon, and turned her face
full upon her patron.  The whole company perceived the force of the
change, and drew a long breath together, that plainly said, ‘she will
go!’

‘Be sure you know your own mind, Jupe,’ Mr. Gradgrind cautioned her; ‘I
say no more.  Be sure you know your own mind!’

‘When father comes back,’ cried the girl, bursting into tears again after
a minute’s silence, ‘how will he ever find me if I go away!’

‘You may be quite at ease,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, calmly; he worked out the
whole matter like a sum: ‘you may be quite at ease, Jupe, on that score.
In such a case, your father, I apprehend, must find out Mr.—’

‘Thleary.  Thath my name, Thquire.  Not athamed of it.  Known all over
England, and alwayth paythe ith way.’

‘Must find out Mr. Sleary, who would then let him know where you went.  I
should have no power of keeping you against his wish, and he would have
no difficulty, at any time, in finding Mr. Thomas Gradgrind of Coketown.
I am well known.’

‘Well known,’ assented Mr. Sleary, rolling his loose eye.  ‘You’re one of
the thort, Thquire, that keepth a prethiouth thight of money out of the
houthe.  But never mind that at prethent.’

There was another silence; and then she exclaimed, sobbing with her hands
before her face, ‘Oh, give me my clothes, give me my clothes, and let me
go away before I break my heart!’

The women sadly bestirred themselves to get the clothes together—it was
soon done, for they were not many—and to pack them in a basket which had
often travelled with them.  Sissy sat all the time upon the ground, still
sobbing, and covering her eyes.  Mr. Gradgrind and his friend Bounderby
stood near the door, ready to take her away.  Mr. Sleary stood in the
middle of the room, with the male members of the company about him,
exactly as he would have stood in the centre of the ring during his
daughter Josephine’s performance.  He wanted nothing but his whip.

The basket packed in silence, they brought her bonnet to her, and
smoothed her disordered hair, and put it on.  Then they pressed about
her, and bent over her in very natural attitudes, kissing and embracing
her: and brought the children to take leave of her; and were a
tender-hearted, simple, foolish set of women altogether.

‘Now, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘If you are quite determined, come!’

But she had to take her farewell of the male part of the company yet, and
every one of them had to unfold his arms (for they all assumed the
professional attitude when they found themselves near Sleary), and give
her a parting kiss—Master Kidderminster excepted, in whose young nature
there was an original flavour of the misanthrope, who was also known to
have harboured matrimonial views, and who moodily withdrew.  Mr. Sleary
was reserved until the last.  Opening his arms wide he took her by both
her hands, and would have sprung her up and down, after the riding-master
manner of congratulating young ladies on their dismounting from a rapid
act; but there was no rebound in Sissy, and she only stood before him
crying.

‘Good-bye, my dear!’ said Sleary.  ‘You’ll make your fortun, I hope, and
none of our poor folkth will ever trouble you, I’ll pound it.  I with
your father hadn’t taken hith dog with him; ith a ill-conwenienth to have
the dog out of the billth.  But on thecond thoughth, he wouldn’t have
performed without hith mathter, tho ith ath broad ath ith long!’

With that he regarded her attentively with his fixed eye, surveyed his
company with his loose one, kissed her, shook his head, and handed her to
Mr. Gradgrind as to a horse.

‘There the ith, Thquire,’ he said, sweeping her with a professional
glance as if she were being adjusted in her seat, ‘and the’ll do you
juthtithe.  Good-bye, Thethilia!’

‘Good-bye, Cecilia!’  ‘Good-bye, Sissy!’  ‘God bless you, dear!’  In a
variety of voices from all the room.

But the riding-master eye had observed the bottle of the nine oils in her
bosom, and he now interposed with ‘Leave the bottle, my dear; ith large
to carry; it will be of no uthe to you now.  Give it to me!’

‘No, no!’ she said, in another burst of tears.  ‘Oh, no!  Pray let me
keep it for father till he comes back!  He will want it when he comes
back.  He had never thought of going away, when he sent me for it.  I
must keep it for him, if you please!’

‘Tho be it, my dear.  (You thee how it ith, Thquire!)  Farewell,
Thethilia!  My latht wordth to you ith thith, Thtick to the termth of
your engagement, be obedient to the Thquire, and forget uth.  But if,
when you’re grown up and married and well off, you come upon any
horthe-riding ever, don’t be hard upon it, don’t be croth with it, give
it a Bethpeak if you can, and think you might do wurth.  People mutht be
amuthed, Thquire, thomehow,’ continued Sleary, rendered more pursy than
ever, by so much talking; ‘they can’t be alwayth a working, nor yet they
can’t be alwayth a learning.  Make the betht of uth; not the wurtht.
I’ve got my living out of the horthe-riding all my life, I know; but I
conthider that I lay down the philothophy of the thubject when I thay to
you, Thquire, make the betht of uth: not the wurtht!’

The Sleary philosophy was propounded as they went downstairs and the
fixed eye of Philosophy—and its rolling eye, too—soon lost the three
figures and the basket in the darkness of the street.



CHAPTER VII
MRS. SPARSIT


MR. BOUNDERBY being a bachelor, an elderly lady presided over his
establishment, in consideration of a certain annual stipend.  Mrs.
Sparsit was this lady’s name; and she was a prominent figure in
attendance on Mr. Bounderby’s car, as it rolled along in triumph with the
Bully of humility inside.

For, Mrs. Sparsit had not only seen different days, but was highly
connected.  She had a great aunt living in these very times called Lady
Scadgers.  Mr. Sparsit, deceased, of whom she was the relict, had been by
the mother’s side what Mrs. Sparsit still called ‘a Powler.’  Strangers
of limited information and dull apprehension were sometimes observed not
to know what a Powler was, and even to appear uncertain whether it might
be a business, or a political party, or a profession of faith.  The
better class of minds, however, did not need to be informed that the
Powlers were an ancient stock, who could trace themselves so exceedingly
far back that it was not surprising if they sometimes lost
themselves—which they had rather frequently done, as respected
horse-flesh, blind-hookey, Hebrew monetary transactions, and the
Insolvent Debtors’ Court.

The late Mr. Sparsit, being by the mother’s side a Powler, married this
lady, being by the father’s side a Scadgers.  Lady Scadgers (an immensely
fat old woman, with an inordinate appetite for butcher’s meat, and a
mysterious leg which had now refused to get out of bed for fourteen
years) contrived the marriage, at a period when Sparsit was just of age,
and chiefly noticeable for a slender body, weakly supported on two long
slim props, and surmounted by no head worth mentioning.  He inherited a
fair fortune from his uncle, but owed it all before he came into it, and
spent it twice over immediately afterwards.  Thus, when he died, at
twenty-four (the scene of his decease, Calais, and the cause, brandy), he
did not leave his widow, from whom he had been separated soon after the
honeymoon, in affluent circumstances.  That bereaved lady, fifteen years
older than he, fell presently at deadly feud with her only relative, Lady
Scadgers; and, partly to spite her ladyship, and partly to maintain
herself, went out at a salary.  And here she was now, in her elderly
days, with the Coriolanian style of nose and the dense black eyebrows
which had captivated Sparsit, making Mr. Bounderby’s tea as he took his
breakfast.

If Bounderby had been a Conqueror, and Mrs. Sparsit a captive Princess
whom he took about as a feature in his state-processions, he could not
have made a greater flourish with her than he habitually did.  Just as it
belonged to his boastfulness to depreciate his own extraction, so it
belonged to it to exalt Mrs. Sparsit’s.  In the measure that he would not
allow his own youth to have been attended by a single favourable
circumstance, he brightened Mrs. Sparsit’s juvenile career with every
possible advantage, and showered waggon-loads of early roses all over
that lady’s path.  ‘And yet, sir,’ he would say, ‘how does it turn out
after all?  Why here she is at a hundred a year (I give her a hundred,
which she is pleased to term handsome), keeping the house of Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown!’

Nay, he made this foil of his so very widely known, that third parties
took it up, and handled it on some occasions with considerable briskness.
It was one of the most exasperating attributes of Bounderby, that he not
only sang his own praises but stimulated other men to sing them.  There
was a moral infection of clap-trap in him.  Strangers, modest enough
elsewhere, started up at dinners in Coketown, and boasted, in quite a
rampant way, of Bounderby.  They made him out to be the Royal arms, the
Union-Jack, Magna Charta, John Bull, Habeas Corpus, the Bill of Rights,
An Englishman’s house is his castle, Church and State, and God save the
Queen, all put together.  And as often (and it was very often) as an
orator of this kind brought into his peroration,

    ‘Princes and lords may flourish or may fade,
    A breath can make them, as a breath has made,’

—it was, for certain, more or less understood among the company that he
had heard of Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you are unusually slow, sir, with
your breakfast this morning.’

‘Why, ma’am,’ he returned, ‘I am thinking about Tom Gradgrind’s whim;’
Tom Gradgrind, for a bluff independent manner of speaking—as if somebody
were always endeavouring to bribe him with immense sums to say Thomas,
and he wouldn’t; ‘Tom Gradgrind’s whim, ma’am, of bringing up the
tumbling-girl.’

‘The girl is now waiting to know,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘whether she is to
go straight to the school, or up to the Lodge.’

‘She must wait, ma’am,’ answered Bounderby, ‘till I know myself.  We
shall have Tom Gradgrind down here presently, I suppose.  If he should
wish her to remain here a day or two longer, of course she can, ma’am.’

‘Of course she can if you wish it, Mr. Bounderby.’

‘I told him I would give her a shake-down here, last night, in order that
he might sleep on it before he decided to let her have any association
with Louisa.’

‘Indeed, Mr. Bounderby?  Very thoughtful of you!’  Mrs. Sparsit’s
Coriolanian nose underwent a slight expansion of the nostrils, and her
black eyebrows contracted as she took a sip of tea.

‘It’s tolerably clear to _me_,’ said Bounderby, ‘that the little puss can
get small good out of such companionship.’

‘Are you speaking of young Miss Gradgrind, Mr. Bounderby?’

‘Yes, ma’am, I’m speaking of Louisa.’

‘Your observation being limited to “little puss,”’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
‘and there being two little girls in question, I did not know which might
be indicated by that expression.’

‘Louisa,’ repeated Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Louisa, Louisa.’

‘You are quite another father to Louisa, sir.’  Mrs. Sparsit took a
little more tea; and, as she bent her again contracted eyebrows over her
steaming cup, rather looked as if her classical countenance were invoking
the infernal gods.

‘If you had said I was another father to Tom—young Tom, I mean, not my
friend Tom Gradgrind—you might have been nearer the mark.  I am going to
take young Tom into my office.  Going to have him under my wing, ma’am.’

‘Indeed?  Rather young for that, is he not, sir?’  Mrs. Spirit’s ‘sir,’
in addressing Mr. Bounderby, was a word of ceremony, rather exacting
consideration for herself in the use, than honouring him.

‘I’m not going to take him at once; he is to finish his educational
cramming before then,’ said Bounderby.  ‘By the Lord Harry, he’ll have
enough of it, first and last!  He’d open his eyes, that boy would, if he
knew how empty of learning _my_ young maw was, at his time of life.’
Which, by the by, he probably did know, for he had heard of it often
enough.  ‘But it’s extraordinary the difficulty I have on scores of such
subjects, in speaking to any one on equal terms.  Here, for example, I
have been speaking to you this morning about tumblers.  Why, what do
_you_ know about tumblers?  At the time when, to have been a tumbler in
the mud of the streets, would have been a godsend to me, a prize in the
lottery to me, you were at the Italian Opera.  You were coming out of the
Italian Opera, ma’am, in white satin and jewels, a blaze of splendour,
when I hadn’t a penny to buy a link to light you.’

‘I certainly, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a dignity serenely
mournful, ‘was familiar with the Italian Opera at a very early age.’

‘Egad, ma’am, so was I,’ said Bounderby, ‘—with the wrong side of it.  A
hard bed the pavement of its Arcade used to make, I assure you.  People
like you, ma’am, accustomed from infancy to lie on Down feathers, have no
idea _how_ hard a paving-stone is, without trying it.  No, no, it’s of no
use my talking to _you_ about tumblers.  I should speak of foreign
dancers, and the West End of London, and May Fair, and lords and ladies
and honourables.’

‘I trust, sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, with decent resignation, ‘it is
not necessary that you should do anything of that kind.  I hope I have
learnt how to accommodate myself to the changes of life.  If I have
acquired an interest in hearing of your instructive experiences, and can
scarcely hear enough of them, I claim no merit for that, since I believe
it is a general sentiment.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ said her patron, ‘perhaps some people may be pleased to
say that they do like to hear, in his own unpolished way, what Josiah
Bounderby, of Coketown, has gone through.  But you must confess that you
were born in the lap of luxury, yourself.  Come, ma’am, you know you were
born in the lap of luxury.’

‘I do not, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit with a shake of her head, ‘deny
it.’

Mr. Bounderby was obliged to get up from table, and stand with his back
to the fire, looking at her; she was such an enhancement of his position.

‘And you were in crack society.  Devilish high society,’ he said, warming
his legs.

‘It is true, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with an affectation of humility
the very opposite of his, and therefore in no danger of jostling it.

‘You were in the tiptop fashion, and all the rest of it,’ said Mr.
Bounderby.

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a kind of social widowhood upon
her.  ‘It is unquestionably true.’

Mr. Bounderby, bending himself at the knees, literally embraced his legs
in his great satisfaction and laughed aloud.  Mr. and Miss Gradgrind
being then announced, he received the former with a shake of the hand,
and the latter with a kiss.

‘Can Jupe be sent here, Bounderby?’ asked Mr. Gradgrind.

Certainly.  So Jupe was sent there.  On coming in, she curtseyed to Mr.
Bounderby, and to his friend Tom Gradgrind, and also to Louisa; but in
her confusion unluckily omitted Mrs. Sparsit.  Observing this, the
blustrous Bounderby had the following remarks to make:

‘Now, I tell you what, my girl.  The name of that lady by the teapot, is
Mrs. Sparsit.  That lady acts as mistress of this house, and she is a
highly connected lady.  Consequently, if ever you come again into any
room in this house, you will make a short stay in it if you don’t behave
towards that lady in your most respectful manner.  Now, I don’t care a
button what you do to _me_, because I don’t affect to be anybody.  So far
from having high connections I have no connections at all, and I come of
the scum of the earth.  But towards that lady, I do care what you do; and
you shall do what is deferential and respectful, or you shall not come
here.’

‘I hope, Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, in a conciliatory voice, ‘that
this was merely an oversight.’

‘My friend Tom Gradgrind suggests, Mrs. Sparsit,’ said Bounderby, ‘that
this was merely an oversight.  Very likely.  However, as you are aware,
ma’am, I don’t allow of even oversights towards you.’

‘You are very good indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head
with her State humility.  ‘It is not worth speaking of.’

Sissy, who all this time had been faintly excusing herself with tears in
her eyes, was now waved over by the master of the house to Mr. Gradgrind.
She stood looking intently at him, and Louisa stood coldly by, with her
eyes upon the ground, while he proceeded thus:

‘Jupe, I have made up my mind to take you into my house; and, when you
are not in attendance at the school, to employ you about Mrs. Gradgrind,
who is rather an invalid.  I have explained to Miss Louisa—this is Miss
Louisa—the miserable but natural end of your late career; and you are to
expressly understand that the whole of that subject is past, and is not
to be referred to any more.  From this time you begin your history.  You
are, at present, ignorant, I know.’

‘Yes, sir, very,’ she answered, curtseying.

‘I shall have the satisfaction of causing you to be strictly educated;
and you will be a living proof to all who come into communication with
you, of the advantages of the training you will receive.  You will be
reclaimed and formed.  You have been in the habit now of reading to your
father, and those people I found you among, I dare say?’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, beckoning her nearer to him before he said so, and dropping
his voice.

‘Only to father and Merrylegs, sir.  At least I mean to father, when
Merrylegs was always there.’

‘Never mind Merrylegs, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, with a passing frown.
‘I don’t ask about him.  I understand you to have been in the habit of
reading to your father?’

‘O, yes, sir, thousands of times.  They were the happiest—O, of all the
happy times we had together, sir!’

It was only now when her sorrow broke out, that Louisa looked at her.

‘And what,’ asked Mr. Gradgrind, in a still lower voice, ‘did you read to
your father, Jupe?’

‘About the Fairies, sir, and the Dwarf, and the Hunchback, and the
Genies,’ she sobbed out; ‘and about—’

‘Hush!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that is enough.  Never breathe a word of
such destructive nonsense any more.  Bounderby, this is a case for rigid
training, and I shall observe it with interest.’

‘Well,’ returned Mr. Bounderby, ‘I have given you my opinion already, and
I shouldn’t do as you do.  But, very well, very well.  Since you are bent
upon it, _very_ well!’

So, Mr. Gradgrind and his daughter took Cecilia Jupe off with them to
Stone Lodge, and on the way Louisa never spoke one word, good or bad.
And Mr. Bounderby went about his daily pursuits.  And Mrs. Sparsit got
behind her eyebrows and meditated in the gloom of that retreat, all the
evening.



CHAPTER VIII
NEVER WONDER


LET us strike the key-note again, before pursuing the tune.

When she was half a dozen years younger, Louisa had been overheard to
begin a conversation with her brother one day, by saying ‘Tom, I
wonder’—upon which Mr. Gradgrind, who was the person overhearing, stepped
forth into the light and said, ‘Louisa, never wonder!’

Herein lay the spring of the mechanical art and mystery of educating the
reason without stooping to the cultivation of the sentiments and
affections.  Never wonder.  By means of addition, subtraction,
multiplication, and division, settle everything somehow, and never
wonder.  Bring to me, says M’Choakumchild, yonder baby just able to walk,
and I will engage that it shall never wonder.

Now, besides very many babies just able to walk, there happened to be in
Coketown a considerable population of babies who had been walking against
time towards the infinite world, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years and
more.  These portentous infants being alarming creatures to stalk about
in any human society, the eighteen denominations incessantly scratched
one another’s faces and pulled one another’s hair by way of agreeing on
the steps to be taken for their improvement—which they never did; a
surprising circumstance, when the happy adaptation of the means to the
end is considered.  Still, although they differed in every other
particular, conceivable and inconceivable (especially inconceivable),
they were pretty well united on the point that these unlucky infants were
never to wonder.  Body number one, said they must take everything on
trust.  Body number two, said they must take everything on political
economy.  Body number three, wrote leaden little books for them, showing
how the good grown-up baby invariably got to the Savings-bank, and the
bad grown-up baby invariably got transported.  Body number four, under
dreary pretences of being droll (when it was very melancholy indeed),
made the shallowest pretences of concealing pitfalls of knowledge, into
which it was the duty of these babies to be smuggled and inveigled.  But,
all the bodies agreed that they were never to wonder.

There was a library in Coketown, to which general access was easy.  Mr.
Gradgrind greatly tormented his mind about what the people read in this
library: a point whereon little rivers of tabular statements periodically
flowed into the howling ocean of tabular statements, which no diver ever
got to any depth in and came up sane.  It was a disheartening
circumstance, but a melancholy fact, that even these readers persisted in
wondering.  They wondered about human nature, human passions, human hopes
and fears, the struggles, triumphs and defeats, the cares and joys and
sorrows, the lives and deaths of common men and women!  They sometimes,
after fifteen hours’ work, sat down to read mere fables about men and
women, more or less like themselves, and about children, more or less
like their own.  They took De Foe to their bosoms, instead of Euclid, and
seemed to be on the whole more comforted by Goldsmith than by Cocker.
Mr. Gradgrind was for ever working, in print and out of print, at this
eccentric sum, and he never could make out how it yielded this
unaccountable product.

‘I am sick of my life, Loo.  I, hate it altogether, and I hate everybody
except you,’ said the unnatural young Thomas Gradgrind in the
hair-cutting chamber at twilight.

‘You don’t hate Sissy, Tom?’

‘I hate to be obliged to call her Jupe.  And she hates me,’ said Tom,
moodily.

‘No, she does not, Tom, I am sure!’

‘She must,’ said Tom.  ‘She must just hate and detest the whole set-out
of us.  They’ll bother her head off, I think, before they have done with
her.  Already she’s getting as pale as wax, and as heavy as—I am.’

Young Thomas expressed these sentiments sitting astride of a chair before
the fire, with his arms on the back, and his sulky face on his arms.  His
sister sat in the darker corner by the fireside, now looking at him, now
looking at the bright sparks as they dropped upon the hearth.

‘As to me,’ said Tom, tumbling his hair all manner of ways with his sulky
hands, ‘I am a Donkey, that’s what _I_ am.  I am as obstinate as one, I
am more stupid than one, I get as much pleasure as one, and I should like
to kick like one.’

‘Not me, I hope, Tom?’

‘No, Loo; I wouldn’t hurt _you_.  I made an exception of you at first.  I
don’t know what this—jolly old—Jaundiced Jail,’ Tom had paused to find a
sufficiently complimentary and expressive name for the parental roof, and
seemed to relieve his mind for a moment by the strong alliteration of
this one, ‘would be without you.’

‘Indeed, Tom?  Do you really and truly say so?’

‘Why, of course I do.  What’s the use of talking about it!’ returned Tom,
chafing his face on his coat-sleeve, as if to mortify his flesh, and have
it in unison with his spirit.

‘Because, Tom,’ said his sister, after silently watching the sparks
awhile, ‘as I get older, and nearer growing up, I often sit wondering
here, and think how unfortunate it is for me that I can’t reconcile you
to home better than I am able to do.  I don’t know what other girls know.
I can’t play to you, or sing to you.  I can’t talk to you so as to
lighten your mind, for I never see any amusing sights or read any amusing
books that it would be a pleasure or a relief to you to talk about, when
you are tired.’

‘Well, no more do I.  I am as bad as you in that respect; and I am a Mule
too, which you’re not.  If father was determined to make me either a Prig
or a Mule, and I am not a Prig, why, it stands to reason, I must be a
Mule.  And so I am,’ said Tom, desperately.

‘It’s a great pity,’ said Louisa, after another pause, and speaking
thoughtfully out of her dark corner: ‘it’s a great pity, Tom.  It’s very
unfortunate for both of us.’

‘Oh!  You,’ said Tom; ‘you are a girl, Loo, and a girl comes out of it
better than a boy does.  I don’t miss anything in you.  You are the only
pleasure I have—you can brighten even this place—and you can always lead
me as you like.’

‘You are a dear brother, Tom; and while you think I can do such things, I
don’t so much mind knowing better.  Though I do know better, Tom, and am
very sorry for it.’  She came and kissed him, and went back into her
corner again.

‘I wish I could collect all the Facts we hear so much about,’ said Tom,
spitefully setting his teeth, ‘and all the Figures, and all the people
who found them out: and I wish I could put a thousand barrels of
gunpowder under them, and blow them all up together!  However, when I go
to live with old Bounderby, I’ll have my revenge.’

‘Your revenge, Tom?’

‘I mean, I’ll enjoy myself a little, and go about and see something, and
hear something.  I’ll recompense myself for the way in which I have been
brought up.’

‘But don’t disappoint yourself beforehand, Tom.  Mr. Bounderby thinks as
father thinks, and is a great deal rougher, and not half so kind.’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, laughing; ‘I don’t mind that.  I shall very well know how
to manage and smooth old Bounderby!’

Their shadows were defined upon the wall, but those of the high presses
in the room were all blended together on the wall and on the ceiling, as
if the brother and sister were overhung by a dark cavern.  Or, a fanciful
imagination—if such treason could have been there—might have made it out
to be the shadow of their subject, and of its lowering association with
their future.

‘What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom?  Is it a
secret?’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, ‘if it is a secret, it’s not far off.  It’s you.  You are
his little pet, you are his favourite; he’ll do anything for you.  When
he says to me what I don’t like, I shall say to him, “My sister Loo will
be hurt and disappointed, Mr. Bounderby.  She always used to tell me she
was sure you would be easier with me than this.”  That’ll bring him
about, or nothing will.’

After waiting for some answering remark, and getting none, Tom wearily
relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and
about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until
he suddenly looked up, and asked:

‘Have you gone to sleep, Loo?’

‘No, Tom.  I am looking at the fire.’

‘You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,’ said
Tom.  ‘Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.’

‘Tom,’ enquired his sister, slowly, and in a curious tone, as if she were
reading what she asked in the fire, and it was not quite plainly written
there, ‘do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr.
Bounderby’s?’

‘Why, there’s one thing to be said of it,’ returned Tom, pushing his
chair from him, and standing up; ‘it will be getting away from home.’

‘There is one thing to be said of it,’ Louisa repeated in her former
curious tone; ‘it will be getting away from home.  Yes.’

‘Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to
leave you here.  But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; and I
had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence,
than where I should lose it altogether.  Don’t you see?’

‘Yes, Tom.’

The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it,
that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the
fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he
could make of it.

‘Except that it is a fire,’ said Tom, ‘it looks to me as stupid and blank
as everything else looks.  What do you see in it?  Not a circus?’

‘I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly.  But since I have been
looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.’

‘Wondering again!’ said Tom.

‘I have such unmanageable thoughts,’ returned his sister, ‘that they
_will_ wonder.’

‘Then I beg of you, Louisa,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, who had opened the door
without being heard, ‘to do nothing of that description, for goodness’
sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from
your father.  And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head
continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and
whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his
sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is
not to do it.’

Louisa denied Tom’s participation in the offence; but her mother stopped
her with the conclusive answer, ‘Louisa, don’t tell me, in my state of
health; for unless you had been encouraged, it is morally and physically
impossible that you could have done it.’

‘I was encouraged by nothing, mother, but by looking at the red sparks
dropping out of the fire, and whitening and dying.  It made me think,
after all, how short my life would be, and how little I could hope to do
in it.’

‘Nonsense!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, rendered almost energetic.  ‘Nonsense!
Don’t stand there and tell me such stuff, Louisa, to my face, when you
know very well that if it was ever to reach your father’s ears I should
never hear the last of it.  After all the trouble that has been taken
with you!  After the lectures you have attended, and the experiments you
have seen!  After I have heard you myself, when the whole of my right
side has been benumbed, going on with your master about combustion, and
calcination, and calorification, and I may say every kind of ation that
could drive a poor invalid distracted, to hear you talking in this absurd
way about sparks and ashes!  I wish,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, taking a
chair, and discharging her strongest point before succumbing under these
mere shadows of facts, ‘yes, I really _do_ wish that I had never had a
family, and then you would have known what it was to do without me!’



CHAPTER IX
SISSY’S PROGRESS


SISSY JUPE had not an easy time of it, between Mr. M’Choakumchild and
Mrs. Gradgrind, and was not without strong impulses, in the first months
of her probation, to run away.  It hailed facts all day long so very
hard, and life in general was opened to her as such a closely ruled
ciphering-book, that assuredly she would have run away, but for only one
restraint.

It is lamentable to think of; but this restraint was the result of no
arithmetical process, was self-imposed in defiance of all calculation,
and went dead against any table of probabilities that any Actuary would
have drawn up from the premises.  The girl believed that her father had
not deserted her; she lived in the hope that he would come back, and in
the faith that he would be made the happier by her remaining where she
was.

The wretched ignorance with which Jupe clung to this consolation,
rejecting the superior comfort of knowing, on a sound arithmetical basis,
that her father was an unnatural vagabond, filled Mr. Gradgrind with
pity.  Yet, what was to be done?  M’Choakumchild reported that she had a
very dense head for figures; that, once possessed with a general idea of
the globe, she took the smallest conceivable interest in its exact
measurements; that she was extremely slow in the acquisition of dates,
unless some pitiful incident happened to be connected therewith; that she
would burst into tears on being required (by the mental process)
immediately to name the cost of two hundred and forty-seven muslin caps
at fourteen-pence halfpenny; that she was as low down, in the school, as
low could be; that after eight weeks of induction into the elements of
Political Economy, she had only yesterday been set right by a prattler
three feet high, for returning to the question, ‘What is the first
principle of this science?’ the absurd answer, ‘To do unto others as I
would that they should do unto me.’

Mr. Gradgrind observed, shaking his head, that all this was very bad;
that it showed the necessity of infinite grinding at the mill of
knowledge, as per system, schedule, blue book, report, and tabular
statements A to Z; and that Jupe ‘must be kept to it.’  So Jupe was kept
to it, and became low-spirited, but no wiser.

‘It would be a fine thing to be you, Miss Louisa!’ she said, one night,
when Louisa had endeavoured to make her perplexities for next day
something clearer to her.

‘Do you think so?’

‘I should know so much, Miss Louisa.  All that is difficult to me now,
would be so easy then.’

‘You might not be the better for it, Sissy.’

Sissy submitted, after a little hesitation, ‘I should not be the worse,
Miss Louisa.’  To which Miss Louisa answered, ‘I don’t know that.’

There had been so little communication between these two—both because
life at Stone Lodge went monotonously round like a piece of machinery
which discouraged human interference, and because of the prohibition
relative to Sissy’s past career—that they were still almost strangers.
Sissy, with her dark eyes wonderingly directed to Louisa’s face, was
uncertain whether to say more or to remain silent.

‘You are more useful to my mother, and more pleasant with her than I can
ever be,’ Louisa resumed.  ‘You are pleasanter to yourself, than _I_ am
to _my_self.’

‘But, if you please, Miss Louisa,’ Sissy pleaded, ‘I am—O so stupid!’

Louisa, with a brighter laugh than usual, told her she would be wiser
by-and-by.

‘You don’t know,’ said Sissy, half crying, ‘what a stupid girl I am.  All
through school hours I make mistakes.  Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild call
me up, over and over again, regularly to make mistakes.  I can’t help
them.  They seem to come natural to me.’

‘Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild never make any mistakes themselves, I
suppose, Sissy?’

‘O no!’ she eagerly returned.  ‘They know everything.’

‘Tell me some of your mistakes.’

‘I am almost ashamed,’ said Sissy, with reluctance.  ‘But to-day, for
instance, Mr. M’Choakumchild was explaining to us about Natural
Prosperity.’

‘National, I think it must have been,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, it was.—But isn’t it the same?’ she timidly asked.

‘You had better say, National, as he said so,’ returned Louisa, with her
dry reserve.

‘National Prosperity.  And he said, Now, this schoolroom is a Nation.
And in this nation, there are fifty millions of money.  Isn’t this a
prosperous nation?  Girl number twenty, isn’t this a prosperous nation,
and a’n’t you in a thriving state?’

‘What did you say?’ asked Louisa.

‘Miss Louisa, I said I didn’t know.  I thought I couldn’t know whether it
was a prosperous nation or not, and whether I was in a thriving state or
not, unless I knew who had got the money, and whether any of it was mine.
But that had nothing to do with it.  It was not in the figures at all,’
said Sissy, wiping her eyes.

‘That was a great mistake of yours,’ observed Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa, I know it was, now.  Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he
would try me again.  And he said, This schoolroom is an immense town, and
in it there are a million of inhabitants, and only five-and-twenty are
starved to death in the streets, in the course of a year.  What is your
remark on that proportion?  And my remark was—for I couldn’t think of a
better one—that I thought it must be just as hard upon those who were
starved, whether the others were a million, or a million million.  And
that was wrong, too.’

‘Of course it was.’

‘Then Mr. M’Choakumchild said he would try me once more.  And he said,
Here are the stutterings—’

‘Statistics,’ said Louisa.

‘Yes, Miss Louisa—they always remind me of stutterings, and that’s
another of my mistakes—of accidents upon the sea.  And I find (Mr.
M’Choakumchild said) that in a given time a hundred thousand persons went
to sea on long voyages, and only five hundred of them were drowned or
burnt to death.  What is the percentage?  And I said, Miss;’ here Sissy
fairly sobbed as confessing with extreme contrition to her greatest
error; ‘I said it was nothing.’

‘Nothing, Sissy?’

‘Nothing, Miss—to the relations and friends of the people who were
killed.  I shall never learn,’ said Sissy.  ‘And the worst of all is,
that although my poor father wished me so much to learn, and although I
am so anxious to learn, because he wished me to, I am afraid I don’t like
it.’

Louisa stood looking at the pretty modest head, as it drooped abashed
before her, until it was raised again to glance at her face.  Then she
asked:

‘Did your father know so much himself, that he wished you to be well
taught too, Sissy?’

Sissy hesitated before replying, and so plainly showed her sense that
they were entering on forbidden ground, that Louisa added, ‘No one hears
us; and if any one did, I am sure no harm could be found in such an
innocent question.’

‘No, Miss Louisa,’ answered Sissy, upon this encouragement, shaking her
head; ‘father knows very little indeed.  It’s as much as he can do to
write; and it’s more than people in general can do to read his writing.
Though it’s plain to _me_.’

‘Your mother?’

‘Father says she was quite a scholar.  She died when I was born.  She
was;’ Sissy made the terrible communication nervously; ‘she was a
dancer.’

‘Did your father love her?’  Louisa asked these questions with a strong,
wild, wandering interest peculiar to her; an interest gone astray like a
banished creature, and hiding in solitary places.

‘O yes!  As dearly as he loves me.  Father loved me, first, for her sake.
He carried me about with him when I was quite a baby.  We have never been
asunder from that time.’

‘Yet he leaves you now, Sissy?’

‘Only for my good.  Nobody understands him as I do; nobody knows him as I
do.  When he left me for my good—he never would have left me for his
own—I know he was almost broken-hearted with the trial.  He will not be
happy for a single minute, till he comes back.’

‘Tell me more about him,’ said Louisa, ‘I will never ask you again.
Where did you live?’

‘We travelled about the country, and had no fixed place to live in.
Father’s a;’ Sissy whispered the awful word, ‘a clown.’

‘To make the people laugh?’ said Louisa, with a nod of intelligence.

‘Yes.  But they wouldn’t laugh sometimes, and then father cried.  Lately,
they very often wouldn’t laugh, and he used to come home despairing.
Father’s not like most.  Those who didn’t know him as well as I do, and
didn’t love him as dearly as I do, might believe he was not quite right.
Sometimes they played tricks upon him; but they never knew how he felt
them, and shrunk up, when he was alone with me.  He was far, far timider
than they thought!’

‘And you were his comfort through everything?’

She nodded, with the tears rolling down her face.  ‘I hope so, and father
said I was.  It was because he grew so scared and trembling, and because
he felt himself to be a poor, weak, ignorant, helpless man (those used to
be his words), that he wanted me so much to know a great deal, and be
different from him.  I used to read to him to cheer his courage, and he
was very fond of that.  They were wrong books—I am never to speak of them
here—but we didn’t know there was any harm in them.’

‘And he liked them?’ said Louisa, with a searching gaze on Sissy all this
time.

‘O very much!  They kept him, many times, from what did him real harm.
And often and often of a night, he used to forget all his troubles in
wondering whether the Sultan would let the lady go on with the story, or
would have her head cut off before it was finished.’

‘And your father was always kind?  To the last?’ asked Louisa
contravening the great principle, and wondering very much.

‘Always, always!’ returned Sissy, clasping her hands.  ‘Kinder and kinder
than I can tell.  He was angry only one night, and that was not to me,
but Merrylegs.  Merrylegs;’ she whispered the awful fact; ‘is his
performing dog.’

‘Why was he angry with the dog?’ Louisa demanded.

‘Father, soon after they came home from performing, told Merrylegs to
jump up on the backs of the two chairs and stand across them—which is one
of his tricks.  He looked at father, and didn’t do it at once.
Everything of father’s had gone wrong that night, and he hadn’t pleased
the public at all.  He cried out that the very dog knew he was failing,
and had no compassion on him.  Then he beat the dog, and I was
frightened, and said, “Father, father!  Pray don’t hurt the creature who
is so fond of you!  O Heaven forgive you, father, stop!”  And he stopped,
and the dog was bloody, and father lay down crying on the floor with the
dog in his arms, and the dog licked his face.’

Louisa saw that she was sobbing; and going to her, kissed her, took her
hand, and sat down beside her.

‘Finish by telling me how your father left you, Sissy.  Now that I have
asked you so much, tell me the end.  The blame, if there is any blame, is
mine, not yours.’

‘Dear Miss Louisa,’ said Sissy, covering her eyes, and sobbing yet; ‘I
came home from the school that afternoon, and found poor father just come
home too, from the booth.  And he sat rocking himself over the fire, as
if he was in pain.  And I said, “Have you hurt yourself, father?” (as he
did sometimes, like they all did), and he said, “A little, my darling.”
And when I came to stoop down and look up at his face, I saw that he was
crying.  The more I spoke to him, the more he hid his face; and at first
he shook all over, and said nothing but “My darling;” and “My love!”’

Here Tom came lounging in, and stared at the two with a coolness not
particularly savouring of interest in anything but himself, and not much
of that at present.

‘I am asking Sissy a few questions, Tom,’ observed his sister.  ‘You have
no occasion to go away; but don’t interrupt us for a moment, Tom dear.’

‘Oh! very well!’ returned Tom.  ‘Only father has brought old Bounderby
home, and I want you to come into the drawing-room.  Because if you come,
there’s a good chance of old Bounderby’s asking me to dinner; and if you
don’t, there’s none.’

‘I’ll come directly.’

‘I’ll wait for you,’ said Tom, ‘to make sure.’

Sissy resumed in a lower voice.  ‘At last poor father said that he had
given no satisfaction again, and never did give any satisfaction now, and
that he was a shame and disgrace, and I should have done better without
him all along.  I said all the affectionate things to him that came into
my heart, and presently he was quiet and I sat down by him, and told him
all about the school and everything that had been said and done there.
When I had no more left to tell, he put his arms round my neck, and
kissed me a great many times.  Then he asked me to fetch some of the
stuff he used, for the little hurt he had had, and to get it at the best
place, which was at the other end of town from there; and then, after
kissing me again, he let me go.  When I had gone down-stairs, I turned
back that I might be a little bit more company to him yet, and looked in
at the door, and said, “Father dear, shall I take Merrylegs?”  Father
shook his head and said, “No, Sissy, no; take nothing that’s known to be
mine, my darling;” and I left him sitting by the fire.  Then the thought
must have come upon him, poor, poor father! of going away to try
something for my sake; for when I came back, he was gone.’

‘I say!  Look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!’ Tom remonstrated.

‘There’s no more to tell, Miss Louisa.  I keep the nine oils ready for
him, and I know he will come back.  Every letter that I see in Mr.
Gradgrind’s hand takes my breath away and blinds my eyes, for I think it
comes from father, or from Mr. Sleary about father.  Mr. Sleary promised
to write as soon as ever father should be heard of, and I trust to him to
keep his word.’

‘Do look sharp for old Bounderby, Loo!’ said Tom, with an impatient
whistle.  ‘He’ll be off if you don’t look sharp!’

After this, whenever Sissy dropped a curtsey to Mr. Gradgrind in the
presence of his family, and said in a faltering way, ‘I beg your pardon,
sir, for being troublesome—but—have you had any letter yet about me?’
Louisa would suspend the occupation of the moment, whatever it was, and
look for the reply as earnestly as Sissy did.  And when Mr. Gradgrind
regularly answered, ‘No, Jupe, nothing of the sort,’ the trembling of
Sissy’s lip would be repeated in Louisa’s face, and her eyes would follow
Sissy with compassion to the door.  Mr. Gradgrind usually improved these
occasions by remarking, when she was gone, that if Jupe had been properly
trained from an early age she would have remonstrated to herself on sound
principles the baselessness of these fantastic hopes.  Yet it did seem
(though not to him, for he saw nothing of it) as if fantastic hope could
take as strong a hold as Fact.

This observation must be limited exclusively to his daughter.  As to Tom,
he was becoming that not unprecedented triumph of calculation which is
usually at work on number one.  As to Mrs. Gradgrind, if she said
anything on the subject, she would come a little way out of her wrappers,
like a feminine dormouse, and say:

‘Good gracious bless me, how my poor head is vexed and worried by that
girl Jupe’s so perseveringly asking, over and over again, about her
tiresome letters!  Upon my word and honour I seem to be fated, and
destined, and ordained, to live in the midst of things that I am never to
hear the last of.  It really is a most extraordinary circumstance that it
appears as if I never was to hear the last of anything!’

At about this point, Mr. Gradgrind’s eye would fall upon her; and under
the influence of that wintry piece of fact, she would become torpid
again.



CHAPTER X
STEPHEN BLACKPOOL


I ENTERTAIN a weak idea that the English people are as hard-worked as any
people upon whom the sun shines.  I acknowledge to this ridiculous
idiosyncrasy, as a reason why I would give them a little more play.

In the hardest working part of Coketown; in the innermost fortifications
of that ugly citadel, where Nature was as strongly bricked out as killing
airs and gases were bricked in; at the heart of the labyrinth of narrow
courts upon courts, and close streets upon streets, which had come into
existence piecemeal, every piece in a violent hurry for some one man’s
purpose, and the whole an unnatural family, shouldering, and trampling,
and pressing one another to death; in the last close nook of this great
exhausted receiver, where the chimneys, for want of air to make a
draught, were built in an immense variety of stunted and crooked shapes,
as though every house put out a sign of the kind of people who might be
expected to be born in it; among the multitude of Coketown, generically
called ‘the Hands,’—a race who would have found more favour with some
people, if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the
lower creatures of the seashore, only hands and stomachs—lived a certain
Stephen Blackpool, forty years of age.

Stephen looked older, but he had had a hard life.  It is said that every
life has its roses and thorns; there seemed, however, to have been a
misadventure or mistake in Stephen’s case, whereby somebody else had
become possessed of his roses, and he had become possessed of the same
somebody else’s thorns in addition to his own.  He had known, to use his
words, a peck of trouble.  He was usually called Old Stephen, in a kind
of rough homage to the fact.

A rather stooping man, with a knitted brow, a pondering expression of
face, and a hard-looking head sufficiently capacious, on which his
iron-grey hair lay long and thin, Old Stephen might have passed for a
particularly intelligent man in his condition.  Yet he was not.  He took
no place among those remarkable ‘Hands,’ who, piecing together their
broken intervals of leisure through many years, had mastered difficult
sciences, and acquired a knowledge of most unlikely things.  He held no
station among the Hands who could make speeches and carry on debates.
Thousands of his compeers could talk much better than he, at any time.
He was a good power-loom weaver, and a man of perfect integrity.  What
more he was, or what else he had in him, if anything, let him show for
himself.

The lights in the great factories, which looked, when they were
illuminated, like Fairy palaces—or the travellers by express-train said
so—were all extinguished; and the bells had rung for knocking off for the
night, and had ceased again; and the Hands, men and women, boy and girl,
were clattering home.  Old Stephen was standing in the street, with the
old sensation upon him which the stoppage of the machinery always
produced—the sensation of its having worked and stopped in his own head.

‘Yet I don’t see Rachael, still!’ said he.

It was a wet night, and many groups of young women passed him, with their
shawls drawn over their bare heads and held close under their chins to
keep the rain out.  He knew Rachael well, for a glance at any one of
these groups was sufficient to show him that she was not there.  At last,
there were no more to come; and then he turned away, saying in a tone of
disappointment, ‘Why, then, ha’ missed her!’

But, he had not gone the length of three streets, when he saw another of
the shawled figures in advance of him, at which he looked so keenly that
perhaps its mere shadow indistinctly reflected on the wet pavement—if he
could have seen it without the figure itself moving along from lamp to
lamp, brightening and fading as it went—would have been enough to tell
him who was there.  Making his pace at once much quicker and much softer,
he darted on until he was very near this figure, then fell into his
former walk, and called ‘Rachael!’

She turned, being then in the brightness of a lamp; and raising her hood
a little, showed a quiet oval face, dark and rather delicate, irradiated
by a pair of very gentle eyes, and further set off by the perfect order
of her shining black hair.  It was not a face in its first bloom; she was
a woman five and thirty years of age.

‘Ah, lad!  ’Tis thou?’  When she had said this, with a smile which would
have been quite expressed, though nothing of her had been seen but her
pleasant eyes, she replaced her hood again, and they went on together.

‘I thought thou wast ahind me, Rachael?’

‘No.’

‘Early t’night, lass?’

‘’Times I’m a little early, Stephen! ’times a little late.  I’m never to
be counted on, going home.’

‘Nor going t’other way, neither, ’t seems to me, Rachael?’

‘No, Stephen.’

He looked at her with some disappointment in his face, but with a
respectful and patient conviction that she must be right in whatever she
did.  The expression was not lost upon her; she laid her hand lightly on
his arm a moment as if to thank him for it.

‘We are such true friends, lad, and such old friends, and getting to be
such old folk, now.’

‘No, Rachael, thou’rt as young as ever thou wast.’

‘One of us would be puzzled how to get old, Stephen, without ’t other
getting so too, both being alive,’ she answered, laughing; ‘but, anyways,
we’re such old friends, and t’ hide a word of honest truth fro’ one
another would be a sin and a pity.  ’Tis better not to walk too much
together.  ’Times, yes!  ’Twould be hard, indeed, if ’twas not to be at
all,’ she said, with a cheerfulness she sought to communicate to him.

‘’Tis hard, anyways, Rachael.’

‘Try to think not; and ’twill seem better.’

‘I’ve tried a long time, and ’ta’nt got better.  But thou’rt right; ’t
might mak fok talk, even of thee.  Thou hast been that to me, Rachael,
through so many year: thou hast done me so much good, and heartened of me
in that cheering way, that thy word is a law to me.  Ah, lass, and a
bright good law!  Better than some real ones.’

‘Never fret about them, Stephen,’ she answered quickly, and not without
an anxious glance at his face.  ‘Let the laws be.’

‘Yes,’ he said, with a slow nod or two.  ‘Let ’em be.  Let everything be.
Let all sorts alone.  ’Tis a muddle, and that’s aw.’

‘Always a muddle?’ said Rachael, with another gentle touch upon his arm,
as if to recall him out of the thoughtfulness, in which he was biting the
long ends of his loose neckerchief as he walked along.  The touch had its
instantaneous effect.  He let them fall, turned a smiling face upon her,
and said, as he broke into a good-humoured laugh, ‘Ay, Rachael, lass,
awlus a muddle.  That’s where I stick.  I come to the muddle many times
and agen, and I never get beyond it.’

They had walked some distance, and were near their own homes.  The
woman’s was the first reached.  It was in one of the many small streets
for which the favourite undertaker (who turned a handsome sum out of the
one poor ghastly pomp of the neighbourhood) kept a black ladder, in order
that those who had done their daily groping up and down the narrow stairs
might slide out of this working world by the windows.  She stopped at the
corner, and putting her hand in his, wished him good night.

‘Good night, dear lass; good night!’

She went, with her neat figure and her sober womanly step, down the dark
street, and he stood looking after her until she turned into one of the
small houses.  There was not a flutter of her coarse shawl, perhaps, but
had its interest in this man’s eyes; not a tone of her voice but had its
echo in his innermost heart.

When she was lost to his view, he pursued his homeward way, glancing up
sometimes at the sky, where the clouds were sailing fast and wildly.
But, they were broken now, and the rain had ceased, and the moon
shone,—looking down the high chimneys of Coketown on the deep furnaces
below, and casting Titanic shadows of the steam-engines at rest, upon the
walls where they were lodged.  The man seemed to have brightened with the
night, as he went on.

His home, in such another street as the first, saving that it was
narrower, was over a little shop.  How it came to pass that any people
found it worth their while to sell or buy the wretched little toys, mixed
up in its window with cheap newspapers and pork (there was a leg to be
raffled for to-morrow-night), matters not here.  He took his end of
candle from a shelf, lighted it at another end of candle on the counter,
without disturbing the mistress of the shop who was asleep in her little
room, and went upstairs into his lodging.

It was a room, not unacquainted with the black ladder under various
tenants; but as neat, at present, as such a room could be.  A few books
and writings were on an old bureau in a corner, the furniture was decent
and sufficient, and, though the atmosphere was tainted, the room was
clean.

Going to the hearth to set the candle down upon a round three-legged
table standing there, he stumbled against something.  As he recoiled,
looking down at it, it raised itself up into the form of a woman in a
sitting attitude.

‘Heaven’s mercy, woman!’ he cried, falling farther off from the figure.
‘Hast thou come back again!’

Such a woman!  A disabled, drunken creature, barely able to preserve her
sitting posture by steadying herself with one begrimed hand on the floor,
while the other was so purposeless in trying to push away her tangled
hair from her face, that it only blinded her the more with the dirt upon
it.  A creature so foul to look at, in her tatters, stains and splashes,
but so much fouler than that in her moral infamy, that it was a shameful
thing even to see her.

After an impatient oath or two, and some stupid clawing of herself with
the hand not necessary to her support, she got her hair away from her
eyes sufficiently to obtain a sight of him.  Then she sat swaying her
body to and fro, and making gestures with her unnerved arm, which seemed
intended as the accompaniment to a fit of laughter, though her face was
stolid and drowsy.

‘Eigh, lad?  What, yo’r there?’  Some hoarse sounds meant for this, came
mockingly out of her at last; and her head dropped forward on her breast.

‘Back agen?’ she screeched, after some minutes, as if he had that moment
said it.  ‘Yes!  And back agen.  Back agen ever and ever so often.  Back?
Yes, back.  Why not?’

Roused by the unmeaning violence with which she cried it out, she
scrambled up, and stood supporting herself with her shoulders against the
wall; dangling in one hand by the string, a dunghill-fragment of a
bonnet, and trying to look scornfully at him.

‘I’ll sell thee off again, and I’ll sell thee off again, and I’ll sell
thee off a score of times!’ she cried, with something between a furious
menace and an effort at a defiant dance.  ‘Come awa’ from th’ bed!’  He
was sitting on the side of it, with his face hidden in his hands.  ‘Come
awa! from ’t.  ’Tis mine, and I’ve a right to t’!’

As she staggered to it, he avoided her with a shudder, and passed—his
face still hidden—to the opposite end of the room.  She threw herself
upon the bed heavily, and soon was snoring hard.  He sunk into a chair,
and moved but once all that night.  It was to throw a covering over her;
as if his hands were not enough to hide her, even in the darkness.



CHAPTER XI
NO WAY OUT


THE Fairy palaces burst into illumination, before pale morning showed the
monstrous serpents of smoke trailing themselves over Coketown.  A
clattering of clogs upon the pavement; a rapid ringing of bells; and all
the melancholy mad elephants, polished and oiled up for the day’s
monotony, were at their heavy exercise again.

Stephen bent over his loom, quiet, watchful, and steady.  A special
contrast, as every man was in the forest of looms where Stephen worked,
to the crashing, smashing, tearing piece of mechanism at which he
laboured.  Never fear, good people of an anxious turn of mind, that Art
will consign Nature to oblivion.  Set anywhere, side by side, the work of
GOD and the work of man; and the former, even though it be a troop of
Hands of very small account, will gain in dignity from the comparison.

So many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power.
It is known, to the force of a single pound weight, what the engine will
do; but, not all the calculators of the National Debt can tell me the
capacity for good or evil, for love or hatred, for patriotism or
discontent, for the decomposition of virtue into vice, or the reverse, at
any single moment in the soul of one of these its quiet servants, with
the composed faces and the regulated actions.  There is no mystery in it;
there is an unfathomable mystery in the meanest of them, for
ever.—Supposing we were to reverse our arithmetic for material objects,
and to govern these awful unknown quantities by other means!

The day grew strong, and showed itself outside, even against the flaming
lights within.  The lights were turned out, and the work went on.  The
rain fell, and the Smoke-serpents, submissive to the curse of all that
tribe, trailed themselves upon the earth.  In the waste-yard outside, the
steam from the escape pipe, the litter of barrels and old iron, the
shining heaps of coals, the ashes everywhere, were shrouded in a veil of
mist and rain.

The work went on, until the noon-bell rang.  More clattering upon the
pavements.  The looms, and wheels, and Hands all out of gear for an hour.

Stephen came out of the hot mill into the damp wind and cold wet streets,
haggard and worn.  He turned from his own class and his own quarter,
taking nothing but a little bread as he walked along, towards the hill on
which his principal employer lived, in a red house with black outside
shutters, green inside blinds, a black street door, up two white steps,
BOUNDERBY (in letters very like himself) upon a brazen plate, and a round
brazen door-handle underneath it, like a brazen full-stop.

Mr. Bounderby was at his lunch.  So Stephen had expected.  Would his
servant say that one of the Hands begged leave to speak to him?  Message
in return, requiring name of such Hand.  Stephen Blackpool.  There was
nothing troublesome against Stephen Blackpool; yes, he might come in.

Stephen Blackpool in the parlour.  Mr. Bounderby (whom he just knew by
sight), at lunch on chop and sherry.  Mrs. Sparsit netting at the
fireside, in a side-saddle attitude, with one foot in a cotton stirrup.
It was a part, at once of Mrs. Sparsit’s dignity and service, not to
lunch.  She supervised the meal officially, but implied that in her own
stately person she considered lunch a weakness.

‘Now, Stephen,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘what’s the matter with _you_?’

Stephen made a bow.  Not a servile one—these Hands will never do that!
Lord bless you, sir, you’ll never catch them at that, if they have been
with you twenty years!—and, as a complimentary toilet for Mrs. Sparsit,
tucked his neckerchief ends into his waistcoat.

‘Now, you know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, taking some sherry, ‘we have never
had any difficulty with you, and you have never been one of the
unreasonable ones.  You don’t expect to be set up in a coach and six, and
to be fed on turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon, as a good many
of ’em do!’  Mr. Bounderby always represented this to be the sole,
immediate, and direct object of any Hand who was not entirely satisfied;
‘and therefore I know already that you have not come here to make a
complaint.  Now, you know, I am certain of that, beforehand.’

‘No, sir, sure I ha’ not coom for nowt o’ th’ kind.’

Mr. Bounderby seemed agreeably surprised, notwithstanding his previous
strong conviction.  ‘Very well,’ he returned.  ‘You’re a steady Hand, and
I was not mistaken.  Now, let me hear what it’s all about.  As it’s not
that, let me hear what it is.  What have you got to say?  Out with it,
lad!’

Stephen happened to glance towards Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘I can go, Mr.
Bounderby, if you wish it,’ said that self-sacrificing lady, making a
feint of taking her foot out of the stirrup.

Mr. Bounderby stayed her, by holding a mouthful of chop in suspension
before swallowing it, and putting out his left hand.  Then, withdrawing
his hand and swallowing his mouthful of chop, he said to Stephen:

‘Now you know, this good lady is a born lady, a high lady.  You are not
to suppose because she keeps my house for me, that she hasn’t been very
high up the tree—ah, up at the top of the tree!  Now, if you have got
anything to say that can’t be said before a born lady, this lady will
leave the room.  If what you have got to say _can_ be said before a born
lady, this lady will stay where she is.’

‘Sir, I hope I never had nowt to say, not fitten for a born lady to year,
sin’ I were born mysen’,’ was the reply, accompanied with a slight flush.

‘Very well,’ said Mr. Bounderby, pushing away his plate, and leaning
back.  ‘Fire away!’

‘I ha’ coom,’ Stephen began, raising his eyes from the floor, after a
moment’s consideration, ‘to ask yo yor advice.  I need ’t overmuch.  I
were married on Eas’r Monday nineteen year sin, long and dree.  She were
a young lass—pretty enow—wi’ good accounts of herseln.  Well!  She went
bad—soon.  Not along of me.  Gonnows I were not a unkind husband to her.’

‘I have heard all this before,’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘She took to
drinking, left off working, sold the furniture, pawned the clothes, and
played old Gooseberry.’

‘I were patient wi’ her.’

(‘The more fool you, I think,’ said Mr. Bounderby, in confidence to his
wine-glass.)

‘I were very patient wi’ her.  I tried to wean her fra ’t ower and ower
agen.  I tried this, I tried that, I tried t’other.  I ha’ gone home,
many’s the time, and found all vanished as I had in the world, and her
without a sense left to bless herseln lying on bare ground.  I ha’ dun ’t
not once, not twice—twenty time!’

Every line in his face deepened as he said it, and put in its affecting
evidence of the suffering he had undergone.

‘From bad to worse, from worse to worsen.  She left me.  She disgraced
herseln everyways, bitter and bad.  She coom back, she coom back, she
coom back.  What could I do t’ hinder her?  I ha’ walked the streets
nights long, ere ever I’d go home.  I ha’ gone t’ th’ brigg, minded to
fling myseln ower, and ha’ no more on’t.  I ha’ bore that much, that I
were owd when I were young.’

Mrs. Sparsit, easily ambling along with her netting-needles, raised the
Coriolanian eyebrows and shook her head, as much as to say, ‘The great
know trouble as well as the small.  Please to turn your humble eye in My
direction.’

‘I ha’ paid her to keep awa’ fra’ me.  These five year I ha’ paid her.  I
ha’ gotten decent fewtrils about me agen.  I ha’ lived hard and sad, but
not ashamed and fearfo’ a’ the minnits o’ my life.  Last night, I went
home.  There she lay upon my har-stone!  There she is!’

In the strength of his misfortune, and the energy of his distress, he
fired for the moment like a proud man.  In another moment, he stood as he
had stood all the time—his usual stoop upon him; his pondering face
addressed to Mr. Bounderby, with a curious expression on it, half shrewd,
half perplexed, as if his mind were set upon unravelling something very
difficult; his hat held tight in his left hand, which rested on his hip;
his right arm, with a rugged propriety and force of action, very
earnestly emphasizing what he said: not least so when it always paused, a
little bent, but not withdrawn, as he paused.

‘I was acquainted with all this, you know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘except
the last clause, long ago.  It’s a bad job; that’s what it is.  You had
better have been satisfied as you were, and not have got married.
However, it’s too late to say that.’

‘Was it an unequal marriage, sir, in point of years?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘You hear what this lady asks.  Was it an unequal marriage in point of
years, this unlucky job of yours?’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Not e’en so.  I were one-and-twenty myseln; she were twenty nighbut.’

‘Indeed, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit to her Chief, with great placidity.  ‘I
inferred, from its being so miserable a marriage, that it was probably an
unequal one in point of years.’

Mr. Bounderby looked very hard at the good lady in a side-long way that
had an odd sheepishness about it.  He fortified himself with a little
more sherry.

‘Well?  Why don’t you go on?’ he then asked, turning rather irritably on
Stephen Blackpool.

‘I ha’ coom to ask yo, sir, how I am to be ridded o’ this woman.’
Stephen infused a yet deeper gravity into the mixed expression of his
attentive face.  Mrs. Sparsit uttered a gentle ejaculation, as having
received a moral shock.

‘What do you mean?’ said Bounderby, getting up to lean his back against
the chimney-piece.  ‘What are you talking about?  You took her for better
for worse.’

‘I mun’ be ridden o’ her.  I cannot bear ’t nommore.  I ha’ lived under
’t so long, for that I ha’ had’n the pity and comforting words o’ th’
best lass living or dead.  Haply, but for her, I should ha’ gone
battering mad.’

‘He wishes to be free, to marry the female of whom he speaks, I fear,
sir,’ observed Mrs. Sparsit in an undertone, and much dejected by the
immorality of the people.

‘I do.  The lady says what’s right.  I do.  I were a coming to ’t.  I ha’
read i’ th’ papers that great folk (fair faw ’em a’!  I wishes ’em no
hurt!) are not bonded together for better for worst so fast, but that
they can be set free fro’ _their_ misfortnet marriages, an’ marry ower
agen.  When they dunnot agree, for that their tempers is ill-sorted, they
has rooms o’ one kind an’ another in their houses, above a bit, and they
can live asunders.  We fok ha’ only one room, and we can’t.  When that
won’t do, they ha’ gowd an’ other cash, an’ they can say “This for yo’
an’ that for me,” an’ they can go their separate ways.  We can’t.  Spite
o’ all that, they can be set free for smaller wrongs than mine.  So, I
mun be ridden o’ this woman, and I want t’ know how?’

‘No how,’ returned Mr. Bounderby.

‘If I do her any hurt, sir, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I flee from her, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I marry t’oother dear lass, there’s a law to punish me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘If I was to live wi’ her an’ not marry her—saying such a thing could be,
which it never could or would, an’ her so good—there’s a law to punish
me, in every innocent child belonging to me?’

‘Of course there is.’

‘Now, a’ God’s name,’ said Stephen Blackpool, ‘show me the law to help
me!’

‘Hem!  There’s a sanctity in this relation of life,’ said Mr. Bounderby,
‘and—and—it must be kept up.’

‘No no, dunnot say that, sir.  ’Tan’t kep’ up that way.  Not that way.
’Tis kep’ down that way.  I’m a weaver, I were in a fact’ry when a chilt,
but I ha’ gotten een to see wi’ and eern to year wi’.  I read in th’
papers every ’Sizes, every Sessions—and you read too—I know it!—with
dismay—how th’ supposed unpossibility o’ ever getting unchained from one
another, at any price, on any terms, brings blood upon this land, and
brings many common married fok to battle, murder, and sudden death.  Let
us ha’ this, right understood.  Mine’s a grievous case, an’ I want—if yo
will be so good—t’ know the law that helps me.’

‘Now, I tell you what!’ said Mr. Bounderby, putting his hands in his
pockets.  ‘There _is_ such a law.’

Stephen, subsiding into his quiet manner, and never wandering in his
attention, gave a nod.

‘But it’s not for you at all.  It costs money.  It costs a mint of
money.’

‘How much might that be?’ Stephen calmly asked.

‘Why, you’d have to go to Doctors’ Commons with a suit, and you’d have to
go to a court of Common Law with a suit, and you’d have to go to the
House of Lords with a suit, and you’d have to get an Act of Parliament to
enable you to marry again, and it would cost you (if it was a case of
very plain sailing), I suppose from a thousand to fifteen hundred pound,’
said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Perhaps twice the money.’

‘There’s no other law?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Why then, sir,’ said Stephen, turning white, and motioning with that
right hand of his, as if he gave everything to the four winds, ‘’_tis_ a
muddle.  ’Tis just a muddle a’toogether, an’ the sooner I am dead, the
better.’

(Mrs. Sparsit again dejected by the impiety of the people.)

‘Pooh, pooh!  Don’t you talk nonsense, my good fellow,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘about things you don’t understand; and don’t you call the
Institutions of your country a muddle, or you’ll get yourself into a real
muddle one of these fine mornings.  The institutions of your country are
not your piece-work, and the only thing you have got to do, is, to mind
your piece-work.  You didn’t take your wife for fast and for loose; but
for better for worse.  If she has turned out worse—why, all we have got
to say is, she might have turned out better.’

‘’Tis a muddle,’ said Stephen, shaking his head as he moved to the door.
‘’Tis a’ a muddle!’

‘Now, I’ll tell you what!’ Mr. Bounderby resumed, as a valedictory
address.  ‘With what I shall call your unhallowed opinions, you have been
quite shocking this lady: who, as I have already told you, is a born
lady, and who, as I have not already told you, has had her own marriage
misfortunes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds—tens of Thousands
of Pounds!’ (he repeated it with great relish).  ‘Now, you have always
been a steady Hand hitherto; but my opinion is, and so I tell you
plainly, that you are turning into the wrong road.  You have been
listening to some mischievous stranger or other—they’re always about—and
the best thing you can do is, to come out of that.  Now you know;’ here
his countenance expressed marvellous acuteness; ‘I can see as far into a
grindstone as another man; farther than a good many, perhaps, because I
had my nose well kept to it when I was young.  I see traces of the turtle
soup, and venison, and gold spoon in this.  Yes, I do!’ cried Mr.
Bounderby, shaking his head with obstinate cunning.  ‘By the Lord Harry,
I do!’

With a very different shake of the head and deep sigh, Stephen said,
‘Thank you, sir, I wish you good day.’  So he left Mr. Bounderby swelling
at his own portrait on the wall, as if he were going to explode himself
into it; and Mrs. Sparsit still ambling on with her foot in her stirrup,
looking quite cast down by the popular vices.



CHAPTER XII
THE OLD WOMAN


OLD STEPHEN descended the two white steps, shutting the black door with
the brazen door-plate, by the aid of the brazen full-stop, to which he
gave a parting polish with the sleeve of his coat, observing that his hot
hand clouded it.  He crossed the street with his eyes bent upon the
ground, and thus was walking sorrowfully away, when he felt a touch upon
his arm.

It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment—the touch that could
calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest
love and patience could abate the raging of the sea—yet it was a woman’s
hand too.  It was an old woman, tall and shapely still, though withered
by time, on whom his eyes fell when he stopped and turned.  She was very
cleanly and plainly dressed, had country mud upon her shoes, and was
newly come from a journey.  The flutter of her manner, in the unwonted
noise of the streets; the spare shawl, carried unfolded on her arm; the
heavy umbrella, and little basket; the loose long-fingered gloves, to
which her hands were unused; all bespoke an old woman from the country,
in her plain holiday clothes, come into Coketown on an expedition of rare
occurrence.  Remarking this at a glance, with the quick observation of
his class, Stephen Blackpool bent his attentive face—his face, which,
like the faces of many of his order, by dint of long working with eyes
and hands in the midst of a prodigious noise, had acquired the
concentrated look with which we are familiar in the countenances of the
deaf—the better to hear what she asked him.

‘Pray, sir,’ said the old woman, ‘didn’t I see you come out of that
gentleman’s house?’ pointing back to Mr. Bounderby’s.  ‘I believe it was
you, unless I have had the bad luck to mistake the person in following?’

‘Yes, missus,’ returned Stephen, ‘it were me.’

‘Have you—you’ll excuse an old woman’s curiosity—have you seen the
gentleman?’

‘Yes, missus.’

‘And how did he look, sir?  Was he portly, bold, outspoken, and hearty?’
As she straightened her own figure, and held up her head in adapting her
action to her words, the idea crossed Stephen that he had seen this old
woman before, and had not quite liked her.

‘O yes,’ he returned, observing her more attentively, ‘he were all that.’

‘And healthy,’ said the old woman, ‘as the fresh wind?’

‘Yes,’ returned Stephen.  ‘He were ett’n and drinking—as large and as
loud as a Hummobee.’

‘Thank you!’ said the old woman, with infinite content.  ‘Thank you!’

He certainly never had seen this old woman before.  Yet there was a vague
remembrance in his mind, as if he had more than once dreamed of some old
woman like her.

She walked along at his side, and, gently accommodating himself to her
humour, he said Coketown was a busy place, was it not?  To which she
answered ‘Eigh sure!  Dreadful busy!’  Then he said, she came from the
country, he saw?  To which she answered in the affirmative.

‘By Parliamentary, this morning.  I came forty mile by Parliamentary this
morning, and I’m going back the same forty mile this afternoon.  I walked
nine mile to the station this morning, and if I find nobody on the road
to give me a lift, I shall walk the nine mile back to-night.  That’s
pretty well, sir, at my age!’ said the chatty old woman, her eye
brightening with exultation.

‘’Deed ’tis.  Don’t do’t too often, missus.’

‘No, no.  Once a year,’ she answered, shaking her head.  ‘I spend my
savings so, once every year.  I come regular, to tramp about the streets,
and see the gentlemen.’

‘Only to see ’em?’ returned Stephen.

‘That’s enough for me,’ she replied, with great earnestness and interest
of manner.  ‘I ask no more!  I have been standing about, on this side of
the way, to see that gentleman,’ turning her head back towards Mr.
Bounderby’s again, ‘come out.  But, he’s late this year, and I have not
seen him.  You came out instead.  Now, if I am obliged to go back without
a glimpse of him—I only want a glimpse—well!  I have seen you, and you
have seen him, and I must make that do.’  Saying this, she looked at
Stephen as if to fix his features in her mind, and her eye was not so
bright as it had been.

With a large allowance for difference of tastes, and with all submission
to the patricians of Coketown, this seemed so extraordinary a source of
interest to take so much trouble about, that it perplexed him.  But they
were passing the church now, and as his eye caught the clock, he
quickened his pace.

He was going to his work? the old woman said, quickening hers, too, quite
easily.  Yes, time was nearly out.  On his telling her where he worked,
the old woman became a more singular old woman than before.

‘An’t you happy?’ she asked him.

‘Why—there’s awmost nobbody but has their troubles, missus.’  He answered
evasively, because the old woman appeared to take it for granted that he
would be very happy indeed, and he had not the heart to disappoint her.
He knew that there was trouble enough in the world; and if the old woman
had lived so long, and could count upon his having so little, why so much
the better for her, and none the worse for him.

‘Ay, ay!  You have your troubles at home, you mean?’ she said.

‘Times.  Just now and then,’ he answered, slightly.

‘But, working under such a gentleman, they don’t follow you to the
Factory?’

No, no; they didn’t follow him there, said Stephen.  All correct there.
Everything accordant there.  (He did not go so far as to say, for her
pleasure, that there was a sort of Divine Right there; but, I have heard
claims almost as magnificent of late years.)

They were now in the black by-road near the place, and the Hands were
crowding in.  The bell was ringing, and the Serpent was a Serpent of many
coils, and the Elephant was getting ready.  The strange old woman was
delighted with the very bell.  It was the beautifullest bell she had ever
heard, she said, and sounded grand!

She asked him, when he stopped good-naturedly to shake hands with her
before going in, how long he had worked there?

‘A dozen year,’ he told her.

‘I must kiss the hand,’ said she, ‘that has worked in this fine factory
for a dozen year!’  And she lifted it, though he would have prevented
her, and put it to her lips.  What harmony, besides her age and her
simplicity, surrounded her, he did not know, but even in this fantastic
action there was a something neither out of time nor place: a something
which it seemed as if nobody else could have made as serious, or done
with such a natural and touching air.

He had been at his loom full half an hour, thinking about this old woman,
when, having occasion to move round the loom for its adjustment, he
glanced through a window which was in his corner, and saw her still
looking up at the pile of building, lost in admiration.  Heedless of the
smoke and mud and wet, and of her two long journeys, she was gazing at
it, as if the heavy thrum that issued from its many stories were proud
music to her.

She was gone by and by, and the day went after her, and the lights sprung
up again, and the Express whirled in full sight of the Fairy Palace over
the arches near: little felt amid the jarring of the machinery, and
scarcely heard above its crash and rattle.  Long before then his thoughts
had gone back to the dreary room above the little shop, and to the
shameful figure heavy on the bed, but heavier on his heart.

Machinery slackened; throbbing feebly like a fainting pulse; stopped.
The bell again; the glare of light and heat dispelled; the factories,
looming heavy in the black wet night—their tall chimneys rising up into
the air like competing Towers of Babel.

He had spoken to Rachael only last night, it was true, and had walked
with her a little way; but he had his new misfortune on him, in which no
one else could give him a moment’s relief, and, for the sake of it, and
because he knew himself to want that softening of his anger which no
voice but hers could effect, he felt he might so far disregard what she
had said as to wait for her again.  He waited, but she had eluded him.
She was gone.  On no other night in the year could he so ill have spared
her patient face.

O!  Better to have no home in which to lay his head, than to have a home
and dread to go to it, through such a cause.  He ate and drank, for he
was exhausted—but he little knew or cared what; and he wandered about in
the chill rain, thinking and thinking, and brooding and brooding.

No word of a new marriage had ever passed between them; but Rachael had
taken great pity on him years ago, and to her alone he had opened his
closed heart all this time, on the subject of his miseries; and he knew
very well that if he were free to ask her, she would take him.  He
thought of the home he might at that moment have been seeking with
pleasure and pride; of the different man he might have been that night;
of the lightness then in his now heavy-laden breast; of the then restored
honour, self-respect, and tranquillity all torn to pieces.  He thought of
the waste of the best part of his life, of the change it made in his
character for the worse every day, of the dreadful nature of his
existence, bound hand and foot, to a dead woman, and tormented by a demon
in her shape.  He thought of Rachael, how young when they were first
brought together in these circumstances, how mature now, how soon to grow
old.  He thought of the number of girls and women she had seen marry, how
many homes with children in them she had seen grow up around her, how she
had contentedly pursued her own lone quiet path—for him—and how he had
sometimes seen a shade of melancholy on her blessed face, that smote him
with remorse and despair.  He set the picture of her up, beside the
infamous image of last night; and thought, Could it be, that the whole
earthly course of one so gentle, good, and self-denying, was subjugate to
such a wretch as that!

Filled with these thoughts—so filled that he had an unwholesome sense of
growing larger, of being placed in some new and diseased relation towards
the objects among which he passed, of seeing the iris round every misty
light turn red—he went home for shelter.



CHAPTER XIII
RACHAEL


A CANDLE faintly burned in the window, to which the black ladder had
often been raised for the sliding away of all that was most precious in
this world to a striving wife and a brood of hungry babies; and Stephen
added to his other thoughts the stern reflection, that of all the
casualties of this existence upon earth, not one was dealt out with so
unequal a hand as Death.  The inequality of Birth was nothing to it.
For, say that the child of a King and the child of a Weaver were born
to-night in the same moment, what was that disparity, to the death of any
human creature who was serviceable to, or beloved by, another, while this
abandoned woman lived on!

From the outside of his home he gloomily passed to the inside, with
suspended breath and with a slow footstep.  He went up to his door,
opened it, and so into the room.

Quiet and peace were there.  Rachael was there, sitting by the bed.

She turned her head, and the light of her face shone in upon the midnight
of his mind.  She sat by the bed, watching and tending his wife.  That is
to say, he saw that some one lay there, and he knew too well it must be
she; but Rachael’s hands had put a curtain up, so that she was screened
from his eyes.  Her disgraceful garments were removed, and some of
Rachael’s were in the room.  Everything was in its place and order as he
had always kept it, the little fire was newly trimmed, and the hearth was
freshly swept.  It appeared to him that he saw all this in Rachael’s
face, and looked at nothing besides.  While looking at it, it was shut
out from his view by the softened tears that filled his eyes; but not
before he had seen how earnestly she looked at him, and how her own eyes
were filled too.

She turned again towards the bed, and satisfying herself that all was
quiet there, spoke in a low, calm, cheerful voice.

‘I am glad you have come at last, Stephen.  You are very late.’

‘I ha’ been walking up an’ down.’

‘I thought so.  But ’tis too bad a night for that.  The rain falls very
heavy, and the wind has risen.’

The wind?  True.  It was blowing hard.  Hark to the thundering in the
chimney, and the surging noise!  To have been out in such a wind, and not
to have known it was blowing!

‘I have been here once before, to-day, Stephen.  Landlady came round for
me at dinner-time.  There was some one here that needed looking to, she
said.  And ‘deed she was right.  All wandering and lost, Stephen.
Wounded too, and bruised.’

He slowly moved to a chair and sat down, drooping his head before her.

‘I came to do what little I could, Stephen; first, for that she worked
with me when we were girls both, and for that you courted her and married
her when I was her friend—’

He laid his furrowed forehead on his hand, with a low groan.

‘And next, for that I know your heart, and am right sure and certain that
’tis far too merciful to let her die, or even so much as suffer, for want
of aid.  Thou knowest who said, “Let him who is without sin among you
cast the first stone at her!”  There have been plenty to do that.  Thou
art not the man to cast the last stone, Stephen, when she is brought so
low.’

‘O Rachael, Rachael!’

‘Thou hast been a cruel sufferer, Heaven reward thee!’ she said, in
compassionate accents.  ‘I am thy poor friend, with all my heart and
mind.’

             [Picture: Stephen and Rachael in the sick room]

The wounds of which she had spoken, seemed to be about the neck of the
self-made outcast.  She dressed them now, still without showing her.  She
steeped a piece of linen in a basin, into which she poured some liquid
from a bottle, and laid it with a gentle hand upon the sore.  The
three-legged table had been drawn close to the bedside, and on it there
were two bottles.  This was one.

It was not so far off, but that Stephen, following her hands with his
eyes, could read what was printed on it in large letters.  He turned of a
deadly hue, and a sudden horror seemed to fall upon him.

‘I will stay here, Stephen,’ said Rachael, quietly resuming her seat,
‘till the bells go Three.  ’Tis to be done again at three, and then she
may be left till morning.’

‘But thy rest agen to-morrow’s work, my dear.’

‘I slept sound last night.  I can wake many nights, when I am put to it.
’Tis thou who art in need of rest—so white and tired.  Try to sleep in
the chair there, while I watch.  Thou hadst no sleep last night, I can
well believe.  To-morrow’s work is far harder for thee than for me.’

He heard the thundering and surging out of doors, and it seemed to him as
if his late angry mood were going about trying to get at him.  She had
cast it out; she would keep it out; he trusted to her to defend him from
himself.

‘She don’t know me, Stephen; she just drowsily mutters and stares.  I
have spoken to her times and again, but she don’t notice!  ’Tis as well
so.  When she comes to her right mind once more, I shall have done what I
can, and she never the wiser.’

‘How long, Rachael, is ’t looked for, that she’ll be so?’

‘Doctor said she would haply come to her mind to-morrow.’

His eyes fell again on the bottle, and a tremble passed over him, causing
him to shiver in every limb.  She thought he was chilled with the wet.
‘No,’ he said, ‘it was not that.  He had had a fright.’

‘A fright?’

‘Ay, ay! coming in.  When I were walking.  When I were thinking.  When
I—’  It seized him again; and he stood up, holding by the mantel-shelf,
as he pressed his dank cold hair down with a hand that shook as if it
were palsied.

‘Stephen!’

She was coming to him, but he stretched out his arm to stop her.

‘No!  Don’t, please; don’t.  Let me see thee setten by the bed.  Let me
see thee, a’ so good, and so forgiving.  Let me see thee as I see thee
when I coom in.  I can never see thee better than so.  Never, never,
never!’

He had a violent fit of trembling, and then sunk into his chair.  After a
time he controlled himself, and, resting with an elbow on one knee, and
his head upon that hand, could look towards Rachael.  Seen across the dim
candle with his moistened eyes, she looked as if she had a glory shining
round her head.  He could have believed she had.  He did believe it, as
the noise without shook the window, rattled at the door below, and went
about the house clamouring and lamenting.

‘When she gets better, Stephen, ’tis to be hoped she’ll leave thee to
thyself again, and do thee no more hurt.  Anyways we will hope so now.
And now I shall keep silence, for I want thee to sleep.’

He closed his eyes, more to please her than to rest his weary head; but,
by slow degrees as he listened to the great noise of the wind, he ceased
to hear it, or it changed into the working of his loom, or even into the
voices of the day (his own included) saying what had been really said.
Even this imperfect consciousness faded away at last, and he dreamed a
long, troubled dream.

He thought that he, and some one on whom his heart had long been set—but
she was not Rachael, and that surprised him, even in the midst of his
imaginary happiness—stood in the church being married.  While the
ceremony was performing, and while he recognized among the witnesses some
whom he knew to be living, and many whom he knew to be dead, darkness
came on, succeeded by the shining of a tremendous light.  It broke from
one line in the table of commandments at the altar, and illuminated the
building with the words.  They were sounded through the church, too, as
if there were voices in the fiery letters.  Upon this, the whole
appearance before him and around him changed, and nothing was left as it
had been, but himself and the clergyman.  They stood in the daylight
before a crowd so vast, that if all the people in the world could have
been brought together into one space, they could not have looked, he
thought, more numerous; and they all abhorred him, and there was not one
pitying or friendly eye among the millions that were fastened on his
face.  He stood on a raised stage, under his own loom; and, looking up at
the shape the loom took, and hearing the burial service distinctly read,
he knew that he was there to suffer death.  In an instant what he stood
on fell below him, and he was gone.

—Out of what mystery he came back to his usual life, and to places that
he knew, he was unable to consider; but he was back in those places by
some means, and with this condemnation upon him, that he was never, in
this world or the next, through all the unimaginable ages of eternity, to
look on Rachael’s face or hear her voice.  Wandering to and fro,
unceasingly, without hope, and in search of he knew not what (he only
knew that he was doomed to seek it), he was the subject of a nameless,
horrible dread, a mortal fear of one particular shape which everything
took.  Whatsoever he looked at, grew into that form sooner or later.  The
object of his miserable existence was to prevent its recognition by any
one among the various people he encountered.  Hopeless labour!  If he led
them out of rooms where it was, if he shut up drawers and closets where
it stood, if he drew the curious from places where he knew it to be
secreted, and got them out into the streets, the very chimneys of the
mills assumed that shape, and round them was the printed word.

The wind was blowing again, the rain was beating on the house-tops, and
the larger spaces through which he had strayed contracted to the four
walls of his room.  Saving that the fire had died out, it was as his eyes
had closed upon it.  Rachael seemed to have fallen into a doze, in the
chair by the bed.  She sat wrapped in her shawl, perfectly still.  The
table stood in the same place, close by the bedside, and on it, in its
real proportions and appearance, was the shape so often repeated.

He thought he saw the curtain move.  He looked again, and he was sure it
moved.  He saw a hand come forth and grope about a little.  Then the
curtain moved more perceptibly, and the woman in the bed put it back, and
sat up.

With her woful eyes, so haggard and wild, so heavy and large, she looked
all round the room, and passed the corner where he slept in his chair.
Her eyes returned to that corner, and she put her hand over them as a
shade, while she looked into it.  Again they went all round the room,
scarcely heeding Rachael if at all, and returned to that corner.  He
thought, as she once more shaded them—not so much looking at him, as
looking for him with a brutish instinct that he was there—that no single
trace was left in those debauched features, or in the mind that went
along with them, of the woman he had married eighteen years before.  But
that he had seen her come to this by inches, he never could have believed
her to be the same.

All this time, as if a spell were on him, he was motionless and
powerless, except to watch her.

Stupidly dozing, or communing with her incapable self about nothing, she
sat for a little while with her hands at her ears, and her head resting
on them.  Presently, she resumed her staring round the room.  And now,
for the first time, her eyes stopped at the table with the bottles on it.

Straightway she turned her eyes back to his corner, with the defiance of
last night, and moving very cautiously and softly, stretched out her
greedy hand.  She drew a mug into the bed, and sat for a while
considering which of the two bottles she should choose.  Finally, she
laid her insensate grasp upon the bottle that had swift and certain death
in it, and, before his eyes, pulled out the cork with her teeth.

Dream or reality, he had no voice, nor had he power to stir.  If this be
real, and her allotted time be not yet come, wake, Rachael, wake!

She thought of that, too.  She looked at Rachael, and very slowly, very
cautiously, poured out the contents.  The draught was at her lips.  A
moment and she would be past all help, let the whole world wake and come
about her with its utmost power.  But in that moment Rachael started up
with a suppressed cry.  The creature struggled, struck her, seized her by
the hair; but Rachael had the cup.

Stephen broke out of his chair.  ‘Rachael, am I wakin’ or dreamin’ this
dreadfo’ night?’

‘’Tis all well, Stephen.  I have been asleep, myself.  ’Tis near three.
Hush!  I hear the bells.’

The wind brought the sounds of the church clock to the window.  They
listened, and it struck three.  Stephen looked at her, saw how pale she
was, noted the disorder of her hair, and the red marks of fingers on her
forehead, and felt assured that his senses of sight and hearing had been
awake.  She held the cup in her hand even now.

‘I thought it must be near three,’ she said, calmly pouring from the cup
into the basin, and steeping the linen as before.  ‘I am thankful I
stayed!  ’Tis done now, when I have put this on.  There!  And now she’s
quiet again.  The few drops in the basin I’ll pour away, for ’tis bad
stuff to leave about, though ever so little of it.’  As she spoke, she
drained the basin into the ashes of the fire, and broke the bottle on the
hearth.

She had nothing to do, then, but to cover herself with her shawl before
going out into the wind and rain.

‘Thou’lt let me walk wi’ thee at this hour, Rachael?’

‘No, Stephen.  ’Tis but a minute, and I’m home.’

‘Thou’rt not fearfo’;’ he said it in a low voice, as they went out at the
door; ‘to leave me alone wi’ her!’

As she looked at him, saying, ‘Stephen?’ he went down on his knee before
her, on the poor mean stairs, and put an end of her shawl to his lips.

‘Thou art an Angel.  Bless thee, bless thee!’

‘I am, as I have told thee, Stephen, thy poor friend.  Angels are not
like me.  Between them, and a working woman fu’ of faults, there is a
deep gulf set.  My little sister is among them, but she is changed.’

She raised her eyes for a moment as she said the words; and then they
fell again, in all their gentleness and mildness, on his face.

‘Thou changest me from bad to good.  Thou mak’st me humbly wishfo’ to be
more like thee, and fearfo’ to lose thee when this life is ower, and a’
the muddle cleared awa’.  Thou’rt an Angel; it may be, thou hast saved my
soul alive!’

She looked at him, on his knee at her feet, with her shawl still in his
hand, and the reproof on her lips died away when she saw the working of
his face.

‘I coom home desp’rate.  I coom home wi’out a hope, and mad wi’ thinking
that when I said a word o’ complaint I was reckoned a unreasonable Hand.
I told thee I had had a fright.  It were the Poison-bottle on table.  I
never hurt a livin’ creetur; but happenin’ so suddenly upon ’t, I thowt,
“How can _I_ say what I might ha’ done to myseln, or her, or both!”’

She put her two hands on his mouth, with a face of terror, to stop him
from saying more.  He caught them in his unoccupied hand, and holding
them, and still clasping the border of her shawl, said hurriedly:

‘But I see thee, Rachael, setten by the bed.  I ha’ seen thee, aw this
night.  In my troublous sleep I ha’ known thee still to be there.
Evermore I will see thee there.  I nevermore will see her or think o’
her, but thou shalt be beside her.  I nevermore will see or think o’
anything that angers me, but thou, so much better than me, shalt be by
th’ side on’t.  And so I will try t’ look t’ th’ time, and so I will try
t’ trust t’ th’ time, when thou and me at last shall walk together far
awa’, beyond the deep gulf, in th’ country where thy little sister is.’

He kissed the border of her shawl again, and let her go.  She bade him
good night in a broken voice, and went out into the street.

The wind blew from the quarter where the day would soon appear, and still
blew strongly.  It had cleared the sky before it, and the rain had spent
itself or travelled elsewhere, and the stars were bright.  He stood
bare-headed in the road, watching her quick disappearance.  As the
shining stars were to the heavy candle in the window, so was Rachael, in
the rugged fancy of this man, to the common experiences of his life.



CHAPTER XIV
THE GREAT MANUFACTURER


TIME went on in Coketown like its own machinery: so much material wrought
up, so much fuel consumed, so many powers worn out, so much money made.
But, less inexorable than iron, steel, and brass, it brought its varying
seasons even into that wilderness of smoke and brick, and made the only
stand that ever _was_ made in the place against its direful uniformity.

‘Louisa is becoming,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘almost a young woman.’

Time, with his innumerable horse-power, worked away, not minding what
anybody said, and presently turned out young Thomas a foot taller than
when his father had last taken particular notice of him.

‘Thomas is becoming,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘almost a young man.’

Time passed Thomas on in the mill, while his father was thinking about
it, and there he stood in a long-tailed coat and a stiff shirt-collar.

‘Really,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘the period has arrived when Thomas ought
to go to Bounderby.’

Time, sticking to him, passed him on into Bounderby’s Bank, made him an
inmate of Bounderby’s house, necessitated the purchase of his first
razor, and exercised him diligently in his calculations relative to
number one.

The same great manufacturer, always with an immense variety of work on
hand, in every stage of development, passed Sissy onward in his mill, and
worked her up into a very pretty article indeed.

‘I fear, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that your continuance at the school
any longer would be useless.’

‘I am afraid it would, sir,’ Sissy answered with a curtsey.

‘I cannot disguise from you, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his
brow, ‘that the result of your probation there has disappointed me; has
greatly disappointed me.  You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs.
M’Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I
looked for.  You are extremely deficient in your facts.  Your
acquaintance with figures is very limited.  You are altogether backward,
and below the mark.’

‘I am sorry, sir,’ she returned; ‘but I know it is quite true.  Yet I
have tried hard, sir.’

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have
observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect.’

‘Thank you, sir.  I have thought sometimes;’ Sissy very timid here; ‘that
perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked to be allowed
to try a little less, I might have—’

‘No, Jupe, no,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his profoundest
and most eminently practical way.  ‘No.  The course you pursued, you
pursued according to the system—the system—and there is no more to be
said about it.  I can only suppose that the circumstances of your early
life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning powers,
and that we began too late.  Still, as I have said already, I am
disappointed.’

‘I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your kindness
to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your protection
of her.’

‘Don’t shed tears,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Don’t shed tears.  I don’t
complain of you.  You are an affectionate, earnest, good young
woman—and—and we must make that do.’

‘Thank you, sir, very much,’ said Sissy, with a grateful curtsey.

‘You are useful to Mrs. Gradgrind, and (in a generally pervading way) you
are serviceable in the family also; so I understand from Miss Louisa,
and, indeed, so I have observed myself.  I therefore hope,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, ‘that you can make yourself happy in those relations.’

‘I should have nothing to wish, sir, if—’

‘I understand you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind; ‘you still refer to your father.
I have heard from Miss Louisa that you still preserve that bottle.  Well!
If your training in the science of arriving at exact results had been
more successful, you would have been wiser on these points.  I will say
no more.’

He really liked Sissy too well to have a contempt for her; otherwise he
held her calculating powers in such very slight estimation that he must
have fallen upon that conclusion.  Somehow or other, he had become
possessed by an idea that there was something in this girl which could
hardly be set forth in a tabular form.  Her capacity of definition might
be easily stated at a very low figure, her mathematical knowledge at
nothing; yet he was not sure that if he had been required, for example,
to tick her off into columns in a parliamentary return, he would have
quite known how to divide her.

In some stages of his manufacture of the human fabric, the processes of
Time are very rapid.  Young Thomas and Sissy being both at such a stage
of their working up, these changes were effected in a year or two; while
Mr. Gradgrind himself seemed stationary in his course, and underwent no
alteration.

Except one, which was apart from his necessary progress through the mill.
Time hustled him into a little noisy and rather dirty machinery, in a
by-comer, and made him Member of Parliament for Coketown: one of the
respected members for ounce weights and measures, one of the
representatives of the multiplication table, one of the deaf honourable
gentlemen, dumb honourable gentlemen, blind honourable gentlemen, lame
honourable gentlemen, dead honourable gentlemen, to every other
consideration.  Else wherefore live we in a Christian land, eighteen
hundred and odd years after our Master?

All this while, Louisa had been passing on, so quiet and reserved, and so
much given to watching the bright ashes at twilight as they fell into the
grate, and became extinct, that from the period when her father had said
she was almost a young woman—which seemed but yesterday—she had scarcely
attracted his notice again, when he found her quite a young woman.

‘Quite a young woman,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, musing.  ‘Dear me!’

Soon after this discovery, he became more thoughtful than usual for
several days, and seemed much engrossed by one subject.  On a certain
night, when he was going out, and Louisa came to bid him good-bye before
his departure—as he was not to be home until late and she would not see
him again until the morning—he held her in his arms, looking at her in
his kindest manner, and said:

‘My dear Louisa, you are a woman!’

She answered with the old, quick, searching look of the night when she
was found at the Circus; then cast down her eyes.  ‘Yes, father.’

‘My dear,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I must speak with you alone and
seriously.  Come to me in my room after breakfast to-morrow, will you?’

‘Yes, father.’

‘Your hands are rather cold, Louisa.  Are you not well?’

‘Quite well, father.’

‘And cheerful?’

She looked at him again, and smiled in her peculiar manner.  ‘I am as
cheerful, father, as I usually am, or usually have been.’

‘That’s well,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  So, he kissed her and went away; and
Louisa returned to the serene apartment of the hair-cutting character,
and leaning her elbow on her hand, looked again at the short-lived sparks
that so soon subsided into ashes.

‘Are you there, Loo?’ said her brother, looking in at the door.  He was
quite a young gentleman of pleasure now, and not quite a prepossessing
one.

‘Dear Tom,’ she answered, rising and embracing him, ‘how long it is since
you have been to see me!’

‘Why, I have been otherwise engaged, Loo, in the evenings; and in the
daytime old Bounderby has been keeping me at it rather.  But I touch him
up with you when he comes it too strong, and so we preserve an
understanding.  I say!  Has father said anything particular to you to-day
or yesterday, Loo?’

‘No, Tom.  But he told me to-night that he wished to do so in the
morning.’

‘Ah!  That’s what I mean,’ said Tom.  ‘Do you know where he is
to-night?’—with a very deep expression.

‘No.’

‘Then I’ll tell you.  He’s with old Bounderby.  They are having a regular
confab together up at the Bank.  Why at the Bank, do you think?  Well,
I’ll tell you again.  To keep Mrs. Sparsit’s ears as far off as possible,
I expect.’

With her hand upon her brother’s shoulder, Louisa still stood looking at
the fire.  Her brother glanced at her face with greater interest than
usual, and, encircling her waist with his arm, drew her coaxingly to him.

‘You are very fond of me, an’t you, Loo?’

‘Indeed I am, Tom, though you do let such long intervals go by without
coming to see me.’

‘Well, sister of mine,’ said Tom, ‘when you say that, you are near my
thoughts.  We might be so much oftener together—mightn’t we?  Always
together, almost—mightn’t we?  It would do me a great deal of good if you
were to make up your mind to I know what, Loo.  It would be a splendid
thing for me.  It would be uncommonly jolly!’

Her thoughtfulness baffled his cunning scrutiny.  He could make nothing
of her face.  He pressed her in his arm, and kissed her cheek.  She
returned the kiss, but still looked at the fire.

‘I say, Loo!  I thought I’d come, and just hint to you what was going on:
though I supposed you’d most likely guess, even if you didn’t know.  I
can’t stay, because I’m engaged to some fellows to-night.  You won’t
forget how fond you are of me?’

‘No, dear Tom, I won’t forget.’

‘That’s a capital girl,’ said Tom.  ‘Good-bye, Loo.’

She gave him an affectionate good-night, and went out with him to the
door, whence the fires of Coketown could be seen, making the distance
lurid.  She stood there, looking steadfastly towards them, and listening
to his departing steps.  They retreated quickly, as glad to get away from
Stone Lodge; and she stood there yet, when he was gone and all was quiet.
It seemed as if, first in her own fire within the house, and then in the
fiery haze without, she tried to discover what kind of woof Old Time,
that greatest and longest-established Spinner of all, would weave from
the threads he had already spun into a woman.  But his factory is a
secret place, his work is noiseless, and his Hands are mutes.



CHAPTER XV
FATHER AND DAUGHTER


ALTHOUGH Mr. Gradgrind did not take after Blue Beard, his room was quite
a blue chamber in its abundance of blue books.  Whatever they could prove
(which is usually anything you like), they proved there, in an army
constantly strengthening by the arrival of new recruits.  In that charmed
apartment, the most complicated social questions were cast up, got into
exact totals, and finally settled—if those concerned could only have been
brought to know it.  As if an astronomical observatory should be made
without any windows, and the astronomer within should arrange the starry
universe solely by pen, ink, and paper, so Mr. Gradgrind, in _his_
Observatory (and there are many like it), had no need to cast an eye upon
the teeming myriads of human beings around him, but could settle all
their destinies on a slate, and wipe out all their tears with one dirty
little bit of sponge.

To this Observatory, then: a stern room, with a deadly statistical clock
in it, which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a
coffin-lid; Louisa repaired on the appointed morning.  A window looked
towards Coketown; and when she sat down near her father’s table, she saw
the high chimneys and the long tracts of smoke looming in the heavy
distance gloomily.

‘My dear Louisa,’ said her father, ‘I prepared you last night to give me
your serious attention in the conversation we are now going to have
together.  You have been so well trained, and you do, I am happy to say,
so much justice to the education you have received, that I have perfect
confidence in your good sense.  You are not impulsive, you are not
romantic, you are accustomed to view everything from the strong
dispassionate ground of reason and calculation.  From that ground alone,
I know you will view and consider what I am going to communicate.’

He waited, as if he would have been glad that she said something.  But
she said never a word.

‘Louisa, my dear, you are the subject of a proposal of marriage that has
been made to me.’

Again he waited, and again she answered not one word.  This so far
surprised him, as to induce him gently to repeat, ‘a proposal of
marriage, my dear.’  To which she returned, without any visible emotion
whatever:

‘I hear you, father.  I am attending, I assure you.’

‘Well!’ said Mr. Gradgrind, breaking into a smile, after being for the
moment at a loss, ‘you are even more dispassionate than I expected,
Louisa.  Or, perhaps, you are not unprepared for the announcement I have
it in charge to make?’

‘I cannot say that, father, until I hear it.  Prepared or unprepared, I
wish to hear it all from you.  I wish to hear you state it to me,
father.’

Strange to relate, Mr. Gradgrind was not so collected at this moment as
his daughter was.  He took a paper-knife in his hand, turned it over,
laid it down, took it up again, and even then had to look along the blade
of it, considering how to go on.

‘What you say, my dear Louisa, is perfectly reasonable.  I have
undertaken then to let you know that—in short, that Mr. Bounderby has
informed me that he has long watched your progress with particular
interest and pleasure, and has long hoped that the time might ultimately
arrive when he should offer you his hand in marriage.  That time, to
which he has so long, and certainly with great constancy, looked forward,
is now come.  Mr. Bounderby has made his proposal of marriage to me, and
has entreated me to make it known to you, and to express his hope that
you will take it into your favourable consideration.’

Silence between them.  The deadly statistical clock very hollow.  The
distant smoke very black and heavy.

‘Father,’ said Louisa, ‘do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?’

Mr. Gradgrind was extremely discomfited by this unexpected question.
‘Well, my child,’ he returned, ‘I—really—cannot take upon myself to say.’

‘Father,’ pursued Louisa in exactly the same voice as before, ‘do you ask
me to love Mr. Bounderby?’

‘My dear Louisa, no.  No.  I ask nothing.’

‘Father,’ she still pursued, ‘does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love him?’

‘Really, my dear,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘it is difficult to answer your
question—’

‘Difficult to answer it, Yes or No, father?

‘Certainly, my dear.  Because;’ here was something to demonstrate, and it
set him up again; ‘because the reply depends so materially, Louisa, on
the sense in which we use the expression.  Now, Mr. Bounderby does not do
you the injustice, and does not do himself the injustice, of pretending
to anything fanciful, fantastic, or (I am using synonymous terms)
sentimental.  Mr. Bounderby would have seen you grow up under his eyes,
to very little purpose, if he could so far forget what is due to your
good sense, not to say to his, as to address you from any such ground.
Therefore, perhaps the expression itself—I merely suggest this to you, my
dear—may be a little misplaced.’

‘What would you advise me to use in its stead, father?’

‘Why, my dear Louisa,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, completely recovered by this
time, ‘I would advise you (since you ask me) to consider this question,
as you have been accustomed to consider every other question, simply as
one of tangible Fact.  The ignorant and the giddy may embarrass such
subjects with irrelevant fancies, and other absurdities that have no
existence, properly viewed—really no existence—but it is no compliment to
you to say, that you know better.  Now, what are the Facts of this case?
You are, we will say in round numbers, twenty years of age; Mr. Bounderby
is, we will say in round numbers, fifty.  There is some disparity in your
respective years, but in your means and positions there is none; on the
contrary, there is a great suitability.  Then the question arises, Is
this one disparity sufficient to operate as a bar to such a marriage?  In
considering this question, it is not unimportant to take into account the
statistics of marriage, so far as they have yet been obtained, in England
and Wales.  I find, on reference to the figures, that a large proportion
of these marriages are contracted between parties of very unequal ages,
and that the elder of these contracting parties is, in rather more than
three-fourths of these instances, the bridegroom.  It is remarkable as
showing the wide prevalence of this law, that among the natives of the
British possessions in India, also in a considerable part of China, and
among the Calmucks of Tartary, the best means of computation yet
furnished us by travellers, yield similar results.  The disparity I have
mentioned, therefore, almost ceases to be disparity, and (virtually) all
but disappears.’

‘What do you recommend, father,’ asked Louisa, her reserved composure not
in the least affected by these gratifying results, ‘that I should
substitute for the term I used just now?  For the misplaced expression?’

‘Louisa,’ returned her father, ‘it appears to me that nothing can be
plainer.  Confining yourself rigidly to Fact, the question of Fact you
state to yourself is: Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to marry him?  Yes, he
does.  The sole remaining question then is: Shall I marry him?  I think
nothing can be plainer than that?’

‘Shall I marry him?’ repeated Louisa, with great deliberation.

‘Precisely.  And it is satisfactory to me, as your father, my dear
Louisa, to know that you do not come to the consideration of that
question with the previous habits of mind, and habits of life, that
belong to many young women.’

‘No, father,’ she returned, ‘I do not.’

‘I now leave you to judge for yourself,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘I have
stated the case, as such cases are usually stated among practical minds;
I have stated it, as the case of your mother and myself was stated in its
time.  The rest, my dear Louisa, is for you to decide.’

From the beginning, she had sat looking at him fixedly.  As he now leaned
back in his chair, and bent his deep-set eyes upon her in his turn,
perhaps he might have seen one wavering moment in her, when she was
impelled to throw herself upon his breast, and give him the pent-up
confidences of her heart.  But, to see it, he must have overleaped at a
bound the artificial barriers he had for many years been erecting,
between himself and all those subtle essences of humanity which will
elude the utmost cunning of algebra until the last trumpet ever to be
sounded shall blow even algebra to wreck.  The barriers were too many and
too high for such a leap.  With his unbending, utilitarian,
matter-of-fact face, he hardened her again; and the moment shot away into
the plumbless depths of the past, to mingle with all the lost
opportunities that are drowned there.

Removing her eyes from him, she sat so long looking silently towards the
town, that he said, at length: ‘Are you consulting the chimneys of the
Coketown works, Louisa?’

‘There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke.  Yet
when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father!’ she answered, turning
quickly.

‘Of course I know that, Louisa.  I do not see the application of the
remark.’  To do him justice he did not, at all.

She passed it away with a slight motion of her hand, and concentrating
her attention upon him again, said, ‘Father, I have often thought that
life is very short.’—This was so distinctly one of his subjects that he
interposed.

‘It is short, no doubt, my dear.  Still, the average duration of human
life is proved to have increased of late years.  The calculations of
various life assurance and annuity offices, among other figures which
cannot go wrong, have established the fact.’

‘I speak of my own life, father.’

‘O indeed?  Still,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I need not point out to you,
Louisa, that it is governed by the laws which govern lives in the
aggregate.’

‘While it lasts, I would wish to do the little I can, and the little I am
fit for.  What does it matter?’

Mr. Gradgrind seemed rather at a loss to understand the last four words;
replying, ‘How, matter?  What matter, my dear?’

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ she went on in a steady, straight way, without regarding
this, ‘asks me to marry him.  The question I have to ask myself is, shall
I marry him?  That is so, father, is it not?  You have told me so,
father.  Have you not?’

‘Certainly, my dear.’

‘Let it be so.  Since Mr. Bounderby likes to take me thus, I am satisfied
to accept his proposal.  Tell him, father, as soon as you please, that
this was my answer.  Repeat it, word for word, if you can, because I
should wish him to know what I said.’

‘It is quite right, my dear,’ retorted her father approvingly, ‘to be
exact.  I will observe your very proper request.  Have you any wish in
reference to the period of your marriage, my child?’

‘None, father.  What does it matter!’

Mr. Gradgrind had drawn his chair a little nearer to her, and taken her
hand.  But, her repetition of these words seemed to strike with some
little discord on his ear.  He paused to look at her, and, still holding
her hand, said:

‘Louisa, I have not considered it essential to ask you one question,
because the possibility implied in it appeared to me to be too remote.
But perhaps I ought to do so.  You have never entertained in secret any
other proposal?’

‘Father,’ she returned, almost scornfully, ‘what other proposal can have
been made to _me_?  Whom have I seen?  Where have I been?  What are my
heart’s experiences?’

‘My dear Louisa,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, reassured and satisfied.  ‘You
correct me justly.  I merely wished to discharge my duty.’

‘What do _I_ know, father,’ said Louisa in her quiet manner, ‘of tastes
and fancies; of aspirations and affections; of all that part of my nature
in which such light things might have been nourished?  What escape have I
had from problems that could be demonstrated, and realities that could be
grasped?’  As she said it, she unconsciously closed her hand, as if upon
a solid object, and slowly opened it as though she were releasing dust or
ash.

‘My dear,’ assented her eminently practical parent, ‘quite true, quite
true.’

‘Why, father,’ she pursued, ‘what a strange question to ask _me_!  The
baby-preference that even I have heard of as common among children, has
never had its innocent resting-place in my breast.  You have been so
careful of me, that I never had a child’s heart.  You have trained me so
well, that I never dreamed a child’s dream.  You have dealt so wisely
with me, father, from my cradle to this hour, that I never had a child’s
belief or a child’s fear.’

Mr. Gradgrind was quite moved by his success, and by this testimony to
it.  ‘My dear Louisa,’ said he, ‘you abundantly repay my care.  Kiss me,
my dear girl.’

So, his daughter kissed him.  Detaining her in his embrace, he said, ‘I
may assure you now, my favourite child, that I am made happy by the sound
decision at which you have arrived.  Mr. Bounderby is a very remarkable
man; and what little disparity can be said to exist between you—if any—is
more than counterbalanced by the tone your mind has acquired.  It has
always been my object so to educate you, as that you might, while still
in your early youth, be (if I may so express myself) almost any age.
Kiss me once more, Louisa.  Now, let us go and find your mother.’

Accordingly, they went down to the drawing-room, where the esteemed lady
with no nonsense about her, was recumbent as usual, while Sissy worked
beside her.  She gave some feeble signs of returning animation when they
entered, and presently the faint transparency was presented in a sitting
attitude.

‘Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband, who had waited for the achievement of
this feat with some impatience, ‘allow me to present to you Mrs.
Bounderby.’

‘Oh!’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘so you have settled it!  Well, I’m sure I
hope your health may be good, Louisa; for if your head begins to split as
soon as you are married, which was the case with mine, I cannot consider
that you are to be envied, though I have no doubt you think you are, as
all girls do.  However, I give you joy, my dear—and I hope you may now
turn all your ological studies to good account, I am sure I do!  I must
give you a kiss of congratulation, Louisa; but don’t touch my right
shoulder, for there’s something running down it all day long.  And now
you see,’ whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind, adjusting her shawls after the
affectionate ceremony, ‘I shall be worrying myself, morning, noon, and
night, to know what I am to call him!’

‘Mrs. Gradgrind,’ said her husband, solemnly, ‘what do you mean?’

‘Whatever I am to call him, Mr. Gradgrind, when he is married to Louisa!
I must call him something.  It’s impossible,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, with a
mingled sense of politeness and injury, ‘to be constantly addressing him
and never giving him a name.  I cannot call him Josiah, for the name is
insupportable to me.  You yourself wouldn’t hear of Joe, you very well
know.  Am I to call my own son-in-law, Mister!  Not, I believe, unless
the time has arrived when, as an invalid, I am to be trampled upon by my
relations.  Then, what am I to call him!’

Nobody present having any suggestion to offer in the remarkable
emergency, Mrs. Gradgrind departed this life for the time being, after
delivering the following codicil to her remarks already executed:

‘As to the wedding, all I ask, Louisa, is,—and I ask it with a fluttering
in my chest, which actually extends to the soles of my feet,—that it may
take place soon.  Otherwise, I know it is one of those subjects I shall
never hear the last of.’

When Mr. Gradgrind had presented Mrs. Bounderby, Sissy had suddenly
turned her head, and looked, in wonder, in pity, in sorrow, in doubt, in
a multitude of emotions, towards Louisa.  Louisa had known it, and seen
it, without looking at her.  From that moment she was impassive, proud
and cold—held Sissy at a distance—changed to her altogether.



CHAPTER XVI
HUSBAND AND WIFE


MR. BOUNDERBY’S first disquietude on hearing of his happiness, was
occasioned by the necessity of imparting it to Mrs. Sparsit.  He could
not make up his mind how to do that, or what the consequences of the step
might be.  Whether she would instantly depart, bag and baggage, to Lady
Scadgers, or would positively refuse to budge from the premises; whether
she would be plaintive or abusive, tearful or tearing; whether she would
break her heart, or break the looking-glass; Mr. Bounderby could not all
foresee.  However, as it must be done, he had no choice but to do it; so,
after attempting several letters, and failing in them all, he resolved to
do it by word of mouth.

On his way home, on the evening he set aside for this momentous purpose,
he took the precaution of stepping into a chemist’s shop and buying a
bottle of the very strongest smelling-salts.  ‘By George!’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘if she takes it in the fainting way, I’ll have the skin off
her nose, at all events!’  But, in spite of being thus forearmed, he
entered his own house with anything but a courageous air; and appeared
before the object of his misgivings, like a dog who was conscious of
coming direct from the pantry.

‘Good evening, Mr. Bounderby!’

‘Good evening, ma’am, good evening.’  He drew up his chair, and Mrs.
Sparsit drew back hers, as who should say, ‘Your fireside, sir.  I freely
admit it.  It is for you to occupy it all, if you think proper.’

‘Don’t go to the North Pole, ma’am!’ said Mr. Bounderby.

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, and returned, though short of her
former position.

Mr. Bounderby sat looking at her, as, with the points of a stiff, sharp
pair of scissors, she picked out holes for some inscrutable ornamental
purpose, in a piece of cambric.  An operation which, taken in connexion
with the bushy eyebrows and the Roman nose, suggested with some
liveliness the idea of a hawk engaged upon the eyes of a tough little
bird.  She was so steadfastly occupied, that many minutes elapsed before
she looked up from her work; when she did so Mr. Bounderby bespoke her
attention with a hitch of his head.

‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, putting his hands in his
pockets, and assuring himself with his right hand that the cork of the
little bottle was ready for use, ‘I have no occasion to say to you, that
you are not only a lady born and bred, but a devilish sensible woman.’

‘Sir,’ returned the lady, ‘this is indeed not the first time that you
have honoured me with similar expressions of your good opinion.’

‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘I am going to astonish you.’

‘Yes, sir?’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, interrogatively, and in the most
tranquil manner possible.  She generally wore mittens, and she now laid
down her work, and smoothed those mittens.

‘I am going, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘to marry Tom Gradgrind’s daughter.’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘I hope you may be happy, Mr.
Bounderby.  Oh, indeed I hope you may be happy, sir!’  And she said it
with such great condescension as well as with such great compassion for
him, that Bounderby,—far more disconcerted than if she had thrown her
workbox at the mirror, or swooned on the hearthrug,—corked up the
smelling-salts tight in his pocket, and thought, ‘Now confound this
woman, who could have even guessed that she would take it in this way!’

‘I wish with all my heart, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, in a highly superior
manner; somehow she seemed, in a moment, to have established a right to
pity him ever afterwards; ‘that you may be in all respects very happy.’

‘Well, ma’am,’ returned Bounderby, with some resentment in his tone:
which was clearly lowered, though in spite of himself, ‘I am obliged to
you.  I hope I shall be.’

‘_Do_ you, sir!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with great affability.  ‘But
naturally you do; of course you do.’

A very awkward pause on Mr. Bounderby’s part, succeeded.  Mrs. Sparsit
sedately resumed her work and occasionally gave a small cough, which
sounded like the cough of conscious strength and forbearance.

‘Well, ma’am,’ resumed Bounderby, ‘under these circumstances, I imagine
it would not be agreeable to a character like yours to remain here,
though you would be very welcome here.’

‘Oh, dear no, sir, I could on no account think of that!’ Mrs. Sparsit
shook her head, still in her highly superior manner, and a little changed
the small cough—coughing now, as if the spirit of prophecy rose within
her, but had better be coughed down.

‘However, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘there are apartments at the Bank,
where a born and bred lady, as keeper of the place, would be rather a
catch than otherwise; and if the same terms—’

‘I beg your pardon, sir.  You were so good as to promise that you would
always substitute the phrase, annual compliment.’

‘Well, ma’am, annual compliment.  If the same annual compliment would be
acceptable there, why, I see nothing to part us, unless you do.’

‘Sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘The proposal is like yourself, and if the
position I shall assume at the Bank is one that I could occupy without
descending lower in the social scale—’

‘Why, of course it is,’ said Bounderby.  ‘If it was not, ma’am, you don’t
suppose that I should offer it to a lady who has moved in the society you
have moved in.  Not that _I_ care for such society, you know!  But _you_
do.’

‘Mr. Bounderby, you are very considerate.’

‘You’ll have your own private apartments, and you’ll have your coals and
your candles, and all the rest of it, and you’ll have your maid to attend
upon you, and you’ll have your light porter to protect you, and you’ll be
what I take the liberty of considering precious comfortable,’ said
Bounderby.

‘Sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, ‘say no more.  In yielding up my trust
here, I shall not be freed from the necessity of eating the bread of
dependence:’ she might have said the sweetbread, for that delicate
article in a savoury brown sauce was her favourite supper: ‘and I would
rather receive it from your hand, than from any other.  Therefore, sir, I
accept your offer gratefully, and with many sincere acknowledgments for
past favours.  And I hope, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, concluding in an
impressively compassionate manner, ‘I fondly hope that Miss Gradgrind may
be all you desire, and deserve!’

Nothing moved Mrs. Sparsit from that position any more.  It was in vain
for Bounderby to bluster or to assert himself in any of his explosive
ways; Mrs. Sparsit was resolved to have compassion on him, as a Victim.
She was polite, obliging, cheerful, hopeful; but, the more polite, the
more obliging, the more cheerful, the more hopeful, the more exemplary
altogether, she; the forlorner Sacrifice and Victim, he.  She had that
tenderness for his melancholy fate, that his great red countenance used
to break out into cold perspirations when she looked at him.

Meanwhile the marriage was appointed to be solemnized in eight weeks’
time, and Mr. Bounderby went every evening to Stone Lodge as an accepted
wooer.  Love was made on these occasions in the form of bracelets; and,
on all occasions during the period of betrothal, took a manufacturing
aspect.  Dresses were made, jewellery was made, cakes and gloves were
made, settlements were made, and an extensive assortment of Facts did
appropriate honour to the contract.  The business was all Fact, from
first to last.  The Hours did not go through any of those rosy
performances, which foolish poets have ascribed to them at such times;
neither did the clocks go any faster, or any slower, than at other
seasons.  The deadly statistical recorder in the Gradgrind observatory
knocked every second on the head as it was born, and buried it with his
accustomed regularity.

So the day came, as all other days come to people who will only stick to
reason; and when it came, there were married in the church of the florid
wooden legs—that popular order of architecture—Josiah Bounderby Esquire
of Coketown, to Louisa eldest daughter of Thomas Gradgrind Esquire of
Stone Lodge, M.P. for that borough.  And when they were united in holy
matrimony, they went home to breakfast at Stone Lodge aforesaid.

There was an improving party assembled on the auspicious occasion, who
knew what everything they had to eat and drink was made of, and how it
was imported or exported, and in what quantities, and in what bottoms,
whether native or foreign, and all about it.  The bridesmaids, down to
little Jane Gradgrind, were, in an intellectual point of view, fit
helpmates for the calculating boy; and there was no nonsense about any of
the company.

After breakfast, the bridegroom addressed them in the following terms:

‘Ladies and gentlemen, I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  Since you have
done my wife and myself the honour of drinking our healths and happiness,
I suppose I must acknowledge the same; though, as you all know me, and
know what I am, and what my extraction was, you won’t expect a speech
from a man who, when he sees a Post, says “that’s a Post,” and when he
sees a Pump, says “that’s a Pump,” and is not to be got to call a Post a
Pump, or a Pump a Post, or either of them a Toothpick.  If you want a
speech this morning, my friend and father-in-law, Tom Gradgrind, is a
Member of Parliament, and you know where to get it.  I am not your man.
However, if I feel a little independent when I look around this table
to-day, and reflect how little I thought of marrying Tom Gradgrind’s
daughter when I was a ragged street-boy, who never washed his face unless
it was at a pump, and that not oftener than once a fortnight, I hope I
may be excused.  So, I hope you like my feeling independent; if you
don’t, I can’t help it.  I _do_ feel independent.  Now I have mentioned,
and you have mentioned, that I am this day married to Tom Gradgrind’s
daughter.  I am very glad to be so.  It has long been my wish to be so.
I have watched her bringing-up, and I believe she is worthy of me.  At
the same time—not to deceive you—I believe I am worthy of her.  So, I
thank you, on both our parts, for the good-will you have shown towards
us; and the best wish I can give the unmarried part of the present
company, is this: I hope every bachelor may find as good a wife as I have
found.  And I hope every spinster may find as good a husband as my wife
has found.’

Shortly after which oration, as they were going on a nuptial trip to
Lyons, in order that Mr. Bounderby might take the opportunity of seeing
how the Hands got on in those parts, and whether they, too, required to
be fed with gold spoons; the happy pair departed for the railroad.  The
bride, in passing down-stairs, dressed for her journey, found Tom waiting
for her—flushed, either with his feelings, or the vinous part of the
breakfast.

‘What a game girl you are, to be such a first-rate sister, Loo!’
whispered Tom.

She clung to him as she should have clung to some far better nature that
day, and was a little shaken in her reserved composure for the first
time.

‘Old Bounderby’s quite ready,’ said Tom.  ‘Time’s up.  Good-bye!  I shall
be on the look-out for you, when you come back.  I say, my dear Loo!
AN’T it uncommonly jolly now!’

                                * * * * *

                          END OF THE FIRST BOOK




BOOK THE SECOND
_REAPING_


CHAPTER I
EFFECTS IN THE BANK


A SUNNY midsummer day.  There was such a thing sometimes, even in
Coketown.

Seen from a distance in such weather, Coketown lay shrouded in a haze of
its own, which appeared impervious to the sun’s rays.  You only knew the
town was there, because you knew there could have been no such sulky
blotch upon the prospect without a town.  A blur of soot and smoke, now
confusedly tending this way, now that way, now aspiring to the vault of
Heaven, now murkily creeping along the earth, as the wind rose and fell,
or changed its quarter: a dense formless jumble, with sheets of cross
light in it, that showed nothing but masses of darkness:—Coketown in the
distance was suggestive of itself, though not a brick of it could be
seen.

The wonder was, it was there at all.  It had been ruined so often, that
it was amazing how it had borne so many shocks.  Surely there never was
such fragile china-ware as that of which the millers of Coketown were
made.  Handle them never so lightly, and they fell to pieces with such
ease that you might suspect them of having been flawed before.  They were
ruined, when they were required to send labouring children to school;
they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works;
they were ruined, when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether
they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery;
they were utterly undone, when it was hinted that perhaps they need not
always make quite so much smoke.  Besides Mr. Bounderby’s gold spoon
which was generally received in Coketown, another prevalent fiction was
very popular there.  It took the form of a threat.  Whenever a Coketowner
felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely
alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for the consequences
of any of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace, that he
would ‘sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.’  This had terrified
the Home Secretary within an inch of his life, on several occasions.

However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all, that they never had
pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had
been kind enough to take mighty good care of it.  So there it was, in the
haze yonder; and it increased and multiplied.

The streets were hot and dusty on the summer day, and the sun was so
bright that it even shone through the heavy vapour drooping over
Coketown, and could not be looked at steadily.  Stokers emerged from low
underground doorways into factory yards, and sat on steps, and posts, and
palings, wiping their swarthy visages, and contemplating coals.  The
whole town seemed to be frying in oil.  There was a stifling smell of hot
oil everywhere.  The steam-engines shone with it, the dresses of the
Hands were soiled with it, the mills throughout their many stories oozed
and trickled it.  The atmosphere of those Fairy palaces was like the
breath of the simoom: and their inhabitants, wasting with heat, toiled
languidly in the desert.  But no temperature made the melancholy mad
elephants more mad or more sane.  Their wearisome heads went up and down
at the same rate, in hot weather and cold, wet weather and dry, fair
weather and foul.  The measured motion of their shadows on the walls, was
the substitute Coketown had to show for the shadows of rustling woods;
while, for the summer hum of insects, it could offer, all the year round,
from the dawn of Monday to the night of Saturday, the whirr of shafts and
wheels.

Drowsily they whirred all through this sunny day, making the passenger
more sleepy and more hot as he passed the humming walls of the mills.
Sun-blinds, and sprinklings of water, a little cooled the main streets
and the shops; but the mills, and the courts and alleys, baked at a
fierce heat.  Down upon the river that was black and thick with dye, some
Coketown boys who were at large—a rare sight there—rowed a crazy boat,
which made a spumous track upon the water as it jogged along, while every
dip of an oar stirred up vile smells.  But the sun itself, however
beneficent, generally, was less kind to Coketown than hard frost, and
rarely looked intently into any of its closer regions without engendering
more death than life.  So does the eye of Heaven itself become an evil
eye, when incapable or sordid hands are interposed between it and the
things it looks upon to bless.

Mrs. Sparsit sat in her afternoon apartment at the Bank, on the shadier
side of the frying street.  Office-hours were over: and at that period of
the day, in warm weather, she usually embellished with her genteel
presence, a managerial board-room over the public office.  Her own
private sitting-room was a story higher, at the window of which post of
observation she was ready, every morning, to greet Mr. Bounderby, as he
came across the road, with the sympathizing recognition appropriate to a
Victim.  He had been married now a year; and Mrs. Sparsit had never
released him from her determined pity a moment.

The Bank offered no violence to the wholesome monotony of the town.  It
was another red brick house, with black outside shutters, green inside
blinds, a black street-door up two white steps, a brazen door-plate, and
a brazen door-handle full stop.  It was a size larger than Mr.
Bounderby’s house, as other houses were from a size to half-a-dozen sizes
smaller; in all other particulars, it was strictly according to pattern.

Mrs. Sparsit was conscious that by coming in the evening-tide among the
desks and writing implements, she shed a feminine, not to say also
aristocratic, grace upon the office.  Seated, with her needlework or
netting apparatus, at the window, she had a self-laudatory sense of
correcting, by her ladylike deportment, the rude business aspect of the
place.  With this impression of her interesting character upon her, Mrs.
Sparsit considered herself, in some sort, the Bank Fairy.  The
townspeople who, in their passing and repassing, saw her there, regarded
her as the Bank Dragon keeping watch over the treasures of the mine.

What those treasures were, Mrs. Sparsit knew as little as they did.  Gold
and silver coin, precious paper, secrets that if divulged would bring
vague destruction upon vague persons (generally, however, people whom she
disliked), were the chief items in her ideal catalogue thereof.  For the
rest, she knew that after office-hours, she reigned supreme over all the
office furniture, and over a locked-up iron room with three locks,
against the door of which strong chamber the light porter laid his head
every night, on a truckle bed, that disappeared at cockcrow.  Further,
she was lady paramount over certain vaults in the basement, sharply
spiked off from communication with the predatory world; and over the
relics of the current day’s work, consisting of blots of ink, worn-out
pens, fragments of wafers, and scraps of paper torn so small, that
nothing interesting could ever be deciphered on them when Mrs. Sparsit
tried.  Lastly, she was guardian over a little armoury of cutlasses and
carbines, arrayed in vengeful order above one of the official
chimney-pieces; and over that respectable tradition never to be separated
from a place of business claiming to be wealthy—a row of
fire-buckets—vessels calculated to be of no physical utility on any
occasion, but observed to exercise a fine moral influence, almost equal
to bullion, on most beholders.

A deaf serving-woman and the light porter completed Mrs. Sparsit’s
empire.  The deaf serving-woman was rumoured to be wealthy; and a saying
had for years gone about among the lower orders of Coketown, that she
would be murdered some night when the Bank was shut, for the sake of her
money.  It was generally considered, indeed, that she had been due some
time, and ought to have fallen long ago; but she had kept her life, and
her situation, with an ill-conditioned tenacity that occasioned much
offence and disappointment.

Mrs. Sparsit’s tea was just set for her on a pert little table, with its
tripod of legs in an attitude, which she insinuated after office-hours,
into the company of the stern, leathern-topped, long board-table that
bestrode the middle of the room.  The light porter placed the tea-tray on
it, knuckling his forehead as a form of homage.

‘Thank you, Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Thank _you_, ma’am,’ returned the light porter.  He was a very light
porter indeed; as light as in the days when he blinkingly defined a
horse, for girl number twenty.

‘All is shut up, Bitzer?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘All is shut up, ma’am.’

‘And what,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, pouring out her tea, ‘is the news of the
day?  Anything?’

‘Well, ma’am, I can’t say that I have heard anything particular.  Our
people are a bad lot, ma’am; but that is no news, unfortunately.’

‘What are the restless wretches doing now?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Merely going on in the old way, ma’am.  Uniting, and leaguing, and
engaging to stand by one another.’

‘It is much to be regretted,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, making her nose more
Roman and her eyebrows more Coriolanian in the strength of her severity,
‘that the united masters allow of any such class-combinations.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ said Bitzer.

‘Being united themselves, they ought one and all to set their faces
against employing any man who is united with any other man,’ said Mrs.
Sparsit.

‘They have done that, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but it rather fell
through, ma’am.’

‘I do not pretend to understand these things,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with
dignity, ‘my lot having been signally cast in a widely different sphere;
and Mr. Sparsit, as a Powler, being also quite out of the pale of any
such dissensions.  I only know that these people must be conquered, and
that it’s high time it was done, once for all.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, with a demonstration of great respect for
Mrs. Sparsit’s oracular authority.  ‘You couldn’t put it clearer, I am
sure, ma’am.’

As this was his usual hour for having a little confidential chat with
Mrs. Sparsit, and as he had already caught her eye and seen that she was
going to ask him something, he made a pretence of arranging the rulers,
inkstands, and so forth, while that lady went on with her tea, glancing
through the open window, down into the street.

‘Has it been a busy day, Bitzer?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Not a very busy day, my lady.  About an average day.’  He now and then
slided into my lady, instead of ma’am, as an involuntary acknowledgment
of Mrs. Sparsit’s personal dignity and claims to reverence.

‘The clerks,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, carefully brushing an imperceptible
crumb of bread and butter from her left-hand mitten, ‘are trustworthy,
punctual, and industrious, of course?’

‘Yes, ma’am, pretty fair, ma’am.  With the usual exception.’

He held the respectable office of general spy and informer in the
establishment, for which volunteer service he received a present at
Christmas, over and above his weekly wage.  He had grown into an
extremely clear-headed, cautious, prudent young man, who was safe to rise
in the world.  His mind was so exactly regulated, that he had no
affections or passions.  All his proceedings were the result of the
nicest and coldest calculation; and it was not without cause that Mrs.
Sparsit habitually observed of him, that he was a young man of the
steadiest principle she had ever known.  Having satisfied himself, on his
father’s death, that his mother had a right of settlement in Coketown,
this excellent young economist had asserted that right for her with such
a steadfast adherence to the principle of the case, that she had been
shut up in the workhouse ever since.  It must be admitted that he allowed
her half a pound of tea a year, which was weak in him: first, because all
gifts have an inevitable tendency to pauperise the recipient, and
secondly, because his only reasonable transaction in that commodity would
have been to buy it for as little as he could possibly give, and sell it
for as much as he could possibly get; it having been clearly ascertained
by philosophers that in this is comprised the whole duty of man—not a
part of man’s duty, but the whole.

‘Pretty fair, ma’am.  With the usual exception, ma’am,’ repeated Bitzer.

‘Ah—h!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head over her tea-cup, and taking
a long gulp.

‘Mr. Thomas, ma’am, I doubt Mr. Thomas very much, ma’am, I don’t like his
ways at all.’

‘Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, in a very impressive manner, ‘do you
recollect my having said anything to you respecting names?’

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am.  It’s quite true that you did object to names
being used, and they’re always best avoided.’

‘Please to remember that I have a charge here,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with
her air of state.  ‘I hold a trust here, Bitzer, under Mr. Bounderby.
However improbable both Mr. Bounderby and myself might have deemed it
years ago, that he would ever become my patron, making me an annual
compliment, I cannot but regard him in that light.  From Mr. Bounderby I
have received every acknowledgment of my social station, and every
recognition of my family descent, that I could possibly expect.  More,
far more.  Therefore, to my patron I will be scrupulously true.  And I do
not consider, I will not consider, I cannot consider,’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
with a most extensive stock on hand of honour and morality, ‘that I
_should_ be scrupulously true, if I allowed names to be mentioned under
this roof, that are unfortunately—most unfortunately—no doubt of
that—connected with his.’

Bitzer knuckled his forehead again, and again begged pardon.

‘No, Bitzer,’ continued Mrs. Sparsit, ‘say an individual, and I will hear
you; say Mr. Thomas, and you must excuse me.’

‘With the usual exception, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, trying back, ‘of an
individual.’

‘Ah—h!’  Mrs. Sparsit repeated the ejaculation, the shake of the head
over her tea-cup, and the long gulp, as taking up the conversation again
at the point where it had been interrupted.

‘An individual, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, ‘has never been what he ought to
have been, since he first came into the place.  He is a dissipated,
extravagant idler.  He is not worth his salt, ma’am.  He wouldn’t get it
either, if he hadn’t a friend and relation at court, ma’am!’

‘Ah—h!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with another melancholy shake of her head.

‘I only hope, ma’am,’ pursued Bitzer, ‘that his friend and relation may
not supply him with the means of carrying on.  Otherwise, ma’am, we know
out of whose pocket _that_ money comes.’

‘Ah—h!’ sighed Mrs. Sparsit again, with another melancholy shake of her
head.

‘He is to be pitied, ma’am.  The last party I have alluded to, is to be
pitied, ma’am,’ said Bitzer.

‘Yes, Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘I have always pitied the delusion,
always.’

‘As to an individual, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, dropping his voice and drawing
nearer, ‘he is as improvident as any of the people in this town.  And you
know what _their_ improvidence is, ma’am.  No one could wish to know it
better than a lady of your eminence does.’

‘They would do well,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘to take example by you,
Bitzer.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.  But, since you do refer to me, now look at me, ma’am.
I have put by a little, ma’am, already.  That gratuity which I receive at
Christmas, ma’am: I never touch it.  I don’t even go the length of my
wages, though they’re not high, ma’am.  Why can’t they do as I have done,
ma’am?  What one person can do, another can do.’

This, again, was among the fictions of Coketown.  Any capitalist there,
who had made sixty thousand pounds out of sixpence, always professed to
wonder why the sixty thousand nearest Hands didn’t each make sixty
thousand pounds out of sixpence, and more or less reproached them every
one for not accomplishing the little feat.  What I did you can do.  Why
don’t you go and do it?

‘As to their wanting recreations, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, ‘it’s stuff and
nonsense.  _I_ don’t want recreations.  I never did, and I never shall; I
don’t like ’em.  As to their combining together; there are many of them,
I have no doubt, that by watching and informing upon one another could
earn a trifle now and then, whether in money or good will, and improve
their livelihood.  Then, why don’t they improve it, ma’am!  It’s the
first consideration of a rational creature, and it’s what they pretend to
want.’

‘Pretend indeed!’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘I am sure we are constantly hearing, ma’am, till it becomes quite
nauseous, concerning their wives and families,’ said Bitzer.  ‘Why look
at me, ma’am!  I don’t want a wife and family.  Why should they?’

‘Because they are improvident,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, ‘that’s where it is.  If they were more
provident and less perverse, ma’am, what would they do?  They would say,
“While my hat covers my family,” or “while my bonnet covers my
family,”—as the case might be, ma’am—“I have only one to feed, and that’s
the person I most like to feed.”’

‘To be sure,’ assented Mrs. Sparsit, eating muffin.

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, knuckling his forehead again, in return
for the favour of Mrs. Sparsit’s improving conversation.  ‘Would you wish
a little more hot water, ma’am, or is there anything else that I could
fetch you?’

‘Nothing just now, Bitzer.’

‘Thank you, ma’am.  I shouldn’t wish to disturb you at your meals, ma’am,
particularly tea, knowing your partiality for it,’ said Bitzer, craning a
little to look over into the street from where he stood; ‘but there’s a
gentleman been looking up here for a minute or so, ma’am, and he has come
across as if he was going to knock.  That _is_ his knock, ma’am, no
doubt.’

He stepped to the window; and looking out, and drawing in his head again,
confirmed himself with, ‘Yes, ma’am.  Would you wish the gentleman to be
shown in, ma’am?’

‘I don’t know who it can be,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, wiping her mouth and
arranging her mittens.

‘A stranger, ma’am, evidently.’

‘What a stranger can want at the Bank at this time of the evening, unless
he comes upon some business for which he is too late, I don’t know,’ said
Mrs. Sparsit, ‘but I hold a charge in this establishment from Mr.
Bounderby, and I will never shrink from it.  If to see him is any part of
the duty I have accepted, I will see him.  Use your own discretion,
Bitzer.’

Here the visitor, all unconscious of Mrs. Sparsit’s magnanimous words,
repeated his knock so loudly that the light porter hastened down to open
the door; while Mrs. Sparsit took the precaution of concealing her little
table, with all its appliances upon it, in a cupboard, and then decamped
up-stairs, that she might appear, if needful, with the greater dignity.

‘If you please, ma’am, the gentleman would wish to see you,’ said Bitzer,
with his light eye at Mrs. Sparsit’s keyhole.  So, Mrs. Sparsit, who had
improved the interval by touching up her cap, took her classical features
down-stairs again, and entered the board-room in the manner of a Roman
matron going outside the city walls to treat with an invading general.

The visitor having strolled to the window, and being then engaged in
looking carelessly out, was as unmoved by this impressive entry as man
could possibly be.  He stood whistling to himself with all imaginable
coolness, with his hat still on, and a certain air of exhaustion upon
him, in part arising from excessive summer, and in part from excessive
gentility.  For it was to be seen with half an eye that he was a thorough
gentleman, made to the model of the time; weary of everything, and
putting no more faith in anything than Lucifer.

‘I believe, sir,’ quoth Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you wished to see me.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, turning and removing his hat; ‘pray excuse
me.’

‘Humph!’ thought Mrs. Sparsit, as she made a stately bend.  ‘Five and
thirty, good-looking, good figure, good teeth, good voice, good breeding,
well-dressed, dark hair, bold eyes.’  All which Mrs. Sparsit observed in
her womanly way—like the Sultan who put his head in the pail of
water—merely in dipping down and coming up again.

‘Please to be seated, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Thank you.  Allow me.’  He placed a chair for her, but remained himself
carelessly lounging against the table.  ‘I left my servant at the railway
looking after the luggage—very heavy train and vast quantity of it in the
van—and strolled on, looking about me.  Exceedingly odd place.  Will you
allow me to ask you if it’s _always_ as black as this?’

‘In general much blacker,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, in her uncompromising
way.

‘Is it possible!  Excuse me: you are not a native, I think?’

‘No, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘It was once my good or ill fortune,
as it may be—before I became a widow—to move in a very different sphere.
My husband was a Powler.’

‘Beg your pardon, really!’ said the stranger.  ‘Was—?’

Mrs. Sparsit repeated, ‘A Powler.’

‘Powler Family,’ said the stranger, after reflecting a few moments.  Mrs.
Sparsit signified assent.  The stranger seemed a little more fatigued
than before.

‘You must be very much bored here?’ was the inference he drew from the
communication.

‘I am the servant of circumstances, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘and I have
long adapted myself to the governing power of my life.’

‘Very philosophical,’ returned the stranger, ‘and very exemplary and
laudable, and—’  It seemed to be scarcely worth his while to finish the
sentence, so he played with his watch-chain wearily.

‘May I be permitted to ask, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘to what I am
indebted for the favour of—’

‘Assuredly,’ said the stranger.  ‘Much obliged to you for reminding me.
I am the bearer of a letter of introduction to Mr. Bounderby, the banker.
Walking through this extraordinarily black town, while they were getting
dinner ready at the hotel, I asked a fellow whom I met; one of the
working people; who appeared to have been taking a shower-bath of
something fluffy, which I assume to be the raw material—’

Mrs. Sparsit inclined her head.

‘—Raw material—where Mr. Bounderby, the banker, might reside.  Upon
which, misled no doubt by the word Banker, he directed me to the Bank.
Fact being, I presume, that Mr. Bounderby the Banker does _not_ reside in
the edifice in which I have the honour of offering this explanation?’

‘No, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘he does not.’

‘Thank you.  I had no intention of delivering my letter at the present
moment, nor have I. But strolling on to the Bank to kill time, and having
the good fortune to observe at the window,’ towards which he languidly
waved his hand, then slightly bowed, ‘a lady of a very superior and
agreeable appearance, I considered that I could not do better than take
the liberty of asking that lady where Mr. Bounderby the Banker _does_
live.  Which I accordingly venture, with all suitable apologies, to do.’

The inattention and indolence of his manner were sufficiently relieved,
to Mrs. Sparsit’s thinking, by a certain gallantry at ease, which offered
her homage too.  Here he was, for instance, at this moment, all but
sitting on the table, and yet lazily bending over her, as if he
acknowledged an attraction in her that made her charming—in her way.

‘Banks, I know, are always suspicious, and officially must be,’ said the
stranger, whose lightness and smoothness of speech were pleasant
likewise; suggesting matter far more sensible and humorous than it ever
contained—which was perhaps a shrewd device of the founder of this
numerous sect, whosoever may have been that great man: ‘therefore I may
observe that my letter—here it is—is from the member for this
place—Gradgrind—whom I have had the pleasure of knowing in London.’

Mrs. Sparsit recognized the hand, intimated that such confirmation was
quite unnecessary, and gave Mr. Bounderby’s address, with all needful
clues and directions in aid.

‘Thousand thanks,’ said the stranger.  ‘Of course you know the Banker
well?’

‘Yes, sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘In my dependent relation towards
him, I have known him ten years.’

‘Quite an eternity!  I think he married Gradgrind’s daughter?’

‘Yes,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, suddenly compressing her mouth, ‘he had
that—honour.’

‘The lady is quite a philosopher, I am told?’

‘Indeed, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘_Is_ she?’

‘Excuse my impertinent curiosity,’ pursued the stranger, fluttering over
Mrs. Sparsit’s eyebrows, with a propitiatory air, ‘but you know the
family, and know the world.  I am about to know the family, and may have
much to do with them.  Is the lady so very alarming?  Her father gives
her such a portentously hard-headed reputation, that I have a burning
desire to know.  Is she absolutely unapproachable?  Repellently and
stunningly clever?  I see, by your meaning smile, you think not.  You
have poured balm into my anxious soul.  As to age, now.  Forty?  Five and
thirty?’

Mrs. Sparsit laughed outright.  ‘A chit,’ said she.  ‘Not twenty when she
was married.’

‘I give you my honour, Mrs. Powler,’ returned the stranger, detaching
himself from the table, ‘that I never was so astonished in my life!’

It really did seem to impress him, to the utmost extent of his capacity
of being impressed.  He looked at his informant for full a quarter of a
minute, and appeared to have the surprise in his mind all the time.  ‘I
assure you, Mrs. Powler,’ he then said, much exhausted, ‘that the
father’s manner prepared me for a grim and stony maturity.  I am obliged
to you, of all things, for correcting so absurd a mistake.  Pray excuse
my intrusion.  Many thanks.  Good day!’

He bowed himself out; and Mrs. Sparsit, hiding in the window curtain, saw
him languishing down the street on the shady side of the way, observed of
all the town.

‘What do you think of the gentleman, Bitzer?’ she asked the light porter,
when he came to take away.

‘Spends a deal of money on his dress, ma’am.’

‘It must be admitted,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that it’s very tasteful.’

‘Yes, ma’am,’ returned Bitzer, ‘if that’s worth the money.’

‘Besides which, ma’am,’ resumed Bitzer, while he was polishing the table,
‘he looks to me as if he gamed.’

‘It’s immoral to game,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘It’s ridiculous, ma’am,’ said Bitzer, ‘because the chances are against
the players.’

Whether it was that the heat prevented Mrs. Sparsit from working, or
whether it was that her hand was out, she did no work that night.  She
sat at the window, when the sun began to sink behind the smoke; she sat
there, when the smoke was burning red, when the colour faded from it,
when darkness seemed to rise slowly out of the ground, and creep upward,
upward, up to the house-tops, up the church steeple, up to the summits of
the factory chimneys, up to the sky.  Without a candle in the room, Mrs.
Sparsit sat at the window, with her hands before her, not thinking much
of the sounds of evening; the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs, the
rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices of passengers, the shrill street
cries, the clogs upon the pavement when it was their hour for going by,
the shutting-up of shop-shutters.  Not until the light porter announced
that her nocturnal sweetbread was ready, did Mrs. Sparsit arouse herself
from her reverie, and convey her dense black eyebrows—by that time
creased with meditation, as if they needed ironing out-up-stairs.

‘O, you Fool!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, when she was alone at her supper.  Whom
she meant, she did not say; but she could scarcely have meant the
sweetbread.



CHAPTER II
MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE


THE Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the throats of the
Graces.  They went about recruiting; and where could they enlist recruits
more hopefully, than among the fine gentlemen who, having found out
everything to be worth nothing, were equally ready for anything?

Moreover, the healthy spirits who had mounted to this sublime height were
attractive to many of the Gradgrind school.  They liked fine gentlemen;
they pretended that they did not, but they did.  They became exhausted in
imitation of them; and they yaw-yawed in their speech like them; and they
served out, with an enervated air, the little mouldy rations of political
economy, on which they regaled their disciples.  There never before was
seen on earth such a wonderful hybrid race as was thus produced.

Among the fine gentlemen not regularly belonging to the Gradgrind school,
there was one of a good family and a better appearance, with a happy turn
of humour which had told immensely with the House of Commons on the
occasion of his entertaining it with his (and the Board of Directors)
view of a railway accident, in which the most careful officers ever
known, employed by the most liberal managers ever heard of, assisted by
the finest mechanical contrivances ever devised, the whole in action on
the best line ever constructed, had killed five people and wounded
thirty-two, by a casualty without which the excellence of the whole
system would have been positively incomplete.  Among the slain was a cow,
and among the scattered articles unowned, a widow’s cap.  And the
honourable member had so tickled the House (which has a delicate sense of
humour) by putting the cap on the cow, that it became impatient of any
serious reference to the Coroner’s Inquest, and brought the railway off
with Cheers and Laughter.

Now, this gentleman had a younger brother of still better appearance than
himself, who had tried life as a Cornet of Dragoons, and found it a bore;
and had afterwards tried it in the train of an English minister abroad,
and found it a bore; and had then strolled to Jerusalem, and got bored
there; and had then gone yachting about the world, and got bored
everywhere.  To whom this honourable and jocular, member fraternally said
one day, ‘Jem, there’s a good opening among the hard Fact fellows, and
they want men.  I wonder you don’t go in for statistics.’  Jem, rather
taken by the novelty of the idea, and very hard up for a change, was as
ready to ‘go in’ for statistics as for anything else.  So, he went in.
He coached himself up with a blue-book or two; and his brother put it
about among the hard Fact fellows, and said, ‘If you want to bring in,
for any place, a handsome dog who can make you a devilish good speech,
look after my brother Jem, for he’s your man.’  After a few dashes in the
public meeting way, Mr. Gradgrind and a council of political sages
approved of Jem, and it was resolved to send him down to Coketown, to
become known there and in the neighbourhood.  Hence the letter Jem had
last night shown to Mrs. Sparsit, which Mr. Bounderby now held in his
hand; superscribed, ‘Josiah Bounderby, Esquire, Banker, Coketown.
Specially to introduce James Harthouse, Esquire.  Thomas Gradgrind.’

Within an hour of the receipt of this dispatch and Mr. James Harthouse’s
card, Mr. Bounderby put on his hat and went down to the Hotel.  There he
found Mr. James Harthouse looking out of window, in a state of mind so
disconsolate, that he was already half-disposed to ‘go in’ for something
else.

‘My name, sir,’ said his visitor, ‘is Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown.’

Mr. James Harthouse was very happy indeed (though he scarcely looked so)
to have a pleasure he had long expected.

‘Coketown, sir,’ said Bounderby, obstinately taking a chair, ‘is not the
kind of place you have been accustomed to.  Therefore, if you will allow
me—or whether you will or not, for I am a plain man—I’ll tell you
something about it before we go any further.’

Mr. Harthouse would be charmed.

‘Don’t be too sure of that,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I don’t promise it.  First
of all, you see our smoke.  That’s meat and drink to us.  It’s the
healthiest thing in the world in all respects, and particularly for the
lungs.  If you are one of those who want us to consume it, I differ from
you.  We are not going to wear the bottoms of our boilers out any faster
than we wear ’em out now, for all the humbugging sentiment in Great
Britain and Ireland.’

By way of ‘going in’ to the fullest extent, Mr. Harthouse rejoined, ‘Mr.
Bounderby, I assure you I am entirely and completely of your way of
thinking.  On conviction.’

‘I am glad to hear it,’ said Bounderby.  ‘Now, you have heard a lot of
talk about the work in our mills, no doubt.  You have?  Very good.  I’ll
state the fact of it to you.  It’s the pleasantest work there is, and
it’s the lightest work there is, and it’s the best-paid work there is.
More than that, we couldn’t improve the mills themselves, unless we laid
down Turkey carpets on the floors.  Which we’re not a-going to do.’

‘Mr. Bounderby, perfectly right.’

‘Lastly,’ said Bounderby, ‘as to our Hands.  There’s not a Hand in this
town, sir, man, woman, or child, but has one ultimate object in life.
That object is, to be fed on turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon.
Now, they’re not a-going—none of ’em—ever to be fed on turtle soup and
venison with a gold spoon.  And now you know the place.’

Mr. Harthouse professed himself in the highest degree instructed and
refreshed, by this condensed epitome of the whole Coketown question.

‘Why, you see,’ replied Mr. Bounderby, ‘it suits my disposition to have a
full understanding with a man, particularly with a public man, when I
make his acquaintance.  I have only one thing more to say to you, Mr.
Harthouse, before assuring you of the pleasure with which I shall
respond, to the utmost of my poor ability, to my friend Tom Gradgrind’s
letter of introduction.  You are a man of family.  Don’t you deceive
yourself by supposing for a moment that I am a man of family.  I am a bit
of dirty riff-raff, and a genuine scrap of tag, rag, and bobtail.’

If anything could have exalted Jem’s interest in Mr. Bounderby, it would
have been this very circumstance.  Or, so he told him.

‘So now,’ said Bounderby, ‘we may shake hands on equal terms.  I say,
equal terms, because although I know what I am, and the exact depth of
the gutter I have lifted myself out of, better than any man does, I am as
proud as you are.  I am just as proud as you are.  Having now asserted my
independence in a proper manner, I may come to how do you find yourself,
and I hope you’re pretty well.’

The better, Mr. Harthouse gave him to understand as they shook hands, for
the salubrious air of Coketown.  Mr. Bounderby received the answer with
favour.

‘Perhaps you know,’ said he, ‘or perhaps you don’t know, I married Tom
Gradgrind’s daughter.  If you have nothing better to do than to walk up
town with me, I shall be glad to introduce you to Tom Gradgrind’s
daughter.’

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Jem, ‘you anticipate my dearest wishes.’

They went out without further discourse; and Mr. Bounderby piloted the
new acquaintance who so strongly contrasted with him, to the private red
brick dwelling, with the black outside shutters, the green inside blinds,
and the black street door up the two white steps.  In the drawing-room of
which mansion, there presently entered to them the most remarkable girl
Mr. James Harthouse had ever seen.  She was so constrained, and yet so
careless; so reserved, and yet so watchful; so cold and proud, and yet so
sensitively ashamed of her husband’s braggart humility—from which she
shrunk as if every example of it were a cut or a blow; that it was quite
a new sensation to observe her.  In face she was no less remarkable than
in manner.  Her features were handsome; but their natural play was so
locked up, that it seemed impossible to guess at their genuine
expression.  Utterly indifferent, perfectly self-reliant, never at a
loss, and yet never at her ease, with her figure in company with them
there, and her mind apparently quite alone—it was of no use ‘going in’
yet awhile to comprehend this girl, for she baffled all penetration.

From the mistress of the house, the visitor glanced to the house itself.
There was no mute sign of a woman in the room.  No graceful little
adornment, no fanciful little device, however trivial, anywhere expressed
her influence.  Cheerless and comfortless, boastfully and doggedly rich,
there the room stared at its present occupants, unsoftened and unrelieved
by the least trace of any womanly occupation.  As Mr. Bounderby stood in
the midst of his household gods, so those unrelenting divinities occupied
their places around Mr. Bounderby, and they were worthy of one another,
and well matched.

‘This, sir,’ said Bounderby, ‘is my wife, Mrs. Bounderby: Tom Gradgrind’s
eldest daughter.  Loo, Mr. James Harthouse.  Mr. Harthouse has joined
your father’s muster-roll.  If he is not Tom Gradgrind’s colleague before
long, I believe we shall at least hear of him in connexion with one of
our neighbouring towns.  You observe, Mr. Harthouse, that my wife is my
junior.  I don’t know what she saw in me to marry me, but she saw
something in me, I suppose, or she wouldn’t have married me.  She has
lots of expensive knowledge, sir, political and otherwise.  If you want
to cram for anything, I should be troubled to recommend you to a better
adviser than Loo Bounderby.’

To a more agreeable adviser, or one from whom he would be more likely to
learn, Mr. Harthouse could never be recommended.

‘Come!’ said his host.  ‘If you’re in the complimentary line, you’ll get
on here, for you’ll meet with no competition.  I have never been in the
way of learning compliments myself, and I don’t profess to understand the
art of paying ’em.  In fact, despise ’em.  But, your bringing-up was
different from mine; mine was a real thing, by George!  You’re a
gentleman, and I don’t pretend to be one.  I am Josiah Bounderby of
Coketown, and that’s enough for me.  However, though I am not influenced
by manners and station, Loo Bounderby may be.  She hadn’t my
advantages—disadvantages you would call ’em, but I call ’em advantages—so
you’ll not waste your power, I dare say.’

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ said Jem, turning with a smile to Louisa, ‘is a noble
animal in a comparatively natural state, quite free from the harness in
which a conventional hack like myself works.’

‘You respect Mr. Bounderby very much,’ she quietly returned.  ‘It is
natural that you should.’

He was disgracefully thrown out, for a gentleman who had seen so much of
the world, and thought, ‘Now, how am I to take this?’

‘You are going to devote yourself, as I gather from what Mr. Bounderby
has said, to the service of your country.  You have made up your mind,’
said Louisa, still standing before him where she had first stopped—in all
the singular contrariety of her self-possession, and her being obviously
very ill at ease—‘to show the nation the way out of all its
difficulties.’

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ he returned, laughing, ‘upon my honour, no.  I will
make no such pretence to you.  I have seen a little, here and there, up
and down; I have found it all to be very worthless, as everybody has, and
as some confess they have, and some do not; and I am going in for your
respected father’s opinions—really because I have no choice of opinions,
and may as well back them as anything else.’

‘Have you none of your own?’ asked Louisa.

‘I have not so much as the slightest predilection left.  I assure you I
attach not the least importance to any opinions.  The result of the
varieties of boredom I have undergone, is a conviction (unless conviction
is too industrious a word for the lazy sentiment I entertain on the
subject), that any set of ideas will do just as much good as any other
set, and just as much harm as any other set.  There’s an English family
with a charming Italian motto.  What will be, will be.  It’s the only
truth going!’

This vicious assumption of honesty in dishonesty—a vice so dangerous, so
deadly, and so common—seemed, he observed, a little to impress her in his
favour.  He followed up the advantage, by saying in his pleasantest
manner: a manner to which she might attach as much or as little meaning
as she pleased: ‘The side that can prove anything in a line of units,
tens, hundreds, and thousands, Mrs. Bounderby, seems to me to afford the
most fun, and to give a man the best chance.  I am quite as much attached
to it as if I believed it.  I am quite ready to go in for it, to the same
extent as if I believed it.  And what more could I possibly do, if I did
believe it!’

‘You are a singular politician,’ said Louisa.

‘Pardon me; I have not even that merit.  We are the largest party in the
state, I assure you, Mrs. Bounderby, if we all fell out of our adopted
ranks and were reviewed together.’

Mr. Bounderby, who had been in danger of bursting in silence, interposed
here with a project for postponing the family dinner till half-past six,
and taking Mr. James Harthouse in the meantime on a round of visits to
the voting and interesting notabilities of Coketown and its vicinity.
The round of visits was made; and Mr. James Harthouse, with a discreet
use of his blue coaching, came off triumphantly, though with a
considerable accession of boredom.

In the evening, he found the dinner-table laid for four, but they sat
down only three.  It was an appropriate occasion for Mr. Bounderby to
discuss the flavour of the hap’orth of stewed eels he had purchased in
the streets at eight years old; and also of the inferior water, specially
used for laying the dust, with which he had washed down that repast.  He
likewise entertained his guest over the soup and fish, with the
calculation that he (Bounderby) had eaten in his youth at least three
horses under the guise of polonies and saveloys.  These recitals, Jem, in
a languid manner, received with ‘charming!’ every now and then; and they
probably would have decided him to ‘go in’ for Jerusalem again to-morrow
morning, had he been less curious respecting Louisa.

‘Is there nothing,’ he thought, glancing at her as she sat at the head of
the table, where her youthful figure, small and slight, but very
graceful, looked as pretty as it looked misplaced; ‘is there nothing that
will move that face?’

Yes!  By Jupiter, there was something, and here it was, in an unexpected
shape.  Tom appeared.  She changed as the door opened, and broke into a
beaming smile.

A beautiful smile.  Mr. James Harthouse might not have thought so much of
it, but that he had wondered so long at her impassive face.  She put out
her hand—a pretty little soft hand; and her fingers closed upon her
brother’s, as if she would have carried them to her lips.

‘Ay, ay?’ thought the visitor.  ‘This whelp is the only creature she
cares for.  So, so!’

The whelp was presented, and took his chair.  The appellation was not
flattering, but not unmerited.

‘When I was your age, young Tom,’ said Bounderby, ‘I was punctual, or I
got no dinner!’

‘When you were my age,’ resumed Tom, ‘you hadn’t a wrong balance to get
right, and hadn’t to dress afterwards.’

‘Never mind that now,’ said Bounderby.

‘Well, then,’ grumbled Tom.  ‘Don’t begin with me.’

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said Harthouse, perfectly hearing this under-strain as
it went on; ‘your brother’s face is quite familiar to me.  Can I have
seen him abroad?  Or at some public school, perhaps?’

‘No,’ she resumed, quite interested, ‘he has never been abroad yet, and
was educated here, at home.  Tom, love, I am telling Mr. Harthouse that
he never saw you abroad.’

‘No such luck, sir,’ said Tom.

There was little enough in him to brighten her face, for he was a sullen
young fellow, and ungracious in his manner even to her.  So much the
greater must have been the solitude of her heart, and her need of some
one on whom to bestow it.  ‘So much the more is this whelp the only
creature she has ever cared for,’ thought Mr. James Harthouse, turning it
over and over.  ‘So much the more.  So much the more.’

Both in his sister’s presence, and after she had left the room, the whelp
took no pains to hide his contempt for Mr. Bounderby, whenever he could
indulge it without the observation of that independent man, by making wry
faces, or shutting one eye.  Without responding to these telegraphic
communications, Mr. Harthouse encouraged him much in the course of the
evening, and showed an unusual liking for him.  At last, when he rose to
return to his hotel, and was a little doubtful whether he knew the way by
night, the whelp immediately proffered his services as guide, and turned
out with him to escort him thither.

            [Picture: Mr. Harthouse dines at the Bounderby’s]



CHAPTER III
THE WHELP


IT was very remarkable that a young gentleman who had been brought up
under one continuous system of unnatural restraint, should be a
hypocrite; but it was certainly the case with Tom.  It was very strange
that a young gentleman who had never been left to his own guidance for
five consecutive minutes, should be incapable at last of governing
himself; but so it was with Tom.  It was altogether unaccountable that a
young gentleman whose imagination had been strangled in his cradle,
should be still inconvenienced by its ghost in the form of grovelling
sensualities; but such a monster, beyond all doubt, was Tom.

‘Do you smoke?’ asked Mr. James Harthouse, when they came to the hotel.

‘I believe you!’ said Tom.

He could do no less than ask Tom up; and Tom could do no less than go up.
What with a cooling drink adapted to the weather, but not so weak as
cool; and what with a rarer tobacco than was to be bought in those parts;
Tom was soon in a highly free and easy state at his end of the sofa, and
more than ever disposed to admire his new friend at the other end.

Tom blew his smoke aside, after he had been smoking a little while, and
took an observation of his friend.  ‘He don’t seem to care about his
dress,’ thought Tom, ‘and yet how capitally he does it.  What an easy
swell he is!’

Mr. James Harthouse, happening to catch Tom’s eye, remarked that he drank
nothing, and filled his glass with his own negligent hand.

‘Thank’ee,’ said Tom.  ‘Thank’ee.  Well, Mr. Harthouse, I hope you have
had about a dose of old Bounderby to-night.’  Tom said this with one eye
shut up again, and looking over his glass knowingly, at his entertainer.

‘A very good fellow indeed!’ returned Mr. James Harthouse.

‘You think so, don’t you?’ said Tom.  And shut up his eye again.

Mr. James Harthouse smiled; and rising from his end of the sofa, and
lounging with his back against the chimney-piece, so that he stood before
the empty fire-grate as he smoked, in front of Tom and looking down at
him, observed:

‘What a comical brother-in-law you are!’

‘What a comical brother-in-law old Bounderby is, I think you mean,’ said
Tom.

‘You are a piece of caustic, Tom,’ retorted Mr. James Harthouse.

There was something so very agreeable in being so intimate with such a
waistcoat; in being called Tom, in such an intimate way, by such a voice;
in being on such off-hand terms so soon, with such a pair of whiskers;
that Tom was uncommonly pleased with himself.

‘Oh!  I don’t care for old Bounderby,’ said he, ‘if you mean that.  I
have always called old Bounderby by the same name when I have talked
about him, and I have always thought of him in the same way.  I am not
going to begin to be polite now, about old Bounderby.  It would be rather
late in the day.’

‘Don’t mind me,’ returned James; ‘but take care when his wife is by, you
know.’

‘His wife?’ said Tom.  ‘My sister Loo?  O yes!’  And he laughed, and took
a little more of the cooling drink.

James Harthouse continued to lounge in the same place and attitude,
smoking his cigar in his own easy way, and looking pleasantly at the
whelp, as if he knew himself to be a kind of agreeable demon who had only
to hover over him, and he must give up his whole soul if required.  It
certainly did seem that the whelp yielded to this influence.  He looked
at his companion sneakingly, he looked at him admiringly, he looked at
him boldly, and put up one leg on the sofa.

‘My sister Loo?’ said Tom.  ‘_She_ never cared for old Bounderby.’

‘That’s the past tense, Tom,’ returned Mr. James Harthouse, striking the
ash from his cigar with his little finger.  ‘We are in the present tense,
now.’

‘Verb neuter, not to care.  Indicative mood, present tense.  First person
singular, I do not care; second person singular, thou dost not care;
third person singular, she does not care,’ returned Tom.

‘Good!  Very quaint!’ said his friend.  ‘Though you don’t mean it.’

‘But I _do_ mean it,’ cried Tom.  ‘Upon my honour!  Why, you won’t tell
me, Mr. Harthouse, that you really suppose my sister Loo does care for
old Bounderby.’

‘My dear fellow,’ returned the other, ‘what am I bound to suppose, when I
find two married people living in harmony and happiness?’

Tom had by this time got both his legs on the sofa.  If his second leg
had not been already there when he was called a dear fellow, he would
have put it up at that great stage of the conversation.  Feeling it
necessary to do something then, he stretched himself out at greater
length, and, reclining with the back of his head on the end of the sofa,
and smoking with an infinite assumption of negligence, turned his common
face, and not too sober eyes, towards the face looking down upon him so
carelessly yet so potently.

‘You know our governor, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, ‘and therefore, you
needn’t be surprised that Loo married old Bounderby.  She never had a
lover, and the governor proposed old Bounderby, and she took him.’

‘Very dutiful in your interesting sister,’ said Mr. James Harthouse.

‘Yes, but she wouldn’t have been as dutiful, and it would not have come
off as easily,’ returned the whelp, ‘if it hadn’t been for me.’

The tempter merely lifted his eyebrows; but the whelp was obliged to go
on.

‘_I_ persuaded her,’ he said, with an edifying air of superiority.  ‘I
was stuck into old Bounderby’s bank (where I never wanted to be), and I
knew I should get into scrapes there, if she put old Bounderby’s pipe
out; so I told her my wishes, and she came into them.  She would do
anything for me.  It was very game of her, wasn’t it?’

‘It was charming, Tom!’

‘Not that it was altogether so important to her as it was to me,’
continued Tom coolly, ‘because my liberty and comfort, and perhaps my
getting on, depended on it; and she had no other lover, and staying at
home was like staying in jail—especially when I was gone.  It wasn’t as
if she gave up another lover for old Bounderby; but still it was a good
thing in her.’

‘Perfectly delightful.  And she gets on so placidly.’

‘Oh,’ returned Tom, with contemptuous patronage, ‘she’s a regular girl.
A girl can get on anywhere.  She has settled down to the life, and _she_
don’t mind.  It does just as well as another.  Besides, though Loo is a
girl, she’s not a common sort of girl.  She can shut herself up within
herself, and think—as I have often known her sit and watch the fire—for
an hour at a stretch.’

‘Ay, ay?  Has resources of her own,’ said Harthouse, smoking quietly.

‘Not so much of that as you may suppose,’ returned Tom; ‘for our governor
had her crammed with all sorts of dry bones and sawdust.  It’s his
system.’

‘Formed his daughter on his own model?’ suggested Harthouse.

‘His daughter?  Ah! and everybody else.  Why, he formed Me that way!’
said Tom.

‘Impossible!’

‘He did, though,’ said Tom, shaking his head.  ‘I mean to say, Mr.
Harthouse, that when I first left home and went to old Bounderby’s, I was
as flat as a warming-pan, and knew no more about life, than any oyster
does.’

‘Come, Tom!  I can hardly believe that.  A joke’s a joke.’

‘Upon my soul!’ said the whelp.  ‘I am serious; I am indeed!’  He smoked
with great gravity and dignity for a little while, and then added, in a
highly complacent tone, ‘Oh!  I have picked up a little since.  I don’t
deny that.  But I have done it myself; no thanks to the governor.’

‘And your intelligent sister?’

‘My intelligent sister is about where she was.  She used to complain to
me that she had nothing to fall back upon, that girls usually fall back
upon; and I don’t see how she is to have got over that since.  But _she_
don’t mind,’ he sagaciously added, puffing at his cigar again.  ‘Girls
can always get on, somehow.’

‘Calling at the Bank yesterday evening, for Mr. Bounderby’s address, I
found an ancient lady there, who seems to entertain great admiration for
your sister,’ observed Mr. James Harthouse, throwing away the last small
remnant of the cigar he had now smoked out.

‘Mother Sparsit!’ said Tom.  ‘What! you have seen her already, have you?’

His friend nodded.  Tom took his cigar out of his mouth, to shut up his
eye (which had grown rather unmanageable) with the greater expression,
and to tap his nose several times with his finger.

‘Mother Sparsit’s feeling for Loo is more than admiration, I should
think,’ said Tom.  ‘Say affection and devotion.  Mother Sparsit never set
her cap at Bounderby when he was a bachelor.  Oh no!’

These were the last words spoken by the whelp, before a giddy drowsiness
came upon him, followed by complete oblivion.  He was roused from the
latter state by an uneasy dream of being stirred up with a boot, and also
of a voice saying: ‘Come, it’s late.  Be off!’

‘Well!’ he said, scrambling from the sofa.  ‘I must take my leave of you
though.  I say.  Yours is very good tobacco.  But it’s too mild.’

‘Yes, it’s too mild,’ returned his entertainer.

‘It’s—it’s ridiculously mild,’ said Tom.  ‘Where’s the door!  Good
night!’

‘He had another odd dream of being taken by a waiter through a mist,
which, after giving him some trouble and difficulty, resolved itself into
the main street, in which he stood alone.  He then walked home pretty
easily, though not yet free from an impression of the presence and
influence of his new friend—as if he were lounging somewhere in the air,
in the same negligent attitude, regarding him with the same look.

The whelp went home, and went to bed.  If he had had any sense of what he
had done that night, and had been less of a whelp and more of a brother,
he might have turned short on the road, might have gone down to the
ill-smelling river that was dyed black, might have gone to bed in it for
good and all, and have curtained his head for ever with its filthy
waters.



CHAPTER IV
MEN AND BROTHERS


‘OH, my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown!  Oh, my friends
and fellow-countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding
despotism!  Oh, my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow-workmen, and
fellow-men!  I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round
one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors
that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the
sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of
our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon
the holy and eternal privileges of Brotherhood!’

‘Good!’  ‘Hear, hear, hear!’  ‘Hurrah!’ and other cries, arose in many
voices from various parts of the densely crowded and suffocatingly close
Hall, in which the orator, perched on a stage, delivered himself of this
and what other froth and fume he had in him.  He had declaimed himself
into a violent heat, and was as hoarse as he was hot.  By dint of roaring
at the top of his voice under a flaring gaslight, clenching his fists,
knitting his brows, setting his teeth, and pounding with his arms, he had
taken so much out of himself by this time, that he was brought to a stop,
and called for a glass of water.

As he stood there, trying to quench his fiery face with his drink of
water, the comparison between the orator and the crowd of attentive faces
turned towards him, was extremely to his disadvantage.  Judging him by
Nature’s evidence, he was above the mass in very little but the stage on
which he stood.  In many great respects he was essentially below them.
He was not so honest, he was not so manly, he was not so good-humoured;
he substituted cunning for their simplicity, and passion for their safe
solid sense.  An ill-made, high-shouldered man, with lowering brows, and
his features crushed into an habitually sour expression, he contrasted
most unfavourably, even in his mongrel dress, with the great body of his
hearers in their plain working clothes.  Strange as it always is to
consider any assembly in the act of submissively resigning itself to the
dreariness of some complacent person, lord or commoner, whom
three-fourths of it could, by no human means, raise out of the slough of
inanity to their own intellectual level, it was particularly strange, and
it was even particularly affecting, to see this crowd of earnest faces,
whose honesty in the main no competent observer free from bias could
doubt, so agitated by such a leader.

Good!  Hear, hear!  Hurrah!  The eagerness both of attention and
intention, exhibited in all the countenances, made them a most impressive
sight.  There was no carelessness, no languor, no idle curiosity; none of
the many shades of indifference to be seen in all other assemblies,
visible for one moment there.  That every man felt his condition to be,
somehow or other, worse than it might be; that every man considered it
incumbent on him to join the rest, towards the making of it better; that
every man felt his only hope to be in his allying himself to the comrades
by whom he was surrounded; and that in this belief, right or wrong
(unhappily wrong then), the whole of that crowd were gravely, deeply,
faithfully in earnest; must have been as plain to any one who chose to
see what was there, as the bare beams of the roof and the whitened brick
walls.  Nor could any such spectator fail to know in his own breast, that
these men, through their very delusions, showed great qualities,
susceptible of being turned to the happiest and best account; and that to
pretend (on the strength of sweeping axioms, howsoever cut and dried)
that they went astray wholly without cause, and of their own irrational
wills, was to pretend that there could be smoke without fire, death
without birth, harvest without seed, anything or everything produced from
nothing.

The orator having refreshed himself, wiped his corrugated forehead from
left to right several times with his handkerchief folded into a pad, and
concentrated all his revived forces, in a sneer of great disdain and
bitterness.

‘But oh, my friends and brothers!  Oh, men and Englishmen, the
down-trodden operatives of Coketown!  What shall we say of that man—that
working-man, that I should find it necessary so to libel the glorious
name—who, being practically and well acquainted with the grievances and
wrongs of you, the injured pith and marrow of this land, and having heard
you, with a noble and majestic unanimity that will make Tyrants tremble,
resolve for to subscribe to the funds of the United Aggregate Tribunal,
and to abide by the injunctions issued by that body for your benefit,
whatever they may be—what, I ask you, will you say of that working-man,
since such I must acknowledge him to be, who, at such a time, deserts his
post, and sells his flag; who, at such a time, turns a traitor and a
craven and a recreant, who, at such a time, is not ashamed to make to you
the dastardly and humiliating avowal that he will hold himself aloof, and
will _not_ be one of those associated in the gallant stand for Freedom
and for Right?’

The assembly was divided at this point.  There were some groans and
hisses, but the general sense of honour was much too strong for the
condemnation of a man unheard.  ‘Be sure you’re right, Slackbridge!’
‘Put him up!’  ‘Let’s hear him!’  Such things were said on many sides.
Finally, one strong voice called out, ‘Is the man heer?  If the man’s
heer, Slackbridge, let’s hear the man himseln, ’stead o’ yo.’  Which was
received with a round of applause.

Slackbridge, the orator, looked about him with a withering smile; and,
holding out his right hand at arm’s length (as the manner of all
Slackbridges is), to still the thundering sea, waited until there was a
profound silence.

‘Oh, my friends and fellow-men!’ said Slackbridge then, shaking his head
with violent scorn, ‘I do not wonder that you, the prostrate sons of
labour, are incredulous of the existence of such a man.  But he who sold
his birthright for a mess of pottage existed, and Judas Iscariot existed,
and Castlereagh existed, and this man exists!’

Here, a brief press and confusion near the stage, ended in the man
himself standing at the orator’s side before the concourse.  He was pale
and a little moved in the face—his lips especially showed it; but he
stood quiet, with his left hand at his chin, waiting to be heard.  There
was a chairman to regulate the proceedings, and this functionary now took
the case into his own hands.

‘My friends,’ said he, ‘by virtue o’ my office as your president, I askes
o’ our friend Slackbridge, who may be a little over hetter in this
business, to take his seat, whiles this man Stephen Blackpool is heern.
You all know this man Stephen Blackpool.  You know him awlung o’ his
misfort’ns, and his good name.’

With that, the chairman shook him frankly by the hand, and sat down
again.  Slackbridge likewise sat down, wiping his hot forehead—always
from left to right, and never the reverse way.

‘My friends,’ Stephen began, in the midst of a dead calm; ‘I ha’ hed
what’s been spok’n o’ me, and ’tis lickly that I shan’t mend it.  But I’d
liefer you’d hearn the truth concernin myseln, fro my lips than fro onny
other man’s, though I never cud’n speak afore so monny, wi’out bein
moydert and muddled.’

Slackbridge shook his head as if he would shake it off, in his
bitterness.

‘I’m th’ one single Hand in Bounderby’s mill, o’ a’ the men theer, as
don’t coom in wi’ th’ proposed reg’lations.  I canna coom in wi’ ’em.  My
friends, I doubt their doin’ yo onny good.  Licker they’ll do yo hurt.’

Slackbridge laughed, folded his arms, and frowned sarcastically.

‘But ’t an’t sommuch for that as I stands out.  If that were aw, I’d coom
in wi’ th’ rest.  But I ha’ my reasons—mine, yo see—for being hindered;
not on’y now, but awlus—awlus—life long!’

Slackbridge jumped up and stood beside him, gnashing and tearing.  ‘Oh,
my friends, what but this did I tell you?  Oh, my fellow-countrymen, what
warning but this did I give you?  And how shows this recreant conduct in
a man on whom unequal laws are known to have fallen heavy?  Oh, you
Englishmen, I ask you how does this subornation show in one of
yourselves, who is thus consenting to his own undoing and to yours, and
to your children’s and your children’s children’s?’

There was some applause, and some crying of Shame upon the man; but the
greater part of the audience were quiet.  They looked at Stephen’s worn
face, rendered more pathetic by the homely emotions it evinced; and, in
the kindness of their nature, they were more sorry than indignant.

‘’Tis this Delegate’s trade for t’ speak,’ said Stephen, ‘an’ he’s paid
for ’t, an’ he knows his work.  Let him keep to ’t.  Let him give no heed
to what I ha had’n to bear.  That’s not for him.  That’s not for nobbody
but me.’

There was a propriety, not to say a dignity in these words, that made the
hearers yet more quiet and attentive.  The same strong voice called out,
‘Slackbridge, let the man be heern, and howd thee tongue!’  Then the
place was wonderfully still.

‘My brothers,’ said Stephen, whose low voice was distinctly heard, ‘and
my fellow-workmen—for that yo are to me, though not, as I knows on, to
this delegate here—I ha but a word to sen, and I could sen nommore if I
was to speak till Strike o’ day.  I know weel, aw what’s afore me.  I
know weel that yo aw resolve to ha nommore ado wi’ a man who is not wi’
yo in this matther.  I know weel that if I was a lyin parisht i’ th’
road, yo’d feel it right to pass me by, as a forrenner and stranger.
What I ha getn, I mun mak th’ best on.’

‘Stephen Blackpool,’ said the chairman, rising, ‘think on ’t agen.  Think
on ’t once agen, lad, afore thou’rt shunned by aw owd friends.’

There was an universal murmur to the same effect, though no man
articulated a word.  Every eye was fixed on Stephen’s face.  To repent of
his determination, would be to take a load from all their minds.  He
looked around him, and knew that it was so.  Not a grain of anger with
them was in his heart; he knew them, far below their surface weaknesses
and misconceptions, as no one but their fellow-labourer could.

‘I ha thowt on ’t, above a bit, sir.  I simply canna coom in.  I mun go
th’ way as lays afore me.  I mun tak my leave o’ aw heer.’

He made a sort of reverence to them by holding up his arms, and stood for
the moment in that attitude; not speaking until they slowly dropped at
his sides.

‘Monny’s the pleasant word as soom heer has spok’n wi’ me; monny’s the
face I see heer, as I first seen when I were yoong and lighter heart’n
than now.  I ha’ never had no fratch afore, sin ever I were born, wi’ any
o’ my like; Gonnows I ha’ none now that’s o’ my makin’.  Yo’ll ca’ me
traitor and that—yo I mean t’ say,’ addressing Slackbridge, ‘but ’tis
easier to ca’ than mak’ out.  So let be.’

He had moved away a pace or two to come down from the platform, when he
remembered something he had not said, and returned again.

‘Haply,’ he said, turning his furrowed face slowly about, that he might
as it were individually address the whole audience, those both near and
distant; ‘haply, when this question has been tak’n up and discoosed,
there’ll be a threat to turn out if I’m let to work among yo.  I hope I
shall die ere ever such a time cooms, and I shall work solitary among yo
unless it cooms—truly, I mun do ’t, my friends; not to brave yo, but to
live.  I ha nobbut work to live by; and wheerever can I go, I who ha
worked sin I were no heighth at aw, in Coketown heer?  I mak’ no
complaints o’ bein turned to the wa’, o’ bein outcasten and overlooken
fro this time forrard, but hope I shall be let to work.  If there is any
right for me at aw, my friends, I think ’tis that.’

Not a word was spoken.  Not a sound was audible in the building, but the
slight rustle of men moving a little apart, all along the centre of the
room, to open a means of passing out, to the man with whom they had all
bound themselves to renounce companionship.  Looking at no one, and going
his way with a lowly steadiness upon him that asserted nothing and sought
nothing, Old Stephen, with all his troubles on his head, left the scene.

Then Slackbridge, who had kept his oratorical arm extended during the
going out, as if he were repressing with infinite solicitude and by a
wonderful moral power the vehement passions of the multitude, applied
himself to raising their spirits.  Had not the Roman Brutus, oh, my
British countrymen, condemned his son to death; and had not the Spartan
mothers, oh my soon to be victorious friends, driven their flying
children on the points of their enemies’ swords?  Then was it not the
sacred duty of the men of Coketown, with forefathers before them, an
admiring world in company with them, and a posterity to come after them,
to hurl out traitors from the tents they had pitched in a sacred and a
God-like cause?  The winds of heaven answered Yes; and bore Yes, east,
west, north, and south.  And consequently three cheers for the United
Aggregate Tribunal!

Slackbridge acted as fugleman, and gave the time.  The multitude of
doubtful faces (a little conscience-stricken) brightened at the sound,
and took it up.  Private feeling must yield to the common cause.  Hurrah!
The roof yet vibrated with the cheering, when the assembly dispersed.

Thus easily did Stephen Blackpool fall into the loneliest of lives, the
life of solitude among a familiar crowd.  The stranger in the land who
looks into ten thousand faces for some answering look and never finds it,
is in cheering society as compared with him who passes ten averted faces
daily, that were once the countenances of friends.  Such experience was
to be Stephen’s now, in every waking moment of his life; at his work, on
his way to it and from it, at his door, at his window, everywhere.  By
general consent, they even avoided that side of the street on which he
habitually walked; and left it, of all the working men, to him only.

He had been for many years, a quiet silent man, associating but little
with other men, and used to companionship with his own thoughts.  He had
never known before the strength of the want in his heart for the frequent
recognition of a nod, a look, a word; or the immense amount of relief
that had been poured into it by drops through such small means.  It was
even harder than he could have believed possible, to separate in his own
conscience his abandonment by all his fellows from a baseless sense of
shame and disgrace.

The first four days of his endurance were days so long and heavy, that he
began to be appalled by the prospect before him.  Not only did he see no
Rachael all the time, but he avoided every chance of seeing her; for,
although he knew that the prohibition did not yet formally extend to the
women working in the factories, he found that some of them with whom he
was acquainted were changed to him, and he feared to try others, and
dreaded that Rachael might be even singled out from the rest if she were
seen in his company.  So, he had been quite alone during the four days,
and had spoken to no one, when, as he was leaving his work at night, a
young man of a very light complexion accosted him in the street.

‘Your name’s Blackpool, ain’t it?’ said the young man.

Stephen coloured to find himself with his hat in his hand, in his
gratitude for being spoken to, or in the suddenness of it, or both.  He
made a feint of adjusting the lining, and said, ‘Yes.’

‘You are the Hand they have sent to Coventry, I mean?’ said Bitzer, the
very light young man in question.

Stephen answered ‘Yes,’ again.

‘I supposed so, from their all appearing to keep away from you.  Mr.
Bounderby wants to speak to you.  You know his house, don’t you?’

Stephen said ‘Yes,’ again.

‘Then go straight up there, will you?’ said Bitzer.  ‘You’re expected,
and have only to tell the servant it’s you.  I belong to the Bank; so, if
you go straight up without me (I was sent to fetch you), you’ll save me a
walk.’

Stephen, whose way had been in the contrary direction, turned about, and
betook himself as in duty bound, to the red brick castle of the giant
Bounderby.



CHAPTER V
MEN AND MASTERS


‘WELL, Stephen,’ said Bounderby, in his windy manner, ‘what’s this I
hear?  What have these pests of the earth been doing to _you_?  Come in,
and speak up.’

It was into the drawing-room that he was thus bidden.  A tea-table was
set out; and Mr. Bounderby’s young wife, and her brother, and a great
gentleman from London, were present.  To whom Stephen made his obeisance,
closing the door and standing near it, with his hat in his hand.

‘This is the man I was telling you about, Harthouse,’ said Mr. Bounderby.
The gentleman he addressed, who was talking to Mrs. Bounderby on the
sofa, got up, saying in an indolent way, ‘Oh really?’ and dawdled to the
hearthrug where Mr. Bounderby stood.

‘Now,’ said Bounderby, ‘speak up!’

After the four days he had passed, this address fell rudely and
discordantly on Stephen’s ear.  Besides being a rough handling of his
wounded mind, it seemed to assume that he really was the self-interested
deserter he had been called.

‘What were it, sir,’ said Stephen, ‘as yo were pleased to want wi’ me?’

‘Why, I have told you,’ returned Bounderby.  ‘Speak up like a man, since
you are a man, and tell us about yourself and this Combination.’

‘Wi’ yor pardon, sir,’ said Stephen Blackpool, ‘I ha’ nowt to sen about
it.’

Mr. Bounderby, who was always more or less like a Wind, finding something
in his way here, began to blow at it directly.

‘Now, look here, Harthouse,’ said he, ‘here’s a specimen of ’em.  When
this man was here once before, I warned this man against the mischievous
strangers who are always about—and who ought to be hanged wherever they
are found—and I told this man that he was going in the wrong direction.
Now, would you believe it, that although they have put this mark upon
him, he is such a slave to them still, that he’s afraid to open his lips
about them?’

‘I sed as I had nowt to sen, sir; not as I was fearfo’ o’ openin’ my
lips.’

‘You said!  Ah!  _I_ know what you said; more than that, I know what you
mean, you see.  Not always the same thing, by the Lord Harry!  Quite
different things.  You had better tell us at once, that that fellow
Slackbridge is not in the town, stirring up the people to mutiny; and
that he is not a regular qualified leader of the people: that is, a most
confounded scoundrel.  You had better tell us so at once; you can’t
deceive me.  You want to tell us so.  Why don’t you?’

‘I’m as sooary as yo, sir, when the people’s leaders is bad,’ said
Stephen, shaking his head.  ‘They taks such as offers.  Haply ’tis na’
the sma’est o’ their misfortuns when they can get no better.’

The wind began to get boisterous.

‘Now, you’ll think this pretty well, Harthouse,’ said Mr. Bounderby.
‘You’ll think this tolerably strong.  You’ll say, upon my soul this is a
tidy specimen of what my friends have to deal with; but this is nothing,
sir!  You shall hear me ask this man a question.  Pray, Mr.
Blackpool’—wind springing up very fast—‘may I take the liberty of asking
you how it happens that you refused to be in this Combination?’

‘How ’t happens?’

‘Ah!’ said Mr. Bounderby, with his thumbs in the arms of his coat, and
jerking his head and shutting his eyes in confidence with the opposite
wall: ‘how it happens.’

‘I’d leefer not coom to ’t, sir; but sin you put th’ question—an’ not
want’n t’ be ill-manner’n—I’ll answer.  I ha passed a promess.’

‘Not to me, you know,’ said Bounderby.  (Gusty weather with deceitful
calms.  One now prevailing.)

‘O no, sir.  Not to yo.’

‘As for me, any consideration for me has had just nothing at all to do
with it,’ said Bounderby, still in confidence with the wall.  ‘If only
Josiah Bounderby of Coketown had been in question, you would have joined
and made no bones about it?’

‘Why yes, sir.  ’Tis true.’

‘Though he knows,’ said Mr. Bounderby, now blowing a gale, ‘that there
are a set of rascals and rebels whom transportation is too good for!
Now, Mr. Harthouse, you have been knocking about in the world some time.
Did you ever meet with anything like that man out of this blessed
country?’  And Mr. Bounderby pointed him out for inspection, with an
angry finger.

‘Nay, ma’am,’ said Stephen Blackpool, staunchly protesting against the
words that had been used, and instinctively addressing himself to Louisa,
after glancing at her face.  ‘Not rebels, nor yet rascals.  Nowt o’ th’
kind, ma’am, nowt o’ th’ kind.  They’ve not doon me a kindness, ma’am, as
I know and feel.  But there’s not a dozen men amoong ’em, ma’am—a dozen?
Not six—but what believes as he has doon his duty by the rest and by
himseln.  God forbid as I, that ha’ known, and had’n experience o’ these
men aw my life—I, that ha’ ett’n an’ droonken wi’ ’em, an’ seet’n wi’
’em, and toil’n wi’ ’em, and lov’n ’em, should fail fur to stan by ’em
wi’ the truth, let ’em ha’ doon to me what they may!’

He spoke with the rugged earnestness of his place and character—deepened
perhaps by a proud consciousness that he was faithful to his class under
all their mistrust; but he fully remembered where he was, and did not
even raise his voice.

‘No, ma’am, no.  They’re true to one another, faithfo’ to one another,
’fectionate to one another, e’en to death.  Be poor amoong ’em, be sick
amoong ’em, grieve amoong ’em for onny o’ th’ monny causes that carries
grief to the poor man’s door, an’ they’ll be tender wi’ yo, gentle wi’
yo, comfortable wi’ yo, Chrisen wi’ yo.  Be sure o’ that, ma’am.  They’d
be riven to bits, ere ever they’d be different.’

‘In short,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘it’s because they are so full of virtues
that they have turned you adrift.  Go through with it while you are about
it.  Out with it.’

‘How ’tis, ma’am,’ resumed Stephen, appearing still to find his natural
refuge in Louisa’s face, ‘that what is best in us fok, seems to turn us
most to trouble an’ misfort’n an’ mistake, I dunno.  But ’tis so.  I know
’tis, as I know the heavens is over me ahint the smoke.  We’re patient
too, an’ wants in general to do right.  An’ I canna think the fawt is aw
wi’ us.’

‘Now, my friend,’ said Mr. Bounderby, whom he could not have exasperated
more, quite unconscious of it though he was, than by seeming to appeal to
any one else, ‘if you will favour me with your attention for half a
minute, I should like to have a word or two with you.  You said just now,
that you had nothing to tell us about this business.  You are quite sure
of that before we go any further.’

‘Sir, I am sure on ’t.’

‘Here’s a gentleman from London present,’ Mr. Bounderby made a backhanded
point at Mr. James Harthouse with his thumb, ‘a Parliament gentleman.  I
should like him to hear a short bit of dialogue between you and me,
instead of taking the substance of it—for I know precious well,
beforehand, what it will be; nobody knows better than I do, take
notice!—instead of receiving it on trust from my mouth.’

Stephen bent his head to the gentleman from London, and showed a rather
more troubled mind than usual.  He turned his eyes involuntarily to his
former refuge, but at a look from that quarter (expressive though
instantaneous) he settled them on Mr. Bounderby’s face.

‘Now, what do you complain of?’ asked Mr. Bounderby.

‘I ha’ not coom here, sir,’ Stephen reminded him, ‘to complain.  I coom
for that I were sent for.’

‘What,’ repeated Mr. Bounderby, folding his arms, ‘do you people, in a
general way, complain of?’

Stephen looked at him with some little irresolution for a moment, and
then seemed to make up his mind.

‘Sir, I were never good at showin o ’t, though I ha had’n my share in
feeling o ’t.  ’Deed we are in a muddle, sir.  Look round town—so rich as
’tis—and see the numbers o’ people as has been broughten into bein heer,
fur to weave, an’ to card, an’ to piece out a livin’, aw the same one
way, somehows, ’twixt their cradles and their graves.  Look how we live,
an’ wheer we live, an’ in what numbers, an’ by what chances, and wi’ what
sameness; and look how the mills is awlus a goin, and how they never
works us no nigher to ony dis’ant object—ceptin awlus, Death.  Look how
you considers of us, and writes of us, and talks of us, and goes up wi’
yor deputations to Secretaries o’ State ’bout us, and how yo are awlus
right, and how we are awlus wrong, and never had’n no reason in us sin
ever we were born.  Look how this ha growen an’ growen, sir, bigger an’
bigger, broader an’ broader, harder an’ harder, fro year to year, fro
generation unto generation.  Who can look on ’t, sir, and fairly tell a
man ’tis not a muddle?’

‘Of course,’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Now perhaps you’ll let the gentleman
know, how you would set this muddle (as you’re so fond of calling it) to
rights.’

‘I donno, sir.  I canna be expecten to ’t.  ’Tis not me as should be
looken to for that, sir.  ’Tis them as is put ower me, and ower aw the
rest of us.  What do they tak upon themseln, sir, if not to do’t?’

‘I’ll tell you something towards it, at any rate,’ returned Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘We will make an example of half a dozen Slackbridges.  We’ll
indict the blackguards for felony, and get ’em shipped off to penal
settlements.’

Stephen gravely shook his head.

‘Don’t tell me we won’t, man,’ said Mr. Bounderby, by this time blowing a
hurricane, ‘because we will, I tell you!’

‘Sir,’ returned Stephen, with the quiet confidence of absolute certainty,
‘if yo was t’ tak a hundred Slackbridges—aw as there is, and aw the
number ten times towd—an’ was t’ sew ’em up in separate sacks, an’ sink
’em in the deepest ocean as were made ere ever dry land coom to be, yo’d
leave the muddle just wheer ’tis.  Mischeevous strangers!’ said Stephen,
with an anxious smile; ‘when ha we not heern, I am sure, sin ever we can
call to mind, o’ th’ mischeevous strangers!  ’Tis not by _them_ the
trouble’s made, sir.  ’Tis not wi’ _them_ ’t commences.  I ha no favour
for ’em—I ha no reason to favour ’em—but ’tis hopeless and useless to
dream o’ takin them fro their trade, ’stead o’ takin their trade fro
them!  Aw that’s now about me in this room were heer afore I coom, an’
will be heer when I am gone.  Put that clock aboard a ship an’ pack it
off to Norfolk Island, an’ the time will go on just the same.  So ’tis
wi’ Slackbridge every bit.’

Reverting for a moment to his former refuge, he observed a cautionary
movement of her eyes towards the door.  Stepping back, he put his hand
upon the lock.  But he had not spoken out of his own will and desire; and
he felt it in his heart a noble return for his late injurious treatment
to be faithful to the last to those who had repudiated him.  He stayed to
finish what was in his mind.

‘Sir, I canna, wi’ my little learning an’ my common way, tell the
genelman what will better aw this—though some working men o’ this town
could, above my powers—but I can tell him what I know will never do ’t.
The strong hand will never do ’t.  Vict’ry and triumph will never do ’t.
Agreeing fur to mak one side unnat’rally awlus and for ever right, and
toother side unnat’rally awlus and for ever wrong, will never, never do
’t.  Nor yet lettin alone will never do ’t.  Let thousands upon thousands
alone, aw leading the like lives and aw faw’en into the like muddle, and
they will be as one, and yo will be as anoother, wi’ a black unpassable
world betwixt yo, just as long or short a time as sich-like misery can
last.  Not drawin nigh to fok, wi’ kindness and patience an’ cheery ways,
that so draws nigh to one another in their monny troubles, and so
cherishes one another in their distresses wi’ what they need
themseln—like, I humbly believe, as no people the genelman ha seen in aw
his travels can beat—will never do ’t till th’ Sun turns t’ ice.  Most o’
aw, rating ’em as so much Power, and reg’latin ’em as if they was figures
in a soom, or machines: wi’out loves and likens, wi’out memories and
inclinations, wi’out souls to weary and souls to hope—when aw goes quiet,
draggin on wi’ ’em as if they’d nowt o’ th’ kind, and when aw goes
onquiet, reproachin ’em for their want o’ sitch humanly feelins in their
dealins wi’ yo—this will never do ’t, sir, till God’s work is onmade.’

Stephen stood with the open door in his hand, waiting to know if anything
more were expected of him.

‘Just stop a moment,’ said Mr. Bounderby, excessively red in the face.
‘I told you, the last time you were here with a grievance, that you had
better turn about and come out of that.  And I also told you, if you
remember, that I was up to the gold spoon look-out.’

‘I were not up to ’t myseln, sir; I do assure yo.’

‘Now it’s clear to me,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘that you are one of those
chaps who have always got a grievance.  And you go about, sowing it and
raising crops.  That’s the business of _your_ life, my friend.’

Stephen shook his head, mutely protesting that indeed he had other
business to do for his life.

‘You are such a waspish, raspish, ill-conditioned chap, you see,’ said
Mr. Bounderby, ‘that even your own Union, the men who know you best, will
have nothing to do with you.  I never thought those fellows could be
right in anything; but I tell you what!  I so far go along with them for
a novelty, that _I_’ll have nothing to do with you either.’

Stephen raised his eyes quickly to his face.

‘You can finish off what you’re at,’ said Mr. Bounderby, with a meaning
nod, ‘and then go elsewhere.’

‘Sir, yo know weel,’ said Stephen expressively, ‘that if I canna get work
wi’ yo, I canna get it elsewheer.’

The reply was, ‘What I know, I know; and what you know, you know.  I have
no more to say about it.’

Stephen glanced at Louisa again, but her eyes were raised to his no more;
therefore, with a sigh, and saying, barely above his breath, ‘Heaven help
us aw in this world!’ he departed.



CHAPTER VI
FADING AWAY


IT was falling dark when Stephen came out of Mr. Bounderby’s house.  The
shadows of night had gathered so fast, that he did not look about him
when he closed the door, but plodded straight along the street.  Nothing
was further from his thoughts than the curious old woman he had
encountered on his previous visit to the same house, when he heard a step
behind him that he knew, and turning, saw her in Rachael’s company.

He saw Rachael first, as he had heard her only.

‘Ah, Rachael, my dear!  Missus, thou wi’ her!’

‘Well, and now you are surprised to be sure, and with reason I must say,’
the old woman returned.  ‘Here I am again, you see.’

‘But how wi’ Rachael?’ said Stephen, falling into their step, walking
between them, and looking from the one to the other.

‘Why, I come to be with this good lass pretty much as I came to be with
you,’ said the old woman, cheerfully, taking the reply upon herself.  ‘My
visiting time is later this year than usual, for I have been rather
troubled with shortness of breath, and so put it off till the weather was
fine and warm.  For the same reason I don’t make all my journey in one
day, but divide it into two days, and get a bed to-night at the
Travellers’ Coffee House down by the railroad (a nice clean house), and
go back Parliamentary, at six in the morning.  Well, but what has this to
do with this good lass, says you?  I’m going to tell you.  I have heard
of Mr. Bounderby being married.  I read it in the paper, where it looked
grand—oh, it looked fine!’ the old woman dwelt on it with strange
enthusiasm: ‘and I want to see his wife.  I have never seen her yet.
Now, if you’ll believe me, she hasn’t come out of that house since noon
to-day.  So not to give her up too easily, I was waiting about, a little
last bit more, when I passed close to this good lass two or three times;
and her face being so friendly I spoke to her, and she spoke to me.
There!’ said the old woman to Stephen, ‘you can make all the rest out for
yourself now, a deal shorter than I can, I dare say!’

Once again, Stephen had to conquer an instinctive propensity to dislike
this old woman, though her manner was as honest and simple as a manner
possibly could be.  With a gentleness that was as natural to him as he
knew it to be to Rachael, he pursued the subject that interested her in
her old age.

‘Well, missus,’ said he, ‘I ha seen the lady, and she were young and
hansom.  Wi’ fine dark thinkin eyes, and a still way, Rachael, as I ha
never seen the like on.’

‘Young and handsome.  Yes!’ cried the old woman, quite delighted.  ‘As
bonny as a rose!  And what a happy wife!’

‘Aye, missus, I suppose she be,’ said Stephen.  But with a doubtful
glance at Rachael.

‘Suppose she be?  She must be.  She’s your master’s wife,’ returned the
old woman.

Stephen nodded assent.  ‘Though as to master,’ said he, glancing again at
Rachael, ‘not master onny more.  That’s aw enden ’twixt him and me.’

‘Have you left his work, Stephen?’ asked Rachael, anxiously and quickly.

‘Why, Rachael,’ he replied, ‘whether I ha lef’n his work, or whether his
work ha lef’n me, cooms t’ th’ same.  His work and me are parted.  ’Tis
as weel so—better, I were thinkin when yo coom up wi’ me.  It would ha
brought’n trouble upon trouble if I had stayed theer.  Haply ’tis a
kindness to monny that I go; haply ’tis a kindness to myseln; anyways it
mun be done.  I mun turn my face fro Coketown fur th’ time, and seek a
fort’n, dear, by beginnin fresh.’

‘Where will you go, Stephen?’

‘I donno t’night,’ said he, lifting off his hat, and smoothing his thin
hair with the flat of his hand.  ‘But I’m not goin t’night, Rachael, nor
yet t’morrow.  ’Tan’t easy overmuch t’ know wheer t’ turn, but a good
heart will coom to me.’

Herein, too, the sense of even thinking unselfishly aided him.  Before he
had so much as closed Mr. Bounderby’s door, he had reflected that at
least his being obliged to go away was good for her, as it would save her
from the chance of being brought into question for not withdrawing from
him.  Though it would cost him a hard pang to leave her, and though he
could think of no similar place in which his condemnation would not
pursue him, perhaps it was almost a relief to be forced away from the
endurance of the last four days, even to unknown difficulties and
distresses.

So he said, with truth, ‘I’m more leetsome, Rachael, under ’t, than I
could’n ha believed.’  It was not her part to make his burden heavier.
She answered with her comforting smile, and the three walked on together.

Age, especially when it strives to be self-reliant and cheerful, finds
much consideration among the poor.  The old woman was so decent and
contented, and made so light of her infirmities, though they had
increased upon her since her former interview with Stephen, that they
both took an interest in her.  She was too sprightly to allow of their
walking at a slow pace on her account, but she was very grateful to be
talked to, and very willing to talk to any extent: so, when they came to
their part of the town, she was more brisk and vivacious than ever.

‘Come to my poor place, missus,’ said Stephen, ‘and tak a coop o’ tea.
Rachael will coom then; and arterwards I’ll see thee safe t’ thy
Travellers’ lodgin.  ’T may be long, Rachael, ere ever I ha th’ chance o’
thy coompany agen.’

They complied, and the three went on to the house where he lodged.  When
they turned into a narrow street, Stephen glanced at his window with a
dread that always haunted his desolate home; but it was open, as he had
left it, and no one was there.  The evil spirit of his life had flitted
away again, months ago, and he had heard no more of her since.  The only
evidence of her last return now, were the scantier moveables in his room,
and the grayer hair upon his head.

He lighted a candle, set out his little tea-board, got hot water from
below, and brought in small portions of tea and sugar, a loaf, and some
butter from the nearest shop.  The bread was new and crusty, the butter
fresh, and the sugar lump, of course—in fulfilment of the standard
testimony of the Coketown magnates, that these people lived like princes,
sir.  Rachael made the tea (so large a party necessitated the borrowing
of a cup), and the visitor enjoyed it mightily.  It was the first glimpse
of sociality the host had had for many days.  He too, with the world a
wide heath before him, enjoyed the meal—again in corroboration of the
magnates, as exemplifying the utter want of calculation on the part of
these people, sir.

‘I ha never thowt yet, missus,’ said Stephen, ‘o’ askin thy name.’

The old lady announced herself as ‘Mrs. Pegler.’

‘A widder, I think?’ said Stephen.

‘Oh, many long years!’  Mrs. Pegler’s husband (one of the best on record)
was already dead, by Mrs. Pegler’s calculation, when Stephen was born.

‘’Twere a bad job, too, to lose so good a one,’ said Stephen.  ‘Onny
children?’

Mrs. Pegler’s cup, rattling against her saucer as she held it, denoted
some nervousness on her part.  ‘No,’ she said.  ‘Not now, not now.’

‘Dead, Stephen,’ Rachael softly hinted.

‘I’m sooary I ha spok’n on ’t,’ said Stephen, ‘I ought t’ hadn in my mind
as I might touch a sore place.  I—I blame myseln.’

While he excused himself, the old lady’s cup rattled more and more.  ‘I
had a son,’ she said, curiously distressed, and not by any of the usual
appearances of sorrow; ‘and he did well, wonderfully well.  But he is not
to be spoken of if you please.  He is—’  Putting down her cup, she moved
her hands as if she would have added, by her action, ‘dead!’  Then she
said aloud, ‘I have lost him.’

Stephen had not yet got the better of his having given the old lady pain,
when his landlady came stumbling up the narrow stairs, and calling him to
the door, whispered in his ear.  Mrs. Pegler was by no means deaf, for
she caught a word as it was uttered.

‘Bounderby!’ she cried, in a suppressed voice, starting up from the
table.  ‘Oh hide me!  Don’t let me be seen for the world.  Don’t let him
come up till I’ve got away.  Pray, pray!’  She trembled, and was
excessively agitated; getting behind Rachael, when Rachael tried to
reassure her; and not seeming to know what she was about.

‘But hearken, missus, hearken,’ said Stephen, astonished.  ‘’Tisn’t Mr.
Bounderby; ’tis his wife.  Yo’r not fearfo’ o’ her.  Yo was hey-go-mad
about her, but an hour sin.’

‘But are you sure it’s the lady, and not the gentleman?’ she asked, still
trembling.

‘Certain sure!’

‘Well then, pray don’t speak to me, nor yet take any notice of me,’ said
the old woman.  ‘Let me be quite to myself in this corner.’

Stephen nodded; looking to Rachael for an explanation, which she was
quite unable to give him; took the candle, went downstairs, and in a few
moments returned, lighting Louisa into the room.  She was followed by the
whelp.

Rachael had risen, and stood apart with her shawl and bonnet in her hand,
when Stephen, himself profoundly astonished by this visit, put the candle
on the table.  Then he too stood, with his doubled hand upon the table
near it, waiting to be addressed.

For the first time in her life Louisa had come into one of the dwellings
of the Coketown Hands; for the first time in her life she was face to
face with anything like individuality in connection with them.  She knew
of their existence by hundreds and by thousands.  She knew what results
in work a given number of them would produce in a given space of time.
She knew them in crowds passing to and from their nests, like ants or
beetles.  But she knew from her reading infinitely more of the ways of
toiling insects than of these toiling men and women.

Something to be worked so much and paid so much, and there ended;
something to be infallibly settled by laws of supply and demand;
something that blundered against those laws, and floundered into
difficulty; something that was a little pinched when wheat was dear, and
over-ate itself when wheat was cheap; something that increased at such a
rate of percentage, and yielded such another percentage of crime, and
such another percentage of pauperism; something wholesale, of which vast
fortunes were made; something that occasionally rose like a sea, and did
some harm and waste (chiefly to itself), and fell again; this she knew
the Coketown Hands to be.  But, she had scarcely thought more of
separating them into units, than of separating the sea itself into its
component drops.

She stood for some moments looking round the room.  From the few chairs,
the few books, the common prints, and the bed, she glanced to the two
women, and to Stephen.

‘I have come to speak to you, in consequence of what passed just now.  I
should like to be serviceable to you, if you will let me.  Is this your
wife?’

Rachael raised her eyes, and they sufficiently answered no, and dropped
again.

‘I remember,’ said Louisa, reddening at her mistake; ‘I recollect, now,
to have heard your domestic misfortunes spoken of, though I was not
attending to the particulars at the time.  It was not my meaning to ask a
question that would give pain to any one here.  If I should ask any other
question that may happen to have that result, give me credit, if you
please, for being in ignorance how to speak to you as I ought.’

As Stephen had but a little while ago instinctively addressed himself to
her, so she now instinctively addressed herself to Rachael.  Her manner
was short and abrupt, yet faltering and timid.

‘He has told you what has passed between himself and my husband?  You
would be his first resource, I think.’

‘I have heard the end of it, young lady,’ said Rachael.

‘Did I understand, that, being rejected by one employer, he would
probably be rejected by all?  I thought he said as much?’

‘The chances are very small, young lady—next to nothing—for a man who
gets a bad name among them.’

‘What shall I understand that you mean by a bad name?’

‘The name of being troublesome.’

‘Then, by the prejudices of his own class, and by the prejudices of the
other, he is sacrificed alike?  Are the two so deeply separated in this
town, that there is no place whatever for an honest workman between
them?’

Rachael shook her head in silence.

‘He fell into suspicion,’ said Louisa, ‘with his fellow-weavers,
because—he had made a promise not to be one of them.  I think it must
have been to you that he made that promise.  Might I ask you why he made
it?’

Rachael burst into tears.  ‘I didn’t seek it of him, poor lad.  I prayed
him to avoid trouble for his own good, little thinking he’d come to it
through me.  But I know he’d die a hundred deaths, ere ever he’d break
his word.  I know that of him well.’

Stephen had remained quietly attentive, in his usual thoughtful attitude,
with his hand at his chin.  He now spoke in a voice rather less steady
than usual.

‘No one, excepting myseln, can ever know what honour, an’ what love, an’
respect, I bear to Rachael, or wi’ what cause.  When I passed that
promess, I towd her true, she were th’ Angel o’ my life.  ’Twere a solemn
promess.  ’Tis gone fro’ me, for ever.’

Louisa turned her head to him, and bent it with a deference that was new
in her.  She looked from him to Rachael, and her features softened.
‘What will you do?’ she asked him.  And her voice had softened too.

‘Weel, ma’am,’ said Stephen, making the best of it, with a smile; ‘when I
ha finished off, I mun quit this part, and try another.  Fortnet or
misfortnet, a man can but try; there’s nowt to be done wi’out tryin’—cept
laying down and dying.’

‘How will you travel?’

‘Afoot, my kind ledy, afoot.’

Louisa coloured, and a purse appeared in her hand.  The rustling of a
bank-note was audible, as she unfolded one and laid it on the table.

‘Rachael, will you tell him—for you know how, without offence—that this
is freely his, to help him on his way?  Will you entreat him to take it?’

‘I canna do that, young lady,’ she answered, turning her head aside.
‘Bless you for thinking o’ the poor lad wi’ such tenderness.  But ’tis
for him to know his heart, and what is right according to it.’

Louisa looked, in part incredulous, in part frightened, in part overcome
with quick sympathy, when this man of so much self-command, who had been
so plain and steady through the late interview, lost his composure in a
moment, and now stood with his hand before his face.  She stretched out
hers, as if she would have touched him; then checked herself, and
remained still.

‘Not e’en Rachael,’ said Stephen, when he stood again with his face
uncovered, ‘could mak sitch a kind offerin, by onny words, kinder.  T’
show that I’m not a man wi’out reason and gratitude, I’ll tak two pound.
I’ll borrow ’t for t’ pay ’t back.  ’Twill be the sweetest work as ever I
ha done, that puts it in my power t’ acknowledge once more my lastin
thankfulness for this present action.’

She was fain to take up the note again, and to substitute the much
smaller sum he had named.  He was neither courtly, nor handsome, nor
picturesque, in any respect; and yet his manner of accepting it, and of
expressing his thanks without more words, had a grace in it that Lord
Chesterfield could not have taught his son in a century.

Tom had sat upon the bed, swinging one leg and sucking his walking-stick
with sufficient unconcern, until the visit had attained this stage.
Seeing his sister ready to depart, he got up, rather hurriedly, and put
in a word.

‘Just wait a moment, Loo!  Before we go, I should like to speak to him a
moment.  Something comes into my head.  If you’ll step out on the stairs,
Blackpool, I’ll mention it.  Never mind a light, man!’  Tom was
remarkably impatient of his moving towards the cupboard, to get one.  ‘It
don’t want a light.’

Stephen followed him out, and Tom closed the room door, and held the lock
in his hand.

‘I say!’ he whispered.  ‘I think I can do you a good turn.  Don’t ask me
what it is, because it may not come to anything.  But there’s no harm in
my trying.’

His breath fell like a flame of fire on Stephen’s ear, it was so hot.

‘That was our light porter at the Bank,’ said Tom, ‘who brought you the
message to-night.  I call him our light porter, because I belong to the
Bank too.’

Stephen thought, ‘What a hurry he is in!’  He spoke so confusedly.

‘Well!’ said Tom.  ‘Now look here!  When are you off?’

‘T’ day’s Monday,’ replied Stephen, considering.  ‘Why, sir, Friday or
Saturday, nigh ’bout.’

‘Friday or Saturday,’ said Tom.  ‘Now look here!  I am not sure that I
can do you the good turn I want to do you—that’s my sister, you know, in
your room—but I may be able to, and if I should not be able to, there’s
no harm done.  So I tell you what.  You’ll know our light porter again?’

‘Yes, sure,’ said Stephen.

‘Very well,’ returned Tom.  ‘When you leave work of a night, between this
and your going away, just hang about the Bank an hour or so, will you?
Don’t take on, as if you meant anything, if he should see you hanging
about there; because I shan’t put him up to speak to you, unless I find I
can do you the service I want to do you.  In that case he’ll have a note
or a message for you, but not else.  Now look here!  You are sure you
understand.’

He had wormed a finger, in the darkness, through a button-hole of
Stephen’s coat, and was screwing that corner of the garment tight up
round and round, in an extraordinary manner.

‘I understand, sir,’ said Stephen.

‘Now look here!’ repeated Tom.  ‘Be sure you don’t make any mistake then,
and don’t forget.  I shall tell my sister as we go home, what I have in
view, and she’ll approve, I know.  Now look here!  You’re all right, are
you?  You understand all about it?  Very well then.  Come along, Loo!’

He pushed the door open as he called to her, but did not return into the
room, or wait to be lighted down the narrow stairs.  He was at the bottom
when she began to descend, and was in the street before she could take
his arm.

Mrs. Pegler remained in her corner until the brother and sister were
gone, and until Stephen came back with the candle in his hand.  She was
in a state of inexpressible admiration of Mrs. Bounderby, and, like an
unaccountable old woman, wept, ‘because she was such a pretty dear.’  Yet
Mrs. Pegler was so flurried lest the object of her admiration should
return by chance, or anybody else should come, that her cheerfulness was
ended for that night.  It was late too, to people who rose early and
worked hard; therefore the party broke up; and Stephen and Rachael
escorted their mysterious acquaintance to the door of the Travellers’
Coffee House, where they parted from her.

They walked back together to the corner of the street where Rachael
lived, and as they drew nearer and nearer to it, silence crept upon them.
When they came to the dark corner where their unfrequent meetings always
ended, they stopped, still silent, as if both were afraid to speak.

‘I shall strive t’ see thee agen, Rachael, afore I go, but if not—’

‘Thou wilt not, Stephen, I know.  ’Tis better that we make up our minds
to be open wi’ one another.’

‘Thou’rt awlus right.  ’Tis bolder and better.  I ha been thinkin then,
Rachael, that as ’tis but a day or two that remains, ’twere better for
thee, my dear, not t’ be seen wi’ me.  ’T might bring thee into trouble,
fur no good.’

‘’Tis not for that, Stephen, that I mind.  But thou know’st our old
agreement.  ’Tis for that.’

‘Well, well,’ said he.  ‘’Tis better, onnyways.’

‘Thou’lt write to me, and tell me all that happens, Stephen?’

‘Yes.  What can I say now, but Heaven be wi’ thee, Heaven bless thee,
Heaven thank thee and reward thee!’

‘May it bless thee, Stephen, too, in all thy wanderings, and send thee
peace and rest at last!’

‘I towd thee, my dear,’ said Stephen Blackpool—‘that night—that I would
never see or think o’ onnything that angered me, but thou, so much better
than me, should’st be beside it.  Thou’rt beside it now.  Thou mak’st me
see it wi’ a better eye.  Bless thee.  Good night.  Good-bye!’

It was but a hurried parting in a common street, yet it was a sacred
remembrance to these two common people.  Utilitarian economists,
skeletons of schoolmasters, Commissioners of Fact, genteel and used-up
infidels, gabblers of many little dog’s-eared creeds, the poor you will
have always with you.  Cultivate in them, while there is yet time, the
utmost graces of the fancies and affections, to adorn their lives so much
in need of ornament; or, in the day of your triumph, when romance is
utterly driven out of their souls, and they and a bare existence stand
face to face, Reality will take a wolfish turn, and make an end of you.

Stephen worked the next day, and the next, uncheered by a word from any
one, and shunned in all his comings and goings as before.  At the end of
the second day, he saw land; at the end of the third, his loom stood
empty.

He had overstayed his hour in the street outside the Bank, on each of the
two first evenings; and nothing had happened there, good or bad.  That he
might not be remiss in his part of the engagement, he resolved to wait
full two hours, on this third and last night.

There was the lady who had once kept Mr. Bounderby’s house, sitting at
the first-floor window as he had seen her before; and there was the light
porter, sometimes talking with her there, and sometimes looking over the
blind below which had BANK upon it, and sometimes coming to the door and
standing on the steps for a breath of air.  When he first came out,
Stephen thought he might be looking for him, and passed near; but the
light porter only cast his winking eyes upon him slightly, and said
nothing.

Two hours were a long stretch of lounging about, after a long day’s
labour.  Stephen sat upon the step of a door, leaned against a wall under
an archway, strolled up and down, listened for the church clock, stopped
and watched children playing in the street.  Some purpose or other is so
natural to every one, that a mere loiterer always looks and feels
remarkable.  When the first hour was out, Stephen even began to have an
uncomfortable sensation upon him of being for the time a disreputable
character.

Then came the lamplighter, and two lengthening lines of light all down
the long perspective of the street, until they were blended and lost in
the distance.  Mrs. Sparsit closed the first-floor window, drew down the
blind, and went up-stairs.  Presently, a light went up-stairs after her,
passing first the fanlight of the door, and afterwards the two staircase
windows, on its way up.  By and by, one corner of the second-floor blind
was disturbed, as if Mrs. Sparsit’s eye were there; also the other
corner, as if the light porter’s eye were on that side.  Still, no
communication was made to Stephen.  Much relieved when the two hours were
at last accomplished, he went away at a quick pace, as a recompense for
so much loitering.

He had only to take leave of his landlady, and lie down on his temporary
bed upon the floor; for his bundle was made up for to-morrow, and all was
arranged for his departure.  He meant to be clear of the town very early;
before the Hands were in the streets.

It was barely daybreak, when, with a parting look round his room,
mournfully wondering whether he should ever see it again, he went out.
The town was as entirely deserted as if the inhabitants had abandoned it,
rather than hold communication with him.  Everything looked wan at that
hour.  Even the coming sun made but a pale waste in the sky, like a sad
sea.

By the place where Rachael lived, though it was not in his way; by the
red brick streets; by the great silent factories, not trembling yet; by
the railway, where the danger-lights were waning in the strengthening
day; by the railway’s crazy neighbourhood, half pulled down and half
built up; by scattered red brick villas, where the besmoked evergreens
were sprinkled with a dirty powder, like untidy snuff-takers; by
coal-dust paths and many varieties of ugliness; Stephen got to the top of
the hill, and looked back.

Day was shining radiantly upon the town then, and the bells were going
for the morning work.  Domestic fires were not yet lighted, and the high
chimneys had the sky to themselves.  Puffing out their poisonous volumes,
they would not be long in hiding it; but, for half an hour, some of the
many windows were golden, which showed the Coketown people a sun
eternally in eclipse, through a medium of smoked glass.

So strange to turn from the chimneys to the birds.  So strange, to have
the road-dust on his feet instead of the coal-grit.  So strange to have
lived to his time of life, and yet to be beginning like a boy this summer
morning!  With these musings in his mind, and his bundle under his arm,
Stephen took his attentive face along the high road.  And the trees
arched over him, whispering that he left a true and loving heart behind.



CHAPTER VII
GUNPOWDER


MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE, ‘going in’ for his adopted party, soon began to
score.  With the aid of a little more coaching for the political sages, a
little more genteel listlessness for the general society, and a tolerable
management of the assumed honesty in dishonesty, most effective and most
patronized of the polite deadly sins, he speedily came to be considered
of much promise.  The not being troubled with earnestness was a grand
point in his favour, enabling him to take to the hard Fact fellows with
as good a grace as if he had been born one of the tribe, and to throw all
other tribes overboard, as conscious hypocrites.

‘Whom none of us believe, my dear Mrs. Bounderby, and who do not believe
themselves.  The only difference between us and the professors of virtue
or benevolence, or philanthropy—never mind the name—is, that we know it
is all meaningless, and say so; while they know it equally and will never
say so.’

Why should she be shocked or warned by this reiteration?  It was not so
unlike her father’s principles, and her early training, that it need
startle her.  Where was the great difference between the two schools,
when each chained her down to material realities, and inspired her with
no faith in anything else?  What was there in her soul for James
Harthouse to destroy, which Thomas Gradgrind had nurtured there in its
state of innocence!

It was even the worse for her at this pass, that in her mind—implanted
there before her eminently practical father began to form it—a struggling
disposition to believe in a wider and nobler humanity than she had ever
heard of, constantly strove with doubts and resentments.  With doubts,
because the aspiration had been so laid waste in her youth.  With
resentments, because of the wrong that had been done her, if it were
indeed a whisper of the truth.  Upon a nature long accustomed to
self-suppression, thus torn and divided, the Harthouse philosophy came as
a relief and justification.  Everything being hollow and worthless, she
had missed nothing and sacrificed nothing.  What did it matter, she had
said to her father, when he proposed her husband.  What did it matter,
she said still.  With a scornful self-reliance, she asked herself, What
did anything matter—and went on.

Towards what?  Step by step, onward and downward, towards some end, yet
so gradually, that she believed herself to remain motionless.  As to Mr.
Harthouse, whither _he_ tended, he neither considered nor cared.  He had
no particular design or plan before him: no energetic wickedness ruffled
his lassitude.  He was as much amused and interested, at present, as it
became so fine a gentleman to be; perhaps even more than it would have
been consistent with his reputation to confess.  Soon after his arrival
he languidly wrote to his brother, the honourable and jocular member,
that the Bounderbys were ‘great fun;’ and further, that the female
Bounderby, instead of being the Gorgon he had expected, was young, and
remarkably pretty.  After that, he wrote no more about them, and devoted
his leisure chiefly to their house.  He was very often in their house, in
his flittings and visitings about the Coketown district; and was much
encouraged by Mr. Bounderby.  It was quite in Mr. Bounderby’s gusty way
to boast to all his world that _he_ didn’t care about your highly
connected people, but that if his wife Tom Gradgrind’s daughter did, she
was welcome to their company.

Mr. James Harthouse began to think it would be a new sensation, if the
face which changed so beautifully for the whelp, would change for him.

He was quick enough to observe; he had a good memory, and did not forget
a word of the brother’s revelations.  He interwove them with everything
he saw of the sister, and he began to understand her.  To be sure, the
better and profounder part of her character was not within his scope of
perception; for in natures, as in seas, depth answers unto depth; but he
soon began to read the rest with a student’s eye.

Mr. Bounderby had taken possession of a house and grounds, about fifteen
miles from the town, and accessible within a mile or two, by a railway
striding on many arches over a wild country, undermined by deserted
coal-shafts, and spotted at night by fires and black shapes of stationary
engines at pits’ mouths.  This country, gradually softening towards the
neighbourhood of Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, there mellowed into a rustic
landscape, golden with heath, and snowy with hawthorn in the spring of
the year, and tremulous with leaves and their shadows all the summer
time.  The bank had foreclosed a mortgage effected on the property thus
pleasantly situated, by one of the Coketown magnates, who, in his
determination to make a shorter cut than usual to an enormous fortune,
overspeculated himself by about two hundred thousand pounds.  These
accidents did sometimes happen in the best regulated families of
Coketown, but the bankrupts had no connexion whatever with the
improvident classes.

It afforded Mr. Bounderby supreme satisfaction to instal himself in this
snug little estate, and with demonstrative humility to grow cabbages in
the flower-garden.  He delighted to live, barrack-fashion, among the
elegant furniture, and he bullied the very pictures with his origin.
‘Why, sir,’ he would say to a visitor, ‘I am told that Nickits,’ the late
owner, ‘gave seven hundred pound for that Seabeach.  Now, to be plain
with you, if I ever, in the whole course of my life, take seven looks at
it, at a hundred pound a look, it will be as much as I shall do.  No, by
George!  I don’t forget that I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  For
years upon years, the only pictures in my possession, or that I could
have got into my possession, by any means, unless I stole ’em, were the
engravings of a man shaving himself in a boot, on the blacking bottles
that I was overjoyed to use in cleaning boots with, and that I sold when
they were empty for a farthing a-piece, and glad to get it!’

Then he would address Mr. Harthouse in the same style.

‘Harthouse, you have a couple of horses down here.  Bring half a dozen
more if you like, and we’ll find room for ’em.  There’s stabling in this
place for a dozen horses; and unless Nickits is belied, he kept the full
number.  A round dozen of ’em, sir.  When that man was a boy, he went to
Westminster School.  Went to Westminster School as a King’s Scholar, when
I was principally living on garbage, and sleeping in market baskets.
Why, if I wanted to keep a dozen horses—which I don’t, for one’s enough
for me—I couldn’t bear to see ’em in their stalls here, and think what my
own lodging used to be.  I couldn’t look at ’em, sir, and not order ’em
out.  Yet so things come round.  You see this place; you know what sort
of a place it is; you are aware that there’s not a completer place of its
size in this kingdom or elsewhere—I don’t care where—and here, got into
the middle of it, like a maggot into a nut, is Josiah Bounderby.  While
Nickits (as a man came into my office, and told me yesterday), Nickits,
who used to act in Latin, in the Westminster School plays, with the
chief-justices and nobility of this country applauding him till they were
black in the face, is drivelling at this minute—drivelling, sir!—in a
fifth floor, up a narrow dark back street in Antwerp.’

It was among the leafy shadows of this retirement, in the long sultry
summer days, that Mr. Harthouse began to prove the face which had set him
wondering when he first saw it, and to try if it would change for him.

‘Mrs. Bounderby, I esteem it a most fortunate accident that I find you
alone here.  I have for some time had a particular wish to speak to you.’

It was not by any wonderful accident that he found her, the time of day
being that at which she was always alone, and the place being her
favourite resort.  It was an opening in a dark wood, where some felled
trees lay, and where she would sit watching the fallen leaves of last
year, as she had watched the falling ashes at home.

He sat down beside her, with a glance at her face.

‘Your brother.  My young friend Tom—’

Her colour brightened, and she turned to him with a look of interest.  ‘I
never in my life,’ he thought, ‘saw anything so remarkable and so
captivating as the lighting of those features!’  His face betrayed his
thoughts—perhaps without betraying him, for it might have been according
to its instructions so to do.

‘Pardon me.  The expression of your sisterly interest is so beautiful—Tom
should be so proud of it—I know this is inexcusable, but I am so
compelled to admire.’

‘Being so impulsive,’ she said composedly.

‘Mrs. Bounderby, no: you know I make no pretence with you.  You know I am
a sordid piece of human nature, ready to sell myself at any time for any
reasonable sum, and altogether incapable of any Arcadian proceeding
whatever.’

‘I am waiting,’ she returned, ‘for your further reference to my brother.’

‘You are rigid with me, and I deserve it.  I am as worthless a dog as you
will find, except that I am not false—not false.  But you surprised and
started me from my subject, which was your brother.  I have an interest
in him.’

‘Have you an interest in anything, Mr. Harthouse?’ she asked, half
incredulously and half gratefully.

‘If you had asked me when I first came here, I should have said no.  I
must say now—even at the hazard of appearing to make a pretence, and of
justly awakening your incredulity—yes.’

She made a slight movement, as if she were trying to speak, but could not
find voice; at length she said, ‘Mr. Harthouse, I give you credit for
being interested in my brother.’

‘Thank you.  I claim to deserve it.  You know how little I do claim, but
I will go that length.  You have done so much for him, you are so fond of
him; your whole life, Mrs. Bounderby, expresses such charming
self-forgetfulness on his account—pardon me again—I am running wide of
the subject.  I am interested in him for his own sake.’

She had made the slightest action possible, as if she would have risen in
a hurry and gone away.  He had turned the course of what he said at that
instant, and she remained.

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ he resumed, in a lighter manner, and yet with a show of
effort in assuming it, which was even more expressive than the manner he
dismissed; ‘it is no irrevocable offence in a young fellow of your
brother’s years, if he is heedless, inconsiderate, and expensive—a little
dissipated, in the common phrase.  Is he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Allow me to be frank.  Do you think he games at all?’

‘I think he makes bets.’  Mr. Harthouse waiting, as if that were not her
whole answer, she added, ‘I know he does.’

‘Of course he loses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Everybody does lose who bets.  May I hint at the probability of your
sometimes supplying him with money for these purposes?’

She sat, looking down; but, at this question, raised her eyes searchingly
and a little resentfully.

‘Acquit me of impertinent curiosity, my dear Mrs. Bounderby.  I think Tom
may be gradually falling into trouble, and I wish to stretch out a
helping hand to him from the depths of my wicked experience.—Shall I say
again, for his sake?  Is that necessary?’

She seemed to try to answer, but nothing came of it.

‘Candidly to confess everything that has occurred to me,’ said James
Harthouse, again gliding with the same appearance of effort into his more
airy manner; ‘I will confide to you my doubt whether he has had many
advantages.  Whether—forgive my plainness—whether any great amount of
confidence is likely to have been established between himself and his
most worthy father.’

‘I do not,’ said Louisa, flushing with her own great remembrance in that
wise, ‘think it likely.’

‘Or, between himself, and—I may trust to your perfect understanding of my
meaning, I am sure—and his highly esteemed brother-in-law.’

She flushed deeper and deeper, and was burning red when she replied in a
fainter voice, ‘I do not think that likely, either.’

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said Harthouse, after a short silence, ‘may there be a
better confidence between yourself and me?  Tom has borrowed a
considerable sum of you?’

‘You will understand, Mr. Harthouse,’ she returned, after some
indecision: she had been more or less uncertain, and troubled throughout
the conversation, and yet had in the main preserved her self-contained
manner; ‘you will understand that if I tell you what you press to know,
it is not by way of complaint or regret.  I would never complain of
anything, and what I have done I do not in the least regret.’

‘So spirited, too!’ thought James Harthouse.

‘When I married, I found that my brother was even at that time heavily in
debt.  Heavily for him, I mean.  Heavily enough to oblige me to sell some
trinkets.  They were no sacrifice.  I sold them very willingly.  I
attached no value to them.  They, were quite worthless to me.’

Either she saw in his face that he knew, or she only feared in her
conscience that he knew, that she spoke of some of her husband’s gifts.
She stopped, and reddened again.  If he had not known it before, he would
have known it then, though he had been a much duller man than he was.

‘Since then, I have given my brother, at various times, what money I
could spare: in short, what money I have had.  Confiding in you at all,
on the faith of the interest you profess for him, I will not do so by
halves.  Since you have been in the habit of visiting here, he has wanted
in one sum as much as a hundred pounds.  I have not been able to give it
to him.  I have felt uneasy for the consequences of his being so
involved, but I have kept these secrets until now, when I trust them to
your honour.  I have held no confidence with any one, because—you
anticipated my reason just now.’  She abruptly broke off.

He was a ready man, and he saw, and seized, an opportunity here of
presenting her own image to her, slightly disguised as her brother.

‘Mrs. Bounderby, though a graceless person, of the world worldly, I feel
the utmost interest, I assure you, in what you tell me.  I cannot
possibly be hard upon your brother.  I understand and share the wise
consideration with which you regard his errors.  With all possible
respect both for Mr. Gradgrind and for Mr. Bounderby, I think I perceive
that he has not been fortunate in his training.  Bred at a disadvantage
towards the society in which he has his part to play, he rushes into
these extremes for himself, from opposite extremes that have long been
forced—with the very best intentions we have no doubt—upon him.  Mr.
Bounderby’s fine bluff English independence, though a most charming
characteristic, does not—as we have agreed—invite confidence.  If I might
venture to remark that it is the least in the world deficient in that
delicacy to which a youth mistaken, a character misconceived, and
abilities misdirected, would turn for relief and guidance, I should
express what it presents to my own view.’

As she sat looking straight before her, across the changing lights upon
the grass into the darkness of the wood beyond, he saw in her face her
application of his very distinctly uttered words.

‘All allowance,’ he continued, ‘must be made.  I have one great fault to
find with Tom, however, which I cannot forgive, and for which I take him
heavily to account.’

Louisa turned her eyes to his face, and asked him what fault was that?

‘Perhaps,’ he returned, ‘I have said enough.  Perhaps it would have been
better, on the whole, if no allusion to it had escaped me.’

‘You alarm me, Mr. Harthouse.  Pray let me know it.’

‘To relieve you from needless apprehension—and as this confidence
regarding your brother, which I prize I am sure above all possible
things, has been established between us—I obey.  I cannot forgive him for
not being more sensible in every word, look, and act of his life, of the
affection of his best friend; of the devotion of his best friend; of her
unselfishness; of her sacrifice.  The return he makes her, within my
observation, is a very poor one.  What she has done for him demands his
constant love and gratitude, not his ill-humour and caprice.  Careless
fellow as I am, I am not so indifferent, Mrs. Bounderby, as to be
regardless of this vice in your brother, or inclined to consider it a
venial offence.’

The wood floated before her, for her eyes were suffused with tears.  They
rose from a deep well, long concealed, and her heart was filled with
acute pain that found no relief in them.

‘In a word, it is to correct your brother in this, Mrs. Bounderby, that I
must aspire.  My better knowledge of his circumstances, and my direction
and advice in extricating them—rather valuable, I hope, as coming from a
scapegrace on a much larger scale—will give me some influence over him,
and all I gain I shall certainly use towards this end.  I have said
enough, and more than enough.  I seem to be protesting that I am a sort
of good fellow, when, upon my honour, I have not the least intention to
make any protestation to that effect, and openly announce that I am
nothing of the sort.  Yonder, among the trees,’ he added, having lifted
up his eyes and looked about; for he had watched her closely until now;
‘is your brother himself; no doubt, just come down.  As he seems to be
loitering in this direction, it may be as well, perhaps, to walk towards
him, and throw ourselves in his way.  He has been very silent and doleful
of late.  Perhaps, his brotherly conscience is touched—if there are such
things as consciences.  Though, upon my honour, I hear of them much too
often to believe in them.’

He assisted her to rise, and she took his arm, and they advanced to meet
the whelp.  He was idly beating the branches as he lounged along: or he
stooped viciously to rip the moss from the trees with his stick.  He was
startled when they came upon him while he was engaged in this latter
pastime, and his colour changed.

‘Halloa!’ he stammered; ‘I didn’t know you were here.’

‘Whose name, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse, putting his hand upon his shoulder
and turning him, so that they all three walked towards the house
together, ‘have you been carving on the trees?’

‘Whose name?’ returned Tom.  ‘Oh!  You mean what girl’s name?’

‘You have a suspicious appearance of inscribing some fair creature’s on
the bark, Tom.’

         [Picture: Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the garden]

‘Not much of that, Mr. Harthouse, unless some fair creature with a
slashing fortune at her own disposal would take a fancy to me.  Or she
might be as ugly as she was rich, without any fear of losing me.  I’d
carve her name as often as she liked.’

‘I am afraid you are mercenary, Tom.’

‘Mercenary,’ repeated Tom.  ‘Who is not mercenary?  Ask my sister.’

‘Have you so proved it to be a failing of mine, Tom?’ said Louisa,
showing no other sense of his discontent and ill-nature.

‘You know whether the cap fits you, Loo,’ returned her brother sulkily.
‘If it does, you can wear it.’

‘Tom is misanthropical to-day, as all bored people are now and then,’
said Mr. Harthouse.  ‘Don’t believe him, Mrs. Bounderby.  He knows much
better.  I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately
expressed to me, unless he relents a little.’

‘At all events, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, softening in his admiration of
his patron, but shaking his head sullenly too, ‘you can’t tell her that I
ever praised her for being mercenary.  I may have praised her for being
the contrary, and I should do it again, if I had as good reason.
However, never mind this now; it’s not very interesting to you, and I am
sick of the subject.’

They walked on to the house, where Louisa quitted her visitor’s arm and
went in.  He stood looking after her, as she ascended the steps, and
passed into the shadow of the door; then put his hand upon her brother’s
shoulder again, and invited him with a confidential nod to a walk in the
garden.

‘Tom, my fine fellow, I want to have a word with you.’

They had stopped among a disorder of roses—it was part of Mr. Bounderby’s
humility to keep Nickits’s roses on a reduced scale—and Tom sat down on a
terrace-parapet, plucking buds and picking them to pieces; while his
powerful Familiar stood over him, with a foot upon the parapet, and his
figure easily resting on the arm supported by that knee.  They were just
visible from her window.  Perhaps she saw them.

‘Tom, what’s the matter?’

‘Oh!  Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom with a groan, ‘I am hard up, and bothered
out of my life.’

‘My good fellow, so am I.’

‘You!’ returned Tom.  ‘You are the picture of independence.  Mr.
Harthouse, I am in a horrible mess.  You have no idea what a state I have
got myself into—what a state my sister might have got me out of, if she
would only have done it.’

He took to biting the rosebuds now, and tearing them away from his teeth
with a hand that trembled like an infirm old man’s.  After one
exceedingly observant look at him, his companion relapsed into his
lightest air.

‘Tom, you are inconsiderate: you expect too much of your sister.  You
have had money of her, you dog, you know you have.’

‘Well, Mr. Harthouse, I know I have.  How else was I to get it?  Here’s
old Bounderby always boasting that at my age he lived upon twopence a
month, or something of that sort.  Here’s my father drawing what he calls
a line, and tying me down to it from a baby, neck and heels.  Here’s my
mother who never has anything of her own, except her complaints.  What
_is_ a fellow to do for money, and where _am_ I to look for it, if not to
my sister?’

He was almost crying, and scattered the buds about by dozens.  Mr.
Harthouse took him persuasively by the coat.

‘But, my dear Tom, if your sister has not got it—’

‘Not got it, Mr. Harthouse?  I don’t say she has got it.  I may have
wanted more than she was likely to have got.  But then she ought to get
it.  She could get it.  It’s of no use pretending to make a secret of
matters now, after what I have told you already; you know she didn’t
marry old Bounderby for her own sake, or for his sake, but for my sake.
Then why doesn’t she get what I want, out of him, for my sake?  She is
not obliged to say what she is going to do with it; she is sharp enough;
she could manage to coax it out of him, if she chose.  Then why doesn’t
she choose, when I tell her of what consequence it is?  But no.  There
she sits in his company like a stone, instead of making herself agreeable
and getting it easily.  I don’t know what you may call this, but I call
it unnatural conduct.’

There was a piece of ornamental water immediately below the parapet, on
the other side, into which Mr. James Harthouse had a very strong
inclination to pitch Mr. Thomas Gradgrind junior, as the injured men of
Coketown threatened to pitch their property into the Atlantic.  But he
preserved his easy attitude; and nothing more solid went over the stone
balustrades than the accumulated rosebuds now floating about, a little
surface-island.

‘My dear Tom,’ said Harthouse, ‘let me try to be your banker.’

‘For God’s sake,’ replied Tom, suddenly, ‘don’t talk about bankers!’  And
very white he looked, in contrast with the roses.  Very white.

Mr. Harthouse, as a thoroughly well-bred man, accustomed to the best
society, was not to be surprised—he could as soon have been affected—but
he raised his eyelids a little more, as if they were lifted by a feeble
touch of wonder.  Albeit it was as much against the precepts of his
school to wonder, as it was against the doctrines of the Gradgrind
College.

‘What is the present need, Tom?  Three figures?  Out with them.  Say what
they are.’

‘Mr. Harthouse,’ returned Tom, now actually crying; and his tears were
better than his injuries, however pitiful a figure he made: ‘it’s too
late; the money is of no use to me at present.  I should have had it
before to be of use to me.  But I am very much obliged to you; you’re a
true friend.’

A true friend!  ‘Whelp, whelp!’ thought Mr. Harthouse, lazily; ‘what an
Ass you are!’

‘And I take your offer as a great kindness,’ said Tom, grasping his hand.
‘As a great kindness, Mr. Harthouse.’

‘Well,’ returned the other, ‘it may be of more use by and by.  And, my
good fellow, if you will open your bedevilments to me when they come
thick upon you, I may show you better ways out of them than you can find
for yourself.’

‘Thank you,’ said Tom, shaking his head dismally, and chewing rosebuds.
‘I wish I had known you sooner, Mr. Harthouse.’

‘Now, you see, Tom,’ said Mr. Harthouse in conclusion, himself tossing
over a rose or two, as a contribution to the island, which was always
drifting to the wall as if it wanted to become a part of the mainland:
‘every man is selfish in everything he does, and I am exactly like the
rest of my fellow-creatures.  I am desperately intent;’ the languor of
his desperation being quite tropical; ‘on your softening towards your
sister—which you ought to do; and on your being a more loving and
agreeable sort of brother—which you ought to be.’

‘I will be, Mr. Harthouse.’

‘No time like the present, Tom.  Begin at once.’

‘Certainly I will.  And my sister Loo shall say so.’

‘Having made which bargain, Tom,’ said Harthouse, clapping him on the
shoulder again, with an air which left him at liberty to infer—as he did,
poor fool—that this condition was imposed upon him in mere careless good
nature to lessen his sense of obligation, ‘we will tear ourselves asunder
until dinner-time.’

When Tom appeared before dinner, though his mind seemed heavy enough, his
body was on the alert; and he appeared before Mr. Bounderby came in.  ‘I
didn’t mean to be cross, Loo,’ he said, giving her his hand, and kissing
her.  ‘I know you are fond of me, and you know I am fond of you.’

After this, there was a smile upon Louisa’s face that day, for some one
else.  Alas, for some one else!

‘So much the less is the whelp the only creature that she cares for,’
thought James Harthouse, reversing the reflection of his first day’s
knowledge of her pretty face.  ‘So much the less, so much the less.’



CHAPTER VIII
EXPLOSION


THE next morning was too bright a morning for sleep, and James Harthouse
rose early, and sat in the pleasant bay window of his dressing-room,
smoking the rare tobacco that had had so wholesome an influence on his
young friend.  Reposing in the sunlight, with the fragrance of his
eastern pipe about him, and the dreamy smoke vanishing into the air, so
rich and soft with summer odours, he reckoned up his advantages as an
idle winner might count his gains.  He was not at all bored for the time,
and could give his mind to it.

He had established a confidence with her, from which her husband was
excluded.  He had established a confidence with her, that absolutely
turned upon her indifference towards her husband, and the absence, now
and at all times, of any congeniality between them.  He had artfully, but
plainly, assured her that he knew her heart in its last most delicate
recesses; he had come so near to her through its tenderest sentiment; he
had associated himself with that feeling; and the barrier behind which
she lived, had melted away.  All very odd, and very satisfactory!

And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him.
Publicly and privately, it were much better for the age in which he
lived, that he and the legion of whom he was one were designedly bad,
than indifferent and purposeless.  It is the drifting icebergs setting
with any current anywhere, that wreck the ships.

When the Devil goeth about like a roaring lion, he goeth about in a shape
by which few but savages and hunters are attracted.  But, when he is
trimmed, smoothed, and varnished, according to the mode; when he is
aweary of vice, and aweary of virtue, used up as to brimstone, and used
up as to bliss; then, whether he take to the serving out of red tape, or
to the kindling of red fire, he is the very Devil.

So James Harthouse reclined in the window, indolently smoking, and
reckoning up the steps he had taken on the road by which he happened to
be travelling.  The end to which it led was before him, pretty plainly;
but he troubled himself with no calculations about it.  What will be,
will be.

As he had rather a long ride to take that day—for there was a public
occasion ‘to do’ at some distance, which afforded a tolerable opportunity
of going in for the Gradgrind men—he dressed early and went down to
breakfast.  He was anxious to see if she had relapsed since the previous
evening.  No.  He resumed where he had left off.  There was a look of
interest for him again.

He got through the day as much (or as little) to his own satisfaction, as
was to be expected under the fatiguing circumstances; and came riding
back at six o’clock.  There was a sweep of some half-mile between the
lodge and the house, and he was riding along at a foot pace over the
smooth gravel, once Nickits’s, when Mr. Bounderby burst out of the
shrubbery, with such violence as to make his horse shy across the road.

‘Harthouse!’ cried Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Have you heard?’

‘Heard what?’ said Harthouse, soothing his horse, and inwardly favouring
Mr. Bounderby with no good wishes.

‘Then you _haven’t_ heard!’

‘I have heard you, and so has this brute.  I have heard nothing else.’

Mr. Bounderby, red and hot, planted himself in the centre of the path
before the horse’s head, to explode his bombshell with more effect.

‘The Bank’s robbed!’

‘You don’t mean it!’

‘Robbed last night, sir.  Robbed in an extraordinary manner.  Robbed with
a false key.’

‘Of much?’

Mr. Bounderby, in his desire to make the most of it, really seemed
mortified by being obliged to reply, ‘Why, no; not of very much.  But it
might have been.’

‘Of how much?’

‘Oh! as a sum—if you stick to a sum—of not more than a hundred and fifty
pound,’ said Bounderby, with impatience.  ‘But it’s not the sum; it’s the
fact.  It’s the fact of the Bank being robbed, that’s the important
circumstance.  I am surprised you don’t see it.’

‘My dear Bounderby,’ said James, dismounting, and giving his bridle to
his servant, ‘I _do_ see it; and am as overcome as you can possibly
desire me to be, by the spectacle afforded to my mental view.
Nevertheless, I may be allowed, I hope, to congratulate you—which I do
with all my soul, I assure you—on your not having sustained a greater
loss.’

‘Thank’ee,’ replied Bounderby, in a short, ungracious manner.  ‘But I
tell you what.  It might have been twenty thousand pound.’

‘I suppose it might.’

‘Suppose it might!  By the Lord, you _may_ suppose so.  By George!’ said
Mr. Bounderby, with sundry menacing nods and shakes of his head.  ‘It
might have been twice twenty.  There’s no knowing what it would have
been, or wouldn’t have been, as it was, but for the fellows’ being
disturbed.’

Louisa had come up now, and Mrs. Sparsit, and Bitzer.

‘Here’s Tom Gradgrind’s daughter knows pretty well what it might have
been, if you don’t,’ blustered Bounderby.  ‘Dropped, sir, as if she was
shot when I told her!  Never knew her do such a thing before.  Does her
credit, under the circumstances, in my opinion!’

She still looked faint and pale.  James Harthouse begged her to take his
arm; and as they moved on very slowly, asked her how the robbery had been
committed.

‘Why, I am going to tell you,’ said Bounderby, irritably giving his arm
to Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘If you hadn’t been so mighty particular about the sum,
I should have begun to tell you before.  You know this lady (for she _is_
a lady), Mrs. Sparsit?’

‘I have already had the honour—’

‘Very well.  And this young man, Bitzer, you saw him too on the same
occasion?’  Mr. Harthouse inclined his head in assent, and Bitzer
knuckled his forehead.

‘Very well.  They live at the Bank.  You know they live at the Bank,
perhaps?  Very well.  Yesterday afternoon, at the close of business
hours, everything was put away as usual.  In the iron room that this
young fellow sleeps outside of, there was never mind how much.  In the
little safe in young Tom’s closet, the safe used for petty purposes,
there was a hundred and fifty odd pound.’

‘A hundred and fifty-four, seven, one,’ said Bitzer.

‘Come!’ retorted Bounderby, stopping to wheel round upon him, ‘let’s have
none of _your_ interruptions.  It’s enough to be robbed while you’re
snoring because you’re too comfortable, without being put right with
_your_ four seven ones.  I didn’t snore, myself, when I was your age, let
me tell you.  I hadn’t victuals enough to snore.  And I didn’t four seven
one.  Not if I knew it.’

Bitzer knuckled his forehead again, in a sneaking manner, and seemed at
once particularly impressed and depressed by the instance last given of
Mr. Bounderby’s moral abstinence.

‘A hundred and fifty odd pound,’ resumed Mr. Bounderby.  ‘That sum of
money, young Tom locked in his safe, not a very strong safe, but that’s
no matter now.  Everything was left, all right.  Some time in the night,
while this young fellow snored—Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, you say you have
heard him snore?’

‘Sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I cannot say that I have heard him
precisely snore, and therefore must not make that statement.  But on
winter evenings, when he has fallen asleep at his table, I have heard
him, what I should prefer to describe as partially choke.  I have heard
him on such occasions produce sounds of a nature similar to what may be
sometimes heard in Dutch clocks.  Not,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, with a lofty
sense of giving strict evidence, ‘that I would convey any imputation on
his moral character.  Far from it.  I have always considered Bitzer a
young man of the most upright principle; and to that I beg to bear my
testimony.’

‘Well!’ said the exasperated Bounderby, ‘while he was snoring, _or_
choking, _or_ Dutch-clocking, _or_ something _or_ other—being asleep—some
fellows, somehow, whether previously concealed in the house or not
remains to be seen, got to young Tom’s safe, forced it, and abstracted
the contents.  Being then disturbed, they made off; letting themselves
out at the main door, and double-locking it again (it was double-locked,
and the key under Mrs. Sparsit’s pillow) with a false key, which was
picked up in the street near the Bank, about twelve o’clock to-day.  No
alarm takes place, till this chap, Bitzer, turns out this morning, and
begins to open and prepare the offices for business.  Then, looking at
Tom’s safe, he sees the door ajar, and finds the lock forced, and the
money gone.’

‘Where is Tom, by the by?’ asked Harthouse, glancing round.

‘He has been helping the police,’ said Bounderby, ‘and stays behind at
the Bank.  I wish these fellows had tried to rob me when I was at his
time of life.  They would have been out of pocket if they had invested
eighteenpence in the job; I can tell ’em that.’

‘Is anybody suspected?’

‘Suspected?  I should think there was somebody suspected.  Egod!’ said
Bounderby, relinquishing Mrs. Sparsit’s arm to wipe his heated head.
‘Josiah Bounderby of Coketown is not to be plundered and nobody
suspected.  No, thank you!’

Might Mr. Harthouse inquire Who was suspected?

‘Well,’ said Bounderby, stopping and facing about to confront them all,
‘I’ll tell you.  It’s not to be mentioned everywhere; it’s not to be
mentioned anywhere: in order that the scoundrels concerned (there’s a
gang of ’em) may be thrown off their guard.  So take this in confidence.
Now wait a bit.’  Mr. Bounderby wiped his head again.  ‘What should you
say to;’ here he violently exploded: ‘to a Hand being in it?’

‘I hope,’ said Harthouse, lazily, ‘not our friend Blackpot?’

‘Say Pool instead of Pot, sir,’ returned Bounderby, ‘and that’s the man.’

Louisa faintly uttered some word of incredulity and surprise.

‘O yes!  I know!’ said Bounderby, immediately catching at the sound.  ‘I
know!  I am used to that.  I know all about it.  They are the finest
people in the world, these fellows are.  They have got the gift of the
gab, they have.  They only want to have their rights explained to them,
they do.  But I tell you what.  Show me a dissatisfied Hand, and I’ll
show you a man that’s fit for anything bad, I don’t care what it is.’

Another of the popular fictions of Coketown, which some pains had been
taken to disseminate—and which some people really believed.

‘But I am acquainted with these chaps,’ said Bounderby.  ‘I can read ’em
off, like books.  Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, I appeal to you.  What warning did
I give that fellow, the first time he set foot in the house, when the
express object of his visit was to know how he could knock Religion over,
and floor the Established Church?  Mrs. Sparsit, in point of high
connexions, you are on a level with the aristocracy,—did I say, or did I
not say, to that fellow, “you can’t hide the truth from me: you are not
the kind of fellow I like; you’ll come to no good”?’

‘Assuredly, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘you did, in a highly impressive
manner, give him such an admonition.’

‘When he shocked you, ma’am,’ said Bounderby; ‘when he shocked your
feelings?’

‘Yes, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a meek shake of her head, ‘he
certainly did so.  Though I do not mean to say but that my feelings may
be weaker on such points—more foolish if the term is preferred—than they
might have been, if I had always occupied my present position.’

Mr. Bounderby stared with a bursting pride at Mr. Harthouse, as much as
to say, ‘I am the proprietor of this female, and she’s worth your
attention, I think.’  Then, resumed his discourse.

‘You can recall for yourself, Harthouse, what I said to him when you saw
him.  I didn’t mince the matter with him.  I am never mealy with ’em.  I
KNOW ’em.  Very well, sir.  Three days after that, he bolted.  Went off,
nobody knows where: as my mother did in my infancy—only with this
difference, that he is a worse subject than my mother, if possible.  What
did he do before he went?  What do you say;’ Mr. Bounderby, with his hat
in his hand, gave a beat upon the crown at every little division of his
sentences, as if it were a tambourine; ‘to his being seen—night after
night—watching the Bank?—to his lurking about there—after dark?—To its
striking Mrs. Sparsit—that he could be lurking for no good—To her calling
Bitzer’s attention to him, and their both taking notice of him—And to its
appearing on inquiry to-day—that he was also noticed by the neighbours?’
Having come to the climax, Mr. Bounderby, like an oriental dancer, put
his tambourine on his head.

‘Suspicious,’ said James Harthouse, ‘certainly.’

‘I think so, sir,’ said Bounderby, with a defiant nod.  ‘I think so.  But
there are more of ’em in it.  There’s an old woman.  One never hears of
these things till the mischief’s done; all sorts of defects are found out
in the stable door after the horse is stolen; there’s an old woman turns
up now.  An old woman who seems to have been flying into town on a
broomstick, every now and then.  _She_ watches the place a whole day
before this fellow begins, and on the night when you saw him, she steals
away with him and holds a council with him—I suppose, to make her report
on going off duty, and be damned to her.’

There was such a person in the room that night, and she shrunk from
observation, thought Louisa.

‘This is not all of ’em, even as we already know ’em,’ said Bounderby,
with many nods of hidden meaning.  ‘But I have said enough for the
present.  You’ll have the goodness to keep it quiet, and mention it to no
one.  It may take time, but we shall have ’em.  It’s policy to give ’em
line enough, and there’s no objection to that.’

‘Of course, they will be punished with the utmost rigour of the law, as
notice-boards observe,’ replied James Harthouse, ‘and serve them right.
Fellows who go in for Banks must take the consequences.  If there were no
consequences, we should all go in for Banks.’  He had gently taken
Louisa’s parasol from her hand, and had put it up for her; and she walked
under its shade, though the sun did not shine there.

‘For the present, Loo Bounderby,’ said her husband, ‘here’s Mrs. Sparsit
to look after.  Mrs. Sparsit’s nerves have been acted upon by this
business, and she’ll stay here a day or two.  So make her comfortable.’

‘Thank you very much, sir,’ that discreet lady observed, ‘but pray do not
let My comfort be a consideration.  Anything will do for Me.’

It soon appeared that if Mrs. Sparsit had a failing in her association
with that domestic establishment, it was that she was so excessively
regardless of herself and regardful of others, as to be a nuisance.  On
being shown her chamber, she was so dreadfully sensible of its comforts
as to suggest the inference that she would have preferred to pass the
night on the mangle in the laundry.  True, the Powlers and the Scadgerses
were accustomed to splendour, ‘but it is my duty to remember,’ Mrs.
Sparsit was fond of observing with a lofty grace: particularly when any
of the domestics were present, ‘that what I was, I am no longer.
Indeed,’ said she, ‘if I could altogether cancel the remembrance that Mr.
Sparsit was a Powler, or that I myself am related to the Scadgers family;
or if I could even revoke the fact, and make myself a person of common
descent and ordinary connexions; I would gladly do so.  I should think
it, under existing circumstances, right to do so.’  The same Hermitical
state of mind led to her renunciation of made dishes and wines at dinner,
until fairly commanded by Mr. Bounderby to take them; when she said,
‘Indeed you are very good, sir;’ and departed from a resolution of which
she had made rather formal and public announcement, to ‘wait for the
simple mutton.’  She was likewise deeply apologetic for wanting the salt;
and, feeling amiably bound to bear out Mr. Bounderby to the fullest
extent in the testimony he had borne to her nerves, occasionally sat back
in her chair and silently wept; at which periods a tear of large
dimensions, like a crystal ear-ring, might be observed (or rather, must
be, for it insisted on public notice) sliding down her Roman nose.

But Mrs. Sparsit’s greatest point, first and last, was her determination
to pity Mr. Bounderby.  There were occasions when in looking at him she
was involuntarily moved to shake her head, as who would say, ‘Alas, poor
Yorick!’  After allowing herself to be betrayed into these evidences of
emotion, she would force a lambent brightness, and would be fitfully
cheerful, and would say, ‘You have still good spirits, sir, I am thankful
to find;’ and would appear to hail it as a blessed dispensation that Mr.
Bounderby bore up as he did.  One idiosyncrasy for which she often
apologized, she found it excessively difficult to conquer.  She had a
curious propensity to call Mrs. Bounderby ‘Miss Gradgrind,’ and yielded
to it some three or four score times in the course of the evening.  Her
repetition of this mistake covered Mrs. Sparsit with modest confusion;
but indeed, she said, it seemed so natural to say Miss Gradgrind:
whereas, to persuade herself that the young lady whom she had had the
happiness of knowing from a child could be really and truly Mrs.
Bounderby, she found almost impossible.  It was a further singularity of
this remarkable case, that the more she thought about it, the more
impossible it appeared; ‘the differences,’ she observed, ‘being such.’

In the drawing-room after dinner, Mr. Bounderby tried the case of the
robbery, examined the witnesses, made notes of the evidence, found the
suspected persons guilty, and sentenced them to the extreme punishment of
the law.  That done, Bitzer was dismissed to town with instructions to
recommend Tom to come home by the mail-train.

When candles were brought, Mrs. Sparsit murmured, ‘Don’t be low, sir.
Pray let me see you cheerful, sir, as I used to do.’  Mr. Bounderby, upon
whom these consolations had begun to produce the effect of making him, in
a bull-headed blundering way, sentimental, sighed like some large
sea-animal.  ‘I cannot bear to see you so, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Try
a hand at backgammon, sir, as you used to do when I had the honour of
living under your roof.’  ‘I haven’t played backgammon, ma’am,’ said Mr.
Bounderby, ‘since that time.’  ‘No, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, soothingly,
‘I am aware that you have not.  I remember that Miss Gradgrind takes no
interest in the game.  But I shall be happy, sir, if you will
condescend.’

They played near a window, opening on the garden.  It was a fine night:
not moonlight, but sultry and fragrant.  Louisa and Mr. Harthouse
strolled out into the garden, where their voices could be heard in the
stillness, though not what they said.  Mrs. Sparsit, from her place at
the backgammon board, was constantly straining her eyes to pierce the
shadows without.  ‘What’s the matter, ma’am?’ said Mr. Bounderby; ‘you
don’t see a Fire, do you?’  ‘Oh dear no, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I
was thinking of the dew.’  ‘What have you got to do with the dew, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘It’s not myself, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I am
fearful of Miss Gradgrind’s taking cold.’  ‘She never takes cold,’ said
Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Really, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  And was affected with
a cough in her throat.

When the time drew near for retiring, Mr. Bounderby took a glass of
water.  ‘Oh, sir?’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Not your sherry warm, with
lemon-peel and nutmeg?’  ‘Why, I have got out of the habit of taking it
now, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby.  ‘The more’s the pity, sir,’ returned
Mrs. Sparsit; ‘you are losing all your good old habits.  Cheer up, sir!
If Miss Gradgrind will permit me, I will offer to make it for you, as I
have often done.’

Miss Gradgrind readily permitting Mrs. Sparsit to do anything she
pleased, that considerate lady made the beverage, and handed it to Mr.
Bounderby.  ‘It will do you good, sir.  It will warm your heart.  It is
the sort of thing you want, and ought to take, sir.’  And when Mr.
Bounderby said, ‘Your health, ma’am!’ she answered with great feeling,
‘Thank you, sir.  The same to you, and happiness also.’  Finally, she
wished him good night, with great pathos; and Mr. Bounderby went to bed,
with a maudlin persuasion that he had been crossed in something tender,
though he could not, for his life, have mentioned what it was.

Long after Louisa had undressed and lain down, she watched and waited for
her brother’s coming home.  That could hardly be, she knew, until an hour
past midnight; but in the country silence, which did anything but calm
the trouble of her thoughts, time lagged wearily.  At last, when the
darkness and stillness had seemed for hours to thicken one another, she
heard the bell at the gate.  She felt as though she would have been glad
that it rang on until daylight; but it ceased, and the circles of its
last sound spread out fainter and wider in the air, and all was dead
again.

She waited yet some quarter of an hour, as she judged.  Then she arose,
put on a loose robe, and went out of her room in the dark, and up the
staircase to her brother’s room.  His door being shut, she softly opened
it and spoke to him, approaching his bed with a noiseless step.

She kneeled down beside it, passed her arm over his neck, and drew his
face to hers.  She knew that he only feigned to be asleep, but she said
nothing to him.

He started by and by as if he were just then awakened, and asked who that
was, and what was the matter?

‘Tom, have you anything to tell me?  If ever you loved me in your life,
and have anything concealed from every one besides, tell it to me.’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo.  You have been dreaming.’

‘My dear brother:’ she laid her head down on his pillow, and her hair
flowed over him as if she would hide him from every one but herself: ‘is
there nothing that you have to tell me?  Is there nothing you can tell me
if you will?  You can tell me nothing that will change me.  O Tom, tell
me the truth!’

‘I don’t know what you mean, Loo!’

‘As you lie here alone, my dear, in the melancholy night, so you must lie
somewhere one night, when even I, if I am living then, shall have left
you.  As I am here beside you, barefoot, unclothed, undistinguishable in
darkness, so must I lie through all the night of my decay, until I am
dust.  In the name of that time, Tom, tell me the truth now!’

‘What is it you want to know?’

‘You may be certain;’ in the energy of her love she took him to her bosom
as if he were a child; ‘that I will not reproach you.  You may be certain
that I will be compassionate and true to you.  You may be certain that I
will save you at whatever cost.  O Tom, have you nothing to tell me?
Whisper very softly.  Say only “yes,” and I shall understand you!’

She turned her ear to his lips, but he remained doggedly silent.

‘Not a word, Tom?’

‘How can I say Yes, or how can I say No, when I don’t know what you mean?
Loo, you are a brave, kind girl, worthy I begin to think of a better
brother than I am.  But I have nothing more to say.  Go to bed, go to
bed.’

‘You are tired,’ she whispered presently, more in her usual way.

‘Yes, I am quite tired out.’

‘You have been so hurried and disturbed to-day.  Have any fresh
discoveries been made?’

‘Only those you have heard of, from—him.’

‘Tom, have you said to any one that we made a visit to those people, and
that we saw those three together?’

‘No.  Didn’t you yourself particularly ask me to keep it quiet when you
asked me to go there with you?’

‘Yes.  But I did not know then what was going to happen.’

‘Nor I neither.  How could I?’

He was very quick upon her with this retort.

‘Ought I to say, after what has happened,’ said his sister, standing by
the bed—she had gradually withdrawn herself and risen, ‘that I made that
visit?  Should I say so?  Must I say so?’

‘Good Heavens, Loo,’ returned her brother, ‘you are not in the habit of
asking my advice.  Say what you like.  If you keep it to yourself, I
shall keep it to _my_self.  If you disclose it, there’s an end of it.’

It was too dark for either to see the other’s face; but each seemed very
attentive, and to consider before speaking.

‘Tom, do you believe the man I gave the money to, is really implicated in
this crime?’

‘I don’t know.  I don’t see why he shouldn’t be.’

‘He seemed to me an honest man.’

‘Another person may seem to you dishonest, and yet not be so.’  There was
a pause, for he had hesitated and stopped.

‘In short,’ resumed Tom, as if he had made up his mind, ‘if you come to
that, perhaps I was so far from being altogether in his favour, that I
took him outside the door to tell him quietly, that I thought he might
consider himself very well off to get such a windfall as he had got from
my sister, and that I hoped he would make good use of it.  You remember
whether I took him out or not.  I say nothing against the man; he may be
a very good fellow, for anything I know; I hope he is.’

‘Was he offended by what you said?’

‘No, he took it pretty well; he was civil enough.  Where are you, Loo?’
He sat up in bed and kissed her.  ‘Good night, my dear, good night.’

‘You have nothing more to tell me?’

‘No.  What should I have?  You wouldn’t have me tell you a lie!’

‘I wouldn’t have you do that to-night, Tom, of all the nights in your
life; many and much happier as I hope they will be.’

‘Thank you, my dear Loo.  I am so tired, that I am sure I wonder I don’t
say anything to get to sleep.  Go to bed, go to bed.’

Kissing her again, he turned round, drew the coverlet over his head, and
lay as still as if that time had come by which she had adjured him.  She
stood for some time at the bedside before she slowly moved away.  She
stopped at the door, looked back when she had opened it, and asked him if
he had called her?  But he lay still, and she softly closed the door and
returned to her room.

Then the wretched boy looked cautiously up and found her gone, crept out
of bed, fastened his door, and threw himself upon his pillow again:
tearing his hair, morosely crying, grudgingly loving her, hatefully but
impenitently spurning himself, and no less hatefully and unprofitably
spurning all the good in the world.



CHAPTER IX
HEARING THE LAST OF IT


MRS. SPARSIT, lying by to recover the tone of her nerves in Mr.
Bounderby’s retreat, kept such a sharp look-out, night and day, under her
Coriolanian eyebrows, that her eyes, like a couple of lighthouses on an
iron-bound coast, might have warned all prudent mariners from that bold
rock her Roman nose and the dark and craggy region in its neighbourhood,
but for the placidity of her manner.  Although it was hard to believe
that her retiring for the night could be anything but a form, so severely
wide awake were those classical eyes of hers, and so impossible did it
seem that her rigid nose could yield to any relaxing influence, yet her
manner of sitting, smoothing her uncomfortable, not to say, gritty
mittens (they were constructed of a cool fabric like a meat-safe), or of
ambling to unknown places of destination with her foot in her cotton
stirrup, was so perfectly serene, that most observers would have been
constrained to suppose her a dove, embodied by some freak of nature, in
the earthly tabernacle of a bird of the hook-beaked order.

She was a most wonderful woman for prowling about the house.  How she got
from story to story was a mystery beyond solution.  A lady so decorous in
herself, and so highly connected, was not to be suspected of dropping
over the banisters or sliding down them, yet her extraordinary facility
of locomotion suggested the wild idea.  Another noticeable circumstance
in Mrs. Sparsit was, that she was never hurried.  She would shoot with
consummate velocity from the roof to the hall, yet would be in full
possession of her breath and dignity on the moment of her arrival there.
Neither was she ever seen by human vision to go at a great pace.

She took very kindly to Mr. Harthouse, and had some pleasant conversation
with him soon after her arrival.  She made him her stately curtsey in the
garden, one morning before breakfast.

‘It appears but yesterday, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that I had the
honour of receiving you at the Bank, when you were so good as to wish to
be made acquainted with Mr. Bounderby’s address.’

‘An occasion, I am sure, not to be forgotten by myself in the course of
Ages,’ said Mr. Harthouse, inclining his head to Mrs. Sparsit with the
most indolent of all possible airs.

‘We live in a singular world, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.

‘I have had the honour, by a coincidence of which I am proud, to have
made a remark, similar in effect, though not so epigrammatically
expressed.’

‘A singular world, I would say, sir,’ pursued Mrs. Sparsit; after
acknowledging the compliment with a drooping of her dark eyebrows, not
altogether so mild in its expression as her voice was in its dulcet
tones; ‘as regards the intimacies we form at one time, with individuals
we were quite ignorant of, at another.  I recall, sir, that on that
occasion you went so far as to say you were actually apprehensive of Miss
Gradgrind.’

‘Your memory does me more honour than my insignificance deserves.  I
availed myself of your obliging hints to correct my timidity, and it is
unnecessary to add that they were perfectly accurate.  Mrs. Sparsit’s
talent for—in fact for anything requiring accuracy—with a combination of
strength of mind—and Family—is too habitually developed to admit of any
question.’  He was almost falling asleep over this compliment; it took
him so long to get through, and his mind wandered so much in the course
of its execution.

‘You found Miss Gradgrind—I really cannot call her Mrs. Bounderby; it’s
very absurd of me—as youthful as I described her?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit,
sweetly.

‘You drew her portrait perfectly,’ said Mr. Harthouse.  ‘Presented her
dead image.’

‘Very engaging, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, causing her mittens slowly to
revolve over one another.

‘Highly so.’

‘It used to be considered,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘that Miss Gradgrind was
wanting in animation, but I confess she appears to me considerably and
strikingly improved in that respect.  Ay, and indeed here _is_ Mr.
Bounderby!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, nodding her head a great many times, as
if she had been talking and thinking of no one else.  ‘How do you find
yourself this morning, sir?  Pray let us see you cheerful, sir.’

Now, these persistent assuagements of his misery, and lightenings of his
load, had by this time begun to have the effect of making Mr. Bounderby
softer than usual towards Mrs. Sparsit, and harder than usual to most
other people from his wife downward.  So, when Mrs. Sparsit said with
forced lightness of heart, ‘You want your breakfast, sir, but I dare say
Miss Gradgrind will soon be here to preside at the table,’ Mr. Bounderby
replied, ‘If I waited to be taken care of by my wife, ma’am, I believe
you know pretty well I should wait till Doomsday, so I’ll trouble _you_
to take charge of the teapot.’  Mrs. Sparsit complied, and assumed her
old position at table.

This again made the excellent woman vastly sentimental.  She was so
humble withal, that when Louisa appeared, she rose, protesting she never
could think of sitting in that place under existing circumstances, often
as she had had the honour of making Mr. Bounderby’s breakfast, before
Mrs. Gradgrind—she begged pardon, she meant to say Miss Bounderby—she
hoped to be excused, but she really could not get it right yet, though
she trusted to become familiar with it by and by—had assumed her present
position.  It was only (she observed) because Miss Gradgrind happened to
be a little late, and Mr. Bounderby’s time was so very precious, and she
knew it of old to be so essential that he should breakfast to the moment,
that she had taken the liberty of complying with his request; long as his
will had been a law to her.

‘There!  Stop where you are, ma’am,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘stop where you
are!  Mrs. Bounderby will be very glad to be relieved of the trouble, I
believe.’

‘Don’t say that, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, almost with severity,
‘because that is very unkind to Mrs. Bounderby.  And to be unkind is not
to be you, sir.’

‘You may set your mind at rest, ma’am.—You can take it very quietly,
can’t you, Loo?’ said Mr. Bounderby, in a blustering way to his wife.

‘Of course.  It is of no moment.  Why should it be of any importance to
me?’

‘Why should it be of any importance to any one, Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’
said Mr. Bounderby, swelling with a sense of slight.  ‘You attach too
much importance to these things, ma’am.  By George, you’ll be corrupted
in some of your notions here.  You are old-fashioned, ma’am.  You are
behind Tom Gradgrind’s children’s time.’

‘What is the matter with you?’ asked Louisa, coldly surprised.  ‘What has
given you offence?’

‘Offence!’ repeated Bounderby.  ‘Do you suppose if there was any offence
given me, I shouldn’t name it, and request to have it corrected?  I am a
straightforward man, I believe.  I don’t go beating about for
side-winds.’

‘I suppose no one ever had occasion to think you too diffident, or too
delicate,’ Louisa answered him composedly: ‘I have never made that
objection to you, either as a child or as a woman.  I don’t understand
what you would have.’

‘Have?’ returned Mr. Bounderby.  ‘Nothing.  Otherwise, don’t you, Loo
Bounderby, know thoroughly well that I, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown,
would have it?’

She looked at him, as he struck the table and made the teacups ring, with
a proud colour in her face that was a new change, Mr. Harthouse thought.
‘You are incomprehensible this morning,’ said Louisa.  ‘Pray take no
further trouble to explain yourself.  I am not curious to know your
meaning.  What does it matter?’

Nothing more was said on this theme, and Mr. Harthouse was soon idly gay
on indifferent subjects.  But from this day, the Sparsit action upon Mr.
Bounderby threw Louisa and James Harthouse more together, and
strengthened the dangerous alienation from her husband and confidence
against him with another, into which she had fallen by degrees so fine
that she could not retrace them if she tried.  But whether she ever tried
or no, lay hidden in her own closed heart.

Mrs. Sparsit was so much affected on this particular occasion, that,
assisting Mr. Bounderby to his hat after breakfast, and being then alone
with him in the hall, she imprinted a chaste kiss upon his hand, murmured
‘My benefactor!’ and retired, overwhelmed with grief.  Yet it is an
indubitable fact, within the cognizance of this history, that five
minutes after he had left the house in the self-same hat, the same
descendant of the Scadgerses and connexion by matrimony of the Powlers,
shook her right-hand mitten at his portrait, made a contemptuous grimace
at that work of art, and said ‘Serve you right, you Noodle, and I am glad
of it.’

Mr. Bounderby had not been long gone, when Bitzer appeared.  Bitzer had
come down by train, shrieking and rattling over the long line of arches
that bestrode the wild country of past and present coal-pits, with an
express from Stone Lodge.  It was a hasty note to inform Louisa that Mrs.
Gradgrind lay very ill.  She had never been well within her daughter’s
knowledge; but, she had declined within the last few days, had continued
sinking all through the night, and was now as nearly dead, as her limited
capacity of being in any state that implied the ghost of an intention to
get out of it, allowed.

Accompanied by the lightest of porters, fit colourless servitor at
Death’s door when Mrs. Gradgrind knocked, Louisa rumbled to Coketown,
over the coal-pits past and present, and was whirled into its smoky jaws.
She dismissed the messenger to his own devices, and rode away to her old
home.

She had seldom been there since her marriage.  Her father was usually
sifting and sifting at his parliamentary cinder-heap in London (without
being observed to turn up many precious articles among the rubbish), and
was still hard at it in the national dust-yard.  Her mother had taken it
rather as a disturbance than otherwise, to be visited, as she reclined
upon her sofa; young people, Louisa felt herself all unfit for; Sissy she
had never softened to again, since the night when the stroller’s child
had raised her eyes to look at Mr. Bounderby’s intended wife.  She had no
inducements to go back, and had rarely gone.

Neither, as she approached her old home now, did any of the best
influences of old home descend upon her.  The dreams of childhood—its
airy fables; its graceful, beautiful, humane, impossible adornments of
the world beyond: so good to be believed in once, so good to be
remembered when outgrown, for then the least among them rises to the
stature of a great Charity in the heart, suffering little children to
come into the midst of it, and to keep with their pure hands a garden in
the stony ways of this world, wherein it were better for all the children
of Adam that they should oftener sun themselves, simple and trustful, and
not worldly-wise—what had she to do with these?  Remembrances of how she
had journeyed to the little that she knew, by the enchanted roads of what
she and millions of innocent creatures had hoped and imagined; of how,
first coming upon Reason through the tender light of Fancy, she had seen
it a beneficent god, deferring to gods as great as itself; not a grim
Idol, cruel and cold, with its victims bound hand to foot, and its big
dumb shape set up with a sightless stare, never to be moved by anything
but so many calculated tons of leverage—what had she to do with these?
Her remembrances of home and childhood were remembrances of the drying up
of every spring and fountain in her young heart as it gushed out.  The
golden waters were not there.  They were flowing for the fertilization of
the land where grapes are gathered from thorns, and figs from thistles.

She went, with a heavy, hardened kind of sorrow upon her, into the house
and into her mother’s room.  Since the time of her leaving home, Sissy
had lived with the rest of the family on equal terms.  Sissy was at her
mother’s side; and Jane, her sister, now ten or twelve years old, was in
the room.

There was great trouble before it could be made known to Mrs. Gradgrind
that her eldest child was there.  She reclined, propped up, from mere
habit, on a couch: as nearly in her old usual attitude, as anything so
helpless could be kept in.  She had positively refused to take to her
bed; on the ground that if she did, she would never hear the last of it.

Her feeble voice sounded so far away in her bundle of shawls, and the
sound of another voice addressing her seemed to take such a long time in
getting down to her ears, that she might have been lying at the bottom of
a well.  The poor lady was nearer Truth than she ever had been: which had
much to do with it.

On being told that Mrs. Bounderby was there, she replied, at
cross-purposes, that she had never called him by that name since he
married Louisa; that pending her choice of an objectionable name, she had
called him J; and that she could not at present depart from that
regulation, not being yet provided with a permanent substitute.  Louisa
had sat by her for some minutes, and had spoken to her often, before she
arrived at a clear understanding who it was.  She then seemed to come to
it all at once.

‘Well, my dear,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘and I hope you are going on
satisfactorily to yourself.  It was all your father’s doing.  He set his
heart upon it.  And he ought to know.’

‘I want to hear of you, mother; not of myself.’

‘You want to hear of me, my dear?  That’s something new, I am sure, when
anybody wants to hear of me.  Not at all well, Louisa.  Very faint and
giddy.’

‘Are you in pain, dear mother?’

‘I think there’s a pain somewhere in the room,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind, ‘but
I couldn’t positively say that I have got it.’

After this strange speech, she lay silent for some time.  Louisa, holding
her hand, could feel no pulse; but kissing it, could see a slight thin
thread of life in fluttering motion.

‘You very seldom see your sister,’ said Mrs. Gradgrind.  ‘She grows like
you.  I wish you would look at her.  Sissy, bring her here.’

She was brought, and stood with her hand in her sister’s.  Louisa had
observed her with her arm round Sissy’s neck, and she felt the difference
of this approach.

‘Do you see the likeness, Louisa?’

‘Yes, mother.  I should think her like me.  But—’

‘Eh!  Yes, I always say so,’ Mrs. Gradgrind cried, with unexpected
quickness.  ‘And that reminds me.  I—I want to speak to you, my dear.
Sissy, my good girl, leave us alone a minute.’ Louisa had relinquished
the hand: had thought that her sister’s was a better and brighter face
than hers had ever been: had seen in it, not without a rising feeling of
resentment, even in that place and at that time, something of the
gentleness of the other face in the room; the sweet face with the
trusting eyes, made paler than watching and sympathy made it, by the rich
dark hair.

Left alone with her mother, Louisa saw her lying with an awful lull upon
her face, like one who was floating away upon some great water, all
resistance over, content to be carried down the stream.  She put the
shadow of a hand to her lips again, and recalled her.

‘You were going to speak to me, mother.’

‘Eh?  Yes, to be sure, my dear.  You know your father is almost always
away now, and therefore I must write to him about it.’

‘About what, mother?  Don’t be troubled.  About what?’

‘You must remember, my dear, that whenever I have said anything, on any
subject, I have never heard the last of it: and consequently, that I have
long left off saying anything.’

‘I can hear you, mother.’  But, it was only by dint of bending down to
her ear, and at the same time attentively watching the lips as they
moved, that she could link such faint and broken sounds into any chain of
connexion.

‘You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother.  Ologies of
all kinds from morning to night.  If there is any Ology left, of any
description, that has not been worn to rags in this house, all I can say
is, I hope I shall never hear its name.’

‘I can hear you, mother, when you have strength to go on.’  This, to keep
her from floating away.

‘But there is something—not an Ology at all—that your father has missed,
or forgotten, Louisa.  I don’t know what it is.  I have often sat with
Sissy near me, and thought about it.  I shall never get its name now.
But your father may.  It makes me restless.  I want to write to him, to
find out for God’s sake, what it is.  Give me a pen, give me a pen.’

Even the power of restlessness was gone, except from the poor head, which
could just turn from side to side.

She fancied, however, that her request had been complied with, and that
the pen she could not have held was in her hand.  It matters little what
figures of wonderful no-meaning she began to trace upon her wrappers.
The hand soon stopped in the midst of them; the light that had always
been feeble and dim behind the weak transparency, went out; and even Mrs.
Gradgrind, emerged from the shadow in which man walketh and disquieteth
himself in vain, took upon her the dread solemnity of the sages and
patriarchs.



CHAPTER X
MRS. SPARSIT’S STAIRCASE


MRS. SPARSIT’S nerves being slow to recover their tone, the worthy woman
made a stay of some weeks in duration at Mr. Bounderby’s retreat, where,
notwithstanding her anchorite turn of mind based upon her becoming
consciousness of her altered station, she resigned herself with noble
fortitude to lodging, as one may say, in clover, and feeding on the fat
of the land.  During the whole term of this recess from the guardianship
of the Bank, Mrs. Sparsit was a pattern of consistency; continuing to
take such pity on Mr. Bounderby to his face, as is rarely taken on man,
and to call his portrait a Noodle to _its_ face, with the greatest
acrimony and contempt.

Mr. Bounderby, having got it into his explosive composition that Mrs.
Sparsit was a highly superior woman to perceive that he had that general
cross upon him in his deserts (for he had not yet settled what it was),
and further that Louisa would have objected to her as a frequent visitor
if it had comported with his greatness that she should object to anything
he chose to do, resolved not to lose sight of Mrs. Sparsit easily.  So
when her nerves were strung up to the pitch of again consuming
sweetbreads in solitude, he said to her at the dinner-table, on the day
before her departure, ‘I tell you what, ma’am; you shall come down here
of a Saturday, while the fine weather lasts, and stay till Monday.’  To
which Mrs. Sparsit returned, in effect, though not of the Mahomedan
persuasion: ‘To hear is to obey.’

Now, Mrs. Sparsit was not a poetical woman; but she took an idea in the
nature of an allegorical fancy, into her head.  Much watching of Louisa,
and much consequent observation of her impenetrable demeanour, which
keenly whetted and sharpened Mrs. Sparsit’s edge, must have given her as
it were a lift, in the way of inspiration.  She erected in her mind a
mighty Staircase, with a dark pit of shame and ruin at the bottom; and
down those stairs, from day to day and hour to hour, she saw Louisa
coming.

It became the business of Mrs. Sparsit’s life, to look up at her
staircase, and to watch Louisa coming down.  Sometimes slowly, sometimes
quickly, sometimes several steps at one bout, sometimes stopping, never
turning back.  If she had once turned back, it might have been the death
of Mrs. Sparsit in spleen and grief.

She had been descending steadily, to the day, and on the day, when Mr.
Bounderby issued the weekly invitation recorded above.  Mrs. Sparsit was
in good spirits, and inclined to be conversational.

‘And pray, sir,’ said she, ‘if I may venture to ask a question
appertaining to any subject on which you show reserve—which is indeed
hardy in me, for I well know you have a reason for everything you do—have
you received intelligence respecting the robbery?’

‘Why, ma’am, no; not yet.  Under the circumstances, I didn’t expect it
yet.  Rome wasn’t built in a day, ma’am.’

‘Very true, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, shaking her head.

‘Nor yet in a week, ma’am.’

‘No, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, with a gentle melancholy upon
her.

‘In a similar manner, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘I can wait, you know.  If
Romulus and Remus could wait, Josiah Bounderby can wait.  They were
better off in their youth than I was, however.  They had a she-wolf for a
nurse; I had only a she-wolf for a grandmother.  She didn’t give any
milk, ma’am; she gave bruises.  She was a regular Alderney at that.’

‘Ah!’ Mrs. Sparsit sighed and shuddered.

‘No, ma’am,’ continued Bounderby, ‘I have not heard anything more about
it.  It’s in hand, though; and young Tom, who rather sticks to business
at present—something new for him; he hadn’t the schooling _I_ had—is
helping.  My injunction is, Keep it quiet, and let it seem to blow over.
Do what you like under the rose, but don’t give a sign of what you’re
about; or half a hundred of ’em will combine together and get this fellow
who has bolted, out of reach for good.  Keep it quiet, and the thieves
will grow in confidence by little and little, and we shall have ’em.’

‘Very sagacious indeed, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Very interesting.  The
old woman you mentioned, sir—’

‘The old woman I mentioned, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, cutting the matter
short, as it was nothing to boast about, ‘is not laid hold of; but, she
may take her oath she will be, if that is any satisfaction to her
villainous old mind.  In the mean time, ma’am, I am of opinion, if you
ask me my opinion, that the less she is talked about, the better.’

The same evening, Mrs. Sparsit, in her chamber window, resting from her
packing operations, looked towards her great staircase and saw Louisa
still descending.

She sat by Mr. Harthouse, in an alcove in the garden, talking very low;
he stood leaning over her, as they whispered together, and his face
almost touched her hair.  ‘If not quite!’ said Mrs. Sparsit, straining
her hawk’s eyes to the utmost.  Mrs. Sparsit was too distant to hear a
word of their discourse, or even to know that they were speaking softly,
otherwise than from the expression of their figures; but what they said
was this:

‘You recollect the man, Mr. Harthouse?’

‘Oh, perfectly!’

‘His face, and his manner, and what he said?’

‘Perfectly.  And an infinitely dreary person he appeared to me to be.
Lengthy and prosy in the extreme.  It was knowing to hold forth, in the
humble-virtue school of eloquence; but, I assure you I thought at the
time, “My good fellow, you are over-doing this!”’

‘It has been very difficult to me to think ill of that man.’

‘My dear Louisa—as Tom says.’  Which he never did say.  ‘You know no good
of the fellow?’

‘No, certainly.’

‘Nor of any other such person?’

‘How can I,’ she returned, with more of her first manner on her than he
had lately seen, ‘when I know nothing of them, men or women?’

‘My dear Louisa, then consent to receive the submissive representation of
your devoted friend, who knows something of several varieties of his
excellent fellow-creatures—for excellent they are, I am quite ready to
believe, in spite of such little foibles as always helping themselves to
what they can get hold of.  This fellow talks.  Well; every fellow talks.
He professes morality.  Well; all sorts of humbugs profess morality.
From the House of Commons to the House of Correction, there is a general
profession of morality, except among our people; it really is that
exception which makes our people quite reviving.  You saw and heard the
case.  Here was one of the fluffy classes pulled up extremely short by my
esteemed friend Mr. Bounderby—who, as we know, is not possessed of that
delicacy which would soften so tight a hand.  The member of the fluffy
classes was injured, exasperated, left the house grumbling, met somebody
who proposed to him to go in for some share in this Bank business, went
in, put something in his pocket which had nothing in it before, and
relieved his mind extremely.  Really he would have been an uncommon,
instead of a common, fellow, if he had not availed himself of such an
opportunity.  Or he may have originated it altogether, if he had the
cleverness.’

‘I almost feel as though it must be bad in me,’ returned Louisa, after
sitting thoughtful awhile, ‘to be so ready to agree with you, and to be
so lightened in my heart by what you say.’

‘I only say what is reasonable; nothing worse.  I have talked it over
with my friend Tom more than once—of course I remain on terms of perfect
confidence with Tom—and he is quite of my opinion, and I am quite of his.
Will you walk?’

They strolled away, among the lanes beginning to be indistinct in the
twilight—she leaning on his arm—and she little thought how she was going
down, down, down, Mrs. Sparsit’s staircase.

Night and day, Mrs. Sparsit kept it standing.  When Louisa had arrived at
the bottom and disappeared in the gulf, it might fall in upon her if it
would; but, until then, there it was to be, a Building, before Mrs.
Sparsit’s eyes.  And there Louisa always was, upon it.

And always gliding down, down, down!

Mrs. Sparsit saw James Harthouse come and go; she heard of him here and
there; she saw the changes of the face he had studied; she, too, remarked
to a nicety how and when it clouded, how and when it cleared; she kept
her black eyes wide open, with no touch of pity, with no touch of
compunction, all absorbed in interest.  In the interest of seeing her,
ever drawing, with no hand to stay her, nearer and nearer to the bottom
of this new Giant’s Staircase.

With all her deference for Mr. Bounderby as contradistinguished from his
portrait, Mrs. Sparsit had not the smallest intention of interrupting the
descent.  Eager to see it accomplished, and yet patient, she waited for
the last fall, as for the ripeness and fulness of the harvest of her
hopes.  Hushed in expectancy, she kept her wary gaze upon the stairs; and
seldom so much as darkly shook her right mitten (with her fist in it), at
the figure coming down.



CHAPTER XI
LOWER AND LOWER


THE figure descended the great stairs, steadily, steadily; always
verging, like a weight in deep water, to the black gulf at the bottom.

Mr. Gradgrind, apprised of his wife’s decease, made an expedition from
London, and buried her in a business-like manner.  He then returned with
promptitude to the national cinder-heap, and resumed his sifting for the
odds and ends he wanted, and his throwing of the dust about into the eyes
of other people who wanted other odds and ends—in fact resumed his
parliamentary duties.

In the meantime, Mrs. Sparsit kept unwinking watch and ward.  Separated
from her staircase, all the week, by the length of iron road dividing
Coketown from the country house, she yet maintained her cat-like
observation of Louisa, through her husband, through her brother, through
James Harthouse, through the outsides of letters and packets, through
everything animate and inanimate that at any time went near the stairs.
‘Your foot on the last step, my lady,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, apostrophizing
the descending figure, with the aid of her threatening mitten, ‘and all
your art shall never blind me.’

Art or nature though, the original stock of Louisa’s character or the
graft of circumstances upon it,—her curious reserve did baffle, while it
stimulated, one as sagacious as Mrs. Sparsit.  There were times when Mr.
James Harthouse was not sure of her.  There were times when he could not
read the face he had studied so long; and when this lonely girl was a
greater mystery to him, than any woman of the world with a ring of
satellites to help her.

So the time went on; until it happened that Mr. Bounderby was called away
from home by business which required his presence elsewhere, for three or
four days.  It was on a Friday that he intimated this to Mrs. Sparsit at
the Bank, adding: ‘But you’ll go down to-morrow, ma’am, all the same.
You’ll go down just as if I was there.  It will make no difference to
you.’

‘Pray, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, reproachfully, ‘let me beg you not to
say that.  Your absence will make a vast difference to me, sir, as I
think you very well know.’

‘Well, ma’am, then you must get on in my absence as well as you can,’
said Mr. Bounderby, not displeased.

‘Mr. Bounderby,’ retorted Mrs. Sparsit, ‘your will is to me a law, sir;
otherwise, it might be my inclination to dispute your kind commands, not
feeling sure that it will be quite so agreeable to Miss Gradgrind to
receive me, as it ever is to your own munificent hospitality.  But you
shall say no more, sir.  I will go, upon your invitation.’

‘Why, when I invite you to my house, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, opening his
eyes, ‘I should hope you want no other invitation.’

‘No, indeed, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘I should hope not.  Say no
more, sir.  I would, sir, I could see you gay again.’

‘What do you mean, ma’am?’ blustered Bounderby.

‘Sir,’ rejoined Mrs. Sparsit, ‘there was wont to be an elasticity in you
which I sadly miss.  Be buoyant, sir!’

Mr. Bounderby, under the influence of this difficult adjuration, backed
up by her compassionate eye, could only scratch his head in a feeble and
ridiculous manner, and afterwards assert himself at a distance, by being
heard to bully the small fry of business all the morning.

‘Bitzer,’ said Mrs. Sparsit that afternoon, when her patron was gone on
his journey, and the Bank was closing, ‘present my compliments to young
Mr. Thomas, and ask him if he would step up and partake of a lamb chop
and walnut ketchup, with a glass of India ale?’  Young Mr. Thomas being
usually ready for anything in that way, returned a gracious answer, and
followed on its heels.  ‘Mr. Thomas,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘these plain
viands being on table, I thought you might be tempted.’

‘Thank’ee, Mrs. Sparsit,’ said the whelp.  And gloomily fell to.

‘How is Mr. Harthouse, Mr. Tom?’ asked Mrs. Sparsit.

‘Oh, he’s all right,’ said Tom.

‘Where may he be at present?’ Mrs. Sparsit asked in a light
conversational manner, after mentally devoting the whelp to the Furies
for being so uncommunicative.

‘He is shooting in Yorkshire,’ said Tom.  ‘Sent Loo a basket half as big
as a church, yesterday.’

‘The kind of gentleman, now,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, sweetly, ‘whom one might
wager to be a good shot!’

‘Crack,’ said Tom.

He had long been a down-looking young fellow, but this characteristic had
so increased of late, that he never raised his eyes to any face for three
seconds together.  Mrs. Sparsit consequently had ample means of watching
his looks, if she were so inclined.

‘Mr. Harthouse is a great favourite of mine,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘as
indeed he is of most people.  May we expect to see him again shortly, Mr.
Tom?’

‘Why, _I_ expect to see him to-morrow,’ returned the whelp.

‘Good news!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, blandly.

‘I have got an appointment with him to meet him in the evening at the
station here,’ said Tom, ‘and I am going to dine with him afterwards, I
believe.  He is not coming down to the country house for a week or so,
being due somewhere else.  At least, he says so; but I shouldn’t wonder
if he was to stop here over Sunday, and stray that way.’

‘Which reminds me!’ said Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Would you remember a message to
your sister, Mr. Tom, if I was to charge you with one?’

‘Well?  I’ll try,’ returned the reluctant whelp, ‘if it isn’t a long un.’

‘It is merely my respectful compliments,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘and I fear
I may not trouble her with my society this week; being still a little
nervous, and better perhaps by my poor self.’

‘Oh!  If that’s all,’ observed Tom, ‘it wouldn’t much matter, even if I
was to forget it, for Loo’s not likely to think of you unless she sees
you.’

Having paid for his entertainment with this agreeable compliment, he
relapsed into a hangdog silence until there was no more India ale left,
when he said, ‘Well, Mrs. Sparsit, I must be off!’ and went off.

Next day, Saturday, Mrs. Sparsit sat at her window all day long looking
at the customers coming in and out, watching the postmen, keeping an eye
on the general traffic of the street, revolving many things in her mind,
but, above all, keeping her attention on her staircase.  The evening
come, she put on her bonnet and shawl, and went quietly out: having her
reasons for hovering in a furtive way about the station by which a
passenger would arrive from Yorkshire, and for preferring to peep into it
round pillars and corners, and out of ladies’ waiting-room windows, to
appearing in its precincts openly.

Tom was in attendance, and loitered about until the expected train came
in.  It brought no Mr. Harthouse.  Tom waited until the crowd had
dispersed, and the bustle was over; and then referred to a posted list of
trains, and took counsel with porters.  That done, he strolled away idly,
stopping in the street and looking up it and down it, and lifting his hat
off and putting it on again, and yawning and stretching himself, and
exhibiting all the symptoms of mortal weariness to be expected in one who
had still to wait until the next train should come in, an hour and forty
minutes hence.

‘This is a device to keep him out of the way,’ said Mrs. Sparsit,
starting from the dull office window whence she had watched him last.
‘Harthouse is with his sister now!’

It was the conception of an inspired moment, and she shot off with her
utmost swiftness to work it out.  The station for the country house was
at the opposite end of the town, the time was short, the road not easy;
but she was so quick in pouncing on a disengaged coach, so quick in
darting out of it, producing her money, seizing her ticket, and diving
into the train, that she was borne along the arches spanning the land of
coal-pits past and present, as if she had been caught up in a cloud and
whirled away.

All the journey, immovable in the air though never left behind; plain to
the dark eyes of her mind, as the electric wires which ruled a colossal
strip of music-paper out of the evening sky, were plain to the dark eyes
of her body; Mrs. Sparsit saw her staircase, with the figure coming down.
Very near the bottom now.  Upon the brink of the abyss.

An overcast September evening, just at nightfall, saw beneath its
drooping eyelids Mrs. Sparsit glide out of her carriage, pass down the
wooden steps of the little station into a stony road, cross it into a
green lane, and become hidden in a summer-growth of leaves and branches.
One or two late birds sleepily chirping in their nests, and a bat heavily
crossing and recrossing her, and the reek of her own tread in the thick
dust that felt like velvet, were all Mrs. Sparsit heard or saw until she
very softly closed a gate.

She went up to the house, keeping within the shrubbery, and went round
it, peeping between the leaves at the lower windows.  Most of them were
open, as they usually were in such warm weather, but there were no lights
yet, and all was silent.  She tried the garden with no better effect.
She thought of the wood, and stole towards it, heedless of long grass and
briers: of worms, snails, and slugs, and all the creeping things that be.
With her dark eyes and her hook nose warily in advance of her, Mrs.
Sparsit softly crushed her way through the thick undergrowth, so intent
upon her object that she probably would have done no less, if the wood
had been a wood of adders.

Hark!

The smaller birds might have tumbled out of their nests, fascinated by
the glittering of Mrs. Sparsit’s eyes in the gloom, as she stopped and
listened.

Low voices close at hand.  His voice and hers.  The appointment _was_ a
device to keep the brother away!  There they were yonder, by the felled
tree.

Bending low among the dewy grass, Mrs. Sparsit advanced closer to them.
She drew herself up, and stood behind a tree, like Robinson Crusoe in his
ambuscade against the savages; so near to them that at a spring, and that
no great one, she could have touched them both.  He was there secretly,
and had not shown himself at the house.  He had come on horseback, and
must have passed through the neighbouring fields; for his horse was tied
to the meadow side of the fence, within a few paces.

‘My dearest love,’ said he, ‘what could I do?  Knowing you were alone,
was it possible that I could stay away?’

‘You may hang your head, to make yourself the more attractive; _I_ don’t
know what they see in you when you hold it up,’ thought Mrs. Sparsit;
‘but you little think, my dearest love, whose eyes are on you!’

That she hung her head, was certain.  She urged him to go away, she
commanded him to go away; but she neither turned her face to him, nor
raised it.  Yet it was remarkable that she sat as still as ever the
amiable woman in ambuscade had seen her sit, at any period in her life.
Her hands rested in one another, like the hands of a statue; and even her
manner of speaking was not hurried.

‘My dear child,’ said Harthouse; Mrs. Sparsit saw with delight that his
arm embraced her; ‘will you not bear with my society for a little while?’

‘Not here.’

‘Where, Louisa?

‘Not here.’

‘But we have so little time to make so much of, and I have come so far,
and am altogether so devoted, and distracted.  There never was a slave at
once so devoted and ill-used by his mistress.  To look for your sunny
welcome that has warmed me into life, and to be received in your frozen
manner, is heart-rending.’

‘Am I to say again, that I must be left to myself here?’

‘But we must meet, my dear Louisa.  Where shall we meet?’

They both started.  The listener started, guiltily, too; for she thought
there was another listener among the trees.  It was only rain, beginning
to fall fast, in heavy drops.

‘Shall I ride up to the house a few minutes hence, innocently supposing
that its master is at home and will be charmed to receive me?’

‘No!’

‘Your cruel commands are implicitly to be obeyed; though I am the most
unfortunate fellow in the world, I believe, to have been insensible to
all other women, and to have fallen prostrate at last under the foot of
the most beautiful, and the most engaging, and the most imperious.  My
dearest Louisa, I cannot go myself, or let you go, in this hard abuse of
your power.’

Mrs. Sparsit saw him detain her with his encircling arm, and heard him
then and there, within her (Mrs. Sparsit’s) greedy hearing, tell her how
he loved her, and how she was the stake for which he ardently desired to
play away all that he had in life.  The objects he had lately pursued,
turned worthless beside her; such success as was almost in his grasp, he
flung away from him like the dirt it was, compared with her.  Its
pursuit, nevertheless, if it kept him near her, or its renunciation if it
took him from her, or flight if she shared it, or secrecy if she
commanded it, or any fate, or every fate, all was alike to him, so that
she was true to him,—the man who had seen how cast away she was, whom she
had inspired at their first meeting with an admiration, an interest, of
which he had thought himself incapable, whom she had received into her
confidence, who was devoted to her and adored her.  All this, and more,
in his hurry, and in hers, in the whirl of her own gratified malice, in
the dread of being discovered, in the rapidly increasing noise of heavy
rain among the leaves, and a thunderstorm rolling up—Mrs. Sparsit
received into her mind, set off with such an unavoidable halo of
confusion and indistinctness, that when at length he climbed the fence
and led his horse away, she was not sure where they were to meet, or
when, except that they had said it was to be that night.

But one of them yet remained in the darkness before her; and while she
tracked that one she must be right.  ‘Oh, my dearest love,’ thought Mrs.
Sparsit, ‘you little think how well attended you are!’

Mrs. Sparsit saw her out of the wood, and saw her enter the house.  What
to do next?  It rained now, in a sheet of water.  Mrs. Sparsit’s white
stockings were of many colours, green predominating; prickly things were
in her shoes; caterpillars slung themselves, in hammocks of their own
making, from various parts of her dress; rills ran from her bonnet, and
her Roman nose.  In such condition, Mrs. Sparsit stood hidden in the
density of the shrubbery, considering what next?

Lo, Louisa coming out of the house!  Hastily cloaked and muffled, and
stealing away.  She elopes!  She falls from the lowermost stair, and is
swallowed up in the gulf.

Indifferent to the rain, and moving with a quick determined step, she
struck into a side-path parallel with the ride.  Mrs. Sparsit followed in
the shadow of the trees, at but a short distance; for it was not easy to
keep a figure in view going quickly through the umbrageous darkness.

When she stopped to close the side-gate without noise, Mrs. Sparsit
stopped.  When she went on, Mrs. Sparsit went on.  She went by the way
Mrs. Sparsit had come, emerged from the green lane, crossed the stony
road, and ascended the wooden steps to the railroad.  A train for
Coketown would come through presently, Mrs. Sparsit knew; so she
understood Coketown to be her first place of destination.

In Mrs. Sparsit’s limp and streaming state, no extensive precautions were
necessary to change her usual appearance; but, she stopped under the lee
of the station wall, tumbled her shawl into a new shape, and put it on
over her bonnet.  So disguised she had no fear of being recognized when
she followed up the railroad steps, and paid her money in the small
office.  Louisa sat waiting in a corner.  Mrs. Sparsit sat waiting in
another corner.  Both listened to the thunder, which was loud, and to the
rain, as it washed off the roof, and pattered on the parapets of the
arches.  Two or three lamps were rained out and blown out; so, both saw
the lightning to advantage as it quivered and zigzagged on the iron
tracks.

The seizure of the station with a fit of trembling, gradually deepening
to a complaint of the heart, announced the train.  Fire and steam, and
smoke, and red light; a hiss, a crash, a bell, and a shriek; Louisa put
into one carriage, Mrs. Sparsit put into another: the little station a
desert speck in the thunderstorm.

Though her teeth chattered in her head from wet and cold, Mrs. Sparsit
exulted hugely.  The figure had plunged down the precipice, and she felt
herself, as it were, attending on the body.  Could she, who had been so
active in the getting up of the funeral triumph, do less than exult?
‘She will be at Coketown long before him,’ thought Mrs. Sparsit, ‘though
his horse is never so good.  Where will she wait for him?  And where will
they go together?  Patience.  We shall see.’

The tremendous rain occasioned infinite confusion, when the train stopped
at its destination.  Gutters and pipes had burst, drains had overflowed,
and streets were under water.  In the first instant of alighting, Mrs.
Sparsit turned her distracted eyes towards the waiting coaches, which
were in great request.  ‘She will get into one,’ she considered, ‘and
will be away before I can follow in another.  At all risks of being run
over, I must see the number, and hear the order given to the coachman.’

But, Mrs. Sparsit was wrong in her calculation.  Louisa got into no
coach, and was already gone.  The black eyes kept upon the
railroad-carriage in which she had travelled, settled upon it a moment
too late.  The door not being opened after several minutes, Mrs. Sparsit
passed it and repassed it, saw nothing, looked in, and found it empty.
Wet through and through: with her feet squelching and squashing in her
shoes whenever she moved; with a rash of rain upon her classical visage;
with a bonnet like an over-ripe fig; with all her clothes spoiled; with
damp impressions of every button, string, and hook-and-eye she wore,
printed off upon her highly connected back; with a stagnant verdure on
her general exterior, such as accumulates on an old park fence in a
mouldy lane; Mrs. Sparsit had no resource but to burst into tears of
bitterness and say, ‘I have lost her!’



CHAPTER XII
DOWN


THE national dustmen, after entertaining one another with a great many
noisy little fights among themselves, had dispersed for the present, and
Mr. Gradgrind was at home for the vacation.

He sat writing in the room with the deadly statistical clock, proving
something no doubt—probably, in the main, that the Good Samaritan was a
Bad Economist.  The noise of the rain did not disturb him much; but it
attracted his attention sufficiently to make him raise his head
sometimes, as if he were rather remonstrating with the elements.  When it
thundered very loudly, he glanced towards Coketown, having it in his mind
that some of the tall chimneys might be struck by lightning.

The thunder was rolling into distance, and the rain was pouring down like
a deluge, when the door of his room opened.  He looked round the lamp
upon his table, and saw, with amazement, his eldest daughter.

‘Louisa!’

‘Father, I want to speak to you.’

‘What is the matter?  How strange you look!  And good Heaven,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, wondering more and more, ‘have you come here exposed to this
storm?’

She put her hands to her dress, as if she hardly knew.  ‘Yes.’  Then she
uncovered her head, and letting her cloak and hood fall where they might,
stood looking at him: so colourless, so dishevelled, so defiant and
despairing, that he was afraid of her.

‘What is it?  I conjure you, Louisa, tell me what is the matter.’

She dropped into a chair before him, and put her cold hand on his arm.

‘Father, you have trained me from my cradle?’

‘Yes, Louisa.’

‘I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.’

He looked at her in doubt and dread, vacantly repeating: ‘Curse the hour?
Curse the hour?’

‘How could you give me life, and take from me all the inappreciable
things that raise it from the state of conscious death?  Where are the
graces of my soul?  Where are the sentiments of my heart?  What have you
done, O father, what have you done, with the garden that should have
bloomed once, in this great wilderness here!’

She struck herself with both her hands upon her bosom.

‘If it had ever been here, its ashes alone would save me from the void in
which my whole life sinks.  I did not mean to say this; but, father, you
remember the last time we conversed in this room?’

He had been so wholly unprepared for what he heard now, that it was with
difficulty he answered, ‘Yes, Louisa.’

‘What has risen to my lips now, would have risen to my lips then, if you
had given me a moment’s help.  I don’t reproach you, father.  What you
have never nurtured in me, you have never nurtured in yourself; but O! if
you had only done so long ago, or if you had only neglected me, what a
much better and much happier creature I should have been this day!’

On hearing this, after all his care, he bowed his head upon his hand and
groaned aloud.

‘Father, if you had known, when we were last together here, what even I
feared while I strove against it—as it has been my task from infancy to
strive against every natural prompting that has arisen in my heart; if
you had known that there lingered in my breast, sensibilities,
affections, weaknesses capable of being cherished into strength, defying
all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his
arithmetic than his Creator is,—would you have given me to the husband
whom I am now sure that I hate?’

He said, ‘No.  No, my poor child.’

‘Would you have doomed me, at any time, to the frost and blight that have
hardened and spoiled me?  Would you have robbed me—for no one’s
enrichment—only for the greater desolation of this world—of the
immaterial part of my life, the spring and summer of my belief, my refuge
from what is sordid and bad in the real things around me, my school in
which I should have learned to be more humble and more trusting with
them, and to hope in my little sphere to make them better?’

‘O no, no.  No, Louisa.’

‘Yet, father, if I had been stone blind; if I had groped my way by my
sense of touch, and had been free, while I knew the shapes and surfaces
of things, to exercise my fancy somewhat, in regard to them; I should
have been a million times wiser, happier, more loving, more contented,
more innocent and human in all good respects, than I am with the eyes I
have.  Now, hear what I have come to say.’

He moved, to support her with his arm.  She rising as he did so, they
stood close together: she, with a hand upon his shoulder, looking fixedly
in his face.

‘With a hunger and thirst upon me, father, which have never been for a
moment appeased; with an ardent impulse towards some region where rules,
and figures, and definitions were not quite absolute; I have grown up,
battling every inch of my way.’

‘I never knew you were unhappy, my child.’

‘Father, I always knew it.  In this strife I have almost repulsed and
crushed my better angel into a demon.  What I have learned has left me
doubting, misbelieving, despising, regretting, what I have not learned;
and my dismal resource has been to think that life would soon go by, and
that nothing in it could be worth the pain and trouble of a contest.’

‘And you so young, Louisa!’ he said with pity.

‘And I so young.  In this condition, father—for I show you now, without
fear or favour, the ordinary deadened state of my mind as I know it—you
proposed my husband to me.  I took him.  I never made a pretence to him
or you that I loved him.  I knew, and, father, you knew, and he knew,
that I never did.  I was not wholly indifferent, for I had a hope of
being pleasant and useful to Tom.  I made that wild escape into something
visionary, and have slowly found out how wild it was.  But Tom had been
the subject of all the little tenderness of my life; perhaps he became so
because I knew so well how to pity him.  It matters little now, except as
it may dispose you to think more leniently of his errors.’

As her father held her in his arms, she put her other hand upon his other
shoulder, and still looking fixedly in his face, went on.

‘When I was irrevocably married, there rose up into rebellion against the
tie, the old strife, made fiercer by all those causes of disparity which
arise out of our two individual natures, and which no general laws shall
ever rule or state for me, father, until they shall be able to direct the
anatomist where to strike his knife into the secrets of my soul.’

‘Louisa!’ he said, and said imploringly; for he well remembered what had
passed between them in their former interview.

‘I do not reproach you, father, I make no complaint.  I am here with
another object.’

‘What can I do, child?  Ask me what you will.’

‘I am coming to it.  Father, chance then threw into my way a new
acquaintance; a man such as I had had no experience of; used to the
world; light, polished, easy; making no pretences; avowing the low
estimate of everything, that I was half afraid to form in secret;
conveying to me almost immediately, though I don’t know how or by what
degrees, that he understood me, and read my thoughts.  I could not find
that he was worse than I.  There seemed to be a near affinity between us.
I only wondered it should be worth his while, who cared for nothing else,
to care so much for me.’

‘For you, Louisa!’

Her father might instinctively have loosened his hold, but that he felt
her strength departing from her, and saw a wild dilating fire in the eyes
steadfastly regarding him.

‘I say nothing of his plea for claiming my confidence.  It matters very
little how he gained it.  Father, he did gain it.  What you know of the
story of my marriage, he soon knew, just as well.’

Her father’s face was ashy white, and he held her in both his arms.

‘I have done no worse, I have not disgraced you.  But if you ask me
whether I have loved him, or do love him, I tell you plainly, father,
that it may be so.  I don’t know.’

She took her hands suddenly from his shoulders, and pressed them both
upon her side; while in her face, not like itself—and in her figure,
drawn up, resolute to finish by a last effort what she had to say—the
feelings long suppressed broke loose.

‘This night, my husband being away, he has been with me, declaring
himself my lover.  This minute he expects me, for I could release myself
of his presence by no other means.  I do not know that I am sorry, I do
not know that I am ashamed, I do not know that I am degraded in my own
esteem.  All that I know is, your philosophy and your teaching will not
save me.  Now, father, you have brought me to this.  Save me by some
other means!’

He tightened his hold in time to prevent her sinking on the floor, but
she cried out in a terrible voice, ‘I shall die if you hold me!  Let me
fall upon the ground!’  And he laid her down there, and saw the pride of
his heart and the triumph of his system, lying, an insensible heap, at
his feet.

                                * * * * *

                          END OF THE SECOND BOOK




BOOK THE THIRD
_GARNERING_


CHAPTER I
ANOTHER THING NEEDFUL


LOUISA awoke from a torpor, and her eyes languidly opened on her old bed
at home, and her old room.  It seemed, at first, as if all that had
happened since the days when these objects were familiar to her were the
shadows of a dream, but gradually, as the objects became more real to her
sight, the events became more real to her mind.

She could scarcely move her head for pain and heaviness, her eyes were
strained and sore, and she was very weak.  A curious passive inattention
had such possession of her, that the presence of her little sister in the
room did not attract her notice for some time.  Even when their eyes had
met, and her sister had approached the bed, Louisa lay for minutes
looking at her in silence, and suffering her timidly to hold her passive
hand, before she asked:

‘When was I brought to this room?’

‘Last night, Louisa.’

‘Who brought me here?’

‘Sissy, I believe.’

‘Why do you believe so?’

‘Because I found her here this morning.  She didn’t come to my bedside to
wake me, as she always does; and I went to look for her.  She was not in
her own room either; and I went looking for her all over the house, until
I found her here taking care of you and cooling your head.  Will you see
father? Sissy said I was to tell him when you woke.’

‘What a beaming face you have, Jane!’ said Louisa, as her young
sister—timidly still—bent down to kiss her.

‘Have I?  I am very glad you think so.  I am sure it must be Sissy’s
doing.’

The arm Louisa had begun to twine around her neck, unbent itself.  ‘You
can tell father if you will.’  Then, staying her for a moment, she said,
‘It was you who made my room so cheerful, and gave it this look of
welcome?’

‘Oh no, Louisa, it was done before I came.  It was—’

Louisa turned upon her pillow, and heard no more.  When her sister had
withdrawn, she turned her head back again, and lay with her face towards
the door, until it opened and her father entered.

He had a jaded anxious look upon him, and his hand, usually steady,
trembled in hers.  He sat down at the side of the bed, tenderly asking
how she was, and dwelling on the necessity of her keeping very quiet
after her agitation and exposure to the weather last night.  He spoke in
a subdued and troubled voice, very different from his usual dictatorial
manner; and was often at a loss for words.

‘My dear Louisa.  My poor daughter.’  He was so much at a loss at that
place, that he stopped altogether.  He tried again.

‘My unfortunate child.’  The place was so difficult to get over, that he
tried again.

‘It would be hopeless for me, Louisa, to endeavour to tell you how
overwhelmed I have been, and still am, by what broke upon me last night.
The ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet.  The
only support on which I leaned, and the strength of which it seemed, and
still does seem, impossible to question, has given way in an instant.  I
am stunned by these discoveries.  I have no selfish meaning in what I
say; but I find the shock of what broke upon me last night, to be very
heavy indeed.’

She could give him no comfort herein.  She had suffered the wreck of her
whole life upon the rock.

‘I will not say, Louisa, that if you had by any happy chance undeceived
me some time ago, it would have been better for us both; better for your
peace, and better for mine.  For I am sensible that it may not have been
a part of my system to invite any confidence of that kind.  I had proved
my—my system to myself, and I have rigidly administered it; and I must
bear the responsibility of its failures.  I only entreat you to believe,
my favourite child, that I have meant to do right.’

He said it earnestly, and to do him justice he had.  In gauging
fathomless deeps with his little mean excise-rod, and in staggering over
the universe with his rusty stiff-legged compasses, he had meant to do
great things.  Within the limits of his short tether he had tumbled
about, annihilating the flowers of existence with greater singleness of
purpose than many of the blatant personages whose company he kept.

‘I am well assured of what you say, father.  I know I have been your
favourite child.  I know you have intended to make me happy.  I have
never blamed you, and I never shall.’

He took her outstretched hand, and retained it in his.

‘My dear, I have remained all night at my table, pondering again and
again on what has so painfully passed between us.  When I consider your
character; when I consider that what has been known to me for hours, has
been concealed by you for years; when I consider under what immediate
pressure it has been forced from you at last; I come to the conclusion
that I cannot but mistrust myself.’

He might have added more than all, when he saw the face now looking at
him.  He did add it in effect, perhaps, as he softly moved her scattered
hair from her forehead with his hand.  Such little actions, slight in
another man, were very noticeable in him; and his daughter received them
as if they had been words of contrition.

‘But,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, slowly, and with hesitation, as well as with a
wretched sense of happiness, ‘if I see reason to mistrust myself for the
past, Louisa, I should also mistrust myself for the present and the
future.  To speak unreservedly to you, I do.  I am far from feeling
convinced now, however differently I might have felt only this time
yesterday, that I am fit for the trust you repose in me; that I know how
to respond to the appeal you have come home to make to me; that I have
the right instinct—supposing it for the moment to be some quality of that
nature—how to help you, and to set you right, my child.’

She had turned upon her pillow, and lay with her face upon her arm, so
that he could not see it.  All her wildness and passion had subsided;
but, though softened, she was not in tears.  Her father was changed in
nothing so much as in the respect that he would have been glad to see her
in tears.

‘Some persons hold,’ he pursued, still hesitating, ‘that there is a
wisdom of the Head, and that there is a wisdom of the Heart.  I have not
supposed so; but, as I have said, I mistrust myself now.  I have supposed
the head to be all-sufficient.  It may not be all-sufficient; how can I
venture this morning to say it is!  If that other kind of wisdom should
be what I have neglected, and should be the instinct that is wanted,
Louisa—’

He suggested it very doubtfully, as if he were half unwilling to admit it
even now.  She made him no answer, lying before him on her bed, still
half-dressed, much as he had seen her lying on the floor of his room last
night.

‘Louisa,’ and his hand rested on her hair again, ‘I have been absent from
here, my dear, a good deal of late; and though your sister’s training has
been pursued according to—the system,’ he appeared to come to that word
with great reluctance always, ‘it has necessarily been modified by daily
associations begun, in her case, at an early age.  I ask you—ignorantly
and humbly, my daughter—for the better, do you think?’

‘Father,’ she replied, without stirring, ‘if any harmony has been
awakened in her young breast that was mute in mine until it turned to
discord, let her thank Heaven for it, and go upon her happier way, taking
it as her greatest blessing that she has avoided my way.’

‘O my child, my child!’ he said, in a forlorn manner, ‘I am an unhappy
man to see you thus!  What avails it to me that you do not reproach me,
if I so bitterly reproach myself!’  He bent his head, and spoke low to
her.  ‘Louisa, I have a misgiving that some change may have been slowly
working about me in this house, by mere love and gratitude: that what the
Head had left undone and could not do, the Heart may have been doing
silently.  Can it be so?’

She made him no reply.

‘I am not too proud to believe it, Louisa.  How could I be arrogant, and
you before me!  Can it be so?  Is it so, my dear?’  He looked upon her
once more, lying cast away there; and without another word went out of
the room.  He had not been long gone, when she heard a light tread near
the door, and knew that some one stood beside her.

She did not raise her head.  A dull anger that she should be seen in her
distress, and that the involuntary look she had so resented should come
to this fulfilment, smouldered within her like an unwholesome fire.  All
closely imprisoned forces rend and destroy.  The air that would be
healthful to the earth, the water that would enrich it, the heat that
would ripen it, tear it when caged up.  So in her bosom even now; the
strongest qualities she possessed, long turned upon themselves, became a
heap of obduracy, that rose against a friend.

It was well that soft touch came upon her neck, and that she understood
herself to be supposed to have fallen asleep.  The sympathetic hand did
not claim her resentment.  Let it lie there, let it lie.

It lay there, warming into life a crowd of gentler thoughts; and she
rested.  As she softened with the quiet, and the consciousness of being
so watched, some tears made their way into her eyes.  The face touched
hers, and she knew that there were tears upon it too, and she the cause
of them.

As Louisa feigned to rouse herself, and sat up, Sissy retired, so that
she stood placidly near the bedside.

‘I hope I have not disturbed you.  I have come to ask if you would let me
stay with you?’

‘Why should you stay with me?  My sister will miss you.  You are
everything to her.’

‘Am I?’ returned Sissy, shaking her head.  ‘I would be something to you,
if I might.’

‘What?’ said Louisa, almost sternly.

‘Whatever you want most, if I could be that.  At all events, I would like
to try to be as near it as I can.  And however far off that may be, I
will never tire of trying.  Will you let me?’

‘My father sent you to ask me.’

‘No indeed,’ replied Sissy.  ‘He told me that I might come in now, but he
sent me away from the room this morning—or at least—’

She hesitated and stopped.

‘At least, what?’ said Louisa, with her searching eyes upon her.

‘I thought it best myself that I should be sent away, for I felt very
uncertain whether you would like to find me here.’

‘Have I always hated you so much?’

‘I hope not, for I have always loved you, and have always wished that you
should know it.  But you changed to me a little, shortly before you left
home.  Not that I wondered at it.  You knew so much, and I knew so
little, and it was so natural in many ways, going as you were among other
friends, that I had nothing to complain of, and was not at all hurt.’

Her colour rose as she said it modestly and hurriedly.  Louisa understood
the loving pretence, and her heart smote her.

‘May I try?’ said Sissy, emboldened to raise her hand to the neck that
was insensibly drooping towards her.

Louisa, taking down the hand that would have embraced her in another
moment, held it in one of hers, and answered:

‘First, Sissy, do you know what I am?  I am so proud and so hardened, so
confused and troubled, so resentful and unjust to every one and to
myself, that everything is stormy, dark, and wicked to me.  Does not that
repel you?’

‘No!’

‘I am so unhappy, and all that should have made me otherwise is so laid
waste, that if I had been bereft of sense to this hour, and instead of
being as learned as you think me, had to begin to acquire the simplest
truths, I could not want a guide to peace, contentment, honour, all the
good of which I am quite devoid, more abjectly than I do.  Does not that
repel you?’

‘No!’

In the innocence of her brave affection, and the brimming up of her old
devoted spirit, the once deserted girl shone like a beautiful light upon
the darkness of the other.

Louisa raised the hand that it might clasp her neck and join its fellow
there.  She fell upon her knees, and clinging to this stroller’s child
looked up at her almost with veneration.

‘Forgive me, pity me, help me!  Have compassion on my great need, and let
me lay this head of mine upon a loving heart!’

‘O lay it here!’ cried Sissy.  ‘Lay it here, my dear.’



CHAPTER II
VERY RIDICULOUS


MR. JAMES HARTHOUSE passed a whole night and a day in a state of so much
hurry, that the World, with its best glass in his eye, would scarcely
have recognized him during that insane interval, as the brother Jem of
the honourable and jocular member.  He was positively agitated.  He
several times spoke with an emphasis, similar to the vulgar manner.  He
went in and went out in an unaccountable way, like a man without an
object.  He rode like a highwayman.  In a word, he was so horribly bored
by existing circumstances, that he forgot to go in for boredom in the
manner prescribed by the authorities.

After putting his horse at Coketown through the storm, as if it were a
leap, he waited up all night: from time to time ringing his bell with the
greatest fury, charging the porter who kept watch with delinquency in
withholding letters or messages that could not fail to have been
entrusted to him, and demanding restitution on the spot.  The dawn
coming, the morning coming, and the day coming, and neither message nor
letter coming with either, he went down to the country house.  There, the
report was, Mr. Bounderby away, and Mrs. Bounderby in town.  Left for
town suddenly last evening.  Not even known to be gone until receipt of
message, importing that her return was not to be expected for the
present.

In these circumstances he had nothing for it but to follow her to town.
He went to the house in town.  Mrs. Bounderby not there.  He looked in at
the Bank.  Mr. Bounderby away and Mrs. Sparsit away.  Mrs. Sparsit away?
Who could have been reduced to sudden extremity for the company of that
griffin!

‘Well!  I don’t know,’ said Tom, who had his own reasons for being uneasy
about it.  ‘She was off somewhere at daybreak this morning.  She’s always
full of mystery; I hate her.  So I do that white chap; he’s always got
his blinking eyes upon a fellow.’

‘Where were you last night, Tom?’

‘Where was I last night!’ said Tom.  ‘Come!  I like that.  I was waiting
for you, Mr. Harthouse, till it came down as _I_ never saw it come down
before.  Where was I too!  Where were you, you mean.’

‘I was prevented from coming—detained.’

‘Detained!’ murmured Tom.  ‘Two of us were detained.  I was detained
looking for you, till I lost every train but the mail.  It would have
been a pleasant job to go down by that on such a night, and have to walk
home through a pond.  I was obliged to sleep in town after all.’

‘Where?’

‘Where?  Why, in my own bed at Bounderby’s.’

‘Did you see your sister?’

‘How the deuce,’ returned Tom, staring, ‘could I see my sister when she
was fifteen miles off?’

Cursing these quick retorts of the young gentleman to whom he was so true
a friend, Mr. Harthouse disembarrassed himself of that interview with the
smallest conceivable amount of ceremony, and debated for the hundredth
time what all this could mean?  He made only one thing clear.  It was,
that whether she was in town or out of town, whether he had been
premature with her who was so hard to comprehend, or she had lost
courage, or they were discovered, or some mischance or mistake, at
present incomprehensible, had occurred, he must remain to confront his
fortune, whatever it was.  The hotel where he was known to live when
condemned to that region of blackness, was the stake to which he was
tied.  As to all the rest—What will be, will be.

‘So, whether I am waiting for a hostile message, or an assignation, or a
penitent remonstrance, or an impromptu wrestle with my friend Bounderby
in the Lancashire manner—which would seem as likely as anything else in
the present state of affairs—I’ll dine,’ said Mr. James Harthouse.
‘Bounderby has the advantage in point of weight; and if anything of a
British nature is to come off between us, it may be as well to be in
training.’

Therefore he rang the bell, and tossing himself negligently on a sofa,
ordered ‘Some dinner at six—with a beefsteak in it,’ and got through the
intervening time as well as he could.  That was not particularly well;
for he remained in the greatest perplexity, and, as the hours went on,
and no kind of explanation offered itself, his perplexity augmented at
compound interest.

However, he took affairs as coolly as it was in human nature to do, and
entertained himself with the facetious idea of the training more than
once.  ‘It wouldn’t be bad,’ he yawned at one time, ‘to give the waiter
five shillings, and throw him.’  At another time it occurred to him, ‘Or
a fellow of about thirteen or fourteen stone might be hired by the hour.’
But these jests did not tell materially on the afternoon, or his
suspense; and, sooth to say, they both lagged fearfully.

It was impossible, even before dinner, to avoid often walking about in
the pattern of the carpet, looking out of the window, listening at the
door for footsteps, and occasionally becoming rather hot when any steps
approached that room.  But, after dinner, when the day turned to
twilight, and the twilight turned to night, and still no communication
was made to him, it began to be as he expressed it, ‘like the Holy Office
and slow torture.’  However, still true to his conviction that
indifference was the genuine high-breeding (the only conviction he had),
he seized this crisis as the opportunity for ordering candles and a
newspaper.

He had been trying in vain, for half an hour, to read this newspaper,
when the waiter appeared and said, at once mysteriously and
apologetically:

‘Beg your pardon, sir.  You’re wanted, sir, if you please.’

A general recollection that this was the kind of thing the Police said to
the swell mob, caused Mr. Harthouse to ask the waiter in return, with
bristling indignation, what the Devil he meant by ‘wanted’?

‘Beg your pardon, sir.  Young lady outside, sir, wishes to see you.’

‘Outside?  Where?’

‘Outside this door, sir.’

Giving the waiter to the personage before mentioned, as a block-head duly
qualified for that consignment, Mr. Harthouse hurried into the gallery.
A young woman whom he had never seen stood there.  Plainly dressed, very
quiet, very pretty.  As he conducted her into the room and placed a chair
for her, he observed, by the light of the candles, that she was even
prettier than he had at first believed.  Her face was innocent and
youthful, and its expression remarkably pleasant.  She was not afraid of
him, or in any way disconcerted; she seemed to have her mind entirely
preoccupied with the occasion of her visit, and to have substituted that
consideration for herself.

‘I speak to Mr. Harthouse?’ she said, when they were alone.

‘To Mr. Harthouse.’  He added in his mind, ‘And you speak to him with the
most confiding eyes I ever saw, and the most earnest voice (though so
quiet) I ever heard.’

‘If I do not understand—and I do not, sir’—said Sissy, ‘what your honour
as a gentleman binds you to, in other matters:’ the blood really rose in
his face as she began in these words: ‘I am sure I may rely upon it to
keep my visit secret, and to keep secret what I am going to say.  I will
rely upon it, if you will tell me I may so far trust—’

‘You may, I assure you.’

‘I am young, as you see; I am alone, as you see.  In coming to you, sir,
I have no advice or encouragement beyond my own hope.’  He thought, ‘But
that is very strong,’ as he followed the momentary upward glance of her
eyes.  He thought besides, ‘This is a very odd beginning.  I don’t see
where we are going.’

‘I think,’ said Sissy, ‘you have already guessed whom I left just now!’

‘I have been in the greatest concern and uneasiness during the last
four-and-twenty hours (which have appeared as many years),’ he returned,
‘on a lady’s account.  The hopes I have been encouraged to form that you
come from that lady, do not deceive me, I trust.’

‘I left her within an hour.’

‘At—!’

‘At her father’s.’

Mr. Harthouse’s face lengthened in spite of his coolness, and his
perplexity increased.  ‘Then I certainly,’ he thought, ‘do _not_ see
where we are going.’

‘She hurried there last night.  She arrived there in great agitation, and
was insensible all through the night.  I live at her father’s, and was
with her.  You may be sure, sir, you will never see her again as long as
you live.’

Mr. Harthouse drew a long breath; and, if ever man found himself in the
position of not knowing what to say, made the discovery beyond all
question that he was so circumstanced.  The child-like ingenuousness with
which his visitor spoke, her modest fearlessness, her truthfulness which
put all artifice aside, her entire forgetfulness of herself in her
earnest quiet holding to the object with which she had come; all this,
together with her reliance on his easily given promise—which in itself
shamed him—presented something in which he was so inexperienced, and
against which he knew any of his usual weapons would fall so powerless;
that not a word could he rally to his relief.

At last he said:

‘So startling an announcement, so confidently made, and by such lips, is
really disconcerting in the last degree.  May I be permitted to inquire,
if you are charged to convey that information to me in those hopeless
words, by the lady of whom we speak?’

‘I have no charge from her.’

‘The drowning man catches at the straw.  With no disrespect for your
judgment, and with no doubt of your sincerity, excuse my saying that I
cling to the belief that there is yet hope that I am not condemned to
perpetual exile from that lady’s presence.’

‘There is not the least hope.  The first object of my coming here, sir,
is to assure you that you must believe that there is no more hope of your
ever speaking with her again, than there would be if she had died when
she came home last night.’

‘Must believe?  But if I can’t—or if I should, by infirmity of nature, be
obstinate—and won’t—’

‘It is still true.  There is no hope.’

James Harthouse looked at her with an incredulous smile upon his lips;
but her mind looked over and beyond him, and the smile was quite thrown
away.

He bit his lip, and took a little time for consideration.

‘Well!  If it should unhappily appear,’ he said, ‘after due pains and
duty on my part, that I am brought to a position so desolate as this
banishment, I shall not become the lady’s persecutor.  But you said you
had no commission from her?’

‘I have only the commission of my love for her, and her love for me.  I
have no other trust, than that I have been with her since she came home,
and that she has given me her confidence.  I have no further trust, than
that I know something of her character and her marriage.  O Mr.
Harthouse, I think you had that trust too!’

He was touched in the cavity where his heart should have been—in that
nest of addled eggs, where the birds of heaven would have lived if they
had not been whistled away—by the fervour of this reproach.

‘I am not a moral sort of fellow,’ he said, ‘and I never make any
pretensions to the character of a moral sort of fellow.  I am as immoral
as need be.  At the same time, in bringing any distress upon the lady who
is the subject of the present conversation, or in unfortunately
compromising her in any way, or in committing myself by any expression of
sentiments towards her, not perfectly reconcilable with—in fact with—the
domestic hearth; or in taking any advantage of her father’s being a
machine, or of her brother’s being a whelp, or of her husband’s being a
bear; I beg to be allowed to assure you that I have had no particularly
evil intentions, but have glided on from one step to another with a
smoothness so perfectly diabolical, that I had not the slightest idea the
catalogue was half so long until I began to turn it over.  Whereas I
find,’ said Mr. James Harthouse, in conclusion, ‘that it is really in
several volumes.’

Though he said all this in his frivolous way, the way seemed, for that
once, a conscious polishing of but an ugly surface.  He was silent for a
moment; and then proceeded with a more self-possessed air, though with
traces of vexation and disappointment that would not be polished out.

‘After what has been just now represented to me, in a manner I find it
impossible to doubt—I know of hardly any other source from which I could
have accepted it so readily—I feel bound to say to you, in whom the
confidence you have mentioned has been reposed, that I cannot refuse to
contemplate the possibility (however unexpected) of my seeing the lady no
more.  I am solely to blame for the thing having come to this—and—and, I
cannot say,’ he added, rather hard up for a general peroration, ‘that I
have any sanguine expectation of ever becoming a moral sort of fellow, or
that I have any belief in any moral sort of fellow whatever.’

Sissy’s face sufficiently showed that her appeal to him was not finished.

‘You spoke,’ he resumed, as she raised her eyes to him again, ‘of your
first object.  I may assume that there is a second to be mentioned?’

‘Yes.’

‘Will you oblige me by confiding it?’

‘Mr. Harthouse,’ returned Sissy, with a blending of gentleness and
steadiness that quite defeated him, and with a simple confidence in his
being bound to do what she required, that held him at a singular
disadvantage, ‘the only reparation that remains with you, is to leave
here immediately and finally.  I am quite sure that you can mitigate in
no other way the wrong and harm you have done.  I am quite sure that it
is the only compensation you have left it in your power to make.  I do
not say that it is much, or that it is enough; but it is something, and
it is necessary.  Therefore, though without any other authority than I
have given you, and even without the knowledge of any other person than
yourself and myself, I ask you to depart from this place to-night, under
an obligation never to return to it.’

If she had asserted any influence over him beyond her plain faith in the
truth and right of what she said; if she had concealed the least doubt or
irresolution, or had harboured for the best purpose any reserve or
pretence; if she had shown, or felt, the lightest trace of any
sensitiveness to his ridicule or his astonishment, or any remonstrance he
might offer; he would have carried it against her at this point.  But he
could as easily have changed a clear sky by looking at it in surprise, as
affect her.

‘But do you know,’ he asked, quite at a loss, ‘the extent of what you
ask?  You probably are not aware that I am here on a public kind of
business, preposterous enough in itself, but which I have gone in for,
and sworn by, and am supposed to be devoted to in quite a desperate
manner?  You probably are not aware of that, but I assure you it’s the
fact.’

It had no effect on Sissy, fact or no fact.

‘Besides which,’ said Mr. Harthouse, taking a turn or two across the
room, dubiously, ‘it’s so alarmingly absurd.  It would make a man so
ridiculous, after going in for these fellows, to back out in such an
incomprehensible way.’

‘I am quite sure,’ repeated Sissy, ‘that it is the only reparation in
your power, sir.  I am quite sure, or I would not have come here.’

He glanced at her face, and walked about again.  ‘Upon my soul, I don’t
know what to say.  So immensely absurd!’

It fell to his lot, now, to stipulate for secrecy.

‘If I were to do such a very ridiculous thing,’ he said, stopping again
presently, and leaning against the chimney-piece, ‘it could only be in
the most inviolable confidence.’

‘I will trust to you, sir,’ returned Sissy, ‘and you will trust to me.’

His leaning against the chimney-piece reminded him of the night with the
whelp.  It was the self-same chimney-piece, and somehow he felt as if
_he_ were the whelp to-night.  He could make no way at all.

‘I suppose a man never was placed in a more ridiculous position,’ he
said, after looking down, and looking up, and laughing, and frowning, and
walking off, and walking back again.  ‘But I see no way out of it.  What
will be, will be.  _This_ will be, I suppose.  I must take off myself, I
imagine—in short, I engage to do it.’

Sissy rose.  She was not surprised by the result, but she was happy in
it, and her face beamed brightly.

‘You will permit me to say,’ continued Mr. James Harthouse, ‘that I doubt
if any other ambassador, or ambassadress, could have addressed me with
the same success.  I must not only regard myself as being in a very
ridiculous position, but as being vanquished at all points.  Will you
allow me the privilege of remembering my enemy’s name?’

‘_My_ name?’ said the ambassadress.

‘The only name I could possibly care to know, to-night.’

‘Sissy Jupe.’

‘Pardon my curiosity at parting.  Related to the family?’

‘I am only a poor girl,’ returned Sissy.  ‘I was separated from my
father—he was only a stroller—and taken pity on by Mr. Gradgrind.  I have
lived in the house ever since.’

She was gone.

‘It wanted this to complete the defeat,’ said Mr. James Harthouse,
sinking, with a resigned air, on the sofa, after standing transfixed a
little while.  ‘The defeat may now be considered perfectly accomplished.
Only a poor girl—only a stroller—only James Harthouse made nothing
of—only James Harthouse a Great Pyramid of failure.’

The Great Pyramid put it into his head to go up the Nile.  He took a pen
upon the instant, and wrote the following note (in appropriate
hieroglyphics) to his brother:

    Dear Jack,—All up at Coketown.  Bored out of the place, and going in
    for camels.

                                                           Affectionately,
                                                                      JEM.

He rang the bell.

‘Send my fellow here.’

‘Gone to bed, sir.’

‘Tell him to get up, and pack up.’

He wrote two more notes.  One, to Mr. Bounderby, announcing his
retirement from that part of the country, and showing where he would be
found for the next fortnight.  The other, similar in effect, to Mr.
Gradgrind.  Almost as soon as the ink was dry upon their superscriptions,
he had left the tall chimneys of Coketown behind, and was in a railway
carriage, tearing and glaring over the dark landscape.

The moral sort of fellows might suppose that Mr. James Harthouse derived
some comfortable reflections afterwards, from this prompt retreat, as one
of his few actions that made any amends for anything, and as a token to
himself that he had escaped the climax of a very bad business.  But it
was not so, at all.  A secret sense of having failed and been
ridiculous—a dread of what other fellows who went in for similar sorts of
things, would say at his expense if they knew it—so oppressed him, that
what was about the very best passage in his life was the one of all
others he would not have owned to on any account, and the only one that
made him ashamed of himself.



CHAPTER III
VERY DECIDED


THE indefatigable Mrs. Sparsit, with a violent cold upon her, her voice
reduced to a whisper, and her stately frame so racked by continual
sneezes that it seemed in danger of dismemberment, gave chase to her
patron until she found him in the metropolis; and there, majestically
sweeping in upon him at his hotel in St. James’s Street, exploded the
combustibles with which she was charged, and blew up.  Having executed
her mission with infinite relish, this high-minded woman then fainted
away on Mr. Bounderby’s coat-collar.

Mr. Bounderby’s first procedure was to shake Mrs. Sparsit off, and leave
her to progress as she might through various stages of suffering on the
floor.  He next had recourse to the administration of potent
restoratives, such as screwing the patient’s thumbs, smiting her hands,
abundantly watering her face, and inserting salt in her mouth.  When
these attentions had recovered her (which they speedily did), he hustled
her into a fast train without offering any other refreshment, and carried
her back to Coketown more dead than alive.

Regarded as a classical ruin, Mrs. Sparsit was an interesting spectacle
on her arrival at her journey’s end; but considered in any other light,
the amount of damage she had by that time sustained was excessive, and
impaired her claims to admiration.  Utterly heedless of the wear and tear
of her clothes and constitution, and adamant to her pathetic sneezes, Mr.
Bounderby immediately crammed her into a coach, and bore her off to Stone
Lodge.

‘Now, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, bursting into his father-in-law’s
room late at night; ‘here’s a lady here—Mrs. Sparsit—you know Mrs.
Sparsit—who has something to say to you that will strike you dumb.’

‘You have missed my letter!’ exclaimed Mr. Gradgrind, surprised by the
apparition.

‘Missed your letter, sir!’ bawled Bounderby.  ‘The present time is no
time for letters.  No man shall talk to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown
about letters, with his mind in the state it’s in now.’

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, in a tone of temperate remonstrance, ‘I
speak of a very special letter I have written to you, in reference to
Louisa.’

‘Tom Gradgrind,’ replied Bounderby, knocking the flat of his hand several
times with great vehemence on the table, ‘I speak of a very special
messenger that has come to me, in reference to Louisa.  Mrs. Sparsit,
ma’am, stand forward!’

That unfortunate lady hereupon essaying to offer testimony, without any
voice and with painful gestures expressive of an inflamed throat, became
so aggravating and underwent so many facial contortions, that Mr.
Bounderby, unable to bear it, seized her by the arm and shook her.

‘If you can’t get it out, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘leave _me_ to get it
out.  This is not a time for a lady, however highly connected, to be
totally inaudible, and seemingly swallowing marbles.  Tom Gradgrind, Mrs.
Sparsit latterly found herself, by accident, in a situation to overhear a
conversation out of doors between your daughter and your precious
gentleman-friend, Mr. James Harthouse.’

‘Indeed!’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘Ah!  Indeed!’ cried Bounderby.  ‘And in that conversation—’

‘It is not necessary to repeat its tenor, Bounderby.  I know what
passed.’

‘You do?  Perhaps,’ said Bounderby, staring with all his might at his so
quiet and assuasive father-in-law, ‘you know where your daughter is at
the present time!’

‘Undoubtedly.  She is here.’

‘Here?’

‘My dear Bounderby, let me beg you to restrain these loud out-breaks, on
all accounts.  Louisa is here.  The moment she could detach herself from
that interview with the person of whom you speak, and whom I deeply
regret to have been the means of introducing to you, Louisa hurried here,
for protection.  I myself had not been at home many hours, when I
received her—here, in this room.  She hurried by the train to town, she
ran from town to this house, through a raging storm, and presented
herself before me in a state of distraction.  Of course, she has remained
here ever since.  Let me entreat you, for your own sake and for hers, to
be more quiet.’

Mr. Bounderby silently gazed about him for some moments, in every
direction except Mrs. Sparsit’s direction; and then, abruptly turning
upon the niece of Lady Scadgers, said to that wretched woman:

‘Now, ma’am!  We shall be happy to hear any little apology you may think
proper to offer, for going about the country at express pace, with no
other luggage than a Cock-and-a-Bull, ma’am!’

‘Sir,’ whispered Mrs. Sparsit, ‘my nerves are at present too much shaken,
and my health is at present too much impaired, in your service, to admit
of my doing more than taking refuge in tears.’  (Which she did.)

‘Well, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘without making any observation to you
that may not be made with propriety to a woman of good family, what I
have got to add to that, is that there is something else in which it
appears to me you may take refuge, namely, a coach.  And the coach in
which we came here being at the door, you’ll allow me to hand you down to
it, and pack you home to the Bank: where the best course for you to
pursue, will be to put your feet into the hottest water you can bear, and
take a glass of scalding rum and butter after you get into bed.’  With
these words, Mr. Bounderby extended his right hand to the weeping lady,
and escorted her to the conveyance in question, shedding many plaintive
sneezes by the way.  He soon returned alone.

‘Now, as you showed me in your face, Tom Gradgrind, that you wanted to
speak to me,’ he resumed, ‘here I am.  But, I am not in a very agreeable
state, I tell you plainly: not relishing this business, even as it is,
and not considering that I am at any time as dutifully and submissively
treated by your daughter, as Josiah Bounderby of Coketown ought to be
treated by his wife.  You have your opinion, I dare say; and I have mine,
I know.  If you mean to say anything to me to-night, that goes against
this candid remark, you had better let it alone.’

Mr. Gradgrind, it will be observed, being much softened, Mr. Bounderby
took particular pains to harden himself at all points.  It was his
amiable nature.

‘My dear Bounderby,’ Mr. Gradgrind began in reply.

‘Now, you’ll excuse me,’ said Bounderby, ‘but I don’t want to be too
dear.  That, to start with.  When I begin to be dear to a man, I
generally find that his intention is to come over me.  I am not speaking
to you politely; but, as you are aware, I am _not_ polite.  If you like
politeness, you know where to get it.  You have your gentleman-friends,
you know, and they’ll serve you with as much of the article as you want.
I don’t keep it myself.’

‘Bounderby,’ urged Mr. Gradgrind, ‘we are all liable to mistakes—’

‘I thought you couldn’t make ’em,’ interrupted Bounderby.

‘Perhaps I thought so.  But, I say we are all liable to mistakes and I
should feel sensible of your delicacy, and grateful for it, if you would
spare me these references to Harthouse.  I shall not associate him in our
conversation with your intimacy and encouragement; pray do not persist in
connecting him with mine.’

‘I never mentioned his name!’ said Bounderby.

‘Well, well!’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a submissive,
air.  And he sat for a little while pondering.  ‘Bounderby, I see reason
to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa.’

‘Who do you mean by We?’

‘Let me say I, then,’ he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted
question; ‘I doubt whether I have understood Louisa.  I doubt whether I
have been quite right in the manner of her education.’

‘There you hit it,’ returned Bounderby.  ‘There I agree with you.  You
have found it out at last, have you?  Education!  I’ll tell you what
education is—To be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the
shortest allowance of everything except blows.  That’s what _I_ call
education.’

‘I think your good sense will perceive,’ Mr. Gradgrind remonstrated in
all humility, ‘that whatever the merits of such a system may be, it would
be difficult of general application to girls.’

‘I don’t see it at all, sir,’ returned the obstinate Bounderby.

‘Well,’ sighed Mr. Gradgrind, ‘we will not enter into the question.  I
assure you I have no desire to be controversial.  I seek to repair what
is amiss, if I possibly can; and I hope you will assist me in a good
spirit, Bounderby, for I have been very much distressed.’

‘I don’t understand you, yet,’ said Bounderby, with determined obstinacy,
‘and therefore I won’t make any promises.’

‘In the course of a few hours, my dear Bounderby,’ Mr. Gradgrind
proceeded, in the same depressed and propitiatory manner, ‘I appear to
myself to have become better informed as to Louisa’s character, than in
previous years.  The enlightenment has been painfully forced upon me, and
the discovery is not mine.  I think there are—Bounderby, you will be
surprised to hear me say this—I think there are qualities in Louisa,
which—which have been harshly neglected, and—and a little perverted.
And—and I would suggest to you, that—that if you would kindly meet me in
a timely endeavour to leave her to her better nature for a while—and to
encourage it to develop itself by tenderness and consideration—it—it
would be the better for the happiness of all of us.  Louisa,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind, shading his face with his hand, ‘has always been my favourite
child.’

The blustrous Bounderby crimsoned and swelled to such an extent on
hearing these words, that he seemed to be, and probably was, on the brink
of a fit.  With his very ears a bright purple shot with crimson, he pent
up his indignation, however, and said:

‘You’d like to keep her here for a time?’

‘I—I had intended to recommend, my dear Bounderby, that you should allow
Louisa to remain here on a visit, and be attended by Sissy (I mean of
course Cecilia Jupe), who understands her, and in whom she trusts.’

‘I gather from all this, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby, standing up with
his hands in his pockets, ‘that you are of opinion that there’s what
people call some incompatibility between Loo Bounderby and myself.’

‘I fear there is at present a general incompatibility between Louisa,
and—and—and almost all the relations in which I have placed her,’ was her
father’s sorrowful reply.

‘Now, look you here, Tom Gradgrind,’ said Bounderby the flushed,
confronting him with his legs wide apart, his hands deeper in his
pockets, and his hair like a hayfield wherein his windy anger was
boisterous.  ‘You have said your say; I am going to say mine.  I am a
Coketown man.  I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.  I know the bricks of
this town, and I know the works of this town, and I know the chimneys of
this town, and I know the smoke of this town, and I know the Hands of
this town.  I know ’em all pretty well.  They’re real.  When a man tells
me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever
he is, that I know what he means.  He means turtle soup and venison, with
a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six.
That’s what your daughter wants.  Since you are of opinion that she ought
to have what she wants, I recommend you to provide it for her.  Because,
Tom Gradgrind, she will never have it from me.’

‘Bounderby,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘I hoped, after my entreaty, you would
have taken a different tone.’

‘Just wait a bit,’ retorted Bounderby; ‘you have said your say, I
believe.  I heard you out; hear me out, if you please.  Don’t make
yourself a spectacle of unfairness as well as inconsistency, because,
although I am sorry to see Tom Gradgrind reduced to his present position,
I should be doubly sorry to see him brought so low as that.  Now, there’s
an incompatibility of some sort or another, I am given to understand by
you, between your daughter and me.  I’ll give _you_ to understand, in
reply to that, that there unquestionably is an incompatibility of the
first magnitude—to be summed up in this—that your daughter don’t properly
know her husband’s merits, and is not impressed with such a sense as
would become her, by George! of the honour of his alliance.  That’s plain
speaking, I hope.’

‘Bounderby,’ urged Mr. Gradgrind, ‘this is unreasonable.’

‘Is it?’ said Bounderby.  ‘I am glad to hear you say so.  Because when
Tom Gradgrind, with his new lights, tells me that what I say is
unreasonable, I am convinced at once it must be devilish sensible.  With
your permission I am going on.  You know my origin; and you know that for
a good many years of my life I didn’t want a shoeing-horn, in consequence
of not having a shoe.  Yet you may believe or not, as you think proper,
that there are ladies—born ladies—belonging to families—Families!—who
next to worship the ground I walk on.’

He discharged this like a Rocket, at his father-in-law’s head.

‘Whereas your daughter,’ proceeded Bounderby, ‘is far from being a born
lady.  That you know, yourself.  Not that I care a pinch of candle-snuff
about such things, for you are very well aware I don’t; but that such is
the fact, and you, Tom Gradgrind, can’t change it.  Why do I say this?’

‘Not, I fear,’ observed Mr. Gradgrind, in a low voice, ‘to spare me.’

‘Hear me out,’ said Bounderby, ‘and refrain from cutting in till your
turn comes round.  I say this, because highly connected females have been
astonished to see the way in which your daughter has conducted herself,
and to witness her insensibility.  They have wondered how I have suffered
it.  And I wonder myself now, and I won’t suffer it.’

‘Bounderby,’ returned Mr. Gradgrind, rising, ‘the less we say to-night
the better, I think.’

‘On the contrary, Tom Gradgrind, the more we say to-night, the better, I
think.  That is,’ the consideration checked him, ‘till I have said all I
mean to say, and then I don’t care how soon we stop.  I come to a
question that may shorten the business.  What do you mean by the proposal
you made just now?’

‘What do I mean, Bounderby?’

‘By your visiting proposition,’ said Bounderby, with an inflexible jerk
of the hayfield.

‘I mean that I hope you may be induced to arrange in a friendly manner,
for allowing Louisa a period of repose and reflection here, which may
tend to a gradual alteration for the better in many respects.’

‘To a softening down of your ideas of the incompatibility?’ said
Bounderby.

‘If you put it in those terms.’

‘What made you think of this?’ said Bounderby.

‘I have already said, I fear Louisa has not been understood.  Is it
asking too much, Bounderby, that you, so far her elder, should aid in
trying to set her right?  You have accepted a great charge of her; for
better for worse, for—’

Mr. Bounderby may have been annoyed by the repetition of his own words to
Stephen Blackpool, but he cut the quotation short with an angry start.

‘Come!’ said he, ‘I don’t want to be told about that.  I know what I took
her for, as well as you do.  Never you mind what I took her for; that’s
my look out.’

‘I was merely going on to remark, Bounderby, that we may all be more or
less in the wrong, not even excepting you; and that some yielding on your
part, remembering the trust you have accepted, may not only be an act of
true kindness, but perhaps a debt incurred towards Louisa.’

‘I think differently,’ blustered Bounderby.  ‘I am going to finish this
business according to my own opinions.  Now, I don’t want to make a
quarrel of it with you, Tom Gradgrind.  To tell you the truth, I don’t
think it would be worthy of my reputation to quarrel on such a subject.
As to your gentleman-friend, he may take himself off, wherever he likes
best.  If he falls in my way, I shall tell him my mind; if he don’t fall
in my way, I shan’t, for it won’t be worth my while to do it.  As to your
daughter, whom I made Loo Bounderby, and might have done better by
leaving Loo Gradgrind, if she don’t come home to-morrow, by twelve
o’clock at noon, I shall understand that she prefers to stay away, and I
shall send her wearing apparel and so forth over here, and you’ll take
charge of her for the future.  What I shall say to people in general, of
the incompatibility that led to my so laying down the law, will be this.
I am Josiah Bounderby, and I had my bringing-up; she’s the daughter of
Tom Gradgrind, and she had her bringing-up; and the two horses wouldn’t
pull together.  I am pretty well known to be rather an uncommon man, I
believe; and most people will understand fast enough that it must be a
woman rather out of the common, also, who, in the long run, would come up
to my mark.’

‘Let me seriously entreat you to reconsider this, Bounderby,’ urged Mr.
Gradgrind, ‘before you commit yourself to such a decision.’

‘I always come to a decision,’ said Bounderby, tossing his hat on: ‘and
whatever I do, I do at once.  I should be surprised at Tom Gradgrind’s
addressing such a remark to Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, knowing what he
knows of him, if I could be surprised by anything Tom Gradgrind did,
after his making himself a party to sentimental humbug.  I have given you
my decision, and I have got no more to say.  Good night!’

So Mr. Bounderby went home to his town house to bed.  At five minutes
past twelve o’clock next day, he directed Mrs. Bounderby’s property to be
carefully packed up and sent to Tom Gradgrind’s; advertised his country
retreat for sale by private contract; and resumed a bachelor life.



CHAPTER IV
LOST


THE robbery at the Bank had not languished before, and did not cease to
occupy a front place in the attention of the principal of that
establishment now.  In boastful proof of his promptitude and activity, as
a remarkable man, and a self-made man, and a commercial wonder more
admirable than Venus, who had risen out of the mud instead of the sea, he
liked to show how little his domestic affairs abated his business ardour.
Consequently, in the first few weeks of his resumed bachelorhood, he even
advanced upon his usual display of bustle, and every day made such a rout
in renewing his investigations into the robbery, that the officers who
had it in hand almost wished it had never been committed.

They were at fault too, and off the scent.  Although they had been so
quiet since the first outbreak of the matter, that most people really did
suppose it to have been abandoned as hopeless, nothing new occurred.  No
implicated man or woman took untimely courage, or made a self-betraying
step.  More remarkable yet, Stephen Blackpool could not be heard of, and
the mysterious old woman remained a mystery.

Things having come to this pass, and showing no latent signs of stirring
beyond it, the upshot of Mr. Bounderby’s investigations was, that he
resolved to hazard a bold burst.  He drew up a placard, offering Twenty
Pounds reward for the apprehension of Stephen Blackpool, suspected of
complicity in the robbery of Coketown Bank on such a night; he described
the said Stephen Blackpool by dress, complexion, estimated height, and
manner, as minutely as he could; he recited how he had left the town, and
in what direction he had been last seen going; he had the whole printed
in great black letters on a staring broadsheet; and he caused the walls
to be posted with it in the dead of night, so that it should strike upon
the sight of the whole population at one blow.

The factory-bells had need to ring their loudest that morning to disperse
the groups of workers who stood in the tardy daybreak, collected round
the placards, devouring them with eager eyes.  Not the least eager of the
eyes assembled, were the eyes of those who could not read.  These people,
as they listened to the friendly voice that read aloud—there was always
some such ready to help them—stared at the characters which meant so much
with a vague awe and respect that would have been half ludicrous, if any
aspect of public ignorance could ever be otherwise than threatening and
full of evil.  Many ears and eyes were busy with a vision of the matter
of these placards, among turning spindles, rattling looms, and whirling
wheels, for hours afterwards; and when the Hands cleared out again into
the streets, there were still as many readers as before.

Slackbridge, the delegate, had to address his audience too that night;
and Slackbridge had obtained a clean bill from the printer, and had
brought it in his pocket.  Oh, my friends and fellow-countrymen, the
down-trodden operatives of Coketown, oh, my fellow-brothers and
fellow-workmen and fellow-citizens and fellow-men, what a to-do was
there, when Slackbridge unfolded what he called ‘that damning document,’
and held it up to the gaze, and for the execration of the working-man
community!  ‘Oh, my fellow-men, behold of what a traitor in the camp of
those great spirits who are enrolled upon the holy scroll of Justice and
of Union, is appropriately capable!  Oh, my prostrate friends, with the
galling yoke of tyrants on your necks and the iron foot of despotism
treading down your fallen forms into the dust of the earth, upon which
right glad would your oppressors be to see you creeping on your bellies
all the days of your lives, like the serpent in the garden—oh, my
brothers, and shall I as a man not add, my sisters too, what do you say,
_now_, of Stephen Blackpool, with a slight stoop in his shoulders and
about five foot seven in height, as set forth in this degrading and
disgusting document, this blighting bill, this pernicious placard, this
abominable advertisement; and with what majesty of denouncement will you
crush the viper, who would bring this stain and shame upon the God-like
race that happily has cast him out for ever!  Yes, my compatriots,
happily cast him out and sent him forth!  For you remember how he stood
here before you on this platform; you remember how, face to face and foot
to foot, I pursued him through all his intricate windings; you remember
how he sneaked and slunk, and sidled, and splitted of straws, until, with
not an inch of ground to which to cling, I hurled him out from amongst
us: an object for the undying finger of scorn to point at, and for the
avenging fire of every free and thinking mind to scorch and scar!  And
now, my friends—my labouring friends, for I rejoice and triumph in that
stigma—my friends whose hard but honest beds are made in toil, and whose
scanty but independent pots are boiled in hardship; and now, I say, my
friends, what appellation has that dastard craven taken to himself, when,
with the mask torn from his features, he stands before us in all his
native deformity, a What?  A thief!  A plunderer!  A proscribed fugitive,
with a price upon his head; a fester and a wound upon the noble character
of the Coketown operative!  Therefore, my band of brothers in a sacred
bond, to which your children and your children’s children yet unborn have
set their infant hands and seals, I propose to you on the part of the
United Aggregate Tribunal, ever watchful for your welfare, ever zealous
for your benefit, that this meeting does Resolve: That Stephen Blackpool,
weaver, referred to in this placard, having been already solemnly
disowned by the community of Coketown Hands, the same are free from the
shame of his misdeeds, and cannot as a class be reproached with his
dishonest actions!’

Thus Slackbridge; gnashing and perspiring after a prodigious sort.  A few
stern voices called out ‘No!’ and a score or two hailed, with assenting
cries of ‘Hear, hear!’ the caution from one man, ‘Slackbridge, y’or over
hetter in’t; y’or a goen too fast!’  But these were pigmies against an
army; the general assemblage subscribed to the gospel according to
Slackbridge, and gave three cheers for him, as he sat demonstratively
panting at them.

These men and women were yet in the streets, passing quietly to their
homes, when Sissy, who had been called away from Louisa some minutes
before, returned.

‘Who is it?’ asked Louisa.

‘It is Mr. Bounderby,’ said Sissy, timid of the name, ‘and your brother
Mr. Tom, and a young woman who says her name is Rachael, and that you
know her.’

‘What do they want, Sissy dear?’

‘They want to see you.  Rachael has been crying, and seems angry.’

‘Father,’ said Louisa, for he was present, ‘I cannot refuse to see them,
for a reason that will explain itself.  Shall they come in here?’

As he answered in the affirmative, Sissy went away to bring them.  She
reappeared with them directly.  Tom was last; and remained standing in
the obscurest part of the room, near the door.

‘Mrs. Bounderby,’ said her husband, entering with a cool nod, ‘I don’t
disturb you, I hope.  This is an unseasonable hour, but here is a young
woman who has been making statements which render my visit necessary.
Tom Gradgrind, as your son, young Tom, refuses for some obstinate reason
or other to say anything at all about those statements, good or bad, I am
obliged to confront her with your daughter.’

‘You have seen me once before, young lady,’ said Rachael, standing in
front of Louisa.

Tom coughed.

‘You have seen me, young lady,’ repeated Rachael, as she did not answer,
‘once before.’

Tom coughed again.

‘I have.’

Rachael cast her eyes proudly towards Mr. Bounderby, and said, ‘Will you
make it known, young lady, where, and who was there?’

‘I went to the house where Stephen Blackpool lodged, on the night of his
discharge from his work, and I saw you there.  He was there too; and an
old woman who did not speak, and whom I could scarcely see, stood in a
dark corner.  My brother was with me.’

‘Why couldn’t you say so, young Tom?’ demanded Bounderby.

‘I promised my sister I wouldn’t.’  Which Louisa hastily confirmed.  ‘And
besides,’ said the whelp bitterly, ‘she tells her own story so precious
well—and so full—that what business had I to take it out of her mouth!’

‘Say, young lady, if you please,’ pursued Rachael, ‘why, in an evil hour,
you ever came to Stephen’s that night.’

‘I felt compassion for him,’ said Louisa, her colour deepening, ‘and I
wished to know what he was going to do, and wished to offer him
assistance.’

‘Thank you, ma’am,’ said Bounderby.  ‘Much flattered and obliged.’

‘Did you offer him,’ asked Rachael, ‘a bank-note?’

‘Yes; but he refused it, and would only take two pounds in gold.’

Rachael cast her eyes towards Mr. Bounderby again.

‘Oh, certainly!’ said Bounderby.  ‘If you put the question whether your
ridiculous and improbable account was true or not, I am bound to say it’s
confirmed.’

‘Young lady,’ said Rachael, ‘Stephen Blackpool is now named as a thief in
public print all over this town, and where else!  There have been a
meeting to-night where he have been spoken of in the same shameful way.
Stephen!  The honestest lad, the truest lad, the best!’  Her indignation
failed her, and she broke off sobbing.

‘I am very, very sorry,’ said Louisa.

‘Oh, young lady, young lady,’ returned Rachael, ‘I hope you may be, but I
don’t know!  I can’t say what you may ha’ done!  The like of you don’t
know us, don’t care for us, don’t belong to us.  I am not sure why you
may ha’ come that night.  I can’t tell but what you may ha’ come wi’ some
aim of your own, not mindin to what trouble you brought such as the poor
lad.  I said then, Bless you for coming; and I said it of my heart, you
seemed to take so pitifully to him; but I don’t know now, I don’t know!’

Louisa could not reproach her for her unjust suspicions; she was so
faithful to her idea of the man, and so afflicted.

‘And when I think,’ said Rachael through her sobs, ‘that the poor lad was
so grateful, thinkin you so good to him—when I mind that he put his hand
over his hard-worken face to hide the tears that you brought up there—Oh,
I hope you may be sorry, and ha’ no bad cause to be it; but I don’t know,
I don’t know!’

‘You’re a pretty article,’ growled the whelp, moving uneasily in his dark
corner, ‘to come here with these precious imputations!  You ought to be
bundled out for not knowing how to behave yourself, and you would be by
rights.’

She said nothing in reply; and her low weeping was the only sound that
was heard, until Mr. Bounderby spoke.

‘Come!’ said he, ‘you know what you have engaged to do.  You had better
give your mind to that; not this.’

‘’Deed, I am loath,’ returned Rachael, drying her eyes, ‘that any here
should see me like this; but I won’t be seen so again.  Young lady, when
I had read what’s put in print of Stephen—and what has just as much truth
in it as if it had been put in print of you—I went straight to the Bank
to say I knew where Stephen was, and to give a sure and certain promise
that he should be here in two days.  I couldn’t meet wi’ Mr. Bounderby
then, and your brother sent me away, and I tried to find you, but you was
not to be found, and I went back to work.  Soon as I come out of the Mill
to-night, I hastened to hear what was said of Stephen—for I know wi’
pride he will come back to shame it!—and then I went again to seek Mr.
Bounderby, and I found him, and I told him every word I knew; and he
believed no word I said, and brought me here.’

‘So far, that’s true enough,’ assented Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in
his pockets and his hat on.  ‘But I have known you people before to-day,
you’ll observe, and I know you never die for want of talking.  Now, I
recommend you not so much to mind talking just now, as doing.  You have
undertaken to do something; all I remark upon that at present is, do it!’

‘I have written to Stephen by the post that went out this afternoon, as I
have written to him once before sin’ he went away,’ said Rachael; ‘and he
will be here, at furthest, in two days.’

‘Then, I’ll tell you something.  You are not aware perhaps,’ retorted Mr.
Bounderby, ‘that you yourself have been looked after now and then, not
being considered quite free from suspicion in this business, on account
of most people being judged according to the company they keep.  The
post-office hasn’t been forgotten either.  What I’ll tell you is, that no
letter to Stephen Blackpool has ever got into it.  Therefore, what has
become of yours, I leave you to guess.  Perhaps you’re mistaken, and
never wrote any.’

‘He hadn’t been gone from here, young lady,’ said Rachael, turning
appealingly to Louisa, ‘as much as a week, when he sent me the only
letter I have had from him, saying that he was forced to seek work in
another name.’

‘Oh, by George!’ cried Bounderby, shaking his head, with a whistle, ‘he
changes his name, does he!  That’s rather unlucky, too, for such an
immaculate chap.  It’s considered a little suspicious in Courts of
Justice, I believe, when an Innocent happens to have many names.’

‘What,’ said Rachael, with the tears in her eyes again, ‘what, young
lady, in the name of Mercy, was left the poor lad to do!  The masters
against him on one hand, the men against him on the other, he only wantin
to work hard in peace, and do what he felt right.  Can a man have no soul
of his own, no mind of his own?  Must he go wrong all through wi’ this
side, or must he go wrong all through wi’ that, or else be hunted like a
hare?’

‘Indeed, indeed, I pity him from my heart,’ returned Louisa; ‘and I hope
that he will clear himself.’

‘You need have no fear of that, young lady.  He is sure!’

‘All the surer, I suppose,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘for your refusing to
tell where he is?  Eh?’

‘He shall not, through any act of mine, come back wi’ the unmerited
reproach of being brought back.  He shall come back of his own accord to
clear himself, and put all those that have injured his good character,
and he not here for its defence, to shame.  I have told him what has been
done against him,’ said Rachael, throwing off all distrust as a rock
throws of the sea, ‘and he will be here, at furthest, in two days.’

‘Notwithstanding which,’ added Mr. Bounderby, ‘if he can be laid hold of
any sooner, he shall have an earlier opportunity of clearing himself.  As
to you, I have nothing against you; what you came and told me turns out
to be true, and I have given you the means of proving it to be true, and
there’s an end of it.  I wish you good night all!  I must be off to look
a little further into this.’

Tom came out of his corner when Mr. Bounderby moved, moved with him, kept
close to him, and went away with him.  The only parting salutation of
which he delivered himself was a sulky ‘Good night, father!’  With a
brief speech, and a scowl at his sister, he left the house.

Since his sheet-anchor had come home, Mr. Gradgrind had been sparing of
speech.  He still sat silent, when Louisa mildly said:

‘Rachael, you will not distrust me one day, when you know me better.’

‘It goes against me,’ Rachael answered, in a gentler manner, ‘to mistrust
any one; but when I am so mistrusted—when we all are—I cannot keep such
things quite out of my mind.  I ask your pardon for having done you an
injury.  I don’t think what I said now.  Yet I might come to think it
again, wi’ the poor lad so wronged.’

‘Did you tell him in your letter,’ inquired Sissy, ‘that suspicion seemed
to have fallen upon him, because he had been seen about the Bank at
night?  He would then know what he would have to explain on coming back,
and would be ready.’

‘Yes, dear,’ she returned; ‘but I can’t guess what can have ever taken
him there.  He never used to go there.  It was never in his way.  His way
was the same as mine, and not near it.’

Sissy had already been at her side asking her where she lived, and
whether she might come to-morrow night, to inquire if there were news of
him.

‘I doubt,’ said Rachael, ‘if he can be here till next day.’

‘Then I will come next night too,’ said Sissy.

When Rachael, assenting to this, was gone, Mr. Gradgrind lifted up his
head, and said to his daughter:

‘Louisa, my dear, I have never, that I know of, seen this man.  Do you
believe him to be implicated?’

‘I think I have believed it, father, though with great difficulty.  I do
not believe it now.’

‘That is to say, you once persuaded yourself to believe it, from knowing
him to be suspected.  His appearance and manner; are they so honest?’

‘Very honest.’

‘And her confidence not to be shaken!  I ask myself,’ said Mr. Gradgrind,
musing, ‘does the real culprit know of these accusations?  Where is he?
Who is he?’

His hair had latterly began to change its colour.  As he leaned upon his
hand again, looking gray and old, Louisa, with a face of fear and pity,
hurriedly went over to him, and sat close at his side.  Her eyes by
accident met Sissy’s at the moment.  Sissy flushed and started, and
Louisa put her finger on her lip.

Next night, when Sissy returned home and told Louisa that Stephen was not
come, she told it in a whisper.  Next night again, when she came home
with the same account, and added that he had not been heard of, she spoke
in the same low frightened tone.  From the moment of that interchange of
looks, they never uttered his name, or any reference to him, aloud; nor
ever pursued the subject of the robbery, when Mr. Gradgrind spoke of it.

The two appointed days ran out, three days and nights ran out, and
Stephen Blackpool was not come, and remained unheard of.  On the fourth
day, Rachael, with unabated confidence, but considering her despatch to
have miscarried, went up to the Bank, and showed her letter from him with
his address, at a working colony, one of many, not upon the main road,
sixty miles away.  Messengers were sent to that place, and the whole town
looked for Stephen to be brought in next day.

During this whole time the whelp moved about with Mr. Bounderby like his
shadow, assisting in all the proceedings.  He was greatly excited,
horribly fevered, bit his nails down to the quick, spoke in a hard
rattling voice, and with lips that were black and burnt up.  At the hour
when the suspected man was looked for, the whelp was at the station;
offering to wager that he had made off before the arrival of those who
were sent in quest of him, and that he would not appear.

The whelp was right.  The messengers returned alone.  Rachael’s letter
had gone, Rachael’s letter had been delivered.  Stephen Blackpool had
decamped in that same hour; and no soul knew more of him.  The only doubt
in Coketown was, whether Rachael had written in good faith, believing
that he really would come back, or warning him to fly.  On this point
opinion was divided.

Six days, seven days, far on into another week.  The wretched whelp
plucked up a ghastly courage, and began to grow defiant.  ‘_Was_ the
suspected fellow the thief?  A pretty question!  If not, where was the
man, and why did he not come back?’

Where was the man, and why did he not come back?  In the dead of night
the echoes of his own words, which had rolled Heaven knows how far away
in the daytime, came back instead, and abided by him until morning.



CHAPTER V
FOUND


DAY and night again, day and night again.  No Stephen Blackpool.  Where
was the man, and why did he not come back?

Every night, Sissy went to Rachael’s lodging, and sat with her in her
small neat room.  All day, Rachael toiled as such people must toil,
whatever their anxieties.  The smoke-serpents were indifferent who was
lost or found, who turned out bad or good; the melancholy mad elephants,
like the Hard Fact men, abated nothing of their set routine, whatever
happened.  Day and night again, day and night again.  The monotony was
unbroken.  Even Stephen Blackpool’s disappearance was falling into the
general way, and becoming as monotonous a wonder as any piece of
machinery in Coketown.

‘I misdoubt,’ said Rachael, ‘if there is as many as twenty left in all
this place, who have any trust in the poor dear lad now.’

She said it to Sissy, as they sat in her lodging, lighted only by the
lamp at the street corner.  Sissy had come there when it was already
dark, to await her return from work; and they had since sat at the window
where Rachael had found her, wanting no brighter light to shine on their
sorrowful talk.

‘If it hadn’t been mercifully brought about, that I was to have you to
speak to,’ pursued Rachael, ‘times are, when I think my mind would not
have kept right.  But I get hope and strength through you; and you
believe that though appearances may rise against him, he will be proved
clear?’

‘I do believe so,’ returned Sissy, ‘with my whole heart.  I feel so
certain, Rachael, that the confidence you hold in yours against all
discouragement, is not like to be wrong, that I have no more doubt of him
than if I had known him through as many years of trial as you have.’

‘And I, my dear,’ said Rachel, with a tremble in her voice, ‘have known
him through them all, to be, according to his quiet ways, so faithful to
everything honest and good, that if he was never to be heard of more, and
I was to live to be a hundred years old, I could say with my last breath,
God knows my heart.  I have never once left trusting Stephen Blackpool!’

‘We all believe, up at the Lodge, Rachael, that he will be freed from
suspicion, sooner or later.’

‘The better I know it to be so believed there, my dear,’ said Rachael,
‘and the kinder I feel it that you come away from there, purposely to
comfort me, and keep me company, and be seen wi’ me when I am not yet
free from all suspicion myself, the more grieved I am that I should ever
have spoken those mistrusting words to the young lady.  And yet I—’

‘You don’t mistrust her now, Rachael?’

‘Now that you have brought us more together, no.  But I can’t at all
times keep out of my mind—’

Her voice so sunk into a low and slow communing with herself, that Sissy,
sitting by her side, was obliged to listen with attention.

‘I can’t at all times keep out of my mind, mistrustings of some one.  I
can’t think who ’tis, I can’t think how or why it may be done, but I
mistrust that some one has put Stephen out of the way.  I mistrust that
by his coming back of his own accord, and showing himself innocent before
them all, some one would be confounded, who—to prevent that—has stopped
him, and put him out of the way.’

‘That is a dreadful thought,’ said Sissy, turning pale.

‘It _is_ a dreadful thought to think he may be murdered.’

Sissy shuddered, and turned paler yet.

‘When it makes its way into my mind, dear,’ said Rachael, ‘and it will
come sometimes, though I do all I can to keep it out, wi’ counting on to
high numbers as I work, and saying over and over again pieces that I knew
when I were a child—I fall into such a wild, hot hurry, that, however
tired I am, I want to walk fast, miles and miles.  I must get the better
of this before bed-time.  I’ll walk home wi’ you.’

‘He might fall ill upon the journey back,’ said Sissy, faintly offering a
worn-out scrap of hope; ‘and in such a case, there are many places on the
road where he might stop.’

‘But he is in none of them.  He has been sought for in all, and he’s not
there.’

‘True,’ was Sissy’s reluctant admission.

‘He’d walk the journey in two days.  If he was footsore and couldn’t
walk, I sent him, in the letter he got, the money to ride, lest he should
have none of his own to spare.’

‘Let us hope that to-morrow will bring something better, Rachael.  Come
into the air!’

Her gentle hand adjusted Rachael’s shawl upon her shining black hair in
the usual manner of her wearing it, and they went out.  The night being
fine, little knots of Hands were here and there lingering at street
corners; but it was supper-time with the greater part of them, and there
were but few people in the streets.

‘You’re not so hurried now, Rachael, and your hand is cooler.’

‘I get better, dear, if I can only walk, and breathe a little fresh.
‘Times when I can’t, I turn weak and confused.’

‘But you must not begin to fail, Rachael, for you may be wanted at any
time to stand by Stephen.  To-morrow is Saturday.  If no news comes
to-morrow, let us walk in the country on Sunday morning, and strengthen
you for another week.  Will you go?’

‘Yes, dear.’

They were by this time in the street where Mr. Bounderby’s house stood.
The way to Sissy’s destination led them past the door, and they were
going straight towards it.  Some train had newly arrived in Coketown,
which had put a number of vehicles in motion, and scattered a
considerable bustle about the town.  Several coaches were rattling before
them and behind them as they approached Mr. Bounderby’s, and one of the
latter drew up with such briskness as they were in the act of passing the
house, that they looked round involuntarily.  The bright gaslight over
Mr. Bounderby’s steps showed them Mrs. Sparsit in the coach, in an
ecstasy of excitement, struggling to open the door; Mrs. Sparsit seeing
them at the same moment, called to them to stop.

‘It’s a coincidence,’ exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, as she was released by the
coachman.  ‘It’s a Providence!  Come out, ma’am!’ then said Mrs. Sparsit,
to some one inside, ‘come out, or we’ll have you dragged out!’

Hereupon, no other than the mysterious old woman descended.  Whom Mrs.
Sparsit incontinently collared.

‘Leave her alone, everybody!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, with great energy.
‘Let nobody touch her.  She belongs to me.  Come in, ma’am!’ then said
Mrs. Sparsit, reversing her former word of command.  ‘Come in, ma’am, or
we’ll have you dragged in!’

The spectacle of a matron of classical deportment, seizing an ancient
woman by the throat, and hauling her into a dwelling-house, would have
been under any circumstances, sufficient temptation to all true English
stragglers so blest as to witness it, to force a way into that
dwelling-house and see the matter out.  But when the phenomenon was
enhanced by the notoriety and mystery by this time associated all over
the town with the Bank robbery, it would have lured the stragglers in,
with an irresistible attraction, though the roof had been expected to
fall upon their heads.  Accordingly, the chance witnesses on the ground,
consisting of the busiest of the neighbours to the number of some
five-and-twenty, closed in after Sissy and Rachael, as they closed in
after Mrs. Sparsit and her prize; and the whole body made a disorderly
irruption into Mr. Bounderby’s dining-room, where the people behind lost
not a moment’s time in mounting on the chairs, to get the better of the
people in front.

‘Fetch Mr. Bounderby down!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘Rachael, young woman;
you know who this is?’

‘It’s Mrs. Pegler,’ said Rachael.

‘I should think it is!’ cried Mrs. Sparsit, exulting.  ‘Fetch Mr.
Bounderby.  Stand away, everybody!’  Here old Mrs. Pegler, muffling
herself up, and shrinking from observation, whispered a word of entreaty.
‘Don’t tell me,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, aloud.  ‘I have told you twenty
times, coming along, that I will _not_ leave you till I have handed you
over to him myself.’

Mr. Bounderby now appeared, accompanied by Mr. Gradgrind and the whelp,
with whom he had been holding conference up-stairs.  Mr. Bounderby looked
more astonished than hospitable, at sight of this uninvited party in his
dining-room.

‘Why, what’s the matter now!’ said he.  ‘Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am?’

‘Sir,’ explained that worthy woman, ‘I trust it is my good fortune to
produce a person you have much desired to find.  Stimulated by my wish to
relieve your mind, sir, and connecting together such imperfect clues to
the part of the country in which that person might be supposed to reside,
as have been afforded by the young woman, Rachael, fortunately now
present to identify, I have had the happiness to succeed, and to bring
that person with me—I need not say most unwillingly on her part.  It has
not been, sir, without some trouble that I have effected this; but
trouble in your service is to me a pleasure, and hunger, thirst, and cold
a real gratification.’

Here Mrs. Sparsit ceased; for Mr. Bounderby’s visage exhibited an
extraordinary combination of all possible colours and expressions of
discomfiture, as old Mrs. Pegler was disclosed to his view.

‘Why, what do you mean by this?’ was his highly unexpected demand, in
great warmth.  ‘I ask you, what do you mean by this, Mrs. Sparsit,
ma’am?’

‘Sir!’ exclaimed Mrs. Sparsit, faintly.

‘Why don’t you mind your own business, ma’am?’ roared Bounderby.  ‘How
dare you go and poke your officious nose into my family affairs?’

This allusion to her favourite feature overpowered Mrs. Sparsit.  She sat
down stiffly in a chair, as if she were frozen; and with a fixed stare at
Mr. Bounderby, slowly grated her mittens against one another, as if they
were frozen too.

‘My dear Josiah!’ cried Mrs. Pegler, trembling.  ‘My darling boy!  I am
not to blame.  It’s not my fault, Josiah.  I told this lady over and over
again, that I knew she was doing what would not be agreeable to you, but
she would do it.’

‘What did you let her bring you for?  Couldn’t you knock her cap off, or
her tooth out, or scratch her, or do something or other to her?’ asked
Bounderby.

‘My own boy!  She threatened me that if I resisted her, I should be
brought by constables, and it was better to come quietly than make that
stir in such a’—Mrs. Pegler glanced timidly but proudly round the
walls—‘such a fine house as this.  Indeed, indeed, it is not my fault!
My dear, noble, stately boy!  I have always lived quiet, and secret,
Josiah, my dear.  I have never broken the condition once.  I have never
said I was your mother.  I have admired you at a distance; and if I have
come to town sometimes, with long times between, to take a proud peep at
you, I have done it unbeknown, my love, and gone away again.’

Mr. Bounderby, with his hands in his pockets, walked in impatient
mortification up and down at the side of the long dining-table, while the
spectators greedily took in every syllable of Mrs. Pegler’s appeal, and
at each succeeding syllable became more and more round-eyed.  Mr.
Bounderby still walking up and down when Mrs. Pegler had done, Mr.
Gradgrind addressed that maligned old lady:

‘I am surprised, madam,’ he observed with severity, ‘that in your old age
you have the face to claim Mr. Bounderby for your son, after your
unnatural and inhuman treatment of him.’

‘_Me_ unnatural!’ cried poor old Mrs. Pegler.  ‘_Me_ inhuman!  To my dear
boy?’

‘Dear!’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Yes; dear in his self-made prosperity,
madam, I dare say.  Not very dear, however, when you deserted him in his
infancy, and left him to the brutality of a drunken grandmother.’

‘_I_ deserted my Josiah!’ cried Mrs. Pegler, clasping her hands.  ‘Now,
Lord forgive you, sir, for your wicked imaginations, and for your scandal
against the memory of my poor mother, who died in my arms before Josiah
was born.  May you repent of it, sir, and live to know better!’

She was so very earnest and injured, that Mr. Gradgrind, shocked by the
possibility which dawned upon him, said in a gentler tone:

‘Do you deny, then, madam, that you left your son to—to be brought up in
the gutter?’

‘Josiah in the gutter!’ exclaimed Mrs. Pegler.  ‘No such a thing, sir.
Never!  For shame on you!  My dear boy knows, and will give _you_ to
know, that though he come of humble parents, he come of parents that
loved him as dear as the best could, and never thought it hardship on
themselves to pinch a bit that he might write and cipher beautiful, and
I’ve his books at home to show it!  Aye, have I!’ said Mrs. Pegler, with
indignant pride.  ‘And my dear boy knows, and will give _you_ to know,
sir, that after his beloved father died, when he was eight years old, his
mother, too, could pinch a bit, as it was her duty and her pleasure and
her pride to do it, to help him out in life, and put him ’prentice.  And
a steady lad he was, and a kind master he had to lend him a hand, and
well he worked his own way forward to be rich and thriving.  And _I_’ll
give you to know, sir—for this my dear boy won’t—that though his mother
kept but a little village shop, he never forgot her, but pensioned me on
thirty pound a year—more than I want, for I put by out of it—only making
the condition that I was to keep down in my own part, and make no boasts
about him, and not trouble him.  And I never have, except with looking at
him once a year, when he has never knowed it.  And it’s right,’ said poor
old Mrs. Pegler, in affectionate championship, ‘that I _should_ keep down
in my own part, and I have no doubts that if I was here I should do a
many unbefitting things, and I am well contented, and I can keep my pride
in my Josiah to myself, and I can love for love’s own sake!  And I am
ashamed of you, sir,’ said Mrs. Pegler, lastly, ‘for your slanders and
suspicions.  And I never stood here before, nor never wanted to stand
here when my dear son said no.  And I shouldn’t be here now, if it hadn’t
been for being brought here.  And for shame upon you, Oh, for shame, to
accuse me of being a bad mother to my son, with my son standing here to
tell you so different!’

The bystanders, on and off the dining-room chairs, raised a murmur of
sympathy with Mrs. Pegler, and Mr. Gradgrind felt himself innocently
placed in a very distressing predicament, when Mr. Bounderby, who had
never ceased walking up and down, and had every moment swelled larger and
larger, and grown redder and redder, stopped short.

‘I don’t exactly know,’ said Mr. Bounderby, ‘how I come to be favoured
with the attendance of the present company, but I don’t inquire.  When
they’re quite satisfied, perhaps they’ll be so good as to disperse;
whether they’re satisfied or not, perhaps they’ll be so good as to
disperse.  I’m not bound to deliver a lecture on my family affairs, I
have not undertaken to do it, and I’m not a going to do it.  Therefore
those who expect any explanation whatever upon that branch of the
subject, will be disappointed—particularly Tom Gradgrind, and he can’t
know it too soon.  In reference to the Bank robbery, there has been a
mistake made, concerning my mother.  If there hadn’t been
over-officiousness it wouldn’t have been made, and I hate
over-officiousness at all times, whether or no. Good evening!’

Although Mr. Bounderby carried it off in these terms, holding the door
open for the company to depart, there was a blustering sheepishness upon
him, at once extremely crestfallen and superlatively absurd.  Detected as
the Bully of humility, who had built his windy reputation upon lies, and
in his boastfulness had put the honest truth as far away from him as if
he had advanced the mean claim (there is no meaner) to tack himself on to
a pedigree, he cut a most ridiculous figure.  With the people filing off
at the door he held, who he knew would carry what had passed to the whole
town, to be given to the four winds, he could not have looked a Bully
more shorn and forlorn, if he had had his ears cropped.  Even that
unlucky female, Mrs. Sparsit, fallen from her pinnacle of exultation into
the Slough of Despond, was not in so bad a plight as that remarkable man
and self-made Humbug, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown.

Rachael and Sissy, leaving Mrs. Pegler to occupy a bed at her son’s for
that night, walked together to the gate of Stone Lodge and there parted.
Mr. Gradgrind joined them before they had gone very far, and spoke with
much interest of Stephen Blackpool; for whom he thought this signal
failure of the suspicions against Mrs. Pegler was likely to work well.

As to the whelp; throughout this scene as on all other late occasions, he
had stuck close to Bounderby.  He seemed to feel that as long as
Bounderby could make no discovery without his knowledge, he was so far
safe.  He never visited his sister, and had only seen her once since she
went home: that is to say on the night when he still stuck close to
Bounderby, as already related.

There was one dim unformed fear lingering about his sister’s mind, to
which she never gave utterance, which surrounded the graceless and
ungrateful boy with a dreadful mystery.  The same dark possibility had
presented itself in the same shapeless guise, this very day, to Sissy,
when Rachael spoke of some one who would be confounded by Stephen’s
return, having put him out of the way.  Louisa had never spoken of
harbouring any suspicion of her brother in connexion with the robbery,
she and Sissy had held no confidence on the subject, save in that one
interchange of looks when the unconscious father rested his gray head on
his hand; but it was understood between them, and they both knew it.
This other fear was so awful, that it hovered about each of them like a
ghostly shadow; neither daring to think of its being near herself, far
less of its being near the other.

And still the forced spirit which the whelp had plucked up, throve with
him.  If Stephen Blackpool was not the thief, let him show himself.  Why
didn’t he?

Another night.  Another day and night.  No Stephen Blackpool.  Where was
the man, and why did he not come back?



CHAPTER VI
THE STARLIGHT


THE Sunday was a bright Sunday in autumn, clear and cool, when early in
the morning Sissy and Rachael met, to walk in the country.

As Coketown cast ashes not only on its own head but on the
neighbourhood’s too—after the manner of those pious persons who do
penance for their own sins by putting other people into sackcloth—it was
customary for those who now and then thirsted for a draught of pure air,
which is not absolutely the most wicked among the vanities of life, to
get a few miles away by the railroad, and then begin their walk, or their
lounge in the fields.  Sissy and Rachael helped themselves out of the
smoke by the usual means, and were put down at a station about midway
between the town and Mr. Bounderby’s retreat.

Though the green landscape was blotted here and there with heaps of coal,
it was green elsewhere, and there were trees to see, and there were larks
singing (though it was Sunday), and there were pleasant scents in the
air, and all was over-arched by a bright blue sky.  In the distance one
way, Coketown showed as a black mist; in another distance hills began to
rise; in a third, there was a faint change in the light of the horizon
where it shone upon the far-off sea.  Under their feet, the grass was
fresh; beautiful shadows of branches flickered upon it, and speckled it;
hedgerows were luxuriant; everything was at peace.  Engines at pits’
mouths, and lean old horses that had worn the circle of their daily
labour into the ground, were alike quiet; wheels had ceased for a short
space to turn; and the great wheel of earth seemed to revolve without the
shocks and noises of another time.

They walked on across the fields and down the shady lanes, sometimes
getting over a fragment of a fence so rotten that it dropped at a touch
of the foot, sometimes passing near a wreck of bricks and beams overgrown
with grass, marking the site of deserted works.  They followed paths and
tracks, however slight.  Mounds where the grass was rank and high, and
where brambles, dock-weed, and such-like vegetation, were confusedly
heaped together, they always avoided; for dismal stories were told in
that country of the old pits hidden beneath such indications.

The sun was high when they sat down to rest.  They had seen no one, near
or distant, for a long time; and the solitude remained unbroken.  ‘It is
so still here, Rachael, and the way is so untrodden, that I think we must
be the first who have been here all the summer.’

As Sissy said it, her eyes were attracted by another of those rotten
fragments of fence upon the ground.  She got up to look at it.  ‘And yet
I don’t know.  This has not been broken very long.  The wood is quite
fresh where it gave way.  Here are footsteps too.—O Rachael!’

She ran back, and caught her round the neck.  Rachael had already started
up.

‘What is the matter?’

‘I don’t know.  There is a hat lying in the grass.’  They went forward
together.  Rachael took it up, shaking from head to foot.  She broke into
a passion of tears and lamentations: Stephen Blackpool was written in his
own hand on the inside.

‘O the poor lad, the poor lad!  He has been made away with.  He is lying
murdered here!’

‘Is there—has the hat any blood upon it?’ Sissy faltered.

They were afraid to look; but they did examine it, and found no mark of
violence, inside or out.  It had been lying there some days, for rain and
dew had stained it, and the mark of its shape was on the grass where it
had fallen.  They looked fearfully about them, without moving, but could
see nothing more.  ‘Rachael,’ Sissy whispered, ‘I will go on a little by
myself.’

She had unclasped her hand, and was in the act of stepping forward, when
Rachael caught her in both arms with a scream that resounded over the
wide landscape.  Before them, at their very feet, was the brink of a
black ragged chasm hidden by the thick grass.  They sprang back, and fell
upon their knees, each hiding her face upon the other’s neck.

‘O, my good Lord!  He’s down there!  Down there!’  At first this, and her
terrific screams, were all that could be got from Rachael, by any tears,
by any prayers, by any representations, by any means.  It was impossible
to hush her; and it was deadly necessary to hold her, or she would have
flung herself down the shaft.

‘Rachael, dear Rachael, good Rachael, for the love of Heaven, not these
dreadful cries!  Think of Stephen, think of Stephen, think of Stephen!’

By an earnest repetition of this entreaty, poured out in all the agony of
such a moment, Sissy at last brought her to be silent, and to look at her
with a tearless face of stone.

‘Rachael, Stephen may be living.  You wouldn’t leave him lying maimed at
the bottom of this dreadful place, a moment, if you could bring help to
him?’

‘No, no, no!’

‘Don’t stir from here, for his sake!  Let me go and listen.’

She shuddered to approach the pit; but she crept towards it on her hands
and knees, and called to him as loud as she could call.  She listened,
but no sound replied.  She called again and listened; still no answering
sound.  She did this, twenty, thirty times.  She took a little clod of
earth from the broken ground where he had stumbled, and threw it in.  She
could not hear it fall.

The wide prospect, so beautiful in its stillness but a few minutes ago,
almost carried despair to her brave heart, as she rose and looked all
round her, seeing no help.  ‘Rachael, we must lose not a moment.  We must
go in different directions, seeking aid.  You shall go by the way we have
come, and I will go forward by the path.  Tell any one you see, and every
one what has happened.  Think of Stephen, think of Stephen!’

She knew by Rachael’s face that she might trust her now.  And after
standing for a moment to see her running, wringing her hands as she ran,
she turned and went upon her own search; she stopped at the hedge to tie
her shawl there as a guide to the place, then threw her bonnet aside, and
ran as she had never run before.

Run, Sissy, run, in Heaven’s name!  Don’t stop for breath.  Run, run!
Quickening herself by carrying such entreaties in her thoughts, she ran
from field to field, and lane to lane, and place to place, as she had
never run before; until she came to a shed by an engine-house, where two
men lay in the shade, asleep on straw.

First to wake them, and next to tell them, all so wild and breathless as
she was, what had brought her there, were difficulties; but they no
sooner understood her than their spirits were on fire like hers.  One of
the men was in a drunken slumber, but on his comrade’s shouting to him
that a man had fallen down the Old Hell Shaft, he started out to a pool
of dirty water, put his head in it, and came back sober.

With these two men she ran to another half-a-mile further, and with that
one to another, while they ran elsewhere.  Then a horse was found; and
she got another man to ride for life or death to the railroad, and send a
message to Louisa, which she wrote and gave him.  By this time a whole
village was up: and windlasses, ropes, poles, candles, lanterns, all
things necessary, were fast collecting and being brought into one place,
to be carried to the Old Hell Shaft.

It seemed now hours and hours since she had left the lost man lying in
the grave where he had been buried alive.  She could not bear to remain
away from it any longer—it was like deserting him—and she hurried swiftly
back, accompanied by half-a-dozen labourers, including the drunken man
whom the news had sobered, and who was the best man of all.  When they
came to the Old Hell Shaft, they found it as lonely as she had left it.
The men called and listened as she had done, and examined the edge of the
chasm, and settled how it had happened, and then sat down to wait until
the implements they wanted should come up.

Every sound of insects in the air, every stirring of the leaves, every
whisper among these men, made Sissy tremble, for she thought it was a cry
at the bottom of the pit.  But the wind blew idly over it, and no sound
arose to the surface, and they sat upon the grass, waiting and waiting.
After they had waited some time, straggling people who had heard of the
accident began to come up; then the real help of implements began to
arrive.  In the midst of this, Rachael returned; and with her party there
was a surgeon, who brought some wine and medicines.  But, the expectation
among the people that the man would be found alive was very slight
indeed.

There being now people enough present to impede the work, the sobered man
put himself at the head of the rest, or was put there by the general
consent, and made a large ring round the Old Hell Shaft, and appointed
men to keep it.  Besides such volunteers as were accepted to work, only
Sissy and Rachael were at first permitted within this ring; but, later in
the day, when the message brought an express from Coketown, Mr. Gradgrind
and Louisa, and Mr. Bounderby, and the whelp, were also there.

The sun was four hours lower than when Sissy and Rachael had first sat
down upon the grass, before a means of enabling two men to descend
securely was rigged with poles and ropes.  Difficulties had arisen in the
construction of this machine, simple as it was; requisites had been found
wanting, and messages had had to go and return.  It was five o’clock in
the afternoon of the bright autumnal Sunday, before a candle was sent
down to try the air, while three or four rough faces stood crowded close
together, attentively watching it: the man at the windlass lowering as
they were told.  The candle was brought up again, feebly burning, and
then some water was cast in.  Then the bucket was hooked on; and the
sobered man and another got in with lights, giving the word ‘Lower away!’

As the rope went out, tight and strained, and the windlass creaked, there
was not a breath among the one or two hundred men and women looking on,
that came as it was wont to come.  The signal was given and the windlass
stopped, with abundant rope to spare.  Apparently so long an interval
ensued with the men at the windlass standing idle, that some women
shrieked that another accident had happened!  But the surgeon who held
the watch, declared five minutes not to have elapsed yet, and sternly
admonished them to keep silence.  He had not well done speaking, when the
windlass was reversed and worked again.  Practised eyes knew that it did
not go as heavily as it would if both workmen had been coming up, and
that only one was returning.

The rope came in tight and strained; and ring after ring was coiled upon
the barrel of the windlass, and all eyes were fastened on the pit.  The
sobered man was brought up and leaped out briskly on the grass.  There
was an universal cry of ‘Alive or dead?’ and then a deep, profound hush.

When he said ‘Alive!’ a great shout arose and many eyes had tears in
them.

‘But he’s hurt very bad,’ he added, as soon as he could make himself
heard again.  ‘Where’s doctor?  He’s hurt so very bad, sir, that we donno
how to get him up.’

They all consulted together, and looked anxiously at the surgeon, as he
asked some questions, and shook his head on receiving the replies.  The
sun was setting now; and the red light in the evening sky touched every
face there, and caused it to be distinctly seen in all its rapt suspense.

The consultation ended in the men returning to the windlass, and the
pitman going down again, carrying the wine and some other small matters
with him.  Then the other man came up.  In the meantime, under the
surgeon’s directions, some men brought a hurdle, on which others made a
thick bed of spare clothes covered with loose straw, while he himself
contrived some bandages and slings from shawls and handkerchiefs.  As
these were made, they were hung upon an arm of the pitman who had last
come up, with instructions how to use them: and as he stood, shown by the
light he carried, leaning his powerful loose hand upon one of the poles,
and sometimes glancing down the pit, and sometimes glancing round upon
the people, he was not the least conspicuous figure in the scene.  It was
dark now, and torches were kindled.

It appeared from the little this man said to those about him, which was
quickly repeated all over the circle, that the lost man had fallen upon a
mass of crumbled rubbish with which the pit was half choked up, and that
his fall had been further broken by some jagged earth at the side.  He
lay upon his back with one arm doubled under him, and according to his
own belief had hardly stirred since he fell, except that he had moved his
free hand to a side pocket, in which he remembered to have some bread and
meat (of which he had swallowed crumbs), and had likewise scooped up a
little water in it now and then.  He had come straight away from his
work, on being written to, and had walked the whole journey; and was on
his way to Mr. Bounderby’s country house after dark, when he fell.  He
was crossing that dangerous country at such a dangerous time, because he
was innocent of what was laid to his charge, and couldn’t rest from
coming the nearest way to deliver himself up.  The Old Hell Shaft, the
pitman said, with a curse upon it, was worthy of its bad name to the
last; for though Stephen could speak now, he believed it would soon be
found to have mangled the life out of him.

When all was ready, this man, still taking his last hurried charges from
his comrades and the surgeon after the windlass had begun to lower him,
disappeared into the pit.  The rope went out as before, the signal was
made as before, and the windlass stopped.  No man removed his hand from
it now.  Every one waited with his grasp set, and his body bent down to
the work, ready to reverse and wind in.  At length the signal was given,
and all the ring leaned forward.

For, now, the rope came in, tightened and strained to its utmost as it
appeared, and the men turned heavily, and the windlass complained.  It
was scarcely endurable to look at the rope, and think of its giving way.
But, ring after ring was coiled upon the barrel of the windlass safely,
and the connecting chains appeared, and finally the bucket with the two
men holding on at the sides—a sight to make the head swim, and oppress
the heart—and tenderly supporting between them, slung and tied within,
the figure of a poor, crushed, human creature.

A low murmur of pity went round the throng, and the women wept aloud, as
this form, almost without form, was moved very slowly from its iron
deliverance, and laid upon the bed of straw.  At first, none but the
surgeon went close to it.  He did what he could in its adjustment on the
couch, but the best that he could do was to cover it.  That gently done,
he called to him Rachael and Sissy.  And at that time the pale, worn,
patient face was seen looking up at the sky, with the broken right hand
lying bare on the outside of the covering garments, as if waiting to be
taken by another hand.

They gave him drink, moistened his face with water, and administered some
drops of cordial and wine.  Though he lay quite motionless looking up at
the sky, he smiled and said, ‘Rachael.’  She stooped down on the grass at
his side, and bent over him until her eyes were between his and the sky,
for he could not so much as turn them to look at her.

‘Rachael, my dear.’

She took his hand.  He smiled again and said, ‘Don’t let ’t go.’

‘Thou’rt in great pain, my own dear Stephen?’

‘I ha’ been, but not now.  I ha’ been—dreadful, and dree, and long, my
dear—but ’tis ower now.  Ah, Rachael, aw a muddle!  Fro’ first to last, a
muddle!’

The spectre of his old look seemed to pass as he said the word.

‘I ha’ fell into th’ pit, my dear, as have cost wi’in the knowledge o’
old fok now livin, hundreds and hundreds o’ men’s lives—fathers, sons,
brothers, dear to thousands an’ thousands, an’ keeping ’em fro’ want and
hunger.  I ha’ fell into a pit that ha’ been wi’ th’ Firedamp crueller
than battle.  I ha’ read on ’t in the public petition, as onny one may
read, fro’ the men that works in pits, in which they ha’ pray’n and
pray’n the lawmakers for Christ’s sake not to let their work be murder to
’em, but to spare ’em for th’ wives and children that they loves as well
as gentlefok loves theirs.  When it were in work, it killed wi’out need;
when ’tis let alone, it kills wi’out need.  See how we die an’ no need,
one way an’ another—in a muddle—every day!’

He faintly said it, without any anger against any one.  Merely as the
truth.

‘Thy little sister, Rachael, thou hast not forgot her.  Thou’rt not like
to forget her now, and me so nigh her.  Thou know’st—poor, patient,
suff’rin, dear—how thou didst work for her, seet’n all day long in her
little chair at thy winder, and how she died, young and misshapen, awlung
o’ sickly air as had’n no need to be, an’ awlung o’ working people’s
miserable homes.  A muddle!  Aw a muddle!’

Louisa approached him; but he could not see her, lying with his face
turned up to the night sky.

‘If aw th’ things that tooches us, my dear, was not so muddled, I
should’n ha’ had’n need to coom heer.  If we was not in a muddle among
ourseln, I should’n ha’ been, by my own fellow weavers and workin’
brothers, so mistook.  If Mr. Bounderby had ever know’d me right—if he’d
ever know’d me at aw—he would’n ha’ took’n offence wi’ me.  He would’n
ha’ suspect’n me.  But look up yonder, Rachael!  Look aboove!’

Following his eyes, she saw that he was gazing at a star.

      [Picture: Stephen Blackpool recovered from the Old Hell Shaft]

‘It ha’ shined upon me,’ he said reverently, ‘in my pain and trouble down
below.  It ha’ shined into my mind.  I ha’ look’n at ’t and thowt o’
thee, Rachael, till the muddle in my mind have cleared awa, above a bit,
I hope.  If soom ha’ been wantin’ in unnerstan’in me better, I, too, ha’
been wantin’ in unnerstan’in them better.  When I got thy letter, I
easily believen that what the yoong ledy sen and done to me, and what her
brother sen and done to me, was one, and that there were a wicked plot
betwixt ’em.  When I fell, I were in anger wi’ her, an’ hurryin on t’ be
as onjust t’ her as oothers was t’ me.  But in our judgments, like as in
our doins, we mun bear and forbear.  In my pain an’ trouble, lookin up
yonder,—wi’ it shinin on me—I ha’ seen more clear, and ha’ made it my
dyin prayer that aw th’ world may on’y coom toogether more, an’ get a
better unnerstan’in o’ one another, than when I were in ’t my own weak
seln.’

Louisa hearing what he said, bent over him on the opposite side to
Rachael, so that he could see her.

‘You ha’ heard?’ he said, after a few moments’ silence.  ‘I ha’ not
forgot you, ledy.’

‘Yes, Stephen, I have heard you.  And your prayer is mine.’

‘You ha’ a father.  Will yo tak’ a message to him?’

‘He is here,’ said Louisa, with dread.  ‘Shall I bring him to you?’

‘If yo please.’

Louisa returned with her father.  Standing hand-in-hand, they both looked
down upon the solemn countenance.

‘Sir, yo will clear me an’ mak my name good wi’ aw men.  This I leave to
yo.’

Mr. Gradgrind was troubled and asked how?

‘Sir,’ was the reply: ‘yor son will tell yo how.  Ask him.  I mak no
charges: I leave none ahint me: not a single word.  I ha’ seen an’ spok’n
wi’ yor son, one night.  I ask no more o’ yo than that yo clear me—an’ I
trust to yo to do ’t.’

The bearers being now ready to carry him away, and the surgeon being
anxious for his removal, those who had torches or lanterns, prepared to
go in front of the litter.  Before it was raised, and while they were
arranging how to go, he said to Rachael, looking upward at the star:

‘Often as I coom to myseln, and found it shinin’ on me down there in my
trouble, I thowt it were the star as guided to Our Saviour’s home.  I
awmust think it be the very star!’

They lifted him up, and he was overjoyed to find that they were about to
take him in the direction whither the star seemed to him to lead.

‘Rachael, beloved lass!  Don’t let go my hand.  We may walk toogether
t’night, my dear!’

‘I will hold thy hand, and keep beside thee, Stephen, all the way.’

‘Bless thee!  Will soombody be pleased to coover my face!’

They carried him very gently along the fields, and down the lanes, and
over the wide landscape; Rachael always holding the hand in hers.  Very
few whispers broke the mournful silence.  It was soon a funeral
procession.  The star had shown him where to find the God of the poor;
and through humility, and sorrow, and forgiveness, he had gone to his
Redeemer’s rest.



CHAPTER VII
WHELP-HUNTING


BEFORE the ring formed round the Old Hell Shaft was broken, one figure
had disappeared from within it.  Mr. Bounderby and his shadow had not
stood near Louisa, who held her father’s arm, but in a retired place by
themselves.  When Mr. Gradgrind was summoned to the couch, Sissy,
attentive to all that happened, slipped behind that wicked shadow—a sight
in the horror of his face, if there had been eyes there for any sight but
one—and whispered in his ear.  Without turning his head, he conferred
with her a few moments, and vanished.  Thus the whelp had gone out of the
circle before the people moved.

When the father reached home, he sent a message to Mr. Bounderby’s,
desiring his son to come to him directly.  The reply was, that Mr.
Bounderby having missed him in the crowd, and seeing nothing of him
since, had supposed him to be at Stone Lodge.

‘I believe, father,’ said Louisa, ‘he will not come back to town
to-night.’  Mr. Gradgrind turned away, and said no more.

In the morning, he went down to the Bank himself as soon as it was
opened, and seeing his son’s place empty (he had not the courage to look
in at first) went back along the street to meet Mr. Bounderby on his way
there.  To whom he said that, for reasons he would soon explain, but
entreated not then to be asked for, he had found it necessary to employ
his son at a distance for a little while.  Also, that he was charged with
the duty of vindicating Stephen Blackpool’s memory, and declaring the
thief.  Mr. Bounderby quite confounded, stood stock-still in the street
after his father-in-law had left him, swelling like an immense
soap-bubble, without its beauty.

Mr. Gradgrind went home, locked himself in his room, and kept it all that
day.  When Sissy and Louisa tapped at his door, he said, without opening
it, ‘Not now, my dears; in the evening.’  On their return in the evening,
he said, ‘I am not able yet—to-morrow.’  He ate nothing all day, and had
no candle after dark; and they heard him walking to and fro late at
night.

But, in the morning he appeared at breakfast at the usual hour, and took
his usual place at the table.  Aged and bent he looked, and quite bowed
down; and yet he looked a wiser man, and a better man, than in the days
when in this life he wanted nothing—but Facts.  Before he left the room,
he appointed a time for them to come to him; and so, with his gray head
drooping, went away.

‘Dear father,’ said Louisa, when they kept their appointment, ‘you have
three young children left.  They will be different, I will be different
yet, with Heaven’s help.’

She gave her hand to Sissy, as if she meant with her help too.

‘Your wretched brother,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Do you think he had
planned this robbery, when he went with you to the lodging?’

‘I fear so, father.  I know he had wanted money very much, and had spent
a great deal.’

‘The poor man being about to leave the town, it came into his evil brain
to cast suspicion on him?’

‘I think it must have flashed upon him while he sat there, father.  For I
asked him to go there with me.  The visit did not originate with him.’

‘He had some conversation with the poor man.  Did he take him aside?’

‘He took him out of the room.  I asked him afterwards, why he had done
so, and he made a plausible excuse; but since last night, father, and
when I remember the circumstances by its light, I am afraid I can imagine
too truly what passed between them.’

‘Let me know,’ said her father, ‘if your thoughts present your guilty
brother in the same dark view as mine.’

‘I fear, father,’ hesitated Louisa, ‘that he must have made some
representation to Stephen Blackpool—perhaps in my name, perhaps in his
own—which induced him to do in good faith and honesty, what he had never
done before, and to wait about the Bank those two or three nights before
he left the town.’

‘Too plain!’ returned the father.  ‘Too plain!’

He shaded his face, and remained silent for some moments.  Recovering
himself, he said:

‘And now, how is he to be found?  How is he to be saved from justice?  In
the few hours that I can possibly allow to elapse before I publish the
truth, how is he to be found by us, and only by us?  Ten thousand pounds
could not effect it.’

‘Sissy has effected it, father.’

He raised his eyes to where she stood, like a good fairy in his house,
and said in a tone of softened gratitude and grateful kindness, ‘It is
always you, my child!’

‘We had our fears,’ Sissy explained, glancing at Louisa, ‘before
yesterday; and when I saw you brought to the side of the litter last
night, and heard what passed (being close to Rachael all the time), I
went to him when no one saw, and said to him, “Don’t look at me.  See
where your father is.  Escape at once, for his sake and your own!”  He
was in a tremble before I whispered to him, and he started and trembled
more then, and said, “Where can I go?  I have very little money, and I
don’t know who will hide me!”  I thought of father’s old circus.  I have
not forgotten where Mr. Sleary goes at this time of year, and I read of
him in a paper only the other day.  I told him to hurry there, and tell
his name, and ask Mr. Sleary to hide him till I came.  “I’ll get to him
before the morning,” he said.  And I saw him shrink away among the
people.’

‘Thank Heaven!’ exclaimed his father.  ‘He may be got abroad yet.’

It was the more hopeful as the town to which Sissy had directed him was
within three hours’ journey of Liverpool, whence he could be swiftly
dispatched to any part of the world.  But, caution being necessary in
communicating with him—for there was a greater danger every moment of his
being suspected now, and nobody could be sure at heart but that Mr.
Bounderby himself, in a bullying vein of public zeal, might play a Roman
part—it was consented that Sissy and Louisa should repair to the place in
question, by a circuitous course, alone; and that the unhappy father,
setting forth in an opposite direction, should get round to the same
bourne by another and wider route.  It was further agreed that he should
not present himself to Mr. Sleary, lest his intentions should be
mistrusted, or the intelligence of his arrival should cause his son to
take flight anew; but, that the communication should be left to Sissy and
Louisa to open; and that they should inform the cause of so much misery
and disgrace, of his father’s being at hand and of the purpose for which
they had come.  When these arrangements had been well considered and were
fully understood by all three, it was time to begin to carry them into
execution.  Early in the afternoon, Mr. Gradgrind walked direct from his
own house into the country, to be taken up on the line by which he was to
travel; and at night the remaining two set forth upon their different
course, encouraged by not seeing any face they knew.

The two travelled all night, except when they were left, for odd numbers
of minutes, at branch-places, up illimitable flights of steps, or down
wells—which was the only variety of those branches—and, early in the
morning, were turned out on a swamp, a mile or two from the town they
sought.  From this dismal spot they were rescued by a savage old
postilion, who happened to be up early, kicking a horse in a fly: and so
were smuggled into the town by all the back lanes where the pigs lived:
which, although not a magnificent or even savoury approach, was, as is
usual in such cases, the legitimate highway.

The first thing they saw on entering the town was the skeleton of
Sleary’s Circus.  The company had departed for another town more than
twenty miles off, and had opened there last night.  The connection
between the two places was by a hilly turnpike-road, and the travelling
on that road was very slow.  Though they took but a hasty breakfast, and
no rest (which it would have been in vain to seek under such anxious
circumstances), it was noon before they began to find the bills of
Sleary’s Horse-riding on barns and walls, and one o’clock when they
stopped in the market-place.

A Grand Morning Performance by the Riders, commencing at that very hour,
was in course of announcement by the bellman as they set their feet upon
the stones of the street.  Sissy recommended that, to avoid making
inquiries and attracting attention in the town, they should present
themselves to pay at the door.  If Mr. Sleary were taking the money, he
would be sure to know her, and would proceed with discretion.  If he were
not, he would be sure to see them inside; and, knowing what he had done
with the fugitive, would proceed with discretion still.

Therefore, they repaired, with fluttering hearts, to the well-remembered
booth.  The flag with the inscription SLEARY’S HORSE-RIDING was there;
and the Gothic niche was there; but Mr. Sleary was not there.  Master
Kidderminster, grown too maturely turfy to be received by the wildest
credulity as Cupid any more, had yielded to the invincible force of
circumstances (and his beard), and, in the capacity of a man who made
himself generally useful, presided on this occasion over the
exchequer—having also a drum in reserve, on which to expend his leisure
moments and superfluous forces.  In the extreme sharpness of his look out
for base coin, Mr. Kidderminster, as at present situated, never saw
anything but money; so Sissy passed him unrecognised, and they went in.

The Emperor of Japan, on a steady old white horse stencilled with black
spots, was twirling five wash-hand basins at once, as it is the favourite
recreation of that monarch to do.  Sissy, though well acquainted with his
Royal line, had no personal knowledge of the present Emperor, and his
reign was peaceful.  Miss Josephine Sleary, in her celebrated graceful
Equestrian Tyrolean Flower Act, was then announced by a new clown (who
humorously said Cauliflower Act), and Mr. Sleary appeared, leading her
in.

Mr. Sleary had only made one cut at the Clown with his long whip-lash,
and the Clown had only said, ‘If you do it again, I’ll throw the horse at
you!’ when Sissy was recognised both by father and daughter.  But they
got through the Act with great self-possession; and Mr. Sleary, saving
for the first instant, conveyed no more expression into his locomotive
eye than into his fixed one.  The performance seemed a little long to
Sissy and Louisa, particularly when it stopped to afford the Clown an
opportunity of telling Mr. Sleary (who said ‘Indeed, sir!’ to all his
observations in the calmest way, and with his eye on the house) about two
legs sitting on three legs looking at one leg, when in came four legs,
and laid hold of one leg, and up got two legs, caught hold of three legs,
and threw ’em at four legs, who ran away with one leg.  For, although an
ingenious Allegory relating to a butcher, a three-legged stool, a dog,
and a leg of mutton, this narrative consumed time; and they were in great
suspense.  At last, however, little fair-haired Josephine made her
curtsey amid great applause; and the Clown, left alone in the ring, had
just warmed himself, and said, ‘Now _I_’ll have a turn!’ when Sissy was
touched on the shoulder, and beckoned out.

She took Louisa with her; and they were received by Mr. Sleary in a very
little private apartment, with canvas sides, a grass floor, and a wooden
ceiling all aslant, on which the box company stamped their approbation,
as if they were coming through.  ‘Thethilia,’ said Mr. Sleary, who had
brandy and water at hand, ‘it doth me good to thee you.  You wath alwayth
a favourite with uth, and you’ve done uth credith thinth the old timeth
I’m thure.  You mutht thee our people, my dear, afore we thpeak of
bithnith, or they’ll break their hearth—ethpethially the women.  Here’th
Jothphine hath been and got married to E. W. B. Childerth, and thee hath
got a boy, and though he’th only three yearth old, he thtickth on to any
pony you can bring againtht him.  He’th named The Little Wonder of
Thcolathtic Equitation; and if you don’t hear of that boy at Athley’th,
you’ll hear of him at Parith.  And you recollect Kidderminthter, that
wath thought to be rather thweet upon yourthelf?  Well.  He’th married
too.  Married a widder.  Old enough to be hith mother.  Thee wath
Tightrope, thee wath, and now thee’th nothing—on accounth of fat.
They’ve got two children, tho we’re thtrong in the Fairy bithnith and the
Nurthery dodge.  If you wath to thee our Children in the Wood, with their
father and mother both a dyin’ on a horthe—their uncle a retheiving of
’em ath hith wardth, upon a horthe—themthelvth both a goin’ a
black-berryin’ on a horthe—and the Robinth a coming in to cover ’em with
leavth, upon a horthe—you’d thay it wath the completetht thing ath ever
you thet your eyeth on!  And you remember Emma Gordon, my dear, ath wath
a’motht a mother to you?  Of courthe you do; I needn’t athk.  Well!
Emma, thee lotht her huthband.  He wath throw’d a heavy back-fall off a
Elephant in a thort of a Pagoda thing ath the Thultan of the Indieth, and
he never got the better of it; and thee married a thecond time—married a
Cheethemonger ath fell in love with her from the front—and he’th a
Overtheer and makin’ a fortun.’

These various changes, Mr. Sleary, very short of breath now, related with
great heartiness, and with a wonderful kind of innocence, considering
what a bleary and brandy-and-watery old veteran he was.  Afterwards he
brought in Josephine, and E. W. B. Childers (rather deeply lined in the
jaws by daylight), and the Little Wonder of Scholastic Equitation, and in
a word, all the company.  Amazing creatures they were in Louisa’s eyes,
so white and pink of complexion, so scant of dress, and so demonstrative
of leg; but it was very agreeable to see them crowding about Sissy, and
very natural in Sissy to be unable to refrain from tears.

‘There!  Now Thethilia hath kithd all the children, and hugged all the
women, and thaken handth all round with all the men, clear, every one of
you, and ring in the band for the thecond part!’

As soon as they were gone, he continued in a low tone.  ‘Now, Thethilia,
I don’t athk to know any thecreth, but I thuppothe I may conthider thith
to be Mith Thquire.’

‘This is his sister.  Yes.’

‘And t’other on’th daughter.  That’h what I mean.  Hope I thee you well,
mith.  And I hope the Thquire’th well?’

‘My father will be here soon,’ said Louisa, anxious to bring him to the
point.  ‘Is my brother safe?’

‘Thafe and thound!’ he replied.  ‘I want you jutht to take a peep at the
Ring, mith, through here.  Thethilia, you know the dodgeth; find a
thpy-hole for yourthelf.’

They each looked through a chink in the boards.

‘That’h Jack the Giant Killer—piethe of comic infant bithnith,’ said
Sleary.  ‘There’th a property-houthe, you thee, for Jack to hide in;
there’th my Clown with a thauthepan-lid and a thpit, for Jack’th
thervant; there’th little Jack himthelf in a thplendid thoot of armour;
there’th two comic black thervanth twithe ath big ath the houthe, to
thtand by it and to bring it in and clear it; and the Giant (a very
ecthpenthive bathket one), he an’t on yet.  Now, do you thee ’em all?’

‘Yes,’ they both said.

‘Look at ’em again,’ said Sleary, ‘look at ’em well.  You thee em all?
Very good.  Now, mith;’ he put a form for them to sit on; ‘I have my
opinionth, and the Thquire your father hath hith.  I don’t want to know
what your brother’th been up to; ith better for me not to know.  All I
thay ith, the Thquire hath thtood by Thethilia, and I’ll thtand by the
Thquire.  Your brother ith one them black thervanth.’

Louisa uttered an exclamation, partly of distress, partly of
satisfaction.

‘Ith a fact,’ said Sleary, ‘and even knowin’ it, you couldn’t put your
finger on him.  Let the Thquire come.  I thall keep your brother here
after the performanth.  I thant undreth him, nor yet wath hith paint off.
Let the Thquire come here after the performanth, or come here yourthelf
after the performanth, and you thall find your brother, and have the
whole plathe to talk to him in.  Never mind the lookth of him, ath long
ath he’th well hid.’

Louisa, with many thanks and with a lightened load, detained Mr. Sleary
no longer then.  She left her love for her brother, with her eyes full of
tears; and she and Sissy went away until later in the afternoon.

Mr. Gradgrind arrived within an hour afterwards.  He too had encountered
no one whom he knew; and was now sanguine with Sleary’s assistance, of
getting his disgraced son to Liverpool in the night.  As neither of the
three could be his companion without almost identifying him under any
disguise, he prepared a letter to a correspondent whom he could trust,
beseeching him to ship the bearer off at any cost, to North or South
America, or any distant part of the world to which he could be the most
speedily and privately dispatched.

This done, they walked about, waiting for the Circus to be quite vacated;
not only by the audience, but by the company and by the horses.  After
watching it a long time, they saw Mr. Sleary bring out a chair and sit
down by the side-door, smoking; as if that were his signal that they
might approach.

‘Your thervant, Thquire,’ was his cautious salutation as they passed in.
‘If you want me you’ll find me here.  You muthn’t mind your thon having a
comic livery on.’

They all three went in; and Mr. Gradgrind sat down forlorn, on the
Clown’s performing chair in the middle of the ring.  On one of the back
benches, remote in the subdued light and the strangeness of the place,
sat the villainous whelp, sulky to the last, whom he had the misery to
call his son.

In a preposterous coat, like a beadle’s, with cuffs and flaps exaggerated
to an unspeakable extent; in an immense waistcoat, knee-breeches, buckled
shoes, and a mad cocked hat; with nothing fitting him, and everything of
coarse material, moth-eaten and full of holes; with seams in his black
face, where fear and heat had started through the greasy composition
daubed all over it; anything so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful
as the whelp in his comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind never could by any other
means have believed in, weighable and measurable fact though it was.  And
one of his model children had come to this!

At first the whelp would not draw any nearer, but persisted in remaining
up there by himself.  Yielding at length, if any concession so sullenly
made can be called yielding, to the entreaties of Sissy—for Louisa he
disowned altogether—he came down, bench by bench, until he stood in the
sawdust, on the verge of the circle, as far as possible, within its
limits from where his father sat.

‘How was this done?’ asked the father.

‘How was what done?’ moodily answered the son.

‘This robbery,’ said the father, raising his voice upon the word.

‘I forced the safe myself over night, and shut it up ajar before I went
away.  I had had the key that was found, made long before.  I dropped it
that morning, that it might be supposed to have been used.  I didn’t take
the money all at once.  I pretended to put my balance away every night,
but I didn’t.  Now you know all about it.’

‘If a thunderbolt had fallen on me,’ said the father, ‘it would have
shocked me less than this!’

‘I don’t see why,’ grumbled the son.  ‘So many people are employed in
situations of trust; so many people, out of so many, will be dishonest.
I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law.  How can _I_
help laws?  You have comforted others with such things, father.  Comfort
yourself!’

The father buried his face in his hands, and the son stood in his
disgraceful grotesqueness, biting straw: his hands, with the black partly
worn away inside, looking like the hands of a monkey.  The evening was
fast closing in; and from time to time, he turned the whites of his eyes
restlessly and impatiently towards his father.  They were the only parts
of his face that showed any life or expression, the pigment upon it was
so thick.

‘You must be got to Liverpool, and sent abroad.’

‘I suppose I must.  I can’t be more miserable anywhere,’ whimpered the
whelp, ‘than I have been here, ever since I can remember.  That’s one
thing.’

Mr. Gradgrind went to the door, and returned with Sleary, to whom he
submitted the question, How to get this deplorable object away?

‘Why, I’ve been thinking of it, Thquire.  There’th not muth time to
lothe, tho you muth thay yeth or no.  Ith over twenty mileth to the rail.
There’th a coath in half an hour, that goeth _to_ the rail, ‘purpothe to
cath the mail train.  That train will take him right to Liverpool.’

‘But look at him,’ groaned Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘Will any coach—’

‘I don’t mean that he thould go in the comic livery,’ said Sleary.  ‘Thay
the word, and I’ll make a Jothkin of him, out of the wardrobe, in five
minutes.’

‘I don’t understand,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.

‘A Jothkin—a Carter.  Make up your mind quick, Thquire.  There’ll be beer
to feth.  I’ve never met with nothing but beer ath’ll ever clean a comic
blackamoor.’

Mr. Gradgrind rapidly assented; Mr. Sleary rapidly turned out from a box,
a smock frock, a felt hat, and other essentials; the whelp rapidly
changed clothes behind a screen of baize; Mr. Sleary rapidly brought
beer, and washed him white again.

‘Now,’ said Sleary, ‘come along to the coath, and jump up behind; I’ll go
with you there, and they’ll thuppothe you one of my people.  Thay
farewell to your family, and tharp’th the word.’  With which he
delicately retired.

‘Here is your letter,’ said Mr. Gradgrind.  ‘All necessary means will be
provided for you.  Atone, by repentance and better conduct, for the
shocking action you have committed, and the dreadful consequences to
which it has led.  Give me your hand, my poor boy, and may God forgive
you as I do!’

The culprit was moved to a few abject tears by these words and their
pathetic tone.  But, when Louisa opened her arms, he repulsed her afresh.

‘Not you.  I don’t want to have anything to say to you!’

‘O Tom, Tom, do we end so, after all my love!’

‘After all your love!’ he returned, obdurately.  ‘Pretty love!  Leaving
old Bounderby to himself, and packing my best friend Mr. Harthouse off,
and going home just when I was in the greatest danger.  Pretty love that!
Coming out with every word about our having gone to that place, when you
saw the net was gathering round me.  Pretty love that!  You have
regularly given me up.  You never cared for me.’

‘Tharp’th the word!’ said Sleary, at the door.

They all confusedly went out: Louisa crying to him that she forgave him,
and loved him still, and that he would one day be sorry to have left her
so, and glad to think of these her last words, far away: when some one
ran against them.  Mr. Gradgrind and Sissy, who were both before him
while his sister yet clung to his shoulder, stopped and recoiled.

For, there was Bitzer, out of breath, his thin lips parted, his thin
nostrils distended, his white eyelashes quivering, his colourless face
more colourless than ever, as if he ran himself into a white heat, when
other people ran themselves into a glow.  There he stood, panting and
heaving, as if he had never stopped since the night, now long ago, when
he had run them down before.

‘I’m sorry to interfere with your plans,’ said Bitzer, shaking his head,
‘but I can’t allow myself to be done by horse-riders.  I must have young
Mr. Tom; he mustn’t be got away by horse-riders; here he is in a smock
frock, and I must have him!’

By the collar, too, it seemed.  For, so he took possession of him.



CHAPTER VIII
PHILOSOPHICAL


THEY went back into the booth, Sleary shutting the door to keep intruders
out.  Bitzer, still holding the paralysed culprit by the collar, stood in
the Ring, blinking at his old patron through the darkness of the
twilight.

‘Bitzer,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, broken down, and miserably submissive to
him, ‘have you a heart?’

‘The circulation, sir,’ returned Bitzer, smiling at the oddity of the
question, ‘couldn’t be carried on without one.  No man, sir, acquainted
with the facts established by Harvey relating to the circulation of the
blood, can doubt that I have a heart.’

‘Is it accessible,’ cried Mr. Gradgrind, ‘to any compassionate
influence?’

‘It is accessible to Reason, sir,’ returned the excellent young man.
‘And to nothing else.’

They stood looking at each other; Mr. Gradgrind’s face as white as the
pursuer’s.

‘What motive—even what motive in reason—can you have for preventing the
escape of this wretched youth,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘and crushing his
miserable father?  See his sister here.  Pity us!’

‘Sir,’ returned Bitzer, in a very business-like and logical manner,
‘since you ask me what motive I have in reason, for taking young Mr. Tom
back to Coketown, it is only reasonable to let you know.  I have
suspected young Mr. Tom of this bank-robbery from the first.  I had had
my eye upon him before that time, for I knew his ways.  I have kept my
observations to myself, but I have made them; and I have got ample proofs
against him now, besides his running away, and besides his own
confession, which I was just in time to overhear.  I had the pleasure of
watching your house yesterday morning, and following you here.  I am
going to take young Mr. Tom back to Coketown, in order to deliver him
over to Mr. Bounderby.  Sir, I have no doubt whatever that Mr. Bounderby
will then promote me to young Mr. Tom’s situation.  And I wish to have
his situation, sir, for it will be a rise to me, and will do me good.’

‘If this is solely a question of self-interest with you—’ Mr. Gradgrind
began.

‘I beg your pardon for interrupting you, sir,’ returned Bitzer; ‘but I am
sure you know that the whole social system is a question of
self-interest.  What you must always appeal to, is a person’s
self-interest.  It’s your only hold.  We are so constituted.  I was
brought up in that catechism when I was very young, sir, as you are
aware.’

‘What sum of money,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘will you set against your
expected promotion?’

‘Thank you, sir,’ returned Bitzer, ‘for hinting at the proposal; but I
will not set any sum against it.  Knowing that your clear head would
propose that alternative, I have gone over the calculations in my mind;
and I find that to compound a felony, even on very high terms indeed,
would not be as safe and good for me as my improved prospects in the
Bank.’

‘Bitzer,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, stretching out his hands as though he would
have said, See how miserable I am!  ‘Bitzer, I have but one chance left
to soften you.  You were many years at my school.  If, in remembrance of
the pains bestowed upon you there, you can persuade yourself in any
degree to disregard your present interest and release my son, I entreat
and pray you to give him the benefit of that remembrance.’

‘I really wonder, sir,’ rejoined the old pupil in an argumentative
manner, ‘to find you taking a position so untenable.  My schooling was
paid for; it was a bargain; and when I came away, the bargain ended.’

It was a fundamental principle of the Gradgrind philosophy that
everything was to be paid for.  Nobody was ever on any account to give
anybody anything, or render anybody help without purchase.  Gratitude was
to be abolished, and the virtues springing from it were not to be.  Every
inch of the existence of mankind, from birth to death, was to be a
bargain across a counter.  And if we didn’t get to Heaven that way, it
was not a politico-economical place, and we had no business there.

‘I don’t deny,’ added Bitzer, ‘that my schooling was cheap.  But that
comes right, sir.  I was made in the cheapest market, and have to dispose
of myself in the dearest.’

He was a little troubled here, by Louisa and Sissy crying.

‘Pray don’t do that,’ said he, ‘it’s of no use doing that: it only
worries.  You seem to think that I have some animosity against young Mr.
Tom; whereas I have none at all.  I am only going, on the reasonable
grounds I have mentioned, to take him back to Coketown.  If he was to
resist, I should set up the cry of Stop thief!  But, he won’t resist, you
may depend upon it.’

Mr. Sleary, who with his mouth open and his rolling eye as immovably
jammed in his head as his fixed one, had listened to these doctrines with
profound attention, here stepped forward.

‘Thquire, you know perfectly well, and your daughter knowth perfectly
well (better than you, becauthe I thed it to her), that I didn’t know
what your thon had done, and that I didn’t want to know—I thed it wath
better not, though I only thought, then, it wath thome thkylarking.
However, thith young man having made it known to be a robbery of a bank,
why, that’h a theriouth thing; muth too theriouth a thing for me to
compound, ath thith young man hath very properly called it.
Conthequently, Thquire, you muthn’t quarrel with me if I take thith young
man’th thide, and thay he’th right and there’th no help for it.  But I
tell you what I’ll do, Thquire; I’ll drive your thon and thith young man
over to the rail, and prevent expothure here.  I can’t conthent to do
more, but I’ll do that.’

Fresh lamentations from Louisa, and deeper affliction on Mr. Gradgrind’s
part, followed this desertion of them by their last friend.  But, Sissy
glanced at him with great attention; nor did she in her own breast
misunderstand him.  As they were all going out again, he favoured her
with one slight roll of his movable eye, desiring her to linger behind.
As he locked the door, he said excitedly:

‘The Thquire thtood by you, Thethilia, and I’ll thtand by the Thquire.
More than that: thith ith a prethiouth rathcal, and belongth to that
bluthtering Cove that my people nearly pitht out o’ winder.  It’ll be a
dark night; I’ve got a horthe that’ll do anything but thpeak; I’ve got a
pony that’ll go fifteen mile an hour with Childerth driving of him; I’ve
got a dog that’ll keep a man to one plathe four-and-twenty hourth.  Get a
word with the young Thquire.  Tell him, when he theeth our horthe begin
to danthe, not to be afraid of being thpilt, but to look out for a
pony-gig coming up.  Tell him, when he theeth that gig clothe by, to jump
down, and it’ll take him off at a rattling pathe.  If my dog leth thith
young man thtir a peg on foot, I give him leave to go.  And if my horthe
ever thtirth from that thpot where he beginth a danthing, till the
morning—I don’t know him?—Tharp’th the word!’

The word was so sharp, that in ten minutes Mr. Childers, sauntering about
the market-place in a pair of slippers, had his cue, and Mr. Sleary’s
equipage was ready.  It was a fine sight, to behold the learned dog
barking round it, and Mr. Sleary instructing him, with his one
practicable eye, that Bitzer was the object of his particular attentions.
Soon after dark they all three got in and started; the learned dog (a
formidable creature) already pinning Bitzer with his eye, and sticking
close to the wheel on his side, that he might be ready for him in the
event of his showing the slightest disposition to alight.

The other three sat up at the inn all night in great suspense.  At eight
o’clock in the morning Mr. Sleary and the dog reappeared: both in high
spirits.

‘All right, Thquire!’ said Mr. Sleary, ‘your thon may be aboard-a-thip by
thith time.  Childerth took him off, an hour and a half after we left
there latht night.  The horthe danthed the polka till he wath dead beat
(he would have walthed if he hadn’t been in harneth), and then I gave him
the word and he went to thleep comfortable.  When that prethiouth young
Rathcal thed he’d go for’ard afoot, the dog hung on to hith
neck-hankercher with all four legth in the air and pulled him down and
rolled him over.  Tho he come back into the drag, and there he that,
’till I turned the horthe’th head, at half-patht thixth thith morning.’

Mr. Gradgrind overwhelmed him with thanks, of course; and hinted as
delicately as he could, at a handsome remuneration in money.

‘I don’t want money mythelf, Thquire; but Childerth ith a family man, and
if you wath to like to offer him a five-pound note, it mightn’t be
unactheptable.  Likewithe if you wath to thtand a collar for the dog, or
a thet of bellth for the horthe, I thould be very glad to take ’em.
Brandy and water I alwayth take.’  He had already called for a glass, and
now called for another.  ‘If you wouldn’t think it going too far,
Thquire, to make a little thpread for the company at about three and
thixth ahead, not reckoning Luth, it would make ’em happy.’

All these little tokens of his gratitude, Mr. Gradgrind very willingly
undertook to render.  Though he thought them far too slight, he said, for
such a service.

‘Very well, Thquire; then, if you’ll only give a Horthe-riding, a
bethpeak, whenever you can, you’ll more than balanthe the account.  Now,
Thquire, if your daughter will ethcuthe me, I thould like one parting
word with you.’

Louisa and Sissy withdrew into an adjoining room; Mr. Sleary, stirring
and drinking his brandy and water as he stood, went on:

‘Thquire,—you don’t need to be told that dogth ith wonderful animalth.’

‘Their instinct,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘is surprising.’

‘Whatever you call it—and I’m bletht if _I_ know what to call it’—said
Sleary, ‘it ith athtonithing.  The way in whith a dog’ll find you—the
dithtanthe he’ll come!’

‘His scent,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘being so fine.’

‘I’m bletht if I know what to call it,’ repeated Sleary, shaking his
head, ‘but I have had dogth find me, Thquire, in a way that made me think
whether that dog hadn’t gone to another dog, and thed, “You don’t happen
to know a perthon of the name of Thleary, do you?  Perthon of the name of
Thleary, in the Horthe-Riding way—thtout man—game eye?”  And whether that
dog mightn’t have thed, “Well, I can’t thay I know him mythelf, but I
know a dog that I think would be likely to be acquainted with him.”  And
whether that dog mightn’t have thought it over, and thed, “Thleary,
Thleary!  O yeth, to be thure!  A friend of mine menthioned him to me at
one time.  I can get you hith addreth directly.”  In conthequenth of my
being afore the public, and going about tho muth, you thee, there mutht
be a number of dogth acquainted with me, Thquire, that _I_ don’t know!’

Mr. Gradgrind seemed to be quite confounded by this speculation.

‘Any way,’ said Sleary, after putting his lips to his brandy and water,
‘ith fourteen month ago, Thquire, thinthe we wath at Chethter.  We wath
getting up our Children in the Wood one morning, when there cometh into
our Ring, by the thtage door, a dog.  He had travelled a long way, he
wath in a very bad condithon, he wath lame, and pretty well blind.  He
went round to our children, one after another, as if he wath a theeking
for a child he know’d; and then he come to me, and throwd hithelf up
behind, and thtood on hith two forelegth, weak ath he wath, and then he
wagged hith tail and died.  Thquire, that dog wath Merrylegth.’

‘Sissy’s father’s dog!’

‘Thethilia’th father’th old dog.  Now, Thquire, I can take my oath, from
my knowledge of that dog, that that man wath dead—and buried—afore that
dog come back to me.  Joth’phine and Childerth and me talked it over a
long time, whether I thould write or not.  But we agreed, “No.  There’th
nothing comfortable to tell; why unthettle her mind, and make her
unhappy?”  Tho, whether her father bathely detherted her; or whether he
broke hith own heart alone, rather than pull her down along with him;
never will be known, now, Thquire, till—no, not till we know how the
dogth findth uth out!’

‘She keeps the bottle that he sent her for, to this hour; and she will
believe in his affection to the last moment of her life,’ said Mr.
Gradgrind.

‘It theemth to prethent two thingth to a perthon, don’t it, Thquire?’
said Mr. Sleary, musing as he looked down into the depths of his brandy
and water: ‘one, that there ith a love in the world, not all
Thelf-interetht after all, but thomething very different; t’other, that
it bath a way of ith own of calculating or not calculating, whith
thomehow or another ith at leatht ath hard to give a name to, ath the
wayth of the dogth ith!’

Mr. Gradgrind looked out of window, and made no reply.  Mr. Sleary
emptied his glass and recalled the ladies.

‘Thethilia my dear, kith me and good-bye!  Mith Thquire, to thee you
treating of her like a thithter, and a thithter that you trutht and
honour with all your heart and more, ith a very pretty thight to me.  I
hope your brother may live to be better detherving of you, and a greater
comfort to you.  Thquire, thake handth, firtht and latht!  Don’t be croth
with uth poor vagabondth.  People mutht be amuthed.  They can’t be
alwayth a learning, nor yet they can’t be alwayth a working, they an’t
made for it.  You _mutht_ have uth, Thquire.  Do the withe thing and the
kind thing too, and make the betht of uth; not the wurtht!’

‘And I never thought before,’ said Mr. Sleary, putting his head in at the
door again to say it, ‘that I wath tho muth of a Cackler!’



CHAPTER IX
FINAL


IT is a dangerous thing to see anything in the sphere of a vain
blusterer, before the vain blusterer sees it himself.  Mr. Bounderby felt
that Mrs. Sparsit had audaciously anticipated him, and presumed to be
wiser than he.  Inappeasably indignant with her for her triumphant
discovery of Mrs. Pegler, he turned this presumption, on the part of a
woman in her dependent position, over and over in his mind, until it
accumulated with turning like a great snowball.  At last he made the
discovery that to discharge this highly connected female—to have it in
his power to say, ‘She was a woman of family, and wanted to stick to me,
but I wouldn’t have it, and got rid of her’—would be to get the utmost
possible amount of crowning glory out of the connection, and at the same
time to punish Mrs. Sparsit according to her deserts.

Filled fuller than ever, with this great idea, Mr. Bounderby came in to
lunch, and sat himself down in the dining-room of former days, where his
portrait was.  Mrs. Sparsit sat by the fire, with her foot in her cotton
stirrup, little thinking whither she was posting.

Since the Pegler affair, this gentlewoman had covered her pity for Mr.
Bounderby with a veil of quiet melancholy and contrition.  In virtue
thereof, it had become her habit to assume a woful look, which woful look
she now bestowed upon her patron.

‘What’s the matter now, ma’am?’ said Mr. Bounderby, in a very short,
rough way.

‘Pray, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit, ‘do not bite my nose off.’

‘Bite your nose off, ma’am?’ repeated Mr. Bounderby.  ‘_Your_ nose!’
meaning, as Mrs. Sparsit conceived, that it was too developed a nose for
the purpose.  After which offensive implication, he cut himself a crust
of bread, and threw the knife down with a noise.

Mrs. Sparsit took her foot out of her stirrup, and said, ‘Mr. Bounderby,
sir!’

‘Well, ma’am?’ retorted Mr. Bounderby.  ‘What are you staring at?’

‘May I ask, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, ‘have you been ruffled this
morning?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘May I inquire, sir,’ pursued the injured woman, ‘whether _I_ am the
unfortunate cause of your having lost your temper?’

‘Now, I’ll tell you what, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, ‘I am not come here to
be bullied.  A female may be highly connected, but she can’t be permitted
to bother and badger a man in my position, and I am not going to put up
with it.’  (Mr. Bounderby felt it necessary to get on: foreseeing that if
he allowed of details, he would be beaten.)

Mrs. Sparsit first elevated, then knitted, her Coriolanian eyebrows;
gathered up her work into its proper basket; and rose.

‘Sir,’ said she, majestically.  ‘It is apparent to me that I am in your
way at present.  I will retire to my own apartment.’

‘Allow me to open the door, ma’am.’

‘Thank you, sir; I can do it for myself.’

‘You had better allow me, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, passing her, and
getting his hand upon the lock; ‘because I can take the opportunity of
saying a word to you, before you go.  Mrs. Sparsit, ma’am, I rather think
you are cramped here, do you know?  It appears to me, that, under my
humble roof, there’s hardly opening enough for a lady of your genius in
other people’s affairs.’

Mrs. Sparsit gave him a look of the darkest scorn, and said with great
politeness, ‘Really, sir?’

‘I have been thinking it over, you see, since the late affairs have
happened, ma’am,’ said Bounderby; ‘and it appears to my poor judgment—’

‘Oh!  Pray, sir,’ Mrs. Sparsit interposed, with sprightly cheerfulness,
‘don’t disparage your judgment.  Everybody knows how unerring Mr.
Bounderby’s judgment is.  Everybody has had proofs of it.  It must be the
theme of general conversation.  Disparage anything in yourself but your
judgment, sir,’ said Mrs. Sparsit, laughing.

Mr. Bounderby, very red and uncomfortable, resumed:

‘It appears to me, ma’am, I say, that a different sort of establishment
altogether would bring out a lady of _your_ powers.  Such an
establishment as your relation, Lady Scadgers’s, now.  Don’t you think
you might find some affairs there, ma’am, to interfere with?’

‘It never occurred to me before, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit; ‘but now
you mention it, should think it highly probable.’

‘Then suppose you try, ma’am,’ said Bounderby, laying an envelope with a
cheque in it in her little basket.  ‘You can take your own time for
going, ma’am; but perhaps in the meanwhile, it will be more agreeable to
a lady of your powers of mind, to eat her meals by herself, and not to be
intruded upon.  I really ought to apologise to you—being only Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown—for having stood in your light so long.’

‘Pray don’t name it, sir,’ returned Mrs. Sparsit.  ‘If that portrait
could speak, sir—but it has the advantage over the original of not
possessing the power of committing itself and disgusting others,—it would
testify, that a long period has elapsed since I first habitually
addressed it as the picture of a Noodle.  Nothing that a Noodle does, can
awaken surprise or indignation; the proceedings of a Noodle can only
inspire contempt.’

Thus saying, Mrs. Sparsit, with her Roman features like a medal struck to
commemorate her scorn of Mr. Bounderby, surveyed him fixedly from head to
foot, swept disdainfully past him, and ascended the staircase.  Mr.
Bounderby closed the door, and stood before the fire; projecting himself
after his old explosive manner into his portrait—and into futurity.

                                * * * * *

Into how much of futurity?  He saw Mrs. Sparsit fighting out a daily
fight at the points of all the weapons in the female armoury, with the
grudging, smarting, peevish, tormenting Lady Scadgers, still laid up in
bed with her mysterious leg, and gobbling her insufficient income down by
about the middle of every quarter, in a mean little airless lodging, a
mere closet for one, a mere crib for two; but did he see more?  Did he
catch any glimpse of himself making a show of Bitzer to strangers, as the
rising young man, so devoted to his master’s great merits, who had won
young Tom’s place, and had almost captured young Tom himself, in the
times when by various rascals he was spirited away?  Did he see any faint
reflection of his own image making a vain-glorious will, whereby
five-and-twenty Humbugs, past five-and-fifty years of age, each taking
upon himself the name, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, should for ever dine
in Bounderby Hall, for ever lodge in Bounderby buildings, for ever attend
a Bounderby chapel, for ever go to sleep under a Bounderby chaplain, for
ever be supported out of a Bounderby estate, and for ever nauseate all
healthy stomachs, with a vast amount of Bounderby balderdash and bluster?
Had he any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown was to die of a fit in the Coketown street, and
this same precious will was to begin its long career of quibble, plunder,
false pretences, vile example, little service and much law?  Probably
not.  Yet the portrait was to see it all out.

Here was Mr. Gradgrind on the same day, and in the same hour, sitting
thoughtful in his own room.  How much of futurity did _he_ see?  Did he
see himself, a white-haired decrepit man, bending his hitherto inflexible
theories to appointed circumstances; making his facts and figures
subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity; and no longer trying to grind
that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills?  Did he catch sight of
himself, therefore much despised by his late political associates?  Did
he see them, in the era of its being quite settled that the national
dustmen have only to do with one another, and owe no duty to an
abstraction called a People, ‘taunting the honourable gentleman’ with
this and with that and with what not, five nights a-week, until the small
hours of the morning?  Probably he had that much foreknowledge, knowing
his men.

                                * * * * *

Here was Louisa on the night of the same day, watching the fire as in
days of yore, though with a gentler and a humbler face.  How much of the
future might arise before _her_ vision?  Broadsides in the streets,
signed with her father’s name, exonerating the late Stephen Blackpool,
weaver, from misplaced suspicion, and publishing the guilt of his own
son, with such extenuation as his years and temptation (he could not
bring himself to add, his education) might beseech; were of the Present.
So, Stephen Blackpool’s tombstone, with her father’s record of his death,
was almost of the Present, for she knew it was to be.  These things she
could plainly see.  But, how much of the Future?

A working woman, christened Rachael, after a long illness once again
appearing at the ringing of the Factory bell, and passing to and fro at
the set hours, among the Coketown Hands; a woman of pensive beauty,
always dressed in black, but sweet-tempered and serene, and even
cheerful; who, of all the people in the place, alone appeared to have
compassion on a degraded, drunken wretch of her own sex, who was
sometimes seen in the town secretly begging of her, and crying to her; a
woman working, ever working, but content to do it, and preferring to do
it as her natural lot, until she should be too old to labour any more?
Did Louisa see this?  Such a thing was to be.

A lonely brother, many thousands of miles away, writing, on paper blotted
with tears, that her words had too soon come true, and that all the
treasures in the world would be cheaply bartered for a sight of her dear
face?  At length this brother coming nearer home, with hope of seeing
her, and being delayed by illness; and then a letter, in a strange hand,
saying ‘he died in hospital, of fever, such a day, and died in penitence
and love of you: his last word being your name’?  Did Louisa see these
things?  Such things were to be.

Herself again a wife—a mother—lovingly watchful of her children, ever
careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a
childhood of the body, as knowing it to be even a more beautiful thing,
and a possession, any hoarded scrap of which, is a blessing and happiness
to the wisest?  Did Louisa see this?  Such a thing was never to be.

But, happy Sissy’s happy children loving her; all children loving her;
she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty
fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler
fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality
with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of
infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally
stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show, will
be the Writing on the Wall,—she holding this course as part of no
fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or
covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be
done,—did Louisa see these things of herself?  These things were to be.

Dear reader!  It rests with you and me, whether, in our two fields of
action, similar things shall be or not.  Let them be!  We shall sit with
lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and
cold.



5xxxxxxxxx

OLIVER TWIST

OR

THE PARISH BOY'S PROGRESS


BY

CHARLES DICKENS




CONTENTS

       I  TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE
          CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH
      II  TREATS OF OLIVER TWIST'S GROWTH, EDUCATION, AND BOARD
     III  RELATES HOW OLIVER TWIST WAS VERY NEAR GETTING A PLACE WHICH
          WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN A SINECURE
      IV  OLIVER, BEING OFFERED ANOTHER PLACE, MAKES HIS FIRST ENTRY INTO
          PUBLIC LIFE
       V  OLIVER MINGLES WITH NEW ASSOCIATES.  GOING TO A FUNERAL FOR THE
          FIRST TIME, HE FORMS AN UNFAVOURABLE NOTION OF HIS MASTER'S
          BUSINESS
      VI  OLIVER, BEING GOADED BY THE TAUNTS OF NOAH, ROUSES INTO ACTION,
          AND RATHER ASTONISHES HIM
     VII  OLIVER CONTINUES REFRACTORY
    VIII  OLIVER WALKS TO LONDON.  HE ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD A STRANGE
          SORT OF YOUNG GENTLEMAN
      IX  CONTAINING FURTHER PARTICULARS CONCERNING THE PLEASANT OLD
          GENTLEMAN, AND HIS HOPEFUL PUPILS
       X  OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW
          ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A
          SHORT, BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY
      XI  TREATS OF MR. FANG THE POLICE MAGISTRATE; AND FURNISHES A
          SLIGHT SPECIMEN OF HIS MODE OF ADMINISTERING JUSTICE
     XII  IN WHICH OLIVER IS TAKEN BETTER CARE OF THAN HE EVER WAS
          BEFORE.  AND IN WHICH THE NARRATIVE REVERTS TO THE MERRY OLD
          GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUTHFUL FRIENDS.
    XIII  SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES ARE INTRODUCED TO THE INTELLIGENT READER,
          CONNECTED WITH WHOM VARIOUS PLEASANT MATTERS ARE RELATED,
          APPERTAINING TO THIS HISTORY
     XIV  COMPRISING FURTHER PARTICULARS OF OLIVER'S STAY AT MR.
          BROWNLOW'S, WITH THE REMARKABLE PREDICTION WHICH ONE MR. GRIMWIG
          UTTERED CONCERNING HIM, WHEN HE WENT OUT ON AN ERRAND
      XV  SHOWING HOW VERY FOND OF OLIVER TWIST, THE MERRY OLD JEW AND
          MISS NANCY WERE
     XVI  RELATES WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER TWIST, AFTER HE HAD BEEN CLAIMED
          BY NANCY
    XVII  OLIVER'S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS, BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO
          LONDON TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION
   XVIII  HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS
          REPUTABLE FRIENDS
     XIX  IN WHICH A NOTABLE PLAN IS DISCUSSED AND DETERMINED ON
      XX  WHEREIN OLIVER IS DELIVERED OVER TO MR. WILLIAM SIKES
     XXI  THE EXPEDITION
    XXII  THE BURGLARY
   XXIII  WHICH CONTAINS THE SUBSTANCE OF A PLEASANT CONVERSATION BETWEEN
          MR. BUMBLE AND A LADY; AND SHOWS THAT EVEN A BEADLE MAY BE
          SUSCEPTIBLE ON SOME POINTS
    XXIV  TREATS ON A VERY POOR SUBJECT.  BUT IS A SHORT ONE, AND MAY BE
          FOUND OF IMPORTANCE IN THIS HISTORY
     XXV  WHEREIN THIS HISTORY REVERTS TO MR. FAGIN AND COMPANY
    XXVI  IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE; AND MANY
          THINGS, INSEPARABLE FROM THIS HISTORY, ARE DONE AND PERFORMED
   XXVII  ATONES FOR THE UNPOLITENESS OF A FORMER CHAPTER; WHICH DESERTED
          A LADY, MOST UNCEREMONIOUSLY
  XXVIII  LOOKS AFTER OLIVER, AND PROCEEDS WITH HIS ADVENTURES
    XXIX  HAS AN INTRODUCTORY ACCOUNT OF THE INMATES OF THE HOUSE, TO
          WHICH OLIVER RESORTED
     XXX  RELATES WHAT OLIVER'S NEW VISITORS THOUGHT OF HIM
    XXXI  INVOLVES A CRITICAL POSITION
   XXXII  OF THE HAPPY LIFE OLIVER BEGAN TO LEAD WITH HIS KIND FRIENDS
  XXXIII  WHEREIN THE HAPPINESS OF OLIVER AND HIS FRIENDS, EXPERIENCES A
          SUDDEN CHECK
   XXXIV  CONTAINS SOME INTRODUCTORY PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO A YOUNG
          GENTLEMAN WHO NOW ARRIVES UPON THE SCENE; AND A NEW ADVENTURE
          WHICH HAPPENED TO OLIVER
    XXXV  CONTAINING THE UNSATISFACTORY RESULT OF OLIVER'S ADVENTURE; AND
          A CONVERSATION OF SOME IMPORTANCE BETWEEN HARRY MAYLIE AND ROSE
   XXXVI  IS A VERY SHORT ONE, AND MAY APPEAR OF NO GREAT IMPORTANCE IN
          ITS PLACE, BUT IT SHOULD BE READ NOTWITHSTANDING, AS A SEQUEL
          TO THE LAST, AND A KEY TO ONE THAT WILL FOLLOW WHEN ITS TIME
          ARRIVES
  XXXVII  IN WHICH THE READER MAY PERCEIVE A CONTRAST, NOT UNCOMMON IN
          MATRIMONIAL CASES
 XXXVIII  CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS.
          BUMBLE, AND MR. MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW
   XXXIX  INTRODUCES SOME RESPECTABLE CHARACTERS WITH WHOM THE READER IS
          ALREADY ACQUAINTED, AND SHOWS HOW MONKS AND THE JEW LAID THEIR
          WORTHY HEADS TOGETHER
      XL  A STRANGE INTERVIEW, WHICH IS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST CHAMBER
     XLI  CONTAINING FRESH DISCOVERIES, AND SHOWING THAT SUPRISES, LIKE
          MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE
    XLII  AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE OF OLIVER'S, EXHIBITING DECIDED MARKS OF
          GENIUS, BECOMES A PUBLIC CHARACTER IN THE METROPOLIS
   XLIII  WHEREIN IS SHOWN HOW THE ARTFUL DODGER GOT INTO TROUBLE
    XLIV  THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE.
          SHE FAILS.
     XLV  NOAH CLAYPOLE IS EMPLOYED BY FAGIN ON A SECRET MISSION
    XLVI  THE APPOINTMENT KEPT
   XLVII  FATAL CONSEQUENCES
  XLVIII  THE FLIGHT OF SIKES
    XLIX  MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET.  THEIR CONVERSATION,
          AND THE INTELLIGENCE THAT INTERRUPTS IT
       L  THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE
      LI  AFFORDING AN EXPLANATION OF MORE MYSTERIES THAN ONE, AND
          COMPREHENDING A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE WITH NO WORD OF SETTLEMENT
          OR PIN-MONEY
     LII  FAGIN'S LAST NIGHT ALIVE
    LIII  AND LAST




CHAPTER I

TREATS OF THE PLACE WHERE OLIVER TWIST WAS BORN AND OF THE
CIRCUMSTANCES ATTENDING HIS BIRTH

Among other public buildings in a certain town, which for many reasons
it will be prudent to refrain from mentioning, and to which I will
assign no fictitious name, there is one anciently common to most towns,
great or small: to wit, a workhouse; and in this workhouse was born; on
a day and date which I need not trouble myself to repeat, inasmuch as
it can be of no possible consequence to the reader, in this stage of
the business at all events; the item of mortality whose name is
prefixed to the head of this chapter.

For a long time after it was ushered into this world of sorrow and
trouble, by the parish surgeon, it remained a matter of considerable
doubt whether the child would survive to bear any name at all; in which
case it is somewhat more than probable that these memoirs would never
have appeared; or, if they had, that being comprised within a couple of
pages, they would have possessed the inestimable merit of being the
most concise and faithful specimen of biography, extant in the
literature of any age or country.

Although I am not disposed to maintain that the being born in a
workhouse, is in itself the most fortunate and enviable circumstance
that can possibly befall a human being, I do mean to say that in this
particular instance, it was the best thing for Oliver Twist that could
by possibility have occurred.  The fact is, that there was considerable
difficulty in inducing Oliver to take upon himself the office of
respiration,--a troublesome practice, but one which custom has rendered
necessary to our easy existence; and for some time he lay gasping on a
little flock mattress, rather unequally poised between this world and
the next: the balance being decidedly in favour of the latter.  Now,
if, during this brief period, Oliver had been surrounded by careful
grandmothers, anxious aunts, experienced nurses, and doctors of
profound wisdom, he would most inevitably and indubitably have been
killed in no time.  There being nobody by, however, but a pauper old
woman, who was rendered rather misty by an unwonted allowance of beer;
and a parish surgeon who did such matters by contract; Oliver and
Nature fought out the point between them.  The result was, that, after
a few struggles, Oliver breathed, sneezed, and proceeded to advertise
to the inmates of the workhouse the fact of a new burden having been
imposed  upon the parish, by setting up as loud a cry as could
reasonably have been expected from a male infant who had not been
possessed of that very useful appendage, a voice, for a much longer
space of time than three minutes and a quarter.

As Oliver gave this first proof of the free and proper action of his
lungs, the patchwork coverlet which was carelessly flung over the iron
bedstead, rustled; the pale face of a young woman was raised feebly
from the pillow; and a faint voice imperfectly articulated the words,
'Let me see the child, and die.'

The surgeon had been sitting with his face turned towards the fire:
giving the palms of his hands a warm and a rub alternately.  As the
young woman spoke, he rose, and advancing to the bed's head, said, with
more kindness than might have been expected of him:

'Oh, you must not talk about dying yet.'

'Lor bless her dear heart, no!' interposed the nurse, hastily
depositing in her pocket a green glass bottle, the contents of which
she had been tasting in a corner with evident satisfaction.

'Lor bless her dear heart, when she has lived as long as I have, sir,
and had thirteen children of her own, and all on 'em dead except two,
and them in the wurkus with me, she'll know better than to take on in
that way, bless her dear heart!  Think what it is to be a mother,
there's a dear young lamb do.'

Apparently this consolatory perspective of a mother's prospects failed
in producing its due effect.  The patient shook her head, and stretched
out her hand towards the child.

The surgeon deposited it in her arms.  She imprinted her cold white
lips passionately on its forehead; passed her hands over her face;
gazed wildly round; shuddered; fell back--and died. They chafed her
breast, hands, and temples; but the blood had stopped forever.  They
talked of hope and comfort. They had been strangers too long.

'It's all over, Mrs. Thingummy!' said the surgeon at last.

'Ah, poor dear, so it is!' said the nurse, picking up the cork of the
green bottle, which had fallen out on the pillow, as she stooped to
take up the child.  'Poor dear!'

'You needn't mind sending up to me, if the child cries, nurse,' said
the surgeon, putting on his gloves with great deliberation. 'It's very
likely it _will_ be troublesome. Give it a little gruel if it is.'  He
put on his hat, and, pausing by the bed-side on his way to the door,
added, 'She was a good-looking girl, too; where did she come from?'

'She was brought here last night,' replied the old woman, 'by the
overseer's order.  She was found lying in the street.  She had walked
some distance, for her shoes were worn to pieces; but where she came
from, or where she was going to, nobody knows.'

The surgeon leaned over the body, and raised the left hand.  'The old
story,' he said, shaking his head: 'no wedding-ring, I see. Ah!
Good-night!'

The medical gentleman walked away to dinner; and the nurse, having once
more applied herself to the green bottle, sat down on a low chair
before the fire, and proceeded to dress the infant.

What an excellent example of the power of dress, young Oliver Twist
was!  Wrapped in the blanket which had hitherto formed his only
covering, he might have been the child of a nobleman or a beggar; it
would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have assigned him
his proper station in society.  But now that he was enveloped in the
old calico robes which had grown yellow in the same service, he was
badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once--a parish
child--the orphan of a workhouse--the humble, half-starved drudge--to
be cuffed and buffeted through the world--despised by all, and pitied
by none.

Oliver cried lustily. If he could have known that he was an orphan,
left to the tender mercies of church-wardens and overseers, perhaps he
would have cried the louder.



CHAPTER II

TREATS OF OLIVER TWIST'S GROWTH, EDUCATION, AND BOARD

For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systematic
course of treachery and deception.  He was brought up by hand.  The
hungry and destitute situation of the infant orphan was duly reported
by the workhouse authorities to the parish authorities.  The parish
authorities inquired with dignity of the workhouse authorities, whether
there was no female then domiciled in 'the house' who was in a
situation to impart to Oliver Twist, the consolation and nourishment of
which he stood in need.  The workhouse authorities replied with
humility, that there was not. Upon this, the parish authorities
magnanimously and humanely resolved, that Oliver should be 'farmed,'
or, in other words, that he should be dispatched to a branch-workhouse
some three miles off, where twenty or thirty other juvenile offenders
against the poor-laws, rolled about the floor all day, without the
inconvenience of too much food or too much clothing, under the parental
superintendence of an elderly female, who received the culprits at and
for the consideration of sevenpence-halfpenny per small head per week.
Sevenpence-halfpenny's worth per week is a good round diet for a child;
a great deal may be got for sevenpence-halfpenny, quite enough to
overload its stomach, and make it uncomfortable. The elderly female was
a woman of wisdom and experience; she knew what was good for children;
and she had a very accurate perception of what was good for herself.
So, she appropriated the greater part of the weekly stipend to her own
use, and consigned the rising parochial generation to even a shorter
allowance than was originally provided for them.  Thereby finding in
the lowest depth a deeper still; and proving herself a very great
experimental philosopher.

Everybody knows the story of another experimental philosopher who had a
great theory about a horse being able to live without eating, and who
demonstrated it so well, that he had got his own horse down to a straw
a day, and would unquestionably have rendered him a very spirited and
rampacious animal on nothing at all, if he had not died,
four-and-twenty hours before he was to have had his first comfortable
bait of air.  Unfortunately for, the experimental philosophy of the
female to whose protecting care Oliver Twist was delivered over, a
similar result usually attended the operation of _her_ system; for at
the very moment when the child had contrived to exist upon the smallest
possible portion of the weakest possible food, it did perversely happen
in eight and a half cases out of ten, either that it sickened from want
and cold, or fell into the fire from neglect, or got half-smothered by
accident; in any one of which cases, the miserable little being was
usually summoned into another world, and there gathered to the fathers
it had never known in this.

Occasionally, when there was some more than usually interesting inquest
upon a parish child who had been overlooked in turning up a bedstead,
or inadvertently scalded to death when there happened to be a
washing--though the latter accident was very scarce, anything
approaching to a washing being of rare occurrence in the farm--the jury
would take it into their heads to ask troublesome questions, or the
parishioners would rebelliously affix their signatures to a
remonstrance.  But these impertinences were speedily checked by the
evidence of the surgeon, and the testimony of the beadle; the former of
whom had always opened the body and found nothing inside (which was
very probable indeed), and the latter of whom invariably swore whatever
the parish wanted; which was very self-devotional.  Besides, the board
made periodical pilgrimages to the farm, and always sent the beadle the
day before, to say they were going.  The children were neat and clean
to behold, when _they_ went; and what more would the people have!

It cannot be expected that this system of farming would produce any
very extraordinary or luxuriant crop.  Oliver Twist's ninth birthday
found him a pale thin child, somewhat diminutive in stature, and
decidedly small in circumference.  But nature or inheritance had
implanted a good sturdy spirit in Oliver's breast.  It had had plenty
of room to expand, thanks to the spare diet of the establishment; and
perhaps to this circumstance may be attributed his having any ninth
birth-day at all.  Be this as it may, however, it was his ninth
birthday; and he was keeping it in the coal-cellar with a select party
of two other young gentleman, who, after participating with him in a
sound thrashing, had been locked up for atrociously presuming to be
hungry, when Mrs. Mann, the good lady of the house, was unexpectedly
startled by the apparition of Mr. Bumble, the beadle, striving to undo
the wicket of the garden-gate.

'Goodness gracious!  Is that you, Mr. Bumble, sir?' said Mrs. Mann,
thrusting her head out of the window in well-affected ecstasies of joy.
'(Susan, take Oliver and them two brats upstairs, and wash 'em
directly.)--My heart alive!  Mr. Bumble, how glad I am to see you,
sure-ly!'

Now, Mr. Bumble was a fat man, and a choleric; so, instead of
responding to this open-hearted salutation in a kindred spirit, he gave
the little wicket a tremendous shake, and then bestowed upon it a kick
which could have emanated from no leg but a beadle's.

'Lor, only think,' said Mrs. Mann, running out,--for the three boys had
been removed by this time,--'only think of that!  That I should have
forgotten that the gate was bolted on the inside, on account of them
dear children!  Walk in sir; walk in, pray, Mr. Bumble, do, sir.'

Although this invitation was accompanied with a curtsey that might have
softened the heart of a church-warden, it by no means mollified the
beadle.

'Do you think this respectful or proper conduct, Mrs. Mann,' inquired
Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane, 'to keep the parish officers a waiting
at your garden-gate, when they come here upon porochial business with
the porochial orphans?  Are you aweer, Mrs. Mann, that you are, as I
may say, a porochial delegate, and a stipendiary?'

'I'm sure Mr. Bumble, that I was only a telling one or two of the dear
children as is so fond of you, that it was you a coming,' replied Mrs.
Mann with great humility.

Mr. Bumble had a great idea of his oratorical powers and his
importance.  He had displayed the one, and vindicated the other. He
relaxed.

'Well, well, Mrs. Mann,' he replied in a calmer tone; 'it may be as you
say; it may be.  Lead the way in, Mrs. Mann, for I come on business,
and have something to say.'

Mrs. Mann ushered the beadle into a small parlour with a brick floor;
placed a seat for him; and officiously deposited his cocked hat and
cane on the table before him.  Mr. Bumble wiped from his forehead the
perspiration which his walk had engendered, glanced complacently at the
cocked hat, and smiled.  Yes, he smiled.  Beadles are but men: and Mr.
Bumble smiled.

'Now don't you be offended at what I'm a going to say,' observed Mrs.
Mann, with captivating sweetness.  'You've had a long walk, you know,
or I wouldn't mention it.  Now, will you take a little drop of
somethink, Mr. Bumble?'

'Not a drop.  Nor a drop,' said Mr. Bumble, waving his right hand in a
dignified, but placid manner.

'I think you will,' said Mrs. Mann, who had noticed the tone of the
refusal, and the gesture that had accompanied it.  'Just a leetle drop,
with a little cold water, and a lump of sugar.'

Mr. Bumble coughed.

'Now, just a leetle drop,' said Mrs. Mann persuasively.

'What is it?' inquired the beadle.

'Why, it's what I'm obliged to keep a little of in the house, to put
into the blessed infants' Daffy, when they ain't well, Mr. Bumble,'
replied Mrs. Mann as she opened a corner cupboard, and took down a
bottle and glass.  'It's gin.  I'll not deceive you, Mr. B.  It's gin.'

'Do you give the children Daffy, Mrs. Mann?' inquired Bumble, following
with his eyes the interesting process of mixing.

'Ah, bless 'em, that I do, dear as it is,' replied the nurse. 'I
couldn't see 'em suffer before my very eyes, you know sir.'

'No'; said Mr. Bumble approvingly; 'no, you could not.  You are a
humane woman, Mrs. Mann.'  (Here she set down the glass.)  'I shall
take a early opportunity of mentioning it to the board, Mrs. Mann.'
(He drew it towards him.)  'You feel as a mother, Mrs. Mann.'  (He
stirred the gin-and-water.) 'I--I drink your health with cheerfulness,
Mrs. Mann'; and he swallowed half of it.

'And now about business,' said the beadle, taking out a leathern
pocket-book.  'The child that was half-baptized Oliver Twist, is nine
year old to-day.'

'Bless him!' interposed Mrs. Mann, inflaming her left eye with the
corner of her apron.

'And notwithstanding a offered reward of ten pound, which was
afterwards increased to twenty pound.  Notwithstanding the most
superlative, and, I may say, supernat'ral exertions on the part of this
parish,' said Bumble, 'we have never been able to discover who is his
father, or what was his mother's settlement, name, or condition.'

Mrs. Mann raised her hands in astonishment; but added, after a moment's
reflection, 'How comes he to have any name at all, then?'

The beadle drew himself up with great pride, and said, 'I inwented it.'

'You, Mr. Bumble!'

'I, Mrs. Mann.  We name our fondlings in alphabetical order. The last
was a S,--Swubble, I named him. This was a T,--Twist, I named _him_.
The next one comes will be Unwin, and the next Vilkins.  I have got
names ready made to the end of the alphabet, and all the way through it
again, when we come to Z.'

'Why, you're quite a literary character, sir!' said Mrs. Mann.

'Well, well,' said the beadle, evidently gratified with the compliment;
'perhaps I may be.  Perhaps I may be, Mrs. Mann.' He finished the
gin-and-water, and added, 'Oliver being now too old to remain here, the
board have determined to have him back into the house.  I have come out
myself to take him there.  So let me see him at once.'

'I'll fetch him directly,' said Mrs. Mann, leaving the room for that
purpose.  Oliver, having had by this time as much of the outer coat of
dirt which encrusted his face and hands, removed, as could be scrubbed
off in one washing, was led into the room by his benevolent protectress.

'Make a bow to the gentleman, Oliver,' said Mrs. Mann.

Oliver made a bow, which was divided between the beadle on the chair,
and the cocked hat on the table.

'Will you go along with me, Oliver?' said Mr. Bumble, in a majestic
voice.

Oliver was about to say that he would go along with anybody with great
readiness, when, glancing upward, he caught sight of Mrs. Mann, who had
got behind the beadle's chair, and was shaking her fist at him with a
furious countenance.  He took the hint at once, for the fist had been
too often impressed upon his body not to be deeply impressed upon his
recollection.

'Will she go with me?' inquired poor Oliver.

'No, she can't,' replied Mr. Bumble.  'But she'll come and see you
sometimes.'

This was no very great consolation to the child.  Young as he was,
however, he had sense enough to make a feint of feeling great regret at
going away.  It was no very difficult matter for the boy to call tears
into his eyes.  Hunger and recent ill-usage are great assistants if you
want to cry; and Oliver cried very naturally indeed.  Mrs. Mann gave
him a thousand embraces, and what Oliver wanted a great deal more, a
piece of bread and butter, less he should seem too hungry when he got
to the workhouse. With the slice of bread in his hand, and the little
brown-cloth parish cap on his head, Oliver was then led away by Mr.
Bumble from the wretched home where one kind word or look had never
lighted the gloom of his infant years.  And yet he burst into an agony
of childish grief, as the cottage-gate closed after him.  Wretched as
were the little companions in misery he was leaving behind, they were
the only friends he had ever known; and a sense of his loneliness in
the great wide world, sank into the child's heart for the first time.

Mr. Bumble walked on with long strides; little Oliver, firmly grasping
his gold-laced cuff, trotted beside him, inquiring at the end of every
quarter of a mile whether they were 'nearly there.' To these
interrogations Mr. Bumble returned very brief and snappish replies; for
the temporary blandness which gin-and-water awakens in some bosoms had
by this time evaporated; and he was once again a beadle.

Oliver had not been within the walls of the workhouse a quarter of an
hour, and had scarcely completed the demolition of a second slice of
bread, when Mr. Bumble, who had handed him over to the care of an old
woman, returned; and, telling him it was a board night, informed him
that the board had said he was to appear before it forthwith.

Not having a very clearly defined notion of what a live board was,
Oliver was rather astounded by this intelligence, and was not quite
certain whether he ought to laugh or cry.  He had no time to think
about the matter, however; for Mr. Bumble gave him a tap on the head,
with his cane, to wake him up: and another on the back to make him
lively: and bidding him to follow, conducted him into a large
white-washed room, where eight or ten fat gentlemen were sitting round
a table.  At the top of the table, seated in an arm-chair rather higher
than the rest, was a particularly fat gentleman with a very round, red
face.

'Bow to the board,' said Bumble.  Oliver brushed away two or three
tears that were lingering in his eyes; and seeing no board but the
table, fortunately bowed to that.

'What's your name, boy?' said the gentleman in the high chair.

Oliver was frightened at the sight of so many gentlemen, which made him
tremble: and the beadle gave him another tap behind, which made him
cry.  These two causes made him answer in a very low and hesitating
voice; whereupon a gentleman in a white waistcoat said he was a fool.
Which was a capital way of raising his spirits, and putting him quite
at his ease.

'Boy,' said the gentleman in the high chair, 'listen to me. You know
you're an orphan, I suppose?'

'What's that, sir?' inquired poor Oliver.

'The boy _is_ a fool--I thought he was,' said the gentleman in the
white waistcoat.

'Hush!' said the gentleman who had spoken first.  'You know you've got
no father or mother, and that you were brought up by the parish, don't
you?'

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, weeping bitterly.

'What are you crying for?' inquired the gentleman in the white
waistcoat.  And to be sure it was very extraordinary.  What _could_ the
boy be crying for?

'I hope you say your prayers every night,' said another gentleman in a
gruff voice; 'and pray for the people who feed you, and take care of
you--like a Christian.'

'Yes, sir,' stammered the boy.  The gentleman who spoke last was
unconsciously right.  It would have been very like a Christian, and a
marvellously good Christian too, if Oliver had prayed for the people
who fed and took care of _him_. But he hadn't, because nobody had
taught him.

'Well!  You have come here to be educated, and taught a useful trade,'
said the red-faced gentleman in the high chair.

'So you'll begin to pick oakum to-morrow morning at six o'clock,' added
the surly one in the white waistcoat.

For the combination of both these blessings in the one simple process
of picking oakum, Oliver bowed low by the direction of the beadle, and
was then hurried away to a large ward; where, on a rough, hard bed, he
sobbed himself to sleep.  What a novel illustration of the tender laws
of England!  They let the paupers go to sleep!

Poor Oliver!  He little thought, as he lay sleeping in happy
unconsciousness of all around him, that the board had that very day
arrived at a decision which would exercise the most material influence
over all his future fortunes.  But they had.  And this was it:

The members of this board were very sage, deep, philosophical men; and
when they came to turn their attention to the workhouse, they found out
at once, what ordinary folks would never have discovered--the poor
people liked it!  It was a regular place of public entertainment for
the poorer classes; a tavern where there was nothing to pay; a public
breakfast, dinner, tea, and supper all the year round; a brick and
mortar elysium, where it was all play and no work.  'Oho!' said the
board, looking very knowing; 'we are the fellows to set this to rights;
we'll stop it all, in no time.'  So, they established the rule, that
all poor people should have the alternative (for they would compel
nobody, not they), of being starved by a gradual process in the house,
or by a quick one out of it.  With this view, they contracted with the
water-works to lay on an unlimited supply of water; and with a
corn-factor to supply periodically small quantities of oatmeal; and
issued three meals of thin gruel a day, with an onion twice a week, and
half a roll of Sundays.  They made a great many other wise and humane
regulations, having reference to the ladies, which it is not necessary
to repeat; kindly undertook to divorce poor married people, in
consequence of the great expense of a suit in Doctors' Commons; and,
instead of compelling a man to support his family, as they had
theretofore done, took his family away from him, and made him a
bachelor!  There is no saying how many applicants for relief, under
these last two heads, might have started up in all classes of society,
if it had not been coupled with the workhouse; but the board were
long-headed men, and had provided for this difficulty.  The relief was
inseparable from the workhouse and the gruel; and that frightened
people.

For the first six months after Oliver Twist was removed, the system was
in full operation.  It was rather expensive at first, in consequence of
the increase in the undertaker's bill, and the necessity of taking in
the clothes of all the paupers, which fluttered loosely on their
wasted, shrunken forms, after a week or two's gruel.  But the number of
workhouse inmates got thin as well as the paupers; and the board were
in ecstasies.

The room in which the boys were fed, was a large stone hall, with a
copper at one end: out of which the master, dressed in an apron for the
purpose, and assisted by one or two women, ladled the gruel at
mealtimes.  Of this festive composition each boy had one porringer, and
no more--except on occasions of great public rejoicing, when he had two
ounces and a quarter of bread besides.

The bowls never wanted washing.  The boys polished them with their
spoons till they shone again; and when they had performed this
operation (which never took very long, the spoons being nearly as large
as the bowls), they would sit staring at the copper, with such eager
eyes, as if they could have devoured the very bricks of which it was
composed; employing themselves, meanwhile, in sucking their fingers
most assiduously, with the view of catching up any stray splashes of
gruel that might have been cast thereon.  Boys have generally excellent
appetites. Oliver Twist and his companions suffered the tortures of
slow starvation for three months: at last they got so voracious and
wild with hunger, that one boy, who was tall for his age, and hadn't
been used to that sort of thing (for his father had kept a small
cook-shop), hinted darkly to his companions, that unless he had another
basin of gruel per diem, he was afraid he might some night happen to
eat the boy who slept next him, who happened to be a weakly youth of
tender age.  He had a wild, hungry eye; and they implicitly believed
him. A council was held; lots were cast who should walk up to the
master after supper that evening, and ask for more; and it fell to
Oliver Twist.

The evening arrived; the boys took their places.  The master, in his
cook's uniform, stationed himself at the copper; his pauper assistants
ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served out; and a long
grace was said over the short commons.  The gruel disappeared; the boys
whispered each other, and winked at Oliver; while his next neighbors
nudged him.  Child as he was, he was desperate with hunger, and
reckless with misery.  He rose from the table; and advancing to the
master, basin and spoon in hand, said: somewhat alarmed at his own
temerity:

'Please, sir, I want some more.'

The master was a fat, healthy man; but he turned very pale. He gazed in
stupefied astonishment on the small rebel for some seconds, and then
clung for support to the copper.  The assistants were paralysed with
wonder; the boys with fear.

'What!' said the master at length, in a faint voice.

'Please, sir,' replied Oliver, 'I want some more.'

The master aimed a blow at Oliver's head with the ladle; pinioned him
in his arm; and shrieked aloud for the beadle.

The board were sitting in solemn conclave, when Mr. Bumble rushed into
the room in great excitement, and addressing the gentleman in the high
chair, said,

'Mr. Limbkins, I beg your pardon, sir!  Oliver Twist has asked for
more!'

There was a general start.  Horror was depicted on every countenance.

'For _more_!' said Mr. Limbkins.  'Compose yourself, Bumble, and answer
me distinctly.  Do I understand that he asked for more, after he had
eaten the supper allotted by the dietary?'

'He did, sir,' replied Bumble.

'That boy will be hung,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.  'I
know that boy will be hung.'

Nobody controverted the prophetic gentleman's opinion.  An animated
discussion took place.  Oliver was ordered into instant confinement;
and a bill was next morning pasted on the outside of the gate, offering
a reward of five pounds to anybody who would take Oliver Twist off the
hands of the parish.  In other words, five pounds and Oliver Twist were
offered to any man or woman who wanted an apprentice to any trade,
business, or calling.

'I never was more convinced of anything in my life,' said the gentleman
in the white waistcoat, as he knocked at the gate and read the bill
next morning: 'I never was more convinced of anything in my life, than
I am that that boy will come to be hung.'

As I purpose to show in the sequel whether the white waistcoated
gentleman was right or not, I should perhaps mar the interest of this
narrative (supposing it to possess any at all), if I ventured to hint
just yet, whether the life of Oliver Twist had this violent termination
or no.



CHAPTER III

RELATES HOW OLIVER TWIST WAS VERY NEAR GETTING A PLACE WHICH WOULD NOT
HAVE BEEN A SINECURE

For a week after the commission of the impious and profane offence of
asking for more, Oliver remained a close prisoner in the dark and
solitary room to which he had been consigned by the wisdom and mercy of
the board.  It appears, at first sight not unreasonable to suppose,
that, if he had entertained a becoming feeling of respect for the
prediction of the gentleman in the white waistcoat, he would have
established that sage individual's prophetic character, once and for
ever, by tying one end of his pocket-handkerchief to a hook in the
wall, and attaching himself to the other.  To the performance of this
feat, however, there was one obstacle: namely, that
pocket-handkerchiefs being decided articles of luxury, had been, for
all future times and ages, removed from the noses of paupers by the
express order of the board, in council assembled: solemnly given and
pronounced under their hands and seals.  There was a still greater
obstacle in Oliver's youth and childishness.  He only cried bitterly
all day; and, when the long, dismal night came on, spread his little
hands before his eyes to shut out the darkness, and crouching in the
corner, tried to sleep: ever and anon waking with a start and tremble,
and drawing himself closer and closer to the wall, as if to feel even
its cold hard surface were a protection in the gloom and loneliness
which surrounded him.

Let it not be supposed by the enemies of 'the system,' that, during the
period of his solitary incarceration, Oliver was denied the benefit of
exercise, the pleasure of society, or the advantages of religious
consolation.  As for exercise, it was nice cold weather, and he was
allowed to perform his ablutions every morning under the pump, in a
stone yard, in the presence of Mr. Bumble, who prevented his catching
cold, and caused a tingling sensation to pervade his frame, by repeated
applications of the cane.  As for society, he was carried every other
day into the hall where the boys dined, and there sociably flogged as a
public warning and example.  And so far from being denied the
advantages of religious consolation, he was kicked into the same
apartment every evening at prayer-time, and there permitted to listen
to, and console his mind with, a general supplication of the boys,
containing a special clause, therein inserted by authority of the
board, in which they entreated to be made good, virtuous, contented,
and obedient, and to be guarded from the sins and vices of Oliver
Twist: whom the supplication distinctly set forth to be under the
exclusive patronage and protection of the powers of wickedness, and an
article direct from the manufactory of the very Devil himself.

It chanced one morning, while Oliver's affairs were in this auspicious
and comfortable state, that Mr. Gamfield, chimney-sweep, went his way
down the High Street, deeply cogitating in his mind his ways and means
of paying certain arrears of rent, for which his landlord had become
rather pressing.  Mr. Gamfield's most sanguine estimate of his finances
could not raise them within full five pounds of the desired amount;
and, in a species of arithmetical desperation, he was alternately
cudgelling his brains and his donkey, when passing the workhouse, his
eyes encountered the bill on the gate.

'Wo--o!' said Mr. Gamfield to the donkey.

The donkey was in a state of profound abstraction: wondering, probably,
whether he was destined to be regaled with a cabbage-stalk or two when
he had disposed of the two sacks of soot with which the little cart was
laden; so, without noticing the word of command, he jogged onward.

Mr. Gamfield growled a fierce imprecation on the donkey generally, but
more particularly on his eyes; and, running after him, bestowed a blow
on his head, which would inevitably have beaten in any skull but a
donkey's.  Then, catching hold of the bridle, he gave his jaw a sharp
wrench, by way of gentle reminder that he was not his own master; and
by these means turned him round.  He then gave him another blow on the
head, just to stun him till he came back again.  Having completed these
arrangements, he walked up to the gate, to read the bill.

The gentleman with the white waistcoat was standing at the gate with
his hands behind him, after having delivered himself of some profound
sentiments in the board-room.  Having witnessed the little dispute
between Mr. Gamfield and the donkey, he smiled joyously when that
person came up to read the bill, for he saw at once that Mr. Gamfield
was exactly the sort of master Oliver Twist wanted.  Mr. Gamfield
smiled, too, as he perused the document; for five pounds was just the
sum he had been wishing for; and, as to the boy with which it was
encumbered, Mr. Gamfield, knowing what the dietary of the workhouse
was, well knew he would be a nice small pattern, just the very thing
for register stoves.  So, he spelt the bill through again, from
beginning to end; and then, touching his fur cap in token of humility,
accosted the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

'This here boy, sir, wot the parish wants to 'prentis,' said Mr.
Gamfield.

'Ay, my man,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat, with a
condescending smile.  'What of him?'

'If the parish vould like him to learn a right pleasant trade, in a
good 'spectable chimbley-sweepin' bisness,' said Mr. Gamfield, 'I wants
a 'prentis, and I am ready to take him.'

'Walk in,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.  Mr. Gamfield
having lingered behind, to give the donkey another blow on the head,
and another wrench of the jaw, as a caution not to run away in his
absence, followed the gentleman with the white waistcoat into the room
where Oliver had first seen him.

'It's a nasty trade,' said Mr. Limbkins, when Gamfield had again stated
his wish.

'Young boys have been smothered in chimneys before now,' said another
gentleman.

'That's acause they damped the straw afore they lit it in the chimbley
to make 'em come down again,' said Gamfield; 'that's all smoke, and no
blaze; vereas smoke ain't o' no use at all in making a boy come down,
for it only sinds him to sleep, and that's wot he likes.  Boys is wery
obstinit, and wery lazy, Gen'l'men, and there's nothink like a good hot
blaze to make 'em come down vith a run.  It's humane too, gen'l'men,
acause, even if they've stuck in the chimbley, roasting their feet
makes 'em struggle to hextricate theirselves.'

The gentleman in the white waistcoat appeared very much amused by this
explanation; but his mirth was speedily checked by a look from Mr.
Limbkins.  The board then proceeded to converse among themselves for a
few minutes, but in so low a tone, that the words 'saving of
expenditure,' 'looked well in the accounts,' 'have a printed report
published,' were alone audible.  These only chanced to be heard,
indeed, or account of their being very frequently repeated with great
emphasis.

At length the whispering ceased; and the members of the board, having
resumed their seats and their solemnity, Mr. Limbkins said:

'We have considered your proposition, and we don't approve of it.'

'Not at all,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

'Decidedly not,' added the other members.

As Mr. Gamfield did happen to labour under the slight imputation of
having bruised three or four boys to death already, it occurred to him
that the board had, perhaps, in some unaccountable freak, taken it into
their heads that this extraneous circumstance ought to influence their
proceedings. It was very unlike their general mode of doing business,
if they had; but still, as he had no particular wish to revive the
rumour, he twisted his cap in his hands, and walked slowly from the
table.

'So you won't let me have him, gen'l'men?' said Mr. Gamfield, pausing
near the door.

'No,' replied Mr. Limbkins; 'at least, as it's a nasty business, we
think you ought to take something less than the premium we offered.'

Mr. Gamfield's countenance brightened, as, with a quick step, he
returned to the table, and said,

'What'll you give, gen'l'men?  Come!  Don't be too hard on a poor man.
What'll you give?'

'I should say, three pound ten was plenty,' said Mr. Limbkins.

'Ten shillings too much,' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.

'Come!' said Gamfield; 'say four pound, gen'l'men.  Say four pound, and
you've got rid of him for good and all.  There!'

'Three pound ten,' repeated Mr. Limbkins, firmly.

'Come!  I'll split the diff'erence, gen'l'men,' urged Gamfield. 'Three
pound fifteen.'

'Not a farthing more,' was the firm reply of Mr. Limbkins.

'You're desperate hard upon me, gen'l'men,' said Gamfield, wavering.

'Pooh!  pooh!  nonsense!' said the gentleman in the white waistcoat.
'He'd be cheap with nothing at all, as a premium. Take him, you silly
fellow!  He's just the boy for you.  He wants the stick, now and then:
it'll do him good; and his board needn't come very expensive, for he
hasn't been overfed since he was born.  Ha!  ha!  ha!'

Mr. Gamfield gave an arch look at the faces round the table, and,
observing a smile on all of them, gradually broke into a smile himself.
The bargain was made.  Mr. Bumble, was at once instructed that Oliver
Twist and his indentures were to be conveyed before the magistrate, for
signature and approval, that very afternoon.

In pursuance of this determination, little Oliver, to his excessive
astonishment, was released from bondage, and ordered to put himself
into a clean shirt.  He had hardly achieved this very unusual gymnastic
performance, when Mr. Bumble brought him, with his own hands, a basin
of gruel, and the holiday allowance of two ounces and a quarter of
bread. At this tremendous sight, Oliver began to cry very piteously:
thinking, not unnaturally, that the board must have determined to kill
him for some useful purpose, or they never would have begun to fatten
him up in that way.

'Don't make your eyes red, Oliver, but eat your food and be thankful,'
said Mr. Bumble, in a tone of impressive pomposity. 'You're a going to
be made a 'prentice of, Oliver.'

'A prentice, sir!' said the child, trembling.

'Yes, Oliver,' said Mr. Bumble.  'The kind and blessed gentleman which
is so many parents to you, Oliver, when you have none of your own: are
a going to 'prentice' you: and to set you up in life, and make a man of
you: although the expense to the parish is three pound ten!--three
pound ten, Oliver!--seventy shillins--one hundred and forty
sixpences!--and all for a naughty orphan which nobody can't love.'

As Mr. Bumble paused to take breath, after delivering this address in
an awful voice, the tears rolled down the poor child's face, and he
sobbed bitterly.

'Come,' said Mr. Bumble, somewhat less pompously, for it was gratifying
to his feelings to observe the effect his eloquence had produced;
'Come, Oliver!  Wipe your eyes with the cuffs of your jacket, and don't
cry into your gruel; that's a very foolish action, Oliver.'  It
certainly was, for there was quite enough water in it already.

On their way to the magistrate, Mr. Bumble instructed Oliver that all
he would have to do, would be to look very happy, and say, when the
gentleman asked him if he wanted to be apprenticed, that he should like
it very much indeed; both of which injunctions Oliver promised to obey:
the rather as Mr. Bumble threw in a gentle hint, that if he failed in
either particular, there was no telling what would be done to him. When
they arrived at the office, he was shut up in a little room by himself,
and admonished by Mr. Bumble to stay there, until he came back to fetch
him.

There the boy remained, with a palpitating heart, for half an hour.  At
the expiration of which time Mr. Bumble thrust in his head, unadorned
with the cocked hat, and said aloud:

'Now, Oliver, my dear, come to the gentleman.'  As Mr. Bumble said
this, he put on a grim and threatening look, and added, in a low voice,
'Mind what I told you, you young rascal!'

Oliver stared innocently in Mr. Bumble's face at this somewhat
contradictory style of address; but that gentleman prevented his
offering any remark thereupon, by leading him at once into an adjoining
room: the door of which was open. It was a large room, with a great
window.  Behind a desk, sat two old gentleman with powdered heads: one
of whom was reading the newspaper; while the other was perusing, with
the aid of a pair of tortoise-shell spectacles, a small piece of
parchment which lay before him.  Mr. Limbkins was standing in front of
the desk on one side; and Mr. Gamfield, with a partially washed face,
on the other; while two or three bluff-looking men, in top-boots, were
lounging about.

The old gentleman with the spectacles gradually dozed off, over the
little bit of parchment; and there was a short pause, after Oliver had
been stationed by Mr. Bumble in front of the desk.

'This is the boy, your worship,' said Mr. Bumble.

The old gentleman who was reading the newspaper raised his head for a
moment, and pulled the other old gentleman by the sleeve; whereupon,
the last-mentioned old gentleman woke up.

'Oh, is this the boy?' said the old gentleman.

'This is him, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble.  'Bow to the magistrate, my
dear.'

Oliver roused himself, and made his best obeisance.  He had been
wondering, with his eyes fixed on the magistrates' powder, whether all
boards were born with that white stuff on their heads, and were boards
from thenceforth on that account.

'Well,' said the old gentleman, 'I suppose he's fond of
chimney-sweeping?'

'He doats on it, your worship,' replied Bumble; giving Oliver a sly
pinch, to intimate that he had better not say he didn't.

'And he _will_ be a sweep, will he?' inquired the old gentleman.

'If we was to bind him to any other trade to-morrow, he'd run away
simultaneous, your worship,' replied Bumble.

'And this man that's to be his master--you, sir--you'll treat him well,
and feed him, and do all that sort of thing, will you?' said the old
gentleman.

'When I says I will, I means I will,' replied Mr. Gamfield doggedly.

'You're a rough speaker, my friend, but you look an honest,
open-hearted man,' said the old gentleman: turning his spectacles in
the direction of the candidate for Oliver's premium, whose villainous
countenance was a regular stamped receipt for cruelty.  But the
magistrate was half blind and half childish, so he couldn't reasonably
be expected to discern what other people did.

'I hope I am, sir,' said Mr. Gamfield, with an ugly leer.

'I have no doubt you are, my friend,' replied the old gentleman: fixing
his spectacles more firmly on his nose, and looking about him for the
inkstand.

It was the critical moment of Oliver's fate.  If the inkstand had been
where the old gentleman thought it was, he would have dipped his pen
into it, and signed the indentures, and Oliver would have been
straightway hurried off.  But, as it chanced to be immediately under
his nose, it followed, as a matter of course, that he looked all over
his desk for it, without finding it; and happening in the course of his
search to look straight before him, his gaze encountered the pale and
terrified face of Oliver Twist: who, despite all the admonitory looks
and pinches of Bumble, was regarding the repulsive countenance of his
future master, with a mingled expression of horror and fear, too
palpable to be mistaken, even by a half-blind magistrate.

The old gentleman stopped, laid down his pen, and looked from Oliver to
Mr. Limbkins; who attempted to take snuff with a cheerful and
unconcerned aspect.

'My boy!' said the old gentleman, 'you look pale and alarmed. What is
the matter?'

'Stand a little away from him, Beadle,' said the other magistrate:
laying aside the paper, and leaning forward with an expression of
interest.  'Now, boy, tell us what's the matter: don't be afraid.'

Oliver fell on his knees, and clasping his hands together, prayed that
they would order him back to the dark room--that they would starve
him--beat him--kill him if they pleased--rather than send him away with
that dreadful man.

'Well!' said Mr. Bumble, raising his hands and eyes with most
impressive solemnity.  'Well! of all the artful and designing orphans
that ever I see, Oliver, you are one of the most bare-facedest.'

'Hold your tongue, Beadle,' said the second old gentleman, when Mr.
Bumble had given vent to this compound adjective.

'I beg your worship's pardon,' said Mr. Bumble, incredulous of having
heard aright.  'Did your worship speak to me?'

'Yes.  Hold your tongue.'

Mr. Bumble was stupefied with astonishment.  A beadle ordered to hold
his tongue!  A moral revolution!

The old gentleman in the tortoise-shell spectacles looked at his
companion, he nodded significantly.

'We refuse to sanction these indentures,' said the old gentleman:
tossing aside the piece of parchment as he spoke.

'I hope,' stammered Mr. Limbkins:  'I hope the magistrates will not
form the opinion that the authorities have been guilty of any improper
conduct, on the unsupported testimony of a child.'

'The magistrates are not called upon to pronounce any opinion on the
matter,' said the second old gentleman sharply.  'Take the boy back to
the workhouse, and treat him kindly.  He seems to want it.'

That same evening, the gentleman in the white waistcoat most positively
and decidedly affirmed, not only that Oliver would be hung, but that he
would be drawn and quartered into the bargain. Mr. Bumble shook his
head with gloomy mystery, and said he wished he might come to good;
whereunto Mr. Gamfield replied, that he wished he might come to him;
which, although he agreed with the beadle in most matters, would seem
to be a wish of a totally opposite description.

The next morning, the public were once informed that Oliver Twist was
again To Let, and that five pounds would be paid to anybody who would
take possession of him.



CHAPTER IV

OLIVER, BEING OFFERED ANOTHER PLACE, MAKES HIS FIRST ENTRY INTO PUBLIC
LIFE

In great families, when an advantageous place cannot be obtained,
either in possession, reversion, remainder, or expectancy, for the
young man who is growing up, it is a very general custom to send him to
sea.  The board, in imitation of so wise and salutary an example, took
counsel together on the expediency of shipping off Oliver Twist, in
some small trading vessel bound to a good unhealthy port.  This
suggested itself as the very best thing that could possibly be done
with him: the probability being, that the skipper would flog him to
death, in a playful mood, some day after dinner, or would knock his
brains out with an iron bar; both pastimes being, as is pretty
generally known, very favourite and common recreations among gentleman
of that class.  The more the case presented itself to the board, in
this point of view, the more manifold the advantages of the step
appeared; so, they came to the conclusion that the only way of
providing for Oliver effectually, was to send him to sea without delay.

Mr. Bumble had been despatched to make various preliminary inquiries,
with the view of finding out some captain or other who wanted a
cabin-boy without any friends; and was returning to the workhouse to
communicate the result of his mission; when he encountered at the gate,
no less a person than Mr. Sowerberry, the parochial undertaker.

Mr. Sowerberry was a tall gaunt, large-jointed man, attired in a suit
of threadbare black, with darned cotton stockings of the same colour,
and shoes to answer.  His features were not naturally intended to wear
a smiling aspect, but he was in general rather given to professional
jocosity.  His step was elastic, and his face betokened inward
pleasantry, as he advanced to Mr. Bumble, and shook him cordially by
the hand.

'I have taken the measure of the two women that died last night, Mr.
Bumble,' said the undertaker.

'You'll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,' said the beadle, as he
thrust his thumb and forefinger into the proffered snuff-box of the
undertaker: which was an ingenious little model of a patent coffin.  'I
say you'll make your fortune, Mr. Sowerberry,' repeated Mr. Bumble,
tapping the undertaker on the shoulder, in a friendly manner, with his
cane.

'Think so?' said the undertaker in a tone which half admitted and half
disputed the probability of the event.  'The prices allowed by the
board are very small, Mr. Bumble.'

'So are the coffins,' replied the beadle: with precisely as near an
approach to a laugh as a great official ought to indulge in.

Mr. Sowerberry was much tickled at this: as of course he ought to be;
and laughed a long time without cessation.  'Well, well, Mr. Bumble,'
he said at length, 'there's no denying that, since the new system of
feeding has come in, the coffins are something narrower and more
shallow than they used to be; but we must have some profit, Mr. Bumble.
Well-seasoned timber is an expensive article, sir; and all the iron
handles come, by canal, from Birmingham.'

'Well, well,' said Mr. Bumble, 'every trade has its drawbacks. A fair
profit is, of course, allowable.'

'Of course, of course,' replied the undertaker; 'and if I don't get a
profit upon this or that particular article, why, I make it up in the
long-run, you see--he! he! he!'

'Just so,' said Mr. Bumble.

'Though I must say,' continued the undertaker, resuming the current of
observations which the beadle had interrupted: 'though I must say, Mr.
Bumble, that I have to contend against one very great disadvantage:
which is, that all the stout people go off the quickest.  The people
who have been better off, and have paid rates for many years, are the
first to sink when they come into the house; and let me tell you, Mr.
Bumble, that three or four inches over one's calculation makes a great
hole in one's profits: especially when one has a family to provide for,
sir.'

As Mr. Sowerberry said this, with the becoming indignation of an
ill-used man; and as Mr. Bumble felt that it rather tended to convey a
reflection on the honour of the parish; the latter gentleman thought it
advisable to change the subject.  Oliver Twist being uppermost in his
mind, he made him his theme.

'By the bye,' said Mr. Bumble, 'you don't know anybody who wants a boy,
do you?  A porochial 'prentis, who is at present a dead-weight; a
millstone, as I may say, round the porochial throat?  Liberal terms,
Mr. Sowerberry, liberal terms?'  As Mr. Bumble spoke, he raised his
cane to the bill above him, and gave three distinct raps upon the words
'five pounds':  which were printed thereon in Roman capitals of
gigantic size.

'Gadso!' said the undertaker: taking Mr. Bumble by the gilt-edged
lappel of his official coat; 'that's just the very thing I wanted to
speak to you about.  You know--dear me, what a very elegant button this
is, Mr. Bumble!  I never noticed it before.'

'Yes, I think it rather pretty,' said the beadle, glancing proudly
downwards at the large brass buttons which embellished his coat. 'The
die is the same as the porochial seal--the Good Samaritan healing the
sick and bruised man. The board presented it to me on Newyear's
morning, Mr. Sowerberry.  I put it on, I remember, for the first time,
to attend the inquest on that reduced tradesman, who died in a doorway
at midnight.'

'I recollect,' said the undertaker. 'The jury brought it in, "Died from
exposure to the cold, and want of the common necessaries of life,"
didn't they?'

Mr. Bumble nodded.

'And they made it a special verdict, I think,' said the undertaker, 'by
adding some words to the effect, that if the relieving officer had--'

'Tush!  Foolery!' interposed the beadle.  'If the board attended to all
the nonsense that ignorant jurymen talk, they'd have enough to do.'

'Very true,' said the undertaker; 'they would indeed.'

'Juries,' said Mr. Bumble, grasping his cane tightly, as was his wont
when working into a passion: 'juries is ineddicated, vulgar, grovelling
wretches.'

'So they are,' said the undertaker.

'They haven't no more philosophy nor political economy about 'em than
that,' said the beadle, snapping his fingers contemptuously.

'No more they have,' acquiesced the undertaker.

'I despise 'em,' said the beadle, growing very red in the face.

'So do I,' rejoined the undertaker.

'And I only wish we'd a jury of the independent sort, in the house for
a week or two,' said the beadle; 'the rules and regulations of the
board would soon bring their spirit down for 'em.'

'Let 'em alone for that,' replied the undertaker.  So saying, he
smiled, approvingly: to calm the rising wrath of the indignant parish
officer.

Mr Bumble lifted off his cocked hat; took a handkerchief from the
inside of the crown; wiped from his forehead the perspiration which his
rage had engendered; fixed the cocked hat on again; and, turning to the
undertaker, said in a calmer voice:

'Well; what about the boy?'

'Oh!' replied the undertaker; 'why, you know, Mr. Bumble, I pay a good
deal towards the poor's rates.'

'Hem!' said Mr. Bumble.  'Well?'

'Well,' replied the undertaker, 'I was thinking that if I pay so much
towards 'em, I've a right to get as much out of 'em as I can, Mr.
Bumble; and so--I think I'll take the boy myself.'

Mr. Bumble grasped the undertaker by the arm, and led him into the
building.  Mr. Sowerberry was closeted with the board for five minutes;
and it was arranged that Oliver should go to him that evening 'upon
liking'--a phrase which means, in the case of a parish apprentice, that
if the master find, upon a short trial, that he can get enough work out
of a boy without putting too much food into him, he shall have him for
a term of years, to do what he likes with.

When little Oliver was taken before 'the gentlemen' that evening; and
informed that he was to go, that night, as general house-lad to a
coffin-maker's; and that if he complained of his situation, or ever
came back to the parish again, he would be sent to sea, there to be
drowned, or knocked on the head, as the case might be, he evinced so
little emotion, that they by common consent pronounced him a hardened
young rascal, and ordered Mr. Bumble to remove him forthwith.

Now, although it was very natural that the board, of all people in the
world, should feel in a great state of virtuous astonishment and horror
at the smallest tokens of want of feeling on the part of anybody, they
were rather out, in this particular instance.  The simple fact was,
that Oliver, instead of possessing too little feeling, possessed rather
too much; and was in a fair way of being reduced, for life, to a state
of brutal stupidity and sullenness by the ill usage he had received.
He heard the news of his destination, in perfect silence; and, having
had his luggage put into his hand--which was not very difficult to
carry, inasmuch as it was all comprised within the limits of a brown
paper parcel, about half a foot square by three inches deep--he pulled
his cap over his eyes; and once more attaching himself to Mr. Bumble's
coat cuff, was led away by that dignitary to a new scene of suffering.

For some time, Mr. Bumble drew Oliver along, without notice or remark;
for the beadle carried his head very erect, as a beadle always should:
and, it being a windy day, little Oliver was completely enshrouded by
the skirts of Mr. Bumble's coat as they blew open, and disclosed to
great advantage his flapped waistcoat and drab plush knee-breeches.  As
they drew near to their destination, however, Mr. Bumble thought it
expedient to look down, and see that the boy was in good order for
inspection by his new master: which he accordingly did, with a fit and
becoming air of gracious patronage.

'Oliver!'  said Mr. Bumble.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, in a low, tremulous voice.

'Pull that cap off your eyes, and hold up your head, sir.'

Although Oliver did as he was desired, at once; and passed the back of
his unoccupied hand briskly across his eyes, he left a tear in them
when he looked up at his conductor.  As Mr. Bumble gazed sternly upon
him, it rolled down his cheek. It was followed by another, and another.
The child made a strong effort, but it was an unsuccessful one.
Withdrawing his other hand from Mr. Bumble's he covered his face with
both; and wept until the tears sprung out from between his chin and
bony fingers.

'Well!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, stopping short, and darting at his little
charge a look of intense malignity.  'Well!  Of _all_ the
ungratefullest, and worst-disposed boys as ever I see, Oliver, you are
the--'

'No, no, sir,' sobbed Oliver, clinging to the hand which held the
well-known cane; 'no, no, sir; I will be good indeed; indeed, indeed I
will, sir!  I am a very little boy, sir; and it is so--so--'

'So what?' inquired Mr. Bumble in amazement.

'So lonely, sir!  So very lonely!' cried the child.  'Everybody hates
me.  Oh! sir, don't, don't pray be cross to me!'  The child beat his
hand upon his heart; and looked in his companion's face, with tears of
real agony.

Mr. Bumble regarded Oliver's piteous and helpless look, with some
astonishment, for a few seconds; hemmed three or four times in a husky
manner; and after muttering something about 'that troublesome cough,'
bade Oliver dry his eyes and be a good boy. Then once more taking his
hand, he walked on with him in silence.

The undertaker, who had just put up the shutters of his shop, was
making some entries in his day-book by the light of a most appropriate
dismal candle, when Mr. Bumble entered.

'Aha!' said the undertaker; looking up from the book, and pausing in
the middle of a word; 'is that you, Bumble?'

'No one else, Mr. Sowerberry,' replied the beadle.  'Here! I've brought
the boy.'  Oliver made a bow.

'Oh! that's the boy, is it?' said the undertaker:  raising the candle
above his head, to get a better view of Oliver. 'Mrs. Sowerberry, will
you have the goodness to come here a moment, my dear?'

Mrs. Sowerberry emerged from a little room behind the shop, and
presented the form of a short, then, squeezed-up woman, with a vixenish
countenance.

'My dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry, deferentially, 'this is the boy from
the workhouse that I told you of.'  Oliver bowed again.

'Dear me!' said the undertaker's wife, 'he's very small.'

'Why, he _is_ rather small,' replied Mr. Bumble: looking at Oliver as
if it were his fault that he was no bigger; 'he is small. There's no
denying it.  But he'll grow, Mrs. Sowerberry--he'll grow.'

'Ah!  I dare say he will,' replied the lady pettishly, 'on our victuals
and our drink.  I see no saving in parish children, not I; for they
always cost more to keep, than they're worth. However, men always think
they know best. There!  Get downstairs, little bag o' bones.'  With
this, the undertaker's wife opened a side door, and pushed Oliver down
a steep flight of stairs into a stone cell, damp and dark: forming the
ante-room to the coal-cellar, and denominated 'kitchen'; wherein sat a
slatternly girl, in shoes down at heel, and blue worsted stockings very
much out of repair.

'Here, Charlotte,' said Mr. Sowerberry, who had followed Oliver down,
'give this boy some of the cold bits that were put by for Trip.  He
hasn't come home since the morning, so he may go without 'em.  I dare
say the boy isn't too dainty to eat 'em--are you, boy?'

Oliver, whose eyes had glistened at the mention of meat, and who was
trembling with eagerness to devour it, replied in the negative; and a
plateful of coarse broken victuals was set before him.

I wish some well-fed philosopher, whose meat and drink turn to gall
within him; whose blood is ice, whose heart is iron; could have seen
Oliver Twist clutching at the dainty viands that the dog had neglected.
I wish he could have witnessed the horrible avidity with which Oliver
tore the bits asunder with all the ferocity of famine.  There is only
one thing I should like better; and that would be to see the
Philosopher making the same sort of meal himself, with the same relish.

'Well,' said the undertaker's wife, when Oliver had finished his
supper: which she had regarded in silent horror, and with fearful
auguries of his future appetite: 'have you done?'

There being nothing eatable within his reach, Oliver replied in the
affirmative.

'Then come with me,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: taking up a dim and dirty
lamp, and leading the way upstairs; 'your bed's under the counter.  You
don't mind sleeping among the coffins, I suppose? But it doesn't much
matter whether you do or don't, for you can't sleep anywhere else.
Come; don't keep me here all night!'

Oliver lingered no longer, but meekly followed his new mistress.



CHAPTER V

OLIVER MINGLES WITH NEW ASSOCIATES.  GOING TO A FUNERAL FOR THE FIRST
TIME, HE FORMS AN UNFAVOURABLE NOTION OF HIS MASTER'S BUSINESS

Oliver, being left to himself in the undertaker's shop, set the lamp
down on a workman's bench, and gazed timidly about him with a feeling
of awe and dread, which many people a good deal older than he will be
at no loss to understand.  An unfinished coffin on black tressels,
which stood in the middle of the shop, looked so gloomy and death-like
that a cold tremble came over him, every time his eyes wandered in the
direction of the dismal object: from which he almost expected to see
some frightful form slowly rear its head, to drive him mad with terror.
Against the wall were ranged, in regular array, a long row of elm
boards cut in the same shape: looking in the dim light, like
high-shouldered ghosts with their hands in their breeches pockets.
Coffin-plates, elm-chips, bright-headed nails, and shreds of black
cloth, lay scattered on the floor; and the wall behind the counter was
ornamented with a lively representation of two mutes in very stiff
neckcloths, on duty at a large private door, with a hearse drawn by
four black steeds, approaching in the distance. The shop was close and
hot.  The atmosphere seemed tainted with the smell of coffins.  The
recess beneath the counter in which his flock mattress was thrust,
looked like a grave.

Nor were these the only dismal feelings which depressed Oliver. He was
alone in a strange place; and we all know how chilled and desolate the
best of us will sometimes feel in such a situation. The boy had no
friends to care for, or to care for him.  The regret of no recent
separation was fresh in his mind; the absence of no loved and
well-remembered face sank heavily into his heart.

But his heart was heavy, notwithstanding; and he wished, as he crept
into his narrow bed, that that were his coffin, and that he could be
lain in a calm and lasting sleep in the churchyard ground, with the
tall grass waving gently above his head, and the sound of the old deep
bell to soothe him in his sleep.

Oliver was awakened in the morning, by a loud kicking at the outside of
the shop-door: which, before he could huddle on his clothes, was
repeated, in an angry and impetuous manner, about twenty-five times.
When he began to undo the chain, the legs desisted, and a voice began.

'Open the door, will yer?' cried the voice which belonged to the legs
which had kicked at the door.

'I will, directly, sir,' replied Oliver: undoing the chain, and turning
the key.

'I suppose yer the new boy, ain't yer?' said the voice through the
key-hole.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.

'How old are yer?' inquired the voice.

'Ten, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Then I'll whop yer when I get in,' said the voice; 'you just see if I
don't, that's all, my work'us brat!' and having made this obliging
promise, the voice began to whistle.

Oliver had been too often subjected to the process to which the very
expressive monosyllable just recorded bears reference, to entertain the
smallest doubt that the owner of the voice, whoever he might be, would
redeem his pledge, most honourably. He drew back the bolts with a
trembling hand, and opened the door.

For a second or two, Oliver glanced up the street, and down the street,
and over the way: impressed with the belief that the unknown, who had
addressed him through the key-hole, had walked a few paces off, to warm
himself; for nobody did he see but a big charity-boy, sitting on a post
in front of the house, eating a slice of bread and butter: which he cut
into wedges, the size of his mouth, with a clasp-knife, and then
consumed with great dexterity.

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Oliver at length: seeing that no other
visitor made his appearance; 'did you knock?'

'I kicked,' replied the charity-boy.

'Did you want a coffin, sir?' inquired Oliver, innocently.

At this, the charity-boy looked monstrous fierce; and said that Oliver
would want one before long, if he cut jokes with his superiors in that
way.

'Yer don't know who I am, I suppose, Work'us?' said the charity-boy, in
continuation: descending from the top of the post, meanwhile, with
edifying gravity.

'No, sir,' rejoined Oliver.

'I'm Mister Noah Claypole,' said the charity-boy, 'and you're under me.
Take down the shutters, yer idle young ruffian!' With this, Mr.
Claypole administered a kick to Oliver, and entered the shop with a
dignified air, which did him great credit.  It is difficult for a
large-headed, small-eyed youth, of lumbering make and heavy
countenance, to look dignified under any circumstances; but it is more
especially so, when superadded to these personal attractions are a red
nose and yellow smalls.

Oliver, having taken down the shutters, and broken a pane of glass in
his effort to stagger away beneath the weight of the first one to a
small court at the side of the house in which they were kept during the
day, was graciously assisted by Noah: who having consoled him with the
assurance that 'he'd catch it,' condescended to help him.  Mr.
Sowerberry came down soon after. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Sowerberry
appeared.  Oliver having 'caught it,' in fulfilment of Noah's
prediction, followed that young gentleman down the stairs to breakfast.

'Come near the fire, Noah,' said Charlotte.  'I saved a nice little bit
of bacon for you from master's breakfast.  Oliver, shut that door at
Mister Noah's back, and take them bits that I've put out on the cover
of the bread-pan.  There's your tea; take it away to that box, and
drink it there, and make haste, for they'll want you to mind the shop.
D'ye hear?'

'D'ye hear, Work'us?' said Noah Claypole.

'Lor, Noah!' said Charlotte, 'what a rum creature you are!  Why don't
you let the boy alone?'

'Let him alone!' said Noah.  'Why everybody lets him alone enough, for
the matter of that.  Neither his father nor his mother will ever
interfere with him.  All his relations let him have his own way pretty
well.  Eh, Charlotte?  He! he! he!'

'Oh, you queer soul!' said Charlotte, bursting into a hearty laugh, in
which she was joined by Noah; after which they both looked scornfully
at poor Oliver Twist, as he sat shivering on the box in the coldest
corner of the room, and ate the stale pieces which had been specially
reserved for him.

Noah was a charity-boy, but not a workhouse orphan.  No chance-child
was he, for he could trace his genealogy all the way back to his
parents, who lived hard by; his mother being a washerwoman, and his
father a drunken soldier, discharged with a wooden leg, and a diurnal
pension of twopence-halfpenny and an unstateable fraction.  The
shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding
Noah in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of
'leathers,' 'charity,' and the like; and Noah had bourne them without
reply.  But, now that fortune had cast in his way a nameless orphan, at
whom even the meanest could point the finger of scorn, he retorted on
him with interest.  This affords charming food for contemplation.  It
shows us what a beautiful thing human nature may be made to be; and how
impartially the same amiable qualities are developed in the finest lord
and the dirtiest charity-boy.

Oliver had been sojourning at the undertaker's some three weeks or a
month.  Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry--the shop being shut up--were taking
their supper in the little back-parlour, when Mr. Sowerberry, after
several deferential glances at his wife, said,

'My dear--'  He was going to say more; but, Mrs. Sowerberry looking up,
with a peculiarly unpropitious aspect, he stopped short.

'Well,' said Mrs. Sowerberry, sharply.

'Nothing, my dear, nothing,' said Mr. Sowerberry.

'Ugh, you brute!' said Mrs. Sowerberry.

'Not at all, my dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry humbly.  'I thought you
didn't want to hear, my dear.  I was only going to say--'

'Oh, don't tell me what you were going to say,' interposed Mrs.
Sowerberry.  'I am nobody; don't consult me, pray.  _I_ don't want to
intrude upon your secrets.'  As Mrs. Sowerberry said this, she gave an
hysterical laugh, which threatened violent consequences.

'But, my dear,' said Sowerberry, 'I want to ask your advice.'

'No, no, don't ask mine,' replied Mrs. Sowerberry, in an affecting
manner: 'ask somebody else's.'  Here, there was another hysterical
laugh, which frightened Mr. Sowerberry very much.  This is a very
common and much-approved matrimonial course of treatment, which is
often very effective. It at once reduced Mr. Sowerberry to begging, as
a special favour, to be allowed to say what Mrs. Sowerberry was most
curious to hear.  After a short duration, the permission was most
graciously conceded.

'It's only about young Twist, my dear,' said Mr. Sowerberry. 'A very
good-looking boy, that, my dear.'

'He need be, for he eats enough,' observed the lady.

'There's an expression of melancholy in his face, my dear,' resumed Mr.
Sowerberry, 'which is very interesting.  He would make a delightful
mute, my love.'

Mrs. Sowerberry looked up with an expression of considerable
wonderment.  Mr. Sowerberry remarked it and, without allowing time for
any observation on the good lady's part, proceeded.

'I don't mean a regular mute to attend grown-up people, my dear, but
only for children's practice.  It would be very new to have a mute in
proportion, my dear.  You may depend upon it, it would have a superb
effect.'

Mrs. Sowerberry, who had a good deal of taste in the undertaking way,
was much struck by the novelty of this idea; but, as it would have been
compromising her dignity to have said so, under existing circumstances,
she merely inquired, with much sharpness, why such an obvious
suggestion had not presented itself to her husband's mind before?  Mr.
Sowerberry rightly construed this, as an acquiescence in his
proposition; it was speedily determined, therefore, that Oliver should
be at once initiated into the mysteries of the trade; and, with this
view, that he should accompany his master on the very next occasion of
his services being required.

The occasion was not long in coming.  Half an hour after breakfast next
morning, Mr. Bumble entered the shop; and supporting his cane against
the counter, drew forth his large leathern pocket-book: from which he
selected a small scrap of paper, which he handed over to Sowerberry.

'Aha!' said the undertaker, glancing over it with a lively countenance;
'an order for a coffin, eh?'

'For a coffin first, and a porochial funeral afterwards,' replied Mr.
Bumble, fastening the strap of the leathern pocket-book: which, like
himself, was very corpulent.

'Bayton,' said the undertaker, looking from the scrap of paper to Mr.
Bumble.  'I never heard the name before.'

Bumble shook his head, as he replied, 'Obstinate people, Mr.
Sowerberry; very obstinate.  Proud, too, I'm afraid, sir.'

'Proud, eh?' exclaimed Mr. Sowerberry with a sneer.  'Come, that's too
much.'

'Oh, it's sickening,' replied the beadle.  'Antimonial, Mr. Sowerberry!'

'So it is,' acquiesced the undertaker.

'We only heard of the family the night before last,' said the beadle;
'and we shouldn't have known anything about them, then, only a woman
who lodges in the same house made an application to the porochial
committee for them to send the porochial surgeon to see a woman as was
very bad.  He had gone out to dinner; but his 'prentice (which is a
very clever lad) sent 'em some medicine in a blacking-bottle, offhand.'

'Ah, there's promptness,' said the undertaker.

'Promptness, indeed!' replied the beadle.  'But what's the consequence;
what's the ungrateful behaviour of these rebels, sir?  Why, the husband
sends back word that the medicine won't suit his wife's complaint, and
so she shan't take it--says she shan't take it, sir!  Good, strong,
wholesome medicine, as was given with great success to two Irish
labourers and a coal-heaver, only a week before--sent 'em for nothing,
with a blackin'-bottle in,--and he sends back word that she shan't take
it, sir!'

As the atrocity presented itself to Mr. Bumble's mind in full force, he
struck the counter sharply with his cane, and became flushed with
indignation.

'Well,' said the undertaker, 'I ne--ver--did--'

'Never did, sir!' ejaculated the beadle.  'No, nor nobody never did;
but now she's dead, we've got to bury her; and that's the direction;
and the sooner it's done, the better.'

Thus saying, Mr. Bumble put on his cocked hat wrong side first, in a
fever of parochial excitement; and flounced out of the shop.

'Why, he was so angry, Oliver, that he forgot even to ask after you!'
said Mr. Sowerberry, looking after the beadle as he strode down the
street.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver, who had carefully kept himself out of
sight, during the interview; and who was shaking from head to foot at
the mere recollection of the sound of Mr. Bumble's voice.

He needn't haven taken the trouble to shrink from Mr. Bumble's glance,
however; for that functionary, on whom the prediction of the gentleman
in the white waistcoat had made a very strong impression, thought that
now the undertaker had got Oliver upon trial the subject was better
avoided, until such time as he should be firmly bound for seven years,
and all danger of his being returned upon the hands of the parish
should be thus effectually and legally overcome.

'Well,' said Mr. Sowerberry, taking up his hat, 'the sooner this job is
done, the better.  Noah, look after the shop. Oliver, put on your cap,
and come with me.'  Oliver obeyed, and followed his master on his
professional mission.

They walked on, for some time, through the most crowded and densely
inhabited part of the town; and then, striking down a narrow street
more dirty and miserable than any they had yet passed through, paused
to look for the house which was the object of their search.  The houses
on either side were high and large, but very old, and tenanted by
people of the poorest class: as their neglected appearance would have
sufficiently denoted, without the concurrent testimony afforded by the
squalid looks of the few men and women who, with folded arms and bodies
half doubled, occasionally skulked along.  A great many of the
tenements had shop-fronts; but these were fast closed, and mouldering
away; only the upper rooms being inhabited.  Some houses which had
become insecure from age and decay, were prevented from falling into
the street, by huge beams of wood reared against the walls, and firmly
planted in the road; but even these crazy dens seemed to have been
selected as the nightly haunts of some houseless wretches, for many of
the rough boards which supplied the place of door and window, were
wrenched from their positions, to afford an aperture wide enough for
the passage of a human body.  The kennel was stagnant and filthy. The
very rats, which here and there lay putrefying in its rottenness, were
hideous with famine.

There was neither knocker nor bell-handle at the open door where Oliver
and his master stopped; so, groping his way cautiously through the dark
passage, and bidding Oliver keep close to him and not be afraid the
undertaker mounted to the top of the first flight of stairs.  Stumbling
against a door on the landing, he rapped at it with his knuckles.

It was opened by a young girl of thirteen or fourteen.  The undertaker
at once saw enough of what the room contained, to know it was the
apartment to which he had been directed.  He stepped in; Oliver
followed him.

There was no fire in the room; but a man was crouching, mechanically,
over the empty stove.  An old woman, too, had drawn a low stool to the
cold hearth, and was sitting beside him. There were some ragged
children in another corner; and in a small recess, opposite the door,
there lay upon the ground, something covered with an old blanket.
Oliver shuddered as he cast his eyes toward the place, and crept
involuntarily closer to his master; for though it was covered up, the
boy felt that it was a corpse.

The man's face was thin and very pale; his hair and beard were grizzly;
his eyes were bloodshot.  The old woman's face was wrinkled; her two
remaining teeth protruded over her under lip; and her eyes were bright
and piercing.  Oliver was afraid to look at either her or the man.
They seemed so like the rats he had seen outside.

'Nobody shall go near her,' said the man, starting fiercely up, as the
undertaker approached the recess. 'Keep back! Damn you, keep back, if
you've a life to lose!'

'Nonsense, my good man,' said the undertaker, who was pretty well used
to misery in all its shapes.  'Nonsense!'

'I tell you,' said the man:  clenching his hands, and stamping
furiously on the floor,--'I tell you I won't have her put into the
ground.  She couldn't rest there.  The worms would worry her--not eat
her--she is so worn away.'

The undertaker offered no reply to this raving; but producing a tape
from his pocket, knelt down for a moment by the side of the body.

'Ah!' said the man: bursting into tears, and sinking on his knees at
the feet of the dead woman; 'kneel down, kneel down--kneel round her,
every one of you, and mark my words!  I say she was starved to death.
I never knew how bad she was, till the fever came upon her; and then
her bones were starting through the skin.  There was neither fire nor
candle; she died in the dark--in the dark!  She couldn't even see her
children's faces, though we heard her gasping out their names. I begged
for her in the streets: and they sent me to prison. When I came back,
she was dying; and all the blood in my heart has dried up, for they
starved her to death.  I swear it before the God that saw it! They
starved her!'  He twined his hands in his hair; and, with a loud
scream, rolled grovelling upon the floor: his eyes fixed, and the foam
covering his lips.

The terrified children cried bitterly; but the old woman, who had
hitherto remained as quiet as if she had been wholly deaf to all that
passed, menaced them into silence.  Having unloosened the cravat of the
man who still remained extended on the ground, she tottered towards the
undertaker.

'She was my daughter,' said the old woman, nodding her head in the
direction of the corpse; and speaking with an idiotic leer, more
ghastly than even the presence of death in such a place. 'Lord, Lord!
Well, it _is_ strange that I who gave birth to her, and was a woman
then, should be alive and merry now, and she lying there: so cold and
stiff!  Lord, Lord!--to think of it; it's as good as a play--as good as
a play!'

As the wretched creature mumbled and chuckled in her hideous merriment,
the undertaker turned to go away.

'Stop, stop!' said the old woman in a loud whisper.  'Will she be
buried to-morrow, or next day, or to-night?  I laid her out; and I must
walk, you know.  Send me a large cloak: a good warm one: for it is
bitter cold.  We should have cake and wine, too, before we go!  Never
mind; send some bread--only a loaf of bread and a cup of water.  Shall
we have some bread, dear?' she said eagerly: catching at the
undertaker's coat, as he once more moved towards the door.

'Yes, yes,' said the undertaker,'of course.  Anything you like!' He
disengaged himself from the old woman's grasp; and, drawing Oliver
after him, hurried away.

The next day, (the family having been meanwhile relieved with a
half-quartern loaf and a piece of cheese, left with them by Mr. Bumble
himself,) Oliver and his master returned to the miserable abode; where
Mr. Bumble had already arrived, accompanied by four men from the
workhouse, who were to act as bearers.  An old black cloak had been
thrown over the rags of the old woman and the man; and the bare coffin
having been screwed down, was hoisted on the shoulders of the bearers,
and carried into the street.

'Now, you must put your best leg foremost, old lady!' whispered
Sowerberry in the old woman's ear; 'we are rather late; and it won't
do, to keep the clergyman waiting.  Move on, my men,--as quick as you
like!'

Thus directed, the bearers trotted on under their light burden; and the
two mourners kept as near them, as they could.  Mr. Bumble and
Sowerberry walked at a good smart pace in front; and Oliver, whose legs
were not so long as his master's, ran by the side.

There was not so great a necessity for hurrying as Mr. Sowerberry had
anticipated, however; for when they reached the obscure corner of the
churchyard in which the nettles grew, and where the parish graves were
made, the clergyman had not arrived; and the clerk, who was sitting by
the vestry-room fire, seemed to think it by no means improbable that it
might be an hour or so, before he came.  So, they put the bier on the
brink of the grave; and the two mourners waited patiently in the damp
clay, with a cold rain drizzling down, while the ragged boys whom the
spectacle had attracted into the churchyard played a noisy game at
hide-and-seek among the tombstones, or varied their amusements by
jumping backwards and forwards over the coffin.  Mr. Sowerberry and
Bumble, being personal friends of the clerk, sat by the fire with him,
and read the paper.

At length, after a lapse of something more than an hour, Mr. Bumble,
and Sowerberry, and the clerk, were seen running towards the grave.
Immediately afterwards, the clergyman appeared: putting on his surplice
as he came along.  Mr. Bumble then thrashed a boy or two, to keep up
appearances; and the reverend gentleman, having read as much of the
burial service as could be compressed into four minutes, gave his
surplice to the clerk, and walked away again.

'Now, Bill!' said Sowerberry to the grave-digger. 'Fill up!'

It was no very difficult task, for the grave was so full, that the
uppermost coffin was within a few feet of the surface.  The
grave-digger shovelled in the earth; stamped it loosely down with his
feet: shouldered his spade; and walked off, followed by the boys, who
murmured very loud complaints at the fun being over so soon.

'Come, my good fellow!' said Bumble, tapping the man on the back. 'They
want to shut up the yard.'

The man who had never once moved, since he had taken his station by the
grave side, started, raised his head, stared at the person who had
addressed him, walked forward for a few paces; and fell down in a
swoon.  The crazy old woman was too much occupied in bewailing the loss
of her cloak (which the undertaker had taken off), to pay him any
attention; so they threw a can of cold water over him; and when he came
to, saw him safely out of the churchyard, locked the gate, and departed
on their different ways.

'Well, Oliver,' said Sowerberry, as they walked home, 'how do you like
it?'

'Pretty well, thank you, sir' replied Oliver, with considerable
hesitation.  'Not very much, sir.'

'Ah, you'll get used to it in time, Oliver,' said Sowerberry. 'Nothing
when you _are_ used to it, my boy.'

Oliver wondered, in his own mind, whether it had taken a very long time
to get Mr. Sowerberry used to it.  But he thought it better not to ask
the question; and walked back to the shop: thinking over all he had
seen and heard.



CHAPTER VI

OLIVER, BEING GOADED BY THE TAUNTS OF NOAH, ROUSES INTO ACTION, AND
RATHER ASTONISHES HIM

The month's trial over, Oliver was formally apprenticed.  It was a nice
sickly season just at this time.  In commercial phrase, coffins were
looking up; and, in the course of a few weeks, Oliver acquired a great
deal of experience.  The success of Mr. Sowerberry's ingenious
speculation, exceeded even his most sanguine hopes.  The oldest
inhabitants recollected no period at which measles had been so
prevalent, or so fatal to infant existence; and many were the mournful
processions which little Oliver headed, in a hat-band reaching down to
his knees, to the indescribable admiration and emotion of all the
mothers in the town.  As Oliver accompanied his master in most of his
adult expeditions too, in order that he might acquire that equanimity
of demeanour and full command of nerve which was essential to a
finished undertaker, he had many opportunities of observing the
beautiful resignation and fortitude with which some strong-minded
people bear their trials and losses.

For instance; when Sowerberry had an order for the burial of some rich
old lady or gentleman, who was surrounded by a great number of nephews
and nieces, who had been perfectly inconsolable during the previous
illness, and whose grief had been wholly irrepressible even on the most
public occasions, they would be as happy among themselves as need
be--quite cheerful and contented--conversing together with as much
freedom and gaiety, as if nothing whatever had happened to disturb
them.  Husbands, too, bore the loss of their wives with the most heroic
calmness. Wives, again, put on weeds for their husbands, as if, so far
from grieving in the garb of sorrow, they had made up their minds to
render it as becoming and attractive as possible.  It was observable,
too, that ladies and gentlemen who were in passions of anguish during
the ceremony of interment, recovered almost as soon as they reached
home, and became quite composed before the tea-drinking was over.  All
this was very pleasant and improving to see; and Oliver beheld it with
great admiration.

That Oliver Twist was moved to resignation by the example of these good
people, I cannot, although I am his biographer, undertake to affirm
with any degree of confidence; but I can most distinctly say, that for
many months he continued meekly to submit to the domination and
ill-treatment of Noah Claypole: who used him far worse than before, now
that his jealousy was roused by seeing the new boy promoted to the
black stick and hatband, while he, the old one, remained stationary in
the muffin-cap and leathers.  Charlotte treated him ill, because Noah
did; and Mrs. Sowerberry was his decided enemy, because Mr. Sowerberry
was disposed to be his friend; so, between these three on one side, and
a glut of funerals on the other, Oliver was not altogether as
comfortable as the hungry pig was, when he was shut up, by mistake, in
the grain department of a brewery.

And now, I come to a very important passage in Oliver's history; for I
have to record an act, slight and unimportant perhaps in appearance,
but which indirectly produced a material change in all his future
prospects and proceedings.

One day, Oliver and Noah had descended into the kitchen at the usual
dinner-hour, to banquet upon a small joint of mutton--a pound and a
half of the worst end of the neck--when Charlotte being called out of
the way, there ensued a brief interval of time, which Noah Claypole,
being hungry and vicious, considered he could not possibly devote to a
worthier purpose than aggravating and tantalising young Oliver Twist.

Intent upon this innocent amusement, Noah put his feet on the
table-cloth; and pulled Oliver's hair; and twitched his ears; and
expressed his opinion that he was a 'sneak'; and furthermore announced
his intention of coming to see him hanged, whenever that desirable
event should take place; and entered upon various topics of petty
annoyance, like a malicious and ill-conditioned charity-boy as he was.
But, making Oliver cry, Noah attempted to be more facetious still; and
in his attempt, did what many sometimes do to this day, when they want
to be funny.  He got rather personal.

'Work'us,' said Noah, 'how's your mother?'

'She's dead,' replied Oliver; 'don't you say anything about her to me!'

Oliver's colour rose as he said this; he breathed quickly; and there
was a curious working of the mouth and nostrils, which Mr. Claypole
thought must be the immediate precursor of a violent fit of crying.
Under this impression he returned to the charge.

'What did she die of, Work'us?' said Noah.

'Of a broken heart, some of our old nurses told me,' replied Oliver:
more as if he were talking to himself, than answering Noah. 'I think I
know what it must be to die of that!'

'Tol de rol lol lol, right fol lairy, Work'us,' said Noah, as a tear
rolled down Oliver's cheek.  'What's set you a snivelling now?'

'Not _you_,' replied Oliver, sharply. 'There; that's enough. Don't say
anything more to me about her; you'd better not!'

'Better not!' exclaimed Noah. 'Well!  Better not!  Work'us, don't be
impudent.  _Your_ mother, too!  She was a nice 'un she was.  Oh, Lor!'
And here, Noah nodded his head expressively; and curled up as much of
his small red nose as muscular action could collect together, for the
occasion.

'Yer know, Work'us,' continued Noah, emboldened by Oliver's silence,
and speaking in a jeering tone of affected pity: of all tones the most
annoying: 'Yer know, Work'us, it can't be helped now; and of course yer
couldn't help it then; and I am very sorry for it; and I'm sure we all
are, and pity yer very much.  But yer must know, Work'us, yer mother
was a regular right-down bad 'un.'

'What did you say?' inquired Oliver, looking up very quickly.

'A regular right-down bad 'un, Work'us,' replied Noah, coolly. 'And
it's a great deal better, Work'us, that she died when she did, or else
she'd have been hard labouring in Bridewell, or transported, or hung;
which is more likely than either, isn't it?'

Crimson with fury, Oliver started up; overthrew the chair and table;
seized Noah by the throat; shook him, in the violence of his rage, till
his teeth chattered in his head; and collecting his whole force into
one heavy blow, felled him to the ground.

A minute ago, the boy had looked the quiet child, mild, dejected
creature that harsh treatment had made him.  But his spirit was roused
at last; the cruel insult to his dead mother had set his blood on fire.
His breast heaved; his attitude was erect; his eye bright and vivid;
his whole person changed, as he stood glaring over the cowardly
tormentor who now lay crouching at his feet; and defied him with an
energy he had never known before.

'He'll murder me!' blubbered Noah.  'Charlotte!  missis!  Here's the
new boy a murdering of me!  Help! help!  Oliver's gone mad!
Char--lotte!'

Noah's shouts were responded to, by a loud scream from Charlotte, and a
louder from Mrs. Sowerberry; the former of whom rushed into the kitchen
by a side-door, while the latter paused on the staircase till she was
quite certain that it was consistent with the preservation of human
life, to come further down.

'Oh, you little wretch!' screamed Charlotte: seizing Oliver with her
utmost force, which was about equal to that of a moderately strong man
in particularly good training.  'Oh, you little un-grate-ful,
mur-de-rous, hor-rid villain!'  And between every syllable, Charlotte
gave Oliver a blow with all her might: accompanying it with a scream,
for the benefit of society.

Charlotte's fist was by no means a light one; but, lest it should not
be effectual in calming Oliver's wrath, Mrs. Sowerberry plunged into
the kitchen, and assisted to hold him with one hand, while she
scratched his face with the other. In this favourable position of
affairs, Noah rose from the ground, and pommelled him behind.

This was rather too violent exercise to last long.  When they were all
wearied out, and could tear and beat no longer, they dragged Oliver,
struggling and shouting, but nothing daunted, into the dust-cellar, and
there locked him up.  This being done, Mrs. Sowerberry sunk into a
chair, and burst into tears.

'Bless her, she's going off!' said Charlotte.  'A glass of water, Noah,
dear.  Make haste!'

'Oh!  Charlotte,' said Mrs. Sowerberry:  speaking as well as she could,
through a deficiency of breath, and a sufficiency of cold water, which
Noah had poured over her head and shoulders.  'Oh! Charlotte, what a
mercy we have not all been murdered in our beds!'

'Ah! mercy indeed, ma'am,' was the reply.  I only hope this'll teach
master not to have any more of these dreadful creatures, that are born
to be murderers and robbers from their very cradle. Poor Noah!  He was
all but killed, ma'am, when I come in.'

'Poor fellow!' said Mrs. Sowerberry: looking piteously on the
charity-boy.

Noah, whose top waistcoat-button might have been somewhere on a level
with the crown of Oliver's head, rubbed his eyes with the inside of his
wrists while this commiseration was bestowed upon him, and performed
some affecting tears and sniffs.

'What's to be done!' exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.  'Your master's not at
home; there's not a man in the house, and he'll kick that door down in
ten minutes.'  Oliver's vigorous plunges against the bit of timber in
question, rendered this occurance highly probable.

'Dear, dear!  I don't know, ma'am,' said Charlotte, 'unless we send for
the police-officers.'

'Or the millingtary,' suggested Mr. Claypole.

'No, no,' said Mrs. Sowerberry: bethinking herself of Oliver's old
friend.  'Run to Mr. Bumble, Noah, and tell him to come here directly,
and not to lose a minute; never mind your cap!  Make haste!  You can
hold a knife to that black eye, as you run along. It'll keep the
swelling down.'

Noah stopped to make no reply, but started off at his fullest speed;
and very much it astonished the people who were out walking, to see a
charity-boy tearing through the streets pell-mell, with no cap on his
head, and a clasp-knife at his eye.



CHAPTER VII

OLIVER CONTINUES REFRACTORY

Noah Claypole ran along the streets at his swiftest pace, and paused
not once for breath, until he reached the workhouse-gate. Having rested
here, for a minute or so, to collect a good burst of sobs and an
imposing show of tears and terror, he knocked loudly at the wicket; and
presented such a rueful face to the aged pauper who opened it, that
even he, who saw nothing but rueful faces about him at the best of
times, started back in astonishment.

'Why, what's the matter with the boy!' said the old pauper.

'Mr. Bumble!  Mr. Bumble!' cried Noah, with well-affected dismay: and
in tones so loud and agitated, that they not only caught the ear of Mr.
Bumble himself, who happened to be hard by, but alarmed him so much
that he rushed into the yard without his cocked hat,--which is a very
curious and remarkable circumstance: as showing that even a beadle,
acted upon a sudden and powerful impulse, may be afflicted with a
momentary visitation of loss of self-possession, and forgetfulness of
personal dignity.

'Oh, Mr. Bumble, sir!' said Noah:  'Oliver, sir,--Oliver has--'

'What?  What?' interposed Mr. Bumble: with a gleam of pleasure in his
metallic eyes. 'Not run away; he hasn't run away, has he, Noah?'

'No, sir, no.  Not run away, sir, but he's turned wicious,' replied
Noah. 'He tried to murder me, sir; and then he tried to murder
Charlotte; and then missis.  Oh! what dreadful pain it is!

Such agony, please, sir!'  And here, Noah writhed and twisted his body
into an extensive variety of eel-like positions; thereby giving Mr.
Bumble to understand that, from the violent and sanguinary onset of
Oliver Twist, he had sustained severe internal injury and damage, from
which he was at that moment suffering the acutest torture.

When Noah saw that the intelligence he communicated perfectly paralysed
Mr. Bumble, he imparted additional effect thereunto, by bewailing his
dreadful wounds ten times louder than before; and when he observed a
gentleman in a white waistcoat crossing the yard, he was more tragic in
his lamentations than ever: rightly conceiving it highly expedient to
attract the notice, and rouse the indignation, of the gentleman
aforesaid.

The gentleman's notice was very soon attracted; for he had not walked
three paces, when he turned angrily round, and inquired what that young
cur was howling for, and why Mr. Bumble did not favour him with
something which would render the series of vocular exclamations so
designated, an involuntary process?

'It's a poor boy from the free-school, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble, 'who
has been nearly murdered--all but murdered, sir,--by young Twist.'

'By Jove!' exclaimed the gentleman in the white waistcoat, stopping
short.  'I knew it!  I felt a strange presentiment from the very first,
that that audacious young savage would come to be hung!'

'He has likewise attempted, sir, to murder the female servant,' said
Mr. Bumble, with a face of ashy paleness.

'And his missis,' interposed Mr. Claypole.

'And his master, too, I think you said, Noah?' added Mr. Bumble.

'No! he's out, or he would have murdered him,' replied Noah. 'He said
he wanted to.'

'Ah!  Said he wanted to, did he, my boy?' inquired the gentleman in the
white waistcoat.

'Yes, sir,' replied Noah.  'And please, sir, missis wants to know
whether Mr. Bumble can spare time to step up there, directly, and flog
him--'cause master's out.'

'Certainly, my boy; certainly,' said the gentleman in the white
waistcoat: smiling benignly, and patting Noah's head, which was about
three inches higher than his own.  'You're a good boy--a very good boy.
Here's a penny for you.  Bumble, just step up to Sowerberry's with your
cane, and see what's best to be done. Don't spare him, Bumble.'

'No, I will not, sir,' replied the beadle.  And the cocked hat and cane
having been, by this time, adjusted to their owner's satisfaction, Mr.
Bumble and Noah Claypole betook themselves with all speed to the
undertaker's shop.

Here the position of affairs had not at all improved.  Sowerberry had
not yet returned, and Oliver continued to kick, with undiminished
vigour, at the cellar-door.  The accounts of his ferocity as related by
Mrs. Sowerberry and Charlotte, were of so startling a nature, that Mr.
Bumble judged it prudent to parley, before opening the door.  With this
view he gave a kick at the outside, by way of prelude; and, then,
applying his mouth to the keyhole, said, in a deep and impressive tone:

'Oliver!'

'Come; you let me out!' replied Oliver, from the inside.

'Do you know this here voice, Oliver?' said Mr. Bumble.

'Yes,' replied Oliver.

'Ain't you afraid of it, sir?  Ain't you a-trembling while I speak,
sir?' said Mr. Bumble.

'No!' replied Oliver, boldly.

An answer so different from the one he had expected to elicit, and was
in the habit of receiving, staggered Mr. Bumble not a little.  He
stepped back from the keyhole; drew himself up to his full height; and
looked from one to another of the three bystanders, in mute
astonishment.

'Oh, you know, Mr. Bumble, he must be mad,' said Mrs. Sowerberry.

'No boy in half his senses could venture to speak so to you.'

'It's not Madness, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, after a few moments of
deep meditation.  'It's Meat.'

'What?' exclaimed Mrs. Sowerberry.

'Meat, ma'am, meat,' replied Bumble, with stern emphasis. 'You've
over-fed him, ma'am.  You've raised a artificial soul and spirit in
him, ma'am unbecoming a person of his condition: as the board, Mrs.
Sowerberry, who are practical philosophers, will tell you.  What have
paupers to do with soul or spirit?  It's quite enough that we let 'em
have live bodies.  If you had kept the boy on gruel, ma'am, this would
never have happened.'

'Dear, dear!' ejaculated Mrs. Sowerberry, piously raising her eyes to
the kitchen ceiling: 'this comes of being liberal!'

The liberality of Mrs. Sowerberry to Oliver, had consisted of a profuse
bestowal upon him of all the dirty odds and ends which nobody else
would eat; so there was a great deal of meekness and self-devotion in
her voluntarily remaining under Mr. Bumble's heavy accusation.  Of
which, to do her justice, she was wholly innocent, in thought, word, or
deed.

'Ah!' said Mr. Bumble, when the lady brought her eyes down to earth
again; 'the only thing that can be done now, that I know of, is to
leave him in the cellar for a day or so, till he's a little starved
down; and then to take him out, and keep him on gruel all through the
apprenticeship.  He comes of a bad family. Excitable natures, Mrs.
Sowerberry!  Both the nurse and doctor said, that that mother of his
made her way here, against difficulties and pain that would have killed
any well-disposed woman, weeks before.'

At this point of Mr. Bumble's discourse, Oliver, just hearing enough to
know that some allusion was being made to his mother, recommenced
kicking, with a violence that rendered every other sound inaudible.
Sowerberry returned at this juncture.  Oliver's offence having been
explained to him, with such exaggerations as the ladies thought best
calculated to rouse his ire, he unlocked the cellar-door in a
twinkling, and dragged his rebellious apprentice out, by the collar.

Oliver's clothes had been torn in the beating he had received; his face
was bruised and scratched; and his hair scattered over his forehead.
The angry flush had not disappeared, however; and when he was pulled
out of his prison, he scowled boldly on Noah, and looked quite
undismayed.

'Now, you are a nice young fellow, ain't you?' said Sowerberry; giving
Oliver a shake, and a box on the ear.

'He called my mother names,' replied Oliver.

'Well, and what if he did, you little ungrateful wretch?' said Mrs.
Sowerberry.  'She deserved what he said, and worse.'

'She didn't' said Oliver.

'She did,' said Mrs. Sowerberry.

'It's a lie!' said Oliver.

Mrs. Sowerberry burst into a flood of tears.

This flood of tears left Mr. Sowerberry no alternative.  If he had
hesitated for one instant to punish Oliver most severely, it must be
quite clear to every experienced reader that he would have been,
according to all precedents in disputes of matrimony established, a
brute, an unnatural husband, an insulting creature, a base imitation of
a man, and various other agreeable characters too numerous for recital
within the limits of this chapter.  To do him justice, he was, as far
as his power went--it was not very extensive--kindly disposed towards
the boy; perhaps, because it was his interest to be so; perhaps,
because his wife disliked him. The flood of tears, however, left him no
resource; so he at once gave him a drubbing, which satisfied even Mrs.
Sowerberry herself, and rendered Mr. Bumble's subsequent application of
the parochial cane, rather unnecessary.  For the rest of the day, he
was shut up in the back kitchen, in company with a pump and a slice of
bread; and at night, Mrs. Sowerberry, after making various remarks
outside the door, by no means complimentary to the memory of his
mother, looked into the room, and, amidst the jeers and pointings of
Noah and Charlotte, ordered him upstairs to his dismal bed.

It was not until he was left alone in the silence and stillness of the
gloomy workshop of the undertaker, that Oliver gave way to the feelings
which the day's treatment may be supposed likely to have awakened in a
mere child.  He had listened to their taunts with a look of contempt;
he had borne the lash without a cry: for he felt that pride swelling in
his heart which would have kept down a shriek to the last, though they
had roasted him alive.  But now, when there were none to see or hear
him, he fell upon his knees on the floor; and, hiding his face in his
hands, wept such tears as, God send for the credit of our nature, few
so young may ever have cause to pour out before him!

For a long time, Oliver remained motionless in this attitude. The
candle was burning low in the socket when he rose to his feet. Having
gazed cautiously round him, and listened intently, he gently undid the
fastenings of the door, and looked abroad.

It was a cold, dark night.  The stars seemed, to the boy's eyes,
farther from the earth than he had ever seen them before; there was no
wind; and the sombre shadows thrown by the trees upon the ground,
looked sepulchral and death-like, from being so still. He softly
reclosed the door.  Having availed himself of the expiring light of the
candle to tie up in a handkerchief the few articles of wearing apparel
he had, sat himself down upon a bench, to wait for morning.

With the first ray of light that struggled through the crevices in the
shutters, Oliver arose, and again unbarred the door.  One timid look
around--one moment's pause of hesitation--he had closed it behind him,
and was in the open street.

He looked to the right and to the left, uncertain whither to fly.

He remembered to have seen the waggons, as they went out, toiling up
the hill.  He took the same route; and arriving at a footpath across
the fields: which he knew, after some distance, led out again into the
road; struck into it, and walked quickly on.

Along this same footpath, Oliver well-remembered he had trotted beside
Mr. Bumble, when he first carried him to the workhouse from the farm.
His way lay directly in front of the cottage. His heart beat quickly
when he bethought himself of this; and he half resolved to turn back.
He had come a long way though, and should lose a great deal of time by
doing so.  Besides, it was so early that there was very little fear of
his being seen; so he walked on.

He reached the house.  There was no appearance of its inmates stirring
at that early hour.  Oliver stopped, and peeped into the garden.  A
child was weeding one of the little beds; as he stopped, he raised his
pale face and disclosed the features of one of his former companions.
Oliver felt glad to see him, before he went; for, though younger than
himself, he had been his little friend and playmate.  They had been
beaten, and starved, and shut up together, many and many a time.

'Hush, Dick!' said Oliver, as the boy ran to the gate, and thrust his
thin arm between the rails to greet him.  'Is any one up?'

'Nobody but me,' replied the child.

'You musn't say you saw me, Dick,' said Oliver.  'I am running away.
They beat and ill-use me, Dick; and I am going to seek my fortune, some
long way off.  I don't know where.  How pale you are!'

'I heard the doctor tell them I was dying,' replied the child with a
faint smile.  'I am very glad to see you, dear; but don't stop, don't
stop!'

'Yes, yes, I will, to say good-b'ye to you,' replied Oliver. 'I shall
see you again, Dick.  I know I shall!  You will be well and happy!'

'I hope so,' replied the child.  'After I am dead, but not before.  I
know the doctor must be right, Oliver, because I dream so much of
Heaven, and Angels, and kind faces that I never see when I am awake.
Kiss me,' said the child,  climbing up the low gate, and flinging his
little arms round Oliver's neck. 'Good-b'ye, dear!  God bless you!'

The blessing was from a young child's lips, but it was the first that
Oliver had ever heard invoked upon his head; and through the struggles
and sufferings, and troubles and changes, of his after life, he never
once forgot it.



CHAPTER VIII

OLIVER WALKS TO LONDON.  HE ENCOUNTERS ON THE ROAD A STRANGE SORT OF
YOUNG GENTLEMAN

Oliver reached the stile at which the by-path terminated; and once more
gained the high-road.  It was eight o'clock now. Though he was nearly
five miles away from the town, he ran, and hid behind the hedges, by
turns, till noon: fearing that he might be pursued and overtaken.  Then
he sat down to rest by the side of the milestone, and began to think,
for the first time, where he had better go and try to live.

The stone by which he was seated, bore, in large characters, an
intimation that it was just seventy miles from that spot to London. The
name awakened a new train of ideas in the boy's mind.

London!--that great place!--nobody--not even Mr. Bumble--could ever
find him there!  He had often heard the old men in the workhouse, too,
say that no lad of spirit need want in London; and that there were ways
of living in that vast city, which those who had been bred up in
country parts had no idea of.  It was the very place for a homeless
boy, who must die in the streets unless some one helped him. As these
things passed through his thoughts, he jumped upon his feet, and again
walked forward.

He had diminished the distance between himself and London by full four
miles more, before he recollected how much he must undergo ere he could
hope to reach his place of destination. As this consideration forced
itself upon him, he slackened his pace a little, and meditated upon his
means of getting there.  He had a crust of bread, a coarse shirt, and
two pairs of stockings, in his bundle.  He had a penny too--a gift of
Sowerberry's after some funeral in which he had acquitted himself more
than ordinarily well--in his pocket. 'A clean shirt,' thought Oliver,
'is a very comfortable thing; and so are two pairs of darned stockings;
and so is a penny; but they are small helps to a sixty-five miles' walk
in winter time.'  But Oliver's thoughts, like those of most other
people, although they were extremely ready and active to point out his
difficulties, were wholly at a loss to suggest any feasible mode of
surmounting them; so, after a good deal of thinking to no particular
purpose, he changed his little bundle over to the other shoulder, and
trudged on.

Oliver walked twenty miles that day; and all that time tasted nothing
but the crust of dry bread, and a few draughts of water, which he
begged at the cottage-doors by the road-side.  When the night came, he
turned into a meadow; and, creeping close under a hay-rick, determined
to lie there, till morning.  He felt frightened at first, for the wind
moaned dismally over the empty fields: and he was cold and hungry, and
more alone than he had ever felt before.  Being very tired with his
walk, however, he soon fell asleep and forgot his troubles.

He felt cold and stiff, when he got up next morning, and so hungry that
he was obliged to exchange the penny for a small loaf, in the very
first village through which he passed.  He had walked no more than
twelve miles, when night closed in again. His feet were sore, and his
legs so weak that they trembled beneath him.  Another night passed in
the bleak damp air, made him worse; when he set forward on his journey
next morning he could hardly crawl along.

He waited at the bottom of a steep hill till a stage-coach came up, and
then begged of the outside passengers; but there were very few who took
any notice of him: and even those told him to wait till they got to the
top of the hill, and then let them see how far he could run for a
halfpenny.  Poor Oliver tried to keep up with the coach a little way,
but was unable to do it, by reason of his fatigue and sore feet.  When
the outsides saw this, they put their halfpence back into their pockets
again, declaring that he was an idle young dog, and didn't deserve
anything; and the coach rattled away and left only a cloud of dust
behind.

In some villages, large painted boards were fixed up: warning all
persons who begged within the district, that they would be sent to
jail.  This frightened Oliver very much, and made him glad to get out
of those villages with all possible expedition.  In others, he would
stand about the inn-yards, and look mournfully at every one who passed:
a proceeding which generally terminated in the landlady's ordering one
of the post-boys who were lounging about, to drive that strange boy out
of the place, for she was sure he had come to steal something.  If he
begged at a farmer's house, ten to one but they threatened to set the
dog on him; and when he showed his nose in a shop, they talked about
the beadle--which brought Oliver's heart into his mouth,--very often
the only thing he had there, for many hours together.

In fact, if it had not been for a good-hearted turnpike-man, and a
benevolent old lady, Oliver's troubles would have been shortened by the
very same process which had put an end to his mother's; in other words,
he would most assuredly have fallen dead upon the king's highway.  But
the turnpike-man gave him a meal of bread and cheese; and the old lady,
who had a shipwrecked grandson wandering barefoot in some distant part
of the earth, took pity upon the poor orphan, and gave him what little
she could afford--and more--with such kind and gentle words, and such
tears of sympathy and compassion, that they sank deeper into Oliver's
soul, than all the sufferings he had ever undergone.

Early on the seventh morning after he had left his native place, Oliver
limped slowly into the little town of Barnet. The window-shutters were
closed; the street was empty; not a soul had awakened to the business
of the day.  The sun was rising in all its splendid beauty; but the
light only served to show the boy his own lonesomeness and desolation,
as he sat, with bleeding feet and covered with dust, upon a door-step.

By degrees, the shutters were opened; the window-blinds were drawn up;
and people began passing to and fro.  Some few stopped to gaze at
Oliver for a moment or two, or turned round to stare at him as they
hurried by; but none relieved him, or troubled themselves to inquire
how he came there. He had no heart to beg. And there he sat.

He had been crouching on the step for some time: wondering at the great
number of public-houses (every other house in Barnet was a tavern,
large or small), gazing listlessly at the coaches as they passed
through, and thinking how strange it seemed that they could do, with
ease, in a few hours, what it had taken him a whole week of courage and
determination beyond his years to accomplish: when he was roused by
observing that a boy, who had passed him carelessly some minutes
before, had returned, and was now surveying him most earnestly from the
opposite side of the way.  He took little heed of this at first; but
the boy remained in the same attitude of close observation so long,
that Oliver raised his head, and returned his steady look.  Upon this,
the boy crossed over; and walking close up to Oliver, said,

'Hullo, my covey!  What's the row?'

The boy who addressed this inquiry to the young wayfarer, was about his
own age: but one of the queerest looking boys that Oliver had even
seen.  He was a snub-nosed, flat-browed, common-faced boy enough; and
as dirty a juvenile as one would wish to see; but he had about him all
the airs and manners of a man.  He was short of his age: with rather
bow-legs, and little, sharp, ugly eyes.  His hat was stuck on the top
of his head so lightly, that it threatened to fall off every
moment--and would have done so, very often, if the wearer had not had a
knack of every now and then giving his head a sudden twitch, which
brought it back to its old place again.  He wore a man's coat, which
reached nearly to his heels.  He had turned the cuffs back, half-way up
his arm, to get his hands out of the sleeves: apparently with the
ultimate view of thrusting them into the pockets of his corduroy
trousers; for there he kept them.  He was, altogether, as roystering
and swaggering a young gentleman as ever stood four feet six, or
something less, in the bluchers.

'Hullo, my covey!  What's the row?' said this strange young gentleman
to Oliver.

'I am very hungry and tired,' replied Oliver: the tears standing in his
eyes as he spoke. 'I have walked a long way.  I have been walking these
seven days.'

'Walking for sivin days!' said the young gentleman.  'Oh, I see. Beak's
order, eh?  But,' he added, noticing Oliver's look of surprise, 'I
suppose you don't know what a beak is, my flash com-pan-i-on.'

Oliver mildly replied, that he had always heard a bird's mouth
described by the term in question.

'My eyes, how green!' exclaimed the young gentleman. 'Why, a beak's a
madgst'rate; and when you walk by a beak's order, it's not straight
forerd, but always agoing up, and niver a coming down agin.  Was you
never on the mill?'

'What mill?' inquired Oliver.

'What mill!  Why, _the_ mill--the mill as takes up so little room that
it'll work inside a Stone Jug; and always goes better when the wind's
low with people, than when it's high; acos then they can't get workmen.
But come,' said the young gentleman; 'you want grub, and you shall have
it.  I'm at low-water-mark myself--only one bob and a magpie; but, as
far as it goes, I'll fork out and stump.  Up with you on your pins.
There!  Now then! 'Morrice!'

Assisting Oliver to rise, the young gentleman took him to an adjacent
chandler's shop, where he purchased a sufficiency of ready-dressed ham
and a half-quartern loaf, or, as he himself expressed it, 'a fourpenny
bran!' the ham being kept clean and preserved from dust, by the
ingenious expedient of making a hole in the loaf by pulling out a
portion of the crumb, and stuffing it therein.  Taking the bread under
his arm, the young gentlman turned into a small public-house, and led
the way to a tap-room in the rear of the premises. Here, a pot of beer
was brought in, by direction of the mysterious youth; and Oliver,
falling to, at his new friend's bidding, made a long and hearty meal,
during the progress of which the strange boy eyed him from time to time
with great attention.

'Going to London?' said the strange boy, when Oliver had at length
concluded.

'Yes.'

'Got any lodgings?'

'No.'

'Money?'

'No.'

The strange boy whistled; and put his arms into his pockets, as far as
the big coat-sleeves would let them go.

'Do you live in London?' inquired Oliver.

'Yes. I do, when I'm at home,' replied the boy. 'I suppose you want
some place to sleep in to-night, don't you?'

'I do, indeed,' answered Oliver. 'I have not slept under a roof since I
left the country.'

'Don't fret your eyelids on that score,' said the young gentleman.
'I've got to be in London to-night; and I know a 'spectable old
gentleman as lives there, wot'll give you lodgings for nothink, and
never ask for the change--that is, if any genelman he knows interduces
you. And don't he know me?  Oh, no! Not in the least!  By no means.
Certainly not!'

The young gentleman smiled, as if to intimate that the latter fragments
of discourse were playfully ironical; and finished the beer as he did
so.

This unexpected offer of shelter was too tempting to be resisted;
especially as it was immediately followed up, by the assurance that the
old gentleman referred to, would doubtless provide Oliver with a
comfortable place, without loss of time.  This led to a more friendly
and confidential dialogue; from which Oliver discovered that his
friend's name was Jack Dawkins, and that he was a peculiar pet and
protege of the elderly gentleman before mentioned.

Mr. Dawkin's appearance did not say a vast deal in favour of the
comforts which his patron's interest obtained for those whom he took
under his protection; but, as he had a rather flightly and dissolute
mode of conversing, and furthermore avowed that among his intimate
friends he was better known by the sobriquet of 'The Artful Dodger,'
Oliver concluded that, being of a dissipated and careless turn, the
moral precepts of his benefactor had hitherto been thrown away upon
him.  Under this impression, he secretly resolved to cultivate the good
opinion of the old gentleman as quickly as possible; and, if he found
the Dodger incorrigible, as he more than half suspected he should, to
decline the honour of his farther acquaintance.

As John Dawkins objected to their entering London before nightfall, it
was nearly eleven o'clock when they reached the turnpike at Islington.
They crossed from the Angel into St. John's Road; struck down the small
street which terminates at Sadler's Wells Theatre; through Exmouth
Street and Coppice Row; down the little court by the side of the
workhouse; across the classic ground which once bore the name of
Hockley-in-the-Hole; thence into Little Saffron Hill; and so into
Saffron Hill the Great: along which the Dodger scudded at a rapid pace,
directing Oliver to follow close at his heels.

Although Oliver had enough to occupy his attention in keeping sight of
his leader, he could not help bestowing a few hasty glances on either
side of the way, as he passed along.  A dirtier or more wretched place
he had never seen.  The street was very narrow and muddy, and the air
was impregnated with filthy odours.

There were a good many small shops; but the only stock in trade
appeared to be heaps of children, who, even at that time of night, were
crawling in and out at the doors, or screaming from the inside.  The
sole places that seemed to prosper amid the general blight of the
place, were the public-houses; and in them, the lowest orders of Irish
were wrangling with might and main. Covered ways and yards, which here
and there diverged from the main street, disclosed little knots of
houses, where drunken men and women were positively wallowing in filth;
and from several of the door-ways, great ill-looking fellows were
cautiously emerging, bound, to all appearance, on no very well-disposed
or harmless errands.

Oliver was just considering whether he hadn't better run away, when
they reached the bottom of the hill.  His conductor, catching him by
the arm, pushed open the door of a house near Field Lane; and drawing
him into the passage, closed it behind them.

'Now, then!' cried a voice from below, in reply to a whistle from the
Dodger.

'Plummy and slam!' was the reply.

This seemed to be some watchword or signal that all was right; for the
light of a feeble candle gleamed on the wall at the remote end of the
passage; and a man's face peeped out, from where a balustrade of the
old kitchen staircase had been broken away.

'There's two on you,' said the man, thrusting the candle farther out,
and shielding his eyes with his hand.  'Who's the t'other one?'

'A new pal,' replied Jack Dawkins, pulling Oliver forward.

'Where did he come from?'

'Greenland. Is Fagin upstairs?'

'Yes, he's a sortin' the wipes.  Up with you!'  The candle was drawn
back, and the face disappeared.

Oliver, groping his way with one hand, and having the other firmly
grasped by his companion, ascended with much difficulty the dark and
broken stairs: which his conductor mounted with an ease and expedition
that showed he was well acquainted with them.

He threw open the door of a back-room, and drew Oliver in after him.

The walls and ceiling of the room were perfectly black with age and
dirt.  There was a deal table before the fire: upon which were a
candle, stuck in a ginger-beer bottle, two or three pewter pots, a loaf
and butter, and a plate.  In a frying-pan, which was on the fire, and
which was secured to the mantelshelf by a string, some sausages were
cooking; and standing over them, with a toasting-fork in his hand, was
a very old shrivelled Jew, whose villainous-looking and repulsive face
was obscured by a quantity of matted red hair. He was dressed in a
greasy flannel gown, with his throat bare; and seemed to be dividing
his attention between the frying-pan and the clothes-horse, over which
a great number of silk handkerchiefs were hanging.  Several rough beds
made of old sacks, were huddled side by side on the floor. Seated round
the table were four or five boys, none older than the Dodger, smoking
long clay pipes, and drinking spirits with the air of middle-aged men.
These all crowded about their associate as he whispered a few words to
the Jew; and then turned round and grinned at Oliver.  So did the Jew
himself, toasting-fork in hand.

'This is him, Fagin,' said Jack Dawkins;'my friend Oliver Twist.'

The Jew grinned; and, making a low obeisance to Oliver, took him by the
hand, and hoped he should have the honour of his intimate acquaintance.
Upon this, the young gentleman with the pipes came round him, and shook
both his hands very hard--especially the one in which he held his
little bundle.  One young gentleman was very anxious to hang up his cap
for him; and another was so obliging as to put his hands in his
pockets, in order that, as he was very tired, he might not have the
trouble of emptying them, himself, when he went to bed.  These
civilities would probably be extended much farther, but for a liberal
exercise of the Jew's toasting-fork on the heads and shoulders of the
affectionate youths who offered them.

'We are very glad to see you, Oliver, very,' said the Jew. 'Dodger,
take off the sausages; and draw a tub near the fire for Oliver.  Ah,
you're a-staring at the pocket-handkerchiefs! eh, my dear. There are a
good many of 'em, ain't there? We've just looked 'em out, ready for the
wash; that's all, Oliver; that's all. Ha! ha! ha!'

The latter part of this speech, was hailed by a boisterous shout from
all the hopeful pupils of the merry old gentleman. In the midst of
which they went to supper.

Oliver ate his share, and the Jew then mixed him a glass of hot
gin-and-water: telling him he must drink it off directly, because
another gentleman wanted the tumbler. Oliver did as he was desired.
Immediately afterwards he felt himself gently lifted on to one of the
sacks; and then he sunk into a deep sleep.



CHAPTER IX

CONTAINING FURTHER PARTICULARS CONCERNING THE PLEASANT OLD GENTLEMAN,
AND HIS HOPEFUL PUPILS

It was late next morning when Oliver awoke, from a sound, long sleep.
There was no other person in the room but the old Jew, who was boiling
some coffee in a saucepan for breakfast, and whistling softly to
himself as he stirred it round and round, with an iron spoon. He would
stop every now and then to listen when there was the least noise below:
and when he had satisfied himself, he would go on whistling and
stirring again, as before.

Although Oliver had roused himself from sleep, he was not thoroughly
awake. There is a drowsy state, between sleeping and waking, when you
dream more in five minutes with your eyes half open, and yourself half
conscious of everything that is passing around you, than you would in
five nights with your eyes fast closed, and your senses wrapt in
perfect unconsciousness. At such time, a mortal knows just enough of
what his mind is doing, to form some glimmering conception of its
mighty powers, its bounding from earth and spurning time and space,
when freed from the restraint of its corporeal associate.

Oliver was precisely in this condition. He saw the Jew with his
half-closed eyes; heard his low whistling; and recognised the sound of
the spoon grating against the saucepan's sides: and yet the self-same
senses were mentally engaged, at the same time, in busy action with
almost everybody he had ever known.

When the coffee was done, the Jew drew the saucepan to the hob.
Standing, then in an irresolute attitude for a few minutes, as if he
did not well know how to employ himself, he turned round and looked at
Oliver, and called him by his name. He did not answer, and was to all
appearances asleep.

After satisfying himself upon this head, the Jew stepped gently to the
door: which he fastened. He then drew forth: as it seemed to Oliver,
from some trap in the floor: a small box, which he placed carefully on
the table. His eyes glistened as he raised the lid, and looked in.
Dragging an old chair to the table, he sat down; and took from it a
magnificent gold watch, sparkling with jewels.

'Aha!' said the Jew, shrugging up his shoulders, and distorting every
feature with a hideous grin. 'Clever dogs! Clever dogs! Staunch to the
last! Never told the old parson where they were. Never poached upon old
Fagin! And why should they? It wouldn't have loosened the knot, or kept
the drop up, a minute longer. No, no, no! Fine fellows! Fine fellows!'

With these, and other muttered reflections of the like nature, the Jew
once more deposited the watch in its place of safety. At least half a
dozen more were severally drawn forth from the same box, and surveyed
with equal pleasure; besides rings, brooches, bracelets, and other
articles of jewellery, of such magnificent materials, and costly
workmanship, that Oliver had no idea, even of their names.

Having replaced these trinkets, the Jew took out another: so small that
it lay in the palm of his hand. There seemed to be some very minute
inscription on it; for the Jew laid it flat upon the table, and shading
it with his hand, pored over it, long and earnestly. At length he put
it down, as if despairing of success; and, leaning back in his chair,
muttered:

'What a fine thing capital punishment is! Dead men never repent; dead
men never bring awkward stories to light. Ah, it's a fine thing for the
trade! Five of 'em strung up in a row, and none left to play booty, or
turn white-livered!'

As the Jew uttered these words, his bright dark eyes, which had been
staring vacantly before him, fell on Oliver's face; the boy's eyes were
fixed on his in mute curiousity; and although the recognition was only
for an instant--for the briefest space of time that can possibly be
conceived--it was enough to show the old man that he had been observed.

He closed the lid of the box with a loud crash; and, laying his hand on
a bread knife which was on the table, started furiously up. He trembled
very much though; for, even in his terror, Oliver could see that the
knife quivered in the air.

'What's that?' said the Jew. 'What do you watch me for? Why are you
awake? What have you seen? Speak out, boy! Quick--quick! for your life.

'I wasn't able to sleep any longer, sir,' replied Oliver, meekly. 'I am
very sorry if I have disturbed you, sir.'

'You were not awake an hour ago?' said the Jew, scowling fiercely on
the boy.

'No! No, indeed!' replied Oliver.

'Are you sure?' cried the Jew: with a still fiercer look than before:
and a threatening attitude.

'Upon my word I was not, sir,' replied Oliver, earnestly. 'I was not,
indeed, sir.'

'Tush, tush, my dear!' said the Jew, abruptly resuming his old manner,
and playing with the knife a little, before he laid it down; as if to
induce the belief that he had caught it up, in mere sport. 'Of course I
know that, my dear. I only tried to frighten you. You're a brave boy.
Ha! ha! you're a brave boy, Oliver.' The Jew rubbed his hands with a
chuckle, but glanced uneasily at the box, notwithstanding.

'Did you see any of these pretty things, my dear?' said the Jew, laying
his hand upon it after a short pause.

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Ah!' said the Jew, turning rather pale. 'They--they're mine, Oliver;
my little property. All I have to live upon, in my old age. The folks
call me a miser, my dear. Only a miser; that's all.'

Oliver thought the old gentleman must be a decided miser to live in
such a dirty place, with so many watches; but, thinking that perhaps
his fondness for the Dodger and the other boys, cost him a good deal of
money, he only cast a deferential look at the Jew, and asked if he
might get up.

'Certainly, my dear, certainly,' replied the old gentleman. 'Stay.
There's a pitcher of water in the corner by the door. Bring it here;
and I'll give you a basin to wash in, my dear.'

Oliver got up; walked across the room; and stooped for an instant to
raise the pitcher.  When he turned his head, the box was gone.

He had scarcely washed himself, and made everything tidy, by emptying
the basin out of the window, agreeably to the Jew's directions, when
the Dodger returned: accompanied by a very sprightly young friend, whom
Oliver had seen smoking on the previous night, and who was now formally
introduced to him as Charley Bates. The four sat down, to breakfast, on
the coffee, and some hot rolls and ham which the Dodger had brought
home in the crown of his hat.

'Well,' said the Jew, glancing slyly at Oliver, and addressing himself
to the Dodger, 'I hope you've been at work this morning, my dears?'

'Hard,' replied the Dodger.

'As nails,' added Charley Bates.

'Good boys, good boys!' said the Jew. 'What have you got, Dodger?'

'A couple of pocket-books,' replied that young gentlman.

'Lined?' inquired the Jew, with eagerness.

'Pretty well,' replied the Dodger, producing two pocket-books; one
green, and the other red.

'Not so heavy as they might be,' said the Jew, after looking at the
insides carefully; 'but very neat and nicely made.  Ingenious workman,
ain't he, Oliver?'

'Very indeed, sir,' said Oliver. At which Mr. Charles Bates laughed
uproariously; very much to the amazement of Oliver, who saw nothing to
laugh at, in anything that had passed.

'And what have you got, my dear?' said Fagin to Charley Bates.

'Wipes,' replied Master Bates; at the same time producing four
pocket-handkerchiefs.

'Well,' said the Jew, inspecting them closely; 'they're very good ones,
very. You haven't marked them well, though, Charley; so the marks shall
be picked out with a needle, and we'll teach Oliver how to do it. Shall
us, Oliver, eh? Ha! ha! ha!'

'If you please, sir,' said Oliver.

'You'd like to be able to make pocket-handkerchiefs as easy as Charley
Bates, wouldn't you, my dear?' said the Jew.

'Very much, indeed, if you'll teach me, sir,' replied Oliver.

Master Bates saw something so exquisitely ludicrous in this reply, that
he burst into another laugh; which laugh, meeting the coffee he was
drinking, and carrying it down some wrong channel, very nearly
terminated in his premature suffocation.

'He is so jolly green!' said Charley when he recovered, as an apology
to the company for his unpolite behaviour.

The Dodger said nothing, but he smoothed Oliver's hair over his eyes,
and said he'd know better, by and by; upon which the old gentleman,
observing Oliver's colour mounting, changed the subject by asking
whether there had been much of a crowd at the execution that morning?
This made him wonder more and more; for it was plain from the replies
of the two boys that they had both been there; and Oliver naturally
wondered how they could possibly have found time to be so very
industrious.

When the breakfast was cleared away; the merry old gentlman and the two
boys played at a very curious and uncommon game, which was performed in
this way. The merry old gentleman, placing a snuff-box in one pocket of
his trousers, a note-case in the other, and a watch in his waistcoat
pocket, with a guard-chain round his neck, and sticking a mock diamond
pin in his shirt: buttoned his coat tight round him, and putting his
spectacle-case and handkerchief in his pockets, trotted up and down the
room with a stick, in imitation of the manner in which old gentlemen
walk about the streets any hour in the day.  Sometimes he stopped at
the fire-place, and sometimes at the door, making believe that he was
staring with all his might into shop-windows.  At such times, he would
look constantly round him, for fear of thieves, and would keep slapping
all his pockets in turn, to see that he hadn't lost anything, in such a
very funny and natural manner, that Oliver laughed till the tears ran
down his face.  All this time, the two boys followed him closely about:
getting out of his sight, so nimbly, every time he turned round, that
it was impossible to follow their motions. At last, the Dodger trod
upon his toes, or ran upon his boot accidently, while Charley Bates
stumbled up against him behind; and in that one moment they took from
him, with the most extraordinary rapidity, snuff-box, note-case,
watch-guard, chain, shirt-pin, pocket-handkerchief, even the
spectacle-case.  If the old gentlman felt a hand in any one of his
pockets, he cried out where it was; and then the game began all over
again.

When this game had been played a great many times, a couple of young
ladies called to see the young gentleman; one of whom was named Bet,
and the other Nancy.  They wore a good deal of hair, not very neatly
turned up behind, and were rather untidy about the shoes and stockings.
They were not exactly pretty, perhaps; but they had a great deal of
colour in their faces, and looked quite stout and hearty.  Being
remarkably free and agreeable in their manners, Oliver thought them
very nice girls indeed.  As there is no doubt they were.

The visitors stopped a long time. Spirits were produced, in consequence
of one of the young ladies complaining of a coldness in her inside; and
the conversation took a very convivial and improving turn. At length,
Charley Bates expressed his opinion that it was time to pad the hoof.
This, it occurred to Oliver, must be French for going out; for directly
afterwards, the Dodger, and Charley, and the two young ladies, went
away together, having been kindly furnished by the amiable old Jew with
money to spend.

'There, my dear,' said Fagin. 'That's a pleasant life, isn't it? They
have gone out for the day.'

'Have they done work, sir?' inquired Oliver.

'Yes,' said the Jew; 'that is, unless they should unexpectedly come
across any, when they are out; and they won't neglect it, if they do,
my dear, depend upon it.  Make 'em your models, my dear. Make 'em your
models,' tapping the fire-shovel on the hearth to add force to his
words; 'do everything they bid you, and take their advice in all
matters--especially the Dodger's, my dear. He'll be a great man
himself, and will make you one too, if you take pattern by him.--Is my
handkerchief hanging out of my pocket, my dear?' said the Jew, stopping
short.

'Yes, sir,' said Oliver.

'See if you can take it out, without my feeling it; as you saw them do,
when we were at play this morning.'

Oliver held up the bottom of the pocket with one hand, as he had seen
the Dodger hold it, and drew the handkerchief lightly out of it with
the other.

'Is it gone?' cried the Jew.

'Here it is, sir,' said Oliver, showing it in his hand.

'You're a clever boy, my dear,' said the playful old gentleman, patting
Oliver on the head approvingly. 'I never saw a sharper lad. Here's a
shilling for you. If you go on, in this way, you'll be the greatest man
of the time. And now come here, and I'll show you how to take the marks
out of the handkerchiefs.'

Oliver wondered what picking the old gentleman's pocket in play, had to
do with his chances of being a great man.  But, thinking that the Jew,
being so much his senior, must know best, he followed him quietly to
the table, and was soon deeply involved in his new study.



CHAPTER X

OLIVER BECOMES BETTER ACQUAINTED WITH THE CHARACTERS OF HIS NEW
ASSOCIATES; AND PURCHASES EXPERIENCE AT A HIGH PRICE. BEING A SHORT,
BUT VERY IMPORTANT CHAPTER, IN THIS HISTORY

For many days, Oliver remained in the Jew's room, picking the marks out
of the pocket-handkerchief, (of which a great number were brought
home,) and sometimes taking part in the game already described: which
the two boys and the Jew played, regularly, every morning. At length,
he began to languish for fresh air, and took many occasions of
earnestly entreating the old gentleman to allow him to go out to work
with his two companions.

Oliver was rendered the more anxious to be actively employed, by what
he had seen of the stern morality of the old gentleman's character.
Whenever the Dodger or Charley Bates came home at night, empty-handed,
he would expatiate with great vehemence on the misery of idle and lazy
habits; and would enforce upon them the necessity of an active life, by
sending them supperless to bed. On one occasion, indeed, he even went
so far as to knock them both down a flight of stairs; but this was
carrying out his virtuous precepts to an unusual extent.

At length, one morning, Oliver obtained the permission he had so
eagerly sought. There had been no handkerchiefs to work upon, for two
or three days, and the dinners had been rather meagre. Perhaps these
were reasons for the old gentleman's giving his assent; but, whether
they were or no, he told Oliver he might go, and placed him under the
joint guardianship of Charley Bates, and his friend the Dodger.

The three boys sallied out; the Dodger with his coat-sleeves tucked up,
and his hat cocked, as usual; Master Bates sauntering along with his
hands in his pockets; and Oliver between them, wondering where they
were going, and what branch of manufacture he would be instructed in,
first.

The pace at which they went, was such a very lazy, ill-looking saunter,
that Oliver soon began to think his companions were going to deceive
the old gentleman, by not going to work at all. The Dodger had a
vicious propensity, too, of pulling the caps from the heads of small
boys and tossing them down areas; while Charley Bates exhibited some
very loose notions concerning the rights of property, by pilfering
divers apples and onions from the stalls at the kennel sides, and
thrusting them into pockets which were so surprisingly capacious, that
they seemed to undermine his whole suit of clothes in every direction.
These things looked so bad, that Oliver was on the point of declaring
his intention of seeking his way back, in the best way he could; when
his thoughts were suddenly directed into another channel, by a very
mysterious change of behaviour on the part of the Dodger.

They were just emerging from a narrow court not far from the open
square in Clerkenwell, which is yet called, by some strange perversion
of terms, 'The Green': when the Dodger made a sudden stop; and, laying
his finger on his lip, drew his companions back again, with the
greatest caution and circumspection.

'What's the matter?' demanded Oliver.

'Hush!' replied the Dodger. 'Do you see that old cove at the
book-stall?'

'The old gentleman over the way?' said Oliver. 'Yes, I see him.'

'He'll do,' said the Dodger.

'A prime plant,' observed Master Charley Bates.

Oliver looked from one to the other, with the greatest surprise; but he
was not permitted to make any inquiries; for the two boys walked
stealthily across the road, and slunk close behind the old gentleman
towards whom his attention had been directed. Oliver walked a few paces
after them; and, not knowing whether to advance or retire, stood
looking on in silent amazement.

The old gentleman was a very respectable-looking personage, with a
powdered head and gold spectacles. He was dressed in a bottle-green
coat with a black velvet collar; wore white trousers; and carried a
smart bamboo cane under his arm. He had taken up a book from the stall,
and there he stood, reading away, as hard as if he were in his
elbow-chair, in his own study. It is very possible that he fancied
himself there, indeed; for it was plain, from his abstraction, that he
saw not the book-stall, nor the street, nor the boys, nor, in short,
anything but the book itself: which he was reading straight through:
turning over the leaf when he got to the bottom of a page, beginning at
the top line of the next one, and going regularly on, with the greatest
interest and eagerness.

What was Oliver's horror and alarm as he stood a few paces off, looking
on with his eyelids as wide open as they would possibly go, to see the
Dodger plunge his hand into the old gentleman's pocket, and draw from
thence a handkerchief! To see him hand the same to Charley Bates; and
finally to behold them, both running away round the corner at full
speed!

In an instant the whole mystery of the hankerchiefs, and the watches,
and the jewels, and the Jew, rushed upon the boy's mind.

He stood, for a moment, with the blood so tingling through all his
veins from terror, that he felt as if he were in a burning fire; then,
confused and frightened, he took to his heels; and, not knowing what he
did, made off as fast as he could lay his feet to the ground.

This was all done in a minute's space. In the very instant when Oliver
began to run, the old gentleman, putting his hand to his pocket, and
missing his handkerchief, turned sharp round. Seeing the boy scudding
away at such a rapid pace, he very naturally concluded him to be the
depredator; and shouting 'Stop thief!' with all his might, made off
after him, book in hand.

But the old gentleman was not the only person who raised the
hue-and-cry. The Dodger and Master Bates, unwilling to attract public
attention by running down the open street, had merely retired into the
very first doorway round the corner. They no sooner heard the cry, and
saw Oliver running, than, guessing exactly how the matter stood, they
issued forth with great promptitude; and, shouting 'Stop thief!' too,
joined in the pursuit like good citizens.

Although Oliver had been brought up by philosophers, he was not
theoretically acquainted with the beautiful axiom that
self-preservation is the first law of nature. If he had been, perhaps
he would have been prepared for this. Not being prepared, however, it
alarmed him the more; so away he went like the wind, with the old
gentleman and the two boys roaring and shouting behind him.

'Stop thief! Stop thief!' There is a magic in the sound. The tradesman
leaves his counter, and the car-man his waggon; the butcher throws down
his tray; the baker his basket; the milkman his pail; the errand-boy
his parcels; the school-boy his marbles; the paviour his pickaxe; the
child his battledore. Away they run, pell-mell, helter-skelter,
slap-dash: tearing, yelling, screaming, knocking down the passengers as
they turn the corners, rousing up the dogs, and astonishing the fowls:
and streets, squares, and courts, re-echo with the sound.

'Stop thief! Stop thief!' The cry is taken up by a hundred voices, and
the crowd accumulate at every turning. Away they fly, splashing through
the mud, and rattling along the pavements: up go the windows, out run
the people, onward bear the mob, a whole audience desert Punch in the
very thickest of the plot, and, joining the rushing throng, swell the
shout, and lend fresh vigour to the cry, 'Stop thief! Stop thief!'

'Stop thief! Stop thief!' There is a passion FOR _hunting_ _something_
deeply implanted in the human breast.  One wretched breathless child,
panting with exhaustion; terror in his looks; agony in his eyes; large
drops of perspiration streaming down his face; strains every nerve to
make head upon his pursuers; and as they follow on his track, and gain
upon him every instant, they hail his decreasing strength with joy.
'Stop thief!'  Ay, stop him for God's sake, were it only in mercy!

Stopped at last!  A clever blow.  He is down upon the pavement; and the
crowd eagerly gather round him:  each new comer, jostling and
struggling with the others to catch a glimpse.  'Stand aside!'  'Give
him a little air!'  'Nonsense! he don't deserve it.'  'Where's the
gentleman?'  'Here his is, coming down the street.'  'Make room there
for the gentleman!' 'Is this the boy, sir!'  'Yes.'

Oliver lay, covered with mud and dust, and bleeding from the mouth,
looking wildly round upon the heap of faces that surrounded him, when
the old gentleman was officiously dragged and pushed into the circle by
the foremost of the pursuers.

'Yes,' said the gentleman, 'I am afraid it is the boy.'

'Afraid!' murmured the crowd.  'That's a good 'un!'

'Poor fellow!' said the gentleman, 'he has hurt himself.'

'_I_ did that, sir,' said a great lubberly fellow, stepping forward;
'and preciously I cut my knuckle agin' his mouth.  I stopped him, sir.'

The fellow touched his hat with a grin, expecting something for his
pains; but, the old gentleman, eyeing him with an expression of
dislike, look anxiously round, as if he contemplated running away
himself:  which it is very possible he might have attempted to do, and
thus have afforded another chase, had not a police officer (who is
generally the last person to arrive in such cases) at that moment made
his way through the crowd, and seized Oliver by the collar.

'Come, get up,' said the man, roughly.

'It wasn't me indeed, sir.  Indeed, indeed, it was two other boys,'
said Oliver, clasping his hands passionately, and looking round.  'They
are here somewhere.'

'Oh no, they ain't,' said the officer.  He meant this to be ironical,
but it was true besides; for the Dodger and Charley Bates had filed off
down the first convenient court they came to.

'Come, get up!'

'Don't hurt him,' said the old gentleman, compassionately.

'Oh no, I won't hurt him,' replied the officer, tearing his jacket half
off his back, in proof thereof.  'Come, I know you; it won't do.  Will
you stand upon your legs, you young devil?'

Oliver, who could hardly stand, made a shift to raise himself on his
feet, and was at once lugged along the streets by the jacket-collar, at
a rapid pace.  The gentleman walked on with them by the officer's side;
and as many of the crowd as could achieve the feat, got a little ahead,
and stared back at Oliver from time to time.  The boys shouted in
triumph; and on they went.



CHAPTER XI

TREATS OF MR. FANG THE POLICE MAGISTRATE; AND FURNISHES A SLIGHT
SPECIMEN OF HIS MODE OF ADMINISTERING JUSTICE

The offence had been committed within the district, and indeed in the
immediate neighborhood of, a very notorious metropolitan police office.
The crowd had only the satisfaction of accompanying Oliver through two
or three streets, and down a place called Mutton Hill, when he was led
beneath a low archway, and up a dirty court, into this dispensary of
summary justice, by the back way.  It was a small paved yard into which
they turned; and here they encountered a stout man with a bunch of
whiskers on his face, and a bunch of keys in his hand.

'What's the matter now?' said the man carelessly.

'A young fogle-hunter,' replied the man who had Oliver in charge.

'Are you the party that's been robbed, sir?' inquired the man with the
keys.

'Yes, I am,' replied the old gentleman; 'but I am not sure that this
boy actually took the handkerchief.  I--I would rather not press the
case.'

'Must go before the magistrate now, sir,' replied the man. 'His worship
will be disengaged in half a minute.  Now, young gallows!'

This was an invitation for Oliver to enter through a door which he
unlocked as he spoke, and which led into a stone cell.  Here he was
searched; and nothing being found upon him, locked up.

This cell was in shape and size something like an area cellar, only not
so light.  It was most intolerably dirty; for it was Monday morning;
and it had been tenanted by six drunken people, who had been locked up,
elsewhere, since Saturday night.  But this is little.  In our
station-houses, men and women are every night confined on the most
trivial charges--the word is worth noting--in dungeons, compared with
which, those in Newgate, occupied by the most atrocious felons, tried,
found guilty, and under sentence of death, are palaces. Let any one who
doubts this, compare the two.

The old gentleman looked almost as rueful as Oliver when the key grated
in the lock.  He turned with a sigh to the book, which had been the
innocent cause of all this disturbance.

'There is something in that boy's face,' said the old gentleman to
himself as he walked slowly away, tapping his chin with the cover of
the book, in a thoughtful manner; 'something that touches and interests
me.  _Can_ he be innocent?  He looked like--Bye the bye,' exclaimed the
old gentleman, halting very abruptly, and staring up into the sky,
'Bless my soul!--where have I seen something like that look before?'

After musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked, with the same
meditative face, into a back anteroom opening from the yard; and there,
retiring into a corner, called up before his mind's eye a vast
amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many
years.  'No,' said the old gentleman, shaking his head; 'it must be
imagination.'

He wandered over them again.  He had called them into view, and it was
not easy to replace the shroud that had so long concealed them.  There
were the faces of friends, and foes, and of many that had been almost
strangers peering intrusively from the crowd; there were the faces of
young and blooming girls that were now old women; there were faces that
the grave had changed and closed upon, but which the mind, superior to
its power, still dressed in their old freshness and beauty, calling
back the lustre of the eyes, the brightness of the smile, the beaming
of the soul through its mask of clay, and whispering of beauty beyond
the tomb, changed but to be heightened, and taken from earth only to be
set up as a light, to shed a soft and gentle glow upon the path to
Heaven.

But the old gentleman could recall no one countenance of which Oliver's
features bore a trace.  So, he heaved a sigh over the recollections he
awakened; and being, happily for himself, an absent old gentleman,
buried them again in the pages of the musty book.

He was roused by a touch on the shoulder, and a request from the man
with the keys to follow him into the office.  He closed his book
hastily; and was at once ushered into the imposing presence of the
renowned Mr. Fang.

The office was a front parlour, with a panelled wall.  Mr. Fang sat
behind a bar, at the upper end; and on one side the door was a sort of
wooden pen in which poor little Oliver was already deposited; trembling
very much at the awfulness of the scene.

Mr. Fang was a lean, long-backed, stiff-necked, middle-sized man, with
no great quantity of hair, and what he had, growing on the back and
sides of his head.  His face was stern, and much flushed.  If he were
really not in the habit of drinking rather more than was exactly good
for him, he might have brought action against his countenance for
libel, and have recovered heavy damages.

The old gentleman bowed respectfully; and advancing to the magistrate's
desk, said, suiting the action to the word, 'That is my name and
address, sir.'  He then withdrew a pace or two; and, with another
polite and gentlemanly inclination of the head, waited to be questioned.

Now, it so happened that Mr. Fang was at that moment perusing a leading
article in a newspaper of the morning, adverting to some recent
decision of his, and commending him, for the three hundred and fiftieth
time, to the special and particular notice of the Secretary of State
for the Home Department.  He was out of temper; and he looked up with
an angry scowl.

'Who are you?' said Mr. Fang.

The old gentleman pointed, with some surprise, to his card.

'Officer!' said Mr. Fang, tossing the card contemptuously away with the
newspaper.  'Who is this fellow?'

'My name, sir,' said the old gentleman, speaking _like_ a gentleman,
'my name, sir, is Brownlow.  Permit me to inquire the name of the
magistrate who offers a gratuitous and unprovoked insult to a
respectable person, under the protection of the bench.'  Saying this,
Mr. Brownlow looked around the office as if in search of some person
who would afford him the required information.

'Officer!' said Mr. Fang, throwing the paper on one side, 'what's this
fellow charged with?'

'He's not charged at all, your worship,' replied the officer. 'He
appears against this boy, your worship.'

His worship knew this perfectly well; but it was a good annoyance, and
a safe one.

'Appears against the boy, does he?' said Mr. Fang, surveying Mr.
Brownlow contemptuously from head to foot.  'Swear him!'

'Before I am sworn, I must beg to say one word,' said Mr. Brownlow;
'and that is, that I really never, without actual experience, could
have believed--'

'Hold your tongue, sir!' said Mr. Fang, peremptorily.

'I will not, sir!' replied the old gentleman.

'Hold your tongue this instant, or I'll have you turned out of the
office!' said Mr. Fang.  'You're an insolent impertinent fellow.  How
dare you bully a magistrate!'

'What!' exclaimed the old gentleman, reddening.

'Swear this person!' said Fang to the clerk.  'I'll not hear another
word.  Swear him.'

Mr. Brownlow's indignation was greatly roused; but reflecting perhaps,
that he might only injure the boy by giving vent to it, he suppressed
his feelings and submitted to be sworn at once.

'Now,' said Fang, 'what's the charge against this boy?  What have you
got to say, sir?'

'I was standing at a bookstall--' Mr. Brownlow began.

'Hold your tongue, sir,' said Mr. Fang.  'Policeman!  Where's the
policeman?  Here, swear this policeman.  Now, policeman, what is this?'

The policeman, with becoming humility, related how he had taken the
charge; how he had searched Oliver, and found nothing on his person;
and how that was all he knew about it.

'Are there any witnesses?' inquired Mr. Fang.

'None, your worship,' replied the policeman.

Mr. Fang sat silent for some minutes, and then, turning round to the
prosecutor, said in a towering passion.

'Do you mean to state what your complaint against this boy is, man, or
do you not?  You have been sworn.  Now, if you stand there, refusing to
give evidence, I'll punish you for disrespect to the bench; I will,
by--'

By what, or by whom, nobody knows, for the clerk and jailor coughed
very loud, just at the right moment; and the former dropped a heavy
book upon the floor, thus preventing the word from being
heard--accidently, of course.

With many interruptions, and repeated insults, Mr. Brownlow contrived
to state his case;  observing that, in the surprise of the moment, he
had run after the boy because he had saw him running away; and
expressing his hope that, if the magistrate should believe him,
although not actually the thief, to be connected with the thieves, he
would deal as leniently with him as justice would allow.

'He has been hurt already,' said the old gentleman in conclusion. 'And
I fear,' he added, with great energy, looking towards the bar, 'I
really fear that he is ill.'

'Oh! yes, I dare say!' said Mr. Fang, with a sneer.  'Come, none of
your tricks here, you young vagabond; they won't do. What's your name?'

Oliver tried to reply but his tongue failed him.  He was deadly pale;
and the whole place seemed turning round and round.

'What's your name, you hardened scoundrel?' demanded Mr. Fang.
'Officer, what's his name?'

This was addressed to a bluff old fellow, in a striped waistcoat, who
was standing by the bar.  He bent over Oliver, and repeated the
inquiry; but finding him really incapable of understanding the
question; and knowing that his not replying would only infuriate the
magistrate the more, and add to the severity of his sentence; he
hazarded a guess.

'He says his name's Tom White, your worship,' said the kind-hearted
thief-taker.

'Oh, he won't speak out, won't he?' said Fang.  'Very well, very well.
Where does he live?'

'Where he can, your worship,' replied the officer; again pretending to
receive Oliver's answer.

'Has he any parents?' inquired Mr. Fang.

'He says they died in his infancy, your worship,' replied the officer:
hazarding the usual reply.

At this point of the inquiry, Oliver raised his head; and, looking
round with imploring eyes, murmured a feeble prayer for a draught of
water.

'Stuff and nonsense!' said Mr. Fang:  'don't try to make a fool of me.'

'I think he really is ill, your worship,' remonstrated the officer.

'I know better,' said Mr. Fang.

'Take care of him, officer,' said the old gentleman, raising his hands
instinctively; 'he'll fall down.'

'Stand away, officer,' cried Fang;  'let him, if he likes.'

Oliver availed himself of the kind permission, and fell to the floor in
a fainting fit.  The men in the office looked at each other, but no one
dared to stir.

'I knew he was shamming,' said Fang, as if this were incontestable
proof of the fact.  'Let him lie there; he'll soon be tired of that.'

'How do you propose to deal with the case, sir?'  inquired the clerk in
a low voice.

'Summarily,' replied Mr. Fang.  'He stands committed for three
months--hard labour of course.  Clear the office.'

The door was opened for this purpose, and a couple of men were
preparing to carry the insensible boy to his cell; when an elderly man
of decent but poor appearance, clad in an old suit of black, rushed
hastily into the office, and advanced towards the bench.

'Stop, stop!  don't take him away!  For Heaven's sake stop a moment!'
cried the new comer, breathless with haste.

Although the presiding Genii in such an office as this, exercise a
summary and arbitrary power over the liberties, the good name, the
character, almost the lives, of Her Majesty's subjects, expecially of
the poorer class; and although, within such walls, enough fantastic
tricks are daily played to make the angels blind with weeping; they are
closed to the public, save through the medium of the daily
press.[Footnote:  Or were virtually, then.] Mr. Fang was consequently
not a little indignant to see an unbidden guest enter in such
irreverent disorder.

'What is this?  Who is this?  Turn this man out.  Clear the office!'
cried Mr. Fang.

'I _will_ speak,' cried the man; 'I will not be turned out.  I saw it
all.  I keep the book-stall.  I demand to be sworn. I will not be put
down.  Mr. Fang, you must hear me.  You must not refuse, sir.'

The man was right.  His manner was determined; and the matter was
growing rather too serious to be hushed up.

'Swear the man,' growled Mr. Fang, with a very ill grace. 'Now, man,
what have you got to say?'

'This,' said the man:  'I saw three boys:  two others and the prisoner
here:  loitering on the opposite side of the way, when this gentleman
was reading.  The robbery was committed by another boy.  I saw it done;
and I saw that this boy was perfectly amazed and stupified by it.'
Having by this time recovered a little breath, the worthy book-stall
keeper proceeded to relate, in a more coherent manner the exact
circumstances of the robbery.

'Why didn't you come here before?' said Fang, after a pause.

'I hadn't a soul to mind the shop,' replied the man.  'Everybody who
could have helped me, had joined in the pursuit.  I could get nobody
till five minutes ago; and I've run here all the way.'

'The prosecutor was reading, was he?' inquired Fang, after another
pause.

'Yes,' replied the man.  'The very book he has in his hand.'

'Oh, that book, eh?' said Fang.  'Is it paid for?'

'No, it is not,' replied the man, with a smile.

'Dear me, I forgot all about it!' exclaimed the absent old gentleman,
innocently.

'A nice person to prefer a charge against a poor boy!' said Fang, with
a comical effort to look humane.  'I consider, sir, that you have
obtained possession of that book, under very suspicious and
disreputable circumstances; and you may think yourself very fortunate
that the owner of the property declines to prosecute. Let this be a
lesson to you, my man, or the law will overtake you yet.  The boy is
discharged.  Clear the office!'

'D--n me!' cried the old gentleman, bursting out with the rage he had
kept down so long, 'd--n me!   I'll--'

'Clear the office!' said the magistrate.  'Officers, do you hear? Clear
the office!'

The mandate was obeyed; and the indignant Mr. Brownlow was conveyed
out, with the book in one hand, and the bamboo cane in the other:  in a
perfect phrenzy of rage and defiance.  He reached the yard; and his
passion vanished in a moment.  Little Oliver Twist lay on his back on
the pavement, with his shirt unbuttoned, and his temples bathed with
water; his face a deadly white; and a cold tremble convulsing his whole
frame.

'Poor boy, poor boy!' said Mr. Brownlow, bending over him. 'Call a
coach, somebody, pray.  Directly!'

A coach was obtained, and Oliver having been carefully laid on the
seat, the old gentleman got in and sat himself on the other.

'May I accompany you?' said the book-stall keeper, looking in.

'Bless me, yes, my dear sir,' said Mr. Brownlow quickly.  'I forgot
you.  Dear, dear!  I have this unhappy book still! Jump in.  Poor
fellow!  There's no time to lose.'

The book-stall keeper got into the coach; and away they drove.



CHAPTER XII

IN WHICH OLIVER IS TAKEN BETTER CARE OF THAN HE EVER WAS BEFORE. AND IN
WHICH THE NARRATIVE REVERTS TO THE MERRY OLD GENTLEMAN AND HIS YOUTHFUL
FRIENDS.

The coach rattled away, over nearly the same ground as that which
Oliver had traversed when he first entered London in company with the
Dodger; and, turning a different way when it reached the Angel at
Islington, stopped at length before a neat house, in a quiet shady
street near Pentonville.  Here, a bed was prepared, without loss of
time, in which Mr. Brownlow saw his young charge carefully and
comfortably deposited; and here, he was tended with a kindness and
solicitude that knew no bounds.

But, for many days, Oliver remained insensible to all the goodness of
his new friends.  The sun rose and sank, and rose and sank again, and
many times after that; and still the boy lay stretched on his uneasy
bed, dwindling away beneath the dry and wasting heat of fever.  The
worm does not work more surely on the dead body, than does this slow
creeping fire upon the living frame.

Weak, and thin, and pallid, he awoke at last from what seemed to have
been a long and troubled dream.  Feebly raising himself in the bed,
with his head resting on his trembling arm, he looked anxiously around.

'What room is this?  Where have I been brought to?' said Oliver. 'This
is not the place I went to sleep in.'

He uttered these words in a feeble voice, being very faint and weak;
but they were overheard at once.  The curtain at the bed's head was
hastily drawn back, and a motherly old lady, very neatly and precisely
dressed, rose as she undrew it, from an arm-chair close by, in which
she had been sitting at needle-work.

'Hush, my dear,' said the old lady softly.  'You must be very quiet, or
you will be ill again; and you have been very bad,--as bad as bad could
be, pretty nigh.  Lie down again; there's a dear!'  With those words,
the old lady very gently placed Oliver's head upon the pillow; and,
smoothing back his hair from his forehead, looked so kindly and loving
in his face, that he could not help placing his little withered hand in
hers, and drawing it round his neck.

'Save us!' said the old lady, with tears in her eyes.  'What a grateful
little dear it is.  Pretty creetur!  What would his mother feel if she
had sat by him as I have, and could see him now!'

'Perhaps she does see me,' whispered Oliver, folding his hands
together; 'perhaps she has sat by me.  I almost feel as if she had.'

'That was the fever, my dear,' said the old lady mildly.

'I suppose it was,' replied Oliver, 'because heaven is a long way off;
and they are too happy there, to come down to the bedside of a poor
boy.  But if she knew I was ill, she must have pitied me, even there;
for she was very ill herself before she died.  She can't know anything
about me though,' added Oliver after a moment's silence.  'If she had
seen me hurt, it would have made her sorrowful; and her face has always
looked sweet and happy, when I have dreamed of her.'

The old lady made no reply to this; but wiping her eyes first, and her
spectacles, which lay on the counterpane, afterwards, as if they were
part and parcel of those features, brought some cool stuff for Oliver
to drink; and then, patting him on the cheek, told him he must lie very
quiet, or he would be ill again.

So, Oliver kept very still; partly because he was anxious to obey the
kind old lady in all things; and partly, to tell the truth, because he
was completely exhausted with what he had already said.  He soon fell
into a gentle doze, from which he was awakened by the light of a
candle:  which, being brought near the bed, showed him a gentleman with
a very large and loud-ticking gold watch in his hand, who felt his
pulse, and said he was a great deal better.

'You _are_ a great deal better, are you not, my dear?' said the
gentleman.

'Yes, thank you, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Yes,  I know you are,' said the gentleman:  'You're hungry too, an't
you?'

'No, sir,' answered Oliver.

'Hem!' said the gentleman.  'No, I know you're not.  He is not hungry,
Mrs. Bedwin,' said the gentleman:  looking very wise.

The old lady made a respectful inclination of the head, which seemed to
say that she thought the doctor was a very clever man. The doctor
appeared much of the same opinion himself.

'You feel sleepy, don't you, my dear?' said the doctor.

'No, sir,' replied Oliver.

'No,' said the doctor, with a very shrewd and satisfied look. 'You're
not sleepy.  Nor thirsty.  Are you?'

'Yes, sir, rather thirsty,' answered Oliver.

'Just as I expected, Mrs. Bedwin,' said the doctor.  'It's very natural
that he should be thirsty.  You may give him a little tea, ma'am, and
some dry toast without any butter.  Don't keep him too warm, ma'am; but
be careful that you don't let him be too cold; will you have the
goodness?'

The old lady dropped a curtsey.  The doctor, after tasting the cool
stuff, and expressing a qualified approval of it, hurried away:  his
boots creaking in a very important and wealthy manner as he went
downstairs.

Oliver dozed off again, soon after this; when he awoke, it was nearly
twelve o'clock.  The old lady tenderly bade him good-night shortly
afterwards, and left him in charge of a fat old woman who had just
come:  bringing with her, in a little bundle, a small Prayer Book and a
large nightcap. Putting the latter on her head and the former on the
table, the old woman, after telling Oliver that she had come to sit up
with him, drew her chair close to the fire and went off into a series
of short naps, chequered at frequent intervals with sundry tumblings
forward, and divers moans and chokings. These, however, had no worse
effect than causing her to rub her nose very hard, and then fall asleep
again.

And thus the night crept slowly on.  Oliver lay awake for some time,
counting the little circles of light which the reflection of the
rushlight-shade threw upon the ceiling; or tracing with his languid
eyes the intricate pattern of the paper on the wall. The darkness and
the deep stillness of the room were very solemn; as they brought into
the boy's mind the thought that death had been hovering there, for many
days and nights, and might yet fill it with the gloom and dread of his
awful presence, he turned his face upon the pillow, and fervently
prayed to Heaven.

Gradually, he fell into that deep tranquil sleep which ease from recent
suffering alone imparts; that calm and peaceful rest which it is pain
to wake from.  Who, if this were death, would be roused again to all
the struggles and turmoils of life; to all its cares for the present;
its anxieties for the future; more than all, its weary recollections of
the past!

It had been bright day, for hours, when Oliver opened his eyes; he felt
cheerful and happy.  The crisis of the disease was safely past.  He
belonged to the world again.

In three days' time he was able to sit in an easy-chair, well propped
up with pillows; and, as he was still too weak to walk, Mrs. Bedwin had
him carried downstairs into the little housekeeper's room, which
belonged to her.  Having him set, here, by the fire-side, the good old
lady sat herself down too; and, being in a state of considerable
delight at seeing him so much better, forthwith began to cry most
violently.

'Never mind me, my dear,' said the old lady; 'I'm only having a regular
good cry.  There; it's all over now; and I'm quite comfortable.'

'You're very, very kind to me, ma'am,' said Oliver.

'Well, never you mind that, my dear,' said the old lady; 'that's got
nothing to do with your broth; and it's full time you had it; for the
doctor says Mr. Brownlow may come in to see you this morning; and we
must get up our best looks, because the better we look, the more he'll
be pleased.'  And with this, the old lady applied herself to warming
up, in a little saucepan, a basin full of broth:  strong enough, Oliver
thought, to furnish an ample dinner, when reduced to the regulation
strength, for three hundred and fifty paupers, at the lowest
computation.

'Are you fond of pictures, dear?' inquired the old lady, seeing that
Oliver had fixed his eyes, most intently, on a portrait which hung
against the wall; just opposite his chair.

'I don't quite know, ma'am,' said Oliver, without taking his eyes from
the canvas; 'I have seen so few that I hardly know.  What a beautiful,
mild face that lady's is!'

'Ah!' said the old lady, 'painters always make ladies out prettier than
they are, or they wouldn't get any custom, child. The man that invented
the machine for taking likenesses might have known that would never
succeed; it's a deal too honest.  A deal,' said the old lady, laughing
very heartily at her own acuteness.

'Is--is that a likeness, ma'am?' said Oliver.

'Yes,' said the old lady, looking up for a moment from the broth;
'that's a portrait.'

'Whose, ma'am?' asked Oliver.

'Why, really, my dear, I don't know,' answered the old lady in a
good-humoured manner.  'It's not a likeness of anybody that you or I
know, I expect.  It seems to strike your fancy, dear.'

'It is so pretty,' replied Oliver.

'Why, sure you're not afraid of it?' said the old lady: observing in
great surprise, the look of awe with which the child regarded the
painting.

'Oh no, no,' returned Oliver quickly; 'but the eyes look so sorrowful;
and where I sit, they seem fixed upon me.  It makes my heart beat,'
added Oliver in a low voice, 'as if it was alive, and wanted to speak
to me, but couldn't.'

'Lord save us!' exclaimed the old lady, starting; 'don't talk in that
way, child.  You're weak and nervous after your illness. Let me wheel
your chair round to the other side; and then you won't see it.  There!'
said the old lady, suiting the action to the word; 'you don't see it
now, at all events.'

Oliver _did_ see it in his mind's eye as distinctly as if he had not
altered his position; but he thought it better not to worry the kind
old lady; so he smiled gently when she looked at him; and Mrs. Bedwin,
satisfied that he felt more comfortable, salted and broke bits of
toasted bread into the broth, with all the bustle befitting so solemn a
preparation. Oliver got through it with extraordinary expedition.  He
had scarcely swallowed the last spoonful, when there came a soft rap at
the door.  'Come in,' said the old lady; and in walked Mr. Brownlow.

Now, the old gentleman came in as brisk as need be; but, he had no
sooner raised his spectacles on his forehead, and thrust his hands
behind the skirts of his dressing-gown to take a good long look at
Oliver, than his countenance underwent a very great variety of odd
contortions.  Oliver looked very worn and shadowy from sickness, and
made an ineffectual attempt to stand up, out of respect to his
benefactor, which terminated in his sinking back into the chair again;
and the fact is, if the truth must be told, that Mr. Brownlow's heart,
being large enough for any six ordinary old gentlemen of humane
disposition, forced a supply of tears into his eyes, by some hydraulic
process which we are not sufficiently philosophical to be in a
condition to explain.

'Poor boy, poor boy!' said Mr. Brownlow, clearing his throat. 'I'm
rather hoarse this morning, Mrs. Bedwin.  I'm afraid I have caught
cold.'

'I hope not, sir,' said Mrs. Bedwin.  'Everything you have had, has
been well aired, sir.'

'I don't know, Bedwin.  I don't know,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'I rather
think I had a damp napkin at dinner-time yesterday; but never mind
that.  How do you feel, my dear?'

'Very happy, sir,' replied Oliver.  'And very grateful indeed, sir, for
your goodness to me.'

'Good by,' said Mr. Brownlow, stoutly.  'Have you given him any
nourishment, Bedwin?  Any slops, eh?'

'He has just had a basin of beautiful strong broth, sir,' replied Mrs.
Bedwin:  drawing herself up slightly, and laying strong emphasis on the
last word:  to intimate that between slops, and broth will compounded,
there existed no affinity or connection whatsoever.

'Ugh!' said Mr. Brownlow, with a slight shudder; 'a couple of glasses
of port wine would have done him a great deal more good. Wouldn't they,
Tom White, eh?'

'My name is Oliver, sir,' replied the little invalid:  with a look of
great astonishment.

'Oliver,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'Oliver what?  Oliver White, eh?'

'No, sir, Twist, Oliver Twist.'

'Queer name!' said the old gentleman.  'What made you tell the
magistrate your name was White?'

'I never told him so, sir,' returned Oliver in amazement.

This sounded so like a falsehood, that the old gentleman looked
somewhat sternly in Oliver's face.  It was impossible to doubt him;
there was truth in every one of its thin and sharpened lineaments.

'Some mistake,' said Mr. Brownlow.  But, although his motive for
looking steadily at Oliver no longer existed, the old idea of the
resemblance between his features and some familiar face came upon him
so strongly, that he could not withdraw his gaze.

'I hope you are not angry with me, sir?' said Oliver, raising his eyes
beseechingly.

'No, no,' replied the old gentleman.  'Why! what's this?  Bedwin, look
there!'

As he spoke, he pointed hastily to the picture over Oliver's head, and
then to the boy's face.  There was its living copy. The eyes, the head,
the mouth; every feature was the same. The expression was, for the
instant, so precisely alike, that the minutest line seemed copied with
startling accuracy!

Oliver knew not the cause of this sudden exclamation; for, not being
strong enough to bear the start it gave him, he fainted away.  A
weakness on his part, which affords the narrative an opportunity of
relieving the reader from suspense, in behalf of the two young pupils
of the Merry Old Gentleman; and of recording--

That when the Dodger, and his accomplished friend Master Bates, joined
in the hue-and-cry which was raised at Oliver's heels, in consequence
of their executing an illegal conveyance of Mr. Brownlow's personal
property, as has been already described, they were actuated by a very
laudable and becoming regard for themselves; and forasmuch as the
freedom of the subject and the liberty of the individual are among the
first and proudest boasts of a true-hearted Englishman, so, I need
hardly beg the reader to observe, that this action should tend to exalt
them in the opinion of all public and patriotic men, in almost as great
a degree as this strong proof of their anxiety for their own
preservation and safety goes to corroborate and confirm the little code
of laws which certain profound and sound-judging philosophers have laid
down as the main-springs of all Nature's deeds and actions:  the said
philosophers very wisely reducing the good lady's proceedings to
matters of maxim and theory:  and, by a very neat and pretty compliment
to her exalted wisdom and understanding, putting entirely out of sight
any considerations of heart, or generous impulse and feeling. For,
these are matters totally beneath a female who is acknowledged by
universal admission to be far above the numerous little foibles and
weaknesses of her sex.

If I wanted any further proof of the strictly philosophical nature of
the conduct of these young gentlemen in their very delicate
predicament, I should at once find it in the fact (also recorded in a
foregoing part of this narrative), of their quitting the pursuit, when
the general attention was fixed upon Oliver; and making immediately for
their home by the shortest possible cut.  Although I do not mean to
assert that it is usually the practice of renowned and learned sages,
to shorten the road to any great conclusion (their course indeed being
rather to lengthen the distance, by various circumlocutions and
discursive staggerings, like unto those in which drunken men under the
pressure of a too mighty flow of ideas, are prone to indulge); still, I
do mean to say, and do say distinctly, that it is the invariable
practice of many mighty philosophers, in carrying out their theories,
to evince great wisdom and foresight in providing against every
possible contingency which can be supposed at all likely to affect
themselves.  Thus, to do a great right, you may do a little wrong; and
you may take any means which the end to be attained, will justify; the
amount of the right, or the amount of the wrong, or indeed the
distinction between the two, being left entirely to the philosopher
concerned, to be settled and determined by his clear, comprehensive,
and impartial view of his own particular case.

It was not until the two boys had scoured, with great rapidity, through
a most intricate maze of narrow streets and courts, that they ventured
to halt beneath a low and dark archway.  Having remained silent here,
just long enough to recover breath to speak, Master Bates uttered an
exclamation of amusement and delight; and, bursting into an
uncontrollable fit of laughter, flung himself upon a doorstep, and
rolled thereon in a transport of mirth.

'What's the matter?' inquired the Dodger.

'Ha! ha! ha!' roared Charley Bates.

'Hold your noise,' remonstrated the Dodger, looking cautiously round.
'Do you want to be grabbed, stupid?'

'I can't help it,' said Charley, 'I can't help it!  To see him
splitting away at that pace, and cutting round the corners, and
knocking up again' the posts, and starting on again as if he was made
of iron as well as them, and me with the wipe in my pocket, singing out
arter him--oh, my eye!' The vivid imagination of Master Bates presented
the scene before him in too strong colours.  As he arrived at this
apostrophe, he again rolled upon the door-step, and laughed louder than
before.

'What'll Fagin say?' inquired the Dodger; taking advantage of the next
interval of breathlessness on the part of his friend to propound the
question.

'What?' repeated Charley Bates.

'Ah, what?' said the Dodger.

'Why, what should he say?' inquired Charley:  stopping rather suddenly
in his merriment; for the Dodger's manner was impressive.  'What should
he say?'

Mr. Dawkins whistled for a couple of minutes; then, taking off his hat,
scratched his head, and nodded thrice.

'What do you mean?' said Charley.

'Toor rul lol loo, gammon and spinnage, the frog he wouldn't, and high
cockolorum,' said the Dodger:  with a slight sneer on his intellectual
countenance.

This was explanatory, but not satisfactory.  Master Bates felt it so;
and again said, 'What do you mean?'

The Dodger made no reply; but putting his hat on again, and gathering
the skirts of his long-tailed coat under his arm, thrust his tongue
into his cheek, slapped the bridge of his nose some half-dozen times in
a familiar but expressive manner, and turning on his heel, slunk down
the court.  Master Bates followed, with a thoughtful countenance.

The noise of footsteps on the creaking stairs, a few minutes after the
occurrence of this conversation, roused the merry old gentleman as he
sat over the fire with a saveloy and a small loaf in his hand; a
pocket-knife in his right; and a pewter pot on the trivet.  There was a
rascally smile on his white face as he turned round, and looking
sharply out from under his thick red eyebrows, bent his ear towards the
door, and listened.

'Why, how's this?' muttered the Jew:  changing countenance; 'only two
of 'em?  Where's the third?  They can't have got into trouble.  Hark!'

The footsteps approached nearer; they reached the landing. The door was
slowly opened; and the Dodger and Charley Bates entered, closing it
behind them.



CHAPTER XIII

SOME NEW ACQUAINTANCES ARE INTRODUCED TO THE INTELLIGENT READER,
CONNECTED WITH WHOM VARIOUS PLEASANT MATTERS ARE RELATED, APPERTAINING
TO THIS HISTORY

'Where's Oliver?' said the Jew, rising with a menacing look. 'Where's
the boy?'

The young thieves eyed their preceptor as if they were alarmed at his
violence; and looked uneasily at each other.  But they made no reply.

'What's become of the boy?' said the Jew, seizing the Dodger tightly by
the collar, and threatening him with horrid imprecations.  'Speak out,
or I'll throttle you!'

Mr. Fagin looked so very much in earnest, that Charley Bates, who
deemed it prudent in all cases to be on the safe side, and who
conceived it by no means improbable that it might be his turn to be
throttled second, dropped upon his knees, and raised a loud,
well-sustained, and continuous roar--something between a mad bull and a
speaking trumpet.

'Will you speak?' thundered the Jew:  shaking the Dodger so much that
his keeping in the big coat at all, seemed perfectly miraculous.

'Why, the traps have got him, and that's all about it,' said the
Dodger, sullenly.  'Come, let go o' me, will you!'  And, swinging
himself, at one jerk, clean out of the big coat, which he left in the
Jew's hands, the Dodger snatched up the toasting fork, and made a pass
at the merry old gentleman's waistcoat; which, if it had taken effect,
would have let a little more merriment out than could have been easily
replaced.

The Jew stepped back in this emergency, with more agility than could
have been anticipated in a man of his apparent decrepitude; and,
seizing up the pot, prepared to hurl it at his assailant's head.  But
Charley Bates, at this moment, calling his attention by a perfectly
terrific howl, he suddenly altered its destination, and flung it full
at that young gentleman.

'Why, what the blazes is in the wind now!' growled a deep voice. 'Who
pitched that 'ere at me?  It's well it's the beer, and not the pot, as
hit me, or I'd have settled somebody.  I might have know'd, as nobody
but an infernal, rich, plundering, thundering old Jew could afford to
throw away any drink but water--and not that, unless he done the River
Company every quarter.  Wot's it all about, Fagin?  D--me, if my
neck-handkercher an't lined with beer!  Come in, you sneaking warmint;
wot are you stopping outside for, as if you was ashamed of your master!
Come in!'

The man who growled out these words, was a stoutly-built fellow of
about five-and-thirty, in a black velveteen coat, very soiled drab
breeches, lace-up half boots, and grey cotton stockings which inclosed
a bulky pair of legs, with large swelling calves;--the kind of legs,
which in such costume, always look in an unfinished and incomplete
state without a set of fetters to garnish them.  He had a brown hat on
his head, and a dirty belcher handkerchief round his neck:  with the
long frayed ends of which he smeared the beer from his face as he
spoke.  He disclosed, when he had done so, a broad heavy countenance
with a beard of three days' growth, and two scowling eyes; one of which
displayed various parti-coloured symptoms of having been recently
damaged by a blow.

'Come in, d'ye hear?' growled this engaging ruffian.

A white shaggy dog, with his face scratched and torn in twenty
different places, skulked into the room.

'Why didn't you come in afore?' said the man.  'You're getting too
proud to own me afore company, are you?  Lie down!'

This command was accompanied with a kick, which sent the animal to the
other end of the room.  He appeared well used to it, however; for he
coiled himself up in a corner very quietly, without uttering a sound,
and winking his very ill-looking eyes twenty times in a minute,
appeared to occupy himself in taking a survey of the apartment.

'What are you up to?  Ill-treating the boys, you covetous, avaricious,
in-sa-ti-a-ble old fence?' said the man, seating himself deliberately.
'I wonder they don't murder you!  I would if I was them.  If I'd been
your 'prentice, I'd have done it long ago, and--no, I couldn't have
sold you afterwards, for you're fit for nothing but keeping as a
curiousity of ugliness in a glass bottle, and I suppose they don't blow
glass bottles large enough.'

'Hush! hush! Mr. Sikes,' said the Jew, trembling; 'don't speak so loud!'

'None of your mistering,' replied the ruffian; 'you always mean
mischief when you come that.  You know my name:  out with it!  I shan't
disgrace it when the time comes.'

'Well, well, then--Bill Sikes,' said the Jew, with abject humility.
'You seem out of humour, Bill.'

'Perhaps I am,' replied Sikes; 'I should think you was rather out of
sorts too, unless you mean as little harm when you throw pewter pots
about, as you do when you blab and--'

'Are you mad?' said the Jew, catching the man by the sleeve, and
pointing towards the boys.

Mr. Sikes contented himself with tying an imaginary knot under his left
ear, and jerking his head over on the right shoulder; a piece of dumb
show which the Jew appeared to understand perfectly.  He then, in cant
terms, with which his whole conversation was plentifully besprinkled,
but which would be quite unintelligible if they were recorded here,
demanded a glass of liquor.

'And mind you don't poison it,' said Mr. Sikes, laying his hat upon the
table.

This was said in jest; but if the speaker could have seen the evil leer
with which the Jew bit his pale lip as he turned round to the cupboard,
he might have thought the caution not wholly unnecessary, or the wish
(at all events) to improve upon the distiller's ingenuity not very far
from the old gentleman's merry heart.

After swallowing two of three glasses of spirits, Mr. Sikes
condescended to take some notice of the young gentlemen; which gracious
act led to a conversation, in which the cause and manner of Oliver's
capture were circumstantially detailed, with such alterations and
improvements on the truth, as to the Dodger appeared most advisable
under the circumstances.

'I'm afraid,' said the Jew, 'that he may say something which will get
us into trouble.'

'That's very likely,' returned Sikes with a malicious grin. 'You're
blowed upon, Fagin.'

'And I'm afraid, you see,' added the Jew, speaking as if he had not
noticed the interruption; and regarding the other closely as he did
so,--'I'm afraid that, if the game was up with us, it might be up with
a good many more, and that it would come out rather worse for you than
it would for me, my dear.'

The man started, and turned round upon the Jew.  But the old
gentleman's shoulders were shrugged up to his ears; and his eyes were
vacantly staring on the opposite wall.

There was a long pause. Every member of the respectable coterie
appeared plunged in his own reflections; not excepting the dog, who by
a certain malicious licking of his lips seemed to be meditating an
attack upon the legs of the first gentleman or lady he might encounter
in the streets when he went out.

'Somebody must find out wot's been done at the office,' said Mr. Sikes
in a much lower tone than he had taken since he came in.

The Jew nodded assent.

'If he hasn't peached, and is committed, there's no fear till he comes
out again,' said Mr. Sikes, 'and then he must be taken care on.  You
must get hold of him somehow.'

Again the Jew nodded.

The prudence of this line of action, indeed, was obvious; but,
unfortunately, there was one very strong objection to its being
adopted.  This was, that the Dodger, and Charley Bates, and Fagin, and
Mr. William Sikes, happened, one and all, to entertain a violent and
deeply-rooted antipathy to going near a police-office on any ground or
pretext whatever.

How long they might have sat and looked at each other, in a state of
uncertainty not the most pleasant of its kind, it is difficult to
guess.  It is not necessary to make any guesses on the subject,
however; for the sudden entrance of the two young ladies whom Oliver
had seen on a former occasion, caused the conversation to flow afresh.

'The very thing!' said the Jew.  'Bet will go; won't you, my dear?'

'Wheres?' inquired the young lady.

'Only just up to the office, my dear,' said the Jew coaxingly.

It is due to the young lady to say that she did not positively affirm
that she would not, but that she merely expressed an emphatic and
earnest desire to be 'blessed' if she would; a polite and delicate
evasion of the request, which shows the young lady to have been
possessed of that natural good breeding which cannot bear to inflict
upon a fellow-creature, the pain of a direct and pointed refusal.

The Jew's countenance fell.  He turned from this young lady, who was
gaily, not to say gorgeously attired, in a red gown, green boots, and
yellow curl-papers, to the other female.

'Nancy, my dear,' said the Jew in a soothing manner, 'what do YOU say?'

'That it won't do; so it's no use a-trying it on, Fagin,' replied Nancy.

'What do you mean by that?' said Mr. Sikes, looking up in a surly
manner.

'What I say, Bill,' replied the lady collectedly.

'Why, you're just the very person for it,' reasoned Mr. Sikes: 'nobody
about here knows anything of you.'

'And as I don't want 'em to, neither,' replied Nancy in the same
composed manner, 'it's rather more no than yes with me, Bill.'

'She'll go, Fagin,' said Sikes.

'No, she won't, Fagin,' said Nancy.

'Yes, she will, Fagin,' said Sikes.

And Mr. Sikes was right.  By dint of alternate threats, promises, and
bribes, the lady in question was ultimately prevailed upon to undertake
the commission.  She was not, indeed, withheld by the same
considerations as her agreeable friend; for, having recently removed
into the neighborhood of Field Lane from the remote but genteel suburb
of Ratcliffe, she was not under the same apprehension of being
recognised by any of her numerous acquaintances.

Accordingly, with a clean white apron tied over her gown, and her
curl-papers tucked up under a straw bonnet,--both articles of dress
being provided from the Jew's inexhaustible stock,--Miss Nancy prepared
to issue forth on her errand.

'Stop a minute, my dear,' said the Jew, producing, a little covered
basket.  'Carry that in one hand.  It looks more respectable, my dear.'

'Give her a door-key to carry in her t'other one, Fagin,' said Sikes;
'it looks real and genivine like.'

'Yes, yes, my dear, so it does,' said the Jew, hanging a large
street-door key on the forefinger of the young lady's right hand.

'There; very good!  Very good indeed, my dear!' said the Jew, rubbing
his hands.

'Oh, my brother!  My poor, dear, sweet, innocent little brother!'
exclaimed Nancy, bursting into tears, and wringing the little basket
and the street-door key in an agony of distress.  'What has become of
him!  Where have they taken him to!  Oh, do have pity, and tell me
what's been done with the dear boy, gentlemen; do, gentlemen, if you
please, gentlemen!'

Having uttered those words in a most lamentable and heart-broken tone:
to the immeasurable delight of her hearers:  Miss Nancy paused, winked
to the company, nodded smilingly round, and disappeared.

'Ah, she's a clever girl, my dears,' said the Jew, turning round to his
young friends, and shaking his head gravely, as if in mute admonition
to them to follow the bright example they had just beheld.

'She's a honour to her sex,' said Mr. Sikes, filling his glass, and
smiting the table with his enormous fist.  'Here's her health, and
wishing they was all like her!'

While these, and many other encomiums, were being passed on the
accomplished Nancy, that young lady made the best of her way to the
police-office; whither, notwithstanding a little natural timidity
consequent upon walking through the streets alone and unprotected, she
arrived in perfect safety shortly afterwards.

Entering by the back way, she tapped softly with the key at one of the
cell-doors, and listened.  There was no sound within:  so she coughed
and listened again.  Still there was no reply:  so she spoke.

'Nolly, dear?' murmured Nancy in a gentle voice; 'Nolly?'

There was nobody inside but a miserable shoeless criminal, who had been
taken up for playing the flute, and who, the offence against society
having been clearly proved, had been very properly committed by Mr.
Fang to the House of Correction for one month; with the appropriate and
amusing remark that since he had so much breath to spare, it would be
more wholesomely expended on the treadmill than in a musical
instrument.  He made no answer: being occupied mentally bewailing the
loss of the flute, which had been confiscated for the use of the
county:  so Nancy passed on to the next cell, and knocked there.

'Well!' cried a faint and feeble voice.

'Is there a little boy here?' inquired Nancy, with a preliminary sob.

'No,' replied the voice; 'God forbid.'

This was a vagrant of sixty-five, who was going to prison for _not_
playing the flute; or, in other words, for begging in the streets, and
doing nothing for his livelihood.  In the next cell was another man,
who was going to the same prison for hawking tin saucepans without
license; thereby doing something for his living, in defiance of the
Stamp-office.

But, as neither of these criminals answered to the name of Oliver, or
knew anything about him, Nancy made straight up to the bluff officer in
the striped waistcoat; and with the most piteous wailings and
lamentations, rendered more piteous by a prompt and efficient use of
the street-door key and the little basket, demanded her own dear
brother.

'I haven't got him, my dear,' said the old man.

'Where is he?' screamed Nancy, in a distracted manner.

'Why, the gentleman's got him,' replied the officer.

'What gentleman!  Oh, gracious heavens!  What gentleman?' exclaimed
Nancy.

In reply to this incoherent questioning, the old man informed the
deeply affected sister that Oliver had been taken ill in the office,
and discharged in consequence of a witness having proved the robbery to
have been committed by another boy, not in custody; and that the
prosecutor had carried him away, in an insensible condition, to his own
residence:  of and concerning which, all the informant knew was, that
it was somewhere in Pentonville, he having heard that word mentioned in
the directions to the coachman.

In a dreadful state of doubt and uncertainty, the agonised young woman
staggered to the gate, and then, exchanging her faltering walk for a
swift run, returned by the most devious and complicated route she could
think of, to the domicile of the Jew.

Mr. Bill Sikes no sooner heard the account of the expedition delivered,
than he very hastily called up the white dog, and, putting on his hat,
expeditiously departed:  without devoting any time to the formality of
wishing the company good-morning.

'We must know where he is, my dears; he must be found,' said the Jew
greatly excited.  'Charley, do nothing but skulk about, till you bring
home some news of him!  Nancy, my dear, I must have him found.  I trust
to you, my dear,--to you and the Artful for everything!  Stay, stay,'
added the Jew, unlocking a drawer with a shaking hand; 'there's money,
my dears.  I shall shut up this shop to-night.  You'll know where to
find me!  Don't stop here a minute.  Not an instant, my dears!'

With these words, he pushed them from the room:  and carefully
double-locking and barring the door behind them, drew from its place of
concealment the box which he had unintentionally disclosed to Oliver.
Then, he hastily proceeded to dispose the watches and jewellery beneath
his clothing.

A rap at the door startled him in this occupation.  'Who's there?' he
cried in a shrill tone.

'Me!' replied the voice of the Dodger, through the key-hole.

'What now?' cried the Jew impatiently.

'Is he to be kidnapped to the other ken, Nancy says?' inquired the
Dodger.

'Yes,' replied the Jew, 'wherever she lays hands on him.  Find him,
find him out, that's all.  I shall know what to do next; never fear.'

The boy murmured a reply of intelligence:  and hurried downstairs after
his companions.

'He has not peached so far,' said the Jew as he pursued his occupation.
'If he means to blab us among his new friends, we may stop his mouth
yet.'



CHAPTER XIV

COMPRISING FURTHER PARTICULARS OF OLIVER'S STAY AT MR. BROWNLOW'S, WITH
THE REMARKABLE PREDICTION WHICH ONE MR. GRIMWIG UTTERED CONCERNING HIM,
WHEN HE WENT OUT ON AN ERRAND

Oliver soon recovering from the fainting-fit into which Mr. Brownlow's
abrupt exclamation had thrown him, the subject of the picture was
carefully avoided, both by the old gentleman and Mrs. Bedwin, in the
conversation that ensued:  which indeed bore no reference to Oliver's
history or prospects, but was confined to such topics as might amuse
without exciting him.  He was still too weak to get up to breakfast;
but, when he came down into the housekeeper's room next day, his first
act was to cast an eager glance at the wall, in the hope of again
looking on the face of the beautiful lady.  His expectations were
disappointed, however, for the picture had been removed.

'Ah!' said the housekeeper, watching the direction of Oliver's eyes.
'It is gone, you see.'

'I see it is ma'am,' replied Oliver.  'Why have they taken it away?'

'It has been taken down, child, because Mr. Brownlow said, that as it
seemed to worry you, perhaps it might prevent your getting well, you
know,' rejoined the old lady.

'Oh, no, indeed.  It didn't worry me, ma'am,' said Oliver. 'I liked to
see it.  I quite loved it.'

'Well, well!' said the old lady, good-humouredly; 'you get well as fast
as ever you can, dear, and it shall be hung up again. There!  I promise
you that!  Now, let us talk about something else.'

This was all the information Oliver could obtain about the picture at
that time.  As the old lady had been so kind to him in his illness, he
endeavoured to think no more of the subject just then; so he listened
attentively to a great many stories she told him, about an amiable and
handsome daughter of hers, who was married to an amiable and handsome
man, and lived in the country; and about a son, who was clerk to a
merchant in the West Indies; and who was, also, such a good young man,
and wrote such dutiful letters home four times a-year, that it brought
the tears into her eyes to talk about them.  When the old lady had
expatiated, a long time, on the excellences of her children, and the
merits of her kind good husband besides, who had been dead and gone,
poor dear soul! just six-and-twenty years, it was time to have tea.
After tea she began to teach Oliver cribbage: which he learnt as
quickly as she could teach:  and at which game they played, with great
interest and gravity, until it was time for the invalid to have some
warm wine and water, with a slice of dry toast, and then to go cosily
to bed.

They were happy days, those of Oliver's recovery.  Everything was so
quiet, and neat, and orderly; everybody so kind and gentle; that after
the noise and turbulence in the midst of which he had always lived, it
seemed like Heaven itself.  He was no sooner strong enough to put his
clothes on, properly, than Mr. Brownlow caused a complete new suit, and
a new cap, and a new pair of shoes, to be provided for him.  As Oliver
was told that he might do what he liked with the old clothes, he gave
them to a servant who had been very kind to him, and asked her to sell
them to a Jew, and keep the money for herself.  This she very readily
did; and, as Oliver looked out of the parlour window, and saw the Jew
roll them up in his bag and walk away, he felt quite delighted to think
that they were safely gone, and that there was now no possible danger
of his ever being able to wear them again.  They were sad rags, to tell
the truth; and Oliver had never had a new suit before.

One evening, about a week after the affair of the picture, as he was
sitting talking to Mrs. Bedwin, there came a message down from Mr.
Brownlow, that if Oliver Twist felt pretty well, he should like to see
him in his study, and talk to him a little while.

'Bless us, and save us!  Wash your hands, and let me part your hair
nicely for you, child,' said Mrs. Bedwin.  'Dear heart alive!  If we
had known he would have asked for you, we would have put you a clean
collar on, and made you as smart as sixpence!'

Oliver did as the old lady bade him; and, although she lamented
grievously, meanwhile, that there was not even time to crimp the little
frill that bordered his shirt-collar; he looked so delicate and
handsome, despite that important personal advantage, that she went so
far as to say:  looking at him with great complacency from head to
foot, that she really didn't think it would have been possible, on the
longest notice, to have made much difference in him for the better.

Thus encouraged, Oliver tapped at the study door.  On Mr. Brownlow
calling to him to come in, he found himself in a little back room,
quite full of books, with a window, looking into some pleasant little
gardens.  There was a table drawn up before the window, at which Mr.
Brownlow was seated reading.  When he saw Oliver, he pushed the book
away from him, and told him to come near the table, and sit down.
Oliver complied; marvelling where the people could be found to read
such a great number of books as seemed to be written to make the world
wiser.  Which is still a marvel to more experienced people than Oliver
Twist, every day of their lives.

'There are a good many books, are there not, my boy?' said Mr.
Brownlow, observing the curiosity with which Oliver surveyed the
shelves that reached from the floor to the ceiling.

'A great number, sir,' replied Oliver.  'I never saw so many.'

'You shall read them, if you behave well,' said the old gentleman
kindly; 'and you will like that, better than looking at the
outsides,--that is, some cases; because there are books of which the
backs and covers are by far the best parts.'

'I suppose they are those heavy ones, sir,' said Oliver, pointing to
some large quartos, with a good deal of gilding about the binding.

'Not always those,' said the old gentleman, patting Oliver on the head,
and smiling as he did so; 'there are other equally heavy ones, though
of a much smaller size.  How should you like to grow up a clever man,
and write books, eh?'

'I think I would rather read them, sir,' replied Oliver.

'What! wouldn't you like to be a book-writer?' said the old gentleman.

Oliver considered a little while; and at last said, he should think it
would be a much better thing to be a book-seller; upon which the old
gentleman laughed heartily, and declared he had said a very good thing.
Which Oliver felt glad to have done, though he by no means knew what it
was.

'Well, well,' said the old gentleman, composing his features. 'Don't be
afraid!  We won't make an author of you, while there's an honest trade
to be learnt, or brick-making to turn to.'

'Thank you, sir,' said Oliver.  At the earnest manner of his reply, the
old gentleman laughed again; and said something about a curious
instinct, which Oliver, not understanding, paid no very great attention
to.

'Now,' said Mr. Brownlow, speaking if possible in a kinder, but at the
same time in a much more serious manner, than Oliver had ever known him
assume yet, 'I want you to pay great attention, my boy, to what I am
going to say.  I shall talk to you without any reserve; because I am
sure you are well able to understand me, as many older persons would
be.'

'Oh, don't tell you are going to send me away, sir, pray!' exclaimed
Oliver, alarmed at the serious tone of the old gentleman's
commencement!  'Don't turn me out of doors to wander in the streets
again.  Let me stay here, and be a servant.  Don't send me back to the
wretched place I came from.  Have mercy upon a poor boy, sir!'

'My dear child,' said the old gentleman, moved by the warmth of
Oliver's sudden appeal; 'you need not be afraid of my deserting you,
unless you give me cause.'

'I never, never will, sir,' interposed Oliver.

'I hope not,' rejoined the old gentleman.  'I do not think you ever
will.  I have been deceived, before, in the objects whom I have
endeavoured to benefit; but I feel strongly disposed to trust you,
nevertheless; and I am more interested in your behalf than I can well
account for, even to myself.  The persons on whom I have bestowed my
dearest love, lie deep in their graves; but, although the happiness and
delight of my life lie buried there too, I have not made a coffin of my
heart, and sealed it up, forever, on my best affections.  Deep
affliction has but strengthened and refined them.'

As the old gentleman said this in a low voice:  more to himself than to
his companion:  and as he remained silent for a short time afterwards:
Oliver sat quite still.

'Well, well!' said the old gentleman at length, in a more cheerful
tone, 'I only say this, because you have a young heart; and knowing
that I have suffered great pain and sorrow, you will be more careful,
perhaps, not to wound me again.  You say you are an orphan, without a
friend in the world; all the inquiries I have been able to make,
confirm the statement.  Let me hear your story; where you come from;
who brought you up; and how you got into the company in which I found
you.  Speak the truth, and you shall not be friendless while I live.'

Oliver's sobs checked his utterance for some minutes; when he was on
the point of beginning to relate how he had been brought up at the
farm, and carried to the workhouse by Mr. Bumble, a peculiarly
impatient little double-knock was heard at the street-door:  and the
servant, running upstairs, announced Mr. Grimwig.

'Is he coming up?' inquired Mr. Brownlow.

'Yes, sir,' replied the servant.  'He asked if there were any muffins
in the house; and, when I told him yes, he said he had come to tea.'

Mr. Brownlow smiled; and, turning to Oliver, said that Mr. Grimwig was
an old friend of his, and he must not mind his being a little rough in
his manners; for he was a worthy creature at bottom, as he had reason
to know.

'Shall I go downstairs, sir?' inquired Oliver.

'No,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'I would rather you remained here.'

At this moment, there walked into the room:  supporting himself by a
thick stick:  a stout old gentleman, rather lame in one leg, who was
dressed in a blue coat, striped waistcoat, nankeen breeches and
gaiters, and a broad-brimmed white hat, with the sides turned up with
green.  A very small-plaited shirt frill stuck out from his waistcoat;
and a very long steel watch-chain, with nothing but a key at the end,
dangled loosely below it.  The ends of his white neckerchief were
twisted into a ball about the size of an orange; the variety of shapes
into which his countenance was twisted, defy description.  He had a
manner of screwing his head on one side when he spoke; and of looking
out of the corners of his eyes at the same time:  which irresistibly
reminded the beholder of a parrot.  In this attitude, he fixed himself,
the moment he made his appearance; and, holding out a small piece of
orange-peel at arm's length, exclaimed, in a growling, discontented
voice.

'Look here! do you see this!  Isn't it a most wonderful and
extraordinary thing that I can't call at a man's house but I find a
piece of this poor surgeon's friend on the staircase? I've been lamed
with orange-peel once, and I know orange-peel will be my death, or I'll
be content to eat my own head, sir!'

This was the handsome offer with which Mr. Grimwig backed and confirmed
nearly every assertion he made; and it was the more singular in his
case, because, even admitting for the sake of argument, the possibility
of scientific improvements being brought to that pass which will enable
a gentleman to eat his own head in the event of his being so disposed,
Mr. Grimwig's head was such a particularly large one, that the most
sanguine man alive could hardly entertain a hope of being able to get
through it at a sitting--to put entirely out of the question, a very
thick coating of powder.

'I'll eat my head, sir,' repeated Mr. Grimwig, striking his stick upon
the ground.  'Hallo! what's that!' looking at Oliver, and retreating a
pace or two.

'This is young Oliver Twist, whom we were speaking about,' said Mr.
Brownlow.

Oliver bowed.

'You don't mean to say that's the boy who had the fever, I hope?' said
Mr. Grimwig, recoiling a little more.  'Wait a minute! Don't speak!
Stop--' continued Mr. Grimwig, abruptly, losing all dread of the fever
in his triumph at the discovery; 'that's the boy who had the orange!
If that's not the boy, sir, who had the orange, and threw this bit of
peel upon the staircase, I'll eat my head, and his too.'

'No, no, he has not had one,' said Mr. Brownlow, laughing. 'Come!  Put
down your hat; and speak to my young friend.'

'I feel strongly on this subject, sir,' said the irritable old
gentleman, drawing off his gloves.  'There's always more or less
orange-peel on the pavement in our street; and I _know_ it's put there
by the surgeon's boy at the corner.  A young woman stumbled over a bit
last night, and fell against my garden-railings; directly she got up I
saw her look towards his infernal red lamp with the pantomime-light.
"Don't go to him," I called out of the window, "he's an assassin!  A
man-trap!"  So he is.  If he is not--'  Here the irascible old
gentleman gave a great knock on the ground with his stick; which was
always understood, by his friends, to imply the customary offer,
whenever it was not expressed in words. Then, still keeping his stick
in his hand, he sat down; and, opening a double eye-glass, which he
wore attached to a broad black riband, took a view of Oliver:  who,
seeing that he was the object of inspection, coloured, and bowed again.

'That's the boy, is it?' said Mr. Grimwig, at length.

'That's the boy,' replied Mr. Brownlow.

'How are you, boy?' said Mr. Grimwig.

'A great deal better, thank you, sir,' replied Oliver.

Mr. Brownlow, seeming to apprehend that his singular friend was about
to say something disagreeable, asked Oliver to step downstairs and tell
Mrs. Bedwin they were ready for tea; which, as he did not half like the
visitor's manner, he was very happy to do.

'He is a nice-looking boy, is he not?' inquired Mr. Brownlow.

'I don't know,' replied Mr. Grimwig, pettishly.

'Don't know?'

'No.  I don't know.  I never see any difference in boys.  I only knew
two sort of boys.  Mealy boys, and beef-faced boys.'

'And which is Oliver?'

'Mealy.  I know a friend who has a beef-faced boy; a fine boy, they
call him; with a round head, and red cheeks, and glaring eyes; a horrid
boy; with a body and limbs that appear to be swelling out of the seams
of his blue clothes; with the voice of a pilot, and the appetite of a
wolf.  I know him!  The wretch!'

'Come,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'these are not the characteristics of young
Oliver Twist; so he needn't excite your wrath.'

'They are not,' replied Mr. Grimwig.  'He may have worse.'

Here, Mr. Brownlow coughed impatiently; which appeared to afford Mr.
Grimwig the most exquisite delight.

'He may have worse, I say,' repeated Mr. Grimwig.  'Where does he come
from!  Who is he?  What is he?  He has had a fever.  What of that?
Fevers are not peculiar to good people; are they?  Bad people have
fevers sometimes; haven't they, eh?  I knew a man who was hung in
Jamaica for murdering his master.  He had had a fever six times; he
wasn't recommended to mercy on that account.  Pooh! nonsense!'

Now, the fact was, that in the inmost recesses of his own heart, Mr.
Grimwig was strongly disposed to admit that Oliver's appearance and
manner were unusually prepossessing; but he had a strong appetite for
contradiction, sharpened on this occasion by the finding of the
orange-peel; and, inwardly determining that no man should dictate to
him whether a boy was well-looking or not, he had resolved, from the
first, to oppose his friend.  When Mr. Brownlow admitted that on no one
point of inquiry could he yet return a satisfactory answer; and that he
had postponed any investigation into Oliver's previous history until he
thought the boy was strong enough to hear it; Mr. Grimwig chuckled
maliciously.  And he demanded, with a sneer, whether the housekeeper
was in the habit of counting the plate at night; because if she didn't
find a table-spoon or two missing some sunshiny morning, why, he would
be content to--and so forth.

All this, Mr. Brownlow, although himself somewhat of an impetuous
gentleman:  knowing his friend's peculiarities, bore with great good
humour; as Mr. Grimwig, at tea, was graciously pleased to express his
entire approval of the muffins, matters went on very smoothly; and
Oliver, who made one of the party, began to feel more at his ease than
he had yet done in the fierce old gentleman's presence.

'And when are you going to hear a full, true, and particular account of
the life and adventures of Oliver Twist?' asked Grimwig of Mr.
Brownlow, at the conclusion of the meal; looking sideways at Oliver, as
he resumed his subject.

'To-morrow morning,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'I would rather he was
alone with me at the time.  Come up to me to-morrow morning at ten
o'clock, my dear.'

'Yes, sir,' replied Oliver.  He answered with some hesitation, because
he was confused by Mr. Grimwig's looking so hard at him.

'I'll tell you what,' whispered that gentleman to Mr. Brownlow; 'he
won't come up to you to-morrow morning.  I saw him hesitate. He is
deceiving you, my good friend.'

'I'll swear he is not,' replied Mr. Brownlow, warmly.

'If he is not,' said Mr. Grimwig, 'I'll--' and down went the stick.

'I'll answer for that boy's truth with my life!' said Mr. Brownlow,
knocking the table.

'And I for his falsehood with my head!' rejoined Mr. Grimwig, knocking
the table also.

'We shall see,' said Mr. Brownlow, checking his rising anger.

'We will,' replied Mr. Grimwig, with a provoking smile;  'we will.'

As fate would have it, Mrs. Bedwin chanced to bring in, at this moment,
a small parcel of books, which Mr. Brownlow had that morning purchased
of the identical bookstall-keeper, who has already figured in this
history; having laid them on the table, she prepared to leave the room.

'Stop the boy, Mrs. Bedwin!' said Mr. Brownlow; 'there is something to
go back.'

'He has gone, sir,' replied Mrs. Bedwin.

'Call after him,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'it's particular.  He is a poor
man, and they are not paid for.  There are some books to be taken back,
too.'

The street-door was opened.  Oliver ran one way; and the girl ran
another; and Mrs. Bedwin stood on the step and screamed for the boy;
but there was no boy in sight.  Oliver and the girl returned, in a
breathless state, to report that there were no tidings of him.

'Dear me, I am very sorry for that,' exclaimed Mr. Brownlow; 'I
particularly wished those books to be returned to-night.'

'Send Oliver with them,' said Mr. Grimwig, with an ironical smile; 'he
will be sure to deliver them safely, you know.'

'Yes; do let me take them, if you please, sir,' said Oliver. 'I'll run
all the way, sir.'

The old gentleman was just going to say that Oliver should not go out
on any account; when a most malicious cough from Mr. Grimwig determined
him that he should; and that, by his prompt discharge of the
commission, he should prove to him the injustice of his suspicions:  on
this head at least:  at once.

'You _shall_ go, my dear,' said the old gentleman.  'The books are on a
chair by my table.  Fetch them down.'

Oliver, delighted to be of use, brought down the books under his arm in
a great bustle; and waited, cap in hand, to hear what message he was to
take.

'You are to say,' said Mr. Brownlow, glancing steadily at Grimwig; 'you
are to say that you have brought those books back; and that you have
come to pay the four pound ten I owe him.  This is a five-pound note,
so you will have to bring me back, ten shillings change.'

'I won't be ten minutes, sir,' said Oliver, eagerly.  Having buttoned
up the bank-note in his jacket pocket, and placed the books carefully
under his arm, he made a respectful bow, and left the room.  Mrs.
Bedwin followed him to the street-door, giving him many directions
about the nearest way, and the name of the bookseller, and the name of
the street:  all of which Oliver said he clearly understood.  Having
superadded many injunctions to be sure and not take cold, the old lady
at length permitted him to depart.

'Bless his sweet face!' said the old lady, looking after him. 'I can't
bear, somehow, to let him go out of my sight.'

At this moment, Oliver looked gaily round, and nodded before he turned
the corner.  The old lady smilingly returned his salutation, and,
closing the door, went back to her own room.

'Let me see; he'll be back in twenty minutes, at the longest,' said Mr.
Brownlow, pulling out his watch, and placing it on the table.  'It will
be dark by that time.'

'Oh! you really expect him to come back, do you?' inquired Mr. Grimwig.

'Don't you?' asked Mr. Brownlow, smiling.

The spirit of contradiction was strong in Mr. Grimwig's breast, at the
moment; and it was rendered stronger by his friend's confident smile.

'No,' he said, smiting the table with his fist, 'I do not. The boy has
a new suit of clothes on his back, a set of valuable books under his
arm, and a five-pound note in his pocket.  He'll join his old friends
the thieves, and laugh at you.  If ever that boy returns to this house,
sir, I'll eat my head.'

With these words he drew his chair closer to the table; and there the
two friends sat, in silent expectation, with the watch between them.

It is worthy of remark, as illustrating the importance we attach to our
own judgments, and the pride with which we put forth our most rash and
hasty conclusions, that, although Mr. Grimwig was not by any means a
bad-hearted man, and though he would have been unfeignedly sorry to see
his respected friend duped and deceived, he really did most earnestly
and strongly hope at that moment, that Oliver Twist might not come back.

It grew so dark, that the figures on the dial-plate were scarcely
discernible; but there the two old gentlemen continued to sit, in
silence, with the watch between them.



CHAPTER XV

SHOWING HOW VERY FOND OF OLIVER TWIST, THE MERRY OLD JEW AND MISS NANCY
WERE

In the obscure parlour of a low public-house, in the filthiest part of
Little Saffron Hill; a dark and gloomy den, where a flaring gas-light
burnt all day in the winter-time; and where no ray of sun ever shone in
the summer:  there sat, brooding over a little pewter measure and a
small glass, strongly impregnated with the smell of liquor, a man in a
velveteen coat, drab shorts, half-boots and stockings, whom even by
that dim light no experienced agent of the police would have hesitated
to recognise as Mr. William Sikes.  At his feet, sat a white-coated,
red-eyed dog; who occupied himself, alternately, in winking at his
master with both eyes at the same time; and in licking a large, fresh
cut on one side of his mouth, which appeared to be the result of some
recent conflict.

'Keep quiet, you warmint!  Keep quiet!' said Mr. Sikes, suddenly
breaking silence.  Whether his meditations were so intense as to be
disturbed by the dog's winking, or whether his feelings were so wrought
upon by his reflections that they required all the relief derivable
from kicking an unoffending animal to allay them, is matter for
argument and consideration.  Whatever was the cause, the effect was a
kick and a curse, bestowed upon the dog simultaneously.

Dogs are not generally apt to revenge injuries inflicted upon them by
their masters; but Mr. Sikes's dog, having faults of temper in common
with his owner, and labouring, perhaps, at this moment, under a
powerful sense of injury, made no more ado but at once fixed his teeth
in one of the half-boots.  Having given in a hearty shake, he retired,
growling, under a form; just escaping the pewter measure which Mr.
Sikes levelled at his head.

'You would, would you?' said Sikes, seizing the poker in one hand, and
deliberately opening with the other a large clasp-knife, which he drew
from his pocket.  'Come here, you born devil!  Come here!  D'ye hear?'

The dog no doubt heard; because Mr. Sikes spoke in the very harshest
key of a very harsh voice; but, appearing to entertain some
unaccountable objection to having his throat cut, he remained where he
was, and growled more fiercely than before:  at the same time grasping
the end of the poker between his teeth, and biting at it like a wild
beast.

This resistance only infuriated Mr. Sikes the more; who, dropping on
his knees, began to assail the animal most furiously.  The dog jumped
from right to left, and from left to right; snapping, growling, and
barking; the man thrust and swore, and struck and blasphemed; and the
struggle was reaching a most critical point for one or other; when, the
door suddenly opening, the dog darted out:  leaving Bill Sikes with the
poker and the clasp-knife in his hands.

There must always be two parties to a quarrel, says the old adage.  Mr.
Sikes, being disappointed of the dog's participation, at once
transferred his share in the quarrel to the new comer.

'What the devil do you come in between me and my dog for?' said Sikes,
with a fierce gesture.

'I didn't know, my dear, I didn't know,' replied Fagin, humbly; for the
Jew was the new comer.

'Didn't know, you white-livered thief!' growled Sikes. 'Couldn't you
hear the noise?'

'Not a sound of it, as I'm a living man, Bill,' replied the Jew.

'Oh no!  You hear nothing, you don't,' retorted Sikes with a fierce
sneer.  'Sneaking in and out, so as nobody hears how you come or go!  I
wish you had been the dog, Fagin, half a minute ago.'

'Why?' inquired the Jew with a forced smile.

'Cause the government, as cares for the lives of such men as you, as
haven't half the pluck of curs, lets a man kill a dog how he likes,'
replied Sikes, shutting up the knife with a very expressive look;
'that's why.'

The Jew rubbed his hands; and, sitting down at the table, affected to
laugh at the pleasantry of his friend.  He was obviously very ill at
ease, however.

'Grin away,' said Sikes, replacing the poker, and surveying him with
savage contempt; 'grin away.  You'll never have the laugh at me,
though, unless it's behind a nightcap.  I've got the upper hand over
you, Fagin; and, d--me, I'll keep it.  There!  If I go, you go; so take
care of me.'

'Well, well, my dear,' said the Jew, 'I know all that; we--we--have a
mutual interest, Bill,--a mutual interest.'

'Humph,' said Sikes, as if he thought the interest lay rather more on
the Jew's side than on his.  'Well, what have you got to say to me?'

'It's all passed safe through the melting-pot,' replied Fagin, 'and
this is your share.  It's rather more than it ought to be, my dear; but
as I know you'll do me a good turn another time, and--'

'Stow that gammon,' interposed the robber, impatiently. 'Where is it?
Hand over!'

'Yes, yes, Bill; give me time, give me time,' replied the Jew,
soothingly.  'Here it is!  All safe!'  As he spoke, he drew forth an
old cotton handkerchief from his breast; and untying a large knot in
one corner, produced a small brown-paper packet.  Sikes, snatching it
from him, hastily opened it; and proceeded to count the sovereigns it
contained.

'This is all, is it?' inquired Sikes.

'All,' replied the Jew.

'You haven't opened the parcel and swallowed one or two as you come
along, have you?' inquired Sikes, suspiciously. 'Don't put on an
injured look at the question; you've done it many a time. Jerk the
tinkler.'

These words, in plain English, conveyed an injunction to ring the bell.
It was answered by another Jew:  younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile
and repulsive in appearance.

Bill Sikes merely pointed to the empty measure.  The Jew, perfectly
understanding the hint, retired to fill it:  previously exchanging a
remarkable look with Fagin, who raised his eyes for an instant, as if
in expectation of it, and shook his head in reply; so slightly that the
action would have been almost imperceptible to an observant third
person.  It was lost upon Sikes, who was stooping at the moment to tie
the boot-lace which the dog had torn.  Possibly, if he had observed the
brief interchange of signals, he might have thought that it boded no
good to him.

'Is anybody here, Barney?' inquired Fagin; speaking, now that that
Sikes was looking on, without raising his eyes from the ground.

'Dot a shoul,' replied Barney; whose words:  whether they came from the
heart or not:  made their way through the nose.

'Nobody?' inquired Fagin, in a tone of surprise:  which perhaps might
mean that Barney was at liberty to tell the truth.

'Dobody but Biss Dadsy,' replied Barney.

'Nancy!' exclaimed Sikes.  'Where?  Strike me blind, if I don't honour
that 'ere girl, for her native talents.'

'She's bid havid a plate of boiled beef id the bar,' replied Barney.

'Send her here,' said Sikes, pouring out a glass of liquor. 'Send her
here.'

Barney looked timidly at Fagin, as if for permission; the Jew remaining
silent, and not lifting his eyes from the ground, he retired; and
presently returned, ushering in Nancy; who was decorated with the
bonnet, apron, basket, and street-door key, complete.

'You are on the scent, are you, Nancy?' inquired Sikes, proffering the
glass.

'Yes, I am, Bill,' replied the young lady, disposing of its contents;
'and tired enough of it I am, too.  The young brat's been ill and
confined to the crib; and--'

'Ah, Nancy, dear!' said Fagin, looking up.

Now, whether a peculiar contraction of the Jew's red eye-brows, and a
half closing of his deeply-set eyes, warned Miss Nancy that she was
disposed to be too communicative, is not a matter of much importance.
The fact is all we need care for here; and the fact is, that she
suddenly checked herself, and with several gracious smiles upon Mr.
Sikes, turned the conversation to other matters. In about ten minutes'
time, Mr. Fagin was seized with a fit of coughing; upon which Nancy
pulled her shawl over her shoulders, and declared it was time to go.
Mr. Sikes, finding that he was walking a short part of her way himself,
expressed his intention of accompanying her; they went away together,
followed, at a little distant, by the dog, who slunk out of a back-yard
as soon as his master was out of sight.

The Jew thrust his head out of the room door when Sikes had left it;
looked after him as he walked up the dark passage; shook his clenched
fist; muttered a deep curse; and then, with a horrible grin, reseated
himself at the table; where he was soon deeply absorbed in the
interesting pages of the Hue-and-Cry.

Meanwhile, Oliver Twist, little dreaming that he was within so very
short a distance of the merry old gentleman, was on his way to the
book-stall.  When he got into Clerkenwell, he accidently turned down a
by-street which was not exactly in his way; but not discovering his
mistake until he had got half-way down it, and knowing it must lead in
the right direction, he did not think it worth while to turn back; and
so marched on, as quickly as he could, with the books under his arm.

He was walking along, thinking how happy and contented he ought to
feel; and how much he would give for only one look at poor little Dick,
who, starved and beaten, might be weeping bitterly at that very moment;
when he was startled by a young woman screaming out very loud.  'Oh, my
dear brother!'  And he had hardly looked up, to see what the matter
was, when he was stopped by having a pair of arms thrown tight round
his neck.

'Don't,' cried Oliver, struggling.  'Let go of me.  Who is it? What are
you stopping me for?'

The only reply to this, was a great number of loud lamentations from
the young woman who had embraced him; and who had a little basket and a
street-door key in her hand.

'Oh my gracious!' said the young woman, 'I have found him!  Oh! Oliver!
Oliver!  Oh you naughty boy, to make me suffer such distress on your
account!  Come home, dear, come.  Oh, I've found him.  Thank gracious
goodness heavins, I've found him!'  With these incoherent exclamations,
the young woman burst into another fit of crying, and got so dreadfully
hysterical, that a couple of women who came up at the moment asked a
butcher's boy with a shiny head of hair anointed with suet, who was
also looking on, whether he didn't think he had better run for the
doctor.  To which, the butcher's boy:  who appeared of a lounging, not
to say indolent disposition:  replied, that he thought not.

'Oh, no, no, never mind,' said the young woman, grasping Oliver's hand;
'I'm better now.  Come home directly, you cruel boy! Come!'

'Oh, ma'am,' replied the young woman, 'he ran away, near a month ago,
from his parents, who are hard-working and respectable people; and went
and joined a set of thieves and bad characters; and almost broke his
mother's heart.'

'Young wretch!' said one woman.

'Go home, do, you little brute,' said the other.

'I am not,' replied Oliver, greatly alarmed.  'I don't know her. I
haven't any sister, or father and mother either.  I'm an orphan; I live
at Pentonville.'

'Only hear him, how he braves it out!' cried the young woman.

'Why, it's Nancy!' exclaimed Oliver; who now saw her face for the first
time; and started back, in irrepressible astonishment.

'You see he knows me!' cried Nancy, appealing to the bystanders. 'He
can't help himself.  Make him come home, there's good people, or he'll
kill his dear mother and father, and break my heart!'

'What the devil's this?' said a man, bursting out of a beer-shop, with
a white dog at his heels; 'young Oliver! Come home to your poor mother,
you young dog!  Come home directly.'

'I don't belong to them.  I don't know them.  Help! help!' cried
Oliver, struggling in the man's powerful grasp.

'Help!' repeated the man.  'Yes; I'll help you, you young rascal!

What books are these?  You've been a stealing 'em, have you? Give 'em
here.'  With these words, the man tore the volumes from his grasp, and
struck him on the head.

'That's right!' cried a looker-on, from a garret-window. 'That's the
only way of bringing him to his senses!'

'To be sure!' cried a sleepy-faced carpenter, casting an approving look
at the garret-window.

'It'll do him good!' said the two women.

'And he shall have it, too!' rejoined the man, administering another
blow, and seizing Oliver by the collar.  'Come on, you young villain!
Here, Bull's-eye, mind him, boy!  Mind him!'

Weak with recent illness; stupified by the blows and the suddenness of
the attack; terrified by the fierce growling of the dog, and the
brutality of the man; overpowered by the conviction of the bystanders
that he really was the hardened little wretch he was described to be;
what could one poor child do!  Darkness had set in; it was a low
neighborhood; no help was near; resistance was useless.  In another
moment he was dragged into a labyrinth of dark narrow courts, and was
forced along them at a pace which rendered the few cries he dared to
give utterance to, unintelligible.  It was of little moment, indeed,
whether they were intelligible or no; for there was nobody to care for
them, had they been ever so plain.


      *      *      *      *      *

The gas-lamps were lighted; Mrs. Bedwin was waiting anxiously at the
open door; the servant had run up the street twenty times to see if
there were any traces of Oliver; and still the two old gentlemen sat,
perseveringly, in the dark parlour, with the watch between them.



CHAPTER XVI

RELATES WHAT BECAME OF OLIVER TWIST, AFTER HE HAD BEEN CLAIMED BY NANCY

The narrow streets and courts, at length, terminated in a large open
space; scattered about which, were pens for beasts, and other
indications of a cattle-market.  Sikes slackened his pace when they
reached this spot:  the girl being quite unable to support any longer,
the rapid rate at which they had hitherto walked.  Turning to Oliver,
he roughly commanded him to take hold of Nancy's hand.

'Do you hear?' growled Sikes, as Oliver hesitated, and looked round.

They were in a dark corner, quite out of the track of passengers.

Oliver saw, but too plainly, that resistance would be of no avail.  He
held out his hand, which Nancy clasped tight in hers.

'Give me the other,' said Sikes, seizing Oliver's unoccupied hand.
'Here, Bull's-Eye!'

The dog looked up, and growled.

'See here, boy!' said Sikes, putting his other hand to Oliver's throat;
'if he speaks ever so soft a word, hold him!  D'ye mind!'

The dog growled again; and licking his lips, eyed Oliver as if he were
anxious to attach himself to his windpipe without delay.

'He's as willing as a Christian, strike me blind if he isn't!' said
Sikes, regarding the animal with a kind of grim and ferocious approval.
'Now, you know what you've got to expect, master, so call away as quick
as you like; the dog will soon stop that game.  Get on, young'un!'

Bull's-eye wagged his tail in acknowledgment of this unusually
endearing form of speech; and, giving vent to another admonitory growl
for the benefit of Oliver, led the way onward.

It was Smithfield that they were crossing, although it might have been
Grosvenor Square, for anything Oliver knew to the contrary. The night
was dark and foggy.  The lights in the shops could scarecely struggle
through the heavy mist, which thickened every moment and shrouded the
streets and houses in gloom; rendering the strange place still stranger
in Oliver's eyes; and making his uncertainty the more dismal and
depressing.

They had hurried on a few paces, when a deep church-bell struck the
hour.  With its first stroke, his two conductors stopped, and turned
their heads in the direction whence the sound proceeded.

'Eight o' clock, Bill,' said Nancy, when the bell ceased.

'What's the good of telling me that; I can hear it, can't I!' replied
Sikes.

'I wonder whether THEY can hear it,' said Nancy.

'Of course they can,' replied Sikes.  'It was Bartlemy time when I was
shopped; and there warn't a penny trumpet in the fair, as I couldn't
hear the squeaking on.  Arter I was locked up for the night, the row
and din outside made the thundering old jail so silent, that I could
almost have beat my brains out against the iron plates of the door.'

'Poor fellow!' said Nancy, who still had her face turned towards the
quarter in which the bell had sounded.  'Oh, Bill, such fine young
chaps as them!'

'Yes; that's all you women think of,' answered Sikes.  'Fine young
chaps!  Well, they're as good as dead, so it don't much matter.'

With this consolation, Mr. Sikes appeared to repress a rising tendency
to jealousy, and, clasping Oliver's wrist more firmly, told him to step
out again.

'Wait a minute!' said the girl:  'I wouldn't hurry by, if it was you
that was coming out to be hung, the next time eight o'clock struck,
Bill.  I'd walk round and round the place till I dropped, if the snow
was on the ground, and I hadn't a shawl to cover me.'

'And what good would that do?' inquired the unsentimental Mr. Sikes.
'Unless you could pitch over a file and twenty yards of good stout
rope, you might as well be walking fifty mile off, or not walking at
all, for all the good it would do me.  Come on, and don't stand
preaching there.'

The girl burst into a laugh; drew her shawl more closely round her; and
they walked away.  But Oliver felt her hand tremble, and, looking up in
her face as they passed a gas-lamp, saw that it had turned a deadly
white.

They walked on, by little-frequented and dirty ways, for a full
half-hour:  meeting very few people, and those appearing from their
looks to hold much the same position in society as Mr. Sikes himself.
At length they turned into a very filthy narrow street, nearly full of
old-clothes shops; the dog running forward, as if conscious that there
was no further occasion for his keeping on guard, stopped before the
door of a shop that was closed and apparently untenanted; the house was
in a ruinous condition, and on the door was nailed a board, intimating
that it was to let:  which looked as if it had hung there for many
years.

'All right,' cried Sikes, glancing cautiously about.

Nancy stooped below the shutters, and Oliver heard the sound of a bell.
They crossed to the opposite side of the street, and stood for a few
moments under a lamp.  A noise, as if a sash window were gently raised,
was heard; and soon afterwards the door softly opened.  Mr. Sikes then
seized the terrified boy by the collar with very little ceremony; and
all three were quickly inside the house.

The passage was perfectly dark.  They waited, while the person who had
let them in, chained and barred the door.

'Anybody here?' inquired Sikes.

'No,' replied a voice, which Oliver thought he had heard before.

'Is the old 'un here?' asked the robber.

'Yes,' replied the voice, 'and precious down in the mouth he has been.
Won't he be glad to see you?  Oh, no!'

The style of this reply, as well as the voice which delivered it,
seemed familiar to Oliver's ears:  but it was impossible to distinguish
even the form of the speaker in the darkness.

'Let's have a glim,' said Sikes, 'or we shall go breaking our necks, or
treading on the dog.  Look after your legs if you do!'

'Stand still a moment, and I'll get you one,' replied the voice. The
receding footsteps of the speaker were heard; and, in another minute,
the form of Mr. John Dawkins, otherwise the Artful Dodger, appeared.
He bore in his right hand a tallow candle stuck in the end of a cleft
stick.

The young gentleman did not stop to bestow any other mark of
recognition upon Oliver than a humourous grin; but, turning away,
beckoned the visitors to follow him down a flight of stairs. They
crossed an empty kitchen; and, opening the door of a low
earthy-smelling room, which seemed to have been built in a small
back-yard, were received with a shout of laughter.

'Oh, my wig, my wig!' cried Master Charles Bates, from whose lungs the
laughter had proceeded:  'here he is! oh, cry, here he is!  Oh, Fagin,
look at him!  Fagin, do look at him! I can't bear it; it is such a
jolly game, I cant' bear it.  Hold me, somebody, while I laugh it out.'

With this irrepressible ebullition of mirth, Master Bates laid himself
flat on the floor: and kicked convulsively for five minutes, in an
ectasy of facetious joy.  Then jumping to his feet, he snatched the
cleft stick from the Dodger; and, advancing to Oliver, viewed him round
and round; while the Jew, taking off his nightcap, made a great number
of low bows to the bewildered boy.  The Artful, meantime, who was of a
rather saturnine disposition, and seldom gave way to merriment when it
interfered with business, rifled Oliver's pockets with steady assiduity.

'Look at his togs, Fagin!' said Charley, putting the light so close to
his new jacket as nearly to set him on fire.  'Look at his togs!
Superfine cloth, and the heavy swell cut!  Oh, my eye, what a game!
And his books, too!  Nothing but a gentleman, Fagin!'

'Delighted to see you looking so well, my dear,' said the Jew, bowing
with mock humility.  'The Artful shall give you another suit, my dear,
for fear you should spoil that Sunday one.  Why didn't you write, my
dear, and say you were coming?  We'd have got something warm for
supper.'

At his, Master Bates roared again: so loud, that Fagin himself relaxed,
and even the Dodger smiled; but as the Artful drew forth the five-pound
note at that instant, it is doubtful whether the sally of the discovery
awakened his merriment.

'Hallo, what's that?' inquired Sikes, stepping forward as the Jew
seized the note.  'That's mine, Fagin.'

'No, no, my dear,' said the Jew.  'Mine, Bill, mine.  You shall have
the books.'

'If that ain't mine!' said Bill Sikes, putting on his hat with a
determined air; 'mine and Nancy's that is; I'll take the boy back
again.'

The Jew started.  Oliver started too, though from a very different
cause; for he hoped that the dispute might really end in his being
taken back.

'Come!  Hand over, will you?' said Sikes.

'This is hardly fair, Bill; hardly fair, is it, Nancy?' inquired the
Jew.

'Fair, or not fair,' retorted Sikes, 'hand over, I tell you! Do you
think Nancy and me has got nothing else to do with our precious time
but to spend it in scouting arter, and kidnapping, every young boy as
gets grabbed through you?  Give it here, you avaricious old skeleton,
give it here!'

With this gentle remonstrance, Mr. Sikes plucked the note from between
the Jew's finger and thumb; and looking the old man coolly in the face,
folded it up small, and tied it in his neckerchief.

'That's for our share of the trouble,' said Sikes; 'and not half
enough, neither.  You may keep the books, if you're fond of reading.
If you ain't, sell 'em.'

'They're very pretty,' said Charley Bates: who, with sundry grimaces,
had been affecting to read one of the volumes in question; 'beautiful
writing, isn't is, Oliver?'  At sight of the dismayed look with which
Oliver regarded his tormentors, Master Bates, who was blessed with a
lively sense of the ludicrous, fell into another ectasy, more
boisterous than the first.

'They belong to the old gentleman,' said Oliver, wringing his hands;
'to the good, kind, old gentleman who took me into his house, and had
me nursed, when I was near dying of the fever. Oh, pray send them back;
send him back the books and money.  Keep me here all my life long; but
pray, pray send them back.  He'll think I stole them; the old lady:
all of them who were so kind to me: will think I stole them.  Oh, do
have mercy upon me, and send them back!'

With these words, which were uttered with all the energy of passionate
grief, Oliver fell upon his knees at the Jew's feet; and beat his hands
together, in perfect desperation.

'The boy's right,' remarked Fagin, looking covertly round, and knitting
his shaggy eyebrows into a hard knot.  'You're right, Oliver, you're
right; they WILL think you have stolen 'em.  Ha! ha!' chuckled the Jew,
rubbing his hands, 'it couldn't have happened better, if we had chosen
our time!'

'Of course it couldn't,' replied Sikes; 'I know'd that, directly I see
him coming through Clerkenwell, with the books under his arm.  It's all
right enough.  They're soft-hearted psalm-singers, or they wouldn't
have taken him in at all; and they'll ask no questions after him, fear
they should be obliged to prosecute, and so get him lagged.  He's safe
enough.'

Oliver had looked from one to the other, while these words were being
spoken, as if he were bewildered, and could scarecely understand what
passed; but when Bill Sikes concluded, he jumped suddenly to his feet,
and tore wildly from the room:  uttering shrieks for help, which made
the bare old house echo to the roof.

'Keep back the dog, Bill!' cried Nancy, springing before the door, and
closing it, as the Jew and his two pupils darted out in pursuit.  'Keep
back the dog; he'll tear the boy to pieces.'

'Serve him right!' cried Sikes, struggling to disengage himself from
the girl's grasp.  'Stand off from me, or I'll split your head against
the wall.'

'I don't care for that, Bill, I don't care for that,' screamed the
girl, struggling violently with the man, 'the child shan't be torn down
by the dog, unless you kill me first.'

'Shan't he!' said Sikes, setting his teeth.  'I'll soon do that, if you
don't keep off.'

The housebreaker flung the girl from him to the further end of the
room, just as the Jew and the two boys returned, dragging Oliver among
them.

'What's the matter here!' said Fagin, looking round.

'The girl's gone mad, I think,' replied Sikes, savagely.

'No, she hasn't,' said Nancy, pale and breathless from the scuffle;
'no, she hasn't, Fagin; don't think it.'

'Then keep quiet, will you?' said the Jew, with a threatening look.

'No, I won't do that, neither,' replied Nancy, speaking very loud.
'Come!  What do you think of that?'

Mr. Fagin was sufficiently well acquainted with the manners and customs
of that particular species of humanity to which Nancy belonged, to feel
tolerably certain that it would be rather unsafe to prolong any
conversation with her, at present.  With the view of diverting the
attention of the company, he turned to Oliver.

'So you wanted to get away, my dear, did you?' said the Jew, taking up
a jagged and knotted club which law in a corner of the fireplace; 'eh?'

Oliver made no reply.  But he watched the Jew's motions, and breathed
quickly.

'Wanted to get assistance; called for the police; did you?' sneered the
Jew, catching the boy by the arm.  'We'll cure you of that, my young
master.'

The Jew inflicted a smart blow on Oliver's shoulders with the club; and
was raising it for a second, when the girl, rushing forward, wrested it
from his hand.  She flung it into the fire, with a force that brought
some of the glowing coals whirling out into the room.

'I won't stand by and see it done, Fagin,' cried the girl. 'You've got
the boy, and what more would you have?--Let him be--let him be--or I
shall put that mark on some of you, that will bring me to the gallows
before my time.'

The girl stamped her foot violently on the floor as she vented this
threat; and with her lips compressed, and her hands clenched, looked
alternately at the Jew and the other robber: her face quite colourless
from the passion of rage into which she had gradually worked herself.

'Why, Nancy!' said the Jew, in a soothing tone; after a pause, during
which he and Mr. Sikes had stared at one another in a disconcerted
manner; 'you,--you're more clever than ever to-night.  Ha! ha! my dear,
you are acting beautifully.'

'Am I!' said the girl.  'Take care I don't overdo it.  You will be the
worse for it, Fagin, if I do; and so I tell you in good time to keep
clear of me.'

There is something about a roused woman: especially if she add to all
her other strong passions, the fierce impulses of recklessness and
despair; which few men like to provoke. The Jew saw that it would be
hopeless to affect any further mistake regarding the reality of Miss
Nancy's rage; and, shrinking involuntarily back a few paces, cast a
glance, half imploring and half cowardly, at Sikes: as if to hint that
he was the fittest person to pursue the dialogue.

Mr. Sikes, thus mutely appealed to; and possibly feeling his personal
pride and influence interested in the immediate reduction of Miss Nancy
to reason; gave utterance to about a couple of score of curses and
threats, the rapid production of which reflected great credit on the
fertility of his invention. As they produced no visible effect on the
object against whom they were discharged, however, he resorted to more
tangible arguments.

'What do you mean by this?' said Sikes; backing the inquiry with a very
common imprecation concerning the most beautiful of human features:
which, if it were heard above, only once out of every fifty thousand
times that it is uttered below, would render blindness as common a
disorder as measles: 'what do you mean by it?  Burn my body!  Do you
know who you are, and what you are?'

'Oh, yes, I know all about it,' replied the girl, laughing
hysterically; and shaking her head from side to side, with a poor
assumption of indifference.

'Well, then, keep quiet,' rejoined Sikes, with a growl like that he was
accustomed to use when addressing his dog, 'or I'll quiet you for a
good long time to come.'

The girl laughed again: even less composedly than before; and, darting
a hasty look at Sikes, turned her face aside, and bit her lip till the
blood came.

'You're a nice one,' added Sikes, as he surveyed her with a
contemptuous air, 'to take up the humane and gen--teel side!  A pretty
subject for the child, as you call him, to make a friend of!'

'God Almighty help me, I am!' cried the girl passionately; 'and I wish
I had been struck dead in the street, or had changed places with them
we passed so near to-night, before I had lent a hand in bringing him
here.  He's a thief, a liar, a devil, all that's bad, from this night
forth.  Isn't that enough for the old wretch, without blows?'

'Come, come, Sikes,' said the Jew appealing to him in a remonstratory
tone, and motioning towards the boys, who were eagerly attentive to all
that passed; 'we must have civil words; civil words, Bill.'

'Civil words!' cried the girl, whose passion was frightful to see.
'Civil words, you villain!  Yes, you deserve 'em from me. I thieved for
you when I was a child not half as old as this!' pointing to Oliver.
'I have been in the same trade, and in the same service, for twelve
years since.  Don't you know it?  Speak out!  Don't you know it?'

'Well, well,' replied the Jew, with an attempt at pacification; 'and,
if you have, it's your living!'

'Aye, it is!' returned the girl; not speaking, but pouring out the
words in one continuous and vehement scream.  'It is my living; and the
cold, wet, dirty streets are my home; and you're the wretch that drove
me to them long ago, and that'll keep me there, day and night, day and
night, till I die!'

'I shall do you a mischief!' interposed the Jew, goaded by these
reproaches; 'a mischief worse than that, if you say much more!'

The girl said nothing more; but, tearing her hair and dress in a
transport of passion, made such a rush at the Jew as would probably
have left signal marks of her revenge upon him, had not her wrists been
seized by Sikes at the right moment; upon which, she made a few
ineffectual struggles, and fainted.

'She's all right now,' said Sikes, laying her down in a corner. 'She's
uncommon strong in the arms, when she's up in this way.'

The Jew wiped his forehead: and smiled, as if it were a relief to have
the disturbance over; but neither he, nor Sikes, nor the dog, nor the
boys, seemed to consider it in any other light than a common occurance
incidental to business.

'It's the worst of having to do with women,' said the Jew, replacing
his club; 'but they're clever, and we can't get on, in our line,
without 'em.  Charley, show Oliver to bed.'

'I suppose he'd better not wear his best clothes tomorrow, Fagin, had
he?' inquired Charley Bates.

'Certainly not,' replied the Jew, reciprocating the grin with which
Charley put the question.

Master Bates, apparently much delighted with his commission, took the
cleft stick: and led Oliver into an adjacent kitchen, where there were
two or three of the beds on which he had slept before; and here, with
many uncontrollable bursts of laughter, he produced the identical old
suit of clothes which Oliver had so much congratulated himself upon
leaving off at Mr. Brownlow's; and the accidental display of which, to
Fagin, by the Jew who purchased them, had been the very first clue
received, of his whereabout.

'Put off the smart ones,' said Charley, 'and I'll give 'em to Fagin to
take care of.  What fun it is!'

Poor Oliver unwillingly complied.  Master Bates rolling up the new
clothes under his arm, departed from the room, leaving Oliver in the
dark, and locking the door behind him.

The noise of Charley's laughter, and the voice of Miss Betsy, who
opportunely arrived to throw water over her friend, and perform other
feminine offices for the promotion of her recovery, might have kept
many people awake under more happy circumstances than those in which
Oliver was placed.  But he was sick and weary; and he soon fell sound
asleep.



CHAPTER XVII

OLIVER'S DESTINY CONTINUING UNPROPITIOUS, BRINGS A GREAT MAN TO LONDON
TO INJURE HIS REPUTATION

It is the custom on the stage, in all good murderous melodramas, to
present the tragic and the comic scenes, in as regular alternation, as
the layers of red and white in a side of streaky bacon.  The hero sinks
upon his straw bed, weighed down by fetters and misfortunes; in the
next scene, his faithful but unconscious squire regales the audience
with a comic song.  We behold, with throbbing bosoms, the heroine in
the grasp of a proud and ruthless baron: her virtue and her life alike
in danger, drawing forth her dagger to preserve the one at the cost of
the other; and just as our expectations are wrought up to the highest
pitch, a whistle is heard, and we are straightway transported to the
great hall of the castle; where a grey-headed seneschal sings a funny
chorus with a funnier body of vassals, who are free of all sorts of
places, from church vaults to palaces, and roam about in company,
carolling perpetually.

Such changes appear absurd; but they are not so unnatural as they would
seem at first sight.  The transitions in real life from well-spread
boards to death-beds, and from mourning-weeds to holiday garments, are
not a whit less startling; only, there, we are busy actors, instead of
passive lookers-on, which makes a vast difference.  The actors in the
mimic life of the theatre, are blind to violent transitions and abrupt
impulses of passion or feeling, which, presented before the eyes of
mere spectators, are at once condemned as outrageous and preposterous.

As sudden shiftings of the scene, and rapid changes of time and place,
are not only sanctioned in books by long usage, but are by many
considered as the great art of authorship: an author's skill in his
craft being, by such critics, chiefly estimated with relation to the
dilemmas in which he leaves his characters at the end of every chapter:
this brief introduction to the present one may perhaps be deemed
unnecessary.  If so, let it be considered a delicate intimation on the
part of the historian that he is going back to the town in which Oliver
Twist was born; the reader taking it for granted that there are good
and substantial reasons for making the journey, or he would not be
invited to proceed upon such an expedition.

Mr. Bumble emerged at early morning from the workhouse-gate, and walked
with portly carriage and commanding steps, up the High Street.  He was
in the full bloom and pride of beadlehood; his cocked hat and coat were
dazzling in the morning sun; he clutched his cane with the vigorous
tenacity of health and power.  Mr. Bumble always carried his head high;
but this morning it was higher than usual.  There was an abstraction in
his eye, an elevation in his air, which might have warned an observant
stranger that thoughts were passing in the beadle's mind, too great for
utterance.

Mr. Bumble stopped not to converse with the small shopkeepers and
others who spoke to him, deferentially, as he passed along.  He merely
returned their salutations with a wave of his hand, and relaxed not in
his dignified pace, until he reached the farm where Mrs. Mann tended
the infant paupers with parochial care.

'Drat that beadle!' said Mrs. Mann, hearing the well-known shaking at
the garden-gate.  'If it isn't him at this time in the morning!  Lauk,
Mr. Bumble, only think of its being you!  Well, dear me, it IS a
pleasure, this is!  Come into the parlour, sir, please.'

The first sentence was addressed to Susan; and the exclamations of
delight were uttered to Mr. Bumble: as the good lady unlocked the
garden-gate: and showed him, with great attention and respect, into the
house.

'Mrs. Mann,' said Mr. Bumble; not sitting upon, or dropping himself
into a seat, as any common jackanapes would: but letting himself
gradually and slowly down into a chair; 'Mrs. Mann, ma'am, good
morning.'

'Well, and good morning to _you_, sir,' replied Mrs. Mann, with many
smiles; 'and hoping you find yourself well, sir!'

'So-so, Mrs. Mann,' replied the beadle.  'A porochial life is not a bed
of roses, Mrs. Mann.'

'Ah, that it isn't indeed, Mr. Bumble,' rejoined the lady. And all the
infant paupers might have chorussed the rejoinder with great propriety,
if they had heard it.

'A porochial life, ma'am,' continued Mr. Bumble, striking the table
with his cane, 'is a life of worrit, and vexation, and hardihood; but
all public characters, as I may say, must suffer prosecution.'

Mrs. Mann, not very well knowing what the beadle meant, raised her
hands with a look of sympathy, and sighed.

'Ah!  You may well sigh, Mrs. Mann!' said the beadle.

Finding she had done right, Mrs. Mann sighed again:  evidently to the
satisfaction of the public character:  who, repressing a complacent
smile by looking sternly at his cocked hat, said,

'Mrs. Mann, I am going to London.'

'Lauk, Mr. Bumble!' cried Mrs. Mann, starting back.

'To London, ma'am,' resumed the inflexible beadle, 'by coach.  I and
two paupers, Mrs. Mann!  A legal action is a coming on, about a
settlement; and the board has appointed me--me, Mrs. Mann--to dispose
to the matter before the quarter-sessions at Clerkinwell.

And I very much question,' added Mr. Bumble, drawing himself up,
'whether the Clerkinwell Sessions will not find themselves in the wrong
box before they have done with me.'

'Oh! you mustn't be too hard upon them, sir,' said Mrs. Mann, coaxingly.

'The Clerkinwell Sessions have brought it upon themselves, ma'am,'
replied Mr. Bumble; 'and if the Clerkinwell Sessions find that they
come off rather worse than they expected, the Clerkinwell Sessions have
only themselves to thank.'

There was so much determination and depth of purpose about the menacing
manner in which Mr. Bumble delivered himself of these words, that Mrs.
Mann appeared quite awed by them. At length she said,

'You're going by coach, sir?  I thought it was always usual to send
them paupers in carts.'

'That's when they're ill, Mrs. Mann,' said the beadle.  'We put the
sick paupers into open carts in the rainy weather, to prevent their
taking cold.'

'Oh!' said Mrs. Mann.

'The opposition coach contracts for these two; and takes them cheap,'
said Mr. Bumble.  'They are both in a very low state, and we find it
would come two pound cheaper to move 'em than to bury 'em--that is, if
we can throw 'em upon another parish, which I think we shall be able to
do, if they don't die upon the road to spite us.  Ha! ha! ha!'

When Mr. Bumble had laughed a little while, his eyes again encountered
the cocked hat; and he became grave.

'We are forgetting business, ma'am,' said the beadle; 'here is your
porochial stipend for the month.'

Mr. Bumble produced some silver money rolled up in paper, from his
pocket-book; and requested a receipt:  which Mrs. Mann wrote.

'It's very much blotted, sir,' said the farmer of infants; 'but it's
formal enough, I dare say.  Thank you, Mr. Bumble, sir, I am very much
obliged to you, I'm sure.'

Mr. Bumble nodded, blandly, in acknowledgment of Mrs. Mann's curtsey;
and inquired how the children were.

'Bless their dear little hearts!' said Mrs. Mann with emotion, 'they're
as well as can be, the dears!  Of course, except the two that died last
week.  And little Dick.'

'Isn't that boy no better?' inquired Mr. Bumble.

Mrs. Mann shook her head.

'He's a ill-conditioned, wicious, bad-disposed porochial child that,'
said Mr. Bumble angrily.  'Where is he?'

'I'll bring him to you in one minute, sir,' replied Mrs. Mann. 'Here,
you Dick!'

After some calling, Dick was discovered.  Having had his face put under
the pump, and dried upon Mrs. Mann's gown, he was led into the awful
presence of Mr. Bumble, the beadle.

The child was pale and thin; his cheeks were sunken; and his eyes large
and bright.  The scanty parish dress, the livery of his misery, hung
loosely on his feeble body; and his young limbs had wasted away, like
those of an old man.

Such was the little being who stood trembling beneath Mr. Bumble's
glance; not daring to lift his eyes from the floor; and dreading even
to hear the beadle's voice.

'Can't you look at the gentleman, you obstinate boy?' said Mrs. Mann.

The child meekly raised his eyes, and encountered those of Mr. Bumble.

'What's the matter with you, porochial Dick?' inquired Mr. Bumble, with
well-timed jocularity.

'Nothing, sir,' replied the child faintly.

'I should think not,' said Mrs. Mann, who had of course laughed very
much at Mr. Bumble's humour.

'You want for nothing, I'm sure.'

'I should like--' faltered the child.

'Hey-day!' interposed Mr. Mann, 'I suppose you're going to say that you
DO want for something, now?  Why, you little wretch--'

'Stop, Mrs. Mann, stop!' said the beadle, raising his hand with a show
of authority.  'Like what, sir, eh?'

'I should like,' faltered the child, 'if somebody that can write, would
put a few words down for me on a piece of paper, and fold it up and
seal it, and keep it for me, after I am laid in the ground.'

'Why, what does the boy mean?' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, on whom the
earnest manner and wan aspect of the child had made some impression:
accustomed as he was to such things.  'What do you mean, sir?'

'I should like,' said the child, 'to leave my dear love to poor Oliver
Twist; and to let him know how often I have sat by myself and cried to
think of his wandering about in the dark nights with nobody to help
him.  And I should like to tell him,' said the child pressing his small
hands together, and speaking with great fervour, 'that I was glad to
die when I was very young; for, perhaps, if I had lived to be a man,
and had grown old, my little sister who is in Heaven, might forget me,
or be unlike me; and it would be so much happier if we were both
children there together.'

Mr. Bumble surveyed the little speaker, from head to foot, with
indescribable astonishment; and, turning to his companion, said,
'They're all in one story, Mrs. Mann.  That out-dacious Oliver had
demogalized them all!'

'I couldn't have believed it, sir' said Mrs Mann, holding up her hands,
and looking malignantly at Dick.  'I never see such a hardened little
wretch!'

'Take him away, ma'am!' said Mr. Bumble imperiously.  'This must be
stated to the board, Mrs. Mann.

'I hope the gentleman will understand that it isn't my fault, sir?'
said Mrs. Mann, whimpering pathetically.

'They shall understand that, ma'am; they shall be acquainted with the
true state of the case,' said Mr. Bumble.  'There; take him away, I
can't bear the sight on him.'

Dick was immediately taken away, and locked up in the coal-cellar.  Mr.
Bumble shortly afterwards took himself off, to prepare for his journey.

At six o'clock next morning, Mr. Bumble:  having exchanged his cocked
hat for a round one, and encased his person in a blue great-coat with a
cape to it:  took his place on the outside of the coach, accompanied by
the criminals whose settlement was disputed; with whom, in due course
of time, he arrived in London.

He experienced no other crosses on the way, than those which originated
in the perverse behaviour of the two paupers, who persisted in
shivering, and complaining of the cold, in a manner which, Mr. Bumble
declared, caused his teeth to chatter in his head, and made him feel
quite uncomfortable; although he had a great-coat on.

Having disposed of these evil-minded persons for the night, Mr. Bumble
sat himself down in the house at which the coach stopped; and took a
temperate dinner of steaks, oyster sauce, and porter. Putting a glass
of hot gin-and-water on the chimney-piece, he drew his chair to the
fire; and, with sundry moral reflections on the too-prevalent sin of
discontent and complaining, composed himself to read the paper.

The very first paragraph upon which Mr. Bumble's eye rested, was the
following advertisement.

                 'FIVE GUINEAS REWARD

'Whereas a young boy, named Oliver Twist, absconded, or was enticed, on
Thursday evening last, from his home, at Pentonville; and has not since
been heard of.  The above reward will be paid to any person who will
give such information as will lead to the discovery of the said Oliver
Twist, or tend to throw any light upon his previous history, in which
the advertiser is, for many reasons, warmly interested.'

And then followed a full description of Oliver's dress, person,
appearance, and disappearance:  with the name and address of Mr.
Brownlow at full length.

Mr. Bumble opened his eyes; read the advertisement, slowly and
carefully, three several times; and in something more than five minutes
was on his way to Pentonville: having actually, in his excitement, left
the glass of hot gin-and-water, untasted.

'Is Mr. Brownlow at home?' inquired Mr. Bumble of the girl who opened
the door.

To this inquiry the girl returned the not uncommon, but rather evasive
reply of 'I don't know; where do you come from?'

Mr. Bumble no sooner uttered Oliver's name, in explanation of his
errand, than Mrs. Bedwin, who had been listening at the parlour door,
hastened into the passage in a breathless state.

'Come in, come in,' said the old lady: 'I knew we should hear of him.
Poor dear!  I knew we should!  I was certain of it.  Bless his heart!
I said so all along.'

Having heard this, the worthy old lady hurried back into the parlour
again; and seating herself on a sofa, burst into tears. The girl, who
was not quite so susceptible, had run upstairs meanwhile; and now
returned with a request that Mr. Bumble would follow her immediately:
which he did.

He was shown into the little back study, where sat Mr. Brownlow and his
friend Mr. Grimwig, with decanters and glasses before them.  The latter
gentleman at once burst into the exclamation:

'A beadle.  A parish beadle, or I'll eat my head.'

'Pray don't interrupt just now,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'Take a seat, will
you?'

Mr. Bumble sat himself down; quite confounded by the oddity of Mr.
Grimwig's manner.  Mr. Brownlow moved the lamp, so as to obtain an
uninterrupted view of the beadle's countenance; and said, with a little
impatience,

'Now, sir, you come in consequence of having seen the advertisement?'

'Yes, sir,' said Mr. Bumble.

'And you ARE a beadle, are you not?' inquired Mr. Grimwig.

'I am a porochial beadle, gentlemen,' rejoined Mr. Bumble proudly.

'Of course,' observed Mr. Grimwig aside to his friend, 'I knew he was.
A beadle all over!'

Mr. Brownlow gently shook his head to impose silence on his friend, and
resumed:

'Do you know where this poor boy is now?'

'No more than nobody,' replied Mr. Bumble.

'Well, what DO you know of him?' inquired the old gentleman. 'Speak
out, my friend, if you have anything to say.  What DO you know of him?'

'You don't happen to know any good of him, do you?' said Mr. Grimwig,
caustically; after an attentive perusal of Mr. Bumble's features.

Mr. Bumble, catching at the inquiry very quickly, shook his head with
portentous solemnity.

'You see?' said Mr. Grimwig, looking triumphantly at Mr. Brownlow.

Mr. Brownlow looked apprehensively at Mr. Bumble's pursed-up
countenance; and requested him to communicate what he knew regarding
Oliver, in as few words as possible.

Mr. Bumble put down his hat; unbuttoned his coat; folded his arms;
inclined his head in a retrospective manner; and, after a few moments'
reflection, commenced his story.

It would be tedious if given in the beadle's words:  occupying, as it
did, some twenty minutes in the telling; but the sum and substance of
it was, that Oliver was a foundling, born of low and vicious parents.
That he had, from his birth, displayed no better qualities than
treachery, ingratitude, and malice.  That he had terminated his brief
career in the place of his birth, by making a sanguinary and cowardly
attack on an unoffending lad, and running away in the night-time from
his master's house.  In proof of his really being the person he
represented himself, Mr. Bumble laid upon the table the papers he had
brought to town. Folding his arms again, he then awaited Mr. Brownlow's
observations.

'I fear it is all too true,' said the old gentleman sorrowfully, after
looking over the papers.  'This is not much for your intelligence; but
I would gladly have given you treble the money, if it had been
favourable to the boy.'

It is not improbable that if Mr. Bumble had been possessed of this
information at an earlier period of the interview, he might have
imparted a very different colouring to his little history. It was too
late to do it now, however; so he shook his head gravely, and,
pocketing the five guineas, withdrew.

Mr. Brownlow paced the room to and fro for some minutes; evidently so
much disturbed by the beadle's tale, that even Mr. Grimwig forbore to
vex him further.

At length he stopped, and rang the bell violently.

'Mrs. Bedwin,' said Mr. Brownlow, when the housekeeper appeared; 'that
boy, Oliver, is an imposter.'

'It can't be, sir.  It cannot be,' said the old lady energetically.

'I tell you he is,' retorted the old gentleman.  'What do you mean by
can't be?  We have just heard a full account of him from his birth; and
he has been a thorough-paced little villain, all his life.'

'I never will believe it, sir,' replied the old lady, firmly. 'Never!'

'You old women never believe anything but quack-doctors, and lying
story-books,' growled Mr. Grimwig.  'I knew it all along. Why didn't
you take my advise in the beginning; you would if he hadn't had a
fever, I suppose, eh?  He was interesting, wasn't he?  Interesting!
Bah!'  And Mr. Grimwig poked the fire with a flourish.

'He was a dear, grateful, gentle child, sir,' retorted Mrs. Bedwin,
indignantly.  'I know what children are, sir; and have done these forty
years; and people who can't say the same, shouldn't say anything about
them.  That's my opinion!'

This was a hard hit at Mr. Grimwig, who was a bachelor.  As it extorted
nothing from that gentleman but a smile, the old lady tossed her head,
and smoothed down her apron preparatory to another speech, when she was
stopped by Mr. Brownlow.

'Silence!' said the old gentleman, feigning an anger he was far from
feeling.  'Never let me hear the boy's name again.  I rang to tell you
that.  Never.  Never, on any pretence, mind!  You may leave the room,
Mrs. Bedwin.  Remember!  I am in earnest.'

There were sad hearts at Mr. Brownlow's that night.

Oliver's heart sank within him, when he thought of his good friends; it
was well for him that he could not know what they had heard, or it
might have broken outright.



CHAPTER XVIII

HOW OLIVER PASSED HIS TIME IN THE IMPROVING SOCIETY OF HIS REPUTABLE
FRIENDS

About noon next day, when the Dodger and Master Bates had gone out to
pursue their customary avocations, Mr. Fagin took the opportunity of
reading Oliver a long lecture on the crying sin of ingratitude; of
which he clearly demonstrated he had been guilty, to no ordinary
extent, in wilfully absenting himself from the society of his anxious
friends; and, still more, in endeavouring to escape from them after so
much trouble and expense had been incurred in his recovery. Mr. Fagin
laid great stress on the fact of his having taken Oliver in, and
cherished him, when, without his timely aid, he might have perished
with hunger; and he related the dismal and affecting history of a young
lad whom, in his philanthropy, he had succoured under parallel
circumstances, but who, proving unworthy of his confidence and evincing
a desire to communicate with the police, had unfortunately come to be
hanged at the Old Bailey one morning.  Mr. Fagin did not seek to
conceal his share in the catastrophe, but lamented with tears in his
eyes that the wrong-headed and treacherous behaviour of the young
person in question, had rendered it necessary that he should become the
victim of certain evidence for the crown: which, if it were not
precisely true, was indispensably necessary for the safety of him (Mr.
Fagin) and a few select friends.  Mr. Fagin concluded by drawing a
rather disagreeable picture of the discomforts of hanging; and, with
great friendliness and politeness of manner, expressed his anxious
hopes that he might never be obliged to submit Oliver Twist to that
unpleasant operation.

Little Oliver's blood ran cold, as he listened to the Jew's words, and
imperfectly comprehended the dark threats conveyed in them.  That it
was possible even for justice itself to confound the innocent with the
guilty when they were in accidental companionship, he knew already; and
that deeply-laid plans for the destruction of inconveniently knowing or
over-communicative persons, had been really devised and carried out by
the Jew on more occasions than one, he thought by no means unlikely,
when he recollected the general nature of the altercations between that
gentleman and Mr. Sikes: which seemed to bear reference to some
foregone conspiracy of the kind.  As he glanced timidly up, and met the
Jew's searching look, he felt that his pale face and trembling limbs
were neither unnoticed nor unrelished by that wary old gentleman.

The Jew, smiling hideously, patted Oliver on the head, and said, that
if he kept himself quiet, and applied himself to business, he saw they
would be very good friends yet.  Then, taking his hat, and covering
himself with an old patched great-coat, he went out, and locked the
room-door behind him.

And so Oliver remained all that day, and for the greater part of many
subsequent days, seeing nobody, between early morning and midnight, and
left during the long hours to commune with his own thoughts.  Which,
never failing to revert to his kind friends, and the opinion they must
long ago have formed of him, were sad indeed.

After the lapse of a week or so, the Jew left the room-door unlocked;
and he was at liberty to wander about the house.

It was a very dirty place.  The rooms upstairs had great high wooden
chimney-pieces and large doors, with panelled walls and cornices to the
ceiling; which, although they were black with neglect and dust, were
ornamented in various ways.  From all of these tokens Oliver concluded
that a long time ago, before the old Jew was born, it had belonged to
better people, and had perhaps been quite gay and handsome:  dismal and
dreary as it looked now.

Spiders had built their webs in the angles of the walls and ceilings;
and sometimes, when Oliver walked softly into a room, the mice would
scamper across the floor, and run back terrified to their holes.  With
these exceptions, there was neither sight nor sound of any living
thing; and often, when it grew dark, and he was tired of wandering from
room to room, he would crouch in the corner of the passage by the
street-door, to be as near living people as he could; and would remain
there, listening and counting the hours, until the Jew or the boys
returned.

In all the rooms, the mouldering shutters were fast closed:  the bars
which held them were screwed tight into the wood; the only light which
was admitted, stealing its way through round holes at the top: which
made the rooms more gloomy, and filled them with strange shadows.
There was a back-garret window with rusty bars outside, which had no
shutter; and out of this, Oliver often gazed with a melancholy face for
hours together; but nothing was to be descried from it but a confused
and crowded mass of housetops, blackened chimneys, and gable-ends.
Sometimes, indeed, a grizzly head might be seen, peering over the
parapet-wall of a distant house; but it was quickly withdrawn again;
and as the window of Oliver's observatory was nailed down, and dimmed
with the rain and smoke of years, it was as much as he could do to make
out the forms of the different objects beyond, without making any
attempt to be seen or heard,--which he had as much chance of being, as
if he had lived inside the ball of St. Paul's Cathedral.

One afternoon, the Dodger and Master Bates being engaged out that
evening, the first-named young gentleman took it into his head to
evince some anxiety regarding the decoration of his person (to do him
justice, this was by no means an habitual weakness with him); and, with
this end and aim, he condescendingly commanded Oliver to assist him in
his toilet, straightway.

Oliver was but too glad to make himself useful; too happy to have some
faces, however bad, to look upon; too desirous to conciliate those
about him when he could honestly do so; to throw any objection in the
way of this proposal.  So he at once expressed his readiness; and,
kneeling on the floor, while the Dodger sat upon the table so that he
could take his foot in his laps, he applied himself to a process which
Mr. Dawkins designated as 'japanning his trotter-cases.'  The phrase,
rendered into plain English, signifieth, cleaning his boots.

Whether it was the sense of freedom and independence which a rational
animal may be supposed to feel when he sits on a table in an easy
attitude smoking a pipe, swinging one leg carelessly to and fro, and
having his boots cleaned all the time, without even the past trouble of
having taken them off, or the prospective misery of putting them on, to
disturb his reflections; or whether it was the goodness of the tobacco
that soothed the feelings of the Dodger, or the mildness of the beer
that mollified his thoughts; he was evidently tinctured, for the nonce,
with a spice of romance and enthusiasm, foreign to his general nature.
He looked down on Oliver, with a thoughtful countenance, for a brief
space; and then, raising his head, and heaving a gentle sign, said,
half in abstraction, and half to Master Bates:

'What a pity it is he isn't a prig!'

'Ah!' said Master Charles Bates; 'he don't know what's good for him.'

The Dodger sighed again, and resumed his pipe: as did Charley Bates.
They both smoked, for some seconds, in silence.

'I suppose you don't even know what a prig is?' said the Dodger
mournfully.

'I think I know that,' replied Oliver, looking up.  'It's a the--;
you're one, are you not?' inquired Oliver, checking himself.

'I am,' replied the Dodger.  'I'd scorn to be anything else.'  Mr.
Dawkins gave his hat a ferocious cock, after delivering this sentiment,
and looked at Master Bates, as if to denote that he would feel obliged
by his saying anything to the contrary.

'I am,' repeated the Dodger.  'So's Charley.  So's Fagin. So's Sikes.
So's Nancy.  So's Bet.  So we all are, down to the dog. And he's the
downiest one of the lot!'

'And the least given to peaching,' added Charley Bates.

'He wouldn't so much as bark in a witness-box, for fear of committing
himself; no, not if you tied him up in one, and left him there without
wittles for a fortnight,' said the Dodger.

'Not a bit of it,' observed Charley.

'He's a rum dog.  Don't he look fierce at any strange cove that laughs
or sings when he's in company!' pursued the Dodger. 'Won't he growl at
all, when he hears a fiddle playing!  And don't he hate other dogs as
ain't of his breed!  Oh, no!'

'He's an out-and-out Christian,' said Charley.

This was merely intended as a tribute to the animal's abilities, but it
was an appropriate remark in another sense, if Master Bates had only
known it; for there are a good many ladies and gentlemen, claiming to
be out-and-out Christians, between whom, and Mr. Sikes' dog, there
exist strong and singular points of resemblance.

'Well, well,' said the Dodger, recurring to the point from which they
had strayed: with that mindfulness of his profession which influenced
all his proceedings.  'This hasn't go anything to do with young Green
here.'

'No more it has,' said Charley.  'Why don't you put yourself under
Fagin, Oliver?'

'And make your fortun' out of hand?' added the Dodger, with a grin.

'And so be able to retire on your property, and do the gen-teel: as I
mean to, in the very next leap-year but four that ever comes, and the
forty-second Tuesday in Trinity-week,' said Charley Bates.

'I don't like it,' rejoined Oliver, timidly; 'I wish they would let me
go.  I--I--would rather go.'

'And Fagin would RATHER not!' rejoined Charley.

Oliver knew this too well; but thinking it might be dangerous to
express his feelings more openly, he only sighed, and went on with his
boot-cleaning.

'Go!' exclaimed the Dodger.  'Why, where's your spirit?' Don't you take
any pride out of yourself?  Would you go and be dependent on your
friends?'

'Oh, blow that!' said Master Bates: drawing two or three silk
handkerchiefs from his pocket, and tossing them into a cupboard,
'that's too mean; that is.'

'_I_ couldn't do it,' said the Dodger, with an air of haughty disgust.

'You can leave your friends, though,' said Oliver with a half smile;
'and let them be punished for what you did.'

'That,' rejoined the Dodger, with a wave of his pipe, 'That was all out
of consideration for Fagin, 'cause the traps know that we work
together, and he might have got into trouble if we hadn't made our
lucky; that was the move, wasn't it, Charley?'

Master Bates nodded assent, and would have spoken, but the recollection
of Oliver's flight came so suddenly upon him, that the smoke he was
inhaling got entangled with a laugh, and went up into his head, and
down into his throat: and brought on a fit of coughing and stamping,
about five minutes long.

'Look here!' said the Dodger, drawing forth a handful of shillings and
halfpence. 'Here's a jolly life!  What's the odds where it comes from?
Here, catch hold; there's plenty more where they were took from.  You
won't, won't you?  Oh, you precious flat!'

'It's naughty, ain't it, Oliver?' inquired Charley Bates. 'He'll come
to be scragged, won't he?'

'I don't know what that means,' replied Oliver.

'Something in this way, old feller,' said Charly.  As he said it,
Master Bates caught up an end of his neckerchief; and, holding it erect
in the air, dropped his head on his shoulder, and jerked a curious
sound through his teeth; thereby indicating, by a lively pantomimic
representation, that scragging and hanging were one and the same thing.

'That's what it means,' said Charley.  'Look how he stares, Jack!

I never did see such prime company as that 'ere boy; he'll be the death
of me, I know he will.'  Master Charley Bates, having laughed heartily
again, resumed his pipe with tears in his eyes.

'You've been brought up bad,' said the Dodger, surveying his boots with
much satisfaction when Oliver had polished them. 'Fagin will make
something of you, though, or you'll be the first he ever had that
turned out unprofitable.  You'd better begin at once; for you'll come
to the trade long before you think of it; and you're only losing time,
Oliver.'

Master Bates backed this advice with sundry moral admonitions of his
own:  which, being exhausted, he and his friend Mr. Dawkins launched
into a glowing description of the numerous pleasures incidental to the
life they led, interspersed with a variety of hints to Oliver that the
best thing he could do, would be to secure Fagin's favour without more
delay, by the means which they themselves had employed to gain it.

'And always put this in your pipe, Nolly,' said the Dodger, as the Jew
was heard unlocking the door above, 'if you don't take fogels and
tickers--'

'What's the good of talking in that way?' interposed Master Bates; 'he
don't know what you mean.'

'If you don't take pocket-handkechers and watches,' said the Dodger,
reducing his conversation to the level of Oliver's capacity, 'some
other cove will; so that the coves that lose 'em will be all the worse,
and you'll be all the worse, too, and nobody half a ha'p'orth the
better, except the chaps wot gets them--and you've just as good a right
to them as they have.'

'To be sure, to be sure!' said the Jew, who had entered unseen by
Oliver.  'It all lies in a nutshell my dear; in a nutshell, take the
Dodger's word for it.  Ha! ha! ha!  He understands the catechism of his
trade.'

The old man rubbed his hands gleefully together, as he corroborated the
Dodger's reasoning in these terms; and chuckled with delight at his
pupil's proficiency.

The conversation proceeded no farther at this time, for the Jew had
returned home accompanied by Miss Betsy, and a gentleman whom Oliver
had never seen before, but who was accosted by the Dodger as Tom
Chitling; and who, having lingered on the stairs to exchange a few
gallantries with the lady, now made his appearance.

Mr. Chitling was older in years than the Dodger: having perhaps
numbered eighteen winters; but there was a degree of deference in his
deportment towards that young gentleman which seemed to indicate that
he felt himself conscious of a slight inferiority in point of genius
and professional aquirements.  He had small twinkling eyes, and a
pock-marked face; wore a fur cap, a dark corduroy jacket, greasy
fustian trousers, and an apron.  His wardrobe was, in truth, rather out
of repair; but he excused himself to the company by stating that his
'time' was only out an hour before; and that, in consequence of having
worn the regimentals for six weeks past, he had not been able to bestow
any attention on his private clothes.  Mr. Chitling added, with strong
marks of irritation, that the new way of fumigating clothes up yonder
was infernal unconstitutional, for it burnt holes in them, and there
was no remedy against the County.  The same remark he considered to
apply to the regulation mode of cutting the hair: which he held to be
decidedly unlawful.  Mr. Chitling wound up his observations by stating
that he had not touched a drop of anything for forty-two moral long
hard-working days; and that he 'wished he might be busted if he warn't
as dry as a lime-basket.'

'Where do you think the gentleman has come from, Oliver?' inquired the
Jew, with a grin, as the other boys put a bottle of spirits on the
table.

'I--I--don't know, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Who's that?' inquired Tom Chitling, casting a contemptuous look at
Oliver.

'A young friend of mine, my dear,' replied the Jew.

'He's in luck, then,' said the young man, with a meaning look at Fagin.
'Never mind where I came from, young 'un; you'll find your way there,
soon enough, I'll bet a crown!'

At this sally, the boys laughed.  After some more jokes on the same
subject, they exchanged a few short whispers with Fagin; and withdrew.

After some words apart between the last comer and Fagin, they drew
their chairs towards the fire; and the Jew, telling Oliver to come and
sit by him, led the conversation to the topics most calculated to
interest his hearers.  These were, the great advantages of the trade,
the proficiency of the Dodger, the amiability of Charley Bates, and the
liberality of the Jew himself.  At length these subjects displayed
signs of being thoroughly exhausted; and Mr. Chitling did the same:
for the house of correction becomes fatiguing after a week or two.
Miss Betsy accordingly withdrew; and left the party to their repose.

From this day, Oliver was seldom left alone; but was placed in almost
constant communication with the two boys, who played the old game with
the Jew every day: whether for their own improvement or Oliver's, Mr.
Fagin best knew.  At other times the old man would tell them stories of
robberies he had committed in his younger days:  mixed up with so much
that was droll and curious, that Oliver could not help laughing
heartily, and showing that he was amused in spite of all his better
feelings.

In short, the wily old Jew had the boy in his toils.  Having prepared
his mind, by solitude and gloom, to prefer any society to the
companionship of his own sad thoughts in such a dreary place, he was
now slowly instilling into his soul the poison which he hoped would
blacken it, and change its hue for ever.



CHAPTER XIX

IN WHICH A NOTABLE PLAN IS DISCUSSED AND DETERMINED ON

It was a chill, damp, windy night, when the Jew: buttoning his
great-coat tight round his shrivelled body, and pulling the collar up
over his ears so as completely to obscure the lower part of his face:
emerged from his den.  He paused on the step as the door was locked and
chained behind him; and having listened while the boys made all secure,
and until their retreating footsteps were no longer audible, slunk down
the street as quickly as he could.

The house to which Oliver had been conveyed, was in the neighborhood of
Whitechapel.  The Jew stopped for an instant at the corner of the
street; and, glancing suspiciously round, crossed the road, and struck
off in the direction of the Spitalfields.

The mud lay thick upon the stones, and a black mist hung over the
streets; the rain fell sluggishly down, and everything felt cold and
clammy to the touch.  It seemed just the night when it befitted such a
being as the Jew to be abroad.  As he glided stealthily along, creeping
beneath the shelter of the walls and doorways, the hideous old man
seemed like some loathsome reptile, engendered in the slime and
darkness through which he moved: crawling forth, by night, in search of
some rich offal for a meal.

He kept on his course, through many winding and narrow ways, until he
reached Bethnal Green; then, turning suddenly off to the left, he soon
became involved in a maze of the mean and dirty streets which abound in
that close and densely-populated quarter.

The Jew was evidently too familiar with the ground he traversed to be
at all bewildered, either by the darkness of the night, or the
intricacies of the way.  He hurried through several alleys and streets,
and at length turned into one, lighted only by a single lamp at the
farther end.  At the door of a house in this street, he knocked; having
exchanged a few muttered words with the person who opened it, he walked
upstairs.

A dog growled as he touched the handle of a room-door; and a man's
voice demanded who was there.

'Only me, Bill; only me, my dear,' said the Jew looking in.

'Bring in your body then,' said Sikes.  'Lie down, you stupid brute!
Don't you know the devil when he's got a great-coat on?'

Apparently, the dog had been somewhat deceived by Mr. Fagin's outer
garment; for as the Jew unbuttoned it, and threw it over the back of a
chair, he retired to the corner from which he had risen:  wagging his
tail as he went, to show that he was as well satisfied as it was in his
nature to be.

'Well!' said Sikes.

'Well, my dear,' replied the Jew.--'Ah! Nancy.'

The latter recognition was uttered with just enough of embarrassment to
imply a doubt of its reception; for Mr. Fagin and his young friend had
not met, since she had interfered in behalf of Oliver.  All doubts upon
the subject, if he had any, were speedily removed by the young lady's
behaviour.  She took her feet off the fender, pushed back her chair,
and bade Fagin draw up his, without saying more about it:  for it was a
cold night, and no mistake.

'It is cold, Nancy dear,' said the Jew, as he warmed his skinny hands
over the fire.  'It seems to go right through one,' added the old man,
touching his side.

'It must be a piercer, if it finds its way through your heart,' said
Mr. Sikes.  'Give him something to drink, Nancy.  Burn my body, make
haste!  It's enough to turn a man ill, to see his lean old carcase
shivering in that way, like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave.'

Nancy quickly brought a bottle from a cupboard, in which there were
many:  which, to judge from the diversity of their appearance, were
filled with several kinds of liquids.  Sikes pouring out a glass of
brandy, bade the Jew drink it off.

'Quite enough, quite, thankye, Bill,' replied the Jew, putting down the
glass after just setting his lips to it.

'What!  You're afraid of our getting the better of you, are you?'
inquired Sikes, fixing his eyes on the Jew.  'Ugh!'

With a hoarse grunt of contempt, Mr. Sikes seized the glass, and threw
the remainder of its contents into the ashes: as a preparatory ceremony
to filling it again for himself:  which he did at once.

The Jew glanced round the room, as his companion tossed down the second
glassful; not in curiousity, for he had seen it often before; but in a
restless and suspicious manner habitual to him. It was a meanly
furnished apartment, with nothing but the contents of the closet to
induce the belief that its occupier was anything but a working man; and
with no more suspicious articles displayed to view than two or three
heavy bludgeons which stood in a corner, and a 'life-preserver' that
hung over the chimney-piece.

'There,' said Sikes, smacking his lips. 'Now I'm ready.'

'For business?' inquired the Jew.

'For business,' replied Sikes; 'so say what you've got to say.'

'About the crib at Chertsey, Bill?' said the Jew, drawing his chair
forward, and speaking in a very low voice.

'Yes.  Wot about it?' inquired Sikes.

'Ah! you know what I mean, my dear,' said the Jew.  'He knows what I
mean, Nancy; don't he?'

'No, he don't,' sneered Mr. Sikes.  'Or he won't, and that's the same
thing.  Speak out, and call things by their right names; don't sit
there, winking and blinking, and talking to me in hints, as if you
warn't the very first that thought about the robbery.  Wot d'ye mean?'

'Hush, Bill, hush!' said the Jew, who had in vain attempted to stop
this burst of indignation; 'somebody will hear us, my dear. Somebody
will hear us.'

'Let 'em hear!' said Sikes; 'I don't care.'  But as Mr. Sikes DID care,
on reflection, he dropped his voice as he said the words, and grew
calmer.

'There, there,' said the Jew, coaxingly.  'It was only my caution,
nothing more.  Now, my dear, about that crib at Chertsey; when is it to
be done, Bill, eh?  When is it to be done?  Such plate, my dear, such
plate!' said the Jew:  rubbing his hands, and elevating his eyebrows in
a rapture of anticipation.

'Not at all,' replied Sikes coldly.

'Not to be done at all!' echoed the Jew, leaning back in his chair.

'No, not at all,' rejoined Sikes.  'At least it can't be a put-up job,
as we expected.'

'Then it hasn't been properly gone about,' said the Jew, turning pale
with anger.  'Don't tell me!'

'But I will tell you,' retorted Sikes.  'Who are you that's not to be
told?  I tell you that Toby Crackit has been hanging about the place
for a fortnight, and he can't get one of the servants in line.'

'Do you mean to tell me, Bill,' said the Jew: softening as the other
grew heated:  'that neither of the two men in the house can be got
over?'

'Yes, I do mean to tell you so,' replied Sikes.  'The old lady has had
'em these twenty years; and if you were to give 'em five hundred pound,
they wouldn't be in it.'

'But do you mean to say, my dear,' remonstrated the Jew, 'that the
women can't be got over?'

'Not a bit of it,' replied Sikes.

'Not by flash Toby Crackit?' said the Jew incredulously. 'Think what
women are, Bill,'

'No; not even by flash Toby Crackit,' replied Sikes.  'He says he's
worn sham whiskers, and a canary waistcoat, the whole blessed time he's
been loitering down there, and it's all of no use.'

'He should have tried mustachios and a pair of military trousers, my
dear,' said the Jew.

'So he did,' rejoined Sikes, 'and they warn't of no more use than the
other plant.'

The Jew looked blank at this information.  After ruminating for some
minutes with his chin sunk on his breast, he raised his head and said,
with a deep sigh, that if flash Toby Crackit reported aright, he feared
the game was up.

'And yet,' said the old man, dropping his hands on his knees, 'it's a
sad thing, my dear, to lose so much when we had set our hearts upon it.'

'So it is,' said Mr. Sikes.  'Worse luck!'

A long silence ensued; during which the Jew was plunged in deep
thought, with his face wrinkled into an expression of villainy
perfectly demoniacal.  Sikes eyed him furtively from time to time.
Nancy, apparently fearful of irritating the housebreaker, sat with her
eyes fixed upon the fire, as if she had been deaf to all that passed.

'Fagin,' said Sikes, abruptly breaking the stillness that prevailed;
'is it worth fifty shiners extra, if it's safely done from the outside?'

'Yes,' said the Jew, as suddenly rousing himself.

'Is it a bargain?' inquired Sikes.

'Yes, my dear, yes,' rejoined the Jew; his eyes glistening, and every
muscle in his face working, with the excitement that the inquiry had
awakened.

'Then,' said Sikes, thrusting aside the Jew's hand, with some disdain,
'let it come off as soon as you like.  Toby and me were over the
garden-wall the night afore last, sounding the panels of the door and
shutters.  The crib's barred up at night like a jail; but there's one
part we can crack, safe and softly.'

'Which is that, Bill?' asked the Jew eagerly.

'Why,' whispered Sikes, 'as you cross the lawn--'

'Yes?' said the Jew, bending his head forward, with his eyes almost
starting out of it.

'Umph!' cried Sikes, stopping short, as the girl, scarcely moving her
head, looked suddenly round, and pointed for an instant to the Jew's
face.  'Never mind which part it is. You can't do it without me, I
know; but it's best to be on the safe side when one deals with you.'

'As you like, my dear, as you like' replied the Jew.  'Is there no help
wanted, but yours and Toby's?'

'None,' said Sikes.  'Cept a centre-bit and a boy.  The first we've
both got; the second you must find us.'

'A boy!' exclaimed the Jew.  'Oh! then it's a panel, eh?'

'Never mind wot it is!' replied Sikes.  'I want a boy, and he musn't be
a big 'un.  Lord!' said Mr. Sikes, reflectively, 'if I'd only got that
young boy of Ned, the chimbley-sweeper's!  He kept him small on
purpose, and let him out by the job.  But the father gets lagged; and
then the Juvenile Delinquent Society comes, and takes the boy away from
a trade where he was earning money, teaches him to read and write, and
in time makes a 'prentice of him.  And so they go on,' said Mr. Sikes,
his wrath rising with the recollection of his wrongs, 'so they go on;
and, if they'd got money enough (which it's a Providence they haven't,)
we shouldn't have half a dozen boys left in the whole trade, in a year
or two.'

'No more we should,' acquiesced the Jew, who had been considering
during this speech, and had only caught the last sentence. 'Bill!'

'What now?' inquired Sikes.

The Jew nodded his head towards Nancy, who was still gazing at the
fire; and intimated, by a sign, that he would have her told to leave
the room.  Sikes shrugged his shoulders impatiently, as if he thought
the precaution unnecessary; but complied, nevertheless, by requesting
Miss Nancy to fetch him a jug of beer.

'You don't want any beer,' said Nancy, folding her arms, and retaining
her seat very composedly.

'I tell you I do!' replied Sikes.

'Nonsense,' rejoined the girl coolly, 'Go on, Fagin.  I know what he's
going to say, Bill; he needn't mind me.'

The Jew still hesitated.  Sikes looked from one to the other in some
surprise.

'Why, you don't mind the old girl, do you, Fagin?' he asked at length.
'You've known her long enough to trust her, or the Devil's in it.  She
ain't one to blab.  Are you Nancy?'

'_I_ should think not!' replied the young lady:  drawing her chair up
to the table, and putting her elbows upon it.

'No, no, my dear, I know you're not,' said the Jew; 'but--' and again
the old man paused.

'But wot?' inquired Sikes.

'I didn't know whether she mightn't p'r'aps be out of sorts, you know,
my dear, as she was the other night,' replied the Jew.

At this confession, Miss Nancy burst into a loud laugh; and, swallowing
a glass of brandy, shook her head with an air of defiance, and burst
into sundry exclamations of 'Keep the game a-going!'  'Never say die!'
and the like.  These seemed to have the effect of re-assuring both
gentlemen; for the Jew nodded his head with a satisfied air, and
resumed his seat: as did Mr. Sikes likewise.

'Now, Fagin,' said Nancy with a laugh.  'Tell Bill at once, about
Oliver!'

'Ha! you're a clever one, my dear: the sharpest girl I ever saw!' said
the Jew, patting her on the neck.  'It WAS about Oliver I was going to
speak, sure enough.  Ha! ha! ha!'

'What about him?' demanded Sikes.

'He's the boy for you, my dear,' replied the Jew in a hoarse whisper;
laying his finger on the side of his nose, and grinning frightfully.

'He!' exclaimed Sikes.

'Have him, Bill!' said Nancy.  'I would, if I was in your place. He
mayn't be so much up, as any of the others; but that's not what you
want, if he's only to open a door for you.  Depend upon it he's a safe
one, Bill.'

'I know he is,' rejoined Fagin.  'He's been in good training these last
few weeks, and it's time he began to work for his bread.  Besides, the
others are all too big.'

'Well, he is just the size I want,' said Mr. Sikes, ruminating.

'And will do everything you want, Bill, my dear,' interposed the Jew;
'he can't help himself.  That is, if you frighten him enough.'

'Frighten him!' echoed Sikes.  'It'll be no sham frightening, mind you.
If there's anything queer about him when we once get into the work; in
for a penny, in for a pound.  You won't see him alive again, Fagin.
Think of that, before you send him.  Mark my words!' said the robber,
poising a crowbar, which he had drawn from under the bedstead.

'I've thought of it all,' said the Jew with energy. 'I've--I've had my
eye upon him, my dears, close--close. Once let him feel that he is one
of us; once fill his mind with the idea that he has been a thief; and
he's ours!  Ours for his life.  Oho!  It couldn't have come about
better!  The old man crossed his arms upon his breast; and, drawing his
head and shoulders into a heap, literally hugged himself for joy.

'Ours!' said Sikes.  'Yours, you mean.'

'Perhaps I do, my dear,' said the Jew, with a shrill chuckle. 'Mine, if
you like, Bill.'

'And wot,' said Sikes, scowling fiercely on his agreeable friend, 'wot
makes you take so much pains about one chalk-faced kid, when you know
there are fifty boys snoozing about Common Garden every night, as you
might pick and choose from?'

'Because they're of no use to me, my dear,' replied the Jew, with some
confusion, 'not worth the taking.  Their looks convict 'em when they
get into trouble, and I lose 'em all.  With this boy, properly managed,
my dears, I could do what I couldn't with twenty of them.  Besides,'
said the Jew, recovering his self-possession, 'he has us now if he
could only give us leg-bail again; and he must be in the same boat with
us.  Never mind how he came there; it's quite enough for my power over
him that he was in a robbery; that's all I want.  Now, how much better
this is, than being obliged to put the poor leetle boy out of the
way--which would be dangerous, and we should lose by it besides.'

'When is it to be done?' asked Nancy, stopping some turbulent
exclamation on the part of Mr. Sikes, expressive of the disgust with
which he received Fagin's affectation of humanity.

'Ah, to be sure,' said the Jew; 'when is it to be done, Bill?'

'I planned with Toby, the night arter to-morrow,' rejoined Sikes in a
surly voice, 'if he heerd nothing from me to the contrairy.'

'Good,' said the Jew; 'there's no moon.'

'No,' rejoined Sikes.

'It's all arranged about bringing off the swag, is it?' asked the Jew.

Sikes nodded.

'And about--'

'Oh, ah, it's all planned,' rejoined Sikes, interrupting him. 'Never
mind particulars.  You'd better bring the boy here to-morrow night.  I
shall get off the stone an hour arter daybreak.  Then you hold your
tongue, and keep the melting-pot ready, and that's all you'll have to
do.'

After some discussion, in which all three took an active part, it was
decided that Nancy should repair to the Jew's next evening when the
night had set in, and bring Oliver away with her; Fagin craftily
observing, that, if he evinced any disinclination to the task, he would
be more willing to accompany the girl who had so recently interfered in
his behalf, than anybody else.  It was also solemnly arranged that poor
Oliver should, for the purposes of the contemplated expedition, be
unreservedly consigned to the care and custody of Mr. William Sikes;
and further, that the said Sikes should deal with him as he thought
fit; and should not be held responsible by the Jew for any mischance or
evil that might be necessary to visit him: it being understood that, to
render the compact in this respect binding, any representations made by
Mr. Sikes on his return should be required to be confirmed and
corroborated, in all important particulars, by the testimony of flash
Toby Crackit.

These preliminaries adjusted, Mr. Sikes proceeded to drink brandy at a
furious rate, and to flourish the crowbar in an alarming manner;
yelling forth, at the same time, most unmusical snatches of song,
mingled with wild execrations.  At length, in a fit of professional
enthusiasm, he insisted upon producing his box of housebreaking tools:
which he had no sooner stumbled in with, and opened for the purpose of
explaining the nature and properties of the various implements it
contained, and the peculiar beauties of their construction, than he
fell over the box upon the floor, and went to sleep where he fell.

'Good-night, Nancy,' said the Jew, muffling himself up as before.

'Good-night.'

Their eyes met, and the Jew scrutinised her, narrowly.  There was no
flinching about the girl.  She was as true and earnest in the matter as
Toby Crackit himself could be.

The Jew again bade her good-night, and, bestowing a sly kick upon the
prostrate form of Mr. Sikes while her back was turned, groped
downstairs.

'Always the way!' muttered the Jew to himself as he turned homeward.
'The worst of these women is, that a very little thing serves to call
up some long-forgotten feeling; and, the best of them is, that it never
lasts.  Ha! ha!  The man against the child, for a bag of gold!'

Beguiling the time with these pleasant reflections, Mr. Fagin wended
his way, through mud and mire, to his gloomy abode:  where the Dodger
was sitting up, impatiently awaiting his return.

'Is Oliver a-bed?  I want to speak to him,' was his first remark as
they descended the stairs.

'Hours ago,' replied the Dodger, throwing open a door.  'Here he is!'

The boy was lying, fast asleep, on a rude bed upon the floor; so pale
with anxiety, and sadness, and the closeness of his prison, that he
looked like death; not death as it shows in shroud and coffin, but in
the guise it wears when life has just departed; when a young and gentle
spirit has, but an instant, fled to Heaven, and the gross air of the
world has not had time to breathe upon the changing dust it hallowed.

'Not now,' said the Jew, turning softly away.  'To-morrow. To-morrow.'



CHAPTER XX

WHEREIN OLIVER IS DELIVERED OVER TO MR. WILLIAM SIKES

When Oliver awoke in the morning, he was a good deal surprised to find
that a new pair of shoes, with strong thick soles, had been placed at
his bedside; and that his old shoes had been removed. At first, he was
pleased with the discovery: hoping that it might be the forerunner of
his release; but such thoughts were quickly dispelled, on his sitting
down to breakfast along with the Jew, who told him, in a tone and
manner which increased his alarm, that he was to be taken to the
residence of Bill Sikes that night.

'To--to--stop there, sir?' asked Oliver, anxiously.

'No, no, my dear.  Not to stop there,' replied the Jew.  'We shouldn't
like to lose you.  Don't be afraid, Oliver, you shall come back to us
again.  Ha! ha! ha!  We won't be so cruel as to send you away, my dear.
Oh no, no!'

The old man, who was stooping over the fire toasting a piece of bread,
looked round as he bantered Oliver thus; and chuckled as if to show
that he knew he would still be very glad to get away if he could.

'I suppose,' said the Jew, fixing his eyes on Oliver, 'you want to know
what you're going to Bill's for---eh, my dear?'

Oliver coloured, involuntarily, to find that the old thief had been
reading his thoughts; but boldly said, Yes, he did want to know.

'Why, do you think?' inquired Fagin, parrying the question.

'Indeed I don't know, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Bah!' said the Jew, turning away with a disappointed countenance from
a close perusal of the boy's face.  'Wait till Bill tells you, then.'

The Jew seemed much vexed by Oliver's not expressing any greater
curiosity on the subject; but the truth is, that, although Oliver felt
very anxious, he was too much confused by the earnest cunning of
Fagin's looks, and his own speculations, to make any further inquiries
just then.  He had no other opportunity:  for the Jew remained very
surly and silent till night:  when he prepared to go abroad.

'You may burn a candle,' said the Jew, putting one upon the table.
'And here's a book for you to read, till they come to fetch you.
Good-night!'

'Good-night!' replied Oliver, softly.

The Jew walked to the door: looking over his shoulder at the boy as he
went.  Suddenly stopping, he called him by his name.

Oliver looked up; the Jew, pointing to the candle, motioned him to
light it.  He did so; and, as he placed the candlestick upon the table,
saw that the Jew was gazing fixedly at him, with lowering and
contracted brows, from the dark end of the room.

'Take heed, Oliver! take heed!' said the old man, shaking his right
hand before him in a warning manner.  'He's a rough man, and thinks
nothing of blood when his own is up. Whatever falls out, say nothing;
and do what he bids you.  Mind!'  Placing a strong emphasis on the last
word, he suffered his features gradually to resolve themselves into a
ghastly grin, and, nodding his head, left the room.

Oliver leaned his head upon his hand when the old man disappeared, and
pondered, with a trembling heart, on the words he had just heard.  The
more he thought of the Jew's admonition, the more he was at a loss to
divine its real purpose and meaning.

He could think of no bad object to be attained by sending him to Sikes,
which would not be equally well answered by his remaining with Fagin;
and after meditating for a long time, concluded that he had been
selected to perform some ordinary menial offices for the housebreaker,
until another boy, better suited for his purpose could be engaged.  He
was too well accustomed to suffering, and had suffered too much where
he was, to bewail the prospect of change very severely.  He remained
lost in thought for some minutes; and then, with a heavy sigh, snuffed
the candle, and, taking up the book which the Jew had left with him,
began to read.

He turned over the leaves.  Carelessly at first; but, lighting on a
passage which attracted his attention, he soon became intent upon the
volume.  It was a history of the lives and trials of great criminals;
and the pages were soiled and thumbed with use. Here, he read of
dreadful crimes that made the blood run cold; of secret murders that
had been committed by the lonely wayside; of bodies hidden from the eye
of man in deep pits and wells: which would not keep them down, deep as
they were, but had yielded them up at last, after many years, and so
maddened the murderers with the sight, that in their horror they had
confessed their guilt, and yelled for the gibbet to end their agony.
Here, too, he read of men who, lying in their beds at dead of night,
had been tempted (so they said) and led on, by their own bad thoughts,
to such dreadful bloodshed as it made the flesh creep, and the limbs
quail, to think of.  The terrible descriptions were so real and vivid,
that the sallow pages seemed to turn red with gore; and the words upon
them, to be sounded in his ears, as if they were whispered, in hollow
murmurs, by the spirits of the dead.

In a paroxysm of fear, the boy closed the book, and thrust it from him.
Then, falling upon his knees, he prayed Heaven to spare him from such
deeds; and rather to will that he should die at once, than be reserved
for crimes, so fearful and appalling. By degrees, he grew more calm,
and besought, in a low and broken voice, that he might be rescued from
his present dangers; and that if any aid were to be raised up for a
poor outcast boy who had never known the love of friends or kindred, it
might come to him now, when, desolate and deserted, he stood alone in
the midst of wickedness and guilt.

He had concluded his prayer, but still remained with his head buried in
his hands, when a rustling noise aroused him.

'What's that!' he cried, starting up, and catching sight of a figure
standing by the door.  'Who's there?'

'Me.  Only me,' replied a tremulous voice.

Oliver raised the candle above his head: and looked towards the door.
It was Nancy.

'Put down the light,' said the girl, turning away her head. 'It hurts
my eyes.'

Oliver saw that she was very pale, and gently inquired if she were ill.
The girl threw herself into a chair, with her back towards him:  and
wrung her hands; but made no reply.

'God forgive me!' she cried after a while, 'I never thought of this.'

'Has anything happened?' asked Oliver.  'Can I help you?  I will if I
can.  I will, indeed.'

She rocked herself to and fro; caught her throat; and, uttering a
gurgling sound, gasped for breath.

'Nancy!' cried Oliver, 'What is it?'

The girl beat her hands upon her knees, and her feet upon the ground;
and, suddenly stopping, drew her shawl close round her: and shivered
with cold.

Oliver stirred the fire.  Drawing her chair close to it, she sat there,
for a little time, without speaking; but at length she raised her head,
and looked round.

'I don't know what comes over me sometimes,' said she, affecting to
busy herself in arranging her dress; 'it's this damp dirty room, I
think.  Now, Nolly, dear, are you ready?'

'Am I to go with you?' asked Oliver.

'Yes.  I have come from Bill,' replied the girl.  'You are to go with
me.'

'What for?' asked Oliver, recoiling.

'What for?' echoed the girl, raising her eyes, and averting them again,
the moment they encountered the boy's face.  'Oh!  For no harm.'

'I don't believe it,' said Oliver:  who had watched her closely.

'Have it your own way,' rejoined the girl, affecting to laugh. 'For no
good, then.'

Oliver could see that he had some power over the girl's better
feelings, and, for an instant, thought of appealing to her compassion
for his helpless state.  But, then, the thought darted across his mind
that it was barely eleven o'clock; and that many people were still in
the streets:  of whom surely some might be found to give credence to
his tale.  As the reflection occured to him, he stepped forward:  and
said, somewhat hastily, that he was ready.

Neither his brief consideration, nor its purport, was lost on his
companion.  She eyed him narrowly, while he spoke; and cast upon him a
look of intelligence which sufficiently showed that she guessed what
had been passing in his thoughts.

'Hush!' said the girl, stooping over him, and pointing to the door as
she looked cautiously round.  'You can't help yourself. I have tried
hard for you, but all to no purpose.  You are hedged round and round.
If ever you are to get loose from here, this is not the time.'

Struck by the energy of her manner, Oliver looked up in her face with
great surprise.  She seemed to speak the truth; her countenance was
white and agitated; and she trembled with very earnestness.

'I have saved you from being ill-used once, and I will again, and I do
now,' continued the girl aloud; 'for those who would have fetched you,
if I had not, would have been far more rough than me.  I have promised
for your being quiet and silent; if you are not, you will only do harm
to yourself and me too, and perhaps be my death.  See here!  I have
borne all this for you already, as true as God sees me show it.'

She pointed, hastily, to some livid bruises on her neck and arms; and
continued, with great rapidity:

'Remember this!  And don't let me suffer more for you, just now. If I
could help you, I would; but I have not the power.  They don't mean to
harm you; whatever they make you do, is no fault of yours.  Hush!
Every word from you is a blow for me.  Give me your hand.  Make haste!
Your hand!'

She caught the hand which Oliver instinctively placed in hers, and,
blowing out the light, drew him after her up the stairs. The door was
opened, quickly, by some one shrouded in the darkness, and was as
quickly closed, when they had passed out.  A hackney-cabriolet was in
waiting; with the same vehemence which she had exhibited in addressing
Oliver, the girl pulled him in with her, and drew the curtains close.
The driver wanted no directions, but lashed his horse into full speed,
without the delay of an instant.

The girl still held Oliver fast by the hand, and continued to pour into
his ear, the warnings and assurances she had already imparted.  All was
so quick and hurried, that he had scarcely time to recollect where he
was, or how he came there, when the carriage stopped at the house to
which the Jew's steps had been directed on the previous evening.

For one brief moment, Oliver cast a hurried glance along the empty
street, and a cry for help hung upon his lips.  But the girl's voice
was in his ear, beseeching him in such tones of agony to remember her,
that he had not the heart to utter it. While he hesitated, the
opportunity was gone; he was already in the house, and the door was
shut.

'This way,' said the girl, releasing her hold for the first time.
'Bill!'

'Hallo!' replied Sikes: appearing at the head of the stairs, with a
candle.  'Oh!  That's the time of day.  Come on!'

This was a very strong expression of approbation, an uncommonly hearty
welcome, from a person of Mr. Sikes' temperament.  Nancy, appearing
much gratified thereby, saluted him cordially.

'Bull's-eye's gone home with Tom,' observed Sikes, as he lighted them
up.  'He'd have been in the way.'

'That's right,' rejoined Nancy.

'So you've got the kid,' said Sikes when they had all reached the room:
closing the door as he spoke.

'Yes, here he is,' replied Nancy.

'Did he come quiet?' inquired Sikes.

'Like a lamb,' rejoined Nancy.

'I'm glad to hear it,' said Sikes, looking grimly at Oliver; 'for the
sake of his young carcase:  as would otherways have suffered for it.
Come here, young 'un; and let me read you a lectur', which is as well
got over at once.'

Thus addressing his new pupil, Mr. Sikes pulled off Oliver's cap and
threw it into a corner; and then, taking him by the shoulder, sat
himself down by the table, and stood the boy in front of him.

'Now, first:  do you know wot this is?' inquired Sikes, taking up a
pocket-pistol which lay on the table.

Oliver replied in the affirmative.

'Well, then, look here,' continued Sikes.  'This is powder; that 'ere's
a bullet; and this is a little bit of a old hat for waddin'.'

Oliver murmured his comprehension of the different bodies referred to;
and Mr. Sikes proceeded to load the pistol, with great nicety and
deliberation.

'Now it's loaded,' said Mr. Sikes, when he had finished.

'Yes, I see it is, sir,' replied Oliver.

'Well,' said the robber, grasping Oliver's wrist, and putting the
barrel so close to his temple that they touched; at which moment the
boy could not repress a start; 'if you speak a word when you're out
o'doors with me, except when I speak to you, that loading will be in
your head without notice.  So, if you _do_ make up your mind to speak
without leave, say your prayers first.'

Having bestowed a scowl upon the object of this warning, to increase
its effect, Mr. Sikes continued.

'As near as I know, there isn't anybody as would be asking very
partickler arter you, if you _was_ disposed of; so I needn't take this
devil-and-all of trouble to explain matters to you, if it warn't for
your own good.  D'ye hear me?'

'The short and the long of what you mean,' said Nancy:  speaking very
emphatically, and slightly frowning at Oliver as if to bespeak his
serious attention to her words:  'is, that if you're crossed by him in
this job you have on hand, you'll prevent his ever telling tales
afterwards, by shooting him through the head, and will take your chance
of swinging for it, as you do for a great many other things in the way
of business, every month of your life.'

'That's it!' observed Mr. Sikes, approvingly; 'women can always put
things in fewest words.--Except when it's blowing up; and then they
lengthens it out.  And now that he's thoroughly up to it, let's have
some supper, and get a snooze before starting.'

In pursuance of this request, Nancy quickly laid the cloth;
disappearing for a few minutes, she presently returned with a pot of
porter and a dish of sheep's heads: which gave occasion to several
pleasant witticisms on the part of Mr. Sikes, founded upon the singular
coincidence of 'jemmies' being a can name, common to them, and also to
an ingenious implement much used in his profession.  Indeed, the worthy
gentleman, stimulated perhaps by the immediate prospect of being on
active service, was in great spirits and good humour; in proof whereof,
it may be here remarked, that he humourously drank all the beer at a
draught, and did not utter, on a rough calculation, more than
four-score oaths during the whole progress of the meal.

Supper being ended--it may be easily conceived that Oliver had no great
appetite for it--Mr. Sikes disposed of a couple of glasses of spirits
and water, and threw himself on the bed; ordering Nancy, with many
imprecations in case of failure, to call him at five precisely.  Oliver
stretched himself in his clothes, by command of the same authority, on
a mattress upon the floor; and the girl, mending the fire, sat before
it, in readiness to rouse them at the appointed time.

For a long time Oliver lay awake, thinking it not impossible that Nancy
might seek that opportunity of whispering some further advice; but the
girl sat brooding over the fire, without moving, save now and then to
trim the light.  Weary with watching and anxiety, he at length fell
asleep.

When he awoke, the table was covered with tea-things, and Sikes was
thrusting various articles into the pockets of his great-coat, which
hung over the back of a chair.  Nancy was busily engaged in preparing
breakfast.  It was not yet daylight; for the candle was still burning,
and it was quite dark outside. A sharp rain, too, was beating against
the window-panes; and the sky looked black and cloudy.

'Now, then!' growled Sikes, as Oliver started up; 'half-past five!
Look sharp, or you'll get no breakfast; for it's late as it is.'

Oliver was not long in making his toilet; having taken some breakfast,
he replied to a surly inquiry from Sikes, by saying that he was quite
ready.

Nancy, scarcely looking at the boy, threw him a handkerchief to tie
round his throat; Sikes gave him a large rough cape to button over his
shoulders.  Thus attired, he gave his hand to the robber, who, merely
pausing to show him with a menacing gesture that he had that same
pistol in a side-pocket of his great-coat, clasped it firmly in his,
and, exchanging a farewell with Nancy, led him away.

Oliver turned, for an instant, when they reached the door, in the hope
of meeting a look from the girl.  But she had resumed her old seat in
front of the fire, and sat, perfectly motionless before it.



CHAPTER XXI

THE EXPEDITION

It was a cheerless morning when they got into the street; blowing and
raining hard; and the clouds looking dull and stormy.  The night had
been very wet: large pools of water had collected in the road: and the
kennels were overflowing.  There was a faint glimmering of the coming
day in the sky; but it rather aggravated than relieved the gloom of the
scene:  the sombre light only serving to pale that which the street
lamps afforded, without shedding any warmer or brighter tints upon the
wet house-tops, and dreary streets.  There appeared to be nobody
stirring in that quarter of the town; the windows of the houses were
all closely shut; and the streets through which they passed, were
noiseless and empty.

By the time they had turned into the Bethnal Green Road, the day had
fairly begun to break.  Many of the lamps were already extinguished; a
few country waggons were slowly toiling on, towards London; now and
then, a stage-coach, covered with mud, rattled briskly by: the driver
bestowing, as he passed, an admonitory lash upon the heavy waggoner
who, by keeping on the wrong side of the road, had endangered his
arriving at the office, a quarter of a minute after his time.  The
public-houses, with gas-lights burning inside, were already open.  By
degrees, other shops began to be unclosed, and a few scattered people
were met with.  Then, came straggling groups of labourers going to
their work; then, men and women with fish-baskets on their heads;
donkey-carts laden with vegetables; chaise-carts filled with live-stock
or whole carcasses of meat; milk-women with pails; an unbroken
concourse of people, trudging out with various supplies to the eastern
suburbs of the town.  As they approached the City, the noise and
traffic gradually increased; when they threaded the streets between
Shoreditch and Smithfield, it had swelled into a roar of sound and
bustle.  It was as light as it was likely to be, till night came on
again, and the busy morning of half the London population had begun.

Turning down Sun Street and Crown Street, and crossing Finsbury square,
Mr. Sikes struck, by way of Chiswell Street, into Barbican: thence into
Long Lane, and so into Smithfield; from which latter place arose a
tumult of discordant sounds that filled Oliver Twist with amazement.

It was market-morning.  The ground was covered, nearly ankle-deep, with
filth and mire; a thick steam, perpetually rising from the reeking
bodies of the cattle, and mingling with the fog, which seemed to rest
upon the chimney-tops, hung heavily above.  All the pens in the centre
of the large area, and as many temporary pens as could be crowded into
the vacant space, were filled with sheep; tied up to posts by the
gutter side were long lines of beasts and oxen, three or four deep.
Countrymen, butchers, drovers, hawkers, boys, thieves, idlers, and
vagabonds of every low grade, were mingled together in a mass; the
whistling of drovers, the barking dogs, the bellowing and plunging of
the oxen, the bleating of sheep, the grunting and squeaking of pigs,
the cries of hawkers, the shouts, oaths, and quarrelling on all sides;
the ringing of bells and roar of voices, that issued from every
public-house; the crowding, pushing, driving, beating, whooping and
yelling; the hideous and discordant dim that resounded from every
corner of the market; and the unwashed, unshaven, squalid, and dirty
figures constantly running to and fro, and bursting in and out of the
throng; rendered it a stunning and bewildering scene, which quite
confounded the senses.

Mr. Sikes, dragging Oliver after him, elbowed his way through the
thickest of the crowd, and bestowed very little attention on the
numerous sights and sounds, which so astonished the boy.  He nodded,
twice or thrice, to a passing friend; and, resisting as many
invitations to take a morning dram, pressed steadily onward, until they
were clear of the turmoil, and had made their way through Hosier Lane
into Holborn.

'Now, young 'un!' said Sikes, looking up at the clock of St. Andrew's
Church, 'hard upon seven! you must step out.  Come, don't lag behind
already, Lazy-legs!'

Mr. Sikes accompanied this speech with a jerk at his little companion's
wrist; Oliver, quickening his pace into a kind of trot between a fast
walk and a run, kept up with the rapid strides of the house-breaker as
well as he could.

They held their course at this rate, until they had passed Hyde Park
corner, and were on their way to Kensington:  when Sikes relaxed his
pace, until an empty cart which was at some little distance behind,
came up.  Seeing 'Hounslow' written on it, he asked the driver with as
much civility as he could assume, if he would give them a lift as far
as Isleworth.

'Jump up,' said the man.  'Is that your boy?'

'Yes; he's my boy,' replied Sikes, looking hard at Oliver, and putting
his hand abstractedly into the pocket where the pistol was.

'Your father walks rather too quick for you, don't he, my man?'
inquired the driver: seeing that Oliver was out of breath.

'Not a bit of it,' replied Sikes, interposing.  'He's used to it.

Here, take hold of my hand, Ned.  In with you!'

Thus addressing Oliver, he helped him into the cart; and the driver,
pointing to a heap of sacks, told him to lie down there, and rest
himself.

As they passed the different mile-stones, Oliver wondered, more and
more, where his companion meant to take him.  Kensington, Hammersmith,
Chiswick, Kew Bridge, Brentford, were all passed; and yet they went on
as steadily as if they had only just begun their journey.  At length,
they came to a public-house called the Coach and Horses; a little way
beyond which, another road appeared to run off.  And here, the cart
stopped.

Sikes dismounted with great precipitation, holding Oliver by the hand
all the while; and lifting him down directly, bestowed a furious look
upon him, and rapped the side-pocket with his fist, in a significant
manner.

'Good-bye, boy,' said the man.

'He's sulky,' replied Sikes, giving him a shake; 'he's sulky.  A young
dog!  Don't mind him.'

'Not I!' rejoined the other, getting into his cart.  'It's a fine day,
after all.'  And he drove away.

Sikes waited until he had fairly gone; and then, telling Oliver he
might look about him if he wanted, once again led him onward on his
journey.

They turned round to the left, a short way past the public-house; and
then, taking a right-hand road, walked on for a long time: passing many
large gardens and gentlemen's houses on both sides of the way, and
stopping for nothing but a little beer, until they reached a town.
Here against the wall of a house, Oliver saw written up in pretty large
letters, 'Hampton.'  They lingered about, in the fields, for some
hours.  At length they came back into the town; and, turning into an
old public-house with a defaced sign-board, ordered some dinner by the
kitchen fire.

The kitchen was an old, low-roofed room; with a great beam across the
middle of the ceiling, and benches, with high backs to them, by the
fire; on which were seated several rough men in smock-frocks, drinking
and smoking.  They took no notice of Oliver; and very little of Sikes;
and, as Sikes took very little notice of them, he and his young comrade
sat in a corner by themselves, without being much troubled by their
company.

They had some cold meat for dinner, and sat so long after it, while Mr.
Sikes indulged himself with three or four pipes, that Oliver began to
feel quite certain they were not going any further.  Being much tired
with the walk, and getting up so early, he dozed a little at first;
then, quite overpowered by fatigue and the fumes of the tobacco, fell
asleep.

It was quite dark when he was awakened by a push from Sikes. Rousing
himself sufficiently to sit up and look about him, he found that worthy
in close fellowship and communication with a labouring man, over a pint
of ale.

'So, you're going on to Lower Halliford, are you?' inquired Sikes.

'Yes, I am,' replied the man, who seemed a little the worse--or better,
as the case might be--for drinking; 'and not slow about it neither.  My
horse hasn't got a load behind him going back, as he had coming up in
the mornin'; and he won't be long a-doing of it.  Here's luck to him.
Ecod! he's a good 'un!'

'Could you give my boy and me a lift as far as there?' demanded Sikes,
pushing the ale towards his new friend.

'If you're going directly, I can,' replied the man, looking out of the
pot.  'Are you going to Halliford?'

'Going on to Shepperton,' replied Sikes.

'I'm your man, as far as I go,' replied the other.  'Is all paid,
Becky?'

'Yes, the other gentleman's paid,' replied the girl.

'I say!' said the man, with tipsy gravity; 'that won't do, you know.'

'Why not?' rejoined Sikes.  'You're a-going to accommodate us, and
wot's to prevent my standing treat for a pint or so, in return?'

The stranger reflected upon this argument, with a very profound face;
having done so, he seized Sikes by the hand:  and declared he was a
real good fellow.  To which Mr. Sikes replied, he was joking; as, if he
had been sober, there would have been strong reason to suppose he was.

After the exchange of a few more compliments, they bade the company
good-night, and went out; the girl gathering up the pots and glasses as
they did so, and lounging out to the door, with her hands full, to see
the party start.

The horse, whose health had been drunk in his absence, was standing
outside:  ready harnessed to the cart.  Oliver and Sikes got in without
any further ceremony; and the man to whom he belonged, having lingered
for a minute or two 'to bear him up,' and to defy the hostler and the
world to produce his equal, mounted also.  Then, the hostler was told
to give the horse his head; and, his head being given him, he made a
very unpleasant use of it:  tossing it into the air with great disdain,
and running into the parlour windows over the way; after performing
those feats, and supporting himself for a short time on his hind-legs,
he started off at great speed, and rattled out of the town right
gallantly.

The night was very dark.  A damp mist rose from the river, and the
marshy ground about; and spread itself over the dreary fields.  It was
piercing cold, too; all was gloomy and black. Not a word was spoken;
for the driver had grown sleepy; and Sikes was in no mood to lead him
into conversation.  Oliver sat huddled together, in a corner of the
cart; bewildered with alarm and apprehension; and figuring strange
objects in the gaunt trees, whose branches waved grimly to and fro, as
if in some fantastic joy at the desolation of the scene.

As they passed Sunbury Church, the clock struck seven.  There was a
light in the ferry-house window opposite:  which streamed across the
road, and threw into more sombre shadow a dark yew-tree with graves
beneath it.  There was a dull sound of falling water not far off; and
the leaves of the old tree stirred gently in the night wind.  It seemed
like quiet music for the repose of the dead.

Sunbury was passed through, and they came again into the lonely road.
Two or three miles more, and the cart stopped.  Sikes alighted, took
Oliver by the hand, and they once again walked on.

They turned into no house at Shepperton, as the weary boy had expected;
but still kept walking on, in mud and darkness, through gloomy lanes
and over cold open wastes, until they came within sight of the lights
of a town at no great distance.  On looking intently forward, Oliver
saw that the water was just below them, and that they were coming to
the foot of a bridge.

Sikes kept straight on, until they were close upon the bridge; then
turned suddenly down a bank upon the left.

'The water!' thought Oliver, turning sick with fear.  'He has brought
me to this lonely place to murder me!'

He was about to throw himself on the ground, and make one struggle for
his young life, when he saw that they stood before a solitary house:
all ruinous and decayed.  There was a window on each side of the
dilapidated entrance; and one story above; but no light was visible.
The house was dark, dismantled: and the all appearance, uninhabited.

Sikes, with Oliver's hand still in his, softly approached the low
porch, and raised the latch.  The door yielded to the pressure, and
they passed in together.



CHAPTER XXII

THE BURGLARY

'Hallo!' cried a loud, hoarse voice, as soon as they set foot in the
passage.

'Don't make such a row,' said Sikes, bolting the door.  'Show a glim,
Toby.'

'Aha! my pal!' cried the same voice.  'A glim, Barney, a glim! Show the
gentleman in, Barney; wake up first, if convenient.'

The speaker appeared to throw a boot-jack, or some such article, at the
person he addressed, to rouse him from his slumbers:  for the noise of
a wooden body, falling violently, was heard; and then an indistinct
muttering, as of a man between sleep and awake.

'Do you hear?' cried the same voice.  'There's Bill Sikes in the
passage with nobody to do the civil to him; and you sleeping there, as
if you took laudanum with your meals, and nothing stronger.  Are you
any fresher now, or do you want the iron candlestick to wake you
thoroughly?'

A pair of slipshod feet shuffled, hastily, across the bare floor of the
room, as this interrogatory was put; and there issued, from a door on
the right hand; first, a feeble candle:  and next, the form of the same
individual who has been heretofore described as labouring under the
infirmity of speaking through his nose, and officiating as waiter at
the public-house on Saffron Hill.

'Bister Sikes!' exclaimed Barney, with real or counterfeit joy; 'cub
id, sir; cub id.'

'Here! you get on first,' said Sikes, putting Oliver in front of him.
'Quicker! or I shall tread upon your heels.'

Muttering a curse upon his tardiness, Sikes pushed Oliver before him;
and they entered a low dark room with a smoky fire, two or three broken
chairs, a table, and a very old couch:  on which, with his legs much
higher than his head, a man was reposing at full length, smoking a long
clay pipe.  He was dressed in a smartly-cut snuff-coloured coat, with
large brass buttons; an orange neckerchief; a coarse, staring,
shawl-pattern waistcoat; and drab breeches.  Mr. Crackit (for he it
was) had no very great quantity of hair, either upon his head or face;
but what he had, was of a reddish dye, and tortured into long corkscrew
curls, through which he occasionally thrust some very dirty fingers,
ornamented with large common rings.  He was a trifle above the middle
size, and apparently rather weak in the legs; but this circumstance by
no means detracted from his own admiration of his top-boots, which he
contemplated, in their elevated situation, with lively satisfaction.

'Bill, my boy!' said this figure, turning his head towards the door,
'I'm glad to see you.  I was almost afraid you'd given it up:  in which
case I should have made a personal wentur.  Hallo!'

Uttering this exclamation in a tone of great surprise, as his eyes
rested on Oliver, Mr. Toby Crackit brought himself into a sitting
posture, and demanded who that was.

'The boy.  Only the boy!' replied Sikes, drawing a chair towards the
fire.

'Wud of Bister Fagid's lads,' exclaimed Barney, with a grin.

'Fagin's, eh!' exclaimed Toby, looking at Oliver.  'Wot an inwalable
boy that'll make, for the old ladies' pockets in chapels!  His mug is a
fortin' to him.'

'There--there's enough of that,' interposed Sikes, impatiently; and
stooping over his recumbant friend, he whispered a few words in his
ear:  at which Mr. Crackit laughed immensely, and honoured Oliver with
a long stare of astonishment.

'Now,' said Sikes, as he resumed his seat, 'if you'll give us something
to eat and drink while we're waiting, you'll put some heart in us; or
in me, at all events.  Sit down by the fire, younker, and rest
yourself; for you'll have to go out with us again to-night, though not
very far off.'

Oliver looked at Sikes, in mute and timid wonder; and drawing a stool
to the fire, sat with his aching head upon his hands, scarecely knowing
where he was, or what was passing around him.

'Here,' said Toby, as the young Jew placed some fragments of food, and
a bottle upon the table,  'Success to the crack!'  He rose to honour
the toast; and, carefully depositing his empty pipe in a corner,
advanced to the table, filled a glass with spirits, and drank off its
contents.  Mr. Sikes did the same.

'A drain for the boy,' said Toby, half-filling a wine-glass. 'Down with
it, innocence.'

'Indeed,' said Oliver, looking piteously up into the man's face;
'indeed, I--'

'Down with it!' echoed Toby.  'Do you think I don't know what's good
for you?  Tell him to drink it, Bill.'

'He had better!' said Sikes clapping his hand upon his pocket. 'Burn my
body, if he isn't more trouble than a whole family of Dodgers.  Drink
it, you perwerse imp; drink it!'

Frightened by the menacing gestures of the two men, Oliver hastily
swallowed the contents of the glass, and immediately fell into a
violent fit of coughing:  which delighted Toby Crackit and Barney, and
even drew a smile from the surly Mr. Sikes.

This done, and Sikes having satisfied his appetite (Oliver could eat
nothing but a small crust of bread which they made him swallow), the
two men laid themselves down on chairs for a short nap.  Oliver
retained his stool by the fire; Barney wrapped in a blanket, stretched
himself on the floor:  close outside the fender.

They slept, or appeared to sleep, for some time; nobody stirring but
Barney, who rose once or twice to throw coals on the fire. Oliver fell
into a heavy doze:  imagining himself straying along the gloomy lanes,
or wandering about the dark churchyard, or retracing some one or other
of the scenes of the past day:  when he was roused by Toby Crackit
jumping up and declaring it was half-past one.

In an instant, the other two were on their legs, and all were actively
engaged in busy preparation.  Sikes and his companion enveloped their
necks and chins in large dark shawls, and drew on their great-coats;
Barney, opening a cupboard, brought forth several articles, which he
hastily crammed into the pockets.

'Barkers for me, Barney,' said Toby Crackit.

'Here they are,' replied Barney, producing a pair of pistols. 'You
loaded them yourself.'

'All right!' replied Toby, stowing them away.  'The persuaders?'

'I've got 'em,' replied Sikes.

'Crape, keys, centre-bits, darkies--nothing forgotten?' inquired Toby:
fastening a small crowbar to a loop inside the skirt of his coat.

'All right,' rejoined his companion.  'Bring them bits of timber,
Barney.  That's the time of day.'

With these words, he took a thick stick from Barney's hands, who,
having delivered another to Toby, busied himself in fastening on
Oliver's cape.

'Now then!' said Sikes, holding out his hand.

Oliver:  who was completely stupified by the unwonted exercise, and the
air, and the drink which had been forced upon him:  put his hand
mechanically into that which Sikes extended for the purpose.

'Take his other hand, Toby,' said Sikes.  'Look out, Barney.'

The man went to the door, and returned to announce that all was quiet.
The two robbers issued forth with Oliver between them. Barney, having
made all fast, rolled himself up as before, and was soon asleep again.

It was now intensely dark.  The fog was much heavier than it had been
in the early part of the night; and the atmosphere was so damp, that,
although no rain fell, Oliver's hair and eyebrows, within a few minutes
after leaving the house, had become stiff with the half-frozen moisture
that was floating about.  They crossed the bridge, and kept on towards
the lights which he had seen before.  They were at no great distance
off; and, as they walked pretty briskly, they soon arrived at Chertsey.

'Slap through the town,' whispered Sikes; 'there'll be nobody in the
way, to-night, to see us.'

Toby acquiesced; and they hurried through the main street of the little
town, which at that late hour was wholly deserted.  A dim light shone
at intervals from some bed-room window; and the hoarse barking of dogs
occasionally broke the silence of the night.  But there was nobody
abroad.  They had cleared the town, as the church-bell struck two.

Quickening their pace, they turned up a road upon the left hand. After
walking about a quarter of a mile, they stopped before a detached house
surrounded by a wall:  to the top of which, Toby Crackit, scarcely
pausing to take breath, climbed in a twinkling.

'The boy next,' said Toby.  'Hoist him up; I'll catch hold of him.'

Before Oliver had time to look round, Sikes had caught him under the
arms; and in three or four seconds he and Toby were lying on the grass
on the other side.  Sikes followed directly.  And they stole cautiously
towards the house.

And now, for the first time, Oliver, well-nigh mad with grief and
terror, saw that housebreaking and robbery, if not murder, were the
objects of the expedition.  He clasped his hands together, and
involuntarily uttered a subdued exclamation of horror.  A mist came
before his eyes; the cold sweat stood upon his ashy face; his limbs
failed him; and he sank upon his knees.

'Get up!' murmured Sikes, trembling with rage, and drawing the pistol
from his pocket; 'Get up, or I'll strew your brains upon the grass.'

'Oh! for God's sake let me go!' cried Oliver; 'let me run away and die
in the fields.  I will never come near London; never, never!  Oh! pray
have mercy on me, and do not make me steal.  For the love of all the
bright Angels that rest in Heaven, have mercy upon me!'

The man to whom this appeal was made, swore a dreadful oath, and had
cocked the pistol, when Toby, striking it from his grasp, placed his
hand upon the boy's mouth, and dragged him to the house.

'Hush!' cried the man; 'it won't answer here.  Say another word, and
I'll do your business myself with a crack on the head.  That makes no
noise, and is quite as certain, and more genteel.  Here, Bill, wrench
the shutter open.  He's game enough now, I'll engage.  I've seen older
hands of his age took the same way, for a minute or two, on a cold
night.'

Sikes, invoking terrific imprecations upon Fagin's head for sending
Oliver on such an errand, plied the crowbar vigorously, but with little
noise.  After some delay, and some assistance from Toby, the shutter to
which he had referred, swung open on its hinges.

It was a little lattice window, about five feet and a half above the
ground, at the back of the house:  which belonged to a scullery, or
small brewing-place, at the end of the passage.  The aperture was so
small, that the inmates had probably not thought it worth while to
defend it more securely; but it was large enough to admit a boy of
Oliver's size, nevertheless.  A very brief exercise of Mr. Sike's art,
sufficed to overcome the fastening of the lattice; and it soon stood
wide open also.

'Now listen, you young limb,' whispered Sikes, drawing a dark lantern
from his pocket, and throwing the glare full on Oliver's face; 'I'm a
going to put you through there.  Take this light; go softly up the
steps straight afore you, and along the little hall, to the street
door; unfasten it, and let us in.'

'There's a bolt at the top, you won't be able to reach,' interposed
Toby. 'Stand upon one of the hall chairs.  There are three there, Bill,
with a jolly large blue unicorn and gold pitchfork on 'em:  which is
the old lady's arms.'

'Keep quiet, can't you?' replied Sikes, with a threatening look. 'The
room-door is open, is it?'

'Wide,' replied Toby, after peeping in to satisfy himself. 'The game of
that is, that they always leave it open with a catch, so that the dog,
who's got a bed in here, may walk up and down the passage when he feels
wakeful.  Ha! ha! Barney 'ticed him away to-night.  So neat!'

Although Mr. Crackit spoke in a scarcely audible whisper, and laughed
without noise, Sikes imperiously commanded him to be silent, and to get
to work.  Toby complied, by first producing his lantern, and placing it
on the ground; then by planting himself firmly with his head against
the wall beneath the window, and his hands upon his knees, so as to
make a step of his back. This was no sooner done, than Sikes, mounting
upon him, put Oliver gently through the window with his feet first;
and, without leaving hold of his collar, planted him safely on the
floor inside.

'Take this lantern,' said Sikes, looking into the room.  'You see the
stairs afore you?'

Oliver, more dead than alive, gasped out, 'Yes.'  Sikes, pointing to
the street-door with the pistol-barrel, briefly advised him to take
notice that he was within shot all the way; and that if he faltered, he
would fall dead that instant.

'It's done in a minute,' said Sikes, in the same low whisper. 'Directly
I leave go of you, do your work.  Hark!'

'What's that?' whispered the other man.

They listened intently.

'Nothing,' said Sikes, releasing his hold of Oliver.  'Now!'

In the short time he had had to collect his senses, the boy had firmly
resolved that, whether he died in the attempt or not, he would make one
effort to dart upstairs from the hall, and alarm the family.  Filled
with this idea, he advanced at once, but stealthily.

'Come back!' suddenly cried Sikes aloud.  'Back! back!'

Scared by the sudden breaking of the dead stillness of the place, and
by a loud cry which followed it, Oliver let his lantern fall, and knew
not whether to advance or fly.

The cry was repeated--a light appeared--a vision of two terrified
half-dressed men at the top of the stairs swam before his eyes--a
flash--a loud noise--a smoke--a crash somewhere, but where he knew
not,--and he staggered back.

Sikes had disappeared for an instant; but he was up again, and had him
by the collar before the smoke had cleared away.  He fired his own
pistol after the men, who were already retreating; and dragged the boy
up.

'Clasp your arm tighter,' said Sikes, as he drew him through the
window.  'Give me a shawl here.  They've hit him.  Quick!  How the boy
bleeds!'

Then came the loud ringing of a bell, mingled with the noise of
fire-arms, and the shouts of men, and the sensation of being carried
over uneven ground at a rapid pace.  And then, the noises grew confused
in the distance; and a cold deadly feeling crept over the boy's heart;
and he saw or heard no more.



CHAPTER XXIII

WHICH CONTAINS THE SUBSTANCE OF A PLEASANT CONVERSATION BETWEEN MR.
BUMBLE AND A LADY; AND SHOWS THAT EVEN A BEADLE MAY BE SUSCEPTIBLE ON
SOME POINTS

The night was bitter cold.  The snow lay on the ground, frozen into a
hard thick crust, so that only the heaps that had drifted into byways
and corners were affected by the sharp wind that howled abroad:  which,
as if expending increased fury on such prey as it found, caught it
savagely up in clouds, and, whirling it into a thousand misty eddies,
scattered it in air.  Bleak, dark, and piercing cold, it was a night
for the well-housed and fed to draw round the bright fire and thank God
they were at home; and for the homeless, starving wretch to lay him
down and die.  Many hunger-worn outcasts close their eyes in our bare
streets, at such times, who, let their crimes have been what they may,
can hardly open them in a more bitter world.

Such was the aspect of out-of-doors affairs, when Mrs. Corney, the
matron of the workhouse to which our readers have been already
introduced as the birthplace of Oliver Twist, sat herself down before a
cheerful fire in her own little room, and glanced, with no small degree
of complacency, at a small round table:  on which stood a tray of
corresponding size, furnished with all necessary materials for the most
grateful meal that matrons enjoy.  In fact, Mrs. Corney was about to
solace herself with a cup of tea. As she glanced from the table to the
fireplace, where the smallest of all possible kettles was singing a
small song in a small voice, her inward satisfaction evidently
increased,--so much so, indeed, that Mrs. Corney smiled.

'Well!' said the matron, leaning her elbow on the table, and looking
reflectively at the fire; 'I'm sure we have all on us a great deal to
be grateful for!  A great deal, if we did but know it.  Ah!'

Mrs. Corney shook her head mournfully, as if deploring the mental
blindness of those paupers who did not know it; and thrusting a silver
spoon (private property) into the inmost recesses of a two-ounce tin
tea-caddy, proceeded to make the tea.

How slight a thing will disturb the equanimity of our frail minds!  The
black teapot, being very small and easily filled, ran over while Mrs.
Corney was moralising; and the water slightly scalded Mrs. Corney's
hand.

'Drat the pot!' said the worthy matron, setting it down very hastily on
the hob; 'a little stupid thing, that only holds a couple of cups!
What use is it of, to anybody!  Except,' said Mrs. Corney, pausing,
'except to a poor desolate creature like me.  Oh dear!'

With these words, the matron dropped into her chair, and, once more
resting her elbow on the table, thought of her solitary fate.  The
small teapot, and the single cup, had awakened in her mind sad
recollections of Mr. Corney (who had not been dead more than
five-and-twenty years); and she was overpowered.

'I shall never get another!' said Mrs. Corney, pettishly; 'I shall
never get another--like him.'

Whether this remark bore reference to the husband, or the teapot, is
uncertain.  It might have been the latter; for Mrs. Corney looked at it
as she spoke; and took it up afterwards.  She had just tasted her first
cup, when she was disturbed by a soft tap at the room-door.

'Oh, come in with you!' said Mrs. Corney, sharply.  'Some of the old
women dying, I suppose.  They always die when I'm at meals. Don't stand
there, letting the cold air in, don't.  What's amiss now, eh?'

'Nothing, ma'am, nothing,' replied a man's voice.

'Dear me!' exclaimed the matron, in a much sweeter tone, 'is that Mr.
Bumble?'

'At your service, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, who had been stopping
outside to rub his shoes clean, and to shake the snow off his coat; and
who now made his appearance, bearing the cocked hat in one hand and a
bundle in the other.  'Shall I shut the door, ma'am?'

The lady modestly hesitated to reply, lest there should be any
impropriety in holding an interview with Mr. Bumble, with closed doors.
Mr. Bumble taking advantage of the hesitation, and being very cold
himself, shut it without permission.

'Hard weather, Mr. Bumble,' said the matron.

'Hard, indeed, ma'am,' replied the beadle.  'Anti-porochial weather
this, ma'am.  We have given away, Mrs. Corney, we have given away a
matter of twenty quartern loaves and a cheese and a half, this very
blessed afternoon; and yet them paupers are not contented.'

'Of course not.  When would they be, Mr. Bumble?' said the matron,
sipping her tea.

'When, indeed, ma'am!' rejoined Mr. Bumble.  'Why here's one man that,
in consideration of his wife and large family, has a quartern loaf and
a good pound of cheese, full weight.  Is he grateful, ma'am?  Is he
grateful?  Not a copper farthing's worth of it!  What does he do,
ma'am, but ask for a few coals; if it's only a pocket handkerchief
full, he says!  Coals! What would he do with coals?  Toast his cheese
with 'em and then come back for more.  That's the way with these
people, ma'am; give 'em a apron full of coals to-day, and they'll come
back for another, the day after to-morrow, as brazen as alabaster.'

The matron expressed her entire concurrence in this intelligible
simile; and the beadle went on.

'I never,' said Mr. Bumble, 'see anything like the pitch it's got to.
The day afore yesterday, a man--you have been a married woman, ma'am,
and I may mention it to you--a man, with hardly a rag upon his back
(here Mrs. Corney looked at the floor), goes to our overseer's door
when he has got company coming to dinner; and says, he must be
relieved, Mrs. Corney.  As he wouldn't go away, and shocked the company
very much, our overseer sent him out a pound of potatoes and half a
pint of oatmeal.  "My heart!" says the ungrateful villain, "what's the
use of _this_ to me?  You might as well give me a pair of iron
spectacles!"  "Very good," says our overseer, taking 'em away again,
"you won't get anything else here."  "Then I'll die in the streets!"
says the vagrant.  "Oh no, you won't," says our overseer.'

'Ha! ha!  That was very good!  So like Mr. Grannett, wasn't it?'
interposed the matron.  'Well, Mr. Bumble?'

'Well, ma'am,' rejoined the beadle, 'he went away; and he _did_ die in
the streets.  There's a obstinate pauper for you!'

'It beats anything I could have believed,' observed the matron
emphatically.  'But don't you think out-of-door relief a very bad
thing, any way, Mr. Bumble?  You're a gentleman of experience, and
ought to know.  Come.'

'Mrs. Corney,' said the beadle, smiling as men smile who are conscious
of superior information, 'out-of-door relief, properly managed:
properly managed, ma'am: is the porochial safeguard.  The great
principle of out-of-door relief is, to give the paupers exactly what
they don't want; and then they get tired of coming.'

'Dear me!' exclaimed Mrs. Corney.  'Well, that is a good one, too!'

'Yes.  Betwixt you and me, ma'am,' returned Mr. Bumble, 'that's the
great principle; and that's the reason why, if you look at any cases
that get into them owdacious newspapers, you'll always observe that
sick families have been relieved with slices of cheese.  That's the
rule now, Mrs. Corney, all over the country. But, however,' said the
beadle, stopping to unpack his bundle, 'these are official secrets,
ma'am; not to be spoken of; except, as I may say, among the porochial
officers, such as ourselves. This is the port wine, ma'am, that the
board ordered for the infirmary; real, fresh, genuine port wine; only
out of the cask this forenoon; clear as a bell, and no sediment!'

Having held the first bottle up to the light, and shaken it well to
test its excellence, Mr. Bumble placed them both on top of a chest of
drawers; folded the handkerchief in which they had been wrapped; put it
carefully in his pocket; and took up his hat, as if to go.

'You'll have a very cold walk, Mr. Bumble,' said the matron.

'It blows, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, turning up his coat-collar,
'enough to cut one's ears off.'

The matron looked, from the little kettle, to the beadle, who was
moving towards the door; and as the beadle coughed, preparatory to
bidding her good-night, bashfully inquired whether--whether he wouldn't
take a cup of tea?

Mr. Bumble instantaneously turned back his collar again; laid his hat
and stick upon a chair; and drew another chair up to the table.  As he
slowly seated himself, he looked at the lady.  She fixed her eyes upon
the little teapot.  Mr. Bumble coughed again, and slightly smiled.

Mrs. Corney rose to get another cup and saucer from the closet. As she
sat down, her eyes once again encountered those of the gallant beadle;
she coloured, and applied herself to the task of making his tea.  Again
Mr. Bumble coughed--louder this time than he had coughed yet.

'Sweet?  Mr. Bumble?' inquired the matron, taking up the sugar-basin.

'Very sweet, indeed, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble.  He fixed his eyes on
Mrs. Corney as he said this; and if ever a beadle looked tender, Mr.
Bumble was that beadle at that moment.

The tea was made, and handed in silence.  Mr. Bumble, having spread a
handkerchief over his knees to prevent the crumbs from sullying the
splendour of his shorts, began to eat and drink; varying these
amusements, occasionally, by fetching a deep sigh; which, however, had
no injurious effect upon his appetite, but, on the contrary, rather
seemed to facilitate his operations in the tea and toast department.

'You have a cat, ma'am, I see,' said Mr. Bumble, glancing at one who,
in the centre of her family, was basking before the fire; 'and kittens
too, I declare!'

'I am so fond of them, Mr. Bumble, you can't think,' replied the
matron.  'They're _so_ happy, _so_ frolicsome, and _so_ cheerful, that
they are quite companions for me.'

'Very nice animals, ma'am,' replied Mr. Bumble, approvingly; 'so very
domestic.'

'Oh, yes!' rejoined the matron with enthusiasm; 'so fond of their home
too, that it's quite a pleasure, I'm sure.'

'Mrs. Corney, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, slowly, and marking the time
with his teaspoon, 'I mean to say this, ma'am; that any cat, or kitten,
that could live with you, ma'am, and _not_ be fond of its home, must be
a ass, ma'am.'

'Oh, Mr. Bumble!' remonstrated Mrs. Corney.

'It's of no use disguising facts, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble, slowly
flourishing the teaspoon with a kind of amorous dignity which made him
doubly impressive; 'I would drown it myself, with pleasure.'

'Then you're a cruel man,' said the matron vivaciously, as she held out
her hand for the beadle's cup; 'and a very hard-hearted man besides.'

'Hard-hearted, ma'am?' said Mr. Bumble.  'Hard?'  Mr. Bumble resigned
his cup without another word; squeezed Mrs. Corney's little finger as
she took it; and inflicting two open-handed slaps upon his laced
waistcoat, gave a mighty sigh, and hitched his chair a very little
morsel farther from the fire.

It was a round table; and as Mrs. Corney and Mr. Bumble had been
sitting opposite each other, with no great space between them, and
fronting the fire, it will be seen that Mr. Bumble, in receding from
the fire, and still keeping at the table, increased the distance
between himself and Mrs. Corney; which proceeding, some prudent readers
will doubtless be disposed to admire, and to consider an act of great
heroism on Mr. Bumble's part:  he being in some sort tempted by time,
place, and opportunity, to give utterance to certain soft nothings,
which however well they may become the lips of the light and
thoughtless, do seem immeasurably beneath the dignity of judges of the
land, members of parliament, ministers of state, lord mayors, and other
great public functionaries, but more particularly beneath the
stateliness and gravity of a beadle:  who (as is well known) should be
the sternest and most inflexible among them all.

Whatever were Mr. Bumble's intentions, however (and no doubt they were
of the best): it unfortunately happened, as has been twice before
remarked, that the table was a round one; consequently Mr. Bumble,
moving his chair by little and little, soon began to diminish the
distance between himself and the matron; and, continuing to travel
round the outer edge of the circle, brought his chair, in time, close
to that in which the matron was seated.

Indeed, the two chairs touched; and when they did so, Mr. Bumble
stopped.

Now, if the matron had moved her chair to the right, she would have
been scorched by the fire; and if to the left, she must have fallen
into Mr. Bumble's arms; so (being a discreet matron, and no doubt
foreseeing these consequences at a glance) she remained where she was,
and handed Mr. Bumble another cup of tea.

'Hard-hearted, Mrs. Corney?' said Mr. Bumble, stirring his tea, and
looking up into the matron's face; 'are _you_ hard-hearted, Mrs.
Corney?'

'Dear me!' exclaimed the matron, 'what a very curious question from a
single man.  What can you want to know for, Mr. Bumble?'

The beadle drank his tea to the last drop; finished a piece of toast;
whisked the crumbs off his knees; wiped his lips; and deliberately
kissed the matron.

'Mr. Bumble!' cried that discreet lady in a whisper; for the fright was
so great, that she had quite lost her voice, 'Mr. Bumble, I shall
scream!'  Mr. Bumble made no reply; but in a slow and dignified manner,
put his arm round the matron's waist.

As the lady had stated her intention of screaming, of course she would
have screamed at this additional boldness, but that the exertion was
rendered unnecessary by a hasty knocking at the door:  which was no
sooner heard, than Mr. Bumble darted, with much agility, to the wine
bottles, and began dusting them with great violence:  while the matron
sharply demanded who was there.

It is worthy of remark, as a curious physical instance of the efficacy
of a sudden surprise in counteracting the effects of extreme fear, that
her voice had quite recovered all its official asperity.

'If you please, mistress,' said a withered old female pauper, hideously
ugly:  putting her head in at the door, 'Old Sally is a-going fast.'

'Well, what's that to me?' angrily demanded the matron.  'I can't keep
her alive, can I?'

'No, no, mistress,' replied the old woman, 'nobody can; she's far
beyond the reach of help.  I've seen a many people die; little babes
and great strong men; and I know when death's a-coming, well enough.
But she's troubled in her mind: and when the fits are not on her,--and
that's not often, for she is dying very hard,--she says she has got
something to tell, which you must hear.  She'll never die quiet till
you come, mistress.'

At this intelligence, the worthy Mrs. Corney muttered a variety of
invectives against old women who couldn't even die without purposely
annoying their betters; and, muffling herself in a thick shawl which
she hastily caught up, briefly requested Mr. Bumble to stay till she
came back, lest anything particular should occur.  Bidding the
messenger walk fast, and not be all night hobbling up the stairs, she
followed her from the room with a very ill grace, scolding all the way.

Mr. Bumble's conduct on being left to himself, was rather inexplicable.
He opened the closet, counted the teaspoons, weighed the sugar-tongs,
closely inspected a silver milk-pot to ascertain that it was of the
genuine metal, and, having satisfied his curiosity on these points, put
on his cocked hat corner-wise, and danced with much gravity four
distinct times round the table.

Having gone through this very extraordinary performance, he took off
the cocked hat again, and, spreading himself before the fire with his
back towards it, seemed to be mentally engaged in taking an exact
inventory of the furniture.



CHAPTER XXIV

TREATS ON A VERY POOR SUBJECT.  BUT IS A SHORT ONE, AND MAY BE FOUND OF
IMPORTANCE IN THIS HISTORY

It was no unfit messenger of death, who had disturbed the quiet of the
matron's room.  Her body was bent by age; her limbs trembled with
palsy; her face, distorted into a mumbling leer, resembled more the
grotesque shaping of some wild pencil, than the work of Nature's hand.

Alas!  How few of Nature's faces are left alone to gladden us with
their beauty!  The cares, and sorrows, and hungerings, of the world,
change them as they change hearts; and it is only when those passions
sleep, and have lost their hold for ever, that the troubled clouds pass
off, and leave Heaven's surface clear.  It is a common thing for the
countenances of the dead, even in that fixed and rigid state, to
subside into the long-forgotten expression of sleeping infancy, and
settle into the very look of early life; so calm, so peaceful, do they
grow again, that those who knew them in their happy childhood, kneel by
the coffin's side in awe, and see the Angel even upon earth.

The old crone tottered along the passages, and up the stairs, muttering
some indistinct answers to the chidings of her companion; being at
length compelled to pause for breath, she gave the light into her hand,
and remained behind to follow as she might: while the more nimble
superior made her way to the room where the sick woman lay.

It was a bare garret-room, with a dim light burning at the farther end.
There was another old woman watching by the bed; the parish
apothecary's apprentice was standing by the fire, making a toothpick
out of a quill.

'Cold night, Mrs. Corney,' said this young gentleman, as the matron
entered.

'Very cold, indeed, sir,' replied the mistress, in her most civil
tones, and dropping a curtsey as she spoke.

'You should get better coals out of your contractors,' said the
apothecary's deputy, breaking a lump on the top of the fire with the
rusty poker; 'these are not at all the sort of thing for a cold night.'

'They're the board's choosing, sir,' returned the matron. 'The least
they could do, would be to keep us pretty warm:  for our places are
hard enough.'

The conversation was here interrupted by a moan from the sick woman.

'Oh!' said the young mag, turning his face towards the bed, as if he
had previously quite forgotten the patient, 'it's all U.P. there, Mrs.
Corney.'

'It is, is it, sir?' asked the matron.

'If she lasts a couple of hours, I shall be surprised,' said the
apothecary's apprentice, intent upon the toothpick's point. 'It's a
break-up of the system altogether.  Is she dozing, old lady?'

The attendant stooped over the bed, to ascertain; and nodded in the
affirmative.

'Then perhaps she'll go off in that way, if you don't make a row,' said
the young man.  'Put the light on the floor.  She won't see it there.'

The attendant did as she was told:  shaking her head meanwhile, to
intimate that the woman would not die so easily; having done so, she
resumed her seat by the side of the other nurse, who had by this time
returned.  The mistress, with an expression of impatience, wrapped
herself in her shawl, and sat at the foot of the bed.

The apothecary's apprentice, having completed the manufacture of the
toothpick, planted himself in front of the fire and made good use of it
for ten minutes or so:  when apparently growing rather dull, he wished
Mrs. Corney joy of her job, and took himself off on tiptoe.

When they had sat in silence for some time, the two old women rose from
the bed, and crouching over the fire, held out their withered hands to
catch the heat.  The flame threw a ghastly light on their shrivelled
faces, and made their ugliness appear terrible, as, in this position,
they began to converse in a low voice.

'Did she say any more, Anny dear, while I was gone?' inquired the
messenger.

'Not a word,' replied the other.  'She plucked and tore at her arms for
a little time; but I held her hands, and she soon dropped off.  She
hasn't much strength in her, so I easily kept her quiet.  I ain't so
weak for an old woman, although I am on parish allowance; no, no!'

'Did she drink the hot wine the doctor said she was to have?' demanded
the first.

'I tried to get it down,' rejoined the other.  'But her teeth were
tight set, and she clenched the mug so hard that it was as much as I
could do to get it back again.  So I drank it; and it did me good!'

Looking cautiously round, to ascertain that they were not overheard,
the two hags cowered nearer to the fire, and chuckled heartily.

'I mind the time,' said the first speaker, 'when she would have done
the same, and made rare fun of it afterwards.'

'Ay, that she would,' rejoined the other; 'she had a merry heart. 'A
many, many, beautiful corpses she laid out, as nice and neat as
waxwork.  My old eyes have seen them--ay, and those old hands touched
them too; for I have helped her, scores of times.'

Stretching forth her trembling fingers as she spoke, the old creature
shook them exultingly before her face, and fumbling in her pocket,
brought out an old time-discoloured tin snuff-box, from which she shook
a few grains into the outstretched palm of her companion, and a few
more into her own.  While they were thus employed, the matron, who had
been impatiently watching until the dying woman should awaken from her
stupor, joined them by the fire, and sharply asked how long she was to
wait?

'Not long, mistress,' replied the second woman, looking up into her
face.  'We have none of us long to wait for Death.  Patience, patience!
He'll be here soon enough for us all.'

'Hold your tongue, you doting idiot!' said the matron sternly. 'You,
Martha, tell me; has she been in this way before?'

'Often,' answered the first woman.

'But will never be again,' added the second one; 'that is, she'll never
wake again but once--and mind, mistress, that won't be for long!'

'Long or short,' said the matron, snappishly, 'she won't find me here
when she does wake; take care, both of you, how you worry me again for
nothing.  It's no part of my duty to see all the old women in the house
die, and I won't--that's more. Mind that, you impudent old harridans.
If you make a fool of me again, I'll soon cure you, I warrant you!'

She was bouncing away, when a cry from the two women, who had turned
towards the bed, caused her to look round.  The patient had raised
herself upright, and was stretching her arms towards them.

'Who's that?' she cried, in a hollow voice.

'Hush, hush!' said one of the women, stooping over her.  'Lie down, lie
down!'

'I'll never lie down again alive!' said the woman, struggling. 'I
_will_ tell her!  Come here!  Nearer!  Let me whisper in your ear.'

She clutched the matron by the arm, and forcing her into a chair by the
bedside, was about to speak, when looking round, she caught sight of
the two old women bending forward in the attitude of eager listeners.

'Turn them away,' said the woman, drowsily; 'make haste! make haste!'

The two old crones, chiming in together, began pouring out many piteous
lamentations that the poor dear was too far gone to know her best
friends; and were uttering sundry protestations that they would never
leave her, when the superior pushed them from the room, closed the
door, and returned to the bedside.  On being excluded, the old ladies
changed their tone, and cried through the keyhole that old Sally was
drunk; which, indeed, was not unlikely; since, in addition to a
moderate dose of opium prescribed by the apothecary, she was labouring
under the effects of a final taste of gin-and-water which had been
privily administered, in the openness of their hearts, by the worthy
old ladies themselves.

'Now listen to me,' said the dying woman aloud, as if making a great
effort to revive one latent spark of energy.  'In this very room--in
this very bed--I once nursed a pretty young creetur', that was brought
into the house with her feet cut and bruised with walking, and all
soiled with dust and blood.  She gave birth to a boy, and died.  Let me
think--what was the year again!'

'Never mind the year,' said the impatient auditor; 'what about her?'

'Ay,' murmured the sick woman, relapsing into her former drowsy state,
'what about her?--what about--I know!' she cried, jumping fiercely up:
her face flushed, and her eyes starting from her head--'I robbed her,
so I did!  She wasn't cold--I tell you she wasn't cold, when I stole
it!'

'Stole what, for God's sake?' cried the matron, with a gesture as if
she would call for help.

'_It_!' replied the woman, laying her hand over the other's mouth. 'The
only thing she had.  She wanted clothes to keep her warm, and food to
eat; but she had kept it safe, and had it in her bosom.  It was gold, I
tell you!  Rich gold, that might have saved her life!'

'Gold!' echoed the matron, bending eagerly over the woman as she fell
back.  'Go on, go on--yes--what of it?  Who was the mother? When was
it?'

'She charged me to keep it safe,' replied the woman with a groan, 'and
trusted me as the only woman about her.  I stole it in my heart when
she first showed it me hanging round her neck; and the child's death,
perhaps, is on me besides!  They would have treated him better, if they
had known it all!'

'Known what?' asked the other.  'Speak!'

'The boy grew so like his mother,' said the woman, rambling on, and not
heeding the question, 'that I could never forget it when I saw his
face.  Poor girl! poor girl!  She was so young, too! Such a gentle
lamb!  Wait; there's more to tell.  I have not told you all, have I?'

'No, no,' replied the matron, inclining her head to catch the words, as
they came more faintly from the dying woman.  'Be quick, or it may be
too late!'

'The mother,' said the woman, making a more violent effort than before;
'the mother, when the pains of death first came upon her, whispered in
my ear that if her baby was born alive, and thrived, the day might come
when it would not feel so much disgraced to hear its poor young mother
named. "And oh, kind Heaven!" she said, folding her thin hands
together, "whether it be boy or girl, raise up some friends for it in
this troubled world, and take pity upon a lonely desolate child,
abandoned to its mercy!"'

'The boy's name?' demanded the matron.

'They _called_ him Oliver,' replied the woman, feebly.  'The gold I
stole was--'

'Yes, yes--what?' cried the other.

She was bending eagerly over the woman to hear her reply; but drew
back, instinctively, as she once again rose, slowly and stiffly, into a
sitting posture; then, clutching the coverlid with both hands, muttered
some indistinct sounds in her throat, and fell lifeless on the bed.

      *      *      *      *      *

'Stone dead!' said one of the old women, hurrying in as soon as the
door was opened.

'And nothing to tell, after all,' rejoined the matron, walking
carelessly away.

The two crones, to all appearance, too busily occupied in the
preparations for their dreadful duties to make any reply, were left
alone, hovering about the body.



CHAPTER XXV

WHEREIN THIS HISTORY REVERTS TO MR. FAGIN AND COMPANY

While these things were passing in the country workhouse, Mr. Fagin sat
in the old den--the same from which Oliver had been removed by the
girl--brooding over a dull, smoky fire.  He held a pair of bellows upon
his knee, with which he had apparently been endeavouring to rouse it
into more cheerful action; but he had fallen into deep thought; and
with his arms folded on them, and his chin resting on his thumbs, fixed
his eyes, abstractedly, on the rusty bars.

At a table behind him sat the Artful Dodger, Master Charles Bates, and
Mr. Chitling: all intent upon a game of whist; the Artful taking dummy
against Master Bates and Mr. Chitling.  The countenance of the
first-named gentleman, peculiarly intelligent at all times, acquired
great additional interest from his close observance of the game, and
his attentive perusal of Mr. Chitling's hand; upon which, from time to
time, as occasion served, he bestowed a variety of earnest glances:
wisely regulating his own play by the result of his observations upon
his neighbour's cards.  It being a cold night, the Dodger wore his hat,
as, indeed, was often his custom within doors.  He also sustained a
clay pipe between his teeth, which he only removed for a brief space
when he deemed it necessary to apply for refreshment to a quart pot
upon the table, which stood ready filled with gin-and-water for the
accommodation of the company.

Master Bates was also attentive to the play; but being of a more
excitable nature than his accomplished friend, it was observable that
he more frequently applied himself to the gin-and-water, and moreover
indulged in many jests and irrelevant remarks, all highly unbecoming a
scientific rubber.  Indeed, the Artful, presuming upon their close
attachment, more than once took occasion to reason gravely with his
companion upon these improprieties; all of which remonstrances, Master
Bates received in extremely good part; merely requesting his friend to
be 'blowed,' or to insert his head in a sack, or replying with some
other neatly-turned witticism of a similar kind, the happy application
of which, excited considerable admiration in the mind of Mr. Chitling.
It was remarkable that the latter gentleman and his partner invariably
lost; and that the circumstance, so far from angering Master Bates,
appeared to afford him the highest amusement, inasmuch as he laughed
most uproariously at the end of every deal, and protested that he had
never seen such a jolly game in all his born days.

'That's two doubles and the rub,' said Mr. Chitling, with a very long
face, as he drew half-a-crown from his waistcoat-pocket.  'I never see
such a feller as you, Jack; you win everything.  Even when we've good
cards, Charley and I can't make nothing of 'em.'

Either the master or the manner of this remark, which was made very
ruefully, delighted Charley Bates so much, that his consequent shout of
laughter roused the Jew from his reverie, and induced him to inquire
what was the matter.

'Matter, Fagin!' cried Charley.  'I wish you had watched the play.
Tommy Chitling hasn't won a point; and I went partners with him against
the Artfull and dumb.'

'Ay, ay!' said the Jew, with a grin, which sufficiently demonstrated
that he was at no loss to understand the reason. 'Try 'em again, Tom;
try 'em again.'

'No more of it for me, thank 'ee, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I've
had enough.  That 'ere Dodger has such a run of luck that there's no
standing again' him.'

'Ha! ha! my dear,' replied the Jew, 'you must get up very early in the
morning, to win against the Dodger.'

'Morning!' said Charley Bates; 'you must put your boots on over-night,
and have a telescope at each eye, and a opera-glass between your
shoulders, if you want to come over him.'

Mr. Dawkins received these handsome compliments with much philosophy,
and offered to cut any gentleman in company, for the first
picture-card, at a shilling at a time.  Nobody accepting the challenge,
and his pipe being by this time smoked out, he proceeded to amuse
himself by sketching a ground-plan of Newgate on the table with the
piece of chalk which had served him in lieu of counters; whistling,
meantime, with peculiar shrillness.

'How precious dull you are, Tommy!' said the Dodger, stopping short
when there had been a long silence; and addressing Mr. Chitling.  'What
do you think he's thinking of, Fagin?'

'How should I know, my dear?' replied the Jew, looking round as he
plied the bellows.  'About his losses, maybe; or the little retirement
in the country that he's just left, eh?  Ha! ha!  Is that it, my dear?'

'Not a bit of it,' replied the Dodger, stopping the subject of
discourse as Mr. Chitling was about to reply.  'What do _you_ say,
Charley?'

'_I_ should say,' replied Master Bates, with a grin, 'that he was
uncommon sweet upon Betsy.  See how he's a-blushing!  Oh, my eye!
here's a merry-go-rounder!  Tommy Chitling's in love!  Oh, Fagin,
Fagin! what a spree!'

Thoroughly overpowered with the notion of Mr. Chitling being the victim
of the tender passion, Master Bates threw himself back in his chair
with such violence, that he lost his balance, and pitched over upon the
floor; where (the accident abating nothing of his merriment) he lay at
full length until his laugh was over, when he resumed his former
position, and began another laugh.

'Never mind him, my dear,' said the Jew, winking at Mr. Dawkins, and
giving Master Bates a reproving tap with the nozzle of the bellows.
'Betsy's a fine girl.  Stick up to her, Tom.  Stick up to her.'

'What I mean to say, Fagin,' replied Mr. Chitling, very red in the
face, 'is, that that isn't anything to anybody here.'

'No more it is,' replied the Jew; 'Charley will talk.  Don't mind him,
my dear; don't mind him.  Betsy's a fine girl.  Do as she bids you,
Tom, and you will make your fortune.'

'So I _do_ do as she bids me,' replied Mr. Chitling; 'I shouldn't have
been milled, if it hadn't been for her advice.  But it turned out a
good job for you; didn't it, Fagin!  And what's six weeks of it?  It
must come, some time or another, and why not in the winter time when
you don't want to go out a-walking so much; eh, Fagin?'

'Ah, to be sure, my dear,' replied the Jew.

'You wouldn't mind it again, Tom, would you,' asked the Dodger, winking
upon Charley and the Jew, 'if Bet was all right?'

'I mean to say that I shouldn't,' replied Tom, angrily. 'There, now.
Ah!  Who'll say as much as that, I should like to know; eh, Fagin?'

'Nobody, my dear,' replied the Jew; 'not a soul, Tom.  I don't know one
of 'em that would do it besides you; not one of 'em, my dear.'

'I might have got clear off, if I'd split upon her; mightn't I, Fagin?'
angrily pursued the poor half-witted dupe.  'A word from me would have
done it; wouldn't it, Fagin?'

'To be sure it would, my dear,' replied the Jew.

'But I didn't blab it; did I, Fagin?' demanded Tom, pouring question
upon question with great volubility.

'No, no, to be sure,' replied the Jew; 'you were too stout-hearted for
that.  A deal too stout, my dear!'

'Perhaps I was,' rejoined Tom, looking round; 'and if I was, what's to
laugh at, in that; eh, Fagin?'

The Jew, perceiving that Mr. Chitling was considerably roused, hastened
to assure him that nobody was laughing; and to prove the gravity of the
company, appealed to Master Bates, the principal offender.  But,
unfortunately, Charley, in opening his mouth to reply that he was never
more serious in his life, was unable to prevent the escape of such a
violent roar, that the abused Mr. Chitling, without any preliminary
ceremonies, rushed across the room and aimed a blow at the offender;
who, being skilful in evading pursuit, ducked to avoid it, and chose
his time so well that it lighted on the chest of the merry old
gentleman, and caused him to stagger to the wall, where he stood
panting for breath, while Mr. Chitling looked on in intense dismay.

'Hark!' cried the Dodger at this moment, 'I heard the tinkler.'
Catching up the light, he crept softly upstairs.

The bell was rung again, with some impatience, while the party were in
darkness.  After a short pause, the Dodger reappeared, and whispered
Fagin mysteriously.

'What!' cried the Jew, 'alone?'

The Dodger nodded in the affirmative, and, shading the flame of the
candle with his hand, gave Charley Bates a private intimation, in dumb
show, that he had better not be funny just then.  Having performed this
friendly office, he fixed his eyes on the Jew's face, and awaited his
directions.

The old man bit his yellow fingers, and meditated for some seconds; his
face working with agitation the while, as if he dreaded something, and
feared to know the worst.  At length he raised his head.

'Where is he?' he asked.

The Dodger pointed to the floor above, and made a gesture, as if to
leave the room.

'Yes,' said the Jew, answering the mute inquiry; 'bring him down. Hush!
Quiet, Charley!  Gently, Tom!  Scarce, scarce!'

This brief direction to Charley Bates, and his recent antagonist, was
softly and immediately obeyed.  There was no sound of their whereabout,
when the Dodger descended the stairs, bearing the light in his hand,
and followed by a man in a coarse smock-frock; who, after casting a
hurried glance round the room, pulled off a large wrapper which had
concealed the lower portion of his face, and disclosed: all haggard,
unwashed, and unshorn: the features of flash Toby Crackit.

'How are you, Faguey?' said this worthy, nodding to the Jew. 'Pop that
shawl away in my castor, Dodger, so that I may know where to find it
when I cut; that's the time of day!  You'll be a fine young cracksman
afore the old file now.'

With these words he pulled up the smock-frock; and, winding it round
his middle, drew a chair to the fire, and placed his feet upon the hob.

'See there, Faguey,' he said, pointing disconsolately to his top boots;
'not a drop of Day and Martin since you know when; not a bubble of
blacking, by Jove!   But don't look at me in that way, man.  All in
good time.  I can't talk about business till I've eat and drank; so
produce the sustainance, and let's have a quiet fill-out for the first
time these three days!'

The Jew motioned to the Dodger to place what eatables there were, upon
the table; and, seating himself opposite the housebreaker, waited his
leisure.

To judge from appearances, Toby was by no means in a hurry to open the
conversation.  At first, the Jew contented himself with patiently
watching his countenance, as if to gain from its expression some clue
to the intelligence he brought; but in vain.

He looked tired and worn, but there was the same complacent repose upon
his features that they always wore:  and through dirt, and beard, and
whisker, there still shone, unimpaired, the self-satisfied smirk of
flash Toby Crackit. Then the Jew, in an agony of impatience, watched
every morsel he put into his mouth; pacing up and down the room,
meanwhile, in irrepressible excitement.  It was all of no use.  Toby
continued to eat with the utmost outward indifference, until he could
eat no more; then, ordering the Dodger out, he closed the door, mixed a
glass of spirits and water, and composed himself for talking.

'First and foremost, Faguey,' said Toby.

'Yes, yes!' interposed the Jew, drawing up his chair.

Mr. Crackit stopped to take a draught of spirits and water, and to
declare that the gin was excellent; then placing his feet against the
low mantelpiece, so as to bring his boots to about the level of his
eye, he quietly resumed.

'First and foremost, Faguey,' said the housebreaker, 'how's Bill?'

'What!' screamed the Jew, starting from his seat.

'Why, you don't mean to say--' began Toby, turning pale.

'Mean!' cried the Jew, stamping furiously on the ground. 'Where are
they?  Sikes and the boy!  Where are they?  Where have they been?
Where are they hiding?  Why have they not been here?'

'The crack failed,' said Toby faintly.

'I know it,' replied the Jew, tearing a newspaper from his pocket and
pointing to it.  'What more?'

'They fired and hit the boy.  We cut over the fields at the back, with
him between us--straight as the crow flies--through hedge and ditch.
They gave chase.  Damme! the whole country was awake, and the dogs upon
us.'

'The boy!'

'Bill had him on his back, and scudded like the wind.  We stopped to
take him between us; his head hung down, and he was cold. They were
close upon our heels; every man for himself, and each from the gallows!
We parted company, and left the youngster lying in a ditch.  Alive or
dead, that's all I know about him.'

The Jew stopped to hear no more; but uttering a loud yell, and twining
his hands in his hair, rushed from the room, and from the house.



CHAPTER XXVI

IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE; AND MANY
THINGS, INSEPARABLE FROM THIS HISTORY, ARE DONE AND PERFORMED

The old man had gained the street corner, before he began to recover
the effect of Toby Crackit's intelligence.  He had relaxed nothing of
his unusual speed; but was still pressing onward, in the same wild and
disordered manner, when the sudden dashing past of a carriage: and a
boisterous cry from the foot passengers, who saw his danger:  drove him
back upon the pavement.  Avoiding, as much as was possible, all the
main streets, and skulking only through the by-ways and alleys, he at
length emerged on Snow Hill.  Here he walked even faster than before;
nor did he linger until he had again turned into a court; when, as if
conscious that he was now in his proper element, he fell into his usual
shuffling pace, and seemed to breathe more freely.

Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, opens, upon
the right hand as you come out of the City, a narrow and dismal alley,
leading to Saffron Hill.  In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge
bunches of second-hand silk handkerchiefs, of all sizes and patterns;
for here reside the traders who purchase them from pick-pockets.
Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the
windows or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves, within, are
piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its
barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its fried-fish warehouse.
It is a commercial colony of itself:  the emporium of petty larceny:
visited at early morning, and setting-in of dusk, by silent merchants,
who traffic in dark back-parlours, and who go as strangely as they
come.  Here, the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the rag-merchant,
display their goods, as sign-boards to the petty thief; here, stores of
old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and
linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars.

It was into this place that the Jew turned.  He was well known to the
sallow denizens of the lane; for such of them as were on the look-out
to buy or sell, nodded, familiarly, as he passed along. He replied to
their salutations in the same way; but bestowed no closer recognition
until he reached the further end of the alley; when he stopped, to
address a salesman of small stature, who had squeezed as much of his
person into a child's chair as the chair would hold, and was smoking a
pipe at his warehouse door.

'Why, the sight of you, Mr. Fagin, would cure the hoptalmy!' said this
respectable trader, in acknowledgment of the Jew's inquiry after his
health.

'The neighbourhood was a little too hot, Lively,' said Fagin, elevating
his eyebrows, and crossing his hands upon his shoulders.

'Well, I've heerd that complaint of it, once or twice before,' replied
the trader; 'but it soon cools down again; don't you find it so?'

Fagin nodded in the affirmative.  Pointing in the direction of Saffron
Hill, he inquired whether any one was up yonder to-night.

'At the Cripples?' inquired the man.

The Jew nodded.

'Let me see,' pursued the merchant, reflecting.

'Yes, there's some half-dozen of 'em gone in, that I knows. I don't
think your friend's there.'

'Sikes is not, I suppose?' inquired the Jew, with a disappointed
countenance.

'_Non istwentus_, as the lawyers say,' replied the little man, shaking
his head, and looking amazingly sly.  'Have you got anything in my line
to-night?'

'Nothing to-night,' said the Jew, turning away.

'Are you going up to the Cripples, Fagin?' cried the little man,
calling after him.  'Stop!  I don't mind if I have a drop there with
you!'

But as the Jew, looking back, waved his hand to intimate that he
preferred being alone; and, moreover, as the little man could not very
easily disengage himself from the chair; the sign of the Cripples was,
for a time, bereft of the advantage of Mr. Lively's presence.  By the
time he had got upon his legs, the Jew had disappeared; so Mr. Lively,
after ineffectually standing on tiptoe, in the hope of catching sight
of him, again forced himself into the little chair, and, exchanging a
shake of the head with a lady in the opposite shop, in which doubt and
mistrust were plainly mingled, resumed his pipe with a grave demeanour.

The Three Cripples, or rather the Cripples; which was the sign by which
the establishment was familiarly known to its patrons:  was the
public-house in which Mr. Sikes and his dog have already figured.
Merely making a sign to a man at the bar, Fagin walked straight
upstairs, and opening the door of a room, and softly insinuating
himself into the chamber, looked anxiously about: shading his eyes with
his hand, as if in search of some particular person.

The room was illuminated by two gas-lights; the glare of which was
prevented by the barred shutters, and closely-drawn curtains of faded
red, from being visible outside.  The ceiling was blackened, to prevent
its colour from being injured by the flaring of the lamps; and the
place was so full of dense tobacco smoke, that at first it was scarcely
possible to discern anything more.  By degrees, however, as some of it
cleared away through the open door, an assemblage of heads, as confused
as the noises that greeted the ear, might be made out; and as the eye
grew more accustomed to the scene, the spectator gradually became aware
of the presence of a numerous company, male and female, crowded round a
long table: at the upper end of which, sat a chairman with a hammer of
office in his hand; while a professional gentleman with a bluish nose,
and his face tied up for the benefit of a toothache, presided at a
jingling piano in a remote corner.

As Fagin stepped softly in, the professional gentleman, running over
the keys by way of prelude, occasioned a general cry of order for a
song; which having subsided, a young lady proceeded to entertain the
company with a ballad in four verses, between each of which the
accompanyist played the melody all through, as loud as he could.  When
this was over, the chairman gave a sentiment, after which, the
professional gentleman on the chairman's right and left volunteered a
duet, and sang it, with great applause.

It was curious to observe some faces which stood out prominently from
among the group.  There was the chairman himself, (the landlord of the
house,) a coarse, rough, heavy built fellow, who, while the songs were
proceeding, rolled his eyes hither and thither, and, seeming to give
himself up to joviality, had an eye for everything that was done, and
an ear for everything that was said--and sharp ones, too.  Near him
were the singers: receiving, with professional indifference, the
compliments of the company, and applying themselves, in turn, to a
dozen proffered glasses of spirits and water, tendered by their more
boisterous admirers; whose countenances, expressive of almost every
vice in almost every grade, irresistibly attracted the attention, by
their very repulsiveness.  Cunning, ferocity, and drunkeness in all its
stages, were there, in their strongest aspect; and women: some with the
last lingering tinge of their early freshness almost fading as you
looked:  others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten
out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of profligacy and crime;
some mere girls, others but young women, and none past the prime of
life; formed the darkest and saddest portion of this dreary picture.

Fagin, troubled by no grave emotions, looked eagerly from face to face
while these proceedings were in progress; but apparently without
meeting that of which he was in search. Succeeding, at length, in
catching the eye of the man who occupied the chair, he beckoned to him
slightly, and left the room, as quietly as he had entered it.

'What can I do for you, Mr. Fagin?' inquired the man, as he followed
him out to the landing.  'Won't you join us?  They'll be delighted,
every one of 'em.'

The Jew shook his head impatiently, and said in a whisper, 'Is _he_
here?'

'No,' replied the man.

'And no news of Barney?' inquired Fagin.

'None,' replied the landlord of the Cripples; for it was he. 'He won't
stir till it's all safe.  Depend on it, they're on the scent down
there; and that if he moved, he'd blow upon the thing at once.  He's
all right enough, Barney is, else I should have heard of him.  I'll
pound it, that Barney's managing properly. Let him alone for that.'

'Will _he_ be here to-night?' asked the Jew, laying the same emphasis
on the pronoun as before.

'Monks, do you mean?' inquired the landlord, hesitating.

'Hush!' said the Jew.  'Yes.'

'Certain,' replied the man, drawing a gold watch from his fob; 'I
expected him here before now.  If you'll wait ten minutes, he'll be--'

'No, no,' said the Jew, hastily; as though, however desirous he might
be to see the person in question, he was nevertheless relieved by his
absence.  'Tell him I came here to see him; and that he must come to me
to-night.  No, say to-morrow.  As he is not here, to-morrow will be
time enough.'

'Good!' said the man.  'Nothing more?'

'Not a word now,' said the Jew, descending the stairs.

'I say,' said the other, looking over the rails, and speaking in a
hoarse whisper; 'what a time this would be for a sell!  I've got Phil
Barker here: so drunk, that a boy might take him!'

'Ah!  But it's not Phil Barker's time,' said the Jew, looking up.

'Phil has something more to do, before we can afford to part with him;
so go back to the company, my dear, and tell them to lead merry
lives--_while they last_.  Ha! ha! ha!'

The landlord reciprocated the old man's laugh; and returned to his
guests.  The Jew was no sooner alone, than his countenance resumed its
former expression of anxiety and thought.  After a brief reflection, he
called a hack-cabriolet, and bade the man drive towards Bethnal Green.
He dismissed him within some quarter of a mile of Mr. Sikes's
residence, and performed the short remainder of the distance, on foot.

'Now,' muttered the Jew, as he knocked at the door, 'if there is any
deep play here, I shall have it out of you, my girl, cunning as you
are.'

She was in her room, the woman said.  Fagin crept softly upstairs, and
entered it without any previous ceremony.  The girl was alone; lying
with her head upon the table, and her hair straggling over it.

'She has been drinking,' thought the Jew, cooly, 'or perhaps she is
only miserable.'

The old man turned to close the door, as he made this reflection; the
noise thus occasioned, roused the girl.  She eyed his crafty face
narrowly, as she inquired to his recital of Toby Crackit's story.  When
it was concluded, she sank into her former attitude, but spoke not a
word.  She pushed the candle impatiently away; and once or twice as she
feverishly changed her position, shuffled her feet upon the ground; but
this was all.

During the silence, the Jew looked restlessly about the room, as if to
assure himself that there were no appearances of Sikes having covertly
returned.  Apparently satisfied with his inspection, he coughed twice
or thrice, and made as many efforts to open a conversation; but the
girl heeded him no more than if he had been made of stone.  At length
he made another attempt; and rubbing his hands together, said, in his
most conciliatory tone,

'And where should you think Bill was now, my dear?'

The girl moaned out some half intelligible reply, that she could not
tell; and seemed, from the smothered noise that escaped her, to be
crying.

'And the boy, too,' said the Jew, straining his eyes to catch a glimpse
of her face.  'Poor leetle child!  Left in a ditch, Nance; only think!'

'The child,' said the girl, suddenly looking up, 'is better where he
is, than among us; and if no harm comes to Bill from it, I hope he lies
dead in the ditch and that his young bones may rot there.'

'What!' cried the Jew, in amazement.

'Ay, I do,' returned the girl, meeting his gaze.  'I shall be glad to
have him away from my eyes, and to know that the worst is over.  I
can't bear to have him about me.  The sight of him turns me against
myself, and all of you.'

'Pooh!' said the Jew, scornfully.  'You're drunk.'

'Am I?' cried the girl bitterly.  'It's no fault of yours, if I am not!
You'd never have me anything else, if you had your will, except
now;--the humour doesn't suit you, doesn't it?'

'No!' rejoined the Jew, furiously.  'It does not.'

'Change it, then!' responded the girl, with a laugh.

'Change it!' exclaimed the Jew, exasperated beyond all bounds by his
companion's unexpected obstinacy, and the vexation of the night, 'I
_will_ change it!  Listen to me, you drab.  Listen to me, who with six
words, can strangle Sikes as surely as if I had his bull's throat
between my fingers now.  If he comes back, and leaves the boy behind
him; if he gets off free, and dead or alive, fails to restore him to
me; murder him yourself if you would have him escape Jack Ketch.  And
do it the moment he sets foot in this room, or mind me, it will be too
late!'

'What is all this?' cried the girl involuntarily.

'What is it?' pursued Fagin, mad with rage.  'When the boy's worth
hundreds of pounds to me, am I to lose what chance threw me in the way
of getting safely, through the whims of a drunken gang that I could
whistle away the lives of!  And me bound, too, to a born devil that
only wants the will, and has the power to, to--'

Panting for breath, the old man stammered for a word; and in that
instant checked the torrent of his wrath, and changed his whole
demeanour.  A moment before, his clenched hands had grasped the air;
his eyes had dilated; and his face grown livid with passion; but now,
he shrunk into a chair, and, cowering together, trembled with the
apprehension of having himself disclosed some hidden villainy.  After a
short silence, he ventured to look round at his companion.  He appeared
somewhat reassured, on beholding her in the same listless attitude from
which he had first roused her.

'Nancy, dear!' croaked the Jew, in his usual voice.  'Did you mind me,
dear?'

'Don't worry me now, Fagin!' replied the girl, raising her head
languidly.  'If Bill has not done it this time, he will another. He has
done many a good job for you, and will do many more when he can; and
when he can't he won't; so no more about that.'

'Regarding this boy, my dear?' said the Jew, rubbing the palms of his
hands nervously together.

'The boy must take his chance with the rest,' interrupted Nancy,
hastily; 'and I say again, I hope he is dead, and out of harm's way,
and out of yours,--that is, if Bill comes to no harm.  And if Toby got
clear off, Bill's pretty sure to be safe; for Bill's worth two of Toby
any time.'

'And about what I was saying, my dear?' observed the Jew, keeping his
glistening eye steadily upon her.

'You must say it all over again, if it's anything you want me to do,'
rejoined Nancy; 'and if it is, you had better wait till to-morrow.  You
put me up for a minute; but now I'm stupid again.'

Fagin put several other questions: all with the same drift of
ascertaining whether the girl had profited by his unguarded hints; but,
she answered them so readily, and was withal so utterly unmoved by his
searching looks, that his original impression of her being more than a
trifle in liquor, was confirmed.  Nancy, indeed, was not exempt from a
failing which was very common among the Jew's female pupils; and in
which, in their tenderer years, they were rather encouraged than
checked. Her disordered appearance, and a wholesale perfume of Geneva
which pervaded the apartment, afforded strong confirmatory evidence of
the justice of the Jew's supposition; and when, after indulging in the
temporary display of violence above described, she subsided, first into
dullness, and afterwards into a compound of feelings: under the
influence of which she shed tears one minute, and in the next gave
utterance to various exclamations of 'Never say die!' and divers
calculations as to what might be the amount of the odds so long as a
lady or gentleman was happy, Mr. Fagin, who had had considerable
experience of such matters in his time, saw, with great satisfaction,
that she was very far gone indeed.

Having eased his mind by this discovery; and having accomplished his
twofold object of imparting to the girl what he had, that night, heard,
and of ascertaining, with his own eyes, that Sikes had not returned,
Mr. Fagin again turned his face homeward: leaving his young friend
asleep, with her head upon the table.

It was within an hour of midnight.  The weather being dark, and
piercing cold, he had no great temptation to loiter.  The sharp wind
that scoured the streets, seemed to have cleared them of passengers, as
of dust and mud, for few people were abroad, and they were to all
appearance hastening fast home. It blew from the right quarter for the
Jew, however, and straight before it he went: trembling, and shivering,
as every fresh gust drove him rudely on his way.

He had reached the corner of his own street, and was already fumbling
in his pocket for the door-key, when a dark figure emerged from a
projecting entrance which lay in deep shadow, and, crossing the road,
glided up to him unperceived.

'Fagin!' whispered a voice close to his ear.

'Ah!' said the Jew, turning quickly round, 'is that--'

'Yes!' interrupted the stranger.  'I have been lingering here these two
hours.  Where the devil have you been?'

'On your business, my dear,' replied the Jew, glancing uneasily at his
companion, and slackening his pace as he spoke.  'On your business all
night.'

'Oh, of course!' said the stranger, with a sneer.  'Well; and what's
come of it?'

'Nothing good,' said the Jew.

'Nothing bad, I hope?' said the stranger, stopping short, and turning a
startled look on his companion.

The Jew shook his head, and was about to reply, when the stranger,
interrupting him, motioned to the house, before which they had by this
time arrived:  remarking, that he had better say what he had got to
say, under cover:  for his blood was chilled with standing about so
long, and the wind blew through him.

Fagin looked as if he could have willingly excused himself from taking
home a visitor at that unseasonable hour; and, indeed, muttered
something about having no fire; but his companion repeating his request
in a peremptory manner, he unlocked the door, and requested him to
close it softly, while he got a light.

'It's as dark as the grave,' said the man, groping forward a few steps.
'Make haste!'

'Shut the door,' whispered Fagin from the end of the passage. As he
spoke, it closed with a loud noise.

'That wasn't my doing,' said the other man, feeling his way. 'The wind
blew it to, or it shut of its own accord: one or the other. Look sharp
with the light, or I shall knock my brains out against something in
this confounded hole.'

Fagin stealthily descended the kitchen stairs.  After a short absence,
he returned with a lighted candle, and the intelligence that Toby
Crackit was asleep in the back room below, and that the boys were in
the front one.  Beckoning the man to follow him, he led the way
upstairs.

'We can say the few words we've got to say in here, my dear,' said the
Jew, throwing open a door on the first floor; 'and as there are holes
in the shutters, and we never show lights to our neighbours, we'll set
the candle on the stairs.  There!'

With those words, the Jew, stooping down, placed the candle on an upper
flight of stairs, exactly opposite to the room door.  This done, he led
the way into the apartment; which was destitute of all movables save a
broken arm-chair, and an old couch or sofa without covering, which
stood behind the door.  Upon this piece of furniture, the stranger sat
himself with the air of a weary man; and the Jew, drawing up the
arm-chair opposite, they sat face to face.  It was not quite dark; the
door was partially open; and the candle outside, threw a feeble
reflection on the opposite wall.

They conversed for some time in whispers.  Though nothing of the
conversation was distinguishable beyond a few disjointed words here and
there, a listener might easily have perceived that Fagin appeared to be
defending himself against some remarks of the stranger; and that the
latter was in a state of considerable irritation.  They might have been
talking, thus, for a quarter of an hour or more, when Monks--by which
name the Jew had designated the strange man several times in the course
of their colloquy--said, raising his voice a little,

'I tell you again, it was badly planned.  Why not have kept him here
among the rest, and made a sneaking, snivelling pickpocket of him at
once?'

'Only hear him!' exclaimed the Jew, shrugging his shoulders.

'Why, do you mean to say you couldn't have done it, if you had chosen?'
demanded Monks, sternly.  'Haven't you done it, with other boys, scores
of times?  If you had had patience for a twelvemonth, at most, couldn't
you have got him convicted, and sent safely out of the kingdom; perhaps
for life?'

'Whose turn would that have served, my dear?' inquired the Jew humbly.

'Mine,' replied Monks.

'But not mine,' said the Jew, submissively.  'He might have become of
use to me.  When there are two parties to a bargain, it is only
reasonable that the interests of both should be consulted; is it, my
good friend?'

'What then?' demanded Monks.

'I saw it was not easy to train him to the business,' replied the Jew;
'he was not like other boys in the same circumstances.'

'Curse him, no!' muttered the man, 'or he would have been a thief, long
ago.'

'I had no hold upon him to make him worse,' pursued the Jew, anxiously
watching the countenance of his companion.  'His hand was not in.  I
had nothing to frighten him with; which we always must have in the
beginning, or we labour in vain.  What could I do?  Send him out with
the Dodger and Charley?  We had enough of that, at first, my dear; I
trembled for us all.'

'_That_ was not my doing,' observed Monks.

'No, no, my dear!' renewed the Jew.  'And I don't quarrel with it now;
because, if it had never happened, you might never have clapped eyes on
the boy to notice him, and so led to the discovery that it was him you
were looking for.  Well!  I got him back for you by means of the girl;
and then _she_ begins to favour him.'

'Throttle the girl!' said Monks, impatiently.

'Why, we can't afford to do that just now, my dear,' replied the Jew,
smiling; 'and, besides, that sort of thing is not in our way; or, one
of these days, I might be glad to have it done.  I know what these
girls are, Monks, well.  As soon as the boy begins to harden, she'll
care no more for him, than for a block of wood.  You want him made a
thief.  If he is alive, I can make him one from this time; and,
if--if--' said the Jew, drawing nearer to the other,--'it's not likely,
mind,--but if the worst comes to the worst, and he is dead--'

'It's no fault of mine if he is!' interposed the other man, with a look
of terror, and clasping the Jew's arm with trembling hands.  'Mind
that.  Fagin!  I had no hand in it.  Anything but his death, I told you
from the first.  I won't shed blood; it's always found out, and haunts
a man besides.  If they shot him dead, I was not the cause; do you hear
me?  Fire this infernal den!  What's that?'

'What!' cried the Jew, grasping the coward round the body, with both
arms, as he sprung to his feet.  'Where?'

'Yonder! replied the man, glaring at the opposite wall.  'The shadow!
I saw the shadow of a woman, in a cloak and bonnet, pass along the
wainscot like a breath!'

The Jew released his hold, and they rushed tumultuously from the room.
The candle, wasted by the draught, was standing where it had been
placed.  It showed them only the empty staircase, and their own white
faces.  They listened intently:  a profound silence reigned throughout
the house.

'It's your fancy,' said the Jew, taking up the light and turning to his
companion.

'I'll swear I saw it!' replied Monks, trembling.  'It was bending
forward when I saw it first; and when I spoke, it darted away.'

The Jew glanced contemptuously at the pale face of his associate, and,
telling him he could follow, if he pleased, ascended the stairs.  They
looked into all the rooms; they were cold, bare, and empty.  They
descended into the passage, and thence into the cellars below.  The
green damp hung upon the low walls; the tracks of the snail and slug
glistened in the light of the candle; but all was still as death.

'What do you think now?' said the Jew, when they had regained the
passage.  'Besides ourselves, there's not a creature in the house
except Toby and the boys; and they're safe enough. See here!'

As a proof of the fact, the Jew drew forth two keys from his pocket;
and explained, that when he first went downstairs, he had locked them
in, to prevent any intrusion on the conference.

This accumulated testimony effectually staggered Mr. Monks. His
protestations had gradually become less and less vehement as they
proceeded in their search without making any discovery; and, now, he
gave vent to several very grim laughs, and confessed it could only have
been his excited imagination.  He declined any renewal of the
conversation, however, for that night:  suddenly remembering that it
was past one o'clock.  And so the amiable couple parted.



CHAPTER XXVII

ATONES FOR THE UNPOLITENESS OF A FORMER CHAPTER; WHICH DESERTED A LADY,
MOST UNCEREMONIOUSLY

As it would be, by no means, seemly in a humble author to keep so
mighty a personage as a beadle waiting, with his back to the fire, and
the skirts of his coat gathered up under his arms, until such time as
it might suit his pleasure to relieve him; and as it would still less
become his station, or his gallantry to involve in the same neglect a
lady on whom that beadle had looked with an eye of tenderness and
affection, and in whose ear he had whispered sweet words, which, coming
from such a quarter, might well thrill the bosom of maid or matron of
whatsoever degree; the historian whose pen traces these words--trusting
that he knows his place, and that he entertains a becoming reverence
for those upon earth to whom high and important authority is
delegated--hastens to pay them that respect which their position
demands, and to treat them with all that duteous ceremony which their
exalted rank, and (by consequence) great virtues, imperatively claim at
his hands.  Towards this end, indeed, he had purposed to introduce, in
this place, a dissertation touching the divine right of beadles, and
elucidative of the position, that a beadle can do no wrong:  which
could not fail to have been both pleasurable and profitable to the
right-minded reader but which he is unfortunately compelled, by want of
time and space, to postpone to some more convenient and fitting
opportunity; on the arrival of which, he will be prepared to show, that
a beadle properly constituted:  that is to say, a parochial beadle,
attached to a parochial workhouse, and attending in his official
capacity the parochial church:  is, in right and virtue of his office,
possessed of all the excellences and best qualities of humanity; and
that to none of those excellences, can mere companies' beadles, or
court-of-law beadles, or even chapel-of-ease beadles (save the last,
and they in a very lowly and inferior degree), lay the remotest
sustainable claim.

Mr. Bumble had re-counted the teaspoons, re-weighed the sugar-tongs,
made a closer inspection of the milk-pot, and ascertained to a nicety
the exact condition of the furniture, down to the very horse-hair seats
of the chairs; and had repeated each process full half a dozen times;
before he began to think that it was time for Mrs. Corney to return.
Thinking begets thinking; as there were no sounds of Mrs. Corney's
approach, it occured to Mr. Bumble that it would be an innocent and
virtuous way of spending the time, if he were further to allay his
curiousity by a cursory glance at the interior of Mrs. Corney's chest
of drawers.

Having listened at the keyhole, to assure himself that nobody was
approaching the chamber, Mr. Bumble, beginning at the bottom, proceeded
to make himself acquainted with the contents of the three long drawers:
which, being filled with various garments of good fashion and texture,
carefully preserved between two layers of old newspapers, speckled with
dried lavender: seemed to yield him exceeding satisfaction.  Arriving,
in course of time, at the right-hand corner drawer (in which was the
key), and beholding therein a small padlocked box, which, being shaken,
gave forth a pleasant sound, as of the chinking of coin, Mr. Bumble
returned with a stately walk to the fireplace; and, resuming his old
attitude, said, with a grave and determined air, 'I'll do it!' He
followed up this remarkable declaration, by shaking his head in a
waggish manner for ten minutes, as though he were remonstrating with
himself for being such a pleasant dog; and then, he took a view of his
legs in profile, with much seeming pleasure and interest.

He was still placidly engaged in this latter survey, when Mrs. Corney,
hurrying into the room, threw herself, in a breathless state, on a
chair by the fireside, and covering her eyes with one hand, placed the
other over her heart, and gasped for breath.

'Mrs. Corney,' said Mr. Bumble, stooping over the matron, 'what is
this, ma'am?  Has anything happened, ma'am?  Pray answer me: I'm
on--on--' Mr. Bumble, in his alarm, could not immediately think of the
word 'tenterhooks,' so he said 'broken bottles.'

'Oh, Mr. Bumble!' cried the lady, 'I have been so dreadfully put out!'

'Put out, ma'am!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble; 'who has dared to--?  I know!'
said Mr. Bumble, checking himself, with native majesty, 'this is them
wicious paupers!'

'It's dreadful to think of!' said the lady, shuddering.

'Then _don't_ think of it, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.

'I can't help it,' whimpered the lady.

'Then take something, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble soothingly.  'A little of
the wine?'

'Not for the world!' replied Mrs. Corney.  'I couldn't,--oh!  The top
shelf in the right-hand corner--oh!'  Uttering these words, the good
lady pointed, distractedly, to the cupboard, and underwent a convulsion
from internal spasms.  Mr. Bumble rushed to the closet; and, snatching
a pint green-glass bottle from the shelf thus incoherently indicated,
filled a tea-cup with its contents, and held it to the lady's lips.

'I'm better now,' said Mrs. Corney, falling back, after drinking half
of it.

Mr. Bumble raised his eyes piously to the ceiling in thankfulness; and,
bringing them down again to the brim of the cup, lifted it to his nose.

'Peppermint,' exclaimed Mrs. Corney, in a faint voice, smiling gently
on the beadle as she spoke.  'Try it!  There's a little--a little
something else in it.'

Mr. Bumble tasted the medicine with a doubtful look; smacked his lips;
took another taste; and put the cup down empty.

'It's very comforting,' said Mrs. Corney.

'Very much so indeed, ma'am,' said the beadle.  As he spoke, he drew a
chair beside the matron, and tenderly inquired what had happened to
distress her.

'Nothing,' replied Mrs. Corney.  'I am a foolish, excitable, weak
creetur.'

'Not weak, ma'am,' retorted Mr. Bumble, drawing his chair a little
closer.  'Are you a weak creetur, Mrs. Corney?'

'We are all weak creeturs,' said Mrs. Corney, laying down a general
principle.

'So we are,' said the beadle.

Nothing was said on either side, for a minute or two afterwards. By the
expiration of that time, Mr. Bumble had illustrated the position by
removing his left arm from the back of Mrs. Corney's chair, where it
had previously rested, to Mrs. Corney's apron-string, round which it
gradually became entwined.

'We are all weak creeturs,' said Mr. Bumble.

Mrs. Corney sighed.

'Don't sigh, Mrs. Corney,' said Mr. Bumble.

'I can't help it,' said Mrs. Corney.  And she sighed again.

'This is a very comfortable room, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble looking
round.  'Another room, and this, ma'am, would be a complete thing.'

'It would be too much for one,' murmured the lady.

'But not for two, ma'am,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, in soft accents. 'Eh,
Mrs. Corney?'

Mrs. Corney drooped her head, when the beadle said this; the beadle
drooped his, to get a view of Mrs. Corney's face.  Mrs. Corney, with
great propriety, turned her head away, and released her hand to get at
her pocket-handkerchief; but insensibly replaced it in that of Mr.
Bumble.

'The board allows you coals, don't they, Mrs. Corney?' inquired the
beadle, affectionately pressing her hand.

'And candles,' replied Mrs. Corney, slightly returning the pressure.

'Coals, candles, and house-rent free,' said Mr. Bumble.  'Oh, Mrs.
Corney, what an Angel you are!'

The lady was not proof against this burst of feeling.  She sank into
Mr. Bumble's arms; and that gentleman in his agitation, imprinted a
passionate kiss upon her chaste nose.

'Such porochial perfection!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, rapturously. 'You
know that Mr. Slout is worse to-night, my fascinator?'

'Yes,' replied Mrs. Corney, bashfully.

'He can't live a week, the doctor says,' pursued Mr. Bumble. 'He is the
master of this establishment; his death will cause a wacancy; that
wacancy must be filled up.  Oh, Mrs. Corney, what a prospect this
opens!  What a opportunity for a jining of hearts and housekeepings!'

Mrs. Corney sobbed.

'The little word?' said Mr. Bumble, bending over the bashful beauty.
'The one little, little, little word, my blessed Corney?'

'Ye--ye--yes!' sighed out the matron.

'One more,' pursued the beadle; 'compose your darling feelings for only
one more.  When is it to come off?'

Mrs. Corney twice essayed to speak:  and twice failed.  At length
summoning up courage, she threw her arms around Mr. Bumble's neck, and
said, it might be as soon as ever he pleased, and that he was 'a
irresistible duck.'

Matters being thus amicably and satisfactorily arranged, the contract
was solemnly ratified in another teacupful of the peppermint mixture;
which was rendered the more necessary, by the flutter and agitation of
the lady's spirits.  While it was being disposed of, she acquainted Mr.
Bumble with the old woman's decease.

'Very good,' said that gentleman, sipping his peppermint; 'I'll call at
Sowerberry's as I go home, and tell him to send to-morrow morning.  Was
it that as frightened you, love?'

'It wasn't anything particular, dear,' said the lady evasively.

'It must have been something, love,' urged Mr. Bumble. 'Won't you tell
your own B.?'

'Not now,' rejoined the lady; 'one of these days.  After we're married,
dear.'

'After we're married!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble.  'It wasn't any impudence
from any of them male paupers as--'

'No, no, love!' interposed the lady, hastily.

'If I thought it was,' continued Mr. Bumble; 'if I thought as any one
of 'em had dared to lift his wulgar eyes to that lovely countenance--'

'They wouldn't have dared to do it, love,' responded the lady.

'They had better not!' said Mr. Bumble, clenching his fist. 'Let me see
any man, porochial or extra-porochial, as would presume to do it; and I
can tell him that he wouldn't do it a second time!'

Unembellished by any violence of gesticulation, this might have seemed
no very high compliment to the lady's charms; but, as Mr. Bumble
accompanied the threat with many warlike gestures, she was much touched
with this proof of his devotion, and protested, with great admiration,
that he was indeed a dove.

The dove then turned up his coat-collar, and put on his cocked hat;
and, having exchanged a long and affectionate embrace with his future
partner, once again braved the cold wind of the night: merely pausing,
for a few minutes, in the male paupers' ward, to abuse them a little,
with the view of satisfying himself that he could fill the office of
workhouse-master with needful acerbity. Assured of his qualifications,
Mr. Bumble left the building with a light heart, and bright visions of
his future promotion:  which served to occupy his mind until he reached
the shop of the undertaker.

Now, Mr. and Mrs. Sowerberry having gone out to tea and supper: and
Noah Claypole not being at any time disposed to take upon himself a
greater amount of physical exertion than is necessary to a convenient
performance of the two functions of eating and drinking, the shop was
not closed, although it was past the usual hour of shutting-up.  Mr.
Bumble tapped with his cane on the counter several times; but,
attracting no attention, and beholding a light shining through the
glass-window of the little parlour at the back of the shop, he made
bold to peep in and see what was going forward; and when he saw what
was going forward, he was not a little surprised.

The cloth was laid for supper; the table was covered with bread and
butter, plates and glasses; a porter-pot and a wine-bottle. At the
upper end of the table, Mr. Noah Claypole lolled negligently in an
easy-chair, with his legs thrown over one of the arms: an open
clasp-knife in one hand, and a mass of buttered bread in the other.
Close beside him stood Charlotte, opening oysters from a barrel: which
Mr. Claypole condescended to swallow, with remarkable avidity.  A more
than ordinary redness in the region of the young gentleman's nose, and
a kind of fixed wink in his right eye, denoted that he was in a slight
degree intoxicated; these symptoms were confirmed by the intense relish
with which he took his oysters, for which nothing but a strong
appreciation of their cooling properties, in cases of internal fever,
could have sufficiently accounted.

'Here's a delicious fat one, Noah, dear!' said Charlotte; 'try him, do;
only this one.'

'What a delicious thing is a oyster!' remarked Mr. Claypole, after he
had swallowed it.  'What a pity it is, a number of 'em should ever make
you feel uncomfortable; isn't it, Charlotte?'

'It's quite a cruelty,' said Charlotte.

'So it is,' acquiesced Mr. Claypole. 'An't yer fond of oysters?'

'Not overmuch,' replied Charlotte.  'I like to see you eat 'em, Noah
dear, better than eating 'em myself.'

'Lor!' said Noah, reflectively; 'how queer!'

'Have another,' said Charlotte.  'Here's one with such a beautiful,
delicate beard!'

'I can't manage any more,' said Noah.  'I'm very sorry.  Come here,
Charlotte, and I'll kiss yer.'

'What!' said Mr. Bumble, bursting into the room.  'Say that again, sir.'

Charlotte uttered a scream, and hid her face in her apron.  Mr.
Claypole, without making any further change in his position than
suffering his legs to reach the ground, gazed at the beadle in drunken
terror.

'Say it again, you wile, owdacious fellow!' said Mr. Bumble. 'How dare
you mention such a thing, sir?  And how dare you encourage him, you
insolent minx?  Kiss her!' exclaimed Mr. Bumble, in strong indignation.
'Faugh!'

'I didn't mean to do it!' said Noah, blubbering.  'She's always
a-kissing of me, whether I like it, or not.'

'Oh, Noah,' cried Charlotte, reproachfully.

'Yer are; yer know yer are!' retorted Noah.  'She's always a-doin' of
it, Mr. Bumble, sir; she chucks me under the chin, please, sir; and
makes all manner of love!'

'Silence!' cried Mr. Bumble, sternly.  'Take yourself downstairs,
ma'am.  Noah, you shut up the shop; say another word till your master
comes home, at your peril; and, when he does come home, tell him that
Mr. Bumble said he was to send a old woman's shell after breakfast
to-morrow morning.  Do you hear sir?  Kissing!' cried Mr. Bumble,
holding up his hands.  'The sin and wickedness of the lower orders in
this porochial district is frightful!  If Parliament don't take their
abominable courses under consideration, this country's ruined, and the
character of the peasantry gone for ever!'  With these words, the
beadle strode, with a lofty and gloomy air, from the undertaker's
premises.

And now that we have accompanied him so far on his road home, and have
made all necessary preparations for the old woman's funeral, let us set
on foot a few inquires after young Oliver Twist, and ascertain whether
he be still lying in the ditch where Toby Crackit left him.



CHAPTER XXVIII

LOOKS AFTER OLIVER, AND PROCEEDS WITH HIS ADVENTURES

'Wolves tear your throats!' muttered Sikes, grinding his teeth. 'I wish
I was among some of you; you'd howl the hoarser for it.'

As Sikes growled forth this imprecation, with the most desperate
ferocity that his desperate nature was capable of, he rested the body
of the wounded boy across his bended knee; and turned his head, for an
instant, to look back at his pursuers.

There was little to be made out, in the mist and darkness; but the loud
shouting of men vibrated through the air, and the barking of the
neighbouring dogs, roused by the sound of the alarm bell, resounded in
every direction.

'Stop, you white-livered hound!' cried the robber, shouting after Toby
Crackit, who, making the best use of his long legs, was already ahead.
'Stop!'

The repetition of the word, brought Toby to a dead stand-still. For he
was not quite satisfied that he was beyond the range of pistol-shot;
and Sikes was in no mood to be played with.

'Bear a hand with the boy,' cried Sikes, beckoning furiously to his
confederate.  'Come back!'

Toby made a show of returning; but ventured, in a low voice, broken for
want of breath, to intimate considerable reluctance as he came slowly
along.

'Quicker!' cried Sikes, laying the boy in a dry ditch at his feet, and
drawing a pistol from his pocket.  'Don't play booty with me.'

At this moment the noise grew louder.  Sikes, again looking round,
could discern that the men who had given chase were already climbing
the gate of the field in which he stood; and that a couple of dogs were
some paces in advance of them.

'It's all up, Bill!' cried Toby; 'drop the kid, and show 'em your
heels.'  With this parting advice, Mr. Crackit, preferring the chance
of being shot by his friend, to the certainty of being taken by his
enemies, fairly turned tail, and darted off at full speed.  Sikes
clenched his teeth; took one look around; threw over the prostrate form
of Oliver, the cape in which he had been hurriedly muffled; ran along
the front of the hedge, as if to distract the attention of those
behind, from the spot where the boy lay; paused, for a second, before
another hedge which met it at right angles; and whirling his pistol
high into the air, cleared it at a bound, and was gone.

'Ho, ho, there!' cried a tremulous voice in the rear. 'Pincher!
Neptune!  Come here, come here!'

The dogs, who, in common with their masters, seemed to have no
particular relish for the sport in which they were engaged, readily
answered to the command.  Three men, who had by this time advanced some
distance into the field, stopped to take counsel together.

'My advice, or, leastways, I should say, my _orders_, is,' said the
fattest man of the party, 'that we 'mediately go home again.'

'I am agreeable to anything which is agreeable to Mr. Giles,' said a
shorter man; who was by no means of a slim figure, and who was very
pale in the face, and very polite: as frightened men frequently are.

'I shouldn't wish to appear ill-mannered, gentlemen,' said the third,
who had called the dogs back, 'Mr. Giles ought to know.'

'Certainly,' replied the shorter man; 'and whatever Mr. Giles says, it
isn't our place to contradict him.  No, no, I know my sitiwation!
Thank my stars, I know my sitiwation.'  To tell the truth, the little
man _did_ seem to know his situation, and to know perfectly well that
it was by no means a desirable one; for his teeth chattered in his head
as he spoke.

'You are afraid, Brittles,' said Mr. Giles.

'I an't,' said Brittles.

'You are,' said Giles.

'You're a falsehood, Mr. Giles,' said Brittles.

'You're a lie, Brittles,' said Mr. Giles.

Now, these four retorts arose from Mr. Giles's taunt; and Mr. Giles's
taunt had arisen from his indignation at having the responsibility of
going home again, imposed upon himself under cover of a compliment.
The third man brought the dispute to a close, most philosophically.

'I'll tell you what it is, gentlemen,' said he, 'we're all afraid.'

'Speak for yourself, sir,' said Mr. Giles, who was the palest of the
party.

'So I do,' replied the man.  'It's natural and proper to be afraid,
under such circumstances.  I am.'

'So am I,' said Brittles; 'only there's no call to tell a man he is, so
bounceably.'

These frank admissions softened Mr. Giles, who at once owned that _he_
was afraid; upon which, they all three faced about, and ran back again
with the completest unanimity, until Mr. Giles (who had the shortest
wind of the party, as was encumbered with a pitchfork) most handsomely
insisted on stopping, to make an apology for his hastiness of speech.

'But it's wonderful,' said Mr. Giles, when he had explained, 'what a
man will do, when his blood is up.  I should have committed murder--I
know I should--if we'd caught one of them rascals.'

As the other two were impressed with a similar presentiment; and as
their blood, like his, had all gone down again; some speculation ensued
upon the cause of this sudden change in their temperament.

'I know what it was,' said Mr. Giles; 'it was the gate.'

'I shouldn't wonder if it was,' exclaimed Brittles, catching at the
idea.

'You may depend upon it,' said Giles, 'that that gate stopped the flow
of the excitement.  I felt all mine suddenly going away, as I was
climbing over it.'

By a remarkable coincidence, the other two had been visited with the
same unpleasant sensation at that precise moment.  It was quite
obvious, therefore, that it was the gate; especially as there was no
doubt regarding the time at which the change had taken place, because
all three remembered that they had come in sight of the robbers at the
instant of its occurance.

This dialogue was held between the two men who had surprised the
burglars, and a travelling tinker who had been sleeping in an outhouse,
and who had been roused, together with his two mongrel curs, to join in
the pursuit.  Mr. Giles acted in the double capacity of butler and
steward to the old lady of the mansion; Brittles was a lad of all-work:
who, having entered her service a mere child, was treated as a
promising young boy still, though he was something past thirty.

Encouraging each other with such converse as this; but, keeping very
close together, notwithstanding, and looking apprehensively round,
whenever a fresh gust rattled through the boughs; the three men hurried
back to a tree, behind which they had left their lantern, lest its
light should inform the thieves in what direction to fire.  Catching up
the light, they made the best of their way home, at a good round trot;
and long after their dusky forms had ceased to be discernible, the
light might have been seen twinkling and dancing in the distance, like
some exhalation of the damp and gloomy atmosphere through which it was
swiftly borne.

The air grew colder, as day came slowly on; and the mist rolled along
the ground like a dense cloud of smoke.  The grass was wet; the
pathways, and low places, were all mire and water; the damp breath of
an unwholesome wind went languidly by, with a hollow moaning.  Still,
Oliver lay motionless and insensible on the spot where Sikes had left
him.

Morning drew on apace.  The air become more sharp and piercing, as its
first dull hue--the death of night, rather than the birth of
day--glimmered faintly in the sky.  The objects which had looked dim
and terrible in the darkness, grew more and more defined, and gradually
resolved into their familiar shapes.  The rain came down, thick and
fast, and pattered noisily among the leafless bushes.  But, Oliver felt
it not, as it beat against him; for he still lay stretched, helpless
and unconscious, on his bed of clay.

At length, a low cry of pain broke the stillness that prevailed; and
uttering it, the boy awoke.  His left arm, rudely bandaged in a shawl,
hung heavy and useless at his side; the bandage was saturated with
blood.  He was so weak, that he could scarcely raise himself into a
sitting posture; when he had done so, he looked feebly round for help,
and groaned with pain.  Trembling in every joint, from cold and
exhaustion, he made an effort to stand upright; but, shuddering from
head to foot, fell prostrate on the ground.

After a short return of the stupor in which he had been so long
plunged, Oliver:  urged by a creeping sickness at his heart, which
seemed to warn him that if he lay there, he must surely die:  got upon
his feet, and essayed to walk. His head was dizzy, and he staggered to
and fro like a drunken man.  But he kept up, nevertheless, and, with
his head drooping languidly on his breast, went stumbling onward, he
knew not whither.

And now, hosts of bewildering and confused ideas came crowding on his
mind.  He seemed to be still walking between Sikes and Crackit, who
were angrily disputing--for the very words they said, sounded in his
ears; and when he caught his own attention, as it were, by making some
violent effort to save himself from falling, he found that he was
talking to them. Then, he was alone with Sikes, plodding on as on the
previous day; and as shadowy people passed them, he felt the robber's
grasp upon his wrist. Suddenly, he started back at the report of
firearms; there rose into the air, loud cries and shouts; lights
gleamed before his eyes; all was noise and tumult, as some unseen hand
bore him hurriedly away.  Through all these rapid visions, there ran an
undefined, uneasy consciousness of pain, which wearied and tormented
him incessantly.

Thus he staggered on, creeping, almost mechanically, between the bars
of gates, or through hedge-gaps as they came in his way, until he
reached a road.  Here the rain began to fall so heavily, that it roused
him.

He looked about, and saw that at no great distance there was a house,
which perhaps he could reach.  Pitying his condition, they might have
compassion on him; and if they did not, it would be better, he thought,
to die near human beings, than in the lonely open fields.  He summoned
up all his strength for one last trial, and bent his faltering steps
towards it.

As he drew nearer to this house, a feeling come over him that he had
seen it before.  He remembered nothing of its details; but the shape
and aspect of the building seemed familiar to him.

That garden wall!  On the grass inside, he had fallen on his knees last
night, and prayed the two men's mercy.  It was the very house they had
attempted to rob.

Oliver felt such fear come over him when he recognised the place, that,
for the instant, he forgot the agony of his wound, and thought only of
flight.  Flight!  He could scarcely stand:  and if he were in full
possession of all the best powers of his slight and youthful frame,
whither could he fly?  He pushed against the garden-gate; it was
unlocked, and swung open on its hinges.  He tottered across the lawn;
climbed the steps; knocked faintly at the door; and, his whole strength
failing him, sunk down against one of the pillars of the little portico.

It happened that about this time, Mr. Giles, Brittles, and the tinker,
were recruiting themselves, after the fatigues and terrors of the
night, with tea and sundries, in the kitchen.  Not that it was Mr.
Giles's habit to admit to too great familiarity the humbler servants:
towards whom it was rather his wont to deport himself with a lofty
affability, which, while it gratified, could not fail to remind them of
his superior position in society.  But, death, fires, and burglary,
make all men equals; so Mr. Giles sat with his legs stretched out
before the kitchen fender, leaning his left arm on the table, while,
with his right, he illustrated a circumstantial and minute account of
the robbery, to which his bearers (but especially the cook and
housemaid, who were of the party) listened with breathless interest.

'It was about half-past two,' said Mr. Giles, 'or I wouldn't swear that
it mightn't have been a little nearer three, when I woke up, and,
turning round in my bed, as it might be so, (here Mr. Giles turned
round in his chair, and pulled the corner of the table-cloth over him
to imitate bed-clothes,) I fancied I heerd a noise.'

At this point of the narrative the cook turned pale, and asked the
housemaid to shut the door: who asked Brittles, who asked the tinker,
who pretended not to hear.

'--Heerd a noise,' continued Mr. Giles.  'I says, at first, "This is
illusion"; and was composing myself off to sleep, when I heerd the
noise again, distinct.'

'What sort of a noise?' asked the cook.

'A kind of a busting noise,' replied Mr. Giles, looking round him.

'More like the noise of powdering a iron bar on a nutmeg-grater,'
suggested Brittles.

'It was, when _you_ heerd it, sir,' rejoined Mr. Giles; 'but, at this
time, it had a busting sound.  I turned down the clothes'; continued
Giles, rolling back the table-cloth, 'sat up in bed; and listened.'

The cook and housemaid simultaneously ejaculated 'Lor!' and drew their
chairs closer together.

'I heerd it now, quite apparent,' resumed Mr. Giles. '"Somebody," I
says, "is forcing of a door, or window; what's to be done? I'll call up
that poor lad, Brittles, and save him from being murdered in his bed;
or his throat," I says, "may be cut from his right ear to his left,
without his ever knowing it."'

Here, all eyes were turned upon Brittles, who fixed his upon the
speaker, and stared at him, with his mouth wide open, and his face
expressive of the most unmitigated horror.

'I tossed off the clothes,' said Giles, throwing away the table-cloth,
and looking very hard at the cook and housemaid, 'got softly out of
bed; drew on a pair of--'

'Ladies present, Mr. Giles,' murmured the tinker.

'--Of _shoes_, sir,' said Giles, turning upon him, and laying great
emphasis on the word; 'seized the loaded pistol that always goes
upstairs with the plate-basket; and walked on tiptoes to his room.
"Brittles," I says, when I had woke him, "don't be frightened!"'

'So you did,' observed Brittles, in a low voice.

'"We're dead men, I think, Brittles," I says,' continued Giles; '"but
don't be frightened."'

'_Was_ he frightened?' asked the cook.

'Not a bit of it,' replied Mr. Giles.  'He was as firm--ah! pretty near
as firm as I was.'

'I should have died at once, I'm sure, if it had been me,' observed the
housemaid.

'You're a woman,' retorted Brittles, plucking up a little.

'Brittles is right,' said Mr. Giles, nodding his head, approvingly;
'from a woman, nothing else was to be expected. We, being men, took a
dark lantern that was standing on Brittle's hob, and groped our way
downstairs in the pitch dark,--as it might be so.'

Mr. Giles had risen from his seat, and taken two steps with his eyes
shut, to accompany his description with appropriate action, when he
started violently, in common with the rest of the company, and hurried
back to his chair.  The cook and housemaid screamed.

'It was a knock,' said Mr. Giles, assuming perfect serenity. 'Open the
door, somebody.'

Nobody moved.

'It seems a strange sort of a thing, a knock coming at such a time in
the morning,' said Mr. Giles, surveying the pale faces which surrounded
him, and looking very blank himself; 'but the door must be opened.  Do
you hear, somebody?'

Mr. Giles, as he spoke, looked at Brittles; but that young man, being
naturally modest, probably considered himself nobody, and so held that
the inquiry could not have any application to him; at all events, he
tendered no reply. Mr. Giles directed an appealing glance at the
tinker; but he had suddenly fallen asleep.  The women were out of the
question.

'If Brittles would rather open the door, in the presence of witnesses,'
said Mr. Giles, after a short silence, 'I am ready to make one.'

'So am I,' said the tinker, waking up, as suddenly as he had fallen
asleep.

Brittles capitulated on these terms; and the party being somewhat
re-assured by the discovery (made on throwing open the shutters) that
it was now broad day, took their way upstairs; with the dogs in front.
The two women, who were afraid to stay below, brought up the rear.  By
the advice of Mr. Giles, they all talked very loud, to warn any
evil-disposed person outside, that they were strong in numbers; and by
a master-stoke of policy, originating in the brain of the same
ingenious gentleman, the dogs' tails were well pinched, in the hall, to
make them bark savagely.

These precautions having been taken, Mr. Giles held on fast by the
tinker's arm (to prevent his running away, as he pleasantly said), and
gave the word of command to open the door.  Brittles obeyed; the group,
peeping timorously over each other's shoulders, beheld no more
formidable object than poor little Oliver Twist, speechless and
exhausted, who raised his heavy eyes, and mutely solicited their
compassion.

'A boy!' exclaimed Mr. Giles, valiantly, pushing the tinker into the
background.  'What's the matter with the--eh?--Why--Brittles--look
here--don't you know?'

Brittles, who had got behind the door to open it, no sooner saw Oliver,
than he uttered a loud cry.  Mr. Giles, seizing the boy by one leg and
one arm (fortunately not the broken limb) lugged him straight into the
hall, and deposited him at full length on the floor thereof.

'Here he is!' bawled Giles, calling in a state of great excitement, up
the staircase; 'here's one of the thieves, ma'am! Here's a thief, miss!
Wounded, miss!  I shot him, miss; and Brittles held the light.'

'--In a lantern, miss,' cried Brittles, applying one hand to the side
of his mouth, so that his voice might travel the better.

The two women-servants ran upstairs to carry the intelligence that Mr.
Giles had captured a robber; and the tinker busied himself in
endeavouring to restore Oliver, lest he should die before he could be
hanged.  In the midst of all this noise and commotion, there was heard
a sweet female voice, which quelled it in an instant.

'Giles!' whispered the voice from the stair-head.

'I'm here, miss,' replied Mr. Giles.  'Don't be frightened, miss; I
ain't much injured.  He didn't make a very desperate resistance, miss!
I was soon too many for him.'

'Hush!' replied the young lady; 'you frighten my aunt as much as the
thieves did.  Is the poor creature much hurt?'

'Wounded desperate, miss,' replied Giles, with indescribable
complacency.

'He looks as if he was a-going, miss,' bawled Brittles, in the same
manner as before.  'Wouldn't you like to come and look at him, miss, in
case he should?'

'Hush, pray; there's a good man!' rejoined the lady.  'Wait quietly
only one instant, while I speak to aunt.'

With a footstep as soft and gentle as the voice, the speaker tripped
away.  She soon returned, with the direction that the wounded person
was to be carried, carefully, upstairs to Mr. Giles's room; and that
Brittles was to saddle the pony and betake himself instantly to
Chertsey:  from which place, he was to despatch, with all speed, a
constable and doctor.

'But won't you take one look at him, first, miss?' asked Mr. Giles,
with as much pride as if Oliver were some bird of rare plumage, that he
had skilfully brought down.  'Not one little peep, miss?'

'Not now, for the world,' replied the young lady.  'Poor fellow! Oh!
treat him kindly, Giles for my sake!'

The old servant looked up at the speaker, as she turned away, with a
glance as proud and admiring as if she had been his own child.  Then,
bending over Oliver, he helped to carry him upstairs, with the care and
solicitude of a woman.



CHAPTER XXIX

HAS AN INTRODUCTORY ACCOUNT OF THE INMATES OF THE HOUSE, TO WHICH
OLIVER RESORTED

In a handsome room:  though its furniture had rather the air of
old-fashioned comfort, than of modern elegance:  there sat two ladies
at a well-spread breakfast-table.  Mr. Giles, dressed with scrupulous
care in a full suit of black, was in attendance upon them.  He had
taken his station some half-way between the side-board and the
breakfast-table; and, with his body drawn up to its full height, his
head thrown back, and inclined the merest trifle on one side, his left
leg advanced, and his right hand thrust into his waist-coat, while his
left hung down by his side, grasping a waiter, looked like one who
laboured under a very agreeable sense of his own merits and importance.

Of the two ladies, one was well advanced in years; but the high-backed
oaken chair in which she sat, was not more upright than she.  Dressed
with the utmost nicety and precision, in a quaint mixture of by-gone
costume, with some slight concessions to the prevailing taste, which
rather served to point the old style pleasantly than to impair its
effect, she sat, in a stately manner, with her hands folded on the
table before her.  Her eyes (and age had dimmed but little of their
brightness) were attentively upon her young companion.

The younger lady was in the lovely bloom and spring-time of womanhood;
at that age, when, if ever angels be for God's good purposes enthroned
in mortal forms, they may be, without impiety, supposed to abide in
such as hers.

She was not past seventeen.  Cast in so slight and exquisite a mould;
so mild and gentle; so pure and beautiful; that earth seemed not her
element, nor its rough creatures her fit companions.  The very
intelligence that shone in her deep blue eye, and was stamped upon her
noble head, seemed scarcely of her age, or of the world; and yet the
changing expression of sweetness and good humour, the thousand lights
that played about the face, and left no shadow there; above all, the
smile, the cheerful, happy smile, were made for Home, and fireside
peace and happiness.

She was busily engaged in the little offices of the table. Chancing to
raise her eyes as the elder lady was regarding her, she playfully put
back her hair, which was simply braided on her forehead; and threw into
her beaming look, such an expression of affection and artless
loveliness, that blessed spirits might have smiled to look upon her.

'And Brittles has been gone upwards of an hour, has he?' asked the old
lady, after a pause.

'An hour and twelve minutes, ma'am,' replied Mr. Giles, referring to a
silver watch, which he drew forth by a black ribbon.

'He is always slow,' remarked the old lady.

'Brittles always was a slow boy, ma'am,' replied the attendant. And
seeing, by the bye, that Brittles had been a slow boy for upwards of
thirty years, there appeared no great probability of his ever being a
fast one.

'He gets worse instead of better, I think,' said the elder lady.

'It is very inexcusable in him if he stops to play with any other
boys,' said the young lady, smiling.

Mr. Giles was apparently considering the propriety of indulging in a
respectful smile himself, when a gig drove up to the garden-gate: out
of which there jumped a fat gentleman, who ran straight up to the door:
and who, getting quickly into the house by some mysterious process,
burst into the room, and nearly overturned Mr. Giles and the
breakfast-table together.

'I never heard of such a thing!' exclaimed the fat gentleman. 'My dear
Mrs. Maylie--bless my soul--in the silence of the night, too--I _never_
heard of such a thing!'

With these expressions of condolence, the fat gentleman shook hands
with both ladies, and drawing up a chair, inquired how they found
themselves.

'You ought to be dead; positively dead with the fright,' said the fat
gentleman.  'Why didn't you send?  Bless me, my man should have come in
a minute; and so would I; and my assistant would have been delighted;
or anybody, I'm sure, under such circumstances.  Dear, dear!  So
unexpected!  In the silence of the night, too!'

The doctor seemed expecially troubled by the fact of the robbery having
been unexpected, and attempted in the night-time; as if it were the
established custom of gentlemen in the housebreaking way to transact
business at noon, and to make an appointment, by post, a day or two
previous.

'And you, Miss Rose,' said the doctor, turning to the young lady, 'I--'

'Oh! very much so, indeed,' said Rose, interrupting him; 'but there is
a poor creature upstairs, whom aunt wishes you to see.'

'Ah! to be sure,' replied the doctor, 'so there is.  That was your
handiwork, Giles, I understand.'

Mr. Giles, who had been feverishly putting the tea-cups to rights,
blushed very red, and said that he had had that honour.

'Honour, eh?' said the doctor; 'well, I don't know; perhaps it's as
honourable to hit a thief in a back kitchen, as to hit your man at
twelve paces.  Fancy that he fired in the air, and you've fought a
duel, Giles.'

Mr. Giles, who thought this light treatment of the matter an unjust
attempt at diminishing his glory, answered respectfully, that it was
not for the like of him to judge about that; but he rather thought it
was no joke to the opposite party.

'Gad, that's true!' said the doctor.  'Where is he?  Show me the way.
I'll look in again, as I come down, Mrs. Maylie.  That's the little
window that he got in at, eh?  Well, I couldn't have believed it!'

Talking all the way, he followed Mr. Giles upstairs; and while he is
going upstairs, the reader may be informed, that Mr. Losberne, a
surgeon in the neighbourhood, known through a circuit of ten miles
round as 'the doctor,' had grown fat, more from good-humour than from
good living:  and was as kind and hearty, and withal as eccentric an
old bachelor, as will be found in five times that space, by any
explorer alive.

The doctor was absent, much longer than either he or the ladies had
anticipated.  A large flat box was fetched out of the gig; and a
bedroom bell was rung very often; and the servants ran up and down
stairs perpetually; from which tokens it was justly concluded that
something important was going on above.  At length he returned; and in
reply to an anxious inquiry after his patient; looked very mysterious,
and closed the door, carefully.

'This is a very extraordinary thing, Mrs. Maylie,' said the doctor,
standing with his back to the door, as if to keep it shut.

'He is not in danger, I hope?' said the old lady.

'Why, that would _not_ be an extraordinary thing, under the
circumstances,' replied the doctor; 'though I don't think he is. Have
you seen the thief?'

'No,' rejoined the old lady.

'Nor heard anything about him?'

'No.'

'I beg your pardon, ma'am, interposed Mr. Giles; 'but I was going to
tell you about him when Doctor Losberne came in.'

The fact was, that Mr. Giles had not, at first, been able to bring his
mind to the avowal, that he had only shot a boy.  Such commendations
had been bestowed upon his bravery, that he could not, for the life of
him, help postponing the explanation for a few delicious minutes;
during which he had flourished, in the very zenith of a brief
reputation for undaunted courage.

'Rose wished to see the man,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'but I wouldn't hear of
it.'

'Humph!' rejoined the doctor.  'There is nothing very alarming in his
appearance.  Have you any objection to see him in my presence?'

'If it be necessary,' replied the old lady, 'certainly not.'

'Then I think it is necessary,' said the doctor; 'at all events, I am
quite sure that you would deeply regret not having done so, if you
postponed it.  He is perfectly quiet and comfortable now. Allow
me--Miss Rose, will you permit me?  Not the slightest fear, I pledge
you my honour!'



CHAPTER XXX

RELATES WHAT OLIVER'S NEW VISITORS THOUGHT OF HIM

With many loquacious assurances that they would be agreeably surprised
in the aspect of the criminal, the doctor drew the young lady's arm
through one of his; and offering his disengaged hand to Mrs. Maylie,
led them, with much ceremony and stateliness, upstairs.

'Now,' said the doctor, in a whisper, as he softly turned the handle of
a bedroom-door, 'let us hear what you think of him.  He has not been
shaved very recently, but he don't look at all ferocious
notwithstanding.  Stop, though!  Let me first see that he is in
visiting order.'

Stepping before them, he looked into the room.  Motioning them to
advance, he closed the door when they had entered; and gently drew back
the curtains of the bed.  Upon it, in lieu of the dogged, black-visaged
ruffian they had expected to behold, there lay a mere child:  worn with
pain and exhaustion, and sunk into a deep sleep.  His wounded arm,
bound and splintered up, was crossed upon his breast; his head reclined
upon the other arm, which was half hidden by his long hair, as it
streamed over the pillow.

The honest gentleman held the curtain in his hand, and looked on, for a
minute or so, in silence.  Whilst he was watching the patient thus, the
younger lady glided softly past, and seating herself in a chair by the
bedside, gathered Oliver's hair from his face.  As she stooped over
him, her tears fell upon his forehead.

The boy stirred, and smiled in his sleep, as though these marks of pity
and compassion had awakened some pleasant dream of a love and affection
he had never known.  Thus, a strain of gentle music, or the rippling of
water in a silent place, or the odour of a flower, or the mention of a
familiar word, will sometimes call up sudden dim remembrances of scenes
that never were, in this life; which vanish like a breath; which some
brief memory of a happier existence, long gone by, would seem to have
awakened; which no voluntary exertion of the mind can ever recall.

'What can this mean?' exclaimed the elder lady.  'This poor child can
never have been the pupil of robbers!'

'Vice,' said the surgeon, replacing the curtain, 'takes up her abode in
many temples; and who can say that a fair outside shell not enshrine
her?'

'But at so early an age!' urged Rose.

'My dear young lady,' rejoined the surgeon, mournfully shaking his
head; 'crime, like death, is not confined to the old and withered
alone.  The youngest and fairest are too often its chosen victims.'

'But, can you--oh! can you really believe that this delicate boy has
been the voluntary associate of the worst outcasts of society?' said
Rose.

The surgeon shook his head, in a manner which intimated that he feared
it was very possible; and observing that they might disturb the
patient, led the way into an adjoining apartment.

'But even if he has been wicked,' pursued Rose, 'think how young he is;
think that he may never have known a mother's love, or the comfort of a
home; that ill-usage and blows, or the want of bread, may have driven
him to herd with men who have forced him to guilt.  Aunt, dear aunt,
for mercy's sake, think of this, before you let them drag this sick
child to a prison, which in any case must be the grave of all his
chances of amendment.  Oh! as you love me, and know that I have never
felt the want of parents in your goodness and affection, but that I
might have done so, and might have been equally helpless and
unprotected with this poor child, have pity upon him before it is too
late!'

'My dear love,' said the elder lady, as she folded the weeping girl to
her bosom, 'do you think I would harm a hair of his head?'

'Oh, no!' replied Rose, eagerly.

'No, surely,' said the old lady; 'my days are drawing to their close:
and may mercy be shown to me as I show it to others! What can I do to
save him, sir?'

'Let me think, ma'am,' said the doctor; 'let me think.'

Mr. Losberne thrust his hands into his pockets, and took several turns
up and down the room; often stopping, and balancing himself on his
toes, and frowning frightfully.  After various exclamations of 'I've
got it now' and 'no, I haven't,' and as many renewals of the walking
and frowning, he at length made a dead halt, and spoke as follows:

'I think if you give me a full and unlimited commission to bully Giles,
and that little boy, Brittles, I can manage it.  Giles is a faithful
fellow and an old servant, I know; but you can make it up to him in a
thousand ways, and reward him for being such a good shot besides.  You
don't object to that?'

'Unless there is some other way of preserving the child,' replied Mrs.
Maylie.

'There is no other,' said the doctor.  'No other, take my word for it.'

'Then my aunt invests you with full power,' said Rose, smiling through
her tears; 'but pray don't be harder upon the poor fellows than is
indispensably necessary.'

'You seem to think,' retorted the doctor, 'that everybody is disposed
to be hard-hearted to-day, except yourself, Miss Rose. I only hope, for
the sake of the rising male sex generally, that you may be found in as
vulnerable and soft-hearted a mood by the first eligible young fellow
who appeals to your compassion; and I wish I were a young fellow, that
I might avail myself, on the spot, of such a favourable opportunity for
doing so, as the present.'

'You are as great a boy as poor Brittles himself,' returned Rose,
blushing.

'Well,' said the doctor, laughing heartily, 'that is no very difficult
matter.  But to return to this boy.  The great point of our agreement
is yet to come.  He will wake in an hour or so, I dare say; and
although I have told that thick-headed constable-fellow downstairs that
he musn't be moved or spoken to, on peril of his life, I think we may
converse with him without danger.  Now I make this stipulation--that I
shall examine him in your presence, and that, if, from what he says, we
judge, and I can show to the satisfaction of your cool reason, that he
is a real and thorough bad one (which is more than possible), he shall
be left to his fate, without any farther interference on my part, at
all events.'

'Oh no, aunt!' entreated Rose.

'Oh yes, aunt!' said the doctor.  'Is is a bargain?'

'He cannot be hardened in vice,' said Rose; 'It is impossible.'

'Very good,' retorted the doctor; 'then so much the more reason for
acceding to my proposition.'

Finally the treaty was entered into; and the parties thereunto sat down
to wait, with some impatience, until Oliver should awake.

The patience of the two ladies was destined to undergo a longer trial
than Mr. Losberne had led them to expect; for hour after hour passed
on, and still Oliver slumbered heavily.  It was evening, indeed, before
the kind-hearted doctor brought them the intelligence, that he was at
length sufficiently restored to be spoken to.  The boy was very ill, he
said, and weak from the loss of blood; but his mind was so troubled
with anxiety to disclose something, that he deemed it better to give
him the opportunity, than to insist upon his remaining quiet until next
morning: which he should otherwise have done.

The conference was a long one.  Oliver told them all his simple
history, and was often compelled to stop, by pain and want of strength.
It was a solemn thing, to hear, in the darkened room, the feeble voice
of the sick child recounting a weary catalogue of evils and calamities
which hard men had brought upon him.  Oh! if when we oppress and grind
our fellow-creatures, we bestowed but one thought on the dark evidences
of human error, which, like dense and heavy clouds, are rising, slowly
it is true, but not less surely, to Heaven, to pour their
after-vengeance on our heads; if we heard but one instant, in
imagination, the deep testimony of dead men's voices, which no power
can stifle, and no pride shut out; where would be the injury and
injustice, the suffering, misery, cruelty, and wrong, that each day's
life brings with it!

Oliver's pillow was smoothed by gentle hands that night; and loveliness
and virtue watched him as he slept.  He felt calm and happy, and could
have died without a murmur.

The momentous interview was no sooner concluded, and Oliver composed to
rest again, than the doctor, after wiping his eyes, and condemning them
for being weak all at once, betook himself downstairs to open upon Mr.
Giles.  And finding nobody about the parlours, it occurred to him, that
he could perhaps originate the proceedings with better effect in the
kitchen; so into the kitchen he went.

There were assembled, in that lower house of the domestic parliament,
the women-servants, Mr. Brittles, Mr. Giles, the tinker (who had
received a special invitation to regale himself for the remainder of
the day, in consideration of his services), and the constable.  The
latter gentleman had a large staff, a large head, large features, and
large half-boots; and he looked as if he had been taking a
proportionate allowance of ale--as indeed he had.

The adventures of the previous night were still under discussion; for
Mr. Giles was expatiating upon his presence of mind, when the doctor
entered; Mr. Brittles, with a mug of ale in his hand, was corroborating
everything, before his superior said it.

'Sit still!' said the doctor, waving his hand.

'Thank you, sir, said Mr. Giles.  'Misses wished some ale to be given
out, sir; and as I felt no ways inclined for my own little room, sir,
and was disposed for company, I am taking mine among 'em here.'

Brittles headed a low murmur, by which the ladies and gentlemen
generally were understood to express the gratification they derived
from Mr. Giles's condescension.  Mr. Giles looked round with a
patronising air, as much as to say that so long as they behaved
properly, he would never desert them.

'How is the patient to-night, sir?' asked Giles.

'So-so'; returned the doctor.  'I am afraid you have got yourself into
a scrape there, Mr. Giles.'

'I hope you don't mean to say, sir,' said Mr. Giles, trembling, 'that
he's going to die.  If I thought it, I should never be happy again.  I
wouldn't cut a boy off:  no, not even Brittles here; not for all the
plate in the county, sir.'

'That's not the point,' said the doctor, mysteriously.  'Mr. Giles, are
you a Protestant?'

'Yes, sir, I hope so,' faltered Mr. Giles, who had turned very pale.

'And what are _you_, boy?' said the doctor, turning sharply upon
Brittles.

'Lord bless me, sir!' replied Brittles, starting violently; 'I'm the
same as Mr. Giles, sir.'

'Then tell me this,' said the doctor, 'both of you, both of you! Are
you going to take upon yourselves to swear, that that boy upstairs is
the boy that was put through the little window last night?  Out with
it!  Come!  We are prepared for you!'

The doctor, who was universally considered one of the best-tempered
creatures on earth, made this demand in such a dreadful tone of anger,
that Giles and Brittles, who were considerably muddled by ale and
excitement, stared at each other in a state of stupefaction.

'Pay attention to the reply, constable, will you?' said the doctor,
shaking his forefinger with great solemnity of manner, and tapping the
bridge of his nose with it, to bespeak the exercise of that worthy's
utmost acuteness. 'Something may come of this before long.'

The constable looked as wise as he could, and took up his staff of
office: which had been reclining indolently in the chimney-corner.

'It's a simple question of identity, you will observe,' said the doctor.

'That's what it is, sir,' replied the constable, coughing with great
violence; for he had finished his ale in a hurry, and some of it had
gone the wrong way.

'Here's the house broken into,' said the doctor, 'and a couple of men
catch one moment's glimpse of a boy, in the midst of gunpowder smoke,
and in all the distraction of alarm and darkness.  Here's a boy comes
to that very same house, next morning, and because he happens to have
his arm tied up, these men lay violent hands upon him--by doing which,
they place his life in great danger--and swear he is the thief.  Now,
the question is, whether these men are justified by the fact; if not,
in what situation do they place themselves?'

The constable nodded profoundly.  He said, if that wasn't law, he would
be glad to know what was.

'I ask you again,' thundered the doctor, 'are you, on your solemn
oaths, able to identify that boy?'

Brittles looked doubtfully at Mr. Giles; Mr. Giles looked doubtfully at
Brittles; the constable put his hand behind his ear, to catch the
reply; the two women and the tinker leaned forward to listen; the
doctor glanced keenly round; when a ring was heard at the gate, and at
the same moment, the sound of wheels.

'It's the runners!' cried Brittles, to all appearance much relieved.

'The what?' exclaimed the doctor, aghast in his turn.

'The Bow Street officers, sir,' replied Brittles, taking up a candle;
'me and Mr. Giles sent for 'em this morning.'

'What?' cried the doctor.

'Yes,' replied Brittles; 'I sent a message up by the coachman, and I
only wonder they weren't here before, sir.'

'You did, did you?  Then confound your--slow coaches down here; that's
all,' said the doctor, walking away.



CHAPTER XXXI

INVOLVES A CRITICAL POSITION

'Who's that?' inquired Brittles, opening the door a little way, with
the chain up, and peeping out, shading the candle with his hand.

'Open the door,' replied a man outside; 'it's the officers from Bow
Street, as was sent to to-day.'

Much comforted by this assurance, Brittles opened the door to its full
width, and confronted a portly man in a great-coat; who walked in,
without saying anything more, and wiped his shoes on the mat, as coolly
as if he lived there.

'Just send somebody out to relieve my mate, will you, young man?' said
the officer; 'he's in the gig, a-minding the prad.  Have you got a
coach 'us here, that you could put it up in, for five or ten minutes?'

Brittles replying in the affirmative, and pointing out the building,
the portly man stepped back to the garden-gate, and helped his
companion to put up the gig:  while Brittles lighted them, in a state
of great admiration.  This done, they returned to the house, and, being
shown into a parlour, took off their great-coats and hats, and showed
like what they were.

The man who had knocked at the door, was a stout personage of middle
height, aged about fifty: with shiny black hair, cropped pretty close;
half-whiskers, a round face, and sharp eyes.  The other was a
red-headed, bony man, in top-boots; with a rather ill-favoured
countenance, and a turned-up sinister-looking nose.

'Tell your governor that Blathers and Duff is here, will you?' said the
stouter man, smoothing down his hair, and laying a pair of handcuffs on
the table.  'Oh!  Good-evening, master.  Can I have a word or two with
you in private, if you please?'

This was addressed to Mr. Losberne, who now made his appearance; that
gentleman, motioning Brittles to retire, brought in the two ladies, and
shut the door.

'This is the lady of the house,' said Mr. Losberne, motioning towards
Mrs. Maylie.

Mr. Blathers made a bow.  Being desired to sit down, he put his hat on
the floor, and taking a chair, motioned to Duff to do the same.  The
latter gentleman, who did not appear quite so much accustomed to good
society, or quite so much at his ease in it--one of the two--seated
himself, after undergoing several muscular affections of the limbs, and
the head of his stick into his mouth, with some embarrassment.

'Now, with regard to this here robbery, master,' said Blathers. 'What
are the circumstances?'

Mr. Losberne, who appeared desirous of gaining time, recounted them at
great length, and with much circumlocution.  Messrs. Blathers and Duff
looked very knowing meanwhile, and occasionally exchanged a nod.

'I can't say, for certain, till I see the work, of course,' said
Blathers; 'but my opinion at once is,--I don't mind committing myself
to that extent,--that this wasn't done by a yokel; eh, Duff?'

'Certainly not,' replied Duff.

'And, translating the word yokel for the benefit of the ladies, I
apprehend your meaning to be, that this attempt was not made by a
countryman?' said Mr. Losberne, with a smile.

'That's it, master,' replied Blathers.  'This is all about the robbery,
is it?'

'All,' replied the doctor.

'Now, what is this, about this here boy that the servants are a-talking
on?' said Blathers.

'Nothing at all,' replied the doctor.  'One of the frightened servants
chose to take it into his head, that he had something to do with this
attempt to break into the house; but it's nonsense: sheer absurdity.'

'Wery easy disposed of, if it is,' remarked Duff.

'What he says is quite correct,' observed Blathers, nodding his head in
a confirmatory way, and playing carelessly with the handcuffs, as if
they were a pair of castanets.  'Who is the boy? What account does he
give of himself?  Where did he come from? He didn't drop out of the
clouds, did he, master?'

'Of course not,' replied the doctor, with a nervous glance at the two
ladies.  'I know his whole history: but we can talk about that
presently.  You would like, first, to see the place where the thieves
made their attempt, I suppose?'

'Certainly,' rejoined Mr. Blathers.  'We had better inspect the
premises first, and examine the servants afterwards. That's the usual
way of doing business.'

Lights were then procured; and Messrs. Blathers and Duff, attended by
the native constable, Brittles, Giles, and everybody else in short,
went into the little room at the end of the passage and looked out at
the window; and afterwards went round by way of the lawn, and looked in
at the window; and after that, had a candle handed out to inspect the
shutter with; and after that, a lantern to trace the footsteps with;
and after that, a pitchfork to poke the bushes with.  This done, amidst
the breathless interest of all beholders, they came in again; and Mr.
Giles and Brittles were put through a melodramatic representation of
their share in the previous night's adventures: which they performed
some six times over: contradicting each other, in not more than one
important respect, the first time, and in not more than a dozen the
last.  This consummation being arrived at, Blathers and Duff cleared
the room, and held a long council together, compared with which, for
secrecy and solemnity, a consultation of great doctors on the knottiest
point in medicine, would be mere child's play.

Meanwhile, the doctor walked up and down the next room in a very uneasy
state; and Mrs. Maylie and Rose looked on, with anxious faces.

'Upon my word,' he said, making a halt, after a great number of very
rapid turns, 'I hardly know what to do.'

'Surely,' said Rose, 'the poor child's story, faithfully repeated to
these men, will be sufficient to exonerate him.'

'I doubt it, my dear young lady,' said the doctor, shaking his head.
'I don't think it would exonerate him, either with them, or with legal
functionaries of a higher grade.  What is he, after all, they would
say?  A runaway.  Judged by mere worldly considerations and
probabilities, his story is a very doubtful one.'

'You believe it, surely?' interrupted Rose.

'_I_ believe it, strange as it is; and perhaps I may be an old fool for
doing so,' rejoined the doctor; 'but I don't think it is exactly the
tale for a practical police-officer, nevertheless.'

'Why not?' demanded Rose.

'Because, my pretty cross-examiner,' replied the doctor: 'because,
viewed with their eyes, there are many ugly points about it; he can
only prove the parts that look ill, and none of those that look well.
Confound the fellows, they _will_ have the why and the wherefore, and
will take nothing for granted.  On his own showing, you see, he has
been the companion of thieves for some time past; he has been carried
to a police-officer, on a charge of picking a gentleman's pocket; he
has been taken away, forcibly, from that gentleman's house, to a place
which he cannot describe or point out, and of the situation of which he
has not the remotest idea.  He is brought down to Chertsey, by men who
seem to have taken a violent fancy to him, whether he will or no; and
is put through a window to rob a house; and then, just at the very
moment when he is going to alarm the inmates, and so do the very thing
that would set him all to rights, there rushes into the way, a
blundering dog of a half-bred butler, and shoots him! As if on purpose
to prevent his doing any good for himself! Don't you see all this?'

'I see it, of course,' replied Rose, smiling at the doctor's
impetuosity; 'but still I do not see anything in it, to criminate the
poor child.'

'No,' replied the doctor; 'of course not!  Bless the bright eyes of
your sex!  They never see, whether for good or bad, more than one side
of any question; and that is, always, the one which first presents
itself to them.'

Having given vent to this result of experience, the doctor put his
hands into his pockets, and walked up and down the room with even
greater rapidity than before.

'The more I think of it,' said the doctor, 'the more I see that it will
occasion endless trouble and difficulty if we put these men in
possession of the boy's real story.  I am certain it will not be
believed; and even if they can do nothing to him in the end, still the
dragging it forward, and giving publicity to all the doubts that will
be cast upon it, must interfere, materially, with your benevolent plan
of rescuing him from misery.'

'Oh! what is to be done?' cried Rose.  'Dear, dear! why did they send
for these people?'

'Why, indeed!' exclaimed Mrs. Maylie.  'I would not have had them here,
for the world.'

'All I know is,' said Mr. Losberne, at last:  sitting down with a kind
of desperate calmness, 'that we must try and carry it off with a bold
face.  The object is a good one, and that must be our excuse.  The boy
has strong symptoms of fever upon him, and is in no condition to be
talked to any more; that's one comfort.  We must make the best of it;
and if bad be the best, it is no fault of ours.  Come in!'

'Well, master,' said Blathers, entering the room followed by his
colleague, and making the door fast, before he said any more. 'This
warn't a put-up thing.'

'And what the devil's a put-up thing?' demanded the doctor, impatiently.

'We call it a put-up robbery, ladies,' said Blathers, turning to them,
as if he pitied their ignorance, but had a contempt for the doctor's,
'when the servants is in it.'

'Nobody suspected them, in this case,' said Mrs. Maylie.

'Wery likely not, ma'am,' replied Blathers; 'but they might have been
in it, for all that.'

'More likely on that wery account,' said Duff.

'We find it was a town hand,' said Blathers, continuing his report;
'for the style of work is first-rate.'

'Wery pretty indeed it is,' remarked Duff, in an undertone.

'There was two of 'em in it,' continued Blathers; 'and they had a boy
with 'em; that's plain from the size of the window.  That's all to be
said at present.  We'll see this lad that you've got upstairs at once,
if you please.'

'Perhaps they will take something to drink first, Mrs. Maylie?' said
the doctor: his face brightening, as if some new thought had occurred
to him.

'Oh! to be sure!' exclaimed Rose, eagerly.  'You shall have it
immediately, if you will.'

'Why, thank you, miss!' said Blathers, drawing his coat-sleeve across
his mouth; 'it's dry work, this sort of duty.  Anythink that's handy,
miss; don't put yourself out of the way, on our accounts.'

'What shall it be?' asked the doctor, following the young lady to the
sideboard.

'A little drop of spirits, master, if it's all the same,' replied
Blathers.  'It's a cold ride from London, ma'am; and I always find that
spirits comes home warmer to the feelings.'

This interesting communication was addressed to Mrs. Maylie, who
received it very graciously.  While it was being conveyed to her, the
doctor slipped out of the room.

'Ah!' said Mr. Blathers:  not holding his wine-glass by the stem, but
grasping the bottom between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand:
and placing it in front of his chest; 'I have seen a good many pieces
of business like this, in my time, ladies.'

'That crack down in the back lane at Edmonton, Blathers,' said Mr.
Duff, assisting his colleague's memory.

'That was something in this way, warn't it?' rejoined Mr. Blathers;
'that was done by Conkey Chickweed, that was.'

'You always gave that to him' replied Duff.  'It was the Family Pet, I
tell you.  Conkey hadn't any more to do with it than I had.'

'Get out!' retorted Mr. Blathers; 'I know better.  Do you mind that
time when Conkey was robbed of his money, though?  What a start that
was!  Better than any novel-book _I_ ever see!'

'What was that?' inquired Rose:  anxious to encourage any symptoms of
good-humour in the unwelcome visitors.

'It was a robbery, miss, that hardly anybody would have been down
upon,' said Blathers.  'This here Conkey Chickweed--'

'Conkey means Nosey, ma'am,' interposed Duff.

'Of course the lady knows that, don't she?' demanded Mr. Blathers.
'Always interrupting, you are, partner!  This here Conkey Chickweed,
miss, kept a public-house over Battlebridge way, and he had a cellar,
where a good many young lords went to see cock-fighting, and
badger-drawing, and that; and a wery intellectual manner the sports was
conducted in, for I've seen 'em off'en.  He warn't one of the family,
at that time; and one night he was robbed of three hundred and
twenty-seven guineas in a canvas bag, that was stole out of his bedroom
in the dead of night, by a tall man with a black patch over his eye,
who had concealed himself under the bed, and after committing the
robbery, jumped slap out of window:  which was only a story high. He
was wery quick about it.  But Conkey was quick, too; for he fired a
blunderbuss arter him, and roused the neighbourhood. They set up a
hue-and-cry, directly, and when they came to look about 'em, found that
Conkey had hit the robber; for there was traces of blood, all the way
to some palings a good distance off; and there they lost 'em.  However,
he had made off with the blunt; and, consequently, the name of Mr.
Chickweed, licensed witler, appeared in the Gazette among the other
bankrupts; and all manner of benefits and subscriptions, and I don't
know what all, was got up for the poor man, who was in a wery low state
of mind about his loss, and went up and down the streets, for three or
four days, a pulling his hair off in such a desperate manner that many
people was afraid he might be going to make away with himself. One day
he came up to the office, all in a hurry, and had a private interview
with the magistrate, who, after a deal of talk, rings the bell, and
orders Jem Spyers in (Jem was a active officer), and tells him to go
and assist Mr. Chickweed in apprehending the man as robbed his house.
"I see him, Spyers," said Chickweed, "pass my house yesterday morning,"
"Why didn't you up, and collar him!" says Spyers.  "I was so struck all
of a heap, that you might have fractured my skull with a toothpick,"
says the poor man; "but we're sure to have him; for between ten and
eleven o'clock at night he passed again."  Spyers no sooner heard this,
than he put some clean linen and a comb, in his pocket, in case he
should have to stop a day or two; and away he goes, and sets himself
down at one of the public-house windows behind the little red curtain,
with his hat on, all ready to bolt out, at a moment's notice. He was
smoking his pipe here, late at night, when all of a sudden Chickweed
roars out, "Here he is! Stop thief!  Murder!"  Jem Spyers dashes out;
and there he sees Chickweed, a-tearing down the street full cry.  Away
goes Spyers; on goes Chickweed; round turns the people; everybody roars
out, "Thieves!" and Chickweed himself keeps on shouting, all the time,
like mad.  Spyers loses sight of him a minute as he turns a corner;
shoots round; sees a little crowd; dives in; "Which is the man?"
"D--me!" says Chickweed, "I've lost him again!"  It was a remarkable
occurrence, but he warn't to be seen nowhere, so they went back to the
public-house. Next morning, Spyers took his old place, and looked out,
from behind the curtain, for a tall man with a black patch over his
eye, till his own two eyes ached again.  At last, he couldn't help
shutting 'em, to ease 'em a minute; and the very moment he did so, he
hears Chickweed a-roaring out, "Here he is!"  Off he starts once more,
with Chickweed half-way down the street ahead of him; and after twice
as long a run as the yesterday's one, the man's lost again!  This was
done, once or twice more, till one-half the neighbours gave out that
Mr. Chickweed had been robbed by the devil, who was playing tricks with
him arterwards; and the other half, that poor Mr. Chickweed had gone
mad with grief.'

'What did Jem Spyers say?' inquired the doctor; who had returned to the
room shortly after the commencement of the story.

'Jem Spyers,' resumed the officer, 'for a long time said nothing at
all, and listened to everything without seeming to, which showed he
understood his business.  But, one morning, he walked into the bar, and
taking out his snuffbox, says "Chickweed, I've found out who done this
here robbery."  "Have you?" said Chickweed.  "Oh, my dear Spyers, only
let me have wengeance, and I shall die contented!  Oh, my dear Spyers,
where is the villain!"  "Come!" said Spyers, offering him a pinch of
snuff, "none of that gammon!  You did it yourself."  So he had; and a
good bit of money he had made by it, too; and nobody would never have
found it out, if he hadn't been so precious anxious to keep up
appearances!' said Mr. Blathers, putting down his wine-glass, and
clinking the handcuffs together.

'Very curious, indeed,' observed the doctor.  'Now, if you please, you
can walk upstairs.'

'If _you_ please, sir,' returned Mr. Blathers.  Closely following Mr.
Losberne, the two officers ascended to Oliver's bedroom; Mr. Giles
preceding the party, with a lighted candle.

Oliver had been dozing; but looked worse, and was more feverish than he
had appeared yet.  Being assisted by the doctor, he managed to sit up
in bed for a minute or so; and looked at the strangers without at all
understanding what was going forward--in fact, without seeming to
recollect where he was, or what had been passing.

'This,' said Mr. Losberne, speaking softly, but with great vehemence
notwithstanding, 'this is the lad, who, being accidently wounded by a
spring-gun in some boyish trespass on Mr. What-d' ye-call-him's
grounds, at the back here, comes to the house for assistance this
morning, and is immediately laid hold of and maltreated, by that
ingenious gentleman with the candle in his hand:  who has placed his
life in considerable danger, as I can professionally certify.'

Messrs. Blathers and Duff looked at Mr. Giles, as he was thus
recommended to their notice.  The bewildered butler gazed from them
towards Oliver, and from Oliver towards Mr. Losberne, with a most
ludicrous mixture of fear and perplexity.

'You don't mean to deny that, I suppose?' said the doctor, laying
Oliver gently down again.

'It was all done for the--for the best, sir,' answered Giles. 'I am
sure I thought it was the boy, or I wouldn't have meddled with him.  I
am not of an inhuman disposition, sir.'

'Thought it was what boy?' inquired the senior officer.

'The housebreaker's boy, sir!' replied Giles.  'They--they certainly
had a boy.'

'Well?  Do you think so now?' inquired Blathers.

'Think what, now?' replied Giles, looking vacantly at his questioner.

'Think it's the same boy, Stupid-head?' rejoined Blathers, impatiently.

'I don't know; I really don't know,' said Giles, with a rueful
countenance.  'I couldn't swear to him.'

'What do you think?' asked Mr. Blathers.

'I don't know what to think,' replied poor Giles.  'I don't think it is
the boy; indeed, I'm almost certain that it isn't.  You know it can't
be.'

'Has this man been a-drinking, sir?' inquired Blathers, turning to the
doctor.

'What a precious muddle-headed chap you are!' said Duff, addressing Mr.
Giles, with supreme contempt.

Mr. Losberne had been feeling the patient's pulse during this short
dialogue; but he now rose from the chair by the bedside, and remarked,
that if the officers had any doubts upon the subject, they would
perhaps like to step into the next room, and have Brittles before them.

Acting upon this suggestion, they adjourned to a neighbouring
apartment, where Mr. Brittles, being called in, involved himself and
his respected superior in such a wonderful maze of fresh contradictions
and impossibilities, as tended to throw no particular light on
anything, but the fact of his own strong mystification; except, indeed,
his declarations that he shouldn't know the real boy, if he were put
before him that instant; that he had only taken Oliver to be he,
because Mr. Giles had said he was; and that Mr. Giles had, five minutes
previously, admitted in the kitchen, that he began to be very much
afraid he had been a little too hasty.

Among other ingenious surmises, the question was then raised, whether
Mr. Giles had really hit anybody; and upon examination of the fellow
pistol to that which he had fired, it turned out to have no more
destructive loading than gunpowder and brown paper: a discovery which
made a considerable impression on everybody but the doctor, who had
drawn the ball about ten minutes before. Upon no one, however, did it
make a greater impression than on Mr. Giles himself; who, after
labouring, for some hours, under the fear of having mortally wounded a
fellow-creature, eagerly caught at this new idea, and favoured it to
the utmost.  Finally, the officers, without troubling themselves very
much about Oliver, left the Chertsey constable in the house, and took
up their rest for that night in the town; promising to return the next
morning.

With the next morning, there came a rumour, that two men and a boy were
in the cage at Kingston, who had been apprehended over night under
suspicious circumstances; and to Kingston Messrs. Blathers and Duff
journeyed accordingly. The suspicious circumstances, however, resolving
themselves, on investigation, into the one fact, that they had been
discovered sleeping under a haystack; which, although a great crime, is
only punishable by imprisonment, and is, in the merciful eye of the
English law, and its comprehensive love of all the King's subjects,
held to be no satisfactory proof, in the absence of all other evidence,
that the sleeper, or sleepers, have committed burglary accompanied with
violence, and have therefore rendered themselves liable to the
punishment of death; Messrs. Blathers and Duff came back again, as wise
as they went.

In short, after some more examination, and a great deal more
conversation, a neighbouring magistrate was readily induced to take the
joint bail of Mrs. Maylie and Mr. Losberne for Oliver's appearance if
he should ever be called upon; and Blathers and Duff, being rewarded
with a couple of guineas, returned to town with divided opinions on the
subject of their expedition: the latter gentleman on a mature
consideration of all the circumstances, inclining to the belief that
the burglarious attempt had originated with the Family Pet; and the
former being equally disposed to concede the full merit of it to the
great Mr. Conkey Chickweed.

Meanwhile, Oliver gradually throve and prospered under the united care
of Mrs. Maylie, Rose, and the kind-hearted Mr. Losberne.  If fervent
prayers, gushing from hearts overcharged with gratitude, be heard in
heaven--and if they be not, what prayers are!--the blessings which the
orphan child called down upon them, sunk into their souls, diffusing
peace and happiness.



CHAPTER XXXII

OF THE HAPPY LIFE OLIVER BEGAN TO LEAD WITH HIS KIND FRIENDS

Oliver's ailings were neither slight nor few.  In addition to the pain
and delay attendant on a broken limb, his exposure to the wet and cold
had brought on fever and ague:  which hung about him for many weeks,
and reduced him sadly. But, at length, he began, by slow degrees, to
get better, and to be able to say sometimes, in a few tearful words,
how deeply he felt the goodness of the two sweet ladies, and how
ardently he hoped that when he grew strong and well again, he could do
something to show his gratitude; only something, which would let them
see the love and duty with which his breast was full; something,
however slight, which would prove to them that their gentle kindness
had not been cast away; but that the poor boy whom their charity had
rescued from misery, or death, was eager to serve them with his whole
heart and soul.

'Poor fellow!' said Rose, when Oliver had been one day feebly
endeavouring to utter the words of thankfulness that rose to his pale
lips; 'you shall have many opportunities of serving us, if you will.
We are going into the country, and my aunt intends that you shall
accompany us.  The quiet place, the pure air, and all the pleasure and
beauties of spring, will restore you in a few days.  We will employ you
in a hundred ways, when you can bear the trouble.'

'The trouble!' cried Oliver.  'Oh! dear lady, if I could but work for
you; if I could only give you pleasure by watering your flowers, or
watching your birds, or running up and down the whole day long, to make
you happy; what would I give to do it!'

'You shall give nothing at all,' said Miss Maylie, smiling; 'for, as I
told you before, we shall employ you in a hundred ways; and if you only
take half the trouble to please us, that you promise now, you will make
me very happy indeed.'

'Happy, ma'am!' cried Oliver; 'how kind of you to say so!'

'You will make me happier than I can tell you,' replied the young lady.
'To think that my dear good aunt should have been the means of rescuing
any one from such sad misery as you have described to us, would be an
unspeakable pleasure to me; but to know that the object of her goodness
and compassion was sincerely grateful and attached, in consequence,
would delight me, more than you can well imagine.  Do you understand
me?' she inquired, watching Oliver's thoughtful face.

'Oh yes, ma'am, yes!' replied Oliver eagerly; 'but I was thinking that
I am ungrateful now.'

'To whom?' inquired the young lady.

'To the kind gentleman, and the dear old nurse, who took so much care
of me before,' rejoined Oliver.  'If they knew how happy I am, they
would be pleased, I am sure.'

'I am sure they would,' rejoined Oliver's benefactress; 'and Mr.
Losberne has already been kind enough to promise that when you are well
enough to bear the journey, he will carry you to see them.'

'Has he, ma'am?' cried Oliver, his face brightening with pleasure.  'I
don't know what I shall do for joy when I see their kind faces once
again!'

In a short time Oliver was sufficiently recovered to undergo the
fatigue of this expedition.  One morning he and Mr. Losberne set out,
accordingly, in a little carriage which belonged to Mrs. Maylie.  When
they came to Chertsey Bridge, Oliver turned very pale, and uttered a
loud exclamation.

'What's the matter with the boy?' cried the doctor, as usual, all in a
bustle.  'Do you see anything--hear anything--feel anything--eh?'

'That, sir,' cried Oliver, pointing out of the carriage window. 'That
house!'

'Yes; well, what of it?  Stop coachman.  Pull up here,' cried the
doctor.  'What of the house, my man; eh?'

'The thieves--the house they took me to!' whispered Oliver.

'The devil it is!' cried the doctor.  'Hallo, there! let me out!'

But, before the coachman could dismount from his box, he had tumbled
out of the coach, by some means or other; and, running down to the
deserted tenement, began kicking at the door like a madman.

'Halloa?' said a little ugly hump-backed man:  opening the door so
suddenly, that the doctor, from the very impetus of his last kick,
nearly fell forward into the passage. 'What's the matter here?'

'Matter!' exclaimed the other, collaring him, without a moment's
reflection.  'A good deal.  Robbery is the matter.'

'There'll be Murder the matter, too,' replied the hump-backed man,
coolly, 'if you don't take your hands off.  Do you hear me?'

'I hear you,' said the doctor, giving his captive a hearty shake.

'Where's--confound the fellow, what's his rascally name--Sikes; that's
it.  Where's Sikes, you thief?'

The hump-backed man stared, as if in excess of amazement and
indignation; then, twisting himself, dexterously, from the doctor's
grasp, growled forth a volley of horrid oaths, and retired into the
house.  Before he could shut the door, however, the doctor had passed
into the parlour, without a word of parley.

He looked anxiously round; not an article of furniture; not a vestige
of anything, animate or inanimate; not even the position of the
cupboards; answered Oliver's description!

'Now!' said the hump-backed man, who had watched him keenly, 'what do
you mean by coming into my house, in this violent way? Do you want to
rob me, or to murder me?  Which is it?'

'Did you ever know a man come out to do either, in a chariot and pair,
you ridiculous old vampire?' said the irritable doctor.

'What do you want, then?' demanded the hunchback.  'Will you take
yourself off, before I do you a mischief?  Curse you!'

'As soon as I think proper,' said Mr. Losberne, looking into the other
parlour; which, like the first, bore no resemblance whatever to
Oliver's account of it.  'I shall find you out, some day, my friend.'

'Will you?' sneered the ill-favoured cripple.  'If you ever want me,
I'm here.  I haven't lived here mad and all alone, for five-and-twenty
years, to be scared by you.  You shall pay for this; you shall pay for
this.'  And so saying, the mis-shapen little demon set up a yell, and
danced upon the ground, as if wild with rage.

'Stupid enough, this,' muttered the doctor to himself; 'the boy must
have made a mistake.  Here!  Put that in your pocket, and shut yourself
up again.'  With these words he flung the hunchback a piece of money,
and returned to the carriage.

The man followed to the chariot door, uttering the wildest imprecations
and curses all the way; but as Mr. Losberne turned to speak to the
driver, he looked into the carriage, and eyed Oliver for an instant
with a glance so sharp and fierce and at the same time so furious and
vindictive, that, waking or sleeping, he could not forget it for months
afterwards.  He continued to utter the most fearful imprecations, until
the driver had resumed his seat; and when they were once more on their
way, they could see him some distance behind: beating his feet upon the
ground, and tearing his hair, in transports of real or pretended rage.

'I am an ass!' said the doctor, after a long silence.  'Did you know
that before, Oliver?'

'No, sir.'

'Then don't forget it another time.'

'An ass,' said the doctor again, after a further silence of some
minutes.  'Even if it had been the right place, and the right fellows
had been there, what could I have done, single-handed? And if I had had
assistance, I see no good that I should have done, except leading to my
own exposure, and an unavoidable statement of the manner in which I
have hushed up this business. That would have served me right, though.
I am always involving myself in some scrape or other, by acting on
impulse.  It might have done me good.'

Now, the fact was that the excellent doctor had never acted upon
anything but impulse all through his life, and it was no bad compliment
to the nature of the impulses which governed him, that so far from
being involved in any peculiar troubles or misfortunes, he had the
warmest respect and esteem of all who knew him.  If the truth must be
told, he was a little out of temper, for a minute or two, at being
disappointed in procuring corroborative evidence of Oliver's story on
the very first occasion on which he had a chance of obtaining any.  He
soon came round again, however; and finding that Oliver's replies to
his questions, were still as straightforward and consistent, and still
delivered with as much apparent sincerity and truth, as they had ever
been, he made up his mind to attach full credence to them, from that
time forth.

As Oliver knew the name of the street in which Mr. Brownlow resided,
they were enabled to drive straight thither.  When the coach turned
into it, his heart beat so violently, that he could scarcely draw his
breath.

'Now, my boy, which house is it?' inquired Mr. Losberne.

'That!  That!' replied Oliver, pointing eagerly out of the window.
'The white house.  Oh! make haste!  Pray make haste! I feel as if I
should die: it makes me tremble so.'

'Come, come!' said the good doctor, patting him on the shoulder. 'You
will see them directly, and they will be overjoyed to find you safe and
well.'

'Oh!  I hope so!' cried Oliver.  'They were so good to me; so very,
very good to me.'

The coach rolled on.  It stopped.  No; that was the wrong house; the
next door.  It went on a few paces, and stopped again. Oliver looked up
at the windows, with tears of happy expectation coursing down his face.

Alas! the white house was empty, and there was a bill in the window.
'To Let.'

'Knock at the next door,' cried Mr. Losberne, taking Oliver's arm in
his.  'What has become of Mr. Brownlow, who used to live in the
adjoining house, do you know?'

The servant did not know; but would go and inquire.  She presently
returned, and said, that Mr. Brownlow had sold off his goods, and gone
to the West Indies, six weeks before.  Oliver clasped his hands, and
sank feebly backward.

'Has his housekeeper gone too?' inquired Mr. Losberne, after a moment's
pause.

'Yes, sir'; replied the servant.  'The old gentleman, the housekeeper,
and a gentleman who was a friend of Mr. Brownlow's, all went together.'

'Then turn towards home again,' said Mr. Losberne to the driver; 'and
don't stop to bait the horses, till you get out of this confounded
London!'

'The book-stall keeper, sir?' said Oliver.  'I know the way there.  See
him, pray, sir!  Do see him!'

'My poor boy, this is disappointment enough for one day,' said the
doctor.  'Quite enough for both of us.  If we go to the book-stall
keeper's, we shall certainly find that he is dead, or has set his house
on fire, or run away.  No; home again straight!'  And in obedience to
the doctor's impulse, home they went.

This bitter disappointment caused Oliver much sorrow and grief, even in
the midst of his happiness; for he had pleased himself, many times
during his illness, with thinking of all that Mr. Brownlow and Mrs.
Bedwin would say to him: and what delight it would be to tell them how
many long days and nights he had passed in reflecting on what they had
done for him, and in bewailing his cruel separation from them. The hope
of eventually clearing himself with them, too, and explaining how he
had been forced away, had buoyed him up, and sustained him, under many
of his recent trials; and now, the idea that they should have gone so
far, and carried with them the belief that he was an impostor and a
robber--a belief which might remain uncontradicted to his dying
day--was almost more than he could bear.

The circumstance occasioned no alteration, however, in the behaviour of
his benefactors.  After another fortnight, when the fine warm weather
had fairly begun, and every tree and flower was putting forth its young
leaves and rich blossoms, they made preparations for quitting the house
at Chertsey, for some months.

Sending the plate, which had so excited Fagin's cupidity, to the
banker's; and leaving Giles and another servant in care of the house,
they departed to a cottage at some distance in the country, and took
Oliver with them.

Who can describe the pleasure and delight, the peace of mind and soft
tranquillity, the sickly boy felt in the balmy air, and among the green
hills and rich woods, of an inland village!  Who can tell how scenes of
peace and quietude sink into the minds of pain-worn dwellers in close
and noisy places, and carry their own freshness, deep into their jaded
hearts!  Men who have lived in crowded, pent-up streets, through lives
of toil, and who have never wished for change; men, to whom custom has
indeed been second nature, and who have come almost to love each brick
and stone that formed the narrow boundaries of their daily walks; even
they, with the hand of death upon them, have been known to yearn at
last for one short glimpse of Nature's face; and, carried far from the
scenes of their old pains and pleasures, have seemed to pass at once
into a new state of being.  Crawling forth, from day to day, to some
green sunny spot, they have had such memories wakened up within them by
the sight of the sky, and hill and plain, and glistening water, that a
foretaste of heaven itself has soothed their quick decline, and they
have sunk into their tombs, as peacefully as the sun whose setting they
watched from their lonely chamber window but a few hours before, faded
from their dim and feeble sight!  The memories which peaceful country
scenes call up, are not of this world, nor of its thoughts and hopes.
Their gentle influence may teach us how to weave fresh garlands for the
graves of those we loved:  may purify our thoughts, and bear down
before it old enmity and hatred; but beneath all this, there lingers,
in the least reflective mind, a vague and half-formed consciousness of
having held such feelings long before, in some remote and distant time,
which calls up solemn thoughts of distant times to come, and bends down
pride and worldliness beneath it.

It was a lovely spot to which they repaired.  Oliver, whose days had
been spent among squalid crowds, and in the midst of noise and
brawling, seemed to enter on a new existence there.  The rose and
honeysuckle clung to the cottage walls; the ivy crept round the trunks
of the trees; and the garden-flowers perfumed the air with delicious
odours.  Hard by, was a little churchyard; not crowded with tall
unsightly gravestones, but full of humble mounds, covered with fresh
turf and moss: beneath which, the old people of the village lay at
rest.  Oliver often wandered here; and, thinking of the wretched grave
in which his mother lay, would sometimes sit him down and sob unseen;
but, when he raised his eyes to the deep sky overhead, he would cease
to think of her as lying in the ground, and would weep for her, sadly,
but without pain.

It was a happy time.  The days were peaceful and serene; the nights
brought with them neither fear nor care; no languishing in a wretched
prison, or associating with wretched men; nothing but pleasant and
happy thoughts.  Every morning he went to a white-headed old gentleman,
who lived near the little church: who taught him to read better, and to
write:  and who spoke so kindly, and took such pains, that Oliver could
never try enough to please him.  Then, he would walk with Mrs. Maylie
and Rose, and hear them talk of books; or perhaps sit near them, in
some shady place, and listen whilst the young lady read: which he could
have done, until it grew too dark to see the letters. Then, he had his
own lesson for the next day to prepare; and at this, he would work
hard, in a little room which looked into the garden, till evening came
slowly on, when the ladies would walk out again, and he with them:
listening with such pleasure to all they said:  and so happy if they
wanted a flower that he could climb to reach, or had forgotten anything
he could run to fetch: that he could never be quick enough about it.
When it became quite dark, and they returned home, the young lady would
sit down to the piano, and play some pleasant air, or sing, in a low
and gentle voice, some old song which it pleased her aunt to hear.
There would be no candles lighted at such times as these; and Oliver
would sit by one of the windows, listening to the sweet music, in a
perfect rapture.

And when Sunday came, how differently the day was spent, from any way
in which he had ever spent it yet! and how happily too; like all the
other days in that most happy time!  There was the little church, in
the morning, with the green leaves fluttering at the windows:  the
birds singing without:  and the sweet-smelling air stealing in at the
low porch, and filling the homely building with its fragrance. The poor
people were so neat and clean, and knelt so reverently in prayer, that
it seemed a pleasure, not a tedious duty, their assembling there
together; and though the singing might be rude, it was real, and
sounded more musical (to Oliver's ears at least) than any he had ever
heard in church before.  Then, there were the walks as usual, and many
calls at the clean houses of the labouring men; and at night, Oliver
read a chapter or two from the Bible, which he had been studying all
the week, and in the performance of which duty he felt more proud and
pleased, than if he had been the clergyman himself.

In the morning, Oliver would be a-foot by six o'clock, roaming the
fields, and plundering the hedges, far and wide, for nosegays of wild
flowers, with which he would return laden, home; and which it took
great care and consideration to arrange, to the best advantage, for the
embellishment of the breakfast-table. There was fresh groundsel, too,
for Miss Maylie's birds, with which Oliver, who had been studying the
subject under the able tuition of the village clerk, would decorate the
cages, in the most approved taste. When the birds were made all spruce
and smart for the day, there was usually some little commission of
charity to execute in the village; or, failing that, there was rare
cricket-playing, sometimes, on the green; or, failing that, there was
always something to do in the garden, or about the plants, to which
Oliver (who had studied this science also, under the same master, who
was a gardener by trade,) applied himself with hearty good-will, until
Miss Rose made her appearance:  when there were a thousand
commendations to be bestowed on all he had done.

So three months glided away; three months which, in the life of the
most blessed and favoured of mortals, might have been unmingled
happiness, and which, in Oliver's were true felicity. With the purest
and most amiable generosity on one side; and the truest, warmest,
soul-felt gratitude on the other; it is no wonder that, by the end of
that short time, Oliver Twist had become completely domesticated with
the old lady and her niece, and that the fervent attachment of his
young and sensitive heart, was repaid by their pride in, and attachment
to, himself.



CHAPTER XXXIII

WHEREIN THE HAPPINESS OF OLIVER AND HIS FRIENDS, EXPERIENCES A SUDDEN
CHECK

Spring flew swiftly by, and summer came.  If the village had been
beautiful at first it was now in the full glow and luxuriance of its
richness.  The great trees, which had looked shrunken and bare in the
earlier months, had now burst into strong life and health; and
stretching forth their green arms over the thirsty ground, converted
open and naked spots into choice nooks, where was a deep and pleasant
shade from which to look upon the wide prospect, steeped in sunshine,
which lay stretched beyond.  The earth had donned her mantle of
brightest green; and shed her richest perfumes abroad.  It was the
prime and vigour of the year; all things were glad and flourishing.

Still, the same quiet life went on at the little cottage, and the same
cheerful serenity prevailed among its inmates.  Oliver had long since
grown stout and healthy; but health or sickness made no difference in
his warm feelings of a great many people.  He was still the same
gentle, attached, affectionate creature that he had been when pain and
suffering had wasted his strength, and when he was dependent for every
slight attention, and comfort on those who tended him.

One beautiful night, when they had taken a longer walk than was
customary with them:  for the day had been unusually warm, and there
was a brilliant moon, and a light wind had sprung up, which was
unusually refreshing.  Rose had been in high spirits, too, and they had
walked on, in merry conversation, until they had far exceeded their
ordinary bounds.  Mrs. Maylie being fatigued, they returned more slowly
home.  The young lady merely throwing off her simple bonnet, sat down
to the piano as usual.  After running abstractedly over the keys for a
few minutes, she fell into a low and very solemn air; and as she played
it, they heard a sound as if she were weeping.

'Rose, my dear!' said the elder lady.

Rose made no reply, but played a little quicker, as though the words
had roused her from some painful thoughts.

'Rose, my love!' cried Mrs. Maylie, rising hastily, and bending over
her.  'What is this?  In tears!  My dear child, what distresses you?'

'Nothing, aunt; nothing,' replied the young lady.  'I don't know what
it is; I can't describe it; but I feel--'

'Not ill, my love?' interposed Mrs. Maylie.

'No, no!  Oh, not ill!' replied Rose: shuddering as though some deadly
chillness were passing over her, while she spoke; 'I shall be better
presently.  Close the window, pray!'

Oliver hastened to comply with her request.  The young lady, making an
effort to recover her cheerfulness, strove to play some livelier tune;
but her fingers dropped powerless over the keys. Covering her face with
her hands, she sank upon a sofa, and gave vent to the tears which she
was now unable to repress.

'My child!' said the elderly lady, folding her arms about her, 'I never
saw you so before.'

'I would not alarm you if I could avoid it,' rejoined Rose; 'but indeed
I have tried very hard, and cannot help this. I fear I _am_ ill, aunt.'

She was, indeed; for, when candles were brought, they saw that in the
very short time which had elapsed since their return home, the hue of
her countenance had changed to a marble whiteness. Its expression had
lost nothing of its beauty; but it was changed; and there was an
anxious haggard look about the gentle face, which it had never worn
before.  Another minute, and it was suffused with a crimson flush:  and
a heavy wildness came over the soft blue eye.  Again this disappeared,
like the shadow thrown by a passing cloud; and she was once more deadly
pale.

Oliver, who watched the old lady anxiously, observed that she was
alarmed by these appearances; and so in truth, was he; but seeing that
she affected to make light of them, he endeavoured to do the same, and
they so far succeeded, that when Rose was persuaded by her aunt to
retire for the night, she was in better spirits; and appeared even in
better health:  assuring them that she felt certain she should rise in
the morning, quite well.

'I hope,' said Oliver, when Mrs. Maylie returned, 'that nothing is the
matter?  She don't look well to-night, but--'

The old lady motioned to him not to speak; and sitting herself down in
a dark corner of the room, remained silent for some time. At length,
she said, in a trembling voice:

'I hope not, Oliver.  I have been very happy with her for some years:
too happy, perhaps.  It may be time that I should meet with some
misfortune; but I hope it is not this.'

'What?' inquired Oliver.

'The heavy blow,' said the old lady, 'of losing the dear girl who has
so long been my comfort and happiness.'

'Oh!  God forbid!' exclaimed Oliver, hastily.

'Amen to that, my child!' said the old lady, wringing her hands.

'Surely there is no danger of anything so dreadful?' said Oliver. 'Two
hours ago, she was quite well.'

'She is very ill now,' rejoined Mrs. Maylies; 'and will be worse, I am
sure.  My dear, dear Rose!  Oh, what shall I do without her!'

She gave way to such great grief, that Oliver, suppressing his own
emotion, ventured to remonstrate with her; and to beg, earnestly, that,
for the sake of the dear young lady herself, she would be more calm.

'And consider, ma'am,' said Oliver, as the tears forced themselves into
his eyes, despite of his efforts to the contrary. 'Oh! consider how
young and good she is, and what pleasure and comfort she gives to all
about her.  I am sure--certain--quite certain--that, for your sake, who
are so good yourself; and for her own; and for the sake of all she
makes so happy; she will not die.  Heaven will never let her die so
young.'

'Hush!' said Mrs. Maylie, laying her hand on Oliver's head. 'You think
like a child, poor boy.  But you teach me my duty, notwithstanding.  I
had forgotten it for a moment, Oliver, but I hope I may be pardoned,
for I am old, and have seen enough of illness and death to know the
agony of separation from the objects of our love.  I have seen enough,
too, to know that it is not always the youngest and best who are spared
to those that love them; but this should give us comfort in our sorrow;
for Heaven is just; and such things teach us, impressively, that there
is a brighter world than this; and that the passage to it is speedy.
God's will be done!  I love her; and He knows how well!'

Oliver was surprised to see that as Mrs. Maylie said these words, she
checked her lamentations as though by one effort; and drawing herself
up as she spoke, became composed and firm.  He was still more
astonished to find that this firmness lasted; and that, under all the
care and watching which ensued, Mrs. Maylie was ever ready and
collected: performing all the duties which had devolved upon her,
steadily, and, to all external appearances, even cheerfully.  But he
was young, and did not know what strong minds are capable of, under
trying circumstances.  How should he, when their possessors so seldom
know themselves?

An anxious night ensued.  When morning came, Mrs. Maylie's predictions
were but too well verified.  Rose was in the first stage of a high and
dangerous fever.

'We must be active, Oliver, and not give way to useless grief,' said
Mrs. Maylie, laying her finger on her lip, as she looked steadily into
his face; 'this letter must be sent, with all possible expedition, to
Mr. Losberne.  It must be carried to the market-town: which is not more
than four miles off, by the footpath across the field:  and thence
dispatched, by an express on horseback, straight to Chertsey. The
people at the inn will undertake to do this: and I can trust to you to
see it done, I know.'

Oliver could make no reply, but looked his anxiety to be gone at once.

'Here is another letter,' said Mrs. Maylie, pausing to reflect; 'but
whether to send it now, or wait until I see how Rose goes on, I
scarcely know.  I would not forward it, unless I feared the worst.'

'Is it for Chertsey, too, ma'am?' inquired Oliver; impatient to execute
his commission, and holding out his trembling hand for the letter.

'No,' replied the old lady, giving it to him mechanically. Oliver
glanced at it, and saw that it was directed to Harry Maylie, Esquire,
at some great lord's house in the country; where, he could not make out.

'Shall it go, ma'am?' asked Oliver, looking up, impatiently.

'I think not,' replied Mrs. Maylie, taking it back.  'I will wait until
to-morrow.'

With these words, she gave Oliver her purse, and he started off,
without more delay, at the greatest speed he could muster.

Swiftly he ran across the fields, and down the little lanes which
sometimes divided them: now almost hidden by the high corn on either
side, and now emerging on an open field, where the mowers and haymakers
were busy at their work:  nor did he stop once, save now and then, for
a few seconds, to recover breath, until he came, in a great heat, and
covered with dust, on the little market-place of the market-town.

Here he paused, and looked about for the inn.  There were a white bank,
and a red brewery, and a yellow town-hall; and in one corner there was
a large house, with all the wood about it painted green:  before which
was the sign of 'The George.'  To this he hastened, as soon as it
caught his eye.

He spoke to a postboy who was dozing under the gateway; and who, after
hearing what he wanted, referred him to the ostler; who after hearing
all he had to say again, referred him to the landlord; who was a tall
gentleman in a blue neckcloth, a white hat, drab breeches, and boots
with tops to match, leaning against a pump by the stable-door, picking
his teeth with a silver toothpick.

This gentleman walked with much deliberation into the bar to make out
the bill:  which took a long time making out:  and after it was ready,
and paid, a horse had to be saddled, and a man to be dressed, which
took up ten good minutes more.  Meanwhile Oliver was in such a
desperate state of impatience and anxiety, that he felt as if he could
have jumped upon the horse himself, and galloped away, full tear, to
the next stage.  At length, all was ready; and the little parcel having
been handed up, with many injunctions and entreaties for its speedy
delivery, the man set spurs to his horse, and rattling over the uneven
paving of the market-place, was out of the town, and galloping along
the turnpike-road, in a couple of minutes.

As it was something to feel certain that assistance was sent for, and
that no time had been lost, Oliver hurried up the inn-yard, with a
somewhat lighter heart.  He was turning out of the gateway when he
accidently stumbled against a tall man wrapped in a cloak, who was at
that moment coming out of the inn door.

'Hah!' cried the man, fixing his eyes on Oliver, and suddenly
recoiling.  'What the devil's this?'

'I beg your pardon, sir,' said Oliver; 'I was in a great hurry to get
home, and didn't see you were coming.'

'Death!' muttered the man to himself, glaring at the boy with his large
dark eyes.  'Who would have thought it! Grind him to ashes! He'd start
up from a stone coffin, to come in my way!'

'I am sorry,' stammered Oliver, confused by the strange man's wild
look.  'I hope I have not hurt you!'

'Rot you!' murmured the man, in a horrible passion; between his
clenched teeth; 'if I had only had the courage to say the word, I might
have been free of you in a night.  Curses on your head, and black death
on your heart, you imp!  What are you doing here?'

The man shook his fist, as he uttered these words incoherently. He
advanced towards Oliver, as if with the intention of aiming a blow at
him, but fell violently on the ground:  writhing and foaming, in a fit.

Oliver gazed, for a moment, at the struggles of the madman (for such he
supposed him to be); and then darted into the house for help.  Having
seen him safely carried into the hotel, he turned his face homewards,
running as fast as he could, to make up for lost time:  and recalling
with a great deal of astonishment and some fear, the extraordinary
behaviour of the person from whom he had just parted.

The circumstance did not dwell in his recollection long, however: for
when he reached the cottage, there was enough to occupy his mind, and
to drive all considerations of self completely from his memory.

Rose Maylie had rapidly grown worse; before mid-night she was
delirious.  A medical practitioner, who resided on the spot, was in
constant attendance upon her; and after first seeing the patient, he
had taken Mrs. Maylie aside, and pronounced her disorder to be one of a
most alarming nature. 'In fact,' he said, 'it would be little short of
a miracle, if she recovered.'

How often did Oliver start from his bed that night, and stealing out,
with noiseless footstep, to the staircase, listen for the slightest
sound from the sick chamber!  How often did a tremble shake his frame,
and cold drops of terror start upon his brow, when a sudden trampling
of feet caused him to fear that something too dreadful to think of, had
even then occurred!  And what had been the fervency of all the prayers
he had ever muttered, compared with those he poured forth, now, in the
agony and passion of his supplication for the life and health of the
gentle creature, who was tottering on the deep grave's verge!

Oh! the suspense, the fearful, acute suspense, of standing idly by
while the life of one we dearly love, is trembling in the balance!  Oh!
the racking thoughts that crowd upon the mind, and make the heart beat
violently, and the breath come thick, by the force of the images they
conjure up before it; the desperate anxiety _to be doing something_ to
relieve the pain, or lessen the danger, which we have no power to
alleviate; the sinking of soul and spirit, which the sad remembrance of
our helplessness produces; what tortures can equal these; what
reflections or endeavours can, in the full tide and fever of the time,
allay them!

Morning came; and the little cottage was lonely and still. People spoke
in whispers; anxious faces appeared at the gate, from time to time;
women and children went away in tears. All the livelong day, and for
hours after it had grown dark, Oliver paced softly up and down the
garden, raising his eyes every instant to the sick chamber, and
shuddering to see the darkened window, looking as if death lay
stretched inside.  Late that night, Mr. Losberne arrived.  'It is
hard,' said the good doctor, turning away as he spoke; 'so young; so
much beloved; but there is very little hope.'

Another morning.  The sun shone brightly; as brightly as if it looked
upon no misery or care; and, with every leaf and flower in full bloom
about her; with life, and health, and sounds and sights of joy,
surrounding her on every side: the fair young creature lay, wasting
fast.  Oliver crept away to the old churchyard, and sitting down on one
of the green mounds, wept and prayed for her, in silence.

There was such peace and beauty in the scene; so much of brightness and
mirth in the sunny landscape; such blithesome music in the songs of the
summer birds; such freedom in the rapid flight of the rook, careering
overhead; so much of life and joyousness in all; that, when the boy
raised his aching eyes, and looked about, the thought instinctively
occurred to him, that this was not a time for death; that Rose could
surely never die when humbler things were all so glad and gay; that
graves were for cold and cheerless winter:  not for sunlight and
fragrance. He almost thought that shrouds were for the old and
shrunken; and that they never wrapped the young and graceful form in
their ghastly folds.

A knell from the church bell broke harshly on these youthful thoughts.
Another!  Again!  It was tolling for the funeral service.  A group of
humble mourners entered the gate: wearing white favours; for the corpse
was young.  They stood uncovered by a grave; and there was a mother--a
mother once--among the weeping train.  But the sun shone brightly, and
the birds sang on.

Oliver turned homeward, thinking on the many kindnesses he had received
from the young lady, and wishing that the time could come again, that
he might never cease showing her how grateful and attached he was.  He
had no cause for self-reproach on the score of neglect, or want of
thought, for he had been devoted to her service; and yet a hundred
little occasions rose up before him, on which he fancied he might have
been more zealous, and more earnest, and wished he had been.  We need
be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to
some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so
little done--of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might
have been repaired!  There is no remorse so deep as that which is
unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this,
in time.

When he reached home Mrs. Maylie was sitting in the little parlour.
Oliver's heart sank at sight of her; for she had never left the bedside
of her niece; and he trembled to think what change could have driven
her away.  He learnt that she had fallen into a deep sleep, from which
she would waken, either to recovery and life, or to bid them farewell,
and die.

They sat, listening, and afraid to speak, for hours.  The untasted meal
was removed, with looks which showed that their thoughts were
elsewhere, they watched the sun as he sank lower and lower, and, at
length, cast over sky and earth those brilliant hues which herald his
departure.  Their quick ears caught the sound of an approaching
footstep.  They both involuntarily darted to the door, as Mr. Losberne
entered.

'What of Rose?' cried the old lady.  'Tell me at once!  I can bear it;
anything but suspense!  Oh, tell me! in the name of Heaven!'

'You must compose yourself,' said the doctor supporting her. 'Be calm,
my dear ma'am, pray.'

'Let me go, in God's name!  My dear child!  She is dead! She is dying!'

'No!' cried the doctor, passionately.  'As He is good and merciful, she
will live to bless us all, for years to come.'

The lady fell upon her knees, and tried to fold her hands together; but
the energy which had supported her so long, fled up to Heaven with her
first thanksgiving; and she sank into the friendly arms which were
extended to receive her.



CHAPTER XXXIV

CONTAINS SOME INTRODUCTORY PARTICULARS RELATIVE TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN
WHO NOW ARRIVES UPON THE SCENE; AND A NEW ADVENTURE WHICH HAPPENED TO
OLIVER

It was almost too much happiness to bear.  Oliver felt stunned and
stupefied by the unexpected intelligence; he could not weep, or speak,
or rest.  He had scarcely the power of understanding anything that had
passed, until, after a long ramble in the quiet evening air, a burst of
tears came to his relief, and he seemed to awaken, all at once, to a
full sense of the joyful change that had occurred, and the almost
insupportable load of anguish which had been taken from his breast.

The night was fast closing in, when he returned homeward:  laden with
flowers which he had culled, with peculiar care, for the adornment of
the sick chamber.  As he walked briskly along the road, he heard behind
him, the noise of some vehicle, approaching at a furious pace.  Looking
round, he saw that it was a post-chaise, driven at great speed; and as
the horses were galloping, and the road was narrow, he stood leaning
against a gate until it should have passed him.

As it dashed on, Oliver caught a glimpse of a man in a white nightcap,
whose face seemed familiar to him, although his view was so brief that
he could not identify the person.  In another second or two, the
nightcap was thrust out of the chaise-window, and a stentorian voice
bellowed to the driver to stop:  which he did, as soon as he could pull
up his horses.  Then, the nightcap once again appeared: and the same
voice called Oliver by his name.

'Here!' cried the voice.  'Oliver, what's the news?  Miss Rose! Master
O-li-ver!'

'Is it you, Giles?' cried Oliver, running up to the chaise-door.

Giles popped out his nightcap again, preparatory to making some reply,
when he was suddenly pulled back by a young gentleman who occupied the
other corner of the chaise, and who eagerly demanded what was the news.

'In a word!' cried the gentleman, 'Better or worse?'

'Better--much better!' replied Oliver, hastily.

'Thank Heaven!' exclaimed the gentleman.  'You are sure?'

'Quite, sir,' replied Oliver.  'The change took place only a few hours
ago; and Mr. Losberne says, that all danger is at an end.'

The gentleman said not another word, but, opening the chaise-door,
leaped out, and taking Oliver hurriedly by the arm, led him aside.

'You are quite certain?  There is no possibility of any mistake on your
part, my boy, is there?' demanded the gentleman in a tremulous voice.
'Do not deceive me, by awakening hopes that are not to be fulfilled.'

'I would not for the world, sir,' replied Oliver.  'Indeed you may
believe me.  Mr. Losberne's words were, that she would live to bless us
all for many years to come.  I heard him say so.'

The tears stood in Oliver's eyes as he recalled the scene which was the
beginning of so much happiness; and the gentleman turned his face away,
and remained silent, for some minutes.  Oliver thought he heard him
sob, more than once; but he feared to interrupt him by any fresh
remark--for he could well guess what his feelings were--and so stood
apart, feigning to be occupied with his nosegay.

All this time, Mr. Giles, with the white nightcap on, had been sitting
on the steps of the chaise, supporting an elbow on each knee, and
wiping his eyes with a blue cotton pocket-handkerchief dotted with
white spots.  That the honest fellow had not been feigning emotion, was
abundantly demonstrated by the very red eyes with which he regarded the
young gentleman, when he turned round and addressed him.

'I think you had better go on to my mother's in the chaise, Giles,'
said he.  'I would rather walk slowly on, so as to gain a little time
before I see her.  You can say I am coming.'

'I beg your pardon, Mr. Harry,' said Giles:  giving a final polish to
his ruffled countenance with the handkerchief; 'but if you would leave
the postboy to say that, I should be very much obliged to you.  It
wouldn't be proper for the maids to see me in this state, sir; I should
never have any more authority with them if they did.'

'Well,' rejoined Harry Maylie, smiling, 'you can do as you like. Let
him go on with the luggage, if you wish it, and do you follow with us.
Only first exchange that nightcap for some more appropriate covering,
or we shall be taken for madmen.'

Mr. Giles, reminded of his unbecoming costume, snatched off and
pocketed his nightcap; and substituted a hat, of grave and sober shape,
which he took out of the chaise.  This done, the postboy drove off;
Giles, Mr. Maylie, and Oliver, followed at their leisure.

As they walked along, Oliver glanced from time to time with much
interest and curiosity at the new comer.  He seemed about
five-and-twenty years of age, and was of the middle height; his
countenance was frank and handsome; and his demeanor easy and
prepossessing.  Notwithstanding the difference between youth and age,
he bore so strong a likeness to the old lady, that Oliver would have
had no great difficulty in imagining their relationship, if he had not
already spoken of her as his mother.

Mrs. Maylie was anxiously waiting to receive her son when he reached
the cottage.  The meeting did not take place without great emotion on
both sides.

'Mother!' whispered the young man; 'why did you not write before?'

'I did,' replied Mrs. Maylie; 'but, on reflection, I determined to keep
back the letter until I had heard Mr. Losberne's opinion.'

'But why,' said the young man, 'why run the chance of that occurring
which so nearly happened?  If Rose had--I cannot utter that word
now--if this illness had terminated differently, how could you ever
have forgiven yourself!  How could I ever have know happiness again!'

'If that _had_ been the case, Harry,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'I fear your
happiness would have been effectually blighted, and that your arrival
here, a day sooner or a day later, would have been of very, very little
import.'

'And who can wonder if it be so, mother?' rejoined the young man; 'or
why should I say, _if_?--It is--it is--you know it, mother--you must
know it!'

'I know that she deserves the best and purest love the heart of man can
offer,' said Mrs. Maylie; 'I know that the devotion and affection of
her nature require no ordinary return, but one that shall be deep and
lasting.  If I did not feel this, and know, besides, that a changed
behaviour in one she loved would break her heart, I should not feel my
task so difficult of performance, or have to encounter so many
struggles in my own bosom, when I take what seems to me to be the
strict line of duty.'

'This is unkind, mother,' said Harry.  'Do you still suppose that I am
a boy ignorant of my own mind, and mistaking the impulses of my own
soul?'

'I think, my dear son,' returned Mrs. Maylie, laying her hand upon his
shoulder, 'that youth has many generous impulses which do not last; and
that among them are some, which, being gratified, become only the more
fleeting.  Above all, I think' said the lady, fixing her eyes on her
son's face, 'that if an enthusiastic, ardent, and ambitious man marry a
wife on whose name there is a stain, which, though it originate in no
fault of hers, may be visited by cold and sordid people upon her, and
upon his children also: and, in exact proportion to his success in the
world, be cast in his teeth, and made the subject of sneers against
him:  he may, no matter how generous and good his nature, one day
repent of the connection he formed in early life.  And she may have the
pain of knowing that he does so.'

'Mother,' said the young man, impatiently, 'he would be a selfish
brute, unworthy alike of the name of man and of the woman you describe,
who acted thus.'

'You think so now, Harry,' replied his mother.

'And ever will!' said the young man.  'The mental agony I have
suffered, during the last two days, wrings from me the avowal to you of
a passion which, as you well know, is not one of yesterday, nor one I
have lightly formed.  On Rose, sweet, gentle girl! my heart is set, as
firmly as ever heart of man was set on woman.  I have no thought, no
view, no hope in life, beyond her; and if you oppose me in this great
stake, you take my peace and happiness in your hands, and cast them to
the wind.  Mother, think better of this, and of me, and do not
disregard the happiness of which you seem to think so little.'

'Harry,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'it is because I think so much of warm and
sensitive hearts, that I would spare them from being wounded. But we
have said enough, and more than enough, on this matter, just now.'

'Let it rest with Rose, then,' interposed Harry.  'You will not press
these overstrained opinions of yours, so far, as to throw any obstacle
in my way?'

'I will not,' rejoined Mrs. Maylie; 'but I would have you consider--'

'I _have_ considered!' was the impatient reply; 'Mother, I have
considered, years and years.  I have considered, ever since I have been
capable of serious reflection.  My feelings remain unchanged, as they
ever will; and why should I suffer the pain of a delay in giving them
vent, which can be productive of no earthly good?  No!  Before I leave
this place, Rose shall hear me.'

'She shall,' said Mrs. Maylie.

'There is something in your manner, which would almost imply that she
will hear me coldly, mother,' said the young man.

'Not coldly,' rejoined the old lady; 'far from it.'

'How then?' urged the young man.  'She has formed no other attachment?'

'No, indeed,' replied his mother; 'you have, or I mistake, too strong a
hold on her affections already.  What I would say,' resumed the old
lady, stopping her son as he was about to speak, 'is this.  Before you
stake your all on this chance; before you suffer yourself to be carried
to the highest point of hope; reflect for a few moments, my dear child,
on Rose's history, and consider what effect the knowledge of her
doubtful birth may have on her decision:  devoted as she is to us, with
all the intensity of her noble mind, and with that perfect sacrifice of
self which, in all matters, great or trifling, has always been her
characteristic.'

'What do you mean?'

'That I leave you to discover,' replied Mrs. Maylie.  'I must go back
to her.  God bless you!'

'I shall see you again to-night?' said the young man, eagerly.

'By and by,' replied the lady; 'when I leave Rose.'

'You will tell her I am here?' said Harry.

'Of course,' replied Mrs. Maylie.

'And say how anxious I have been, and how much I have suffered, and how
I long to see her.  You will not refuse to do this, mother?'

'No,' said the old lady; 'I will tell her all.'  And pressing her son's
hand, affectionately, she hastened from the room.

Mr. Losberne and Oliver had remained at another end of the apartment
while this hurried conversation was proceeding.  The former now held
out his hand to Harry Maylie; and hearty salutations were exchanged
between them.  The doctor then communicated, in reply to multifarious
questions from his young friend, a precise account of his patient's
situation; which was quite as consolatory and full of promise, as
Oliver's statement had encouraged him to hope; and to the whole of
which, Mr. Giles, who affected to be busy about the luggage, listened
with greedy ears.

'Have you shot anything particular, lately, Giles?' inquired the
doctor, when he had concluded.

'Nothing particular, sir,' replied Mr. Giles, colouring up to the eyes.

'Nor catching any thieves, nor identifying any house-breakers?' said
the doctor.

'None at all, sir,' replied Mr. Giles, with much gravity.

'Well,' said the doctor, 'I am sorry to hear it, because you do that
sort of thing admirably.  Pray, how is Brittles?'

'The boy is very well, sir,' said Mr. Giles, recovering his usual tone
of patronage; 'and sends his respectful duty, sir.'

'That's well,' said the doctor.  'Seeing you here, reminds me, Mr.
Giles, that on the day before that on which I was called away so
hurriedly, I executed, at the request of your good mistress, a small
commission in your favour.  Just step into this corner a moment, will
you?'

Mr. Giles walked into the corner with much importance, and some wonder,
and was honoured with a short whispering conference with the doctor, on
the termination of which, he made a great many bows, and retired with
steps of unusual stateliness.  The subject matter of this conference
was not disclosed in the parlour, but the kitchen was speedily
enlightened concerning it; for Mr. Giles walked straight thither, and
having called for a mug of ale, announced, with an air of majesty,
which was highly effective, that it had pleased his mistress, in
consideration of his gallant behaviour on the occasion of that
attempted robbery, to deposit, in the local savings-bank, the sum of
five-and-twenty pounds, for his sole use and benefit.  At this, the two
women-servants lifted up their hands and eyes, and supposed that Mr.
Giles, pulling out his shirt-frill, replied, 'No, no'; and that if they
observed that he was at all haughty to his inferiors, he would thank
them to tell him so.  And then he made a great many other remarks, no
less illustrative of his humility, which were received with equal
favour and applause, and were, withal, as original and as much to the
purpose, as the remarks of great men commonly are.

Above stairs, the remainder of the evening passed cheerfully away; for
the doctor was in high spirits; and however fatigued or thoughtful
Harry Maylie might have been at first, he was not proof against the
worthy gentleman's good humour, which displayed itself in a great
variety of sallies and professional recollections, and an abundance of
small jokes, which struck Oliver as being the drollest things he had
ever heard, and caused him to laugh proportionately; to the evident
satisfaction of the doctor, who laughed immoderately at himself, and
made Harry laugh almost as heartily, by the very force of sympathy.
So, they were as pleasant a party as, under the circumstances, they
could well have been; and it was late before they retired, with light
and thankful hearts, to take that rest of which, after the doubt and
suspense they had recently undergone, they stood much in need.

Oliver rose next morning, in better heart, and went about his usual
occupations, with more hope and pleasure than he had known for many
days.  The birds were once more hung out, to sing, in their old places;
and the sweetest wild flowers that could be found, were once more
gathered to gladden Rose with their beauty. The melancholy which had
seemed to the sad eyes of the anxious boy to hang, for days past, over
every object, beautiful as all were, was dispelled by magic.  The dew
seemed to sparkle more brightly on the green leaves; the air to rustle
among them with a sweeter music; and the sky itself to look more blue
and bright. Such is the influence which the condition of our own
thoughts, exercise, even over the appearance of external objects.  Men
who look on nature, and their fellow-men, and cry that all is dark and
gloomy, are in the right; but the sombre colours are reflections from
their own jaundiced eyes and hearts.  The real hues are delicate, and
need a clearer vision.

It is worthy of remark, and Oliver did not fail to note it at the time,
that his morning expeditions were no longer made alone. Harry Maylie,
after the very first morning when he met Oliver coming laden home, was
seized with such a passion for flowers, and displayed such a taste in
their arrangement, as left his young companion far behind.  If Oliver
were behindhand in these respects, he knew where the best were to be
found; and morning after morning they scoured the country together, and
brought home the fairest that blossomed.  The window of the young
lady's chamber was opened now; for she loved to feel the rich summer
air stream in, and revive her with its freshness; but there always
stood in water, just inside the lattice, one particular little bunch,
which was made up with great care, every morning.  Oliver could not
help noticing that the withered flowers were never thrown away,
although the little vase was regularly replenished; nor, could he help
observing, that whenever the doctor came into the garden, he invariably
cast his eyes up to that particular corner, and nodded his head most
expressively, as he set forth on his morning's walk.  Pending these
observations, the days were flying by; and Rose was rapidly recovering.

Nor did Oliver's time hang heavy on his hands, although the young lady
had not yet left her chamber, and there were no evening walks, save now
and then, for a short distance, with Mrs. Maylie. He applied himself,
with redoubled assiduity, to the instructions of the white-headed old
gentleman, and laboured so hard that his quick progress surprised even
himself.  It was while he was engaged in this pursuit, that he was
greatly startled and distressed by a most unexpected occurrence.

The little room in which he was accustomed to sit, when busy at his
books, was on the ground-floor, at the back of the house.  It was quite
a cottage-room, with a lattice-window: around which were clusters of
jessamine and honeysuckle, that crept over the casement, and filled the
place with their delicious perfume.  It looked into a garden, whence a
wicket-gate opened into a small paddock; all beyond, was fine
meadow-land and wood.  There was no other dwelling near, in that
direction; and the prospect it commanded was very extensive.

One beautiful evening, when the first shades of twilight were beginning
to settle upon the earth, Oliver sat at this window, intent upon his
books.  He had been poring over them for some time; and, as the day had
been uncommonly sultry, and he had exerted himself a great deal, it is
no disparagement to the authors, whoever they may have been, to say,
that gradually and by slow degrees, he fell asleep.

There is a kind of sleep that steals upon us sometimes, which, while it
holds the body prisoner, does not free the mind from a sense of things
about it, and enable it to ramble at its pleasure.  So far as an
overpowering heaviness, a prostration of strength, and an utter
inability to control our thoughts or power of motion, can be called
sleep, this is it; and yet, we have a consciousness of all that is
going on about us, and, if we dream at such a time, words which are
really spoken, or sounds which really exist at the moment, accommodate
themselves with surprising readiness to our visions, until reality and
imagination become so strangely blended that it is afterwards almost
matter of impossibility to separate the two.  Nor is this, the most
striking phenomenon incidental to such a state.  It is an undoubted
fact, that although our senses of touch and sight be for the time dead,
yet our sleeping thoughts, and the visionary scenes that pass before
us, will be influenced and materially influenced, by the _mere silent
presence_ of some external object; which may not have been near us when
we closed our eyes:  and of whose vicinity we have had no waking
consciousness.

Oliver knew, perfectly well, that he was in his own little room; that
his books were lying on the table before him; that the sweet air was
stirring among the creeping plants outside.  And yet he was asleep.
Suddenly, the scene changed; the air became close and confined; and he
thought, with a glow of terror, that he was in the Jew's house again.
There sat the hideous old man, in his accustomed corner, pointing at
him, and whispering to another man, with his face averted, who sat
beside him.

'Hush, my dear!' he thought he heard the Jew say; 'it is he, sure
enough.  Come away.'

'He!' the other man seemed to answer; 'could I mistake him, think you?
If a crowd of ghosts were to put themselves into his exact shape, and
he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to
point him out.  If you buried him fifty feet deep, and took me across
his grave, I fancy I should know, if there wasn't a mark above it, that
he lay buried there?'

The man seemed to say this, with such dreadful hatred, that Oliver
awoke with the fear, and started up.

Good Heaven!  what was that, which sent the blood tingling to his
heart, and deprived him of his voice, and of power to move!
There--there--at the window--close before him--so close, that he could
have almost touched him before he started back:  with his eyes peering
into the room, and meeting his:  there stood the Jew!  And beside him,
white with rage or fear, or both, were the scowling features of the man
who had accosted him in the inn-yard.

It was but an instant, a glance, a flash, before his eyes; and they
were gone.  But they had recognised him, and he them; and their look
was as firmly impressed upon his memory, as if it had been deeply
carved in stone, and set before him from his birth. He stood transfixed
for a moment; then, leaping from the window into the garden, called
loudly for help.



CHAPTER XXXV

CONTAINING THE UNSATISFACTORY RESULT OF OLIVER'S ADVENTURE; AND A
CONVERSATION OF SOME IMPORTANCE BETWEEN HARRY MAYLIE AND ROSE

When the inmates of the house, attracted by Oliver's cries, hurried to
the spot from which they proceeded, they found him, pale and agitated,
pointing in the direction of the meadows behind the house, and scarcely
able to articulate the words, 'The Jew! the Jew!'

Mr. Giles was at a loss to comprehend what this outcry meant; but Harry
Maylie, whose perceptions were something quicker, and who had heard
Oliver's history from his mother, understood it at once.

'What direction did he take?' he asked, catching up a heavy stick which
was standing in a corner.

'That,' replied Oliver, pointing out the course the man had taken; 'I
missed them in an instant.'

'Then, they are in the ditch!' said Harry.  'Follow!  And keep as near
me, as you can.' So saying, he sprang over the hedge, and darted off
with a speed which rendered it matter of exceeding difficulty for the
others to keep near him.

Giles followed as well as he could; and Oliver followed too; and in the
course of a minute or two, Mr. Losberne, who had been out walking, and
just then returned, tumbled over the hedge after them, and picking
himself up with more agility than he could have been supposed to
possess, struck into the same course at no contemptible speed, shouting
all the while, most prodigiously, to know what was the matter.

On they all went; nor stopped they once to breathe, until the leader,
striking off into an angle of the field indicated by Oliver, began to
search, narrowly, the ditch and hedge adjoining; which afforded time
for the remainder of the party to come up; and for Oliver to
communicate to Mr. Losberne the circumstances that had led to so
vigorous a pursuit.

The search was all in vain.  There were not even the traces of recent
footsteps, to be seen.  They stood now, on the summit of a little hill,
commanding the open fields in every direction for three or four miles.
There was the village in the hollow on the left; but, in order to gain
that, after pursuing the track Oliver had pointed out, the men must
have made a circuit of open ground, which it was impossible they could
have accomplished in so short a time.  A thick wood skirted the
meadow-land in another direction; but they could not have gained that
covert for the same reason.

'It must have been a dream, Oliver,' said Harry Maylie.

'Oh no, indeed, sir,' replied Oliver, shuddering at the very
recollection of the old wretch's countenance; 'I saw him too plainly
for that.  I saw them both, as plainly as I see you now.'

'Who was the other?' inquired Harry and Mr. Losberne, together.

'The very same man I told you of, who came so suddenly upon me at the
inn,' said Oliver.  'We had our eyes fixed full upon each other; and I
could swear to him.'

'They took this way?' demanded Harry:  'are you sure?'

'As I am that the men were at the window,' replied Oliver, pointing
down, as he spoke, to the hedge which divided the cottage-garden from
the meadow.  'The tall man leaped over, just there; and the Jew,
running a few paces to the right, crept through that gap.'

The two gentlemen watched Oliver's earnest face, as he spoke, and
looking from him to each other, seemed to feel satisfied of the
accuracy of what he said.  Still, in no direction were there any
appearances of the trampling of men in hurried flight.  The grass was
long; but it was trodden down nowhere, save where their own feet had
crushed it.  The sides and brinks of the ditches were of damp clay; but
in no one place could they discern the print of men's shoes, or the
slightest mark which would indicate that any feet had pressed the
ground for hours before.

'This is strange!' said Harry.

'Strange?' echoed the doctor.  'Blathers and Duff, themselves, could
make nothing of it.'

Notwithstanding the evidently useless nature of their search, they did
not desist until the coming on of night rendered its further
prosecution hopeless; and even then, they gave it up with reluctance.
Giles was dispatched to the different ale-houses in the village,
furnished with the best description Oliver could give of the appearance
and dress of the strangers.  Of these, the Jew was, at all events,
sufficiently remarkable to be remembered, supposing he had been seen
drinking, or loitering about; but Giles returned without any
intelligence, calculated to dispel or lessen the mystery.

On the next day, fresh search was made, and the inquiries renewed; but
with no better success.  On the day following, Oliver and Mr. Maylie
repaired to the market-town, in the hope of seeing or hearing something
of the men there; but this effort was equally fruitless.  After a few
days, the affair began to be forgotten, as most affairs are, when
wonder, having no fresh food to support it, dies away of itself.

Meanwhile, Rose was rapidly recovering.  She had left her room: was
able to go out; and mixing once more with the family, carried joy into
the hearts of all.

But, although this happy change had a visible effect on the little
circle; and although cheerful voices and merry laughter were once more
heard in the cottage; there was at times, an unwonted restraint upon
some there:  even upon Rose herself: which Oliver could not fail to
remark.  Mrs. Maylie and her son were often closeted together for a
long time; and more than once Rose appeared with traces of tears upon
her face.  After Mr. Losberne had fixed a day for his departure to
Chertsey, these symptoms increased; and it became evident that
something was in progress which affected the peace of the young lady,
and of somebody else besides.

At length, one morning, when Rose was alone in the breakfast-parlour,
Harry Maylie entered; and, with some hesitation, begged permission to
speak with her for a few moments.

'A few--a very few--will suffice, Rose,' said the young man, drawing
his chair towards her.  'What I shall have to say, has already
presented itself to your mind; the most cherished hopes of my heart are
not unknown to you, though from my lips you have not heard them stated.'

Rose had been very pale from the moment of his entrance; but that might
have been the effect of her recent illness.  She merely bowed; and
bending over some plants that stood near, waited in silence for him to
proceed.

'I--I--ought to have left here, before,' said Harry.

'You should, indeed,' replied Rose.  'Forgive me for saying so, but I
wish you had.'

'I was brought here, by the most dreadful and agonising of all
apprehensions,' said the young man; 'the fear of losing the one dear
being on whom my every wish and hope are fixed.  You had been dying;
trembling between earth and heaven.  We know that when the young, the
beautiful, and good, are visited with sickness, their pure spirits
insensibly turn towards their bright home of lasting rest; we know,
Heaven help us! that the best and fairest of our kind, too often fade
in blooming.'

There were tears in the eyes of the gentle girl, as these words were
spoken; and when one fell upon the flower over which she bent, and
glistened brightly in its cup, making it more beautiful, it seemed as
though the outpouring of her fresh young heart, claimed kindred
naturally, with the loveliest things in nature.

'A creature,' continued the young man, passionately, 'a creature as
fair and innocent of guile as one of God's own angels, fluttered
between life and death.  Oh! who could hope, when the distant world to
which she was akin, half opened to her view, that she would return to
the sorrow and calamity of this!  Rose, Rose, to know that you were
passing away like some soft shadow, which a light from above, casts
upon the earth; to have no hope that you would be spared to those who
linger here; hardly to know a reason why you should be; to feel that
you belonged to that bright sphere whither so many of the fairest and
the best have winged their early flight; and yet to pray, amid all
these consolations, that you might be restored to those who loved
you--these were distractions almost too great to bear. They were mine,
by day and night; and with them, came such a rushing torrent of fears,
and apprehensions, and selfish regrets, lest you should die, and never
know how devotedly I loved you, as almost bore down sense and reason in
its course.  You recovered. Day by day, and almost hour by hour, some
drop of health came back, and mingling with the spent and feeble stream
of life which circulated languidly within you, swelled it again to a
high and rushing tide.  I have watched you change almost from death, to
life, with eyes that turned blind with their eagerness and deep
affection. Do not tell me that you wish I had lost this; for it has
softened my heart to all mankind.'

'I did not mean that,' said Rose, weeping; 'I only wish you had left
here, that you might have turned to high and noble pursuits again; to
pursuits well worthy of you.'

'There is no pursuit more worthy of me:  more worthy of the highest
nature that exists:  than the struggle to win such a heart as yours,'
said the young man, taking her hand. 'Rose, my own dear Rose!  For
years--for years--I have loved you; hoping to win my way to fame, and
then come proudly home and tell you it had been pursued only for you to
share; thinking, in my daydreams, how I would remind you, in that happy
moment, of the many silent tokens I had given of a boy's attachment,
and claim your hand, as in redemption of some old mute contract that
had been sealed between us!  That time has not arrived; but here, with
not fame won, and no young vision realised, I offer you the heart so
long your own, and stake my all upon the words with which you greet the
offer.'

'Your behaviour has ever been kind and noble.' said Rose, mastering the
emotions by which she was agitated.  'As you believe that I am not
insensible or ungrateful, so hear my answer.'

'It is, that I may endeavour to deserve you; it is, dear Rose?'

'It is,' replied Rose, 'that you must endeavour to forget me; not as
your old and dearly-attached companion, for that would wound me deeply;
but, as the object of your love.  Look into the world; think how many
hearts you would be proud to gain, are there. Confide some other
passion to me, if you will; I will be the truest, warmest, and most
faithful friend you have.'

There was a pause, during which, Rose, who had covered her face with
one hand, gave free vent to her tears.  Harry still retained the other.

'And your reasons, Rose,' he said, at length, in a low voice; 'your
reasons for this decision?'

'You have a right to know them,' rejoined Rose.  'You can say nothing
to alter my resolution.  It is a duty that I must perform.  I owe it,
alike to others, and to myself.'

'To yourself?'

'Yes, Harry.  I owe it to myself, that I, a friendless, portionless,
girl, with a blight upon my name, should not give your friends reason
to suspect that I had sordidly yielded to your first passion, and
fastened myself, a clog, on all your hopes and projects.  I owe it to
you and yours, to prevent you from opposing, in the warmth of your
generous nature, this great obstacle to your progress in the world.'

'If your inclinations chime with your sense of duty--' Harry began.

'They do not,' replied Rose, colouring deeply.

'Then you return my love?' said Harry.  'Say but that, dear Rose; say
but that; and soften the bitterness of this hard disappointment!'

'If I could have done so, without doing heavy wrong to him I loved,'
rejoined Rose, 'I could have--'

'Have received this declaration very differently?' said Harry. 'Do not
conceal that from me, at least, Rose.'

'I could,' said Rose.  'Stay!' she added, disengaging her hand, 'why
should we prolong this painful interview?  Most painful to me, and yet
productive of lasting happiness, notwithstanding; for it _will_ be
happiness to know that I once held the high place in your regard which
I now occupy, and every triumph you achieve in life will animate me
with new fortitude and firmness.  Farewell, Harry!  As we have met
to-day, we meet no more; but in other relations than those in which
this conversation have placed us, we may be long and happily entwined;
and may every blessing that the prayers of a true and earnest heart can
call down from the source of all truth and sincerity, cheer and prosper
you!'

'Another word, Rose,' said Harry.  'Your reason in your own words.
From your own lips, let me hear it!'

'The prospect before you,' answered Rose, firmly, 'is a brilliant one.
All the honours to which great talents and powerful connections can
help men in public life, are in store for you. But those connections
are proud; and I will neither mingle with such as may hold in scorn the
mother who gave me life; nor bring disgrace or failure on the son of
her who has so well supplied that mother's place.  In a word,' said the
young lady, turning away, as her temporary firmness forsook her, 'there
is a stain upon my name, which the world visits on innocent heads.  I
will carry it into no blood but my own; and the reproach shall rest
alone on me.'

'One word more, Rose.  Dearest Rose! one more!' cried Harry, throwing
himself before her.  'If I had been less--less fortunate, the world
would call it--if some obscure and peaceful life had been my
destiny--if I had been poor, sick, helpless--would you have turned from
me then?  Or has my probable advancement to riches and honour, given
this scruple birth?'

'Do not press me to reply,' answered Rose.  'The question does not
arise, and never will.  It is unfair, almost unkind, to urge it.'

'If your answer be what I almost dare to hope it is,' retorted Harry,
'it will shed a gleam of happiness upon my lonely way, and light the
path before me.  It is not an idle thing to do so much, by the
utterance of a few brief words, for one who loves you beyond all else.
Oh, Rose: in the name of my ardent and enduring attachment; in the name
of all I have suffered for you, and all you doom me to undergo; answer
me this one question!'

'Then, if your lot had been differently cast,' rejoined Rose; 'if you
had been even a little, but not so far, above me; if I could have been
a help and comfort to you in any humble scene of peace and retirement,
and not a blot and drawback in ambitious and distinguished crowds; I
should have been spared this trial.  I have every reason to be happy,
very happy, now; but then, Harry, I own I should have been happier.'

Busy recollections of old hopes, cherished as a girl, long ago, crowded
into the mind of Rose, while making this avowal; but they brought tears
with them, as old hopes will when they come back withered; and they
relieved her.

'I cannot help this weakness, and it makes my purpose stronger,' said
Rose, extending her hand.  'I must leave you now, indeed.'

'I ask one promise,' said Harry.  'Once, and only once more,--say
within a year, but it may be much sooner,--I may speak to you again on
this subject, for the last time.'

'Not to press me to alter my right determination,' replied Rose, with a
melancholy smile; 'it will be useless.'

'No,' said Harry; 'to hear you repeat it, if you will--finally repeat
it!  I will lay at your feet, whatever of station of fortune I may
possess; and if you still adhere to your present resolution, will not
seek, by word or act, to change it.'

'Then let it be so,' rejoined Rose; 'it is but one pang the more, and
by that time I may be enabled to bear it better.'

She extended her hand again.  But the young man caught her to his
bosom; and imprinting one kiss on her beautiful forehead, hurried from
the room.



CHAPTER XXXVI

IS A VERY SHORT ONE, AND MAY APPEAR OF NO GREAT IMPORTANCE IN ITS
PLACE, BUT IT SHOULD BE READ NOTWITHSTANDING, AS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST,
AND A KEY TO ONE THAT WILL FOLLOW WHEN ITS TIME ARRIVES

'And so you are resolved to be my travelling companion this morning;
eh?' said the doctor, as Harry Maylie joined him and Oliver at the
breakfast-table.  'Why, you are not in the same mind or intention two
half-hours together!'

'You will tell me a different tale one of these days,' said Harry,
colouring without any perceptible reason.

'I hope I may have good cause to do so,' replied Mr. Losberne; 'though
I confess I don't think I shall.  But yesterday morning you had made up
your mind, in a great hurry, to stay here, and to accompany your
mother, like a dutiful son, to the sea-side. Before noon, you announce
that you are going to do me the honour of accompanying me as far as I
go, on your road to London.  And at night, you urge me, with great
mystery, to start before the ladies are stirring; the consequence of
which is, that young Oliver here is pinned down to his breakfast when
he ought to be ranging the meadows after botanical phenomena of all
kinds. Too bad, isn't it, Oliver?'

'I should have been very sorry not to have been at home when you and
Mr. Maylie went away, sir,' rejoined Oliver.

'That's a fine fellow,' said the doctor; 'you shall come and see me
when you return.  But, to speak seriously, Harry; has any communication
from the great nobs produced this sudden anxiety on your part to be
gone?'

'The great nobs,' replied Harry, 'under which designation, I presume,
you include my most stately uncle, have not communicated with me at
all, since I have been here; nor, at this time of the year, is it
likely that anything would occur to render necessary my immediate
attendance among them.'

'Well,' said the doctor, 'you are a queer fellow.  But of course they
will get you into parliament at the election before Christmas, and
these sudden shiftings and changes are no bad preparation for political
life.  There's something in that.  Good training is always desirable,
whether the race be for place, cup, or sweepstakes.'

Harry Maylie looked as if he could have followed up this short dialogue
by one or two remarks that would have staggered the doctor not a
little; but he contented himself with saying, 'We shall see,' and
pursued the subject no farther.  The post-chaise drove up to the door
shortly afterwards; and Giles coming in for the luggage, the good
doctor bustled out, to see it packed.

'Oliver,' said Harry Maylie, in a low voice, 'let me speak a word with
you.'

Oliver walked into the window-recess to which Mr. Maylie beckoned him;
much surprised at the mixture of sadness and boisterous spirits, which
his whole behaviour displayed.

'You can write well now?' said Harry, laying his hand upon his arm.

'I hope so, sir,' replied Oliver.

'I shall not be at home again, perhaps for some time; I wish you would
write to me--say once a fort-night:  every alternate Monday: to the
General Post Office in London.  Will you?'

'Oh! certainly, sir; I shall be proud to do it,' exclaimed Oliver,
greatly delighted with the commission.

'I should like to know how--how my mother and Miss Maylie are,' said
the young man; 'and you can fill up a sheet by telling me what walks
you take, and what you talk about, and whether she--they, I mean--seem
happy and quite well. You understand me?'

'Oh! quite, sir, quite,' replied Oliver.

'I would rather you did not mention it to them,' said Harry, hurrying
over his words; 'because it might make my mother anxious to write to me
oftener, and it is a trouble and worry to her. Let it be a secret
between you and me; and mind you tell me everything!  I depend upon
you.'

Oliver, quite elated and honoured by a sense of his importance,
faithfully promised to be secret and explicit in his communications.
Mr. Maylie took leave of him, with many assurances of his regard and
protection.

The doctor was in the chaise; Giles (who, it had been arranged, should
be left behind) held the door open in his hand; and the women-servants
were in the garden, looking on.  Harry cast one slight glance at the
latticed window, and jumped into the carriage.

'Drive on!' he cried, 'hard, fast, full gallop!  Nothing short of
flying will keep pace with me, to-day.'

'Halloa!' cried the doctor, letting down the front glass in a great
hurry, and shouting to the postillion; 'something very short of flying
will keep pace with _me_.  Do you hear?'

Jingling and clattering, till distance rendered its noise inaudible,
and its rapid progress only perceptible to the eye, the vehicle wound
its way along the road, almost hidden in a cloud of dust: now wholly
disappearing, and now becoming visible again, as intervening objects,
or the intricacies of the way, permitted.  It was not until even the
dusty cloud was no longer to be seen, that the gazers dispersed.

And there was one looker-on, who remained with eyes fixed upon the spot
where the carriage had disappeared, long after it was many miles away;
for, behind the white curtain which had shrouded her from view when
Harry raised his eyes towards the window, sat Rose herself.

'He seems in high spirits and happy,' she said, at length. 'I feared
for a time he might be otherwise.  I was mistaken.  I am very, very
glad.'

Tears are signs of gladness as well as grief; but those which coursed
down Rose's face, as she sat pensively at the window, still gazing in
the same direction, seemed to tell more of sorrow than of joy.



CHAPTER XXXVII

IN WHICH THE READER MAY PERCEIVE A CONTRAST, NOT UNCOMMON IN
MATRIMONIAL CASES

Mr. Bumble sat in the workhouse parlour, with his eyes moodily fixed on
the cheerless grate, whence, as it was summer time, no brighter gleam
proceeded, than the reflection of certain sickly rays of the sun, which
were sent back from its cold and shining surface.  A paper fly-cage
dangled from the ceiling, to which he occasionally raised his eyes in
gloomy thought; and, as the heedless insects hovered round the gaudy
net-work, Mr. Bumble would heave a deep sigh, while a more gloomy
shadow overspread his countenance.  Mr. Bumble was meditating; it might
be that the insects brought to mind, some painful passage in his own
past life.

Nor was Mr. Bumble's gloom the only thing calculated to awaken a
pleasing melancholy in the bosom of a spectator. There were not wanting
other appearances, and those closely connected with his own person,
which announced that a great change had taken place in the position of
his affairs.  The laced coat, and the cocked hat; where were they?  He
still wore knee-breeches, and dark cotton stockings on his nether
limbs; but they were not _the_ breeches.  The coat was wide-skirted;
and in that respect like _the_ coat, but, oh how different!  The mighty
cocked hat was replaced by a modest round one.  Mr. Bumble was no
longer a beadle.

There are some promotions in life, which, independent of the more
substantial rewards they offer, require peculiar value and dignity from
the coats and waistcoats connected with them.  A field-marshal has his
uniform; a bishop his silk apron; a counsellor his silk gown; a beadle
his cocked hat.  Strip the bishop of his apron, or the beadle of his
hat and lace; what are they?  Men.  Mere men.  Dignity, and even
holiness too, sometimes, are more questions of coat and waistcoat than
some people imagine.

Mr. Bumble had married Mrs. Corney, and was master of the workhouse.
Another beadle had come into power.  On him the cocked hat, gold-laced
coat, and staff, had all three descended.

'And to-morrow two months it was done!' said Mr. Bumble, with a sigh.
'It seems a age.'

Mr. Bumble might have meant that he had concentrated a whole existence
of happiness into the short space of eight weeks; but the sigh--there
was a vast deal of meaning in the sigh.

'I sold myself,' said Mr. Bumble, pursuing the same train of relection,
'for six teaspoons, a pair of sugar-tongs, and a milk-pot; with a small
quantity of second-hand furniture, and twenty pound in money.  I went
very reasonable.  Cheap, dirt cheap!'

'Cheap!' cried a shrill voice in Mr. Bumble's ear: 'you would have been
dear at any price; and dear enough I paid for you, Lord above knows
that!'

Mr. Bumble turned, and encountered the face of his interesting consort,
who, imperfectly comprehending the few words she had overheard of his
complaint, had hazarded the foregoing remark at a venture.

'Mrs. Bumble, ma'am!' said Mr. Bumble, with a sentimental sternness.

'Well!' cried the lady.

'Have the goodness to look at me,' said Mr. Bumble, fixing his eyes
upon her.  (If she stands such a eye as that,' said Mr. Bumble to
himself, 'she can stand anything.  It is a eye I never knew to fail
with paupers.  If it fails with her, my power is gone.')

Whether an exceedingly small expansion of eye be sufficient to quell
paupers, who, being lightly fed, are in no very high condition; or
whether the late Mrs. Corney was particularly proof against eagle
glances; are matters of opinion.  The matter of fact, is, that the
matron was in no way overpowered by Mr. Bumble's scowl, but, on the
contrary, treated it with great disdain, and even raised a laugh
thereat, which sounded as though it were genuine.

On hearing this most unexpected sound, Mr. Bumble looked, first
incredulous, and afterwards amazed.  He then relapsed into his former
state; nor did he rouse himself until his attention was again awakened
by the voice of his partner.

'Are you going to sit snoring there, all day?' inquired Mrs. Bumble.

'I am going to sit here, as long as I think proper, ma'am,' rejoined
Mr. Bumble; 'and although I was _not_ snoring, I shall snore, gape,
sneeze, laugh, or cry, as the humour strikes me; such being my
prerogative.'

'_Your_ prerogative!' sneered Mrs. Bumble, with ineffable contempt.

'I said the word, ma'am,' said Mr. Bumble.  'The prerogative of a man
is to command.'

'And what's the prerogative of a woman, in the name of Goodness?' cried
the relict of Mr. Corney deceased.

'To obey, ma'am,' thundered Mr. Bumble.  'Your late unfortunate husband
should have taught it you; and then, perhaps, he might have been alive
now.  I wish he was, poor man!'

Mrs. Bumble, seeing at a glance, that the decisive moment had now
arrived, and that a blow struck for the mastership on one side or
other, must necessarily be final and conclusive, no sooner heard this
allusion to the dead and gone, than she dropped into a chair, and with
a loud scream that Mr. Bumble was a hard-hearted brute, fell into a
paroxysm of tears.

But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul;
his heart was waterproof.  Like washable beaver hats that improve with
rain, his nerves were rendered stouter and more vigorous, by showers of
tears, which, being tokens of weakness, and so far tacit admissions of
his own power, pleased and exalted him.  He eyed his good lady with
looks of great satisfaction, and begged, in an encouraging manner, that
she should cry her hardest:  the exercise being looked upon, by the
faculty, as strongly conducive to health.

'It opens the lungs, washes the countenance, exercises the eyes, and
softens down the temper,' said Mr. Bumble.  'So cry away.'

As he discharged himself of this pleasantry, Mr. Bumble took his hat
from a peg, and putting it on, rather rakishly, on one side, as a man
might, who felt he had asserted his superiority in a becoming manner,
thrust his hands into his pockets, and sauntered towards the door, with
much ease and waggishness depicted in his whole appearance.

Now, Mrs. Corney that was, had tried the tears, because they were less
troublesome than a manual assault; but, she was quite prepared to make
trial of the latter mode of proceeding, as Mr. Bumble was not long in
discovering.

The first proof he experienced of the fact, was conveyed in a hollow
sound, immediately succeeded by the sudden flying off of his hat to the
opposite end of the room.  This preliminary proceeding laying bare his
head, the expert lady, clasping him tightly round the throat with one
hand, inflicted a shower of blows (dealt with singular vigour and
dexterity) upon it with the other.  This done, she created a little
variety by scratching his face, and tearing his hair; and, having, by
this time, inflicted as much punishment as she deemed necessary for the
offence, she pushed him over a chair, which was luckily well situated
for the purpose:  and defied him to talk about his prerogative again,
if he dared.

'Get up!' said Mrs. Bumble, in a voice of command.  'And take yourself
away from here, unless you want me to do something desperate.'

Mr. Bumble rose with a very rueful countenance:  wondering much what
something desperate might be.  Picking up his hat, he looked towards
the door.

'Are you going?' demanded Mrs. Bumble.

'Certainly, my dear, certainly,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, making a quicker
motion towards the door.  'I didn't intend to--I'm going, my dear!  You
are so very violent, that really I--'

At this instant, Mrs. Bumble stepped hastily forward to replace the
carpet, which had been kicked up in the scuffle.  Mr. Bumble
immediately darted out of the room, without bestowing another thought
on his unfinished sentence:  leaving the late Mrs. Corney in full
possession of the field.

Mr. Bumble was fairly taken by surprise, and fairly beaten.  He had a
decided propensity for bullying:  derived no inconsiderable pleasure
from the exercise of petty cruelty; and, consequently, was (it is
needless to say) a coward.  This is by no means a disparagement to his
character; for many official personages, who are held in high respect
and admiration, are the victims of similar infirmities.  The remark is
made, indeed, rather in his favour than otherwise, and with a view of
impressing the reader with a just sense of his qualifications for
office.

But, the measure of his degradation was not yet full.  After making a
tour of the house, and thinking, for the first time, that the poor-laws
really were too hard on people; and that men who ran away from their
wives, leaving them chargeable to the parish, ought, in justice to be
visited with no punishment at all, but rather rewarded as meritorious
individuals who had suffered much; Mr. Bumble came to a room where some
of the female paupers were usually employed in washing the parish
linen:  when the sound of voices in conversation, now proceeded.

'Hem!' said Mr. Bumble, summoning up all his native dignity. 'These
women at least shall continue to respect the prerogative. Hallo! hallo
there!  What do you mean by this noise, you hussies?'

With these words, Mr. Bumble opened the door, and walked in with a very
fierce and angry manner:  which was at once exchanged for a most
humiliated and cowering air, as his eyes unexpectedly rested on the
form of his lady wife.

'My dear,' said Mr. Bumble, 'I didn't know you were here.'

'Didn't know I was here!' repeated Mrs. Bumble.  'What do _you_ do
here?'

'I thought they were talking rather too much to be doing their work
properly, my dear,' replied Mr. Bumble:  glancing distractedly at a
couple of old women at the wash-tub, who were comparing notes of
admiration at the workhouse-master's humility.

'_You_ thought they were talking too much?' said Mrs. Bumble. 'What
business is it of yours?'

'Why, my dear--' urged Mr. Bumble submissively.

'What business is it of yours?' demanded Mrs. Bumble, again.

'It's very true, you're matron here, my dear,' submitted Mr. Bumble;
'but I thought you mightn't be in the way just then.'

'I'll tell you what, Mr. Bumble,' returned his lady.  'We don't want
any of your interference.  You're a great deal too fond of poking your
nose into things that don't concern you, making everybody in the house
laugh, the moment your back is turned, and making yourself look like a
fool every hour in the day.  Be off; come!'

Mr. Bumble, seeing with excruciating feelings, the delight of the two
old paupers, who were tittering together most rapturously, hesitated
for an instant.  Mrs. Bumble, whose patience brooked no delay, caught
up a bowl of soap-suds, and motioning him towards the door, ordered him
instantly to depart, on pain of receiving the contents upon his portly
person.

What could Mr. Bumble do?  He looked dejectedly round, and slunk away;
and, as he reached the door, the titterings of the paupers broke into a
shrill chuckle of irrepressible delight.  It wanted but this.  He was
degraded in their eyes; he had lost caste and station before the very
paupers; he had fallen from all the height and pomp of beadleship, to
the lowest depth of the most snubbed hen-peckery.

'All in two months!' said Mr. Bumble, filled with dismal thoughts.
'Two months!  No more than two months ago, I was not only my own
master, but everybody else's, so far as the porochial workhouse was
concerned, and now!--'

It was too much.  Mr. Bumble boxed the ears of the boy who opened the
gate for him (for he had reached the portal in his reverie); and
walked, distractedly, into the street.

He walked up one street, and down another, until exercise had abated
the first passion of his grief; and then the revulsion of feeling made
him thirsty.  He passed a great many public-houses; but, at length
paused before one in a by-way, whose parlour, as he gathered from a
hasty peep over the blinds, was deserted, save by one solitary
customer.  It began to rain, heavily, at the moment.  This determined
him.  Mr. Bumble stepped in; and ordering something to drink, as he
passed the bar, entered the apartment into which he had looked from the
street.

The man who was seated there, was tall and dark, and wore a large
cloak.  He had the air of a stranger; and seemed, by a certain
haggardness in his look, as well as by the dusty soils on his dress, to
have travelled some distance.  He eyed Bumble askance, as he entered,
but scarcely deigned to nod his head in acknowledgment of his
salutation.

Mr. Bumble had quite dignity enough for two; supposing even that the
stranger had been more familiar:  so he drank his gin-and-water in
silence, and read the paper with great show of pomp and circumstance.

It so happened, however: as it will happen very often, when men fall
into company under such circumstances:  that Mr. Bumble felt, every now
and then, a powerful inducement, which he could not resist, to steal a
look at the stranger:  and that whenever he did so, he withdrew his
eyes, in some confusion, to find that the stranger was at that moment
stealing a look at him.  Mr. Bumble's awkwardness was enhanced by the
very remarkable expression of the stranger's eye, which was keen and
bright, but shadowed by a scowl of distrust and suspicion, unlike
anything he had ever observed before, and repulsive to behold.

When they had encountered each other's glance several times in this
way, the stranger, in a harsh, deep voice, broke silence.

'Were you looking for me,' he said, 'when you peered in at the window?'

'Not that I am aware of, unless you're Mr.--'  Here Mr. Bumble stopped
short; for he was curious to know the stranger's name, and thought in
his impatience, he might supply the blank.

'I see you were not,' said the stranger; an expression of quiet sarcasm
playing about his mouth; 'or you have known my name.  You don't know
it.  I would recommend you not to ask for it.'

'I meant no harm, young man,' observed Mr. Bumble, majestically.

'And have done none,' said the stranger.

Another silence succeeded this short dialogue:  which was again broken
by the stranger.

'I have seen you before, I think?' said he.  'You were differently
dressed at that time, and I only passed you in the street, but I should
know you again.  You were beadle here, once; were you not?'

'I was,' said Mr. Bumble, in some surprise; 'porochial beadle.'

'Just so,' rejoined the other, nodding his head.  'It was in that
character I saw you.  What are you now?'

'Master of the workhouse,' rejoined Mr. Bumble, slowly and
impressively, to check any undue familiarity the stranger might
otherwise assume.  'Master of the workhouse, young man!'

'You have the same eye to your own interest, that you always had, I
doubt not?' resumed the stranger, looking keenly into Mr. Bumble's
eyes, as he raised them in astonishment at the question.

'Don't scruple to answer freely, man.  I know you pretty well, you see.'

'I suppose, a married man,' replied Mr. Bumble, shading his eyes with
his hand, and surveying the stranger, from head to foot, in evident
perplexity, 'is not more averse to turning an honest penny when he can,
than a single one.  Porochial officers are not so well paid that they
can afford to refuse any little extra fee, when it comes to them in a
civil and proper manner.'

The stranger smiled, and nodded his head again: as much to say, he had
not mistaken his man; then rang the bell.

'Fill this glass again,' he said, handing Mr. Bumble's empty tumbler to
the landlord.  'Let it be strong and hot.  You like it so, I suppose?'

'Not too strong,' replied Mr. Bumble, with a delicate cough.

'You understand what that means, landlord!' said the stranger, drily.

The host smiled, disappeared, and shortly afterwards returned with a
steaming jorum: of which, the first gulp brought the water into Mr.
Bumble's eyes.

'Now listen to me,' said the stranger, after closing the door and
window.  'I came down to this place, to-day, to find you out; and, by
one of those chances which the devil throws in the way of his friends
sometimes, you walked into the very room I was sitting in, while you
were uppermost in my mind.  I want some information from you.  I don't
ask you to give it for nothing, slight as it is.  Put up that, to begin
with.'

As he spoke, he pushed a couple of sovereigns across the table to his
companion, carefully, as though unwilling that the chinking of money
should be heard without.  When Mr. Bumble had scrupulously examined the
coins, to see that they were genuine, and had put them up, with much
satisfaction, in his waistcoat-pocket, he went on:

'Carry your memory back--let me see--twelve years, last winter.'

'It's a long time,' said Mr. Bumble.  'Very good.  I've done it.'

'The scene, the workhouse.'

'Good!'

'And the time, night.'

'Yes.'

'And the place, the crazy hole, wherever it was, in which miserable
drabs brought forth the life and health so often denied to
themselves--gave birth to puling children for the parish to rear; and
hid their shame, rot 'em in the grave!'

'The lying-in room, I suppose?' said Mr. Bumble, not quite following
the stranger's excited description.

'Yes,' said the stranger.  'A boy was born there.'

'A many boys,' observed Mr. Bumble, shaking his head, despondingly.

'A murrain on the young devils!' cried the stranger; 'I speak of one; a
meek-looking, pale-faced boy, who was apprenticed down here, to a
coffin-maker--I wish he had made his coffin, and screwed his body in
it--and who afterwards ran away to London, as it was supposed.

'Why, you mean Oliver!  Young Twist!' said Mr. Bumble; 'I remember him,
of course.  There wasn't a obstinater young rascal--'

'It's not of him I want to hear; I've heard enough of him,' said the
stranger, stopping Mr. Bumble in the outset of a tirade on the subject
of poor Oliver's vices.  'It's of a woman; the hag that nursed his
mother.  Where is she?'

'Where is she?' said Mr. Bumble, whom the gin-and-water had rendered
facetious.  'It would be hard to tell.  There's no midwifery there,
whichever place she's gone to; so I suppose she's out of employment,
anyway.'

'What do you mean?' demanded the stranger, sternly.

'That she died last winter,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.

The man looked fixedly at him when he had given this information, and
although he did not withdraw his eyes for some time afterwards, his
gaze gradually became vacant and abstracted, and he seemed lost in
thought.  For some time, he appeared doubtful whether he ought to be
relieved or disappointed by the intelligence; but at length he breathed
more freely; and withdrawing his eyes, observed that it was no great
matter. With that he rose, as if to depart.

But Mr. Bumble was cunning enough; and he at once saw that an
opportunity was opened, for the lucrative disposal of some secret in
the possession of his better half.  He well remembered the night of old
Sally's death, which the occurrences of that day had given him good
reason to recollect, as the occasion on which he had proposed to Mrs.
Corney; and although that lady had never confided to him the disclosure
of which she had been the solitary witness, he had heard enough to know
that it related to something that had occurred in the old woman's
attendance, as workhouse nurse, upon the young mother of Oliver Twist.
Hastily calling this circumstance to mind, he informed the stranger,
with an air of mystery, that one woman had been closeted with the old
harridan shortly before she died; and that she could, as he had reason
to believe, throw some light on the subject of his inquiry.

'How can I find her?' said the stranger, thrown off his guard; and
plainly showing that all his fears (whatever they were) were aroused
afresh by the intelligence.

'Only through me,' rejoined Mr. Bumble.

'When?' cried the stranger, hastily.

'To-morrow,' rejoined Bumble.

'At nine in the evening,' said the stranger, producing a scrap of
paper, and writing down upon it, an obscure address by the water-side,
in characters that betrayed his agitation; 'at nine in the evening,
bring her to me there.  I needn't tell you to be secret.  It's your
interest.'

With these words, he led the way to the door, after stopping to pay for
the liquor that had been drunk.  Shortly remarking that their roads
were different, he departed, without more ceremony than an emphatic
repetition of the hour of appointment for the following night.

On glancing at the address, the parochial functionary observed that it
contained no name.  The stranger had not gone far, so he made after him
to ask it.

'What do you want?' cried the man, turning quickly round, as Bumble
touched him on the arm.  'Following me?'

'Only to ask a question,' said the other, pointing to the scrap of
paper.  'What name am I to ask for?'

'Monks!' rejoined the man; and strode hastily, away.



CHAPTER XXXVIII

CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS. BUMBLE, AND
MR. MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW

It was a dull, close, overcast summer evening.  The clouds, which had
been threatening all day, spread out in a dense and sluggish mass of
vapour, already yielded large drops of rain, and seemed to presage a
violent thunder-storm, when Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, turning out of the
main street of the town, directed their course towards a scattered
little colony of ruinous houses, distant from it some mile and a-half,
or thereabouts, and erected on a low unwholesome swamp, bordering upon
the river.

They were both wrapped in old and shabby outer garments, which might,
perhaps, serve the double purpose of protecting their persons from the
rain, and sheltering them from observation.  The husband carried a
lantern, from which, however, no light yet shone; and trudged on, a few
paces in front, as though--the way being dirty--to give his wife the
benefit of treading in his heavy footprints.  They went on, in profound
silence; every now and then, Mr. Bumble relaxed his pace, and turned
his head as if to make sure that his helpmate was following; then,
discovering that she was close at his heels, he mended his rate of
walking, and proceeded, at a considerable increase of speed, towards
their place of destination.

This was far from being a place of doubtful character; for it had long
been known as the residence of none but low ruffians, who, under
various pretences of living by their labour, subsisted chiefly on
plunder and crime.  It was a collection of mere hovels:  some, hastily
built with loose bricks: others, of old worm-eaten ship-timber: jumbled
together without any attempt at order or arrangement, and planted, for
the most part, within a few feet of the river's bank.  A few leaky
boats drawn up on the mud, and made fast to the dwarf wall which
skirted it:  and here and there an oar or coil of rope:  appeared, at
first, to indicate that the inhabitants of these miserable cottages
pursued some avocation on the river; but a glance at the shattered and
useless condition of the articles thus displayed, would have led a
passer-by, without much difficulty, to the conjecture that they were
disposed there, rather for the preservation of appearances, than with
any view to their being actually employed.

In the heart of this cluster of huts; and skirting the river, which its
upper stories overhung; stood a large building, formerly used as a
manufactory of some kind.  It had, in its day, probably furnished
employment to the inhabitants of the surrounding tenements.  But it had
long since gone to ruin.  The rat, the worm, and the action of the
damp, had weakened and rotted the piles on which it stood; and a
considerable portion of the building had already sunk down into the
water; while the remainder, tottering and bending over the dark stream,
seemed to wait a favourable opportunity of following its old companion,
and involving itself in the same fate.

It was before this ruinous building that the worthy couple paused, as
the first peal of distant thunder reverberated in the air, and the rain
commenced pouring violently down.

'The place should be somewhere here,' said Bumble, consulting a scrap
of paper he held in his hand.

'Halloa there!' cried a voice from above.

Following the sound, Mr. Bumble raised his head and descried a man
looking out of a door, breast-high, on the second story.

'Stand still, a minute,' cried the voice; 'I'll be with you directly.'
With which the head disappeared, and the door closed.

'Is that the man?' asked Mr. Bumble's good lady.

Mr. Bumble nodded in the affirmative.

'Then, mind what I told you,' said the matron: 'and be careful to say
as little as you can, or you'll betray us at once.'

Mr. Bumble, who had eyed the building with very rueful looks, was
apparently about to express some doubts relative to the advisability of
proceeding any further with the enterprise just then, when he was
prevented by the appearance of Monks: who opened a small door, near
which they stood, and beckoned them inwards.

'Come in!' he cried impatiently, stamping his foot upon the ground.
'Don't keep me here!'

The woman, who had hesitated at first, walked boldly in, without any
other invitation.  Mr. Bumble, who was ashamed or afraid to lag behind,
followed:  obviously very ill at ease and with scarcely any of that
remarkable dignity which was usually his chief characteristic.

'What the devil made you stand lingering there, in the wet?' said
Monks, turning round, and addressing Bumble, after he had bolted the
door behind them.

'We--we were only cooling ourselves,' stammered Bumble, looking
apprehensively about him.

'Cooling yourselves!' retorted Monks.  'Not all the rain that ever
fell, or ever will fall, will put as much of hell's fire out, as a man
can carry about with him.  You won't cool yourself so easily; don't
think it!'

With this agreeable speech, Monks turned short upon the matron, and
bent his gaze upon her, till even she, who was not easily cowed, was
fain to withdraw her eyes, and turn them towards the ground.

'This is the woman, is it?' demanded Monks.

'Hem!  That is the woman,' replied Mr. Bumble, mindful of his wife's
caution.

'You think women never can keep secrets, I suppose?' said the matron,
interposing, and returning, as she spoke, the searching look of Monks.

'I know they will always keep _one_ till it's found out,' said Monks.

'And what may that be?' asked the matron.

'The loss of their own good name,' replied Monks.  'So, by the same
rule, if a woman's a party to a secret that might hang or transport
her, I'm not afraid of her telling it to anybody; not I!  Do you
understand, mistress?'

'No,' rejoined the matron, slightly colouring as she spoke.

'Of course you don't!' said Monks.  'How should you?'

Bestowing something half-way between a smile and a frown upon his two
companions, and again beckoning them to follow him, the man hastened
across the apartment, which was of considerable extent, but low in the
roof.  He was preparing to ascend a steep staircase, or rather ladder,
leading to another floor of warehouses above:  when a bright flash of
lightning streamed down the aperture, and a peal of thunder followed,
which shook the crazy building to its centre.

'Hear it!' he cried, shrinking back.  'Hear it!  Rolling and crashing
on as if it echoed through a thousand caverns where the devils were
hiding from it.  I hate the sound!'

He remained silent for a few moments; and then, removing his hands
suddenly from his face, showed, to the unspeakable discomposure of Mr.
Bumble, that it was much distorted and discoloured.

'These fits come over me, now and then,' said Monks, observing his
alarm; 'and thunder sometimes brings them on. Don't mind me now; it's
all over for this once.'

Thus speaking, he led the way up the ladder; and hastily closing the
window-shutter of the room into which it led, lowered a lantern which
hung at the end of a rope and pulley passed through one of the heavy
beams in the ceiling:  and which cast a dim light upon an old table and
three chairs that were placed beneath it.

'Now,' said Monks, when they had all three seated themselves, 'the
sooner we come to our business, the better for all.  The woman know
what it is, does she?'

The question was addressed to Bumble; but his wife anticipated the
reply, by intimating that she was perfectly acquainted with it.

'He is right in saying that you were with this hag the night she died;
and that she told you something--'

'About the mother of the boy you named,' replied the matron
interrupting him.  'Yes.'

'The first question is, of what nature was her communication?' said
Monks.

'That's the second,' observed the woman with much deliberation. 'The
first is, what may the communication be worth?'

'Who the devil can tell that, without knowing of what kind it is?'
asked Monks.

'Nobody better than you, I am persuaded,' answered Mrs. Bumble: who did
not want for spirit, as her yoke-fellow could abundantly testify.

'Humph!' said Monks significantly, and with a look of eager inquiry;
'there may be money's worth to get, eh?'

'Perhaps there may,' was the composed reply.

'Something that was taken from her,' said Monks.  'Something that she
wore.  Something that--'

'You had better bid,' interrupted Mrs. Bumble.  'I have heard enough,
already, to assure me that you are the man I ought to talk to.'

Mr. Bumble, who had not yet been admitted by his better half into any
greater share of the secret than he had originally possessed, listened
to this dialogue with outstretched neck and distended eyes:  which he
directed towards his wife and Monks, by turns, in undisguised
astonishment; increased, if possible, when the latter sternly demanded,
what sum was required for the disclosure.

'What's it worth to you?' asked the woman, as collectedly as before.

'It may be nothing; it may be twenty pounds,' replied Monks. 'Speak
out, and let me know which.'

'Add five pounds to the sum you have named; give me five-and-twenty
pounds in gold,' said the woman; 'and I'll tell you all I know.  Not
before.'

'Five-and-twenty pounds!' exclaimed Monks, drawing back.

'I spoke as plainly as I could,' replied Mrs. Bumble.  'It's not a
large sum, either.'

'Not a large sum for a paltry secret, that may be nothing when it's
told!' cried Monks impatiently; 'and which has been lying dead for
twelve years past or more!'

'Such matters keep well, and, like good wine, often double their value
in course of time,' answered the matron, still preserving the resolute
indifference she had assumed.  'As to lying dead, there are those who
will lie dead for twelve thousand years to come, or twelve million, for
anything you or I know, who will tell strange tales at last!'

'What if I pay it for nothing?' asked Monks, hesitating.

'You can easily take it away again,' replied the matron. 'I am but a
woman; alone here; and unprotected.'

'Not alone, my dear, nor unprotected, neither,' submitted Mr. Bumble,
in a voice tremulous with fear: '_I_ am here, my dear. And besides,'
said Mr. Bumble, his teeth chattering as he spoke, 'Mr. Monks is too
much of a gentleman to attempt any violence on porochial persons.  Mr.
Monks is aware that I am not a young man, my dear, and also that I am a
little run to seed, as I may say; bu he has heerd:  I say I have no
doubt Mr. Monks has heerd, my dear:  that I am a very determined
officer, with very uncommon strength, if I'm once roused.  I only want
a little rousing; that's all.'

As Mr. Bumble spoke, he made a melancholy feint of grasping his lantern
with fierce determination; and plainly showed, by the alarmed
expression of every feature, that he _did_ want a little rousing, and
not a little, prior to making any very warlike demonstration: unless,
indeed, against paupers, or other person or persons trained down for
the purpose.

'You are a fool,' said Mrs. Bumble, in reply; 'and had better hold your
tongue.'

'He had better have cut it out, before he came, if he can't speak in a
lower tone,' said Monks, grimly.  'So!  He's your husband, eh?'

'He my husband!' tittered the matron, parrying the question.

'I thought as much, when you came in,' rejoined Monks, marking the
angry glance which the lady darted at her spouse as she spoke.  'So
much the better; I have less hesitation in dealing with two people,
when I find that there's only one will between them.  I'm in earnest.
See here!'

He thrust his hand into a side-pocket; and producing a canvas bag, told
out twenty-five sovereigns on the table, and pushed them over to the
woman.

'Now,' he said, 'gather them up; and when this cursed peal of thunder,
which I feel is coming up to break over the house-top, is gone, let's
hear your story.'

The thunder, which seemed in fact much nearer, and to shiver and break
almost over their heads, having subsided, Monks, raising his face from
the table, bent forward to listen to what the woman should say.  The
faces of the three nearly touched, as the two men leant over the small
table in their eagerness to hear, and the woman also leant forward to
render her whisper audible.  The sickly rays of the suspended lantern
falling directly upon them, aggravated the paleness and anxiety of
their countenances: which, encircled by the deepest gloom and darkness,
looked ghastly in the extreme.

'When this woman, that we called old Sally, died,' the matron began,
'she and I were alone.'

'Was there no one by?' asked Monks, in the same hollow whisper; 'No
sick wretch or idiot in some other bed?  No one who could hear, and
might, by possibility, understand?'

'Not a soul,' replied the woman; 'we were alone.  _I_ stood alone
beside the body when death came over it.'

'Good,' said Monks, regarding her attentively.  'Go on.'

'She spoke of a young creature,' resumed the matron, 'who had brought a
child into the world some years before; not merely in the same room,
but in the same bed, in which she then lay dying.'

'Ay?' said Monks, with quivering lip, and glancing over his shoulder,
'Blood!  How things come about!'

'The child was the one you named to him last night,' said the matron,
nodding carelessly towards her husband; 'the mother this nurse had
robbed.'

'In life?' asked Monks.

'In death,' replied the woman, with something like a shudder. 'She
stole from the corpse, when it had hardly turned to one, that which the
dead mother had prayed her, with her last breath, to keep for the
infant's sake.'

'She sold it,' cried Monks, with desperate eagerness; 'did she sell it?
Where?  When?  To whom?  How long before?'

'As she told me, with great difficulty, that she had done this,' said
the matron, 'she fell back and died.'

'Without saying more?' cried Monks, in a voice which, from its very
suppression, seemed only the more furious.  'It's a lie! I'll not be
played with.  She said more.  I'll tear the life out of you both, but
I'll know what it was.'

'She didn't utter another word,' said the woman, to all appearance
unmoved (as Mr. Bumble was very far from being) by the strange man's
violence; 'but she clutched my gown, violently, with one hand, which
was partly closed; and when I saw that she was dead, and so removed the
hand by force, I found it clasped a scrap of dirty paper.'

'Which contained--' interposed Monks, stretching forward.

'Nothing,' replied the woman; 'it was a pawnbroker's duplicate.'

'For what?' demanded Monks.

'In good time I'll tell you.' said the woman.  'I judge that she had
kept the trinket, for some time, in the hope of turning it to better
account; and then had pawned it; and had saved or scraped together
money to pay the pawnbroker's interest year by year, and prevent its
running out; so that if anything came of it, it could still be
redeemed.  Nothing had come of it; and, as I tell you, she died with
the scrap of paper, all worn and tattered, in her hand.  The time was
out in two days; I thought something might one day come of it too; and
so redeemed the pledge.'

'Where is it now?' asked Monks quickly.

'_There_,' replied the woman.  And, as if glad to be relieved of it,
she hastily threw upon the table a small kid bag scarcely large enough
for a French watch, which Monks pouncing upon, tore open with trembling
hands.  It contained a little gold locket: in which were two locks of
hair, and a plain gold wedding-ring.

'It has the word "Agnes" engraved on the inside,' said the woman.

'There is a blank left for the surname; and then follows the date;
which is within a year before the child was born.  I found out that.'

'And this is all?' said Monks, after a close and eager scrutiny of the
contents of the little packet.

'All,' replied the woman.

Mr. Bumble drew a long breath, as if he were glad to find that the
story was over, and no mention made of taking the five-and-twenty
pounds back again; and now he took courage to wipe the perspiration
which had been trickling over his nose, unchecked, during the whole of
the previous dialogue.

'I know nothing of the story, beyond what I can guess at,' said his
wife addressing Monks, after a short silence; 'and I want to know
nothing; for it's safer not.  But I may ask you two questions, may I?'

'You may ask,' said Monks, with some show of surprise; 'but whether I
answer or not is another question.'

'--Which makes three,' observed Mr. Bumble, essaying a stroke of
facetiousness.

'Is that what you expected to get from me?' demanded the matron.

'It is,' replied Monks.  'The other question?'

'What do you propose to do with it?  Can it be used against me?'

'Never,' rejoined Monks; 'nor against me either.  See here!  But don't
move a step forward, or your life is not worth a bulrush.'

With these words, he suddenly wheeled the table aside, and pulling an
iron ring in the boarding, threw back a large trap-door which opened
close at Mr. Bumble's feet, and caused that gentleman to retire several
paces backward, with great precipitation.

'Look down,' said Monks, lowering the lantern into the gulf. 'Don't
fear me.  I could have let you down, quietly enough, when you were
seated over it, if that had been my game.'

Thus encouraged, the matron drew near to the brink; and even Mr. Bumble
himself, impelled by curiousity, ventured to do the same. The turbid
water, swollen by the heavy rain, was rushing rapidly on below; and all
other sounds were lost in the noise of its plashing and eddying against
the green and slimy piles.  There had once been a water-mill beneath;
the tide foaming and chafing round the few rotten stakes, and fragments
of machinery that yet remained, seemed to dart onward, with a new
impulse, when freed from the obstacles which had unavailingly attempted
to stem its headlong course.

'If you flung a man's body down there, where would it be to-morrow
morning?' said Monks, swinging the lantern to and fro in the dark well.

'Twelve miles down the river, and cut to pieces besides,' replied
Bumble, recoiling at the thought.

Monks drew the little packet from his breast, where he had hurriedly
thrust it; and tying it to a leaden weight, which had formed a part of
some pulley, and was lying on the floor, dropped it into the stream.
It fell straight, and true as a die; clove the water with a scarcely
audible splash; and was gone.

The three looking into each other's faces, seemed to breathe more
freely.

'There!' said Monks, closing the trap-door, which fell heavily back
into its former position.  'If the sea ever gives up its dead, as books
say it will, it will keep its gold and silver to itself, and that trash
among it.  We have nothing more to say, and may break up our pleasant
party.'

'By all means,' observed Mr. Bumble, with great alacrity.

'You'll keep a quiet tongue in your head, will you?' said Monks, with a
threatening look.  'I am not afraid of your wife.'

'You may depend upon me, young man,' answered Mr. Bumble, bowing
himself gradually towards the ladder, with excessive politeness. 'On
everybody's account, young man; on my own, you know, Mr. Monks.'

'I am glad, for your sake, to hear it,' remarked Monks. 'Light your
lantern!  And get away from here as fast as you can.'

It was fortunate that the conversation terminated at this point, or Mr.
Bumble, who had bowed himself to within six inches of the ladder, would
infallibly have pitched headlong into the room below.  He lighted his
lantern from that which Monks had detached from the rope, and now
carried in his hand; and making no effort to prolong the discourse,
descended in silence, followed by his wife.  Monks brought up the rear,
after pausing on the steps to satisfy himself that there were no other
sounds to be heard than the beating of the rain without, and the
rushing of the water.

They traversed the lower room, slowly, and with caution; for Monks
started at every shadow; and Mr. Bumble, holding his lantern a foot
above the ground, walked not only with remarkable care, but with a
marvellously light step for a gentleman of his figure:  looking
nervously about him for hidden trap-doors.  The gate at which they had
entered, was softly unfastened and opened by Monks; merely exchanging a
nod with their mysterious acquaintance, the married couple emerged into
the wet and darkness outside.

They were no sooner gone, than Monks, who appeared to entertain an
invincible repugnance to being left alone, called to a boy who had been
hidden somewhere below. Bidding him go first, and bear the light, he
returned to the chamber he had just quitted.



CHAPTER XXXIX

INTRODUCES SOME RESPECTABLE CHARACTERS WITH WHOM THE READER IS ALREADY
ACQUAINTED, AND SHOWS HOW MONKS AND THE JEW LAID THEIR WORTHY HEADS
TOGETHER

On the evening following that upon which the three worthies mentioned
in the last chapter, disposed of their little matter of business as
therein narrated, Mr. William Sikes, awakening from a nap, drowsily
growled forth an inquiry what time of night it was.

The room in which Mr. Sikes propounded this question, was not one of
those he had tenanted, previous to the Chertsey expedition, although it
was in the same quarter of the town, and was situated at no great
distance from his former lodgings.  It was not, in appearance, so
desirable a habitation as his old quarters:  being a mean and
badly-furnished apartment, of very limited size; lighted only by one
small window in the shelving roof, and abutting on a close and dirty
lane.  Nor were there wanting other indications of the good gentleman's
having gone down in the world of late:  for a great scarcity of
furniture, and total absence of comfort, together with the
disappearance of all such small moveables as spare clothes and linen,
bespoke a state of extreme poverty; while the meagre and attenuated
condition of Mr. Sikes himself would have fully confirmed these
symptoms, if they had stood in any need of corroboration.

The housebreaker was lying on the bed, wrapped in his white great-coat,
by way of dressing-gown, and displaying a set of features in no degree
improved by the cadaverous hue of illness, and the addition of a soiled
nightcap, and a stiff, black beard of a week's growth.  The dog sat at
the bedside:  now eyeing his master with a wistful look, and now
pricking his ears, and uttering a low growl as some noise in the
street, or in the lower part of the house, attracted his attention.
Seated by the window, busily engaged in patching an old waistcoat which
formed a portion of the robber's ordinary dress, was a female:  so pale
and reduced with watching and privation, that there would have been
considerable difficulty in recognising her as the same Nancy who has
already figured in this tale, but for the voice in which she replied to
Mr. Sikes's question.

'Not long gone seven,' said the girl.  'How do you feel to-night, Bill?'

'As weak as water,' replied Mr. Sikes, with an imprecation on his eyes
and limbs.  'Here; lend us a hand, and let me get off this thundering
bed anyhow.'

Illness had not improved Mr. Sikes's temper; for, as the girl raised
him up and led him to a chair, he muttered various curses on her
awkwardness, and struck her.

'Whining are you?' said Sikes.  'Come!  Don't stand snivelling there.
If you can't do anything better than that, cut off altogether.  D'ye
hear me?'

'I hear you,' replied the girl, turning her face aside, and forcing a
laugh.  'What fancy have you got in your head now?'

'Oh! you've thought better of it, have you?' growled Sikes, marking the
tear which trembled in her eye.  'All the better for you, you have.'

'Why, you don't mean to say, you'd be hard upon me to-night, Bill,'
said the girl, laying her hand upon his shoulder.

'No!' cried Mr. Sikes.  'Why not?'

'Such a number of nights,' said the girl, with a touch of woman's
tenderness, which communicated something like sweetness of tone, even
to her voice: 'such a number of nights as I've been patient with you,
nursing and caring for you, as if you had been a child: and this the
first that I've seen you like yourself; you wouldn't have served me as
you did just now, if you'd thought of that, would you?  Come, come; say
you wouldn't.'

'Well, then,' rejoined Mr. Sikes, 'I wouldn't.  Why, damme, now, the
girls's whining again!'

'It's nothing,' said the girl, throwing herself into a chair. 'Don't
you seem to mind me.  It'll soon be over.'

'What'll be over?' demanded Mr. Sikes in a savage voice. 'What foolery
are you up to, now, again?  Get up and bustle about, and don't come
over me with your woman's nonsense.'

At any other time, this remonstrance, and the tone in which it was
delivered, would have had the desired effect; but the girl being really
weak and exhausted, dropped her head over the back of the chair, and
fainted, before Mr. Sikes could get out a few of the appropriate oaths
with which, on similar occasions, he was accustomed to garnish his
threats.  Not knowing, very well, what to do, in this uncommon
emergency; for Miss Nancy's hysterics were usually of that violent kind
which the patient fights and struggles out of, without much assistance;
Mr. Sikes tried a little blasphemy: and finding that mode of treatment
wholly ineffectual, called for assistance.

'What's the matter here, my dear?' said Fagin, looking in.

'Lend a hand to the girl, can't you?' replied Sikes impatiently. 'Don't
stand chattering and grinning at me!'

With an exclamation of surprise, Fagin hastened to the girl's
assistance, while Mr. John Dawkins (otherwise the Artful Dodger), who
had followed his venerable friend into the room, hastily deposited on
the floor a bundle with which he was laden; and snatching a bottle from
the grasp of Master Charles Bates who came close at his heels, uncorked
it in a twinkling with his teeth, and poured a portion of its contents
down the patient's throat:  previously taking a taste, himself, to
prevent mistakes.

'Give her a whiff of fresh air with the bellows, Charley,' said Mr.
Dawkins; 'and you slap her hands, Fagin, while Bill undoes the
petticuts.'

These united restoratives, administered with great energy: especially
that department consigned to Master Bates, who appeared to consider his
share in the proceedings, a piece of unexampled pleasantry:  were not
long in producing the desired effect.  The girl gradually recovered her
senses; and, staggering to a chair by the bedside, hid her face upon
the pillow:  leaving Mr. Sikes to confront the new comers, in some
astonishment at their unlooked-for appearance.

'Why, what evil wind has blowed you here?' he asked Fagin.

'No evil wind at all, my dear, for evil winds blow nobody any good; and
I've brought something good with me, that you'll be glad to see.
Dodger, my dear, open the bundle; and give Bill the little trifles that
we spent all our money on, this morning.'

In compliance with Mr. Fagin's request, the Artful untied this bundle,
which was of large size, and formed of an old table-cloth; and handed
the articles it contained, one by one, to Charley Bates: who placed
them on the table, with various encomiums on their rarity and
excellence.

'Sitch a rabbit pie, Bill,' exclaimed that young gentleman, disclosing
to view a huge pasty; 'sitch delicate creeturs, with sitch tender
limbs, Bill, that the wery bones melt in your mouth, and there's no
occasion to pick 'em; half a pound of seven and six-penny green, so
precious strong that if you mix it with biling water, it'll go nigh to
blow the lid of the tea-pot off; a pound and a half of moist sugar that
the niggers didn't work at all at, afore they got it up to sitch a
pitch of goodness,--oh no!  Two half-quartern brans; pound of best
fresh; piece of double Glo'ster; and, to wind up all, some of the
richest sort you ever lushed!'

Uttering this last panegyric, Master Bates produced, from one of his
extensive pockets, a full-sized wine-bottle, carefully corked; while
Mr. Dawkins, at the same instant, poured out a wine-glassful of raw
spirits from the bottle he carried:  which the invalid tossed down his
throat without a moment's hesitation.

'Ah!' said Fagin, rubbing his hands with great satisfaction. 'You'll
do, Bill; you'll do now.'

'Do!' exclaimed Mr. Sikes; 'I might have been done for, twenty times
over, afore you'd have done anything to help me.  What do you mean by
leaving a man in this state, three weeks and more, you false-hearted
wagabond?'

'Only hear him, boys!' said Fagin, shrugging his shoulders. 'And us
come to bring him all these beau-ti-ful things.'

'The things is well enough in their way,' observed Mr. Sikes:  a little
soothed as he glanced over the table; 'but what have you got to say for
yourself, why you should leave me here, down in the mouth, health,
blunt, and everything else; and take no more notice of me, all this
mortal time, than if I was that 'ere dog.--Drive him down, Charley!'

'I never see such a jolly dog as that,' cried Master Bates, doing as he
was desired.  'Smelling the grub like a old lady a going to market!
He'd make his fortun' on the stage that dog would, and rewive the
drayma besides.'

'Hold your din,' cried Sikes, as the dog retreated under the bed: still
growling angrily.  'What have you got to say for yourself, you withered
old fence, eh?'

'I was away from London, a week and more, my dear, on a plant,' replied
the Jew.

'And what about the other fortnight?' demanded Sikes.  'What about the
other fortnight that you've left me lying here, like a sick rat in his
hole?'

'I couldn't help it, Bill.  I can't go into a long explanation before
company; but I couldn't help it, upon my honour.'

'Upon your what?' growled Sikes, with excessive disgust. 'Here! Cut me
off a piece of that pie, one of you boys, to take the taste of that out
of my mouth, or it'll choke me dead.'

'Don't be out of temper, my dear,' urged Fagin, submissively. 'I have
never forgot you, Bill; never once.'

'No!  I'll pound it that you han't,' replied Sikes, with a bitter grin.
'You've been scheming and plotting away, every hour that I have laid
shivering and burning here; and Bill was to do this; and Bill was to do
that; and Bill was to do it all, dirt cheap, as soon as he got well:
and was quite poor enough for your work. If it hadn't been for the
girl, I might have died.'

'There now, Bill,' remonstrated Fagin, eagerly catching at the word.
'If it hadn't been for the girl!  Who but poor ould Fagin was the means
of your having such a handy girl about you?'

'He says true enough there!' said Nancy, coming hastily forward. 'Let
him be; let him be.'

Nancy's appearance gave a new turn to the conversation; for the boys,
receiving a sly wink from the wary old Jew, began to ply her with
liquor: of which, however, she took very sparingly; while Fagin,
assuming an unusual flow of spirits, gradually brought Mr. Sikes into a
better temper, by affecting to regard his threats as a little pleasant
banter; and, moreover, by laughing very heartily at one or two rough
jokes, which, after repeated applications to the spirit-bottle, he
condescended to make.

'It's all very well,' said Mr. Sikes; 'but I must have some blunt from
you to-night.'

'I haven't a piece of coin about me,' replied the Jew.

'Then you've got lots at home,' retorted Sikes; 'and I must have some
from there.'

'Lots!' cried Fagin, holding up is hands.  'I haven't so much as
would--'

'I don't know how much you've got, and I dare say you hardly know
yourself, as it would take a pretty long time to count it,' said Sikes;
'but I must have some to-night; and that's flat.'

'Well, well,' said Fagin, with a sigh, 'I'll send the Artful round
presently.'

'You won't do nothing of the kind,' rejoined Mr. Sikes. 'The Artful's a
deal too artful, and would forget to come, or lose his way, or get
dodged by traps and so be perwented, or anything for an excuse, if you
put him up to it.  Nancy shall go to the ken and fetch it, to make all
sure; and I'll lie down and have a snooze while she's gone.'

After a great deal of haggling and squabbling, Fagin beat down the
amount of the required advance from five pounds to three pounds four
and sixpence: protesting with many solemn asseverations that that would
only leave him eighteen-pence to keep house with; Mr. Sikes sullenly
remarking that if he couldn't get any more he must accompany him home;
with the Dodger and Master Bates put the eatables in the cupboard.  The
Jew then, taking leave of his affectionate friend, returned homeward,
attended by Nancy and the boys:  Mr. Sikes, meanwhile, flinging himself
on the bed, and composing himself to sleep away the time until the
young lady's return.

In due course, they arrived at Fagin's abode, where they found Toby
Crackit and Mr. Chitling intent upon their fifteenth game at cribbage,
which it is scarcely necessary to say the latter gentleman lost, and
with it, his fifteenth and last sixpence: much to the amusement of his
young friends.  Mr. Crackit, apparently somewhat ashamed at being found
relaxing himself with a gentleman so much his inferior in station and
mental endowments, yawned, and inquiring after Sikes, took up his hat
to go.

'Has nobody been, Toby?' asked Fagin.

'Not a living leg,' answered Mr. Crackit, pulling up his collar; 'it's
been as dull as swipes.  You ought to stand something handsome, Fagin,
to recompense me for keeping house so long. Damme, I'm as flat as a
juryman; and should have gone to sleep, as fast as Newgate, if I hadn't
had the good natur' to amuse this youngster.  Horrid dull, I'm blessed
if I an't!'

With these and other ejaculations of the same kind, Mr. Toby Crackit
swept up his winnings, and crammed them into his waistcoat pocket with
a haughty air, as though such small pieces of silver were wholly
beneath the consideration of a man of his figure; this done, he
swaggered out of the room, with so much elegance and gentility, that
Mr. Chitling, bestowing numerous admiring glances on his legs and boots
till they were out of sight, assured the company that he considered his
acquaintance cheap at fifteen sixpences an interview, and that he
didn't value his losses the snap of his little finger.

'Wot a rum chap you are, Tom!' said Master Bates, highly amused by this
declaration.

'Not a bit of it,' replied Mr. Chitling.  'Am I, Fagin?'

'A very clever fellow, my dear,' said Fagin, patting him on the
shoulder, and winking to his other pupils.

'And Mr. Crackit is a heavy swell; an't he, Fagin?' asked Tom.

'No doubt at all of that, my dear.'

'And it is a creditable thing to have his acquaintance; an't it,
Fagin?' pursued Tom.

'Very much so, indeed, my dear.  They're only jealous, Tom, because he
won't give it to them.'

'Ah!' cried Tom, triumphantly, 'that's where it is!  He has cleaned me
out.  But I can go and earn some more, when I like; can't I, Fagin?'

'To be sure you can, and the sooner you go the better, Tom; so make up
your loss at once, and don't lose any more time.  Dodger! Charley!
It's time you were on the lay.  Come!  It's near ten, and nothing done
yet.'

In obedience to this hint, the boys, nodding to Nancy, took up their
hats, and left the room; the Dodger and his vivacious friend indulging,
as they went, in many witticisms at the expense of Mr. Chitling; in
whose conduct, it is but justice to say, there was nothing very
conspicuous or peculiar:  inasmuch as there are a great number of
spirited young bloods upon town, who pay a much higher price than Mr.
Chitling for being seen in good society:  and a great number of fine
gentlemen (composing the good society aforesaid) who established their
reputation upon very much the same footing as flash Toby Crackit.

'Now,' said Fagin, when they had left the room, 'I'll go and get you
that cash, Nancy.  This is only the key of a little cupboard where I
keep a few odd things the boys get, my dear.  I never lock up my money,
for I've got none to lock up, my dear--ha! ha! ha!--none to lock up.
It's a poor trade, Nancy, and no thanks; but I'm fond of seeing the
young people about me; and I bear it all, I bear it all.  Hush!' he
said, hastily concealing the key in his breast; 'who's that?  Listen!'

The girl, who was sitting at the table with her arms folded, appeared
in no way interested in the arrival: or to care whether the person,
whoever he was, came or went:  until the murmur of a man's voice
reached her ears.  The instant she caught the sound, she tore off her
bonnet and shawl, with the rapidity of lightning, and thrust them under
the table. The Jew, turning round immediately afterwards, she muttered
a complaint of the heat:  in a tone of languor that contrasted, very
remarkably, with the extreme haste and violence of this action:  which,
however, had been unobserved by Fagin, who had his back towards her at
the time.

'Bah!' he whispered, as though nettled by the interruption; 'it's the
man I expected before; he's coming downstairs.  Not a word about the
money while he's here, Nance.  He won't stop long.  Not ten minutes, my
dear.'

Laying his skinny forefinger upon his lip, the Jew carried a candle to
the door, as a man's step was heard upon the stairs without.  He
reached it, at the same moment as the visitor, who, coming hastily into
the room, was close upon the girl before he observed her.

It was Monks.

'Only one of my young people,' said Fagin, observing that Monks drew
back, on beholding a stranger.  'Don't move, Nancy.'

The girl drew closer to the table, and glancing at Monks with an air of
careless levity, withdrew her eyes; but as he turned towards Fagin, she
stole another look; so keen and searching, and full of purpose, that if
there had been any bystander to observe the change, he could hardly
have believed the two looks to have proceeded from the same person.

'Any news?' inquired Fagin.

'Great.'

'And--and--good?' asked Fagin, hesitating as though he feared to vex
the other man by being too sanguine.

'Not bad, any way,' replied Monks with a smile.  'I have been prompt
enough this time.  Let me have a word with you.'

The girl drew closer to the table, and made no offer to leave the room,
although she could see that Monks was pointing to her.  The Jew:
perhaps fearing she might say something aloud about the money, if he
endeavoured to get rid of her:  pointed upward, and took Monks out of
the room.

'Not that infernal hole we were in before,' she could hear the man say
as they went upstairs.  Fagin laughed; and making some reply which did
not reach her, seemed, by the creaking of the boards, to lead his
companion to the second story.

Before the sound of their footsteps had ceased to echo through the
house, the girl had slipped off her shoes; and drawing her gown loosely
over her head, and muffling her arms in it, stood at the door,
listening with breathless interest.  The moment the noise ceased, she
glided from the room; ascended the stairs with incredible softness and
silence; and was lost in the gloom above.

The room remained deserted for a quarter of an hour or more; the girl
glided back with the same unearthly tread; and, immediately afterwards,
the two men were heard descending.  Monks went at once into the street;
and the Jew crawled upstairs again for the money.  When he returned,
the girl was adjusting her shawl and bonnet, as if preparing to be gone.

'Why, Nance!' exclaimed the Jew, starting back as he put down the
candle, 'how pale you are!'

'Pale!' echoed the girl, shading her eyes with her hands, as if to look
steadily at him.

'Quite horrible.  What have you been doing to yourself?'

'Nothing that I know of, except sitting in this close place for I don't
know how long and all,' replied the girl carelessly. 'Come!  Let me get
back; that's a dear.'

With a sigh for every piece of money, Fagin told the amount into her
hand.  They parted without more conversation, merely interchanging a
'good-night.'

When the girl got into the open street, she sat down upon a doorstep;
and seemed, for a few moments, wholly bewildered and unable to pursue
her way.  Suddenly she arose; and hurrying on, in a direction quite
opposite to that in which Sikes was awaiting her returned, quickened
her pace, until it gradually resolved into a violent run.  After
completely exhausting herself, she stopped to take breath:  and, as if
suddenly recollecting herself, and deploring her inability to do
something she was bent upon, wrung her hands, and burst into tears.

It might be that her tears relieved her, or that she felt the full
hopelessness of her condition; but she turned back; and hurrying with
nearly as great rapidity in the contrary direction; partly to recover
lost time, and partly to keep pace with the violent current of her own
thoughts:  soon reached the dwelling where she had left the
housebreaker.

If she betrayed any agitation, when she presented herself to Mr. Sikes,
he did not observe it; for merely inquiring if she had brought the
money, and receiving a reply in the affirmative, he uttered a growl of
satisfaction, and replacing his head upon the pillow, resumed the
slumbers which her arrival had interrupted.

It was fortunate for her that the possession of money occasioned him so
much employment next day in the way of eating and drinking; and withal
had so beneficial an effect in smoothing down the asperities of his
temper; that he had neither time nor inclination to be very critical
upon her behaviour and deportment.  That she had all the abstracted and
nervous manner of one who is on the eve of some bold and hazardous
step, which it has required no common struggle to resolve upon, would
have been obvious to the lynx-eyed Fagin, who would most probably have
taken the alarm at once; but Mr. Sikes lacking the niceties of
discrimination, and being troubled with no more subtle misgivings than
those which resolve themselves into a dogged roughness of behaviour
towards everybody; and being, furthermore, in an unusually amiable
condition, as has been already observed; saw nothing unusual in her
demeanor, and indeed, troubled himself so little about her, that, had
her agitation been far more perceptible than it was, it would have been
very unlikely to have awakened his suspicions.

As that day closed in, the girl's excitement increased; and, when night
came on, and she sat by, watching until the housebreaker should drink
himself asleep, there was an unusual paleness in her cheek, and a fire
in her eye, that even Sikes observed with astonishment.

Mr. Sikes being weak from the fever, was lying in bed, taking hot water
with his gin to render it less inflammatory; and had pushed his glass
towards Nancy to be replenished for the third or fourth time, when
these symptoms first struck him.

'Why, burn my body!' said the man, raising himself on his hands as he
stared the girl in the face.  'You look like a corpse come to life
again.  What's the matter?'

'Matter!' replied the girl.  'Nothing.  What do you look at me so hard
for?'

'What foolery is this?' demanded Sikes, grasping her by the arm, and
shaking her roughly.  'What is it?  What do you mean?  What are you
thinking of?'

'Of many things, Bill,' replied the girl, shivering, and as she did so,
pressing her hands upon her eyes.  'But, Lord!  What odds in that?'

The tone of forced gaiety in which the last words were spoken, seemed
to produce a deeper impression on Sikes than the wild and rigid look
which had preceded them.

'I tell you wot it is,' said Sikes; 'if you haven't caught the fever,
and got it comin' on, now, there's something more than usual in the
wind, and something dangerous too.  You're not a-going to--.  No,
damme! you wouldn't do that!'

'Do what?' asked the girl.

'There ain't,' said Sikes, fixing his eyes upon her, and muttering the
words to himself; 'there ain't a stauncher-hearted gal going, or I'd
have cut her throat three months ago.  She's got the fever coming on;
that's it.'

Fortifying himself with this assurance, Sikes drained the glass to the
bottom, and then, with many grumbling oaths, called for his physic.
The girl jumped up, with great alacrity; poured it quickly out, but
with her back towards him; and held the vessel to his lips, while he
drank off the contents.

'Now,' said the robber, 'come and sit aside of me, and put on your own
face; or I'll alter it so, that you won't know it agin when you do want
it.'

The girl obeyed.  Sikes, locking her hand in his, fell back upon the
pillow: turning his eyes upon her face.  They closed; opened again;
closed once more; again opened.  He shifted his position restlessly;
and, after dozing again, and again, for two or three minutes, and as
often springing up with a look of terror, and gazing vacantly about
him, was suddenly stricken, as it were, while in the very attitude of
rising, into a deep and heavy sleep.  The grasp of his hand relaxed;
the upraised arm fell languidly by his side; and he lay like one in a
profound trance.

'The laudanum has taken effect at last,' murmured the girl, as she rose
from the bedside.  'I may be too late, even now.'

She hastily dressed herself in her bonnet and shawl:  looking fearfully
round, from time to time, as if, despite the sleeping draught, she
expected every moment to feel the pressure of Sikes's heavy hand upon
her shoulder; then, stooping softly over the bed, she kissed the
robber's lips; and then opening and closing the room-door with
noiseless touch, hurried from the house.

A watchman was crying half-past nine, down a dark passage through which
she had to pass, in gaining the main thoroughfare.

'Has it long gone the half-hour?' asked the girl.

'It'll strike the hour in another quarter,' said the man: raising his
lantern to her face.

'And I cannot get there in less than an hour or more,' muttered Nancy:
brushing swiftly past him, and gliding rapidly down the street.

Many of the shops were already closing in the back lanes and avenues
through which she tracked her way, in making from Spitalfields towards
the West-End of London.  The clock struck ten, increasing her
impatience.  She tore along the narrow pavement:  elbowing the
passengers from side to side; and darting almost under the horses'
heads, crossed crowded streets, where clusters of persons were eagerly
watching their opportunity to do the like.

'The woman is mad!' said the people, turning to look after her as she
rushed away.

When she reached the more wealthy quarter of the town, the streets were
comparatively deserted; and here her headlong progress excited a still
greater curiosity in the stragglers whom she hurried past.  Some
quickened their pace behind, as though to see whither she was hastening
at such an unusual rate; and a few made head upon her, and looked back,
surprised at her undiminished speed; but they fell off one by one; and
when she neared her place of destination, she was alone.

It was a family hotel in a quiet but handsome street near Hyde Park.
As the brilliant light of the lamp which burnt before its door, guided
her to the spot, the clock struck eleven.  She had loitered for a few
paces as though irresolute, and making up her mind to advance; but the
sound determined her, and she stepped into the hall.  The porter's seat
was vacant.  She looked round with an air of incertitude, and advanced
towards the stairs.

'Now, young woman!' said a smartly-dressed female, looking out from a
door behind her, 'who do you want here?'

'A lady who is stopping in this house,' answered the girl.

'A lady!' was the reply, accompanied with a scornful look. 'What lady?'

'Miss Maylie,' said Nancy.

The young woman, who had by this time, noted her appearance, replied
only by a look of virtuous disdain; and summoned a man to answer her.
To him, Nancy repeated her request.

'What name am I to say?' asked the waiter.

'It's of no use saying any,' replied Nancy.

'Nor business?' said the man.

'No, nor that neither,' rejoined the girl.  'I must see the lady.'

'Come!' said the man, pushing her towards the door.  'None of this.
Take yourself off.'

'I shall be carried out if I go!' said the girl violently; 'and I can
make that a job that two of you won't like to do.  Isn't there anybody
here,' she said, looking round, 'that will see a simple message carried
for a poor wretch like me?'

This appeal produced an effect on a good-tempered-faced man-cook, who
with some of the other servants was looking on, and who stepped forward
to interfere.

'Take it up for her, Joe; can't you?' said this person.

'What's the good?' replied the man.  'You don't suppose the young lady
will see such as her; do you?'

This allusion to Nancy's doubtful character, raised a vast quantity of
chaste wrath in the bosoms of four housemaids, who remarked, with great
fervour, that the creature was a disgrace to her sex; and strongly
advocated her being thrown, ruthlessly, into the kennel.

'Do what you like with me,' said the girl, turning to the men again;
'but do what I ask you first, and I ask you to give this message for
God Almighty's sake.'

The soft-hearted cook added his intercession, and the result was that
the man who had first appeared undertook its delivery.

'What's it to be?' said the man, with one foot on the stairs.

'That a young woman earnestly asks to speak to Miss Maylie alone,' said
Nancy; 'and that if the lady will only hear the first word she has to
say, she will know whether to hear her business, or to have her turned
out of doors as an impostor.'

'I say,' said the man, 'you're coming it strong!'

'You give the message,' said the girl firmly; 'and let me hear the
answer.'

The man ran upstairs.  Nancy remained, pale and almost breathless,
listening with quivering lip to the very audible expressions of scorn,
of which the chaste housemaids were very prolific; and of which they
became still more so, when the man returned, and said the young woman
was to walk upstairs.

'It's no good being proper in this world,' said the first housemaid.

'Brass can do better than the gold what has stood the fire,' said the
second.

The third contented herself with wondering 'what ladies was made of';
and the fourth took the first in a quartette of 'Shameful!' with which
the Dianas concluded.

Regardless of all this: for she had weightier matters at heart: Nancy
followed the man, with trembling limbs, to a small ante-chamber,
lighted by a lamp from the ceiling. Here he left her, and retired.



CHAPTER XL

A STRANGE INTERVIEW, WHICH IS A SEQUEL TO THE LAST CHAMBER

The girl's life had been squandered in the streets, and among the most
noisome of the stews and dens of London, but there was something of the
woman's original nature left in her still; and when she heard a light
step approaching the door opposite to that by which she had entered,
and thought of the wide contrast which the small room would in another
moment contain, she felt burdened with the sense of her own deep shame,
and shrunk as though she could scarcely bear the presence of her with
whom she had sought this interview.

But struggling with these better feelings was pride,--the vice of the
lowest and most debased creatures no less than of the high and
self-assured.  The miserable companion of thieves and ruffians, the
fallen outcast of low haunts, the associate of the scourings of the
jails and hulks, living within the shadow of the gallows itself,--even
this degraded being felt too proud to betray a feeble gleam of the
womanly feeling which she thought a weakness, but which alone connected
her with that humanity, of which her wasting life had obliterated so
many, many traces when a very child.

She raised her eyes sufficiently to observe that the figure which
presented itself was that of a slight and beautiful girl; then, bending
them on the ground, she tossed her head with affected carelessness as
she said:

'It's a hard matter to get to see you, lady.  If I had taken offence,
and gone away, as many would have done, you'd have been sorry for it
one day, and not without reason either.'

'I am very sorry if any one has behaved harshly to you,' replied Rose.
'Do not think of that.  Tell me why you wished to see me. I am the
person you inquired for.'

The kind tone of this answer, the sweet voice, the gentle manner, the
absence of any accent of haughtiness or displeasure, took the girl
completely by surprise, and she burst into tears.

'Oh, lady, lady!' she said, clasping her hands passionately before her
face, 'if there was more like you, there would be fewer like me,--there
would--there would!'

'Sit down,' said Rose, earnestly.  'If you are in poverty or affliction
I shall be truly glad to relieve you if I can,--I shall indeed.  Sit
down.'

'Let me stand, lady,' said the girl, still weeping, 'and do not speak
to me so kindly till you know me better.  It is growing late.
Is--is--that door shut?'

'Yes,' said Rose, recoiling a few steps, as if to be nearer assistance
in case she should require it.  'Why?'

'Because,' said the girl, 'I am about to put my life and the lives of
others in your hands.  I am the girl that dragged little Oliver back to
old Fagin's on the night he went out from the house in Pentonville.'

'You!' said Rose Maylie.

'I, lady!' replied the girl.  'I am the infamous creature you have
heard of, that lives among the thieves, and that never from the first
moment I can recollect my eyes and senses opening on London streets
have known any better life, or kinder words than they have given me, so
help me God!  Do not mind shrinking openly from me, lady.  I am younger
than you would think, to look at me, but I am well used to it. The
poorest women fall back, as I make my way along the crowded pavement.'

'What dreadful things are these!' said Rose, involuntarily falling from
her strange companion.

'Thank Heaven upon your knees, dear lady,' cried the girl, 'that you
had friends to care for and keep you in your childhood, and that you
were never in the midst of cold and hunger, and riot and drunkenness,
and--and--something worse than all--as I have been from my cradle.  I
may use the word, for the alley and the gutter were mine, as they will
be my deathbed.'

'I pity you!' said Rose, in a broken voice.  'It wrings my heart to
hear you!'

'Heaven bless you for your goodness!' rejoined the girl. 'If you knew
what I am sometimes, you would pity me, indeed. But I have stolen away
from those who would surely murder me, if they knew I had been here, to
tell you what I have overheard.  Do you know a man named Monks?'

'No,' said Rose.

'He knows you,' replied the girl; 'and knew you were here, for it was
by hearing him tell the place that I found you out.'

'I never heard the name,' said Rose.

'Then he goes by some other amongst us,' rejoined the girl, 'which I
more than thought before.  Some time ago, and soon after Oliver was put
into your house on the night of the robbery, I--suspecting this
man--listened to a conversation held between him and Fagin in the dark.
I found out, from what I heard, that Monks--the man I asked you about,
you know--'

'Yes,' said Rose, 'I understand.'

'--That Monks,' pursued the girl, 'had seen him accidently with two of
our boys on the day we first lost him, and had known him directly to be
the same child that he was watching for, though I couldn't make out
why.  A bargain was struck with Fagin, that if Oliver was got back he
should have a certain sum; and he was to have more for making him a
thief, which this Monks wanted for some purpose of his own.'

'For what purpose?' asked Rose.

'He caught sight of my shadow on the wall as I listened, in the hope of
finding out,' said the girl; 'and there are not many people besides me
that could have got out of their way in time to escape discovery.  But
I did; and I saw him no more till last night.'

'And what occurred then?'

'I'll tell you, lady.  Last night he came again.  Again they went
upstairs, and I, wrapping myself up so that my shadow would not betray
me, again listened at the door.  The first words I heard Monks say were
these:  "So the only proofs of the boy's identity lie at the bottom of
the river, and the old hag that received them from the mother is
rotting in her coffin."  They laughed, and talked of his success in
doing this; and Monks, talking on about the boy, and getting very wild,
said that though he had got the young devil's money safely now, he'd
rather have had it the other way; for, what a game it would have been
to have brought down the boast of the father's will, by driving him
through every jail in town, and then hauling him up for some capital
felony which Fagin could easily manage, after having made a good profit
of him besides.'

'What is all this!' said Rose.

'The truth, lady, though it comes from my lips,' replied the girl.
'Then, he said, with oaths common enough in my ears, but strange to
yours, that if he could gratify his hatred by taking the boy's life
without bringing his own neck in danger, he would; but, as he couldn't,
he'd be upon the watch to meet him at every turn in life; and if he
took advantage of his birth and history, he might harm him yet. "In
short, Fagin," he says, "Jew as you are, you never laid such snares as
I'll contrive for my young brother, Oliver."'

'His brother!' exclaimed Rose.

'Those were his words,' said Nancy, glancing uneasily round, as she had
scarcely ceased to do, since she began to speak, for a vision of Sikes
haunted her perpetually.  'And more. When he spoke of you and the other
lady, and said it seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against
him, that Oliver should come into your hands, he laughed, and said
there was some comfort in that too, for how many thousands and hundreds
of thousands of pounds would you not give, if you had them, to know who
your two-legged spaniel was.'

'You do not mean,' said Rose, turning very pale, 'to tell me that this
was said in earnest?'

'He spoke in hard and angry earnest, if a man ever did,' replied the
girl, shaking her head.  'He is an earnest man when his hatred is up.
I know many who do worse things; but I'd rather listen to them all a
dozen times, than to that Monks once.  It is growing late, and I have
to reach home without suspicion of having been on such an errand as
this.  I must get back quickly.'

'But what can I do?' said Rose.  'To what use can I turn this
communication without you?  Back!  Why do you wish to return to
companions you paint in such terrible colors?  If you repeat this
information to a gentleman whom I can summon in an instant from the
next room, you can be consigned to some place of safety without half an
hour's delay.'

'I wish to go back,' said the girl.  'I must go back, because--how can
I tell such things to an innocent lady like you?--because among the men
I have told you of, there is one: the most desperate among them all;
that I can't leave:  no, not even to be saved from the life I am
leading now.'

'Your having interfered in this dear boy's behalf before,' said Rose;
'your coming here, at so great a risk, to tell me what you have heard;
your manner, which convinces me of the truth of what you say; your
evident contrition, and sense of shame; all lead me to believe that you
might yet be reclaimed.  Oh!' said the earnest girl, folding her hands
as the tears coursed down her face, 'do not turn a deaf ear to the
entreaties of one of your own sex; the first--the first, I do believe,
who ever appealed to you in the voice of pity and compassion.  Do hear
my words, and let me save you yet, for better things.'

'Lady,' cried the girl, sinking on her knees, 'dear, sweet, angel lady,
you _are_ the first that ever blessed me with such words as these, and
if I had heard them years ago, they might have turned me from a life of
sin and sorrow; but it is too late, it is too late!'

'It is never too late,' said Rose, 'for penitence and atonement.'

'It is,' cried the girl, writhing in agony of her mind; 'I cannot leave
him now!  I could not be his death.'

'Why should you be?' asked Rose.

'Nothing could save him,' cried the girl.  'If I told others what I
have told you, and led to their being taken, he would be sure to die.
He is the boldest, and has been so cruel!'

'Is it possible,' cried Rose, 'that for such a man as this, you can
resign every future hope, and the certainty of immediate rescue?  It is
madness.'

'I don't know what it is,' answered the girl; 'I only know that it is
so, and not with me alone, but with hundreds of others as bad and
wretched as myself.  I must go back.  Whether it is God's wrath for the
wrong I have done, I do not know; but I am drawn back to him through
every suffering and ill usage; and I should be, I believe, if I knew
that I was to die by his hand at last.'

'What am I to do?' said Rose.  'I should not let you depart from me
thus.'

'You should, lady, and I know you will,' rejoined the girl, rising.
'You will not stop my going because I have trusted in your goodness,
and forced no promise from you, as I might have done.'

'Of what use, then, is the communication you have made?' said Rose.
'This mystery must be investigated, or how will its disclosure to me,
benefit Oliver, whom you are anxious to serve?'

'You must have some kind gentleman about you that will hear it as a
secret, and advise you what to do,' rejoined the girl.

'But where can I find you again when it is necessary?' asked Rose.  'I
do not seek to know where these dreadful people live, but where will
you be walking or passing at any settled period from this time?'

'Will you promise me that you will have my secret strictly kept, and
come alone, or with the only other person that knows it; and that I
shall not be watched or followed?' asked the girl.

'I promise you solemnly,' answered Rose.

'Every Sunday night, from eleven until the clock strikes twelve,' said
the girl without hesitation, 'I will walk on London Bridge if I am
alive.'

'Stay another moment,' interposed Rose, as the girl moved hurriedly
towards the door.  'Think once again on your own condition, and the
opportunity you have of escaping from it.  You have a claim on me:  not
only as the voluntary bearer of this intelligence, but as a woman lost
almost beyond redemption.  Will you return to this gang of robbers, and
to this man, when a word can save you?  What fascination is it that can
take you back, and make you cling to wickedness and misery?  Oh! is
there no chord in your heart that I can touch!  Is there nothing left,
to which I can appeal against this terrible infatuation!'

'When ladies as young, and good, and beautiful as you are,' replied the
girl steadily, 'give away your hearts, love will carry you all
lengths--even such as you, who have home, friends, other admirers,
everything, to fill them.  When such as I, who have no certain roof but
the coffinlid, and no friend in sickness or death but the hospital
nurse, set our rotten hearts on any man, and let him fill the place
that has been a blank through all our wretched lives, who can hope to
cure us?  Pity us, lady--pity us for having only one feeling of the
woman left, and for having that turned, by a heavy judgment, from a
comfort and a pride, into a new means of violence and suffering.'

'You will,' said Rose, after a pause, 'take some money from me, which
may enable you to live without dishonesty--at all events until we meet
again?'

'Not a penny,' replied the girl, waving her hand.

'Do not close your heart against all my efforts to help you,' said
Rose, stepping gently forward.  'I wish to serve you indeed.'

'You would serve me best, lady,' replied the girl, wringing her hands,
'if you could take my life at once; for I have felt more grief to think
of what I am, to-night, than I ever did before, and it would be
something not to die in the hell in which I have lived.  God bless you,
sweet lady, and send as much happiness on your head as I have brought
shame on mine!'

Thus speaking, and sobbing aloud, the unhappy creature turned away;
while Rose Maylie, overpowered by this extraordinary interview, which
had more the semblance of a rapid dream than an actual occurrence, sank
into a chair, and endeavoured to collect her wandering thoughts.



CHAPTER XLI

CONTAINING FRESH DISCOVERIES, AND SHOWING THAT SUPRISES, LIKE
MISFORTUNES, SELDOM COME ALONE

Her situation was, indeed, one of no common trial and difficulty. While
she felt the most eager and burning desire to penetrate the mystery in
which Oliver's history was enveloped, she could not but hold sacred the
confidence which the miserable woman with whom she had just conversed,
had reposed in her, as a young and guileless girl.  Her words and
manner had touched Rose Maylie's heart; and, mingled with her love for
her young charge, and scarcely less intense in its truth and fervour,
was her fond wish to win the outcast back to repentance and hope.

They purposed remaining in London only three days, prior to departing
for some weeks to a distant part of the coast.  It was now midnight of
the first day.  What course of action could she determine upon, which
could be adopted in eight-and-forty hours? Or how could she postpone
the journey without exciting suspicion?

Mr. Losberne was with them, and would be for the next two days; but
Rose was too well acquainted with the excellent gentleman's
impetuosity, and foresaw too clearly the wrath with which, in the first
explosion of his indignation, he would regard the instrument of
Oliver's recapture, to trust him with the secret, when her
representations in the girl's behalf could be seconded by no
experienced person.  These were all reasons for the greatest caution
and most circumspect behaviour in communicating it to Mrs. Maylie,
whose first impulse would infallibly be to hold a conference with the
worthy doctor on the subject.  As to resorting to any legal adviser,
even if she had known how to do so, it was scarcely to be thought of,
for the same reason.  Once the thought occurred to her of seeking
assistance from Harry; but this awakened the recollection of their last
parting, and it seemed unworthy of her to call him back, when--the
tears rose to her eyes as she pursued this train of reflection--he
might have by this time learnt to forget her, and to be happier away.

Disturbed by these different reflections; inclining now to one course
and then to another, and again recoiling from all, as each successive
consideration presented itself to her mind; Rose passed a sleepless and
anxious night.  After more communing with herself next day, she arrived
at the desperate conclusion of consulting Harry.

'If it be painful to him,' she thought, 'to come back here, how painful
it will be to me!  But perhaps he will not come; he may write, or he
may come himself, and studiously abstain from meeting me--he did when
he went away.  I hardly thought he would; but it was better for us
both.'  And here Rose dropped the pen, and turned away, as though the
very paper which was to be her messenger should not see her weep.

She had taken up the same pen, and laid it down again fifty times, and
had considered and reconsidered the first line of her letter without
writing the first word, when Oliver, who had been walking in the
streets, with Mr. Giles for a body-guard, entered the room in such
breathless haste and violent agitation, as seemed to betoken some new
cause of alarm.

'What makes you look so flurried?' asked Rose, advancing to meet him.

'I hardly know how; I feel as if I should be choked,' replied the boy.
'Oh dear!  To think that I should see him at last, and you should be
able to know that I have told you the truth!'

'I never thought you had told us anything but the truth,' said Rose,
soothing him.  'But what is this?--of whom do you speak?'

'I have seen the gentleman,' replied Oliver, scarcely able to
articulate, 'the gentleman who was so good to me--Mr. Brownlow, that we
have so often talked about.'

'Where?' asked Rose.

'Getting out of a coach,' replied Oliver, shedding tears of delight,
'and going into a house.  I didn't speak to him--I couldn't speak to
him, for he didn't see me, and I trembled so, that I was not able to go
up to him.  But Giles asked, for me, whether he lived there, and they
said he did.  Look here,' said Oliver, opening a scrap of paper, 'here
it is; here's where he lives--I'm going there directly!  Oh, dear me,
dear me!  What shall I do when I come to see him and hear him speak
again!'

With her attention not a little distracted by these and a great many
other incoherent exclamations of joy, Rose read the address, which was
Craven Street, in the Strand.  She very soon determined upon turning
the discovery to account.

'Quick!' she said.  'Tell them to fetch a hackney-coach, and be ready
to go with me.  I will take you there directly, without a minute's loss
of time.  I will only tell my aunt that we are going out for an hour,
and be ready as soon as you are.'

Oliver needed no prompting to despatch, and in little more than five
minutes they were on their way to Craven Street.  When they arrived
there, Rose left Oliver in the coach, under pretence of preparing the
old gentleman to receive him; and sending up her card by the servant,
requested to see Mr. Brownlow on very pressing business.  The servant
soon returned, to beg that she would walk upstairs; and following him
into an upper room, Miss Maylie was presented to an elderly gentleman
of benevolent appearance, in a bottle-green coat.  At no great distance
from whom, was seated another old gentleman, in nankeen breeches and
gaiters; who did not look particularly benevolent, and who was sitting
with his hands clasped on the top of a thick stick, and his chin
propped thereupon.

'Dear me,' said the gentleman, in the bottle-green coat, hastily rising
with great politeness, 'I beg your pardon, young lady--I imagined it
was some importunate person who--I beg you will excuse me.  Be seated,
pray.'

'Mr. Brownlow, I believe, sir?' said Rose, glancing from the other
gentleman to the one who had spoken.

'That is my name,' said the old gentleman.  'This is my friend, Mr.
Grimwig.  Grimwig, will you leave us for a few minutes?'

'I believe,' interposed Miss Maylie, 'that at this period of our
interview, I need not give that gentleman the trouble of going away.
If I am correctly informed, he is cognizant of the business on which I
wish to speak to you.'

Mr. Brownlow inclined his head.  Mr. Grimwig, who had made one very
stiff bow, and risen from his chair, made another very stiff bow, and
dropped into it again.

'I shall surprise you very much, I have no doubt,' said Rose, naturally
embarrassed; 'but you once showed great benevolence and goodness to a
very dear young friend of mine, and I am sure you will take an interest
in hearing of him again.'

'Indeed!' said Mr. Brownlow.

'Oliver Twist you knew him as,' replied Rose.

The words no sooner escaped her lips, than Mr. Grimwig, who had been
affecting to dip into a large book that lay on the table, upset it with
a great crash, and falling back in his chair, discharged from his
features every expression but one of unmitigated wonder, and indulged
in a prolonged and vacant stare; then, as if ashamed of having betrayed
so much emotion, he jerked himself, as it were, by a convulsion into
his former attitude, and looking out straight before him emitted a long
deep whistle, which seemed, at last, not to be discharged on empty air,
but to die away in the innermost recesses of his stomach.

Mr. Browlow was no less surprised, although his astonishment was not
expressed in the same eccentric manner.  He drew his chair nearer to
Miss Maylie's, and said,

'Do me the favour, my dear young lady, to leave entirely out of the
question that goodness and benevolence of which you speak, and of which
nobody else knows anything; and if you have it in your power to produce
any evidence which will alter the unfavourable opinion I was once
induced to entertain of that poor child, in Heaven's name put me in
possession of it.'

'A bad one!  I'll eat my head if he is not a bad one,' growled Mr.
Grimwig, speaking by some ventriloquial power, without moving a muscle
of his face.

'He is a child of a noble nature and a warm heart,' said Rose,
colouring; 'and that Power which has thought fit to try him beyond his
years, has planted in his breast affections and feelings which would do
honour to many who have numbered his days six times over.'

'I'm only sixty-one,' said Mr. Grimwig, with the same rigid face. 'And,
as the devil's in it if this Oliver is not twelve years old at least, I
don't see the application of that remark.'

'Do not heed my friend, Miss Maylie,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'he does not
mean what he says.'

'Yes, he does,' growled Mr. Grimwig.

'No, he does not,' said Mr. Brownlow, obviously rising in wrath as he
spoke.

'He'll eat his head, if he doesn't,' growled Mr. Grimwig.

'He would deserve to have it knocked off, if he does,' said Mr.
Brownlow.

'And he'd uncommonly like to see any man offer to do it,' responded Mr.
Grimwig, knocking his stick upon the floor.

Having gone thus far, the two old gentlemen severally took snuff, and
afterwards shook hands, according to their invariable custom.

'Now, Miss Maylie,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'to return to the subject in
which your humanity is so much interested.  Will you let me know what
intelligence you have of this poor child:  allowing me to promise that
I exhausted every means in my power of discovering him, and that since
I have been absent from this country, my first impression that he had
imposed upon me, and had been persuaded by his former associates to rob
me, has been considerably shaken.'

Rose, who had had time to collect her thoughts, at once related, in a
few natural words, all that had befallen Oliver since he left Mr.
Brownlow's house; reserving Nancy's information for that gentleman's
private ear, and concluding with the assurance that his only sorrow,
for some months past, had been not being able to meet with his former
benefactor and friend.

'Thank God!' said the old gentleman.  'This is great happiness to me,
great happiness.  But you have not told me where he is now, Miss
Maylie.  You must pardon my finding fault with you,--but why not have
brought him?'

'He is waiting in a coach at the door,' replied Rose.

'At this door!' cried the old gentleman.  With which he hurried out of
the room, down the stairs, up the coachsteps, and into the coach,
without another word.

When the room-door closed behind him, Mr. Grimwig lifted up his head,
and converting one of the hind legs of his chair into a pivot,
described three distinct circles with the assistance of his stick and
the table; sitting in it all the time.  After performing this
evolution, he rose and limped as fast as he could up and down the room
at least a dozen times, and then stopping suddenly before Rose, kissed
her without the slightest preface.

'Hush!' he said, as the young lady rose in some alarm at this unusual
proceeding.  'Don't be afraid.  I'm old enough to be your grandfather.
You're a sweet girl.  I like you.  Here they are!'

In fact, as he threw himself at one dexterous dive into his former
seat, Mr. Brownlow returned, accompanied by Oliver, whom Mr. Grimwig
received very graciously; and if the gratification of that moment had
been the only reward for all her anxiety and care in Oliver's behalf,
Rose Maylie would have been well repaid.

'There is somebody else who should not be forgotten, by the bye,' said
Mr. Brownlow, ringing the bell.  'Send Mrs. Bedwin here, if you please.'

The old housekeeper answered the summons with all dispatch; and
dropping a curtsey at the door, waited for orders.

'Why, you get blinder every day, Bedwin,' said Mr. Brownlow, rather
testily.

'Well, that I do, sir,' replied the old lady.  'People's eyes, at my
time of life, don't improve with age, sir.'

'I could have told you that,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow; 'but put on your
glasses, and see if you can't find out what you were wanted for, will
you?'

The old lady began to rummage in her pocket for her spectacles. But
Oliver's patience was not proof against this new trial; and yielding to
his first impulse, he sprang into her arms.

'God be good to me!' cried the old lady, embracing him; 'it is my
innocent boy!'

'My dear old nurse!' cried Oliver.

'He would come back--I knew he would,' said the old lady, holding him
in her arms.  'How well he looks, and how like a gentleman's son he is
dressed again!  Where have you been, this long, long while?  Ah! the
same sweet face, but not so pale; the same soft eye, but not so sad.  I
have never forgotten them or his quiet smile, but have seen them every
day, side by side with those of my own dear children, dead and gone
since I was a lightsome young creature.'  Running on thus, and now
holding Oliver from her to mark how he had grown, now clasping him to
her and passing her fingers fondly through his hair, the good soul
laughed and wept upon his neck by turns.

Leaving her and Oliver to compare notes at leisure, Mr. Brownlow led
the way into another room; and there, heard from Rose a full narration
of her interview with Nancy, which occasioned him no little surprise
and perplexity.  Rose also explained her reasons for not confiding in
her friend Mr. Losberne in the first instance.  The old gentleman
considered that she had acted prudently, and readily undertook to hold
solemn conference with the worthy doctor himself.  To afford him an
early opportunity for the execution of this design, it was arranged
that he should call at the hotel at eight o'clock that evening, and
that in the meantime Mrs. Maylie should be cautiously informed of all
that had occurred.  These preliminaries adjusted, Rose and Oliver
returned home.

Rose had by no means overrated the measure of the good doctor's wrath.
Nancy's history was no sooner unfolded to him, than he poured forth a
shower of mingled threats and execrations; threatened to make her the
first victim of the combined ingenuity of Messrs. Blathers and Duff;
and actually put on his hat preparatory to sallying forth to obtain the
assistance of those worthies.  And, doubtless, he would, in this first
outbreak, have carried the intention into effect without a moment's
consideration of the consequences, if he had not been restrained, in
part, by corresponding violence on the side of Mr. Brownlow, who was
himself of an irascible temperament, and party by such arguments and
representations as seemed best calculated to dissuade him from his
hotbrained purpose.

'Then what the devil is to be done?' said the impetuous doctor, when
they had rejoined the two ladies.  'Are we to pass a vote of thanks to
all these vagabonds, male and female, and beg them to accept a hundred
pounds, or so, apiece, as a trifling mark of our esteem, and some
slight acknowledgment of their kindness to Oliver?'

'Not exactly that,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow, laughing; 'but we must
proceed gently and with great care.'

'Gentleness and care,' exclaimed the doctor.  'I'd send them one and
all to--'

'Never mind where,' interposed Mr. Brownlow.  'But reflect whether
sending them anywhere is likely to attain the object we have in view.'

'What object?' asked the doctor.

'Simply, the discovery of Oliver's parentage, and regaining for him the
inheritance of which, if this story be true, he has been fraudulently
deprived.'

'Ah!' said Mr. Losberne, cooling himself with his pocket-handkerchief;
'I almost forgot that.'

'You see,' pursued Mr. Brownlow; 'placing this poor girl entirely out
of the question, and supposing it were possible to bring these
scoundrels to justice without compromising her safety, what good should
we bring about?'

'Hanging a few of them at least, in all probability,' suggested the
doctor, 'and transporting the rest.'

'Very good,' replied Mr. Brownlow, smiling; 'but no doubt they will
bring that about for themselves in the fulness of time, and if we step
in to forestall them, it seems to me that we shall be performing a very
Quixotic act, in direct opposition to our own interest--or at least to
Oliver's, which is the same thing.'

'How?' inquired the doctor.

'Thus.  It is quite clear that we shall have extreme difficulty in
getting to the bottom of this mystery, unless we can bring this man,
Monks, upon his knees.  That can only be done by stratagem, and by
catching him when he is not surrounded by these people.  For, suppose
he were apprehended, we have no proof against him.  He is not even (so
far as we know, or as the facts appear to us) concerned with the gang
in any of their robberies. If he were not discharged, it is very
unlikely that he could receive any further punishment than being
committed to prison as a rogue and vagabond; and of course ever
afterwards his mouth would be so obstinately closed that he might as
well, for our purposes, be deaf, dumb, blind, and an idiot.'

'Then,' said the doctor impetuously, 'I put it to you again, whether
you think it reasonable that this promise to the girl should be
considered binding; a promise made with the best and kindest
intentions, but really--'

'Do not discuss the point, my dear young lady, pray,' said Mr.
Brownlow, interrupting Rose as she was about to speak. 'The promise
shall be kept.  I don't think it will, in the slightest degree,
interfere with our proceedings.  But, before we can resolve upon any
precise course of action, it will be necessary to see the girl; to
ascertain from her whether she will point out this Monks, on the
understanding that he is to be dealt with by us, and not by the law;
or, if she will not, or cannot do that, to procure from her such an
account of his haunts and description of his person, as will enable us
to identify him.  She cannot be seen until next Sunday night; this is
Tuesday.  I would suggest that in the meantime, we remain perfectly
quiet, and keep these matters secret even from Oliver himself.'

Although Mr. Losberne received with many wry faces a proposal involving
a delay of five whole days, he was fain to admit that no better course
occurred to him just then; and as both Rose and Mrs. Maylie sided very
strongly with Mr. Brownlow, that gentleman's proposition was carried
unanimously.

'I should like,' he said, 'to call in the aid of my friend Grimwig.  He
is a strange creature, but a shrewd one, and might prove of material
assistance to us; I should say that he was bred a lawyer, and quitted
the Bar in disgust because he had only one brief and a motion of
course, in twenty years, though whether that is recommendation or not,
you must determine for yourselves.'

'I have no objection to your calling in your friend if I may call in
mine,' said the doctor.

'We must put it to the vote,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'who may he be?'

'That lady's son, and this young lady's--very old friend,' said the
doctor, motioning towards Mrs. Maylie, and concluding with an
expressive glance at her niece.

Rose blushed deeply, but she did not make any audible objection to this
motion (possibly she felt in a hopeless minority); and Harry Maylie and
Mr. Grimwig were accordingly added to the committee.

'We stay in town, of course,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'while there remains
the slightest prospect of prosecuting this inquiry with a chance of
success.  I will spare neither trouble nor expense in behalf of the
object in which we are all so deeply interested, and I am content to
remain here, if it be for twelve months, so long as you assure me that
any hope remains.'

'Good!' rejoined Mr. Brownlow.  'And as I see on the faces about me, a
disposition to inquire how it happened that I was not in the way to
corroborate Oliver's tale, and had so suddenly left the kingdom, let me
stipulate that I shall be asked no questions until such time as I may
deem it expedient to forestall them by telling my own story.  Believe
me, I make this request with good reason, for I might otherwise excite
hopes destined never to be realised, and only increase difficulties and
disappointments already quite numerous enough.  Come!  Supper has been
announced, and young Oliver, who is all alone in the next room, will
have begun to think, by this time, that we have wearied of his company,
and entered into some dark conspiracy to thrust him forth upon the
world.'

With these words, the old gentleman gave his hand to Mrs. Maylie, and
escorted her into the supper-room.  Mr. Losberne followed, leading
Rose; and the council was, for the present, effectually broken up.



CHAPTER XLII

AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE OF OLIVER'S, EXHIBITING DECIDED MARKS OF GENIUS,
BECOMES A PUBLIC CHARACTER IN THE METROPOLIS

Upon the night when Nancy, having lulled Mr. Sikes to sleep, hurried on
her self-imposed mission to Rose Maylie, there advanced towards London,
by the Great North Road, two persons, upon whom it is expedient that
this history should bestow some attention.

They were a man and woman; or perhaps they would be better described as
a male and female:  for the former was one of those long-limbed,
knock-kneed, shambling, bony people, to whom it is difficult to assign
any precise age,--looking as they do, when they are yet boys, like
undergrown men, and when they are almost men, like overgrown boys.  The
woman was young, but of a robust and hardy make, as she need have been
to bear the weight of the heavy bundle which was strapped to her back.
Her companion was not encumbered with much luggage, as there merely
dangled from a stick which he carried over his shoulder, a small parcel
wrapped in a common handkerchief, and apparently light enough.  This
circumstance, added to the length of his legs, which were of unusual
extent, enabled him with much ease to keep some half-dozen paces in
advance of his companion, to whom he occasionally turned with an
impatient jerk of the head:  as if reproaching her tardiness, and
urging her to greater exertion.

Thus, they had toiled along the dusty road, taking little heed of any
object within sight, save when they stepped aside to allow a wider
passage for the mail-coaches which were whirling out of town, until
they passed through Highgate archway; when the foremost traveller
stopped and called impatiently to his companion,

'Come on, can't yer?  What a lazybones yer are, Charlotte.'

'It's a heavy load, I can tell you,' said the female, coming up, almost
breathless with fatigue.

'Heavy!  What are yer talking about?  What are yer made for?' rejoined
the male traveller, changing his own little bundle as he spoke, to the
other shoulder.  'Oh, there yer are, resting again! Well, if yer ain't
enough to tire anybody's patience out, I don't know what is!'

'Is it much farther?' asked the woman, resting herself against a bank,
and looking up with the perspiration streaming from her face.

'Much farther!  Yer as good as there,' said the long-legged tramper,
pointing out before him.  'Look there!  Those are the lights of London.'

'They're a good two mile off, at least,' said the woman despondingly.

'Never mind whether they're two mile off, or twenty,' said Noah
Claypole; for he it was; 'but get up and come on, or I'll kick yer, and
so I give yer notice.'

As Noah's red nose grew redder with anger, and as he crossed the road
while speaking, as if fully prepared to put his threat into execution,
the woman rose without any further remark, and trudged onward by his
side.

'Where do you mean to stop for the night, Noah?' she asked, after they
had walked a few hundred yards.

'How should I know?' replied Noah, whose temper had been considerably
impaired by walking.

'Near, I hope,' said Charlotte.

'No, not near,' replied Mr. Claypole.  'There!  Not near; so don't
think it.'

'Why not?'

'When I tell yer that I don't mean to do a thing, that's enough,
without any why or because either,' replied Mr. Claypole with dignity.

'Well, you needn't be so cross,' said his companion.

'A pretty thing it would be, wouldn't it to go and stop at the very
first public-house outside the town, so that Sowerberry, if he come up
after us, might poke in his old nose, and have us taken back in a cart
with handcuffs on,' said Mr. Claypole in a jeering tone.  'No!  I shall
go and lose myself among the narrowest streets I can find, and not stop
till we come to the very out-of-the-wayest house I can set eyes on.
'Cod, yer may thanks yer stars I've got a head; for if we hadn't gone,
at first, the wrong road a purpose, and come back across country, yer'd
have been locked up hard and fast a week ago, my lady.  And serve yer
right for being a fool.'

'I know I ain't as cunning as you are,' replied Charlotte; 'but don't
put all the blame on me, and say I should have been locked up.  You
would have been if I had been, any way.'

'Yer took the money from the till, yer know yer did,' said Mr. Claypole.

'I took it for you, Noah, dear,' rejoined Charlotte.

'Did I keep it?' asked Mr. Claypole.

'No; you trusted in me, and let me carry it like a dear, and so you
are,' said the lady, chucking him under the chin, and drawing her arm
through his.

This was indeed the case; but as it was not Mr. Claypole's habit to
repose a blind and foolish confidence in anybody, it should be
observed, in justice to that gentleman, that he had trusted Charlotte
to this extent, in order that, if they were pursued, the money might be
found on her:  which would leave him an opportunity of asserting his
innocence of any theft, and would greatly facilitate his chances of
escape.  Of course, he entered at this juncture, into no explanation of
his motives, and they walked on very lovingly together.

In pursuance of this cautious plan, Mr. Claypole went on, without
halting, until he arrived at the Angel at Islington, where he wisely
judged, from the crowd of passengers and numbers of vehicles, that
London began in earnest.  Just pausing to observe which appeared the
most crowded streets, and consequently the most to be avoided, he
crossed into Saint John's Road, and was soon deep in the obscurity of
the intricate and dirty ways, which, lying between Gray's Inn Lane and
Smithfield, render that part of the town one of the lowest and worst
that improvement has left in the midst of London.

Through these streets, Noah Claypole walked, dragging Charlotte after
him; now stepping into the kennel to embrace at a glance the whole
external character of some small public-house; now jogging on again, as
some fancied appearance induced him to believe it too public for his
purpose.  At length, he stopped in front of one, more humble in
appearance and more dirty than any he had yet seen; and, having crossed
over and surveyed it from the opposite pavement, graciously announced
his intention of putting up there, for the night.

'So give us the bundle,' said Noah, unstrapping it from the woman's
shoulders, and slinging it over his own; 'and don't yer speak, except
when yer spoke to.  What's the name of the house--t-h-r--three what?'

'Cripples,' said Charlotte.

'Three Cripples,' repeated Noah, 'and a very good sign too.  Now, then!
Keep close at my heels, and come along.'  With these injunctions, he
pushed the rattling door with his shoulder, and entered the house,
followed by his companion.

There was nobody in the bar but a young Jew, who, with his two elbows
on the counter, was reading a dirty newspaper. He stared very hard at
Noah, and Noah stared very hard at him.

If Noah had been attired in his charity-boy's dress, there might have
been some reason for the Jew opening his eyes so wide; but as he had
discarded the coat and badge, and wore a short smock-frock over his
leathers, there seemed no particular reason for his appearance exciting
so much attention in a public-house.

'Is this the Three Cripples?' asked Noah.

'That is the dabe of this 'ouse,' replied the Jew.

'A gentleman we met on the road, coming up from the country,
recommended us here,' said Noah, nudging Charlotte, perhaps to call her
attention to this most ingenious device for attracting respect, and
perhaps to warn her to betray no surprise.  'We want to sleep here
to-night.'

'I'b dot certaid you cad,' said Barney, who was the attendant sprite;
'but I'll idquire.'

'Show us the tap, and give us a bit of cold meat and a drop of beer
while yer inquiring, will yer?' said Noah.

Barney complied by ushering them into a small back-room, and setting
the required viands before them; having done which, he informed the
travellers that they could be lodged that night, and left the amiable
couple to their refreshment.

Now, this back-room was immediately behind the bar, and some steps
lower, so that any person connected with the house, undrawing a small
curtain which concealed a single pane of glass fixed in the wall of the
last-named apartment, about five feet from its flooring, could not only
look down upon any guests in the back-room without any great hazard of
being observed (the glass being in a dark angle of the wall, between
which and a large upright beam the observer had to thrust himself), but
could, by applying his ear to the partition, ascertain with tolerable
distinctness, their subject of conversation.  The landlord of the house
had not withdrawn his eye from this place of espial for five minutes,
and Barney had only just returned from making the communication above
related, when Fagin, in the course of his evening's business, came into
the bar to inquire after some of his young pupils.

'Hush!' said Barney:  'stradegers id the next roob.'

'Strangers!' repeated the old man in a whisper.

'Ah!  Ad rub uds too,' added Barney.  'Frob the cuttry, but subthig in
your way, or I'b bistaked.'

Fagin appeared to receive this communication with great interest.

Mounting a stool, he cautiously applied his eye to the pane of glass,
from which secret post he could see Mr. Claypole taking cold beef from
the dish, and porter from the pot, and administering homeopathic doses
of both to Charlotte, who sat patiently by, eating and drinking at his
pleasure.

'Aha!' he whispered, looking round to Barney, 'I like that fellow's
looks.  He'd be of use to us; he knows how to train the girl already.
Don't make as much noise as a mouse, my dear, and let me hear 'em
talk--let me hear 'em.'

He again applied his eye to the glass, and turning his ear to the
partition, listened attentively:  with a subtle and eager look upon his
face, that might have appertained to some old goblin.

'So I mean to be a gentleman,' said Mr. Claypole, kicking out his legs,
and continuing a conversation, the commencement of which Fagin had
arrived too late to hear. 'No more jolly old coffins, Charlotte, but a
gentleman's life for me:  and, if yer like, yer shall be a lady.'

'I should like that well enough, dear,' replied Charlotte; 'but tills
ain't to be emptied every day, and people to get clear off after it.'

'Tills be blowed!' said Mr. Claypole; 'there's more things besides
tills to be emptied.'

'What do you mean?' asked his companion.

'Pockets, women's ridicules, houses, mail-coaches, banks!' said Mr.
Claypole, rising with the porter.

'But you can't do all that, dear,' said Charlotte.

'I shall look out to get into company with them as can,' replied Noah.
'They'll be able to make us useful some way or another. Why, you
yourself are worth fifty women; I never see such a precious sly and
deceitful creetur as yer can be when I let yer.'

'Lor, how nice it is to hear yer say so!' exclaimed Charlotte,
imprinting a kiss upon his ugly face.

'There, that'll do:  don't yer be too affectionate, in case I'm cross
with yer,' said Noah, disengaging himself with great gravity.  'I
should like to be the captain of some band, and have the whopping of
'em, and follering 'em about, unbeknown to themselves.  That would suit
me, if there was good profit; and if we could only get in with some
gentleman of this sort, I say it would be cheap at that twenty-pound
note you've got,--especially as we don't very well know how to get rid
of it ourselves.'

After expressing this opinion, Mr. Claypole looked into the porter-pot
with an aspect of deep wisdom; and having well shaken its contents,
nodded condescendingly to Charlotte, and took a draught, wherewith he
appeared greatly refreshed.  He was meditating another, when the sudden
opening of the door, and the appearance of a stranger, interrupted him.

The stranger was Mr. Fagin.  And very amiable he looked, and a very low
bow he made, as he advanced, and setting himself down at the nearest
table, ordered something to drink of the grinning Barney.

'A pleasant night, sir, but cool for the time of year,' said Fagin,
rubbing his hands.  'From the country, I see, sir?'

'How do yer see that?' asked Noah Claypole.

'We have not so much dust as that in London,' replied Fagin, pointing
from Noah's shoes to those of his companion, and from them to the two
bundles.

'Yer a sharp feller,' said Noah.  'Ha! ha! only hear that, Charlotte!'

'Why, one need be sharp in this town, my dear,' replied the Jew,
sinking his voice to a confidential whisper; 'and that's the truth.'

Fagin followed up this remark by striking the side of his nose with his
right forefinger,--a gesture which Noah attempted to imitate, though
not with complete success, in consequence of his own nose not being
large enough for the purpose.  However, Mr. Fagin seemed to interpret
the endeavour as expressing a perfect coincidence with his opinion, and
put about the liquor which Barney reappeared with, in a very friendly
manner.

'Good stuff that,' observed Mr. Claypole, smacking his lips.

'Dear!' said Fagin.  'A man need be always emptying a till, or a
pocket, or a woman's reticule, or a house, or a mail-coach, or a bank,
if he drinks it regularly.'

Mr. Claypole no sooner heard this extract from his own remarks than he
fell back in his chair, and looked from the Jew to Charlotte with a
countenance of ashy paleness and excessive terror.

'Don't mind me, my dear,' said Fagin, drawing his chair closer. 'Ha!
ha! it was lucky it was only me that heard you by chance. It was very
lucky it was only me.'

'I didn't take it,' stammered Noah, no longer stretching out his legs
like an independent gentleman, but coiling them up as well as he could
under his chair; 'it was all her doing; yer've got it now, Charlotte,
yer know yer have.'

'No matter who's got it, or who did it, my dear,' replied Fagin,
glancing, nevertheless, with a hawk's eye at the girl and the two
bundles.  'I'm in that way myself, and I like you for it.'

'In what way?' asked Mr. Claypole, a little recovering.

'In that way of business,' rejoined Fagin; 'and so are the people of
the house.  You've hit the right nail upon the head, and are as safe
here as you could be.  There is not a safer place in all this town than
is the Cripples; that is, when I like to make it so.  And I have taken
a fancy to you and the young woman; so I've said the word, and you may
make your minds easy.'

Noah Claypole's mind might have been at ease after this assurance, but
his body certainly was not; for he shuffled and writhed about, into
various uncouth positions:  eyeing his new friend meanwhile with
mingled fear and suspicion.

'I'll tell you more,' said Fagin, after he had reassured the girl, by
dint of friendly nods and muttered encouragements. 'I have got a friend
that I think can gratify your darling wish, and put you in the right
way, where you can take whatever department of the business you think
will suit you best at first, and be taught all the others.'

'Yer speak as if yer were in earnest,' replied Noah.

'What advantage would it be to me to be anything else?' inquired Fagin,
shrugging his shoulders.  'Here!  Let me have a word with you outside.'

'There's no occasion to trouble ourselves to move,' said Noah, getting
his legs by gradual degrees abroad again. 'She'll take the luggage
upstairs the while.  Charlotte, see to them bundles.'

This mandate, which had been delivered with great majesty, was obeyed
without the slightest demur; and Charlotte made the best of her way off
with the packages while Noah held the door open and watched her out.

'She's kept tolerably well under, ain't she?' he asked as he resumed
his seat:  in the tone of a keeper who had tamed some wild animal.

'Quite perfect,' rejoined Fagin, clapping him on the shoulder. 'You're
a genius, my dear.'

'Why, I suppose if I wasn't, I shouldn't be here,' replied Noah. 'But,
I say, she'll be back if yer lose time.'

'Now, what do you think?' said Fagin.  'If you was to like my friend,
could you do better than join him?'

'Is he in a good way of business; that's where it is!' responded Noah,
winking one of his little eyes.

'The top of the tree; employs a power of hands; has the very best
society in the profession.'

'Regular town-maders?' asked Mr. Claypole.

'Not a countryman among 'em; and I don't think he'd take you, even on
my recommendation, if he didn't run rather short of assistants just
now,' replied Fagin.

'Should I have to hand over?' said Noah, slapping his breeches-pocket.

'It couldn't possibly be done without,' replied Fagin, in a most
decided manner.

'Twenty pound, though--it's a lot of money!'

'Not when it's in a note you can't get rid of,' retorted Fagin. 'Number
and date taken, I suppose?  Payment stopped at the Bank? Ah!  It's not
worth much to him.  It'll have to go abroad, and he couldn't sell it
for a great deal in the market.'

'When could I see him?' asked Noah doubtfully.

'To-morrow morning.'

'Where?'

'Here.'

'Um!' said Noah.  'What's the wages?'

'Live like a gentleman--board and lodging, pipes and spirits free--half
of all you earn, and half of all the young woman earns,' replied Mr.
Fagin.

Whether Noah Claypole, whose rapacity was none of the least
comprehensive, would have acceded even to these glowing terms, had he
been a perfectly free agent, is very doubtful; but as he recollected
that, in the event of his refusal, it was in the power of his new
acquaintance to give him up to justice immediately (and more unlikely
things had come to pass), he gradually relented, and said he thought
that would suit him.

'But, yer see,' observed Noah, 'as she will be able to do a good deal,
I should like to take something very light.'

'A little fancy work?' suggested Fagin.

'Ah! something of that sort,' replied Noah.  'What do you think would
suit me now?  Something not too trying for the strength, and not very
dangerous, you know.  That's the sort of thing!'

'I heard you talk of something in the spy way upon the others, my
dear,' said Fagin.  'My friend wants somebody who would do that well,
very much.'

'Why, I did mention that, and I shouldn't mind turning my hand to it
sometimes,' rejoined Mr. Claypole slowly; 'but it wouldn't pay by
itself, you know.'

'That's true!' observed the Jew, ruminating or pretending to ruminate.
'No, it might not.'

'What do you think, then?' asked Noah, anxiously regarding him.
'Something in the sneaking way, where it was pretty sure work, and not
much more risk than being at home.'

'What do you think of the old ladies?' asked Fagin. 'There's a good
deal of money made in snatching their bags and parcels, and running
round the corner.'

'Don't they holler out a good deal, and scratch sometimes?' asked Noah,
shaking his head.  'I don't think that would answer my purpose.  Ain't
there any other line open?'

'Stop!' said Fagin, laying his hand on Noah's knee.  'The kinchin lay.'

'What's that?' demanded Mr. Claypole.

'The kinchins, my dear,' said Fagin, 'is the young children that's sent
on errands by their mothers, with sixpences and shillings; and the lay
is just to take their money away--they've always got it ready in their
hands,--then knock 'em into the kennel, and walk off very slow, as if
there were nothing else the matter but a child fallen down and hurt
itself.  Ha! ha! ha!'

'Ha! ha!' roared Mr. Claypole, kicking up his legs in an ecstasy.
'Lord, that's the very thing!'

'To be sure it is,' replied Fagin; 'and you can have a few good beats
chalked out in Camden Town, and Battle Bridge, and neighborhoods like
that, where they're always going errands; and you can upset as many
kinchins as you want, any hour in the day. Ha! ha! ha!'

With this, Fagin poked Mr. Claypole in the side, and they joined in a
burst of laughter both long and loud.

'Well, that's all right!' said Noah, when he had recovered himself, and
Charlotte had returned.  'What time to-morrow shall we say?'

'Will ten do?' asked Fagin, adding, as Mr. Claypole nodded assent,
'What name shall I tell my good friend.'

'Mr. Bolter,' replied Noah, who had prepared himself for such
emergency.  'Mr. Morris Bolter.  This is Mrs. Bolter.'

'Mrs. Bolter's humble servant,' said Fagin, bowing with grotesque
politeness.  'I hope I shall know her better very shortly.'

'Do you hear the gentleman, Charlotte?' thundered Mr. Claypole.

'Yes, Noah, dear!' replied Mrs. Bolter, extending her hand.

'She calls me Noah, as a sort of fond way of talking,' said Mr. Morris
Bolter, late Claypole, turning to Fagin.  'You understand?'

'Oh yes, I understand--perfectly,' replied Fagin, telling the truth for
once.  'Good-night!  Good-night!'

With many adieus and good wishes, Mr. Fagin went his way. Noah
Claypole, bespeaking his good lady's attention, proceeded to enlighten
her relative to the arrangement he had made, with all that haughtiness
and air of superiority, becoming, not only a member of the sterner sex,
but a gentleman who appreciated the dignity of a special appointment on
the kinchin lay, in London and its vicinity.



CHAPTER XLIII

WHEREIN IS SHOWN HOW THE ARTFUL DODGER GOT INTO TROUBLE

'And so it was you that was your own friend, was it?' asked Mr.
Claypole, otherwise Bolter, when, by virtue of the compact entered into
between them, he had removed next day to Fagin's house.  ''Cod, I
thought as much last night!'

'Every man's his own friend, my dear,' replied Fagin, with his most
insinuating grin.  'He hasn't as good a one as himself anywhere.'

'Except sometimes,' replied Morris Bolter, assuming the air of a man of
the world.  'Some people are nobody's enemies but their own, yer know.'

'Don't believe that,' said Fagin.  'When a man's his own enemy, it's
only because he's too much his own friend; not because he's careful for
everybody but himself.  Pooh! pooh!  There ain't such a thing in
nature.'

'There oughn't to be, if there is,' replied Mr. Bolter.

'That stands to reason.  Some conjurers say that number three is the
magic number, and some say number seven.  It's neither, my friend,
neither.  It's number one.

'Ha! ha!' cried Mr. Bolter.  'Number one for ever.'

'In a little community like ours, my dear,' said Fagin, who felt it
necessary to qualify this position, 'we have a general number one,
without considering me too as the same, and all the other young people.'

'Oh, the devil!' exclaimed Mr. Bolter.

'You see,' pursued Fagin, affecting to disregard this interruption, 'we
are so mixed up together, and identified in our interests, that it must
be so.  For instance, it's your object to take care of number
one--meaning yourself.'

'Certainly,' replied Mr. Bolter.  'Yer about right there.'

'Well!  You can't take care of yourself, number one, without taking
care of me, number one.'

'Number two, you mean,' said Mr. Bolter, who was largely endowed with
the quality of selfishness.

'No, I don't!' retorted Fagin.  'I'm of the same importance to you, as
you are to yourself.'

'I say,' interrupted Mr. Bolter, 'yer a very nice man, and I'm very
fond of yer; but we ain't quite so thick together, as all that comes
to.'

'Only think,' said Fagin, shrugging his shoulders, and stretching out
his hands; 'only consider.  You've done what's a very pretty thing, and
what I love you for doing; but what at the same time would put the
cravat round your throat, that's so very easily tied and so very
difficult to unloose--in plain English, the halter!'

Mr. Bolter put his hand to his neckerchief, as if he felt it
inconveniently tight; and murmured an assent, qualified in tone but not
in substance.

'The gallows,' continued Fagin, 'the gallows, my dear, is an ugly
finger-post, which points out a very short and sharp turning that has
stopped many a bold fellow's career on the broad highway.  To keep in
the easy road, and keep it at a distance, is object number one with
you.'

'Of course it is,' replied Mr. Bolter.  'What do yer talk about such
things for?'

'Only to show you my meaning clearly,' said the Jew, raising his
eyebrows.  'To be able to do that, you depend upon me. To keep my
little business all snug, I depend upon you. The first is your number
one, the second my number one.  The more you value your number one, the
more careful you must be of mine; so we come at last to what I told you
at first--that a regard for number one holds us all together, and must
do so, unless we would all go to pieces in company.'

'That's true,' rejoined Mr. Bolter, thoughtfully.  'Oh! yer a cunning
old codger!'

Mr. Fagin saw, with delight, that this tribute to his powers was no
mere compliment, but that he had really impressed his recruit with a
sense of his wily genius, which it was most important that he should
entertain in the outset of their acquaintance.  To strengthen an
impression so desirable and useful, he followed up the blow by
acquainting him, in some detail, with the magnitude and extent of his
operations; blending truth and fiction together, as best served his
purpose; and bringing both to bear, with so much art, that Mr. Bolter's
respect visibly increased, and became tempered, at the same time, with
a degree of wholesome fear, which it was highly desirable to awaken.

'It's this mutual trust we have in each other that consoles me under
heavy losses,' said Fagin.  'My best hand was taken from me, yesterday
morning.'

'You don't mean to say he died?' cried Mr. Bolter.

'No, no,' replied Fagin, 'not so bad as that.  Not quite so bad.'

'What, I suppose he was--'

'Wanted,' interposed Fagin.  'Yes, he was wanted.'

'Very particular?' inquired Mr. Bolter.

'No,' replied Fagin, 'not very.  He was charged with attempting to pick
a pocket, and they found a silver snuff-box on him,--his own, my dear,
his own, for he took snuff himself, and was very fond of it.  They
remanded him till to-day, for they thought they knew the owner.  Ah! he
was worth fifty boxes, and I'd give the price of as many to have him
back.  You should have known the Dodger, my dear; you should have known
the Dodger.'

'Well, but I shall know him, I hope; don't yer think so?' said Mr.
Bolter.

'I'm doubtful about it,' replied Fagin, with a sigh.  'If they don't
get any fresh evidence, it'll only be a summary conviction, and we
shall have him back again after six weeks or so; but, if they do, it's
a case of lagging.  They know what a clever lad he is; he'll be a
lifer.  They'll make the Artful nothing less than a lifer.'

'What do you mean by lagging and a lifer?' demanded Mr. Bolter. 'What's
the good of talking in that way to me; why don't yer speak so as I can
understand yer?'

Fagin was about to translate these mysterious expressions into the
vulgar tongue; and, being interpreted, Mr. Bolter would have been
informed that they represented that combination of words,
'transportation for life,' when the dialogue was cut short by the entry
of Master Bates, with his hands in his breeches-pockets, and his face
twisted into a look of semi-comical woe.

'It's all up, Fagin,' said Charley, when he and his new companion had
been made known to each other.

'What do you mean?'

'They've found the gentleman as owns the box; two or three more's a
coming to 'dentify him; and the Artful's booked for a passage out,'
replied Master Bates.  'I must have a full suit of mourning, Fagin, and
a hatband, to wisit him in, afore he sets out upon his travels.  To
think of Jack Dawkins--lummy Jack--the Dodger--the Artful Dodger--going
abroad for a common twopenny-halfpenny sneeze-box!  I never thought
he'd a done it under a gold watch, chain, and seals, at the lowest.
Oh, why didn't he rob some rich old gentleman of all his walables, and
go out as a gentleman, and not like a common prig, without no honour
nor glory!'

With this expression of feeling for his unfortunate friend, Master
Bates sat himself on the nearest chair with an aspect of chagrin and
despondency.

'What do you talk about his having neither honour nor glory for!'
exclaimed Fagin, darting an angry look at his pupil. 'Wasn't he always
the top-sawyer among you all!  Is there one of you that could touch him
or come near him on any scent!  Eh?'

'Not one,' replied Master Bates, in a voice rendered husky by regret;
'not one.'

'Then what do you talk of?' replied Fagin angrily; 'what are you
blubbering for?'

''Cause it isn't on the rec-ord, is it?' said Charley, chafed into
perfect defiance of his venerable friend by the current of his regrets;
''cause it can't come out in the 'dictment; 'cause nobody will never
know half of what he was.  How will he stand in the Newgate Calendar?
P'raps not be there at all.  Oh, my eye, my eye, wot a blow it is!'

'Ha! ha!' cried Fagin, extending his right hand, and turning to Mr.
Bolter in a fit of chuckling which shook him as though he had the
palsy; 'see what a pride they take in their profession, my dear.  Ain't
it beautiful?'

Mr. Bolter nodded assent, and Fagin, after contemplating the grief of
Charley Bates for some seconds with evident satisfaction, stepped up to
that young gentleman and patted him on the shoulder.

'Never mind, Charley,' said Fagin soothingly; 'it'll come out, it'll be
sure to come out.  They'll all know what a clever fellow he was; he'll
show it himself, and not disgrace his old pals and teachers.  Think how
young he is too!  What a distinction, Charley, to be lagged at his time
of life!'

'Well, it is a honour that is!' said Charley, a little consoled.

'He shall have all he wants,' continued the Jew.  'He shall be kept in
the Stone Jug, Charley, like a gentleman.  Like a gentleman!  With his
beer every day, and money in his pocket to pitch and toss with, if he
can't spend it.'

'No, shall he though?' cried Charley Bates.

'Ay, that he shall,' replied Fagin, 'and we'll have a big-wig, Charley:
one that's got the greatest gift of the gab:  to carry on his defence;
and he shall make a speech for himself too, if he likes; and we'll read
it all in the papers--"Artful Dodger--shrieks of laughter--here the
court was convulsed"--eh, Charley, eh?'

'Ha! ha!' laughed Master Bates, 'what a lark that would be, wouldn't
it, Fagin?  I say, how the Artful would bother 'em wouldn't he?'

'Would!' cried Fagin.  'He shall--he will!'

'Ah, to be sure, so he will,' repeated Charley, rubbing his hands.

'I think I see him now,' cried the Jew, bending his eyes upon his pupil.

'So do I,' cried Charley Bates.  'Ha! ha! ha! so do I.  I see it all
afore me, upon my soul I do, Fagin.  What a game!  What a regular game!
All the big-wigs trying to look solemn, and Jack Dawkins addressing of
'em as intimate and comfortable as if he was the judge's own son making
a speech arter dinner--ha! ha! ha!'

In fact, Mr. Fagin had so well humoured his young friend's eccentric
disposition, that Master Bates, who had at first been disposed to
consider the imprisoned Dodger rather in the light of a victim, now
looked upon him as the chief actor in a scene of most uncommon and
exquisite humour, and felt quite impatient for the arrival of the time
when his old companion should have so favourable an opportunity of
displaying his abilities.

'We must know how he gets on to-day, by some handy means or other,'
said Fagin.  'Let me think.'

'Shall I go?' asked Charley.

'Not for the world,' replied Fagin.  'Are you mad, my dear, stark mad,
that you'd walk into the very place where--No, Charley, no. One is
enough to lose at a time.'

'You don't mean to go yourself, I suppose?' said Charley with a
humorous leer.

'That wouldn't quite fit,' replied Fagin shaking his head.

'Then why don't you send this new cove?' asked Master Bates, laying his
hand on Noah's arm.  'Nobody knows him.'

'Why, if he didn't mind--' observed Fagin.

'Mind!' interposed Charley.  'What should he have to mind?'

'Really nothing, my dear,' said Fagin, turning to Mr. Bolter, 'really
nothing.'

'Oh, I dare say about that, yer know,' observed Noah, backing towards
the door, and shaking his head with a kind of sober alarm.  'No,
no--none of that.  It's not in my department, that ain't.'

'Wot department has he got, Fagin?' inquired Master Bates, surveying
Noah's lank form with much disgust.  'The cutting away when there's
anything wrong, and the eating all the wittles when there's everything
right; is that his branch?'

'Never mind,' retorted Mr. Bolter; 'and don't yer take liberties with
yer superiors, little boy, or yer'll find yerself in the wrong shop.'

Master Bates laughed so vehemently at this magnificent threat, that it
was some time before Fagin could interpose, and represent to Mr. Bolter
that he incurred no possible danger in visiting the police-office;
that, inasmuch as no account of the little affair in which he had
engaged, nor any description of his person, had yet been forwarded to
the metropolis, it was very probable that he was not even suspected of
having resorted to it for shelter; and that, if he were properly
disguised, it would be as safe a spot for him to visit as any in
London, inasmuch as it would be, of all places, the very last, to which
he could be supposed likely to resort of his own free will.

Persuaded, in part, by these representations, but overborne in a much
greater degree by his fear of Fagin, Mr. Bolter at length consented,
with a very bad grace, to undertake the expedition. By Fagin's
directions, he immediately substituted for his own attire, a waggoner's
frock, velveteen breeches, and leather leggings:  all of which articles
the Jew had at hand.  He was likewise furnished with a felt hat well
garnished with turnpike tickets; and a carter's whip.  Thus equipped,
he was to saunter into the office, as some country fellow from Covent
Garden market might be supposed to do for the gratification of his
curiousity; and as he was as awkward, ungainly, and raw-boned a fellow
as need be, Mr. Fagin had no fear but that he would look the part to
perfection.

These arrangements completed, he was informed of the necessary signs
and tokens by which to recognise the Artful Dodger, and was conveyed by
Master Bates through dark and winding ways to within a very short
distance of Bow Street. Having described the precise situation of the
office, and accompanied it with copious directions how he was to walk
straight up the passage, and when he got into the side, and pull off
his hat as he went into the room, Charley Bates bade him hurry on
alone, and promised to bide his return on the spot of their parting.

Noah Claypole, or Morris Bolter as the reader pleases, punctually
followed the directions he had received, which--Master Bates being
pretty well acquainted with the locality--were so exact that he was
enabled to gain the magisterial presence without asking any question,
or meeting with any interruption by the way.

He found himself jostled among a crowd of people, chiefly women, who
were huddled together in a dirty frowsy room, at the upper end of which
was a raised platform railed off from the rest, with a dock for the
prisoners on the left hand against the wall, a box for the witnesses in
the middle, and a desk for the magistrates on the right; the awful
locality last named, being screened off by a partition which concealed
the bench from the common gaze, and left the vulgar to imagine (if they
could) the full majesty of justice.

There were only a couple of women in the dock, who were nodding to
their admiring friends, while the clerk read some depositions to a
couple of policemen and a man in plain clothes who leant over the
table.  A jailer stood reclining against the dock-rail, tapping his
nose listlessly with a large key, except when he repressed an undue
tendency to conversation among the idlers, by proclaiming silence; or
looked sternly up to bid some woman 'Take that baby out,' when the
gravity of justice was disturbed by feeble cries, half-smothered in the
mother's shawl, from some meagre infant.  The room smelt close and
unwholesome; the walls were dirt-discoloured; and the ceiling
blackened.  There was an old smoky bust over the mantel-shelf, and a
dusty clock above the dock--the only thing present, that seemed to go
on as it ought; for depravity, or poverty, or an habitual acquaintance
with both, had left a taint on all the animate matter, hardly less
unpleasant than the thick greasy scum on every inanimate object that
frowned upon it.

Noah looked eagerly about him for the Dodger; but although there were
several women who would have done very well for that distinguished
character's mother or sister, and more than one man who might be
supposed to bear a strong resemblance to his father, nobody at all
answering the description given him of Mr. Dawkins was to be seen.  He
waited in a state of much suspense and uncertainty until the women,
being committed for trial, went flaunting out; and then was quickly
relieved by the appearance of another prisoner who he felt at once
could be no other than the object of his visit.

It was indeed Mr. Dawkins, who, shuffling into the office with the big
coat sleeves tucked up as usual, his left hand in his pocket, and his
hat in his right hand, preceded the jailer, with a rolling gait
altogether indescribable, and, taking his place in the dock, requested
in an audible voice to know what he was placed in that 'ere disgraceful
sitivation for.

'Hold your tongue, will you?' said the jailer.

'I'm an Englishman, ain't I?' rejoined the Dodger.  'Where are my
priwileges?'

'You'll get your privileges soon enough,' retorted the jailer, 'and
pepper with 'em.'

'We'll see wot the Secretary of State for the Home Affairs has got to
say to the beaks, if I don't,' replied Mr. Dawkins.  'Now then!  Wot is
this here business?  I shall thank the madg'strates to dispose of this
here little affair, and not to keep me while they read the paper, for
I've got an appointment with a genelman in the City, and as I am a man
of my word and wery punctual in business matters, he'll go away if I
ain't there to my time, and then pr'aps ther won't be an action for
damage against them as kep me away.  Oh no, certainly not!'

At this point, the Dodger, with a show of being very particular with a
view to proceedings to be had thereafter, desired the jailer to
communicate 'the names of them two files as was on the bench.'  Which
so tickled the spectators, that they laughed almost as heartily as
Master Bates could have done if he had heard the request.

'Silence there!' cried the jailer.

'What is this?' inquired one of the magistrates.

'A pick-pocketing case, your worship.'

'Has the boy ever been here before?'

'He ought to have been, a many times,' replied the jailer. 'He has been
pretty well everywhere else.  _I_ know him well, your worship.'

'Oh! you know me, do you?' cried the Artful, making a note of the
statement.  'Wery good.  That's a case of deformation of character, any
way.'

Here there was another laugh, and another cry of silence.

'Now then, where are the witnesses?' said the clerk.

'Ah! that's right,' added the Dodger.  'Where are they?  I should like
to see 'em.'

This wish was immediately gratified, for a policeman stepped forward
who had seen the prisoner attempt the pocket of an unknown gentleman in
a crowd, and indeed take a handkerchief therefrom, which, being a very
old one, he deliberately put back again, after trying it on his own
countenance.  For this reason, he took the Dodger into custody as soon
as he could get near him, and the said Dodger, being searched, had upon
his person a silver snuff-box, with the owner's name engraved upon the
lid.  This gentleman had been discovered on reference to the Court
Guide, and being then and there present, swore that the snuff-box was
his, and that he had missed it on the previous day, the moment he had
disengaged himself from the crowd before referred to.  He had also
remarked a young gentleman in the throng, particularly active in making
his way about, and that young gentleman was the prisoner before him.

'Have you anything to ask this witness, boy?' said the magistrate.

'I wouldn't abase myself by descending to hold no conversation with
him,' replied the Dodger.

'Have you anything to say at all?'

'Do you hear his worship ask if you've anything to say?' inquired the
jailer, nudging the silent Dodger with his elbow.

'I beg your pardon,' said the Dodger, looking up with an air of
abstraction.  'Did you redress yourself to me, my man?'

'I never see such an out-and-out young wagabond, your worship,'
observed the officer with a grin.  'Do you mean to say anything, you
young shaver?'

'No,' replied the Dodger, 'not here, for this ain't the shop for
justice:  besides which, my attorney is a-breakfasting this morning
with the Wice President of the House of Commons; but I shall have
something to say elsewhere, and so will he, and so will a wery numerous
and 'spectable circle of acquaintance as'll make them beaks wish they'd
never been born, or that they'd got their footmen to hang 'em up to
their own hat-pegs, afore they let 'em come out this morning to try it
on upon me.  I'll--'

'There!  He's fully committed!' interposed the clerk. 'Take him away.'

'Come on,' said the jailer.

'Oh ah!  I'll come on,' replied the Dodger, brushing his hat with the
palm of his hand.  'Ah! (to the Bench) it's no use your looking
frightened; I won't show you no mercy, not a ha'porth of it.  _You'll_
pay for this, my fine fellers.  I wouldn't be you for something!  I
wouldn't go free, now, if you was to fall down on your knees and ask
me.  Here, carry me off to prison!  Take me away!'

With these last words, the Dodger suffered himself to be led off by the
collar; threatening, till he got into the yard, to make a parliamentary
business of it; and then grinning in the officer's face, with great
glee and self-approval.

Having seen him locked up by himself in a little cell, Noah made the
best of his way back to where he had left Master Bates. After waiting
here some time, he was joined by that young gentleman, who had
prudently abstained from showing himself until he had looked carefully
abroad from a snug retreat, and ascertained that his new friend had not
been followed by any impertinent person.

The two hastened back together, to bear to Mr. Fagin the animating news
that the Dodger was doing full justice to his bringing-up, and
establishing for himself a glorious reputation.



CHAPTER XLIV

THE TIME ARRIVES FOR NANCY TO REDEEM HER PLEDGE TO ROSE MAYLIE. SHE
FAILS.

Adept as she was, in all the arts of cunning and dissimulation, the
girl Nancy could not wholly conceal the effect which the knowledge of
the step she had taken, wrought upon her mind.  She remembered that
both the crafty Jew and the brutal Sikes had confided to her schemes,
which had been hidden from all others: in the full confidence that she
was trustworthy and beyond the reach of their suspicion.  Vile as those
schemes were, desperate as were their originators, and bitter as were
her feelings towards Fagin, who had led her, step by step, deeper and
deeper down into an abyss of crime and misery, whence was no escape;
still, there were times when, even towards him, she felt some
relenting, lest her disclosure should bring him within the iron grasp
he had so long eluded, and he should fall at last--richly as he merited
such a fate--by her hand.

But, these were the mere wanderings of a mind unable wholly to detach
itself from old companions and associations, though enabled to fix
itself steadily on one object, and resolved not to be turned aside by
any consideration.  Her fears for Sikes would have been more powerful
inducements to recoil while there was yet time; but she had stipulated
that her secret should be rigidly kept, she had dropped no clue which
could lead to his discovery, she had refused, even for his sake, a
refuge from all the guilt and wretchedness that encompasses her--and
what more could she do! She was resolved.

Though all her mental struggles terminated in this conclusion, they
forced themselves upon her, again and again, and left their traces too.
She grew pale and thin, even within a few days.  At times, she took no
heed of what was passing before her, or no part in conversations where
once, she would have been the loudest.  At other times, she laughed
without merriment, and was noisy without a moment afterwards--she sat
silent and dejected, brooding with her head upon her hands, while the
very effort by which she roused herself, told, more forcibly than even
these indications, that she was ill at ease, and that her thoughts were
occupied with matters very different and distant from those in the
course of discussion by her companions.

It was Sunday night, and the bell of the nearest church struck the
hour.  Sikes and the Jew were talking, but they paused to listen.  The
girl looked up from the low seat on which she crouched, and listened
too.  Eleven.

'An hour this side of midnight,' said Sikes, raising the blind to look
out and returning to his seat.  'Dark and heavy it is too. A good night
for business this.'

'Ah!' replied Fagin.  'What a pity, Bill, my dear, that there's none
quite ready to be done.'

'You're right for once,' replied Sikes gruffly.  'It is a pity, for I'm
in the humour too.'

Fagin sighed, and shook his head despondingly.

'We must make up for lost time when we've got things into a good train.
That's all I know,' said Sikes.

'That's the way to talk, my dear,' replied Fagin, venturing to pat him
on the shoulder.  'It does me good to hear you.'

'Does you good, does it!' cried Sikes.  'Well, so be it.'

'Ha! ha! ha!' laughed Fagin, as if he were relieved by even this
concession.  'You're like yourself to-night, Bill.  Quite like
yourself.'

'I don't feel like myself when you lay that withered old claw on my
shoulder, so take it away,' said Sikes, casting off the Jew's hand.

'It make you nervous, Bill,--reminds you of being nabbed, does it?'
said Fagin, determined not to be offended.

'Reminds me of being nabbed by the devil,' returned Sikes. 'There never
was another man with such a face as yours, unless it was your father,
and I suppose _he_ is singeing his grizzled red beard by this time,
unless you came straight from the old 'un without any father at all
betwixt you; which I shouldn't wonder at, a bit.'

Fagin offered no reply to this compliment:  but, pulling Sikes by the
sleeve, pointed his finger towards Nancy, who had taken advantage of
the foregoing conversation to put on her bonnet, and was now leaving
the room.

'Hallo!' cried Sikes.  'Nance.  Where's the gal going to at this time
of night?'

'Not far.'

'What answer's that?' retorted Sikes.  'Do you hear me?'

'I don't know where,' replied the girl.

'Then I do,' said Sikes, more in the spirit of obstinacy than because
he had any real objection to the girl going where she listed.
'Nowhere.  Sit down.'

'I'm not well.  I told you that before,' rejoined the girl.  'I want a
breath of air.'

'Put your head out of the winder,' replied Sikes.

'There's not enough there,' said the girl.  'I want it in the street.'

'Then you won't have it,' replied Sikes.  With which assurance he rose,
locked the door, took the key out, and pulling her bonnet from her
head, flung it up to the top of an old press.  'There,' said the
robber.  'Now stop quietly where you are, will you?'

'It's not such a matter as a bonnet would keep me,' said the girl
turning very pale.  'What do you mean, Bill?  Do you know what you're
doing?'

'Know what I'm--Oh!' cried Sikes, turning to Fagin, 'she's out of her
senses, you know, or she daren't talk to me in that way.'

'You'll drive me on the something desperate,' muttered the girl placing
both hands upon her breast, as though to keep down by force some
violent outbreak.  'Let me go, will you,--this minute--this instant.'

'No!' said Sikes.

'Tell him to let me go, Fagin.  He had better.  It'll be better for
him.  Do you hear me?' cried Nancy stamping her foot upon the ground.

'Hear you!' repeated Sikes turning round in his chair to confront her.
'Aye!  And if I hear you for half a minute longer, the dog shall have
such a grip on your throat as'll tear some of that screaming voice out.
Wot has come over you, you jade!  Wot is it?'

'Let me go,' said the girl with great earnestness; then sitting herself
down on the floor, before the door, she said, 'Bill, let me go; you
don't know what you are doing. You don't, indeed.  For only one
hour--do--do!'

'Cut my limbs off one by one!' cried Sikes, seizing her roughly by the
arm, 'If I don't think the gal's stark raving mad.  Get up.'

'Not till you let me go--not till you let me go--Never--never!'
screamed the girl.  Sikes looked on, for a minute, watching his
opportunity, and suddenly pinioning her hands dragged her, struggling
and wrestling with him by the way, into a small room adjoining, where
he sat himself on a bench, and thrusting her into a chair, held her
down by force.  She struggled and implored by turns until twelve
o'clock had struck, and then, wearied and exhausted, ceased to contest
the point any further.  With a caution, backed by many oaths, to make
no more efforts to go out that night, Sikes left her to recover at
leisure and rejoined Fagin.

'Whew!' said the housebreaker wiping the perspiration from his face.
'Wot a precious strange gal that is!'

'You may say that, Bill,' replied Fagin thoughtfully.  'You may say
that.'

'Wot did she take it into her head to go out to-night for, do you
think?' asked Sikes.  'Come; you should know her better than me. Wot
does it mean?'

'Obstinacy; woman's obstinacy, I suppose, my dear.'

'Well, I suppose it is,' growled Sikes.  'I thought I had tamed her,
but she's as bad as ever.'

'Worse,' said Fagin thoughtfully.  'I never knew her like this, for
such a little cause.'

'Nor I,' said Sikes.  'I think she's got a touch of that fever in her
blood yet, and it won't come out--eh?'

'Like enough.'

'I'll let her a little blood, without troubling the doctor, if she's
took that way again,' said Sikes.

Fagin nodded an expressive approval of this mode of treatment.

'She was hanging about me all day, and night too, when I was stretched
on my back; and you, like a blackhearted wolf as you are, kept yourself
aloof,' said Sikes.  'We was poor too, all the time, and I think, one
way or other, it's worried and fretted her; and that being shut up here
so long has made her restless--eh?'

'That's it, my dear,' replied the Jew in a whisper.  'Hush!'

As he uttered these words, the girl herself appeared and resumed her
former seat.  Her eyes were swollen and red; she rocked herself to and
fro; tossed her head; and, after a little time, burst out laughing.

'Why, now she's on the other tack!' exclaimed Sikes, turning a look of
excessive surprise on his companion.

Fagin nodded to him to take no further notice just then; and, in a few
minutes, the girl subsided into her accustomed demeanour. Whispering
Sikes that there was no fear of her relapsing, Fagin took up his hat
and bade him good-night.  He paused when he reached the room-door, and
looking round, asked if somebody would light him down the dark stairs.

'Light him down,' said Sikes, who was filling his pipe. 'It's a pity he
should break his neck himself, and disappoint the sight-seers.  Show
him a light.'

Nancy followed the old man downstairs, with a candle.  When they
reached the passage, he laid his finger on his lip, and drawing close
to the girl, said, in a whisper.

'What is it, Nancy, dear?'

'What do you mean?' replied the girl, in the same tone.

'The reason of all this,' replied Fagin.  'If _he_'--he pointed with
his skinny fore-finger up the stairs--'is so hard with you (he's a
brute, Nance, a brute-beast), why don't you--'

'Well?' said the girl, as Fagin paused, with his mouth almost touching
her ear, and his eyes looking into hers.

'No matter just now.  We'll talk of this again.  You have a friend in
me, Nance; a staunch friend.  I have the means at hand, quiet and
close.  If you want revenge on those that treat you like a dog--like a
dog!  worse than his dog, for he humours him sometimes--come to me.  I
say, come to me.  He is the mere hound of a day, but you know me of
old, Nance.'

'I know you well,' replied the girl, without manifesting the least
emotion.  'Good-night.'

She shrank back, as Fagin offered to lay his hand on hers, but said
good-night again, in a steady voice, and, answering his parting look
with a nod of intelligence, closed the door between them.

Fagin walked towards his home, intent upon the thoughts that were
working within his brain.  He had conceived the idea--not from what had
just passed though that had tended to confirm him, but slowly and by
degrees--that Nancy, wearied of the housebreaker's brutality, had
conceived an attachment for some new friend.  Her altered manner, her
repeated absences from home alone, her comparative indifference to the
interests of the gang for which she had once been so zealous, and,
added to these, her desperate impatience to leave home that night at a
particular hour, all favoured the supposition, and rendered it, to him
at least, almost matter of certainty.  The object of this new liking
was not among his myrmidons.  He would be a valuable acquisition with
such an assistant as Nancy, and must (thus Fagin argued) be secured
without delay.

There was another, and a darker object, to be gained.  Sikes knew too
much, and his ruffian taunts had not galled Fagin the less, because the
wounds were hidden.  The girl must know, well, that if she shook him
off, she could never be safe from his fury, and that it would be surely
wreaked--to the maiming of limbs, or perhaps the loss of life--on the
object of her more recent fancy.

'With a little persuasion,' thought Fagin, 'what more likely than that
she would consent to poison him?  Women have done such things, and
worse, to secure the same object before now.  There would be the
dangerous villain:  the man I hate:  gone; another secured in his
place; and my influence over the girl, with a knowledge of this crime
to back it, unlimited.'

These things passed through the mind of Fagin, during the short time he
sat alone, in the housebreaker's room; and with them uppermost in his
thoughts, he had taken the opportunity afterwards afforded him, of
sounding the girl in the broken hints he threw out at parting.  There
was no expression of surprise, no assumption of an inability to
understand his meaning.  The girl clearly comprehended it.  Her glance
at parting showed _that_.

But perhaps she would recoil from a plot to take the life of Sikes, and
that was one of the chief ends to be attained. 'How,' thought Fagin, as
he crept homeward, 'can I increase my influence with her?  What new
power can I acquire?'

Such brains are fertile in expedients.  If, without extracting a
confession from herself, he laid a watch, discovered the object of her
altered regard, and threatened to reveal the whole history to Sikes (of
whom she stood in no common fear) unless she entered into his designs,
could he not secure her compliance?

'I can,' said Fagin, almost aloud.  'She durst not refuse me then.  Not
for her life, not for her life!  I have it all.  The means are ready,
and shall be set to work.  I shall have you yet!'

He cast back a dark look, and a threatening motion of the hand, towards
the spot where he had left the bolder villain; and went on his way:
busying his bony hands in the folds of his tattered garment, which he
wrenched tightly in his grasp, as though there were a hated enemy
crushed with every motion of his fingers.



CHAPTER XLV

NOAH CLAYPOLE IS EMPLOYED BY FAGIN ON A SECRET MISSION

The old man was up, betimes, next morning, and waited impatiently for
the appearance of his new associate, who after a delay that seemed
interminable, at length presented himself, and commenced a voracious
assault on the breakfast.

'Bolter,' said Fagin, drawing up a chair and seating himself opposite
Morris Bolter.

'Well, here I am,' returned Noah.  'What's the matter?  Don't yer ask
me to do anything till I have done eating. That's a great fault in this
place.  Yer never get time enough over yer meals.'

'You can talk as you eat, can't you?' said Fagin, cursing his dear
young friend's greediness from the very bottom of his heart.

'Oh yes, I can talk.  I get on better when I talk,' said Noah, cutting
a monstrous slice of bread.  'Where's Charlotte?'

'Out,' said Fagin.  'I sent her out this morning with the other young
woman, because I wanted us to be alone.'

'Oh!' said Noah.  'I wish yer'd ordered her to make some buttered toast
first.  Well.  Talk away.  Yer won't interrupt me.'

There seemed, indeed, no great fear of anything interrupting him, as he
had evidently sat down with a determination to do a great deal of
business.

'You did well yesterday, my dear,' said Fagin.  'Beautiful!  Six
shillings and ninepence halfpenny on the very first day!  The kinchin
lay will be a fortune to you.'

'Don't you forget to add three pint-pots and a milk-can,' said Mr.
Bolter.

'No, no, my dear.  The pint-pots were great strokes of genius: but the
milk-can was a perfect masterpiece.'

'Pretty well, I think, for a beginner,' remarked Mr. Bolter
complacently.  'The pots I took off airy railings, and the milk-can was
standing by itself outside a public-house.  I thought it might get
rusty with the rain, or catch cold, yer know.  Eh?  Ha! ha! ha!'

Fagin affected to laugh very heartily; and Mr. Bolter having had his
laugh out, took a series of large bites, which finished his first hunk
of bread and butter, and assisted himself to a second.

'I want you, Bolter,' said Fagin, leaning over the table, 'to do a
piece of work for me, my dear, that needs great care and caution.'

'I say,' rejoined Bolter, 'don't yer go shoving me into danger, or
sending me any more o' yer police-offices. That don't suit me, that
don't; and so I tell yer.'

'That's not the smallest danger in it--not the very smallest,' said the
Jew; 'it's only to dodge a woman.'

'An old woman?' demanded Mr. Bolter.

'A young one,' replied Fagin.

'I can do that pretty well, I know,' said Bolter.  'I was a regular
cunning sneak when I was at school.  What am I to dodge her for?  Not
to--'

'Not to do anything, but to tell me where she goes, who she sees, and,
if possible, what she says; to remember the street, if it is a street,
or the house, if it is a house; and to bring me back all the
information you can.'

'What'll yer give me?' asked Noah, setting down his cup, and looking
his employer, eagerly, in the face.

'If you do it well, a pound, my dear.  One pound,' said Fagin, wishing
to interest him in the scent as much as possible.  'And that's what I
never gave yet, for any job of work where there wasn't valuable
consideration to be gained.'

'Who is she?' inquired Noah.

'One of us.'

'Oh Lor!' cried Noah, curling up his nose.  'Yer doubtful of her, are
yer?'

'She has found out some new friends, my dear, and I must know who they
are,' replied Fagin.

'I see,' said Noah.  'Just to have the pleasure of knowing them, if
they're respectable people, eh?  Ha! ha! ha! I'm your man.'

'I knew you would be,' cried Fagin, elated by the success of his
proposal.

'Of course, of course,' replied Noah.  'Where is she? Where am I to
wait for her?  Where am I to go?'

'All that, my dear, you shall hear from me.  I'll point her out at the
proper time,' said Fagin.  'You keep ready, and leave the rest to me.'

That night, and the next, and the next again, the spy sat booted and
equipped in his carter's dress:  ready to turn out at a word from
Fagin.  Six nights passed--six long weary nights--and on each, Fagin
came home with a disappointed face, and briefly intimated that it was
not yet time.  On the seventh, he returned earlier, and with an
exultation he could not conceal.  It was Sunday.

'She goes abroad to-night,' said Fagin, 'and on the right errand, I'm
sure; for she has been alone all day, and the man she is afraid of will
not be back much before daybreak.  Come with me. Quick!'

Noah started up without saying a word; for the Jew was in a state of
such intense excitement that it infected him.  They left the house
stealthily, and hurrying through a labyrinth of streets, arrived at
length before a public-house, which Noah recognised as the same in
which he had slept, on the night of his arrival in London.

It was past eleven o'clock, and the door was closed.  It opened softly
on its hinges as Fagin gave a low whistle. They entered, without noise;
and the door was closed behind them.

Scarcely venturing to whisper, but substituting dumb show for words,
Fagin, and the young Jew who had admitted them, pointed out the pane of
glass to Noah, and signed to him to climb up and observe the person in
the adjoining room.

'Is that the woman?' he asked, scarcely above his breath.

Fagin nodded yes.

'I can't see her face well,' whispered Noah.  'She is looking down, and
the candle is behind her.

'Stay there,' whispered Fagin.  He signed to Barney, who withdrew.  In
an instant, the lad entered the room adjoining, and, under pretence of
snuffing the candle, moved it in the required position, and, speaking
to the girl, caused her to raise her face.

'I see her now,' cried the spy.

'Plainly?'

'I should know her among a thousand.'

He hastily descended, as the room-door opened, and the girl came out.
Fagin drew him behind a small partition which was curtained off, and
they held their breaths as she passed within a few feet of their place
of concealment, and emerged by the door at which they had entered.

'Hist!' cried the lad who held the door.  'Dow.'

Noah exchanged a look with Fagin, and darted out.

'To the left,' whispered the lad; 'take the left had, and keep od the
other side.'

He did so; and, by the light of the lamps, saw the girl's retreating
figure, already at some distance before him.  He advanced as near as he
considered prudent, and kept on the opposite side of the street, the
better to observe her motions. She looked nervously round, twice or
thrice, and once stopped to let two men who were following close behind
her, pass on.  She seemed to gather courage as she advanced, and to
walk with a steadier and firmer step.  The spy preserved the same
relative distance between them, and followed:  with his eye upon her.



CHAPTER XLVI

THE APPOINTMENT KEPT

The church clocks chimed three quarters past eleven, as two figures
emerged on London Bridge.  One, which advanced with a swift and rapid
step, was that of a woman who looked eagerly about her as though in
quest of some expected object; the other figure was that of a man, who
slunk along in the deepest shadow he could find, and, at some distance,
accommodated his pace to hers:  stopping when she stopped:  and as she
moved again, creeping stealthily on:  but never allowing himself, in
the ardour of his pursuit, to gain upon her footsteps.  Thus, they
crossed the bridge, from the Middlesex to the Surrey shore, when the
woman, apparently disappointed in her anxious scrutiny of the
foot-passengers, turned back.  The movement was sudden; but he who
watched her, was not thrown off his guard by it; for, shrinking into
one of the recesses which surmount the piers of the bridge, and leaning
over the parapet the better to conceal his figure, he suffered her to
pass on the opposite pavement. When she was about the same distance in
advance as she had been before, he slipped quietly down, and followed
her again. At nearly the centre of the bridge, she stopped.  The man
stopped too.

It was a very dark night.  The day had been unfavourable, and at that
hour and place there were few people stirring. Such as there were,
hurried quickly past:  very possibly without seeing, but certainly
without noticing, either the woman, or the man who kept her in view.
Their appearance was not calculated to attract the importunate regards
of such of London's destitute population, as chanced to take their way
over the bridge that night in search of some cold arch or doorless
hovel wherein to lay their heads; they stood there in silence:  neither
speaking nor spoken to, by any one who passed.

A mist hung over the river, deepening the red glare of the fires that
burnt upon the small craft moored off the different wharfs, and
rendering darker and more indistinct the murky buildings on the banks.
The old smoke-stained storehouses on either side, rose heavy and dull
from the dense mass of roofs and gables, and frowned sternly upon water
too black to reflect even their lumbering shapes. The tower of old
Saint Saviour's Church, and the spire of Saint Magnus, so long the
giant-warders of the ancient bridge, were visible in the gloom; but the
forest of shipping below bridge, and the thickly scattered spires of
churches above, were nearly all hidden from sight.

The girl had taken a few restless turns to and fro--closely watched
meanwhile by her hidden observer--when the heavy bell of St. Paul's
tolled for the death of another day.  Midnight had come upon the
crowded city.  The palace, the night-cellar, the jail, the madhouse:
the chambers of birth and death, of health and sickness, the rigid face
of the corpse and the calm sleep of the child:  midnight was upon them
all.

The hour had not struck two minutes, when a young lady, accompanied by
a grey-haired gentleman, alighted from a hackney-carriage within a
short distance of the bridge, and, having dismissed the vehicle, walked
straight towards it.  They had scarcely set foot upon its pavement,
when the girl started, and immediately made towards them.

They walked onward, looking about them with the air of persons who
entertained some very slight expectation which had little chance of
being realised, when they were suddenly joined by this new associate.
They halted with an exclamation of surprise, but suppressed it
immediately; for a man in the garments of a countryman came close
up--brushed against them, indeed--at that precise moment.

'Not here,' said Nancy hurriedly, 'I am afraid to speak to you here.
Come away--out of the public road--down the steps yonder!'

As she uttered these words, and indicated, with her hand, the direction
in which she wished them to proceed, the countryman looked round, and
roughly asking what they took up the whole pavement for, passed on.

The steps to which the girl had pointed, were those which, on the
Surrey bank, and on the same side of the bridge as Saint Saviour's
Church, form a landing-stairs from the river.  To this spot, the man
bearing the appearance of a countryman, hastened unobserved; and after
a moment's survey of the place, he began to descend.

These stairs are a part of the bridge; they consist of three flights.
Just below the end of the second, going down, the stone wall on the
left terminates in an ornamental pilaster facing towards the Thames.
At this point the lower steps widen:  so that a person turning that
angle of the wall, is necessarily unseen by any others on the stairs
who chance to be above him, if only a step. The countryman looked
hastily round, when he reached this point; and as there seemed no
better place of concealment, and, the tide being out, there was plenty
of room, he slipped aside, with his back to the pilaster, and there
waited:  pretty certain that they would come no lower, and that even if
he could not hear what was said, he could follow them again, with
safety.

So tardily stole the time in this lonely place, and so eager was the
spy to penetrate the motives of an interview so different from what he
had been led to expect, that he more than once gave the matter up for
lost, and persuaded himself, either that they had stopped far above, or
had resorted to some entirely different spot to hold their mysterious
conversation.  He was on the point of emerging from his hiding-place,
and regaining the road above, when he heard the sound of footsteps, and
directly afterwards of voices almost close at his ear.

He drew himself straight upright against the wall, and, scarcely
breathing, listened attentively.

'This is far enough,' said a voice, which was evidently that of the
gentleman.  'I will not suffer the young lady to go any farther.  Many
people would have distrusted you too much to have come even so far, but
you see I am willing to humour you.'

'To humour me!' cried the voice of the girl whom he had followed.
'You're considerate, indeed, sir.  To humour me!  Well, well, it's no
matter.'

'Why, for what,' said the gentleman in a kinder tone, 'for what purpose
can you have brought us to this strange place?  Why not have let me
speak to you, above there, where it is light, and there is something
stirring, instead of bringing us to this dark and dismal hole?'

'I told you before,' replied Nancy, 'that I was afraid to speak to you
there.  I don't know why it is,' said the girl, shuddering, 'but I have
such a fear and dread upon me to-night that I can hardly stand.'

'A fear of what?' asked the gentleman, who seemed to pity her.

'I scarcely know of what,' replied the girl.  'I wish I did. Horrible
thoughts of death, and shrouds with blood upon them, and a fear that
has made me burn as if I was on fire, have been upon me all day.  I was
reading a book to-night, to wile the time away, and the same things
came into the print.'

'Imagination,' said the gentleman, soothing her.

'No imagination,' replied the girl in a hoarse voice. 'I'll swear I saw
"coffin" written in every page of the book in large black
letters,--aye, and they carried one close to me, in the streets
to-night.'

'There is nothing unusual in that,' said the gentleman. 'They have
passed me often.'

'_Real ones_,' rejoined the girl.  'This was not.'

There was something so uncommon in her manner, that the flesh of the
concealed listener crept as he heard the girl utter these words, and
the blood chilled within him.  He had never experienced a greater
relief than in hearing the sweet voice of the young lady as she begged
her to be calm, and not allow herself to become the prey of such
fearful fancies.

'Speak to her kindly,' said the young lady to her companion. 'Poor
creature!  She seems to need it.'

'Your haughty religious people would have held their heads up to see me
as I am to-night, and preached of flames and vengeance,' cried the
girl.  'Oh, dear lady, why ar'n't those who claim to be God's own folks
as gentle and as kind to us poor wretches as you, who, having youth,
and beauty, and all that they have lost, might be a little proud
instead of so much humbler?'

'Ah!' said the gentleman.  'A Turk turns his face, after washing it
well, to the East, when he says his prayers; these good people, after
giving their faces such a rub against the World as to take the smiles
off, turn with no less regularity, to the darkest side of Heaven.
Between the Mussulman and the Pharisee, commend me to the first!'

These words appeared to be addressed to the young lady, and were
perhaps uttered with the view of affording Nancy time to recover
herself.  The gentleman, shortly afterwards, addressed himself to her.

'You were not here last Sunday night,' he said.

'I couldn't come,' replied Nancy; 'I was kept by force.'

'By whom?'

'Him that I told the young lady of before.'

'You were not suspected of holding any communication with anybody on
the subject which has brought us here to-night, I hope?' asked the old
gentleman.

'No,' replied the girl, shaking her head.  'It's not very easy for me
to leave him unless he knows why; I couldn't give him a drink of
laudanum before I came away.'

'Did he awake before you returned?' inquired the gentleman.

'No; and neither he nor any of them suspect me.'

'Good,' said the gentleman.  'Now listen to me.'

'I am ready,' replied the girl, as he paused for a moment.

'This young lady,' the gentleman began, 'has communicated to me, and to
some other friends who can be safely trusted, what you told her nearly
a fortnight since.  I confess to you that I had doubts, at first,
whether you were to be implicitly relied upon, but now I firmly believe
you are.'

'I am,' said the girl earnestly.

'I repeat that I firmly believe it.  To prove to you that I am disposed
to trust you, I tell you without reserve, that we propose to extort the
secret, whatever it may be, from the fear of this man Monks.  But
if--if--' said the gentleman, 'he cannot be secured, or, if secured,
cannot be acted upon as we wish, you must deliver up the Jew.'

'Fagin,' cried the girl, recoiling.

'That man must be delivered up by you,' said the gentleman.

'I will not do it!  I will never do it!' replied the girl. 'Devil that
he is, and worse than devil as he has been to me, I will never do that.'

'You will not?' said the gentleman, who seemed fully prepared for this
answer.

'Never!' returned the girl.

'Tell me why?'

'For one reason,' rejoined the girl firmly, 'for one reason, that the
lady knows and will stand by me in, I know she will, for I have her
promise:  and for this other reason, besides, that, bad life as he has
led, I have led a bad life too; there are many of us who have kept the
same courses together, and I'll not turn upon them, who might--any of
them--have turned upon me, but didn't, bad as they are.'

'Then,' said the gentleman, quickly, as if this had been the point he
had been aiming to attain; 'put Monks into my hands, and leave him to
me to deal with.'

'What if he turns against the others?'

'I promise you that in that case, if the truth is forced from him,
there the matter will rest; there must be circumstances in Oliver's
little history which it would be painful to drag before the public eye,
and if the truth is once elicited, they shall go scot free.'

'And if it is not?' suggested the girl.

'Then,' pursued the gentleman, 'this Fagin shall not be brought to
justice without your consent.  In such a case I could show you reasons,
I think, which would induce you to yield it.'

'Have I the lady's promise for that?' asked the girl.

'You have,' replied Rose.  'My true and faithful pledge.'

'Monks would never learn how you knew what you do?' said the girl,
after a short pause.

'Never,' replied the gentleman.  'The intelligence should be brought to
bear upon him, that he could never even guess.'

'I have been a liar, and among liars from a little child,' said the
girl after another interval of silence, 'but I will take your words.'

After receiving an assurance from both, that she might safely do so,
she proceeded in a voice so low that it was often difficult for the
listener to discover even the purport of what she said, to describe, by
name and situation, the public-house whence she had been followed that
night.  From the manner in which she occasionally paused, it appeared
as if the gentleman were making some hasty notes of the information she
communicated.  When she had thoroughly explained the localities of the
place, the best position from which to watch it without exciting
observation, and the night and hour on which Monks was most in the
habit of frequenting it, she seemed to consider for a few moments, for
the purpose of recalling his features and appearances more forcibly to
her recollection.

'He is tall,' said the girl, 'and a strongly made man, but not stout;
he has a lurking walk; and as he walks, constantly looks over his
shoulder, first on one side, and then on the other. Don't forget that,
for his eyes are sunk in his head so much deeper than any other man's,
that you might almost tell him by that alone.  His face is dark, like
his hair and eyes; and, although he can't be more than six or eight and
twenty, withered and haggard. His lips are often discoloured and
disfigured with the marks of teeth; for he has desperate fits, and
sometimes even bites his hands and covers them with wounds--why did you
start?' said the girl, stopping suddenly.

The gentleman replied, in a hurried manner, that he was not conscious
of having done so, and begged her to proceed.

'Part of this,' said the girl, 'I have drawn out from other people at
the house I tell you of, for I have only seen him twice, and both times
he was covered up in a large cloak.  I think that's all I can give you
to know him by.  Stay though,' she added.  'Upon his throat:  so high
that you can see a part of it below his neckerchief when he turns his
face:  there is--'

'A broad red mark, like a burn or scald?' cried the gentleman.

'How's this?' said the girl.  'You know him!'

The young lady uttered a cry of surprise, and for a few moments they
were so still that the listener could distinctly hear them breathe.

'I think I do,' said the gentleman, breaking silence.  'I should by
your description.  We shall see.  Many people are singularly like each
other.  It may not be the same.'

As he expressed himself to this effect, with assumed carelessness, he
took a step or two nearer the concealed spy, as the latter could tell
from the distinctness with which he heard him mutter, 'It must be he!'

'Now,' he said, returning:  so it seemed by the sound:  to the spot
where he had stood before, 'you have given us most valuable assistance,
young woman, and I wish you to be the better for it. What can I do to
serve you?'

'Nothing,' replied Nancy.

'You will not persist in saying that,' rejoined the gentleman, with a
voice and emphasis of kindness that might have touched a much harder
and more obdurate heart. 'Think now.  Tell me.'

'Nothing, sir,' rejoined the girl, weeping.  'You can do nothing to
help me.  I am past all hope, indeed.'

'You put yourself beyond its pale,' said the gentleman. 'The past has
been a dreary waste with you, of youthful energies mis-spent, and such
priceless treasures lavished, as the Creator bestows but once and never
grants again, but, for the future, you may hope. I do not say that it
is in our power to offer you peace of heart and mind, for that must
come as you seek it; but a quiet asylum, either in England, or, if you
fear to remain here, in some foreign country, it is not only within the
compass of our ability but our most anxious wish to secure you. Before
the dawn of morning, before this river wakes to the first glimpse of
day-light, you shall be placed as entirely beyond the reach of your
former associates, and leave as utter an absence of all trace behind
you, as if you were to disappear from the earth this moment.  Come!  I
would not have you go back to exchange one word with any old companion,
or take one look at any old haunt, or breathe the very air which is
pestilence and death to you.  Quit them all, while there is time and
opportunity!'

'She will be persuaded now,' cried the young lady.  'She hesitates, I
am sure.'

'I fear not, my dear,' said the gentleman.

'No sir, I do not,' replied the girl, after a short struggle.  'I am
chained to my old life.  I loathe and hate it now, but I cannot leave
it.  I must have gone too far to turn back,--and yet I don't know, for
if you had spoken to me so, some time ago, I should have laughed it
off.  But,' she said, looking hastily round, 'this fear comes over me
again.  I must go home.'

'Home!' repeated the young lady, with great stress upon the word.

'Home, lady,' rejoined the girl.  'To such a home as I have raised for
myself with the work of my whole life.  Let us part. I shall be watched
or seen.  Go!  Go!  If I have done you any service all I ask is, that
you leave me, and let me go my way alone.'

'It is useless,' said the gentleman, with a sigh.  'We compromise her
safety, perhaps, by staying here.  We may have detained her longer than
she expected already.'

'Yes, yes,' urged the girl. 'You have.'

'What,' cried the young lady, 'can be the end of this poor creature's
life!'

'What!' repeated the girl.  'Look before you, lady.  Look at that dark
water.  How many times do you read of such as I who spring into the
tide, and leave no living thing, to care for, or bewail them.  It may
be years hence, or it may be only months, but I shall come to that at
last.'

'Do not speak thus, pray,' returned the young lady, sobbing.

'It will never reach your ears, dear lady, and God forbid such horrors
should!' replied the girl.  'Good-night, good-night!'

The gentleman turned away.

'This purse,' cried the young lady.  'Take it for my sake, that you may
have some resource in an hour of need and trouble.'

'No!' replied the girl.  'I have not done this for money.  Let me have
that to think of.  And yet--give me something that you have worn:  I
should like to have something--no, no, not a ring--your gloves or
handkerchief--anything that I can keep, as having belonged to you,
sweet lady.  There.  Bless you!  God bless you. Good-night, good-night!'

The violent agitation of the girl, and the apprehension of some
discovery which would subject her to ill-usage and violence, seemed to
determine the gentleman to leave her, as she requested.

The sound of retreating footsteps were audible and the voices ceased.

The two figures of the young lady and her companion soon afterwards
appeared upon the bridge.  They stopped at the summit of the stairs.

'Hark!' cried the young lady, listening.  'Did she call!  I thought I
heard her voice.'

'No, my love,' replied Mr. Brownlow, looking sadly back. 'She has not
moved, and will not till we are gone.'

Rose Maylie lingered, but the old gentleman drew her arm through his,
and led her, with gentle force, away.  As they disappeared, the girl
sunk down nearly at her full length upon one of the stone stairs, and
vented the anguish of her heart in bitter tears.

After a time she arose, and with feeble and tottering steps ascended
the street.  The astonished listener remained motionless on his post
for some minutes afterwards, and having ascertained, with many cautious
glances round him, that he was again alone, crept slowly from his
hiding-place, and returned, stealthily and in the shade of the wall, in
the same manner as he had descended.

Peeping out, more than once, when he reached the top, to make sure that
he was unobserved, Noah Claypole darted away at his utmost speed, and
made for the Jew's house as fast as his legs would carry him.



CHAPTER XLVII

FATAL CONSEQUENCES

It was nearly two hours before day-break; that time which in the autumn
of the year, may be truly called the dead of night; when the streets
are silent and deserted; when even sounds appear to slumber, and
profligacy and riot have staggered home to dream; it was at this still
and silent hour, that Fagin sat watching in his old lair, with face so
distorted and pale, and eyes so red and blood-shot, that he looked less
like a man, than like some hideous phantom, moist from the grave, and
worried by an evil spirit.

He sat crouching over a cold hearth, wrapped in an old torn coverlet,
with his face turned towards a wasting candle that stood upon a table
by his side.  His right hand was raised to his lips, and as, absorbed
in thought, he hit his long black nails, he disclosed among his
toothless gums a few such fangs as should have been a dog's or rat's.

Stretched upon a mattress on the floor, lay Noah Claypole, fast asleep.
Towards him the old man sometimes directed his eyes for an instant, and
then brought them back again to the candle; which with a long-burnt
wick drooping almost double, and hot grease falling down in clots upon
the table, plainly showed that his thoughts were busy elsewhere.

Indeed they were.  Mortification at the overthrow of his notable
scheme; hatred of the girl who had dared to palter with strangers; and
utter distrust of the sincerity of her refusal to yield him up; bitter
disappointment at the loss of his revenge on Sikes; the fear of
detection, and ruin, and death; and a fierce and deadly rage kindled by
all; these were the passionate considerations which, following close
upon each other with rapid and ceaseless whirl, shot through the brain
of Fagin, as every evil thought and blackest purpose lay working at his
heart.

He sat without changing his attitude in the least, or appearing to take
the smallest heed of time, until his quick ear seemed to be attracted
by a footstep in the street.

'At last,' he muttered, wiping his dry and fevered mouth. 'At last!'

The bell rang gently as he spoke.  He crept upstairs to the door, and
presently returned accompanied by a man muffled to the chin, who
carried a bundle under one arm. Sitting down and throwing back his
outer coat, the man displayed the burly frame of Sikes.

'There!' he said, laying the bundle on the table.  'Take care of that,
and do the most you can with it.  It's been trouble enough to get; I
thought I should have been here, three hours ago.'

Fagin laid his hand upon the bundle, and locking it in the cupboard,
sat down again without speaking.  But he did not take his eyes off the
robber, for an instant, during this action; and now that they sat over
against each other, face to face, he looked fixedly at him, with his
lips quivering so violently, and his face so altered by the emotions
which had mastered him, that the housebreaker involuntarily drew back
his chair, and surveyed him with a look of real affright.

'Wot now?' cried Sikes.  'Wot do you look at a man so for?'

Fagin raised his right hand, and shook his trembling forefinger in the
air; but his passion was so great, that the power of speech was for the
moment gone.

'Damme!' said Sikes, feeling in his breast with a look of alarm. 'He's
gone mad.  I must look to myself here.'

'No, no,' rejoined Fagin, finding his voice.  'It's not--you're not the
person, Bill.  I've no--no fault to find with you.'

'Oh, you haven't, haven't you?' said Sikes, looking sternly at him, and
ostentatiously passing a pistol into a more convenient pocket.  'That's
lucky--for one of us.  Which one that is, don't matter.'

'I've got that to tell you, Bill,' said Fagin, drawing his chair
nearer, 'will make you worse than me.'

'Aye?' returned the robber with an incredulous air.  'Tell away! Look
sharp, or Nance will think I'm lost.'

'Lost!' cried Fagin.  'She has pretty well settled that, in her own
mind, already.'

Sikes looked with an aspect of great perplexity into the Jew's face,
and reading no satisfactory explanation of the riddle there, clenched
his coat collar in his huge hand and shook him soundly.

'Speak, will you!' he said; 'or if you don't, it shall be for want of
breath.  Open your mouth and say wot you've got to say in plain words.
Out with it, you thundering old cur, out with it!'

'Suppose that lad that's laying there--' Fagin began.

Sikes turned round to where Noah was sleeping, as if he had not
previously observed him.  'Well!' he said, resuming his former position.

'Suppose that lad,' pursued Fagin, 'was to peach--to blow upon us
all--first seeking out the right folks for the purpose, and then having
a meeting with 'em in the street to paint our likenesses, describe
every mark that they might know us by, and the crib where we might be
most easily taken.  Suppose he was to do all this, and besides to blow
upon a plant we've all been in, more or less--of his own fancy; not
grabbed, trapped, tried, earwigged by the parson and brought to it on
bread and water,--but of his own fancy; to please his own taste;
stealing out at nights to find those most interested against us, and
peaching to them.  Do you hear me?' cried the Jew, his eyes flashing
with rage.  'Suppose he did all this, what then?'

'What then!' replied Sikes; with a tremendous oath.  'If he was left
alive till I came, I'd grind his skull under the iron heel of my boot
into as many grains as there are hairs upon his head.'

'What if I did it!' cried Fagin almost in a yell.  'I, that knows so
much, and could hang so many besides myself!'

'I don't know,' replied Sikes, clenching his teeth and turning white at
the mere suggestion.  'I'd do something in the jail that 'ud get me put
in irons; and if I was tried along with you, I'd fall upon you with
them in the open court, and beat your brains out afore the people. I
should have such strength,' muttered the robber, poising his brawny
arm, 'that I could smash your head as if a loaded waggon had gone over
it.'

'You would?'

'Would I!' said the housebreaker.  'Try me.'

'If it was Charley, or the Dodger, or Bet, or--'

'I don't care who,' replied Sikes impatiently.  'Whoever it was, I'd
serve them the same.'

Fagin looked hard at the robber; and, motioning him to be silent,
stooped over the bed upon the floor, and shook the sleeper to rouse
him.  Sikes leant forward in his chair:  looking on with his hands upon
his knees, as if wondering much what all this questioning and
preparation was to end in.

'Bolter, Bolter!  Poor lad!' said Fagin, looking up with an expression
of devilish anticipation, and speaking slowly and with marked emphasis.
'He's tired--tired with watching for her so long,--watching for _her_,
Bill.'

'Wot d'ye mean?' asked Sikes, drawing back.

Fagin made no answer, but bending over the sleeper again, hauled him
into a sitting posture.  When his assumed name had been repeated
several times, Noah rubbed his eyes, and, giving a heavy yawn, looked
sleepily about him.

'Tell me that again--once again, just for him to hear,' said the Jew,
pointing to Sikes as he spoke.

'Tell yer what?' asked the sleepy Noah, shaking himself pettishly.

'That about-- _Nancy_,' said Fagin, clutching Sikes by the wrist, as if
to prevent his leaving the house before he had heard enough. 'You
followed her?'

'Yes.'

'To London Bridge?'

'Yes.'

'Where she met two people.'

'So she did.'

'A gentleman and a lady that she had gone to of her own accord before,
who asked her to give up all her pals, and Monks first, which she
did--and to describe him, which she did--and to tell her what house it
was that we meet at, and go to, which she did--and where it could be
best watched from, which she did--and what time the people went there,
which she did.  She did all this.  She told it all every word without a
threat, without a murmur--she did--did she not?' cried Fagin, half mad
with fury.

'All right,' replied Noah, scratching his head.  'That's just what it
was!'

'What did they say, about last Sunday?'

'About last Sunday!' replied Noah, considering.  'Why I told yer that
before.'

'Again.  Tell it again!' cried Fagin, tightening his grasp on Sikes,
and brandishing his other hand aloft, as the foam flew from his lips.

'They asked her,' said Noah, who, as he grew more wakeful, seemed to
have a dawning perception who Sikes was, 'they asked her why she didn't
come, last Sunday, as she promised.  She said she couldn't.'

'Why--why?  Tell him that.'

'Because she was forcibly kept at home by Bill, the man she had told
them of before,' replied Noah.

'What more of him?' cried Fagin.  'What more of the man she had told
them of before?  Tell him that, tell him that.'

'Why, that she couldn't very easily get out of doors unless he knew
where she was going to,' said Noah; 'and so the first time she went to
see the lady, she--ha! ha! ha! it made me laugh when she said it, that
it did--she gave him a drink of laudanum.'

'Hell's fire!' cried Sikes, breaking fiercely from the Jew.  'Let me
go!'

Flinging the old man from him, he rushed from the room, and darted,
wildly and furiously, up the stairs.

'Bill, Bill!' cried Fagin, following him hastily.  'A word. Only a
word.'

The word would not have been exchanged, but that the housebreaker was
unable to open the door:  on which he was expending fruitless oaths and
violence, when the Jew came panting up.

'Let me out,' said Sikes.  'Don't speak to me; it's not safe. Let me
out, I say!'

'Hear me speak a word,' rejoined Fagin, laying his hand upon the lock.
'You won't be--'

'Well,' replied the other.

'You won't be--too--violent, Bill?'

The day was breaking, and there was light enough for the men to see
each other's faces.  They exchanged one brief glance; there was a fire
in the eyes of both, which could not be mistaken.

'I mean,' said Fagin, showing that he felt all disguise was now
useless, 'not too violent for safety.  Be crafty, Bill, and not too
bold.'

Sikes made no reply; but, pulling open the door, of which Fagin had
turned the lock, dashed into the silent streets.

Without one pause, or moment's consideration; without once turning his
head to the right or left, or raising his eyes to the sky, or lowering
them to the ground, but looking straight before him with savage
resolution:  his teeth so tightly compressed that the strained jaw
seemed starting through his skin; the robber held on his headlong
course, nor muttered a word, nor relaxed a muscle, until he reached his
own door.  He opened it, softly, with a key; strode lightly up the
stairs; and entering his own room, double-locked the door, and lifting
a heavy table against it, drew back the curtain of the bed.

The girl was lying, half-dressed, upon it.  He had roused her from her
sleep, for she raised herself with a hurried and startled look.

'Get up!' said the man.

'It is you, Bill!' said the girl, with an expression of pleasure at his
return.

'It is,' was the reply.  'Get up.'

There was a candle burning, but the man hastily drew it from the
candlestick, and hurled it under the grate.  Seeing the faint light of
early day without, the girl rose to undraw the curtain.

'Let it be,' said Sikes, thrusting his hand before her. 'There's enough
light for wot I've got to do.'

'Bill,' said the girl, in the low voice of alarm, 'why do you look like
that at me!'

The robber sat regarding her, for a few seconds, with dilated nostrils
and heaving breast; and then, grasping her by the head and throat,
dragged her into the middle of the room, and looking once towards the
door, placed his heavy hand upon her mouth.

'Bill, Bill!' gasped the girl, wrestling with the strength of mortal
fear,--'I--I won't scream or cry--not once--hear me--speak to me--tell
me what I have done!'

'You know, you she devil!' returned the robber, suppressing his breath.
'You were watched to-night; every word you said was heard.'

'Then spare my life for the love of Heaven, as I spared yours,'
rejoined the girl, clinging to him.  'Bill, dear Bill, you cannot have
the heart to kill me.  Oh! think of all I have given up, only this one
night, for you.  You _shall_ have time to think, and save yourself this
crime; I will not loose my hold, you cannot throw me off.  Bill, Bill,
for dear God's sake, for your own, for mine, stop before you spill my
blood!  I have been true to you, upon my guilty soul I have!'

The man struggled violently, to release his arms; but those of the girl
were clasped round his, and tear her as he would, he could not tear
them away.

'Bill,' cried the girl, striving to lay her head upon his breast, 'the
gentleman and that dear lady, told me to-night of a home in some
foreign country where I could end my days in solitude and peace.  Let
me see them again, and beg them, on my knees, to show the same mercy
and goodness to you; and let us both leave this dreadful place, and far
apart lead better lives, and forget how we have lived, except in
prayers, and never see each other more. It is never too late to repent.
They told me so--I feel it now--but we must have time--a little, little
time!'

The housebreaker freed one arm, and grasped his pistol. The certainty
of immediate detection if he fired, flashed across his mind even in the
midst of his fury; and he beat it twice with all the force he could
summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.

She staggered and fell:  nearly blinded with the blood that rained down
from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty,
on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief--Rose Maylie's
own--and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as
her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her
Maker.

It was a ghastly figure to look upon.  The murderer staggering backward
to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy
club and struck her down.



CHAPTER XLVIII

THE FLIGHT OF SIKES

Of all bad deeds that, under cover of the darkness, had been committed
within wide London's bounds since night hung over it, that was the
worst.  Of all the horrors that rose with an ill scent upon the morning
air, that was the foulest and most cruel.

The sun--the bright sun, that brings back, not light alone, but new
life, and hope, and freshness to man--burst upon the crowded city in
clear and radiant glory.  Through costly-coloured glass and
paper-mended window, through cathedral dome and rotten crevice, it shed
its equal ray.  It lighted up the room where the murdered woman lay.
It did.  He tried to shut it out, but it would stream in.  If the sight
had been a ghastly one in the dull morning, what was it, now, in all
that brilliant light!

He had not moved; he had been afraid to stir.  There had been a moan
and motion of the hand; and, with terror added to rage, he had struck
and struck again.  Once he threw a rug over it; but it was worse to
fancy the eyes, and imagine them moving towards him, than to see them
glaring upward, as if watching the reflection of the pool of gore that
quivered and danced in the sunlight on the ceiling.  He had plucked it
off again.  And there was the body--mere flesh and blood, no more--but
such flesh, and so much blood!

He struck a light, kindled a fire, and thrust the club into it. There
was hair upon the end, which blazed and shrunk into a light cinder,
and, caught by the air, whirled up the chimney.  Even that frightened
him, sturdy as he was; but he held the weapon till it broke, and then
piled it on the coals to burn away, and smoulder into ashes.  He washed
himself, and rubbed his clothes; there were spots that would not be
removed, but he cut the pieces out, and burnt them.  How those stains
were dispersed about the room!  The very feet of the dog were bloody.

All this time he had, never once, turned his back upon the corpse; no,
not for a moment.  Such preparations completed, he moved, backward,
towards the door:  dragging the dog with him, lest he should soil his
feet anew and carry out new evidence of the crime into the streets. He
shut the door softly, locked it, took the key, and left the house.

He crossed over, and glanced up at the window, to be sure that nothing
was visible from the outside.  There was the curtain still drawn, which
she would have opened to admit the light she never saw again.  It lay
nearly under there.  _He_ knew that.  God, how the sun poured down upon
the very spot!

The glance was instantaneous.  It was a relief to have got free of the
room.  He whistled on the dog, and walked rapidly away.

He went through Islington; strode up the hill at Highgate on which
stands the stone in honour of Whittington; turned down to Highgate
Hill, unsteady of purpose, and uncertain where to go; struck off to the
right again, almost as soon as he began to descend it; and taking the
foot-path across the fields, skirted Caen Wood, and so came on
Hampstead Heath.  Traversing the hollow by the Vale of Heath, he
mounted the opposite bank, and crossing the road which joins the
villages of Hampstead and Highgate, made along the remaining portion of
the heath to the fields at North End, in one of which he laid himself
down under a hedge, and slept.

Soon he was up again, and away,--not far into the country, but back
towards London by the high-road--then back again--then over another
part of the same ground as he already traversed--then wandering up and
down in fields, and lying on ditches' brinks to rest, and starting up
to make for some other spot, and do the same, and ramble on again.

Where could he go, that was near and not too public, to get some meat
and drink?  Hendon.  That was a good place, not far off, and out of
most people's way.  Thither he directed his steps,--running sometimes,
and sometimes, with a strange perversity, loitering at a snail's pace,
or stopping altogether and idly breaking the hedges with a stick.  But
when he got there, all the people he met--the very children at the
doors--seemed to view him with suspicion.  Back he turned again,
without the courage to purchase bit or drop, though he had tasted no
food for many hours; and once more he lingered on the Heath, uncertain
where to go.

He wandered over miles and miles of ground, and still came back to the
old place.  Morning and noon had passed, and the day was on the wane,
and still he rambled to and fro, and up and down, and round and round,
and still lingered about the same spot.  At last he got away, and
shaped his course for Hatfield.

It was nine o'clock at night, when the man, quite tired out, and the
dog, limping and lame from the unaccustomed exercise, turned down the
hill by the church of the quiet village, and plodding along the little
street, crept into a small public-house, whose scanty light had guided
them to the spot.  There was a fire in the tap-room, and some
country-labourers were drinking before it.

They made room for the stranger, but he sat down in the furthest
corner, and ate and drank alone, or rather with his dog:  to whom he
cast a morsel of food from time to time.

The conversation of the men assembled here, turned upon the
neighbouring land, and farmers; and when those topics were exhausted,
upon the age of some old man who had been buried on the previous
Sunday; the young men present considering him very old, and the old men
present declaring him to have been quite young--not older, one
white-haired grandfather said, than he was--with ten or fifteen year of
life in him at least--if he had taken care; if he had taken care.

There was nothing to attract attention, or excite alarm in this. The
robber, after paying his reckoning, sat silent and unnoticed in his
corner, and had almost dropped asleep, when he was half wakened by the
noisy entrance of a new comer.

This was an antic fellow, half pedlar and half mountebank, who
travelled about the country on foot to vend hones, strops, razors,
washballs, harness-paste, medicine for dogs and horses, cheap
perfumery, cosmetics, and such-like wares, which he carried in a case
slung to his back.  His entrance was the signal for various homely
jokes with the countrymen, which slackened not until he had made his
supper, and opened his box of treasures, when he ingeniously contrived
to unite business with amusement.

'And what be that stoof?  Good to eat, Harry?' asked a grinning
countryman, pointing to some composition-cakes in one corner.

'This,' said the fellow, producing one, 'this is the infallible and
invaluable composition for removing all sorts of stain, rust, dirt,
mildew, spick, speck, spot, or spatter, from silk, satin, linen,
cambric, cloth, crape, stuff, carpet, merino, muslin, bombazeen, or
woollen stuff.  Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains,
paint-stains, pitch-stains, any stains, all come out at one rub with
the infallible and invaluable composition.  If a lady stains her
honour, she has only need to swallow one cake and she's cured at
once--for it's poison.  If a gentleman wants to prove this, he has only
need to bolt one little square, and he has put it beyond question--for
it's quite as satisfactory as a pistol-bullet, and a great deal nastier
in the flavour, consequently the more credit in taking it.  One penny a
square.  With all these virtues, one penny a square!'

There were two buyers directly, and more of the listeners plainly
hesitated.  The vendor observing this, increased in loquacity.

'It's all bought up as fast as it can be made,' said the fellow. 'There
are fourteen water-mills, six steam-engines, and a galvanic battery,
always a-working upon it, and they can't make it fast enough, though
the men work so hard that they die off, and the widows is pensioned
directly, with twenty pound a-year for each of the children, and a
premium of fifty for twins.  One penny a square!  Two half-pence is all
the same, and four farthings is received with joy.  One penny a square!
Wine-stains, fruit-stains, beer-stains, water-stains, paint-stains,
pitch-stains, mud-stains, blood-stains!  Here is a stain upon the hat
of a gentleman in company, that I'll take clean out, before he can
order me a pint of ale.'

'Hah!' cried Sikes starting up.  'Give that back.'

'I'll take it clean out, sir,' replied the man, winking to the company,
'before you can come across the room to get it. Gentlemen all, observe
the dark stain upon this gentleman's hat, no wider than a shilling, but
thicker than a half-crown.  Whether it is a wine-stain, fruit-stain,
beer-stain, water-stain, paint-stain, pitch-stain, mud-stain, or
blood-stain--'

The man got no further, for Sikes with a hideous imprecation overthrew
the table, and tearing the hat from him, burst out of the house.

With the same perversity of feeling and irresolution that had fastened
upon him, despite himself, all day, the murderer, finding that he was
not followed, and that they most probably considered him some drunken
sullen fellow, turned back up the town, and getting out of the glare of
the lamps of a stage-coach that was standing in the street, was walking
past, when he recognised the mail from London, and saw that it was
standing at the little post-office.  He almost knew what was to come;
but he crossed over, and listened.

The guard was standing at the door, waiting for the letter-bag. A man,
dressed like a game-keeper, came up at the moment, and he handed him a
basket which lay ready on the pavement.

'That's for your people,' said the guard.  'Now, look alive in there,
will you.  Damn that 'ere bag, it warn't ready night afore last; this
won't do, you know!'

'Anything new up in town, Ben?' asked the game-keeper, drawing back to
the window-shutters, the better to admire the horses.

'No, nothing that I knows on,' replied the man, pulling on his gloves.
'Corn's up a little.  I heerd talk of a murder, too, down Spitalfields
way, but I don't reckon much upon it.'

'Oh, that's quite true,' said a gentleman inside, who was looking out
of the window.  'And a dreadful murder it was.'

'Was it, sir?' rejoined the guard, touching his hat.  'Man or woman,
pray, sir?'

'A woman,' replied the gentleman.  'It is supposed--'

'Now, Ben,' replied the coachman impatiently.

'Damn that 'ere bag,' said the guard; 'are you gone to sleep in there?'

'Coming!' cried the office keeper, running out.

'Coming,' growled the guard.  'Ah, and so's the young 'ooman of
property that's going to take a fancy to me, but I don't know when.
Here, give hold.  All ri--ight!'

The horn sounded a few cheerful notes, and the coach was gone.

Sikes remained standing in the street, apparently unmoved by what he
had just heard, and agitated by no stronger feeling than a doubt where
to go.  At length he went back again, and took the road which leads
from Hatfield to St. Albans.

He went on doggedly; but as he left the town behind him, and plunged
into the solitude and darkness of the road, he felt a dread and awe
creeping upon him which shook him to the core. Every object before him,
substance or shadow, still or moving, took the semblance of some
fearful thing; but these fears were nothing compared to the sense that
haunted him of that morning's ghastly figure following at his heels.
He could trace its shadow in the gloom, supply the smallest item of the
outline, and note how stiff and solemn it seemed to stalk along.  He
could hear its garments rustling in the leaves, and every breath of
wind came laden with that last low cry.  If he stopped it did the same.
If he ran, it followed--not running too:  that would have been a
relief:  but like a corpse endowed with the mere machinery of life, and
borne on one slow melancholy wind that never rose or fell.

At times, he turned, with desperate determination, resolved to beat
this phantom off, though it should look him dead; but the hair rose on
his head, and his blood stood still, for it had turned with him and was
behind him then.  He had kept it before him that morning, but it was
behind now--always.  He leaned his back against a bank, and felt that
it stood above him, visibly out against the cold night-sky.  He threw
himself upon the road--on his back upon the road.  At his head it
stood, silent, erect, and still--a living grave-stone, with its epitaph
in blood.

Let no man talk of murderers escaping justice, and hint that Providence
must sleep.  There were twenty score of violent deaths in one long
minute of that agony of fear.

There was a shed in a field he passed, that offered shelter for the
night.  Before the door, were three tall poplar trees, which made it
very dark within; and the wind moaned through them with a dismal wail.
He _could not_ walk on, till daylight came again; and here he stretched
himself close to the wall--to undergo new torture.

For now, a vision came before him, as constant and more terrible than
that from which he had escaped.  Those widely staring eyes, so
lustreless and so glassy, that he had better borne to see them than
think upon them, appeared in the midst of the darkness: light in
themselves, but giving light to nothing.  There were but two, but they
were everywhere.  If he shut out the sight, there came the room with
every well-known object--some, indeed, that he would have forgotten, if
he had gone over its contents from memory--each in its accustomed
place.  The body was in _its_ place, and its eyes were as he saw them
when he stole away.  He got up, and rushed into the field without.  The
figure was behind him. He re-entered the shed, and shrunk down once
more.  The eyes were there, before he had laid himself along.

And here he remained in such terror as none but he can know, trembling
in every limb, and the cold sweat starting from every pore, when
suddenly there arose upon the night-wind the noise of distant shouting,
and the roar of voices mingled in alarm and wonder.  Any sound of men
in that lonely place, even though it conveyed a real cause of alarm,
was something to him.  He regained his strength and energy at the
prospect of personal danger; and springing to his feet, rushed into the
open air.

The broad sky seemed on fire.  Rising into the air with showers of
sparks, and rolling one above the other, were sheets of flame, lighting
the atmosphere for miles round, and driving clouds of smoke in the
direction where he stood.  The shouts grew louder as new voices swelled
the roar, and he could hear the cry of Fire! mingled with the ringing
of an alarm-bell, the fall of heavy bodies, and the crackling of flames
as they twined round some new obstacle, and shot aloft as though
refreshed by food.  The noise increased as he looked.  There were
people there--men and women--light, bustle.  It was like new life to
him.  He darted onward--straight, headlong--dashing through brier and
brake, and leaping gate and fence as madly as his dog, who careered
with loud and sounding bark before him.

He came upon the spot.  There were half-dressed figures tearing to and
fro, some endeavouring to drag the frightened horses from the stables,
others driving the cattle from the yard and out-houses, and others
coming laden from the burning pile, amidst a shower of falling sparks,
and the tumbling down of red-hot beams.  The apertures, where doors and
windows stood an hour ago, disclosed a mass of raging fire; walls
rocked and crumbled into the burning well; the molten lead and iron
poured down, white hot, upon the ground.  Women and children shrieked,
and men encouraged each other with noisy shouts and cheers.  The
clanking of the engine-pumps, and the spirting and hissing of the water
as it fell upon the blazing wood, added to the tremendous roar.  He
shouted, too, till he was hoarse; and flying from memory and himself,
plunged into the thickest of the throng.  Hither and thither he dived
that night:  now working at the pumps, and now hurrying through the
smoke and flame, but never ceasing to engage himself wherever noise and
men were thickest.  Up and down the ladders, upon the roofs of
buildings, over floors that quaked and trembled with his weight, under
the lee of falling bricks and stones, in every part of that great fire
was he; but he bore a charmed life, and had neither scratch nor bruise,
nor weariness nor thought, till morning dawned again, and only smoke
and blackened ruins remained.

This mad excitement over, there returned, with ten-fold force, the
dreadful consciousness of his crime.  He looked suspiciously about him,
for the men were conversing in groups, and he feared to be the subject
of their talk.  The dog obeyed the significant beck of his finger, and
they drew off, stealthily, together.  He passed near an engine where
some men were seated, and they called to him to share in their
refreshment.  He took some bread and meat; and as he drank a draught of
beer, heard the firemen, who were from London, talking about the
murder.  'He has gone to Birmingham, they say,' said one:  'but they'll
have him yet, for the scouts are out, and by to-morrow night there'll
be a cry all through the country.'

He hurried off, and walked till he almost dropped upon the ground; then
lay down in a lane, and had a long, but broken and uneasy sleep.  He
wandered on again, irresolute and undecided, and oppressed with the
fear of another solitary night.

Suddenly, he took the desperate resolution to going back to London.

'There's somebody to speak to there, at all event,' he thought. 'A good
hiding-place, too.  They'll never expect to nab me there, after this
country scent.  Why can't I lie by for a week or so, and, forcing blunt
from Fagin, get abroad to France?  Damme, I'll risk it.'

He acted upon this impulse without delay, and choosing the least
frequented roads began his journey back, resolved to lie concealed
within a short distance of the metropolis, and, entering it at dusk by
a circuitous route, to proceed straight to that part of it which he had
fixed on for his destination.

The dog, though.  If any description of him were out, it would not be
forgotten that the dog was missing, and had probably gone with him.
This might lead to his apprehension as he passed along the streets.  He
resolved to drown him, and walked on, looking about for a pond:
picking up a heavy stone and tying it to his handkerchief as he went.

The animal looked up into his master's face while these preparations
were making; whether his instinct apprehended something of their
purpose, or the robber's sidelong look at him was sterner than
ordinary, he skulked a little farther in the rear than usual, and
cowered as he came more slowly along.  When his master halted at the
brink of a pool, and looked round to call him, he stopped outright.

'Do you hear me call?  Come here!' cried Sikes.

The animal came up from the very force of habit; but as Sikes stooped
to attach the handkerchief to his throat, he uttered a low growl and
started back.

'Come back!' said the robber.

The dog wagged his tail, but moved not.  Sikes made a running noose and
called him again.

The dog advanced, retreated, paused an instant, and scoured away at his
hardest speed.

The man whistled again and again, and sat down and waited in the
expectation that he would return.  But no dog appeared, and at length
he resumed his journey.



CHAPTER XLIX

MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET.  THEIR CONVERSATION, AND THE
INTELLIGENCE THAT INTERRUPTS IT

 The twilight was beginning to close in, when Mr. Brownlow
alighted from a hackney-coach at his own door, and knocked softly.  The
door being opened, a sturdy man got out of the coach and stationed
himself on one side of the steps, while another man, who had been
seated on the box, dismounted too, and stood upon the other side.  At a
sign from Mr. Brownlow, they helped out a third man, and taking him
between them, hurried him into the house. This man was Monks.

They walked in the same manner up the stairs without speaking, and Mr.
Brownlow, preceding them, led the way into a back-room. At the door of
this apartment, Monks, who had ascended with evident reluctance,
stopped.  The two men looked at the old gentleman as if for
instructions.

'He knows the alternative,' said Mr. Browlow.  'If he hesitates or
moves a finger but as you bid him, drag him into the street, call for
the aid of the police, and impeach him as a felon in my name.'

'How dare you say this of me?' asked Monks.

'How dare you urge me to it, young man?' replied Mr. Brownlow,
confronting him with a steady look.  'Are you mad enough to leave this
house?  Unhand him.  There, sir. You are free to go, and we to follow.
But I warn you, by all I hold most solemn and most sacred, that instant
will have you apprehended on a charge of fraud and robbery.  I am
resolute and immoveable.  If you are determined to be the same, your
blood be upon your own head!'

'By what authority am I kidnapped in the street, and brought here by
these dogs?' asked Monks, looking from one to the other of the men who
stood beside him.

'By mine,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'Those persons are indemnified by me.
If you complain of being deprived of your liberty--you had power and
opportunity to retrieve it as you came along, but you deemed it
advisable to remain quiet--I say again, throw yourself for protection
on the law.  I will appeal to the law too; but when you have gone too
far to recede, do not sue to me for leniency, when the power will have
passed into other hands; and do not say I plunged you down the gulf
into which you rushed, yourself.'

Monks was plainly disconcerted, and alarmed besides.  He hesitated.

'You will decide quickly,' said Mr. Brownlow, with perfect firmness and
composure.  'If you wish me to prefer my charges publicly, and consign
you to a punishment the extent of which, although I can, with a
shudder, foresee, I cannot control, once more, I say, for you know the
way.  If not, and you appeal to my forbearance, and the mercy of those
you have deeply injured, seat yourself, without a word, in that chair.
It has waited for you two whole days.'

Monks muttered some unintelligible words, but wavered still.

'You will be prompt,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'A word from me, and the
alternative has gone for ever.'

Still the man hesitated.

'I have not the inclination to parley,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'and, as I
advocate the dearest interests of others, I have not the right.'

'Is there--' demanded Monks with a faltering tongue,--'is there--no
middle course?'

'None.'

Monks looked at the old gentleman, with an anxious eye; but, reading in
his countenance nothing but severity and determination, walked into the
room, and, shrugging his shoulders, sat down.

'Lock the door on the outside,' said Mr. Brownlow to the attendants,
'and come when I ring.'

The men obeyed, and the two were left alone together.

'This is pretty treatment, sir,' said Monks, throwing down his hat and
cloak, 'from my father's oldest friend.'

'It is because I was your father's oldest friend, young man,' returned
Mr. Brownlow; 'it is because the hopes and wishes of young and happy
years were bound up with him, and that fair creature of his blood and
kindred who rejoined her God in youth, and left me here a solitary,
lonely man:  it is because he knelt with me beside his only sisters's
death-bed when he was yet a boy, on the morning that would--but Heaven
willed otherwise--have made her my young wife; it is because my seared
heart clung to him, from that time forth, through all his trials and
errors, till he died; it is because old recollections and associations
filled my heart, and even the sight of you brings with it old thoughts
of him; it is because of all these things that I am moved to treat you
gently now--yes, Edward Leeford, even now--and blush for your
unworthiness who bear the name.'

'What has the name to do with it?' asked the other, after
contemplating, half in silence, and half in dogged wonder, the
agitation of his companion.  'What is the name to me?'

'Nothing,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'nothing to you.  But it was _hers_,
and even at this distance of time brings back to me, an old man, the
glow and thrill which I once felt, only to hear it repeated by a
stranger.  I am very glad you have changed it--very--very.'

'This is all mighty fine,' said Monks (to retain his assumed
designation) after a long silence, during which he had jerked himself
in sullen defiance to and fro, and Mr. Brownlow had sat, shading his
face with his hand. 'But what do you want with me?'

'You have a brother,' said Mr. Brownlow, rousing himself:  'a brother,
the whisper of whose name in your ear when I came behind you in the
street, was, in itself, almost enough to make you accompany me hither,
in wonder and alarm.'

'I have no brother,' replied Monks.  'You know I was an only child.
Why do you talk to me of brothers?  You know that, as well as I.'

'Attend to what I do know, and you may not,' said Mr. Brownlow. 'I
shall interest you by and by.  I know that of the wretched marriage,
into which family pride, and the most sordid and narrowest of all
ambition, forced your unhappy father when a mere boy, you were the sole
and most unnatural issue.'

'I don't care for hard names,' interrupted Monks with a jeering laugh.
'You know the fact, and that's enough for me.'

'But I also know,' pursued the old gentleman, 'the misery, the slow
torture, the protracted anguish of that ill-assorted union. I know how
listlessly and wearily each of that wretched pair dragged on their
heavy chain through a world that was poisoned to them both.  I know how
cold formalities were succeeded by open taunts; how indifference gave
place to dislike, dislike to hate, and hate to loathing, until at last
they wrenched the clanking bond asunder, and retiring a wide space
apart, carried each a galling fragment, of which nothing but death
could break the rivets, to hide it in new society beneath the gayest
looks they could assume.  Your mother succeeded; she forgot it soon.
But it rusted and cankered at your father's heart for years.'

'Well, they were separated,' said Monks, 'and what of that?'

'When they had been separated for some time,' returned Mr. Brownlow,
'and your mother, wholly given up to continental frivolities, had
utterly forgotten the young husband ten good years her junior, who,
with prospects blighted, lingered on at home, he fell among new
friends.  This circumstance, at least, you know already.'

'Not I,' said Monks, turning away his eyes and beating his foot upon
the ground, as a man who is determined to deny everything. 'Not I.'

'Your manner, no less than your actions, assures me that you have never
forgotten it, or ceased to think of it with bitterness,' returned Mr.
Brownlow.  'I speak of fifteen years ago, when you were not more than
eleven years old, and your father but one-and-thirty--for he was, I
repeat, a boy, when _his_ father ordered him to marry. Must I go back
to events which cast a shade upon the memory of your parent, or will
you spare it, and disclose to me the truth?'

'I have nothing to disclose,' rejoined Monks.  'You must talk on if you
will.'

'These new friends, then,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'were a naval officer
retired from active service, whose wife had died some half-a-year
before, and left him with two children--there had been more, but, of
all their family, happily but two survived. They were both daughters;
one a beautiful creature of nineteen, and the other a mere child of two
or three years old.'

'What's this to me?' asked Monks.

'They resided,' said Mr. Brownlow, without seeming to hear the
interruption, 'in a part of the country to which your father in his
wandering had repaired, and where he had taken up his abode.
Acquaintance, intimacy, friendship, fast followed on each other. Your
father was gifted as few men are.  He had his sister's soul and person.
As the old officer knew him more and more, he grew to love him.  I
would that it had ended there.  His daughter did the same.'

The old gentleman paused; Monks was biting his lips, with his eyes
fixed upon the floor; seeing this, he immediately resumed:

'The end of a year found him contracted, solemnly contracted, to that
daughter; the object of the first, true, ardent, only passion of a
guileless girl.'

'Your tale is of the longest,' observed Monks, moving restlessly in his
chair.

'It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man,' returned
Mr. Brownlow, 'and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed
joy and happiness, it would be very brief.  At length one of those rich
relations to strengthen whose interest and importance your father had
been sacrificed, as others are often--it is no uncommon case--died, and
to repair the misery he had been instrumental in occasioning, left him
his panacea for all griefs--Money.  It was necessary that he should
immediately repair to Rome, whither this man had sped for health, and
where he had died, leaving his affairs in great confusion.  He went;
was seized with mortal illness there; was followed, the moment the
intelligence reached Paris, by your mother who carried you with her; he
died the day after her arrival, leaving no will--_no will_--so that the
whole property fell to her and you.'

At this part of the recital Monks held his breath, and listened with a
face of intense eagerness, though his eyes were not directed towards
the speaker.  As Mr. Brownlow paused, he changed his position with the
air of one who has experienced a sudden relief, and wiped his hot face
and hands.

'Before he went abroad, and as he passed through London on his way,'
said Mr. Brownlow, slowly, and fixing his eyes upon the other's face,
'he came to me.'

'I never heard of that,' interrupted Monks in a tone intended to appear
incredulous, but savouring more of disagreeable surprise.

'He came to me, and left with me, among some other things, a picture--a
portrait painted by himself--a likeness of this poor girl--which he did
not wish to leave behind, and could not carry forward on his hasty
journey.  He was worn by anxiety and remorse almost to a shadow; talked
in a wild, distracted way, of ruin and dishonour worked by himself;
confided to me his intention to convert his whole property, at any
loss, into money, and, having settled on his wife and you a portion of
his recent acquisition, to fly the country--I guessed too well he would
not fly alone--and never see it more.  Even from me, his old and early
friend, whose strong attachment had taken root in the earth that
covered one most dear to both--even from me he withheld any more
particular confession, promising to write and tell me all, and after
that to see me once again, for the last time on earth. Alas!  _That_
was the last time.  I had no letter, and I never saw him more.'

'I went,' said Mr. Brownlow, after a short pause, 'I went, when all was
over, to the scene of his--I will use the term the world would freely
use, for worldly harshness or favour are now alike to him--of his
guilty love, resolved that if my fears were realised that erring child
should find one heart and home to shelter and compassionate her.  The
family had left that part a week before; they had called in such
trifling debts as were outstanding, discharged them, and left the place
by night.  Why, or whither, none can tell.'

Monks drew his breath yet more freely, and looked round with a smile of
triumph.

'When your brother,' said Mr. Brownlow, drawing nearer to the other's
chair, 'When your brother:  a feeble, ragged, neglected child:  was
cast in my way by a stronger hand than chance, and rescued by me from a
life of vice and infamy--'

'What?' cried Monks.

'By me,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'I told you I should interest you before
long.  I say by me--I see that your cunning associate suppressed my
name, although for ought he knew, it would be quite strange to your
ears.  When he was rescued by me, then, and lay recovering from
sickness in my house, his strong resemblance to this picture I have
spoken of, struck me with astonishment.  Even when I first saw him in
all his dirt and misery, there was a lingering expression in his face
that came upon me like a glimpse of some old friend flashing on one in
a vivid dream.  I need not tell you he was snared away before I knew
his history--'

'Why not?' asked Monks hastily.

'Because you know it well.'

'I!'

'Denial to me is vain,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'I shall show you that I
know more than that.'

'You--you--can't prove anything against me,' stammered Monks.  'I defy
you to do it!'

'We shall see,' returned the old gentleman with a searching glance.  'I
lost the boy, and no efforts of mine could recover him.  Your mother
being dead, I knew that you alone could solve the mystery if anybody
could, and as when I had last heard of you you were on your own estate
in the West Indies--whither, as you well know, you retired upon your
mother's death to escape the consequences of vicious courses here--I
made the voyage.  You had left it, months before, and were supposed to
be in London, but no one could tell where.  I returned.  Your agents
had no clue to your residence.  You came and went, they said, as
strangely as you had ever done:  sometimes for days together and
sometimes not for months:  keeping to all appearance the same low
haunts and mingling with the same infamous herd who had been your
associates when a fierce ungovernable boy.  I wearied them with new
applications.  I paced the streets by night and day, but until two
hours ago, all my efforts were fruitless, and I never saw you for an
instant.'

'And now you do see me,' said Monks, rising boldly, 'what then? Fraud
and robbery are high-sounding words--justified, you think, by a fancied
resemblance in some young imp to an idle daub of a dead man's Brother!
You don't even know that a child was born of this maudlin pair; you
don't even know that.'

'I _did not_,' replied Mr. Brownlow, rising too; 'but within the last
fortnight I have learnt it all.  You have a brother; you know it, and
him.  There was a will, which your mother destroyed, leaving the secret
and the gain to you at her own death.  It contained a reference to some
child likely to be the result of this sad connection, which child was
born, and accidentally encountered by you, when your suspicions were
first awakened by his resemblance to your father.  You repaired to the
place of his birth. There existed proofs--proofs long suppressed--of
his birth and parentage.  Those proofs were destroyed by you, and now,
in your own words to your accomplice the Jew, "_the only proofs of the
boy's identity lie at the bottom of the river, and the old hag that
received them from the mother is rotting in her coffin_." Unworthy son,
coward, liar,--you, who hold your councils with thieves and murderers
in dark rooms at night,--you, whose plots and wiles have brought a
violent death upon the head of one worth millions such as you,--you,
who from your cradle were gall and bitterness to your own father's
heart, and in whom all evil passions, vice, and profligacy, festered,
till they found a vent in a hideous disease which had made your face an
index even to your mind--you, Edward Leeford, do you still brave me!'

'No, no, no!' returned the coward, overwhelmed by these accumulated
charges.

'Every word!' cried the gentleman, 'every word that has passed between
you and this detested villain, is known to me.  Shadows on the wall
have caught your whispers, and brought them to my ear; the sight of the
persecuted child has turned vice itself, and given it the courage and
almost the attributes of virtue. Murder has been done, to which you
were morally if not really a party.'

'No, no,' interposed Monks.  'I--I knew nothing of that; I was going to
inquire the truth of the story when you overtook me.  I didn't know the
cause.  I thought it was a common quarrel.'

'It was the partial disclosure of your secrets,' replied Mr. Brownlow.
'Will you disclose the whole?'

'Yes, I will.'

'Set your hand to a statement of truth and facts, and repeat it before
witnesses?'

'That I promise too.'

'Remain quietly here, until such a document is drawn up, and proceed
with me to such a place as I may deem most advisable, for the purpose
of attesting it?'

'If you insist upon that, I'll do that also,' replied Monks.

'You must do more than that,' said Mr. Brownlow.  'Make restitution to
an innocent and unoffending child, for such he is, although the
offspring of a guilty and most miserable love.  You have not forgotten
the provisions of the will.  Carry them into execution so far as your
brother is concerned, and then go where you please.  In this world you
need meet no more.'

While Monks was pacing up and down, meditating with dark and evil looks
on this proposal and the possibilities of evading it:  torn by his
fears on the one hand and his hatred on the other:  the door was
hurriedly unlocked, and a gentleman (Mr. Losberne) entered the room in
violent agitation.

'The man will be taken,' he cried.  'He will be taken to-night!'

'The murderer?' asked Mr. Brownlow.

'Yes, yes,' replied the other.  'His dog has been seen lurking about
some old haunt, and there seems little doubt that his master either is,
or will be, there, under cover of the darkness.  Spies are hovering
about in every direction.  I have spoken to the men who are charged
with his capture, and they tell me he cannot escape.  A reward of a
hundred pounds is proclaimed by Government to-night.'

'I will give fifty more,' said Mr. Brownlow, 'and proclaim it with my
own lips upon the spot, if I can reach it.  Where is Mr. Maylie?'

'Harry?  As soon as he had seen your friend here, safe in a coach with
you, he hurried off to where he heard this,' replied the doctor, 'and
mounting his horse sallied forth to join the first party at some place
in the outskirts agreed upon between them.'

'Fagin,' said Mr. Brownlow; 'what of him?'

'When I last heard, he had not been taken, but he will be, or is, by
this time.  They're sure of him.'

'Have you made up your mind?' asked Mr. Brownlow, in a low voice, of
Monks.

'Yes,' he replied.  'You--you--will be secret with me?'

'I will.  Remain here till I return.  It is your only hope of safety.'

They left the room, and the door was again locked.

'What have you done?' asked the doctor in a whisper.

'All that I could hope to do, and even more.  Coupling the poor girl's
intelligence with my previous knowledge, and the result of our good
friend's inquiries on the spot, I left him no loophole of escape, and
laid bare the whole villainy which by these lights became plain as day.
Write and appoint the evening after to-morrow, at seven, for the
meeting.  We shall be down there, a few hours before, but shall require
rest:  especially the young lady, who _may_ have greater need of
firmness than either you or I can quite foresee just now.  But my blood
boils to avenge this poor murdered creature.  Which way have they
taken?'

'Drive straight to the office and you will be in time,' replied Mr.
Losberne.  'I will remain here.'

The two gentlemen hastily separated; each in a fever of excitement
wholly uncontrollable.



CHAPTER L

THE PURSUIT AND ESCAPE

Near to that part of the Thames on which the church at Rotherhithe
abuts, where the buildings on the banks are dirtiest and the vessels on
the river blackest with the dust of colliers and the smoke of
close-built low-roofed houses, there exists the filthiest, the
strangest, the most extraordinary of the many localities that are
hidden in London, wholly unknown, even by name, to the great mass of
its inhabitants.

To reach this place, the visitor has to penetrate through a maze of
close, narrow, and muddy streets, thronged by the roughest and poorest
of waterside people, and devoted to the traffic they may be supposed to
occasion.  The cheapest and least delicate provisions are heaped in the
shops; the coarsest and commonest articles of wearing apparel dangle at
the salesman's door, and stream from the house-parapet and windows.
Jostling with unemployed labourers of the lowest class,
ballast-heavers, coal-whippers, brazen women, ragged children, and the
raff and refuse of the river, he makes his way with difficulty along,
assailed by offensive sights and smells from the narrow alleys which
branch off on the right and left, and deafened by the clash of
ponderous waggons that bear great piles of merchandise from the stacks
of warehouses that rise from every corner.  Arriving, at length, in
streets remoter and less-frequented than those through which he has
passed, he walks beneath tottering house-fronts projecting over the
pavement, dismantled walls that seem to totter as he passes, chimneys
half crushed half hesitating to fall, windows guarded by rusty iron
bars that time and dirt have almost eaten away, every imaginable sign
of desolation and neglect.

In such a neighborhood, beyond Dockhead in the Borough of Southwark,
stands Jacob's Island, surrounded by a muddy ditch, six or eight feet
deep and fifteen or twenty wide when the tide is in, once called Mill
Pond, but known in the days of this story as Folly Ditch.  It is a
creek or inlet from the Thames, and can always be filled at high water
by opening the sluices at the Lead Mills from which it took its old
name.  At such times, a stranger, looking from one of the wooden
bridges thrown across it at Mill Lane, will see the inhabitants of the
houses on either side lowering from their back doors and windows,
buckets, pails, domestic utensils of all kinds, in which to haul the
water up; and when his eye is turned from these operations to the
houses themselves, his utmost astonishment will be excited by the scene
before him.  Crazy wooden galleries common to the backs of half a dozen
houses, with holes from which to look upon the slime beneath; windows,
broken and patched, with poles thrust out, on which to dry the linen
that is never there; rooms so small, so filthy, so confined, that the
air would seem too tainted even for the dirt and squalor which they
shelter; wooden chambers thrusting themselves out above the mud, and
threatening to fall into it--as some have done; dirt-besmeared walls
and decaying foundations; every repulsive lineament of poverty, every
loathsome indication of filth, rot, and garbage; all these ornament the
banks of Folly Ditch.

In Jacob's Island, the warehouses are roofless and empty; the walls are
crumbling down; the windows are windows no more; the doors are falling
into the streets; the chimneys are blackened, but they yield no smoke.
Thirty or forty years ago, before losses and chancery suits came upon
it, it was a thriving place; but now it is a desolate island indeed.
The houses have no owners; they are broken open, and entered upon by
those who have the courage; and there they live, and there they die.
They must have powerful motives for a secret residence, or be reduced
to a destitute condition indeed, who seek a refuge in Jacob's Island.

In an upper room of one of these houses--a detached house of fair size,
ruinous in other respects, but strongly defended at door and window:
of which house the back commanded the ditch in manner already
described--there were assembled three men, who, regarding each other
every now and then with looks expressive of perplexity and expectation,
sat for some time in profound and gloomy silence.  One of these was
Toby Crackit, another Mr. Chitling, and the third a robber of fifty
years, whose nose had been almost beaten in, in some old scuffle, and
whose face bore a frightful scar which might probably be traced to the
same occasion.  This man was a returned transport, and his name was
Kags.

'I wish,' said Toby turning to Mr. Chitling, 'that you had picked out
some other crib when the two old ones got too warm, and had not come
here, my fine feller.'

'Why didn't you, blunder-head!' said Kags.

'Well, I thought you'd have been a little more glad to see me than
this,' replied Mr. Chitling, with a melancholy air.

'Why, look'e, young gentleman,' said Toby, 'when a man keeps himself so
very ex-clusive as I have done, and by that means has a snug house over
his head with nobody a prying and smelling about it, it's rather a
startling thing to have the honour of a wisit from a young gentleman
(however respectable and pleasant a person he may be to play cards with
at conweniency) circumstanced as you are.'

'Especially, when the exclusive young man has got a friend stopping
with him, that's arrived sooner than was expected from foreign parts,
and is too modest to want to be presented to the Judges on his return,'
added Mr. Kags.

There was a short silence, after which Toby Crackit, seeming to abandon
as hopeless any further effort to maintain his usual devil-may-care
swagger, turned to Chitling and said,

'When was Fagin took then?'

'Just at dinner-time--two o'clock this afternoon.  Charley and I made
our lucky up the wash-us chimney, and Bolter got into the empty
water-butt, head downwards; but his legs were so precious long that
they stuck out at the top, and so they took him too.'

'And Bet?'

'Poor Bet!  She went to see the Body, to speak to who it was,' replied
Chitling, his countenance falling more and more, 'and went off mad,
screaming and raving, and beating her head against the boards; so they
put a strait-weskut on her and took her to the hospital--and there she
is.'

'Wot's come of young Bates?' demanded Kags.

'He hung about, not to come over here afore dark, but he'll be here
soon,' replied Chitling.  'There's nowhere else to go to now, for the
people at the Cripples are all in custody, and the bar of the ken--I
went up there and see it with my own eyes--is filled with traps.'

'This is a smash,' observed Toby, biting his lips. 'There's more than
one will go with this.'

'The sessions are on,' said Kags:  'if they get the inquest over, and
Bolter turns King's evidence:  as of course he will, from what he's
said already:  they can prove Fagin an accessory before the fact, and
get the trial on on Friday, and he'll swing in six days from this, by
G--!'

'You should have heard the people groan,' said Chitling; 'the officers
fought like devils, or they'd have torn him away.  He was down once,
but they made a ring round him, and fought their way along.  You should
have seen how he looked about him, all muddy and bleeding, and clung to
them as if they were his dearest friends.  I can see 'em now, not able
to stand upright with the pressing of the mob, and draggin him along
amongst 'em; I can see the people jumping up, one behind another, and
snarling with their teeth and making at him; I can see the blood upon
his hair and beard, and hear the cries with which the women worked
themselves into the centre of the crowd at the street corner, and swore
they'd tear his heart out!'

The horror-stricken witness of this scene pressed his hands upon his
ears, and with his eyes closed got up and paced violently to and fro,
like one distracted.

While he was thus engaged, and the two men sat by in silence with their
eyes fixed upon the floor, a pattering noise was heard upon the stairs,
and Sikes's dog bounded into the room.  They ran to the window,
downstairs, and into the street.  The dog had jumped in at an open
window; he made no attempt to follow them, nor was his master to be
seen.

'What's the meaning of this?' said Toby when they had returned. 'He
can't be coming here.  I--I--hope not.'

'If he was coming here, he'd have come with the dog,' said Kags,
stooping down to examine the animal, who lay panting on the floor.
'Here!  Give us some water for him; he has run himself faint.'

'He's drunk it all up, every drop,' said Chitling after watching the
dog some time in silence.  'Covered with mud--lame--half blind--he must
have come a long way.'

'Where can he have come from!' exclaimed Toby.  'He's been to the other
kens of course, and finding them filled with strangers come on here,
where he's been many a time and often.  But where can he have come from
first, and how comes he here alone without the other!'

'He'--(none of them called the murderer by his old name)--'He can't
have made away with himself.  What do you think?' said Chitling.

Toby shook his head.

'If he had,' said Kags, 'the dog 'ud want to lead us away to where he
did it.  No.  I think he's got out of the country, and left the dog
behind.  He must have given him the slip somehow, or he wouldn't be so
easy.'

This solution, appearing the most probable one, was adopted as the
right; the dog, creeping under a chair, coiled himself up to sleep,
without more notice from anybody.

It being now dark, the shutter was closed, and a candle lighted and
placed upon the table.  The terrible events of the last two days had
made a deep impression on all three, increased by the danger and
uncertainty of their own position.  They drew their chairs closer
together, starting at every sound.  They spoke little, and that in
whispers, and were as silent and awe-stricken as if the remains of the
murdered woman lay in the next room.

They had sat thus, some time, when suddenly was heard a hurried
knocking at the door below.

'Young Bates,' said Kags, looking angrily round, to check the fear he
felt himself.

The knocking came again.  No, it wasn't he.  He never knocked like that.

Crackit went to the window, and shaking all over, drew in his head.
There was no need to tell them who it was; his pale face was enough.
The dog too was on the alert in an instant, and ran whining to the door.

'We must let him in,' he said, taking up the candle.

'Isn't there any help for it?' asked the other man in a hoarse voice.

'None.  He _must_ come in.'

'Don't leave us in the dark,' said Kags, taking down a candle from the
chimney-piece, and lighting it, with such a trembling hand that the
knocking was twice repeated before he had finished.

Crackit went down to the door, and returned followed by a man with the
lower part of his face buried in a handkerchief, and another tied over
his head under his hat.  He drew them slowly off.  Blanched face,
sunken eyes, hollow cheeks, beard of three days' growth, wasted flesh,
short thick breath; it was the very ghost of Sikes.

He laid his hand upon a chair which stood in the middle of the room,
but shuddering as he was about to drop into it, and seeming to glance
over his shoulder, dragged it back close to the wall--as close as it
would go--and ground it against it--and sat down.

Not a word had been exchanged.  He looked from one to another in
silence.  If an eye were furtively raised and met his, it was instantly
averted.  When his hollow voice broke silence, they all three started.
They seemed never to have heard its tones before.

'How came that dog here?' he asked.

'Alone.  Three hours ago.'

'To-night's paper says that Fagin's took.  Is it true, or a lie?'

'True.'

They were silent again.

'Damn you all!' said Sikes, passing his hand across his forehead.

'Have you nothing to say to me?'

There was an uneasy movement among them, but nobody spoke.

'You that keep this house,' said Sikes, turning his face to Crackit,
'do you mean to sell me, or to let me lie here till this hunt is over?'

'You may stop here, if you think it safe,' returned the person
addressed, after some hesitation.

Sikes carried his eyes slowly up the wall behind him:  rather trying to
turn his head than actually doing it:  and said, 'Is--it--the body--is
it buried?'

They shook their heads.

'Why isn't it!' he retorted with the same glance behind him. 'Wot do
they keep such ugly things above the ground for?--Who's that knocking?'

Crackit intimated, by a motion of his hand as he left the room, that
there was nothing to fear; and directly came back with Charley Bates
behind him.  Sikes sat opposite the door, so that the moment the boy
entered the room he encountered his figure.

'Toby,' said the boy falling back, as Sikes turned his eyes towards
him, 'why didn't you tell me this, downstairs?'

There had been something so tremendous in the shrinking off of the
three, that the wretched man was willing to propitiate even this lad.
Accordingly he nodded, and made as though he would shake hands with him.

'Let me go into some other room,' said the boy, retreating still
farther.

'Charley!' said Sikes, stepping forward.  'Don't you--don't you know
me?'

'Don't come nearer me,' answered the boy, still retreating, and
looking, with horror in his eyes, upon the murderer's face.  'You
monster!'

The man stopped half-way, and they looked at each other; but Sikes's
eyes sunk gradually to the ground.

'Witness you three,' cried the boy shaking his clenched fist, and
becoming more and more excited as he spoke. 'Witness you three--I'm not
afraid of him--if they come here after him, I'll give him up; I will.
I tell you out at once.  He may kill me for it if he likes, or if he
dares, but if I am here I'll give him up.  I'd give him up if he was to
be boiled alive.  Murder! Help!  If there's the pluck of a man among
you three, you'll help me.  Murder!  Help!  Down with him!'

Pouring out these cries, and accompanying them with violent
gesticulation, the boy actually threw himself, single-handed, upon the
strong man, and in the intensity of his energy and the suddenness of
his surprise, brought him heavily to the ground.

The three spectators seemed quite stupefied.  They offered no
interference, and the boy and man rolled on the ground together; the
former, heedless of the blows that showered upon him, wrenching his
hands tighter and tighter in the garments about the murderer's breast,
and never ceasing to call for help with all his might.

The contest, however, was too unequal to last long.  Sikes had him
down, and his knee was on his throat, when Crackit pulled him back with
a look of alarm, and pointed to the window.  There were lights gleaming
below, voices in loud and earnest conversation, the tramp of hurried
footsteps--endless they seemed in number--crossing the nearest wooden
bridge.  One man on horseback seemed to be among the crowd; for there
was the noise of hoofs rattling on the uneven pavement.  The gleam of
lights increased; the footsteps came more thickly and noisily on.
Then, came a loud knocking at the door, and then a hoarse murmur from
such a multitude of angry voices as would have made the boldest quail.

'Help!' shrieked the boy in a voice that rent the air.

'He's here!  Break down the door!'

'In the King's name,' cried the voices without; and the hoarse cry
arose again, but louder.

'Break down the door!' screamed the boy.  'I tell you they'll never
open it.  Run straight to the room where the light is. Break down the
door!'

Strokes, thick and heavy, rattled upon the door and lower
window-shutters as he ceased to speak, and a loud huzzah burst from the
crowd; giving the listener, for the first time, some adequate idea of
its immense extent.

'Open the door of some place where I can lock this screeching
Hell-babe,' cried Sikes fiercely; running to and fro, and dragging the
boy, now, as easily as if he were an empty sack. 'That door.  Quick!'
He flung him in, bolted it, and turned the key.  'Is the downstairs
door fast?'

'Double-locked and chained,' replied Crackit, who, with the other two
men, still remained quite helpless and bewildered.

'The panels--are they strong?'

'Lined with sheet-iron.'

'And the windows too?'

'Yes, and the windows.'

'Damn you!' cried the desperate ruffian, throwing up the sash and
menacing the crowd.  'Do your worst!  I'll cheat you yet!'

Of all the terrific yells that ever fell on mortal ears, none could
exceed the cry of the infuriated throng.  Some shouted to those who
were nearest to set the house on fire; others roared to the officers to
shoot him dead.  Among them all, none showed such fury as the man on
horseback, who, throwing himself out of the saddle, and bursting
through the crowd as if he were parting water, cried, beneath the
window, in a voice that rose above all others, 'Twenty guineas to the
man who brings a ladder!'

The nearest voices took up the cry, and hundreds echoed it.  Some
called for ladders, some for sledge-hammers; some ran with torches to
and fro as if to seek them, and still came back and roared again; some
spent their breath in impotent curses and execrations; some pressed
forward with the ecstasy of madmen, and thus impeded the progress of
those below; some among the boldest attempted to climb up by the
water-spout and crevices in the wall; and all waved to and fro, in the
darkness beneath, like a field of corn moved by an angry wind:  and
joined from time to time in one loud furious roar.

'The tide,' cried the murderer, as he staggered back into the room, and
shut the faces out, 'the tide was in as I came up. Give me a rope, a
long rope.  They're all in front.  I may drop into the Folly Ditch, and
clear off that way.  Give me a rope, or I shall do three more murders
and kill myself.'

The panic-stricken men pointed to where such articles were kept; the
murderer, hastily selecting the longest and strongest cord, hurried up
to the house-top.

All the window in the rear of the house had been long ago bricked up,
except one small trap in the room where the boy was locked, and that
was too small even for the passage of his body.  But, from this
aperture, he had never ceased to call on those without, to guard the
back; and thus, when the murderer emerged at last on the house-top by
the door in the roof, a loud shout proclaimed the fact to those in
front, who immediately began to pour round, pressing upon each other in
an unbroken stream.

He planted a board, which he had carried up with him for the purpose,
so firmly against the door that it must be matter of great difficulty
to open it from the inside; and creeping over the tiles, looked over
the low parapet.

The water was out, and the ditch a bed of mud.

The crowd had been hushed during these few moments, watching his
motions and doubtful of his purpose, but the instant they perceived it
and knew it was defeated, they raised a cry of triumphant execration to
which all their previous shouting had been whispers.  Again and again
it rose.  Those who were at too great a distance to know its meaning,
took up the sound; it echoed and re-echoed; it seemed as though the
whole city had poured its population out to curse him.

On pressed the people from the front--on, on, on, in a strong
struggling current of angry faces, with here and there a glaring torch
to lighten them up, and show them out in all their wrath and passion.
The houses on the opposite side of the ditch had been entered by the
mob; sashes were thrown up, or torn bodily out; there were tiers and
tiers of faces in every window; cluster upon cluster of people clinging
to every house-top.  Each little bridge (and there were three in sight)
bent beneath the weight of the crowd upon it.  Still the current poured
on to find some nook or hole from which to vent their shouts, and only
for an instant see the wretch.

'They have him now,' cried a man on the nearest bridge. 'Hurrah!'

The crowd grew light with uncovered heads; and again the shout uprose.

'I will give fifty pounds,' cried an old gentleman from the same
quarter, 'to the man who takes him alive.  I will remain here, till he
come to ask me for it.'

There was another roar.  At this moment the word was passed among the
crowd that the door was forced at last, and that he who had first
called for the ladder had mounted into the room.  The stream abruptly
turned, as this intelligence ran from mouth to mouth; and the people at
the windows, seeing those upon the bridges pouring back, quitted their
stations, and running into the street, joined the concourse that now
thronged pell-mell to the spot they had left:  each man crushing and
striving with his neighbor, and all panting with impatience to get near
the door, and look upon the criminal as the officers brought him out.
The cries and shrieks of those who were pressed almost to suffocation,
or trampled down and trodden under foot in the confusion, were
dreadful; the narrow ways were completely blocked up; and at this time,
between the rush of some to regain the space in front of the house, and
the unavailing struggles of others to extricate themselves from the
mass, the immediate attention was distracted from the murderer,
although the universal eagerness for his capture was, if possible,
increased.

The man had shrunk down, thoroughly quelled by the ferocity of the
crowd, and the impossibility of escape; but seeing this sudden change
with no less rapidity than it had occurred, he sprang upon his feet,
determined to make one last effort for his life by dropping into the
ditch, and, at the risk of being stifled, endeavouring to creep away in
the darkness and confusion.

Roused into new strength and energy, and stimulated by the noise within
the house which announced that an entrance had really been effected, he
set his foot against the stack of chimneys, fastened one end of the
rope tightly and firmly round it, and with the other made a strong
running noose by the aid of his hands and teeth almost in a second.  He
could let himself down by the cord to within a less distance of the
ground than his own height, and had his knife ready in his hand to cut
it then and drop.

At the very instant when he brought the loop over his head previous to
slipping it beneath his arm-pits, and when the old gentleman
before-mentioned (who had clung so tight to the railing of the bridge
as to resist the force of the crowd, and retain his position) earnestly
warned those about him that the man was about to lower himself down--at
that very instant the murderer, looking behind him on the roof, threw
his arms above his head, and uttered a yell of terror.

'The eyes again!' he cried in an unearthly screech.

Staggering as if struck by lightning, he lost his balance and tumbled
over the parapet.  The noose was on his neck. It ran up with his
weight, tight as a bow-string, and swift as the arrow it speeds.  He
fell for five-and-thirty feet.  There was a sudden jerk, a terrific
convulsion of the limbs; and there he hung, with the open knife
clenched in his stiffening hand.

The old chimney quivered with the shock, but stood it bravely. The
murderer swung lifeless against the wall; and the boy, thrusting aside
the dangling body which obscured his view, called to the people to come
and take him out, for God's sake.

A dog, which had lain concealed till now, ran backwards and forwards on
the parapet with a dismal howl, and collecting himself for a spring,
jumped for the dead man's shoulders. Missing his aim, he fell into the
ditch, turning completely over as he went; and striking his head
against a stone, dashed out his brains.



CHAPTER LI

AFFORDING AN EXPLANATION OF MORE MYSTERIES THAN ONE, AND COMPREHENDING
A PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE WITH NO WORD OF SETTLEMENT OR PIN-MONEY

The events narrated in the last chapter were yet but two days old, when
Oliver found himself, at three o'clock in the afternoon, in a
travelling-carriage rolling fast towards his native town.  Mrs. Maylie,
and Rose, and Mrs. Bedwin, and the good doctor were with him:  and Mr.
Brownlow followed in a post-chaise, accompanied by one other person
whose name had not been mentioned.

They had not talked much upon the way; for Oliver was in a flutter of
agitation and uncertainty which deprived him of the power of collecting
his thoughts, and almost of speech, and appeared to have scarcely less
effect on his companions, who shared it, in at least an equal degree.
He and the two ladies had been very carefully made acquainted by Mr.
Brownlow with the nature of the admissions which had been forced from
Monks; and although they knew that the object of their present journey
was to complete the work which had been so well begun, still the whole
matter was enveloped in enough of doubt and mystery to leave them in
endurance of the most intense suspense.

The same kind friend had, with Mr. Losberne's assistance, cautiously
stopped all channels of communication through which they could receive
intelligence of the dreadful occurrences that so recently taken place.
'It was quite true,' he said, 'that they must know them before long,
but it might be at a better time than the present, and it could not be
at a worse.'  So, they travelled on in silence:  each busied with
reflections on the object which had brought them together:  and no one
disposed to give utterance to the thoughts which crowded upon all.

But if Oliver, under these influences, had remained silent while they
journeyed towards his birth-place by a road he had never seen, how the
whole current of his recollections ran back to old times, and what a
crowd of emotions were wakened up in his breast, when they turned into
that which he had traversed on foot:  a poor houseless, wandering boy,
without a friend to help him, or a roof to shelter his head.

'See there, there!' cried Oliver, eagerly clasping the hand of Rose,
and pointing out at the carriage window; 'that's the stile I came over;
there are the hedges I crept behind, for fear any one should overtake
me and force me back!  Yonder is the path across the fields, leading to
the old house where I was a little child!  Oh Dick, Dick, my dear old
friend, if I could only see you now!'

'You will see him soon,' replied Rose, gently taking his folded hands
between her own.  'You shall tell him how happy you are, and how rich
you have grown, and that in all your happiness you have none so great
as the coming back to make him happy too.'

'Yes, yes,' said Oliver, 'and we'll--we'll take him away from here, and
have him clothed and taught, and send him to some quiet country place
where he may grow strong and well,--shall we?'

Rose nodded 'yes,' for the boy was smiling through such happy tears
that she could not speak.

'You will be kind and good to him, for you are to every one,' said
Oliver.  'It will make you cry, I know, to hear what he can tell; but
never mind, never mind, it will be all over, and you will smile
again--I know that too--to think how changed he is; you did the same
with me.  He said "God bless you" to me when I ran away,' cried the boy
with a burst of affectionate emotion; 'and I will say "God bless you"
now, and show him how I love him for it!'

As they approached the town, and at length drove through its narrow
streets, it became matter of no small difficulty to restrain the boy
within reasonable bounds.  There was Sowerberry's the undertaker's just
as it used to be, only smaller and less imposing in appearance than he
remembered it--there were all the well-known shops and houses, with
almost every one of which he had some slight incident connected--there
was Gamfield's cart, the very cart he used to have, standing at the old
public-house door--there was the workhouse, the dreary prison of his
youthful days, with its dismal windows frowning on the street--there
was the same lean porter standing at the gate, at sight of whom Oliver
involuntarily shrunk back, and then laughed at himself for being so
foolish, then cried, then laughed again--there were scores of faces at
the doors and windows that he knew quite well--there was nearly
everything as if he had left it but yesterday, and all his recent life
had been but a happy dream.

But it was pure, earnest, joyful reality.  They drove straight to the
door of the chief hotel (which Oliver used to stare up at, with awe,
and think a mighty palace, but which had somehow fallen off in grandeur
and size); and here was Mr. Grimwig all ready to receive them, kissing
the young lady, and the old one too, when they got out of the coach, as
if he were the grandfather of the whole party, all smiles and kindness,
and not offering to eat his head--no, not once; not even when he
contradicted a very old postboy about the nearest road to London, and
maintained he knew it best, though he had only come that way once, and
that time fast asleep.  There was dinner prepared, and there were
bedrooms ready, and everything was arranged as if by magic.

Notwithstanding all this, when the hurry of the first half-hour was
over, the same silence and constraint prevailed that had marked their
journey down.  Mr. Brownlow did not join them at dinner, but remained
in a separate room.  The two other gentlemen hurried in and out with
anxious faces, and, during the short intervals when they were present,
conversed apart.  Once, Mrs. Maylie was called away, and after being
absent for nearly an hour, returned with eyes swollen with weeping.
All these things made Rose and Oliver, who were not in any new secrets,
nervous and uncomfortable.  They sat wondering, in silence; or, if they
exchanged a few words, spoke in whispers, as if they were afraid to
hear the sound of their own voices.

At length, when nine o'clock had come, and they began to think they
were to hear no more that night, Mr. Losberne and Mr. Grimwig entered
the room, followed by Mr. Brownlow and a man whom Oliver almost
shrieked with surprise to see; for they told him it was his brother,
and it was the same man he had met at the market-town, and seen looking
in with Fagin at the window of his little room.  Monks cast a look of
hate, which, even then, he could not dissemble, at the astonished boy,
and sat down near the door.  Mr. Brownlow, who had papers in his hand,
walked to a table near which Rose and Oliver were seated.

'This is a painful task,' said he, 'but these declarations, which have
been signed in London before many gentlemen, must be in substance
repeated here.  I would have spared you the degradation, but we must
hear them from your own lips before we part, and you know why.'

'Go on,' said the person addressed, turning away his face. 'Quick.  I
have almost done enough, I think.  Don't keep me here.'

'This child,' said Mr. Brownlow, drawing Oliver to him, and laying his
hand upon his head, 'is your half-brother; the illegitimate son of your
father, my dear friend Edwin Leeford, by poor young Agnes Fleming, who
died in giving him birth.'

'Yes,' said Monks, scowling at the trembling boy:  the beating of whose
heart he might have heard.  'That is the bastard child.'

'The term you use,' said Mr. Brownlow, sternly, 'is a reproach to those
long since passed beyond the feeble censure of the world. It reflects
disgrace on no one living, except you who use it. Let that pass.  He
was born in this town.'

'In the workhouse of this town,' was the sullen reply. 'You have the
story there.'  He pointed impatiently to the papers as he spoke.

'I must have it here, too,' said Mr. Brownlow, looking round upon the
listeners.

'Listen then!  You!' returned Monks.  'His father being taken ill at
Rome, was joined by his wife, my mother, from whom he had been long
separated, who went from Paris and took me with her--to look after his
property, for what I know, for she had no great affection for him, nor
he for her.  He knew nothing of us, for his senses were gone, and he
slumbered on till next day, when he died.  Among the papers in his
desk, were two, dated on the night his illness first came on, directed
to yourself'; he addressed himself to Mr. Brownlow; 'and enclosed in a
few short lines to you, with an intimation on the cover of the package
that it was not to be forwarded till after he was dead.  One of these
papers was a letter to this girl Agnes; the other a will.'

'What of the letter?' asked Mr. Brownlow.

'The letter?--A sheet of paper crossed and crossed again, with a
penitent confession, and prayers to God to help her.  He had palmed a
tale on the girl that some secret mystery--to be explained one
day--prevented his marrying her just then; and so she had gone on,
trusting patiently to him, until she trusted too far, and lost what
none could ever give her back.  She was, at that time, within a few
months of her confinement.  He told her all he had meant to do, to hide
her shame, if he had lived, and prayed her, if he died, not to curse
his memory, or think the consequences of their sin would be visited on
her or their young child; for all the guilt was his.  He reminded her
of the day he had given her the little locket and the ring with her
christian name engraved upon it, and a blank left for that which he
hoped one day to have bestowed upon her--prayed her yet to keep it, and
wear it next her heart, as she had done before--and then ran on,
wildly, in the same words, over and over again, as if he had gone
distracted.  I believe he had.'

'The will,' said Mr. Brownlow, as Oliver's tears fell fast.

Monks was silent.

'The will,' said Mr. Brownlow, speaking for him, 'was in the same
spirit as the letter.  He talked of miseries which his wife had brought
upon him; of the rebellious disposition, vice, malice, and premature
bad passions of you his only son, who had been trained to hate him; and
left you, and your mother, each an annuity of eight hundred pounds.
The bulk of his property he divided into two equal portions--one for
Agnes Fleming, and the other for their child, if it should be born
alive, and ever come of age.  If it were a girl, it was to inherit the
money unconditionally; but if a boy, only on the stipulation that in
his minority he should never have stained his name with any public act
of dishonour, meanness, cowardice, or wrong.  He did this, he said, to
mark his confidence in the other, and his conviction--only strengthened
by approaching death--that the child would share her gentle heart, and
noble nature.  If he were disappointed in this expectation, then the
money was to come to you:  for then, and not till then, when both
children were equal, would he recognise your prior claim upon his
purse, who had none upon his heart, but had, from an infant, repulsed
him with coldness and aversion.'

'My mother,' said Monks, in a louder tone, 'did what a woman should
have done.  She burnt this will.  The letter never reached its
destination; but that, and other proofs, she kept, in case they ever
tried to lie away the blot.  The girl's father had the truth from her
with every aggravation that her violent hate--I love her for it
now--could add.  Goaded by shame and dishonour he fled with his
children into a remote corner of Wales, changing his very name that his
friends might never know of his retreat; and here, no great while
afterwards, he was found dead in his bed.  The girl had left her home,
in secret, some weeks before; he had searched for her, on foot, in
every town and village near; it was on the night when he returned home,
assured that she had destroyed herself, to hide her shame and his, that
his old heart broke.'

There was a short silence here, until Mr. Brownlow took up the thread
of the narrative.

'Years after this,' he said, 'this man's--Edward Leeford's--mother came
to me.  He had left her, when only eighteen; robbed her of jewels and
money; gambled, squandered, forged, and fled to London:  where for two
years he had associated with the lowest outcasts.  She was sinking
under a painful and incurable disease, and wished to recover him before
she died.  Inquiries were set on foot, and strict searches made. They
were unavailing for a long time, but ultimately successful; and he went
back with her to France.'

'There she died,' said Monks, 'after a lingering illness; and, on her
death-bed, she bequeathed these secrets to me, together with her
unquenchable and deadly hatred of all whom they involved--though she
need not have left me that, for I had inherited it long before.  She
would not believe that the girl had destroyed herself, and the child
too, but was filled with the impression that a male child had been
born, and was alive.  I swore to her, if ever it crossed my path, to
hunt it down; never to let it rest; to pursue it with the bitterest and
most unrelenting animosity; to vent upon it the hatred that I deeply
felt, and to spit upon the empty vaunt of that insulting will by
draggin it, if I could, to the very gallows-foot.  She was right. He
came in my way at last.  I began well; and, but for babbling drabs, I
would have finished as I began!'

As the villain folded his arms tight together, and muttered curses on
himself in the impotence of baffled malice, Mr. Brownlow turned to the
terrified group beside him, and explained that the Jew, who had been
his old accomplice and confidant, had a large reward for keeping Oliver
ensnared:  of which some part was to be given up, in the event of his
being rescued:  and that a dispute on this head had led to their visit
to the country house for the purpose of identifying him.

'The locket and ring?' said Mr. Brownlow, turning to Monks.

'I bought them from the man and woman I told you of, who stole them
from the nurse, who stole them from the corpse,' answered Monks without
raising his eyes.  'You know what became of them.'

Mr. Brownlow merely nodded to Mr. Grimwig, who disappearing with great
alacrity, shortly returned, pushing in Mrs. Bumble, and dragging her
unwilling consort after him.

'Do my hi's deceive me!' cried Mr. Bumble, with ill-feigned enthusiasm,
'or is that little Oliver?  Oh O-li-ver, if you know'd how I've been
a-grieving for you--'

'Hold your tongue, fool,' murmured Mrs. Bumble.

'Isn't natur, natur, Mrs. Bumble?' remonstrated the workhouse master.
'Can't I be supposed to feel--_I_ as brought him up porochially--when I
see him a-setting here among ladies and gentlemen of the very affablest
description!  I always loved that boy as if he'd been my--my--my own
grandfather,' said Mr. Bumble, halting for an appropriate comparison.
'Master Oliver, my dear, you remember the blessed gentleman in the
white waistcoat?  Ah! he went to heaven last week, in a oak coffin with
plated handles, Oliver.'

'Come, sir,' said Mr. Grimwig, tartly; 'suppress your feelings.'

'I will do my endeavours, sir,' replied Mr. Bumble.  'How do you do,
sir?  I hope you are very well.'

This salutation was addressed to Mr. Brownlow, who had stepped up to
within a short distance of the respectable couple.  He inquired, as he
pointed to Monks,

'Do you know that person?'

'No,' replied Mrs. Bumble flatly.

'Perhaps _you_ don't?' said Mr. Brownlow, addressing her spouse.

'I never saw him in all my life,' said Mr. Bumble.

'Nor sold him anything, perhaps?'

'No,' replied Mrs. Bumble.

'You never had, perhaps, a certain gold locket and ring?' said Mr.
Brownlow.

'Certainly not,' replied the matron.  'Why are we brought here to
answer to such nonsense as this?'

Again Mr. Brownlow nodded to Mr. Grimwig; and again that gentleman
limped away with extraordinary readiness.  But not again did he return
with a stout man and wife; for this time, he led in two palsied women,
who shook and tottered as they walked.

'You shut the door the night old Sally died,' said the foremost one,
raising her shrivelled hand, 'but you couldn't shut out the sound, nor
stop the chinks.'

'No, no,' said the other, looking round her and wagging her toothless
jaws.  'No, no, no.'

'We heard her try to tell you what she'd done, and saw you take a paper
from her hand, and watched you too, next day, to the pawnbroker's
shop,' said the first.

'Yes,' added the second, 'and it was a "locket and gold ring." We found
out that, and saw it given you.  We were by.  Oh! we were by.'

'And we know more than that,' resumed the first, 'for she told us
often, long ago, that the young mother had told her that, feeling she
should never get over it, she was on her way, at the time that she was
taken ill, to die near the grave of the father of the child.'

'Would you like to see the pawnbroker himself?' asked Mr. Grimwig with
a motion towards the door.

'No,' replied the woman; 'if he'--she pointed to Monks--'has been coward
enough to confess, as I see he has, and you have sounded all these hags
till you have found the right ones, I have nothing more to say.  I
_did_ sell them, and they're where you'll never get them.  What then?'

'Nothing,' replied Mr. Brownlow, 'except that it remains for us to take
care that neither of you is employed in a situation of trust again.
You may leave the room.'

'I hope,' said Mr. Bumble, looking about him with great ruefulness, as
Mr. Grimwig disappeared with the two old women: 'I hope that this
unfortunate little circumstance will not deprive me of my porochial
office?'

'Indeed it will,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'You may make up your mind to
that, and think yourself well off besides.'

'It was all Mrs. Bumble.  She _would_ do it,' urged Mr. Bumble; first
looking round to ascertain that his partner had left the room.

'That is no excuse,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'You were present on the
occasion of the destruction of these trinkets, and indeed are the more
guilty of the two, in the eye of the law; for the law supposes that
your wife acts under your direction.'

'If the law supposes that,' said Mr. Bumble, squeezing his hat
emphatically in both hands, 'the law is a ass--a idiot.  If that's the
eye of the law, the law is a bachelor; and the worst I wish the law is,
that his eye may be opened by experience--by experience.'

Laying great stress on the repetition of these two words, Mr. Bumble
fixed his hat on very tight, and putting his hands in his pockets,
followed his helpmate downstairs.

'Young lady,' said Mr. Brownlow, turning to Rose, 'give me your hand.
Do not tremble.  You need not fear to hear the few remaining words we
have to say.'

'If they have--I do not know how they can, but if they have--any
reference to me,' said Rose, 'pray let me hear them at some other time.
I have not strength or spirits now.'

'Nay,' returned the old gentlman, drawing her arm through his; 'you
have more fortitude than this, I am sure.  Do you know this young lady,
sir?'

'Yes,' replied Monks.

'I never saw you before,' said Rose faintly.

'I have seen you often,' returned Monks.

'The father of the unhappy Agnes had _two_ daughters,' said Mr.
Brownlow.  'What was the fate of the other--the child?'

'The child,' replied Monks, 'when her father died in a strange place,
in a strange name, without a letter, book, or scrap of paper that
yielded the faintest clue by which his friends or relatives could be
traced--the child was taken by some wretched cottagers, who reared it
as their own.'

'Go on,' said Mr. Brownlow, signing to Mrs. Maylie to approach. 'Go on!'

'You couldn't find the spot to which these people had repaired,' said
Monks, 'but where friendship fails, hatred will often force a way.  My
mother found it, after a year of cunning search--ay, and found the
child.'

'She took it, did she?'

'No.  The people were poor and began to sicken--at least the man
did--of their fine humanity; so she left it with them, giving them a
small present of money which would not last long, and promised more,
which she never meant to send.  She didn't quite rely, however, on
their discontent and poverty for the child's unhappiness, but told the
history of the sister's shame, with such alterations as suited her;
bade them take good heed of the child, for she came of bad blood; and
told them she was illegitimate, and sure to go wrong at one time or
other.  The circumstances countenanced all this; the people believed
it; and there the child dragged on an existence, miserable enough even
to satisfy us, until a widow lady, residing, then, at Chester, saw the
girl by chance, pitied her, and took her home.  There was some cursed
spell, I think, against us; for in spite of all our efforts she
remained there and was happy.  I lost sight of her, two or three years
ago, and saw her no more until a few months back.'

'Do you see her now?'

'Yes.  Leaning on your arm.'

'But not the less my niece,' cried Mrs. Maylie, folding the fainting
girl in her arms; 'not the less my dearest child.  I would not lose her
now, for all the treasures of the world.  My sweet companion, my own
dear girl!'

'The only friend I ever had,' cried Rose, clinging to her. 'The
kindest, best of friends.  My heart will burst.  I cannot bear all
this.'

'You have borne more, and have been, through all, the best and gentlest
creature that ever shed happiness on every one she knew,' said Mrs.
Maylie, embracing her tenderly. 'Come, come, my love, remember who this
is who waits to clasp you in his arms, poor child!  See here--look,
look, my dear!'

'Not aunt,' cried Oliver, throwing his arms about her neck; 'I'll never
call her aunt--sister, my own dear sister, that something taught my
heart to love so dearly from the first!  Rose, dear, darling Rose!'

Let the tears which fell, and the broken words which were exchanged in
the long close embrace between the orphans, be sacred.  A father,
sister, and mother, were gained, and lost, in that one moment.  Joy and
grief were mingled in the cup; but there were no bitter tears:  for
even grief itself arose so softened, and clothed in such sweet and
tender recollections, that it became a solemn pleasure, and lost all
character of pain.

They were a long, long time alone.  A soft tap at the door, at length
announced that some one was without.  Oliver opened it, glided away,
and gave place to Harry Maylie.

'I know it all,' he said, taking a seat beside the lovely girl. 'Dear
Rose, I know it all.'

'I am not here by accident,' he added after a lengthened silence; 'nor
have I heard all this to-night, for I knew it yesterday--only
yesterday.  Do you guess that I have come to remind you of a promise?'

'Stay,' said Rose.  'You _do_ know all.'

'All.  You gave me leave, at any time within a year, to renew the
subject of our last discourse.'

'I did.'

'Not to press you to alter your determination,' pursued the young man,
'but to hear you repeat it, if you would. I was to lay whatever of
station or fortune I might possess at your feet, and if you still
adhered to your former determination, I pledged myself, by no word or
act, to seek to change it.'

'The same reasons which influenced me then, will influence me now,'
said Rose firmly.  'If I ever owed a strict and rigid duty to her,
whose goodness saved me from a life of indigence and suffering, when
should I ever feel it, as I should to-night?  It is a struggle,' said
Rose, 'but one I am proud to make; it is a pang, but one my heart shall
bear.'

'The disclosure of to-night,'--Harry began.

'The disclosure of to-night,' replied Rose softly, 'leaves me in the
same position, with reference to you, as that in which I stood before.'

'You harden your heart against me, Rose,' urged her lover.

'Oh Harry, Harry,' said the young lady, bursting into tears; 'I wish I
could, and spare myself this pain.'

'Then why inflict it on yourself?' said Harry, taking her hand. 'Think,
dear Rose, think what you have heard to-night.'

'And what have I heard!  What have I heard!' cried Rose. 'That a sense
of his deep disgrace so worked upon my own father that he shunned
all--there, we have said enough, Harry, we have said enough.'

'Not yet, not yet,' said the young man, detaining her as she rose.  'My
hopes, my wishes, prospects, feeling:  every thought in life except my
love for you:  have undergone a change.  I offer you, now, no
distinction among a bustling crowd; no mingling with a world of malice
and detraction, where the blood is called into honest cheeks by aught
but real disgrace and shame; but a home--a heart and home--yes, dearest
Rose, and those, and those alone, are all I have to offer.'

'What do you mean!' she faltered.

'I mean but this--that when I left you last, I left you with a firm
determination to level all fancied barriers between yourself and me;
resolved that if my world could not be yours, I would make yours mine;
that no pride of birth should curl the lip at you, for I would turn
from it.  This I have done.  Those who have shrunk from me because of
this, have shrunk from you, and proved you so far right.  Such power
and patronage:  such relatives of influence and rank:  as smiled upon
me then, look coldly now; but there are smiling fields and waving trees
in England's richest county; and by one village church--mine, Rose, my
own!--there stands a rustic dwelling which you can make me prouder of,
than all the hopes I have renounced, measured a thousandfold.  This is
my rank and station now, and here I lay it down!'

      *      *      *      *      *

'It's a trying thing waiting supper for lovers,' said Mr. Grimwig,
waking up, and pulling his pocket-handkerchief from over his head.

Truth to tell, the supper had been waiting a most unreasonable time.
Neither Mrs. Maylie, nor Harry, nor Rose (who all came in together),
could offer a word in extenuation.

'I had serious thoughts of eating my head to-night,' said Mr. Grimwig,
'for I began to think I should get nothing else.  I'll take the
liberty, if you'll allow me, of saluting the bride that is to be.'

Mr. Grimwig lost no time in carrying this notice into effect upon the
blushing girl; and the example, being contagious, was followed both by
the doctor and Mr. Brownlow:  some people affirm that Harry Maylie had
been observed to set it, originally, in a dark room adjoining; but the
best authorities consider this downright scandal:  he being young and a
clergyman.

'Oliver, my child,' said Mrs. Maylie, 'where have you been, and why do
you look so sad?  There are tears stealing down your face at this
moment.  What is the matter?'

It is a world of disappointment:  often to the hopes we most cherish,
and hopes that do our nature the greatest honour.

Poor Dick was dead!



CHAPTER LII

FAGIN'S LAST NIGHT ALIVE

The court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces. Inquisitive
and eager eyes peered from every inch of space. From the rail before
the dock, away into the sharpest angle of the smallest corner in the
galleries, all looks were fixed upon one man--Fagin.  Before him and
behind:  above, below, on the right and on the left:  he seemed to
stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes.

He stood there, in all this glare of living light, with one hand
resting on the wooden slab before him, the other held to his ear, and
his head thrust forward to enable him to catch with greater
distinctness every word that fell from the presiding judge, who was
delivering his charge to the jury.  At times, he turned his eyes
sharply upon them to observe the effect of the slightest featherweight
in his favour; and when the points against him were stated with
terrible distinctness, looked towards his counsel, in mute appeal that
he would, even then, urge something in his behalf.  Beyond these
manifestations of anxiety, he stirred not hand or foot.  He had
scarcely moved since the trial began; and now that the judge ceased to
speak, he still remained in the same strained attitude of close
attention, with his gaze bent on him, as though he listened still.

A slight bustle in the court, recalled him to himself.  Looking round,
he saw that the juryman had turned together, to consider their verdict.
As his eyes wandered to the gallery, he could see the people rising
above each other to see his face:  some hastily applying their glasses
to their eyes:  and others whispering their neighbours with looks
expressive of abhorrence.  A few there were, who seemed unmindful of
him, and looked only to the jury, in impatient wonder how they could
delay.  But in no one face--not even among the women, of whom there
were many there--could he read the faintest sympathy with himself, or
any feeling but one of all-absorbing interest that he should be
condemned.

As he saw all this in one bewildered glance, the deathlike stillness
came again, and looking back he saw that the jurymen had turned towards
the judge.  Hush!

They only sought permission to retire.

He looked, wistfully, into their faces, one by one when they passed
out, as though to see which way the greater number leant; but that was
fruitless.  The jailer touched him on the shoulder. He followed
mechanically to the end of the dock, and sat down on a chair.  The man
pointed it out, or he would not have seen it.

He looked up into the gallery again.  Some of the people were eating,
and some fanning themselves with handkerchiefs; for the crowded place
was very hot.  There was one young man sketching his face in a little
note-book.  He wondered whether it was like, and looked on when the
artist broke his pencil-point, and made another with his knife, as any
idle spectator might have done.

In the same way, when he turned his eyes towards the judge, his mind
began to busy itself with the fashion of his dress, and what it cost,
and how he put it on.  There was an old fat gentleman on the bench,
too, who had gone out, some half an hour before, and now come back.  He
wondered within himself whether this man had been to get his dinner,
what he had had, and where he had had it; and pursued this train of
careless thought until some new object caught his eye and roused
another.

Not that, all this time, his mind was, for an instant, free from one
oppressive overwhelming sense of the grave that opened at his feet; it
was ever present to him, but in a vague and general way, and he could
not fix his thoughts upon it.  Thus, even while he trembled, and turned
burning hot at the idea of speedy death, he fell to counting the iron
spikes before him, and wondering how the head of one had been broken
off, and whether they would mend it, or leave it as it was.  Then, he
thought of all the horrors of the gallows and the scaffold--and stopped
to watch a man sprinkling the floor to cool it--and then went on to
think again.

At length there was a cry of silence, and a breathless look from all
towards the door.  The jury returned, and passed him close. He could
glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone.
Perfect stillness ensued--not a rustle--not a breath--Guilty.

The building rang with a tremendous shout, and another, and another,
and then it echoed loud groans, that gathered strength as they swelled
out, like angry thunder.  It was a peal of joy from the populace
outside, greeting the news that he would die on Monday.

The noise subsided, and he was asked if he had anything to say why
sentence of death should not be passed upon him. He had resumed his
listening attitude, and looked intently at his questioner while the
demand was made; but it was twice repeated before he seemed to hear it,
and then he only muttered that he was an old man--an old man--and so,
dropping into a whisper, was silent again.

The judge assumed the black cap, and the prisoner still stood with the
same air and gesture.  A woman in the gallery, uttered some
exclamation, called forth by this dread solemnity; he looked hastily up
as if angry at the interruption, and bent forward yet more attentively.
The address was solemn and impressive; the sentence fearful to hear.
But he stood, like a marble figure, without the motion of a nerve.  His
haggard face was still thrust forward, his under-jaw hanging down, and
his eyes staring out before him, when the jailer put his hand upon his
arm, and beckoned him away.  He gazed stupidly about him for an
instant, and obeyed.

They led him through a paved room under the court, where some prisoners
were waiting till their turns came, and others were talking to their
friends, who crowded round a grate which looked into the open yard.
There was nobody there to speak to _him_; but, as he passed, the
prisoners fell back to render him more visible to the people who were
clinging to the bars:  and they assailed him with opprobrious names,
and screeched and hissed.  He shook his fist, and would have spat upon
them; but his conductors hurried him on, through a gloomy passage
lighted by a few dim lamps, into the interior of the prison.

Here, he was searched, that he might not have about him the means of
anticipating the law; this ceremony performed, they led him to one of
the condemned cells, and left him there--alone.

He sat down on a stone bench opposite the door, which served for seat
and bedstead; and casting his blood-shot eyes upon the ground, tried to
collect his thoughts. After awhile, he began to remember a few
disjointed fragments of what the judge had said: though it had seemed
to him, at the time, that he could not hear a word.  These gradually
fell into their proper places, and by degrees suggested more:  so that
in a little time he had the whole, almost as it was delivered.  To be
hanged by the neck, till he was dead--that was the end.  To be hanged
by the neck till he was dead.

As it came on very dark, he began to think of all the men he had known
who had died upon the scaffold; some of them through his means.  They
rose up, in such quick succession, that he could hardly count them.  He
had seen some of them die,--and had joked too, because they died with
prayers upon their lips.  With what a rattling noise the drop went
down; and how suddenly they changed, from strong and vigorous men to
dangling heaps of clothes!

Some of them might have inhabited that very cell--sat upon that very
spot.  It was very dark; why didn't they bring a light?  The cell had
been built for many years.  Scores of men must have passed their last
hours there.  It was like sitting in a vault strewn with dead
bodies--the cap, the noose, the pinioned arms, the faces that he knew,
even beneath that hideous veil.--Light, light!

At length, when his hands were raw with beating against the heavy door
and walls, two men appeared:  one bearing a candle, which he thrust
into an iron candlestick fixed against the wall:  the other dragging in
a mattress on which to pass the night; for the prisoner was to be left
alone no more.

Then came the night--dark, dismal, silent night.  Other watchers are
glad to hear this church-clock strike, for they tell of life and coming
day.  To him they brought despair.  The boom of every iron bell came
laden with the one, deep, hollow sound--Death. What availed the noise
and bustle of cheerful morning, which penetrated even there, to him?
It was another form of knell, with mockery added to the warning.

The day passed off.  Day?  There was no day; it was gone as soon as
come--and night came on again; night so long, and yet so short; long in
its dreadful silence, and short in its fleeting hours.  At one time he
raved and blasphemed; and at another howled and tore his hair.
Venerable men of his own persuasion had come to pray beside him, but he
had driven them away with curses.  They renewed their charitable
efforts, and he beat them off.

Saturday night.  He had only one night more to live.  And as he thought
of this, the day broke--Sunday.

It was not until the night of this last awful day, that a withering
sense of his helpless, desperate state came in its full intensity upon
his blighted soul; not that he had ever held any defined or positive
hope of mercy, but that he had never been able to consider more than
the dim probability of dying so soon. He had spoken little to either of
the two men, who relieved each other in their attendance upon him; and
they, for their parts, made no effort to rouse his attention.  He had
sat there, awake, but dreaming.  Now, he started up, every minute, and
with gasping mouth and burning skin, hurried to and fro, in such a
paroxysm of fear and wrath that even they--used to such
sights--recoiled from him with horror.  He grew so terrible, at last,
in all the tortures of his evil conscience, that one man could not bear
to sit there, eyeing him alone; and so the two kept watch together.

He cowered down upon his stone bed, and thought of the past. He had
been wounded with some missiles from the crowd on the day of his
capture, and his head was bandaged with a linen cloth.  His red hair
hung down upon his bloodless face; his beard was torn, and twisted into
knots; his eyes shone with a terrible light; his unwashed flesh
crackled with the fever that burnt him up. Eight--nine--then.  If it
was not a trick to frighten him, and those were the real hours treading
on each other's heels, where would he be, when they came round again!
Eleven!  Another struck, before the voice of the previous hour had
ceased to vibrate.  At eight, he would be the only mourner in his own
funeral train; at eleven--

Those dreadful walls of Newgate, which have hidden so much misery and
such unspeakable anguish, not only from the eyes, but, too often, and
too long, from the thoughts, of men, never held so dread a spectacle as
that.  The few who lingered as they passed, and wondered what the man
was doing who was to be hanged to-morrow, would have slept but ill that
night, if they could have seen him.

From early in the evening until nearly midnight, little groups of two
and three presented themselves at the lodge-gate, and inquired, with
anxious faces, whether any reprieve had been received.  These being
answered in the negative, communicated the welcome intelligence to
clusters in the street, who pointed out to one another the door from
which he must come out, and showed where the scaffold would be built,
and, walking with unwilling steps away, turned back to conjure up the
scene.  By degrees they fell off, one by one; and, for an hour, in the
dead of night, the street was left to solitude and darkness.

The space before the prison was cleared, and a few strong barriers,
painted black, had been already thrown across the road to break the
pressure of the expected crowd, when Mr. Brownlow and Oliver appeared
at the wicket, and presented an order of admission to the prisoner,
signed by one of the sheriffs.  They were immediately admitted into the
lodge.

'Is the young gentleman to come too, sir?' said the man whose duty it
was to conduct them.  'It's not a sight for children, sir.'

'It is not indeed, my friend,' rejoined Mr. Brownlow; 'but my business
with this man is intimately connected with him; and as this child has
seen him in the full career of his success and villainy, I think it as
well--even at the cost of some pain and fear--that he should see him
now.'

These few words had been said apart, so as to be inaudible to Oliver.
The man touched his hat; and glancing at Oliver with some curiousity,
opened another gate, opposite to that by which they had entered, and
led them on, through dark and winding ways, towards the cells.

'This,' said the man, stopping in a gloomy passage where a couple of
workmen were making some preparations in profound silence--'this is the
place he passes through.  If you step this way, you can see the door he
goes out at.'

He led them into a stone kitchen, fitted with coppers for dressing the
prison food, and pointed to a door.  There was an open grating above
it, through which came the sound of men's voices, mingled with the
noise of hammering, and the throwing down of boards.  They were
putting up the scaffold.

From this place, they passed through several strong gates, opened by
other turnkeys from the inner side; and, having entered an open yard,
ascended a flight of narrow steps, and came into a passage with a row
of strong doors on the left hand.  Motioning them to remain where they
were, the turnkey knocked at one of these with his bunch of keys. The
two attendants, after a little whispering, came out into the passage,
stretching themselves as if glad of the temporary relief, and motioned
the visitors to follow the jailer into the cell.  They did so.

The condemned criminal was seated on his bed, rocking himself from side
to side, with a countenance more like that of a snared beast than the
face of a man.  His mind was evidently wandering to his old life, for
he continued to mutter, without appearing conscious of their presence
otherwise than as a part of his vision.

'Good boy, Charley--well done--' he mumbled.  'Oliver, too, ha! ha! ha!
Oliver too--quite the gentleman now--quite the--take that boy away to
bed!'

The jailer took the disengaged hand of Oliver; and, whispering him not
to be alarmed, looked on without speaking.

'Take him away to bed!' cried Fagin.  'Do you hear me, some of you?  He
has been the--the--somehow the cause of all this.  It's worth the money
to bring him up to it--Bolter's throat, Bill; never mind the
girl--Bolter's throat as deep as you can cut.  Saw his head off!'

'Fagin,' said the jailer.

'That's me!' cried the Jew, falling instantly, into the attitude of
listening he had assumed upon his trial.  'An old man, my Lord; a very
old, old man!'

'Here,' said the turnkey, laying his hand upon his breast to keep him
down.  'Here's somebody wants to see you, to ask you some questions, I
suppose.  Fagin, Fagin!  Are you a man?'

'I shan't be one long,' he replied, looking up with a face retaining no
human expression but rage and terror.  'Strike them all dead!  What
right have they to butcher me?'

As he spoke he caught sight of Oliver and Mr. Brownlow. Shrinking to
the furthest corner of the seat, he demanded to know what they wanted
there.

'Steady,' said the turnkey, still holding him down.  'Now, sir, tell
him what you want.  Quick, if you please, for he grows worse as the
time gets on.'

'You have some papers,' said Mr. Brownlow advancing, 'which were placed
in your hands, for better security, by a man called Monks.'

'It's all a lie together,' replied Fagin.  'I haven't one--not one.'

'For the love of God,' said Mr. Brownlow solemnly, 'do not say that
now, upon the very verge of death; but tell me where they are.  You
know that Sikes is dead; that Monks has confessed; that there is no
hope of any further gain.  Where are those papers?'

'Oliver,' cried Fagin, beckoning to him.  'Here, here! Let me whisper
to you.'

'I am not afraid,' said Oliver in a low voice, as he relinquished Mr.
Brownlow's hand.

'The papers,' said Fagin, drawing Oliver towards him, 'are in a canvas
bag, in a hole a little way up the chimney in the top front-room.  I
want to talk to you, my dear.  I want to talk to you.'

'Yes, yes,' returned Oliver.  'Let me say a prayer.  Do!  Let me say
one prayer.  Say only one, upon your knees, with me, and we will talk
till morning.'

'Outside, outside,' replied Fagin, pushing the boy before him towards
the door, and looking vacantly over his head. 'Say I've gone to
sleep--they'll believe you.  You can get me out, if you take me so.
Now then, now then!'

'Oh!  God forgive this wretched man!' cried the boy with a burst of
tears.

'That's right, that's right,' said Fagin.  'That'll help us on. This
door first.  If I shake and tremble, as we pass the gallows, don't you
mind, but hurry on.  Now, now, now!'

'Have you nothing else to ask him, sir?' inquired the turnkey.

'No other question,' replied Mr. Brownlow.  'If I hoped we could recall
him to a sense of his position--'

'Nothing will do that, sir,' replied the man, shaking his head. 'You
had better leave him.'

The door of the cell opened, and the attendants returned.

'Press on, press on,' cried Fagin.  'Softly, but not so slow. Faster,
faster!'

The men laid hands upon him, and disengaging Oliver from his grasp,
held him back.  He struggled with the power of desperation, for an
instant; and then sent up cry upon cry that penetrated even those
massive walls, and rang in their ears until they reached the open yard.

It was some time before they left the prison.  Oliver nearly swooned
after this frightful scene, and was so weak that for an hour or more,
he had not the strength to walk.

Day was dawning when they again emerged.  A great multitude had already
assembled; the windows were filled with people, smoking and playing
cards to beguile the time; the crowd were pushing, quarrelling, joking.
Everything told of life and animation, but one dark cluster of objects
in the centre of all--the black stage, the cross-beam, the rope, and
all the hideous apparatus of death.



CHAPTER LIII

AND LAST

The fortunes of those who have figured in this tale are nearly closed.
The little that remains to their historian to relate, is told in few
and simple words.

Before three months had passed, Rose Fleming and Harry Maylie were
married in the village church which was henceforth to be the scene of
the young clergyman's labours; on the same day they entered into
possession of their new and happy home.

Mrs. Maylie took up her abode with her son and daughter-in-law, to
enjoy, during the tranquil remainder of her days, the greatest felicity
that age and worth can know--the contemplation of the happiness of
those on whom the warmest affections and tenderest cares of a
well-spent life, have been unceasingly bestowed.

It appeared, on full and careful investigation, that if the wreck of
property remaining in the custody of Monks (which had never prospered
either in his hands or in those of his mother) were equally divided
between himself and Oliver, it would yield, to each, little more than
three thousand pounds.  By the provisions of his father's will, Oliver
would have been entitled to the whole; but Mr. Brownlow, unwilling to
deprive the elder son of the opportunity of retrieving his former vices
and pursuing an honest career, proposed this mode of distribution, to
which his young charge joyfully acceded.

Monks, still bearing that assumed name, retired with his portion to a
distant part of the New World; where, having quickly squandered it, he
once more fell into his old courses, and, after undergoing a long
confinement for some fresh act of fraud and knavery, at length sunk
under an attack of his old disorder, and died in prison.  As far from
home, died the chief remaining members of his friend Fagin's gang.

Mr. Brownlow adopted Oliver as his son.  Removing with him and the old
housekeeper to within a mile of the parsonage-house, where his dear
friends resided, he gratified the only remaining wish of Oliver's warm
and earnest heart, and thus linked together a little society, whose
condition approached as nearly to one of perfect happiness as can ever
be known in this changing world.

Soon after the marriage of the young people, the worthy doctor returned
to Chertsey, where, bereft of the presence of his old friends, he would
have been discontented if his temperament had admitted of such a
feeling; and would have turned quite peevish if he had known how.  For
two or three months, he contented himself with hinting that he feared
the air began to disagree with him; then, finding that the place really
no longer was, to him, what it had been, he settled his business on his
assistant, took a bachelor's cottage outside the village of which his
young friend was pastor, and instantaneously recovered.  Here he took
to gardening, planting, fishing, carpentering, and various other
pursuits of a similar kind:  all undertaken with his characteristic
impetuosity.  In each and all he has since become famous throughout the
neighborhood, as a most profound authority.

Before his removal, he had managed to contract a strong friendship for
Mr. Grimwig, which that eccentric gentleman cordially reciprocated.  He
is accordingly visited by Mr. Grimwig a great many times in the course
of the year.  On all such occasions, Mr. Grimwig plants, fishes, and
carpenters, with great ardour; doing everything in a very singular and
unprecedented manner, but always maintaining with his favourite
asseveration, that his mode is the right one.  On Sundays, he never
fails to criticise the sermon to the young clergyman's face:  always
informing Mr. Losberne, in strict confidence afterwards, that he
considers it an excellent performance, but deems it as well not to say
so.  It is a standing and very favourite joke, for Mr. Brownlow to
rally him on his old prophecy concerning Oliver, and to remind him of
the night on which they sat with the watch between them, waiting his
return; but Mr. Grimwig contends that he was right in the main, and, in
proof thereof, remarks that Oliver did not come back after all; which
always calls forth a laugh on his side, and increases his good humour.

Mr. Noah Claypole:  receiving a free pardon from the Crown in
consequence of being admitted approver against Fagin:  and considering
his profession not altogether as safe a one as he could wish:  was, for
some little time, at a loss for the means of a livelihood, not burdened
with too much work.  After some consideration, he went into business as
an informer, in which calling he realises a genteel subsistence.  His
plan is, to walk out once a week during church time attended by
Charlotte in respectable attire.  The lady faints away at the doors of
charitable publicans, and the gentleman being accommodated with
three-penny worth of brandy to restore her, lays an information next
day, and pockets half the penalty.  Sometimes Mr. Claypole faints
himself, but the result is the same.

Mr. and Mrs. Bumble, deprived of their situations, were gradually
reduced to great indigence and misery, and finally became paupers in
that very same workhouse in which they had once lorded it over others.
Mr. Bumble has been heard to say, that in this reverse and degradation,
he has not even spirits to be thankful for being separated from his
wife.

As to Mr. Giles and Brittles, they still remain in their old posts,
although the former is bald, and the last-named boy quite grey.  They
sleep at the parsonage, but divide their attentions so equally among
its inmates, and Oliver and Mr. Brownlow, and Mr. Losberne, that to
this day the villagers have never been able to discover to which
establishment they properly belong.

Master Charles Bates, appalled by Sikes's crime, fell into a train of
reflection whether an honest life was not, after all, the best.
Arriving at the conclusion that it certainly was, he turned his back
upon the scenes of the past, resolved to amend it in some new sphere of
action.  He struggled hard, and suffered much, for some time; but,
having a contented disposition, and a good purpose, succeeded in the
end; and, from being a farmer's drudge, and a carrier's lad, he is now
the merriest young grazier in all Northamptonshire.

And now, the hand that traces these words, falters, as it approaches
the conclusion of its task; and would weave, for a little longer space,
the thread of these adventures.

I would fain linger yet with a few of those among whom I have so long
moved, and share their happiness by endeavouring to depict it.  I would
show Rose Maylie in all the bloom and grace of early womanhood,
shedding on her secluded path in life soft and gentle light, that fell
on all who trod it with her, and shone into their hearts.  I would
paint her the life and joy of the fire-side circle and the lively
summer group; I would follow her through the sultry fields at noon, and
hear the low tones of her sweet voice in the moonlit evening walk; I
would watch her in all her goodness and charity abroad, and the smiling
untiring discharge of domestic duties at home; I would paint her and
her dead sister's child happy in their love for one another, and
passing whole hours together in picturing the friends whom they had so
sadly lost; I would summon before me, once again, those joyous little
faces that clustered round her knee, and listen to their merry prattle;
I would recall the tones of that clear laugh, and conjure up the
sympathising tear that glistened in the soft blue eye.  These, and a
thousand looks and smiles, and turns of thought and speech--I would
fain recall them every one.

How Mr. Brownlow went on, from day to day, filling the mind of his
adopted child with stores of knowledge, and becoming attached to him,
more and more, as his nature developed itself, and showed the thriving
seeds of all he wished him to become--how he traced in him new traits
of his early friend, that awakened in his own bosom old remembrances,
melancholy and yet sweet and soothing--how the two orphans, tried by
adversity, remembered its lessons in mercy to others, and mutual love,
and fervent thanks to Him who had protected and preserved them--these
are all matters which need not to be told.  I have said that they were
truly happy; and without strong affection and humanity of heart, and
gratitude to that Being whose code is Mercy, and whose great attribute
is Benevolence to all things that breathe, happiness can never be
attained.

Within the altar of the old village church there stands a white marble
tablet, which bears as yet but one word:  'AGNES.'  There is no coffin
in that tomb; and may it be many, many years, before another name is
placed above it!  But, if the spirits of the Dead ever come back to
earth, to visit spots hallowed by the love--the love beyond the
grave--of those whom they knew in life, I believe that the shade of
Agnes sometimes hovers round that solemn nook. I believe it none the
less because that nook is in a Church, and she was weak and erring.




6xxxxxxxxx




A TALE OF TWO CITIES

A STORY OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

By Charles Dickens


CONTENTS


     Book the First--Recalled to Life

     Chapter I      The Period
     Chapter II     The Mail
     Chapter III    The Night Shadows
     Chapter IV     The Preparation
     Chapter V      The Wine-shop
     Chapter VI     The Shoemaker


     Book the Second--the Golden Thread

     Chapter I      Five Years Later
     Chapter II     A Sight
     Chapter III    A Disappointment
     Chapter IV     Congratulatory
     Chapter V      The Jackal
     Chapter VI     Hundreds of People
     Chapter VII    Monseigneur in Town
     Chapter VIII   Monseigneur in the Country
     Chapter IX     The Gorgon's Head
     Chapter X      Two Promises
     Chapter XI     A Companion Picture
     Chapter XII    The Fellow of Delicacy
     Chapter XIII   The Fellow of no Delicacy
     Chapter XIV    The Honest Tradesman
     Chapter XV     Knitting
     Chapter XVI    Still Knitting
     Chapter XVII   One Night
     Chapter XVIII  Nine Days
     Chapter XIX    An Opinion
     Chapter XX     A Plea
     Chapter XXI    Echoing Footsteps
     Chapter XXII   The Sea Still Rises
     Chapter XXIII  Fire Rises
     Chapter XXIV   Drawn to the Loadstone Rock


     Book the Third--the Track of a Storm

     Chapter I      In Secret
     Chapter II     The Grindstone
     Chapter III    The Shadow
     Chapter IV     Calm in Storm
     Chapter V      The Wood-sawyer
     Chapter VI     Triumph
     Chapter VII    A Knock at the Door
     Chapter VIII   A Hand at Cards
     Chapter IX     The Game Made
     Chapter X      The Substance of the Shadow
     Chapter XI     Dusk
     Chapter XII    Darkness
     Chapter XIII   Fifty-two
     Chapter XIV    The Knitting Done
     Chapter XV     The Footsteps Die Out For Ever





Book the First--Recalled to Life




I. The Period


It was the best of times,
it was the worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief,
it was the epoch of incredulity,
it was the season of Light,
it was the season of Darkness,
it was the spring of hope,
it was the winter of despair,
we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us,
we were all going direct to Heaven,
we were all going direct the other way--
in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of
its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

There were a king with a large jaw and a queen with a plain face, on the
throne of England; there were a king with a large jaw and a queen with
a fair face, on the throne of France. In both countries it was clearer
than crystal to the lords of the State preserves of loaves and fishes,
that things in general were settled for ever.

It was the year of Our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Spiritual revelations were conceded to England at that favoured period,
as at this. Mrs. Southcott had recently attained her five-and-twentieth
blessed birthday, of whom a prophetic private in the Life Guards had
heralded the sublime appearance by announcing that arrangements were
made for the swallowing up of London and Westminster. Even the Cock-lane
ghost had been laid only a round dozen of years, after rapping out its
messages, as the spirits of this very year last past (supernaturally
deficient in originality) rapped out theirs. Mere messages in the
earthly order of events had lately come to the English Crown and People,
from a congress of British subjects in America: which, strange
to relate, have proved more important to the human race than any
communications yet received through any of the chickens of the Cock-lane
brood.

France, less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her
sister of the shield and trident, rolled with exceeding smoothness down
hill, making paper money and spending it. Under the guidance of her
Christian pastors, she entertained herself, besides, with such humane
achievements as sentencing a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue
torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not
kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks
which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty
yards. It is likely enough that, rooted in the woods of France and
Norway, there were growing trees, when that sufferer was put to death,
already marked by the Woodman, Fate, to come down and be sawn into
boards, to make a certain movable framework with a sack and a knife in
it, terrible in history. It is likely enough that in the rough outhouses
of some tillers of the heavy lands adjacent to Paris, there were
sheltered from the weather that very day, rude carts, bespattered with
rustic mire, snuffed about by pigs, and roosted in by poultry, which
the Farmer, Death, had already set apart to be his tumbrils of
the Revolution. But that Woodman and that Farmer, though they work
unceasingly, work silently, and no one heard them as they went about
with muffled tread: the rather, forasmuch as to entertain any suspicion
that they were awake, was to be atheistical and traitorous.

In England, there was scarcely an amount of order and protection to
justify much national boasting. Daring burglaries by armed men, and
highway robberies, took place in the capital itself every night;
families were publicly cautioned not to go out of town without removing
their furniture to upholsterers' warehouses for security; the highwayman
in the dark was a City tradesman in the light, and, being recognised and
challenged by his fellow-tradesman whom he stopped in his character of
“the Captain,” gallantly shot him through the head and rode away; the
mail was waylaid by seven robbers, and the guard shot three dead, and
then got shot dead himself by the other four, “in consequence of the
failure of his ammunition:” after which the mail was robbed in peace;
that magnificent potentate, the Lord Mayor of London, was made to stand
and deliver on Turnham Green, by one highwayman, who despoiled the
illustrious creature in sight of all his retinue; prisoners in London
gaols fought battles with their turnkeys, and the majesty of the law
fired blunderbusses in among them, loaded with rounds of shot and ball;
thieves snipped off diamond crosses from the necks of noble lords at
Court drawing-rooms; musketeers went into St. Giles's, to search
for contraband goods, and the mob fired on the musketeers, and the
musketeers fired on the mob, and nobody thought any of these occurrences
much out of the common way. In the midst of them, the hangman, ever busy
and ever worse than useless, was in constant requisition; now, stringing
up long rows of miscellaneous criminals; now, hanging a housebreaker on
Saturday who had been taken on Tuesday; now, burning people in the
hand at Newgate by the dozen, and now burning pamphlets at the door of
Westminster Hall; to-day, taking the life of an atrocious murderer,
and to-morrow of a wretched pilferer who had robbed a farmer's boy of
sixpence.

All these things, and a thousand like them, came to pass in and close
upon the dear old year one thousand seven hundred and seventy-five.
Environed by them, while the Woodman and the Farmer worked unheeded,
those two of the large jaws, and those other two of the plain and the
fair faces, trod with stir enough, and carried their divine rights
with a high hand. Thus did the year one thousand seven hundred
and seventy-five conduct their Greatnesses, and myriads of small
creatures--the creatures of this chronicle among the rest--along the
roads that lay before them.




II. The Mail


It was the Dover road that lay, on a Friday night late in November,
before the first of the persons with whom this history has business.
The Dover road lay, as to him, beyond the Dover mail, as it lumbered up
Shooter's Hill. He walked up hill in the mire by the side of the mail,
as the rest of the passengers did; not because they had the least relish
for walking exercise, under the circumstances, but because the hill,
and the harness, and the mud, and the mail, were all so heavy, that the
horses had three times already come to a stop, besides once drawing the
coach across the road, with the mutinous intent of taking it back
to Blackheath. Reins and whip and coachman and guard, however, in
combination, had read that article of war which forbade a purpose
otherwise strongly in favour of the argument, that some brute animals
are endued with Reason; and the team had capitulated and returned to
their duty.

With drooping heads and tremulous tails, they mashed their way through
the thick mud, floundering and stumbling between whiles, as if they were
falling to pieces at the larger joints. As often as the driver rested
them and brought them to a stand, with a wary “Wo-ho! so-ho-then!” the
near leader violently shook his head and everything upon it--like an
unusually emphatic horse, denying that the coach could be got up the
hill. Whenever the leader made this rattle, the passenger started, as a
nervous passenger might, and was disturbed in mind.

There was a steaming mist in all the hollows, and it had roamed in its
forlornness up the hill, like an evil spirit, seeking rest and finding
none. A clammy and intensely cold mist, it made its slow way through the
air in ripples that visibly followed and overspread one another, as the
waves of an unwholesome sea might do. It was dense enough to shut out
everything from the light of the coach-lamps but these its own workings,
and a few yards of road; and the reek of the labouring horses steamed
into it, as if they had made it all.

Two other passengers, besides the one, were plodding up the hill by the
side of the mail. All three were wrapped to the cheekbones and over the
ears, and wore jack-boots. Not one of the three could have said, from
anything he saw, what either of the other two was like; and each was
hidden under almost as many wrappers from the eyes of the mind, as from
the eyes of the body, of his two companions. In those days, travellers
were very shy of being confidential on a short notice, for anybody on
the road might be a robber or in league with robbers. As to the latter,
when every posting-house and ale-house could produce somebody in
“the Captain's” pay, ranging from the landlord to the lowest stable
non-descript, it was the likeliest thing upon the cards. So the guard
of the Dover mail thought to himself, that Friday night in November, one
thousand seven hundred and seventy-five, lumbering up Shooter's Hill, as
he stood on his own particular perch behind the mail, beating his feet,
and keeping an eye and a hand on the arm-chest before him, where a
loaded blunderbuss lay at the top of six or eight loaded horse-pistols,
deposited on a substratum of cutlass.

The Dover mail was in its usual genial position that the guard suspected
the passengers, the passengers suspected one another and the guard, they
all suspected everybody else, and the coachman was sure of nothing but
the horses; as to which cattle he could with a clear conscience have
taken his oath on the two Testaments that they were not fit for the
journey.

“Wo-ho!” said the coachman. “So, then! One more pull and you're at the
top and be damned to you, for I have had trouble enough to get you to
it!--Joe!”

“Halloa!” the guard replied.

“What o'clock do you make it, Joe?”

“Ten minutes, good, past eleven.”

“My blood!” ejaculated the vexed coachman, “and not atop of Shooter's
yet! Tst! Yah! Get on with you!”

The emphatic horse, cut short by the whip in a most decided negative,
made a decided scramble for it, and the three other horses followed
suit. Once more, the Dover mail struggled on, with the jack-boots of its
passengers squashing along by its side. They had stopped when the coach
stopped, and they kept close company with it. If any one of the three
had had the hardihood to propose to another to walk on a little ahead
into the mist and darkness, he would have put himself in a fair way of
getting shot instantly as a highwayman.

The last burst carried the mail to the summit of the hill. The horses
stopped to breathe again, and the guard got down to skid the wheel for
the descent, and open the coach-door to let the passengers in.

“Tst! Joe!” cried the coachman in a warning voice, looking down from his
box.

“What do you say, Tom?”

They both listened.

“I say a horse at a canter coming up, Joe.”

“_I_ say a horse at a gallop, Tom,” returned the guard, leaving his hold
of the door, and mounting nimbly to his place. “Gentlemen! In the king's
name, all of you!”

With this hurried adjuration, he cocked his blunderbuss, and stood on
the offensive.

The passenger booked by this history, was on the coach-step, getting in;
the two other passengers were close behind him, and about to follow. He
remained on the step, half in the coach and half out of; they remained
in the road below him. They all looked from the coachman to the guard,
and from the guard to the coachman, and listened. The coachman looked
back and the guard looked back, and even the emphatic leader pricked up
his ears and looked back, without contradicting.

The stillness consequent on the cessation of the rumbling and labouring
of the coach, added to the stillness of the night, made it very quiet
indeed. The panting of the horses communicated a tremulous motion to
the coach, as if it were in a state of agitation. The hearts of the
passengers beat loud enough perhaps to be heard; but at any rate, the
quiet pause was audibly expressive of people out of breath, and holding
the breath, and having the pulses quickened by expectation.

The sound of a horse at a gallop came fast and furiously up the hill.

“So-ho!” the guard sang out, as loud as he could roar. “Yo there! Stand!
I shall fire!”

The pace was suddenly checked, and, with much splashing and floundering,
a man's voice called from the mist, “Is that the Dover mail?”

“Never you mind what it is!” the guard retorted. “What are you?”

“_Is_ that the Dover mail?”

“Why do you want to know?”

“I want a passenger, if it is.”

“What passenger?”

“Mr. Jarvis Lorry.”

Our booked passenger showed in a moment that it was his name. The guard,
the coachman, and the two other passengers eyed him distrustfully.

“Keep where you are,” the guard called to the voice in the mist,
“because, if I should make a mistake, it could never be set right in
your lifetime. Gentleman of the name of Lorry answer straight.”

“What is the matter?” asked the passenger, then, with mildly quavering
speech. “Who wants me? Is it Jerry?”

(“I don't like Jerry's voice, if it is Jerry,” growled the guard to
himself. “He's hoarser than suits me, is Jerry.”)

“Yes, Mr. Lorry.”

“What is the matter?”

“A despatch sent after you from over yonder. T. and Co.”

“I know this messenger, guard,” said Mr. Lorry, getting down into the
road--assisted from behind more swiftly than politely by the other two
passengers, who immediately scrambled into the coach, shut the door, and
pulled up the window. “He may come close; there's nothing wrong.”

“I hope there ain't, but I can't make so 'Nation sure of that,” said the
guard, in gruff soliloquy. “Hallo you!”

“Well! And hallo you!” said Jerry, more hoarsely than before.

“Come on at a footpace! d'ye mind me? And if you've got holsters to that
saddle o' yourn, don't let me see your hand go nigh 'em. For I'm a devil
at a quick mistake, and when I make one it takes the form of Lead. So
now let's look at you.”

The figures of a horse and rider came slowly through the eddying mist,
and came to the side of the mail, where the passenger stood. The rider
stooped, and, casting up his eyes at the guard, handed the passenger
a small folded paper. The rider's horse was blown, and both horse and
rider were covered with mud, from the hoofs of the horse to the hat of
the man.

“Guard!” said the passenger, in a tone of quiet business confidence.

The watchful guard, with his right hand at the stock of his raised
blunderbuss, his left at the barrel, and his eye on the horseman,
answered curtly, “Sir.”

“There is nothing to apprehend. I belong to Tellson's Bank. You must
know Tellson's Bank in London. I am going to Paris on business. A crown
to drink. I may read this?”

“If so be as you're quick, sir.”

He opened it in the light of the coach-lamp on that side, and
read--first to himself and then aloud: “'Wait at Dover for Mam'selle.'
It's not long, you see, guard. Jerry, say that my answer was, RECALLED
TO LIFE.”

Jerry started in his saddle. “That's a Blazing strange answer, too,”
 said he, at his hoarsest.

“Take that message back, and they will know that I received this, as
well as if I wrote. Make the best of your way. Good night.”

With those words the passenger opened the coach-door and got in; not at
all assisted by his fellow-passengers, who had expeditiously secreted
their watches and purses in their boots, and were now making a general
pretence of being asleep. With no more definite purpose than to escape
the hazard of originating any other kind of action.

The coach lumbered on again, with heavier wreaths of mist closing round
it as it began the descent. The guard soon replaced his blunderbuss
in his arm-chest, and, having looked to the rest of its contents, and
having looked to the supplementary pistols that he wore in his belt,
looked to a smaller chest beneath his seat, in which there were a
few smith's tools, a couple of torches, and a tinder-box. For he was
furnished with that completeness that if the coach-lamps had been blown
and stormed out, which did occasionally happen, he had only to shut
himself up inside, keep the flint and steel sparks well off the straw,
and get a light with tolerable safety and ease (if he were lucky) in
five minutes.

“Tom!” softly over the coach roof.

“Hallo, Joe.”

“Did you hear the message?”

“I did, Joe.”

“What did you make of it, Tom?”

“Nothing at all, Joe.”

“That's a coincidence, too,” the guard mused, “for I made the same of it
myself.”

Jerry, left alone in the mist and darkness, dismounted meanwhile, not
only to ease his spent horse, but to wipe the mud from his face, and
shake the wet out of his hat-brim, which might be capable of
holding about half a gallon. After standing with the bridle over his
heavily-splashed arm, until the wheels of the mail were no longer within
hearing and the night was quite still again, he turned to walk down the
hill.

“After that there gallop from Temple Bar, old lady, I won't trust your
fore-legs till I get you on the level,” said this hoarse messenger,
glancing at his mare. “'Recalled to life.' That's a Blazing strange
message. Much of that wouldn't do for you, Jerry! I say, Jerry! You'd
be in a Blazing bad way, if recalling to life was to come into fashion,
Jerry!”




III. The Night Shadows


A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is
constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A
solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every
one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every
room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating
heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of
its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the
awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I
turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time
to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable
water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses
of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the
book should shut with a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read
but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an
eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood
in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead,
my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable
consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that
individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In
any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there
a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their
innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

As to this, his natural and not to be alienated inheritance, the
messenger on horseback had exactly the same possessions as the King, the
first Minister of State, or the richest merchant in London. So with the
three passengers shut up in the narrow compass of one lumbering old mail
coach; they were mysteries to one another, as complete as if each had
been in his own coach and six, or his own coach and sixty, with the
breadth of a county between him and the next.

The messenger rode back at an easy trot, stopping pretty often at
ale-houses by the way to drink, but evincing a tendency to keep his
own counsel, and to keep his hat cocked over his eyes. He had eyes that
assorted very well with that decoration, being of a surface black, with
no depth in the colour or form, and much too near together--as if they
were afraid of being found out in something, singly, if they kept too
far apart. They had a sinister expression, under an old cocked-hat like
a three-cornered spittoon, and over a great muffler for the chin and
throat, which descended nearly to the wearer's knees. When he stopped
for drink, he moved this muffler with his left hand, only while he
poured his liquor in with his right; as soon as that was done, he
muffled again.

“No, Jerry, no!” said the messenger, harping on one theme as he rode.
“It wouldn't do for you, Jerry. Jerry, you honest tradesman, it wouldn't
suit _your_ line of business! Recalled--! Bust me if I don't think he'd
been a drinking!”

His message perplexed his mind to that degree that he was fain, several
times, to take off his hat to scratch his head. Except on the crown,
which was raggedly bald, he had stiff, black hair, standing jaggedly all
over it, and growing down hill almost to his broad, blunt nose. It was
so like Smith's work, so much more like the top of a strongly spiked
wall than a head of hair, that the best of players at leap-frog might
have declined him, as the most dangerous man in the world to go over.

While he trotted back with the message he was to deliver to the night
watchman in his box at the door of Tellson's Bank, by Temple Bar, who
was to deliver it to greater authorities within, the shadows of the
night took such shapes to him as arose out of the message, and took such
shapes to the mare as arose out of _her_ private topics of uneasiness.
They seemed to be numerous, for she shied at every shadow on the road.

What time, the mail-coach lumbered, jolted, rattled, and bumped upon
its tedious way, with its three fellow-inscrutables inside. To whom,
likewise, the shadows of the night revealed themselves, in the forms
their dozing eyes and wandering thoughts suggested.

Tellson's Bank had a run upon it in the mail. As the bank
passenger--with an arm drawn through the leathern strap, which did what
lay in it to keep him from pounding against the next passenger,
and driving him into his corner, whenever the coach got a special
jolt--nodded in his place, with half-shut eyes, the little
coach-windows, and the coach-lamp dimly gleaming through them, and the
bulky bundle of opposite passenger, became the bank, and did a great
stroke of business. The rattle of the harness was the chink of money,
and more drafts were honoured in five minutes than even Tellson's, with
all its foreign and home connection, ever paid in thrice the time. Then
the strong-rooms underground, at Tellson's, with such of their valuable
stores and secrets as were known to the passenger (and it was not a
little that he knew about them), opened before him, and he went in among
them with the great keys and the feebly-burning candle, and found them
safe, and strong, and sound, and still, just as he had last seen them.

But, though the bank was almost always with him, and though the coach
(in a confused way, like the presence of pain under an opiate) was
always with him, there was another current of impression that never
ceased to run, all through the night. He was on his way to dig some one
out of a grave.

Now, which of the multitude of faces that showed themselves before him
was the true face of the buried person, the shadows of the night did
not indicate; but they were all the faces of a man of five-and-forty by
years, and they differed principally in the passions they expressed,
and in the ghastliness of their worn and wasted state. Pride, contempt,
defiance, stubbornness, submission, lamentation, succeeded one another;
so did varieties of sunken cheek, cadaverous colour, emaciated hands
and figures. But the face was in the main one face, and every head was
prematurely white. A hundred times the dozing passenger inquired of this
spectre:

“Buried how long?”

The answer was always the same: “Almost eighteen years.”

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”

“Long ago.”

“You know that you are recalled to life?”

“They tell me so.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can't say.”

“Shall I show her to you? Will you come and see her?”

The answers to this question were various and contradictory. Sometimes
the broken reply was, “Wait! It would kill me if I saw her too soon.”
 Sometimes, it was given in a tender rain of tears, and then it was,
“Take me to her.” Sometimes it was staring and bewildered, and then it
was, “I don't know her. I don't understand.”

After such imaginary discourse, the passenger in his fancy would dig,
and dig, dig--now with a spade, now with a great key, now with his
hands--to dig this wretched creature out. Got out at last, with earth
hanging about his face and hair, he would suddenly fan away to dust. The
passenger would then start to himself, and lower the window, to get the
reality of mist and rain on his cheek.

Yet even when his eyes were opened on the mist and rain, on the moving
patch of light from the lamps, and the hedge at the roadside retreating
by jerks, the night shadows outside the coach would fall into the train
of the night shadows within. The real Banking-house by Temple Bar, the
real business of the past day, the real strong rooms, the real express
sent after him, and the real message returned, would all be there. Out
of the midst of them, the ghostly face would rise, and he would accost
it again.

“Buried how long?”

“Almost eighteen years.”

“I hope you care to live?”

“I can't say.”

Dig--dig--dig--until an impatient movement from one of the two
passengers would admonish him to pull up the window, draw his arm
securely through the leathern strap, and speculate upon the two
slumbering forms, until his mind lost its hold of them, and they again
slid away into the bank and the grave.

“Buried how long?”

“Almost eighteen years.”

“You had abandoned all hope of being dug out?”

“Long ago.”

The words were still in his hearing as just spoken--distinctly in
his hearing as ever spoken words had been in his life--when the weary
passenger started to the consciousness of daylight, and found that the
shadows of the night were gone.

He lowered the window, and looked out at the rising sun. There was a
ridge of ploughed land, with a plough upon it where it had been left
last night when the horses were unyoked; beyond, a quiet coppice-wood,
in which many leaves of burning red and golden yellow still remained
upon the trees. Though the earth was cold and wet, the sky was clear,
and the sun rose bright, placid, and beautiful.

“Eighteen years!” said the passenger, looking at the sun. “Gracious
Creator of day! To be buried alive for eighteen years!”




IV. The Preparation


When the mail got successfully to Dover, in the course of the forenoon,
the head drawer at the Royal George Hotel opened the coach-door as his
custom was. He did it with some flourish of ceremony, for a mail journey
from London in winter was an achievement to congratulate an adventurous
traveller upon.

By that time, there was only one adventurous traveller left be
congratulated: for the two others had been set down at their respective
roadside destinations. The mildewy inside of the coach, with its damp
and dirty straw, its disagreeable smell, and its obscurity, was rather
like a larger dog-kennel. Mr. Lorry, the passenger, shaking himself out
of it in chains of straw, a tangle of shaggy wrapper, flapping hat, and
muddy legs, was rather like a larger sort of dog.

“There will be a packet to Calais, tomorrow, drawer?”

“Yes, sir, if the weather holds and the wind sets tolerable fair. The
tide will serve pretty nicely at about two in the afternoon, sir. Bed,
sir?”

“I shall not go to bed till night; but I want a bedroom, and a barber.”

“And then breakfast, sir? Yes, sir. That way, sir, if you please.
Show Concord! Gentleman's valise and hot water to Concord. Pull off
gentleman's boots in Concord. (You will find a fine sea-coal fire, sir.)
Fetch barber to Concord. Stir about there, now, for Concord!”

The Concord bed-chamber being always assigned to a passenger by the
mail, and passengers by the mail being always heavily wrapped up from
head to foot, the room had the odd interest for the establishment of the
Royal George, that although but one kind of man was seen to go into it,
all kinds and varieties of men came out of it. Consequently, another
drawer, and two porters, and several maids and the landlady, were all
loitering by accident at various points of the road between the Concord
and the coffee-room, when a gentleman of sixty, formally dressed in a
brown suit of clothes, pretty well worn, but very well kept, with large
square cuffs and large flaps to the pockets, passed along on his way to
his breakfast.

The coffee-room had no other occupant, that forenoon, than the gentleman
in brown. His breakfast-table was drawn before the fire, and as he sat,
with its light shining on him, waiting for the meal, he sat so still,
that he might have been sitting for his portrait.

Very orderly and methodical he looked, with a hand on each knee, and a
loud watch ticking a sonorous sermon under his flapped waist-coat,
as though it pitted its gravity and longevity against the levity and
evanescence of the brisk fire. He had a good leg, and was a little vain
of it, for his brown stockings fitted sleek and close, and were of a
fine texture; his shoes and buckles, too, though plain, were trim. He
wore an odd little sleek crisp flaxen wig, setting very close to his
head: which wig, it is to be presumed, was made of hair, but which
looked far more as though it were spun from filaments of silk or glass.
His linen, though not of a fineness in accordance with his stockings,
was as white as the tops of the waves that broke upon the neighbouring
beach, or the specks of sail that glinted in the sunlight far at sea. A
face habitually suppressed and quieted, was still lighted up under the
quaint wig by a pair of moist bright eyes that it must have cost
their owner, in years gone by, some pains to drill to the composed and
reserved expression of Tellson's Bank. He had a healthy colour in his
cheeks, and his face, though lined, bore few traces of anxiety.
But, perhaps the confidential bachelor clerks in Tellson's Bank were
principally occupied with the cares of other people; and perhaps
second-hand cares, like second-hand clothes, come easily off and on.

Completing his resemblance to a man who was sitting for his portrait,
Mr. Lorry dropped off to sleep. The arrival of his breakfast roused him,
and he said to the drawer, as he moved his chair to it:

“I wish accommodation prepared for a young lady who may come here at any
time to-day. She may ask for Mr. Jarvis Lorry, or she may only ask for a
gentleman from Tellson's Bank. Please to let me know.”

“Yes, sir. Tellson's Bank in London, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, sir. We have oftentimes the honour to entertain your gentlemen in
their travelling backwards and forwards betwixt London and Paris, sir. A
vast deal of travelling, sir, in Tellson and Company's House.”

“Yes. We are quite a French House, as well as an English one.”

“Yes, sir. Not much in the habit of such travelling yourself, I think,
sir?”

“Not of late years. It is fifteen years since we--since I--came last
from France.”

“Indeed, sir? That was before my time here, sir. Before our people's
time here, sir. The George was in other hands at that time, sir.”

“I believe so.”

“But I would hold a pretty wager, sir, that a House like Tellson and
Company was flourishing, a matter of fifty, not to speak of fifteen
years ago?”

“You might treble that, and say a hundred and fifty, yet not be far from
the truth.”

“Indeed, sir!”

Rounding his mouth and both his eyes, as he stepped backward from the
table, the waiter shifted his napkin from his right arm to his left,
dropped into a comfortable attitude, and stood surveying the guest while
he ate and drank, as from an observatory or watchtower. According to the
immemorial usage of waiters in all ages.

When Mr. Lorry had finished his breakfast, he went out for a stroll on
the beach. The little narrow, crooked town of Dover hid itself away
from the beach, and ran its head into the chalk cliffs, like a marine
ostrich. The beach was a desert of heaps of sea and stones tumbling
wildly about, and the sea did what it liked, and what it liked was
destruction. It thundered at the town, and thundered at the cliffs, and
brought the coast down, madly. The air among the houses was of so strong
a piscatory flavour that one might have supposed sick fish went up to be
dipped in it, as sick people went down to be dipped in the sea. A little
fishing was done in the port, and a quantity of strolling about by
night, and looking seaward: particularly at those times when the tide
made, and was near flood. Small tradesmen, who did no business whatever,
sometimes unaccountably realised large fortunes, and it was remarkable
that nobody in the neighbourhood could endure a lamplighter.

As the day declined into the afternoon, and the air, which had been
at intervals clear enough to allow the French coast to be seen, became
again charged with mist and vapour, Mr. Lorry's thoughts seemed to cloud
too. When it was dark, and he sat before the coffee-room fire, awaiting
his dinner as he had awaited his breakfast, his mind was busily digging,
digging, digging, in the live red coals.

A bottle of good claret after dinner does a digger in the red coals no
harm, otherwise than as it has a tendency to throw him out of work.
Mr. Lorry had been idle a long time, and had just poured out his last
glassful of wine with as complete an appearance of satisfaction as is
ever to be found in an elderly gentleman of a fresh complexion who has
got to the end of a bottle, when a rattling of wheels came up the narrow
street, and rumbled into the inn-yard.

He set down his glass untouched. “This is Mam'selle!” said he.

In a very few minutes the waiter came in to announce that Miss Manette
had arrived from London, and would be happy to see the gentleman from
Tellson's.

“So soon?”

Miss Manette had taken some refreshment on the road, and required none
then, and was extremely anxious to see the gentleman from Tellson's
immediately, if it suited his pleasure and convenience.

The gentleman from Tellson's had nothing left for it but to empty his
glass with an air of stolid desperation, settle his odd little flaxen
wig at the ears, and follow the waiter to Miss Manette's apartment.
It was a large, dark room, furnished in a funereal manner with black
horsehair, and loaded with heavy dark tables. These had been oiled and
oiled, until the two tall candles on the table in the middle of the room
were gloomily reflected on every leaf; as if _they_ were buried, in deep
graves of black mahogany, and no light to speak of could be expected
from them until they were dug out.

The obscurity was so difficult to penetrate that Mr. Lorry, picking his
way over the well-worn Turkey carpet, supposed Miss Manette to be, for
the moment, in some adjacent room, until, having got past the two tall
candles, he saw standing to receive him by the table between them and
the fire, a young lady of not more than seventeen, in a riding-cloak,
and still holding her straw travelling-hat by its ribbon in her hand. As
his eyes rested on a short, slight, pretty figure, a quantity of golden
hair, a pair of blue eyes that met his own with an inquiring look, and
a forehead with a singular capacity (remembering how young and smooth
it was), of rifting and knitting itself into an expression that was
not quite one of perplexity, or wonder, or alarm, or merely of a bright
fixed attention, though it included all the four expressions--as his
eyes rested on these things, a sudden vivid likeness passed before him,
of a child whom he had held in his arms on the passage across that very
Channel, one cold time, when the hail drifted heavily and the sea ran
high. The likeness passed away, like a breath along the surface of
the gaunt pier-glass behind her, on the frame of which, a hospital
procession of negro cupids, several headless and all cripples, were
offering black baskets of Dead Sea fruit to black divinities of the
feminine gender--and he made his formal bow to Miss Manette.

“Pray take a seat, sir.” In a very clear and pleasant young voice; a
little foreign in its accent, but a very little indeed.

“I kiss your hand, miss,” said Mr. Lorry, with the manners of an earlier
date, as he made his formal bow again, and took his seat.

“I received a letter from the Bank, sir, yesterday, informing me that
some intelligence--or discovery--”

“The word is not material, miss; either word will do.”

“--respecting the small property of my poor father, whom I never saw--so
long dead--”

Mr. Lorry moved in his chair, and cast a troubled look towards the
hospital procession of negro cupids. As if _they_ had any help for
anybody in their absurd baskets!

“--rendered it necessary that I should go to Paris, there to communicate
with a gentleman of the Bank, so good as to be despatched to Paris for
the purpose.”

“Myself.”

“As I was prepared to hear, sir.”

She curtseyed to him (young ladies made curtseys in those days), with a
pretty desire to convey to him that she felt how much older and wiser he
was than she. He made her another bow.

“I replied to the Bank, sir, that as it was considered necessary, by
those who know, and who are so kind as to advise me, that I should go to
France, and that as I am an orphan and have no friend who could go with
me, I should esteem it highly if I might be permitted to place myself,
during the journey, under that worthy gentleman's protection. The
gentleman had left London, but I think a messenger was sent after him to
beg the favour of his waiting for me here.”

“I was happy,” said Mr. Lorry, “to be entrusted with the charge. I shall
be more happy to execute it.”

“Sir, I thank you indeed. I thank you very gratefully. It was told me
by the Bank that the gentleman would explain to me the details of the
business, and that I must prepare myself to find them of a surprising
nature. I have done my best to prepare myself, and I naturally have a
strong and eager interest to know what they are.”

“Naturally,” said Mr. Lorry. “Yes--I--”

After a pause, he added, again settling the crisp flaxen wig at the
ears, “It is very difficult to begin.”

He did not begin, but, in his indecision, met her glance. The young
forehead lifted itself into that singular expression--but it was pretty
and characteristic, besides being singular--and she raised her hand,
as if with an involuntary action she caught at, or stayed some passing
shadow.

“Are you quite a stranger to me, sir?”

“Am I not?” Mr. Lorry opened his hands, and extended them outwards with
an argumentative smile.

Between the eyebrows and just over the little feminine nose, the line of
which was as delicate and fine as it was possible to be, the expression
deepened itself as she took her seat thoughtfully in the chair by which
she had hitherto remained standing. He watched her as she mused, and the
moment she raised her eyes again, went on:

“In your adopted country, I presume, I cannot do better than address you
as a young English lady, Miss Manette?”

“If you please, sir.”

“Miss Manette, I am a man of business. I have a business charge to
acquit myself of. In your reception of it, don't heed me any more than
if I was a speaking machine--truly, I am not much else. I will, with
your leave, relate to you, miss, the story of one of our customers.”

“Story!”

He seemed wilfully to mistake the word she had repeated, when he added,
in a hurry, “Yes, customers; in the banking business we usually call
our connection our customers. He was a French gentleman; a scientific
gentleman; a man of great acquirements--a Doctor.”

“Not of Beauvais?”

“Why, yes, of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
gentleman was of Beauvais. Like Monsieur Manette, your father, the
gentleman was of repute in Paris. I had the honour of knowing him there.
Our relations were business relations, but confidential. I was at that
time in our French House, and had been--oh! twenty years.”

“At that time--I may ask, at what time, sir?”

“I speak, miss, of twenty years ago. He married--an English lady--and
I was one of the trustees. His affairs, like the affairs of many other
French gentlemen and French families, were entirely in Tellson's hands.
In a similar way I am, or I have been, trustee of one kind or other for
scores of our customers. These are mere business relations, miss;
there is no friendship in them, no particular interest, nothing like
sentiment. I have passed from one to another, in the course of my
business life, just as I pass from one of our customers to another in
the course of my business day; in short, I have no feelings; I am a mere
machine. To go on--”

“But this is my father's story, sir; and I begin to think”--the
curiously roughened forehead was very intent upon him--“that when I was
left an orphan through my mother's surviving my father only two years,
it was you who brought me to England. I am almost sure it was you.”

Mr. Lorry took the hesitating little hand that confidingly advanced
to take his, and he put it with some ceremony to his lips. He then
conducted the young lady straightway to her chair again, and, holding
the chair-back with his left hand, and using his right by turns to rub
his chin, pull his wig at the ears, or point what he said, stood looking
down into her face while she sat looking up into his.

“Miss Manette, it _was_ I. And you will see how truly I spoke of myself
just now, in saying I had no feelings, and that all the relations I hold
with my fellow-creatures are mere business relations, when you reflect
that I have never seen you since. No; you have been the ward of
Tellson's House since, and I have been busy with the other business of
Tellson's House since. Feelings! I have no time for them, no chance
of them. I pass my whole life, miss, in turning an immense pecuniary
Mangle.”

After this odd description of his daily routine of employment, Mr. Lorry
flattened his flaxen wig upon his head with both hands (which was most
unnecessary, for nothing could be flatter than its shining surface was
before), and resumed his former attitude.

“So far, miss (as you have remarked), this is the story of your
regretted father. Now comes the difference. If your father had not died
when he did--Don't be frightened! How you start!”

She did, indeed, start. And she caught his wrist with both her hands.

“Pray,” said Mr. Lorry, in a soothing tone, bringing his left hand from
the back of the chair to lay it on the supplicatory fingers that clasped
him in so violent a tremble: “pray control your agitation--a matter of
business. As I was saying--”

Her look so discomposed him that he stopped, wandered, and began anew:

“As I was saying; if Monsieur Manette had not died; if he had suddenly
and silently disappeared; if he had been spirited away; if it had not
been difficult to guess to what dreadful place, though no art could
trace him; if he had an enemy in some compatriot who could exercise a
privilege that I in my own time have known the boldest people afraid
to speak of in a whisper, across the water there; for instance, the
privilege of filling up blank forms for the consignment of any one
to the oblivion of a prison for any length of time; if his wife had
implored the king, the queen, the court, the clergy, for any tidings of
him, and all quite in vain;--then the history of your father would have
been the history of this unfortunate gentleman, the Doctor of Beauvais.”

“I entreat you to tell me more, sir.”

“I will. I am going to. You can bear it?”

“I can bear anything but the uncertainty you leave me in at this
moment.”

“You speak collectedly, and you--_are_ collected. That's good!” (Though
his manner was less satisfied than his words.) “A matter of business.
Regard it as a matter of business--business that must be done. Now
if this doctor's wife, though a lady of great courage and spirit,
had suffered so intensely from this cause before her little child was
born--”

“The little child was a daughter, sir.”

“A daughter. A-a-matter of business--don't be distressed. Miss, if the
poor lady had suffered so intensely before her little child was born,
that she came to the determination of sparing the poor child the
inheritance of any part of the agony she had known the pains of, by
rearing her in the belief that her father was dead--No, don't kneel! In
Heaven's name why should you kneel to me!”

“For the truth. O dear, good, compassionate sir, for the truth!”

“A--a matter of business. You confuse me, and how can I transact
business if I am confused? Let us be clear-headed. If you could kindly
mention now, for instance, what nine times ninepence are, or how many
shillings in twenty guineas, it would be so encouraging. I should be so
much more at my ease about your state of mind.”

Without directly answering to this appeal, she sat so still when he had
very gently raised her, and the hands that had not ceased to clasp
his wrists were so much more steady than they had been, that she
communicated some reassurance to Mr. Jarvis Lorry.

“That's right, that's right. Courage! Business! You have business before
you; useful business. Miss Manette, your mother took this course with
you. And when she died--I believe broken-hearted--having never slackened
her unavailing search for your father, she left you, at two years old,
to grow to be blooming, beautiful, and happy, without the dark cloud
upon you of living in uncertainty whether your father soon wore his
heart out in prison, or wasted there through many lingering years.”

As he said the words he looked down, with an admiring pity, on the
flowing golden hair; as if he pictured to himself that it might have
been already tinged with grey.

“You know that your parents had no great possession, and that what
they had was secured to your mother and to you. There has been no new
discovery, of money, or of any other property; but--”

He felt his wrist held closer, and he stopped. The expression in the
forehead, which had so particularly attracted his notice, and which was
now immovable, had deepened into one of pain and horror.

“But he has been--been found. He is alive. Greatly changed, it is too
probable; almost a wreck, it is possible; though we will hope the best.
Still, alive. Your father has been taken to the house of an old servant
in Paris, and we are going there: I, to identify him if I can: you, to
restore him to life, love, duty, rest, comfort.”

A shiver ran through her frame, and from it through his. She said, in a
low, distinct, awe-stricken voice, as if she were saying it in a dream,

“I am going to see his Ghost! It will be his Ghost--not him!”

Mr. Lorry quietly chafed the hands that held his arm. “There, there,
there! See now, see now! The best and the worst are known to you, now.
You are well on your way to the poor wronged gentleman, and, with a fair
sea voyage, and a fair land journey, you will be soon at his dear side.”

She repeated in the same tone, sunk to a whisper, “I have been free, I
have been happy, yet his Ghost has never haunted me!”

“Only one thing more,” said Mr. Lorry, laying stress upon it as a
wholesome means of enforcing her attention: “he has been found under
another name; his own, long forgotten or long concealed. It would be
worse than useless now to inquire which; worse than useless to seek to
know whether he has been for years overlooked, or always designedly
held prisoner. It would be worse than useless now to make any inquiries,
because it would be dangerous. Better not to mention the subject,
anywhere or in any way, and to remove him--for a while at all
events--out of France. Even I, safe as an Englishman, and even
Tellson's, important as they are to French credit, avoid all naming of
the matter. I carry about me, not a scrap of writing openly referring
to it. This is a secret service altogether. My credentials, entries,
and memoranda, are all comprehended in the one line, 'Recalled to Life;'
which may mean anything. But what is the matter! She doesn't notice a
word! Miss Manette!”

Perfectly still and silent, and not even fallen back in her chair, she
sat under his hand, utterly insensible; with her eyes open and fixed
upon him, and with that last expression looking as if it were carved or
branded into her forehead. So close was her hold upon his arm, that he
feared to detach himself lest he should hurt her; therefore he called
out loudly for assistance without moving.

A wild-looking woman, whom even in his agitation, Mr. Lorry observed to
be all of a red colour, and to have red hair, and to be dressed in some
extraordinary tight-fitting fashion, and to have on her head a most
wonderful bonnet like a Grenadier wooden measure, and good measure too,
or a great Stilton cheese, came running into the room in advance of the
inn servants, and soon settled the question of his detachment from the
poor young lady, by laying a brawny hand upon his chest, and sending him
flying back against the nearest wall.

(“I really think this must be a man!” was Mr. Lorry's breathless
reflection, simultaneously with his coming against the wall.)

“Why, look at you all!” bawled this figure, addressing the inn servants.
“Why don't you go and fetch things, instead of standing there staring
at me? I am not so much to look at, am I? Why don't you go and fetch
things? I'll let you know, if you don't bring smelling-salts, cold
water, and vinegar, quick, I will.”

There was an immediate dispersal for these restoratives, and she
softly laid the patient on a sofa, and tended her with great skill and
gentleness: calling her “my precious!” and “my bird!” and spreading her
golden hair aside over her shoulders with great pride and care.

“And you in brown!” she said, indignantly turning to Mr. Lorry;
“couldn't you tell her what you had to tell her, without frightening her
to death? Look at her, with her pretty pale face and her cold hands. Do
you call _that_ being a Banker?”

Mr. Lorry was so exceedingly disconcerted by a question so hard to
answer, that he could only look on, at a distance, with much feebler
sympathy and humility, while the strong woman, having banished the inn
servants under the mysterious penalty of “letting them know” something
not mentioned if they stayed there, staring, recovered her charge by a
regular series of gradations, and coaxed her to lay her drooping head
upon her shoulder.

“I hope she will do well now,” said Mr. Lorry.

“No thanks to you in brown, if she does. My darling pretty!”

“I hope,” said Mr. Lorry, after another pause of feeble sympathy and
humility, “that you accompany Miss Manette to France?”

“A likely thing, too!” replied the strong woman. “If it was ever
intended that I should go across salt water, do you suppose Providence
would have cast my lot in an island?”

This being another question hard to answer, Mr. Jarvis Lorry withdrew to
consider it.




V. The Wine-shop


A large cask of wine had been dropped and broken, in the street. The
accident had happened in getting it out of a cart; the cask had tumbled
out with a run, the hoops had burst, and it lay on the stones just
outside the door of the wine-shop, shattered like a walnut-shell.

All the people within reach had suspended their business, or their
idleness, to run to the spot and drink the wine. The rough, irregular
stones of the street, pointing every way, and designed, one might have
thought, expressly to lame all living creatures that approached them,
had dammed it into little pools; these were surrounded, each by its own
jostling group or crowd, according to its size. Some men kneeled down,
made scoops of their two hands joined, and sipped, or tried to help
women, who bent over their shoulders, to sip, before the wine had all
run out between their fingers. Others, men and women, dipped in
the puddles with little mugs of mutilated earthenware, or even with
handkerchiefs from women's heads, which were squeezed dry into infants'
mouths; others made small mud-embankments, to stem the wine as it ran;
others, directed by lookers-on up at high windows, darted here and
there, to cut off little streams of wine that started away in new
directions; others devoted themselves to the sodden and lee-dyed
pieces of the cask, licking, and even champing the moister wine-rotted
fragments with eager relish. There was no drainage to carry off the
wine, and not only did it all get taken up, but so much mud got taken up
along with it, that there might have been a scavenger in the street,
if anybody acquainted with it could have believed in such a miraculous
presence.

A shrill sound of laughter and of amused voices--voices of men, women,
and children--resounded in the street while this wine game lasted. There
was little roughness in the sport, and much playfulness. There was a
special companionship in it, an observable inclination on the part
of every one to join some other one, which led, especially among the
luckier or lighter-hearted, to frolicsome embraces, drinking of healths,
shaking of hands, and even joining of hands and dancing, a dozen
together. When the wine was gone, and the places where it had been
most abundant were raked into a gridiron-pattern by fingers, these
demonstrations ceased, as suddenly as they had broken out. The man who
had left his saw sticking in the firewood he was cutting, set it in
motion again; the women who had left on a door-step the little pot of
hot ashes, at which she had been trying to soften the pain in her own
starved fingers and toes, or in those of her child, returned to it; men
with bare arms, matted locks, and cadaverous faces, who had emerged into
the winter light from cellars, moved away, to descend again; and a gloom
gathered on the scene that appeared more natural to it than sunshine.

The wine was red wine, and had stained the ground of the narrow street
in the suburb of Saint Antoine, in Paris, where it was spilled. It had
stained many hands, too, and many faces, and many naked feet, and many
wooden shoes. The hands of the man who sawed the wood, left red marks
on the billets; and the forehead of the woman who nursed her baby, was
stained with the stain of the old rag she wound about her head again.
Those who had been greedy with the staves of the cask, had acquired a
tigerish smear about the mouth; and one tall joker so besmirched, his
head more out of a long squalid bag of a nightcap than in it, scrawled
upon a wall with his finger dipped in muddy wine-lees--BLOOD.

The time was to come, when that wine too would be spilled on the
street-stones, and when the stain of it would be red upon many there.

And now that the cloud settled on Saint Antoine, which a momentary
gleam had driven from his sacred countenance, the darkness of it was
heavy--cold, dirt, sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in
waiting on the saintly presence--nobles of great power all of them;
but, most especially the last. Samples of a people that had undergone a
terrible grinding and regrinding in the mill, and certainly not in the
fabulous mill which ground old people young, shivered at every corner,
passed in and out at every doorway, looked from every window, fluttered
in every vestige of a garment that the wind shook. The mill which
had worked them down, was the mill that grinds young people old; the
children had ancient faces and grave voices; and upon them, and upon the
grown faces, and ploughed into every furrow of age and coming up afresh,
was the sigh, Hunger. It was prevalent everywhere. Hunger was pushed out
of the tall houses, in the wretched clothing that hung upon poles and
lines; Hunger was patched into them with straw and rag and wood and
paper; Hunger was repeated in every fragment of the small modicum of
firewood that the man sawed off; Hunger stared down from the smokeless
chimneys, and started up from the filthy street that had no offal,
among its refuse, of anything to eat. Hunger was the inscription on the
baker's shelves, written in every small loaf of his scanty stock of
bad bread; at the sausage-shop, in every dead-dog preparation that
was offered for sale. Hunger rattled its dry bones among the roasting
chestnuts in the turned cylinder; Hunger was shred into atomics in every
farthing porringer of husky chips of potato, fried with some reluctant
drops of oil.

Its abiding place was in all things fitted to it. A narrow winding
street, full of offence and stench, with other narrow winding streets
diverging, all peopled by rags and nightcaps, and all smelling of rags
and nightcaps, and all visible things with a brooding look upon them
that looked ill. In the hunted air of the people there was yet some
wild-beast thought of the possibility of turning at bay. Depressed and
slinking though they were, eyes of fire were not wanting among them; nor
compressed lips, white with what they suppressed; nor foreheads knitted
into the likeness of the gallows-rope they mused about enduring, or
inflicting. The trade signs (and they were almost as many as the shops)
were, all, grim illustrations of Want. The butcher and the porkman
painted up, only the leanest scrags of meat; the baker, the coarsest of
meagre loaves. The people rudely pictured as drinking in the wine-shops,
croaked over their scanty measures of thin wine and beer, and were
gloweringly confidential together. Nothing was represented in a
flourishing condition, save tools and weapons; but, the cutler's knives
and axes were sharp and bright, the smith's hammers were heavy, and the
gunmaker's stock was murderous. The crippling stones of the pavement,
with their many little reservoirs of mud and water, had no footways, but
broke off abruptly at the doors. The kennel, to make amends, ran down
the middle of the street--when it ran at all: which was only after heavy
rains, and then it ran, by many eccentric fits, into the houses. Across
the streets, at wide intervals, one clumsy lamp was slung by a rope and
pulley; at night, when the lamplighter had let these down, and lighted,
and hoisted them again, a feeble grove of dim wicks swung in a sickly
manner overhead, as if they were at sea. Indeed they were at sea, and
the ship and crew were in peril of tempest.

For, the time was to come, when the gaunt scarecrows of that region
should have watched the lamplighter, in their idleness and hunger, so
long, as to conceive the idea of improving on his method, and hauling
up men by those ropes and pulleys, to flare upon the darkness of their
condition. But, the time was not come yet; and every wind that blew over
France shook the rags of the scarecrows in vain, for the birds, fine of
song and feather, took no warning.

The wine-shop was a corner shop, better than most others in its
appearance and degree, and the master of the wine-shop had stood outside
it, in a yellow waistcoat and green breeches, looking on at the struggle
for the lost wine. “It's not my affair,” said he, with a final shrug
of the shoulders. “The people from the market did it. Let them bring
another.”

There, his eyes happening to catch the tall joker writing up his joke,
he called to him across the way:

“Say, then, my Gaspard, what do you do there?”

The fellow pointed to his joke with immense significance, as is often
the way with his tribe. It missed its mark, and completely failed, as is
often the way with his tribe too.

“What now? Are you a subject for the mad hospital?” said the wine-shop
keeper, crossing the road, and obliterating the jest with a handful of
mud, picked up for the purpose, and smeared over it. “Why do you write
in the public streets? Is there--tell me thou--is there no other place
to write such words in?”

In his expostulation he dropped his cleaner hand (perhaps accidentally,
perhaps not) upon the joker's heart. The joker rapped it with his
own, took a nimble spring upward, and came down in a fantastic dancing
attitude, with one of his stained shoes jerked off his foot into his
hand, and held out. A joker of an extremely, not to say wolfishly
practical character, he looked, under those circumstances.

“Put it on, put it on,” said the other. “Call wine, wine; and finish
there.” With that advice, he wiped his soiled hand upon the joker's
dress, such as it was--quite deliberately, as having dirtied the hand on
his account; and then recrossed the road and entered the wine-shop.

This wine-shop keeper was a bull-necked, martial-looking man of thirty,
and he should have been of a hot temperament, for, although it was a
bitter day, he wore no coat, but carried one slung over his shoulder.
His shirt-sleeves were rolled up, too, and his brown arms were bare to
the elbows. Neither did he wear anything more on his head than his own
crisply-curling short dark hair. He was a dark man altogether, with good
eyes and a good bold breadth between them. Good-humoured looking on
the whole, but implacable-looking, too; evidently a man of a strong
resolution and a set purpose; a man not desirable to be met, rushing
down a narrow pass with a gulf on either side, for nothing would turn
the man.

Madame Defarge, his wife, sat in the shop behind the counter as he
came in. Madame Defarge was a stout woman of about his own age, with
a watchful eye that seldom seemed to look at anything, a large hand
heavily ringed, a steady face, strong features, and great composure of
manner. There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might
have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself
in any of the reckonings over which she presided. Madame Defarge being
sensitive to cold, was wrapped in fur, and had a quantity of bright
shawl twined about her head, though not to the concealment of her large
earrings. Her knitting was before her, but she had laid it down to pick
her teeth with a toothpick. Thus engaged, with her right elbow supported
by her left hand, Madame Defarge said nothing when her lord came in, but
coughed just one grain of cough. This, in combination with the lifting
of her darkly defined eyebrows over her toothpick by the breadth of a
line, suggested to her husband that he would do well to look round the
shop among the customers, for any new customer who had dropped in while
he stepped over the way.

The wine-shop keeper accordingly rolled his eyes about, until they
rested upon an elderly gentleman and a young lady, who were seated in
a corner. Other company were there: two playing cards, two playing
dominoes, three standing by the counter lengthening out a short supply
of wine. As he passed behind the counter, he took notice that the
elderly gentleman said in a look to the young lady, “This is our man.”

“What the devil do _you_ do in that galley there?” said Monsieur Defarge
to himself; “I don't know you.”

But, he feigned not to notice the two strangers, and fell into discourse
with the triumvirate of customers who were drinking at the counter.

“How goes it, Jacques?” said one of these three to Monsieur Defarge. “Is
all the spilt wine swallowed?”

“Every drop, Jacques,” answered Monsieur Defarge.

When this interchange of Christian name was effected, Madame Defarge,
picking her teeth with her toothpick, coughed another grain of cough,
and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

“It is not often,” said the second of the three, addressing Monsieur
Defarge, “that many of these miserable beasts know the taste of wine, or
of anything but black bread and death. Is it not so, Jacques?”

“It is so, Jacques,” Monsieur Defarge returned.

At this second interchange of the Christian name, Madame Defarge, still
using her toothpick with profound composure, coughed another grain of
cough, and raised her eyebrows by the breadth of another line.

The last of the three now said his say, as he put down his empty
drinking vessel and smacked his lips.

“Ah! So much the worse! A bitter taste it is that such poor cattle
always have in their mouths, and hard lives they live, Jacques. Am I
right, Jacques?”

“You are right, Jacques,” was the response of Monsieur Defarge.

This third interchange of the Christian name was completed at the moment
when Madame Defarge put her toothpick by, kept her eyebrows up, and
slightly rustled in her seat.

“Hold then! True!” muttered her husband. “Gentlemen--my wife!”

The three customers pulled off their hats to Madame Defarge, with three
flourishes. She acknowledged their homage by bending her head, and
giving them a quick look. Then she glanced in a casual manner round the
wine-shop, took up her knitting with great apparent calmness and repose
of spirit, and became absorbed in it.

“Gentlemen,” said her husband, who had kept his bright eye observantly
upon her, “good day. The chamber, furnished bachelor-fashion, that you
wished to see, and were inquiring for when I stepped out, is on the
fifth floor. The doorway of the staircase gives on the little courtyard
close to the left here,” pointing with his hand, “near to the window of
my establishment. But, now that I remember, one of you has already been
there, and can show the way. Gentlemen, adieu!”

They paid for their wine, and left the place. The eyes of Monsieur
Defarge were studying his wife at her knitting when the elderly
gentleman advanced from his corner, and begged the favour of a word.

“Willingly, sir,” said Monsieur Defarge, and quietly stepped with him to
the door.

Their conference was very short, but very decided. Almost at the first
word, Monsieur Defarge started and became deeply attentive. It had
not lasted a minute, when he nodded and went out. The gentleman then
beckoned to the young lady, and they, too, went out. Madame Defarge
knitted with nimble fingers and steady eyebrows, and saw nothing.

Mr. Jarvis Lorry and Miss Manette, emerging from the wine-shop thus,
joined Monsieur Defarge in the doorway to which he had directed his own
company just before. It opened from a stinking little black courtyard,
and was the general public entrance to a great pile of houses, inhabited
by a great number of people. In the gloomy tile-paved entry to the
gloomy tile-paved staircase, Monsieur Defarge bent down on one knee
to the child of his old master, and put her hand to his lips. It was
a gentle action, but not at all gently done; a very remarkable
transformation had come over him in a few seconds. He had no good-humour
in his face, nor any openness of aspect left, but had become a secret,
angry, dangerous man.

“It is very high; it is a little difficult. Better to begin slowly.”
 Thus, Monsieur Defarge, in a stern voice, to Mr. Lorry, as they began
ascending the stairs.

“Is he alone?” the latter whispered.

“Alone! God help him, who should be with him!” said the other, in the
same low voice.

“Is he always alone, then?”

“Yes.”

“Of his own desire?”

“Of his own necessity. As he was, when I first saw him after they
found me and demanded to know if I would take him, and, at my peril be
discreet--as he was then, so he is now.”

“He is greatly changed?”

“Changed!”

The keeper of the wine-shop stopped to strike the wall with his hand,
and mutter a tremendous curse. No direct answer could have been half so
forcible. Mr. Lorry's spirits grew heavier and heavier, as he and his
two companions ascended higher and higher.

Such a staircase, with its accessories, in the older and more crowded
parts of Paris, would be bad enough now; but, at that time, it was vile
indeed to unaccustomed and unhardened senses. Every little habitation
within the great foul nest of one high building--that is to say,
the room or rooms within every door that opened on the general
staircase--left its own heap of refuse on its own landing, besides
flinging other refuse from its own windows. The uncontrollable and
hopeless mass of decomposition so engendered, would have polluted
the air, even if poverty and deprivation had not loaded it with their
intangible impurities; the two bad sources combined made it almost
insupportable. Through such an atmosphere, by a steep dark shaft of dirt
and poison, the way lay. Yielding to his own disturbance of mind, and to
his young companion's agitation, which became greater every instant, Mr.
Jarvis Lorry twice stopped to rest. Each of these stoppages was made
at a doleful grating, by which any languishing good airs that were left
uncorrupted, seemed to escape, and all spoilt and sickly vapours seemed
to crawl in. Through the rusted bars, tastes, rather than glimpses, were
caught of the jumbled neighbourhood; and nothing within range, nearer
or lower than the summits of the two great towers of Notre-Dame, had any
promise on it of healthy life or wholesome aspirations.

At last, the top of the staircase was gained, and they stopped for the
third time. There was yet an upper staircase, of a steeper inclination
and of contracted dimensions, to be ascended, before the garret story
was reached. The keeper of the wine-shop, always going a little in
advance, and always going on the side which Mr. Lorry took, as though he
dreaded to be asked any question by the young lady, turned himself about
here, and, carefully feeling in the pockets of the coat he carried over
his shoulder, took out a key.

“The door is locked then, my friend?” said Mr. Lorry, surprised.

“Ay. Yes,” was the grim reply of Monsieur Defarge.

“You think it necessary to keep the unfortunate gentleman so retired?”

“I think it necessary to turn the key.” Monsieur Defarge whispered it
closer in his ear, and frowned heavily.

“Why?”

“Why! Because he has lived so long, locked up, that he would be
frightened--rave--tear himself to pieces--die--come to I know not what
harm--if his door was left open.”

“Is it possible!” exclaimed Mr. Lorry.

“Is it possible!” repeated Defarge, bitterly. “Yes. And a beautiful
world we live in, when it _is_ possible, and when many other such things
are possible, and not only possible, but done--done, see you!--under
that sky there, every day. Long live the Devil. Let us go on.”

This dialogue had been held in so very low a whisper, that not a word
of it had reached the young lady's ears. But, by this time she trembled
under such strong emotion, and her face expressed such deep anxiety,
and, above all, such dread and terror, that Mr. Lorry felt it incumbent
on him to speak a word or two of reassurance.

“Courage, dear miss! Courage! Business! The worst will be over in a
moment; it is but passing the room-door, and the worst is over. Then,
all the good you bring to him, all the relief, all the happiness you
bring to him, begin. Let our good friend here, assist you on that side.
That's well, friend Defarge. Come, now. Business, business!”

They went up slowly and softly. The staircase was short, and they were
soon at the top. There, as it had an abrupt turn in it, they came all at
once in sight of three men, whose heads were bent down close together at
the side of a door, and who were intently looking into the room to which
the door belonged, through some chinks or holes in the wall. On hearing
footsteps close at hand, these three turned, and rose, and showed
themselves to be the three of one name who had been drinking in the
wine-shop.

“I forgot them in the surprise of your visit,” explained Monsieur
Defarge. “Leave us, good boys; we have business here.”

The three glided by, and went silently down.

There appearing to be no other door on that floor, and the keeper of
the wine-shop going straight to this one when they were left alone, Mr.
Lorry asked him in a whisper, with a little anger:

“Do you make a show of Monsieur Manette?”

“I show him, in the way you have seen, to a chosen few.”

“Is that well?”

“_I_ think it is well.”

“Who are the few? How do you choose them?”

“I choose them as real men, of my name--Jacques is my name--to whom the
sight is likely to do good. Enough; you are English; that is another
thing. Stay there, if you please, a little moment.”

With an admonitory gesture to keep them back, he stooped, and looked in
through the crevice in the wall. Soon raising his head again, he struck
twice or thrice upon the door--evidently with no other object than to
make a noise there. With the same intention, he drew the key across it,
three or four times, before he put it clumsily into the lock, and turned
it as heavily as he could.

The door slowly opened inward under his hand, and he looked into the
room and said something. A faint voice answered something. Little more
than a single syllable could have been spoken on either side.

He looked back over his shoulder, and beckoned them to enter. Mr. Lorry
got his arm securely round the daughter's waist, and held her; for he
felt that she was sinking.

“A-a-a-business, business!” he urged, with a moisture that was not of
business shining on his cheek. “Come in, come in!”

“I am afraid of it,” she answered, shuddering.

“Of it? What?”

“I mean of him. Of my father.”

Rendered in a manner desperate, by her state and by the beckoning of
their conductor, he drew over his neck the arm that shook upon his
shoulder, lifted her a little, and hurried her into the room. He sat her
down just within the door, and held her, clinging to him.

Defarge drew out the key, closed the door, locked it on the inside,
took out the key again, and held it in his hand. All this he did,
methodically, and with as loud and harsh an accompaniment of noise as he
could make. Finally, he walked across the room with a measured tread to
where the window was. He stopped there, and faced round.

The garret, built to be a depository for firewood and the like, was dim
and dark: for, the window of dormer shape, was in truth a door in the
roof, with a little crane over it for the hoisting up of stores from
the street: unglazed, and closing up the middle in two pieces, like any
other door of French construction. To exclude the cold, one half of this
door was fast closed, and the other was opened but a very little way.
Such a scanty portion of light was admitted through these means, that it
was difficult, on first coming in, to see anything; and long habit
alone could have slowly formed in any one, the ability to do any work
requiring nicety in such obscurity. Yet, work of that kind was being
done in the garret; for, with his back towards the door, and his face
towards the window where the keeper of the wine-shop stood looking at
him, a white-haired man sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very
busy, making shoes.




VI. The Shoemaker


“Good day!” said Monsieur Defarge, looking down at the white head that
bent low over the shoemaking.

It was raised for a moment, and a very faint voice responded to the
salutation, as if it were at a distance:

“Good day!”

“You are still hard at work, I see?”

After a long silence, the head was lifted for another moment, and the
voice replied, “Yes--I am working.” This time, a pair of haggard eyes
had looked at the questioner, before the face had dropped again.

The faintness of the voice was pitiable and dreadful. It was not the
faintness of physical weakness, though confinement and hard fare no
doubt had their part in it. Its deplorable peculiarity was, that it was
the faintness of solitude and disuse. It was like the last feeble echo
of a sound made long and long ago. So entirely had it lost the life and
resonance of the human voice, that it affected the senses like a once
beautiful colour faded away into a poor weak stain. So sunken and
suppressed it was, that it was like a voice underground. So expressive
it was, of a hopeless and lost creature, that a famished traveller,
wearied out by lonely wandering in a wilderness, would have remembered
home and friends in such a tone before lying down to die.

Some minutes of silent work had passed: and the haggard eyes had looked
up again: not with any interest or curiosity, but with a dull mechanical
perception, beforehand, that the spot where the only visitor they were
aware of had stood, was not yet empty.

“I want,” said Defarge, who had not removed his gaze from the shoemaker,
“to let in a little more light here. You can bear a little more?”

The shoemaker stopped his work; looked with a vacant air of listening,
at the floor on one side of him; then similarly, at the floor on the
other side of him; then, upward at the speaker.

“What did you say?”

“You can bear a little more light?”

“I must bear it, if you let it in.” (Laying the palest shadow of a
stress upon the second word.)

The opened half-door was opened a little further, and secured at that
angle for the time. A broad ray of light fell into the garret, and
showed the workman with an unfinished shoe upon his lap, pausing in his
labour. His few common tools and various scraps of leather were at his
feet and on his bench. He had a white beard, raggedly cut, but not very
long, a hollow face, and exceedingly bright eyes. The hollowness and
thinness of his face would have caused them to look large, under his yet
dark eyebrows and his confused white hair, though they had been really
otherwise; but, they were naturally large, and looked unnaturally so.
His yellow rags of shirt lay open at the throat, and showed his body
to be withered and worn. He, and his old canvas frock, and his loose
stockings, and all his poor tatters of clothes, had, in a long seclusion
from direct light and air, faded down to such a dull uniformity of
parchment-yellow, that it would have been hard to say which was which.

He had put up a hand between his eyes and the light, and the very bones
of it seemed transparent. So he sat, with a steadfastly vacant gaze,
pausing in his work. He never looked at the figure before him, without
first looking down on this side of himself, then on that, as if he had
lost the habit of associating place with sound; he never spoke, without
first wandering in this manner, and forgetting to speak.

“Are you going to finish that pair of shoes to-day?” asked Defarge,
motioning to Mr. Lorry to come forward.

“What did you say?”

“Do you mean to finish that pair of shoes to-day?”

“I can't say that I mean to. I suppose so. I don't know.”

But, the question reminded him of his work, and he bent over it again.

Mr. Lorry came silently forward, leaving the daughter by the door. When
he had stood, for a minute or two, by the side of Defarge, the shoemaker
looked up. He showed no surprise at seeing another figure, but the
unsteady fingers of one of his hands strayed to his lips as he looked at
it (his lips and his nails were of the same pale lead-colour), and then
the hand dropped to his work, and he once more bent over the shoe. The
look and the action had occupied but an instant.

“You have a visitor, you see,” said Monsieur Defarge.

“What did you say?”

“Here is a visitor.”

The shoemaker looked up as before, but without removing a hand from his
work.

“Come!” said Defarge. “Here is monsieur, who knows a well-made shoe when
he sees one. Show him that shoe you are working at. Take it, monsieur.”

Mr. Lorry took it in his hand.

“Tell monsieur what kind of shoe it is, and the maker's name.”

There was a longer pause than usual, before the shoemaker replied:

“I forget what it was you asked me. What did you say?”

“I said, couldn't you describe the kind of shoe, for monsieur's
information?”

“It is a lady's shoe. It is a young lady's walking-shoe. It is in the
present mode. I never saw the mode. I have had a pattern in my hand.” He
glanced at the shoe with some little passing touch of pride.

“And the maker's name?” said Defarge.

Now that he had no work to hold, he laid the knuckles of the right hand
in the hollow of the left, and then the knuckles of the left hand in the
hollow of the right, and then passed a hand across his bearded chin, and
so on in regular changes, without a moment's intermission. The task of
recalling him from the vagrancy into which he always sank when he
had spoken, was like recalling some very weak person from a swoon, or
endeavouring, in the hope of some disclosure, to stay the spirit of a
fast-dying man.

“Did you ask me for my name?”

“Assuredly I did.”

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”

“Is that all?”

“One Hundred and Five, North Tower.”

With a weary sound that was not a sigh, nor a groan, he bent to work
again, until the silence was again broken.

“You are not a shoemaker by trade?” said Mr. Lorry, looking steadfastly
at him.

His haggard eyes turned to Defarge as if he would have transferred the
question to him: but as no help came from that quarter, they turned back
on the questioner when they had sought the ground.

“I am not a shoemaker by trade? No, I was not a shoemaker by trade. I-I
learnt it here. I taught myself. I asked leave to--”

He lapsed away, even for minutes, ringing those measured changes on his
hands the whole time. His eyes came slowly back, at last, to the face
from which they had wandered; when they rested on it, he started, and
resumed, in the manner of a sleeper that moment awake, reverting to a
subject of last night.

“I asked leave to teach myself, and I got it with much difficulty after
a long while, and I have made shoes ever since.”

As he held out his hand for the shoe that had been taken from him, Mr.
Lorry said, still looking steadfastly in his face:

“Monsieur Manette, do you remember nothing of me?”

The shoe dropped to the ground, and he sat looking fixedly at the
questioner.

“Monsieur Manette”; Mr. Lorry laid his hand upon Defarge's arm; “do you
remember nothing of this man? Look at him. Look at me. Is there no old
banker, no old business, no old servant, no old time, rising in your
mind, Monsieur Manette?”

As the captive of many years sat looking fixedly, by turns, at Mr.
Lorry and at Defarge, some long obliterated marks of an actively intent
intelligence in the middle of the forehead, gradually forced themselves
through the black mist that had fallen on him. They were overclouded
again, they were fainter, they were gone; but they had been there. And
so exactly was the expression repeated on the fair young face of her who
had crept along the wall to a point where she could see him, and where
she now stood looking at him, with hands which at first had been only
raised in frightened compassion, if not even to keep him off and
shut out the sight of him, but which were now extending towards him,
trembling with eagerness to lay the spectral face upon her warm young
breast, and love it back to life and hope--so exactly was the expression
repeated (though in stronger characters) on her fair young face, that it
looked as though it had passed like a moving light, from him to her.

Darkness had fallen on him in its place. He looked at the two, less and
less attentively, and his eyes in gloomy abstraction sought the ground
and looked about him in the old way. Finally, with a deep long sigh, he
took the shoe up, and resumed his work.

“Have you recognised him, monsieur?” asked Defarge in a whisper.

“Yes; for a moment. At first I thought it quite hopeless, but I have
unquestionably seen, for a single moment, the face that I once knew so
well. Hush! Let us draw further back. Hush!”

She had moved from the wall of the garret, very near to the bench on
which he sat. There was something awful in his unconsciousness of the
figure that could have put out its hand and touched him as he stooped
over his labour.

Not a word was spoken, not a sound was made. She stood, like a spirit,
beside him, and he bent over his work.

It happened, at length, that he had occasion to change the instrument
in his hand, for his shoemaker's knife. It lay on that side of him
which was not the side on which she stood. He had taken it up, and was
stooping to work again, when his eyes caught the skirt of her dress. He
raised them, and saw her face. The two spectators started forward,
but she stayed them with a motion of her hand. She had no fear of his
striking at her with the knife, though they had.

He stared at her with a fearful look, and after a while his lips began
to form some words, though no sound proceeded from them. By degrees, in
the pauses of his quick and laboured breathing, he was heard to say:

“What is this?”

With the tears streaming down her face, she put her two hands to her
lips, and kissed them to him; then clasped them on her breast, as if she
laid his ruined head there.

“You are not the gaoler's daughter?”

She sighed “No.”

“Who are you?”

Not yet trusting the tones of her voice, she sat down on the bench
beside him. He recoiled, but she laid her hand upon his arm. A strange
thrill struck him when she did so, and visibly passed over his frame; he
laid the knife down softly, as he sat staring at her.

Her golden hair, which she wore in long curls, had been hurriedly pushed
aside, and fell down over her neck. Advancing his hand by little and
little, he took it up and looked at it. In the midst of the action
he went astray, and, with another deep sigh, fell to work at his
shoemaking.

But not for long. Releasing his arm, she laid her hand upon his
shoulder. After looking doubtfully at it, two or three times, as if to
be sure that it was really there, he laid down his work, put his hand
to his neck, and took off a blackened string with a scrap of folded rag
attached to it. He opened this, carefully, on his knee, and it contained
a very little quantity of hair: not more than one or two long golden
hairs, which he had, in some old day, wound off upon his finger.

He took her hair into his hand again, and looked closely at it. “It is
the same. How can it be! When was it! How was it!”

As the concentrated expression returned to his forehead, he seemed to
become conscious that it was in hers too. He turned her full to the
light, and looked at her.

“She had laid her head upon my shoulder, that night when I was summoned
out--she had a fear of my going, though I had none--and when I was
brought to the North Tower they found these upon my sleeve. 'You will
leave me them? They can never help me to escape in the body, though they
may in the spirit.' Those were the words I said. I remember them very
well.”

He formed this speech with his lips many times before he could utter it.
But when he did find spoken words for it, they came to him coherently,
though slowly.

“How was this?--_Was it you_?”

Once more, the two spectators started, as he turned upon her with a
frightful suddenness. But she sat perfectly still in his grasp, and only
said, in a low voice, “I entreat you, good gentlemen, do not come near
us, do not speak, do not move!”

“Hark!” he exclaimed. “Whose voice was that?”

His hands released her as he uttered this cry, and went up to his white
hair, which they tore in a frenzy. It died out, as everything but his
shoemaking did die out of him, and he refolded his little packet and
tried to secure it in his breast; but he still looked at her, and
gloomily shook his head.

“No, no, no; you are too young, too blooming. It can't be. See what the
prisoner is. These are not the hands she knew, this is not the face
she knew, this is not a voice she ever heard. No, no. She was--and He
was--before the slow years of the North Tower--ages ago. What is your
name, my gentle angel?”

Hailing his softened tone and manner, his daughter fell upon her knees
before him, with her appealing hands upon his breast.

“O, sir, at another time you shall know my name, and who my mother was,
and who my father, and how I never knew their hard, hard history. But I
cannot tell you at this time, and I cannot tell you here. All that I may
tell you, here and now, is, that I pray to you to touch me and to bless
me. Kiss me, kiss me! O my dear, my dear!”

His cold white head mingled with her radiant hair, which warmed and
lighted it as though it were the light of Freedom shining on him.

“If you hear in my voice--I don't know that it is so, but I hope it
is--if you hear in my voice any resemblance to a voice that once was
sweet music in your ears, weep for it, weep for it! If you touch, in
touching my hair, anything that recalls a beloved head that lay on your
breast when you were young and free, weep for it, weep for it! If, when
I hint to you of a Home that is before us, where I will be true to you
with all my duty and with all my faithful service, I bring back the
remembrance of a Home long desolate, while your poor heart pined away,
weep for it, weep for it!”

She held him closer round the neck, and rocked him on her breast like a
child.

“If, when I tell you, dearest dear, that your agony is over, and that I
have come here to take you from it, and that we go to England to be at
peace and at rest, I cause you to think of your useful life laid waste,
and of our native France so wicked to you, weep for it, weep for it! And
if, when I shall tell you of my name, and of my father who is living,
and of my mother who is dead, you learn that I have to kneel to my
honoured father, and implore his pardon for having never for his sake
striven all day and lain awake and wept all night, because the love of
my poor mother hid his torture from me, weep for it, weep for it! Weep
for her, then, and for me! Good gentlemen, thank God! I feel his sacred
tears upon my face, and his sobs strike against my heart. O, see! Thank
God for us, thank God!”

He had sunk in her arms, and his face dropped on her breast: a sight so
touching, yet so terrible in the tremendous wrong and suffering which
had gone before it, that the two beholders covered their faces.

When the quiet of the garret had been long undisturbed, and his heaving
breast and shaken form had long yielded to the calm that must follow all
storms--emblem to humanity, of the rest and silence into which the storm
called Life must hush at last--they came forward to raise the father and
daughter from the ground. He had gradually dropped to the floor, and lay
there in a lethargy, worn out. She had nestled down with him, that his
head might lie upon her arm; and her hair drooping over him curtained
him from the light.

“If, without disturbing him,” she said, raising her hand to Mr. Lorry as
he stooped over them, after repeated blowings of his nose, “all could be
arranged for our leaving Paris at once, so that, from the very door, he
could be taken away--”

“But, consider. Is he fit for the journey?” asked Mr. Lorry.

“More fit for that, I think, than to remain in this city, so dreadful to
him.”

“It is true,” said Defarge, who was kneeling to look on and hear. “More
than that; Monsieur Manette is, for all reasons, best out of France.
Say, shall I hire a carriage and post-horses?”

“That's business,” said Mr. Lorry, resuming on the shortest notice his
methodical manners; “and if business is to be done, I had better do it.”

“Then be so kind,” urged Miss Manette, “as to leave us here. You see how
composed he has become, and you cannot be afraid to leave him with me
now. Why should you be? If you will lock the door to secure us from
interruption, I do not doubt that you will find him, when you come back,
as quiet as you leave him. In any case, I will take care of him until
you return, and then we will remove him straight.”

Both Mr. Lorry and Defarge were rather disinclined to this course, and
in favour of one of them remaining. But, as there were not only carriage
and horses to be seen to, but travelling papers; and as time pressed,
for the day was drawing to an end, it came at last to their hastily
dividing the business that was necessary to be done, and hurrying away
to do it.

Then, as the darkness closed in, the daughter laid her head down on the
hard ground close at the father's side, and watched him. The darkness
deepened and deepened, and they both lay quiet, until a light gleamed
through the chinks in the wall.

Mr. Lorry and Monsieur Defarge had made all ready for the journey, and
had brought with them, besides travelling cloaks and wrappers, bread and
meat, wine, and hot coffee. Monsieur Defarge put this provender, and the
lamp he carried, on the shoemaker's bench (there was nothing else in the
garret but a pallet bed), and he and Mr. Lorry roused the captive, and
assisted him to his feet.

No human intelligence could have read the mysteries of his mind, in
the scared blank wonder of his face. Whether he knew what had happened,
whether he recollected what they had said to him, whether he knew that
he was free, were questions which no sagacity could have solved. They
tried speaking to him; but, he was so confused, and so very slow to
answer, that they took fright at his bewilderment, and agreed for
the time to tamper with him no more. He had a wild, lost manner of
occasionally clasping his head in his hands, that had not been seen
in him before; yet, he had some pleasure in the mere sound of his
daughter's voice, and invariably turned to it when she spoke.

In the submissive way of one long accustomed to obey under coercion, he
ate and drank what they gave him to eat and drink, and put on the cloak
and other wrappings, that they gave him to wear. He readily responded to
his daughter's drawing her arm through his, and took--and kept--her hand
in both his own.

They began to descend; Monsieur Defarge going first with the lamp, Mr.
Lorry closing the little procession. They had not traversed many steps
of the long main staircase when he stopped, and stared at the roof and
round at the walls.

“You remember the place, my father? You remember coming up here?”

“What did you say?”

But, before she could repeat the question, he murmured an answer as if
she had repeated it.

“Remember? No, I don't remember. It was so very long ago.”

That he had no recollection whatever of his having been brought from his
prison to that house, was apparent to them. They heard him mutter,
“One Hundred and Five, North Tower;” and when he looked about him, it
evidently was for the strong fortress-walls which had long encompassed
him. On their reaching the courtyard he instinctively altered his
tread, as being in expectation of a drawbridge; and when there was
no drawbridge, and he saw the carriage waiting in the open street, he
dropped his daughter's hand and clasped his head again.

No crowd was about the door; no people were discernible at any of the
many windows; not even a chance passerby was in the street. An unnatural
silence and desertion reigned there. Only one soul was to be seen, and
that was Madame Defarge--who leaned against the door-post, knitting, and
saw nothing.

The prisoner had got into a coach, and his daughter had followed
him, when Mr. Lorry's feet were arrested on the step by his asking,
miserably, for his shoemaking tools and the unfinished shoes. Madame
Defarge immediately called to her husband that she would get them, and
went, knitting, out of the lamplight, through the courtyard. She quickly
brought them down and handed them in;--and immediately afterwards leaned
against the door-post, knitting, and saw nothing.

Defarge got upon the box, and gave the word “To the Barrier!” The
postilion cracked his whip, and they clattered away under the feeble
over-swinging lamps.

Under the over-swinging lamps--swinging ever brighter in the better
streets, and ever dimmer in the worse--and by lighted shops, gay crowds,
illuminated coffee-houses, and theatre-doors, to one of the city
gates. Soldiers with lanterns, at the guard-house there. “Your papers,
travellers!” “See here then, Monsieur the Officer,” said Defarge,
getting down, and taking him gravely apart, “these are the papers of
monsieur inside, with the white head. They were consigned to me, with
him, at the--” He dropped his voice, there was a flutter among the
military lanterns, and one of them being handed into the coach by an arm
in uniform, the eyes connected with the arm looked, not an every day
or an every night look, at monsieur with the white head. “It is well.
Forward!” from the uniform. “Adieu!” from Defarge. And so, under a short
grove of feebler and feebler over-swinging lamps, out under the great
grove of stars.

Beneath that arch of unmoved and eternal lights; some, so remote from
this little earth that the learned tell us it is doubtful whether their
rays have even yet discovered it, as a point in space where anything
is suffered or done: the shadows of the night were broad and black.
All through the cold and restless interval, until dawn, they once more
whispered in the ears of Mr. Jarvis Lorry--sitting opposite the buried
man who had been dug out, and wondering what subtle powers were for ever
lost to him, and what were capable of restoration--the old inquiry:

“I hope you care to be recalled to life?”

And the old answer:

“I can't say.”


The end of the first book.





Book the Second--the Golden Thread




I. Five Years Later


Tellson's Bank by Temple Bar was an old-fashioned place, even in the
year one thousand seven hundred and eighty. It was very small, very
dark, very ugly, very incommodious. It was an old-fashioned place,
moreover, in the moral attribute that the partners in the House were
proud of its smallness, proud of its darkness, proud of its ugliness,
proud of its incommodiousness. They were even boastful of its eminence
in those particulars, and were fired by an express conviction that, if
it were less objectionable, it would be less respectable. This was
no passive belief, but an active weapon which they flashed at more
convenient places of business. Tellson's (they said) wanted
no elbow-room, Tellson's wanted no light, Tellson's wanted no
embellishment. Noakes and Co.'s might, or Snooks Brothers' might; but
Tellson's, thank Heaven--!

Any one of these partners would have disinherited his son on the
question of rebuilding Tellson's. In this respect the House was much
on a par with the Country; which did very often disinherit its sons for
suggesting improvements in laws and customs that had long been highly
objectionable, but were only the more respectable.

Thus it had come to pass, that Tellson's was the triumphant perfection
of inconvenience. After bursting open a door of idiotic obstinacy with
a weak rattle in its throat, you fell into Tellson's down two steps,
and came to your senses in a miserable little shop, with two little
counters, where the oldest of men made your cheque shake as if the
wind rustled it, while they examined the signature by the dingiest of
windows, which were always under a shower-bath of mud from Fleet-street,
and which were made the dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the
heavy shadow of Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing
“the House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the back,
where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House came with its
hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it in the dismal
twilight. Your money came out of, or went into, wormy old wooden
drawers, particles of which flew up your nose and down your throat when
they were opened and shut. Your bank-notes had a musty odour, as if they
were fast decomposing into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among
the neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its good
polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised strong-rooms
made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the fat out of their
parchments into the banking-house air. Your lighter boxes of family
papers went up-stairs into a Barmecide room, that always had a great
dining-table in it and never had a dinner, and where, even in the year
one thousand seven hundred and eighty, the first letters written to you
by your old love, or by your little children, were but newly released
from the horror of being ogled through the windows, by the heads
exposed on Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of
Abyssinia or Ashantee.

But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in vogue
with all trades and professions, and not least of all with Tellson's.
Death is Nature's remedy for all things, and why not Legislation's?
Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the utterer of a bad note
was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a letter was put to Death; the
purloiner of forty shillings and sixpence was put to Death; the holder
of a horse at Tellson's door, who made off with it, was put to
Death; the coiner of a bad shilling was put to Death; the sounders of
three-fourths of the notes in the whole gamut of Crime, were put to
Death. Not that it did the least good in the way of prevention--it
might almost have been worth remarking that the fact was exactly the
reverse--but, it cleared off (as to this world) the trouble of each
particular case, and left nothing else connected with it to be looked
after. Thus, Tellson's, in its day, like greater places of business,
its contemporaries, had taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid
low before it had been ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately
disposed of, they would probably have excluded what little light the
ground floor had, in a rather significant manner.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at Tellson's, the
oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When they took a young
man into Tellson's London house, they hid him somewhere till he was
old. They kept him in a dark place, like a cheese, until he had the full
Tellson flavour and blue-mould upon him. Then only was he permitted to
be seen, spectacularly poring over large books, and casting his breeches
and gaiters into the general weight of the establishment.

Outside Tellson's--never by any means in it, unless called in--was an
odd-job-man, an occasional porter and messenger, who served as the live
sign of the house. He was never absent during business hours, unless
upon an errand, and then he was represented by his son: a grisly urchin
of twelve, who was his express image. People understood that Tellson's,
in a stately way, tolerated the odd-job-man. The house had always
tolerated some person in that capacity, and time and tide had drifted
this person to the post. His surname was Cruncher, and on the youthful
occasion of his renouncing by proxy the works of darkness, in the
easterly parish church of Hounsditch, he had received the added
appellation of Jerry.

The scene was Mr. Cruncher's private lodging in Hanging-sword-alley,
Whitefriars: the time, half-past seven of the clock on a windy March
morning, Anno Domini seventeen hundred and eighty. (Mr. Cruncher himself
always spoke of the year of our Lord as Anna Dominoes: apparently under
the impression that the Christian era dated from the invention of a
popular game, by a lady who had bestowed her name upon it.)

Mr. Cruncher's apartments were not in a savoury neighbourhood, and were
but two in number, even if a closet with a single pane of glass in it
might be counted as one. But they were very decently kept. Early as
it was, on the windy March morning, the room in which he lay abed was
already scrubbed throughout; and between the cups and saucers arranged
for breakfast, and the lumbering deal table, a very clean white cloth
was spread.

Mr. Cruncher reposed under a patchwork counterpane, like a Harlequin
at home. At first, he slept heavily, but, by degrees, began to roll
and surge in bed, until he rose above the surface, with his spiky hair
looking as if it must tear the sheets to ribbons. At which juncture, he
exclaimed, in a voice of dire exasperation:

“Bust me, if she ain't at it agin!”

A woman of orderly and industrious appearance rose from her knees in a
corner, with sufficient haste and trepidation to show that she was the
person referred to.

“What!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking out of bed for a boot. “You're at it
agin, are you?”

After hailing the morn with this second salutation, he threw a boot at
the woman as a third. It was a very muddy boot, and may introduce the
odd circumstance connected with Mr. Cruncher's domestic economy, that,
whereas he often came home after banking hours with clean boots, he
often got up next morning to find the same boots covered with clay.

“What,” said Mr. Cruncher, varying his apostrophe after missing his
mark--“what are you up to, Aggerawayter?”

“I was only saying my prayers.”

“Saying your prayers! You're a nice woman! What do you mean by flopping
yourself down and praying agin me?”

“I was not praying against you; I was praying for you.”

“You weren't. And if you were, I won't be took the liberty with. Here!
your mother's a nice woman, young Jerry, going a praying agin your
father's prosperity. You've got a dutiful mother, you have, my son.
You've got a religious mother, you have, my boy: going and flopping
herself down, and praying that the bread-and-butter may be snatched out
of the mouth of her only child.”

Master Cruncher (who was in his shirt) took this very ill, and, turning
to his mother, strongly deprecated any praying away of his personal
board.

“And what do you suppose, you conceited female,” said Mr. Cruncher, with
unconscious inconsistency, “that the worth of _your_ prayers may be?
Name the price that you put _your_ prayers at!”

“They only come from the heart, Jerry. They are worth no more than
that.”

“Worth no more than that,” repeated Mr. Cruncher. “They ain't worth
much, then. Whether or no, I won't be prayed agin, I tell you. I can't
afford it. I'm not a going to be made unlucky by _your_ sneaking. If
you must go flopping yourself down, flop in favour of your husband and
child, and not in opposition to 'em. If I had had any but a unnat'ral
wife, and this poor boy had had any but a unnat'ral mother, I might
have made some money last week instead of being counter-prayed and
countermined and religiously circumwented into the worst of luck.
B-u-u-ust me!” said Mr. Cruncher, who all this time had been putting
on his clothes, “if I ain't, what with piety and one blowed thing and
another, been choused this last week into as bad luck as ever a poor
devil of a honest tradesman met with! Young Jerry, dress yourself, my
boy, and while I clean my boots keep a eye upon your mother now and
then, and if you see any signs of more flopping, give me a call. For, I
tell you,” here he addressed his wife once more, “I won't be gone agin,
in this manner. I am as rickety as a hackney-coach, I'm as sleepy as
laudanum, my lines is strained to that degree that I shouldn't know, if
it wasn't for the pain in 'em, which was me and which somebody else, yet
I'm none the better for it in pocket; and it's my suspicion that you've
been at it from morning to night to prevent me from being the better for
it in pocket, and I won't put up with it, Aggerawayter, and what do you
say now!”

Growling, in addition, such phrases as “Ah! yes! You're religious, too.
You wouldn't put yourself in opposition to the interests of your husband
and child, would you? Not you!” and throwing off other sarcastic sparks
from the whirling grindstone of his indignation, Mr. Cruncher betook
himself to his boot-cleaning and his general preparation for business.
In the meantime, his son, whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes,
and whose young eyes stood close by one another, as his father's did,
kept the required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed that poor
woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he made
his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop, mother.
--Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm, darting in
again with an undutiful grin.

Mr. Cruncher's temper was not at all improved when he came to his
breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher's saying grace with particular
animosity.

“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it again?”

His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”

“Don't do it!” said Mr. Crunches looking about, as if he rather expected
to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife's petitions. “I
ain't a going to be blest out of house and home. I won't have my wittles
blest off my table. Keep still!”

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at a party
which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry Cruncher worried
his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it like any four-footed
inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o'clock he smoothed his ruffled
aspect, and, presenting as respectable and business-like an exterior as
he could overlay his natural self with, issued forth to the occupation
of the day.

It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite
description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock consisted of
a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair cut down, which stool,
young Jerry, walking at his father's side, carried every morning to
beneath the banking-house window that was nearest Temple Bar: where,
with the addition of the first handful of straw that could be gleaned
from any passing vehicle to keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man's
feet, it formed the encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr.
Cruncher was as well known to Fleet-street and the Temple, as the Bar
itself,--and was almost as in-looking.

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his
three-cornered hat to the oldest of men as they passed in to Tellson's,
Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning, with young Jerry
standing by him, when not engaged in making forays through the Bar, to
inflict bodily and mental injuries of an acute description on passing
boys who were small enough for his amiable purpose. Father and son,
extremely like each other, looking silently on at the morning traffic
in Fleet-street, with their two heads as near to one another as the two
eyes of each were, bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys.
The resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance, that
the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling eyes of the
youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of everything else
in Fleet-street.

The head of one of the regular indoor messengers attached to Tellson's
establishment was put through the door, and the word was given:

“Porter wanted!”

“Hooray, father! Here's an early job to begin with!”

Having thus given his parent God speed, young Jerry seated himself on
the stool, entered on his reversionary interest in the straw his father
had been chewing, and cogitated.

“Al-ways rusty! His fingers is al-ways rusty!” muttered young Jerry.
“Where does my father get all that iron rust from? He don't get no iron
rust here!”




II. A Sight


“You know the Old Bailey well, no doubt?” said one of the oldest of
clerks to Jerry the messenger.

“Ye-es, sir,” returned Jerry, in something of a dogged manner. “I _do_
know the Bailey.”

“Just so. And you know Mr. Lorry.”

“I know Mr. Lorry, sir, much better than I know the Bailey. Much
better,” said Jerry, not unlike a reluctant witness at the establishment
in question, “than I, as a honest tradesman, wish to know the Bailey.”

“Very well. Find the door where the witnesses go in, and show the
door-keeper this note for Mr. Lorry. He will then let you in.”

“Into the court, sir?”

“Into the court.”

Mr. Cruncher's eyes seemed to get a little closer to one another, and to
interchange the inquiry, “What do you think of this?”

“Am I to wait in the court, sir?” he asked, as the result of that
conference.

“I am going to tell you. The door-keeper will pass the note to Mr.
Lorry, and do you make any gesture that will attract Mr. Lorry's
attention, and show him where you stand. Then what you have to do, is,
to remain there until he wants you.”

“Is that all, sir?”

“That's all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell him
you are there.”

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note,
Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the
blotting-paper stage, remarked:

“I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this morning?”

“Treason!”

“That's quartering,” said Jerry. “Barbarous!”

“It is the law,” remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him. “It is the law.”

“It's hard in the law to spile a man, I think. It's hard enough to kill
him, but it's wery hard to spile him, sir.”

“Not at all,” retained the ancient clerk. “Speak well of the law. Take
care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law to take
care of itself. I give you that advice.”

“It's the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said Jerry. “I
leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is.”

“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have dry
ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal
deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a lean old one,
too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination,
and went his way.

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate had
not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.
But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of debauchery and
villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were bred, that came
into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed straight from the
dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench. It
had more than once happened, that the Judge in the black cap pronounced
his own doom as certainly as the prisoner's, and even died before him.
For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard,
from which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on
a violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles and a
half of public street and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any.
So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It
was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted
a punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for
the whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and
softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in
blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically
leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be committed
under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice
illustration of the precept, that “Whatever is is right;” an aphorism
that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and down this
hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man accustomed to make his
way quietly, the messenger found out the door he sought, and handed in
his letter through a trap in it. For, people then paid to see the play
at the Old Bailey, just as they paid to see the play in Bedlam--only the
former entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey
doors were well guarded--except, indeed, the social doors by which the
criminals got there, and those were always left wide open.

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its hinges a
very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself into
court.

“What's on?” he asked, in a whisper, of the man he found himself next
to.

“Nothing yet.”

“What's coming on?”

“The Treason case.”

“The quartering one, eh?”

“Ah!” returned the man, with a relish; “he'll be drawn on a hurdle to
be half hanged, and then he'll be taken down and sliced before his own
face, and then his inside will be taken out and burnt while he looks on,
and then his head will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into quarters.
That's the sentence.”

“If he's found Guilty, you mean to say?” Jerry added, by way of proviso.

“Oh! they'll find him guilty,” said the other. “Don't you be afraid of
that.”

Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted to the door-keeper, whom he
saw making his way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand. Mr. Lorry
sat at a table, among the gentlemen in wigs: not far from a wigged
gentleman, the prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of papers
before him: and nearly opposite another wigged gentleman with his hands
in his pockets, whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher looked at him
then or afterwards, seemed to be concentrated on the ceiling of the
court. After some gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin and signing
with his hand, Jerry attracted the notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up
to look for him, and who quietly nodded and sat down again.

“What's _he_ got to do with the case?” asked the man he had spoken with.

“Blest if I know,” said Jerry.

“What have _you_ got to do with it, then, if a person may inquire?”

“Blest if I know that either,” said Jerry.

The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent great stir and settling
down in the court, stopped the dialogue. Presently, the dock became the
central point of interest. Two gaolers, who had been standing there,
went out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put to the bar.

Everybody present, except the one wigged gentleman who looked at the
ceiling, stared at him. All the human breath in the place, rolled
at him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces strained round
pillars and corners, to get a sight of him; spectators in back rows
stood up, not to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of the court,
laid their hands on the shoulders of the people before them, to help
themselves, at anybody's cost, to a view of him--stood a-tiptoe, got
upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing, to see every inch of him.
Conspicuous among these latter, like an animated bit of the spiked wall
of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming at the prisoner the beery breath of a
whet he had taken as he came along, and discharging it to mingle with
the waves of other beer, and gin, and tea, and coffee, and what not,
that flowed at him, and already broke upon the great windows behind him
in an impure mist and rain.

The object of all this staring and blaring, was a young man of about
five-and-twenty, well-grown and well-looking, with a sunburnt cheek and
a dark eye. His condition was that of a young gentleman. He was plainly
dressed in black, or very dark grey, and his hair, which was long and
dark, was gathered in a ribbon at the back of his neck; more to be out
of his way than for ornament. As an emotion of the mind will express
itself through any covering of the body, so the paleness which his
situation engendered came through the brown upon his cheek, showing the
soul to be stronger than the sun. He was otherwise quite self-possessed,
bowed to the Judge, and stood quiet.

The sort of interest with which this man was stared and breathed at,
was not a sort that elevated humanity. Had he stood in peril of a less
horrible sentence--had there been a chance of any one of its savage
details being spared--by just so much would he have lost in his
fascination. The form that was to be doomed to be so shamefully mangled,
was the sight; the immortal creature that was to be so butchered
and torn asunder, yielded the sensation. Whatever gloss the various
spectators put upon the interest, according to their several arts and
powers of self-deceit, the interest was, at the root of it, Ogreish.

Silence in the court! Charles Darnay had yesterday pleaded Not Guilty to
an indictment denouncing him (with infinite jingle and jangle) for that
he was a false traitor to our serene, illustrious, excellent, and so
forth, prince, our Lord the King, by reason of his having, on divers
occasions, and by divers means and ways, assisted Lewis, the French
King, in his wars against our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and
so forth; that was to say, by coming and going, between the dominions of
our said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, and those of the
said French Lewis, and wickedly, falsely, traitorously, and otherwise
evil-adverbiously, revealing to the said French Lewis what forces our
said serene, illustrious, excellent, and so forth, had in preparation
to send to Canada and North America. This much, Jerry, with his head
becoming more and more spiky as the law terms bristled it, made out with
huge satisfaction, and so arrived circuitously at the understanding that
the aforesaid, and over and over again aforesaid, Charles Darnay, stood
there before him upon his trial; that the jury were swearing in; and
that Mr. Attorney-General was making ready to speak.

The accused, who was (and who knew he was) being mentally hanged,
beheaded, and quartered, by everybody there, neither flinched from
the situation, nor assumed any theatrical air in it. He was quiet and
attentive; watched the opening proceedings with a grave interest;
and stood with his hands resting on the slab of wood before him, so
composedly, that they had not displaced a leaf of the herbs with which
it was strewn. The court was all bestrewn with herbs and sprinkled with
vinegar, as a precaution against gaol air and gaol fever.

Over the prisoner's head there was a mirror, to throw the light down
upon him. Crowds of the wicked and the wretched had been reflected in
it, and had passed from its surface and this earth's together. Haunted
in a most ghastly manner that abominable place would have been, if the
glass could ever have rendered back its reflections, as the ocean is one
day to give up its dead. Some passing thought of the infamy and disgrace
for which it had been reserved, may have struck the prisoner's mind. Be
that as it may, a change in his position making him conscious of a bar
of light across his face, he looked up; and when he saw the glass his
face flushed, and his right hand pushed the herbs away.

It happened, that the action turned his face to that side of the court
which was on his left. About on a level with his eyes, there sat,
in that corner of the Judge's bench, two persons upon whom his look
immediately rested; so immediately, and so much to the changing of his
aspect, that all the eyes that were turned upon him, turned to them.

The spectators saw in the two figures, a young lady of little more than
twenty, and a gentleman who was evidently her father; a man of a very
remarkable appearance in respect of the absolute whiteness of his hair,
and a certain indescribable intensity of face: not of an active kind,
but pondering and self-communing. When this expression was upon him, he
looked as if he were old; but when it was stirred and broken up--as
it was now, in a moment, on his speaking to his daughter--he became a
handsome man, not past the prime of life.

His daughter had one of her hands drawn through his arm, as she sat by
him, and the other pressed upon it. She had drawn close to him, in her
dread of the scene, and in her pity for the prisoner. Her forehead had
been strikingly expressive of an engrossing terror and compassion
that saw nothing but the peril of the accused. This had been so very
noticeable, so very powerfully and naturally shown, that starers who
had had no pity for him were touched by her; and the whisper went about,
“Who are they?”

Jerry, the messenger, who had made his own observations, in his own
manner, and who had been sucking the rust off his fingers in his
absorption, stretched his neck to hear who they were. The crowd about
him had pressed and passed the inquiry on to the nearest attendant, and
from him it had been more slowly pressed and passed back; at last it got
to Jerry:

“Witnesses.”

“For which side?”

“Against.”

“Against what side?”

“The prisoner's.”

The Judge, whose eyes had gone in the general direction, recalled them,
leaned back in his seat, and looked steadily at the man whose life was
in his hand, as Mr. Attorney-General rose to spin the rope, grind the
axe, and hammer the nails into the scaffold.




III. A Disappointment


Mr. Attorney-General had to inform the jury, that the prisoner before
them, though young in years, was old in the treasonable practices which
claimed the forfeit of his life. That this correspondence with the
public enemy was not a correspondence of to-day, or of yesterday, or
even of last year, or of the year before. That, it was certain the
prisoner had, for longer than that, been in the habit of passing and
repassing between France and England, on secret business of which
he could give no honest account. That, if it were in the nature of
traitorous ways to thrive (which happily it never was), the real
wickedness and guilt of his business might have remained undiscovered.
That Providence, however, had put it into the heart of a person who
was beyond fear and beyond reproach, to ferret out the nature of the
prisoner's schemes, and, struck with horror, to disclose them to his
Majesty's Chief Secretary of State and most honourable Privy Council.
That, this patriot would be produced before them. That, his position and
attitude were, on the whole, sublime. That, he had been the prisoner's
friend, but, at once in an auspicious and an evil hour detecting his
infamy, had resolved to immolate the traitor he could no longer cherish
in his bosom, on the sacred altar of his country. That, if statues
were decreed in Britain, as in ancient Greece and Rome, to public
benefactors, this shining citizen would assuredly have had one. That, as
they were not so decreed, he probably would not have one. That, Virtue,
as had been observed by the poets (in many passages which he well
knew the jury would have, word for word, at the tips of their tongues;
whereat the jury's countenances displayed a guilty consciousness that
they knew nothing about the passages), was in a manner contagious; more
especially the bright virtue known as patriotism, or love of country.
That, the lofty example of this immaculate and unimpeachable witness
for the Crown, to refer to whom however unworthily was an honour, had
communicated itself to the prisoner's servant, and had engendered in him
a holy determination to examine his master's table-drawers and pockets,
and secrete his papers. That, he (Mr. Attorney-General) was prepared to
hear some disparagement attempted of this admirable servant; but that,
in a general way, he preferred him to his (Mr. Attorney-General's)
brothers and sisters, and honoured him more than his (Mr.
Attorney-General's) father and mother. That, he called with confidence
on the jury to come and do likewise. That, the evidence of these two
witnesses, coupled with the documents of their discovering that would be
produced, would show the prisoner to have been furnished with lists of
his Majesty's forces, and of their disposition and preparation, both by
sea and land, and would leave no doubt that he had habitually conveyed
such information to a hostile power. That, these lists could not be
proved to be in the prisoner's handwriting; but that it was all the
same; that, indeed, it was rather the better for the prosecution, as
showing the prisoner to be artful in his precautions. That, the proof
would go back five years, and would show the prisoner already engaged
in these pernicious missions, within a few weeks before the date of the
very first action fought between the British troops and the Americans.
That, for these reasons, the jury, being a loyal jury (as he knew they
were), and being a responsible jury (as _they_ knew they were), must
positively find the prisoner Guilty, and make an end of him, whether
they liked it or not. That, they never could lay their heads upon their
pillows; that, they never could tolerate the idea of their wives laying
their heads upon their pillows; that, they never could endure the notion
of their children laying their heads upon their pillows; in short, that
there never more could be, for them or theirs, any laying of heads upon
pillows at all, unless the prisoner's head was taken off. That head
Mr. Attorney-General concluded by demanding of them, in the name of
everything he could think of with a round turn in it, and on the faith
of his solemn asseveration that he already considered the prisoner as
good as dead and gone.

When the Attorney-General ceased, a buzz arose in the court as if
a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming about the prisoner, in
anticipation of what he was soon to become. When toned down again, the
unimpeachable patriot appeared in the witness-box.

Mr. Solicitor-General then, following his leader's lead, examined the
patriot: John Barsad, gentleman, by name. The story of his pure soul was
exactly what Mr. Attorney-General had described it to be--perhaps, if
it had a fault, a little too exactly. Having released his noble bosom
of its burden, he would have modestly withdrawn himself, but that the
wigged gentleman with the papers before him, sitting not far from Mr.
Lorry, begged to ask him a few questions. The wigged gentleman sitting
opposite, still looking at the ceiling of the court.

Had he ever been a spy himself? No, he scorned the base insinuation.
What did he live upon? His property. Where was his property? He didn't
precisely remember where it was. What was it? No business of anybody's.
Had he inherited it? Yes, he had. From whom? Distant relation. Very
distant? Rather. Ever been in prison? Certainly not. Never in a debtors'
prison? Didn't see what that had to do with it. Never in a debtors'
prison?--Come, once again. Never? Yes. How many times? Two or three
times. Not five or six? Perhaps. Of what profession? Gentleman. Ever
been kicked? Might have been. Frequently? No. Ever kicked downstairs?
Decidedly not; once received a kick on the top of a staircase, and fell
downstairs of his own accord. Kicked on that occasion for cheating at
dice? Something to that effect was said by the intoxicated liar who
committed the assault, but it was not true. Swear it was not true?
Positively. Ever live by cheating at play? Never. Ever live by play? Not
more than other gentlemen do. Ever borrow money of the prisoner? Yes.
Ever pay him? No. Was not this intimacy with the prisoner, in reality a
very slight one, forced upon the prisoner in coaches, inns, and packets?
No. Sure he saw the prisoner with these lists? Certain. Knew no more
about the lists? No. Had not procured them himself, for instance? No.
Expect to get anything by this evidence? No. Not in regular government
pay and employment, to lay traps? Oh dear no. Or to do anything? Oh dear
no. Swear that? Over and over again. No motives but motives of sheer
patriotism? None whatever.

The virtuous servant, Roger Cly, swore his way through the case at a
great rate. He had taken service with the prisoner, in good faith and
simplicity, four years ago. He had asked the prisoner, aboard the Calais
packet, if he wanted a handy fellow, and the prisoner had engaged him.
He had not asked the prisoner to take the handy fellow as an act of
charity--never thought of such a thing. He began to have suspicions of
the prisoner, and to keep an eye upon him, soon afterwards. In arranging
his clothes, while travelling, he had seen similar lists to these in the
prisoner's pockets, over and over again. He had taken these lists from
the drawer of the prisoner's desk. He had not put them there first. He
had seen the prisoner show these identical lists to French gentlemen
at Calais, and similar lists to French gentlemen, both at Calais and
Boulogne. He loved his country, and couldn't bear it, and had given
information. He had never been suspected of stealing a silver tea-pot;
he had been maligned respecting a mustard-pot, but it turned out to be
only a plated one. He had known the last witness seven or eight years;
that was merely a coincidence. He didn't call it a particularly curious
coincidence; most coincidences were curious. Neither did he call it a
curious coincidence that true patriotism was _his_ only motive too. He
was a true Briton, and hoped there were many like him.

The blue-flies buzzed again, and Mr. Attorney-General called Mr. Jarvis
Lorry.

“Mr. Jarvis Lorry, are you a clerk in Tellson's bank?”

“I am.”

“On a certain Friday night in November one thousand seven hundred and
seventy-five, did business occasion you to travel between London and
Dover by the mail?”

“It did.”

“Were there any other passengers in the mail?”

“Two.”

“Did they alight on the road in the course of the night?”

“They did.”

“Mr. Lorry, look upon the prisoner. Was he one of those two passengers?”

“I cannot undertake to say that he was.”

“Does he resemble either of these two passengers?”

“Both were so wrapped up, and the night was so dark, and we were all so
reserved, that I cannot undertake to say even that.”

“Mr. Lorry, look again upon the prisoner. Supposing him wrapped up as
those two passengers were, is there anything in his bulk and stature to
render it unlikely that he was one of them?”

“No.”

“You will not swear, Mr. Lorry, that he was not one of them?”

“No.”

“So at least you say he may have been one of them?”

“Yes. Except that I remember them both to have been--like
myself--timorous of highwaymen, and the prisoner has not a timorous
air.”

“Did you ever see a counterfeit of timidity, Mr. Lorry?”

“I certainly have seen that.”

“Mr. Lorry, look once more upon the prisoner. Have you seen him, to your
certain knowledge, before?”

“I have.”

“When?”

“I was returning from France a few days afterwards, and, at Calais, the
prisoner came on board the packet-ship in which I returned, and made the
voyage with me.”

“At what hour did he come on board?”

“At a little after midnight.”

“In the dead of the night. Was he the only passenger who came on board
at that untimely hour?”

“He happened to be the only one.”

“Never mind about 'happening,' Mr. Lorry. He was the only passenger who
came on board in the dead of the night?”

“He was.”

“Were you travelling alone, Mr. Lorry, or with any companion?”

“With two companions. A gentleman and lady. They are here.”

“They are here. Had you any conversation with the prisoner?”

“Hardly any. The weather was stormy, and the passage long and rough, and
I lay on a sofa, almost from shore to shore.”

“Miss Manette!”

The young lady, to whom all eyes had been turned before, and were now
turned again, stood up where she had sat. Her father rose with her, and
kept her hand drawn through his arm.

“Miss Manette, look upon the prisoner.”

To be confronted with such pity, and such earnest youth and beauty, was
far more trying to the accused than to be confronted with all the crowd.
Standing, as it were, apart with her on the edge of his grave, not all
the staring curiosity that looked on, could, for the moment, nerve him
to remain quite still. His hurried right hand parcelled out the herbs
before him into imaginary beds of flowers in a garden; and his efforts
to control and steady his breathing shook the lips from which the colour
rushed to his heart. The buzz of the great flies was loud again.

“Miss Manette, have you seen the prisoner before?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Where?”

“On board of the packet-ship just now referred to, sir, and on the same
occasion.”

“You are the young lady just now referred to?”

“O! most unhappily, I am!”

The plaintive tone of her compassion merged into the less musical voice
of the Judge, as he said something fiercely: “Answer the questions put
to you, and make no remark upon them.”

“Miss Manette, had you any conversation with the prisoner on that
passage across the Channel?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Recall it.”

In the midst of a profound stillness, she faintly began: “When the
gentleman came on board--”

“Do you mean the prisoner?” inquired the Judge, knitting his brows.

“Yes, my Lord.”

“Then say the prisoner.”

“When the prisoner came on board, he noticed that my father,” turning
her eyes lovingly to him as he stood beside her, “was much fatigued
and in a very weak state of health. My father was so reduced that I was
afraid to take him out of the air, and I had made a bed for him on the
deck near the cabin steps, and I sat on the deck at his side to take
care of him. There were no other passengers that night, but we four.
The prisoner was so good as to beg permission to advise me how I could
shelter my father from the wind and weather, better than I had done. I
had not known how to do it well, not understanding how the wind would
set when we were out of the harbour. He did it for me. He expressed
great gentleness and kindness for my father's state, and I am sure he
felt it. That was the manner of our beginning to speak together.”

“Let me interrupt you for a moment. Had he come on board alone?”

“No.”

“How many were with him?”

“Two French gentlemen.”

“Had they conferred together?”

“They had conferred together until the last moment, when it was
necessary for the French gentlemen to be landed in their boat.”

“Had any papers been handed about among them, similar to these lists?”

“Some papers had been handed about among them, but I don't know what
papers.”

“Like these in shape and size?”

“Possibly, but indeed I don't know, although they stood whispering very
near to me: because they stood at the top of the cabin steps to have the
light of the lamp that was hanging there; it was a dull lamp, and they
spoke very low, and I did not hear what they said, and saw only that
they looked at papers.”

“Now, to the prisoner's conversation, Miss Manette.”

“The prisoner was as open in his confidence with me--which arose out
of my helpless situation--as he was kind, and good, and useful to my
father. I hope,” bursting into tears, “I may not repay him by doing him
harm to-day.”

Buzzing from the blue-flies.

“Miss Manette, if the prisoner does not perfectly understand that
you give the evidence which it is your duty to give--which you must
give--and which you cannot escape from giving--with great unwillingness,
he is the only person present in that condition. Please to go on.”

“He told me that he was travelling on business of a delicate and
difficult nature, which might get people into trouble, and that he was
therefore travelling under an assumed name. He said that this business
had, within a few days, taken him to France, and might, at intervals,
take him backwards and forwards between France and England for a long
time to come.”

“Did he say anything about America, Miss Manette? Be particular.”

“He tried to explain to me how that quarrel had arisen, and he said
that, so far as he could judge, it was a wrong and foolish one on
England's part. He added, in a jesting way, that perhaps George
Washington might gain almost as great a name in history as George the
Third. But there was no harm in his way of saying this: it was said
laughingly, and to beguile the time.”

Any strongly marked expression of face on the part of a chief actor in
a scene of great interest to whom many eyes are directed, will be
unconsciously imitated by the spectators. Her forehead was painfully
anxious and intent as she gave this evidence, and, in the pauses when
she stopped for the Judge to write it down, watched its effect upon
the counsel for and against. Among the lookers-on there was the same
expression in all quarters of the court; insomuch, that a great majority
of the foreheads there, might have been mirrors reflecting the witness,
when the Judge looked up from his notes to glare at that tremendous
heresy about George Washington.

Mr. Attorney-General now signified to my Lord, that he deemed it
necessary, as a matter of precaution and form, to call the young lady's
father, Doctor Manette. Who was called accordingly.

“Doctor Manette, look upon the prisoner. Have you ever seen him before?”

“Once. When he called at my lodgings in London. Some three years, or
three years and a half ago.”

“Can you identify him as your fellow-passenger on board the packet, or
speak to his conversation with your daughter?”

“Sir, I can do neither.”

“Is there any particular and special reason for your being unable to do
either?”

He answered, in a low voice, “There is.”

“Has it been your misfortune to undergo a long imprisonment, without
trial, or even accusation, in your native country, Doctor Manette?”

He answered, in a tone that went to every heart, “A long imprisonment.”

“Were you newly released on the occasion in question?”

“They tell me so.”

“Have you no remembrance of the occasion?”

“None. My mind is a blank, from some time--I cannot even say what
time--when I employed myself, in my captivity, in making shoes, to the
time when I found myself living in London with my dear daughter
here. She had become familiar to me, when a gracious God restored
my faculties; but, I am quite unable even to say how she had become
familiar. I have no remembrance of the process.”

Mr. Attorney-General sat down, and the father and daughter sat down
together.

A singular circumstance then arose in the case. The object in hand being
to show that the prisoner went down, with some fellow-plotter untracked,
in the Dover mail on that Friday night in November five years ago, and
got out of the mail in the night, as a blind, at a place where he did
not remain, but from which he travelled back some dozen miles or more,
to a garrison and dockyard, and there collected information; a witness
was called to identify him as having been at the precise time required,
in the coffee-room of an hotel in that garrison-and-dockyard town,
waiting for another person. The prisoner's counsel was cross-examining
this witness with no result, except that he had never seen the prisoner
on any other occasion, when the wigged gentleman who had all this time
been looking at the ceiling of the court, wrote a word or two on a
little piece of paper, screwed it up, and tossed it to him. Opening
this piece of paper in the next pause, the counsel looked with great
attention and curiosity at the prisoner.

“You say again you are quite sure that it was the prisoner?”

The witness was quite sure.

“Did you ever see anybody very like the prisoner?”

Not so like (the witness said) as that he could be mistaken.

“Look well upon that gentleman, my learned friend there,” pointing
to him who had tossed the paper over, “and then look well upon the
prisoner. How say you? Are they very like each other?”

Allowing for my learned friend's appearance being careless and slovenly
if not debauched, they were sufficiently like each other to surprise,
not only the witness, but everybody present, when they were thus brought
into comparison. My Lord being prayed to bid my learned friend lay aside
his wig, and giving no very gracious consent, the likeness became
much more remarkable. My Lord inquired of Mr. Stryver (the prisoner's
counsel), whether they were next to try Mr. Carton (name of my learned
friend) for treason? But, Mr. Stryver replied to my Lord, no; but he
would ask the witness to tell him whether what happened once, might
happen twice; whether he would have been so confident if he had seen
this illustration of his rashness sooner, whether he would be so
confident, having seen it; and more. The upshot of which, was, to smash
this witness like a crockery vessel, and shiver his part of the case to
useless lumber.

Mr. Cruncher had by this time taken quite a lunch of rust off his
fingers in his following of the evidence. He had now to attend while Mr.
Stryver fitted the prisoner's case on the jury, like a compact suit
of clothes; showing them how the patriot, Barsad, was a hired spy and
traitor, an unblushing trafficker in blood, and one of the greatest
scoundrels upon earth since accursed Judas--which he certainly did look
rather like. How the virtuous servant, Cly, was his friend and partner,
and was worthy to be; how the watchful eyes of those forgers and false
swearers had rested on the prisoner as a victim, because some family
affairs in France, he being of French extraction, did require his making
those passages across the Channel--though what those affairs were, a
consideration for others who were near and dear to him, forbade him,
even for his life, to disclose. How the evidence that had been warped
and wrested from the young lady, whose anguish in giving it they
had witnessed, came to nothing, involving the mere little innocent
gallantries and politenesses likely to pass between any young gentleman
and young lady so thrown together;--with the exception of that
reference to George Washington, which was altogether too extravagant and
impossible to be regarded in any other light than as a monstrous joke.
How it would be a weakness in the government to break down in this
attempt to practise for popularity on the lowest national antipathies
and fears, and therefore Mr. Attorney-General had made the most of it;
how, nevertheless, it rested upon nothing, save that vile and infamous
character of evidence too often disfiguring such cases, and of which the
State Trials of this country were full. But, there my Lord interposed
(with as grave a face as if it had not been true), saying that he could
not sit upon that Bench and suffer those allusions.

Mr. Stryver then called his few witnesses, and Mr. Cruncher had next to
attend while Mr. Attorney-General turned the whole suit of clothes Mr.
Stryver had fitted on the jury, inside out; showing how Barsad and
Cly were even a hundred times better than he had thought them, and the
prisoner a hundred times worse. Lastly, came my Lord himself, turning
the suit of clothes, now inside out, now outside in, but on the whole
decidedly trimming and shaping them into grave-clothes for the prisoner.

And now, the jury turned to consider, and the great flies swarmed again.

Mr. Carton, who had so long sat looking at the ceiling of the court,
changed neither his place nor his attitude, even in this excitement.
While his learned friend, Mr. Stryver, massing his papers before him,
whispered with those who sat near, and from time to time glanced
anxiously at the jury; while all the spectators moved more or less, and
grouped themselves anew; while even my Lord himself arose from his seat,
and slowly paced up and down his platform, not unattended by a suspicion
in the minds of the audience that his state was feverish; this one man
sat leaning back, with his torn gown half off him, his untidy wig put
on just as it had happened to light on his head after its removal, his
hands in his pockets, and his eyes on the ceiling as they had been all
day. Something especially reckless in his demeanour, not only gave him
a disreputable look, but so diminished the strong resemblance he
undoubtedly bore to the prisoner (which his momentary earnestness,
when they were compared together, had strengthened), that many of the
lookers-on, taking note of him now, said to one another they would
hardly have thought the two were so alike. Mr. Cruncher made the
observation to his next neighbour, and added, “I'd hold half a guinea
that _he_ don't get no law-work to do. Don't look like the sort of one
to get any, do he?”

Yet, this Mr. Carton took in more of the details of the scene than he
appeared to take in; for now, when Miss Manette's head dropped upon
her father's breast, he was the first to see it, and to say audibly:
“Officer! look to that young lady. Help the gentleman to take her out.
Don't you see she will fall!”

There was much commiseration for her as she was removed, and much
sympathy with her father. It had evidently been a great distress to
him, to have the days of his imprisonment recalled. He had shown
strong internal agitation when he was questioned, and that pondering or
brooding look which made him old, had been upon him, like a heavy cloud,
ever since. As he passed out, the jury, who had turned back and paused a
moment, spoke, through their foreman.

They were not agreed, and wished to retire. My Lord (perhaps with George
Washington on his mind) showed some surprise that they were not agreed,
but signified his pleasure that they should retire under watch and ward,
and retired himself. The trial had lasted all day, and the lamps in
the court were now being lighted. It began to be rumoured that the
jury would be out a long while. The spectators dropped off to get
refreshment, and the prisoner withdrew to the back of the dock, and sat
down.

Mr. Lorry, who had gone out when the young lady and her father went out,
now reappeared, and beckoned to Jerry: who, in the slackened interest,
could easily get near him.

“Jerry, if you wish to take something to eat, you can. But, keep in the
way. You will be sure to hear when the jury come in. Don't be a moment
behind them, for I want you to take the verdict back to the bank. You
are the quickest messenger I know, and will get to Temple Bar long
before I can.”

Jerry had just enough forehead to knuckle, and he knuckled it in
acknowledgment of this communication and a shilling. Mr. Carton came up
at the moment, and touched Mr. Lorry on the arm.

“How is the young lady?”

“She is greatly distressed; but her father is comforting her, and she
feels the better for being out of court.”

“I'll tell the prisoner so. It won't do for a respectable bank gentleman
like you, to be seen speaking to him publicly, you know.”

Mr. Lorry reddened as if he were conscious of having debated the point
in his mind, and Mr. Carton made his way to the outside of the bar.
The way out of court lay in that direction, and Jerry followed him, all
eyes, ears, and spikes.

“Mr. Darnay!”

The prisoner came forward directly.

“You will naturally be anxious to hear of the witness, Miss Manette. She
will do very well. You have seen the worst of her agitation.”

“I am deeply sorry to have been the cause of it. Could you tell her so
for me, with my fervent acknowledgments?”

“Yes, I could. I will, if you ask it.”

Mr. Carton's manner was so careless as to be almost insolent. He stood,
half turned from the prisoner, lounging with his elbow against the bar.

“I do ask it. Accept my cordial thanks.”

“What,” said Carton, still only half turned towards him, “do you expect,
Mr. Darnay?”

“The worst.”

“It's the wisest thing to expect, and the likeliest. But I think their
withdrawing is in your favour.”

Loitering on the way out of court not being allowed, Jerry heard no
more: but left them--so like each other in feature, so unlike each other
in manner--standing side by side, both reflected in the glass above
them.

An hour and a half limped heavily away in the thief-and-rascal crowded
passages below, even though assisted off with mutton pies and ale.
The hoarse messenger, uncomfortably seated on a form after taking that
refection, had dropped into a doze, when a loud murmur and a rapid tide
of people setting up the stairs that led to the court, carried him along
with them.

“Jerry! Jerry!” Mr. Lorry was already calling at the door when he got
there.

“Here, sir! It's a fight to get back again. Here I am, sir!”

Mr. Lorry handed him a paper through the throng. “Quick! Have you got
it?”

“Yes, sir.”

Hastily written on the paper was the word “ACQUITTED.”

“If you had sent the message, 'Recalled to Life,' again,” muttered
Jerry, as he turned, “I should have known what you meant, this time.”

He had no opportunity of saying, or so much as thinking, anything else,
until he was clear of the Old Bailey; for, the crowd came pouring out
with a vehemence that nearly took him off his legs, and a loud buzz
swept into the street as if the baffled blue-flies were dispersing in
search of other carrion.




IV. Congratulatory


From the dimly-lighted passages of the court, the last sediment of the
human stew that had been boiling there all day, was straining off, when
Doctor Manette, Lucie Manette, his daughter, Mr. Lorry, the solicitor
for the defence, and its counsel, Mr. Stryver, stood gathered round Mr.
Charles Darnay--just released--congratulating him on his escape from
death.

It would have been difficult by a far brighter light, to recognise
in Doctor Manette, intellectual of face and upright of bearing, the
shoemaker of the garret in Paris. Yet, no one could have looked at him
twice, without looking again: even though the opportunity of observation
had not extended to the mournful cadence of his low grave voice, and
to the abstraction that overclouded him fitfully, without any apparent
reason. While one external cause, and that a reference to his long
lingering agony, would always--as on the trial--evoke this condition
from the depths of his soul, it was also in its nature to arise of
itself, and to draw a gloom over him, as incomprehensible to those
unacquainted with his story as if they had seen the shadow of the actual
Bastille thrown upon him by a summer sun, when the substance was three
hundred miles away.

Only his daughter had the power of charming this black brooding from
his mind. She was the golden thread that united him to a Past beyond his
misery, and to a Present beyond his misery: and the sound of her voice,
the light of her face, the touch of her hand, had a strong beneficial
influence with him almost always. Not absolutely always, for she could
recall some occasions on which her power had failed; but they were few
and slight, and she believed them over.

Mr. Darnay had kissed her hand fervently and gratefully, and had turned
to Mr. Stryver, whom he warmly thanked. Mr. Stryver, a man of little
more than thirty, but looking twenty years older than he was, stout,
loud, red, bluff, and free from any drawback of delicacy, had a pushing
way of shouldering himself (morally and physically) into companies and
conversations, that argued well for his shouldering his way up in life.

He still had his wig and gown on, and he said, squaring himself at his
late client to that degree that he squeezed the innocent Mr. Lorry clean
out of the group: “I am glad to have brought you off with honour, Mr.
Darnay. It was an infamous prosecution, grossly infamous; but not the
less likely to succeed on that account.”

“You have laid me under an obligation to you for life--in two senses,”
 said his late client, taking his hand.

“I have done my best for you, Mr. Darnay; and my best is as good as
another man's, I believe.”

It clearly being incumbent on some one to say, “Much better,” Mr. Lorry
said it; perhaps not quite disinterestedly, but with the interested
object of squeezing himself back again.

“You think so?” said Mr. Stryver. “Well! you have been present all day,
and you ought to know. You are a man of business, too.”

“And as such,” quoth Mr. Lorry, whom the counsel learned in the law had
now shouldered back into the group, just as he had previously shouldered
him out of it--“as such I will appeal to Doctor Manette, to break up
this conference and order us all to our homes. Miss Lucie looks ill, Mr.
Darnay has had a terrible day, we are worn out.”

“Speak for yourself, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver; “I have a night's work to
do yet. Speak for yourself.”

“I speak for myself,” answered Mr. Lorry, “and for Mr. Darnay, and for
Miss Lucie, and--Miss Lucie, do you not think I may speak for us all?”
 He asked her the question pointedly, and with a glance at her father.

His face had become frozen, as it were, in a very curious look at
Darnay: an intent look, deepening into a frown of dislike and distrust,
not even unmixed with fear. With this strange expression on him his
thoughts had wandered away.

“My father,” said Lucie, softly laying her hand on his.

He slowly shook the shadow off, and turned to her.

“Shall we go home, my father?”

With a long breath, he answered “Yes.”

The friends of the acquitted prisoner had dispersed, under the
impression--which he himself had originated--that he would not be
released that night. The lights were nearly all extinguished in the
passages, the iron gates were being closed with a jar and a rattle,
and the dismal place was deserted until to-morrow morning's interest of
gallows, pillory, whipping-post, and branding-iron, should repeople it.
Walking between her father and Mr. Darnay, Lucie Manette passed into
the open air. A hackney-coach was called, and the father and daughter
departed in it.

Mr. Stryver had left them in the passages, to shoulder his way back
to the robing-room. Another person, who had not joined the group, or
interchanged a word with any one of them, but who had been leaning
against the wall where its shadow was darkest, had silently strolled
out after the rest, and had looked on until the coach drove away. He now
stepped up to where Mr. Lorry and Mr. Darnay stood upon the pavement.

“So, Mr. Lorry! Men of business may speak to Mr. Darnay now?”

Nobody had made any acknowledgment of Mr. Carton's part in the day's
proceedings; nobody had known of it. He was unrobed, and was none the
better for it in appearance.

“If you knew what a conflict goes on in the business mind, when the
business mind is divided between good-natured impulse and business
appearances, you would be amused, Mr. Darnay.”

Mr. Lorry reddened, and said, warmly, “You have mentioned that before,
sir. We men of business, who serve a House, are not our own masters. We
have to think of the House more than ourselves.”

“_I_ know, _I_ know,” rejoined Mr. Carton, carelessly. “Don't be
nettled, Mr. Lorry. You are as good as another, I have no doubt: better,
I dare say.”

“And indeed, sir,” pursued Mr. Lorry, not minding him, “I really don't
know what you have to do with the matter. If you'll excuse me, as very
much your elder, for saying so, I really don't know that it is your
business.”

“Business! Bless you, _I_ have no business,” said Mr. Carton.

“It is a pity you have not, sir.”

“I think so, too.”

“If you had,” pursued Mr. Lorry, “perhaps you would attend to it.”

“Lord love you, no!--I shouldn't,” said Mr. Carton.

“Well, sir!” cried Mr. Lorry, thoroughly heated by his indifference,
“business is a very good thing, and a very respectable thing. And, sir,
if business imposes its restraints and its silences and impediments, Mr.
Darnay as a young gentleman of generosity knows how to make allowance
for that circumstance. Mr. Darnay, good night, God bless you, sir!
I hope you have been this day preserved for a prosperous and happy
life.--Chair there!”

Perhaps a little angry with himself, as well as with the barrister, Mr.
Lorry bustled into the chair, and was carried off to Tellson's. Carton,
who smelt of port wine, and did not appear to be quite sober, laughed
then, and turned to Darnay:

“This is a strange chance that throws you and me together. This must
be a strange night to you, standing alone here with your counterpart on
these street stones?”

“I hardly seem yet,” returned Charles Darnay, “to belong to this world
again.”

“I don't wonder at it; it's not so long since you were pretty far
advanced on your way to another. You speak faintly.”

“I begin to think I _am_ faint.”

“Then why the devil don't you dine? I dined, myself, while those
numskulls were deliberating which world you should belong to--this, or
some other. Let me show you the nearest tavern to dine well at.”

Drawing his arm through his own, he took him down Ludgate-hill to
Fleet-street, and so, up a covered way, into a tavern. Here, they were
shown into a little room, where Charles Darnay was soon recruiting
his strength with a good plain dinner and good wine: while Carton sat
opposite to him at the same table, with his separate bottle of port
before him, and his fully half-insolent manner upon him.

“Do you feel, yet, that you belong to this terrestrial scheme again, Mr.
Darnay?”

“I am frightfully confused regarding time and place; but I am so far
mended as to feel that.”

“It must be an immense satisfaction!”

He said it bitterly, and filled up his glass again: which was a large
one.

“As to me, the greatest desire I have, is to forget that I belong to it.
It has no good in it for me--except wine like this--nor I for it. So we
are not much alike in that particular. Indeed, I begin to think we are
not much alike in any particular, you and I.”

Confused by the emotion of the day, and feeling his being there with
this Double of coarse deportment, to be like a dream, Charles Darnay was
at a loss how to answer; finally, answered not at all.

“Now your dinner is done,” Carton presently said, “why don't you call a
health, Mr. Darnay; why don't you give your toast?”

“What health? What toast?”

“Why, it's on the tip of your tongue. It ought to be, it must be, I'll
swear it's there.”

“Miss Manette, then!”

“Miss Manette, then!”

Looking his companion full in the face while he drank the toast, Carton
flung his glass over his shoulder against the wall, where it shivered to
pieces; then, rang the bell, and ordered in another.

“That's a fair young lady to hand to a coach in the dark, Mr. Darnay!”
 he said, filling his new goblet.

A slight frown and a laconic “Yes,” were the answer.

“That's a fair young lady to be pitied by and wept for by! How does it
feel? Is it worth being tried for one's life, to be the object of such
sympathy and compassion, Mr. Darnay?”

Again Darnay answered not a word.

“She was mightily pleased to have your message, when I gave it her. Not
that she showed she was pleased, but I suppose she was.”

The allusion served as a timely reminder to Darnay that this
disagreeable companion had, of his own free will, assisted him in the
strait of the day. He turned the dialogue to that point, and thanked him
for it.

“I neither want any thanks, nor merit any,” was the careless rejoinder.
“It was nothing to do, in the first place; and I don't know why I did
it, in the second. Mr. Darnay, let me ask you a question.”

“Willingly, and a small return for your good offices.”

“Do you think I particularly like you?”

“Really, Mr. Carton,” returned the other, oddly disconcerted, “I have
not asked myself the question.”

“But ask yourself the question now.”

“You have acted as if you do; but I don't think you do.”

“_I_ don't think I do,” said Carton. “I begin to have a very good
opinion of your understanding.”

“Nevertheless,” pursued Darnay, rising to ring the bell, “there is
nothing in that, I hope, to prevent my calling the reckoning, and our
parting without ill-blood on either side.”

Carton rejoining, “Nothing in life!” Darnay rang. “Do you call the whole
reckoning?” said Carton. On his answering in the affirmative, “Then
bring me another pint of this same wine, drawer, and come and wake me at
ten.”

The bill being paid, Charles Darnay rose and wished him good night.
Without returning the wish, Carton rose too, with something of a threat
of defiance in his manner, and said, “A last word, Mr. Darnay: you think
I am drunk?”

“I think you have been drinking, Mr. Carton.”

“Think? You know I have been drinking.”

“Since I must say so, I know it.”

“Then you shall likewise know why. I am a disappointed drudge, sir. I
care for no man on earth, and no man on earth cares for me.”

“Much to be regretted. You might have used your talents better.”

“May be so, Mr. Darnay; may be not. Don't let your sober face elate you,
however; you don't know what it may come to. Good night!”

When he was left alone, this strange being took up a candle, went to a
glass that hung against the wall, and surveyed himself minutely in it.

“Do you particularly like the man?” he muttered, at his own image; “why
should you particularly like a man who resembles you? There is nothing
in you to like; you know that. Ah, confound you! What a change you have
made in yourself! A good reason for taking to a man, that he shows you
what you have fallen away from, and what you might have been! Change
places with him, and would you have been looked at by those blue eyes as
he was, and commiserated by that agitated face as he was? Come on, and
have it out in plain words! You hate the fellow.”

He resorted to his pint of wine for consolation, drank it all in a few
minutes, and fell asleep on his arms, with his hair straggling over the
table, and a long winding-sheet in the candle dripping down upon him.




V. The Jackal


Those were drinking days, and most men drank hard. So very great is
the improvement Time has brought about in such habits, that a moderate
statement of the quantity of wine and punch which one man would swallow
in the course of a night, without any detriment to his reputation as a
perfect gentleman, would seem, in these days, a ridiculous exaggeration.
The learned profession of the law was certainly not behind any other
learned profession in its Bacchanalian propensities; neither was Mr.
Stryver, already fast shouldering his way to a large and lucrative
practice, behind his compeers in this particular, any more than in the
drier parts of the legal race.

A favourite at the Old Bailey, and eke at the Sessions, Mr. Stryver had
begun cautiously to hew away the lower staves of the ladder on which
he mounted. Sessions and Old Bailey had now to summon their favourite,
specially, to their longing arms; and shouldering itself towards the
visage of the Lord Chief Justice in the Court of King's Bench, the
florid countenance of Mr. Stryver might be daily seen, bursting out of
the bed of wigs, like a great sunflower pushing its way at the sun from
among a rank garden-full of flaring companions.

It had once been noted at the Bar, that while Mr. Stryver was a glib
man, and an unscrupulous, and a ready, and a bold, he had not that
faculty of extracting the essence from a heap of statements, which is
among the most striking and necessary of the advocate's accomplishments.
But, a remarkable improvement came upon him as to this. The more
business he got, the greater his power seemed to grow of getting at its
pith and marrow; and however late at night he sat carousing with Sydney
Carton, he always had his points at his fingers' ends in the morning.

Sydney Carton, idlest and most unpromising of men, was Stryver's great
ally. What the two drank together, between Hilary Term and Michaelmas,
might have floated a king's ship. Stryver never had a case in hand,
anywhere, but Carton was there, with his hands in his pockets, staring
at the ceiling of the court; they went the same Circuit, and even there
they prolonged their usual orgies late into the night, and Carton was
rumoured to be seen at broad day, going home stealthily and unsteadily
to his lodgings, like a dissipated cat. At last, it began to get about,
among such as were interested in the matter, that although Sydney Carton
would never be a lion, he was an amazingly good jackal, and that he
rendered suit and service to Stryver in that humble capacity.

“Ten o'clock, sir,” said the man at the tavern, whom he had charged to
wake him--“ten o'clock, sir.”

“_What's_ the matter?”

“Ten o'clock, sir.”

“What do you mean? Ten o'clock at night?”

“Yes, sir. Your honour told me to call you.”

“Oh! I remember. Very well, very well.”

After a few dull efforts to get to sleep again, which the man
dexterously combated by stirring the fire continuously for five minutes,
he got up, tossed his hat on, and walked out. He turned into the Temple,
and, having revived himself by twice pacing the pavements of King's
Bench-walk and Paper-buildings, turned into the Stryver chambers.

The Stryver clerk, who never assisted at these conferences, had gone
home, and the Stryver principal opened the door. He had his slippers on,
and a loose bed-gown, and his throat was bare for his greater ease. He
had that rather wild, strained, seared marking about the eyes, which
may be observed in all free livers of his class, from the portrait of
Jeffries downward, and which can be traced, under various disguises of
Art, through the portraits of every Drinking Age.

“You are a little late, Memory,” said Stryver.

“About the usual time; it may be a quarter of an hour later.”

They went into a dingy room lined with books and littered with papers,
where there was a blazing fire. A kettle steamed upon the hob, and in
the midst of the wreck of papers a table shone, with plenty of wine upon
it, and brandy, and rum, and sugar, and lemons.

“You have had your bottle, I perceive, Sydney.”

“Two to-night, I think. I have been dining with the day's client; or
seeing him dine--it's all one!”

“That was a rare point, Sydney, that you brought to bear upon the
identification. How did you come by it? When did it strike you?”

“I thought he was rather a handsome fellow, and I thought I should have
been much the same sort of fellow, if I had had any luck.”

Mr. Stryver laughed till he shook his precocious paunch.

“You and your luck, Sydney! Get to work, get to work.”

Sullenly enough, the jackal loosened his dress, went into an adjoining
room, and came back with a large jug of cold water, a basin, and a towel
or two. Steeping the towels in the water, and partially wringing them
out, he folded them on his head in a manner hideous to behold, sat down
at the table, and said, “Now I am ready!”

“Not much boiling down to be done to-night, Memory,” said Mr. Stryver,
gaily, as he looked among his papers.

“How much?”

“Only two sets of them.”

“Give me the worst first.”

“There they are, Sydney. Fire away!”

The lion then composed himself on his back on a sofa on one side of the
drinking-table, while the jackal sat at his own paper-bestrewn table
proper, on the other side of it, with the bottles and glasses ready to
his hand. Both resorted to the drinking-table without stint, but each in
a different way; the lion for the most part reclining with his hands in
his waistband, looking at the fire, or occasionally flirting with some
lighter document; the jackal, with knitted brows and intent face,
so deep in his task, that his eyes did not even follow the hand he
stretched out for his glass--which often groped about, for a minute or
more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or three times, the
matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on
him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the
jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp headgear as
no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious
gravity.

At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion, and
proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and caution,
made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal
assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his
hands in his waistband again, and lay down to meditate. The jackal then
invigorated himself with a bumper for his throttle, and a fresh application
to his head, and applied himself to the collection of a second meal;
this was administered to the lion in the same manner, and was not
disposed of until the clocks struck three in the morning.

“And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,” said Mr.
Stryver.

The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming
again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.

“You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses
to-day. Every question told.”

“I always am sound; am I not?”

“I don't gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to
it and smooth it again.”

With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.

“The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,” said Stryver, nodding
his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, “the
old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and
now in despondency!”

“Ah!” returned the other, sighing: “yes! The same Sydney, with the same
luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own.”

“And why not?”

“God knows. It was my way, I suppose.”

He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before
him, looking at the fire.

“Carton,” said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying air,
as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour
was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney
Carton of old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into it, “your way
is, and always was, a lame way. You summon no energy and purpose. Look
at me.”

“Oh, botheration!” returned Sydney, with a lighter and more
good-humoured laugh, “don't _you_ be moral!”

“How have I done what I have done?” said Stryver; “how do I do what I
do?”

“Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it's not worth
your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to
do, you do. You were always in the front rank, and I was always behind.”

“I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?”

“I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,” said
Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.

“Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury,”
 pursued Carton, “you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into
mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the Student-Quarter of Paris,
picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that we
didn't get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always
nowhere.”

“And whose fault was that?”

“Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were always
driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless degree
that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose. It's a gloomy
thing, however, to talk about one's own past, with the day breaking.
Turn me in some other direction before I go.”

“Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,” said Stryver, holding up
his glass. “Are you turned in a pleasant direction?”

Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.

“Pretty witness,” he muttered, looking down into his glass. “I have had
enough of witnesses to-day and to-night; who's your pretty witness?”

“The picturesque doctor's daughter, Miss Manette.”

“_She_ pretty?”

“Is she not?”

“No.”

“Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!”

“Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a judge
of beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!”

“Do you know, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, looking at him with sharp eyes,
and slowly drawing a hand across his florid face: “do you know, I rather
thought, at the time, that you sympathised with the golden-haired doll,
and were quick to see what happened to the golden-haired doll?”

“Quick to see what happened! If a girl, doll or no doll, swoons within a
yard or two of a man's nose, he can see it without a perspective-glass.
I pledge you, but I deny the beauty. And now I'll have no more drink;
I'll get to bed.”

When his host followed him out on the staircase with a candle, to light
him down the stairs, the day was coldly looking in through its grimy
windows. When he got out of the house, the air was cold and sad, the
dull sky overcast, the river dark and dim, the whole scene like a
lifeless desert. And wreaths of dust were spinning round and round
before the morning blast, as if the desert-sand had risen far away, and
the first spray of it in its advance had begun to overwhelm the city.

Waste forces within him, and a desert all around, this man stood still
on his way across a silent terrace, and saw for a moment, lying in the
wilderness before him, a mirage of honourable ambition, self-denial, and
perseverance. In the fair city of this vision, there were airy galleries
from which the loves and graces looked upon him, gardens in which the
fruits of life hung ripening, waters of Hope that sparkled in his sight.
A moment, and it was gone. Climbing to a high chamber in a well of
houses, he threw himself down in his clothes on a neglected bed, and its
pillow was wet with wasted tears.

Sadly, sadly, the sun rose; it rose upon no sadder sight than the man of
good abilities and good emotions, incapable of their directed exercise,
incapable of his own help and his own happiness, sensible of the blight
on him, and resigning himself to let it eat him away.




VI. Hundreds of People


The quiet lodgings of Doctor Manette were in a quiet street-corner not
far from Soho-square. On the afternoon of a certain fine Sunday when the
waves of four months had rolled over the trial for treason, and carried
it, as to the public interest and memory, far out to sea, Mr. Jarvis
Lorry walked along the sunny streets from Clerkenwell where he lived,
on his way to dine with the Doctor. After several relapses into
business-absorption, Mr. Lorry had become the Doctor's friend, and the
quiet street-corner was the sunny part of his life.

On this certain fine Sunday, Mr. Lorry walked towards Soho, early in
the afternoon, for three reasons of habit. Firstly, because, on fine
Sundays, he often walked out, before dinner, with the Doctor and Lucie;
secondly, because, on unfavourable Sundays, he was accustomed to be with
them as the family friend, talking, reading, looking out of window, and
generally getting through the day; thirdly, because he happened to have
his own little shrewd doubts to solve, and knew how the ways of the
Doctor's household pointed to that time as a likely time for solving
them.

A quainter corner than the corner where the Doctor lived, was not to be
found in London. There was no way through it, and the front windows of
the Doctor's lodgings commanded a pleasant little vista of street that
had a congenial air of retirement on it. There were few buildings then,
north of the Oxford-road, and forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers
grew, and the hawthorn blossomed, in the now vanished fields. As a
consequence, country airs circulated in Soho with vigorous freedom,
instead of languishing into the parish like stray paupers without a
settlement; and there was many a good south wall, not far off, on which
the peaches ripened in their season.

The summer light struck into the corner brilliantly in the earlier part
of the day; but, when the streets grew hot, the corner was in shadow,
though not in shadow so remote but that you could see beyond it into a
glare of brightness. It was a cool spot, staid but cheerful, a wonderful
place for echoes, and a very harbour from the raging streets.

There ought to have been a tranquil bark in such an anchorage, and
there was. The Doctor occupied two floors of a large stiff house, where
several callings purported to be pursued by day, but whereof little was
audible any day, and which was shunned by all of them at night. In
a building at the back, attainable by a courtyard where a plane-tree
rustled its green leaves, church-organs claimed to be made, and silver
to be chased, and likewise gold to be beaten by some mysterious giant
who had a golden arm starting out of the wall of the front hall--as if
he had beaten himself precious, and menaced a similar conversion of all
visitors. Very little of these trades, or of a lonely lodger rumoured
to live up-stairs, or of a dim coach-trimming maker asserted to have
a counting-house below, was ever heard or seen. Occasionally, a stray
workman putting his coat on, traversed the hall, or a stranger peered
about there, or a distant clink was heard across the courtyard, or a
thump from the golden giant. These, however, were only the exceptions
required to prove the rule that the sparrows in the plane-tree behind
the house, and the echoes in the corner before it, had their own way
from Sunday morning unto Saturday night.

Doctor Manette received such patients here as his old reputation, and
its revival in the floating whispers of his story, brought him.
His scientific knowledge, and his vigilance and skill in conducting
ingenious experiments, brought him otherwise into moderate request, and
he earned as much as he wanted.

These things were within Mr. Jarvis Lorry's knowledge, thoughts, and
notice, when he rang the door-bell of the tranquil house in the corner,
on the fine Sunday afternoon.

“Doctor Manette at home?”

Expected home.

“Miss Lucie at home?”

Expected home.

“Miss Pross at home?”

Possibly at home, but of a certainty impossible for handmaid to
anticipate intentions of Miss Pross, as to admission or denial of the
fact.

“As I am at home myself,” said Mr. Lorry, “I'll go upstairs.”

Although the Doctor's daughter had known nothing of the country of her
birth, she appeared to have innately derived from it that ability to
make much of little means, which is one of its most useful and most
agreeable characteristics. Simple as the furniture was, it was set off
by so many little adornments, of no value but for their taste and fancy,
that its effect was delightful. The disposition of everything in the
rooms, from the largest object to the least; the arrangement of colours,
the elegant variety and contrast obtained by thrift in trifles, by
delicate hands, clear eyes, and good sense; were at once so pleasant in
themselves, and so expressive of their originator, that, as Mr. Lorry
stood looking about him, the very chairs and tables seemed to ask him,
with something of that peculiar expression which he knew so well by this
time, whether he approved?

There were three rooms on a floor, and, the doors by which they
communicated being put open that the air might pass freely through them
all, Mr. Lorry, smilingly observant of that fanciful resemblance which
he detected all around him, walked from one to another. The first was
the best room, and in it were Lucie's birds, and flowers, and books,
and desk, and work-table, and box of water-colours; the second was
the Doctor's consulting-room, used also as the dining-room; the third,
changingly speckled by the rustle of the plane-tree in the yard, was the
Doctor's bedroom, and there, in a corner, stood the disused shoemaker's
bench and tray of tools, much as it had stood on the fifth floor of the
dismal house by the wine-shop, in the suburb of Saint Antoine in Paris.

“I wonder,” said Mr. Lorry, pausing in his looking about, “that he keeps
that reminder of his sufferings about him!”

“And why wonder at that?” was the abrupt inquiry that made him start.

It proceeded from Miss Pross, the wild red woman, strong of hand, whose
acquaintance he had first made at the Royal George Hotel at Dover, and
had since improved.

“I should have thought--” Mr. Lorry began.

“Pooh! You'd have thought!” said Miss Pross; and Mr. Lorry left off.

“How do you do?” inquired that lady then--sharply, and yet as if to
express that she bore him no malice.

“I am pretty well, I thank you,” answered Mr. Lorry, with meekness; “how
are you?”

“Nothing to boast of,” said Miss Pross.

“Indeed?”

“Ah! indeed!” said Miss Pross. “I am very much put out about my
Ladybird.”

“Indeed?”

“For gracious sake say something else besides 'indeed,' or you'll
fidget me to death,” said Miss Pross: whose character (dissociated from
stature) was shortness.

“Really, then?” said Mr. Lorry, as an amendment.

“Really, is bad enough,” returned Miss Pross, “but better. Yes, I am
very much put out.”

“May I ask the cause?”

“I don't want dozens of people who are not at all worthy of Ladybird, to
come here looking after her,” said Miss Pross.

“_Do_ dozens come for that purpose?”

“Hundreds,” said Miss Pross.

It was characteristic of this lady (as of some other people before her
time and since) that whenever her original proposition was questioned,
she exaggerated it.

“Dear me!” said Mr. Lorry, as the safest remark he could think of.

“I have lived with the darling--or the darling has lived with me, and
paid me for it; which she certainly should never have done, you may take
your affidavit, if I could have afforded to keep either myself or her
for nothing--since she was ten years old. And it's really very hard,”
 said Miss Pross.

Not seeing with precision what was very hard, Mr. Lorry shook his head;
using that important part of himself as a sort of fairy cloak that would
fit anything.

“All sorts of people who are not in the least degree worthy of the pet,
are always turning up,” said Miss Pross. “When you began it--”

“_I_ began it, Miss Pross?”

“Didn't you? Who brought her father to life?”

“Oh! If _that_ was beginning it--” said Mr. Lorry.

“It wasn't ending it, I suppose? I say, when you began it, it was hard
enough; not that I have any fault to find with Doctor Manette, except
that he is not worthy of such a daughter, which is no imputation on
him, for it was not to be expected that anybody should be, under any
circumstances. But it really is doubly and trebly hard to have crowds
and multitudes of people turning up after him (I could have forgiven
him), to take Ladybird's affections away from me.”

Mr. Lorry knew Miss Pross to be very jealous, but he also knew her by
this time to be, beneath the service of her eccentricity, one of those
unselfish creatures--found only among women--who will, for pure love and
admiration, bind themselves willing slaves, to youth when they have lost
it, to beauty that they never had, to accomplishments that they were
never fortunate enough to gain, to bright hopes that never shone upon
their own sombre lives. He knew enough of the world to know that there
is nothing in it better than the faithful service of the heart; so
rendered and so free from any mercenary taint, he had such an exalted
respect for it, that in the retributive arrangements made by his own
mind--we all make such arrangements, more or less--he stationed Miss
Pross much nearer to the lower Angels than many ladies immeasurably
better got up both by Nature and Art, who had balances at Tellson's.

“There never was, nor will be, but one man worthy of Ladybird,” said
Miss Pross; “and that was my brother Solomon, if he hadn't made a
mistake in life.”

Here again: Mr. Lorry's inquiries into Miss Pross's personal history had
established the fact that her brother Solomon was a heartless scoundrel
who had stripped her of everything she possessed, as a stake to
speculate with, and had abandoned her in her poverty for evermore, with
no touch of compunction. Miss Pross's fidelity of belief in Solomon
(deducting a mere trifle for this slight mistake) was quite a serious
matter with Mr. Lorry, and had its weight in his good opinion of her.

“As we happen to be alone for the moment, and are both people of
business,” he said, when they had got back to the drawing-room and had
sat down there in friendly relations, “let me ask you--does the Doctor,
in talking with Lucie, never refer to the shoemaking time, yet?”

“Never.”

“And yet keeps that bench and those tools beside him?”

“Ah!” returned Miss Pross, shaking her head. “But I don't say he don't
refer to it within himself.”

“Do you believe that he thinks of it much?”

“I do,” said Miss Pross.

“Do you imagine--” Mr. Lorry had begun, when Miss Pross took him up
short with:

“Never imagine anything. Have no imagination at all.”

“I stand corrected; do you suppose--you go so far as to suppose,
sometimes?”

“Now and then,” said Miss Pross.

“Do you suppose,” Mr. Lorry went on, with a laughing twinkle in his
bright eye, as it looked kindly at her, “that Doctor Manette has any
theory of his own, preserved through all those years, relative to
the cause of his being so oppressed; perhaps, even to the name of his
oppressor?”

“I don't suppose anything about it but what Ladybird tells me.”

“And that is--?”

“That she thinks he has.”

“Now don't be angry at my asking all these questions; because I am a
mere dull man of business, and you are a woman of business.”

“Dull?” Miss Pross inquired, with placidity.

Rather wishing his modest adjective away, Mr. Lorry replied, “No, no,
no. Surely not. To return to business:--Is it not remarkable that Doctor
Manette, unquestionably innocent of any crime as we are all well assured
he is, should never touch upon that question? I will not say with me,
though he had business relations with me many years ago, and we are now
intimate; I will say with the fair daughter to whom he is so devotedly
attached, and who is so devotedly attached to him? Believe me, Miss
Pross, I don't approach the topic with you, out of curiosity, but out of
zealous interest.”

“Well! To the best of my understanding, and bad's the best, you'll tell
me,” said Miss Pross, softened by the tone of the apology, “he is afraid
of the whole subject.”

“Afraid?”

“It's plain enough, I should think, why he may be. It's a dreadful
remembrance. Besides that, his loss of himself grew out of it. Not
knowing how he lost himself, or how he recovered himself, he may never
feel certain of not losing himself again. That alone wouldn't make the
subject pleasant, I should think.”

It was a profounder remark than Mr. Lorry had looked for. “True,” said
he, “and fearful to reflect upon. Yet, a doubt lurks in my mind, Miss
Pross, whether it is good for Doctor Manette to have that suppression
always shut up within him. Indeed, it is this doubt and the uneasiness
it sometimes causes me that has led me to our present confidence.”

“Can't be helped,” said Miss Pross, shaking her head. “Touch that
string, and he instantly changes for the worse. Better leave it alone.
In short, must leave it alone, like or no like. Sometimes, he gets up in
the dead of the night, and will be heard, by us overhead there, walking
up and down, walking up and down, in his room. Ladybird has learnt to
know then that his mind is walking up and down, walking up and down, in
his old prison. She hurries to him, and they go on together, walking up
and down, walking up and down, until he is composed. But he never says
a word of the true reason of his restlessness, to her, and she finds it
best not to hint at it to him. In silence they go walking up and down
together, walking up and down together, till her love and company have
brought him to himself.”

Notwithstanding Miss Pross's denial of her own imagination, there was a
perception of the pain of being monotonously haunted by one sad idea,
in her repetition of the phrase, walking up and down, which testified to
her possessing such a thing.

The corner has been mentioned as a wonderful corner for echoes; it
had begun to echo so resoundingly to the tread of coming feet, that it
seemed as though the very mention of that weary pacing to and fro had
set it going.

“Here they are!” said Miss Pross, rising to break up the conference;
“and now we shall have hundreds of people pretty soon!”

It was such a curious corner in its acoustical properties, such a
peculiar Ear of a place, that as Mr. Lorry stood at the open window,
looking for the father and daughter whose steps he heard, he fancied
they would never approach. Not only would the echoes die away, as though
the steps had gone; but, echoes of other steps that never came would be
heard in their stead, and would die away for good when they seemed close
at hand. However, father and daughter did at last appear, and Miss Pross
was ready at the street door to receive them.

Miss Pross was a pleasant sight, albeit wild, and red, and grim, taking
off her darling's bonnet when she came up-stairs, and touching it up
with the ends of her handkerchief, and blowing the dust off it, and
folding her mantle ready for laying by, and smoothing her rich hair with
as much pride as she could possibly have taken in her own hair if she
had been the vainest and handsomest of women. Her darling was a pleasant
sight too, embracing her and thanking her, and protesting against
her taking so much trouble for her--which last she only dared to do
playfully, or Miss Pross, sorely hurt, would have retired to her own
chamber and cried. The Doctor was a pleasant sight too, looking on at
them, and telling Miss Pross how she spoilt Lucie, in accents and with
eyes that had as much spoiling in them as Miss Pross had, and would
have had more if it were possible. Mr. Lorry was a pleasant sight too,
beaming at all this in his little wig, and thanking his bachelor
stars for having lighted him in his declining years to a Home. But, no
Hundreds of people came to see the sights, and Mr. Lorry looked in vain
for the fulfilment of Miss Pross's prediction.

Dinner-time, and still no Hundreds of people. In the arrangements of
the little household, Miss Pross took charge of the lower regions, and
always acquitted herself marvellously. Her dinners, of a very modest
quality, were so well cooked and so well served, and so neat in their
contrivances, half English and half French, that nothing could be
better. Miss Pross's friendship being of the thoroughly practical
kind, she had ravaged Soho and the adjacent provinces, in search of
impoverished French, who, tempted by shillings and half-crowns, would
impart culinary mysteries to her. From these decayed sons and daughters
of Gaul, she had acquired such wonderful arts, that the woman and girl
who formed the staff of domestics regarded her as quite a Sorceress,
or Cinderella's Godmother: who would send out for a fowl, a rabbit,
a vegetable or two from the garden, and change them into anything she
pleased.

On Sundays, Miss Pross dined at the Doctor's table, but on other days
persisted in taking her meals at unknown periods, either in the lower
regions, or in her own room on the second floor--a blue chamber, to
which no one but her Ladybird ever gained admittance. On this occasion,
Miss Pross, responding to Ladybird's pleasant face and pleasant efforts
to please her, unbent exceedingly; so the dinner was very pleasant, too.

It was an oppressive day, and, after dinner, Lucie proposed that the
wine should be carried out under the plane-tree, and they should sit
there in the air. As everything turned upon her, and revolved about her,
they went out under the plane-tree, and she carried the wine down for
the special benefit of Mr. Lorry. She had installed herself, some
time before, as Mr. Lorry's cup-bearer; and while they sat under the
plane-tree, talking, she kept his glass replenished. Mysterious backs
and ends of houses peeped at them as they talked, and the plane-tree
whispered to them in its own way above their heads.

Still, the Hundreds of people did not present themselves. Mr. Darnay
presented himself while they were sitting under the plane-tree, but he
was only One.

Doctor Manette received him kindly, and so did Lucie. But, Miss Pross
suddenly became afflicted with a twitching in the head and body, and
retired into the house. She was not unfrequently the victim of this
disorder, and she called it, in familiar conversation, “a fit of the
jerks.”

The Doctor was in his best condition, and looked specially young. The
resemblance between him and Lucie was very strong at such times, and as
they sat side by side, she leaning on his shoulder, and he resting
his arm on the back of her chair, it was very agreeable to trace the
likeness.

He had been talking all day, on many subjects, and with unusual
vivacity. “Pray, Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Darnay, as they sat under the
plane-tree--and he said it in the natural pursuit of the topic in hand,
which happened to be the old buildings of London--“have you seen much of
the Tower?”

“Lucie and I have been there; but only casually. We have seen enough of
it, to know that it teems with interest; little more.”

“_I_ have been there, as you remember,” said Darnay, with a smile,
though reddening a little angrily, “in another character, and not in a
character that gives facilities for seeing much of it. They told me a
curious thing when I was there.”

“What was that?” Lucie asked.

“In making some alterations, the workmen came upon an old dungeon, which
had been, for many years, built up and forgotten. Every stone of
its inner wall was covered by inscriptions which had been carved by
prisoners--dates, names, complaints, and prayers. Upon a corner stone
in an angle of the wall, one prisoner, who seemed to have gone to
execution, had cut as his last work, three letters. They were done with
some very poor instrument, and hurriedly, with an unsteady hand.
At first, they were read as D. I. C.; but, on being more carefully
examined, the last letter was found to be G. There was no record or
legend of any prisoner with those initials, and many fruitless guesses
were made what the name could have been. At length, it was suggested
that the letters were not initials, but the complete word, DIG. The
floor was examined very carefully under the inscription, and, in the
earth beneath a stone, or tile, or some fragment of paving, were found
the ashes of a paper, mingled with the ashes of a small leathern case
or bag. What the unknown prisoner had written will never be read, but he
had written something, and hidden it away to keep it from the gaoler.”

“My father,” exclaimed Lucie, “you are ill!”

He had suddenly started up, with his hand to his head. His manner and
his look quite terrified them all.

“No, my dear, not ill. There are large drops of rain falling, and they
made me start. We had better go in.”

He recovered himself almost instantly. Rain was really falling in large
drops, and he showed the back of his hand with rain-drops on it. But, he
said not a single word in reference to the discovery that had been told
of, and, as they went into the house, the business eye of Mr. Lorry
either detected, or fancied it detected, on his face, as it turned
towards Charles Darnay, the same singular look that had been upon it
when it turned towards him in the passages of the Court House.

He recovered himself so quickly, however, that Mr. Lorry had doubts of
his business eye. The arm of the golden giant in the hall was not more
steady than he was, when he stopped under it to remark to them that he
was not yet proof against slight surprises (if he ever would be), and
that the rain had startled him.

Tea-time, and Miss Pross making tea, with another fit of the jerks upon
her, and yet no Hundreds of people. Mr. Carton had lounged in, but he
made only Two.

The night was so very sultry, that although they sat with doors and
windows open, they were overpowered by heat. When the tea-table was
done with, they all moved to one of the windows, and looked out into the
heavy twilight. Lucie sat by her father; Darnay sat beside her; Carton
leaned against a window. The curtains were long and white, and some of
the thunder-gusts that whirled into the corner, caught them up to the
ceiling, and waved them like spectral wings.

“The rain-drops are still falling, large, heavy, and few,” said Doctor
Manette. “It comes slowly.”

“It comes surely,” said Carton.

They spoke low, as people watching and waiting mostly do; as people in a
dark room, watching and waiting for Lightning, always do.

There was a great hurry in the streets of people speeding away to
get shelter before the storm broke; the wonderful corner for echoes
resounded with the echoes of footsteps coming and going, yet not a
footstep was there.

“A multitude of people, and yet a solitude!” said Darnay, when they had
listened for a while.

“Is it not impressive, Mr. Darnay?” asked Lucie. “Sometimes, I have
sat here of an evening, until I have fancied--but even the shade of
a foolish fancy makes me shudder to-night, when all is so black and
solemn--”

“Let us shudder too. We may know what it is.”

“It will seem nothing to you. Such whims are only impressive as we
originate them, I think; they are not to be communicated. I have
sometimes sat alone here of an evening, listening, until I have made
the echoes out to be the echoes of all the footsteps that are coming
by-and-bye into our lives.”

“There is a great crowd coming one day into our lives, if that be so,”
 Sydney Carton struck in, in his moody way.

The footsteps were incessant, and the hurry of them became more and more
rapid. The corner echoed and re-echoed with the tread of feet; some,
as it seemed, under the windows; some, as it seemed, in the room; some
coming, some going, some breaking off, some stopping altogether; all in
the distant streets, and not one within sight.

“Are all these footsteps destined to come to all of us, Miss Manette, or
are we to divide them among us?”

“I don't know, Mr. Darnay; I told you it was a foolish fancy, but you
asked for it. When I have yielded myself to it, I have been alone, and
then I have imagined them the footsteps of the people who are to come
into my life, and my father's.”

“I take them into mine!” said Carton. “_I_ ask no questions and make no
stipulations. There is a great crowd bearing down upon us, Miss Manette,
and I see them--by the Lightning.” He added the last words, after there
had been a vivid flash which had shown him lounging in the window.

“And I hear them!” he added again, after a peal of thunder. “Here they
come, fast, fierce, and furious!”

It was the rush and roar of rain that he typified, and it stopped him,
for no voice could be heard in it. A memorable storm of thunder and
lightning broke with that sweep of water, and there was not a moment's
interval in crash, and fire, and rain, until after the moon rose at
midnight.

The great bell of Saint Paul's was striking one in the cleared air, when
Mr. Lorry, escorted by Jerry, high-booted and bearing a lantern, set
forth on his return-passage to Clerkenwell. There were solitary patches
of road on the way between Soho and Clerkenwell, and Mr. Lorry, mindful
of foot-pads, always retained Jerry for this service: though it was
usually performed a good two hours earlier.

“What a night it has been! Almost a night, Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry, “to
bring the dead out of their graves.”

“I never see the night myself, master--nor yet I don't expect to--what
would do that,” answered Jerry.

“Good night, Mr. Carton,” said the man of business. “Good night, Mr.
Darnay. Shall we ever see such a night again, together!”

Perhaps. Perhaps, see the great crowd of people with its rush and roar,
bearing down upon them, too.




VII. Monseigneur in Town


Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his
fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in
his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to
the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur
was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many
things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather
rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's chocolate could not so
much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four
strong men besides the Cook.

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the
Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his
pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to
conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried
the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed
the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function;
a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold
watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to
dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high
place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon
his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three
men; he must have died of two.

Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy
and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at
a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so
impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far
more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and
state secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance
for France, as the like always is for all countries similarly
favoured!--always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted
days of the merry Stuart who sold it.

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which
was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go
his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and
particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world
was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original
by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: “The earth and the fulness
thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur.”

Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into
his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of
affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances
public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and
must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances
private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after
generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet
time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could
wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,
poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with
a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer
rooms, much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting superior
mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked
down upon him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and
forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his matrimonial
relations conduced to social morality--was at least the greatest reality
among the personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with
every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could
achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with any
reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not
so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost
equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would
have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have
been anybody's business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;
civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the
worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives;
all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in
pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of
Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which
anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the
score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State,
yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives
passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were
no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies
for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly
patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had
discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the
State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to
root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this
wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has been
since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various
notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies
among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half
of the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among
the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and
appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of
bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far
towards the realisation of the name of mother--there was no such thing
known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,
and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance
upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional
people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that
things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting
them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic
sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves
whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the
spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the
Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other
three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
jargon about “the Centre of Truth:” holding that Man had got out of the
Centre of Truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got
out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of
the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre,
by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much
discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never
became manifest.

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of
Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been
ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally
correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such
delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant
swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would
surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen
of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they
languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells;
and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and
fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and
his devouring hunger far away.

Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all
things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that
was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through
Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals
of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball
descended to the Common Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm, was
required to officiate “frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps,
and white silk stockings.” At the gallows and the wheel--the axe was a
rarity--Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his brother
Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call
him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at
Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year
of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled
hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would
see the very stars out!

Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown
open, and issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and
fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in
body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven--which may have
been one among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never
troubled it.

Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one
happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably
passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of
Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due
course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate
sprites, and was seen no more.

The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,
and the precious little bells went ringing downstairs. There was soon
but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm
and his snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his
way out.

“I devote you,” said this person, stopping at the last door on his way,
and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, “to the Devil!”

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the
dust from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and
with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every
feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose,
beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top
of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little
change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing
colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted
by something like a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of
treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with
attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the
line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much
too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a
handsome face, and a remarkable one.

Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and
drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had
stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been warmer
in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable
to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and
often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were
charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no
check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had
sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age,
that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician
custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a
barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second
time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were
left to get out of their difficulties as they could.

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of
consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage
dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming
before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of
its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its
wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a
number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have
stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded
behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry,
and there were twenty hands at the horses' bridles.

“What has gone wrong?” said Monsieur, calmly looking out.

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of
the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was
down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.

“Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!” said a ragged and submissive man, “it is
a child.”

“Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?”

“Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes.”

The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,
into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly
got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the
Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.

“Killed!” shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at
their length above his head, and staring at him. “Dead!”

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was
nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness
and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the
people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they
remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat
and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes
over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

“It is extraordinary to me,” said he, “that you people cannot take care
of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in
the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give
him that.”

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads
craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The
tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, “Dead!”

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest
made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder,
sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were
stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They
were as silent, however, as the men.

“I know all, I know all,” said the last comer. “Be a brave man, my
Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to
live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour
as happily?”

“You are a philosopher, you there,” said the Marquis, smiling. “How do
they call you?”

“They call me Defarge.”

“Of what trade?”

“Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine.”

“Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine,” said the Marquis,
throwing him another gold coin, “and spend it as you will. The horses
there; are they right?”

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the
Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the
air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing, and had
paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly
disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.

“Hold!” said Monsieur the Marquis. “Hold the horses! Who threw that?”

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a
moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on
the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the
figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.

“You dogs!” said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front,
except as to the spots on his nose: “I would ride over any of you very
willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal
threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he
should be crushed under the wheels.”

So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of
what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not
a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one.
But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the
Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his
contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he
leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word “Go on!”

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick
succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the
Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the
whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats
had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking
on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the
spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through
which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and
bidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle
while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running
of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball--when the one woman who
had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness
of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran
into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule,
time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together
in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all
things ran their course.




VIII. Monseigneur in the Country


A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant.
Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas
and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On
inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent
tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a dejected
disposition to give up, and wither away.

Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been
lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up
a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was
no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was
occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control--the setting
sun.

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it
gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. “It will
die out,” said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, “directly.”

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the
heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down
hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed
quickly; the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow
left when the drag was taken off.

But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village
at the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a
church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a
fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening objects
as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was
coming near home.

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor
tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor
fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All
its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors,
shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the
fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small yieldings of
the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them poor,
were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax
for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be
paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until
the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,
their choice on earth was stated in the prospect--Life on the lowest
terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill;
or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions'
whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as
if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in
his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the
fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him.
He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow
sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the
meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the
truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that
drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before
Monseigneur of the Court--only the difference was, that these faces
drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate--when a grizzled mender
of the roads joined the group.

“Bring me hither that fellow!” said the Marquis to the courier.

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round
to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.

“I passed you on the road?”

“Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road.”

“Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?”

“Monseigneur, it is true.”

“What did you look at, so fixedly?”

“Monseigneur, I looked at the man.”

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the
carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.

“What man, pig? And why look there?”

“Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe--the drag.”

“Who?” demanded the traveller.

“Monseigneur, the man.”

“May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You
know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?”

“Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of
all the days of my life, I never saw him.”

“Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?”

“With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur.
His head hanging over--like this!”

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his
face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered
himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.

“What was he like?”

“Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust,
white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!”

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all
eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur
the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his
conscience.

“Truly, you did well,” said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such
vermin were not to ruffle him, “to see a thief accompanying my carriage,
and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur
Gabelle!”

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary
united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this
examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an
official manner.

“Bah! Go aside!” said Monsieur Gabelle.

“Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village
to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle.”

“Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders.”

“Did he run away, fellow?--where is that Accursed?”

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen
particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some
half-dozen other particular friends promptly hauled him out, and
presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.

“Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?”

“Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as
a person plunges into the river.”

“See to it, Gabelle. Go on!”

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the
wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky
to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or
they might not have been so fortunate.

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the
rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually,
it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many
sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer
gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the
points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the
courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground,
with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor
figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had
studied the figure from the life--his own life, maybe--for it was
dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been
growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She
turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and
presented herself at the carriage-door.

“It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition.”

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,
Monseigneur looked out.

“How, then! What is it? Always petitions!”

“Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester.”

“What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He
cannot pay something?”

“He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead.”

“Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?”

“Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor
grass.”

“Well?”

“Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass?”

“Again, well?”

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate
grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together
with wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door--tenderly,
caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to
feel the appealing touch.

“Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of
want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want.”

“Again, well? Can I feed them?”

“Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don't ask it. My petition is,
that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be placed
over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly
forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I
shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they
are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!
Monseigneur!”

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into
a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far
behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly
diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and
his chateau.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as
the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group
at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid
of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his
man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they
could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled
in little casements; which lights, as the casements darkened, and more
stars came out, seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having
been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over-hanging trees,
was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged
for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door
of his chateau was opened to him.

“Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?”

“Monseigneur, not yet.”




IX. The Gorgon's Head


It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,
with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps of
staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony
business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and
stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in
all directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it, when it was
finished, two centuries ago.

Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau
preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness
to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile
of stable building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the
flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great
door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state, instead of being
in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl's voice there was none,
save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of
those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then
heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a
hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the chase;
grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a
peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord
was angry.

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,
Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up
the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him
to his own private apartment of three rooms: his bed-chamber and two
others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon
the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries
befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country.
The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to
break--the fourteenth Louis--was conspicuous in their rich furniture;
but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old
pages in the history of France.

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round
room, in one of the chateau's four extinguisher-topped towers. A small
lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds
closed, so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of
black, alternating with their broad lines of stone colour.

“My nephew,” said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; “they
said he was not arrived.”

Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.

“Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the
table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour.”

In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his
sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and
he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his
lips, when he put it down.

“What is that?” he calmly asked, looking with attention at the
horizontal lines of black and stone colour.

“Monseigneur? That?”

“Outside the blinds. Open the blinds.”

It was done.

“Well?”

“Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are
here.”

The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into
the vacant darkness, and stood with that blank behind him, looking round
for instructions.

“Good,” said the imperturbable master. “Close them again.”

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was
half way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand,
hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the
front of the chateau.

“Ask who is arrived.”

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind
Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance
rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road.
He had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and
there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came.
He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake
hands.

“You left Paris yesterday, sir?” he said to Monseigneur, as he took his
seat at table.

“Yesterday. And you?”

“I come direct.”

“From London?”

“Yes.”

“You have been a long time coming,” said the Marquis, with a smile.

“On the contrary; I come direct.”

“Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time
intending the journey.”

“I have been detained by”--the nephew stopped a moment in his
answer--“various business.”

“Without doubt,” said the polished uncle.

So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.
When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,
looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a
fine mask, opened a conversation.

“I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that
took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is
a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have
sustained me.”

“Not to death,” said the uncle; “it is not necessary to say, to death.”

“I doubt, sir,” returned the nephew, “whether, if it had carried me to
the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there.”

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight
lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a
graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good
breeding that it was not reassuring.

“Indeed, sir,” pursued the nephew, “for anything I know, you may have
expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious
circumstances that surrounded me.”

“No, no, no,” said the uncle, pleasantly.

“But, however that may be,” resumed the nephew, glancing at him with
deep distrust, “I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,
and would know no scruple as to means.”

“My friend, I told you so,” said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the
two marks. “Do me the favour to recall that I told you so, long ago.”

“I recall it.”

“Thank you,” said the Marquis--very sweetly indeed.

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical
instrument.

“In effect, sir,” pursued the nephew, “I believe it to be at once your
bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in
France here.”

“I do not quite understand,” returned the uncle, sipping his coffee.
“Dare I ask you to explain?”

“I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and had not
been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter de cachet would
have sent me to some fortress indefinitely.”

“It is possible,” said the uncle, with great calmness. “For the honour
of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent.
Pray excuse me!”

“I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before
yesterday was, as usual, a cold one,” observed the nephew.

“I would not say happily, my friend,” returned the uncle, with refined
politeness; “I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence
your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for
yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say,
at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these gentle
aids to the power and honour of families, these slight favours that
might so incommode you, are only to be obtained now by interest
and importunity. They are sought by so many, and they are granted
(comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such
things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right
of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such
dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom),
one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing
some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter--_his_ daughter? We have
lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the
assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as
to say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very
bad!”

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head;
as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a country still
containing himself, that great means of regeneration.

“We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern
time also,” said the nephew, gloomily, “that I believe our name to be
more detested than any name in France.”

“Let us hope so,” said the uncle. “Detestation of the high is the
involuntary homage of the low.”

“There is not,” pursued the nephew, in his former tone, “a face I can
look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any
deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery.”

“A compliment,” said the Marquis, “to the grandeur of the family,
merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.
Hah!” And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly
crossed his legs.

But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at
him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness,
and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer's assumption of
indifference.

“Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear
and slavery, my friend,” observed the Marquis, “will keep the dogs
obedient to the whip, as long as this roof,” looking up to it, “shuts
out the sky.”

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the
chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as
they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to
him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from
the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked rains. As for the roof
he vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new
way--to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead
was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.

“Meanwhile,” said the Marquis, “I will preserve the honour and repose
of the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we
terminate our conference for the night?”

“A moment more.”

“An hour, if you please.”

“Sir,” said the nephew, “we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits
of wrong.”

“_We_ have done wrong?” repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,
and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

“Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account
to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father's time, we did
a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and
our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father's time,
when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin-brother, joint
inheritor, and next successor, from himself?”

“Death has done that!” said the Marquis.

“And has left me,” answered the nephew, “bound to a system that is
frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to
execute the last request of my dear mother's lips, and obey the last
look of my dear mother's eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to
redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain.”

“Seeking them from me, my nephew,” said the Marquis, touching him on the
breast with his forefinger--they were now standing by the hearth--“you
will for ever seek them in vain, be assured.”

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was
cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking
quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he
touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine point of
a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the
body, and said,

“My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have
lived.”

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his
box in his pocket.

“Better to be a rational creature,” he added then, after ringing a small
bell on the table, “and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost,
Monsieur Charles, I see.”

“This property and France are lost to me,” said the nephew, sadly; “I
renounce them.”

“Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It
is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?”

“I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed
to me from you, to-morrow--”

“Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable.”

“--or twenty years hence--”

“You do me too much honour,” said the Marquis; “still, I prefer that
supposition.”

“--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!”

“Hah!” said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.

“To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity,
under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,
mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness,
and suffering.”

“Hah!” said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.

“If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better
qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the
weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave
it and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance, may, in
another generation, suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse
on it, and on all this land.”

“And you?” said the uncle. “Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new
philosophy, graciously intend to live?”

“I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at
their backs, may have to do some day--work.”

“In England, for example?”

“Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The
family name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other.”

The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bed-chamber to be
lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The
Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his
valet.

“England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have
prospered there,” he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew
with a smile.

“I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may
be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge.”

“They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You
know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“With a daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Yes,” said the Marquis. “You are fatigued. Good night!”

As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy
in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,
which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same
time, the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin
straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that
looked handsomely diabolic.

“Yes,” repeated the Marquis. “A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So
commences the new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good night!”

It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face
outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew
looked at him, in vain, in passing on to the door.

“Good night!” said the uncle. “I look to the pleasure of seeing you
again in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his
chamber there!--And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will,” he
added to himself, before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his
valet to his own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his
loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still
night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no
noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:--looked like some
enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose
periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just
coming on.

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the
scraps of the day's journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow
toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the
prison on the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at
the fountain, and the mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the
chain under the carriage. That fountain suggested the Paris fountain,
the little bundle lying on the step, the women bending over it, and the
tall man with his arms up, crying, “Dead!”

“I am cool now,” said Monsieur the Marquis, “and may go to bed.”

So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin
gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence
with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night
for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables
rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with
very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to
the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures
hardly ever to say what is set down for them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human,
stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape,
dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads.
The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass
were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might
have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village,
taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as
the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and
the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and
freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain
at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard--both melting away, like the
minutes that were falling from the spring of Time--through three dark
hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light,
and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.

Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still
trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water
of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces
crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and, on the
weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur
the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might.
At this, the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and, with open
mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.

Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement
windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth
shivering--chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely
lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some, to the
fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men
and women there, to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows
out, to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church
and at the Cross, a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter
prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its
foot.

The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and
surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been
reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine;
now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked
round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at
doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs
pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.

All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the
return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the
chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried
figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and
everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?

What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already
at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day's dinner (not
much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow's while to
peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it
to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or
no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life,
down the hill, knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the
fountain.

All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about
in their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other
emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought
in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly
on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their
trouble, which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of
the people of the chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and
all the taxing authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded
on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way, that was
highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated
into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting
himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend,
and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind
a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle
(double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of
the German ballad of Leonora?

It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.

The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added
the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited
through about two hundred years.

It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine
mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the
heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt
was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:

“Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques.”




X. Two Promises


More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr. Charles
Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of the French
language who was conversant with French literature. In this age, he
would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He read with
young men who could find any leisure and interest for the study of a
living tongue spoken all over the world, and he cultivated a taste for
its stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them, besides, in
sound English, and render them into sound English. Such masters were not
at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were
to be, were not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had
dropped out of Tellson's ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters. As a
tutor, whose attainments made the student's way unusually pleasant and
profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to his
work besides mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay soon became
known and encouraged. He was well acquainted, more-over, with the
circumstances of his country, and those were of ever-growing interest.
So, with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor
to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he
would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and
did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.

A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he
read with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a
contraband trade in European languages, instead of conveying Greek
and Latin through the Custom-house. The rest of his time he passed in
London.

Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days
when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has
invariably gone one way--Charles Darnay's way--the way of the love of a
woman.

He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never
heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice;
he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was
confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for
him. But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject; the assassination
at the deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long,
long, dusty roads--the solid stone chateau which had itself become the
mere mist of a dream--had been done a year, and he had never yet, by so
much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his heart.

That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a
summer day when, lately arrived in London from his college occupation,
he turned into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity
of opening his mind to Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer
day, and he knew Lucie to be out with Miss Pross.

He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window. The energy
which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated
their sharpness, had been gradually restored to him. He was now a
very energetic man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength
of resolution, and vigour of action. In his recovered energy he was
sometimes a little fitful and sudden, as he had at first been in the
exercise of his other recovered faculties; but, this had never been
frequently observable, and had grown more and more rare.

He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with
ease, and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay, at
sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.

“Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your
return these three or four days past. Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton were
both here yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due.”

“I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter,” he answered,
a little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor. “Miss
Manette--”

“Is well,” said the Doctor, as he stopped short, “and your return will
delight us all. She has gone out on some household matters, but will
soon be home.”

“Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her
being from home, to beg to speak to you.”

There was a blank silence.

“Yes?” said the Doctor, with evident constraint. “Bring your chair here,
and speak on.”

He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less
easy.

“I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,”
 so he at length began, “for some year and a half, that I hope the topic
on which I am about to touch may not--”

He was stayed by the Doctor's putting out his hand to stop him. When he
had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:

“Is Lucie the topic?”

“She is.”

“It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me
to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay.”

“It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor
Manette!” he said deferentially.

There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:

“I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it.”

His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that it
originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles
Darnay hesitated.

“Shall I go on, sir?”

Another blank.

“Yes, go on.”

“You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly
I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and
the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been
laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly,
disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love
her. You have loved yourself; let your old love speak for me!”

The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the
ground. At the last words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly,
and cried:

“Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!”

His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles
Darnay's ears long after he had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had
extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter
so received it, and remained silent.

“I ask your pardon,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some
moments. “I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it.”

He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or
raise his eyes. His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair
overshadowed his face:

“Have you spoken to Lucie?”

“No.”

“Nor written?”

“Never.”

“It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is
to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks
you.”

He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.

“I know,” said Darnay, respectfully, “how can I fail to know, Doctor
Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day, that between
you and Miss Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching, so
belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it
can have few parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and
child. I know, Doctor Manette--how can I fail to know--that, mingled
with the affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there
is, in her heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy
itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is
now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present
years and character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the
early days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if
you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you could
hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred character than that
in which you are always with her. I know that when she is clinging to
you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one, are round your
neck. I know that in loving you she sees and loves her mother at her
own age, sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted,
loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I
have known this, night and day, since I have known you in your home.”

Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a
little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.

“Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her and you
with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne, as
long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even
now feel, that to bring my love--even mine--between you, is to touch
your history with something not quite so good as itself. But I love her.
Heaven is my witness that I love her!”

“I believe it,” answered her father, mournfully. “I have thought so
before now. I believe it.”

“But, do not believe,” said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice
struck with a reproachful sound, “that if my fortune were so cast as
that, being one day so happy as to make her my wife, I must at any time
put any separation between her and you, I could or would breathe a
word of what I now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I
should know it to be a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at
a remote distance of years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my
heart--if it ever had been there--if it ever could be there--I could not
now touch this honoured hand.”

He laid his own upon it as he spoke.

“No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like
you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like
you, striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting
in a happier future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your
life and home, and being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide
with Lucie her privilege as your child, companion, and friend; but to
come in aid of it, and bind her closer to you, if such a thing can be.”

His touch still lingered on her father's hand. Answering the touch for a
moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of
his chair, and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the
conference. A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle with that
occasional look which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.

“You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank
you with all my heart, and will open all my heart--or nearly so. Have
you any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?”

“None. As yet, none.”

“Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once
ascertain that, with my knowledge?”

“Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks; I
might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow.”

“Do you seek any guidance from me?”

“I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it
in your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some.”

“Do you seek any promise from me?”

“I do seek that.”

“What is it?”

“I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well
understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her
innocent heart--do not think I have the presumption to assume so much--I
could retain no place in it against her love for her father.”

“If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?”

“I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any suitor's
favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason,
Doctor Manette,” said Darnay, modestly but firmly, “I would not ask that
word, to save my life.”

“I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close love, as
well as out of wide division; in the former case, they are subtle and
delicate, and difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one
respect, such a mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her
heart.”

“May I ask, sir, if you think she is--” As he hesitated, her father
supplied the rest.

“Is sought by any other suitor?”

“It is what I meant to say.”

Her father considered a little before he answered:

“You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is here too,
occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these.”

“Or both,” said Darnay.

“I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely. You want
a promise from me. Tell me what it is.”

“It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own
part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will
bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you
may be able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against
me. I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The
condition on which I ask it, and which you have an undoubted right to
require, I will observe immediately.”

“I give the promise,” said the Doctor, “without any condition. I believe
your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I
believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties
between me and my other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me
that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you.
If there were--Charles Darnay, if there were--”

The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as
the Doctor spoke:

“--any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever,
new or old, against the man she really loved--the direct responsibility
thereof not lying on his head--they should all be obliterated for her
sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me
than wrong, more to me--Well! This is idle talk.”

So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange
his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own
hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.

“You said something to me,” said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile.
“What was it you said to me?”

He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a
condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:

“Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my
part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother's, is
not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and
why I am in England.”

“Stop!” said the Doctor of Beauvais.

“I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no
secret from you.”

“Stop!”

For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for
another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay's lips.

“Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie
should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you
promise?”

“Willingly.

“Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she
should not see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!”

It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and
darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone--for
Miss Pross had gone straight up-stairs--and was surprised to find his
reading-chair empty.

“My father!” she called to him. “Father dear!”

Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his
bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at
his door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her
blood all chilled, “What shall I do! What shall I do!”

Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at
his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of
her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down
together for a long time.

She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He
slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished
work, were all as usual.




XI. A Companion Picture


“Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, on that self-same night, or morning, to his
jackal; “mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you.”

Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night before,
and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession, making
a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver's papers before the setting in
of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver
arrears were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until
November should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal, and
bring grist to the mill again.

Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much
application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him
through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded
the towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled
his turban off and threw it into the basin in which he had steeped it at
intervals for the last six hours.

“Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?” said Stryver the portly, with
his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on
his back.

“I am.”

“Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather
surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as
shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry.”

“_Do_ you?”

“Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?”

“I don't feel disposed to say much. Who is she?”

“Guess.”

“Do I know her?”

“Guess.”

“I am not going to guess, at five o'clock in the morning, with my brains
frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask
me to dinner.”

“Well then, I'll tell you,” said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting
posture. “Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you,
because you are such an insensible dog.”

“And you,” returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, “are such a
sensitive and poetical spirit--”

“Come!” rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, “though I don't prefer
any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still
I am a tenderer sort of fellow than _you_.”

“You are a luckier, if you mean that.”

“I don't mean that. I mean I am a man of more--more--”

“Say gallantry, while you are about it,” suggested Carton.

“Well! I'll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man,” said Stryver,
inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, “who cares more to
be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how
to be agreeable, in a woman's society, than you do.”

“Go on,” said Sydney Carton.

“No; but before I go on,” said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying
way, “I'll have this out with you. You've been at Doctor Manette's house
as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your
moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and
hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you,
Sydney!”

“It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to
be ashamed of anything,” returned Sydney; “you ought to be much obliged
to me.”

“You shall not get off in that way,” rejoined Stryver, shouldering the
rejoinder at him; “no, Sydney, it's my duty to tell you--and I tell you
to your face to do you good--that you are a devilish ill-conditioned
fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow.”

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.

“Look at me!” said Stryver, squaring himself; “I have less need to make
myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances.
Why do I do it?”

“I never saw you do it yet,” muttered Carton.

“I do it because it's politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I
get on.”

“You don't get on with your account of your matrimonial intentions,”
 answered Carton, with a careless air; “I wish you would keep to that. As
to me--will you never understand that I am incorrigible?”

He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.

“You have no business to be incorrigible,” was his friend's answer,
delivered in no very soothing tone.

“I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,” said Sydney Carton.
“Who is the lady?”

“Now, don't let my announcement of the name make you uncomfortable,
Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with ostentatious friendliness
for the disclosure he was about to make, “because I know you don't mean
half you say; and if you meant it all, it would be of no importance. I
make this little preface, because you once mentioned the young lady to
me in slighting terms.”

“I did?”

“Certainly; and in these chambers.”

Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his complacent friend;
drank his punch and looked at his complacent friend.

“You made mention of the young lady as a golden-haired doll. The young
lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any sensitiveness or
delicacy of feeling in that kind of way, Sydney, I might have been a
little resentful of your employing such a designation; but you are not.
You want that sense altogether; therefore I am no more annoyed when I
think of the expression, than I should be annoyed by a man's opinion of
a picture of mine, who had no eye for pictures: or of a piece of music
of mine, who had no ear for music.”

Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by bumpers,
looking at his friend.

“Now you know all about it, Syd,” said Mr. Stryver. “I don't care about
fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made up my mind to
please myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to please myself. She
will have in me a man already pretty well off, and a rapidly rising man,
and a man of some distinction: it is a piece of good fortune for her,
but she is worthy of good fortune. Are you astonished?”

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I be
astonished?”

“You approve?”

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I not approve?”

“Well!” said his friend Stryver, “you take it more easily than I fancied
you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I thought you would
be; though, to be sure, you know well enough by this time that your
ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong will. Yes, Sydney, I have had
enough of this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I
feel that it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels
inclined to go to it (when he doesn't, he can stay away), and I feel
that Miss Manette will tell well in any station, and will always do me
credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old boy, I want to
say a word to _you_ about _your_ prospects. You are in a bad way, you
know; you really are in a bad way. You don't know the value of money,
you live hard, you'll knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor;
you really ought to think about a nurse.”

The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as
big as he was, and four times as offensive.

“Now, let me recommend you,” pursued Stryver, “to look it in the face.
I have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face,
you, in your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of
you. Never mind your having no enjoyment of women's society, nor
understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some
respectable woman with a little property--somebody in the landlady way,
or lodging-letting way--and marry her, against a rainy day. That's the
kind of thing for _you_. Now think of it, Sydney.”

“I'll think of it,” said Sydney.




XII. The Fellow of Delicacy


Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good
fortune on the Doctor's daughter, resolved to make her happiness known
to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental
debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as
well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange
at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two
before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it
and Hilary.

As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly
saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly
grounds--the only grounds ever worth taking into account--it was a
plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the
plaintiff, there was no getting over his evidence, the counsel for
the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even turn to
consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer
case could be.

Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal
proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to
Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present
himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.

Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple,
while the bloom of the Long Vacation's infancy was still upon it.
Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet
on Saint Dunstan's side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way
along the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have
seen how safe and strong he was.

His way taking him past Tellson's, and he both banking at Tellson's and
knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr.
Stryver's mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness
of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle
in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient
cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr.
Lorry sat at great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron
bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything
under the clouds were a sum.

“Halloa!” said Mr. Stryver. “How do you do? I hope you are well!”

It was Stryver's grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson's, that old clerks
in distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he
squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading
the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if
the Stryver head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.

The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would
recommend under the circumstances, “How do you do, Mr. Stryver? How do
you do, sir?” and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner
of shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson's who shook
hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a
self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.

“Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?” asked Mr. Lorry, in his
business character.

“Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I
have come for a private word.”

“Oh indeed!” said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed
to the House afar off.

“I am going,” said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the
desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to
be not half desk enough for him: “I am going to make an offer of myself
in marriage to your agreeable little friend, Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry.”

“Oh dear me!” cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his
visitor dubiously.

“Oh dear me, sir?” repeated Stryver, drawing back. “Oh dear you, sir?
What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?”

“My meaning,” answered the man of business, “is, of course, friendly and
appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and--in short,
my meaning is everything you could desire. But--really, you know, Mr.
Stryver--” Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest
manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally,
“you know there really is so much too much of you!”

“Well!” said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand,
opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, “if I understand you,
Mr. Lorry, I'll be hanged!”

Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that
end, and bit the feather of a pen.

“D--n it all, sir!” said Stryver, staring at him, “am I not eligible?”

“Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you're eligible!” said Mr. Lorry. “If you say
eligible, you are eligible.”

“Am I not prosperous?” asked Stryver.

“Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous,” said Mr. Lorry.

“And advancing?”

“If you come to advancing you know,” said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be
able to make another admission, “nobody can doubt that.”

“Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?” demanded Stryver,
perceptibly crestfallen.

“Well! I--Were you going there now?” asked Mr. Lorry.

“Straight!” said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.

“Then I think I wouldn't, if I was you.”

“Why?” said Stryver. “Now, I'll put you in a corner,” forensically
shaking a forefinger at him. “You are a man of business and bound to
have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn't you go?”

“Because,” said Mr. Lorry, “I wouldn't go on such an object without
having some cause to believe that I should succeed.”

“D--n _me_!” cried Stryver, “but this beats everything.”

Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry
Stryver.

“Here's a man of business--a man of years--a man of experience--_in_
a Bank,” said Stryver; “and having summed up three leading reasons for
complete success, he says there's no reason at all! Says it with his
head on!” Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have
been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.

“When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and
when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of
causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young
lady, my good sir,” said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, “the
young lady. The young lady goes before all.”

“Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry,” said Stryver, squaring his
elbows, “that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at
present in question is a mincing Fool?”

“Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver,” said Mr. Lorry,
reddening, “that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady
from any lips; and that if I knew any man--which I hope I do not--whose
taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could
not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at
this desk, not even Tellson's should prevent my giving him a piece of my
mind.”

The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver's
blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry;
Mr. Lorry's veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in
no better state now it was his turn.

“That is what I mean to tell you, sir,” said Mr. Lorry. “Pray let there
be no mistake about it.”

Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:

“This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not
to go up to Soho and offer myself--_my_self, Stryver of the King's Bench
bar?”

“Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?”

“Yes, I do.”

“Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly.”

“And all I can say of it is,” laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, “that
this--ha, ha!--beats everything past, present, and to come.”

“Now understand me,” pursued Mr. Lorry. “As a man of business, I am
not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of
business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried
Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and
of her father too, and who has a great affection for them both, I have
spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I
may not be right?”

“Not I!” said Stryver, whistling. “I can't undertake to find third
parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense
in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It's
new to me, but you are right, I dare say.”

“What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself--And
understand me, sir,” said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, “I
will not--not even at Tellson's--have it characterised for me by any
gentleman breathing.”

“There! I beg your pardon!” said Stryver.

“Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to say:--it might be
painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very
painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You
know the terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with
the family. If you please, committing you in no way, representing you
in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a
little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon
it. If you should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its
soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied
with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is
best spared. What do you say?”

“How long would you keep me in town?”

“Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho in the
evening, and come to your chambers afterwards.”

“Then I say yes,” said Stryver: “I won't go up there now, I am not so
hot upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look
in to-night. Good morning.”

Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a
concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it
bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength
of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were
always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly
believed, when they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in
the empty office until they bowed another customer in.

The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have
gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than
moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to
swallow, he got it down. “And now,” said Mr. Stryver, shaking his
forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, when it was down, “my way
out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong.”

It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found
great relief. “You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady,” said Mr.
Stryver; “I'll do that for you.”

Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o'clock,
Mr. Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the
purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of
the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry, and was
altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.

“Well!” said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of
bootless attempts to bring him round to the question. “I have been to
Soho.”

“To Soho?” repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. “Oh, to be sure! What am I
thinking of!”

“And I have no doubt,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was right in the
conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my
advice.”

“I assure you,” returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, “that I
am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father's
account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let
us say no more about it.”

“I don't understand you,” said Mr. Lorry.

“I dare say not,” rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and
final way; “no matter, no matter.”

“But it does matter,” Mr. Lorry urged.

“No it doesn't; I assure you it doesn't. Having supposed that there was
sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is
not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is
done. Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have
repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish
aspect, I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been
a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am
glad that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing
for me in a worldly point of view--it is hardly necessary to say I could
have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not
proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means
certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to
that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and
giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you
will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you,
I regret it on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account.
And I am really very much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you,
and for giving me your advice; you know the young lady better than I do;
you were right, it never would have done.”

Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr.
Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of
showering generosity, forbearance, and goodwill, on his erring head.
“Make the best of it, my dear sir,” said Stryver; “say no more about it;
thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!”

Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr. Stryver
was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.




XIII. The Fellow of No Delicacy


If Sydney Carton ever shone anywhere, he certainly never shone in the
house of Doctor Manette. He had been there often, during a whole year,
and had always been the same moody and morose lounger there. When he
cared to talk, he talked well; but, the cloud of caring for nothing,
which overshadowed him with such a fatal darkness, was very rarely
pierced by the light within him.

And yet he did care something for the streets that environed that house,
and for the senseless stones that made their pavements. Many a night
he vaguely and unhappily wandered there, when wine had brought no
transitory gladness to him; many a dreary daybreak revealed his solitary
figure lingering there, and still lingering there when the first beams
of the sun brought into strong relief, removed beauties of architecture
in spires of churches and lofty buildings, as perhaps the quiet time
brought some sense of better things, else forgotten and unattainable,
into his mind. Of late, the neglected bed in the Temple Court had known
him more scantily than ever; and often when he had thrown himself upon
it no longer than a few minutes, he had got up again, and haunted that
neighbourhood.

On a day in August, when Mr. Stryver (after notifying to his jackal
that “he had thought better of that marrying matter”) had carried his
delicacy into Devonshire, and when the sight and scent of flowers in the
City streets had some waifs of goodness in them for the worst, of health
for the sickliest, and of youth for the oldest, Sydney's feet still trod
those stones. From being irresolute and purposeless, his feet became
animated by an intention, and, in the working out of that intention,
they took him to the Doctor's door.

He was shown up-stairs, and found Lucie at her work, alone. She had
never been quite at her ease with him, and received him with some little
embarrassment as he seated himself near her table. But, looking up at
his face in the interchange of the first few common-places, she observed
a change in it.

“I fear you are not well, Mr. Carton!”

“No. But the life I lead, Miss Manette, is not conducive to health. What
is to be expected of, or by, such profligates?”

“Is it not--forgive me; I have begun the question on my lips--a pity to
live no better life?”

“God knows it is a shame!”

“Then why not change it?”

Looking gently at him again, she was surprised and saddened to see that
there were tears in his eyes. There were tears in his voice too, as he
answered:

“It is too late for that. I shall never be better than I am. I shall
sink lower, and be worse.”

He leaned an elbow on her table, and covered his eyes with his hand. The
table trembled in the silence that followed.

She had never seen him softened, and was much distressed. He knew her to
be so, without looking at her, and said:

“Pray forgive me, Miss Manette. I break down before the knowledge of
what I want to say to you. Will you hear me?”

“If it will do you any good, Mr. Carton, if it would make you happier,
it would make me very glad!”

“God bless you for your sweet compassion!”

He unshaded his face after a little while, and spoke steadily.

“Don't be afraid to hear me. Don't shrink from anything I say. I am like
one who died young. All my life might have been.”

“No, Mr. Carton. I am sure that the best part of it might still be; I am
sure that you might be much, much worthier of yourself.”

“Say of you, Miss Manette, and although I know better--although in the
mystery of my own wretched heart I know better--I shall never forget
it!”

She was pale and trembling. He came to her relief with a fixed despair
of himself which made the interview unlike any other that could have
been holden.

“If it had been possible, Miss Manette, that you could have returned the
love of the man you see before yourself--flung away, wasted, drunken,
poor creature of misuse as you know him to be--he would have been
conscious this day and hour, in spite of his happiness, that he would
bring you to misery, bring you to sorrow and repentance, blight you,
disgrace you, pull you down with him. I know very well that you can have
no tenderness for me; I ask for none; I am even thankful that it cannot
be.”

“Without it, can I not save you, Mr. Carton? Can I not recall
you--forgive me again!--to a better course? Can I in no way repay your
confidence? I know this is a confidence,” she modestly said, after a
little hesitation, and in earnest tears, “I know you would say this to
no one else. Can I turn it to no good account for yourself, Mr. Carton?”

He shook his head.

“To none. No, Miss Manette, to none. If you will hear me through a very
little more, all you can ever do for me is done. I wish you to know that
you have been the last dream of my soul. In my degradation I have not
been so degraded but that the sight of you with your father, and of this
home made such a home by you, has stirred old shadows that I thought had
died out of me. Since I knew you, I have been troubled by a remorse that
I thought would never reproach me again, and have heard whispers from
old voices impelling me upward, that I thought were silent for ever. I
have had unformed ideas of striving afresh, beginning anew, shaking off
sloth and sensuality, and fighting out the abandoned fight. A dream, all
a dream, that ends in nothing, and leaves the sleeper where he lay down,
but I wish you to know that you inspired it.”

“Will nothing of it remain? O Mr. Carton, think again! Try again!”

“No, Miss Manette; all through it, I have known myself to be quite
undeserving. And yet I have had the weakness, and have still the
weakness, to wish you to know with what a sudden mastery you kindled me,
heap of ashes that I am, into fire--a fire, however, inseparable in
its nature from myself, quickening nothing, lighting nothing, doing no
service, idly burning away.”

“Since it is my misfortune, Mr. Carton, to have made you more unhappy
than you were before you knew me--”

“Don't say that, Miss Manette, for you would have reclaimed me, if
anything could. You will not be the cause of my becoming worse.”

“Since the state of your mind that you describe, is, at all events,
attributable to some influence of mine--this is what I mean, if I can
make it plain--can I use no influence to serve you? Have I no power for
good, with you, at all?”

“The utmost good that I am capable of now, Miss Manette, I have come
here to realise. Let me carry through the rest of my misdirected life,
the remembrance that I opened my heart to you, last of all the world;
and that there was something left in me at this time which you could
deplore and pity.”

“Which I entreated you to believe, again and again, most fervently, with
all my heart, was capable of better things, Mr. Carton!”

“Entreat me to believe it no more, Miss Manette. I have proved myself,
and I know better. I distress you; I draw fast to an end. Will you let
me believe, when I recall this day, that the last confidence of my life
was reposed in your pure and innocent breast, and that it lies there
alone, and will be shared by no one?”

“If that will be a consolation to you, yes.”

“Not even by the dearest one ever to be known to you?”

“Mr. Carton,” she answered, after an agitated pause, “the secret is
yours, not mine; and I promise to respect it.”

“Thank you. And again, God bless you.”

He put her hand to his lips, and moved towards the door.

“Be under no apprehension, Miss Manette, of my ever resuming this
conversation by so much as a passing word. I will never refer to it
again. If I were dead, that could not be surer than it is henceforth. In
the hour of my death, I shall hold sacred the one good remembrance--and
shall thank and bless you for it--that my last avowal of myself was made
to you, and that my name, and faults, and miseries were gently carried
in your heart. May it otherwise be light and happy!”

He was so unlike what he had ever shown himself to be, and it was so
sad to think how much he had thrown away, and how much he every day kept
down and perverted, that Lucie Manette wept mournfully for him as he
stood looking back at her.

“Be comforted!” he said, “I am not worth such feeling, Miss Manette. An
hour or two hence, and the low companions and low habits that I scorn
but yield to, will render me less worth such tears as those, than any
wretch who creeps along the streets. Be comforted! But, within myself, I
shall always be, towards you, what I am now, though outwardly I shall be
what you have heretofore seen me. The last supplication but one I make
to you, is, that you will believe this of me.”

“I will, Mr. Carton.”

“My last supplication of all, is this; and with it, I will relieve
you of a visitor with whom I well know you have nothing in unison, and
between whom and you there is an impassable space. It is useless to say
it, I know, but it rises out of my soul. For you, and for any dear to
you, I would do anything. If my career were of that better kind that
there was any opportunity or capacity of sacrifice in it, I would
embrace any sacrifice for you and for those dear to you. Try to hold
me in your mind, at some quiet times, as ardent and sincere in this one
thing. The time will come, the time will not be long in coming, when new
ties will be formed about you--ties that will bind you yet more tenderly
and strongly to the home you so adorn--the dearest ties that will ever
grace and gladden you. O Miss Manette, when the little picture of a
happy father's face looks up in yours, when you see your own bright
beauty springing up anew at your feet, think now and then that there is
a man who would give his life, to keep a life you love beside you!”

He said, “Farewell!” said a last “God bless you!” and left her.




XIV. The Honest Tradesman


To the eyes of Mr. Jeremiah Cruncher, sitting on his stool in
Fleet-street with his grisly urchin beside him, a vast number and
variety of objects in movement were every day presented. Who could sit
upon anything in Fleet-street during the busy hours of the day, and
not be dazed and deafened by two immense processions, one ever tending
westward with the sun, the other ever tending eastward from the sun,
both ever tending to the plains beyond the range of red and purple where
the sun goes down!

With his straw in his mouth, Mr. Cruncher sat watching the two streams,
like the heathen rustic who has for several centuries been on duty
watching one stream--saving that Jerry had no expectation of their ever
running dry. Nor would it have been an expectation of a hopeful kind,
since a small part of his income was derived from the pilotage of timid
women (mostly of a full habit and past the middle term of life) from
Tellson's side of the tides to the opposite shore. Brief as such
companionship was in every separate instance, Mr. Cruncher never failed
to become so interested in the lady as to express a strong desire to
have the honour of drinking her very good health. And it was from
the gifts bestowed upon him towards the execution of this benevolent
purpose, that he recruited his finances, as just now observed.

Time was, when a poet sat upon a stool in a public place, and mused in
the sight of men. Mr. Cruncher, sitting on a stool in a public place,
but not being a poet, mused as little as possible, and looked about him.

It fell out that he was thus engaged in a season when crowds were
few, and belated women few, and when his affairs in general were so
unprosperous as to awaken a strong suspicion in his breast that Mrs.
Cruncher must have been “flopping” in some pointed manner, when an
unusual concourse pouring down Fleet-street westward, attracted his
attention. Looking that way, Mr. Cruncher made out that some kind of
funeral was coming along, and that there was popular objection to this
funeral, which engendered uproar.

“Young Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, turning to his offspring, “it's a
buryin'.”

“Hooroar, father!” cried Young Jerry.

The young gentleman uttered this exultant sound with mysterious
significance. The elder gentleman took the cry so ill, that he watched
his opportunity, and smote the young gentleman on the ear.

“What d'ye mean? What are you hooroaring at? What do you want to conwey
to your own father, you young Rip? This boy is a getting too many for
_me_!” said Mr. Cruncher, surveying him. “Him and his hooroars! Don't
let me hear no more of you, or you shall feel some more of me. D'ye
hear?”

“I warn't doing no harm,” Young Jerry protested, rubbing his cheek.

“Drop it then,” said Mr. Cruncher; “I won't have none of _your_ no
harms. Get a top of that there seat, and look at the crowd.”

His son obeyed, and the crowd approached; they were bawling and hissing
round a dingy hearse and dingy mourning coach, in which mourning coach
there was only one mourner, dressed in the dingy trappings that were
considered essential to the dignity of the position. The position
appeared by no means to please him, however, with an increasing rabble
surrounding the coach, deriding him, making grimaces at him, and
incessantly groaning and calling out: “Yah! Spies! Tst! Yaha! Spies!”
 with many compliments too numerous and forcible to repeat.

Funerals had at all times a remarkable attraction for Mr. Cruncher; he
always pricked up his senses, and became excited, when a funeral passed
Tellson's. Naturally, therefore, a funeral with this uncommon attendance
excited him greatly, and he asked of the first man who ran against him:

“What is it, brother? What's it about?”

“_I_ don't know,” said the man. “Spies! Yaha! Tst! Spies!”

He asked another man. “Who is it?”

“_I_ don't know,” returned the man, clapping his hands to his mouth
nevertheless, and vociferating in a surprising heat and with the
greatest ardour, “Spies! Yaha! Tst, tst! Spi--ies!”

At length, a person better informed on the merits of the case, tumbled
against him, and from this person he learned that the funeral was the
funeral of one Roger Cly.

“Was he a spy?” asked Mr. Cruncher.

“Old Bailey spy,” returned his informant. “Yaha! Tst! Yah! Old Bailey
Spi--i--ies!”

“Why, to be sure!” exclaimed Jerry, recalling the Trial at which he had
assisted. “I've seen him. Dead, is he?”

“Dead as mutton,” returned the other, “and can't be too dead. Have 'em
out, there! Spies! Pull 'em out, there! Spies!”

The idea was so acceptable in the prevalent absence of any idea,
that the crowd caught it up with eagerness, and loudly repeating the
suggestion to have 'em out, and to pull 'em out, mobbed the two vehicles
so closely that they came to a stop. On the crowd's opening the coach
doors, the one mourner scuffled out by himself and was in their hands
for a moment; but he was so alert, and made such good use of his time,
that in another moment he was scouring away up a bye-street, after
shedding his cloak, hat, long hatband, white pocket-handkerchief, and
other symbolical tears.

These, the people tore to pieces and scattered far and wide with great
enjoyment, while the tradesmen hurriedly shut up their shops; for a
crowd in those times stopped at nothing, and was a monster much dreaded.
They had already got the length of opening the hearse to take the coffin
out, when some brighter genius proposed instead, its being escorted to
its destination amidst general rejoicing. Practical suggestions being
much needed, this suggestion, too, was received with acclamation, and
the coach was immediately filled with eight inside and a dozen out,
while as many people got on the roof of the hearse as could by any
exercise of ingenuity stick upon it. Among the first of these volunteers
was Jerry Cruncher himself, who modestly concealed his spiky head from
the observation of Tellson's, in the further corner of the mourning
coach.

The officiating undertakers made some protest against these changes in
the ceremonies; but, the river being alarmingly near, and several voices
remarking on the efficacy of cold immersion in bringing refractory
members of the profession to reason, the protest was faint and brief.
The remodelled procession started, with a chimney-sweep driving the
hearse--advised by the regular driver, who was perched beside him, under
close inspection, for the purpose--and with a pieman, also attended
by his cabinet minister, driving the mourning coach. A bear-leader, a
popular street character of the time, was impressed as an additional
ornament, before the cavalcade had gone far down the Strand; and his
bear, who was black and very mangy, gave quite an Undertaking air to
that part of the procession in which he walked.

Thus, with beer-drinking, pipe-smoking, song-roaring, and infinite
caricaturing of woe, the disorderly procession went its way, recruiting
at every step, and all the shops shutting up before it. Its destination
was the old church of Saint Pancras, far off in the fields. It got there
in course of time; insisted on pouring into the burial-ground; finally,
accomplished the interment of the deceased Roger Cly in its own way, and
highly to its own satisfaction.

The dead man disposed of, and the crowd being under the necessity of
providing some other entertainment for itself, another brighter
genius (or perhaps the same) conceived the humour of impeaching casual
passers-by, as Old Bailey spies, and wreaking vengeance on them. Chase
was given to some scores of inoffensive persons who had never been near
the Old Bailey in their lives, in the realisation of this fancy, and
they were roughly hustled and maltreated. The transition to the sport of
window-breaking, and thence to the plundering of public-houses, was easy
and natural. At last, after several hours, when sundry summer-houses had
been pulled down, and some area-railings had been torn up, to arm
the more belligerent spirits, a rumour got about that the Guards were
coming. Before this rumour, the crowd gradually melted away, and perhaps
the Guards came, and perhaps they never came, and this was the usual
progress of a mob.

Mr. Cruncher did not assist at the closing sports, but had remained
behind in the churchyard, to confer and condole with the undertakers.
The place had a soothing influence on him. He procured a pipe from a
neighbouring public-house, and smoked it, looking in at the railings and
maturely considering the spot.

“Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, apostrophising himself in his usual way,
“you see that there Cly that day, and you see with your own eyes that he
was a young 'un and a straight made 'un.”

Having smoked his pipe out, and ruminated a little longer, he turned
himself about, that he might appear, before the hour of closing, on his
station at Tellson's. Whether his meditations on mortality had touched
his liver, or whether his general health had been previously at all
amiss, or whether he desired to show a little attention to an eminent
man, is not so much to the purpose, as that he made a short call upon
his medical adviser--a distinguished surgeon--on his way back.

Young Jerry relieved his father with dutiful interest, and reported No
job in his absence. The bank closed, the ancient clerks came out, the
usual watch was set, and Mr. Cruncher and his son went home to tea.

“Now, I tell you where it is!” said Mr. Cruncher to his wife, on
entering. “If, as a honest tradesman, my wenturs goes wrong to-night, I
shall make sure that you've been praying again me, and I shall work you
for it just the same as if I seen you do it.”

The dejected Mrs. Cruncher shook her head.

“Why, you're at it afore my face!” said Mr. Cruncher, with signs of
angry apprehension.

“I am saying nothing.”

“Well, then; don't meditate nothing. You might as well flop as meditate.
You may as well go again me one way as another. Drop it altogether.”

“Yes, Jerry.”

“Yes, Jerry,” repeated Mr. Cruncher sitting down to tea. “Ah! It _is_
yes, Jerry. That's about it. You may say yes, Jerry.”

Mr. Cruncher had no particular meaning in these sulky corroborations,
but made use of them, as people not unfrequently do, to express general
ironical dissatisfaction.

“You and your yes, Jerry,” said Mr. Cruncher, taking a bite out of his
bread-and-butter, and seeming to help it down with a large invisible
oyster out of his saucer. “Ah! I think so. I believe you.”

“You are going out to-night?” asked his decent wife, when he took
another bite.

“Yes, I am.”

“May I go with you, father?” asked his son, briskly.

“No, you mayn't. I'm a going--as your mother knows--a fishing. That's
where I'm going to. Going a fishing.”

“Your fishing-rod gets rayther rusty; don't it, father?”

“Never you mind.”

“Shall you bring any fish home, father?”

“If I don't, you'll have short commons, to-morrow,” returned that
gentleman, shaking his head; “that's questions enough for you; I ain't a
going out, till you've been long abed.”

He devoted himself during the remainder of the evening to keeping a
most vigilant watch on Mrs. Cruncher, and sullenly holding her in
conversation that she might be prevented from meditating any petitions
to his disadvantage. With this view, he urged his son to hold her in
conversation also, and led the unfortunate woman a hard life by dwelling
on any causes of complaint he could bring against her, rather than
he would leave her for a moment to her own reflections. The devoutest
person could have rendered no greater homage to the efficacy of an
honest prayer than he did in this distrust of his wife. It was as if a
professed unbeliever in ghosts should be frightened by a ghost story.

“And mind you!” said Mr. Cruncher. “No games to-morrow! If I, as a
honest tradesman, succeed in providing a jinte of meat or two, none
of your not touching of it, and sticking to bread. If I, as a honest
tradesman, am able to provide a little beer, none of your declaring
on water. When you go to Rome, do as Rome does. Rome will be a ugly
customer to you, if you don't. _I_'m your Rome, you know.”

Then he began grumbling again:

“With your flying into the face of your own wittles and drink! I don't
know how scarce you mayn't make the wittles and drink here, by your
flopping tricks and your unfeeling conduct. Look at your boy: he _is_
your'n, ain't he? He's as thin as a lath. Do you call yourself a mother,
and not know that a mother's first duty is to blow her boy out?”

This touched Young Jerry on a tender place; who adjured his mother to
perform her first duty, and, whatever else she did or neglected, above
all things to lay especial stress on the discharge of that maternal
function so affectingly and delicately indicated by his other parent.

Thus the evening wore away with the Cruncher family, until Young Jerry
was ordered to bed, and his mother, laid under similar injunctions,
obeyed them. Mr. Cruncher beguiled the earlier watches of the night with
solitary pipes, and did not start upon his excursion until nearly one
o'clock. Towards that small and ghostly hour, he rose up from his chair,
took a key out of his pocket, opened a locked cupboard, and brought
forth a sack, a crowbar of convenient size, a rope and chain, and other
fishing tackle of that nature. Disposing these articles about him
in skilful manner, he bestowed a parting defiance on Mrs. Cruncher,
extinguished the light, and went out.

Young Jerry, who had only made a feint of undressing when he went to
bed, was not long after his father. Under cover of the darkness he
followed out of the room, followed down the stairs, followed down the
court, followed out into the streets. He was in no uneasiness concerning
his getting into the house again, for it was full of lodgers, and the
door stood ajar all night.

Impelled by a laudable ambition to study the art and mystery of his
father's honest calling, Young Jerry, keeping as close to house fronts,
walls, and doorways, as his eyes were close to one another, held his
honoured parent in view. The honoured parent steering Northward, had not
gone far, when he was joined by another disciple of Izaak Walton, and
the two trudged on together.

Within half an hour from the first starting, they were beyond the
winking lamps, and the more than winking watchmen, and were out upon a
lonely road. Another fisherman was picked up here--and that so silently,
that if Young Jerry had been superstitious, he might have supposed the
second follower of the gentle craft to have, all of a sudden, split
himself into two.

The three went on, and Young Jerry went on, until the three stopped
under a bank overhanging the road. Upon the top of the bank was a low
brick wall, surmounted by an iron railing. In the shadow of bank and
wall the three turned out of the road, and up a blind lane, of which
the wall--there, risen to some eight or ten feet high--formed one side.
Crouching down in a corner, peeping up the lane, the next object that
Young Jerry saw, was the form of his honoured parent, pretty well
defined against a watery and clouded moon, nimbly scaling an iron gate.
He was soon over, and then the second fisherman got over, and then the
third. They all dropped softly on the ground within the gate, and lay
there a little--listening perhaps. Then, they moved away on their hands
and knees.

It was now Young Jerry's turn to approach the gate: which he did,
holding his breath. Crouching down again in a corner there, and looking
in, he made out the three fishermen creeping through some rank grass!
and all the gravestones in the churchyard--it was a large churchyard
that they were in--looking on like ghosts in white, while the church
tower itself looked on like the ghost of a monstrous giant. They did not
creep far, before they stopped and stood upright. And then they began to
fish.

They fished with a spade, at first. Presently the honoured parent
appeared to be adjusting some instrument like a great corkscrew.
Whatever tools they worked with, they worked hard, until the awful
striking of the church clock so terrified Young Jerry, that he made off,
with his hair as stiff as his father's.

But, his long-cherished desire to know more about these matters, not
only stopped him in his running away, but lured him back again. They
were still fishing perseveringly, when he peeped in at the gate for
the second time; but, now they seemed to have got a bite. There was a
screwing and complaining sound down below, and their bent figures were
strained, as if by a weight. By slow degrees the weight broke away the
earth upon it, and came to the surface. Young Jerry very well knew what
it would be; but, when he saw it, and saw his honoured parent about to
wrench it open, he was so frightened, being new to the sight, that he
made off again, and never stopped until he had run a mile or more.

He would not have stopped then, for anything less necessary than breath,
it being a spectral sort of race that he ran, and one highly desirable
to get to the end of. He had a strong idea that the coffin he had seen
was running after him; and, pictured as hopping on behind him, bolt
upright, upon its narrow end, always on the point of overtaking him
and hopping on at his side--perhaps taking his arm--it was a pursuer to
shun. It was an inconsistent and ubiquitous fiend too, for, while it
was making the whole night behind him dreadful, he darted out into the
roadway to avoid dark alleys, fearful of its coming hopping out of them
like a dropsical boy's kite without tail and wings. It hid in doorways
too, rubbing its horrible shoulders against doors, and drawing them up
to its ears, as if it were laughing. It got into shadows on the road,
and lay cunningly on its back to trip him up. All this time it was
incessantly hopping on behind and gaining on him, so that when the boy
got to his own door he had reason for being half dead. And even then
it would not leave him, but followed him upstairs with a bump on every
stair, scrambled into bed with him, and bumped down, dead and heavy, on
his breast when he fell asleep.

From his oppressed slumber, Young Jerry in his closet was awakened after
daybreak and before sunrise, by the presence of his father in the
family room. Something had gone wrong with him; at least, so Young Jerry
inferred, from the circumstance of his holding Mrs. Cruncher by the
ears, and knocking the back of her head against the head-board of the
bed.

“I told you I would,” said Mr. Cruncher, “and I did.”

“Jerry, Jerry, Jerry!” his wife implored.

“You oppose yourself to the profit of the business,” said Jerry, “and me
and my partners suffer. You was to honour and obey; why the devil don't
you?”

“I try to be a good wife, Jerry,” the poor woman protested, with tears.

“Is it being a good wife to oppose your husband's business? Is it
honouring your husband to dishonour his business? Is it obeying your
husband to disobey him on the wital subject of his business?”

“You hadn't taken to the dreadful business then, Jerry.”

“It's enough for you,” retorted Mr. Cruncher, “to be the wife of a
honest tradesman, and not to occupy your female mind with calculations
when he took to his trade or when he didn't. A honouring and obeying
wife would let his trade alone altogether. Call yourself a religious
woman? If you're a religious woman, give me a irreligious one! You have
no more nat'ral sense of duty than the bed of this here Thames river has
of a pile, and similarly it must be knocked into you.”

The altercation was conducted in a low tone of voice, and terminated in
the honest tradesman's kicking off his clay-soiled boots, and lying down
at his length on the floor. After taking a timid peep at him lying on
his back, with his rusty hands under his head for a pillow, his son lay
down too, and fell asleep again.

There was no fish for breakfast, and not much of anything else. Mr.
Cruncher was out of spirits, and out of temper, and kept an iron pot-lid
by him as a projectile for the correction of Mrs. Cruncher, in case
he should observe any symptoms of her saying Grace. He was brushed
and washed at the usual hour, and set off with his son to pursue his
ostensible calling.

Young Jerry, walking with the stool under his arm at his father's side
along sunny and crowded Fleet-street, was a very different Young Jerry
from him of the previous night, running home through darkness and
solitude from his grim pursuer. His cunning was fresh with the day,
and his qualms were gone with the night--in which particulars it is not
improbable that he had compeers in Fleet-street and the City of London,
that fine morning.

“Father,” said Young Jerry, as they walked along: taking care to keep
at arm's length and to have the stool well between them: “what's a
Resurrection-Man?”

Mr. Cruncher came to a stop on the pavement before he answered, “How
should I know?”

“I thought you knowed everything, father,” said the artless boy.

“Hem! Well,” returned Mr. Cruncher, going on again, and lifting off his
hat to give his spikes free play, “he's a tradesman.”

“What's his goods, father?” asked the brisk Young Jerry.

“His goods,” said Mr. Cruncher, after turning it over in his mind, “is a
branch of Scientific goods.”

“Persons' bodies, ain't it, father?” asked the lively boy.

“I believe it is something of that sort,” said Mr. Cruncher.

“Oh, father, I should so like to be a Resurrection-Man when I'm quite
growed up!”

Mr. Cruncher was soothed, but shook his head in a dubious and moral way.
“It depends upon how you dewelop your talents. Be careful to dewelop
your talents, and never to say no more than you can help to nobody, and
there's no telling at the present time what you may not come to be fit
for.” As Young Jerry, thus encouraged, went on a few yards in advance,
to plant the stool in the shadow of the Bar, Mr. Cruncher added to
himself: “Jerry, you honest tradesman, there's hopes wot that boy will
yet be a blessing to you, and a recompense to you for his mother!”




XV. Knitting


There had been earlier drinking than usual in the wine-shop of Monsieur
Defarge. As early as six o'clock in the morning, sallow faces peeping
through its barred windows had descried other faces within, bending over
measures of wine. Monsieur Defarge sold a very thin wine at the best
of times, but it would seem to have been an unusually thin wine that
he sold at this time. A sour wine, moreover, or a souring, for its
influence on the mood of those who drank it was to make them gloomy. No
vivacious Bacchanalian flame leaped out of the pressed grape of Monsieur
Defarge: but, a smouldering fire that burnt in the dark, lay hidden in
the dregs of it.

This had been the third morning in succession, on which there had been
early drinking at the wine-shop of Monsieur Defarge. It had begun
on Monday, and here was Wednesday come. There had been more of early
brooding than drinking; for, many men had listened and whispered and
slunk about there from the time of the opening of the door, who could
not have laid a piece of money on the counter to save their souls. These
were to the full as interested in the place, however, as if they could
have commanded whole barrels of wine; and they glided from seat to seat,
and from corner to corner, swallowing talk in lieu of drink, with greedy
looks.

Notwithstanding an unusual flow of company, the master of the wine-shop
was not visible. He was not missed; for, nobody who crossed the
threshold looked for him, nobody asked for him, nobody wondered to see
only Madame Defarge in her seat, presiding over the distribution of
wine, with a bowl of battered small coins before her, as much defaced
and beaten out of their original impress as the small coinage of
humanity from whose ragged pockets they had come.

A suspended interest and a prevalent absence of mind, were perhaps
observed by the spies who looked in at the wine-shop, as they looked in
at every place, high and low, from the king's palace to the criminal's
gaol. Games at cards languished, players at dominoes musingly built
towers with them, drinkers drew figures on the tables with spilt drops
of wine, Madame Defarge herself picked out the pattern on her sleeve
with her toothpick, and saw and heard something inaudible and invisible
a long way off.

Thus, Saint Antoine in this vinous feature of his, until midday. It was
high noontide, when two dusty men passed through his streets and under
his swinging lamps: of whom, one was Monsieur Defarge: the other a
mender of roads in a blue cap. All adust and athirst, the two entered
the wine-shop. Their arrival had lighted a kind of fire in the breast
of Saint Antoine, fast spreading as they came along, which stirred and
flickered in flames of faces at most doors and windows. Yet, no one had
followed them, and no man spoke when they entered the wine-shop, though
the eyes of every man there were turned upon them.

“Good day, gentlemen!” said Monsieur Defarge.

It may have been a signal for loosening the general tongue. It elicited
an answering chorus of “Good day!”

“It is bad weather, gentlemen,” said Defarge, shaking his head.

Upon which, every man looked at his neighbour, and then all cast down
their eyes and sat silent. Except one man, who got up and went out.

“My wife,” said Defarge aloud, addressing Madame Defarge: “I have
travelled certain leagues with this good mender of roads, called
Jacques. I met him--by accident--a day and half's journey out of Paris.
He is a good child, this mender of roads, called Jacques. Give him to
drink, my wife!”

A second man got up and went out. Madame Defarge set wine before the
mender of roads called Jacques, who doffed his blue cap to the company,
and drank. In the breast of his blouse he carried some coarse dark
bread; he ate of this between whiles, and sat munching and drinking near
Madame Defarge's counter. A third man got up and went out.

Defarge refreshed himself with a draught of wine--but, he took less
than was given to the stranger, as being himself a man to whom it was no
rarity--and stood waiting until the countryman had made his breakfast.
He looked at no one present, and no one now looked at him; not even
Madame Defarge, who had taken up her knitting, and was at work.

“Have you finished your repast, friend?” he asked, in due season.

“Yes, thank you.”

“Come, then! You shall see the apartment that I told you you could
occupy. It will suit you to a marvel.”

Out of the wine-shop into the street, out of the street into a
courtyard, out of the courtyard up a steep staircase, out of the
staircase into a garret--formerly the garret where a white-haired man
sat on a low bench, stooping forward and very busy, making shoes.

No white-haired man was there now; but, the three men were there who had
gone out of the wine-shop singly. And between them and the white-haired
man afar off, was the one small link, that they had once looked in at
him through the chinks in the wall.

Defarge closed the door carefully, and spoke in a subdued voice:

“Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques Three! This is the witness
encountered by appointment, by me, Jacques Four. He will tell you all.
Speak, Jacques Five!”

The mender of roads, blue cap in hand, wiped his swarthy forehead with
it, and said, “Where shall I commence, monsieur?”

“Commence,” was Monsieur Defarge's not unreasonable reply, “at the
commencement.”

“I saw him then, messieurs,” began the mender of roads, “a year ago this
running summer, underneath the carriage of the Marquis, hanging by the
chain. Behold the manner of it. I leaving my work on the road, the sun
going to bed, the carriage of the Marquis slowly ascending the hill, he
hanging by the chain--like this.”

Again the mender of roads went through the whole performance; in which
he ought to have been perfect by that time, seeing that it had been
the infallible resource and indispensable entertainment of his village
during a whole year.

Jacques One struck in, and asked if he had ever seen the man before?

“Never,” answered the mender of roads, recovering his perpendicular.

Jacques Three demanded how he afterwards recognised him then?

“By his tall figure,” said the mender of roads, softly, and with his
finger at his nose. “When Monsieur the Marquis demands that evening,
'Say, what is he like?' I make response, 'Tall as a spectre.'”

“You should have said, short as a dwarf,” returned Jacques Two.

“But what did I know? The deed was not then accomplished, neither did he
confide in me. Observe! Under those circumstances even, I do not
offer my testimony. Monsieur the Marquis indicates me with his finger,
standing near our little fountain, and says, 'To me! Bring that rascal!'
My faith, messieurs, I offer nothing.”

“He is right there, Jacques,” murmured Defarge, to him who had
interrupted. “Go on!”

“Good!” said the mender of roads, with an air of mystery. “The tall man
is lost, and he is sought--how many months? Nine, ten, eleven?”

“No matter, the number,” said Defarge. “He is well hidden, but at last
he is unluckily found. Go on!”

“I am again at work upon the hill-side, and the sun is again about to
go to bed. I am collecting my tools to descend to my cottage down in the
village below, where it is already dark, when I raise my eyes, and see
coming over the hill six soldiers. In the midst of them is a tall man
with his arms bound--tied to his sides--like this!”

With the aid of his indispensable cap, he represented a man with his
elbows bound fast at his hips, with cords that were knotted behind him.

“I stand aside, messieurs, by my heap of stones, to see the soldiers
and their prisoner pass (for it is a solitary road, that, where any
spectacle is well worth looking at), and at first, as they approach, I
see no more than that they are six soldiers with a tall man bound, and
that they are almost black to my sight--except on the side of the sun
going to bed, where they have a red edge, messieurs. Also, I see that
their long shadows are on the hollow ridge on the opposite side of the
road, and are on the hill above it, and are like the shadows of giants.
Also, I see that they are covered with dust, and that the dust moves
with them as they come, tramp, tramp! But when they advance quite near
to me, I recognise the tall man, and he recognises me. Ah, but he would
be well content to precipitate himself over the hill-side once again, as
on the evening when he and I first encountered, close to the same spot!”

He described it as if he were there, and it was evident that he saw it
vividly; perhaps he had not seen much in his life.

“I do not show the soldiers that I recognise the tall man; he does not
show the soldiers that he recognises me; we do it, and we know it, with
our eyes. 'Come on!' says the chief of that company, pointing to the
village, 'bring him fast to his tomb!' and they bring him faster. I
follow. His arms are swelled because of being bound so tight, his wooden
shoes are large and clumsy, and he is lame. Because he is lame, and
consequently slow, they drive him with their guns--like this!”

He imitated the action of a man's being impelled forward by the
butt-ends of muskets.

“As they descend the hill like madmen running a race, he falls. They
laugh and pick him up again. His face is bleeding and covered with dust,
but he cannot touch it; thereupon they laugh again. They bring him into
the village; all the village runs to look; they take him past the mill,
and up to the prison; all the village sees the prison gate open in the
darkness of the night, and swallow him--like this!”

He opened his mouth as wide as he could, and shut it with a sounding
snap of his teeth. Observant of his unwillingness to mar the effect by
opening it again, Defarge said, “Go on, Jacques.”

“All the village,” pursued the mender of roads, on tiptoe and in a low
voice, “withdraws; all the village whispers by the fountain; all the
village sleeps; all the village dreams of that unhappy one, within the
locks and bars of the prison on the crag, and never to come out of it,
except to perish. In the morning, with my tools upon my shoulder, eating
my morsel of black bread as I go, I make a circuit by the prison, on
my way to my work. There I see him, high up, behind the bars of a lofty
iron cage, bloody and dusty as last night, looking through. He has no
hand free, to wave to me; I dare not call to him; he regards me like a
dead man.”

Defarge and the three glanced darkly at one another. The looks of all
of them were dark, repressed, and revengeful, as they listened to the
countryman's story; the manner of all of them, while it was secret, was
authoritative too. They had the air of a rough tribunal; Jacques One
and Two sitting on the old pallet-bed, each with his chin resting on
his hand, and his eyes intent on the road-mender; Jacques Three, equally
intent, on one knee behind them, with his agitated hand always gliding
over the network of fine nerves about his mouth and nose; Defarge
standing between them and the narrator, whom he had stationed in the
light of the window, by turns looking from him to them, and from them to
him.

“Go on, Jacques,” said Defarge.

“He remains up there in his iron cage some days. The village looks
at him by stealth, for it is afraid. But it always looks up, from a
distance, at the prison on the crag; and in the evening, when the work
of the day is achieved and it assembles to gossip at the fountain, all
faces are turned towards the prison. Formerly, they were turned towards
the posting-house; now, they are turned towards the prison. They
whisper at the fountain, that although condemned to death he will not be
executed; they say that petitions have been presented in Paris, showing
that he was enraged and made mad by the death of his child; they say
that a petition has been presented to the King himself. What do I know?
It is possible. Perhaps yes, perhaps no.”

“Listen then, Jacques,” Number One of that name sternly interposed.
“Know that a petition was presented to the King and Queen. All here,
yourself excepted, saw the King take it, in his carriage in the street,
sitting beside the Queen. It is Defarge whom you see here, who, at the
hazard of his life, darted out before the horses, with the petition in
his hand.”

“And once again listen, Jacques!” said the kneeling Number Three:
his fingers ever wandering over and over those fine nerves, with a
strikingly greedy air, as if he hungered for something--that was neither
food nor drink; “the guard, horse and foot, surrounded the petitioner,
and struck him blows. You hear?”

“I hear, messieurs.”

“Go on then,” said Defarge.

“Again; on the other hand, they whisper at the fountain,” resumed the
countryman, “that he is brought down into our country to be executed on
the spot, and that he will very certainly be executed. They even whisper
that because he has slain Monseigneur, and because Monseigneur was the
father of his tenants--serfs--what you will--he will be executed as a
parricide. One old man says at the fountain, that his right hand, armed
with the knife, will be burnt off before his face; that, into wounds
which will be made in his arms, his breast, and his legs, there will be
poured boiling oil, melted lead, hot resin, wax, and sulphur; finally,
that he will be torn limb from limb by four strong horses. That old man
says, all this was actually done to a prisoner who made an attempt on
the life of the late King, Louis Fifteen. But how do I know if he lies?
I am not a scholar.”

“Listen once again then, Jacques!” said the man with the restless hand
and the craving air. “The name of that prisoner was Damiens, and it was
all done in open day, in the open streets of this city of Paris; and
nothing was more noticed in the vast concourse that saw it done, than
the crowd of ladies of quality and fashion, who were full of eager
attention to the last--to the last, Jacques, prolonged until nightfall,
when he had lost two legs and an arm, and still breathed! And it was
done--why, how old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” said the mender of roads, who looked sixty.

“It was done when you were more than ten years old; you might have seen
it.”

“Enough!” said Defarge, with grim impatience. “Long live the Devil! Go
on.”

“Well! Some whisper this, some whisper that; they speak of nothing else;
even the fountain appears to fall to that tune. At length, on Sunday
night when all the village is asleep, come soldiers, winding down from
the prison, and their guns ring on the stones of the little street.
Workmen dig, workmen hammer, soldiers laugh and sing; in the morning, by
the fountain, there is raised a gallows forty feet high, poisoning the
water.”

The mender of roads looked _through_ rather than _at_ the low ceiling,
and pointed as if he saw the gallows somewhere in the sky.

“All work is stopped, all assemble there, nobody leads the cows out,
the cows are there with the rest. At midday, the roll of drums. Soldiers
have marched into the prison in the night, and he is in the midst
of many soldiers. He is bound as before, and in his mouth there is
a gag--tied so, with a tight string, making him look almost as if he
laughed.” He suggested it, by creasing his face with his two thumbs,
from the corners of his mouth to his ears. “On the top of the gallows is
fixed the knife, blade upwards, with its point in the air. He is hanged
there forty feet high--and is left hanging, poisoning the water.”

They looked at one another, as he used his blue cap to wipe his face,
on which the perspiration had started afresh while he recalled the
spectacle.

“It is frightful, messieurs. How can the women and the children draw
water! Who can gossip of an evening, under that shadow! Under it, have
I said? When I left the village, Monday evening as the sun was going to
bed, and looked back from the hill, the shadow struck across the church,
across the mill, across the prison--seemed to strike across the earth,
messieurs, to where the sky rests upon it!”

The hungry man gnawed one of his fingers as he looked at the other
three, and his finger quivered with the craving that was on him.

“That's all, messieurs. I left at sunset (as I had been warned to do),
and I walked on, that night and half next day, until I met (as I was
warned I should) this comrade. With him, I came on, now riding and now
walking, through the rest of yesterday and through last night. And here
you see me!”

After a gloomy silence, the first Jacques said, “Good! You have acted
and recounted faithfully. Will you wait for us a little, outside the
door?”

“Very willingly,” said the mender of roads. Whom Defarge escorted to the
top of the stairs, and, leaving seated there, returned.

The three had risen, and their heads were together when he came back to
the garret.

“How say you, Jacques?” demanded Number One. “To be registered?”

“To be registered, as doomed to destruction,” returned Defarge.

“Magnificent!” croaked the man with the craving.

“The chateau, and all the race?” inquired the first.

“The chateau and all the race,” returned Defarge. “Extermination.”

The hungry man repeated, in a rapturous croak, “Magnificent!” and began
gnawing another finger.

“Are you sure,” asked Jacques Two, of Defarge, “that no embarrassment
can arise from our manner of keeping the register? Without doubt it is
safe, for no one beyond ourselves can decipher it; but shall we always
be able to decipher it--or, I ought to say, will she?”

“Jacques,” returned Defarge, drawing himself up, “if madame my wife
undertook to keep the register in her memory alone, she would not lose
a word of it--not a syllable of it. Knitted, in her own stitches and her
own symbols, it will always be as plain to her as the sun. Confide in
Madame Defarge. It would be easier for the weakest poltroon that lives,
to erase himself from existence, than to erase one letter of his name or
crimes from the knitted register of Madame Defarge.”

There was a murmur of confidence and approval, and then the man who
hungered, asked: “Is this rustic to be sent back soon? I hope so. He is
very simple; is he not a little dangerous?”

“He knows nothing,” said Defarge; “at least nothing more than would
easily elevate himself to a gallows of the same height. I charge myself
with him; let him remain with me; I will take care of him, and set him
on his road. He wishes to see the fine world--the King, the Queen, and
Court; let him see them on Sunday.”

“What?” exclaimed the hungry man, staring. “Is it a good sign, that he
wishes to see Royalty and Nobility?”

“Jacques,” said Defarge; “judiciously show a cat milk, if you wish her
to thirst for it. Judiciously show a dog his natural prey, if you wish
him to bring it down one day.”

Nothing more was said, and the mender of roads, being found already
dozing on the topmost stair, was advised to lay himself down on the
pallet-bed and take some rest. He needed no persuasion, and was soon
asleep.

Worse quarters than Defarge's wine-shop, could easily have been found
in Paris for a provincial slave of that degree. Saving for a mysterious
dread of madame by which he was constantly haunted, his life was very
new and agreeable. But, madame sat all day at her counter, so expressly
unconscious of him, and so particularly determined not to perceive that
his being there had any connection with anything below the surface, that
he shook in his wooden shoes whenever his eye lighted on her. For, he
contended with himself that it was impossible to foresee what that lady
might pretend next; and he felt assured that if she should take it
into her brightly ornamented head to pretend that she had seen him do a
murder and afterwards flay the victim, she would infallibly go through
with it until the play was played out.

Therefore, when Sunday came, the mender of roads was not enchanted
(though he said he was) to find that madame was to accompany monsieur
and himself to Versailles. It was additionally disconcerting to have
madame knitting all the way there, in a public conveyance; it was
additionally disconcerting yet, to have madame in the crowd in the
afternoon, still with her knitting in her hands as the crowd waited to
see the carriage of the King and Queen.

“You work hard, madame,” said a man near her.

“Yes,” answered Madame Defarge; “I have a good deal to do.”

“What do you make, madame?”

“Many things.”

“For instance--”

“For instance,” returned Madame Defarge, composedly, “shrouds.”

The man moved a little further away, as soon as he could, and the mender
of roads fanned himself with his blue cap: feeling it mightily close
and oppressive. If he needed a King and Queen to restore him, he was
fortunate in having his remedy at hand; for, soon the large-faced King
and the fair-faced Queen came in their golden coach, attended by the
shining Bull's Eye of their Court, a glittering multitude of laughing
ladies and fine lords; and in jewels and silks and powder and splendour
and elegantly spurning figures and handsomely disdainful faces of both
sexes, the mender of roads bathed himself, so much to his temporary
intoxication, that he cried Long live the King, Long live the Queen,
Long live everybody and everything! as if he had never heard of
ubiquitous Jacques in his time. Then, there were gardens, courtyards,
terraces, fountains, green banks, more King and Queen, more Bull's Eye,
more lords and ladies, more Long live they all! until he absolutely wept
with sentiment. During the whole of this scene, which lasted some three
hours, he had plenty of shouting and weeping and sentimental company,
and throughout Defarge held him by the collar, as if to restrain him
from flying at the objects of his brief devotion and tearing them to
pieces.

“Bravo!” said Defarge, clapping him on the back when it was over, like a
patron; “you are a good boy!”

The mender of roads was now coming to himself, and was mistrustful of
having made a mistake in his late demonstrations; but no.

“You are the fellow we want,” said Defarge, in his ear; “you make
these fools believe that it will last for ever. Then, they are the more
insolent, and it is the nearer ended.”

“Hey!” cried the mender of roads, reflectively; “that's true.”

“These fools know nothing. While they despise your breath, and would
stop it for ever and ever, in you or in a hundred like you rather than
in one of their own horses or dogs, they only know what your breath
tells them. Let it deceive them, then, a little longer; it cannot
deceive them too much.”

Madame Defarge looked superciliously at the client, and nodded in
confirmation.

“As to you,” said she, “you would shout and shed tears for anything, if
it made a show and a noise. Say! Would you not?”

“Truly, madame, I think so. For the moment.”

“If you were shown a great heap of dolls, and were set upon them to
pluck them to pieces and despoil them for your own advantage, you would
pick out the richest and gayest. Say! Would you not?”

“Truly yes, madame.”

“Yes. And if you were shown a flock of birds, unable to fly, and were
set upon them to strip them of their feathers for your own advantage,
you would set upon the birds of the finest feathers; would you not?”

“It is true, madame.”

“You have seen both dolls and birds to-day,” said Madame Defarge, with
a wave of her hand towards the place where they had last been apparent;
“now, go home!”




XVI. Still Knitting


Madame Defarge and monsieur her husband returned amicably to the
bosom of Saint Antoine, while a speck in a blue cap toiled through the
darkness, and through the dust, and down the weary miles of avenue by
the wayside, slowly tending towards that point of the compass where
the chateau of Monsieur the Marquis, now in his grave, listened to
the whispering trees. Such ample leisure had the stone faces, now,
for listening to the trees and to the fountain, that the few village
scarecrows who, in their quest for herbs to eat and fragments of dead
stick to burn, strayed within sight of the great stone courtyard and
terrace staircase, had it borne in upon their starved fancy that
the expression of the faces was altered. A rumour just lived in the
village--had a faint and bare existence there, as its people had--that
when the knife struck home, the faces changed, from faces of pride to
faces of anger and pain; also, that when that dangling figure was hauled
up forty feet above the fountain, they changed again, and bore a cruel
look of being avenged, which they would henceforth bear for ever. In the
stone face over the great window of the bed-chamber where the murder
was done, two fine dints were pointed out in the sculptured nose, which
everybody recognised, and which nobody had seen of old; and on the
scarce occasions when two or three ragged peasants emerged from the
crowd to take a hurried peep at Monsieur the Marquis petrified, a
skinny finger would not have pointed to it for a minute, before they all
started away among the moss and leaves, like the more fortunate hares
who could find a living there.

Chateau and hut, stone face and dangling figure, the red stain on the
stone floor, and the pure water in the village well--thousands of acres
of land--a whole province of France--all France itself--lay under the
night sky, concentrated into a faint hair-breadth line. So does a whole
world, with all its greatnesses and littlenesses, lie in a twinkling
star. And as mere human knowledge can split a ray of light and analyse
the manner of its composition, so, sublimer intelligences may read in
the feeble shining of this earth of ours, every thought and act, every
vice and virtue, of every responsible creature on it.

The Defarges, husband and wife, came lumbering under the starlight,
in their public vehicle, to that gate of Paris whereunto their
journey naturally tended. There was the usual stoppage at the barrier
guardhouse, and the usual lanterns came glancing forth for the usual
examination and inquiry. Monsieur Defarge alighted; knowing one or two
of the soldiery there, and one of the police. The latter he was intimate
with, and affectionately embraced.

When Saint Antoine had again enfolded the Defarges in his dusky wings,
and they, having finally alighted near the Saint's boundaries, were
picking their way on foot through the black mud and offal of his
streets, Madame Defarge spoke to her husband:

“Say then, my friend; what did Jacques of the police tell thee?”

“Very little to-night, but all he knows. There is another spy
commissioned for our quarter. There may be many more, for all that he
can say, but he knows of one.”

“Eh well!” said Madame Defarge, raising her eyebrows with a cool
business air. “It is necessary to register him. How do they call that
man?”

“He is English.”

“So much the better. His name?”

“Barsad,” said Defarge, making it French by pronunciation. But, he had
been so careful to get it accurately, that he then spelt it with perfect
correctness.

“Barsad,” repeated madame. “Good. Christian name?”

“John.”

“John Barsad,” repeated madame, after murmuring it once to herself.
“Good. His appearance; is it known?”

“Age, about forty years; height, about five feet nine; black hair;
complexion dark; generally, rather handsome visage; eyes dark, face
thin, long, and sallow; nose aquiline, but not straight, having a
peculiar inclination towards the left cheek; expression, therefore,
sinister.”

“Eh my faith. It is a portrait!” said madame, laughing. “He shall be
registered to-morrow.”

They turned into the wine-shop, which was closed (for it was midnight),
and where Madame Defarge immediately took her post at her desk, counted
the small moneys that had been taken during her absence, examined the
stock, went through the entries in the book, made other entries of
her own, checked the serving man in every possible way, and finally
dismissed him to bed. Then she turned out the contents of the bowl
of money for the second time, and began knotting them up in her
handkerchief, in a chain of separate knots, for safe keeping through the
night. All this while, Defarge, with his pipe in his mouth, walked
up and down, complacently admiring, but never interfering; in which
condition, indeed, as to the business and his domestic affairs, he
walked up and down through life.

The night was hot, and the shop, close shut and surrounded by so foul a
neighbourhood, was ill-smelling. Monsieur Defarge's olfactory sense was
by no means delicate, but the stock of wine smelt much stronger than
it ever tasted, and so did the stock of rum and brandy and aniseed. He
whiffed the compound of scents away, as he put down his smoked-out pipe.

“You are fatigued,” said madame, raising her glance as she knotted the
money. “There are only the usual odours.”

“I am a little tired,” her husband acknowledged.

“You are a little depressed, too,” said madame, whose quick eyes had
never been so intent on the accounts, but they had had a ray or two for
him. “Oh, the men, the men!”

“But my dear!” began Defarge.

“But my dear!” repeated madame, nodding firmly; “but my dear! You are
faint of heart to-night, my dear!”

“Well, then,” said Defarge, as if a thought were wrung out of his
breast, “it _is_ a long time.”

“It is a long time,” repeated his wife; “and when is it not a long time?
Vengeance and retribution require a long time; it is the rule.”

“It does not take a long time to strike a man with Lightning,” said
Defarge.

“How long,” demanded madame, composedly, “does it take to make and store
the lightning? Tell me.”

Defarge raised his head thoughtfully, as if there were something in that
too.

“It does not take a long time,” said madame, “for an earthquake to
swallow a town. Eh well! Tell me how long it takes to prepare the
earthquake?”

“A long time, I suppose,” said Defarge.

“But when it is ready, it takes place, and grinds to pieces everything
before it. In the meantime, it is always preparing, though it is not
seen or heard. That is your consolation. Keep it.”

She tied a knot with flashing eyes, as if it throttled a foe.

“I tell thee,” said madame, extending her right hand, for emphasis,
“that although it is a long time on the road, it is on the road and
coming. I tell thee it never retreats, and never stops. I tell thee it
is always advancing. Look around and consider the lives of all the world
that we know, consider the faces of all the world that we know, consider
the rage and discontent to which the Jacquerie addresses itself with
more and more of certainty every hour. Can such things last? Bah! I mock
you.”

“My brave wife,” returned Defarge, standing before her with his head
a little bent, and his hands clasped at his back, like a docile and
attentive pupil before his catechist, “I do not question all this. But
it has lasted a long time, and it is possible--you know well, my wife,
it is possible--that it may not come, during our lives.”

“Eh well! How then?” demanded madame, tying another knot, as if there
were another enemy strangled.

“Well!” said Defarge, with a half complaining and half apologetic shrug.
“We shall not see the triumph.”

“We shall have helped it,” returned madame, with her extended hand in
strong action. “Nothing that we do, is done in vain. I believe, with all
my soul, that we shall see the triumph. But even if not, even if I knew
certainly not, show me the neck of an aristocrat and tyrant, and still I
would--”

Then madame, with her teeth set, tied a very terrible knot indeed.

“Hold!” cried Defarge, reddening a little as if he felt charged with
cowardice; “I too, my dear, will stop at nothing.”

“Yes! But it is your weakness that you sometimes need to see your victim
and your opportunity, to sustain you. Sustain yourself without that.
When the time comes, let loose a tiger and a devil; but wait for the
time with the tiger and the devil chained--not shown--yet always ready.”

Madame enforced the conclusion of this piece of advice by striking her
little counter with her chain of money as if she knocked its brains
out, and then gathering the heavy handkerchief under her arm in a serene
manner, and observing that it was time to go to bed.

Next noontide saw the admirable woman in her usual place in the
wine-shop, knitting away assiduously. A rose lay beside her, and if she
now and then glanced at the flower, it was with no infraction of her
usual preoccupied air. There were a few customers, drinking or not
drinking, standing or seated, sprinkled about. The day was very hot,
and heaps of flies, who were extending their inquisitive and adventurous
perquisitions into all the glutinous little glasses near madame, fell
dead at the bottom. Their decease made no impression on the other flies
out promenading, who looked at them in the coolest manner (as if they
themselves were elephants, or something as far removed), until they met
the same fate. Curious to consider how heedless flies are!--perhaps they
thought as much at Court that sunny summer day.

A figure entering at the door threw a shadow on Madame Defarge which she
felt to be a new one. She laid down her knitting, and began to pin her
rose in her head-dress, before she looked at the figure.

It was curious. The moment Madame Defarge took up the rose, the
customers ceased talking, and began gradually to drop out of the
wine-shop.

“Good day, madame,” said the new-comer.

“Good day, monsieur.”

She said it aloud, but added to herself, as she resumed her knitting:
“Hah! Good day, age about forty, height about five feet nine, black
hair, generally rather handsome visage, complexion dark, eyes dark,
thin, long and sallow face, aquiline nose but not straight, having a
peculiar inclination towards the left cheek which imparts a sinister
expression! Good day, one and all!”

“Have the goodness to give me a little glass of old cognac, and a
mouthful of cool fresh water, madame.”

Madame complied with a polite air.

“Marvellous cognac this, madame!”

It was the first time it had ever been so complimented, and Madame
Defarge knew enough of its antecedents to know better. She said,
however, that the cognac was flattered, and took up her knitting. The
visitor watched her fingers for a few moments, and took the opportunity
of observing the place in general.

“You knit with great skill, madame.”

“I am accustomed to it.”

“A pretty pattern too!”

“_You_ think so?” said madame, looking at him with a smile.

“Decidedly. May one ask what it is for?”

“Pastime,” said madame, still looking at him with a smile while her
fingers moved nimbly.

“Not for use?”

“That depends. I may find a use for it one day. If I do--Well,” said
madame, drawing a breath and nodding her head with a stern kind of
coquetry, “I'll use it!”

It was remarkable; but, the taste of Saint Antoine seemed to be
decidedly opposed to a rose on the head-dress of Madame Defarge. Two
men had entered separately, and had been about to order drink, when,
catching sight of that novelty, they faltered, made a pretence of
looking about as if for some friend who was not there, and went away.
Nor, of those who had been there when this visitor entered, was there
one left. They had all dropped off. The spy had kept his eyes open,
but had been able to detect no sign. They had lounged away in a
poverty-stricken, purposeless, accidental manner, quite natural and
unimpeachable.

“_John_,” thought madame, checking off her work as her fingers knitted,
and her eyes looked at the stranger. “Stay long enough, and I shall knit
'BARSAD' before you go.”

“You have a husband, madame?”

“I have.”

“Children?”

“No children.”

“Business seems bad?”

“Business is very bad; the people are so poor.”

“Ah, the unfortunate, miserable people! So oppressed, too--as you say.”

“As _you_ say,” madame retorted, correcting him, and deftly knitting an
extra something into his name that boded him no good.

“Pardon me; certainly it was I who said so, but you naturally think so.
Of course.”

“_I_ think?” returned madame, in a high voice. “I and my husband have
enough to do to keep this wine-shop open, without thinking. All we
think, here, is how to live. That is the subject _we_ think of, and
it gives us, from morning to night, enough to think about, without
embarrassing our heads concerning others. _I_ think for others? No, no.”

The spy, who was there to pick up any crumbs he could find or make, did
not allow his baffled state to express itself in his sinister face; but,
stood with an air of gossiping gallantry, leaning his elbow on Madame
Defarge's little counter, and occasionally sipping his cognac.

“A bad business this, madame, of Gaspard's execution. Ah! the poor
Gaspard!” With a sigh of great compassion.

“My faith!” returned madame, coolly and lightly, “if people use knives
for such purposes, they have to pay for it. He knew beforehand what the
price of his luxury was; he has paid the price.”

“I believe,” said the spy, dropping his soft voice to a tone
that invited confidence, and expressing an injured revolutionary
susceptibility in every muscle of his wicked face: “I believe there
is much compassion and anger in this neighbourhood, touching the poor
fellow? Between ourselves.”

“Is there?” asked madame, vacantly.

“Is there not?”

“--Here is my husband!” said Madame Defarge.

As the keeper of the wine-shop entered at the door, the spy saluted
him by touching his hat, and saying, with an engaging smile, “Good day,
Jacques!” Defarge stopped short, and stared at him.

“Good day, Jacques!” the spy repeated; with not quite so much
confidence, or quite so easy a smile under the stare.

“You deceive yourself, monsieur,” returned the keeper of the wine-shop.
“You mistake me for another. That is not my name. I am Ernest Defarge.”

“It is all the same,” said the spy, airily, but discomfited too: “good
day!”

“Good day!” answered Defarge, drily.

“I was saying to madame, with whom I had the pleasure of chatting when
you entered, that they tell me there is--and no wonder!--much sympathy
and anger in Saint Antoine, touching the unhappy fate of poor Gaspard.”

“No one has told me so,” said Defarge, shaking his head. “I know nothing
of it.”

Having said it, he passed behind the little counter, and stood with his
hand on the back of his wife's chair, looking over that barrier at the
person to whom they were both opposed, and whom either of them would
have shot with the greatest satisfaction.

The spy, well used to his business, did not change his unconscious
attitude, but drained his little glass of cognac, took a sip of fresh
water, and asked for another glass of cognac. Madame Defarge poured it
out for him, took to her knitting again, and hummed a little song over
it.

“You seem to know this quarter well; that is to say, better than I do?”
 observed Defarge.

“Not at all, but I hope to know it better. I am so profoundly interested
in its miserable inhabitants.”

“Hah!” muttered Defarge.

“The pleasure of conversing with you, Monsieur Defarge, recalls to me,”
 pursued the spy, “that I have the honour of cherishing some interesting
associations with your name.”

“Indeed!” said Defarge, with much indifference.

“Yes, indeed. When Doctor Manette was released, you, his old domestic,
had the charge of him, I know. He was delivered to you. You see I am
informed of the circumstances?”

“Such is the fact, certainly,” said Defarge. He had had it conveyed
to him, in an accidental touch of his wife's elbow as she knitted and
warbled, that he would do best to answer, but always with brevity.

“It was to you,” said the spy, “that his daughter came; and it was
from your care that his daughter took him, accompanied by a neat brown
monsieur; how is he called?--in a little wig--Lorry--of the bank of
Tellson and Company--over to England.”

“Such is the fact,” repeated Defarge.

“Very interesting remembrances!” said the spy. “I have known Doctor
Manette and his daughter, in England.”

“Yes?” said Defarge.

“You don't hear much about them now?” said the spy.

“No,” said Defarge.

“In effect,” madame struck in, looking up from her work and her little
song, “we never hear about them. We received the news of their safe
arrival, and perhaps another letter, or perhaps two; but, since then,
they have gradually taken their road in life--we, ours--and we have held
no correspondence.”

“Perfectly so, madame,” replied the spy. “She is going to be married.”

“Going?” echoed madame. “She was pretty enough to have been married long
ago. You English are cold, it seems to me.”

“Oh! You know I am English.”

“I perceive your tongue is,” returned madame; “and what the tongue is, I
suppose the man is.”

He did not take the identification as a compliment; but he made the best
of it, and turned it off with a laugh. After sipping his cognac to the
end, he added:

“Yes, Miss Manette is going to be married. But not to an Englishman; to
one who, like herself, is French by birth. And speaking of Gaspard (ah,
poor Gaspard! It was cruel, cruel!), it is a curious thing that she is
going to marry the nephew of Monsieur the Marquis, for whom Gaspard
was exalted to that height of so many feet; in other words, the present
Marquis. But he lives unknown in England, he is no Marquis there; he is
Mr. Charles Darnay. D'Aulnais is the name of his mother's family.”

Madame Defarge knitted steadily, but the intelligence had a palpable
effect upon her husband. Do what he would, behind the little counter,
as to the striking of a light and the lighting of his pipe, he was
troubled, and his hand was not trustworthy. The spy would have been no
spy if he had failed to see it, or to record it in his mind.

Having made, at least, this one hit, whatever it might prove to be
worth, and no customers coming in to help him to any other, Mr. Barsad
paid for what he had drunk, and took his leave: taking occasion to say,
in a genteel manner, before he departed, that he looked forward to the
pleasure of seeing Monsieur and Madame Defarge again. For some minutes
after he had emerged into the outer presence of Saint Antoine, the
husband and wife remained exactly as he had left them, lest he should
come back.

“Can it be true,” said Defarge, in a low voice, looking down at his wife
as he stood smoking with his hand on the back of her chair: “what he has
said of Ma'amselle Manette?”

“As he has said it,” returned madame, lifting her eyebrows a little, “it
is probably false. But it may be true.”

“If it is--” Defarge began, and stopped.

“If it is?” repeated his wife.

“--And if it does come, while we live to see it triumph--I hope, for her
sake, Destiny will keep her husband out of France.”

“Her husband's destiny,” said Madame Defarge, with her usual composure,
“will take him where he is to go, and will lead him to the end that is
to end him. That is all I know.”

“But it is very strange--now, at least, is it not very strange”--said
Defarge, rather pleading with his wife to induce her to admit it,
“that, after all our sympathy for Monsieur her father, and herself, her
husband's name should be proscribed under your hand at this moment, by
the side of that infernal dog's who has just left us?”

“Stranger things than that will happen when it does come,” answered
madame. “I have them both here, of a certainty; and they are both here
for their merits; that is enough.”

She rolled up her knitting when she had said those words, and presently
took the rose out of the handkerchief that was wound about her head.
Either Saint Antoine had an instinctive sense that the objectionable
decoration was gone, or Saint Antoine was on the watch for its
disappearance; howbeit, the Saint took courage to lounge in, very
shortly afterwards, and the wine-shop recovered its habitual aspect.

In the evening, at which season of all others Saint Antoine turned
himself inside out, and sat on door-steps and window-ledges, and came
to the corners of vile streets and courts, for a breath of air, Madame
Defarge with her work in her hand was accustomed to pass from place
to place and from group to group: a Missionary--there were many like
her--such as the world will do well never to breed again. All the women
knitted. They knitted worthless things; but, the mechanical work was a
mechanical substitute for eating and drinking; the hands moved for the
jaws and the digestive apparatus: if the bony fingers had been still,
the stomachs would have been more famine-pinched.

But, as the fingers went, the eyes went, and the thoughts. And as Madame
Defarge moved on from group to group, all three went quicker and fiercer
among every little knot of women that she had spoken with, and left
behind.

Her husband smoked at his door, looking after her with admiration. “A
great woman,” said he, “a strong woman, a grand woman, a frightfully
grand woman!”

Darkness closed around, and then came the ringing of church bells and
the distant beating of the military drums in the Palace Courtyard, as
the women sat knitting, knitting. Darkness encompassed them. Another
darkness was closing in as surely, when the church bells, then ringing
pleasantly in many an airy steeple over France, should be melted into
thundering cannon; when the military drums should be beating to drown a
wretched voice, that night all potent as the voice of Power and Plenty,
Freedom and Life. So much was closing in about the women who sat
knitting, knitting, that they their very selves were closing in around
a structure yet unbuilt, where they were to sit knitting, knitting,
counting dropping heads.




XVII. One Night


Never did the sun go down with a brighter glory on the quiet corner in
Soho, than one memorable evening when the Doctor and his daughter sat
under the plane-tree together. Never did the moon rise with a milder
radiance over great London, than on that night when it found them still
seated under the tree, and shone upon their faces through its leaves.

Lucie was to be married to-morrow. She had reserved this last evening
for her father, and they sat alone under the plane-tree.

“You are happy, my dear father?”

“Quite, my child.”

They had said little, though they had been there a long time. When it
was yet light enough to work and read, she had neither engaged herself
in her usual work, nor had she read to him. She had employed herself in
both ways, at his side under the tree, many and many a time; but, this
time was not quite like any other, and nothing could make it so.

“And I am very happy to-night, dear father. I am deeply happy in the
love that Heaven has so blessed--my love for Charles, and Charles's love
for me. But, if my life were not to be still consecrated to you, or
if my marriage were so arranged as that it would part us, even by
the length of a few of these streets, I should be more unhappy and
self-reproachful now than I can tell you. Even as it is--”

Even as it was, she could not command her voice.

In the sad moonlight, she clasped him by the neck, and laid her face
upon his breast. In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of
the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and
its going.

“Dearest dear! Can you tell me, this last time, that you feel quite,
quite sure, no new affections of mine, and no new duties of mine, will
ever interpose between us? _I_ know it well, but do you know it? In your
own heart, do you feel quite certain?”

Her father answered, with a cheerful firmness of conviction he could
scarcely have assumed, “Quite sure, my darling! More than that,” he
added, as he tenderly kissed her: “my future is far brighter, Lucie,
seen through your marriage, than it could have been--nay, than it ever
was--without it.”

“If I could hope _that_, my father!--”

“Believe it, love! Indeed it is so. Consider how natural and how plain
it is, my dear, that it should be so. You, devoted and young, cannot
fully appreciate the anxiety I have felt that your life should not be
wasted--”

She moved her hand towards his lips, but he took it in his, and repeated
the word.

“--wasted, my child--should not be wasted, struck aside from the
natural order of things--for my sake. Your unselfishness cannot entirely
comprehend how much my mind has gone on this; but, only ask yourself,
how could my happiness be perfect, while yours was incomplete?”

“If I had never seen Charles, my father, I should have been quite happy
with you.”

He smiled at her unconscious admission that she would have been unhappy
without Charles, having seen him; and replied:

“My child, you did see him, and it is Charles. If it had not been
Charles, it would have been another. Or, if it had been no other, I
should have been the cause, and then the dark part of my life would have
cast its shadow beyond myself, and would have fallen on you.”

It was the first time, except at the trial, of her ever hearing him
refer to the period of his suffering. It gave her a strange and new
sensation while his words were in her ears; and she remembered it long
afterwards.

“See!” said the Doctor of Beauvais, raising his hand towards the moon.
“I have looked at her from my prison-window, when I could not bear her
light. I have looked at her when it has been such torture to me to think
of her shining upon what I had lost, that I have beaten my head against
my prison-walls. I have looked at her, in a state so dull and lethargic,
that I have thought of nothing but the number of horizontal lines I
could draw across her at the full, and the number of perpendicular lines
with which I could intersect them.” He added in his inward and pondering
manner, as he looked at the moon, “It was twenty either way, I remember,
and the twentieth was difficult to squeeze in.”

The strange thrill with which she heard him go back to that time,
deepened as he dwelt upon it; but, there was nothing to shock her in
the manner of his reference. He only seemed to contrast his present
cheerfulness and felicity with the dire endurance that was over.

“I have looked at her, speculating thousands of times upon the unborn
child from whom I had been rent. Whether it was alive. Whether it had
been born alive, or the poor mother's shock had killed it. Whether it
was a son who would some day avenge his father. (There was a time in my
imprisonment, when my desire for vengeance was unbearable.) Whether it
was a son who would never know his father's story; who might even live
to weigh the possibility of his father's having disappeared of his own
will and act. Whether it was a daughter who would grow to be a woman.”

She drew closer to him, and kissed his cheek and his hand.

“I have pictured my daughter, to myself, as perfectly forgetful of
me--rather, altogether ignorant of me, and unconscious of me. I have
cast up the years of her age, year after year. I have seen her married
to a man who knew nothing of my fate. I have altogether perished from
the remembrance of the living, and in the next generation my place was a
blank.”

“My father! Even to hear that you had such thoughts of a daughter who
never existed, strikes to my heart as if I had been that child.”

“You, Lucie? It is out of the Consolation and restoration you have
brought to me, that these remembrances arise, and pass between us and
the moon on this last night.--What did I say just now?”

“She knew nothing of you. She cared nothing for you.”

“So! But on other moonlight nights, when the sadness and the silence
have touched me in a different way--have affected me with something as
like a sorrowful sense of peace, as any emotion that had pain for its
foundations could--I have imagined her as coming to me in my cell, and
leading me out into the freedom beyond the fortress. I have seen her
image in the moonlight often, as I now see you; except that I never held
her in my arms; it stood between the little grated window and the door.
But, you understand that that was not the child I am speaking of?”

“The figure was not; the--the--image; the fancy?”

“No. That was another thing. It stood before my disturbed sense of
sight, but it never moved. The phantom that my mind pursued, was another
and more real child. Of her outward appearance I know no more than
that she was like her mother. The other had that likeness too--as you
have--but was not the same. Can you follow me, Lucie? Hardly, I think?
I doubt you must have been a solitary prisoner to understand these
perplexed distinctions.”

His collected and calm manner could not prevent her blood from running
cold, as he thus tried to anatomise his old condition.

“In that more peaceful state, I have imagined her, in the moonlight,
coming to me and taking me out to show me that the home of her married
life was full of her loving remembrance of her lost father. My picture
was in her room, and I was in her prayers. Her life was active,
cheerful, useful; but my poor history pervaded it all.”

“I was that child, my father, I was not half so good, but in my love
that was I.”

“And she showed me her children,” said the Doctor of Beauvais, “and
they had heard of me, and had been taught to pity me. When they passed
a prison of the State, they kept far from its frowning walls, and looked
up at its bars, and spoke in whispers. She could never deliver me; I
imagined that she always brought me back after showing me such things.
But then, blessed with the relief of tears, I fell upon my knees, and
blessed her.”

“I am that child, I hope, my father. O my dear, my dear, will you bless
me as fervently to-morrow?”

“Lucie, I recall these old troubles in the reason that I have to-night
for loving you better than words can tell, and thanking God for my great
happiness. My thoughts, when they were wildest, never rose near the
happiness that I have known with you, and that we have before us.”

He embraced her, solemnly commended her to Heaven, and humbly thanked
Heaven for having bestowed her on him. By-and-bye, they went into the
house.

There was no one bidden to the marriage but Mr. Lorry; there was even to
be no bridesmaid but the gaunt Miss Pross. The marriage was to make no
change in their place of residence; they had been able to extend it,
by taking to themselves the upper rooms formerly belonging to the
apocryphal invisible lodger, and they desired nothing more.

Doctor Manette was very cheerful at the little supper. They were only
three at table, and Miss Pross made the third. He regretted that Charles
was not there; was more than half disposed to object to the loving
little plot that kept him away; and drank to him affectionately.

So, the time came for him to bid Lucie good night, and they separated.
But, in the stillness of the third hour of the morning, Lucie came
downstairs again, and stole into his room; not free from unshaped fears,
beforehand.

All things, however, were in their places; all was quiet; and he lay
asleep, his white hair picturesque on the untroubled pillow, and his
hands lying quiet on the coverlet. She put her needless candle in the
shadow at a distance, crept up to his bed, and put her lips to his;
then, leaned over him, and looked at him.

Into his handsome face, the bitter waters of captivity had worn; but, he
covered up their tracks with a determination so strong, that he held the
mastery of them even in his sleep. A more remarkable face in its quiet,
resolute, and guarded struggle with an unseen assailant, was not to be
beheld in all the wide dominions of sleep, that night.

She timidly laid her hand on his dear breast, and put up a prayer that
she might ever be as true to him as her love aspired to be, and as his
sorrows deserved. Then, she withdrew her hand, and kissed his lips once
more, and went away. So, the sunrise came, and the shadows of the leaves
of the plane-tree moved upon his face, as softly as her lips had moved
in praying for him.




XVIII. Nine Days


The marriage-day was shining brightly, and they were ready outside the
closed door of the Doctor's room, where he was speaking with Charles
Darnay. They were ready to go to church; the beautiful bride, Mr.
Lorry, and Miss Pross--to whom the event, through a gradual process of
reconcilement to the inevitable, would have been one of absolute bliss,
but for the yet lingering consideration that her brother Solomon should
have been the bridegroom.

“And so,” said Mr. Lorry, who could not sufficiently admire the bride,
and who had been moving round her to take in every point of her quiet,
pretty dress; “and so it was for this, my sweet Lucie, that I brought
you across the Channel, such a baby! Lord bless me! How little I thought
what I was doing! How lightly I valued the obligation I was conferring
on my friend Mr. Charles!”

“You didn't mean it,” remarked the matter-of-fact Miss Pross, “and
therefore how could you know it? Nonsense!”

“Really? Well; but don't cry,” said the gentle Mr. Lorry.

“I am not crying,” said Miss Pross; “_you_ are.”

“I, my Pross?” (By this time, Mr. Lorry dared to be pleasant with her,
on occasion.)

“You were, just now; I saw you do it, and I don't wonder at it. Such
a present of plate as you have made 'em, is enough to bring tears into
anybody's eyes. There's not a fork or a spoon in the collection,” said
Miss Pross, “that I didn't cry over, last night after the box came, till
I couldn't see it.”

“I am highly gratified,” said Mr. Lorry, “though, upon my honour, I
had no intention of rendering those trifling articles of remembrance
invisible to any one. Dear me! This is an occasion that makes a man
speculate on all he has lost. Dear, dear, dear! To think that there
might have been a Mrs. Lorry, any time these fifty years almost!”

“Not at all!” From Miss Pross.

“You think there never might have been a Mrs. Lorry?” asked the
gentleman of that name.

“Pooh!” rejoined Miss Pross; “you were a bachelor in your cradle.”

“Well!” observed Mr. Lorry, beamingly adjusting his little wig, “that
seems probable, too.”

“And you were cut out for a bachelor,” pursued Miss Pross, “before you
were put in your cradle.”

“Then, I think,” said Mr. Lorry, “that I was very unhandsomely dealt
with, and that I ought to have had a voice in the selection of my
pattern. Enough! Now, my dear Lucie,” drawing his arm soothingly round
her waist, “I hear them moving in the next room, and Miss Pross and
I, as two formal folks of business, are anxious not to lose the final
opportunity of saying something to you that you wish to hear. You leave
your good father, my dear, in hands as earnest and as loving as your
own; he shall be taken every conceivable care of; during the next
fortnight, while you are in Warwickshire and thereabouts, even Tellson's
shall go to the wall (comparatively speaking) before him. And when, at
the fortnight's end, he comes to join you and your beloved husband, on
your other fortnight's trip in Wales, you shall say that we have sent
him to you in the best health and in the happiest frame. Now, I hear
Somebody's step coming to the door. Let me kiss my dear girl with an
old-fashioned bachelor blessing, before Somebody comes to claim his
own.”

For a moment, he held the fair face from him to look at the
well-remembered expression on the forehead, and then laid the bright
golden hair against his little brown wig, with a genuine tenderness and
delicacy which, if such things be old-fashioned, were as old as Adam.

The door of the Doctor's room opened, and he came out with Charles
Darnay. He was so deadly pale--which had not been the case when they
went in together--that no vestige of colour was to be seen in his face.
But, in the composure of his manner he was unaltered, except that to the
shrewd glance of Mr. Lorry it disclosed some shadowy indication that the
old air of avoidance and dread had lately passed over him, like a cold
wind.

He gave his arm to his daughter, and took her down-stairs to the chariot
which Mr. Lorry had hired in honour of the day. The rest followed in
another carriage, and soon, in a neighbouring church, where no strange
eyes looked on, Charles Darnay and Lucie Manette were happily married.

Besides the glancing tears that shone among the smiles of the little
group when it was done, some diamonds, very bright and sparkling,
glanced on the bride's hand, which were newly released from the
dark obscurity of one of Mr. Lorry's pockets. They returned home to
breakfast, and all went well, and in due course the golden hair that had
mingled with the poor shoemaker's white locks in the Paris garret, were
mingled with them again in the morning sunlight, on the threshold of the
door at parting.

It was a hard parting, though it was not for long. But her father
cheered her, and said at last, gently disengaging himself from her
enfolding arms, “Take her, Charles! She is yours!”

And her agitated hand waved to them from a chaise window, and she was
gone.

The corner being out of the way of the idle and curious, and the
preparations having been very simple and few, the Doctor, Mr. Lorry,
and Miss Pross, were left quite alone. It was when they turned into
the welcome shade of the cool old hall, that Mr. Lorry observed a great
change to have come over the Doctor; as if the golden arm uplifted
there, had struck him a poisoned blow.

He had naturally repressed much, and some revulsion might have been
expected in him when the occasion for repression was gone. But, it was
the old scared lost look that troubled Mr. Lorry; and through his absent
manner of clasping his head and drearily wandering away into his own
room when they got up-stairs, Mr. Lorry was reminded of Defarge the
wine-shop keeper, and the starlight ride.

“I think,” he whispered to Miss Pross, after anxious consideration, “I
think we had best not speak to him just now, or at all disturb him.
I must look in at Tellson's; so I will go there at once and come back
presently. Then, we will take him a ride into the country, and dine
there, and all will be well.”

It was easier for Mr. Lorry to look in at Tellson's, than to look out of
Tellson's. He was detained two hours. When he came back, he ascended the
old staircase alone, having asked no question of the servant; going thus
into the Doctor's rooms, he was stopped by a low sound of knocking.

“Good God!” he said, with a start. “What's that?”

Miss Pross, with a terrified face, was at his ear. “O me, O me! All is
lost!” cried she, wringing her hands. “What is to be told to Ladybird?
He doesn't know me, and is making shoes!”

Mr. Lorry said what he could to calm her, and went himself into the
Doctor's room. The bench was turned towards the light, as it had been
when he had seen the shoemaker at his work before, and his head was bent
down, and he was very busy.

“Doctor Manette. My dear friend, Doctor Manette!”

The Doctor looked at him for a moment--half inquiringly, half as if he
were angry at being spoken to--and bent over his work again.

He had laid aside his coat and waistcoat; his shirt was open at the
throat, as it used to be when he did that work; and even the old
haggard, faded surface of face had come back to him. He worked
hard--impatiently--as if in some sense of having been interrupted.

Mr. Lorry glanced at the work in his hand, and observed that it was a
shoe of the old size and shape. He took up another that was lying by
him, and asked what it was.

“A young lady's walking shoe,” he muttered, without looking up. “It
ought to have been finished long ago. Let it be.”

“But, Doctor Manette. Look at me!”

He obeyed, in the old mechanically submissive manner, without pausing in
his work.

“You know me, my dear friend? Think again. This is not your proper
occupation. Think, dear friend!”

Nothing would induce him to speak more. He looked up, for an instant at
a time, when he was requested to do so; but, no persuasion would extract
a word from him. He worked, and worked, and worked, in silence, and
words fell on him as they would have fallen on an echoless wall, or on
the air. The only ray of hope that Mr. Lorry could discover, was, that
he sometimes furtively looked up without being asked. In that, there
seemed a faint expression of curiosity or perplexity--as though he were
trying to reconcile some doubts in his mind.

Two things at once impressed themselves on Mr. Lorry, as important above
all others; the first, that this must be kept secret from Lucie;
the second, that it must be kept secret from all who knew him. In
conjunction with Miss Pross, he took immediate steps towards the latter
precaution, by giving out that the Doctor was not well, and required a
few days of complete rest. In aid of the kind deception to be practised
on his daughter, Miss Pross was to write, describing his having been
called away professionally, and referring to an imaginary letter of
two or three hurried lines in his own hand, represented to have been
addressed to her by the same post.

These measures, advisable to be taken in any case, Mr. Lorry took in
the hope of his coming to himself. If that should happen soon, he kept
another course in reserve; which was, to have a certain opinion that he
thought the best, on the Doctor's case.

In the hope of his recovery, and of resort to this third course
being thereby rendered practicable, Mr. Lorry resolved to watch him
attentively, with as little appearance as possible of doing so. He
therefore made arrangements to absent himself from Tellson's for the
first time in his life, and took his post by the window in the same
room.

He was not long in discovering that it was worse than useless to speak
to him, since, on being pressed, he became worried. He abandoned that
attempt on the first day, and resolved merely to keep himself always
before him, as a silent protest against the delusion into which he had
fallen, or was falling. He remained, therefore, in his seat near the
window, reading and writing, and expressing in as many pleasant and
natural ways as he could think of, that it was a free place.

Doctor Manette took what was given him to eat and drink, and worked on,
that first day, until it was too dark to see--worked on, half an hour
after Mr. Lorry could not have seen, for his life, to read or write.
When he put his tools aside as useless, until morning, Mr. Lorry rose
and said to him:

“Will you go out?”

He looked down at the floor on either side of him in the old manner,
looked up in the old manner, and repeated in the old low voice:

“Out?”

“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”

He made no effort to say why not, and said not a word more. But, Mr.
Lorry thought he saw, as he leaned forward on his bench in the dusk,
with his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands, that he was in
some misty way asking himself, “Why not?” The sagacity of the man of
business perceived an advantage here, and determined to hold it.

Miss Pross and he divided the night into two watches, and observed him
at intervals from the adjoining room. He paced up and down for a long
time before he lay down; but, when he did finally lay himself down, he
fell asleep. In the morning, he was up betimes, and went straight to his
bench and to work.

On this second day, Mr. Lorry saluted him cheerfully by his name,
and spoke to him on topics that had been of late familiar to them. He
returned no reply, but it was evident that he heard what was said, and
that he thought about it, however confusedly. This encouraged Mr. Lorry
to have Miss Pross in with her work, several times during the day;
at those times, they quietly spoke of Lucie, and of her father then
present, precisely in the usual manner, and as if there were nothing
amiss. This was done without any demonstrative accompaniment, not long
enough, or often enough to harass him; and it lightened Mr. Lorry's
friendly heart to believe that he looked up oftener, and that he
appeared to be stirred by some perception of inconsistencies surrounding
him.

When it fell dark again, Mr. Lorry asked him as before:

“Dear Doctor, will you go out?”

As before, he repeated, “Out?”

“Yes; for a walk with me. Why not?”

This time, Mr. Lorry feigned to go out when he could extract no answer
from him, and, after remaining absent for an hour, returned. In the
meanwhile, the Doctor had removed to the seat in the window, and had
sat there looking down at the plane-tree; but, on Mr. Lorry's return, he
slipped away to his bench.

The time went very slowly on, and Mr. Lorry's hope darkened, and his
heart grew heavier again, and grew yet heavier and heavier every day.
The third day came and went, the fourth, the fifth. Five days, six days,
seven days, eight days, nine days.

With a hope ever darkening, and with a heart always growing heavier and
heavier, Mr. Lorry passed through this anxious time. The secret was
well kept, and Lucie was unconscious and happy; but he could not fail to
observe that the shoemaker, whose hand had been a little out at first,
was growing dreadfully skilful, and that he had never been so intent on
his work, and that his hands had never been so nimble and expert, as in
the dusk of the ninth evening.




XIX. An Opinion


Worn out by anxious watching, Mr. Lorry fell asleep at his post. On the
tenth morning of his suspense, he was startled by the shining of the sun
into the room where a heavy slumber had overtaken him when it was dark
night.

He rubbed his eyes and roused himself; but he doubted, when he had
done so, whether he was not still asleep. For, going to the door of the
Doctor's room and looking in, he perceived that the shoemaker's bench
and tools were put aside again, and that the Doctor himself sat reading
at the window. He was in his usual morning dress, and his face (which
Mr. Lorry could distinctly see), though still very pale, was calmly
studious and attentive.

Even when he had satisfied himself that he was awake, Mr. Lorry felt
giddily uncertain for some few moments whether the late shoemaking might
not be a disturbed dream of his own; for, did not his eyes show him his
friend before him in his accustomed clothing and aspect, and employed
as usual; and was there any sign within their range, that the change of
which he had so strong an impression had actually happened?

It was but the inquiry of his first confusion and astonishment, the
answer being obvious. If the impression were not produced by a real
corresponding and sufficient cause, how came he, Jarvis Lorry, there?
How came he to have fallen asleep, in his clothes, on the sofa in Doctor
Manette's consulting-room, and to be debating these points outside the
Doctor's bedroom door in the early morning?

Within a few minutes, Miss Pross stood whispering at his side. If he
had had any particle of doubt left, her talk would of necessity have
resolved it; but he was by that time clear-headed, and had none.
He advised that they should let the time go by until the regular
breakfast-hour, and should then meet the Doctor as if nothing unusual
had occurred. If he appeared to be in his customary state of mind, Mr.
Lorry would then cautiously proceed to seek direction and guidance from
the opinion he had been, in his anxiety, so anxious to obtain.

Miss Pross, submitting herself to his judgment, the scheme was worked
out with care. Having abundance of time for his usual methodical
toilette, Mr. Lorry presented himself at the breakfast-hour in his usual
white linen, and with his usual neat leg. The Doctor was summoned in the
usual way, and came to breakfast.

So far as it was possible to comprehend him without overstepping those
delicate and gradual approaches which Mr. Lorry felt to be the only safe
advance, he at first supposed that his daughter's marriage had taken
place yesterday. An incidental allusion, purposely thrown out, to
the day of the week, and the day of the month, set him thinking and
counting, and evidently made him uneasy. In all other respects, however,
he was so composedly himself, that Mr. Lorry determined to have the aid
he sought. And that aid was his own.

Therefore, when the breakfast was done and cleared away, and he and the
Doctor were left together, Mr. Lorry said, feelingly:

“My dear Manette, I am anxious to have your opinion, in confidence, on a
very curious case in which I am deeply interested; that is to say, it is
very curious to me; perhaps, to your better information it may be less
so.”

Glancing at his hands, which were discoloured by his late work, the
Doctor looked troubled, and listened attentively. He had already glanced
at his hands more than once.

“Doctor Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, touching him affectionately on the
arm, “the case is the case of a particularly dear friend of mine. Pray
give your mind to it, and advise me well for his sake--and above all,
for his daughter's--his daughter's, my dear Manette.”

“If I understand,” said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, “some mental
shock--?”

“Yes!”

“Be explicit,” said the Doctor. “Spare no detail.”

Mr. Lorry saw that they understood one another, and proceeded.

“My dear Manette, it is the case of an old and a prolonged shock,
of great acuteness and severity to the affections, the feelings,
the--the--as you express it--the mind. The mind. It is the case of a
shock under which the sufferer was borne down, one cannot say for how
long, because I believe he cannot calculate the time himself, and there
are no other means of getting at it. It is the case of a shock from
which the sufferer recovered, by a process that he cannot trace
himself--as I once heard him publicly relate in a striking manner. It is
the case of a shock from which he has recovered, so completely, as to
be a highly intelligent man, capable of close application of mind, and
great exertion of body, and of constantly making fresh additions to his
stock of knowledge, which was already very large. But, unfortunately,
there has been,” he paused and took a deep breath--“a slight relapse.”

The Doctor, in a low voice, asked, “Of how long duration?”

“Nine days and nights.”

“How did it show itself? I infer,” glancing at his hands again, “in the
resumption of some old pursuit connected with the shock?”

“That is the fact.”

“Now, did you ever see him,” asked the Doctor, distinctly and
collectedly, though in the same low voice, “engaged in that pursuit
originally?”

“Once.”

“And when the relapse fell on him, was he in most respects--or in all
respects--as he was then?”

“I think in all respects.”

“You spoke of his daughter. Does his daughter know of the relapse?”

“No. It has been kept from her, and I hope will always be kept from her.
It is known only to myself, and to one other who may be trusted.”

The Doctor grasped his hand, and murmured, “That was very kind. That was
very thoughtful!” Mr. Lorry grasped his hand in return, and neither of
the two spoke for a little while.

“Now, my dear Manette,” said Mr. Lorry, at length, in his most
considerate and most affectionate way, “I am a mere man of business,
and unfit to cope with such intricate and difficult matters. I do not
possess the kind of information necessary; I do not possess the kind of
intelligence; I want guiding. There is no man in this world on whom
I could so rely for right guidance, as on you. Tell me, how does this
relapse come about? Is there danger of another? Could a repetition of it
be prevented? How should a repetition of it be treated? How does it come
about at all? What can I do for my friend? No man ever can have been
more desirous in his heart to serve a friend, than I am to serve mine,
if I knew how.

“But I don't know how to originate, in such a case. If your sagacity,
knowledge, and experience, could put me on the right track, I might be
able to do so much; unenlightened and undirected, I can do so little.
Pray discuss it with me; pray enable me to see it a little more clearly,
and teach me how to be a little more useful.”

Doctor Manette sat meditating after these earnest words were spoken, and
Mr. Lorry did not press him.

“I think it probable,” said the Doctor, breaking silence with an effort,
“that the relapse you have described, my dear friend, was not quite
unforeseen by its subject.”

“Was it dreaded by him?” Mr. Lorry ventured to ask.

“Very much.” He said it with an involuntary shudder.

“You have no idea how such an apprehension weighs on the sufferer's
mind, and how difficult--how almost impossible--it is, for him to force
himself to utter a word upon the topic that oppresses him.”

“Would he,” asked Mr. Lorry, “be sensibly relieved if he could prevail
upon himself to impart that secret brooding to any one, when it is on
him?”

“I think so. But it is, as I have told you, next to impossible. I even
believe it--in some cases--to be quite impossible.”

“Now,” said Mr. Lorry, gently laying his hand on the Doctor's arm again,
after a short silence on both sides, “to what would you refer this
attack?”

“I believe,” returned Doctor Manette, “that there had been a strong and
extraordinary revival of the train of thought and remembrance that
was the first cause of the malady. Some intense associations of a most
distressing nature were vividly recalled, I think. It is probable that
there had long been a dread lurking in his mind, that those associations
would be recalled--say, under certain circumstances--say, on a
particular occasion. He tried to prepare himself in vain; perhaps the
effort to prepare himself made him less able to bear it.”

“Would he remember what took place in the relapse?” asked Mr. Lorry,
with natural hesitation.

The Doctor looked desolately round the room, shook his head, and
answered, in a low voice, “Not at all.”

“Now, as to the future,” hinted Mr. Lorry.

“As to the future,” said the Doctor, recovering firmness, “I should have
great hope. As it pleased Heaven in its mercy to restore him so soon, I
should have great hope. He, yielding under the pressure of a complicated
something, long dreaded and long vaguely foreseen and contended against,
and recovering after the cloud had burst and passed, I should hope that
the worst was over.”

“Well, well! That's good comfort. I am thankful!” said Mr. Lorry.

“I am thankful!” repeated the Doctor, bending his head with reverence.

“There are two other points,” said Mr. Lorry, “on which I am anxious to
be instructed. I may go on?”

“You cannot do your friend a better service.” The Doctor gave him his
hand.

“To the first, then. He is of a studious habit, and unusually energetic;
he applies himself with great ardour to the acquisition of professional
knowledge, to the conducting of experiments, to many things. Now, does
he do too much?”

“I think not. It may be the character of his mind, to be always in
singular need of occupation. That may be, in part, natural to it; in
part, the result of affliction. The less it was occupied with healthy
things, the more it would be in danger of turning in the unhealthy
direction. He may have observed himself, and made the discovery.”

“You are sure that he is not under too great a strain?”

“I think I am quite sure of it.”

“My dear Manette, if he were overworked now--”

“My dear Lorry, I doubt if that could easily be. There has been a
violent stress in one direction, and it needs a counterweight.”

“Excuse me, as a persistent man of business. Assuming for a moment,
that he _was_ overworked; it would show itself in some renewal of this
disorder?”

“I do not think so. I do not think,” said Doctor Manette with the
firmness of self-conviction, “that anything but the one train of
association would renew it. I think that, henceforth, nothing but some
extraordinary jarring of that chord could renew it. After what has
happened, and after his recovery, I find it difficult to imagine any
such violent sounding of that string again. I trust, and I almost
believe, that the circumstances likely to renew it are exhausted.”

He spoke with the diffidence of a man who knew how slight a thing
would overset the delicate organisation of the mind, and yet with the
confidence of a man who had slowly won his assurance out of personal
endurance and distress. It was not for his friend to abate that
confidence. He professed himself more relieved and encouraged than he
really was, and approached his second and last point. He felt it to
be the most difficult of all; but, remembering his old Sunday morning
conversation with Miss Pross, and remembering what he had seen in the
last nine days, he knew that he must face it.

“The occupation resumed under the influence of this passing affliction
so happily recovered from,” said Mr. Lorry, clearing his throat, “we
will call--Blacksmith's work, Blacksmith's work. We will say, to put a
case and for the sake of illustration, that he had been used, in his bad
time, to work at a little forge. We will say that he was unexpectedly
found at his forge again. Is it not a pity that he should keep it by
him?”

The Doctor shaded his forehead with his hand, and beat his foot
nervously on the ground.

“He has always kept it by him,” said Mr. Lorry, with an anxious look at
his friend. “Now, would it not be better that he should let it go?”

Still, the Doctor, with shaded forehead, beat his foot nervously on the
ground.

“You do not find it easy to advise me?” said Mr. Lorry. “I quite
understand it to be a nice question. And yet I think--” And there he
shook his head, and stopped.

“You see,” said Doctor Manette, turning to him after an uneasy pause,
“it is very hard to explain, consistently, the innermost workings
of this poor man's mind. He once yearned so frightfully for that
occupation, and it was so welcome when it came; no doubt it relieved
his pain so much, by substituting the perplexity of the fingers for
the perplexity of the brain, and by substituting, as he became more
practised, the ingenuity of the hands, for the ingenuity of the mental
torture; that he has never been able to bear the thought of putting it
quite out of his reach. Even now, when I believe he is more hopeful of
himself than he has ever been, and even speaks of himself with a kind
of confidence, the idea that he might need that old employment, and not
find it, gives him a sudden sense of terror, like that which one may
fancy strikes to the heart of a lost child.”

He looked like his illustration, as he raised his eyes to Mr. Lorry's
face.

“But may not--mind! I ask for information, as a plodding man of business
who only deals with such material objects as guineas, shillings, and
bank-notes--may not the retention of the thing involve the retention of
the idea? If the thing were gone, my dear Manette, might not the fear go
with it? In short, is it not a concession to the misgiving, to keep the
forge?”

There was another silence.

“You see, too,” said the Doctor, tremulously, “it is such an old
companion.”

“I would not keep it,” said Mr. Lorry, shaking his head; for he gained
in firmness as he saw the Doctor disquieted. “I would recommend him to
sacrifice it. I only want your authority. I am sure it does no good.
Come! Give me your authority, like a dear good man. For his daughter's
sake, my dear Manette!”

Very strange to see what a struggle there was within him!

“In her name, then, let it be done; I sanction it. But, I would not take
it away while he was present. Let it be removed when he is not there;
let him miss his old companion after an absence.”

Mr. Lorry readily engaged for that, and the conference was ended. They
passed the day in the country, and the Doctor was quite restored. On the
three following days he remained perfectly well, and on the fourteenth
day he went away to join Lucie and her husband. The precaution that
had been taken to account for his silence, Mr. Lorry had previously
explained to him, and he had written to Lucie in accordance with it, and
she had no suspicions.

On the night of the day on which he left the house, Mr. Lorry went into
his room with a chopper, saw, chisel, and hammer, attended by Miss Pross
carrying a light. There, with closed doors, and in a mysterious and
guilty manner, Mr. Lorry hacked the shoemaker's bench to pieces, while
Miss Pross held the candle as if she were assisting at a murder--for
which, indeed, in her grimness, she was no unsuitable figure. The
burning of the body (previously reduced to pieces convenient for the
purpose) was commenced without delay in the kitchen fire; and the tools,
shoes, and leather, were buried in the garden. So wicked do destruction
and secrecy appear to honest minds, that Mr. Lorry and Miss Pross,
while engaged in the commission of their deed and in the removal of its
traces, almost felt, and almost looked, like accomplices in a horrible
crime.




XX. A Plea


When the newly-married pair came home, the first person who appeared, to
offer his congratulations, was Sydney Carton. They had not been at home
many hours, when he presented himself. He was not improved in habits, or
in looks, or in manner; but there was a certain rugged air of fidelity
about him, which was new to the observation of Charles Darnay.

He watched his opportunity of taking Darnay aside into a window, and of
speaking to him when no one overheard.

“Mr. Darnay,” said Carton, “I wish we might be friends.”

“We are already friends, I hope.”

“You are good enough to say so, as a fashion of speech; but, I don't
mean any fashion of speech. Indeed, when I say I wish we might be
friends, I scarcely mean quite that, either.”

Charles Darnay--as was natural--asked him, in all good-humour and
good-fellowship, what he did mean?

“Upon my life,” said Carton, smiling, “I find that easier to comprehend
in my own mind, than to convey to yours. However, let me try. You
remember a certain famous occasion when I was more drunk than--than
usual?”

“I remember a certain famous occasion when you forced me to confess that
you had been drinking.”

“I remember it too. The curse of those occasions is heavy upon me, for I
always remember them. I hope it may be taken into account one day,
when all days are at an end for me! Don't be alarmed; I am not going to
preach.”

“I am not at all alarmed. Earnestness in you, is anything but alarming
to me.”

“Ah!” said Carton, with a careless wave of his hand, as if he waved that
away. “On the drunken occasion in question (one of a large number, as
you know), I was insufferable about liking you, and not liking you. I
wish you would forget it.”

“I forgot it long ago.”

“Fashion of speech again! But, Mr. Darnay, oblivion is not so easy to
me, as you represent it to be to you. I have by no means forgotten it,
and a light answer does not help me to forget it.”

“If it was a light answer,” returned Darnay, “I beg your forgiveness
for it. I had no other object than to turn a slight thing, which, to my
surprise, seems to trouble you too much, aside. I declare to you, on the
faith of a gentleman, that I have long dismissed it from my mind. Good
Heaven, what was there to dismiss! Have I had nothing more important to
remember, in the great service you rendered me that day?”

“As to the great service,” said Carton, “I am bound to avow to you, when
you speak of it in that way, that it was mere professional claptrap, I
don't know that I cared what became of you, when I rendered it.--Mind! I
say when I rendered it; I am speaking of the past.”

“You make light of the obligation,” returned Darnay, “but I will not
quarrel with _your_ light answer.”

“Genuine truth, Mr. Darnay, trust me! I have gone aside from my purpose;
I was speaking about our being friends. Now, you know me; you know I am
incapable of all the higher and better flights of men. If you doubt it,
ask Stryver, and he'll tell you so.”

“I prefer to form my own opinion, without the aid of his.”

“Well! At any rate you know me as a dissolute dog, who has never done
any good, and never will.”

“I don't know that you 'never will.'”

“But I do, and you must take my word for it. Well! If you could endure
to have such a worthless fellow, and a fellow of such indifferent
reputation, coming and going at odd times, I should ask that I might be
permitted to come and go as a privileged person here; that I might
be regarded as an useless (and I would add, if it were not for the
resemblance I detected between you and me, an unornamental) piece of
furniture, tolerated for its old service, and taken no notice of. I
doubt if I should abuse the permission. It is a hundred to one if I
should avail myself of it four times in a year. It would satisfy me, I
dare say, to know that I had it.”

“Will you try?”

“That is another way of saying that I am placed on the footing I have
indicated. I thank you, Darnay. I may use that freedom with your name?”

“I think so, Carton, by this time.”

They shook hands upon it, and Sydney turned away. Within a minute
afterwards, he was, to all outward appearance, as unsubstantial as ever.

When he was gone, and in the course of an evening passed with Miss
Pross, the Doctor, and Mr. Lorry, Charles Darnay made some mention of
this conversation in general terms, and spoke of Sydney Carton as a
problem of carelessness and recklessness. He spoke of him, in short, not
bitterly or meaning to bear hard upon him, but as anybody might who saw
him as he showed himself.

He had no idea that this could dwell in the thoughts of his fair young
wife; but, when he afterwards joined her in their own rooms, he found
her waiting for him with the old pretty lifting of the forehead strongly
marked.

“We are thoughtful to-night!” said Darnay, drawing his arm about her.

“Yes, dearest Charles,” with her hands on his breast, and the inquiring
and attentive expression fixed upon him; “we are rather thoughtful
to-night, for we have something on our mind to-night.”

“What is it, my Lucie?”

“Will you promise not to press one question on me, if I beg you not to
ask it?”

“Will I promise? What will I not promise to my Love?”

What, indeed, with his hand putting aside the golden hair from the
cheek, and his other hand against the heart that beat for him!

“I think, Charles, poor Mr. Carton deserves more consideration and
respect than you expressed for him to-night.”

“Indeed, my own? Why so?”

“That is what you are not to ask me. But I think--I know--he does.”

“If you know it, it is enough. What would you have me do, my Life?”

“I would ask you, dearest, to be very generous with him always, and very
lenient on his faults when he is not by. I would ask you to believe that
he has a heart he very, very seldom reveals, and that there are deep
wounds in it. My dear, I have seen it bleeding.”

“It is a painful reflection to me,” said Charles Darnay, quite
astounded, “that I should have done him any wrong. I never thought this
of him.”

“My husband, it is so. I fear he is not to be reclaimed; there is
scarcely a hope that anything in his character or fortunes is reparable
now. But, I am sure that he is capable of good things, gentle things,
even magnanimous things.”

She looked so beautiful in the purity of her faith in this lost man,
that her husband could have looked at her as she was for hours.

“And, O my dearest Love!” she urged, clinging nearer to him, laying her
head upon his breast, and raising her eyes to his, “remember how strong
we are in our happiness, and how weak he is in his misery!”

The supplication touched him home. “I will always remember it, dear
Heart! I will remember it as long as I live.”

He bent over the golden head, and put the rosy lips to his, and folded
her in his arms. If one forlorn wanderer then pacing the dark streets,
could have heard her innocent disclosure, and could have seen the drops
of pity kissed away by her husband from the soft blue eyes so loving of
that husband, he might have cried to the night--and the words would not
have parted from his lips for the first time--

“God bless her for her sweet compassion!”




XXI. Echoing Footsteps


A wonderful corner for echoes, it has been remarked, that corner where
the Doctor lived. Ever busily winding the golden thread which bound
her husband, and her father, and herself, and her old directress and
companion, in a life of quiet bliss, Lucie sat in the still house in
the tranquilly resounding corner, listening to the echoing footsteps of
years.

At first, there were times, though she was a perfectly happy young wife,
when her work would slowly fall from her hands, and her eyes would be
dimmed. For, there was something coming in the echoes, something light,
afar off, and scarcely audible yet, that stirred her heart too much.
Fluttering hopes and doubts--hopes, of a love as yet unknown to her:
doubts, of her remaining upon earth, to enjoy that new delight--divided
her breast. Among the echoes then, there would arise the sound of
footsteps at her own early grave; and thoughts of the husband who would
be left so desolate, and who would mourn for her so much, swelled to her
eyes, and broke like waves.

That time passed, and her little Lucie lay on her bosom. Then, among the
advancing echoes, there was the tread of her tiny feet and the sound of
her prattling words. Let greater echoes resound as they would, the young
mother at the cradle side could always hear those coming. They came, and
the shady house was sunny with a child's laugh, and the Divine friend of
children, to whom in her trouble she had confided hers, seemed to take
her child in his arms, as He took the child of old, and made it a sacred
joy to her.

Ever busily winding the golden thread that bound them all together,
weaving the service of her happy influence through the tissue of all
their lives, and making it predominate nowhere, Lucie heard in the
echoes of years none but friendly and soothing sounds. Her husband's
step was strong and prosperous among them; her father's firm and equal.
Lo, Miss Pross, in harness of string, awakening the echoes, as an
unruly charger, whip-corrected, snorting and pawing the earth under the
plane-tree in the garden!

Even when there were sounds of sorrow among the rest, they were not
harsh nor cruel. Even when golden hair, like her own, lay in a halo on a
pillow round the worn face of a little boy, and he said, with a radiant
smile, “Dear papa and mamma, I am very sorry to leave you both, and to
leave my pretty sister; but I am called, and I must go!” those were not
tears all of agony that wetted his young mother's cheek, as the spirit
departed from her embrace that had been entrusted to it. Suffer them and
forbid them not. They see my Father's face. O Father, blessed words!

Thus, the rustling of an Angel's wings got blended with the other
echoes, and they were not wholly of earth, but had in them that breath
of Heaven. Sighs of the winds that blew over a little garden-tomb were
mingled with them also, and both were audible to Lucie, in a hushed
murmur--like the breathing of a summer sea asleep upon a sandy shore--as
the little Lucie, comically studious at the task of the morning, or
dressing a doll at her mother's footstool, chattered in the tongues of
the Two Cities that were blended in her life.

The Echoes rarely answered to the actual tread of Sydney Carton. Some
half-dozen times a year, at most, he claimed his privilege of coming in
uninvited, and would sit among them through the evening, as he had once
done often. He never came there heated with wine. And one other thing
regarding him was whispered in the echoes, which has been whispered by
all true echoes for ages and ages.

No man ever really loved a woman, lost her, and knew her with a
blameless though an unchanged mind, when she was a wife and a mother,
but her children had a strange sympathy with him--an instinctive
delicacy of pity for him. What fine hidden sensibilities are touched in
such a case, no echoes tell; but it is so, and it was so here. Carton
was the first stranger to whom little Lucie held out her chubby arms,
and he kept his place with her as she grew. The little boy had spoken of
him, almost at the last. “Poor Carton! Kiss him for me!”

Mr. Stryver shouldered his way through the law, like some great engine
forcing itself through turbid water, and dragged his useful friend in
his wake, like a boat towed astern. As the boat so favoured is usually
in a rough plight, and mostly under water, so, Sydney had a swamped
life of it. But, easy and strong custom, unhappily so much easier and
stronger in him than any stimulating sense of desert or disgrace, made
it the life he was to lead; and he no more thought of emerging from his
state of lion's jackal, than any real jackal may be supposed to think of
rising to be a lion. Stryver was rich; had married a florid widow with
property and three boys, who had nothing particularly shining about them
but the straight hair of their dumpling heads.

These three young gentlemen, Mr. Stryver, exuding patronage of the most
offensive quality from every pore, had walked before him like three
sheep to the quiet corner in Soho, and had offered as pupils to
Lucie's husband: delicately saying “Halloa! here are three lumps of
bread-and-cheese towards your matrimonial picnic, Darnay!” The polite
rejection of the three lumps of bread-and-cheese had quite bloated Mr.
Stryver with indignation, which he afterwards turned to account in the
training of the young gentlemen, by directing them to beware of the
pride of Beggars, like that tutor-fellow. He was also in the habit of
declaiming to Mrs. Stryver, over his full-bodied wine, on the arts
Mrs. Darnay had once put in practice to “catch” him, and on the
diamond-cut-diamond arts in himself, madam, which had rendered him “not
to be caught.” Some of his King's Bench familiars, who were occasionally
parties to the full-bodied wine and the lie, excused him for the
latter by saying that he had told it so often, that he believed
it himself--which is surely such an incorrigible aggravation of an
originally bad offence, as to justify any such offender's being carried
off to some suitably retired spot, and there hanged out of the way.

These were among the echoes to which Lucie, sometimes pensive, sometimes
amused and laughing, listened in the echoing corner, until her little
daughter was six years old. How near to her heart the echoes of her
child's tread came, and those of her own dear father's, always active
and self-possessed, and those of her dear husband's, need not be told.
Nor, how the lightest echo of their united home, directed by herself
with such a wise and elegant thrift that it was more abundant than any
waste, was music to her. Nor, how there were echoes all about her, sweet
in her ears, of the many times her father had told her that he found her
more devoted to him married (if that could be) than single, and of the
many times her husband had said to her that no cares and duties seemed
to divide her love for him or her help to him, and asked her “What is
the magic secret, my darling, of your being everything to all of us,
as if there were only one of us, yet never seeming to be hurried, or to
have too much to do?”

But, there were other echoes, from a distance, that rumbled menacingly
in the corner all through this space of time. And it was now, about
little Lucie's sixth birthday, that they began to have an awful sound,
as of a great storm in France with a dreadful sea rising.

On a night in mid-July, one thousand seven hundred and eighty-nine, Mr.
Lorry came in late, from Tellson's, and sat himself down by Lucie and
her husband in the dark window. It was a hot, wild night, and they were
all three reminded of the old Sunday night when they had looked at the
lightning from the same place.

“I began to think,” said Mr. Lorry, pushing his brown wig back, “that
I should have to pass the night at Tellson's. We have been so full of
business all day, that we have not known what to do first, or which way
to turn. There is such an uneasiness in Paris, that we have actually a
run of confidence upon us! Our customers over there, seem not to be able
to confide their property to us fast enough. There is positively a mania
among some of them for sending it to England.”

“That has a bad look,” said Darnay--

“A bad look, you say, my dear Darnay? Yes, but we don't know what reason
there is in it. People are so unreasonable! Some of us at Tellson's are
getting old, and we really can't be troubled out of the ordinary course
without due occasion.”

“Still,” said Darnay, “you know how gloomy and threatening the sky is.”

“I know that, to be sure,” assented Mr. Lorry, trying to persuade
himself that his sweet temper was soured, and that he grumbled, “but I
am determined to be peevish after my long day's botheration. Where is
Manette?”

“Here he is,” said the Doctor, entering the dark room at the moment.

“I am quite glad you are at home; for these hurries and forebodings by
which I have been surrounded all day long, have made me nervous without
reason. You are not going out, I hope?”

“No; I am going to play backgammon with you, if you like,” said the
Doctor.

“I don't think I do like, if I may speak my mind. I am not fit to be
pitted against you to-night. Is the teaboard still there, Lucie? I can't
see.”

“Of course, it has been kept for you.”

“Thank ye, my dear. The precious child is safe in bed?”

“And sleeping soundly.”

“That's right; all safe and well! I don't know why anything should be
otherwise than safe and well here, thank God; but I have been so put out
all day, and I am not as young as I was! My tea, my dear! Thank ye. Now,
come and take your place in the circle, and let us sit quiet, and hear
the echoes about which you have your theory.”

“Not a theory; it was a fancy.”

“A fancy, then, my wise pet,” said Mr. Lorry, patting her hand. “They
are very numerous and very loud, though, are they not? Only hear them!”

Headlong, mad, and dangerous footsteps to force their way into anybody's
life, footsteps not easily made clean again if once stained red, the
footsteps raging in Saint Antoine afar off, as the little circle sat in
the dark London window.

Saint Antoine had been, that morning, a vast dusky mass of scarecrows
heaving to and fro, with frequent gleams of light above the billowy
heads, where steel blades and bayonets shone in the sun. A tremendous
roar arose from the throat of Saint Antoine, and a forest of naked arms
struggled in the air like shrivelled branches of trees in a winter wind:
all the fingers convulsively clutching at every weapon or semblance of a
weapon that was thrown up from the depths below, no matter how far off.

Who gave them out, whence they last came, where they began, through what
agency they crookedly quivered and jerked, scores at a time, over the
heads of the crowd, like a kind of lightning, no eye in the throng could
have told; but, muskets were being distributed--so were cartridges,
powder, and ball, bars of iron and wood, knives, axes, pikes, every
weapon that distracted ingenuity could discover or devise. People who
could lay hold of nothing else, set themselves with bleeding hands to
force stones and bricks out of their places in walls. Every pulse and
heart in Saint Antoine was on high-fever strain and at high-fever heat.
Every living creature there held life as of no account, and was demented
with a passionate readiness to sacrifice it.

As a whirlpool of boiling waters has a centre point, so, all this raging
circled round Defarge's wine-shop, and every human drop in the caldron
had a tendency to be sucked towards the vortex where Defarge himself,
already begrimed with gunpowder and sweat, issued orders, issued arms,
thrust this man back, dragged this man forward, disarmed one to arm
another, laboured and strove in the thickest of the uproar.

“Keep near to me, Jacques Three,” cried Defarge; “and do you, Jacques
One and Two, separate and put yourselves at the head of as many of these
patriots as you can. Where is my wife?”

“Eh, well! Here you see me!” said madame, composed as ever, but not
knitting to-day. Madame's resolute right hand was occupied with an axe,
in place of the usual softer implements, and in her girdle were a pistol
and a cruel knife.

“Where do you go, my wife?”

“I go,” said madame, “with you at present. You shall see me at the head
of women, by-and-bye.”

“Come, then!” cried Defarge, in a resounding voice. “Patriots and
friends, we are ready! The Bastille!”

With a roar that sounded as if all the breath in France had been shaped
into the detested word, the living sea rose, wave on wave, depth on
depth, and overflowed the city to that point. Alarm-bells ringing, drums
beating, the sea raging and thundering on its new beach, the attack
began.

Deep ditches, double drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great
towers, cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. Through the fire and through
the smoke--in the fire and in the smoke, for the sea cast him up against
a cannon, and on the instant he became a cannonier--Defarge of the
wine-shop worked like a manful soldier, Two fierce hours.

Deep ditch, single drawbridge, massive stone walls, eight great towers,
cannon, muskets, fire and smoke. One drawbridge down! “Work, comrades
all, work! Work, Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques
Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand; in the name of all
the Angels or the Devils--which you prefer--work!” Thus Defarge of the
wine-shop, still at his gun, which had long grown hot.

“To me, women!” cried madame his wife. “What! We can kill as well as
the men when the place is taken!” And to her, with a shrill thirsty
cry, trooping women variously armed, but all armed alike in hunger and
revenge.

Cannon, muskets, fire and smoke; but, still the deep ditch, the single
drawbridge, the massive stone walls, and the eight great towers. Slight
displacements of the raging sea, made by the falling wounded. Flashing
weapons, blazing torches, smoking waggonloads of wet straw, hard work
at neighbouring barricades in all directions, shrieks, volleys,
execrations, bravery without stint, boom smash and rattle, and the
furious sounding of the living sea; but, still the deep ditch, and the
single drawbridge, and the massive stone walls, and the eight great
towers, and still Defarge of the wine-shop at his gun, grown doubly hot
by the service of Four fierce hours.

A white flag from within the fortress, and a parley--this dimly
perceptible through the raging storm, nothing audible in it--suddenly
the sea rose immeasurably wider and higher, and swept Defarge of the
wine-shop over the lowered drawbridge, past the massive stone outer
walls, in among the eight great towers surrendered!

So resistless was the force of the ocean bearing him on, that even to
draw his breath or turn his head was as impracticable as if he had been
struggling in the surf at the South Sea, until he was landed in the
outer courtyard of the Bastille. There, against an angle of a wall, he
made a struggle to look about him. Jacques Three was nearly at his side;
Madame Defarge, still heading some of her women, was visible in the
inner distance, and her knife was in her hand. Everywhere was tumult,
exultation, deafening and maniacal bewilderment, astounding noise, yet
furious dumb-show.

“The Prisoners!”

“The Records!”

“The secret cells!”

“The instruments of torture!”

“The Prisoners!”

Of all these cries, and ten thousand incoherences, “The Prisoners!” was
the cry most taken up by the sea that rushed in, as if there were an
eternity of people, as well as of time and space. When the foremost
billows rolled past, bearing the prison officers with them, and
threatening them all with instant death if any secret nook remained
undisclosed, Defarge laid his strong hand on the breast of one of
these men--a man with a grey head, who had a lighted torch in his
hand--separated him from the rest, and got him between himself and the
wall.

“Show me the North Tower!” said Defarge. “Quick!”

“I will faithfully,” replied the man, “if you will come with me. But
there is no one there.”

“What is the meaning of One Hundred and Five, North Tower?” asked
Defarge. “Quick!”

“The meaning, monsieur?”

“Does it mean a captive, or a place of captivity? Or do you mean that I
shall strike you dead?”

“Kill him!” croaked Jacques Three, who had come close up.

“Monsieur, it is a cell.”

“Show it me!”

“Pass this way, then.”

Jacques Three, with his usual craving on him, and evidently disappointed
by the dialogue taking a turn that did not seem to promise bloodshed,
held by Defarge's arm as he held by the turnkey's. Their three heads had
been close together during this brief discourse, and it had been as much
as they could do to hear one another, even then: so tremendous was the
noise of the living ocean, in its irruption into the Fortress, and
its inundation of the courts and passages and staircases. All around
outside, too, it beat the walls with a deep, hoarse roar, from which,
occasionally, some partial shouts of tumult broke and leaped into the
air like spray.

Through gloomy vaults where the light of day had never shone, past
hideous doors of dark dens and cages, down cavernous flights of steps,
and again up steep rugged ascents of stone and brick, more like dry
waterfalls than staircases, Defarge, the turnkey, and Jacques Three,
linked hand and arm, went with all the speed they could make. Here and
there, especially at first, the inundation started on them and swept by;
but when they had done descending, and were winding and climbing up a
tower, they were alone. Hemmed in here by the massive thickness of walls
and arches, the storm within the fortress and without was only audible
to them in a dull, subdued way, as if the noise out of which they had
come had almost destroyed their sense of hearing.

The turnkey stopped at a low door, put a key in a clashing lock, swung
the door slowly open, and said, as they all bent their heads and passed
in:

“One hundred and five, North Tower!”

There was a small, heavily-grated, unglazed window high in the wall,
with a stone screen before it, so that the sky could be only seen by
stooping low and looking up. There was a small chimney, heavily barred
across, a few feet within. There was a heap of old feathery wood-ashes
on the hearth. There was a stool, and table, and a straw bed. There were
the four blackened walls, and a rusted iron ring in one of them.

“Pass that torch slowly along these walls, that I may see them,” said
Defarge to the turnkey.

The man obeyed, and Defarge followed the light closely with his eyes.

“Stop!--Look here, Jacques!”

“A. M.!” croaked Jacques Three, as he read greedily.

“Alexandre Manette,” said Defarge in his ear, following the letters
with his swart forefinger, deeply engrained with gunpowder. “And here he
wrote 'a poor physician.' And it was he, without doubt, who scratched
a calendar on this stone. What is that in your hand? A crowbar? Give it
me!”

He had still the linstock of his gun in his own hand. He made a sudden
exchange of the two instruments, and turning on the worm-eaten stool and
table, beat them to pieces in a few blows.

“Hold the light higher!” he said, wrathfully, to the turnkey. “Look
among those fragments with care, Jacques. And see! Here is my knife,”
 throwing it to him; “rip open that bed, and search the straw. Hold the
light higher, you!”

With a menacing look at the turnkey he crawled upon the hearth, and,
peering up the chimney, struck and prised at its sides with the crowbar,
and worked at the iron grating across it. In a few minutes, some mortar
and dust came dropping down, which he averted his face to avoid; and
in it, and in the old wood-ashes, and in a crevice in the chimney
into which his weapon had slipped or wrought itself, he groped with a
cautious touch.

“Nothing in the wood, and nothing in the straw, Jacques?”

“Nothing.”

“Let us collect them together, in the middle of the cell. So! Light
them, you!”

The turnkey fired the little pile, which blazed high and hot. Stooping
again to come out at the low-arched door, they left it burning, and
retraced their way to the courtyard; seeming to recover their sense
of hearing as they came down, until they were in the raging flood once
more.

They found it surging and tossing, in quest of Defarge himself. Saint
Antoine was clamorous to have its wine-shop keeper foremost in the guard
upon the governor who had defended the Bastille and shot the people.
Otherwise, the governor would not be marched to the Hotel de Ville for
judgment. Otherwise, the governor would escape, and the people's
blood (suddenly of some value, after many years of worthlessness) be
unavenged.

In the howling universe of passion and contention that seemed to
encompass this grim old officer conspicuous in his grey coat and red
decoration, there was but one quite steady figure, and that was a
woman's. “See, there is my husband!” she cried, pointing him out.
“See Defarge!” She stood immovable close to the grim old officer, and
remained immovable close to him; remained immovable close to him through
the streets, as Defarge and the rest bore him along; remained immovable
close to him when he was got near his destination, and began to
be struck at from behind; remained immovable close to him when the
long-gathering rain of stabs and blows fell heavy; was so close to him
when he dropped dead under it, that, suddenly animated, she put her foot
upon his neck, and with her cruel knife--long ready--hewed off his head.

The hour was come, when Saint Antoine was to execute his horrible idea
of hoisting up men for lamps to show what he could be and do. Saint
Antoine's blood was up, and the blood of tyranny and domination by the
iron hand was down--down on the steps of the Hotel de Ville where the
governor's body lay--down on the sole of the shoe of Madame Defarge
where she had trodden on the body to steady it for mutilation. “Lower
the lamp yonder!” cried Saint Antoine, after glaring round for a new
means of death; “here is one of his soldiers to be left on guard!” The
swinging sentinel was posted, and the sea rushed on.

The sea of black and threatening waters, and of destructive upheaving
of wave against wave, whose depths were yet unfathomed and whose forces
were yet unknown. The remorseless sea of turbulently swaying shapes,
voices of vengeance, and faces hardened in the furnaces of suffering
until the touch of pity could make no mark on them.

But, in the ocean of faces where every fierce and furious expression was
in vivid life, there were two groups of faces--each seven in number--so
fixedly contrasting with the rest, that never did sea roll which bore
more memorable wrecks with it. Seven faces of prisoners, suddenly
released by the storm that had burst their tomb, were carried high
overhead: all scared, all lost, all wondering and amazed, as if the Last
Day were come, and those who rejoiced around them were lost spirits.
Other seven faces there were, carried higher, seven dead faces, whose
drooping eyelids and half-seen eyes awaited the Last Day. Impassive
faces, yet with a suspended--not an abolished--expression on them;
faces, rather, in a fearful pause, as having yet to raise the dropped
lids of the eyes, and bear witness with the bloodless lips, “THOU DIDST
IT!”

Seven prisoners released, seven gory heads on pikes, the keys of the
accursed fortress of the eight strong towers, some discovered letters
and other memorials of prisoners of old time, long dead of broken
hearts,--such, and such--like, the loudly echoing footsteps of Saint
Antoine escort through the Paris streets in mid-July, one thousand seven
hundred and eighty-nine. Now, Heaven defeat the fancy of Lucie Darnay,
and keep these feet far out of her life! For, they are headlong, mad,
and dangerous; and in the years so long after the breaking of the cask
at Defarge's wine-shop door, they are not easily purified when once
stained red.




XXII. The Sea Still Rises


Haggard Saint Antoine had had only one exultant week, in which to soften
his modicum of hard and bitter bread to such extent as he could, with
the relish of fraternal embraces and congratulations, when Madame
Defarge sat at her counter, as usual, presiding over the customers.
Madame Defarge wore no rose in her head, for the great brotherhood of
Spies had become, even in one short week, extremely chary of trusting
themselves to the saint's mercies. The lamps across his streets had a
portentously elastic swing with them.

Madame Defarge, with her arms folded, sat in the morning light and heat,
contemplating the wine-shop and the street. In both, there were several
knots of loungers, squalid and miserable, but now with a manifest sense
of power enthroned on their distress. The raggedest nightcap, awry on
the wretchedest head, had this crooked significance in it: “I know how
hard it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to support life in myself;
but do you know how easy it has grown for me, the wearer of this, to
destroy life in you?” Every lean bare arm, that had been without work
before, had this work always ready for it now, that it could strike.
The fingers of the knitting women were vicious, with the experience that
they could tear. There was a change in the appearance of Saint Antoine;
the image had been hammering into this for hundreds of years, and the
last finishing blows had told mightily on the expression.

Madame Defarge sat observing it, with such suppressed approval as was
to be desired in the leader of the Saint Antoine women. One of her
sisterhood knitted beside her. The short, rather plump wife of a starved
grocer, and the mother of two children withal, this lieutenant had
already earned the complimentary name of The Vengeance.

“Hark!” said The Vengeance. “Listen, then! Who comes?”

As if a train of powder laid from the outermost bound of Saint Antoine
Quarter to the wine-shop door, had been suddenly fired, a fast-spreading
murmur came rushing along.

“It is Defarge,” said madame. “Silence, patriots!”

Defarge came in breathless, pulled off a red cap he wore, and looked
around him! “Listen, everywhere!” said madame again. “Listen to him!”
 Defarge stood, panting, against a background of eager eyes and open
mouths, formed outside the door; all those within the wine-shop had
sprung to their feet.

“Say then, my husband. What is it?”

“News from the other world!”

“How, then?” cried madame, contemptuously. “The other world?”

“Does everybody here recall old Foulon, who told the famished people
that they might eat grass, and who died, and went to Hell?”

“Everybody!” from all throats.

“The news is of him. He is among us!”

“Among us!” from the universal throat again. “And dead?”

“Not dead! He feared us so much--and with reason--that he caused himself
to be represented as dead, and had a grand mock-funeral. But they have
found him alive, hiding in the country, and have brought him in. I have
seen him but now, on his way to the Hotel de Ville, a prisoner. I have
said that he had reason to fear us. Say all! _Had_ he reason?”

Wretched old sinner of more than threescore years and ten, if he had
never known it yet, he would have known it in his heart of hearts if he
could have heard the answering cry.

A moment of profound silence followed. Defarge and his wife looked
steadfastly at one another. The Vengeance stooped, and the jar of a drum
was heard as she moved it at her feet behind the counter.

“Patriots!” said Defarge, in a determined voice, “are we ready?”

Instantly Madame Defarge's knife was in her girdle; the drum was beating
in the streets, as if it and a drummer had flown together by magic; and
The Vengeance, uttering terrific shrieks, and flinging her arms about
her head like all the forty Furies at once, was tearing from house to
house, rousing the women.

The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked
from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into
the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From
such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their
children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground
famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one
another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.
Villain Foulon taken, my sister! Old Foulon taken, my mother! Miscreant
Foulon taken, my daughter! Then, a score of others ran into the midst of
these, beating their breasts, tearing their hair, and screaming, Foulon
alive! Foulon who told the starving people they might eat grass! Foulon
who told my old father that he might eat grass, when I had no bread
to give him! Foulon who told my baby it might suck grass, when these
breasts were dry with want! O mother of God, this Foulon! O Heaven our
suffering! Hear me, my dead baby and my withered father: I swear on my
knees, on these stones, to avenge you on Foulon! Husbands, and brothers,
and young men, Give us the blood of Foulon, Give us the head of Foulon,
Give us the heart of Foulon, Give us the body and soul of Foulon, Rend
Foulon to pieces, and dig him into the ground, that grass may grow from
him! With these cries, numbers of the women, lashed into blind frenzy,
whirled about, striking and tearing at their own friends until they
dropped into a passionate swoon, and were only saved by the men
belonging to them from being trampled under foot.

Nevertheless, not a moment was lost; not a moment! This Foulon was at
the Hotel de Ville, and might be loosed. Never, if Saint Antoine knew
his own sufferings, insults, and wrongs! Armed men and women flocked out
of the Quarter so fast, and drew even these last dregs after them with
such a force of suction, that within a quarter of an hour there was not
a human creature in Saint Antoine's bosom but a few old crones and the
wailing children.

No. They were all by that time choking the Hall of Examination where
this old man, ugly and wicked, was, and overflowing into the adjacent
open space and streets. The Defarges, husband and wife, The Vengeance,
and Jacques Three, were in the first press, and at no great distance
from him in the Hall.

“See!” cried madame, pointing with her knife. “See the old villain bound
with ropes. That was well done to tie a bunch of grass upon his back.
Ha, ha! That was well done. Let him eat it now!” Madame put her knife
under her arm, and clapped her hands as at a play.

The people immediately behind Madame Defarge, explaining the cause of
her satisfaction to those behind them, and those again explaining to
others, and those to others, the neighbouring streets resounded with the
clapping of hands. Similarly, during two or three hours of drawl,
and the winnowing of many bushels of words, Madame Defarge's frequent
expressions of impatience were taken up, with marvellous quickness, at
a distance: the more readily, because certain men who had by some
wonderful exercise of agility climbed up the external architecture
to look in from the windows, knew Madame Defarge well, and acted as a
telegraph between her and the crowd outside the building.

At length the sun rose so high that it struck a kindly ray as of hope or
protection, directly down upon the old prisoner's head. The favour was
too much to bear; in an instant the barrier of dust and chaff that had
stood surprisingly long, went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got
him!

It was known directly, to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge
had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable
wretch in a deadly embrace--Madame Defarge had but followed and turned
her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied--The Vengeance and
Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows
had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey from their high
perches--when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, “Bring him
out! Bring him to the lamp!”

Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now, on
his knees; now, on his feet; now, on his back; dragged, and struck at,
and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his
face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always
entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of
action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one
another back that they might see; now, a log of dead wood drawn through
a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one
of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go--as a cat
might have done to a mouse--and silently and composedly looked at him
while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately
screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have
him killed with grass in his mouth. Once, he went aloft, and the rope
broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice, he went aloft, and the rope
broke, and they caught him shrieking; then, the rope was merciful, and
held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the
mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of.

Nor was this the end of the day's bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted
and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when
the day closed in that the son-in-law of the despatched, another of the
people's enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard
five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes
on flaring sheets of paper, seized him--would have torn him out of the
breast of an army to bear Foulon company--set his head and heart on
pikes, and carried the three spoils of the day, in Wolf-procession
through the streets.

Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children,
wailing and breadless. Then, the miserable bakers' shops were beset by
long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while
they waited with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by
embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them
again in gossip. Gradually, these strings of ragged people shortened and
frayed away; and then poor lights began to shine in high windows, and
slender fires were made in the streets, at which neighbours cooked in
common, afterwards supping at their doors.

Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and innocent of meat, as of
most other sauce to wretched bread. Yet, human fellowship infused
some nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of
cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers who had had their full
share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre children;
and lovers, with such a world around them and before them, loved and
hoped.

It was almost morning, when Defarge's wine-shop parted with its last
knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in
husky tones, while fastening the door:

“At last it is come, my dear!”

“Eh well!” returned madame. “Almost.”

Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept: even The Vengeance slept with
her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum's was the
only voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The
Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up and had
the same speech out of him as before the Bastille fell, or old Foulon
was seized; not so with the hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint
Antoine's bosom.




XXIII. Fire Rises


There was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where
the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on the
highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold his
poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on the
crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it,
but not many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of
them knew what his men would do--beyond this: that it would probably not
be what he was ordered.

Far and wide lay a ruined country, yielding nothing but desolation.
Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as
shrivelled and poor as the miserable people. Everything was bowed down,
dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated
animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them--all worn
out.

Monseigneur (often a most worthy individual gentleman) was a national
blessing, gave a chivalrous tone to things, was a polite example of
luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose;
nevertheless, Monseigneur as a class had, somehow or other, brought
things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for
Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must
be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements, surely! Thus it
was, however; and the last drop of blood having been extracted from the
flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that
its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing
to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and
unaccountable.

But, this was not the change on the village, and on many a village like
it. For scores of years gone by, Monseigneur had squeezed it and wrung
it, and had seldom graced it with his presence except for the pleasures
of the chase--now, found in hunting the people; now, found in hunting
the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying spaces
of barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in
the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than in the
disappearance of the high caste, chiselled, and otherwise beautified and
beautifying features of Monseigneur.

For, in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the
dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and
to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in
thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat if
he had it--in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labour,
and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure approaching on
foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those parts, but was now
a frequent presence. As it advanced, the mender of roads would discern
without surprise, that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian
aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a
mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many
highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled
with the thorns and leaves and moss of many byways through woods.

Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at noon in the July weather,
as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he
could get from a shower of hail.

The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill,
and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects
in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just
intelligible:

“How goes it, Jacques?”

“All well, Jacques.”

“Touch then!”

They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones.

“No dinner?”

“Nothing but supper now,” said the mender of roads, with a hungry face.

“It is the fashion,” growled the man. “I meet no dinner anywhere.”

He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and
steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then, suddenly held
it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and
thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke.

“Touch then.” It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this
time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands.

“To-night?” said the mender of roads.

“To-night,” said the man, putting the pipe in his mouth.

“Where?”

“Here.”

He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at
one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge
of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village.

“Show me!” said the traveller then, moving to the brow of the hill.

“See!” returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. “You go down
here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain--”

“To the Devil with all that!” interrupted the other, rolling his eye
over the landscape. “_I_ go through no streets and past no fountains.
Well?”

“Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the
village.”

“Good. When do you cease to work?”

“At sunset.”

“Will you wake me, before departing? I have walked two nights without
resting. Let me finish my pipe, and I shall sleep like a child. Will you
wake me?”

“Surely.”

The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his
great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He
was fast asleep directly.

As the road-mender plied his dusty labour, and the hail-clouds, rolling
away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to
by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap
now, in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the
heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned towards it, that he used
his tools mechanically, and, one would have said, to very poor account.
The bronze face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woollen
red cap, the rough medley dress of home-spun stuff and hairy skins of
beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen
and desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender
of roads with awe. The traveller had travelled far, and his feet were
footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed
with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long
leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was into
sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at
secret weapons in his breast or where not; but, in vain, for he slept
with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips.
Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and
drawbridges, seemed to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against
this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and
looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no
obstacle, tending to centres all over France.

The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of
brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the paltering lumps
of dull ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed
them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then,
the mender of roads having got his tools together and all things ready
to go down into the village, roused him.

“Good!” said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. “Two leagues beyond the
summit of the hill?”

“About.”

“About. Good!”

The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him
according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain,
squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and
appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the village.
When the village had taken its poor supper, it did not creep to bed,
as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and remained there. A
curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when it gathered
together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of
looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur Gabelle,
chief functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on his house-top
alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced down from behind his
chimneys at the darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to
the sacristan who kept the keys of the church, that there might be need
to ring the tocsin by-and-bye.

The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its
solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened
the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace
flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a
swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through
the hall, among the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the
stairs, and shook the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis
had slept. East, West, North, and South, through the woods, four
heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the
branches, striding on cautiously to come together in the courtyard. Four
lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and all
was black again.

But, not for long. Presently, the chateau began to make itself strangely
visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous.
Then, a flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front,
picking out transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches,
and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter.
Soon, from a score of the great windows, flames burst forth, and the
stone faces awakened, stared out of fire.

A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left
there, and there was a saddling of a horse and riding away. There was
spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the
space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur
Gabelle's door. “Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!” The tocsin rang
impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The
mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood
with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the
sky. “It must be forty feet high,” said they, grimly; and never moved.

The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away
through the village, and galloped up the stony steep, to the prison on
the crag. At the gate, a group of officers were looking at the fire;
removed from them, a group of soldiers. “Help, gentlemen--officers! The
chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by
timely aid! Help, help!” The officers looked towards the soldiers who
looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting
of lips, “It must burn.”

As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street, the
village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and
fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of
lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in
every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of everything,
occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of
Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on
that functionary's part, the mender of roads, once so submissive to
authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with,
and that post-horses would roast.

The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and
raging of the conflagration, a red-hot wind, driving straight from the
infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising
and falling of the blaze, the stone faces showed as if they were in
torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell, the face with the
two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke
again, as if it were the face of the cruel Marquis, burning at the stake
and contending with the fire.

The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire,
scorched and shrivelled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce
figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten
lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water ran
dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice before the
heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great rents and
splits branched out in the solid walls, like crystallisation; stupefied
birds wheeled about and dropped into the furnace; four fierce figures
trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the night-enshrouded
roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, towards their next
destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and,
abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy.

Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and
bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with
the collection of rent and taxes--though it was but a small instalment
of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in those latter
days--became impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his
house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon,
Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door, and retire to hold counsel
with himself. The result of that conference was, that Gabelle again
withdrew himself to his housetop behind his stack of chimneys; this time
resolved, if his door were broken in (he was a small Southern man
of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the
parapet, and crush a man or two below.

Probably, Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the
distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door,
combined with the joy-ringing, for music; not to mention his having an
ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate,
which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favour.
A trying suspense, to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of
the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur
Gabelle had resolved! But, the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the
rush-candles of the village guttering out, the people happily dispersed,
and Monsieur Gabelle came down bringing his life with him for that
while.

Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were
other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom
the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they
had been born and bred; also, there were other villagers and townspeople
less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the
functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up
in their turn. But, the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West,
North, and South, be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned.
The altitude of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it,
no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate
successfully.




XXIV. Drawn to the Loadstone Rock


In such risings of fire and risings of sea--the firm earth shaken by
the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the
flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on
the shore--three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays
of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful
tissue of the life of her home.

Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in
the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging
feet. For, the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of
a people, tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared in
danger, changed into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted
in.

Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of
his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France, as
to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and
this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with
infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could
ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled; so, Monseigneur, after
boldly reading the Lord's Prayer backwards for a great number of years,
and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no
sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels.

The shining Bull's Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been the
mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good
eye to see with--had long had the mote in it of Lucifer's pride,
Sardanapalus's luxury, and a mole's blindness--but it had dropped
out and was gone. The Court, from that exclusive inner circle to its
outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was
all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged in its Palace and
“suspended,” when the last tidings came over.

The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was
come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide.

As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of
Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson's Bank. Spirits are supposed to
haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur
without a guinea haunted the spot where his guineas used to be.
Moreover, it was the spot to which such French intelligence as was most
to be relied upon, came quickest. Again: Tellson's was a munificent
house, and extended great liberality to old customers who had fallen
from their high estate. Again: those nobles who had seen the coming
storm in time, and anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made
provident remittances to Tellson's, were always to be heard of there
by their needy brethren. To which it must be added that every new-comer
from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson's, almost as
a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson's was at that
time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange; and this
was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there were in
consequence so numerous, that Tellson's sometimes wrote the latest news
out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows, for all who ran
through Temple Bar to read.

On a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry sat at his desk, and Charles
Darnay stood leaning on it, talking with him in a low voice. The
penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House, was now
the news-Exchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half an
hour or so of the time of closing.

“But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived,” said Charles
Darnay, rather hesitating, “I must still suggest to you--”

“I understand. That I am too old?” said Mr. Lorry.

“Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of travelling, a
disorganised country, a city that may not be even safe for you.”

“My dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, “you touch
some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying away. It is safe
enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with an old fellow of hard
upon fourscore when there are so many people there much better worth
interfering with. As to its being a disorganised city, if it were not a
disorganised city there would be no occasion to send somebody from our
House here to our House there, who knows the city and the business, of
old, and is in Tellson's confidence. As to the uncertain travelling, the
long journey, and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit
myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson's, after all
these years, who ought to be?”

“I wish I were going myself,” said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly,
and like one thinking aloud.

“Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!” exclaimed Mr.
Lorry. “You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman born? You
are a wise counsellor.”

“My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born, that the
thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed through
my mind often. One cannot help thinking, having had some sympathy for
the miserable people, and having abandoned something to them,” he spoke
here in his former thoughtful manner, “that one might be listened to,
and might have the power to persuade to some restraint. Only last night,
after you had left us, when I was talking to Lucie--”

“When you were talking to Lucie,” Mr. Lorry repeated. “Yes. I wonder you
are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie! Wishing you were going to
France at this time of day!”

“However, I am not going,” said Charles Darnay, with a smile. “It is
more to the purpose that you say you are.”

“And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles,” Mr. Lorry
glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, “you can have no
conception of the difficulty with which our business is transacted, and
of the peril in which our books and papers over yonder are involved. The
Lord above knows what the compromising consequences would be to numbers
of people, if some of our documents were seized or destroyed; and they
might be, at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set
afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow! Now, a judicious selection from these
with the least possible delay, and the burying of them, or otherwise
getting of them out of harm's way, is within the power (without loss of
precious time) of scarcely any one but myself, if any one. And shall
I hang back, when Tellson's knows this and says this--Tellson's, whose
bread I have eaten these sixty years--because I am a little stiff about
the joints? Why, I am a boy, sir, to half a dozen old codgers here!”

“How I admire the gallantry of your youthful spirit, Mr. Lorry.”

“Tut! Nonsense, sir!--And, my dear Charles,” said Mr. Lorry, glancing at
the House again, “you are to remember, that getting things out of
Paris at this present time, no matter what things, is next to an
impossibility. Papers and precious matters were this very day brought
to us here (I speak in strict confidence; it is not business-like to
whisper it, even to you), by the strangest bearers you can imagine,
every one of whom had his head hanging on by a single hair as he passed
the Barriers. At another time, our parcels would come and go, as easily
as in business-like Old England; but now, everything is stopped.”

“And do you really go to-night?”

“I really go to-night, for the case has become too pressing to admit of
delay.”

“And do you take no one with you?”

“All sorts of people have been proposed to me, but I will have nothing
to say to any of them. I intend to take Jerry. Jerry has been my
bodyguard on Sunday nights for a long time past and I am used to him.
Nobody will suspect Jerry of being anything but an English bull-dog, or
of having any design in his head but to fly at anybody who touches his
master.”

“I must say again that I heartily admire your gallantry and
youthfulness.”

“I must say again, nonsense, nonsense! When I have executed this little
commission, I shall, perhaps, accept Tellson's proposal to retire and
live at my ease. Time enough, then, to think about growing old.”

This dialogue had taken place at Mr. Lorry's usual desk, with
Monseigneur swarming within a yard or two of it, boastful of what he
would do to avenge himself on the rascal-people before long. It was too
much the way of Monseigneur under his reverses as a refugee, and it
was much too much the way of native British orthodoxy, to talk of this
terrible Revolution as if it were the only harvest ever known under
the skies that had not been sown--as if nothing had ever been done, or
omitted to be done, that had led to it--as if observers of the wretched
millions in France, and of the misused and perverted resources that
should have made them prosperous, had not seen it inevitably coming,
years before, and had not in plain words recorded what they saw. Such
vapouring, combined with the extravagant plots of Monseigneur for the
restoration of a state of things that had utterly exhausted itself,
and worn out Heaven and earth as well as itself, was hard to be endured
without some remonstrance by any sane man who knew the truth. And it was
such vapouring all about his ears, like a troublesome confusion of blood
in his own head, added to a latent uneasiness in his mind, which had
already made Charles Darnay restless, and which still kept him so.

Among the talkers, was Stryver, of the King's Bench Bar, far on his
way to state promotion, and, therefore, loud on the theme: broaching
to Monseigneur, his devices for blowing the people up and exterminating
them from the face of the earth, and doing without them: and for
accomplishing many similar objects akin in their nature to the abolition
of eagles by sprinkling salt on the tails of the race. Him, Darnay heard
with a particular feeling of objection; and Darnay stood divided between
going away that he might hear no more, and remaining to interpose his
word, when the thing that was to be, went on to shape itself out.

The House approached Mr. Lorry, and laying a soiled and unopened letter
before him, asked if he had yet discovered any traces of the person to
whom it was addressed? The House laid the letter down so close to Darnay
that he saw the direction--the more quickly because it was his own right
name. The address, turned into English, ran:

“Very pressing. To Monsieur heretofore the Marquis St. Evremonde, of
France. Confided to the cares of Messrs. Tellson and Co., Bankers,
London, England.”

On the marriage morning, Doctor Manette had made it his one urgent and
express request to Charles Darnay, that the secret of this name should
be--unless he, the Doctor, dissolved the obligation--kept inviolate
between them. Nobody else knew it to be his name; his own wife had no
suspicion of the fact; Mr. Lorry could have none.

“No,” said Mr. Lorry, in reply to the House; “I have referred it,
I think, to everybody now here, and no one can tell me where this
gentleman is to be found.”

The hands of the clock verging upon the hour of closing the Bank, there
was a general set of the current of talkers past Mr. Lorry's desk. He
held the letter out inquiringly; and Monseigneur looked at it, in the
person of this plotting and indignant refugee; and Monseigneur looked at
it in the person of that plotting and indignant refugee; and This, That,
and The Other, all had something disparaging to say, in French or in
English, concerning the Marquis who was not to be found.

“Nephew, I believe--but in any case degenerate successor--of the
polished Marquis who was murdered,” said one. “Happy to say, I never
knew him.”

“A craven who abandoned his post,” said another--this Monseigneur had
been got out of Paris, legs uppermost and half suffocated, in a load of
hay--“some years ago.”

“Infected with the new doctrines,” said a third, eyeing the direction
through his glass in passing; “set himself in opposition to the last
Marquis, abandoned the estates when he inherited them, and left them to
the ruffian herd. They will recompense him now, I hope, as he deserves.”

“Hey?” cried the blatant Stryver. “Did he though? Is that the sort of
fellow? Let us look at his infamous name. D--n the fellow!”

Darnay, unable to restrain himself any longer, touched Mr. Stryver on
the shoulder, and said:

“I know the fellow.”

“Do you, by Jupiter?” said Stryver. “I am sorry for it.”

“Why?”

“Why, Mr. Darnay? D'ye hear what he did? Don't ask, why, in these
times.”

“But I do ask why?”

“Then I tell you again, Mr. Darnay, I am sorry for it. I am sorry to
hear you putting any such extraordinary questions. Here is a fellow,
who, infected by the most pestilent and blasphemous code of devilry that
ever was known, abandoned his property to the vilest scum of the earth
that ever did murder by wholesale, and you ask me why I am sorry that a
man who instructs youth knows him? Well, but I'll answer you. I am sorry
because I believe there is contamination in such a scoundrel. That's
why.”

Mindful of the secret, Darnay with great difficulty checked himself, and
said: “You may not understand the gentleman.”

“I understand how to put _you_ in a corner, Mr. Darnay,” said Bully
Stryver, “and I'll do it. If this fellow is a gentleman, I _don't_
understand him. You may tell him so, with my compliments. You may also
tell him, from me, that after abandoning his worldly goods and position
to this butcherly mob, I wonder he is not at the head of them. But, no,
gentlemen,” said Stryver, looking all round, and snapping his fingers,
“I know something of human nature, and I tell you that you'll never
find a fellow like this fellow, trusting himself to the mercies of such
precious _protégés_. No, gentlemen; he'll always show 'em a clean pair
of heels very early in the scuffle, and sneak away.”

With those words, and a final snap of his fingers, Mr. Stryver
shouldered himself into Fleet-street, amidst the general approbation of
his hearers. Mr. Lorry and Charles Darnay were left alone at the desk,
in the general departure from the Bank.

“Will you take charge of the letter?” said Mr. Lorry. “You know where to
deliver it?”

“I do.”

“Will you undertake to explain, that we suppose it to have been
addressed here, on the chance of our knowing where to forward it, and
that it has been here some time?”

“I will do so. Do you start for Paris from here?”

“From here, at eight.”

“I will come back, to see you off.”

Very ill at ease with himself, and with Stryver and most other men,
Darnay made the best of his way into the quiet of the Temple, opened the
letter, and read it. These were its contents:


“Prison of the Abbaye, Paris.

“June 21, 1792. “MONSIEUR HERETOFORE THE MARQUIS.

“After having long been in danger of my life at the hands of the
village, I have been seized, with great violence and indignity, and
brought a long journey on foot to Paris. On the road I have suffered a
great deal. Nor is that all; my house has been destroyed--razed to the
ground.

“The crime for which I am imprisoned, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
and for which I shall be summoned before the tribunal, and shall lose my
life (without your so generous help), is, they tell me, treason against
the majesty of the people, in that I have acted against them for an
emigrant. It is in vain I represent that I have acted for them, and not
against, according to your commands. It is in vain I represent that,
before the sequestration of emigrant property, I had remitted the
imposts they had ceased to pay; that I had collected no rent; that I had
had recourse to no process. The only response is, that I have acted for
an emigrant, and where is that emigrant?

“Ah! most gracious Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, where is that
emigrant? I cry in my sleep where is he? I demand of Heaven, will he
not come to deliver me? No answer. Ah Monsieur heretofore the Marquis,
I send my desolate cry across the sea, hoping it may perhaps reach your
ears through the great bank of Tilson known at Paris!

“For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
your noble name, I supplicate you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, to
succour and release me. My fault is, that I have been true to you. Oh
Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, I pray you be you true to me!

“From this prison here of horror, whence I every hour tend nearer and
nearer to destruction, I send you, Monsieur heretofore the Marquis, the
assurance of my dolorous and unhappy service.

“Your afflicted,

“Gabelle.”


The latent uneasiness in Darnay's mind was roused to vigourous life
by this letter. The peril of an old servant and a good one, whose
only crime was fidelity to himself and his family, stared him so
reproachfully in the face, that, as he walked to and fro in the Temple
considering what to do, he almost hid his face from the passersby.

He knew very well, that in his horror of the deed which had culminated
the bad deeds and bad reputation of the old family house, in his
resentful suspicions of his uncle, and in the aversion with which his
conscience regarded the crumbling fabric that he was supposed to uphold,
he had acted imperfectly. He knew very well, that in his love for Lucie,
his renunciation of his social place, though by no means new to his own
mind, had been hurried and incomplete. He knew that he ought to have
systematically worked it out and supervised it, and that he had meant to
do it, and that it had never been done.

The happiness of his own chosen English home, the necessity of being
always actively employed, the swift changes and troubles of the time
which had followed on one another so fast, that the events of this week
annihilated the immature plans of last week, and the events of the week
following made all new again; he knew very well, that to the force of
these circumstances he had yielded:--not without disquiet, but still
without continuous and accumulating resistance. That he had watched
the times for a time of action, and that they had shifted and struggled
until the time had gone by, and the nobility were trooping from
France by every highway and byway, and their property was in course of
confiscation and destruction, and their very names were blotting out,
was as well known to himself as it could be to any new authority in
France that might impeach him for it.

But, he had oppressed no man, he had imprisoned no man; he was so
far from having harshly exacted payment of his dues, that he had
relinquished them of his own will, thrown himself on a world with no
favour in it, won his own private place there, and earned his own
bread. Monsieur Gabelle had held the impoverished and involved estate
on written instructions, to spare the people, to give them what little
there was to give--such fuel as the heavy creditors would let them have
in the winter, and such produce as could be saved from the same grip in
the summer--and no doubt he had put the fact in plea and proof, for his
own safety, so that it could not but appear now.

This favoured the desperate resolution Charles Darnay had begun to make,
that he would go to Paris.

Yes. Like the mariner in the old story, the winds and streams had driven
him within the influence of the Loadstone Rock, and it was drawing him
to itself, and he must go. Everything that arose before his mind drifted
him on, faster and faster, more and more steadily, to the terrible
attraction. His latent uneasiness had been, that bad aims were being
worked out in his own unhappy land by bad instruments, and that he who
could not fail to know that he was better than they, was not there,
trying to do something to stay bloodshed, and assert the claims of mercy
and humanity. With this uneasiness half stifled, and half reproaching
him, he had been brought to the pointed comparison of himself with the
brave old gentleman in whom duty was so strong; upon that comparison
(injurious to himself) had instantly followed the sneers of Monseigneur,
which had stung him bitterly, and those of Stryver, which above all were
coarse and galling, for old reasons. Upon those, had followed Gabelle's
letter: the appeal of an innocent prisoner, in danger of death, to his
justice, honour, and good name.

His resolution was made. He must go to Paris.

Yes. The Loadstone Rock was drawing him, and he must sail on, until he
struck. He knew of no rock; he saw hardly any danger. The intention
with which he had done what he had done, even although he had left
it incomplete, presented it before him in an aspect that would be
gratefully acknowledged in France on his presenting himself to assert
it. Then, that glorious vision of doing good, which is so often the
sanguine mirage of so many good minds, arose before him, and he even
saw himself in the illusion with some influence to guide this raging
Revolution that was running so fearfully wild.

As he walked to and fro with his resolution made, he considered that
neither Lucie nor her father must know of it until he was gone.
Lucie should be spared the pain of separation; and her father, always
reluctant to turn his thoughts towards the dangerous ground of old,
should come to the knowledge of the step, as a step taken, and not in
the balance of suspense and doubt. How much of the incompleteness of his
situation was referable to her father, through the painful anxiety
to avoid reviving old associations of France in his mind, he did not
discuss with himself. But, that circumstance too, had had its influence
in his course.

He walked to and fro, with thoughts very busy, until it was time to
return to Tellson's and take leave of Mr. Lorry. As soon as he arrived
in Paris he would present himself to this old friend, but he must say
nothing of his intention now.

A carriage with post-horses was ready at the Bank door, and Jerry was
booted and equipped.

“I have delivered that letter,” said Charles Darnay to Mr. Lorry. “I
would not consent to your being charged with any written answer, but
perhaps you will take a verbal one?”

“That I will, and readily,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it is not dangerous.”

“Not at all. Though it is to a prisoner in the Abbaye.”

“What is his name?” said Mr. Lorry, with his open pocket-book in his
hand.

“Gabelle.”

“Gabelle. And what is the message to the unfortunate Gabelle in prison?”

“Simply, 'that he has received the letter, and will come.'”

“Any time mentioned?”

“He will start upon his journey to-morrow night.”

“Any person mentioned?”

“No.”

He helped Mr. Lorry to wrap himself in a number of coats and cloaks,
and went out with him from the warm atmosphere of the old Bank, into the
misty air of Fleet-street. “My love to Lucie, and to little Lucie,” said
Mr. Lorry at parting, “and take precious care of them till I come back.”
 Charles Darnay shook his head and doubtfully smiled, as the carriage
rolled away.

That night--it was the fourteenth of August--he sat up late, and wrote
two fervent letters; one was to Lucie, explaining the strong obligation
he was under to go to Paris, and showing her, at length, the reasons
that he had, for feeling confident that he could become involved in no
personal danger there; the other was to the Doctor, confiding Lucie and
their dear child to his care, and dwelling on the same topics with the
strongest assurances. To both, he wrote that he would despatch letters
in proof of his safety, immediately after his arrival.

It was a hard day, that day of being among them, with the first
reservation of their joint lives on his mind. It was a hard matter to
preserve the innocent deceit of which they were profoundly unsuspicious.
But, an affectionate glance at his wife, so happy and busy, made him
resolute not to tell her what impended (he had been half moved to do it,
so strange it was to him to act in anything without her quiet aid), and
the day passed quickly. Early in the evening he embraced her, and her
scarcely less dear namesake, pretending that he would return by-and-bye
(an imaginary engagement took him out, and he had secreted a valise
of clothes ready), and so he emerged into the heavy mist of the heavy
streets, with a heavier heart.

The unseen force was drawing him fast to itself, now, and all the tides
and winds were setting straight and strong towards it. He left his
two letters with a trusty porter, to be delivered half an hour before
midnight, and no sooner; took horse for Dover; and began his journey.
“For the love of Heaven, of justice, of generosity, of the honour of
your noble name!” was the poor prisoner's cry with which he strengthened
his sinking heart, as he left all that was dear on earth behind him, and
floated away for the Loadstone Rock.


The end of the second book.





Book the Third--the Track of a Storm




I. In Secret


The traveller fared slowly on his way, who fared towards Paris from
England in the autumn of the year one thousand seven hundred and
ninety-two. More than enough of bad roads, bad equipages, and bad
horses, he would have encountered to delay him, though the fallen and
unfortunate King of France had been upon his throne in all his glory;
but, the changed times were fraught with other obstacles than
these. Every town-gate and village taxing-house had its band of
citizen-patriots, with their national muskets in a most explosive state
of readiness, who stopped all comers and goers, cross-questioned them,
inspected their papers, looked for their names in lists of their own,
turned them back, or sent them on, or stopped them and laid them in
hold, as their capricious judgment or fancy deemed best for the dawning
Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or
Death.

A very few French leagues of his journey were accomplished, when Charles
Darnay began to perceive that for him along these country roads there
was no hope of return until he should have been declared a good citizen
at Paris. Whatever might befall now, he must on to his journey's end.
Not a mean village closed upon him, not a common barrier dropped across
the road behind him, but he knew it to be another iron door in
the series that was barred between him and England. The universal
watchfulness so encompassed him, that if he had been taken in a net,
or were being forwarded to his destination in a cage, he could not have
felt his freedom more completely gone.

This universal watchfulness not only stopped him on the highway twenty
times in a stage, but retarded his progress twenty times in a day, by
riding after him and taking him back, riding before him and stopping him
by anticipation, riding with him and keeping him in charge. He had been
days upon his journey in France alone, when he went to bed tired out, in
a little town on the high road, still a long way from Paris.

Nothing but the production of the afflicted Gabelle's letter from his
prison of the Abbaye would have got him on so far. His difficulty at the
guard-house in this small place had been such, that he felt his journey
to have come to a crisis. And he was, therefore, as little surprised as
a man could be, to find himself awakened at the small inn to which he
had been remitted until morning, in the middle of the night.

Awakened by a timid local functionary and three armed patriots in rough
red caps and with pipes in their mouths, who sat down on the bed.

“Emigrant,” said the functionary, “I am going to send you on to Paris,
under an escort.”

“Citizen, I desire nothing more than to get to Paris, though I could
dispense with the escort.”

“Silence!” growled a red-cap, striking at the coverlet with the butt-end
of his musket. “Peace, aristocrat!”

“It is as the good patriot says,” observed the timid functionary. “You
are an aristocrat, and must have an escort--and must pay for it.”

“I have no choice,” said Charles Darnay.

“Choice! Listen to him!” cried the same scowling red-cap. “As if it was
not a favour to be protected from the lamp-iron!”

“It is always as the good patriot says,” observed the functionary. “Rise
and dress yourself, emigrant.”

Darnay complied, and was taken back to the guard-house, where other
patriots in rough red caps were smoking, drinking, and sleeping, by
a watch-fire. Here he paid a heavy price for his escort, and hence he
started with it on the wet, wet roads at three o'clock in the morning.

The escort were two mounted patriots in red caps and tri-coloured
cockades, armed with national muskets and sabres, who rode one on either
side of him.

The escorted governed his own horse, but a loose line was attached to
his bridle, the end of which one of the patriots kept girded round his
wrist. In this state they set forth with the sharp rain driving in their
faces: clattering at a heavy dragoon trot over the uneven town pavement,
and out upon the mire-deep roads. In this state they traversed without
change, except of horses and pace, all the mire-deep leagues that lay
between them and the capital.

They travelled in the night, halting an hour or two after daybreak, and
lying by until the twilight fell. The escort were so wretchedly clothed,
that they twisted straw round their bare legs, and thatched their ragged
shoulders to keep the wet off. Apart from the personal discomfort of
being so attended, and apart from such considerations of present danger
as arose from one of the patriots being chronically drunk, and carrying
his musket very recklessly, Charles Darnay did not allow the restraint
that was laid upon him to awaken any serious fears in his breast; for,
he reasoned with himself that it could have no reference to the merits
of an individual case that was not yet stated, and of representations,
confirmable by the prisoner in the Abbaye, that were not yet made.

But when they came to the town of Beauvais--which they did at eventide,
when the streets were filled with people--he could not conceal from
himself that the aspect of affairs was very alarming. An ominous crowd
gathered to see him dismount of the posting-yard, and many voices called
out loudly, “Down with the emigrant!”

He stopped in the act of swinging himself out of his saddle, and,
resuming it as his safest place, said:

“Emigrant, my friends! Do you not see me here, in France, of my own
will?”

“You are a cursed emigrant,” cried a farrier, making at him in a
furious manner through the press, hammer in hand; “and you are a cursed
aristocrat!”

The postmaster interposed himself between this man and the rider's
bridle (at which he was evidently making), and soothingly said, “Let him
be; let him be! He will be judged at Paris.”

“Judged!” repeated the farrier, swinging his hammer. “Ay! and condemned
as a traitor.” At this the crowd roared approval.

Checking the postmaster, who was for turning his horse's head to the
yard (the drunken patriot sat composedly in his saddle looking on, with
the line round his wrist), Darnay said, as soon as he could make his
voice heard:

“Friends, you deceive yourselves, or you are deceived. I am not a
traitor.”

“He lies!” cried the smith. “He is a traitor since the decree. His life
is forfeit to the people. His cursed life is not his own!”

At the instant when Darnay saw a rush in the eyes of the crowd, which
another instant would have brought upon him, the postmaster turned his
horse into the yard, the escort rode in close upon his horse's flanks,
and the postmaster shut and barred the crazy double gates. The farrier
struck a blow upon them with his hammer, and the crowd groaned; but, no
more was done.

“What is this decree that the smith spoke of?” Darnay asked the
postmaster, when he had thanked him, and stood beside him in the yard.

“Truly, a decree for selling the property of emigrants.”

“When passed?”

“On the fourteenth.”

“The day I left England!”

“Everybody says it is but one of several, and that there will be
others--if there are not already--banishing all emigrants, and
condemning all to death who return. That is what he meant when he said
your life was not your own.”

“But there are no such decrees yet?”

“What do I know!” said the postmaster, shrugging his shoulders; “there
may be, or there will be. It is all the same. What would you have?”

They rested on some straw in a loft until the middle of the night, and
then rode forward again when all the town was asleep. Among the many
wild changes observable on familiar things which made this wild ride
unreal, not the least was the seeming rarity of sleep. After long and
lonely spurring over dreary roads, they would come to a cluster of poor
cottages, not steeped in darkness, but all glittering with lights, and
would find the people, in a ghostly manner in the dead of the night,
circling hand in hand round a shrivelled tree of Liberty, or all drawn
up together singing a Liberty song. Happily, however, there was sleep in
Beauvais that night to help them out of it and they passed on once more
into solitude and loneliness: jingling through the untimely cold and
wet, among impoverished fields that had yielded no fruits of the earth
that year, diversified by the blackened remains of burnt houses, and by
the sudden emergence from ambuscade, and sharp reining up across their
way, of patriot patrols on the watch on all the roads.

Daylight at last found them before the wall of Paris. The barrier was
closed and strongly guarded when they rode up to it.

“Where are the papers of this prisoner?” demanded a resolute-looking man
in authority, who was summoned out by the guard.

Naturally struck by the disagreeable word, Charles Darnay requested the
speaker to take notice that he was a free traveller and French citizen,
in charge of an escort which the disturbed state of the country had
imposed upon him, and which he had paid for.

“Where,” repeated the same personage, without taking any heed of him
whatever, “are the papers of this prisoner?”

The drunken patriot had them in his cap, and produced them. Casting his
eyes over Gabelle's letter, the same personage in authority showed some
disorder and surprise, and looked at Darnay with a close attention.

He left escort and escorted without saying a word, however, and went
into the guard-room; meanwhile, they sat upon their horses outside the
gate. Looking about him while in this state of suspense, Charles
Darnay observed that the gate was held by a mixed guard of soldiers and
patriots, the latter far outnumbering the former; and that while ingress
into the city for peasants' carts bringing in supplies, and for similar
traffic and traffickers, was easy enough, egress, even for the homeliest
people, was very difficult. A numerous medley of men and women, not
to mention beasts and vehicles of various sorts, was waiting to issue
forth; but, the previous identification was so strict, that they
filtered through the barrier very slowly. Some of these people knew
their turn for examination to be so far off, that they lay down on the
ground to sleep or smoke, while others talked together, or loitered
about. The red cap and tri-colour cockade were universal, both among men
and women.

When he had sat in his saddle some half-hour, taking note of these
things, Darnay found himself confronted by the same man in authority,
who directed the guard to open the barrier. Then he delivered to the
escort, drunk and sober, a receipt for the escorted, and requested him
to dismount. He did so, and the two patriots, leading his tired horse,
turned and rode away without entering the city.

He accompanied his conductor into a guard-room, smelling of common wine
and tobacco, where certain soldiers and patriots, asleep and awake,
drunk and sober, and in various neutral states between sleeping and
waking, drunkenness and sobriety, were standing and lying about. The
light in the guard-house, half derived from the waning oil-lamps of
the night, and half from the overcast day, was in a correspondingly
uncertain condition. Some registers were lying open on a desk, and an
officer of a coarse, dark aspect, presided over these.

“Citizen Defarge,” said he to Darnay's conductor, as he took a slip of
paper to write on. “Is this the emigrant Evremonde?”

“This is the man.”

“Your age, Evremonde?”

“Thirty-seven.”

“Married, Evremonde?”

“Yes.”

“Where married?”

“In England.”

“Without doubt. Where is your wife, Evremonde?”

“In England.”

“Without doubt. You are consigned, Evremonde, to the prison of La
Force.”

“Just Heaven!” exclaimed Darnay. “Under what law, and for what offence?”

The officer looked up from his slip of paper for a moment.

“We have new laws, Evremonde, and new offences, since you were here.” He
said it with a hard smile, and went on writing.

“I entreat you to observe that I have come here voluntarily, in response
to that written appeal of a fellow-countryman which lies before you. I
demand no more than the opportunity to do so without delay. Is not that
my right?”

“Emigrants have no rights, Evremonde,” was the stolid reply. The officer
wrote until he had finished, read over to himself what he had written,
sanded it, and handed it to Defarge, with the words “In secret.”

Defarge motioned with the paper to the prisoner that he must accompany
him. The prisoner obeyed, and a guard of two armed patriots attended
them.

“Is it you,” said Defarge, in a low voice, as they went down the
guardhouse steps and turned into Paris, “who married the daughter of
Doctor Manette, once a prisoner in the Bastille that is no more?”

“Yes,” replied Darnay, looking at him with surprise.

“My name is Defarge, and I keep a wine-shop in the Quarter Saint
Antoine. Possibly you have heard of me.”

“My wife came to your house to reclaim her father? Yes!”

The word “wife” seemed to serve as a gloomy reminder to Defarge, to say
with sudden impatience, “In the name of that sharp female newly-born,
and called La Guillotine, why did you come to France?”

“You heard me say why, a minute ago. Do you not believe it is the
truth?”

“A bad truth for you,” said Defarge, speaking with knitted brows, and
looking straight before him.

“Indeed I am lost here. All here is so unprecedented, so changed, so
sudden and unfair, that I am absolutely lost. Will you render me a
little help?”

“None.” Defarge spoke, always looking straight before him.

“Will you answer me a single question?”

“Perhaps. According to its nature. You can say what it is.”

“In this prison that I am going to so unjustly, shall I have some free
communication with the world outside?”

“You will see.”

“I am not to be buried there, prejudged, and without any means of
presenting my case?”

“You will see. But, what then? Other people have been similarly buried
in worse prisons, before now.”

“But never by me, Citizen Defarge.”

Defarge glanced darkly at him for answer, and walked on in a steady
and set silence. The deeper he sank into this silence, the fainter hope
there was--or so Darnay thought--of his softening in any slight degree.
He, therefore, made haste to say:

“It is of the utmost importance to me (you know, Citizen, even better
than I, of how much importance), that I should be able to communicate to
Mr. Lorry of Tellson's Bank, an English gentleman who is now in Paris,
the simple fact, without comment, that I have been thrown into the
prison of La Force. Will you cause that to be done for me?”

“I will do,” Defarge doggedly rejoined, “nothing for you. My duty is to
my country and the People. I am the sworn servant of both, against you.
I will do nothing for you.”

Charles Darnay felt it hopeless to entreat him further, and his pride
was touched besides. As they walked on in silence, he could not but see
how used the people were to the spectacle of prisoners passing along the
streets. The very children scarcely noticed him. A few passers turned
their heads, and a few shook their fingers at him as an aristocrat;
otherwise, that a man in good clothes should be going to prison, was no
more remarkable than that a labourer in working clothes should be
going to work. In one narrow, dark, and dirty street through which they
passed, an excited orator, mounted on a stool, was addressing an excited
audience on the crimes against the people, of the king and the royal
family. The few words that he caught from this man's lips, first made
it known to Charles Darnay that the king was in prison, and that the
foreign ambassadors had one and all left Paris. On the road (except at
Beauvais) he had heard absolutely nothing. The escort and the universal
watchfulness had completely isolated him.

That he had fallen among far greater dangers than those which had
developed themselves when he left England, he of course knew now. That
perils had thickened about him fast, and might thicken faster and faster
yet, he of course knew now. He could not but admit to himself that he
might not have made this journey, if he could have foreseen the events
of a few days. And yet his misgivings were not so dark as, imagined by
the light of this later time, they would appear. Troubled as the future
was, it was the unknown future, and in its obscurity there was ignorant
hope. The horrible massacre, days and nights long, which, within a few
rounds of the clock, was to set a great mark of blood upon the blessed
garnering time of harvest, was as far out of his knowledge as if it had
been a hundred thousand years away. The “sharp female newly-born, and
called La Guillotine,” was hardly known to him, or to the generality
of people, by name. The frightful deeds that were to be soon done, were
probably unimagined at that time in the brains of the doers. How could
they have a place in the shadowy conceptions of a gentle mind?

Of unjust treatment in detention and hardship, and in cruel separation
from his wife and child, he foreshadowed the likelihood, or the
certainty; but, beyond this, he dreaded nothing distinctly. With this on
his mind, which was enough to carry into a dreary prison courtyard, he
arrived at the prison of La Force.

A man with a bloated face opened the strong wicket, to whom Defarge
presented “The Emigrant Evremonde.”

“What the Devil! How many more of them!” exclaimed the man with the
bloated face.

Defarge took his receipt without noticing the exclamation, and withdrew,
with his two fellow-patriots.

“What the Devil, I say again!” exclaimed the gaoler, left with his wife.
“How many more!”

The gaoler's wife, being provided with no answer to the question, merely
replied, “One must have patience, my dear!” Three turnkeys who entered
responsive to a bell she rang, echoed the sentiment, and one added, “For
the love of Liberty;” which sounded in that place like an inappropriate
conclusion.

The prison of La Force was a gloomy prison, dark and filthy, and with a
horrible smell of foul sleep in it. Extraordinary how soon the noisome
flavour of imprisoned sleep, becomes manifest in all such places that
are ill cared for!

“In secret, too,” grumbled the gaoler, looking at the written paper. “As
if I was not already full to bursting!”

He stuck the paper on a file, in an ill-humour, and Charles Darnay
awaited his further pleasure for half an hour: sometimes, pacing to and
fro in the strong arched room: sometimes, resting on a stone seat: in
either case detained to be imprinted on the memory of the chief and his
subordinates.

“Come!” said the chief, at length taking up his keys, “come with me,
emigrant.”

Through the dismal prison twilight, his new charge accompanied him by
corridor and staircase, many doors clanging and locking behind them,
until they came into a large, low, vaulted chamber, crowded with
prisoners of both sexes. The women were seated at a long table, reading
and writing, knitting, sewing, and embroidering; the men were for the
most part standing behind their chairs, or lingering up and down the
room.

In the instinctive association of prisoners with shameful crime and
disgrace, the new-comer recoiled from this company. But the crowning
unreality of his long unreal ride, was, their all at once rising to
receive him, with every refinement of manner known to the time, and with
all the engaging graces and courtesies of life.

So strangely clouded were these refinements by the prison manners and
gloom, so spectral did they become in the inappropriate squalor and
misery through which they were seen, that Charles Darnay seemed to stand
in a company of the dead. Ghosts all! The ghost of beauty, the ghost
of stateliness, the ghost of elegance, the ghost of pride, the ghost of
frivolity, the ghost of wit, the ghost of youth, the ghost of age, all
waiting their dismissal from the desolate shore, all turning on him eyes
that were changed by the death they had died in coming there.

It struck him motionless. The gaoler standing at his side, and the other
gaolers moving about, who would have been well enough as to appearance
in the ordinary exercise of their functions, looked so extravagantly
coarse contrasted with sorrowing mothers and blooming daughters who were
there--with the apparitions of the coquette, the young beauty, and the
mature woman delicately bred--that the inversion of all experience and
likelihood which the scene of shadows presented, was heightened to its
utmost. Surely, ghosts all. Surely, the long unreal ride some progress
of disease that had brought him to these gloomy shades!

“In the name of the assembled companions in misfortune,” said a
gentleman of courtly appearance and address, coming forward, “I have the
honour of giving you welcome to La Force, and of condoling with you
on the calamity that has brought you among us. May it soon terminate
happily! It would be an impertinence elsewhere, but it is not so here,
to ask your name and condition?”

Charles Darnay roused himself, and gave the required information, in
words as suitable as he could find.

“But I hope,” said the gentleman, following the chief gaoler with his
eyes, who moved across the room, “that you are not in secret?”

“I do not understand the meaning of the term, but I have heard them say
so.”

“Ah, what a pity! We so much regret it! But take courage; several
members of our society have been in secret, at first, and it has lasted
but a short time.” Then he added, raising his voice, “I grieve to inform
the society--in secret.”

There was a murmur of commiseration as Charles Darnay crossed the room
to a grated door where the gaoler awaited him, and many voices--among
which, the soft and compassionate voices of women were conspicuous--gave
him good wishes and encouragement. He turned at the grated door, to
render the thanks of his heart; it closed under the gaoler's hand; and
the apparitions vanished from his sight forever.

The wicket opened on a stone staircase, leading upward. When they had
ascended forty steps (the prisoner of half an hour already counted
them), the gaoler opened a low black door, and they passed into a
solitary cell. It struck cold and damp, but was not dark.

“Yours,” said the gaoler.

“Why am I confined alone?”

“How do I know!”

“I can buy pen, ink, and paper?”

“Such are not my orders. You will be visited, and can ask then. At
present, you may buy your food, and nothing more.”

There were in the cell, a chair, a table, and a straw mattress. As
the gaoler made a general inspection of these objects, and of the four
walls, before going out, a wandering fancy wandered through the mind of
the prisoner leaning against the wall opposite to him, that this gaoler
was so unwholesomely bloated, both in face and person, as to look like
a man who had been drowned and filled with water. When the gaoler was
gone, he thought in the same wandering way, “Now am I left, as if I were
dead.” Stopping then, to look down at the mattress, he turned from it
with a sick feeling, and thought, “And here in these crawling creatures
is the first condition of the body after death.”

“Five paces by four and a half, five paces by four and a half, five
paces by four and a half.” The prisoner walked to and fro in his cell,
counting its measurement, and the roar of the city arose like muffled
drums with a wild swell of voices added to them. “He made shoes, he made
shoes, he made shoes.” The prisoner counted the measurement again, and
paced faster, to draw his mind with him from that latter repetition.
“The ghosts that vanished when the wicket closed. There was one among
them, the appearance of a lady dressed in black, who was leaning in the
embrasure of a window, and she had a light shining upon her golden
hair, and she looked like * * * * Let us ride on again, for God's sake,
through the illuminated villages with the people all awake! * * * * He
made shoes, he made shoes, he made shoes. * * * * Five paces by four and
a half.” With such scraps tossing and rolling upward from the depths of
his mind, the prisoner walked faster and faster, obstinately counting
and counting; and the roar of the city changed to this extent--that it
still rolled in like muffled drums, but with the wail of voices that he
knew, in the swell that rose above them.




II. The Grindstone


Tellson's Bank, established in the Saint Germain Quarter of Paris, was
in a wing of a large house, approached by a courtyard and shut off from
the street by a high wall and a strong gate. The house belonged to
a great nobleman who had lived in it until he made a flight from the
troubles, in his own cook's dress, and got across the borders. A
mere beast of the chase flying from hunters, he was still in his
metempsychosis no other than the same Monseigneur, the preparation
of whose chocolate for whose lips had once occupied three strong men
besides the cook in question.

Monseigneur gone, and the three strong men absolving themselves from the
sin of having drawn his high wages, by being more than ready and
willing to cut his throat on the altar of the dawning Republic one and
indivisible of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, Monseigneur's
house had been first sequestrated, and then confiscated. For, all
things moved so fast, and decree followed decree with that fierce
precipitation, that now upon the third night of the autumn month
of September, patriot emissaries of the law were in possession of
Monseigneur's house, and had marked it with the tri-colour, and were
drinking brandy in its state apartments.

A place of business in London like Tellson's place of business in Paris,
would soon have driven the House out of its mind and into the Gazette.
For, what would staid British responsibility and respectability have
said to orange-trees in boxes in a Bank courtyard, and even to a Cupid
over the counter? Yet such things were. Tellson's had whitewashed the
Cupid, but he was still to be seen on the ceiling, in the coolest
linen, aiming (as he very often does) at money from morning to
night. Bankruptcy must inevitably have come of this young Pagan, in
Lombard-street, London, and also of a curtained alcove in the rear of
the immortal boy, and also of a looking-glass let into the wall, and
also of clerks not at all old, who danced in public on the slightest
provocation. Yet, a French Tellson's could get on with these things
exceedingly well, and, as long as the times held together, no man had
taken fright at them, and drawn out his money.

What money would be drawn out of Tellson's henceforth, and what would
lie there, lost and forgotten; what plate and jewels would tarnish in
Tellson's hiding-places, while the depositors rusted in prisons,
and when they should have violently perished; how many accounts with
Tellson's never to be balanced in this world, must be carried over into
the next; no man could have said, that night, any more than Mr. Jarvis
Lorry could, though he thought heavily of these questions. He sat by
a newly-lighted wood fire (the blighted and unfruitful year was
prematurely cold), and on his honest and courageous face there was a
deeper shade than the pendent lamp could throw, or any object in the
room distortedly reflect--a shade of horror.

He occupied rooms in the Bank, in his fidelity to the House of which
he had grown to be a part, like strong root-ivy. It chanced that they
derived a kind of security from the patriotic occupation of the main
building, but the true-hearted old gentleman never calculated about
that. All such circumstances were indifferent to him, so that he did
his duty. On the opposite side of the courtyard, under a colonnade,
was extensive standing--for carriages--where, indeed, some carriages
of Monseigneur yet stood. Against two of the pillars were fastened two
great flaring flambeaux, and in the light of these, standing out in the
open air, was a large grindstone: a roughly mounted thing which appeared
to have hurriedly been brought there from some neighbouring smithy,
or other workshop. Rising and looking out of window at these harmless
objects, Mr. Lorry shivered, and retired to his seat by the fire. He had
opened, not only the glass window, but the lattice blind outside it, and
he had closed both again, and he shivered through his frame.

From the streets beyond the high wall and the strong gate, there came
the usual night hum of the city, with now and then an indescribable ring
in it, weird and unearthly, as if some unwonted sounds of a terrible
nature were going up to Heaven.

“Thank God,” said Mr. Lorry, clasping his hands, “that no one near and
dear to me is in this dreadful town to-night. May He have mercy on all
who are in danger!”

Soon afterwards, the bell at the great gate sounded, and he thought,
“They have come back!” and sat listening. But, there was no loud
irruption into the courtyard, as he had expected, and he heard the gate
clash again, and all was quiet.

The nervousness and dread that were upon him inspired that vague
uneasiness respecting the Bank, which a great change would naturally
awaken, with such feelings roused. It was well guarded, and he got up to
go among the trusty people who were watching it, when his door suddenly
opened, and two figures rushed in, at sight of which he fell back in
amazement.

Lucie and her father! Lucie with her arms stretched out to him, and with
that old look of earnestness so concentrated and intensified, that it
seemed as though it had been stamped upon her face expressly to give
force and power to it in this one passage of her life.

“What is this?” cried Mr. Lorry, breathless and confused. “What is the
matter? Lucie! Manette! What has happened? What has brought you here?
What is it?”

With the look fixed upon him, in her paleness and wildness, she panted
out in his arms, imploringly, “O my dear friend! My husband!”

“Your husband, Lucie?”

“Charles.”

“What of Charles?”

“Here.

“Here, in Paris?”

“Has been here some days--three or four--I don't know how many--I can't
collect my thoughts. An errand of generosity brought him here unknown to
us; he was stopped at the barrier, and sent to prison.”

The old man uttered an irrepressible cry. Almost at the same moment, the
bell of the great gate rang again, and a loud noise of feet and voices
came pouring into the courtyard.

“What is that noise?” said the Doctor, turning towards the window.

“Don't look!” cried Mr. Lorry. “Don't look out! Manette, for your life,
don't touch the blind!”

The Doctor turned, with his hand upon the fastening of the window, and
said, with a cool, bold smile:

“My dear friend, I have a charmed life in this city. I have been
a Bastille prisoner. There is no patriot in Paris--in Paris? In
France--who, knowing me to have been a prisoner in the Bastille, would
touch me, except to overwhelm me with embraces, or carry me in triumph.
My old pain has given me a power that has brought us through the
barrier, and gained us news of Charles there, and brought us here. I
knew it would be so; I knew I could help Charles out of all danger; I
told Lucie so.--What is that noise?” His hand was again upon the window.

“Don't look!” cried Mr. Lorry, absolutely desperate. “No, Lucie, my
dear, nor you!” He got his arm round her, and held her. “Don't be so
terrified, my love. I solemnly swear to you that I know of no harm
having happened to Charles; that I had no suspicion even of his being in
this fatal place. What prison is he in?”

“La Force!”

“La Force! Lucie, my child, if ever you were brave and serviceable in
your life--and you were always both--you will compose yourself now, to
do exactly as I bid you; for more depends upon it than you can think, or
I can say. There is no help for you in any action on your part to-night;
you cannot possibly stir out. I say this, because what I must bid you
to do for Charles's sake, is the hardest thing to do of all. You must
instantly be obedient, still, and quiet. You must let me put you in a
room at the back here. You must leave your father and me alone for
two minutes, and as there are Life and Death in the world you must not
delay.”

“I will be submissive to you. I see in your face that you know I can do
nothing else than this. I know you are true.”

The old man kissed her, and hurried her into his room, and turned the
key; then, came hurrying back to the Doctor, and opened the window and
partly opened the blind, and put his hand upon the Doctor's arm, and
looked out with him into the courtyard.

Looked out upon a throng of men and women: not enough in number, or near
enough, to fill the courtyard: not more than forty or fifty in all. The
people in possession of the house had let them in at the gate, and they
had rushed in to work at the grindstone; it had evidently been set up
there for their purpose, as in a convenient and retired spot.

But, such awful workers, and such awful work!

The grindstone had a double handle, and, turning at it madly were two
men, whose faces, as their long hair flapped back when the whirlings of
the grindstone brought their faces up, were more horrible and cruel than
the visages of the wildest savages in their most barbarous disguise.
False eyebrows and false moustaches were stuck upon them, and their
hideous countenances were all bloody and sweaty, and all awry with
howling, and all staring and glaring with beastly excitement and want of
sleep. As these ruffians turned and turned, their matted locks now flung
forward over their eyes, now flung backward over their necks, some women
held wine to their mouths that they might drink; and what with dropping
blood, and what with dropping wine, and what with the stream of sparks
struck out of the stone, all their wicked atmosphere seemed gore and
fire. The eye could not detect one creature in the group free from
the smear of blood. Shouldering one another to get next at the
sharpening-stone, were men stripped to the waist, with the stain all
over their limbs and bodies; men in all sorts of rags, with the stain
upon those rags; men devilishly set off with spoils of women's lace
and silk and ribbon, with the stain dyeing those trifles through
and through. Hatchets, knives, bayonets, swords, all brought to be
sharpened, were all red with it. Some of the hacked swords were tied to
the wrists of those who carried them, with strips of linen and fragments
of dress: ligatures various in kind, but all deep of the one colour. And
as the frantic wielders of these weapons snatched them from the stream
of sparks and tore away into the streets, the same red hue was red in
their frenzied eyes;--eyes which any unbrutalised beholder would have
given twenty years of life, to petrify with a well-directed gun.

All this was seen in a moment, as the vision of a drowning man, or of
any human creature at any very great pass, could see a world if it
were there. They drew back from the window, and the Doctor looked for
explanation in his friend's ashy face.

“They are,” Mr. Lorry whispered the words, glancing fearfully round at
the locked room, “murdering the prisoners. If you are sure of what you
say; if you really have the power you think you have--as I believe you
have--make yourself known to these devils, and get taken to La Force. It
may be too late, I don't know, but let it not be a minute later!”

Doctor Manette pressed his hand, hastened bareheaded out of the room,
and was in the courtyard when Mr. Lorry regained the blind.

His streaming white hair, his remarkable face, and the impetuous
confidence of his manner, as he put the weapons aside like water,
carried him in an instant to the heart of the concourse at the stone.
For a few moments there was a pause, and a hurry, and a murmur, and
the unintelligible sound of his voice; and then Mr. Lorry saw him,
surrounded by all, and in the midst of a line of twenty men long, all
linked shoulder to shoulder, and hand to shoulder, hurried out with
cries of--“Live the Bastille prisoner! Help for the Bastille prisoner's
kindred in La Force! Room for the Bastille prisoner in front there! Save
the prisoner Evremonde at La Force!” and a thousand answering shouts.

He closed the lattice again with a fluttering heart, closed the window
and the curtain, hastened to Lucie, and told her that her father was
assisted by the people, and gone in search of her husband. He found
her child and Miss Pross with her; but, it never occurred to him to be
surprised by their appearance until a long time afterwards, when he sat
watching them in such quiet as the night knew.

Lucie had, by that time, fallen into a stupor on the floor at his feet,
clinging to his hand. Miss Pross had laid the child down on his own
bed, and her head had gradually fallen on the pillow beside her pretty
charge. O the long, long night, with the moans of the poor wife! And O
the long, long night, with no return of her father and no tidings!

Twice more in the darkness the bell at the great gate sounded, and the
irruption was repeated, and the grindstone whirled and spluttered.
“What is it?” cried Lucie, affrighted. “Hush! The soldiers' swords are
sharpened there,” said Mr. Lorry. “The place is national property now,
and used as a kind of armoury, my love.”

Twice more in all; but, the last spell of work was feeble and fitful.
Soon afterwards the day began to dawn, and he softly detached himself
from the clasping hand, and cautiously looked out again. A man, so
besmeared that he might have been a sorely wounded soldier creeping back
to consciousness on a field of slain, was rising from the pavement by
the side of the grindstone, and looking about him with a vacant air.
Shortly, this worn-out murderer descried in the imperfect light one of
the carriages of Monseigneur, and, staggering to that gorgeous vehicle,
climbed in at the door, and shut himself up to take his rest on its
dainty cushions.

The great grindstone, Earth, had turned when Mr. Lorry looked out again,
and the sun was red on the courtyard. But, the lesser grindstone stood
alone there in the calm morning air, with a red upon it that the sun had
never given, and would never take away.




III. The Shadow


One of the first considerations which arose in the business mind of Mr.
Lorry when business hours came round, was this:--that he had no right to
imperil Tellson's by sheltering the wife of an emigrant prisoner under
the Bank roof. His own possessions, safety, life, he would have hazarded
for Lucie and her child, without a moment's demur; but the great trust
he held was not his own, and as to that business charge he was a strict
man of business.

At first, his mind reverted to Defarge, and he thought of finding out
the wine-shop again and taking counsel with its master in reference to
the safest dwelling-place in the distracted state of the city. But, the
same consideration that suggested him, repudiated him; he lived in the
most violent Quarter, and doubtless was influential there, and deep in
its dangerous workings.

Noon coming, and the Doctor not returning, and every minute's delay
tending to compromise Tellson's, Mr. Lorry advised with Lucie. She said
that her father had spoken of hiring a lodging for a short term, in that
Quarter, near the Banking-house. As there was no business objection to
this, and as he foresaw that even if it were all well with Charles, and
he were to be released, he could not hope to leave the city, Mr. Lorry
went out in quest of such a lodging, and found a suitable one, high up
in a removed by-street where the closed blinds in all the other windows
of a high melancholy square of buildings marked deserted homes.

To this lodging he at once removed Lucie and her child, and Miss Pross:
giving them what comfort he could, and much more than he had himself.
He left Jerry with them, as a figure to fill a doorway that would bear
considerable knocking on the head, and returned to his own occupations.
A disturbed and doleful mind he brought to bear upon them, and slowly
and heavily the day lagged on with him.

It wore itself out, and wore him out with it, until the Bank closed. He
was again alone in his room of the previous night, considering what to
do next, when he heard a foot upon the stair. In a few moments, a
man stood in his presence, who, with a keenly observant look at him,
addressed him by his name.

“Your servant,” said Mr. Lorry. “Do you know me?”

He was a strongly made man with dark curling hair, from forty-five
to fifty years of age. For answer he repeated, without any change of
emphasis, the words:

“Do you know me?”

“I have seen you somewhere.”

“Perhaps at my wine-shop?”

Much interested and agitated, Mr. Lorry said: “You come from Doctor
Manette?”

“Yes. I come from Doctor Manette.”

“And what says he? What does he send me?”

Defarge gave into his anxious hand, an open scrap of paper. It bore the
words in the Doctor's writing:

    “Charles is safe, but I cannot safely leave this place yet.
     I have obtained the favour that the bearer has a short note
     from Charles to his wife.  Let the bearer see his wife.”

It was dated from La Force, within an hour.

“Will you accompany me,” said Mr. Lorry, joyfully relieved after reading
this note aloud, “to where his wife resides?”

“Yes,” returned Defarge.

Scarcely noticing as yet, in what a curiously reserved and mechanical
way Defarge spoke, Mr. Lorry put on his hat and they went down into the
courtyard. There, they found two women; one, knitting.

“Madame Defarge, surely!” said Mr. Lorry, who had left her in exactly
the same attitude some seventeen years ago.

“It is she,” observed her husband.

“Does Madame go with us?” inquired Mr. Lorry, seeing that she moved as
they moved.

“Yes. That she may be able to recognise the faces and know the persons.
It is for their safety.”

Beginning to be struck by Defarge's manner, Mr. Lorry looked dubiously
at him, and led the way. Both the women followed; the second woman being
The Vengeance.

They passed through the intervening streets as quickly as they might,
ascended the staircase of the new domicile, were admitted by Jerry,
and found Lucie weeping, alone. She was thrown into a transport by the
tidings Mr. Lorry gave her of her husband, and clasped the hand that
delivered his note--little thinking what it had been doing near him in
the night, and might, but for a chance, have done to him.

     “DEAREST,--Take courage.  I am well, and your father has
      influence around me.  You cannot answer this.
      Kiss our child for me.”

That was all the writing. It was so much, however, to her who received
it, that she turned from Defarge to his wife, and kissed one of the
hands that knitted. It was a passionate, loving, thankful, womanly
action, but the hand made no response--dropped cold and heavy, and took
to its knitting again.

There was something in its touch that gave Lucie a check. She stopped in
the act of putting the note in her bosom, and, with her hands yet at her
neck, looked terrified at Madame Defarge. Madame Defarge met the lifted
eyebrows and forehead with a cold, impassive stare.

“My dear,” said Mr. Lorry, striking in to explain; “there are frequent
risings in the streets; and, although it is not likely they will ever
trouble you, Madame Defarge wishes to see those whom she has the power
to protect at such times, to the end that she may know them--that she
may identify them. I believe,” said Mr. Lorry, rather halting in his
reassuring words, as the stony manner of all the three impressed itself
upon him more and more, “I state the case, Citizen Defarge?”

Defarge looked gloomily at his wife, and gave no other answer than a
gruff sound of acquiescence.

“You had better, Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, doing all he could to
propitiate, by tone and manner, “have the dear child here, and our
good Pross. Our good Pross, Defarge, is an English lady, and knows no
French.”

The lady in question, whose rooted conviction that she was more than a
match for any foreigner, was not to be shaken by distress and, danger,
appeared with folded arms, and observed in English to The Vengeance,
whom her eyes first encountered, “Well, I am sure, Boldface! I hope
_you_ are pretty well!” She also bestowed a British cough on Madame
Defarge; but, neither of the two took much heed of her.

“Is that his child?” said Madame Defarge, stopping in her work for the
first time, and pointing her knitting-needle at little Lucie as if it
were the finger of Fate.

“Yes, madame,” answered Mr. Lorry; “this is our poor prisoner's darling
daughter, and only child.”

The shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed to fall so
threatening and dark on the child, that her mother instinctively
kneeled on the ground beside her, and held her to her breast. The
shadow attendant on Madame Defarge and her party seemed then to fall,
threatening and dark, on both the mother and the child.

“It is enough, my husband,” said Madame Defarge. “I have seen them. We
may go.”

But, the suppressed manner had enough of menace in it--not visible and
presented, but indistinct and withheld--to alarm Lucie into saying, as
she laid her appealing hand on Madame Defarge's dress:

“You will be good to my poor husband. You will do him no harm. You will
help me to see him if you can?”

“Your husband is not my business here,” returned Madame Defarge, looking
down at her with perfect composure. “It is the daughter of your father
who is my business here.”

“For my sake, then, be merciful to my husband. For my child's sake! She
will put her hands together and pray you to be merciful. We are more
afraid of you than of these others.”

Madame Defarge received it as a compliment, and looked at her husband.
Defarge, who had been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking at her,
collected his face into a sterner expression.

“What is it that your husband says in that little letter?” asked Madame
Defarge, with a lowering smile. “Influence; he says something touching
influence?”

“That my father,” said Lucie, hurriedly taking the paper from her
breast, but with her alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it, “has
much influence around him.”

“Surely it will release him!” said Madame Defarge. “Let it do so.”

“As a wife and mother,” cried Lucie, most earnestly, “I implore you to
have pity on me and not to exercise any power that you possess, against
my innocent husband, but to use it in his behalf. O sister-woman, think
of me. As a wife and mother!”

Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at the suppliant, and said,
turning to her friend The Vengeance:

“The wives and mothers we have been used to see, since we were as little
as this child, and much less, have not been greatly considered? We have
known _their_ husbands and fathers laid in prison and kept from them,
often enough? All our lives, we have seen our sister-women suffer, in
themselves and in their children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst,
sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all kinds?”

“We have seen nothing else,” returned The Vengeance.

“We have borne this a long time,” said Madame Defarge, turning her eyes
again upon Lucie. “Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble of one wife
and mother would be much to us now?”

She resumed her knitting and went out. The Vengeance followed. Defarge
went last, and closed the door.

“Courage, my dear Lucie,” said Mr. Lorry, as he raised her. “Courage,
courage! So far all goes well with us--much, much better than it has of
late gone with many poor souls. Cheer up, and have a thankful heart.”

“I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful woman seems to throw a
shadow on me and on all my hopes.”

“Tut, tut!” said Mr. Lorry; “what is this despondency in the brave
little breast? A shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie.”

But the shadow of the manner of these Defarges was dark upon himself,
for all that, and in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.




IV. Calm in Storm


Doctor Manette did not return until the morning of the fourth day of his
absence. So much of what had happened in that dreadful time as could be
kept from the knowledge of Lucie was so well concealed from her, that
not until long afterwards, when France and she were far apart, did she
know that eleven hundred defenceless prisoners of both sexes and all
ages had been killed by the populace; that four days and nights had been
darkened by this deed of horror; and that the air around her had been
tainted by the slain. She only knew that there had been an attack upon
the prisons, that all political prisoners had been in danger, and that
some had been dragged out by the crowd and murdered.

To Mr. Lorry, the Doctor communicated under an injunction of secrecy on
which he had no need to dwell, that the crowd had taken him through a
scene of carnage to the prison of La Force. That, in the prison he had
found a self-appointed Tribunal sitting, before which the prisoners were
brought singly, and by which they were rapidly ordered to be put forth
to be massacred, or to be released, or (in a few cases) to be sent back
to their cells. That, presented by his conductors to this Tribunal, he
had announced himself by name and profession as having been for eighteen
years a secret and unaccused prisoner in the Bastille; that, one of the
body so sitting in judgment had risen and identified him, and that this
man was Defarge.

That, hereupon he had ascertained, through the registers on the table,
that his son-in-law was among the living prisoners, and had pleaded hard
to the Tribunal--of whom some members were asleep and some awake, some
dirty with murder and some clean, some sober and some not--for his life
and liberty. That, in the first frantic greetings lavished on himself as
a notable sufferer under the overthrown system, it had been accorded
to him to have Charles Darnay brought before the lawless Court, and
examined. That, he seemed on the point of being at once released, when
the tide in his favour met with some unexplained check (not intelligible
to the Doctor), which led to a few words of secret conference. That,
the man sitting as President had then informed Doctor Manette that
the prisoner must remain in custody, but should, for his sake, be held
inviolate in safe custody. That, immediately, on a signal, the prisoner
was removed to the interior of the prison again; but, that he, the
Doctor, had then so strongly pleaded for permission to remain and
assure himself that his son-in-law was, through no malice or mischance,
delivered to the concourse whose murderous yells outside the gate had
often drowned the proceedings, that he had obtained the permission, and
had remained in that Hall of Blood until the danger was over.

The sights he had seen there, with brief snatches of food and sleep by
intervals, shall remain untold. The mad joy over the prisoners who were
saved, had astounded him scarcely less than the mad ferocity against
those who were cut to pieces. One prisoner there was, he said, who had
been discharged into the street free, but at whom a mistaken savage had
thrust a pike as he passed out. Being besought to go to him and dress
the wound, the Doctor had passed out at the same gate, and had found him
in the arms of a company of Samaritans, who were seated on the bodies
of their victims. With an inconsistency as monstrous as anything in this
awful nightmare, they had helped the healer, and tended the wounded man
with the gentlest solicitude--had made a litter for him and escorted him
carefully from the spot--had then caught up their weapons and plunged
anew into a butchery so dreadful, that the Doctor had covered his eyes
with his hands, and swooned away in the midst of it.

As Mr. Lorry received these confidences, and as he watched the face of
his friend now sixty-two years of age, a misgiving arose within him that
such dread experiences would revive the old danger.

But, he had never seen his friend in his present aspect: he had never
at all known him in his present character. For the first time the Doctor
felt, now, that his suffering was strength and power. For the first time
he felt that in that sharp fire, he had slowly forged the iron which
could break the prison door of his daughter's husband, and deliver him.
“It all tended to a good end, my friend; it was not mere waste and ruin.
As my beloved child was helpful in restoring me to myself, I will be
helpful now in restoring the dearest part of herself to her; by the aid
of Heaven I will do it!” Thus, Doctor Manette. And when Jarvis Lorry saw
the kindled eyes, the resolute face, the calm strong look and bearing
of the man whose life always seemed to him to have been stopped, like a
clock, for so many years, and then set going again with an energy which
had lain dormant during the cessation of its usefulness, he believed.

Greater things than the Doctor had at that time to contend with, would
have yielded before his persevering purpose. While he kept himself
in his place, as a physician, whose business was with all degrees
of mankind, bond and free, rich and poor, bad and good, he used his
personal influence so wisely, that he was soon the inspecting physician
of three prisons, and among them of La Force. He could now assure Lucie
that her husband was no longer confined alone, but was mixed with the
general body of prisoners; he saw her husband weekly, and brought sweet
messages to her, straight from his lips; sometimes her husband himself
sent a letter to her (though never by the Doctor's hand), but she was
not permitted to write to him: for, among the many wild suspicions of
plots in the prisons, the wildest of all pointed at emigrants who were
known to have made friends or permanent connections abroad.

This new life of the Doctor's was an anxious life, no doubt; still, the
sagacious Mr. Lorry saw that there was a new sustaining pride in it.
Nothing unbecoming tinged the pride; it was a natural and worthy one;
but he observed it as a curiosity. The Doctor knew, that up to that
time, his imprisonment had been associated in the minds of his daughter
and his friend, with his personal affliction, deprivation, and weakness.
Now that this was changed, and he knew himself to be invested through
that old trial with forces to which they both looked for Charles's
ultimate safety and deliverance, he became so far exalted by the change,
that he took the lead and direction, and required them as the weak, to
trust to him as the strong. The preceding relative positions of himself
and Lucie were reversed, yet only as the liveliest gratitude and
affection could reverse them, for he could have had no pride but in
rendering some service to her who had rendered so much to him. “All
curious to see,” thought Mr. Lorry, in his amiably shrewd way, “but all
natural and right; so, take the lead, my dear friend, and keep it; it
couldn't be in better hands.”

But, though the Doctor tried hard, and never ceased trying, to get
Charles Darnay set at liberty, or at least to get him brought to trial,
the public current of the time set too strong and fast for him. The new
era began; the king was tried, doomed, and beheaded; the Republic of
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death, declared for victory or death
against the world in arms; the black flag waved night and day from the
great towers of Notre Dame; three hundred thousand men, summoned to rise
against the tyrants of the earth, rose from all the varying soils
of France, as if the dragon's teeth had been sown broadcast, and
had yielded fruit equally on hill and plain, on rock, in gravel, and
alluvial mud, under the bright sky of the South and under the clouds of
the North, in fell and forest, in the vineyards and the olive-grounds
and among the cropped grass and the stubble of the corn, along the
fruitful banks of the broad rivers, and in the sand of the sea-shore.
What private solicitude could rear itself against the deluge of the Year
One of Liberty--the deluge rising from below, not falling from above,
and with the windows of Heaven shut, not opened!

There was no pause, no pity, no peace, no interval of relenting rest, no
measurement of time. Though days and nights circled as regularly as when
time was young, and the evening and morning were the first day, other
count of time there was none. Hold of it was lost in the raging fever
of a nation, as it is in the fever of one patient. Now, breaking the
unnatural silence of a whole city, the executioner showed the people the
head of the king--and now, it seemed almost in the same breath, the
head of his fair wife which had had eight weary months of imprisoned
widowhood and misery, to turn it grey.

And yet, observing the strange law of contradiction which obtains in
all such cases, the time was long, while it flamed by so fast. A
revolutionary tribunal in the capital, and forty or fifty thousand
revolutionary committees all over the land; a law of the Suspected,
which struck away all security for liberty or life, and delivered over
any good and innocent person to any bad and guilty one; prisons gorged
with people who had committed no offence, and could obtain no hearing;
these things became the established order and nature of appointed
things, and seemed to be ancient usage before they were many weeks old.
Above all, one hideous figure grew as familiar as if it had been before
the general gaze from the foundations of the world--the figure of the
sharp female called La Guillotine.

It was the popular theme for jests; it was the best cure for headache,
it infallibly prevented the hair from turning grey, it imparted a
peculiar delicacy to the complexion, it was the National Razor which
shaved close: who kissed La Guillotine, looked through the little window
and sneezed into the sack. It was the sign of the regeneration of the
human race. It superseded the Cross. Models of it were worn on breasts
from which the Cross was discarded, and it was bowed down to and
believed in where the Cross was denied.

It sheared off heads so many, that it, and the ground it most polluted,
were a rotten red. It was taken to pieces, like a toy-puzzle for a young
Devil, and was put together again when the occasion wanted it. It hushed
the eloquent, struck down the powerful, abolished the beautiful and
good. Twenty-two friends of high public mark, twenty-one living and one
dead, it had lopped the heads off, in one morning, in as many minutes.
The name of the strong man of Old Scripture had descended to the chief
functionary who worked it; but, so armed, he was stronger than his
namesake, and blinder, and tore away the gates of God's own Temple every
day.

Among these terrors, and the brood belonging to them, the Doctor walked
with a steady head: confident in his power, cautiously persistent in his
end, never doubting that he would save Lucie's husband at last. Yet the
current of the time swept by, so strong and deep, and carried the time
away so fiercely, that Charles had lain in prison one year and three
months when the Doctor was thus steady and confident. So much more
wicked and distracted had the Revolution grown in that December month,
that the rivers of the South were encumbered with the bodies of the
violently drowned by night, and prisoners were shot in lines and squares
under the southern wintry sun. Still, the Doctor walked among the
terrors with a steady head. No man better known than he, in Paris at
that day; no man in a stranger situation. Silent, humane, indispensable
in hospital and prison, using his art equally among assassins and
victims, he was a man apart. In the exercise of his skill, the
appearance and the story of the Bastille Captive removed him from all
other men. He was not suspected or brought in question, any more than if
he had indeed been recalled to life some eighteen years before, or were
a Spirit moving among mortals.




V. The Wood-Sawyer


One year and three months. During all that time Lucie was never
sure, from hour to hour, but that the Guillotine would strike off her
husband's head next day. Every day, through the stony streets, the
tumbrils now jolted heavily, filled with Condemned. Lovely girls; bright
women, brown-haired, black-haired, and grey; youths; stalwart men and
old; gentle born and peasant born; all red wine for La Guillotine, all
daily brought into light from the dark cellars of the loathsome prisons,
and carried to her through the streets to slake her devouring thirst.
Liberty, equality, fraternity, or death;--the last, much the easiest to
bestow, O Guillotine!

If the suddenness of her calamity, and the whirling wheels of the time,
had stunned the Doctor's daughter into awaiting the result in idle
despair, it would but have been with her as it was with many. But, from
the hour when she had taken the white head to her fresh young bosom in
the garret of Saint Antoine, she had been true to her duties. She was
truest to them in the season of trial, as all the quietly loyal and good
will always be.

As soon as they were established in their new residence, and her father
had entered on the routine of his avocations, she arranged the little
household as exactly as if her husband had been there. Everything had
its appointed place and its appointed time. Little Lucie she taught,
as regularly, as if they had all been united in their English home. The
slight devices with which she cheated herself into the show of a belief
that they would soon be reunited--the little preparations for his speedy
return, the setting aside of his chair and his books--these, and the
solemn prayer at night for one dear prisoner especially, among the many
unhappy souls in prison and the shadow of death--were almost the only
outspoken reliefs of her heavy mind.

She did not greatly alter in appearance. The plain dark dresses, akin to
mourning dresses, which she and her child wore, were as neat and as well
attended to as the brighter clothes of happy days. She lost her colour,
and the old and intent expression was a constant, not an occasional,
thing; otherwise, she remained very pretty and comely. Sometimes, at
night on kissing her father, she would burst into the grief she had
repressed all day, and would say that her sole reliance, under Heaven,
was on him. He always resolutely answered: “Nothing can happen to him
without my knowledge, and I know that I can save him, Lucie.”

They had not made the round of their changed life many weeks, when her
father said to her, on coming home one evening:

“My dear, there is an upper window in the prison, to which Charles can
sometimes gain access at three in the afternoon. When he can get to
it--which depends on many uncertainties and incidents--he might see you
in the street, he thinks, if you stood in a certain place that I can
show you. But you will not be able to see him, my poor child, and even
if you could, it would be unsafe for you to make a sign of recognition.”

“O show me the place, my father, and I will go there every day.”

From that time, in all weathers, she waited there two hours. As the
clock struck two, she was there, and at four she turned resignedly away.
When it was not too wet or inclement for her child to be with her, they
went together; at other times she was alone; but, she never missed a
single day.

It was the dark and dirty corner of a small winding street. The hovel
of a cutter of wood into lengths for burning, was the only house at that
end; all else was wall. On the third day of her being there, he noticed
her.

“Good day, citizeness.”

“Good day, citizen.”

This mode of address was now prescribed by decree. It had been
established voluntarily some time ago, among the more thorough patriots;
but, was now law for everybody.

“Walking here again, citizeness?”

“You see me, citizen!”

The wood-sawyer, who was a little man with a redundancy of gesture (he
had once been a mender of roads), cast a glance at the prison, pointed
at the prison, and putting his ten fingers before his face to represent
bars, peeped through them jocosely.

“But it's not my business,” said he. And went on sawing his wood.

Next day he was looking out for her, and accosted her the moment she
appeared.

“What? Walking here again, citizeness?”

“Yes, citizen.”

“Ah! A child too! Your mother, is it not, my little citizeness?”

“Do I say yes, mamma?” whispered little Lucie, drawing close to her.

“Yes, dearest.”

“Yes, citizen.”

“Ah! But it's not my business. My work is my business. See my saw! I
call it my Little Guillotine. La, la, la; La, la, la! And off his head
comes!”

The billet fell as he spoke, and he threw it into a basket.

“I call myself the Samson of the firewood guillotine. See here again!
Loo, loo, loo; Loo, loo, loo! And off _her_ head comes! Now, a child.
Tickle, tickle; Pickle, pickle! And off _its_ head comes. All the
family!”

Lucie shuddered as he threw two more billets into his basket, but it was
impossible to be there while the wood-sawyer was at work, and not be in
his sight. Thenceforth, to secure his good will, she always spoke to him
first, and often gave him drink-money, which he readily received.

He was an inquisitive fellow, and sometimes when she had quite forgotten
him in gazing at the prison roof and grates, and in lifting her heart
up to her husband, she would come to herself to find him looking at her,
with his knee on his bench and his saw stopped in its work. “But it's
not my business!” he would generally say at those times, and would
briskly fall to his sawing again.

In all weathers, in the snow and frost of winter, in the bitter winds of
spring, in the hot sunshine of summer, in the rains of autumn, and again
in the snow and frost of winter, Lucie passed two hours of every day at
this place; and every day on leaving it, she kissed the prison wall.
Her husband saw her (so she learned from her father) it might be once in
five or six times: it might be twice or thrice running: it might be, not
for a week or a fortnight together. It was enough that he could and did
see her when the chances served, and on that possibility she would have
waited out the day, seven days a week.

These occupations brought her round to the December month, wherein her
father walked among the terrors with a steady head. On a lightly-snowing
afternoon she arrived at the usual corner. It was a day of some wild
rejoicing, and a festival. She had seen the houses, as she came along,
decorated with little pikes, and with little red caps stuck upon them;
also, with tricoloured ribbons; also, with the standard inscription
(tricoloured letters were the favourite), Republic One and Indivisible.
Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death!

The miserable shop of the wood-sawyer was so small, that its whole
surface furnished very indifferent space for this legend. He had got
somebody to scrawl it up for him, however, who had squeezed Death in
with most inappropriate difficulty. On his house-top, he displayed pike
and cap, as a good citizen must, and in a window he had stationed his
saw inscribed as his “Little Sainte Guillotine”--for the great sharp
female was by that time popularly canonised. His shop was shut and he
was not there, which was a relief to Lucie, and left her quite alone.

But, he was not far off, for presently she heard a troubled movement
and a shouting coming along, which filled her with fear. A moment
afterwards, and a throng of people came pouring round the corner by the
prison wall, in the midst of whom was the wood-sawyer hand in hand with
The Vengeance. There could not be fewer than five hundred people, and
they were dancing like five thousand demons. There was no other music
than their own singing. They danced to the popular Revolution song,
keeping a ferocious time that was like a gnashing of teeth in unison.
Men and women danced together, women danced together, men danced
together, as hazard had brought them together. At first, they were a
mere storm of coarse red caps and coarse woollen rags; but, as they
filled the place, and stopped to dance about Lucie, some ghastly
apparition of a dance-figure gone raving mad arose among them. They
advanced, retreated, struck at one another's hands, clutched at one
another's heads, spun round alone, caught one another and spun round
in pairs, until many of them dropped. While those were down, the rest
linked hand in hand, and all spun round together: then the ring broke,
and in separate rings of two and four they turned and turned until they
all stopped at once, began again, struck, clutched, and tore, and then
reversed the spin, and all spun round another way. Suddenly they stopped
again, paused, struck out the time afresh, formed into lines the width
of the public way, and, with their heads low down and their hands high
up, swooped screaming off. No fight could have been half so terrible
as this dance. It was so emphatically a fallen sport--a something, once
innocent, delivered over to all devilry--a healthy pastime changed into
a means of angering the blood, bewildering the senses, and steeling the
heart. Such grace as was visible in it, made it the uglier, showing how
warped and perverted all things good by nature were become. The maidenly
bosom bared to this, the pretty almost-child's head thus distracted, the
delicate foot mincing in this slough of blood and dirt, were types of
the disjointed time.

This was the Carmagnole. As it passed, leaving Lucie frightened and
bewildered in the doorway of the wood-sawyer's house, the feathery snow
fell as quietly and lay as white and soft, as if it had never been.

“O my father!” for he stood before her when she lifted up the eyes she
had momentarily darkened with her hand; “such a cruel, bad sight.”

“I know, my dear, I know. I have seen it many times. Don't be
frightened! Not one of them would harm you.”

“I am not frightened for myself, my father. But when I think of my
husband, and the mercies of these people--”

“We will set him above their mercies very soon. I left him climbing to
the window, and I came to tell you. There is no one here to see. You may
kiss your hand towards that highest shelving roof.”

“I do so, father, and I send him my Soul with it!”

“You cannot see him, my poor dear?”

“No, father,” said Lucie, yearning and weeping as she kissed her hand,
“no.”

A footstep in the snow. Madame Defarge. “I salute you, citizeness,”
 from the Doctor. “I salute you, citizen.” This in passing. Nothing more.
Madame Defarge gone, like a shadow over the white road.

“Give me your arm, my love. Pass from here with an air of cheerfulness
and courage, for his sake. That was well done;” they had left the spot;
“it shall not be in vain. Charles is summoned for to-morrow.”

“For to-morrow!”

“There is no time to lose. I am well prepared, but there are precautions
to be taken, that could not be taken until he was actually summoned
before the Tribunal. He has not received the notice yet, but I know
that he will presently be summoned for to-morrow, and removed to the
Conciergerie; I have timely information. You are not afraid?”

She could scarcely answer, “I trust in you.”

“Do so, implicitly. Your suspense is nearly ended, my darling; he shall
be restored to you within a few hours; I have encompassed him with every
protection. I must see Lorry.”

He stopped. There was a heavy lumbering of wheels within hearing. They
both knew too well what it meant. One. Two. Three. Three tumbrils faring
away with their dread loads over the hushing snow.

“I must see Lorry,” the Doctor repeated, turning her another way.

The staunch old gentleman was still in his trust; had never left it. He
and his books were in frequent requisition as to property confiscated
and made national. What he could save for the owners, he saved. No
better man living to hold fast by what Tellson's had in keeping, and to
hold his peace.

A murky red and yellow sky, and a rising mist from the Seine, denoted
the approach of darkness. It was almost dark when they arrived at the
Bank. The stately residence of Monseigneur was altogether blighted and
deserted. Above a heap of dust and ashes in the court, ran the letters:
National Property. Republic One and Indivisible. Liberty, Equality,
Fraternity, or Death!

Who could that be with Mr. Lorry--the owner of the riding-coat upon the
chair--who must not be seen? From whom newly arrived, did he come out,
agitated and surprised, to take his favourite in his arms? To whom did
he appear to repeat her faltering words, when, raising his voice and
turning his head towards the door of the room from which he had issued,
he said: “Removed to the Conciergerie, and summoned for to-morrow?”




VI. Triumph


The dread tribunal of five Judges, Public Prosecutor, and determined
Jury, sat every day. Their lists went forth every evening, and were
read out by the gaolers of the various prisons to their prisoners. The
standard gaoler-joke was, “Come out and listen to the Evening Paper, you
inside there!”

“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay!”

So at last began the Evening Paper at La Force.

When a name was called, its owner stepped apart into a spot reserved
for those who were announced as being thus fatally recorded. Charles
Evremonde, called Darnay, had reason to know the usage; he had seen
hundreds pass away so.

His bloated gaoler, who wore spectacles to read with, glanced over them
to assure himself that he had taken his place, and went through the
list, making a similar short pause at each name. There were twenty-three
names, but only twenty were responded to; for one of the prisoners so
summoned had died in gaol and been forgotten, and two had already been
guillotined and forgotten. The list was read, in the vaulted chamber
where Darnay had seen the associated prisoners on the night of his
arrival. Every one of those had perished in the massacre; every human
creature he had since cared for and parted with, had died on the
scaffold.

There were hurried words of farewell and kindness, but the parting was
soon over. It was the incident of every day, and the society of La Force
were engaged in the preparation of some games of forfeits and a little
concert, for that evening. They crowded to the grates and shed tears
there; but, twenty places in the projected entertainments had to be
refilled, and the time was, at best, short to the lock-up hour, when the
common rooms and corridors would be delivered over to the great dogs
who kept watch there through the night. The prisoners were far from
insensible or unfeeling; their ways arose out of the condition of the
time. Similarly, though with a subtle difference, a species of fervour
or intoxication, known, without doubt, to have led some persons to
brave the guillotine unnecessarily, and to die by it, was not mere
boastfulness, but a wild infection of the wildly shaken public mind. In
seasons of pestilence, some of us will have a secret attraction to the
disease--a terrible passing inclination to die of it. And all of us have
like wonders hidden in our breasts, only needing circumstances to evoke
them.

The passage to the Conciergerie was short and dark; the night in its
vermin-haunted cells was long and cold. Next day, fifteen prisoners were
put to the bar before Charles Darnay's name was called. All the fifteen
were condemned, and the trials of the whole occupied an hour and a half.

“Charles Evremonde, called Darnay,” was at length arraigned.

His judges sat upon the Bench in feathered hats; but the rough red cap
and tricoloured cockade was the head-dress otherwise prevailing. Looking
at the Jury and the turbulent audience, he might have thought that the
usual order of things was reversed, and that the felons were trying the
honest men. The lowest, cruelest, and worst populace of a city, never
without its quantity of low, cruel, and bad, were the directing
spirits of the scene: noisily commenting, applauding, disapproving,
anticipating, and precipitating the result, without a check. Of the men,
the greater part were armed in various ways; of the women, some wore
knives, some daggers, some ate and drank as they looked on, many
knitted. Among these last, was one, with a spare piece of knitting under
her arm as she worked. She was in a front row, by the side of a man whom
he had never seen since his arrival at the Barrier, but whom he directly
remembered as Defarge. He noticed that she once or twice whispered in
his ear, and that she seemed to be his wife; but, what he most noticed
in the two figures was, that although they were posted as close to
himself as they could be, they never looked towards him. They seemed to
be waiting for something with a dogged determination, and they looked at
the Jury, but at nothing else. Under the President sat Doctor Manette,
in his usual quiet dress. As well as the prisoner could see, he and Mr.
Lorry were the only men there, unconnected with the Tribunal, who
wore their usual clothes, and had not assumed the coarse garb of the
Carmagnole.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, was accused by the public prosecutor
as an emigrant, whose life was forfeit to the Republic, under the decree
which banished all emigrants on pain of Death. It was nothing that the
decree bore date since his return to France. There he was, and there was
the decree; he had been taken in France, and his head was demanded.

“Take off his head!” cried the audience. “An enemy to the Republic!”

The President rang his bell to silence those cries, and asked the
prisoner whether it was not true that he had lived many years in
England?

Undoubtedly it was.

Was he not an emigrant then? What did he call himself?

Not an emigrant, he hoped, within the sense and spirit of the law.

Why not? the President desired to know.

Because he had voluntarily relinquished a title that was distasteful
to him, and a station that was distasteful to him, and had left
his country--he submitted before the word emigrant in the present
acceptation by the Tribunal was in use--to live by his own industry in
England, rather than on the industry of the overladen people of France.

What proof had he of this?

He handed in the names of two witnesses; Theophile Gabelle, and
Alexandre Manette.

But he had married in England? the President reminded him.

True, but not an English woman.

A citizeness of France?

Yes. By birth.

Her name and family?

“Lucie Manette, only daughter of Doctor Manette, the good physician who
sits there.”

This answer had a happy effect upon the audience. Cries in exaltation
of the well-known good physician rent the hall. So capriciously were
the people moved, that tears immediately rolled down several ferocious
countenances which had been glaring at the prisoner a moment before, as
if with impatience to pluck him out into the streets and kill him.

On these few steps of his dangerous way, Charles Darnay had set his foot
according to Doctor Manette's reiterated instructions. The same cautious
counsel directed every step that lay before him, and had prepared every
inch of his road.

The President asked, why had he returned to France when he did, and not
sooner?

He had not returned sooner, he replied, simply because he had no means
of living in France, save those he had resigned; whereas, in England,
he lived by giving instruction in the French language and literature.
He had returned when he did, on the pressing and written entreaty of
a French citizen, who represented that his life was endangered by his
absence. He had come back, to save a citizen's life, and to bear his
testimony, at whatever personal hazard, to the truth. Was that criminal
in the eyes of the Republic?

The populace cried enthusiastically, “No!” and the President rang his
bell to quiet them. Which it did not, for they continued to cry “No!”
 until they left off, of their own will.

The President required the name of that citizen. The accused explained
that the citizen was his first witness. He also referred with confidence
to the citizen's letter, which had been taken from him at the Barrier,
but which he did not doubt would be found among the papers then before
the President.

The Doctor had taken care that it should be there--had assured him that
it would be there--and at this stage of the proceedings it was produced
and read. Citizen Gabelle was called to confirm it, and did so. Citizen
Gabelle hinted, with infinite delicacy and politeness, that in the
pressure of business imposed on the Tribunal by the multitude of
enemies of the Republic with which it had to deal, he had been slightly
overlooked in his prison of the Abbaye--in fact, had rather passed out
of the Tribunal's patriotic remembrance--until three days ago; when he
had been summoned before it, and had been set at liberty on the Jury's
declaring themselves satisfied that the accusation against him was
answered, as to himself, by the surrender of the citizen Evremonde,
called Darnay.

Doctor Manette was next questioned. His high personal popularity,
and the clearness of his answers, made a great impression; but, as he
proceeded, as he showed that the Accused was his first friend on his
release from his long imprisonment; that, the accused had remained in
England, always faithful and devoted to his daughter and himself in
their exile; that, so far from being in favour with the Aristocrat
government there, he had actually been tried for his life by it, as
the foe of England and friend of the United States--as he brought these
circumstances into view, with the greatest discretion and with the
straightforward force of truth and earnestness, the Jury and the
populace became one. At last, when he appealed by name to Monsieur
Lorry, an English gentleman then and there present, who, like himself,
had been a witness on that English trial and could corroborate his
account of it, the Jury declared that they had heard enough, and that
they were ready with their votes if the President were content to
receive them.

At every vote (the Jurymen voted aloud and individually), the populace
set up a shout of applause. All the voices were in the prisoner's
favour, and the President declared him free.

Then, began one of those extraordinary scenes with which the populace
sometimes gratified their fickleness, or their better impulses towards
generosity and mercy, or which they regarded as some set-off against
their swollen account of cruel rage. No man can decide now to which of
these motives such extraordinary scenes were referable; it is probable,
to a blending of all the three, with the second predominating. No sooner
was the acquittal pronounced, than tears were shed as freely as blood
at another time, and such fraternal embraces were bestowed upon the
prisoner by as many of both sexes as could rush at him, that after
his long and unwholesome confinement he was in danger of fainting from
exhaustion; none the less because he knew very well, that the very same
people, carried by another current, would have rushed at him with
the very same intensity, to rend him to pieces and strew him over the
streets.

His removal, to make way for other accused persons who were to be tried,
rescued him from these caresses for the moment. Five were to be tried
together, next, as enemies of the Republic, forasmuch as they had not
assisted it by word or deed. So quick was the Tribunal to compensate
itself and the nation for a chance lost, that these five came down to
him before he left the place, condemned to die within twenty-four
hours. The first of them told him so, with the customary prison sign
of Death--a raised finger--and they all added in words, “Long live the
Republic!”

The five had had, it is true, no audience to lengthen their proceedings,
for when he and Doctor Manette emerged from the gate, there was a great
crowd about it, in which there seemed to be every face he had seen in
Court--except two, for which he looked in vain. On his coming out, the
concourse made at him anew, weeping, embracing, and shouting, all by
turns and all together, until the very tide of the river on the bank of
which the mad scene was acted, seemed to run mad, like the people on the
shore.

They put him into a great chair they had among them, and which they had
taken either out of the Court itself, or one of its rooms or passages.
Over the chair they had thrown a red flag, and to the back of it they
had bound a pike with a red cap on its top. In this car of triumph, not
even the Doctor's entreaties could prevent his being carried to his home
on men's shoulders, with a confused sea of red caps heaving about him,
and casting up to sight from the stormy deep such wrecks of faces, that
he more than once misdoubted his mind being in confusion, and that he
was in the tumbril on his way to the Guillotine.

In wild dreamlike procession, embracing whom they met and pointing
him out, they carried him on. Reddening the snowy streets with the
prevailing Republican colour, in winding and tramping through them, as
they had reddened them below the snow with a deeper dye, they carried
him thus into the courtyard of the building where he lived. Her father
had gone on before, to prepare her, and when her husband stood upon his
feet, she dropped insensible in his arms.

As he held her to his heart and turned her beautiful head between his
face and the brawling crowd, so that his tears and her lips might come
together unseen, a few of the people fell to dancing. Instantly, all the
rest fell to dancing, and the courtyard overflowed with the Carmagnole.
Then, they elevated into the vacant chair a young woman from the
crowd to be carried as the Goddess of Liberty, and then swelling and
overflowing out into the adjacent streets, and along the river's bank,
and over the bridge, the Carmagnole absorbed them every one and whirled
them away.

After grasping the Doctor's hand, as he stood victorious and proud
before him; after grasping the hand of Mr. Lorry, who came panting in
breathless from his struggle against the waterspout of the Carmagnole;
after kissing little Lucie, who was lifted up to clasp her arms round
his neck; and after embracing the ever zealous and faithful Pross who
lifted her; he took his wife in his arms, and carried her up to their
rooms.

“Lucie! My own! I am safe.”

“O dearest Charles, let me thank God for this on my knees as I have
prayed to Him.”

They all reverently bowed their heads and hearts. When she was again in
his arms, he said to her:

“And now speak to your father, dearest. No other man in all this France
could have done what he has done for me.”

She laid her head upon her father's breast, as she had laid his poor
head on her own breast, long, long ago. He was happy in the return he
had made her, he was recompensed for his suffering, he was proud of his
strength. “You must not be weak, my darling,” he remonstrated; “don't
tremble so. I have saved him.”




VII. A Knock at the Door


“I have saved him.” It was not another of the dreams in which he had
often come back; he was really here. And yet his wife trembled, and a
vague but heavy fear was upon her.

All the air round was so thick and dark, the people were so passionately
revengeful and fitful, the innocent were so constantly put to death on
vague suspicion and black malice, it was so impossible to forget that
many as blameless as her husband and as dear to others as he was to
her, every day shared the fate from which he had been clutched, that her
heart could not be as lightened of its load as she felt it ought to be.
The shadows of the wintry afternoon were beginning to fall, and even now
the dreadful carts were rolling through the streets. Her mind pursued
them, looking for him among the Condemned; and then she clung closer to
his real presence and trembled more.

Her father, cheering her, showed a compassionate superiority to this
woman's weakness, which was wonderful to see. No garret, no shoemaking,
no One Hundred and Five, North Tower, now! He had accomplished the task
he had set himself, his promise was redeemed, he had saved Charles. Let
them all lean upon him.

Their housekeeping was of a very frugal kind: not only because that was
the safest way of life, involving the least offence to the people, but
because they were not rich, and Charles, throughout his imprisonment,
had had to pay heavily for his bad food, and for his guard, and towards
the living of the poorer prisoners. Partly on this account, and
partly to avoid a domestic spy, they kept no servant; the citizen and
citizeness who acted as porters at the courtyard gate, rendered them
occasional service; and Jerry (almost wholly transferred to them by
Mr. Lorry) had become their daily retainer, and had his bed there every
night.

It was an ordinance of the Republic One and Indivisible of Liberty,
Equality, Fraternity, or Death, that on the door or doorpost of every
house, the name of every inmate must be legibly inscribed in letters
of a certain size, at a certain convenient height from the ground. Mr.
Jerry Cruncher's name, therefore, duly embellished the doorpost down
below; and, as the afternoon shadows deepened, the owner of that name
himself appeared, from overlooking a painter whom Doctor Manette had
employed to add to the list the name of Charles Evremonde, called
Darnay.

In the universal fear and distrust that darkened the time, all the usual
harmless ways of life were changed. In the Doctor's little household, as
in very many others, the articles of daily consumption that were wanted
were purchased every evening, in small quantities and at various small
shops. To avoid attracting notice, and to give as little occasion as
possible for talk and envy, was the general desire.

For some months past, Miss Pross and Mr. Cruncher had discharged the
office of purveyors; the former carrying the money; the latter, the
basket. Every afternoon at about the time when the public lamps were
lighted, they fared forth on this duty, and made and brought home
such purchases as were needful. Although Miss Pross, through her long
association with a French family, might have known as much of their
language as of her own, if she had had a mind, she had no mind in that
direction; consequently she knew no more of that “nonsense” (as she was
pleased to call it) than Mr. Cruncher did. So her manner of marketing
was to plump a noun-substantive at the head of a shopkeeper without any
introduction in the nature of an article, and, if it happened not to be
the name of the thing she wanted, to look round for that thing, lay hold
of it, and hold on by it until the bargain was concluded. She always
made a bargain for it, by holding up, as a statement of its just price,
one finger less than the merchant held up, whatever his number might be.

“Now, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose eyes were red with felicity;
“if you are ready, I am.”

Jerry hoarsely professed himself at Miss Pross's service. He had worn
all his rust off long ago, but nothing would file his spiky head down.

“There's all manner of things wanted,” said Miss Pross, “and we shall
have a precious time of it. We want wine, among the rest. Nice toasts
these Redheads will be drinking, wherever we buy it.”

“It will be much the same to your knowledge, miss, I should think,”
 retorted Jerry, “whether they drink your health or the Old Un's.”

“Who's he?” said Miss Pross.

Mr. Cruncher, with some diffidence, explained himself as meaning “Old
Nick's.”

“Ha!” said Miss Pross, “it doesn't need an interpreter to explain the
meaning of these creatures. They have but one, and it's Midnight Murder,
and Mischief.”

“Hush, dear! Pray, pray, be cautious!” cried Lucie.

“Yes, yes, yes, I'll be cautious,” said Miss Pross; “but I may say
among ourselves, that I do hope there will be no oniony and tobaccoey
smotherings in the form of embracings all round, going on in the
streets. Now, Ladybird, never you stir from that fire till I come back!
Take care of the dear husband you have recovered, and don't move your
pretty head from his shoulder as you have it now, till you see me again!
May I ask a question, Doctor Manette, before I go?”

“I think you may take that liberty,” the Doctor answered, smiling.

“For gracious sake, don't talk about Liberty; we have quite enough of
that,” said Miss Pross.

“Hush, dear! Again?” Lucie remonstrated.

“Well, my sweet,” said Miss Pross, nodding her head emphatically, “the
short and the long of it is, that I am a subject of His Most Gracious
Majesty King George the Third;” Miss Pross curtseyed at the name; “and
as such, my maxim is, Confound their politics, Frustrate their knavish
tricks, On him our hopes we fix, God save the King!”

Mr. Cruncher, in an access of loyalty, growlingly repeated the words
after Miss Pross, like somebody at church.

“I am glad you have so much of the Englishman in you, though I wish you
had never taken that cold in your voice,” said Miss Pross, approvingly.
“But the question, Doctor Manette. Is there”--it was the good creature's
way to affect to make light of anything that was a great anxiety
with them all, and to come at it in this chance manner--“is there any
prospect yet, of our getting out of this place?”

“I fear not yet. It would be dangerous for Charles yet.”

“Heigh-ho-hum!” said Miss Pross, cheerfully repressing a sigh as she
glanced at her darling's golden hair in the light of the fire, “then we
must have patience and wait: that's all. We must hold up our heads and
fight low, as my brother Solomon used to say. Now, Mr. Cruncher!--Don't
you move, Ladybird!”

They went out, leaving Lucie, and her husband, her father, and the
child, by a bright fire. Mr. Lorry was expected back presently from the
Banking House. Miss Pross had lighted the lamp, but had put it aside in
a corner, that they might enjoy the fire-light undisturbed. Little Lucie
sat by her grandfather with her hands clasped through his arm: and he,
in a tone not rising much above a whisper, began to tell her a story of
a great and powerful Fairy who had opened a prison-wall and let out
a captive who had once done the Fairy a service. All was subdued and
quiet, and Lucie was more at ease than she had been.

“What is that?” she cried, all at once.

“My dear!” said her father, stopping in his story, and laying his hand
on hers, “command yourself. What a disordered state you are in! The
least thing--nothing--startles you! _You_, your father's daughter!”

“I thought, my father,” said Lucie, excusing herself, with a pale face
and in a faltering voice, “that I heard strange feet upon the stairs.”

“My love, the staircase is as still as Death.”

As he said the word, a blow was struck upon the door.

“Oh father, father. What can this be! Hide Charles. Save him!”

“My child,” said the Doctor, rising, and laying his hand upon her
shoulder, “I _have_ saved him. What weakness is this, my dear! Let me go
to the door.”

He took the lamp in his hand, crossed the two intervening outer rooms,
and opened it. A rude clattering of feet over the floor, and four rough
men in red caps, armed with sabres and pistols, entered the room.

“The Citizen Evremonde, called Darnay,” said the first.

“Who seeks him?” answered Darnay.

“I seek him. We seek him. I know you, Evremonde; I saw you before the
Tribunal to-day. You are again the prisoner of the Republic.”

The four surrounded him, where he stood with his wife and child clinging
to him.

“Tell me how and why am I again a prisoner?”

“It is enough that you return straight to the Conciergerie, and will
know to-morrow. You are summoned for to-morrow.”

Doctor Manette, whom this visitation had so turned into stone, that he
stood with the lamp in his hand, as if he were a statue made to hold it,
moved after these words were spoken, put the lamp down, and confronting
the speaker, and taking him, not ungently, by the loose front of his red
woollen shirt, said:

“You know him, you have said. Do you know me?”

“Yes, I know you, Citizen Doctor.”

“We all know you, Citizen Doctor,” said the other three.

He looked abstractedly from one to another, and said, in a lower voice,
after a pause:

“Will you answer his question to me then? How does this happen?”

“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, reluctantly, “he has been denounced to
the Section of Saint Antoine. This citizen,” pointing out the second who
had entered, “is from Saint Antoine.”

The citizen here indicated nodded his head, and added:

“He is accused by Saint Antoine.”

“Of what?” asked the Doctor.

“Citizen Doctor,” said the first, with his former reluctance, “ask no
more. If the Republic demands sacrifices from you, without doubt you as
a good patriot will be happy to make them. The Republic goes before all.
The People is supreme. Evremonde, we are pressed.”

“One word,” the Doctor entreated. “Will you tell me who denounced him?”

“It is against rule,” answered the first; “but you can ask Him of Saint
Antoine here.”

The Doctor turned his eyes upon that man. Who moved uneasily on his
feet, rubbed his beard a little, and at length said:

“Well! Truly it is against rule. But he is denounced--and gravely--by
the Citizen and Citizeness Defarge. And by one other.”

“What other?”

“Do _you_ ask, Citizen Doctor?”

“Yes.”

“Then,” said he of Saint Antoine, with a strange look, “you will be
answered to-morrow. Now, I am dumb!”




VIII. A Hand at Cards


Happily unconscious of the new calamity at home, Miss Pross threaded her
way along the narrow streets and crossed the river by the bridge of the
Pont-Neuf, reckoning in her mind the number of indispensable purchases
she had to make. Mr. Cruncher, with the basket, walked at her side. They
both looked to the right and to the left into most of the shops they
passed, had a wary eye for all gregarious assemblages of people, and
turned out of their road to avoid any very excited group of talkers. It
was a raw evening, and the misty river, blurred to the eye with blazing
lights and to the ear with harsh noises, showed where the barges were
stationed in which the smiths worked, making guns for the Army of the
Republic. Woe to the man who played tricks with _that_ Army, or got
undeserved promotion in it! Better for him that his beard had never
grown, for the National Razor shaved him close.

Having purchased a few small articles of grocery, and a measure of oil
for the lamp, Miss Pross bethought herself of the wine they wanted.
After peeping into several wine-shops, she stopped at the sign of the
Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, not far from the National Palace,
once (and twice) the Tuileries, where the aspect of things rather
took her fancy. It had a quieter look than any other place of the same
description they had passed, and, though red with patriotic caps, was
not so red as the rest. Sounding Mr. Cruncher, and finding him of her
opinion, Miss Pross resorted to the Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity,
attended by her cavalier.

Slightly observant of the smoky lights; of the people, pipe in mouth,
playing with limp cards and yellow dominoes; of the one bare-breasted,
bare-armed, soot-begrimed workman reading a journal aloud, and of
the others listening to him; of the weapons worn, or laid aside to be
resumed; of the two or three customers fallen forward asleep, who in the
popular high-shouldered shaggy black spencer looked, in that attitude,
like slumbering bears or dogs; the two outlandish customers approached
the counter, and showed what they wanted.

As their wine was measuring out, a man parted from another man in a
corner, and rose to depart. In going, he had to face Miss Pross. No
sooner did he face her, than Miss Pross uttered a scream, and clapped
her hands.

In a moment, the whole company were on their feet. That somebody was
assassinated by somebody vindicating a difference of opinion was the
likeliest occurrence. Everybody looked to see somebody fall, but only
saw a man and a woman standing staring at each other; the man with all
the outward aspect of a Frenchman and a thorough Republican; the woman,
evidently English.

What was said in this disappointing anti-climax, by the disciples of the
Good Republican Brutus of Antiquity, except that it was something very
voluble and loud, would have been as so much Hebrew or Chaldean to Miss
Pross and her protector, though they had been all ears. But, they had no
ears for anything in their surprise. For, it must be recorded, that
not only was Miss Pross lost in amazement and agitation, but,
Mr. Cruncher--though it seemed on his own separate and individual
account--was in a state of the greatest wonder.

“What is the matter?” said the man who had caused Miss Pross to scream;
speaking in a vexed, abrupt voice (though in a low tone), and in
English.

“Oh, Solomon, dear Solomon!” cried Miss Pross, clapping her hands again.
“After not setting eyes upon you or hearing of you for so long a time,
do I find you here!”

“Don't call me Solomon. Do you want to be the death of me?” asked the
man, in a furtive, frightened way.

“Brother, brother!” cried Miss Pross, bursting into tears. “Have I ever
been so hard with you that you ask me such a cruel question?”

“Then hold your meddlesome tongue,” said Solomon, “and come out, if you
want to speak to me. Pay for your wine, and come out. Who's this man?”

Miss Pross, shaking her loving and dejected head at her by no means
affectionate brother, said through her tears, “Mr. Cruncher.”

“Let him come out too,” said Solomon. “Does he think me a ghost?”

Apparently, Mr. Cruncher did, to judge from his looks. He said not a
word, however, and Miss Pross, exploring the depths of her reticule
through her tears with great difficulty paid for her wine. As she did
so, Solomon turned to the followers of the Good Republican Brutus
of Antiquity, and offered a few words of explanation in the French
language, which caused them all to relapse into their former places and
pursuits.

“Now,” said Solomon, stopping at the dark street corner, “what do you
want?”

“How dreadfully unkind in a brother nothing has ever turned my love away
from!” cried Miss Pross, “to give me such a greeting, and show me no
affection.”

“There. Confound it! There,” said Solomon, making a dab at Miss Pross's
lips with his own. “Now are you content?”

Miss Pross only shook her head and wept in silence.

“If you expect me to be surprised,” said her brother Solomon, “I am not
surprised; I knew you were here; I know of most people who are here. If
you really don't want to endanger my existence--which I half believe you
do--go your ways as soon as possible, and let me go mine. I am busy. I
am an official.”

“My English brother Solomon,” mourned Miss Pross, casting up her
tear-fraught eyes, “that had the makings in him of one of the best and
greatest of men in his native country, an official among foreigners, and
such foreigners! I would almost sooner have seen the dear boy lying in
his--”

“I said so!” cried her brother, interrupting. “I knew it. You want to be
the death of me. I shall be rendered Suspected, by my own sister. Just
as I am getting on!”

“The gracious and merciful Heavens forbid!” cried Miss Pross. “Far
rather would I never see you again, dear Solomon, though I have ever
loved you truly, and ever shall. Say but one affectionate word to me,
and tell me there is nothing angry or estranged between us, and I will
detain you no longer.”

Good Miss Pross! As if the estrangement between them had come of any
culpability of hers. As if Mr. Lorry had not known it for a fact, years
ago, in the quiet corner in Soho, that this precious brother had spent
her money and left her!

He was saying the affectionate word, however, with a far more grudging
condescension and patronage than he could have shown if their relative
merits and positions had been reversed (which is invariably the case,
all the world over), when Mr. Cruncher, touching him on the shoulder,
hoarsely and unexpectedly interposed with the following singular
question:

“I say! Might I ask the favour? As to whether your name is John Solomon,
or Solomon John?”

The official turned towards him with sudden distrust. He had not
previously uttered a word.

“Come!” said Mr. Cruncher. “Speak out, you know.” (Which, by the way,
was more than he could do himself.) “John Solomon, or Solomon John? She
calls you Solomon, and she must know, being your sister. And _I_ know
you're John, you know. Which of the two goes first? And regarding that
name of Pross, likewise. That warn't your name over the water.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I don't know all I mean, for I can't call to mind what your name
was, over the water.”

“No?”

“No. But I'll swear it was a name of two syllables.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes. T'other one's was one syllable. I know you. You was a spy--witness
at the Bailey. What, in the name of the Father of Lies, own father to
yourself, was you called at that time?”

“Barsad,” said another voice, striking in.

“That's the name for a thousand pound!” cried Jerry.

The speaker who struck in, was Sydney Carton. He had his hands behind
him under the skirts of his riding-coat, and he stood at Mr. Cruncher's
elbow as negligently as he might have stood at the Old Bailey itself.

“Don't be alarmed, my dear Miss Pross. I arrived at Mr. Lorry's, to his
surprise, yesterday evening; we agreed that I would not present myself
elsewhere until all was well, or unless I could be useful; I present
myself here, to beg a little talk with your brother. I wish you had a
better employed brother than Mr. Barsad. I wish for your sake Mr. Barsad
was not a Sheep of the Prisons.”

Sheep was a cant word of the time for a spy, under the gaolers. The spy,
who was pale, turned paler, and asked him how he dared--

“I'll tell you,” said Sydney. “I lighted on you, Mr. Barsad, coming out
of the prison of the Conciergerie while I was contemplating the walls,
an hour or more ago. You have a face to be remembered, and I remember
faces well. Made curious by seeing you in that connection, and having
a reason, to which you are no stranger, for associating you with
the misfortunes of a friend now very unfortunate, I walked in your
direction. I walked into the wine-shop here, close after you, and
sat near you. I had no difficulty in deducing from your unreserved
conversation, and the rumour openly going about among your admirers, the
nature of your calling. And gradually, what I had done at random, seemed
to shape itself into a purpose, Mr. Barsad.”

“What purpose?” the spy asked.

“It would be troublesome, and might be dangerous, to explain in the
street. Could you favour me, in confidence, with some minutes of your
company--at the office of Tellson's Bank, for instance?”

“Under a threat?”

“Oh! Did I say that?”

“Then, why should I go there?”

“Really, Mr. Barsad, I can't say, if you can't.”

“Do you mean that you won't say, sir?” the spy irresolutely asked.

“You apprehend me very clearly, Mr. Barsad. I won't.”

Carton's negligent recklessness of manner came powerfully in aid of his
quickness and skill, in such a business as he had in his secret mind,
and with such a man as he had to do with. His practised eye saw it, and
made the most of it.

“Now, I told you so,” said the spy, casting a reproachful look at his
sister; “if any trouble comes of this, it's your doing.”

“Come, come, Mr. Barsad!” exclaimed Sydney. “Don't be ungrateful.
But for my great respect for your sister, I might not have led up so
pleasantly to a little proposal that I wish to make for our mutual
satisfaction. Do you go with me to the Bank?”

“I'll hear what you have got to say. Yes, I'll go with you.”

“I propose that we first conduct your sister safely to the corner of her
own street. Let me take your arm, Miss Pross. This is not a good city,
at this time, for you to be out in, unprotected; and as your escort
knows Mr. Barsad, I will invite him to Mr. Lorry's with us. Are we
ready? Come then!”

Miss Pross recalled soon afterwards, and to the end of her life
remembered, that as she pressed her hands on Sydney's arm and looked up
in his face, imploring him to do no hurt to Solomon, there was a braced
purpose in the arm and a kind of inspiration in the eyes, which not only
contradicted his light manner, but changed and raised the man. She was
too much occupied then with fears for the brother who so little deserved
her affection, and with Sydney's friendly reassurances, adequately to
heed what she observed.

They left her at the corner of the street, and Carton led the way to Mr.
Lorry's, which was within a few minutes' walk. John Barsad, or Solomon
Pross, walked at his side.

Mr. Lorry had just finished his dinner, and was sitting before a cheery
little log or two of fire--perhaps looking into their blaze for the
picture of that younger elderly gentleman from Tellson's, who had looked
into the red coals at the Royal George at Dover, now a good many years
ago. He turned his head as they entered, and showed the surprise with
which he saw a stranger.

“Miss Pross's brother, sir,” said Sydney. “Mr. Barsad.”

“Barsad?” repeated the old gentleman, “Barsad? I have an association
with the name--and with the face.”

“I told you you had a remarkable face, Mr. Barsad,” observed Carton,
coolly. “Pray sit down.”

As he took a chair himself, he supplied the link that Mr. Lorry wanted,
by saying to him with a frown, “Witness at that trial.” Mr. Lorry
immediately remembered, and regarded his new visitor with an undisguised
look of abhorrence.

“Mr. Barsad has been recognised by Miss Pross as the affectionate
brother you have heard of,” said Sydney, “and has acknowledged the
relationship. I pass to worse news. Darnay has been arrested again.”

Struck with consternation, the old gentleman exclaimed, “What do you
tell me! I left him safe and free within these two hours, and am about
to return to him!”

“Arrested for all that. When was it done, Mr. Barsad?”

“Just now, if at all.”

“Mr. Barsad is the best authority possible, sir,” said Sydney, “and I
have it from Mr. Barsad's communication to a friend and brother Sheep
over a bottle of wine, that the arrest has taken place. He left the
messengers at the gate, and saw them admitted by the porter. There is no
earthly doubt that he is retaken.”

Mr. Lorry's business eye read in the speaker's face that it was loss
of time to dwell upon the point. Confused, but sensible that something
might depend on his presence of mind, he commanded himself, and was
silently attentive.

“Now, I trust,” said Sydney to him, “that the name and influence of
Doctor Manette may stand him in as good stead to-morrow--you said he
would be before the Tribunal again to-morrow, Mr. Barsad?--”

“Yes; I believe so.”

“--In as good stead to-morrow as to-day. But it may not be so. I own
to you, I am shaken, Mr. Lorry, by Doctor Manette's not having had the
power to prevent this arrest.”

“He may not have known of it beforehand,” said Mr. Lorry.

“But that very circumstance would be alarming, when we remember how
identified he is with his son-in-law.”

“That's true,” Mr. Lorry acknowledged, with his troubled hand at his
chin, and his troubled eyes on Carton.

“In short,” said Sydney, “this is a desperate time, when desperate games
are played for desperate stakes. Let the Doctor play the winning game; I
will play the losing one. No man's life here is worth purchase. Any one
carried home by the people to-day, may be condemned tomorrow. Now, the
stake I have resolved to play for, in case of the worst, is a friend
in the Conciergerie. And the friend I purpose to myself to win, is Mr.
Barsad.”

“You need have good cards, sir,” said the spy.

“I'll run them over. I'll see what I hold,--Mr. Lorry, you know what a
brute I am; I wish you'd give me a little brandy.”

It was put before him, and he drank off a glassful--drank off another
glassful--pushed the bottle thoughtfully away.

“Mr. Barsad,” he went on, in the tone of one who really was looking
over a hand at cards: “Sheep of the prisons, emissary of Republican
committees, now turnkey, now prisoner, always spy and secret informer,
so much the more valuable here for being English that an Englishman
is less open to suspicion of subornation in those characters than a
Frenchman, represents himself to his employers under a false name.
That's a very good card. Mr. Barsad, now in the employ of the republican
French government, was formerly in the employ of the aristocratic
English government, the enemy of France and freedom. That's an excellent
card. Inference clear as day in this region of suspicion, that Mr.
Barsad, still in the pay of the aristocratic English government, is the
spy of Pitt, the treacherous foe of the Republic crouching in its bosom,
the English traitor and agent of all mischief so much spoken of and so
difficult to find. That's a card not to be beaten. Have you followed my
hand, Mr. Barsad?”

“Not to understand your play,” returned the spy, somewhat uneasily.

“I play my Ace, Denunciation of Mr. Barsad to the nearest Section
Committee. Look over your hand, Mr. Barsad, and see what you have. Don't
hurry.”

He drew the bottle near, poured out another glassful of brandy, and
drank it off. He saw that the spy was fearful of his drinking himself
into a fit state for the immediate denunciation of him. Seeing it, he
poured out and drank another glassful.

“Look over your hand carefully, Mr. Barsad. Take time.”

It was a poorer hand than he suspected. Mr. Barsad saw losing cards
in it that Sydney Carton knew nothing of. Thrown out of his honourable
employment in England, through too much unsuccessful hard swearing
there--not because he was not wanted there; our English reasons for
vaunting our superiority to secrecy and spies are of very modern
date--he knew that he had crossed the Channel, and accepted service in
France: first, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among his own countrymen
there: gradually, as a tempter and an eavesdropper among the natives. He
knew that under the overthrown government he had been a spy upon Saint
Antoine and Defarge's wine-shop; had received from the watchful police
such heads of information concerning Doctor Manette's imprisonment,
release, and history, as should serve him for an introduction to
familiar conversation with the Defarges; and tried them on Madame
Defarge, and had broken down with them signally. He always remembered
with fear and trembling, that that terrible woman had knitted when he
talked with her, and had looked ominously at him as her fingers moved.
He had since seen her, in the Section of Saint Antoine, over and over
again produce her knitted registers, and denounce people whose lives the
guillotine then surely swallowed up. He knew, as every one employed as
he was did, that he was never safe; that flight was impossible; that
he was tied fast under the shadow of the axe; and that in spite of
his utmost tergiversation and treachery in furtherance of the reigning
terror, a word might bring it down upon him. Once denounced, and on such
grave grounds as had just now been suggested to his mind, he foresaw
that the dreadful woman of whose unrelenting character he had seen many
proofs, would produce against him that fatal register, and would quash
his last chance of life. Besides that all secret men are men soon
terrified, here were surely cards enough of one black suit, to justify
the holder in growing rather livid as he turned them over.

“You scarcely seem to like your hand,” said Sydney, with the greatest
composure. “Do you play?”

“I think, sir,” said the spy, in the meanest manner, as he turned to Mr.
Lorry, “I may appeal to a gentleman of your years and benevolence, to
put it to this other gentleman, so much your junior, whether he can
under any circumstances reconcile it to his station to play that Ace
of which he has spoken. I admit that _I_ am a spy, and that it is
considered a discreditable station--though it must be filled by
somebody; but this gentleman is no spy, and why should he so demean
himself as to make himself one?”

“I play my Ace, Mr. Barsad,” said Carton, taking the answer on himself,
and looking at his watch, “without any scruple, in a very few minutes.”

“I should have hoped, gentlemen both,” said the spy, always striving to
hook Mr. Lorry into the discussion, “that your respect for my sister--”

“I could not better testify my respect for your sister than by finally
relieving her of her brother,” said Sydney Carton.

“You think not, sir?”

“I have thoroughly made up my mind about it.”

The smooth manner of the spy, curiously in dissonance with his
ostentatiously rough dress, and probably with his usual demeanour,
received such a check from the inscrutability of Carton,--who was a
mystery to wiser and honester men than he,--that it faltered here and
failed him. While he was at a loss, Carton said, resuming his former air
of contemplating cards:

“And indeed, now I think again, I have a strong impression that I
have another good card here, not yet enumerated. That friend and
fellow-Sheep, who spoke of himself as pasturing in the country prisons;
who was he?”

“French. You don't know him,” said the spy, quickly.

“French, eh?” repeated Carton, musing, and not appearing to notice him
at all, though he echoed his word. “Well; he may be.”

“Is, I assure you,” said the spy; “though it's not important.”

“Though it's not important,” repeated Carton, in the same mechanical
way--“though it's not important--No, it's not important. No. Yet I know
the face.”

“I think not. I am sure not. It can't be,” said the spy.

“It-can't-be,” muttered Sydney Carton, retrospectively, and idling his
glass (which fortunately was a small one) again. “Can't-be. Spoke good
French. Yet like a foreigner, I thought?”

“Provincial,” said the spy.

“No. Foreign!” cried Carton, striking his open hand on the table, as a
light broke clearly on his mind. “Cly! Disguised, but the same man. We
had that man before us at the Old Bailey.”

“Now, there you are hasty, sir,” said Barsad, with a smile that gave his
aquiline nose an extra inclination to one side; “there you really give
me an advantage over you. Cly (who I will unreservedly admit, at this
distance of time, was a partner of mine) has been dead several years. I
attended him in his last illness. He was buried in London, at the church
of Saint Pancras-in-the-Fields. His unpopularity with the blackguard
multitude at the moment prevented my following his remains, but I helped
to lay him in his coffin.”

Here, Mr. Lorry became aware, from where he sat, of a most remarkable
goblin shadow on the wall. Tracing it to its source, he discovered it
to be caused by a sudden extraordinary rising and stiffening of all the
risen and stiff hair on Mr. Cruncher's head.

“Let us be reasonable,” said the spy, “and let us be fair. To show you
how mistaken you are, and what an unfounded assumption yours is, I will
lay before you a certificate of Cly's burial, which I happened to have
carried in my pocket-book,” with a hurried hand he produced and opened
it, “ever since. There it is. Oh, look at it, look at it! You may take
it in your hand; it's no forgery.”

Here, Mr. Lorry perceived the reflection on the wall to elongate, and
Mr. Cruncher rose and stepped forward. His hair could not have been more
violently on end, if it had been that moment dressed by the Cow with the
crumpled horn in the house that Jack built.

Unseen by the spy, Mr. Cruncher stood at his side, and touched him on
the shoulder like a ghostly bailiff.

“That there Roger Cly, master,” said Mr. Cruncher, with a taciturn and
iron-bound visage. “So _you_ put him in his coffin?”

“I did.”

“Who took him out of it?”

Barsad leaned back in his chair, and stammered, “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” said Mr. Cruncher, “that he warn't never in it. No! Not he!
I'll have my head took off, if he was ever in it.”

The spy looked round at the two gentlemen; they both looked in
unspeakable astonishment at Jerry.

“I tell you,” said Jerry, “that you buried paving-stones and earth in
that there coffin. Don't go and tell me that you buried Cly. It was a
take in. Me and two more knows it.”

“How do you know it?”

“What's that to you? Ecod!” growled Mr. Cruncher, “it's you I have got a
old grudge again, is it, with your shameful impositions upon tradesmen!
I'd catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a guinea.”

Sydney Carton, who, with Mr. Lorry, had been lost in amazement at
this turn of the business, here requested Mr. Cruncher to moderate and
explain himself.

“At another time, sir,” he returned, evasively, “the present time is
ill-conwenient for explainin'. What I stand to, is, that he knows well
wot that there Cly was never in that there coffin. Let him say he was,
in so much as a word of one syllable, and I'll either catch hold of his
throat and choke him for half a guinea;” Mr. Cruncher dwelt upon this as
quite a liberal offer; “or I'll out and announce him.”

“Humph! I see one thing,” said Carton. “I hold another card, Mr. Barsad.
Impossible, here in raging Paris, with Suspicion filling the air, for
you to outlive denunciation, when you are in communication with another
aristocratic spy of the same antecedents as yourself, who, moreover, has
the mystery about him of having feigned death and come to life again!
A plot in the prisons, of the foreigner against the Republic. A strong
card--a certain Guillotine card! Do you play?”

“No!” returned the spy. “I throw up. I confess that we were so unpopular
with the outrageous mob, that I only got away from England at the risk
of being ducked to death, and that Cly was so ferreted up and down, that
he never would have got away at all but for that sham. Though how this
man knows it was a sham, is a wonder of wonders to me.”

“Never you trouble your head about this man,” retorted the contentious
Mr. Cruncher; “you'll have trouble enough with giving your attention to
that gentleman. And look here! Once more!”--Mr. Cruncher could not
be restrained from making rather an ostentatious parade of his
liberality--“I'd catch hold of your throat and choke you for half a
guinea.”

The Sheep of the prisons turned from him to Sydney Carton, and said,
with more decision, “It has come to a point. I go on duty soon, and
can't overstay my time. You told me you had a proposal; what is it?
Now, it is of no use asking too much of me. Ask me to do anything in my
office, putting my head in great extra danger, and I had better trust my
life to the chances of a refusal than the chances of consent. In short,
I should make that choice. You talk of desperation. We are all desperate
here. Remember! I may denounce you if I think proper, and I can swear my
way through stone walls, and so can others. Now, what do you want with
me?”

“Not very much. You are a turnkey at the Conciergerie?”

“I tell you once for all, there is no such thing as an escape possible,”
 said the spy, firmly.

“Why need you tell me what I have not asked? You are a turnkey at the
Conciergerie?”

“I am sometimes.”

“You can be when you choose?”

“I can pass in and out when I choose.”

Sydney Carton filled another glass with brandy, poured it slowly out
upon the hearth, and watched it as it dropped. It being all spent, he
said, rising:

“So far, we have spoken before these two, because it was as well that
the merits of the cards should not rest solely between you and me. Come
into the dark room here, and let us have one final word alone.”




IX. The Game Made


While Sydney Carton and the Sheep of the prisons were in the adjoining
dark room, speaking so low that not a sound was heard, Mr. Lorry looked
at Jerry in considerable doubt and mistrust. That honest tradesman's
manner of receiving the look, did not inspire confidence; he changed the
leg on which he rested, as often as if he had fifty of those limbs,
and were trying them all; he examined his finger-nails with a very
questionable closeness of attention; and whenever Mr. Lorry's eye caught
his, he was taken with that peculiar kind of short cough requiring the
hollow of a hand before it, which is seldom, if ever, known to be an
infirmity attendant on perfect openness of character.

“Jerry,” said Mr. Lorry. “Come here.”

Mr. Cruncher came forward sideways, with one of his shoulders in advance
of him.

“What have you been, besides a messenger?”

After some cogitation, accompanied with an intent look at his patron,
Mr. Cruncher conceived the luminous idea of replying, “Agicultooral
character.”

“My mind misgives me much,” said Mr. Lorry, angrily shaking a forefinger
at him, “that you have used the respectable and great house of Tellson's
as a blind, and that you have had an unlawful occupation of an infamous
description. If you have, don't expect me to befriend you when you
get back to England. If you have, don't expect me to keep your secret.
Tellson's shall not be imposed upon.”

“I hope, sir,” pleaded the abashed Mr. Cruncher, “that a gentleman like
yourself wot I've had the honour of odd jobbing till I'm grey at it,
would think twice about harming of me, even if it wos so--I don't say it
is, but even if it wos. And which it is to be took into account that if
it wos, it wouldn't, even then, be all o' one side. There'd be two sides
to it. There might be medical doctors at the present hour, a picking
up their guineas where a honest tradesman don't pick up his
fardens--fardens! no, nor yet his half fardens--half fardens! no, nor
yet his quarter--a banking away like smoke at Tellson's, and a cocking
their medical eyes at that tradesman on the sly, a going in and going
out to their own carriages--ah! equally like smoke, if not more so.
Well, that 'ud be imposing, too, on Tellson's. For you cannot sarse the
goose and not the gander. And here's Mrs. Cruncher, or leastways wos
in the Old England times, and would be to-morrow, if cause given,
a floppin' again the business to that degree as is ruinating--stark
ruinating! Whereas them medical doctors' wives don't flop--catch 'em at
it! Or, if they flop, their floppings goes in favour of more patients,
and how can you rightly have one without t'other? Then, wot with
undertakers, and wot with parish clerks, and wot with sextons, and wot
with private watchmen (all awaricious and all in it), a man wouldn't get
much by it, even if it wos so. And wot little a man did get, would never
prosper with him, Mr. Lorry. He'd never have no good of it; he'd want
all along to be out of the line, if he, could see his way out, being
once in--even if it wos so.”

“Ugh!” cried Mr. Lorry, rather relenting, nevertheless, “I am shocked at
the sight of you.”

“Now, what I would humbly offer to you, sir,” pursued Mr. Cruncher,
“even if it wos so, which I don't say it is--”

“Don't prevaricate,” said Mr. Lorry.

“No, I will _not_, sir,” returned Mr. Crunches as if nothing were
further from his thoughts or practice--“which I don't say it is--wot I
would humbly offer to you, sir, would be this. Upon that there stool, at
that there Bar, sets that there boy of mine, brought up and growed up to
be a man, wot will errand you, message you, general-light-job you, till
your heels is where your head is, if such should be your wishes. If it
wos so, which I still don't say it is (for I will not prewaricate to
you, sir), let that there boy keep his father's place, and take care of
his mother; don't blow upon that boy's father--do not do it, sir--and
let that father go into the line of the reg'lar diggin', and make amends
for what he would have undug--if it wos so--by diggin' of 'em in with
a will, and with conwictions respectin' the futur' keepin' of 'em safe.
That, Mr. Lorry,” said Mr. Cruncher, wiping his forehead with his
arm, as an announcement that he had arrived at the peroration of his
discourse, “is wot I would respectfully offer to you, sir. A man don't
see all this here a goin' on dreadful round him, in the way of Subjects
without heads, dear me, plentiful enough fur to bring the price down
to porterage and hardly that, without havin' his serious thoughts of
things. And these here would be mine, if it wos so, entreatin' of you
fur to bear in mind that wot I said just now, I up and said in the good
cause when I might have kep' it back.”

“That at least is true,” said Mr. Lorry. “Say no more now. It may be
that I shall yet stand your friend, if you deserve it, and repent in
action--not in words. I want no more words.”

Mr. Cruncher knuckled his forehead, as Sydney Carton and the spy
returned from the dark room. “Adieu, Mr. Barsad,” said the former; “our
arrangement thus made, you have nothing to fear from me.”

He sat down in a chair on the hearth, over against Mr. Lorry. When they
were alone, Mr. Lorry asked him what he had done?

“Not much. If it should go ill with the prisoner, I have ensured access
to him, once.”

Mr. Lorry's countenance fell.

“It is all I could do,” said Carton. “To propose too much, would be
to put this man's head under the axe, and, as he himself said, nothing
worse could happen to him if he were denounced. It was obviously the
weakness of the position. There is no help for it.”

“But access to him,” said Mr. Lorry, “if it should go ill before the
Tribunal, will not save him.”

“I never said it would.”

Mr. Lorry's eyes gradually sought the fire; his sympathy with his
darling, and the heavy disappointment of his second arrest, gradually
weakened them; he was an old man now, overborne with anxiety of late,
and his tears fell.

“You are a good man and a true friend,” said Carton, in an altered
voice. “Forgive me if I notice that you are affected. I could not see my
father weep, and sit by, careless. And I could not respect your
sorrow more, if you were my father. You are free from that misfortune,
however.”

Though he said the last words, with a slip into his usual manner, there
was a true feeling and respect both in his tone and in his touch,
that Mr. Lorry, who had never seen the better side of him, was wholly
unprepared for. He gave him his hand, and Carton gently pressed it.

“To return to poor Darnay,” said Carton. “Don't tell Her of this
interview, or this arrangement. It would not enable Her to go to see
him. She might think it was contrived, in case of the worse, to convey
to him the means of anticipating the sentence.”

Mr. Lorry had not thought of that, and he looked quickly at Carton to
see if it were in his mind. It seemed to be; he returned the look, and
evidently understood it.

“She might think a thousand things,” Carton said, “and any of them would
only add to her trouble. Don't speak of me to her. As I said to you when
I first came, I had better not see her. I can put my hand out, to do any
little helpful work for her that my hand can find to do, without that.
You are going to her, I hope? She must be very desolate to-night.”

“I am going now, directly.”

“I am glad of that. She has such a strong attachment to you and reliance
on you. How does she look?”

“Anxious and unhappy, but very beautiful.”

“Ah!”

It was a long, grieving sound, like a sigh--almost like a sob. It
attracted Mr. Lorry's eyes to Carton's face, which was turned to the
fire. A light, or a shade (the old gentleman could not have said which),
passed from it as swiftly as a change will sweep over a hill-side on a
wild bright day, and he lifted his foot to put back one of the little
flaming logs, which was tumbling forward. He wore the white riding-coat
and top-boots, then in vogue, and the light of the fire touching their
light surfaces made him look very pale, with his long brown hair,
all untrimmed, hanging loose about him. His indifference to fire was
sufficiently remarkable to elicit a word of remonstrance from Mr. Lorry;
his boot was still upon the hot embers of the flaming log, when it had
broken under the weight of his foot.

“I forgot it,” he said.

Mr. Lorry's eyes were again attracted to his face. Taking note of the
wasted air which clouded the naturally handsome features, and having
the expression of prisoners' faces fresh in his mind, he was strongly
reminded of that expression.

“And your duties here have drawn to an end, sir?” said Carton, turning
to him.

“Yes. As I was telling you last night when Lucie came in so
unexpectedly, I have at length done all that I can do here. I hoped to
have left them in perfect safety, and then to have quitted Paris. I have
my Leave to Pass. I was ready to go.”

They were both silent.

“Yours is a long life to look back upon, sir?” said Carton, wistfully.

“I am in my seventy-eighth year.”

“You have been useful all your life; steadily and constantly occupied;
trusted, respected, and looked up to?”

“I have been a man of business, ever since I have been a man. Indeed, I
may say that I was a man of business when a boy.”

“See what a place you fill at seventy-eight. How many people will miss
you when you leave it empty!”

“A solitary old bachelor,” answered Mr. Lorry, shaking his head. “There
is nobody to weep for me.”

“How can you say that? Wouldn't She weep for you? Wouldn't her child?”

“Yes, yes, thank God. I didn't quite mean what I said.”

“It _is_ a thing to thank God for; is it not?”

“Surely, surely.”

“If you could say, with truth, to your own solitary heart, to-night,
'I have secured to myself the love and attachment, the gratitude or
respect, of no human creature; I have won myself a tender place in no
regard; I have done nothing good or serviceable to be remembered by!'
your seventy-eight years would be seventy-eight heavy curses; would they
not?”

“You say truly, Mr. Carton; I think they would be.”

Sydney turned his eyes again upon the fire, and, after a silence of a
few moments, said:

“I should like to ask you:--Does your childhood seem far off? Do the
days when you sat at your mother's knee, seem days of very long ago?”

Responding to his softened manner, Mr. Lorry answered:

“Twenty years back, yes; at this time of my life, no. For, as I draw
closer and closer to the end, I travel in the circle, nearer and
nearer to the beginning. It seems to be one of the kind smoothings and
preparings of the way. My heart is touched now, by many remembrances
that had long fallen asleep, of my pretty young mother (and I so old!),
and by many associations of the days when what we call the World was not
so real with me, and my faults were not confirmed in me.”

“I understand the feeling!” exclaimed Carton, with a bright flush. “And
you are the better for it?”

“I hope so.”

Carton terminated the conversation here, by rising to help him on with
his outer coat; “But you,” said Mr. Lorry, reverting to the theme, “you
are young.”

“Yes,” said Carton. “I am not old, but my young way was never the way to
age. Enough of me.”

“And of me, I am sure,” said Mr. Lorry. “Are you going out?”

“I'll walk with you to her gate. You know my vagabond and restless
habits. If I should prowl about the streets a long time, don't be
uneasy; I shall reappear in the morning. You go to the Court to-morrow?”

“Yes, unhappily.”

“I shall be there, but only as one of the crowd. My Spy will find a
place for me. Take my arm, sir.”

Mr. Lorry did so, and they went down-stairs and out in the streets. A
few minutes brought them to Mr. Lorry's destination. Carton left him
there; but lingered at a little distance, and turned back to the gate
again when it was shut, and touched it. He had heard of her going to
the prison every day. “She came out here,” he said, looking about him,
“turned this way, must have trod on these stones often. Let me follow in
her steps.”

It was ten o'clock at night when he stood before the prison of La Force,
where she had stood hundreds of times. A little wood-sawyer, having
closed his shop, was smoking his pipe at his shop-door.

“Good night, citizen,” said Sydney Carton, pausing in going by; for, the
man eyed him inquisitively.

“Good night, citizen.”

“How goes the Republic?”

“You mean the Guillotine. Not ill. Sixty-three to-day. We shall mount
to a hundred soon. Samson and his men complain sometimes, of being
exhausted. Ha, ha, ha! He is so droll, that Samson. Such a Barber!”

“Do you often go to see him--”

“Shave? Always. Every day. What a barber! You have seen him at work?”

“Never.”

“Go and see him when he has a good batch. Figure this to yourself,
citizen; he shaved the sixty-three to-day, in less than two pipes! Less
than two pipes. Word of honour!”

As the grinning little man held out the pipe he was smoking, to explain
how he timed the executioner, Carton was so sensible of a rising desire
to strike the life out of him, that he turned away.

“But you are not English,” said the wood-sawyer, “though you wear
English dress?”

“Yes,” said Carton, pausing again, and answering over his shoulder.

“You speak like a Frenchman.”

“I am an old student here.”

“Aha, a perfect Frenchman! Good night, Englishman.”

“Good night, citizen.”

“But go and see that droll dog,” the little man persisted, calling after
him. “And take a pipe with you!”

Sydney had not gone far out of sight, when he stopped in the middle of
the street under a glimmering lamp, and wrote with his pencil on a scrap
of paper. Then, traversing with the decided step of one who remembered
the way well, several dark and dirty streets--much dirtier than usual,
for the best public thoroughfares remained uncleansed in those times of
terror--he stopped at a chemist's shop, which the owner was closing with
his own hands. A small, dim, crooked shop, kept in a tortuous, up-hill
thoroughfare, by a small, dim, crooked man.

Giving this citizen, too, good night, as he confronted him at his
counter, he laid the scrap of paper before him. “Whew!” the chemist
whistled softly, as he read it. “Hi! hi! hi!”

Sydney Carton took no heed, and the chemist said:

“For you, citizen?”

“For me.”

“You will be careful to keep them separate, citizen? You know the
consequences of mixing them?”

“Perfectly.”

Certain small packets were made and given to him. He put them, one by
one, in the breast of his inner coat, counted out the money for them,
and deliberately left the shop. “There is nothing more to do,” said he,
glancing upward at the moon, “until to-morrow. I can't sleep.”

It was not a reckless manner, the manner in which he said these words
aloud under the fast-sailing clouds, nor was it more expressive of
negligence than defiance. It was the settled manner of a tired man, who
had wandered and struggled and got lost, but who at length struck into
his road and saw its end.

Long ago, when he had been famous among his earliest competitors as a
youth of great promise, he had followed his father to the grave. His
mother had died, years before. These solemn words, which had been
read at his father's grave, arose in his mind as he went down the dark
streets, among the heavy shadows, with the moon and the clouds sailing
on high above him. “I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord:
he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and
whosoever liveth and believeth in me, shall never die.”

In a city dominated by the axe, alone at night, with natural sorrow
rising in him for the sixty-three who had been that day put to death,
and for to-morrow's victims then awaiting their doom in the prisons,
and still of to-morrow's and to-morrow's, the chain of association that
brought the words home, like a rusty old ship's anchor from the deep,
might have been easily found. He did not seek it, but repeated them and
went on.

With a solemn interest in the lighted windows where the people were
going to rest, forgetful through a few calm hours of the horrors
surrounding them; in the towers of the churches, where no prayers
were said, for the popular revulsion had even travelled that length
of self-destruction from years of priestly impostors, plunderers, and
profligates; in the distant burial-places, reserved, as they wrote upon
the gates, for Eternal Sleep; in the abounding gaols; and in the streets
along which the sixties rolled to a death which had become so common and
material, that no sorrowful story of a haunting Spirit ever arose among
the people out of all the working of the Guillotine; with a solemn
interest in the whole life and death of the city settling down to its
short nightly pause in fury; Sydney Carton crossed the Seine again for
the lighter streets.

Few coaches were abroad, for riders in coaches were liable to be
suspected, and gentility hid its head in red nightcaps, and put on heavy
shoes, and trudged. But, the theatres were all well filled, and the
people poured cheerfully out as he passed, and went chatting home. At
one of the theatre doors, there was a little girl with a mother, looking
for a way across the street through the mud. He carried the child over,
and before the timid arm was loosed from his neck asked her for a kiss.

“I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me, shall never die.”

Now, that the streets were quiet, and the night wore on, the words
were in the echoes of his feet, and were in the air. Perfectly calm
and steady, he sometimes repeated them to himself as he walked; but, he
heard them always.

The night wore out, and, as he stood upon the bridge listening to the
water as it splashed the river-walls of the Island of Paris, where the
picturesque confusion of houses and cathedral shone bright in the light
of the moon, the day came coldly, looking like a dead face out of the
sky. Then, the night, with the moon and the stars, turned pale and died,
and for a little while it seemed as if Creation were delivered over to
Death's dominion.

But, the glorious sun, rising, seemed to strike those words, that burden
of the night, straight and warm to his heart in its long bright rays.
And looking along them, with reverently shaded eyes, a bridge of light
appeared to span the air between him and the sun, while the river
sparkled under it.

The strong tide, so swift, so deep, and certain, was like a congenial
friend, in the morning stillness. He walked by the stream, far from the
houses, and in the light and warmth of the sun fell asleep on the
bank. When he awoke and was afoot again, he lingered there yet a little
longer, watching an eddy that turned and turned purposeless, until the
stream absorbed it, and carried it on to the sea.--“Like me.”

A trading-boat, with a sail of the softened colour of a dead leaf, then
glided into his view, floated by him, and died away. As its silent track
in the water disappeared, the prayer that had broken up out of his heart
for a merciful consideration of all his poor blindnesses and errors,
ended in the words, “I am the resurrection and the life.”

Mr. Lorry was already out when he got back, and it was easy to surmise
where the good old man was gone. Sydney Carton drank nothing but a
little coffee, ate some bread, and, having washed and changed to refresh
himself, went out to the place of trial.

The court was all astir and a-buzz, when the black sheep--whom many fell
away from in dread--pressed him into an obscure corner among the crowd.
Mr. Lorry was there, and Doctor Manette was there. She was there,
sitting beside her father.

When her husband was brought in, she turned a look upon him, so
sustaining, so encouraging, so full of admiring love and pitying
tenderness, yet so courageous for his sake, that it called the healthy
blood into his face, brightened his glance, and animated his heart. If
there had been any eyes to notice the influence of her look, on Sydney
Carton, it would have been seen to be the same influence exactly.

Before that unjust Tribunal, there was little or no order of procedure,
ensuring to any accused person any reasonable hearing. There could have
been no such Revolution, if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not
first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the
Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.

Every eye was turned to the jury. The same determined patriots and good
republicans as yesterday and the day before, and to-morrow and the day
after. Eager and prominent among them, one man with a craving face, and
his fingers perpetually hovering about his lips, whose appearance
gave great satisfaction to the spectators. A life-thirsting,
cannibal-looking, bloody-minded juryman, the Jacques Three of St.
Antoine. The whole jury, as a jury of dogs empannelled to try the deer.

Every eye then turned to the five judges and the public prosecutor.
No favourable leaning in that quarter to-day. A fell, uncompromising,
murderous business-meaning there. Every eye then sought some other eye
in the crowd, and gleamed at it approvingly; and heads nodded at one
another, before bending forward with a strained attention.

Charles Evremonde, called Darnay. Released yesterday. Reaccused and
retaken yesterday. Indictment delivered to him last night. Suspected and
Denounced enemy of the Republic, Aristocrat, one of a family of tyrants,
one of a race proscribed, for that they had used their abolished
privileges to the infamous oppression of the people. Charles Evremonde,
called Darnay, in right of such proscription, absolutely Dead in Law.

To this effect, in as few or fewer words, the Public Prosecutor.

The President asked, was the Accused openly denounced or secretly?

“Openly, President.”

“By whom?”

“Three voices. Ernest Defarge, wine-vendor of St. Antoine.”

“Good.”

“Therese Defarge, his wife.”

“Good.”

“Alexandre Manette, physician.”

A great uproar took place in the court, and in the midst of it, Doctor
Manette was seen, pale and trembling, standing where he had been seated.

“President, I indignantly protest to you that this is a forgery and
a fraud. You know the accused to be the husband of my daughter. My
daughter, and those dear to her, are far dearer to me than my life. Who
and where is the false conspirator who says that I denounce the husband
of my child!”

“Citizen Manette, be tranquil. To fail in submission to the authority of
the Tribunal would be to put yourself out of Law. As to what is dearer
to you than life, nothing can be so dear to a good citizen as the
Republic.”

Loud acclamations hailed this rebuke. The President rang his bell, and
with warmth resumed.

“If the Republic should demand of you the sacrifice of your child
herself, you would have no duty but to sacrifice her. Listen to what is
to follow. In the meanwhile, be silent!”

Frantic acclamations were again raised. Doctor Manette sat down, with
his eyes looking around, and his lips trembling; his daughter drew
closer to him. The craving man on the jury rubbed his hands together,
and restored the usual hand to his mouth.

Defarge was produced, when the court was quiet enough to admit of his
being heard, and rapidly expounded the story of the imprisonment, and of
his having been a mere boy in the Doctor's service, and of the release,
and of the state of the prisoner when released and delivered to him.
This short examination followed, for the court was quick with its work.

“You did good service at the taking of the Bastille, citizen?”

“I believe so.”

Here, an excited woman screeched from the crowd: “You were one of the
best patriots there. Why not say so? You were a cannonier that day
there, and you were among the first to enter the accursed fortress when
it fell. Patriots, I speak the truth!”

It was The Vengeance who, amidst the warm commendations of the audience,
thus assisted the proceedings. The President rang his bell; but, The
Vengeance, warming with encouragement, shrieked, “I defy that bell!”
 wherein she was likewise much commended.

“Inform the Tribunal of what you did that day within the Bastille,
citizen.”

“I knew,” said Defarge, looking down at his wife, who stood at the
bottom of the steps on which he was raised, looking steadily up at him;
“I knew that this prisoner, of whom I speak, had been confined in a cell
known as One Hundred and Five, North Tower. I knew it from himself. He
knew himself by no other name than One Hundred and Five, North Tower,
when he made shoes under my care. As I serve my gun that day, I resolve,
when the place shall fall, to examine that cell. It falls. I mount to
the cell, with a fellow-citizen who is one of the Jury, directed by a
gaoler. I examine it, very closely. In a hole in the chimney, where a
stone has been worked out and replaced, I find a written paper. This is
that written paper. I have made it my business to examine some specimens
of the writing of Doctor Manette. This is the writing of Doctor Manette.
I confide this paper, in the writing of Doctor Manette, to the hands of
the President.”

“Let it be read.”

In a dead silence and stillness--the prisoner under trial looking
lovingly at his wife, his wife only looking from him to look with
solicitude at her father, Doctor Manette keeping his eyes fixed on the
reader, Madame Defarge never taking hers from the prisoner, Defarge
never taking his from his feasting wife, and all the other eyes there
intent upon the Doctor, who saw none of them--the paper was read, as
follows.




X. The Substance of the Shadow


“I, Alexandre Manette, unfortunate physician, native of Beauvais, and
afterwards resident in Paris, write this melancholy paper in my doleful
cell in the Bastille, during the last month of the year, 1767. I write
it at stolen intervals, under every difficulty. I design to secrete it
in the wall of the chimney, where I have slowly and laboriously made a
place of concealment for it. Some pitying hand may find it there, when I
and my sorrows are dust.

“These words are formed by the rusty iron point with which I write with
difficulty in scrapings of soot and charcoal from the chimney, mixed
with blood, in the last month of the tenth year of my captivity. Hope
has quite departed from my breast. I know from terrible warnings I have
noted in myself that my reason will not long remain unimpaired, but I
solemnly declare that I am at this time in the possession of my right
mind--that my memory is exact and circumstantial--and that I write the
truth as I shall answer for these my last recorded words, whether they
be ever read by men or not, at the Eternal Judgment-seat.

“One cloudy moonlight night, in the third week of December (I think the
twenty-second of the month) in the year 1757, I was walking on a retired
part of the quay by the Seine for the refreshment of the frosty air,
at an hour's distance from my place of residence in the Street of the
School of Medicine, when a carriage came along behind me, driven very
fast. As I stood aside to let that carriage pass, apprehensive that it
might otherwise run me down, a head was put out at the window, and a
voice called to the driver to stop.

“The carriage stopped as soon as the driver could rein in his horses,
and the same voice called to me by my name. I answered. The carriage
was then so far in advance of me that two gentlemen had time to open the
door and alight before I came up with it.

“I observed that they were both wrapped in cloaks, and appeared to
conceal themselves. As they stood side by side near the carriage door,
I also observed that they both looked of about my own age, or rather
younger, and that they were greatly alike, in stature, manner, voice,
and (as far as I could see) face too.

“'You are Doctor Manette?' said one.

“I am.”

“'Doctor Manette, formerly of Beauvais,' said the other; 'the young
physician, originally an expert surgeon, who within the last year or two
has made a rising reputation in Paris?'

“'Gentlemen,' I returned, 'I am that Doctor Manette of whom you speak so
graciously.'

“'We have been to your residence,' said the first, 'and not being
so fortunate as to find you there, and being informed that you were
probably walking in this direction, we followed, in the hope of
overtaking you. Will you please to enter the carriage?'

“The manner of both was imperious, and they both moved, as these words
were spoken, so as to place me between themselves and the carriage door.
They were armed. I was not.

“'Gentlemen,' said I, 'pardon me; but I usually inquire who does me
the honour to seek my assistance, and what is the nature of the case to
which I am summoned.'

“The reply to this was made by him who had spoken second. 'Doctor,
your clients are people of condition. As to the nature of the case,
our confidence in your skill assures us that you will ascertain it for
yourself better than we can describe it. Enough. Will you please to
enter the carriage?'

“I could do nothing but comply, and I entered it in silence. They both
entered after me--the last springing in, after putting up the steps. The
carriage turned about, and drove on at its former speed.

“I repeat this conversation exactly as it occurred. I have no doubt that
it is, word for word, the same. I describe everything exactly as it took
place, constraining my mind not to wander from the task. Where I make
the broken marks that follow here, I leave off for the time, and put my
paper in its hiding-place.

        *****

“The carriage left the streets behind, passed the North Barrier, and
emerged upon the country road. At two-thirds of a league from the
Barrier--I did not estimate the distance at that time, but afterwards
when I traversed it--it struck out of the main avenue, and presently
stopped at a solitary house, We all three alighted, and walked, by
a damp soft footpath in a garden where a neglected fountain had
overflowed, to the door of the house. It was not opened immediately, in
answer to the ringing of the bell, and one of my two conductors struck
the man who opened it, with his heavy riding glove, across the face.

“There was nothing in this action to attract my particular attention,
for I had seen common people struck more commonly than dogs. But, the
other of the two, being angry likewise, struck the man in like manner
with his arm; the look and bearing of the brothers were then so exactly
alike, that I then first perceived them to be twin brothers.

“From the time of our alighting at the outer gate (which we found
locked, and which one of the brothers had opened to admit us, and had
relocked), I had heard cries proceeding from an upper chamber. I was
conducted to this chamber straight, the cries growing louder as we
ascended the stairs, and I found a patient in a high fever of the brain,
lying on a bed.

“The patient was a woman of great beauty, and young; assuredly not much
past twenty. Her hair was torn and ragged, and her arms were bound to
her sides with sashes and handkerchiefs. I noticed that these bonds were
all portions of a gentleman's dress. On one of them, which was a fringed
scarf for a dress of ceremony, I saw the armorial bearings of a Noble,
and the letter E.

“I saw this, within the first minute of my contemplation of the patient;
for, in her restless strivings she had turned over on her face on the
edge of the bed, had drawn the end of the scarf into her mouth, and was
in danger of suffocation. My first act was to put out my hand to relieve
her breathing; and in moving the scarf aside, the embroidery in the
corner caught my sight.

“I turned her gently over, placed my hands upon her breast to calm her
and keep her down, and looked into her face. Her eyes were dilated and
wild, and she constantly uttered piercing shrieks, and repeated the
words, 'My husband, my father, and my brother!' and then counted up to
twelve, and said, 'Hush!' For an instant, and no more, she would pause
to listen, and then the piercing shrieks would begin again, and she
would repeat the cry, 'My husband, my father, and my brother!' and
would count up to twelve, and say, 'Hush!' There was no variation in the
order, or the manner. There was no cessation, but the regular moment's
pause, in the utterance of these sounds.

“'How long,' I asked, 'has this lasted?'

“To distinguish the brothers, I will call them the elder and the
younger; by the elder, I mean him who exercised the most authority. It
was the elder who replied, 'Since about this hour last night.'

“'She has a husband, a father, and a brother?'

“'A brother.'

“'I do not address her brother?'

“He answered with great contempt, 'No.'

“'She has some recent association with the number twelve?'

“The younger brother impatiently rejoined, 'With twelve o'clock?'

“'See, gentlemen,' said I, still keeping my hands upon her breast, 'how
useless I am, as you have brought me! If I had known what I was coming
to see, I could have come provided. As it is, time must be lost. There
are no medicines to be obtained in this lonely place.'

“The elder brother looked to the younger, who said haughtily, 'There is
a case of medicines here;' and brought it from a closet, and put it on
the table.

        *****

“I opened some of the bottles, smelt them, and put the stoppers to my
lips. If I had wanted to use anything save narcotic medicines that were
poisons in themselves, I would not have administered any of those.

“'Do you doubt them?' asked the younger brother.

“'You see, monsieur, I am going to use them,' I replied, and said no
more.

“I made the patient swallow, with great difficulty, and after many
efforts, the dose that I desired to give. As I intended to repeat it
after a while, and as it was necessary to watch its influence, I then
sat down by the side of the bed. There was a timid and suppressed woman
in attendance (wife of the man down-stairs), who had retreated into
a corner. The house was damp and decayed, indifferently
furnished--evidently, recently occupied and temporarily used. Some thick
old hangings had been nailed up before the windows, to deaden the
sound of the shrieks. They continued to be uttered in their regular
succession, with the cry, 'My husband, my father, and my brother!' the
counting up to twelve, and 'Hush!' The frenzy was so violent, that I had
not unfastened the bandages restraining the arms; but, I had looked to
them, to see that they were not painful. The only spark of encouragement
in the case, was, that my hand upon the sufferer's breast had this much
soothing influence, that for minutes at a time it tranquillised the
figure. It had no effect upon the cries; no pendulum could be more
regular.

“For the reason that my hand had this effect (I assume), I had sat by
the side of the bed for half an hour, with the two brothers looking on,
before the elder said:

“'There is another patient.'

“I was startled, and asked, 'Is it a pressing case?'

“'You had better see,' he carelessly answered; and took up a light.

        *****

“The other patient lay in a back room across a second staircase, which
was a species of loft over a stable. There was a low plastered ceiling
to a part of it; the rest was open, to the ridge of the tiled roof, and
there were beams across. Hay and straw were stored in that portion of
the place, fagots for firing, and a heap of apples in sand. I had to
pass through that part, to get at the other. My memory is circumstantial
and unshaken. I try it with these details, and I see them all, in
this my cell in the Bastille, near the close of the tenth year of my
captivity, as I saw them all that night.

“On some hay on the ground, with a cushion thrown under his head, lay a
handsome peasant boy--a boy of not more than seventeen at the most.
He lay on his back, with his teeth set, his right hand clenched on his
breast, and his glaring eyes looking straight upward. I could not see
where his wound was, as I kneeled on one knee over him; but, I could see
that he was dying of a wound from a sharp point.

“'I am a doctor, my poor fellow,' said I. 'Let me examine it.'

“'I do not want it examined,' he answered; 'let it be.'

“It was under his hand, and I soothed him to let me move his hand away.
The wound was a sword-thrust, received from twenty to twenty-four hours
before, but no skill could have saved him if it had been looked to
without delay. He was then dying fast. As I turned my eyes to the elder
brother, I saw him looking down at this handsome boy whose life was
ebbing out, as if he were a wounded bird, or hare, or rabbit; not at all
as if he were a fellow-creature.

“'How has this been done, monsieur?' said I.

“'A crazed young common dog! A serf! Forced my brother to draw upon him,
and has fallen by my brother's sword--like a gentleman.'

“There was no touch of pity, sorrow, or kindred humanity, in this
answer. The speaker seemed to acknowledge that it was inconvenient to
have that different order of creature dying there, and that it would
have been better if he had died in the usual obscure routine of his
vermin kind. He was quite incapable of any compassionate feeling about
the boy, or about his fate.

“The boy's eyes had slowly moved to him as he had spoken, and they now
slowly moved to me.

“'Doctor, they are very proud, these Nobles; but we common dogs are
proud too, sometimes. They plunder us, outrage us, beat us, kill us; but
we have a little pride left, sometimes. She--have you seen her, Doctor?'

“The shrieks and the cries were audible there, though subdued by the
distance. He referred to them, as if she were lying in our presence.

“I said, 'I have seen her.'

“'She is my sister, Doctor. They have had their shameful rights, these
Nobles, in the modesty and virtue of our sisters, many years, but we
have had good girls among us. I know it, and have heard my father say
so. She was a good girl. She was betrothed to a good young man, too: a
tenant of his. We were all tenants of his--that man's who stands there.
The other is his brother, the worst of a bad race.'

“It was with the greatest difficulty that the boy gathered bodily force
to speak; but, his spirit spoke with a dreadful emphasis.

“'We were so robbed by that man who stands there, as all we common dogs
are by those superior Beings--taxed by him without mercy, obliged to
work for him without pay, obliged to grind our corn at his mill, obliged
to feed scores of his tame birds on our wretched crops, and forbidden
for our lives to keep a single tame bird of our own, pillaged and
plundered to that degree that when we chanced to have a bit of meat, we
ate it in fear, with the door barred and the shutters closed, that his
people should not see it and take it from us--I say, we were so robbed,
and hunted, and were made so poor, that our father told us it was a
dreadful thing to bring a child into the world, and that what we should
most pray for, was, that our women might be barren and our miserable
race die out!'

“I had never before seen the sense of being oppressed, bursting forth
like a fire. I had supposed that it must be latent in the people
somewhere; but, I had never seen it break out, until I saw it in the
dying boy.

“'Nevertheless, Doctor, my sister married. He was ailing at that time,
poor fellow, and she married her lover, that she might tend and comfort
him in our cottage--our dog-hut, as that man would call it. She had not
been married many weeks, when that man's brother saw her and admired
her, and asked that man to lend her to him--for what are husbands among
us! He was willing enough, but my sister was good and virtuous, and
hated his brother with a hatred as strong as mine. What did the two
then, to persuade her husband to use his influence with her, to make her
willing?'

“The boy's eyes, which had been fixed on mine, slowly turned to the
looker-on, and I saw in the two faces that all he said was true. The two
opposing kinds of pride confronting one another, I can see, even in this
Bastille; the gentleman's, all negligent indifference; the peasant's, all
trodden-down sentiment, and passionate revenge.

“'You know, Doctor, that it is among the Rights of these Nobles to
harness us common dogs to carts, and drive us. They so harnessed him and
drove him. You know that it is among their Rights to keep us in their
grounds all night, quieting the frogs, in order that their noble sleep
may not be disturbed. They kept him out in the unwholesome mists at
night, and ordered him back into his harness in the day. But he was
not persuaded. No! Taken out of harness one day at noon, to feed--if he
could find food--he sobbed twelve times, once for every stroke of the
bell, and died on her bosom.'

“Nothing human could have held life in the boy but his determination to
tell all his wrong. He forced back the gathering shadows of death, as
he forced his clenched right hand to remain clenched, and to cover his
wound.

“'Then, with that man's permission and even with his aid, his
brother took her away; in spite of what I know she must have told his
brother--and what that is, will not be long unknown to you, Doctor, if
it is now--his brother took her away--for his pleasure and diversion,
for a little while. I saw her pass me on the road. When I took the
tidings home, our father's heart burst; he never spoke one of the words
that filled it. I took my young sister (for I have another) to a place
beyond the reach of this man, and where, at least, she will never be
_his_ vassal. Then, I tracked the brother here, and last night climbed
in--a common dog, but sword in hand.--Where is the loft window? It was
somewhere here?'

“The room was darkening to his sight; the world was narrowing around
him. I glanced about me, and saw that the hay and straw were trampled
over the floor, as if there had been a struggle.

“'She heard me, and ran in. I told her not to come near us till he was
dead. He came in and first tossed me some pieces of money; then struck
at me with a whip. But I, though a common dog, so struck at him as to
make him draw. Let him break into as many pieces as he will, the sword
that he stained with my common blood; he drew to defend himself--thrust
at me with all his skill for his life.'

“My glance had fallen, but a few moments before, on the fragments of
a broken sword, lying among the hay. That weapon was a gentleman's. In
another place, lay an old sword that seemed to have been a soldier's.

“'Now, lift me up, Doctor; lift me up. Where is he?'

“'He is not here,' I said, supporting the boy, and thinking that he
referred to the brother.

“'He! Proud as these nobles are, he is afraid to see me. Where is the
man who was here? Turn my face to him.'

“I did so, raising the boy's head against my knee. But, invested for the
moment with extraordinary power, he raised himself completely: obliging
me to rise too, or I could not have still supported him.

“'Marquis,' said the boy, turned to him with his eyes opened wide, and
his right hand raised, 'in the days when all these things are to be
answered for, I summon you and yours, to the last of your bad race, to
answer for them. I mark this cross of blood upon you, as a sign that
I do it. In the days when all these things are to be answered for,
I summon your brother, the worst of the bad race, to answer for them
separately. I mark this cross of blood upon him, as a sign that I do
it.'

“Twice, he put his hand to the wound in his breast, and with his
forefinger drew a cross in the air. He stood for an instant with the
finger yet raised, and as it dropped, he dropped with it, and I laid him
down dead.

        *****

“When I returned to the bedside of the young woman, I found her raving
in precisely the same order of continuity. I knew that this might last
for many hours, and that it would probably end in the silence of the
grave.

“I repeated the medicines I had given her, and I sat at the side of
the bed until the night was far advanced. She never abated the piercing
quality of her shrieks, never stumbled in the distinctness or the order
of her words. They were always 'My husband, my father, and my brother!
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven,
twelve. Hush!'

“This lasted twenty-six hours from the time when I first saw her. I had
come and gone twice, and was again sitting by her, when she began to
falter. I did what little could be done to assist that opportunity, and
by-and-bye she sank into a lethargy, and lay like the dead.

“It was as if the wind and rain had lulled at last, after a long and
fearful storm. I released her arms, and called the woman to assist me to
compose her figure and the dress she had torn. It was then that I knew
her condition to be that of one in whom the first expectations of being
a mother have arisen; and it was then that I lost the little hope I had
had of her.

“'Is she dead?' asked the Marquis, whom I will still describe as the
elder brother, coming booted into the room from his horse.

“'Not dead,' said I; 'but like to die.'

“'What strength there is in these common bodies!' he said, looking down
at her with some curiosity.

“'There is prodigious strength,' I answered him, 'in sorrow and
despair.'

“He first laughed at my words, and then frowned at them. He moved a
chair with his foot near to mine, ordered the woman away, and said in a
subdued voice,

“'Doctor, finding my brother in this difficulty with these hinds, I
recommended that your aid should be invited. Your reputation is high,
and, as a young man with your fortune to make, you are probably mindful
of your interest. The things that you see here, are things to be seen,
and not spoken of.'

“I listened to the patient's breathing, and avoided answering.

“'Do you honour me with your attention, Doctor?'

“'Monsieur,' said I, 'in my profession, the communications of patients
are always received in confidence.' I was guarded in my answer, for I
was troubled in my mind with what I had heard and seen.

“Her breathing was so difficult to trace, that I carefully tried the
pulse and the heart. There was life, and no more. Looking round as I
resumed my seat, I found both the brothers intent upon me.

        *****

“I write with so much difficulty, the cold is so severe, I am so
fearful of being detected and consigned to an underground cell and total
darkness, that I must abridge this narrative. There is no confusion or
failure in my memory; it can recall, and could detail, every word that
was ever spoken between me and those brothers.

“She lingered for a week. Towards the last, I could understand some few
syllables that she said to me, by placing my ear close to her lips. She
asked me where she was, and I told her; who I was, and I told her. It
was in vain that I asked her for her family name. She faintly shook her
head upon the pillow, and kept her secret, as the boy had done.

“I had no opportunity of asking her any question, until I had told the
brothers she was sinking fast, and could not live another day. Until
then, though no one was ever presented to her consciousness save the
woman and myself, one or other of them had always jealously sat behind
the curtain at the head of the bed when I was there. But when it came to
that, they seemed careless what communication I might hold with her; as
if--the thought passed through my mind--I were dying too.

“I always observed that their pride bitterly resented the younger
brother's (as I call him) having crossed swords with a peasant, and that
peasant a boy. The only consideration that appeared to affect the mind
of either of them was the consideration that this was highly degrading
to the family, and was ridiculous. As often as I caught the younger
brother's eyes, their expression reminded me that he disliked me deeply,
for knowing what I knew from the boy. He was smoother and more polite to
me than the elder; but I saw this. I also saw that I was an incumbrance
in the mind of the elder, too.

“My patient died, two hours before midnight--at a time, by my watch,
answering almost to the minute when I had first seen her. I was alone
with her, when her forlorn young head drooped gently on one side, and
all her earthly wrongs and sorrows ended.

“The brothers were waiting in a room down-stairs, impatient to ride
away. I had heard them, alone at the bedside, striking their boots with
their riding-whips, and loitering up and down.

“'At last she is dead?' said the elder, when I went in.

“'She is dead,' said I.

“'I congratulate you, my brother,' were his words as he turned round.

“He had before offered me money, which I had postponed taking. He now
gave me a rouleau of gold. I took it from his hand, but laid it on
the table. I had considered the question, and had resolved to accept
nothing.

“'Pray excuse me,' said I. 'Under the circumstances, no.'

“They exchanged looks, but bent their heads to me as I bent mine to
them, and we parted without another word on either side.

        *****

“I am weary, weary, weary--worn down by misery. I cannot read what I
have written with this gaunt hand.

“Early in the morning, the rouleau of gold was left at my door in a
little box, with my name on the outside. From the first, I had anxiously
considered what I ought to do. I decided, that day, to write privately
to the Minister, stating the nature of the two cases to which I had been
summoned, and the place to which I had gone: in effect, stating all the
circumstances. I knew what Court influence was, and what the immunities
of the Nobles were, and I expected that the matter would never be
heard of; but, I wished to relieve my own mind. I had kept the matter a
profound secret, even from my wife; and this, too, I resolved to state
in my letter. I had no apprehension whatever of my real danger; but
I was conscious that there might be danger for others, if others were
compromised by possessing the knowledge that I possessed.

“I was much engaged that day, and could not complete my letter that
night. I rose long before my usual time next morning to finish it.
It was the last day of the year. The letter was lying before me just
completed, when I was told that a lady waited, who wished to see me.

        *****

“I am growing more and more unequal to the task I have set myself. It is
so cold, so dark, my senses are so benumbed, and the gloom upon me is so
dreadful.

“The lady was young, engaging, and handsome, but not marked for long
life. She was in great agitation. She presented herself to me as the
wife of the Marquis St. Evremonde. I connected the title by which the
boy had addressed the elder brother, with the initial letter embroidered
on the scarf, and had no difficulty in arriving at the conclusion that I
had seen that nobleman very lately.

“My memory is still accurate, but I cannot write the words of our
conversation. I suspect that I am watched more closely than I was, and I
know not at what times I may be watched. She had in part suspected, and
in part discovered, the main facts of the cruel story, of her husband's
share in it, and my being resorted to. She did not know that the girl
was dead. Her hope had been, she said in great distress, to show her,
in secret, a woman's sympathy. Her hope had been to avert the wrath of
Heaven from a House that had long been hateful to the suffering many.

“She had reasons for believing that there was a young sister living, and
her greatest desire was, to help that sister. I could tell her nothing
but that there was such a sister; beyond that, I knew nothing. Her
inducement to come to me, relying on my confidence, had been the hope
that I could tell her the name and place of abode. Whereas, to this
wretched hour I am ignorant of both.

        *****

“These scraps of paper fail me. One was taken from me, with a warning,
yesterday. I must finish my record to-day.

“She was a good, compassionate lady, and not happy in her marriage. How
could she be! The brother distrusted and disliked her, and his influence
was all opposed to her; she stood in dread of him, and in dread of her
husband too. When I handed her down to the door, there was a child, a
pretty boy from two to three years old, in her carriage.

“'For his sake, Doctor,' she said, pointing to him in tears, 'I would do
all I can to make what poor amends I can. He will never prosper in his
inheritance otherwise. I have a presentiment that if no other innocent
atonement is made for this, it will one day be required of him. What
I have left to call my own--it is little beyond the worth of a few
jewels--I will make it the first charge of his life to bestow, with the
compassion and lamenting of his dead mother, on this injured family, if
the sister can be discovered.'

“She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him, 'It is for thine own dear
sake. Thou wilt be faithful, little Charles?' The child answered her
bravely, 'Yes!' I kissed her hand, and she took him in her arms, and
went away caressing him. I never saw her more.

“As she had mentioned her husband's name in the faith that I knew it,
I added no mention of it to my letter. I sealed my letter, and, not
trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it myself that day.

“That night, the last night of the year, towards nine o'clock, a man in
a black dress rang at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly followed
my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth, up-stairs. When my servant came
into the room where I sat with my wife--O my wife, beloved of my heart!
My fair young English wife!--we saw the man, who was supposed to be at
the gate, standing silent behind him.

“An urgent case in the Rue St. Honore, he said. It would not detain me,
he had a coach in waiting.

“It brought me here, it brought me to my grave. When I was clear of the
house, a black muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from behind, and
my arms were pinioned. The two brothers crossed the road from a dark
corner, and identified me with a single gesture. The Marquis took from
his pocket the letter I had written, showed it me, burnt it in the light
of a lantern that was held, and extinguished the ashes with his foot.
Not a word was spoken. I was brought here, I was brought to my living
grave.

“If it had pleased _God_ to put it in the hard heart of either of the
brothers, in all these frightful years, to grant me any tidings of
my dearest wife--so much as to let me know by a word whether alive or
dead--I might have thought that He had not quite abandoned them. But,
now I believe that the mark of the red cross is fatal to them, and that
they have no part in His mercies. And them and their descendants, to the
last of their race, I, Alexandre Manette, unhappy prisoner, do this last
night of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony, denounce to the times
when all these things shall be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven
and to earth.”

A terrible sound arose when the reading of this document was done. A
sound of craving and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it but
blood. The narrative called up the most revengeful passions of the time,
and there was not a head in the nation but must have dropped before it.

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and that auditory, to show
how the Defarges had not made the paper public, with the other captured
Bastille memorials borne in procession, and had kept it, biding their
time. Little need to show that this detested family name had long been
anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was wrought into the fatal register.
The man never trod ground whose virtues and services would have
sustained him in that place that day, against such denunciation.

And all the worse for the doomed man, that the denouncer was a
well-known citizen, his own attached friend, the father of his wife. One
of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was, for imitations of
the questionable public virtues of antiquity, and for sacrifices and
self-immolations on the people's altar. Therefore when the President
said (else had his own head quivered on his shoulders), that the good
physician of the Republic would deserve better still of the Republic by
rooting out an obnoxious family of Aristocrats, and would doubtless feel
a sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a widow and her child an
orphan, there was wild excitement, patriotic fervour, not a touch of
human sympathy.

“Much influence around him, has that Doctor?” murmured Madame Defarge,
smiling to The Vengeance. “Save him now, my Doctor, save him!”

At every juryman's vote, there was a roar. Another and another. Roar and
roar.

Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent an Aristocrat, an enemy
of the Republic, a notorious oppressor of the People. Back to the
Conciergerie, and Death within four-and-twenty hours!




XI. Dusk


The wretched wife of the innocent man thus doomed to die, fell under
the sentence, as if she had been mortally stricken. But, she uttered no
sound; and so strong was the voice within her, representing that it was
she of all the world who must uphold him in his misery and not augment
it, that it quickly raised her, even from that shock.

The Judges having to take part in a public demonstration out of doors,
the Tribunal adjourned. The quick noise and movement of the court's
emptying itself by many passages had not ceased, when Lucie stood
stretching out her arms towards her husband, with nothing in her face
but love and consolation.

“If I might touch him! If I might embrace him once! O, good citizens, if
you would have so much compassion for us!”

There was but a gaoler left, along with two of the four men who had
taken him last night, and Barsad. The people had all poured out to the
show in the streets. Barsad proposed to the rest, “Let her embrace
him then; it is but a moment.” It was silently acquiesced in, and they
passed her over the seats in the hall to a raised place, where he, by
leaning over the dock, could fold her in his arms.

“Farewell, dear darling of my soul. My parting blessing on my love. We
shall meet again, where the weary are at rest!”

They were her husband's words, as he held her to his bosom.

“I can bear it, dear Charles. I am supported from above: don't suffer
for me. A parting blessing for our child.”

“I send it to her by you. I kiss her by you. I say farewell to her by
you.”

“My husband. No! A moment!” He was tearing himself apart from her.
“We shall not be separated long. I feel that this will break my heart
by-and-bye; but I will do my duty while I can, and when I leave her, God
will raise up friends for her, as He did for me.”

Her father had followed her, and would have fallen on his knees to both
of them, but that Darnay put out a hand and seized him, crying:

“No, no! What have you done, what have you done, that you should kneel
to us! We know now, what a struggle you made of old. We know, now what
you underwent when you suspected my descent, and when you knew it. We
know now, the natural antipathy you strove against, and conquered, for
her dear sake. We thank you with all our hearts, and all our love and
duty. Heaven be with you!”

Her father's only answer was to draw his hands through his white hair,
and wring them with a shriek of anguish.

“It could not be otherwise,” said the prisoner. “All things have worked
together as they have fallen out. It was the always-vain endeavour to
discharge my poor mother's trust that first brought my fatal presence
near you. Good could never come of such evil, a happier end was not in
nature to so unhappy a beginning. Be comforted, and forgive me. Heaven
bless you!”

As he was drawn away, his wife released him, and stood looking after him
with her hands touching one another in the attitude of prayer, and
with a radiant look upon her face, in which there was even a comforting
smile. As he went out at the prisoners' door, she turned, laid her head
lovingly on her father's breast, tried to speak to him, and fell at his
feet.

Then, issuing from the obscure corner from which he had never moved,
Sydney Carton came and took her up. Only her father and Mr. Lorry were
with her. His arm trembled as it raised her, and supported her head.
Yet, there was an air about him that was not all of pity--that had a
flush of pride in it.

“Shall I take her to a coach? I shall never feel her weight.”

He carried her lightly to the door, and laid her tenderly down in a
coach. Her father and their old friend got into it, and he took his seat
beside the driver.

When they arrived at the gateway where he had paused in the dark not
many hours before, to picture to himself on which of the rough stones of
the street her feet had trodden, he lifted her again, and carried her up
the staircase to their rooms. There, he laid her down on a couch, where
her child and Miss Pross wept over her.

“Don't recall her to herself,” he said, softly, to the latter, “she is
better so. Don't revive her to consciousness, while she only faints.”

“Oh, Carton, Carton, dear Carton!” cried little Lucie, springing up and
throwing her arms passionately round him, in a burst of grief. “Now that
you have come, I think you will do something to help mamma, something to
save papa! O, look at her, dear Carton! Can you, of all the people who
love her, bear to see her so?”

He bent over the child, and laid her blooming cheek against his face. He
put her gently from him, and looked at her unconscious mother.

“Before I go,” he said, and paused--“I may kiss her?”

It was remembered afterwards that when he bent down and touched her face
with his lips, he murmured some words. The child, who was nearest to
him, told them afterwards, and told her grandchildren when she was a
handsome old lady, that she heard him say, “A life you love.”

When he had gone out into the next room, he turned suddenly on Mr. Lorry
and her father, who were following, and said to the latter:

“You had great influence but yesterday, Doctor Manette; let it at least
be tried. These judges, and all the men in power, are very friendly to
you, and very recognisant of your services; are they not?”

“Nothing connected with Charles was concealed from me. I had the
strongest assurances that I should save him; and I did.” He returned the
answer in great trouble, and very slowly.

“Try them again. The hours between this and to-morrow afternoon are few
and short, but try.”

“I intend to try. I will not rest a moment.”

“That's well. I have known such energy as yours do great things before
now--though never,” he added, with a smile and a sigh together, “such
great things as this. But try! Of little worth as life is when we misuse
it, it is worth that effort. It would cost nothing to lay down if it
were not.”

“I will go,” said Doctor Manette, “to the Prosecutor and the President
straight, and I will go to others whom it is better not to name. I will
write too, and--But stay! There is a Celebration in the streets, and no
one will be accessible until dark.”

“That's true. Well! It is a forlorn hope at the best, and not much the
forlorner for being delayed till dark. I should like to know how you
speed; though, mind! I expect nothing! When are you likely to have seen
these dread powers, Doctor Manette?”

“Immediately after dark, I should hope. Within an hour or two from
this.”

“It will be dark soon after four. Let us stretch the hour or two. If I
go to Mr. Lorry's at nine, shall I hear what you have done, either from
our friend or from yourself?”

“Yes.”

“May you prosper!”

Mr. Lorry followed Sydney to the outer door, and, touching him on the
shoulder as he was going away, caused him to turn.

“I have no hope,” said Mr. Lorry, in a low and sorrowful whisper.

“Nor have I.”

“If any one of these men, or all of these men, were disposed to spare
him--which is a large supposition; for what is his life, or any man's
to them!--I doubt if they durst spare him after the demonstration in the
court.”

“And so do I. I heard the fall of the axe in that sound.”

Mr. Lorry leaned his arm upon the door-post, and bowed his face upon it.

“Don't despond,” said Carton, very gently; “don't grieve. I encouraged
Doctor Manette in this idea, because I felt that it might one day be
consolatory to her. Otherwise, she might think 'his life was wantonly
thrown away or wasted,' and that might trouble her.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” returned Mr. Lorry, drying his eyes, “you are right.
But he will perish; there is no real hope.”

“Yes. He will perish: there is no real hope,” echoed Carton.

And walked with a settled step, down-stairs.




XII. Darkness


Sydney Carton paused in the street, not quite decided where to go. “At
Tellson's banking-house at nine,” he said, with a musing face. “Shall I
do well, in the mean time, to show myself? I think so. It is best that
these people should know there is such a man as I here; it is a sound
precaution, and may be a necessary preparation. But care, care, care!
Let me think it out!”

Checking his steps which had begun to tend towards an object, he took a
turn or two in the already darkening street, and traced the thought
in his mind to its possible consequences. His first impression was
confirmed. “It is best,” he said, finally resolved, “that these people
should know there is such a man as I here.” And he turned his face
towards Saint Antoine.

Defarge had described himself, that day, as the keeper of a wine-shop in
the Saint Antoine suburb. It was not difficult for one who knew the city
well, to find his house without asking any question. Having ascertained
its situation, Carton came out of those closer streets again, and dined
at a place of refreshment and fell sound asleep after dinner. For the
first time in many years, he had no strong drink. Since last night he
had taken nothing but a little light thin wine, and last night he had
dropped the brandy slowly down on Mr. Lorry's hearth like a man who had
done with it.

It was as late as seven o'clock when he awoke refreshed, and went out
into the streets again. As he passed along towards Saint Antoine, he
stopped at a shop-window where there was a mirror, and slightly altered
the disordered arrangement of his loose cravat, and his coat-collar, and
his wild hair. This done, he went on direct to Defarge's, and went in.

There happened to be no customer in the shop but Jacques Three, of the
restless fingers and the croaking voice. This man, whom he had seen upon
the Jury, stood drinking at the little counter, in conversation with the
Defarges, man and wife. The Vengeance assisted in the conversation, like
a regular member of the establishment.

As Carton walked in, took his seat and asked (in very indifferent
French) for a small measure of wine, Madame Defarge cast a careless
glance at him, and then a keener, and then a keener, and then advanced
to him herself, and asked him what it was he had ordered.

He repeated what he had already said.

“English?” asked Madame Defarge, inquisitively raising her dark
eyebrows.

After looking at her, as if the sound of even a single French word were
slow to express itself to him, he answered, in his former strong foreign
accent. “Yes, madame, yes. I am English!”

Madame Defarge returned to her counter to get the wine, and, as he
took up a Jacobin journal and feigned to pore over it puzzling out its
meaning, he heard her say, “I swear to you, like Evremonde!”

Defarge brought him the wine, and gave him Good Evening.

“How?”

“Good evening.”

“Oh! Good evening, citizen,” filling his glass. “Ah! and good wine. I
drink to the Republic.”

Defarge went back to the counter, and said, “Certainly, a little like.”
 Madame sternly retorted, “I tell you a good deal like.” Jacques Three
pacifically remarked, “He is so much in your mind, see you, madame.”
 The amiable Vengeance added, with a laugh, “Yes, my faith! And you
are looking forward with so much pleasure to seeing him once more
to-morrow!”

Carton followed the lines and words of his paper, with a slow
forefinger, and with a studious and absorbed face. They were all leaning
their arms on the counter close together, speaking low. After a silence
of a few moments, during which they all looked towards him without
disturbing his outward attention from the Jacobin editor, they resumed
their conversation.

“It is true what madame says,” observed Jacques Three. “Why stop? There
is great force in that. Why stop?”

“Well, well,” reasoned Defarge, “but one must stop somewhere. After all,
the question is still where?”

“At extermination,” said madame.

“Magnificent!” croaked Jacques Three. The Vengeance, also, highly
approved.

“Extermination is good doctrine, my wife,” said Defarge, rather
troubled; “in general, I say nothing against it. But this Doctor has
suffered much; you have seen him to-day; you have observed his face when
the paper was read.”

“I have observed his face!” repeated madame, contemptuously and angrily.
“Yes. I have observed his face. I have observed his face to be not the
face of a true friend of the Republic. Let him take care of his face!”

“And you have observed, my wife,” said Defarge, in a deprecatory manner,
“the anguish of his daughter, which must be a dreadful anguish to him!”

“I have observed his daughter,” repeated madame; “yes, I have observed
his daughter, more times than one. I have observed her to-day, and I
have observed her other days. I have observed her in the court, and
I have observed her in the street by the prison. Let me but lift my
finger--!” She seemed to raise it (the listener's eyes were always on
his paper), and to let it fall with a rattle on the ledge before her, as
if the axe had dropped.

“The citizeness is superb!” croaked the Juryman.

“She is an Angel!” said The Vengeance, and embraced her.

“As to thee,” pursued madame, implacably, addressing her husband, “if it
depended on thee--which, happily, it does not--thou wouldst rescue this
man even now.”

“No!” protested Defarge. “Not if to lift this glass would do it! But I
would leave the matter there. I say, stop there.”

“See you then, Jacques,” said Madame Defarge, wrathfully; “and see you,
too, my little Vengeance; see you both! Listen! For other crimes as
tyrants and oppressors, I have this race a long time on my register,
doomed to destruction and extermination. Ask my husband, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge, without being asked.

“In the beginning of the great days, when the Bastille falls, he finds
this paper of to-day, and he brings it home, and in the middle of the
night when this place is clear and shut, we read it, here on this spot,
by the light of this lamp. Ask him, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge.

“That night, I tell him, when the paper is read through, and the lamp is
burnt out, and the day is gleaming in above those shutters and between
those iron bars, that I have now a secret to communicate. Ask him, is
that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge again.

“I communicate to him that secret. I smite this bosom with these two
hands as I smite it now, and I tell him, 'Defarge, I was brought up
among the fishermen of the sea-shore, and that peasant family so injured
by the two Evremonde brothers, as that Bastille paper describes, is my
family. Defarge, that sister of the mortally wounded boy upon the ground
was my sister, that husband was my sister's husband, that unborn child
was their child, that brother was my brother, that father was my father,
those dead are my dead, and that summons to answer for those things
descends to me!' Ask him, is that so.”

“It is so,” assented Defarge once more.

“Then tell Wind and Fire where to stop,” returned madame; “but don't
tell me.”

Both her hearers derived a horrible enjoyment from the deadly nature
of her wrath--the listener could feel how white she was, without seeing
her--and both highly commended it. Defarge, a weak minority, interposed
a few words for the memory of the compassionate wife of the Marquis; but
only elicited from his own wife a repetition of her last reply. “Tell
the Wind and the Fire where to stop; not me!”

Customers entered, and the group was broken up. The English customer
paid for what he had had, perplexedly counted his change, and asked, as
a stranger, to be directed towards the National Palace. Madame Defarge
took him to the door, and put her arm on his, in pointing out the road.
The English customer was not without his reflections then, that it might
be a good deed to seize that arm, lift it, and strike under it sharp and
deep.

But, he went his way, and was soon swallowed up in the shadow of the
prison wall. At the appointed hour, he emerged from it to present
himself in Mr. Lorry's room again, where he found the old gentleman
walking to and fro in restless anxiety. He said he had been with Lucie
until just now, and had only left her for a few minutes, to come and
keep his appointment. Her father had not been seen, since he quitted the
banking-house towards four o'clock. She had some faint hopes that his
mediation might save Charles, but they were very slight. He had been
more than five hours gone: where could he be?

Mr. Lorry waited until ten; but, Doctor Manette not returning, and
he being unwilling to leave Lucie any longer, it was arranged that he
should go back to her, and come to the banking-house again at midnight.
In the meanwhile, Carton would wait alone by the fire for the Doctor.

He waited and waited, and the clock struck twelve; but Doctor Manette
did not come back. Mr. Lorry returned, and found no tidings of him, and
brought none. Where could he be?

They were discussing this question, and were almost building up some
weak structure of hope on his prolonged absence, when they heard him on
the stairs. The instant he entered the room, it was plain that all was
lost.

Whether he had really been to any one, or whether he had been all that
time traversing the streets, was never known. As he stood staring at
them, they asked him no question, for his face told them everything.

“I cannot find it,” said he, “and I must have it. Where is it?”

His head and throat were bare, and, as he spoke with a helpless look
straying all around, he took his coat off, and let it drop on the floor.

“Where is my bench? I have been looking everywhere for my bench, and I
can't find it. What have they done with my work? Time presses: I must
finish those shoes.”

They looked at one another, and their hearts died within them.

“Come, come!” said he, in a whimpering miserable way; “let me get to
work. Give me my work.”

Receiving no answer, he tore his hair, and beat his feet upon the
ground, like a distracted child.

“Don't torture a poor forlorn wretch,” he implored them, with a dreadful
cry; “but give me my work! What is to become of us, if those shoes are
not done to-night?”

Lost, utterly lost!

It was so clearly beyond hope to reason with him, or try to restore him,
that--as if by agreement--they each put a hand upon his shoulder, and
soothed him to sit down before the fire, with a promise that he should
have his work presently. He sank into the chair, and brooded over the
embers, and shed tears. As if all that had happened since the garret
time were a momentary fancy, or a dream, Mr. Lorry saw him shrink into
the exact figure that Defarge had had in keeping.

Affected, and impressed with terror as they both were, by this spectacle
of ruin, it was not a time to yield to such emotions. His lonely
daughter, bereft of her final hope and reliance, appealed to them both
too strongly. Again, as if by agreement, they looked at one another with
one meaning in their faces. Carton was the first to speak:

“The last chance is gone: it was not much. Yes; he had better be taken
to her. But, before you go, will you, for a moment, steadily attend to
me? Don't ask me why I make the stipulations I am going to make, and
exact the promise I am going to exact; I have a reason--a good one.”

“I do not doubt it,” answered Mr. Lorry. “Say on.”

The figure in the chair between them, was all the time monotonously
rocking itself to and fro, and moaning. They spoke in such a tone as
they would have used if they had been watching by a sick-bed in the
night.

Carton stooped to pick up the coat, which lay almost entangling his
feet. As he did so, a small case in which the Doctor was accustomed to
carry the lists of his day's duties, fell lightly on the floor. Carton
took it up, and there was a folded paper in it. “We should look
at this!” he said. Mr. Lorry nodded his consent. He opened it, and
exclaimed, “Thank _God!_”

“What is it?” asked Mr. Lorry, eagerly.

“A moment! Let me speak of it in its place. First,” he put his hand in
his coat, and took another paper from it, “that is the certificate which
enables me to pass out of this city. Look at it. You see--Sydney Carton,
an Englishman?”

Mr. Lorry held it open in his hand, gazing in his earnest face.

“Keep it for me until to-morrow. I shall see him to-morrow, you
remember, and I had better not take it into the prison.”

“Why not?”

“I don't know; I prefer not to do so. Now, take this paper that Doctor
Manette has carried about him. It is a similar certificate, enabling him
and his daughter and her child, at any time, to pass the barrier and the
frontier! You see?”

“Yes!”

“Perhaps he obtained it as his last and utmost precaution against evil,
yesterday. When is it dated? But no matter; don't stay to look; put it
up carefully with mine and your own. Now, observe! I never doubted until
within this hour or two, that he had, or could have such a paper. It is
good, until recalled. But it may be soon recalled, and, I have reason to
think, will be.”

“They are not in danger?”

“They are in great danger. They are in danger of denunciation by Madame
Defarge. I know it from her own lips. I have overheard words of that
woman's, to-night, which have presented their danger to me in strong
colours. I have lost no time, and since then, I have seen the spy. He
confirms me. He knows that a wood-sawyer, living by the prison wall,
is under the control of the Defarges, and has been rehearsed by
Madame Defarge as to his having seen Her”--he never mentioned Lucie's
name--“making signs and signals to prisoners. It is easy to foresee that
the pretence will be the common one, a prison plot, and that it will
involve her life--and perhaps her child's--and perhaps her father's--for
both have been seen with her at that place. Don't look so horrified. You
will save them all.”

“Heaven grant I may, Carton! But how?”

“I am going to tell you how. It will depend on you, and it could depend
on no better man. This new denunciation will certainly not take place
until after to-morrow; probably not until two or three days afterwards;
more probably a week afterwards. You know it is a capital crime, to
mourn for, or sympathise with, a victim of the Guillotine. She and her
father would unquestionably be guilty of this crime, and this woman (the
inveteracy of whose pursuit cannot be described) would wait to add that
strength to her case, and make herself doubly sure. You follow me?”

“So attentively, and with so much confidence in what you say, that for
the moment I lose sight,” touching the back of the Doctor's chair, “even
of this distress.”

“You have money, and can buy the means of travelling to the seacoast
as quickly as the journey can be made. Your preparations have been
completed for some days, to return to England. Early to-morrow have your
horses ready, so that they may be in starting trim at two o'clock in the
afternoon.”

“It shall be done!”

His manner was so fervent and inspiring, that Mr. Lorry caught the
flame, and was as quick as youth.

“You are a noble heart. Did I say we could depend upon no better man?
Tell her, to-night, what you know of her danger as involving her child
and her father. Dwell upon that, for she would lay her own fair head
beside her husband's cheerfully.” He faltered for an instant; then went
on as before. “For the sake of her child and her father, press upon her
the necessity of leaving Paris, with them and you, at that hour. Tell
her that it was her husband's last arrangement. Tell her that more
depends upon it than she dare believe, or hope. You think that her
father, even in this sad state, will submit himself to her; do you not?”

“I am sure of it.”

“I thought so. Quietly and steadily have all these arrangements made in
the courtyard here, even to the taking of your own seat in the carriage.
The moment I come to you, take me in, and drive away.”

“I understand that I wait for you under all circumstances?”

“You have my certificate in your hand with the rest, you know, and will
reserve my place. Wait for nothing but to have my place occupied, and
then for England!”

“Why, then,” said Mr. Lorry, grasping his eager but so firm and steady
hand, “it does not all depend on one old man, but I shall have a young
and ardent man at my side.”

“By the help of Heaven you shall! Promise me solemnly that nothing will
influence you to alter the course on which we now stand pledged to one
another.”

“Nothing, Carton.”

“Remember these words to-morrow: change the course, or delay in it--for
any reason--and no life can possibly be saved, and many lives must
inevitably be sacrificed.”

“I will remember them. I hope to do my part faithfully.”

“And I hope to do mine. Now, good bye!”

Though he said it with a grave smile of earnestness, and though he even
put the old man's hand to his lips, he did not part from him then. He
helped him so far to arouse the rocking figure before the dying embers,
as to get a cloak and hat put upon it, and to tempt it forth to find
where the bench and work were hidden that it still moaningly besought
to have. He walked on the other side of it and protected it to the
courtyard of the house where the afflicted heart--so happy in
the memorable time when he had revealed his own desolate heart to
it--outwatched the awful night. He entered the courtyard and remained
there for a few moments alone, looking up at the light in the window of
her room. Before he went away, he breathed a blessing towards it, and a
Farewell.




XIII. Fifty-two


In the black prison of the Conciergerie, the doomed of the day awaited
their fate. They were in number as the weeks of the year. Fifty-two were
to roll that afternoon on the life-tide of the city to the boundless
everlasting sea. Before their cells were quit of them, new occupants
were appointed; before their blood ran into the blood spilled yesterday,
the blood that was to mingle with theirs to-morrow was already set
apart.

Two score and twelve were told off. From the farmer-general of seventy,
whose riches could not buy his life, to the seamstress of twenty, whose
poverty and obscurity could not save her. Physical diseases, engendered
in the vices and neglects of men, will seize on victims of all degrees;
and the frightful moral disorder, born of unspeakable suffering,
intolerable oppression, and heartless indifference, smote equally
without distinction.

Charles Darnay, alone in a cell, had sustained himself with no
flattering delusion since he came to it from the Tribunal. In every line
of the narrative he had heard, he had heard his condemnation. He had
fully comprehended that no personal influence could possibly save him,
that he was virtually sentenced by the millions, and that units could
avail him nothing.

Nevertheless, it was not easy, with the face of his beloved wife fresh
before him, to compose his mind to what it must bear. His hold on life
was strong, and it was very, very hard, to loosen; by gradual efforts
and degrees unclosed a little here, it clenched the tighter there; and
when he brought his strength to bear on that hand and it yielded,
this was closed again. There was a hurry, too, in all his thoughts,
a turbulent and heated working of his heart, that contended against
resignation. If, for a moment, he did feel resigned, then his wife and
child who had to live after him, seemed to protest and to make it a
selfish thing.

But, all this was at first. Before long, the consideration that there
was no disgrace in the fate he must meet, and that numbers went the same
road wrongfully, and trod it firmly every day, sprang up to stimulate
him. Next followed the thought that much of the future peace of mind
enjoyable by the dear ones, depended on his quiet fortitude. So,
by degrees he calmed into the better state, when he could raise his
thoughts much higher, and draw comfort down.

Before it had set in dark on the night of his condemnation, he had
travelled thus far on his last way. Being allowed to purchase the means
of writing, and a light, he sat down to write until such time as the
prison lamps should be extinguished.

He wrote a long letter to Lucie, showing her that he had known nothing
of her father's imprisonment, until he had heard of it from herself,
and that he had been as ignorant as she of his father's and uncle's
responsibility for that misery, until the paper had been read. He had
already explained to her that his concealment from herself of the name
he had relinquished, was the one condition--fully intelligible now--that
her father had attached to their betrothal, and was the one promise he
had still exacted on the morning of their marriage. He entreated her,
for her father's sake, never to seek to know whether her father had
become oblivious of the existence of the paper, or had had it recalled
to him (for the moment, or for good), by the story of the Tower, on
that old Sunday under the dear old plane-tree in the garden. If he had
preserved any definite remembrance of it, there could be no doubt that
he had supposed it destroyed with the Bastille, when he had found no
mention of it among the relics of prisoners which the populace had
discovered there, and which had been described to all the world. He
besought her--though he added that he knew it was needless--to console
her father, by impressing him through every tender means she could think
of, with the truth that he had done nothing for which he could justly
reproach himself, but had uniformly forgotten himself for their joint
sakes. Next to her preservation of his own last grateful love and
blessing, and her overcoming of her sorrow, to devote herself to their
dear child, he adjured her, as they would meet in Heaven, to comfort her
father.

To her father himself, he wrote in the same strain; but, he told her
father that he expressly confided his wife and child to his care. And
he told him this, very strongly, with the hope of rousing him from any
despondency or dangerous retrospect towards which he foresaw he might be
tending.

To Mr. Lorry, he commended them all, and explained his worldly affairs.
That done, with many added sentences of grateful friendship and warm
attachment, all was done. He never thought of Carton. His mind was so
full of the others, that he never once thought of him.

He had time to finish these letters before the lights were put out. When
he lay down on his straw bed, he thought he had done with this world.

But, it beckoned him back in his sleep, and showed itself in shining
forms. Free and happy, back in the old house in Soho (though it had
nothing in it like the real house), unaccountably released and light of
heart, he was with Lucie again, and she told him it was all a dream, and
he had never gone away. A pause of forgetfulness, and then he had even
suffered, and had come back to her, dead and at peace, and yet there
was no difference in him. Another pause of oblivion, and he awoke in the
sombre morning, unconscious where he was or what had happened, until it
flashed upon his mind, “this is the day of my death!”

Thus, had he come through the hours, to the day when the fifty-two heads
were to fall. And now, while he was composed, and hoped that he could
meet the end with quiet heroism, a new action began in his waking
thoughts, which was very difficult to master.

He had never seen the instrument that was to terminate his life. How
high it was from the ground, how many steps it had, where he would be
stood, how he would be touched, whether the touching hands would be dyed
red, which way his face would be turned, whether he would be the first,
or might be the last: these and many similar questions, in nowise
directed by his will, obtruded themselves over and over again, countless
times. Neither were they connected with fear: he was conscious of no
fear. Rather, they originated in a strange besetting desire to know what
to do when the time came; a desire gigantically disproportionate to the
few swift moments to which it referred; a wondering that was more like
the wondering of some other spirit within his, than his own.

The hours went on as he walked to and fro, and the clocks struck the
numbers he would never hear again. Nine gone for ever, ten gone for
ever, eleven gone for ever, twelve coming on to pass away. After a hard
contest with that eccentric action of thought which had last perplexed
him, he had got the better of it. He walked up and down, softly
repeating their names to himself. The worst of the strife was over.
He could walk up and down, free from distracting fancies, praying for
himself and for them.

Twelve gone for ever.

He had been apprised that the final hour was Three, and he knew he would
be summoned some time earlier, inasmuch as the tumbrils jolted heavily
and slowly through the streets. Therefore, he resolved to keep Two
before his mind, as the hour, and so to strengthen himself in the
interval that he might be able, after that time, to strengthen others.

Walking regularly to and fro with his arms folded on his breast, a very
different man from the prisoner, who had walked to and fro at La Force,
he heard One struck away from him, without surprise. The hour had
measured like most other hours. Devoutly thankful to Heaven for his
recovered self-possession, he thought, “There is but another now,” and
turned to walk again.

Footsteps in the stone passage outside the door. He stopped.

The key was put in the lock, and turned. Before the door was opened, or
as it opened, a man said in a low voice, in English: “He has never seen
me here; I have kept out of his way. Go you in alone; I wait near. Lose
no time!”

The door was quickly opened and closed, and there stood before him
face to face, quiet, intent upon him, with the light of a smile on his
features, and a cautionary finger on his lip, Sydney Carton.

There was something so bright and remarkable in his look, that, for the
first moment, the prisoner misdoubted him to be an apparition of his own
imagining. But, he spoke, and it was his voice; he took the prisoner's
hand, and it was his real grasp.

“Of all the people upon earth, you least expected to see me?” he said.

“I could not believe it to be you. I can scarcely believe it now. You
are not”--the apprehension came suddenly into his mind--“a prisoner?”

“No. I am accidentally possessed of a power over one of the keepers
here, and in virtue of it I stand before you. I come from her--your
wife, dear Darnay.”

The prisoner wrung his hand.

“I bring you a request from her.”

“What is it?”

“A most earnest, pressing, and emphatic entreaty, addressed to you
in the most pathetic tones of the voice so dear to you, that you well
remember.”

The prisoner turned his face partly aside.

“You have no time to ask me why I bring it, or what it means; I have
no time to tell you. You must comply with it--take off those boots you
wear, and draw on these of mine.”

There was a chair against the wall of the cell, behind the prisoner.
Carton, pressing forward, had already, with the speed of lightning, got
him down into it, and stood over him, barefoot.

“Draw on these boots of mine. Put your hands to them; put your will to
them. Quick!”

“Carton, there is no escaping from this place; it never can be done. You
will only die with me. It is madness.”

“It would be madness if I asked you to escape; but do I? When I ask you
to pass out at that door, tell me it is madness and remain here. Change
that cravat for this of mine, that coat for this of mine. While you do
it, let me take this ribbon from your hair, and shake out your hair like
this of mine!”

With wonderful quickness, and with a strength both of will and action,
that appeared quite supernatural, he forced all these changes upon him.
The prisoner was like a young child in his hands.

“Carton! Dear Carton! It is madness. It cannot be accomplished, it never
can be done, it has been attempted, and has always failed. I implore you
not to add your death to the bitterness of mine.”

“Do I ask you, my dear Darnay, to pass the door? When I ask that,
refuse. There are pen and ink and paper on this table. Is your hand
steady enough to write?”

“It was when you came in.”

“Steady it again, and write what I shall dictate. Quick, friend, quick!”

Pressing his hand to his bewildered head, Darnay sat down at the table.
Carton, with his right hand in his breast, stood close beside him.

“Write exactly as I speak.”

“To whom do I address it?”

“To no one.” Carton still had his hand in his breast.

“Do I date it?”

“No.”

The prisoner looked up, at each question. Carton, standing over him with
his hand in his breast, looked down.

“'If you remember,'” said Carton, dictating, “'the words that passed
between us, long ago, you will readily comprehend this when you see it.
You do remember them, I know. It is not in your nature to forget them.'”

He was drawing his hand from his breast; the prisoner chancing to look
up in his hurried wonder as he wrote, the hand stopped, closing upon
something.

“Have you written 'forget them'?” Carton asked.

“I have. Is that a weapon in your hand?”

“No; I am not armed.”

“What is it in your hand?”

“You shall know directly. Write on; there are but a few words more.” He
dictated again. “'I am thankful that the time has come, when I can prove
them. That I do so is no subject for regret or grief.'” As he said these
words with his eyes fixed on the writer, his hand slowly and softly
moved down close to the writer's face.

The pen dropped from Darnay's fingers on the table, and he looked about
him vacantly.

“What vapour is that?” he asked.

“Vapour?”

“Something that crossed me?”

“I am conscious of nothing; there can be nothing here. Take up the pen
and finish. Hurry, hurry!”

As if his memory were impaired, or his faculties disordered, the
prisoner made an effort to rally his attention. As he looked at Carton
with clouded eyes and with an altered manner of breathing, Carton--his
hand again in his breast--looked steadily at him.

“Hurry, hurry!”

The prisoner bent over the paper, once more.

“'If it had been otherwise;'” Carton's hand was again watchfully and
softly stealing down; “'I never should have used the longer opportunity.
If it had been otherwise;'” the hand was at the prisoner's face; “'I
should but have had so much the more to answer for. If it had been
otherwise--'” Carton looked at the pen and saw it was trailing off into
unintelligible signs.

Carton's hand moved back to his breast no more. The prisoner sprang up
with a reproachful look, but Carton's hand was close and firm at his
nostrils, and Carton's left arm caught him round the waist. For a few
seconds he faintly struggled with the man who had come to lay down his
life for him; but, within a minute or so, he was stretched insensible on
the ground.

Quickly, but with hands as true to the purpose as his heart was, Carton
dressed himself in the clothes the prisoner had laid aside, combed back
his hair, and tied it with the ribbon the prisoner had worn. Then, he
softly called, “Enter there! Come in!” and the Spy presented himself.

“You see?” said Carton, looking up, as he kneeled on one knee beside the
insensible figure, putting the paper in the breast: “is your hazard very
great?”

“Mr. Carton,” the Spy answered, with a timid snap of his fingers, “my
hazard is not _that_, in the thick of business here, if you are true to
the whole of your bargain.”

“Don't fear me. I will be true to the death.”

“You must be, Mr. Carton, if the tale of fifty-two is to be right. Being
made right by you in that dress, I shall have no fear.”

“Have no fear! I shall soon be out of the way of harming you, and the
rest will soon be far from here, please God! Now, get assistance and
take me to the coach.”

“You?” said the Spy nervously.

“Him, man, with whom I have exchanged. You go out at the gate by which
you brought me in?”

“Of course.”

“I was weak and faint when you brought me in, and I am fainter now you
take me out. The parting interview has overpowered me. Such a thing has
happened here, often, and too often. Your life is in your own hands.
Quick! Call assistance!”

“You swear not to betray me?” said the trembling Spy, as he paused for a
last moment.

“Man, man!” returned Carton, stamping his foot; “have I sworn by no
solemn vow already, to go through with this, that you waste the precious
moments now? Take him yourself to the courtyard you know of, place
him yourself in the carriage, show him yourself to Mr. Lorry, tell him
yourself to give him no restorative but air, and to remember my words of
last night, and his promise of last night, and drive away!”

The Spy withdrew, and Carton seated himself at the table, resting his
forehead on his hands. The Spy returned immediately, with two men.

“How, then?” said one of them, contemplating the fallen figure. “So
afflicted to find that his friend has drawn a prize in the lottery of
Sainte Guillotine?”

“A good patriot,” said the other, “could hardly have been more afflicted
if the Aristocrat had drawn a blank.”

They raised the unconscious figure, placed it on a litter they had
brought to the door, and bent to carry it away.

“The time is short, Evremonde,” said the Spy, in a warning voice.

“I know it well,” answered Carton. “Be careful of my friend, I entreat
you, and leave me.”

“Come, then, my children,” said Barsad. “Lift him, and come away!”

The door closed, and Carton was left alone. Straining his powers of
listening to the utmost, he listened for any sound that might denote
suspicion or alarm. There was none. Keys turned, doors clashed,
footsteps passed along distant passages: no cry was raised, or hurry
made, that seemed unusual. Breathing more freely in a little while, he
sat down at the table, and listened again until the clock struck Two.

Sounds that he was not afraid of, for he divined their meaning, then
began to be audible. Several doors were opened in succession, and
finally his own. A gaoler, with a list in his hand, looked in, merely
saying, “Follow me, Evremonde!” and he followed into a large dark room,
at a distance. It was a dark winter day, and what with the shadows
within, and what with the shadows without, he could but dimly discern
the others who were brought there to have their arms bound. Some were
standing; some seated. Some were lamenting, and in restless motion;
but, these were few. The great majority were silent and still, looking
fixedly at the ground.

As he stood by the wall in a dim corner, while some of the fifty-two
were brought in after him, one man stopped in passing, to embrace him,
as having a knowledge of him. It thrilled him with a great dread of
discovery; but the man went on. A very few moments after that, a young
woman, with a slight girlish form, a sweet spare face in which there was
no vestige of colour, and large widely opened patient eyes, rose from
the seat where he had observed her sitting, and came to speak to him.

“Citizen Evremonde,” she said, touching him with her cold hand. “I am a
poor little seamstress, who was with you in La Force.”

He murmured for answer: “True. I forget what you were accused of?”

“Plots. Though the just Heaven knows that I am innocent of any. Is it
likely? Who would think of plotting with a poor little weak creature
like me?”

The forlorn smile with which she said it, so touched him, that tears
started from his eyes.

“I am not afraid to die, Citizen Evremonde, but I have done nothing. I
am not unwilling to die, if the Republic which is to do so much good
to us poor, will profit by my death; but I do not know how that can be,
Citizen Evremonde. Such a poor weak little creature!”

As the last thing on earth that his heart was to warm and soften to, it
warmed and softened to this pitiable girl.

“I heard you were released, Citizen Evremonde. I hoped it was true?”

“It was. But, I was again taken and condemned.”

“If I may ride with you, Citizen Evremonde, will you let me hold your
hand? I am not afraid, but I am little and weak, and it will give me
more courage.”

As the patient eyes were lifted to his face, he saw a sudden doubt in
them, and then astonishment. He pressed the work-worn, hunger-worn young
fingers, and touched his lips.

“Are you dying for him?” she whispered.

“And his wife and child. Hush! Yes.”

“O you will let me hold your brave hand, stranger?”

“Hush! Yes, my poor sister; to the last.”

        *****

The same shadows that are falling on the prison, are falling, in that
same hour of the early afternoon, on the Barrier with the crowd about
it, when a coach going out of Paris drives up to be examined.

“Who goes here? Whom have we within? Papers!”

The papers are handed out, and read.

“Alexandre Manette. Physician. French. Which is he?”

This is he; this helpless, inarticulately murmuring, wandering old man
pointed out.

“Apparently the Citizen-Doctor is not in his right mind? The
Revolution-fever will have been too much for him?”

Greatly too much for him.

“Hah! Many suffer with it. Lucie. His daughter. French. Which is she?”

This is she.

“Apparently it must be. Lucie, the wife of Evremonde; is it not?”

It is.

“Hah! Evremonde has an assignation elsewhere. Lucie, her child. English.
This is she?”

She and no other.

“Kiss me, child of Evremonde. Now, thou hast kissed a good Republican;
something new in thy family; remember it! Sydney Carton. Advocate.
English. Which is he?”

He lies here, in this corner of the carriage. He, too, is pointed out.

“Apparently the English advocate is in a swoon?”

It is hoped he will recover in the fresher air. It is represented that
he is not in strong health, and has separated sadly from a friend who is
under the displeasure of the Republic.

“Is that all? It is not a great deal, that! Many are under the
displeasure of the Republic, and must look out at the little window.
Jarvis Lorry. Banker. English. Which is he?”

“I am he. Necessarily, being the last.”

It is Jarvis Lorry who has replied to all the previous questions. It
is Jarvis Lorry who has alighted and stands with his hand on the coach
door, replying to a group of officials. They leisurely walk round the
carriage and leisurely mount the box, to look at what little luggage it
carries on the roof; the country-people hanging about, press nearer to
the coach doors and greedily stare in; a little child, carried by its
mother, has its short arm held out for it, that it may touch the wife of
an aristocrat who has gone to the Guillotine.

“Behold your papers, Jarvis Lorry, countersigned.”

“One can depart, citizen?”

“One can depart. Forward, my postilions! A good journey!”

“I salute you, citizens.--And the first danger passed!”

These are again the words of Jarvis Lorry, as he clasps his hands, and
looks upward. There is terror in the carriage, there is weeping, there
is the heavy breathing of the insensible traveller.

“Are we not going too slowly? Can they not be induced to go faster?”
 asks Lucie, clinging to the old man.

“It would seem like flight, my darling. I must not urge them too much;
it would rouse suspicion.”

“Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued!”

“The road is clear, my dearest. So far, we are not pursued.”

Houses in twos and threes pass by us, solitary farms, ruinous buildings,
dye-works, tanneries, and the like, open country, avenues of leafless
trees. The hard uneven pavement is under us, the soft deep mud is on
either side. Sometimes, we strike into the skirting mud, to avoid the
stones that clatter us and shake us; sometimes, we stick in ruts and
sloughs there. The agony of our impatience is then so great, that in our
wild alarm and hurry we are for getting out and running--hiding--doing
anything but stopping.

Out of the open country, in again among ruinous buildings, solitary
farms, dye-works, tanneries, and the like, cottages in twos and threes,
avenues of leafless trees. Have these men deceived us, and taken us back
by another road? Is not this the same place twice over? Thank Heaven,
no. A village. Look back, look back, and see if we are pursued! Hush!
the posting-house.

Leisurely, our four horses are taken out; leisurely, the coach stands in
the little street, bereft of horses, and with no likelihood upon it
of ever moving again; leisurely, the new horses come into visible
existence, one by one; leisurely, the new postilions follow, sucking and
plaiting the lashes of their whips; leisurely, the old postilions count
their money, make wrong additions, and arrive at dissatisfied results.
All the time, our overfraught hearts are beating at a rate that would
far outstrip the fastest gallop of the fastest horses ever foaled.

At length the new postilions are in their saddles, and the old are left
behind. We are through the village, up the hill, and down the hill, and
on the low watery grounds. Suddenly, the postilions exchange speech with
animated gesticulation, and the horses are pulled up, almost on their
haunches. We are pursued?

“Ho! Within the carriage there. Speak then!”

“What is it?” asks Mr. Lorry, looking out at window.

“How many did they say?”

“I do not understand you.”

“--At the last post. How many to the Guillotine to-day?”

“Fifty-two.”

“I said so! A brave number! My fellow-citizen here would have it
forty-two; ten more heads are worth having. The Guillotine goes
handsomely. I love it. Hi forward. Whoop!”

The night comes on dark. He moves more; he is beginning to revive, and
to speak intelligibly; he thinks they are still together; he asks him,
by his name, what he has in his hand. O pity us, kind Heaven, and help
us! Look out, look out, and see if we are pursued.

The wind is rushing after us, and the clouds are flying after us, and
the moon is plunging after us, and the whole wild night is in pursuit of
us; but, so far, we are pursued by nothing else.




XIV. The Knitting Done


In that same juncture of time when the Fifty-Two awaited their fate
Madame Defarge held darkly ominous council with The Vengeance and
Jacques Three of the Revolutionary Jury. Not in the wine-shop did Madame
Defarge confer with these ministers, but in the shed of the wood-sawyer,
erst a mender of roads. The sawyer himself did not participate in the
conference, but abided at a little distance, like an outer satellite who
was not to speak until required, or to offer an opinion until invited.

“But our Defarge,” said Jacques Three, “is undoubtedly a good
Republican? Eh?”

“There is no better,” the voluble Vengeance protested in her shrill
notes, “in France.”

“Peace, little Vengeance,” said Madame Defarge, laying her hand with
a slight frown on her lieutenant's lips, “hear me speak. My husband,
fellow-citizen, is a good Republican and a bold man; he has deserved
well of the Republic, and possesses its confidence. But my husband has
his weaknesses, and he is so weak as to relent towards this Doctor.”

“It is a great pity,” croaked Jacques Three, dubiously shaking his head,
with his cruel fingers at his hungry mouth; “it is not quite like a good
citizen; it is a thing to regret.”

“See you,” said madame, “I care nothing for this Doctor, I. He may wear
his head or lose it, for any interest I have in him; it is all one to
me. But, the Evremonde people are to be exterminated, and the wife and
child must follow the husband and father.”

“She has a fine head for it,” croaked Jacques Three. “I have seen blue
eyes and golden hair there, and they looked charming when Samson held
them up.” Ogre that he was, he spoke like an epicure.

Madame Defarge cast down her eyes, and reflected a little.

“The child also,” observed Jacques Three, with a meditative enjoyment
of his words, “has golden hair and blue eyes. And we seldom have a child
there. It is a pretty sight!”

“In a word,” said Madame Defarge, coming out of her short abstraction,
“I cannot trust my husband in this matter. Not only do I feel, since
last night, that I dare not confide to him the details of my projects;
but also I feel that if I delay, there is danger of his giving warning,
and then they might escape.”

“That must never be,” croaked Jacques Three; “no one must escape. We
have not half enough as it is. We ought to have six score a day.”

“In a word,” Madame Defarge went on, “my husband has not my reason for
pursuing this family to annihilation, and I have not his reason for
regarding this Doctor with any sensibility. I must act for myself,
therefore. Come hither, little citizen.”

The wood-sawyer, who held her in the respect, and himself in the
submission, of mortal fear, advanced with his hand to his red cap.

“Touching those signals, little citizen,” said Madame Defarge, sternly,
“that she made to the prisoners; you are ready to bear witness to them
this very day?”

“Ay, ay, why not!” cried the sawyer. “Every day, in all weathers, from
two to four, always signalling, sometimes with the little one, sometimes
without. I know what I know. I have seen with my eyes.”

He made all manner of gestures while he spoke, as if in incidental
imitation of some few of the great diversity of signals that he had
never seen.

“Clearly plots,” said Jacques Three. “Transparently!”

“There is no doubt of the Jury?” inquired Madame Defarge, letting her
eyes turn to him with a gloomy smile.

“Rely upon the patriotic Jury, dear citizeness. I answer for my
fellow-Jurymen.”

“Now, let me see,” said Madame Defarge, pondering again. “Yet once more!
Can I spare this Doctor to my husband? I have no feeling either way. Can
I spare him?”

“He would count as one head,” observed Jacques Three, in a low voice.
“We really have not heads enough; it would be a pity, I think.”

“He was signalling with her when I saw her,” argued Madame Defarge; “I
cannot speak of one without the other; and I must not be silent, and
trust the case wholly to him, this little citizen here. For, I am not a
bad witness.”

The Vengeance and Jacques Three vied with each other in their fervent
protestations that she was the most admirable and marvellous of
witnesses. The little citizen, not to be outdone, declared her to be a
celestial witness.

“He must take his chance,” said Madame Defarge. “No, I cannot spare
him! You are engaged at three o'clock; you are going to see the batch of
to-day executed.--You?”

The question was addressed to the wood-sawyer, who hurriedly replied in
the affirmative: seizing the occasion to add that he was the most ardent
of Republicans, and that he would be in effect the most desolate of
Republicans, if anything prevented him from enjoying the pleasure of
smoking his afternoon pipe in the contemplation of the droll national
barber. He was so very demonstrative herein, that he might have been
suspected (perhaps was, by the dark eyes that looked contemptuously at
him out of Madame Defarge's head) of having his small individual fears
for his own personal safety, every hour in the day.

“I,” said madame, “am equally engaged at the same place. After it is
over--say at eight to-night--come you to me, in Saint Antoine, and we
will give information against these people at my Section.”

The wood-sawyer said he would be proud and flattered to attend the
citizeness. The citizeness looking at him, he became embarrassed, evaded
her glance as a small dog would have done, retreated among his wood, and
hid his confusion over the handle of his saw.

Madame Defarge beckoned the Juryman and The Vengeance a little nearer to
the door, and there expounded her further views to them thus:

“She will now be at home, awaiting the moment of his death. She will
be mourning and grieving. She will be in a state of mind to impeach the
justice of the Republic. She will be full of sympathy with its enemies.
I will go to her.”

“What an admirable woman; what an adorable woman!” exclaimed Jacques
Three, rapturously. “Ah, my cherished!” cried The Vengeance; and
embraced her.

“Take you my knitting,” said Madame Defarge, placing it in her
lieutenant's hands, “and have it ready for me in my usual seat. Keep
me my usual chair. Go you there, straight, for there will probably be a
greater concourse than usual, to-day.”

“I willingly obey the orders of my Chief,” said The Vengeance with
alacrity, and kissing her cheek. “You will not be late?”

“I shall be there before the commencement.”

“And before the tumbrils arrive. Be sure you are there, my soul,” said
The Vengeance, calling after her, for she had already turned into the
street, “before the tumbrils arrive!”

Madame Defarge slightly waved her hand, to imply that she heard, and
might be relied upon to arrive in good time, and so went through the
mud, and round the corner of the prison wall. The Vengeance and the
Juryman, looking after her as she walked away, were highly appreciative
of her fine figure, and her superb moral endowments.

There were many women at that time, upon whom the time laid a dreadfully
disfiguring hand; but, there was not one among them more to be dreaded
than this ruthless woman, now taking her way along the streets. Of a
strong and fearless character, of shrewd sense and readiness, of great
determination, of that kind of beauty which not only seems to impart
to its possessor firmness and animosity, but to strike into others an
instinctive recognition of those qualities; the troubled time would have
heaved her up, under any circumstances. But, imbued from her childhood
with a brooding sense of wrong, and an inveterate hatred of a class,
opportunity had developed her into a tigress. She was absolutely without
pity. If she had ever had the virtue in her, it had quite gone out of
her.

It was nothing to her, that an innocent man was to die for the sins of
his forefathers; she saw, not him, but them. It was nothing to her, that
his wife was to be made a widow and his daughter an orphan; that was
insufficient punishment, because they were her natural enemies and
her prey, and as such had no right to live. To appeal to her, was made
hopeless by her having no sense of pity, even for herself. If she had
been laid low in the streets, in any of the many encounters in which
she had been engaged, she would not have pitied herself; nor, if she had
been ordered to the axe to-morrow, would she have gone to it with any
softer feeling than a fierce desire to change places with the man who
sent her there.

Such a heart Madame Defarge carried under her rough robe. Carelessly
worn, it was a becoming robe enough, in a certain weird way, and her
dark hair looked rich under her coarse red cap. Lying hidden in her
bosom, was a loaded pistol. Lying hidden at her waist, was a sharpened
dagger. Thus accoutred, and walking with the confident tread of such
a character, and with the supple freedom of a woman who had habitually
walked in her girlhood, bare-foot and bare-legged, on the brown
sea-sand, Madame Defarge took her way along the streets.

Now, when the journey of the travelling coach, at that very moment
waiting for the completion of its load, had been planned out last night,
the difficulty of taking Miss Pross in it had much engaged Mr. Lorry's
attention. It was not merely desirable to avoid overloading the coach,
but it was of the highest importance that the time occupied in examining
it and its passengers, should be reduced to the utmost; since their
escape might depend on the saving of only a few seconds here and there.
Finally, he had proposed, after anxious consideration, that Miss Pross
and Jerry, who were at liberty to leave the city, should leave it at
three o'clock in the lightest-wheeled conveyance known to that period.
Unencumbered with luggage, they would soon overtake the coach, and,
passing it and preceding it on the road, would order its horses in
advance, and greatly facilitate its progress during the precious hours
of the night, when delay was the most to be dreaded.

Seeing in this arrangement the hope of rendering real service in that
pressing emergency, Miss Pross hailed it with joy. She and Jerry had
beheld the coach start, had known who it was that Solomon brought, had
passed some ten minutes in tortures of suspense, and were now concluding
their arrangements to follow the coach, even as Madame Defarge,
taking her way through the streets, now drew nearer and nearer to the
else-deserted lodging in which they held their consultation.

“Now what do you think, Mr. Cruncher,” said Miss Pross, whose agitation
was so great that she could hardly speak, or stand, or move, or live:
“what do you think of our not starting from this courtyard? Another
carriage having already gone from here to-day, it might awaken
suspicion.”

“My opinion, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “is as you're right. Likewise
wot I'll stand by you, right or wrong.”

“I am so distracted with fear and hope for our precious creatures,” said
Miss Pross, wildly crying, “that I am incapable of forming any plan. Are
_you_ capable of forming any plan, my dear good Mr. Cruncher?”

“Respectin' a future spear o' life, miss,” returned Mr. Cruncher, “I
hope so. Respectin' any present use o' this here blessed old head o'
mine, I think not. Would you do me the favour, miss, to take notice o'
two promises and wows wot it is my wishes fur to record in this here
crisis?”

“Oh, for gracious sake!” cried Miss Pross, still wildly crying, “record
them at once, and get them out of the way, like an excellent man.”

“First,” said Mr. Cruncher, who was all in a tremble, and who spoke with
an ashy and solemn visage, “them poor things well out o' this, never no
more will I do it, never no more!”

“I am quite sure, Mr. Cruncher,” returned Miss Pross, “that you
never will do it again, whatever it is, and I beg you not to think it
necessary to mention more particularly what it is.”

“No, miss,” returned Jerry, “it shall not be named to you. Second: them
poor things well out o' this, and never no more will I interfere with
Mrs. Cruncher's flopping, never no more!”

“Whatever housekeeping arrangement that may be,” said Miss Pross,
striving to dry her eyes and compose herself, “I have no doubt it
is best that Mrs. Cruncher should have it entirely under her own
superintendence.--O my poor darlings!”

“I go so far as to say, miss, moreover,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with a
most alarming tendency to hold forth as from a pulpit--“and let my words
be took down and took to Mrs. Cruncher through yourself--that wot my
opinions respectin' flopping has undergone a change, and that wot I only
hope with all my heart as Mrs. Cruncher may be a flopping at the present
time.”

“There, there, there! I hope she is, my dear man,” cried the distracted
Miss Pross, “and I hope she finds it answering her expectations.”

“Forbid it,” proceeded Mr. Cruncher, with additional solemnity,
additional slowness, and additional tendency to hold forth and hold
out, “as anything wot I have ever said or done should be wisited on my
earnest wishes for them poor creeturs now! Forbid it as we shouldn't all
flop (if it was anyways conwenient) to get 'em out o' this here dismal
risk! Forbid it, miss! Wot I say, for-_bid_ it!” This was Mr. Cruncher's
conclusion after a protracted but vain endeavour to find a better one.

And still Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came
nearer and nearer.

“If we ever get back to our native land,” said Miss Pross, “you may rely
upon my telling Mrs. Cruncher as much as I may be able to remember and
understand of what you have so impressively said; and at all events
you may be sure that I shall bear witness to your being thoroughly in
earnest at this dreadful time. Now, pray let us think! My esteemed Mr.
Cruncher, let us think!”

Still, Madame Defarge, pursuing her way along the streets, came nearer
and nearer.

“If you were to go before,” said Miss Pross, “and stop the vehicle and
horses from coming here, and were to wait somewhere for me; wouldn't
that be best?”

Mr. Cruncher thought it might be best.

“Where could you wait for me?” asked Miss Pross.

Mr. Cruncher was so bewildered that he could think of no locality but
Temple Bar. Alas! Temple Bar was hundreds of miles away, and Madame
Defarge was drawing very near indeed.

“By the cathedral door,” said Miss Pross. “Would it be much out of
the way, to take me in, near the great cathedral door between the two
towers?”

“No, miss,” answered Mr. Cruncher.

“Then, like the best of men,” said Miss Pross, “go to the posting-house
straight, and make that change.”

“I am doubtful,” said Mr. Cruncher, hesitating and shaking his head,
“about leaving of you, you see. We don't know what may happen.”

“Heaven knows we don't,” returned Miss Pross, “but have no fear for me.
Take me in at the cathedral, at Three o'Clock, or as near it as you can,
and I am sure it will be better than our going from here. I feel certain
of it. There! Bless you, Mr. Cruncher! Think-not of me, but of the lives
that may depend on both of us!”

This exordium, and Miss Pross's two hands in quite agonised entreaty
clasping his, decided Mr. Cruncher. With an encouraging nod or two, he
immediately went out to alter the arrangements, and left her by herself
to follow as she had proposed.

The having originated a precaution which was already in course of
execution, was a great relief to Miss Pross. The necessity of composing
her appearance so that it should attract no special notice in the
streets, was another relief. She looked at her watch, and it was twenty
minutes past two. She had no time to lose, but must get ready at once.

Afraid, in her extreme perturbation, of the loneliness of the deserted
rooms, and of half-imagined faces peeping from behind every open door
in them, Miss Pross got a basin of cold water and began laving her eyes,
which were swollen and red. Haunted by her feverish apprehensions, she
could not bear to have her sight obscured for a minute at a time by the
dripping water, but constantly paused and looked round to see that there
was no one watching her. In one of those pauses she recoiled and cried
out, for she saw a figure standing in the room.

The basin fell to the ground broken, and the water flowed to the feet of
Madame Defarge. By strange stern ways, and through much staining blood,
those feet had come to meet that water.

Madame Defarge looked coldly at her, and said, “The wife of Evremonde;
where is she?”

It flashed upon Miss Pross's mind that the doors were all standing open,
and would suggest the flight. Her first act was to shut them. There were
four in the room, and she shut them all. She then placed herself before
the door of the chamber which Lucie had occupied.

Madame Defarge's dark eyes followed her through this rapid movement,
and rested on her when it was finished. Miss Pross had nothing beautiful
about her; years had not tamed the wildness, or softened the grimness,
of her appearance; but, she too was a determined woman in her different
way, and she measured Madame Defarge with her eyes, every inch.

“You might, from your appearance, be the wife of Lucifer,” said Miss
Pross, in her breathing. “Nevertheless, you shall not get the better of
me. I am an Englishwoman.”

Madame Defarge looked at her scornfully, but still with something of
Miss Pross's own perception that they two were at bay. She saw a tight,
hard, wiry woman before her, as Mr. Lorry had seen in the same figure a
woman with a strong hand, in the years gone by. She knew full well that
Miss Pross was the family's devoted friend; Miss Pross knew full well
that Madame Defarge was the family's malevolent enemy.

“On my way yonder,” said Madame Defarge, with a slight movement of
her hand towards the fatal spot, “where they reserve my chair and my
knitting for me, I am come to make my compliments to her in passing. I
wish to see her.”

“I know that your intentions are evil,” said Miss Pross, “and you may
depend upon it, I'll hold my own against them.”

Each spoke in her own language; neither understood the other's words;
both were very watchful, and intent to deduce from look and manner, what
the unintelligible words meant.

“It will do her no good to keep herself concealed from me at this
moment,” said Madame Defarge. “Good patriots will know what that means.
Let me see her. Go tell her that I wish to see her. Do you hear?”

“If those eyes of yours were bed-winches,” returned Miss Pross, “and I
was an English four-poster, they shouldn't loose a splinter of me. No,
you wicked foreign woman; I am your match.”

Madame Defarge was not likely to follow these idiomatic remarks in
detail; but, she so far understood them as to perceive that she was set
at naught.

“Woman imbecile and pig-like!” said Madame Defarge, frowning. “I take no
answer from you. I demand to see her. Either tell her that I demand
to see her, or stand out of the way of the door and let me go to her!”
 This, with an angry explanatory wave of her right arm.

“I little thought,” said Miss Pross, “that I should ever want to
understand your nonsensical language; but I would give all I have,
except the clothes I wear, to know whether you suspect the truth, or any
part of it.”

Neither of them for a single moment released the other's eyes. Madame
Defarge had not moved from the spot where she stood when Miss Pross
first became aware of her; but, she now advanced one step.

“I am a Briton,” said Miss Pross, “I am desperate. I don't care an
English Twopence for myself. I know that the longer I keep you here, the
greater hope there is for my Ladybird. I'll not leave a handful of that
dark hair upon your head, if you lay a finger on me!”

Thus Miss Pross, with a shake of her head and a flash of her eyes
between every rapid sentence, and every rapid sentence a whole breath.
Thus Miss Pross, who had never struck a blow in her life.

But, her courage was of that emotional nature that it brought the
irrepressible tears into her eyes. This was a courage that Madame
Defarge so little comprehended as to mistake for weakness. “Ha, ha!” she
laughed, “you poor wretch! What are you worth! I address myself to that
Doctor.” Then she raised her voice and called out, “Citizen Doctor! Wife
of Evremonde! Child of Evremonde! Any person but this miserable fool,
answer the Citizeness Defarge!”

Perhaps the following silence, perhaps some latent disclosure in the
expression of Miss Pross's face, perhaps a sudden misgiving apart from
either suggestion, whispered to Madame Defarge that they were gone.
Three of the doors she opened swiftly, and looked in.

“Those rooms are all in disorder, there has been hurried packing, there
are odds and ends upon the ground. There is no one in that room behind
you! Let me look.”

“Never!” said Miss Pross, who understood the request as perfectly as
Madame Defarge understood the answer.

“If they are not in that room, they are gone, and can be pursued and
brought back,” said Madame Defarge to herself.

“As long as you don't know whether they are in that room or not, you are
uncertain what to do,” said Miss Pross to herself; “and you shall not
know that, if I can prevent your knowing it; and know that, or not know
that, you shall not leave here while I can hold you.”

“I have been in the streets from the first, nothing has stopped me,
I will tear you to pieces, but I will have you from that door,” said
Madame Defarge.

“We are alone at the top of a high house in a solitary courtyard, we are
not likely to be heard, and I pray for bodily strength to keep you here,
while every minute you are here is worth a hundred thousand guineas to
my darling,” said Miss Pross.

Madame Defarge made at the door. Miss Pross, on the instinct of the
moment, seized her round the waist in both her arms, and held her tight.
It was in vain for Madame Defarge to struggle and to strike; Miss Pross,
with the vigorous tenacity of love, always so much stronger than hate,
clasped her tight, and even lifted her from the floor in the struggle
that they had. The two hands of Madame Defarge buffeted and tore her
face; but, Miss Pross, with her head down, held her round the waist, and
clung to her with more than the hold of a drowning woman.

Soon, Madame Defarge's hands ceased to strike, and felt at her encircled
waist. “It is under my arm,” said Miss Pross, in smothered tones, “you
shall not draw it. I am stronger than you, I bless Heaven for it. I hold
you till one or other of us faints or dies!”

Madame Defarge's hands were at her bosom. Miss Pross looked up, saw
what it was, struck at it, struck out a flash and a crash, and stood
alone--blinded with smoke.

All this was in a second. As the smoke cleared, leaving an awful
stillness, it passed out on the air, like the soul of the furious woman
whose body lay lifeless on the ground.

In the first fright and horror of her situation, Miss Pross passed the
body as far from it as she could, and ran down the stairs to call for
fruitless help. Happily, she bethought herself of the consequences of
what she did, in time to check herself and go back. It was dreadful to
go in at the door again; but, she did go in, and even went near it, to
get the bonnet and other things that she must wear. These she put on,
out on the staircase, first shutting and locking the door and taking
away the key. She then sat down on the stairs a few moments to breathe
and to cry, and then got up and hurried away.

By good fortune she had a veil on her bonnet, or she could hardly have
gone along the streets without being stopped. By good fortune, too, she
was naturally so peculiar in appearance as not to show disfigurement
like any other woman. She needed both advantages, for the marks of
gripping fingers were deep in her face, and her hair was torn, and her
dress (hastily composed with unsteady hands) was clutched and dragged a
hundred ways.

In crossing the bridge, she dropped the door key in the river. Arriving
at the cathedral some few minutes before her escort, and waiting there,
she thought, what if the key were already taken in a net, what if
it were identified, what if the door were opened and the remains
discovered, what if she were stopped at the gate, sent to prison, and
charged with murder! In the midst of these fluttering thoughts, the
escort appeared, took her in, and took her away.

“Is there any noise in the streets?” she asked him.

“The usual noises,” Mr. Cruncher replied; and looked surprised by the
question and by her aspect.

“I don't hear you,” said Miss Pross. “What do you say?”

It was in vain for Mr. Cruncher to repeat what he said; Miss Pross could
not hear him. “So I'll nod my head,” thought Mr. Cruncher, amazed, “at
all events she'll see that.” And she did.

“Is there any noise in the streets now?” asked Miss Pross again,
presently.

Again Mr. Cruncher nodded his head.

“I don't hear it.”

“Gone deaf in an hour?” said Mr. Cruncher, ruminating, with his mind
much disturbed; “wot's come to her?”

“I feel,” said Miss Pross, “as if there had been a flash and a crash,
and that crash was the last thing I should ever hear in this life.”

“Blest if she ain't in a queer condition!” said Mr. Cruncher, more and
more disturbed. “Wot can she have been a takin', to keep her courage up?
Hark! There's the roll of them dreadful carts! You can hear that, miss?”

“I can hear,” said Miss Pross, seeing that he spoke to her, “nothing. O,
my good man, there was first a great crash, and then a great stillness,
and that stillness seems to be fixed and unchangeable, never to be
broken any more as long as my life lasts.”

“If she don't hear the roll of those dreadful carts, now very nigh their
journey's end,” said Mr. Cruncher, glancing over his shoulder, “it's my
opinion that indeed she never will hear anything else in this world.”

And indeed she never did.




XV. The Footsteps Die Out For Ever


Along the Paris streets, the death-carts rumble, hollow and harsh. Six
tumbrils carry the day's wine to La Guillotine. All the devouring and
insatiate Monsters imagined since imagination could record itself,
are fused in the one realisation, Guillotine. And yet there is not in
France, with its rich variety of soil and climate, a blade, a leaf,
a root, a sprig, a peppercorn, which will grow to maturity under
conditions more certain than those that have produced this horror. Crush
humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will
twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of
rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield
the same fruit according to its kind.

Six tumbrils roll along the streets. Change these back again to what
they were, thou powerful enchanter, Time, and they shall be seen to be
the carriages of absolute monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the
toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father's
house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!
No; the great magician who majestically works out the appointed order
of the Creator, never reverses his transformations. “If thou be changed
into this shape by the will of God,” say the seers to the enchanted, in
the wise Arabian stories, “then remain so! But, if thou wear this
form through mere passing conjuration, then resume thy former aspect!”
 Changeless and hopeless, the tumbrils roll along.

As the sombre wheels of the six carts go round, they seem to plough up
a long crooked furrow among the populace in the streets. Ridges of faces
are thrown to this side and to that, and the ploughs go steadily onward.
So used are the regular inhabitants of the houses to the spectacle, that
in many windows there are no people, and in some the occupation of the
hands is not so much as suspended, while the eyes survey the faces in
the tumbrils. Here and there, the inmate has visitors to see the sight;
then he points his finger, with something of the complacency of a
curator or authorised exponent, to this cart and to this, and seems to
tell who sat here yesterday, and who there the day before.

Of the riders in the tumbrils, some observe these things, and all
things on their last roadside, with an impassive stare; others, with
a lingering interest in the ways of life and men. Some, seated with
drooping heads, are sunk in silent despair; again, there are some so
heedful of their looks that they cast upon the multitude such glances as
they have seen in theatres, and in pictures. Several close their eyes,
and think, or try to get their straying thoughts together. Only one, and
he a miserable creature, of a crazed aspect, is so shattered and made
drunk by horror, that he sings, and tries to dance. Not one of the whole
number appeals by look or gesture, to the pity of the people.

There is a guard of sundry horsemen riding abreast of the tumbrils,
and faces are often turned up to some of them, and they are asked some
question. It would seem to be always the same question, for, it is
always followed by a press of people towards the third cart. The
horsemen abreast of that cart, frequently point out one man in it with
their swords. The leading curiosity is, to know which is he; he stands
at the back of the tumbril with his head bent down, to converse with a
mere girl who sits on the side of the cart, and holds his hand. He has
no curiosity or care for the scene about him, and always speaks to the
girl. Here and there in the long street of St. Honore, cries are raised
against him. If they move him at all, it is only to a quiet smile, as he
shakes his hair a little more loosely about his face. He cannot easily
touch his face, his arms being bound.

On the steps of a church, awaiting the coming-up of the tumbrils, stands
the Spy and prison-sheep. He looks into the first of them: not there.
He looks into the second: not there. He already asks himself, “Has he
sacrificed me?” when his face clears, as he looks into the third.

“Which is Evremonde?” says a man behind him.

“That. At the back there.”

“With his hand in the girl's?”

“Yes.”

The man cries, “Down, Evremonde! To the Guillotine all aristocrats!
Down, Evremonde!”

“Hush, hush!” the Spy entreats him, timidly.

“And why not, citizen?”

“He is going to pay the forfeit: it will be paid in five minutes more.
Let him be at peace.”

But the man continuing to exclaim, “Down, Evremonde!” the face of
Evremonde is for a moment turned towards him. Evremonde then sees the
Spy, and looks attentively at him, and goes his way.

The clocks are on the stroke of three, and the furrow ploughed among the
populace is turning round, to come on into the place of execution, and
end. The ridges thrown to this side and to that, now crumble in and
close behind the last plough as it passes on, for all are following
to the Guillotine. In front of it, seated in chairs, as in a garden of
public diversion, are a number of women, busily knitting. On one of the
fore-most chairs, stands The Vengeance, looking about for her friend.

“Therese!” she cries, in her shrill tones. “Who has seen her? Therese
Defarge!”

“She never missed before,” says a knitting-woman of the sisterhood.

“No; nor will she miss now,” cries The Vengeance, petulantly. “Therese.”

“Louder,” the woman recommends.

Ay! Louder, Vengeance, much louder, and still she will scarcely hear
thee. Louder yet, Vengeance, with a little oath or so added, and yet
it will hardly bring her. Send other women up and down to seek her,
lingering somewhere; and yet, although the messengers have done dread
deeds, it is questionable whether of their own wills they will go far
enough to find her!

“Bad Fortune!” cries The Vengeance, stamping her foot in the chair, “and
here are the tumbrils! And Evremonde will be despatched in a wink, and
she not here! See her knitting in my hand, and her empty chair ready for
her. I cry with vexation and disappointment!”

As The Vengeance descends from her elevation to do it, the tumbrils
begin to discharge their loads. The ministers of Sainte Guillotine are
robed and ready. Crash!--A head is held up, and the knitting-women who
scarcely lifted their eyes to look at it a moment ago when it could
think and speak, count One.

The second tumbril empties and moves on; the third comes up. Crash!--And
the knitting-women, never faltering or pausing in their Work, count Two.

The supposed Evremonde descends, and the seamstress is lifted out next
after him. He has not relinquished her patient hand in getting out, but
still holds it as he promised. He gently places her with her back to the
crashing engine that constantly whirrs up and falls, and she looks into
his face and thanks him.

“But for you, dear stranger, I should not be so composed, for I am
naturally a poor little thing, faint of heart; nor should I have been
able to raise my thoughts to Him who was put to death, that we might
have hope and comfort here to-day. I think you were sent to me by
Heaven.”

“Or you to me,” says Sydney Carton. “Keep your eyes upon me, dear child,
and mind no other object.”

“I mind nothing while I hold your hand. I shall mind nothing when I let
it go, if they are rapid.”

“They will be rapid. Fear not!”

The two stand in the fast-thinning throng of victims, but they speak as
if they were alone. Eye to eye, voice to voice, hand to hand, heart to
heart, these two children of the Universal Mother, else so wide apart
and differing, have come together on the dark highway, to repair home
together, and to rest in her bosom.

“Brave and generous friend, will you let me ask you one last question? I
am very ignorant, and it troubles me--just a little.”

“Tell me what it is.”

“I have a cousin, an only relative and an orphan, like myself, whom I
love very dearly. She is five years younger than I, and she lives in a
farmer's house in the south country. Poverty parted us, and she knows
nothing of my fate--for I cannot write--and if I could, how should I
tell her! It is better as it is.”

“Yes, yes: better as it is.”

“What I have been thinking as we came along, and what I am still
thinking now, as I look into your kind strong face which gives me so
much support, is this:--If the Republic really does good to the poor,
and they come to be less hungry, and in all ways to suffer less, she may
live a long time: she may even live to be old.”

“What then, my gentle sister?”

“Do you think:” the uncomplaining eyes in which there is so much
endurance, fill with tears, and the lips part a little more and tremble:
“that it will seem long to me, while I wait for her in the better land
where I trust both you and I will be mercifully sheltered?”

“It cannot be, my child; there is no Time there, and no trouble there.”

“You comfort me so much! I am so ignorant. Am I to kiss you now? Is the
moment come?”

“Yes.”

She kisses his lips; he kisses hers; they solemnly bless each other.
The spare hand does not tremble as he releases it; nothing worse than
a sweet, bright constancy is in the patient face. She goes next before
him--is gone; the knitting-women count Twenty-Two.

“I am the Resurrection and the Life, saith the Lord: he that believeth
in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live: and whosoever liveth and
believeth in me shall never die.”

The murmuring of many voices, the upturning of many faces, the pressing
on of many footsteps in the outskirts of the crowd, so that it swells
forward in a mass, like one great heave of water, all flashes away.
Twenty-Three.

        *****

They said of him, about the city that night, that it was the
peacefullest man's face ever beheld there. Many added that he looked
sublime and prophetic.

One of the most remarkable sufferers by the same axe--a woman--had asked
at the foot of the same scaffold, not long before, to be allowed to
write down the thoughts that were inspiring her. If he had given any
utterance to his, and they were prophetic, they would have been these:

“I see Barsad, and Cly, Defarge, The Vengeance, the Juryman, the Judge,
long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of
the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease
out of its present use. I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people
rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in
their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil
of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural
birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.

“I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful,
prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more. I see
Her with a child upon her bosom, who bears my name. I see her father,
aged and bent, but otherwise restored, and faithful to all men in his
healing office, and at peace. I see the good old man, so long their
friend, in ten years' time enriching them with all he has, and passing
tranquilly to his reward.

“I see that I hold a sanctuary in their hearts, and in the hearts of
their descendants, generations hence. I see her, an old woman, weeping
for me on the anniversary of this day. I see her and her husband, their
course done, lying side by side in their last earthly bed, and I know
that each was not more honoured and held sacred in the other's soul,
than I was in the souls of both.

“I see that child who lay upon her bosom and who bore my name, a man
winning his way up in that path of life which once was mine. I see him
winning it so well, that my name is made illustrious there by the
light of his. I see the blots I threw upon it, faded away. I see him,
fore-most of just judges and honoured men, bringing a boy of my name,
with a forehead that I know and golden hair, to this place--then fair to
look upon, with not a trace of this day's disfigurement--and I hear him
tell the child my story, with a tender and a faltering voice.

“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a
far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”


